8
A single European state has been a dream since antiquity. Charlemagne restored the Roman Empire, and the Germans maintained a version of it until the nineteenth century. Napoleon and Hitler both united Europe, after a fashion. During the spring of 1945, amidst his nightmare ruin, the Führer described himself as ‘Europe’s last chance’, explaining ‘It could not be conquered by charm or persuasion – I had to rape it.’
To some extent the Emperor considered that he was reviving the Western Empire, claiming his sovereignty derived from the people like the Roman Emperors’. His ‘Continental System’ covered an area corresponding to the heartland of today’s European Community. France swallowed up Belgium, Holland, the southern Rhineland, the German North Sea coast, Piedmont, Tuscany, the Papal States and Illyria. Napoleon was also Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, his kindred ruled Spain and Italy as client kings. Western Poland was likewise a vassal. ‘From nothing I soared until I became the mightiest ruler in the world,’ he recalled ‘Europe lay at my feet.’25
Hitler was even more of an admirer of Charlemagne than Napoleon had been, regarding him as a German. In 1942 he told Himmler that Karl der Grosse was one of the greatest men in history. As for the Carolingian state, ‘for centuries the peoples of Europe have regarded it as the successor to the universal empire of the Caesars’. (At the Nuremberg Rally of 1935 he was presented with a replica of Charlemagne’s sword.) His own ‘Great Germanic Empire of the German Nation’ embraced all the lands once ruled by Charlemagne, together with those as far east as the Urals. The Reich proper – territory under his direct rule – stretched westward to the Channel, including Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg; its southern boundary was the line of the Somme, taking in half of Burgundy. In the north he planned to incorporate Denmark and Norway.
Both men were at least realistic enough to seek a junior partner to help them rule Europe. At first Napoleon hoped it might be Russia, but he fell out with the Tsar. He then opted for Habsburg Austria instead, since it was ready to let him have a dynastic alliance – a marriage which he supposed would guarantee his acceptance by the old European monarchies. In return Austria might expect favoured-ally treatment, and new territory at Russia’s expense. Hitler too sought a partner to buttress his European hegemony, fascist Italy.
As has been seen, the creators of the Napoleonic and Nazi empires did not rule out the possibility of expansion beyond Europe. Nearly a century ago Emile Bourgeois produced a study of Bonaparte’s foreign policy in which he argues, eloquently if not altogether convincingly, that it had been inspired by a secret determination to take over the crumbling Ottoman Empire. He dreamt of going even farther than Asia Minor, prophesying that ‘India will be lost to the English by foreign invasion’. (In his view the Indians were incapable of ruling themselves – they ‘will not grow up, they always remain children’.) The Führer too indulged in fantasies of this type, though never as seriously as Napoleon; after all, he had not led an army to Egypt. Nevertheless, he opened negotiations with theGrand Mufti and had designs of a sort on Iraq’s oil-fields. As for the sub-continent, ‘the Indians are unanimous in their desire to shake off the British yoke. Some of them would like to try Bolshevism for that purpose, others would like to try us.’
The Emperor grew steadily more dictatorial. He was obsessed by power, would not share it, would brook no criticism, let alone opposition. The Tribunate, the last consultative institution to remain from Sieyès’s constitution, was reduced to a tame shadow, then finally abolished in 1807. The Senate was too cowed to question Imperial decrees. Ministers were deliberately prevented from working together as a body; to divide them still further, they were encouraged to compete for his favour. Men of genius like Talleyrand, Fouché and Chaptal who expressed reservations about his policies were eventually dismissed. In consequence there was much confusion, with considerable duplication of effort. From the very beginning he set out to create a numbing atmosphere of fear and distrust. Even under the Consulate, during a visit to Paris in 1801, Cyril Jackson, Dean of Christchurch, received the strong impression that Bonaparte’s ‘great end is to diffuse suspicion everywhere, considering it his best hold’. Napoleon himself declared, ‘I reign only through the fear I inspire.’ Not just France but the entire Grand Empire became increasingly fearful as the years went by.
‘Napoleon was always on his guard against ambitious generals or popular discontent, constantly breaking the former or forestalling the latter,’ says Count Chaptal, his Minister of the Interior for five years. He tells us how the Emperor kept his commanders at a distance, barely speaking to them, rarely congratulating them, though loading them with honours and estates to ensure their loyalty. He adds that Napoleon had henchmen whom he neither liked nor trusted. ‘Yet by nature distrustful himself, he relished their blind obedience and was able to pretend that his orders were carried out so easily. These men were all the more dangerous since his first reactions [to a threat] were invariably quite terrifying.’
‘Virtue, good feeling, religion, enthusiasm – these are in his eyes, to use his favourite expression – “the eternal enemy of the continent”,’ Mme de Staël informs us. He saw men as ‘things, not fellow human beings’. Metternich says the Emperor was convinced that everyone in public life was motivated by self-interest.
