I really don’t have time to be doing this today, but as I was lying in bed last night in that “in-between” state of sleep, I kept thinking back to a program I had heard on NPR earlier that day and figured it would be somewhat blog-worthy.
The program on Talk of the Nation, was an interview with several historians and their book “What if?” which is a collection of essays asking just that question. While this is really nothing new, I’ve often asked myself , “what if I had only…” but I’ve never thought of asking these questions in a much larger forum. There was even a whole television series based on a concept like this, but for whatever reason, I never thought much about it.
The example that really struck me, was the one given “What if Ike, as Commander and Chief of the Allied forces in Europe (before he was president), had chosen to make a sudden, hard strike on Berlin”. Apparently, the decision not to was a political move, to make sure that neither the US nor the UK would get all the glory for single handedly finishing the war.
Had this strike been made, it would have prevented the German borders from becoming too heavily barricaded, and would have more than likely ended the war a good 8 months earlier.
The real significance here is that a majority of the deaths in the camps took place during this time. Imagine a world where the holocaust was, for the most part, avoided. That the lives and deaths and tragedies once again hang on one man’s simple decision.
Food for thought.