Victor Davis Hanson
In a recent and now widely seen Tucker Carlson interview, a guest historian named Darryl Cooper casually presented a surprising number of flawed theories about World War II. He focused his misstatements on the respective roles of Winston Churchill’s Britain and Adolf Hitler’s Germany—especially in matters of the treatment and fate of Russian prisoners, the Holocaust, the systematic slaughtering of Jews, strategic bombing, and the nature of Winston Churchill.
Because of the size of the audience Carlson introduced him to, and because of the gravity of Cooper’s falsehoods, his assertions deserve a response.
On the Treatment of Russian Prisoners
It is simply not true, as Cooper alleges, that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was completely surprised and unprepared for the mass capitulation of the Red Army and some two million Russian prisoners who fell into German hands in summer 1941.
The virtual extinction of these POWs in the first six months of the war was a natural consequence of a series of infamous and so-called “criminal orders” issued by Hitler in spring 1941 to be immediately implemented in his planned “war of extermination” in the East.
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