‘That terrible man enslaved us all,’ recalled Decrès, Minister for the Marine. ‘He held our imagination in his hand, sometimes a hand of steel, sometimes a hand of velvet; one never knew how it was going to be from day to day, so that there was no means of escaping. Once he fastened his hold over one he never let go.’
If one is attempting a comparison with Hitler, Napoleon’s most stimulating interpreter is certainly Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828-93). One of the forgotten ‘great minds’ of nineteenth-century France, he is quoted but seldom read. The Left find him antipathetic, as he rejects the revolution; the Right cannot forgive his condemnation of the Emperor. Admittedly he is eccentric. (In his Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise he claims that the English have developed large feet to cope with their country’s marshes.) Yet his portrait of Napoleon, in his Origines de la France contemporaine, is not implausible. It is of a man possessed by the devil, a foreigner who is an amoral egoist on a vast scale. His dream of ruling Europe brings misery on the French:
At home he demanded not only undisputed control over all executive and legislative power but, even more, the annihilation of any moral authority other than his own, the silencing of public opinion and the isolation of each individual; and consequently the systematic destruction in advance of any initiative, spiritual, clerical, educational, charitable, literary, departmental or municipal which whether at the present moment or in the future might unite men against him or even at his side. Being a good tactician he guarded his rear; during his European struggle he ensured that in the France he was dragging with him, no hostile elements were able to join forces.
Commenting on this passage, Geyl says that in the 1940s certain resemblances would occur to readers which Taine could not have foreseen; even so, Taine considered the distinguishing features of the Napoleonic régime to be ‘the shattering of individuality and of group, the uprooting of local government, the destruction of all initiative and all conviction in political matters’. (It is only fair to record that on the whole Geyl disagreed with Taine’s interpretation of Napoleon.
The Emperor can at least be exonerated from the appalling ‘racial’ pseudo-philosophy which was the basic inspiration for Hitler’s dreams of empire. His own inspiration was self-aggrandizement, purely and simply. Even so, in certain areas of Europe – such as southern Italy – he undoubtedly contemplated imposing a new nobility of French settlers. He certainly tried to create a new ruling class in France. It was to be constructed by intermarriage between the old French noble families and men of humble origin who had proved their merit by their achievements; the Minister of Police was ordered to supply statistics of suitable girls from the nobility, including physique, intelligence and education, and a number of these were forced to marry ‘new men’ whom he selected. The great schools such as the Polytechnique and the new lycées, together with the Imperial University, were founded to instil Imperialist principles – ‘If one does not learn in childhood whether to be a republican or a monarchist, an infidel or a believer, the State will never be formed into a nation.’ There was opposition from many parents to sending their children to the new boarding schools, which were run on semi-military lines – Taine comments that the atmosphere was that of ‘anterooms to barracks’. In 1808 Napoleon had a register compiled of leading families of the grande-noblesse and haute-bourgeoisie throughout France, with the intention of forcing them to send their sons to the military academy at Saint-Cyr.
If Taine’s interpretation is correct, the purpose of the new educational system anticipated the totalitarianism of the twentieth century to a remarkable degree:
training at an early age, systematic, continuous, relentless training which concentrates every method – lessons, example, practical application – on indoctrinating young minds with certain principles, moulding them so that they will retain permanently the ‘national doctrine’, a species of social and political catechism, whose first item is a demand for fanatical obedience, passionate loyalty and total self-sacrifice to the Emperor.26
One might almost feel that the Führer read Taine.
Nevertheless, the Napoleonic régime possessed considerable support. For most of its existence it enjoyed great material prosperity, while the French were not averse to being the European master-race. Since the campaigns were far away, they were spared the miseries of war. There was also an element of resignation, at least until 1813. The Emperor had not so much ended the Revolution (which he sometimes claimed) as embraced most of its vast complexities, and the majority of Frenchmen preferred monolithic authority to the nerve-racking uncertainties of the 1790s. No doubt many who accepted the Empire yearned in secret for a Bourbon restoration or for a republic, but they had no wish to see an accompanying civil war – had one been possible.
Imperial France was no less of a police state than Nazi Germany. The title and plot of Une ténébreuse affaire (‘A Dark Business’), Balzac’s novel about political persecution under the Empire, foreshadows the decree Nacht und Nebel (‘Night and Fog’) of 1941 by which those deemed to threaten the State disappeared without trace. The Emperor is widely admired for giving France what is called the Code Napoléon; in reality this was the culmination of over a century’s work by legal experts and had been initiated by Louis XIV, who if anyone was its true instigator. The ‘modern Justinian’ manipulated it as he pleased. There was no need for the Führer to give Germany new laws; it already possessed an excellent legal code, very much the same as that enjoyed by today’s Federal Republic.
The Empire was even more heavily policed than the Consulate, Savary proving far heavier-handed than the subtle Fouché. The new administration’s efficiency ensured its repressiveness. The only opposition, from the Right, was muted; the royalists were too discouraged to mount any further plots after Georges Cadoudal’s death in 1804, their activities being confined to salon gossip, although devout Catholics among them grew increasingly restive at Napoleon’s ill-treatment of the Pope. The régime’s most dangerous if silent opponents were Fouché and Talleyrand when they foresaw it might be destroyed by its creator’s ambition, their unease reflecting that of the Notables, who began to fear for their wealth. There was no overt defiance until the very end, save for General Malet’s tragicomic attempt.
Censorship was stifling. Eventually only four newspapers were allowed to appear in Paris (compared with seventy-three in 1799), every issue being read by the Minister of Police before publication; most of contents were supplied by the authorities, Napoleon himself sometimes contributing pieces. All British newspapers were banned from 1802. ‘If the Press weren’t censored, I shouldn’t stay in power another week,’ said the Emperor. Plays were censored from 1800, the number of theatres in the capital being cut to eight in 1807. Booksellers were forbidden to sell any book before it had been with the censors for a week. Bookshops and printing presses came under government control in 1810, the number of shops in Paris being restricted to sixty – regularly inspected by the police – while printers had to take an oath to print nothing contrary to the interests of the State. Letters were systematically intercepted in the post and scruitinized. There was a determined effort to influence the climate of ideas. Napoleon disliked and distrusted intellectuals, whom he described variously as ‘metaphysicians’, ‘ideologists’ and ‘vermin’; in 1803 the faculty of moral and physical sciences in the Institut de France was closed down. The Emperor’s remark that the Minister of the Interior should do something about the decline of literature is only too revealing, and it is hard not to agree with Mme de Staël that his sole interest in writers was as witnesses to his glory. Yet classical French theatre and actors like Talma received his enthusiastic support, while he was the patron of fashionable composers such as Cimarosa and Paesiello. Châteaubriand, a known enemy of the régime, was allowed to publish books so long as they contained nothing political – though he was too widely read to persecute with impunity.
He secured considerable support from the Church, persuading the French hierarchy to tell the peasants not to evade conscription in their pastoral letters. Yet he failed to secure absolute control over it, to make Paris ‘the metropolis of Christendom, the centre and guide of the religious as well as the political world’, as he put it.
During a disagreement with Pius VII in 1806 Napoleon declared: ‘For the Pope’s purposes I am Charlemagne – like Charlemagne I join the crown of France with the crown of the Lombards.’ Had he conquered Russia and finally subjected Europe he would have enslaved the Church too. He wanted the pontiff to be in constant attendance on him, at his beck and call. ‘I would have been master of religion as though I were its sole lord,’ he claimed when on St Helena. He planned a Byzantine caesaro-papalism, with the Pope as an obedient patriarch. While Pius was prepared to reconcile Catholics to the revolution, even quoting Rousseau in his sermons, he declined such a role. After he refused to implement the Continental Blockade, in 1808 the Emperor occupied the Papal States, annexing Rome itself in May of the following year on the pretext that it had been part of the Carolingian Empire. The Pope excommunicated him, to be arrested and confined at Savona. In 1811 Pius signed a concordat [dictated by Napoleon] almost certainly as a consequence of morphine administered in the guise of a sedative – though he swiftly repudiated the document. He was brought to Fontainebleau in 1812 but would not submit. A final attempt to break the old pontiff in 1813 was no more successful, if he yielded just enough to save the Papacy from being installed at Paris or Avignon. (Almost incredibly, in 1817 Pius was to ask the Allies to release his tormentor from St Helena.) Understandably, after 1809 many Catholics began to regard Napoleon as anti-Christian. Some clergy even denounced his wars from the pulpit.
Catholic opposition was partly fuelled by a reaction against the philosophaillerie of Voltaire and Rousseau. As Bonald had written in 1796, the terror lurked behind all the Enlightenment’s elegant verbiage, just as plague so often accompanied cargoes of spices from the Levant. The ideals of the Emperor’s youth were going out of fashion.
The régime was undeniably imposing, if marred by a certain flashiness. Among other embellishments Paris was given the Arc de Triomphe, the Bourse, the Madeleine (‘Temple de la Gloire’) and the Odéon, together with such elegant thoroughfares as the Rue de Rivoli, the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Soufflot. The Louvre was refurbished, the horses of St Mark from Venice placed on top of the gateway of the Tuileries and the column set up in the Place Vendôme. Among less showy edifices were granaries and abattoirs, so that the capital’s workers were assured of cheap food. The Emperor intended to build much more, including a vast new ‘Palais du Roi de Rome’ – which would have been bigger than the Luxembourg – and a new opera house. There were brilliant military reviews and Court spectacles, though the latter had an unmistakably tinsel quality.
The Imperial Guard – the Old Guard, Middle Guard and Young Guard – was the ultimate protector of both the régime and its creator. He chose its men with the utmost care, vetting, promoting, rewarding, cashiering. He rode at its head over countless battlefields and on countless parades, to that stirring if raucous march the Chant du Départ. He often hummed it to himself, the Empire’s music of triumph.
In its own way Imperial France was surprisingly well organized for war, by the standards of the time, relatively perhaps more so than Nazi Germany. It coped with shortages resulting from the British blockade with considerable ingenuity. Since sugar cane could no longer be had from the West Indies, its place was taken by the cultivation of sugar beet, while since tall Baltic timbers were not available for warships’ masts, composite masts were constructed. Understandably, the armaments industry flourished, its workers being exempt for military service; nearly 270,000 cannon and small arms were produced in 1806. If great Atlantic ports such as Nantes and Bordeaux were hit badly by lack of trade there was something of an industrial boom – except in manufactures like cottons, which depended on imports. To some extent shortages were alleviated by widespread smuggling, which received a considerable measure of tolerance from the régime. The steady drain of manpower into the Imperial armies caused difficulty in working the land; peasant women took to ploughing, and in 1809 the Emperor experimented with foreign slave labour in the form of Austrian prisoners of war, though on a very limited scale. One cannot deny that France suffered severely from the straitjacket wrapped around it by the Royal Navy, for all the often heroic efforts of privateers and blockade-runners.
Yet despite relative prosperity, the sense that France was the greatest nation in the world and the gratifying exploits of the Grande Armée which marched into every European capital, there were frenetic, uneasy undertones. It was not just corruption and venality (vast fortunes were made by everyone, from the Imperial family and Talleyrand down to the lowest army contractor, while bribery was a fact of life) but a combination of insecurity and repression. The Notables feared increasingly for their new wealth each time Napoleon embarked on a fresh adventure, gambling his entire régime on the fortunes of war. The police were ubiquitous, constantly raiding the most inoffensive gatherings; hunting horns might not be blown in taverns, women had to obtain a licence if they wished to dress like men and a curfew was enforced. There were agents provocateurs everywhere, stirring up discontent in order to identify potential enemies of the régime who were then arrested at midnight, brutally interrogated, and imprisoned or executed.
The Parisian working class was deliberately pampered by the Emperor – still nervous of revolution after what he had seen as a young man. Nevertheless, with the country people who formed the great bulk of the French population, they suffered savagely in consequence of conscription – ‘the blood tax’. The sons of the rich were allowed to buy themselves out by hiring a replacement, at a price often almost ten times a labourer’s annual wage; as many as 9 per cent of the draft did so. Less fortunate young men chopped off thumbs or gouged out eyes to avoid serving. Deserters were hunted down by the gendarmerie, 60,000 being caught during 1812. Many hid in the woods or in cellars, their families having to pay fines for their evasion. Chateaubriand writes of entire villages miserably scanning call-up lists posted at street-corners, of parents arrested as hostages for sons in hiding. He also writes of ‘passers-by crowding beneath long lists of those sentenced to death, studying them frantically for the names of children, brothers, friends andneighbours. By 1813 the Emperor was recruiting men over sixty and boys under fifteen (the ‘Marie Louises’, so called after his Austrian Empress). On one occasion he described the latter as ‘only fit for filling up the hospitals and roadsides’.
The country suffered as much from soldiers who followed the colours as it did from deserters. Paris and every major French town was filled with noisy, swaggering, pugnacious troopers. Frequently drunk, they fought each other, attacked civilians, broke into wineshops and molested women. Not everyone in France was pleased to see the splendidly uniformed soldiers of the Grande Armée.
Needless to say, everything was much worse in the conquered territories than in France. Brute force was used to cow initial opposition to French occupation, calculated atrocities subsequently holding down the population. Napoleon welcomed shows of defiance since it enabled him to identify opponents and break their resistance. The rising in Madrid in 1808 and Murat’s savage suppression of it was exactly what he wanted. The same year he informed his brother Joseph, who he had installed as King of Naples, ‘I would like the Neapolitan mob to try a rebellion. So long as you haven’t set an example you won’t be their master. Every conquered country should have its rising.’ Spanish resistance was met with savage reprisals, even subjugated areas seeing the ghastly executions of the sort portrayed in Goya’s horrible drawings. The French conquerors were scarcely less brutal in southern Italy, hanging, burning and looting even if Napoleon’s gauleiters – his brother Joseph and Murat, whom he made kings – did not impose a new French nobility as he wished. Plunder was on a vast scale in Spain, Portugal and Naples, marshals such as Soult anticipating Goering in their greed for works of art.
Among Napoleon’s kinsmen, Joseph Bonaparte ruled in Naples and then in Spain, Louis Bonaparte in Holland, Jerome Bonaparte in Westphalia, Joachim Murat in Naples and Eugène de Beauharnais in northern Italy. The first three – appointed solely because they were Napoleon’s brothers – were too feeble to be compared with the Führer’s gauleiters. The last two were quite as ruthless, even if they too were promoted for family reasons, being respectively the Emperor’s brother-in-law and stepson. All found a bare handful of collaborators. In Spain the Josefinos were drawn from the liberal, free-thinking element among the nobility, disciples of the Enlightenment who hoped for an end to the bigotry and backwardness of the Spanish Bourbons; if these were genuine enough, there were very few of them, and in any case they were seen as traitors by the vast majority of Spaniards. In Holland Louis Bonaparte tried to fill his Court with Dutchmen, and took the side of new subjects much too enthusiastically for his Imperial brother’s taste. He refused to enforce the blockade, and he obstructed French officials, in order to avert the commercial ruin which threatened the Dutch; besides welcoming American ships carrying British goods and encouraging smuggling. In 1810 he abdicated, his kingdom being absorbed into France. At Cassel Jerome Bonaparte proved an unmitigated disaster.
The Emperor has been severely criticized for giving his family crowns. Geyl calls them ‘that peculiarly unpleasant set of people’ and stresses the contradiction in appointing someone to embody a nation while insisting he stay a Frenchman. Napoleon’s explanation is that he ‘was dropping anchors’ throughout Europe to make his own new monarchy in France more acceptable to the world. On the whole the Bonaparte sovereigns were embarrassingly ineffectual. All save Murat and Eugéne had to have a marshal behind them – notably Davout in Westphalia, Masséna, Marmont, Soult and Suchet in Spain – together with civilian advisers, such as Fréville at Madrid or Count Daure who was Minister for both War and the Marine at Naples. Control was also exerted through ambassadors, not to mention French bayonets and French police.
The most committed Imperial satellite was Frederick Augustus of Saxony. Slavishly grateful for being made a king and Grand Duke of Warsaw, he hoped to wear the Polish crown worn by his grandfather. (He had been accepted as the next King of Poland in the Constitution of 1791.) Other German satellites, such as the Kings of Bavaria and Württemberg, secretly detested their French master and would one day betray him.
The emperor was greeted as a liberator by the Poles. ‘We worship you’, the Palatine of Gniezno told him in 1807. ‘We place all our hopes in you, the man who builds or destroys empires, who humbles the proud – restorer of our country, lawgiver to the world.’ In 1812 they felt sure he would bring back their ancient monarchy. Yet he never had any intention of upsetting the Austrians who occupied a third of Polish territory. On St Helena he declared, unconvincingly, ‘Circumstances were stronger than my wishes. I had hoped to restore the Kingdom of Poland as a strong and powerful bulwark against the Tsars’ insatiable ambition.’ In reality Poles – apart from his beautiful and noble mistress, Countess Walewska – meant no more to him than money or cannon-fodder, and he bled their country white.
If not a puppet or a client state, Prussia was very much an occupied country. French garrisons were installed at every strongpoint, maintained by Prussian money (a sum which eventually came to 160 million francs). The Emperor refused to withdraw his troops until a general European peace was settled – a peace which must include Britain.
While the subject lands, whether occupied territory or client states, produced men and money, the system was inefficient at every level, despite the Emperor’s attempting to supervise it as much as possible, and devoting considerable attention not only to military but to fiscal and economic problems. In particular there was the difficulty of feeding wretchedly paid troops without a proper commissariat. Outside France they had to live off the country, which meant that food and wine, grain and livestock, were commandeered without compensation, that thatch was torn from roofs to serve as fodder for horses who otherwise grazed in rye or wheat fields – if these had not been flattened by detachments marching or riding over them. There were no military police apart from inadequate provost marshals, so that drunken, swaggering ruffians were able to rob and to rape. The ordinary French police who accompanied them behaved as badly, both treating the population as they did Spaniards. (The traditional German dislike of the French dates not from Louis XIV’s devastation of the Palatinate but from the Napoleonic occupation.) There were swingeing levies, grinding taxation, appropriation of raw materials, foodstuffs and luxury goods, confiscation of property, theft of art treasures, and – in Austria and Prussia – extraction of huge indemnities. Another burden was military service. Few of the conscripted came home and those who did brought tales of dreadful suffering.
There were far more resisters than collaborators. In Spain it meant full-scale civil war. In Italy, while northerners and those in the centre stayed cowed, guerrilla warfare proved ineradicable in Calabria. In Germany the situation was more complex.
Although admitting that they hated him, the Emperor afterwards claimed that he had been good to Germans. ‘I could have extorted enormous contributions from the Germans to pay for the war and would have been justified. But I took great care not to treat them ruthlessly since I respected them.’ Somewhat querulously, he grumbled, ‘I was forced to fight on their soil for ten years yet they could neither grasp my aims nor see I was planning to give them very real and very important benefits.’ He fascinated the Romantics of the nascent Sturm und Drang, but even if he inspired much music together with many plays, German composers and playwrights alike detested him and his army of occupation, which by 1806 stood at 200,000 men. A Naumburg journalist called Palm published anonymously a pamphlet entitled Germany In Her Deep Humiliation. Napoleon ordered all booksellers stocking it to be shot; Palm, who lived on neutral territory, was grabbed by a troop of gendarmes and sent before a firing-squad. Andreas Hofer, who led 40,000 mountaineers against the transfer of his native Tyrol from Austria to Bavaria, was hunted down and executed, Colonel Dornberg, trying unsuccessfully to seize Cassel, met a similar fate. The Prussian Colonel Schill – without his King’s permission – invaded Westphalia with his regiment but was driven off, cornered at Stralsund and slaughtered with his men.
Yet, to quote Geyl, ‘What are the executions of Palm, of Hofer, what are even the severities with which so many villages and towns in Germany and Spain were visited, besides what in our time all occupied territories have had to suffer from Hitler’s armies?’
The Europe of Napoleon and Hitler’s Europe shared a common insecurity, their rulers being always fearful of attack or invasion. Both men were convinced that they had to win fresh victories to survive. Each despised and mistrusted their own subjects, to an extent, which is seldom appreciated, seeing the role of French or Germans as servants to their overweening ambition. The peoples of the lands they had subjected were even less than this. Each set up surprisingly similar hierarchies.
‘Berlin must become the true centre of Europe,’ Hitler observed in July 1941, ‘a capital that shall be the capital for everyone’. His ‘New Europe’ was no less of an empire than Napoleon’s. If its creator refrained from becoming ‘Kaiser Adolf I’, he was sufficiently conscious of his monarchical role to consult the speeches of Wilhelm II, keeping four volumes by him at his headquarters throughout the war. He was not philoprogenitive like the Emperor, and he did not possess presentable relations. He therefore ruled the conquered lands through ‘Reich commissars’, mainly men whom he had known for many years, ‘Old Party Fighters’ such as Hans Frank or Alfred Rosenberg. Seyss-Inquart did just what was wanted in Holland, the Führer describing him as ‘an extraordinarily clever man, as supple as an eel, amiable – and at the same time thick-skinned and tough’. He was anxious (in Holland, at any rate) to avoid ‘a North German martinet’ who might ‘alienate popularity’. He had no such inhibitions about Poland or Russia. The former Munich lawyer Hans Frank ruled the Polish General-Gouvernement from the Royal Castle on the Wawel as a corrupt tyrant, while Erich Koch terrorized an East Prussia incorporating a large slice of Russia with sadistic brutality remarkable even by Nazi standards. Once a citizen of the Russian Empire, Alfred Rosenberg – who was supposed to hold sway over the territories farther east – had a certain sympathy for his ‘subjects’, but his master would allow nothing but vicious repression or extermination – a policy implemented ruthlessly by the SS. The ‘hangman’ Reinhard Heydrich proved a surprisingly subtle Deputy Reich-Protector of Bohemia, giving Czech workers such a high standard of living that it alarmed the Allies. The Führer was very pleased with Josef Terboven’s performance in Norway, which he thought ‘the most difficult commissarship of the Reich’. The Nazis had valuable assistance from arch-collaborators like Vidkun Quisling in Norway, Anton Mussert in Holland, Léon Degrelle in Belgium and Ante Pavelić in Croatia, their followers providing militia recruits for the Waffen SS.
Like Napoleon, Hitler had satellites. He saw not only Italy but Finland, Hungary, Romania and Vichy France—and, marginally, Spain – as part of his ‘New Europe’, in much the same way that the Emperor had regarded the German states and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. After Mussolini he rated General Antonescu, Romania’s Conducator, as his most satisfactory ally. He considered Admiral Horthy the Regent of Hungary, to be the least, and he eventually replaced him in 1944 with the bloodthirsty Ferenc Szálasi and his Arrow Cross Party – murdering Horthy’s son in the process.
There was an only too recent precedent of a Germany geared to war, that of 1916-18 when General Ludendorff had been virtually a military dictator, with the support of the uncompromisingly nationalist Vaterland Party. Nevertheless, from the consumer point of view, life in Nazi Germany was comfortable enough. Such luxuries as champagne, furs, spirits and scent flooded in from the conquered territories. The nation’s economy was surprisingly un-militarized, in contrast to what Ludendorff had imposed by 1918. Women were not made to work in factories (as in Britain), while it was always possible to find servants. The huge bureaucracy which resulted from Hitler’s policy of playing off one satrap against another – as Napoleon had done – enabled determined shirkers to evade military service in well-paid and undemanding jobs. Even so, wartime conditions enabled the Führer to fasten his absolutism still more firmly over all Germans.
Everyone lived in dread of the Gestapo. Under the ‘Night and Fog’ decree of 1941 the security services had powers to remove without warning or trial, and in such a way that they disappeared without trace, anyone who was suspected of disloyalty to the régime. Opposition – apart from espionage – was confined to the Right, mainly to people who trusted each other because of close family or social links. A few officers plotted against the Führer from as early as 1938, and by 1942 were scheming somewhat ineffectually to assassinate him. Himmler was vaguely aware of such activities, that something was going on, but for the time being he did not take them very seriously. They stemmed partly from a genuine sense of outrage at the régime’s cruelty and immorality, though the onlyeffective plot to overthrow Hitler did not occur until he was seen to be facing defeat. German officers remained cowed till their nation was threatened by cataclysmic ruin in 1944, just as the Emperor’s paladins had feared for the destruction of France in 1814.
Hitler’s relationship with the Wehrmacht was complicated. Its officers had always kept out of politics, and he made them still more unwilling to intervene by discrediting their leaders; two successive commanders-in-chief were destroyed by scandal – as soon as Field Marshal von Blomberg married a typist from the War Ministry it was revealed that she had posed for pornographic photographs, while General von Fritsch was unjustly branded as a homosexual. In any case, the army was inclined to accept the new régime because of the enormously increased chance for promotion: additional opportunities were provided by the Luftwaffe and the Waffen SS. Yet he never succeeded in subjugating the General Staff, not even in 1941 when he made himself commander-in-chief. It had its own ideas till the last, unshakably traditional; while wanting a strong Germany with the frontiers of 1914, it had no wish for military adventures – let alone to conquer Russia. In the end it tried to kill him, in July 1944. Even after that unhappy failure anyone visiting the army headquarters building beside the Tirpitz Ufer in Berlin was unlikely to hear the greeting ‘Heil Hitler’.27
After becoming Pope in 1939 Pius XII (the former Cardinal Pacelli) was so well aware of the threat to humanity posed by the Führer that he acted as go-between for a group of German generals and the British government in an abortive plot to remove him the following year. Hitler knew the pontiff for his enemy, remarking that had he been the Duce ‘I’d have entered the Vatican and thrown everybody out.’ Pius was sufficiently apprehensive to dress the Swiss Guard in khaki, arming it with machine-guns for a token resistance. He also wrote a secret letter of provisional abdication, to come into effect should the Gestapo arrest him, with the conscious intention of avoiding the leadership crisis which existed while Pius VII was Napoleon’s prisoner. When Mussolini fell in 1943 the Führer seriously contemplated seizing the Pope, but had second thoughts.
Within the Reich itself the German hierarchy dared not be too outspoken, just as in Napoleonic France – though one must not press the comparison too far since, officially the French empire had been a Christian state. When Count von Galen, Bishop of Münster (the ‘Lion’) denounced Gestapo activities Hitler refrained from making a martyr of him. Sometimes the Führer echoed Napoleon’s view of Catholicism’s role: ‘The Church is almost certainly necessary for people,’ Albert Speer records him as saying, ‘It is a strong conservative element.’ After the war Hitler planned to impose an emasculated Catholicism which would be the servant of National Socialism.
The Führer made determined attempts to build a new Germanic ‘aristocracy’. Special boarding-schools, ‘napolas’ Nazional-politische erziehunganstalten, were established to inculcate National Socialist principles into promising young Aryans. ‘The pupils of these schools will consist of a selection of the best elements from the boys and girls of all classes in the German Reich’, Hitler declared. ‘I aim at forming a corps d’élite of fine physique, well-formed character and supple intelligence.’ He saw no difficulties in surpassing in every way the British public schools which to a large extent were their model. (Similar academies were set up in Holland and Norway.) The products of these Nordic Etons emerged as fanatical Nazis, but scarcely as an élite – many were rejected as officer material by the SS.
Occupied countries were governed by a Reich Commissioner or a Military Commandant. Everywhere their half-starved populations were cowed by the presence of the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo, who reacted savagely to the resistance movements which sprang up. Just as the Empire had Europeanized the Grande Armée, every country had to provide troops for the Waffen SS, which became a kind of enormous Foreign Legion. There was also forced labour, the press-ganging of men to work in German factories.
Some countries fared worse than others, notably in the East. No doubt the Führer found justification for his decision to wipe Poland off the map in Vom Kriege, where Clausewitz describes it as a ‘Tartar state’ which could not be really regarded as a European state, as a member of the community of European nations. ‘For a hundred years this country [Poland] has ceased to play any independent part in European politics, and had only been an apple of discord … Poland, if it had not been partitioned, must have become a Russian province.’ He also speaks contemptuously of the ‘turbulent political condition and unbounded levity’ of its leaders, seeing little reason to wonder at ‘the noiseless downfall of Poland’ at the end of the eighteenth century. In his view he was not writing as a soldier of expansionist Hohenzollern Prussia but merely trying ‘to look at things as they really are’, an attitude which would have had considerable appeal for his ardent twentieth-century disciple.
Pomerania, Silesia and Posnania (beyond the furthest boundaries of previous German annexations) were incorporated into the Reich. The inhabitants were deported to the territory known as the General-Gouvernement, which was ruled from Warsaw as a German colony, while three-quarters of a million Germans were settled in their place. The Nazi occupation was accompanied by a systematic attempt to exterminate Polish nobility, intelligentsia and clergy, schools and universities being banned. In October 1939 twenty bearers of the nation’s most historic names were shot at Koscian. In November the entire faculty of Cracow University was invited to a meeting to discuss academic problems, then taken away and murdered. By October 1941 74 priests had been shot in Posnania alone, while another 450 were in prison camps – not because they were priests but because they were potential leaders who might head a cultural resistance. It was even worse for clergy farther east. All educated men, whether landowners, lawyers, or schoolmasters, were liable to be shot. Poles of Jewish origin were herded into ghettos; eventually almost three million were murdered. Still more Poles suffered deportation or press-ganging as slave labour. Any Pole venturing outside the General Gouvernement had to wear a yellow ‘P’, like the yellow star of the Jews. In the Führer’s words, ‘There should be one master only for the Poles, the German.’ His policy of destroying the Polish nation, so that it became no more than a pool of brutalized serfs, was frustrated by the heroism of the resistance. Ironically, it is conceivable that a Vichy-style régime might have attracted substantial support from Poles eager to free their fellow-countrymen from the Russians. The situation became bewildering in occupied Russia. While Hitler intended to reduce all Slavs to serfdom, many army officers and even some high-ranking Nazi officials sympathized with the Ukrainian nationalists and with White Russian refugees. On the whole, however, both Ukrainians and Russians were treated with indescribable brutality.
Late in 1945 SS Obersturmbannführer Günther D’Alquen under interrogation told Colonel Charles Beauclerk of the British Intelligence: ‘We could have recruited a million Russian troops and conquered Russia without difficulty’, and that he had been charged with organizing such an operation. D’Alquen was a sufficiently influential Nazi for Himmler to have been best man at his wedding. Contact had been made before Operation Barbarossa with Ukrainian nationalists, but after the invasion they were sent to camps only marginally superior to those of other prisoners. The millions of Russians who surrendered in 1941, and indeed many who surrendered much later, did so because they felt no allegiance to Marxist socialism. Alfred Rosenberg, a German Balt born a subject of the Tsar, who was appointed Reich Minister for the East, begged frantically that Russia should be divided into its component nationalities, as the Central Powers had tried to do after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, but in vain. The Führer envisaged four Reich Commissariats – Ostland, Ukraine, Caucasia and Moscovia – inhabited by a race of Slav serfs reduced to bestiality and ruled by German settlers. He grudgingly permitted the establishment of General Vlasov’s anit-Soviet force, though its members were treated as inferior troops and inadequately equipped. D’Alquen was convinced that if they had received proper treatment, many more might have been recruited, in which case Germany could have won the war even in 1943.28
Needless to say, Jews anywhere could expect no mercy. Beyond question this was Hitler’s express wish. Until as late as 1941 he may have thought of expelling them from his territory to some far-distant place such as Madagascar instead of murdering them, but the enormous expansion of his empire made this impossible. Schramm says, rightly, ‘no one has ever surpassed him in the extent to which he allowed anti-Semitism to grow into so intensive a mania that it almost completely shattered his faculty of reason’, that he was ‘almost like the medieval person who sensed the Devil everywhere’. He concludes: ‘In the end, all attempts to explain the unprecedented and immeasurable intensity of Hitler’s anti-Semitism finally founded on the inexplicable.’
There is a theory that the real responsibility for the ‘Final Solution’ (systematic extermination of the Jews) lies not with the Führer but with Himmler. It argues that he had not thought out the logical consequences of his anti-Semitic ‘ideology’ as his empire grew, that the Reichsführer introduced the Final Solution without his knowledge, and cites the lack of documentary evidence involving him. Yet exactly the same methods had been applied earlier, and not only to the Polish élite. He had never had any pity for those who did not fit into his ideal racial world; in 1939 Germany had begun to gas the mentally handicapped, thousands dying before protests by religious leaders halted the policy. Another race besides the Jews was systematically exterminated; throughout the Naziempire gypsies were rounded up and sent to the gas chambers, probably as many as 25 per cent of the entire Romany folk perishing. It is impossible that so all-seeing, so malevolent an eye was unaware of what was happening in his Reich.
The holocaust visited on the Jews by Hitler was not, mercifully, foreshadowed by Napoleon. Apart from being generally well disposed towards Jews, Napoleon would never have given Fouché power of the sort wielded by Himmler, nor did he dominate Fouché in the way the Führer did the Reichsführer. Fouché may have been evil, but he was a formidable personage in his own right – without Hitler, Himmler was nothing.
Both empires constitute a remarkable achievement, however much misery they may have caused the people of Europe. Yet, as will be seen, they soon produced far more problems for their creators than they solved. Constant vigilance, many thousands of troops and a vast apparatus of administration were needed to hold down conquered, resentful nations, to stop unwilling allies deserting. Throughout their existence Blocus Continental and Festung Europa always bore the seeds of their own destruction, even if their eventual overthrow had to be through force of arms.
No conquest can be finished too soon.
Clausewitz, Vom Kriege
It has to be remembered that Napoleon, who was a professional strategist, had been just as badly dazzled by his own success, and made the same fatal mistakes in the same place.
Sir Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill