XI

TENEBRAE

Part III

Europe in Eclipse, 1914–1945

MOARTE

IN 1927 the Legion of the Archangel Michael was formed in Bucharest by Comeliu Codreanu. Together with its paramilitary wing, the Iron Guard, it grew into one of Europe’s more violent Fascist movements. In 1937 it secured a substantial share of a large right-radical vote, and in 1940–1, in alliance with General Antonescu’s army, it briefly commanded Romania’s ‘National Legionary State’. In February 1941, having rebelled against its military allies, it was suppressed.

The Legion’s ideology expounded a peculiar variation on the theme of ‘Blood and Soil’, giving a special place to ‘the bones of the ancestors’. In resurrecting Romania’s fortunes it claimed to have created one national community of the quick and the dead. Party rituals centred on a death cult. Meetings began with a roll-call of fallen comrades, whose names were greeted with the shout of ‘Present’. Earth from the tombs of saints was mingled with the ‘blood-soaked soil’ of Party battlefields. Grandiose ceremonies attended the exhumation, cleaning, and reburial of the corpses of Party martyrs. The exhumation of ‘the Captain’, Codreanu, murdered in 1938, constituted the grandest event of the Legion’s months in power. Nazi planes flew overhead, dropping wreaths on the open tomb. Codreanu’s death was one among hundreds of political murders in Romania in the late 1930s, when the Legion’s death squads fought a running battle with the King’s political police. Codreanu was garrotted, shot in the head, and disfigured by acid, before being buried in secret under seven tons of concrete.

In Romania, Serbia, and Greece, Orthodox belief maintains that the soul of the deceased cannot depart until the flesh has decomposed. For this reason, families traditionally gather three to seven years after the first burial and exhume the skeleton, which is then lovingly cleaned and washed in wine before committal to eternal rest. It is also believed that certain categories of corpse are unable to decompose. The Orthodox service of excommunication contains the phrase ‘May thy body never dissolve’. In cases of murder and suicide, the tormented souls are thought to remain indefinitely trapped in the grave. In the district of Maramures, a ceremonial ‘Wedding of the Dead’ is held to placate them.

In certain regions of Romania, folk tradition further holds that a trapped soul can take flight between sundown and cock-crow. Especially on St Andrew’s Day (30 November) and on St Michael’s Eve (8 November), the reanimated corpse returns to haunt the world, slipping through keyholes to take sexual favours from its sleeping victims and to suck their blood. To guard against such visitations, peasants will lead a black stallion into the graveyard. Wherever it shies from stepping over a grave, they drive a great stake through the suspect corpse, to pin it down. From the earliest ethnographic studies, it is well known that this is vampire country.

Political scientists have concluded that Romanian Fascism was just a nasty variety of the genre, with special interests in anti-semitism and necrophilia. The anthropologist would conclude that it mobilized deep-rooted religious and folk traditions. In December 1991, as soon as the Communist dictatorship collapsed, a new ‘Movement for Romania’ emerged, with Codreanu as its hero.

Hitler’s democratic triumph exposed the true nature of democracy. Democracy has few values of its own: it is as good, or as bad, as the principles of the people who operate it. In the hands of liberal and tolerant people, it will produce a liberal and tolerant government; in the hands of cannibals, a government of cannibals. In Germany in 1933–4 it produced a Nazi government because the prevailing culture of Germany’s voters did not give priority to the exclusion of gangsters.

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was an Austrian who became the master of all Germany as no German had ever been. He had been born at Braunau on the Bavarian frontier, the son of a customs official, and had grown up with the stigma of his father’s bastardy (for this reason, unkind acquaintances sometimes called him ‘Schickelgrüber’). His early life had been painful and, in career terms, disastrous. He had some artistic ability, but failed to follow the requisite courses, and drifted round Vienna’s twilight doss-houses as a part-time decorator and postcard artist. Introverted, resentful, and lonely, he was well versed in the social pathology of German Vienna’s anti-Slav and antisemitic demi-monde. Having fled to Munich, he welcomed the First World War, which came as a blessed relief to his personal misery. He served with courage, was twice decorated with the Iron Cross (second class and first class), survived when his comrades died, and was gassed. He ended the war in a military hospital, profoundly embittered. [LANGEMARCK]

Hitler’s post-war political career filled the void of the early failures. His party, the NSDAP, had adopted a brew of commonplace racism, German nationalism, and vulgar socialism which proved attractive first to drifters like himself and later to millions of voters. On the soap-boxes and street-corners of defeated Germany, he found the gift for oratory, or demagoguery, which would carry him to the heights. He learned to modulate the pitch and tempo of his voice, to gesticulate, to wrap his face in winning smiles and blazing fury, and so to captivate an audience that the substance of his words was almost immaterial. His skill, which would soon be magnified by searchlights, loudspeakers, and musical choruses, can only be likened to that of revivalist preachers or of latter-day popstars, whose pseudo-hypnotic performances induce mass hysteria. His emotional intensity uncannily matched the feelings of a humiliated nation. He played on people’s fears, ranting against the ‘Jewish–Bolshevik conspiracy’ and the Allies’ ‘stab in the back’. His one and only attempt to seize power was a total fiasco. The ‘Beer-Cellar Putsch’ of November 1923 taught him to stick to ‘legal means’—that is, to mass rallies, electoral procedures, and political blackmail. His trial, where he railed impressively at the judges, made him a national figure: and his two years in the Landsberg gave him the leisure to write his rambling memoirs, Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1925–6), which became a best-seller. Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer was exactly what the majority of Germans wanted to hear. He promised to make Germany great again, in a ‘Third Reich’ that was to stand a thousand years. To be precise, he kept it in being for twelve years and three months. ‘In the Big Lie’, he had written, ‘there is always a certain force of credibility.’

In his private life, Hitler remained withdrawn, and unmarried until his final hours. He loved animals and children, and kept a homely mistress. In contrast to his companions, many of whom were swaggering louts, he was well-groomed and polite. He has never been linked to personal violence, although he clearly gave the (unrecorded) orders for genocide. But his heart was filled with hate. He was given to quoting Frederick II, whose portrait hung in his study to the end: ‘Now that I know men, I prefer dogs.’ His one passion was architecture. In the 1920s he built himself a magnificent mountain chalet, the Berghof, perched on a peak near Berchtesgaden. Later, he revelled in grandiose plans to rebuild the ruins of Berlin or to turn his native Linz into the art centre of Europe. Western commentators have built Hitler up into an ‘evil genius’. ‘Evil’ is accurate, ‘genius’ doubtful. [BOGEY]

Once at the helm, Hitler moved swiftly to eliminate rivals and opponents. He had to crush the socialist wing of the NSDAP, which had considerable popularity, and which had been calling for the ‘second, socialist revolution’ to follow his own success. On the night of 30 June 1934, ‘the Night of the Long Knives’, he called in the Party’s new élite guard, the SS ‘Blackshirts’, to cut down the Party’s older formation of stormtroopers, the SA ‘Brownshirts’. All the Führer’s immediate rivals were killed at a stroke—Ernst Röhm, the SA leader, Gregor Strasser, the Party’s leading socialist, General von Schleicher, the Nazis’ leading ally in parliament. Having banned the German Communist Party in 1933, he then dissolved all the other parties. Assuming Hindenburg’s office of Commander-in-Chief, he won the army to his side and proceeded to remove unreliable elements.

Hitler arrived with no grand economic design. After all, Germany did not need to be modernized as Russia did. But he soon gained a feel for collectivist economics, and was offered a ready-made scheme by Dr Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank. His initial industrial backers were demanding action, and he guessed that action would generate confidence and employment. Schacht’s plan combined Keynesian financial management with complete state direction of industry and agriculture: the trade unions were replaced by a Nazi labour front; strikes were outlawed. The new deal, like its American counterpart, aimed at full production and full employment through a state-funded work creation programme. The flagship projects included the building of the German Autobahns (1933–4) the launching of the Volkswagen (1938), and, above all, rearmament.

The relationship between Nazism and German industry provides a most contentious issue. One standard interpretation, much favoured by communist scholarship, posited ‘the primacy of economics’. According to this, the interests of big business determined not only short-term political policy, aimed at the destruction of the German left, but long-term strategic policy as well. Germany’s expansion to the East was supposedly motivated by German industry’s demands for raw materials, secure oil, and cheap labour. A contrary interpretation has posited the ‘primacy of politics’. In this view, Hitler soon threw off the tutelage of the industrialists and developed the state-owned sector as a counterweight to private industry. As from 1936, the introduction of a Four-Year Plan, the replacement of Schacht as chief economic adviser, and the promotion of the state-owned steel corporation, the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, all pointed in that direction. A compromise interpretation argues on the basis of the shifting alliances of a ‘poly-cratic power centre’ made up of the NSDAP, army, and industry.38 Rearmament was important for psychological and for political reasons. The German armaments sector, which had been artificially constrained, could recover very quickly; Krupps’ turnover began to improve dramatically from 1933. But rearmament also healed Germany’s wounded pride; and it won over the army, which in 1935–6 was able to reintroduce conscription. Hitler had no precise plans for using his rearmed forces. But it was convenient to let people think that the gun under his coat was loaded.

Agriculture was not a subject that interested the Nazis. They came up with a scheme for the formation of co-operatives. But the main thrust was to guarantee state-fixed prices, and hence the farmers’ security.

Nazi ideology, to put it mildly, was not very sophisticated. Unlike Stalin, Hitler did not inherit a corpus of party thought which could be bent to his own purposes. His one and only work, Mein Kampf (1925), which was to find its way onto the bookshelf of almost every German family, contained only two or three consistent ideas, and nothing original. Most important was the chain of argument which led from the supposed existence of the Herrenvolk or ‘master race’ to the supposed German right to Lebensraum or ‘living space’ in the East.

Hitler took a hierarchy of races for granted. He divided mankind into ‘culture-founders’, ‘culture-bearers’, and ‘culture destroyers’. ‘The bearers of human cultural development’ today were ‘the Aryans’. ‘The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is the Jew.’ The Jews were the Todfeind, the mortal enemy. He did not care to define the Aryans, nor to establish a hierarchy of nations within the Aryan race. His chapter on the subject starts with the observation that some things are so obvious that they don’t need explaining.39 Hitler also believed in ‘the iron logic’ of’racial purity’. ‘In every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower people’, he observed, ‘the result was the end of the cultured people.’ ‘All great cultures of the past perished … from blood-poisoning.’ Hitler believed that the health of a nation was dependent on the value of its national territory. ‘Only an adequately large space on this earth assures a nation freedom of existence.’ ‘The foreign policy of the folkish state must… create a healthy relation between the nation’s population and the quantity and quality of its soil.’

BOGEY

SOON after the German Army occupied Austria in March 1938, Adolf Hitler is said to have ordered the commander of Wehrkreis XVII to demolish the village of Dollersheim by ‘target practice’. The inhabitants were evacuated, and all the buildings of the village, including the cemetery, were duly reduced to rubble by artillery. The point behind this savage operation seems to have been that both Hitler’s father and paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, were buried at Dollersheim, and that Hitler had recently learned the facts of his father’s early life. According to a Gestapo report, the young Frâulein Schicklgruber had conceived Hitler’s father when working as an unmarried domestic servant in a rich Jewish household. The implications, from Hitler’s point of view, were disturbing.

From this, and many other indications, there is reason to believe that Hitler suffered from intense feelings of repressed guilt, shame, and self-hatred about his origins, his blood, his body, and his personality. One is not obliged to take the conflicting evidence at face value to conclude that Hitler is a prime subject for ‘psycho-history’.1

Particularly interesting, and possibly crucial to the Führer’s wartime state of mind, was his rampant hypochondria. From 1936 to 1945 he placed total faith in a dubious physician, Dr Theo Morell, who treated him with constant massive doses of glucose, vitamins, stimulants, appetizers, relax-ants, tranquillizers, and sedatives, usually by direct intravenous injections. Hitler’s obsession with flatulence addicted him to a huge daily diet of anti-gas pills based on atropine and strychnine. Morell’s rivals unsuccessfully reported to the Gestapo that Morell was poisoning the Führer by stealth.2

Soldiers can be intuitive. Sometime during the Second World War, marching to the magnificent beat of ‘Colonel Bogey’, someone in the British Army composed the immortal refrain:

‘itler — ‘as only got one ball;
Goering has two but far too small,
‘immler — is rather sim’ler,
But Gerballs—’as no balls—at all.3

The point here is that twenty years later, when the Soviet authorities released the text of a supposed autopsy report on the late Führer’s corpse, it stated that ‘the left testicle was missing’.4 The report bore traces of a KGB plant, and was not supported by other witnesses. But some historians have taken it seriously. Since congenital monorchidism is rare, they have concluded that Hitler must have mutilated himself by self-castration.5 The mystery was not resolved by the opening of the KGB files in the 1990s.6

Yet the observations do not stop with the physical evidence. Numerous aspects of Hitler’s conduct hint at something hideous beneath the demure exterior. He permitted no talk in his presence about even mildly sexual matters. He had a deep fear of incest. He professed revulsion about ‘filth’ of all sorts. Although the evidence is contradictory, his sex life was either totally sublimated or disgustingly perverse.

At every stage, Hitler’s brilliant openings were paralysed by a pervasive sense of failure. And he repeatedly flirted with suicide. In his love of political ritual, he indulged in a range of pseudo-religious Catholic parodies. Above all, he felt constantly impelled to say that history, or the German nation, or God, or whatever, had found him würdig—’worthy’. The inference has to be that the cauldron of self-hatred which seethed within him fuelled the overt hatred which he then projected onto Jews, Slavs, communists, homosexuals, and gipsies, and eventually onto Germany herself.

Needless to say, self-mockery is a healthier mechanism than self-praise. In the First World War, the British had marched to another magnificent refrain, sung to the lugubrious hymn tune of ‘Greenland’s Icy Mountains’:

‘We are Fred Carno’s Army,* the ragtime infantry.
We cannot fight; we cannot shoot;
No bleedin’ use are we.
And when we get to Berlin, the Kaiser he will say:
Hochl Hoch! Mein Gotti What a bloody awful lot
Are the British Infantry!’

Since Germany’s neighbours already possessed land in abundance, either in the colonies or, in Russia’s case, through the conquest of the steppes, Germany could only compete by seizing the adjacent lands to the East. ‘We stop the endless German movement to the South and West, and turn our gaze towards the land in the East.’ German expansion into Poland and Ukraine would give her the strength not only to fight Russia but also to check France, also ‘the mortal enemy’. Hitler believed that Germany was fighting at a disadvantage in its struggle to exist. ‘Germany is no world power,’ he wailed. ‘Germany will either be a world power, or there will be no Germany.’

Overt racism was accompanied by a collectivist creed which has often been described in vague terms such as ‘the herd instinct’, but which has distinct Marxist overtones. Of his own debt to the Marxism of the pre-war SPD, Hitler once said:

I had only to develop logically what social democracy failed in… National socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd ties with a democratic order … Why need we trouble to socialise banks and factories? We socialise human beings.44

Recent studies have shown that the young Hitler was familiar with Marxist writing, and was impressed by the flag-waving rallies of the Austrian Social Democrats.45 He may have absorbed more than he knew: the Nazis did not have a strong intellectual tradition, but their reticence does not mean that a primitive sort of socialism lay beyond their horizons. It was the Nazis who first instituted May Day as a national festival for (German) workers.

Nazi policies were deduced very rationally from these few shaky propositions. Hitler’s racist nationalism led immediately to the introduction of antisemitic measures. Jews were excluded from state employment and from German citizenship; Jewish traders were officially boycotted; marriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews was forbidden. These measures received their clearest formulation in the Nurnberg Laws of 1935. From the start the Nazis favoured euthanasia, the killing of the mentally and genetically handicapped, and the rewarding of multiple childbirth achieved by heroic German motherhood. On the social plane, the Nazis were contemptuous of all the existing hierarchies—aristocracy, officer corps, professions, and guilds. The ranks of the Nazi Party-State were thrown open to everyone who was prepared to serve without shame or dissent. Offices were filled by the advancement in every German town and village of the most vulgar, unqualified, and grasping elements. Their idols were the failed chicken farmer, Heinrich Himmler, who ran the SS, or the overweight ex-pilot, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, who could no longer squeeze into a cockpit.46 Here was another close counterpart to the ethos of the burgeoning Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR.

Nazism, like Stalinism, was strong on official fictions. Nazi propaganda peddled many strange notions. Hitler was the new Frederick or the new Bismarck. The Nazis were successors to the Germanic gods or the Teutonic Knights. The Third Reich was the natural heir to the Holy Roman Empire and to the Hohenzollerns. The German people, united and free, knew unbounded love for their homeland, unlimited joy in their learning and art, untrammelled pride in their emancipated women, unstinting wrath against traitors and enemies… It was all rather familiar. The cult of Hitler’s personality knew no bounds. The Führer was the embodiment of all that is beautiful, wise, and good.

Most Nazi leaders were unbelievers; Hitler himself was a lapsed Catholic. Their rituals owed more to the parody of ancient Germanic paganism than to any modern religion. So they had a major problem in defining their relationship with a German nation that was still predominantly Christian. As often as not, they ignored the theoretical issues. But to pacify the Catholics, Hitler signed a Concordat with the Vatican in July 1933, confirming the autonomy of the German See in return for the hierarchy’s renunciation of political involvement. The compromise encouraged some Catholic prelates, such as Archbishop Innitzer of Vienna, to express sympathy for Nazi aims. But it did not prevent the Vatican from ordering Mit brennender Sorge (1937), which denounced Nazi ideology, to be read in all Catholic churches in Germany. To manage the Protestants, Hitler announced the creation in 1935 of a state-controlled Union of Protestant Churches. There was also an attempt to found a new movement for ‘German Christians’, where the swastika embraced the cross, under Reichsbishop Dr Muller. In November 1933 these pseudo-Christian Nazi surrogates staged a demonstration in Berlin to the honour of ‘Christ the Hero’. In the end, religion and irreligión had to co-exist as best they could.

In the field of coercion and terror the Nazis were fast learners. Their ‘Brownshirts’ and ‘Blackshirts’ had a solid grounding in common fraud, blackmail, and thuggery. On the other hand, at the head the German Rechtsstaat, they did not have 500 years of the Muscovite oprichniki behind them. The structures of social control were less complete than in the USSR. There was no state monopoly in employment; there was no collectivized countryside; and there were no party cells or commissars in the Wehrmacht until 1944. All of which goes some way to explain the Nazis’ special style, where studied bestial ferocity had to compensate for structural weaknesses. A high level of well-publicized brutality was required, simply because more refined instruments of control were often lacking.

The security organs of the Reich never assumed the monstrous proportions of their Soviet counterparts. Both the Party Guard, the Schutzstaffeln, and the Gestapo, the ‘Secret State Police’, were used by the Party to supplement existing military and police forces. But neither was given the same range of competence invested in the NKVD. One concentration camp was opened at Dachau, near Munich, in 1934; but the number of prisoners was dropping in the late 1930s. Nazi-run People’s Courts and People’s Judges increasingly absorbed the work of the traditional judiciary. But wholesale terror was not the norm. In Germany itself, Nazi violence stayed within predictable parameters. Germans who conformed could expect to survive. Some 500,000 German Jews were persecuted and expelled; the Kristallnacht of 1938, when Jewish synagogues and shops were smashed, caused vast damage and apprehension. But it does not appear that ‘the Final Solution’ was planned in advance. At no point prior to the outbreak of war did the Reich possess the facilities or the modern death technology which it subsequently employed. It is an open question how far the Nazis emulated the Soviet terror machine, which was both older and larger than theirs.

Political scientists worry too much about the theoretical classification of Nazism. Some, after Arendt, accept that it was a member of the totalitarian family, others, after Nolte, think of it as one of the ‘three faces of Fascism’; others prefer to leave it as a movement sui generis.47 It was one, none, or all of these things, according to the criteria one chooses. Less than fifty years after the last Nazi fell from grace, many analysts are still strongly swayed by personal rancour, by political bias, or by the victors’ syndrome. Suffice it to say, if personal views are permitted, that Nazism was the most repulsive movement of modern times. The ideals of its utopia were no less ugly than the realities of its Reich.

Europe, wracked by the Depression, was in poor shape to meet the challenge posed by Stalin and Hitler. The Western Powers were absorbed with their own affairs. The USA was absent. The states of East Central Europe were weak and divided. At the very time that the idea of collective security was mooted, Europe’s attention was diverted by the Civil War in Spain.

Britain at the end of the Great War had retreated into its island and imperial concerns. There were crises enough in Ireland, in India, and in Palestine. Despite the formation of two Labour governments, labour troubles multiplied at home. The General Strike of May 1926, the launching of the communist Daily Worker (1930), the Labour Party’s expulsion of its own leader, Ramsay MacDonald, for forming a National Government (1931), and the creation of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (1932), all took place to the background of unemployment rising to 3 million. The Conservative Government headed first by Stanley Baldwin and then by Neville Chamberlain was elected in 1935 on promises of stability and good management. Its principal headache prior to the Munich Crisis lay in the young King’s love affair with an American divorcee and his subsequent abdication. All the while, a remarkable series of social and technological advances were taking place: the initiation of the BBC (1922), of family planning (1922), of full women’s suffrage (1928), and of paperback books (1935); the invention of television (1926), penicillin (1928), and the jet engine (1937). The British generation which came to maturity after the Great War felt that they had lived through enough stresses; the last thing they wanted to worry about was storm clouds on the Continent.

France could not withdraw from the Continent. In the 1920s French policy gave priority to building security, partly by the hard line towards Germany and partly through the ‘Little Entente’ in the East (see below). But then the emphasis shifted. The 1930s saw the heyday of French Algiers and French Saigon, whilst at home the Depression brought labour issues to the fore. édouard Daladier (1884–1970), a radical socialist, twice served as Premier, whilst shifting coalitions and the Stavisky scandal (1934) aroused widespread disillusionment. Political opinion polarized, with the Parti Communiste Francais and Action Française both vociferous. A whole stereotype of allegedly static French attitudes came to be associated with the name of Andre Maginot, Minister of War 1929–32 and constructor of a vast line of fortifications along the eastern frontier. This was not entirely fair. It is not true, as the British were later to charge, that the French army was unwilling to fight; but in the absence of any significant British force, it did not relish the task of fighting Germany single-handed; and it was locked into organizational plans that impeded early offensive action.

Scandinavia in the 1930s was fortunate in lying beyond the sphere of strategic tensions. Sweden was hard hit by recession in the iron trade, but responded under the Social Democrats by organizing the most comprehensive system of social welfare in the world, [SOCIALIS]

East Central Europe, in contrast, lay in the eye of the gathering storm. With Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other, its leaders had every right to be nervous. Security arrangements made by the French in the 1920s had several serious loopholes. The concept of the cordon sanitaire which began as a belt of states holding off Soviet Russia, was not pursued with any consistency. The ‘Little Entente’, which joined Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia in a cooperative system designed for the containment of a resurgent Hungary, did not include Poland—the largest country of the region—and from 1934 was matched by an independent Balkan Pact of Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey. The Western Powers had no high reputation for decisiveness. When Warsaw had been attacked by the Red Army in 1920, they sent a flurry of unsolicited military missions, but no military reinforcements. In 1934, when Marshal Pikudski took soundings in Paris about a preventative war against Nazi Germany, he elicited no response. The Western Powers never quite decided whether their policy in Eastern Europe was to be based on the new states, like Poland, or on the congenial post-Bolshevik Russia, which never materialized. From 1935, when their fear of Hitler outgrew their dislike of Stalin, they turned to a hyena to tame a wolf.

In East Central Europe, the international crisis of the 1930s inevitably affected internal affairs. The communist parties, usually illegal, had little popular support except in Czechoslovakia; but they acted as an important irritant, provoking nationalist elements to react. Hitler, when he wasn’t inciting the German minorities in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, encouraged other nationalistic elements to emulate him. In the process dictatorships were strengthened, military budgets soared, the political role of the officer class increased; nationalism and ethnic conflicts of all sorts intensified.

In Poland, for example, the vicinity of Stalin and Hitler could be sensed on every hand. Marshal Pilsudski, who signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR in 1932 and another with Germany in 1934, sought an even-handed stance summed up in his ‘doctrine of two enemies’. The Polish Communist Party, which had opposed Poland’s independence in 1918–20, had adopted an internationalist and Trotskyite leaning. Its exiled leadership, largely Jewish, was liquidated en masse during Stalin’s purges. At the other extreme, the National Democratic movement spawned a fascistic offshoot, the Falanga, which was also banned. Militant nationalistic organizations sprang up in each of the national minorities. The Ukrainian OUN—a radical offshoot of the older UWO organisation— indulged in common terrorism and provoked brutal pacifications of the peasants. Zionism made rapid headway in the Jewish community, where ‘revisionist’ groups such as Betar spawned militants such as Menachem Begin or Yitzak Shamir, who would shine elsewhere. A Nazi Fifth Column was organized among the German minority. The activities of all these groups fuelled the fires of mutual hatred. After Pilsudski’s death in 1935, the so-called ‘Government of Colonels’ strove to check the centrifugal forces by forming a Camp of National Unity (OZON). But they found that the main opposition parties joined forces against them. General Sikorski joined Paderewski in Switzerland in the anti-government Morges Front. Priority was given to belated military reform and, in a state economic plan, to rearmament. The Foreign Minister, Colonel Józef Beck, trod an even-handed course which displeased the Western Powers, who wanted him to co-operate with Stalin. Towards his lesser neighbours, however, he thumped the nationalist drum. He set his eyes on the district of Zaolzie (Polish Cieszyn), which had been forcibly seized by the Czechs in 1919. And in early 1939 he sent a brusque ultimatum to Lithuania demanding an end to the state of undeclared war. Violent incidents were few; but the threat of violence was abroad.

Poland’s Jewish community—still the largest in Europe—lived out its last summers. In the late 1930s apprehension about the future was growing, especially when waves of Jewish refugees and expellees arrived from Germany. Various forms of petty harassment, in education, municipal laws, and employment, were on the rise, but there was nothing to compare with the rampages of the Nazis. For anyone who has seen the pictures and documents of those years, the image is one of a vibrant, variegated communal life. The Jewish kahals enjoyed full autonomy. Jewish parties of many hues were free to operate. There were Jewish film stars, Jewish boxing champions, Jewish women MPs, Jewish millionaires. To say, as is sometimes done, that Polish Jewry was ‘on the edge of destruction’ is true enough; but it is to read history backwards.48

Czechoslovakia had a reputation for democracy that was stronger abroad than among the country’s own German, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, and Ruthenian minorities. Exceptionally for the region, it was highly industrialized, it had a genuine communist movement, and it looked to Russia for moral support. During the long presidency of the great T. G. Masaryk, who retired in 1935, it held together.

The ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes’ changed its name to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. It had no common history, language, or religion. It had come into being on the initiative of Slovenes and Croats from Austro-Hungary, who urged the Serbian establishment to admit them and then came to resent Serbian domination. The Serbian monarchy and army played the central role, particularly after the establishment of a unitary royal dictatorship in 1929. In Catholic Croatia, the national party of Stefan Radie* gained the upper hand in local affairs that had been impossible under Hungarian rule, only to find its voice blocked in Belgrade. Slovenia prospered quietly under its leader, Father Korosec, the original convenor of the Yugoslav National Council. Macedonia simmered. The climate of violence was heightened by the murder of Radió (1929) and then of King Alexander (1934). The democratic Serb opposition began to make common cause with the Croats. But time was short: ‘Yugoslavia is a necessity,’ wrote one observer, ‘not a predestined harmony.’ (See Appendix III, p. 1319.) [SARAJEVO]

In the Mediterranean the main shock-waves were generated by Fascist Italy. Mussolini, who liked to talk in ancient Roman style of ‘Mare Nostro’ (Our Sea), was determined to become the regional power. Having eliminated the active opposition, who abandoned the parliament after the murder of a socialist deputy, he had a free hand. His designs were expedited by a pliant King and by the stage-managed organs of a streamlined ‘corporate state’. In the 1930s he looked further afield: Italian troops were sent to Abyssinia, to Spain, and, in March 1939, to Albania. The League of Nations recommended sanctions, the British and the French threatened reprisals, but nothing was actually done. Mussolini thrived by baiting Austria over South Tyrol. Prior to the ‘Pact of Steel’ of 22 May 1939, and the consequent Rome–Berlin Axis, he liked to flaunt his independence from Germany.

Civil strife had been festering in Spain for at least twenty years. The Spaniards met added misfortune by unleashing a civil war at a juncture when communist–fascist rivalry was moving to its peak throughout Europe. As a result, the military insurrection of 1936 attracted the attention of Hitler and Stalin. Spain was turned into a laboratory for Europe’s nastiest political practices. Three years of agony culminated in the resounding defeat of democracy. The roots of the conflict lay deep in Spain’s unstable history, in a polarized society, and in an intractable land problem. Over half of the land belonged to barely 1 per cent of the population. The mass of peasants lived on tiny holdings or on starvation wages. The small working class was badly hit by the Depression. The Roman Catholic Church, dominated by an ultra-reactionary hierarchy, was deeply involved in economic affairs as a major landowner and as the controller of many enterprises from the Banco Espíritu Santo to the Madrid tramways. An army whose ratio of officers to men was unusually high was a bastion of ultramontane and monarchist sentiment. The result was a peculiarly obtuse and resistant social fortress composed of priest, squire, and officer, which habitually obstructed any reforms that touched their interests. Social protests were desperate, vicious, and anticlerical. Anarchists were prominent among both the rural labourers of the south and the workers’ unions of Barcelona. There were separatist provinces in Catalonia, in the Basque country, and, to some extent, in Galicia. In Morocco, where the long war against the Riffs ended in 1925, the army ruled supreme. In 1930–1 the latest lurch of the political seesaw brought the downfall of the military dictator, General Primo de Rivera, a lengthy interregnum, the Dictablanca, the abdication of King Alfonso, and finally the declaration of the Second Republic.

SARAJEVO

WHOEVER lies awake in Sarajevo hears the voices of the Sarajevo night. The clock on the Catholic cathedral strikes the hour with weighty confidence: 2 a.m. More than a minute passes—seventy-five seconds to be exact—and only then does the Orthodox church chime its own 2 a.m. A moment later the tower clock on the Bey’s Mosque strikes the hour in a hoarse, faraway voice; and it strikes 11, the ghostly Turkish hour. The Jews have no clock, so God knows what time it is for them … Thus division keeps vigil, and separates these sleeping people, who wake, rejoice, and mourn, feast and fast by four different calendars…

Bosnia is a country of hatred and fear. And the fatal characteristic is that the Bosnian is unaware of the hatred which lives within, shrinks from analysing it—and hates anyone who tries to do so. Yet there are more people ready in fits of subconscious hatred to kill and be killed than in other much bigger lands … It is hatred acting as an independent force: hatred like a cancer consuming everything around it.

And by a strange contrast, it can also be said that there are few countries with such firm belief, so much tenderness, such loyalty and unshakeable devotion. But in secret depths hide entire hurricanes of compressed and maturing hatreds awaiting their hour. The relationship between your loves and your hatred is the same as between your high mountains and the invisible geological strata beneath them. You are condemned to live on deep layers of explosive which are lit from time to time by the very sparks of your loves.

In countries like Bosnia, virtue itself often speaks and acts through hatred. Those who do believe and love feel a mortal hatred for those who don’t, or who believe and love differently. (The most evil and sinister-looking faces can be met in greatest numbers at places of worship—at monasteries and dervish tekkes.)

On every occasion you will be told: LOVE YOUR BROTHER, THOUGH HIS RELIGION IS OTHER, IT’S NOT THE CROSS THAT MARKS THE SLAV, and RESPECT OTHERS’ WAYS AND TAKE PRIDE IN YOUR OWN. But there has been plenty of counterfeit courtesy since time immemorial. Under cover of these maxims, old instincts and Cainlike plans may only be slumbering. They will live on until the foundations of material and spiritual life are completely changed. And when will that time come, and who will have the strength to carry it out?

In some Maupassant story, there is a dionysiac description of spring which ends with the remark that on such days there should be a warning posted on every corner: citoyens! this is spring—beware of love!

Perhaps in Bosnia, too, people should be warned …1

These paragraphs are contained in a work that is classed as fiction. They enshrine the imagined reflections of an emigrant, who left Bosnia in 1920. They were composed in 1946 by Ivo Andrió (1892–1975), child of Travnik, student of Zagreb, Vienna, and Krakow, sometime prisoner of the Habsburgs, pre-war Yugoslav diplomat, and Nobel laureate.

Is it really fiction? ‘Much of [Andrió’s work] is set in Bosnia,’ his editor explains, ‘and is closely dependent on this setting. He roots his stories in a specific geographical and historical context.’ In other words, an important element of the stories is not fiction. Andriö paints the psychological landscape of Bosnian society with the same precision that he reports the sounds of the Sarajevo night. These descriptions can be treated as invaluable historical documents.

At that same time, in 1946, an experienced welfare officer was working for UNRRA in Sarajevo. She presented the opposite opinion. ‘It is only by working together that people can get over their hatreds,’ she wrote. ‘Now is a good time. Everything that is young is thinking the right way … Now we don’t care—is he Moslem, is he Catholic, is he Orthodox? Now it is brotherhood and unity.’

The five years of constitutional government from 1931 to 1936 brought mayhem out of chaos. In 1931 the Primate, the Archbishop of Toledo, was exiled for denouncing the Republic. In 1932 an abortive pronunciamiento was launched by the generals. In 1933 the landowners of the south kept peasants off the land rather than accept reform. Legislation introducing state schools and divorce, and separating Church from State, could not be implemented. Agrarian reform was reversed and sequestrated land returned to its former owners. In 1934 a determined strike by miners in Asturias grew into a separatist rising which was broken only with massive bloodshed. In the elections of February 1936 the left-wing Frente Popular or ‘Popular Front’ of republicans, socialists, Catalans, and communists carried the day. But by then the central government was losing control. Recalcitrant peasants were occupying the great estates. Workers were organizing one general strike after another. The Catalans were claiming autonomy. Political murders and church-burning proliferated. ‘We are present today’ said the outgoing Catholic Prime Minister, ‘at the funeral service of democracy.’ The country was becoming ungovernable.

On 18 July 1936 the Generals struck for a second time. General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) crossed to Tetuán from his command in the Canaries and issued a manifesto. Spain was to be saved from Red revolution; the army in North Africa would not hesitate to use its Moorish troops. ‘The Crusade against Marxism’, as one republican sympathizer put it, ‘was to be undertaken by Moors against Catholics.’

At the outset, the political spectrum in Spain was extremely wide and complicated. In the Cortes, the Popular Front was opposed by a right-wing coalition, including the Acción Popular or ‘People’s Action’ and the Fascist Falange Española, recently founded by Primo de Rivera’s son. On the left, the Communist Party hold only 16 out of the Front’s 277 seats, compared to 89 for the Socialists headed by Largo Caballero and 84 for Manuel Azaña’s Left Republicans. Inexorably, however, the strains of civil war boosted the fortunes of the two most violent and radical extremes. TheFalange was destined to become the main political instrument of the army. The communists were destined to dominate the beleaguered Republic. Franco said, and possibly believed, that he was fighting to forestall Bolshevism. His slogan was Fe ciega en la victoria ‘Blind Faith in Victory’. It was beside the point that the communist menace was exaggerated, what counted was that many Spaniards feared it.

The pattern of political and geographical support became very complex. When Franco’s army command proclaimed its insurrection in Morocco, it rebelled against the Government of the Spanish Republic in Madrid, headed at the time by Azaña. The army could count on garrisons in each of the main cities of the mainland, on the paramilitary squads of the Falange, and, in some areas, on the ultra-Catholic formations, the Requetes, left over from the Carlist era. Generally speaking, they could count on the political support of the Catholic hierarchy, of the larger landowners, and of all who gave priority to the restoration of law and order. From an early stage they received military assistance from Portugal, from Nazi Germany, and from Fascist Italy. Portugal offered secure bases. The war-planes of the German Condor Legion provided air superiority. Early in 1937 Italian troops occupied the Balearic Islands, and the southern coast round Málaga.

The Government, in contrast, had few professional troops to call its own. In time, it trained and fielded a regular force; but it had to rely heavily on the armed militias of various left-wing unions—the socialist PSOE, the anarchist FAI, the Marxist but anti-Stalinist POUM, the UGT and the communist-run CNT. Generally speaking, it could count on the political support of the peasants in the countryside, of workers in the towns, of anticlericals everywhere, and of all who gave priority to constitutional government. From an early stage they received assistance from abroad: tanks, planes, munitions, and advisers from the USSR, and in the International Brigades a flood of perhaps 50,000 foreign volunteers. In the later stages, in 1938–9, it has to be said that the nightmare painted by Fascist propaganda did materialize. Under Dr Negrin, the Government did fall under the influence of hard-line communists, and its security agency, the Military Investigation Service (SIM), into the direct control of the Soviet GPU. The Spanish Republic’s gold, transferred to Odessa for safe keeping in September 1936, was never returned, [ADELANTE]

The fighting was long, fragmented, and often confused (see Appendix III, p. 1324). Ragged and vicious local confrontations were more common than sustained campaigns or set-piece battles. Behind the lines, massacres of prisoners and civilians were perpetrated by both sides. The strategic layout was not simple. After the initial exchanges, when army garrisons in Madrid and Barcelona were shelled into submission, the Government held most of the country except for the northwest at Corunna and the extreme south at Seville. But once the army had re-established itself along the Portuguese frontier, and captured the central fortress of Toledo, it could gradually envelop the Government strongholds on the north coast and in the corridor linking Madrid and Valencia. The Army Junta established itself at Burgos, with HQ at Salamanca; the Government at Valencia. Outstanding events included the year-long nationalist siege of Oviedo, the German bombing of Guernica in April 1937, the lunging operations for control of the Ebro and the strong point of Teruel in 1938, and, in 1939, the terminal sieges first of Barcelona (January) and then of Madrid (March). In Barcelona, ‘the wildest city in Europe’, where Catalans and anarchists were opposed to any form of Spanish government, whether Red or White, the tragedy ended with frightful massacres perpetrated by both the defeated communists and their erstwhile anarchist allies. In Madrid, where the rump Council of Defence of the Popular Front eventually renounced the communists, it ended with the rebels’ triumphal entry on 29 March. At the victory parade, Franco could at last voice his slogans with conviction: ‘Hay orden en el país’ (there is order in the country) and ‘España, una, grande, libre’ (Spain is one, great, and free). Republican leaders fled. Thousands of refugees poured over the Pyrenees.51 Spain lay firmly in the Fascists’ grip for 40 years, [FARAON]

ADELANTE

IN September 1936, Comintern’s propaganda chief in Western Europe I advised Moscow to form a series of International Brigades to fight for the Spanish Republic. The idea had originated with Maurice Thorez of the Parti Communiste Francais, who remembered the ‘International Legion of the Red Army’ which had fought in the Russian Civil War.1

From the start, therefore, though the Brigades were presented as the spontaneous action of volunteers, they were thoroughly subordinated to the Communist movement. They operated outside the regular command of the Spanish Republican Army; all their senior military and political staff were Communist appointees; and all recruits were vetted by Soviet agents. Their slogans were ‘Spain—the graveyard of European Fascism’, No pasarán (‘They will not pass’), and Adelante, ‘Forward’.

The principal recruiting office in Paris was headed by Jozip Broz, alias ‘Tito’, the future dictator of Yugoslavia. It organized a ‘secret railway’, using false passports to send recruits to the Spanish frontier and thence to the Brigades’ main base at Albacete in La Mancha.

In Europe of the Depression there was a large pool of manpower to draw on—unemployed workers, refugees from the Fascist states, rebel intellectuals. Of the 50,000 who served, the biggest contingents were raised by the Confederation Générale du Travail in France, by Polish miners’ organizations in Belgium and the French département of Le Nord, and by left-wing German exiles. Eighty per cent of them were working men. There was also a nucleus of foreign volunteers already serving at the front. These included German, Italian, French, and British ‘columns’ (see Appendix III, p. 1325). Their leaders included Carlo Rosselli, a socialist who had escaped from a Fascist gaol in Italy, and Hans Beimler, a German escapee from Dachau.

The intellectual recruits were few, but vocal. They answered the call, often without knowing the implications:

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fisherman’s islands,

Or the corrupt heart of a city;

Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.2

The military leadership of the Brigades was not experienced in warfare. The commander-in-chief, Andre Marty, a Catalan sailor from Perpignan, had led a mutiny in the French fleet off Odessa in 1919. The chief military adviser, Col. Karol Swierczewski, alias ‘Walter’, was a Polish officer from the Soviet security service, and a professor at the military academy in Moscow. The inspector-general, Luigi Longo, and the chief political officer, Giuseppe di Vittorio, were Italian Communists. The one commander to show real talent was Lazar Stern, alias ‘General Kléber’, an Austrian Jew from Bukovina, who had gone over to the Bolsheviks as a POW in Russia. He, like many such comrades, would be shot on Stalin’s orders on his return to Russia.

The courage of the men was not in doubt. They lived in squalid conditions and were subject to ferocious discipline, including executions, for the slightest offence. They fought with desperate courage. At the siege of Madrid in November 1936, for example, the British battalion lost one third of its effectives. At the Jarama, the same unit suffered 375 casualties out of 600 men.3 Worst of all, the Brigades were used to suppress the communists’ erstwhile socialist and anarchist allies by brute force.

By the end of 1938, the Kremlin agreed to pull the Brigades out. About 12,000 departed, leaving some 6,000 Germans with nowhere to go. A farewell parade in Barcelona on 15 November, held under portraits of Negrin, Azaña, and Stalin, was addressed by ‘La Pasionaria’:

You are history … You are legend … We will not forget you. And when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves again, and mingles them with the laurels of a victorious Spanish Republic … come back!4

Thanks to later developments, when the Western powers adopted the anti-Fascist cause, the career of the International Brigades in Spain attracted much favourable publicity. In fact, they were always outnumbered by the foreigners fighting for Franco. The latter included some Fascist regulars, some idealistic volunteers, and some, like the Irish Brigade of General O’Duffy, blatant adventurers. To see the overall picture, one has to compare the recruits raised by the Communists in 1936–7 with those attracted by the Fascists both in Spain and in the Second World War [LETTLAND].

Franco’s victory over ‘the Spanish people’, as his opponents put it, was frequently attributed to his superior armaments and foreign help. But the truth was not so simple or so palatable. The ‘Spanish people’ were not all on one side, and neither were all of Spain’s ‘anti-democratic’ forces. It is hard to say whether the Spanish Republic was more discomfited by its nationalist enemies or by the totalitarian elements within its own ranks. Franco could unite his supporters; the Republic’s supporters could not organize a united or effective democracy.

For Spain, the Civil War was a tragic lesson in the fruits of fratricidal hatred. Estimates of casualties range from 400,000 to a million.52 For Europe, it was yet another object lesson in the mechanisms whereby disciplined minorities can take control of countries which let them breed. Also, since Western sympathies were strongly behind the defeated Republic, it greatly magnified fears of a general fascist menace. By the same token, it diminished fears of the ‘Red Bogey’. Thanks to Franco’s unwelcome success, public opinion in the Western democracies entered the ‘anti-fascist’ mode which was to characterize its priorities for the duration. Franco strengthened the West’s resolve to stand up to Hitler and Mussolini, whilst lowering its sensitivity to Stalin. After March 1939 it was hard for any politician in the West to argue that communism was as great a menace as fascism.

FARAON

GENERAL Franco’s mausoleum, at Cuel de Moros in the Valley of the Fallen near Madrid, was built after his victory in 1939. It consists of a grandiose underground basilica, larger than the nave of St Peter’s, which is approached through a tunnel hewn through the granite and lined with the tombs of the Civil War dead. On the exterior it is surmounted by ‘the largest Christian symbol ever erected’—a stone cross 492 ft high and weighing 181,740 tons.1 It was constructed by the slave labour of ex-POWs, branded with the letter ‘T’ for trabajador or ‘worker’, who toiled for two decades between the work-site, the quarries, and compulsory church services in the nearby Escorial. They were officially employed by the ‘Board for the Redemption of Penalties through Labour’—a name reminiscent of Nazi slogans. Visiting the site in 1940, a Nazi officer was said to have remarked, ‘Who does [Franco] think he is—a new Pharaoh?’

Ironically enough, Franco’s victory came too late to arrest the general drift of events. If fascism had triumphed in Spain in 1937 or 1938, it is conceivable that the West would have been aroused to the danger in time to nip Hitler in the bud. It is conceivable that the whole sorry story of appeasement could have been avoided. As it was, in the three years that the Civil War in Spain dragged on, the dictators grew from strength to strength, and the chance for collective security was missed.

‘Collective security’ was one of several abortive brain-children of the Western Powers, especially of the British, who were past masters at getting somebody else to do the fighting for them. Discussions went back to late 1933 when Hitler first pulled Germany out of the League of Nations. Before then, since the Soviet Union did not impinge on the West directly, Western anxieties had remained low. But the prospect of Nazi Germany on the loose in central Europe brought the danger rather nearer home. The obvious solution was for London and Paris to revive the strategic triangle of the Great War, and to recruit the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Germany. It was a move which the British in particular had been hoping to make since 1917. There was something of a public-relations problem, of course, in that Western politicians had been given to bad-mouthing Soviet communism; but it was not beyond the ingenuity of diplomats to explain that the Soviet regime was now entering a constructive phase, or that Stalin was more democratic than Lenin and Trotsky. Hence, in the middle of the most enormous campaigns of mass killing in European history, Stalin was made respectable and brought into the fold of the peaceful nations. Hitler’s representative walked out of the League on 14 October 1933; Stalin’s representative, Maxim Litvinov, moved in on 18 September 1934.

From Stalin’s point of view, rapprochement with the West offered several advantages. It would increase trade, and with it the import of technology. It would improve the USSR’s image, whilst keeping the Nazis guessing. It would give Moscow’s loyal communist parties abroad the chance to win acceptance and, by entering the Popular Fronts—as in Spain—to penetrate democratic parliaments and unions. Again there was a public-relations problem, since the Stalinists were given to calling democratic politicians everything from ‘bourgeois exploiters’ to ‘lackeys of international imperialism’; but this did not mean that Stalin had to abandon his discreet relations with Berlin, or the possibility of an eventual deal with Hitler. For the time being, he could keep all options open.

In the years that followed, the Nazis reacted to the rumblings of the West with thinly disguised contempt. Their every step spelled disaster for the Versailles settlement. In July 1934 they almost brought off a coup in Austria, where they murdered the Chancellor, Dr Engelbert Dolfuss, whose Fatherland Front had organized a one-party but anti-Nazi state. In 1935 they celebrated the Saarland’s accession to the Reich, through a plebiscite envisaged by the Treaty, then promptly reintroduced conscription, reconstituted the Luftwaffe, and renounced the disarmament clauses. In March 1936 they openly defied the Treaty by reoccu-pying the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland. In 1937 they pulled out of the British-backed Non-intervention Committee that was trying to keep foreign forces out of Spain, and signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Italy. In March 1938 Hitler engineered theAnschluss or ‘merger’ with Austria, proclaimed the Greater German Reich, and drove to Vienna in triumph (see Appendix III, p. 1323).

Throughout this period Hitler was boasting of, and exaggerating, the scale of German rearmament. He kept quiet about the fact that he had already told his staff to prepare for war. [HOSSBACH] This does not mean that he had prepared a timetable for the events which ensued; on the contrary, the major conflict for which German industrialists and generals were preparing was not envisaged before 1942. In the mean time Hitler would be engaged in the tactics of bluff and threat, in what has aptly been called the policy of ‘peaceful aggression’. He felt that he could get what he wanted either without war or at most by localized conflict. To this end, in the spring of 1938 he began to make noises about the intolerable oppression of Germans in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. By that time the Western leaders could not fail to notice that Nazi Germany was bent on expansion, and that collective security was not producing concrete results. So, at the instigation of the new British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, they embarked on appeasement. Chamberlain was acutely aware that renewed war in Europe would undermine Britain’s fragile economic recovery and her imperial position overseas.

Appeasement, despite its later reputation, need not necessarily have been a policy of abject surrender. It contained elements both of realism and of magnanimity; certainly, in the form that favoured negotiations with Germany, it rejected the cynicism revealed in earlier Franco-British dealings with Italy. As Chamberlain well knew, the Hoare–Laval Pact of December 1935, which simply sought to acquiesce in the Italian attack on Abyssinia, had been disowned both in London and Paris, and had led to the downfall of its inventors. What is more, twenty years after the Great War, liberal opinion largely accepted that German grievances over their minorities in Eastern Europe deserved discussion. Many also agreed with the MacDonald Plan of 1933, which had proposed a balance of armaments in Europe in place of the indefinite prolongation of Allied supremacy. The generals advised that there were only two ways of effective Allied intervention against eventual German aggression in the East. Yet co-operation with Stalin’s Red Army was fraught with dangers; and direct action against Germany in the West could only be undertaken by starting the full-scale war whose avoidance was so heartily desired. All in all, it was not dishonourable for Chamberlain to seek out ‘Herr Hitler’ in Germany, or to seek a resolution of the Sudeten question. It was not the fact of negotiation that was at fault, only the skills and priorities of the negotiators. Chamberlain went as a lamb into the lion’s den, woefully ignorant of the ‘faraway country ’ whose fate hung in the balance. Nor should one imagine that the history of appeasement was confined to the policy of the Western Powers towards Hitler. It has an even longer chapter in their relations at a slightly later date with Stalin. Democratic governments who neglect the moral fundamentals negotiate with dictators at their peril.53

The Munich Crisis, as it came to be called, unfolded in September 1938 on terms set by Hitler and never seriously challenged. It was concerned with Germany’s designs on France’s ally Czechoslovakia. Yet France took a back seat; the Czechoslovak government was excluded from the main discussions; and no thought was given to keeping Czechoslovakia’s defences viable. The negotiations were supposed to draw a line on German expansion to the East. Yet they proceeded without the participation of the two most interested parties, namely Poland and the USSR. They were supposed to impress on Hitler the risk he was running. Yet the Western negotiators did not lay their strongest cards on the table. As Hitler rightly sensed, the more outrageous aspects of his contentions were not going to be tested. This, plus Chamberlain’s limitless gullibility, determined the outcome. ‘In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness of his face,’ Chamberlain mused of Hitler, ‘I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied on.’

HOSSBACH

ON 5 November 1937, from 4.15 to 8.30 p.m., a conference was held in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. It was attended by a group of leading German dignitaries, including Goering, Neurath, and Raeder, and was addressed by Hitler on the subject of ‘opportunities for the development of our position in the field of foreign affairs.’ The contents of his speech, the Führer melodramatically announced, were, in the event of his death, to be regarded as his last testament. They are known from a memorandum written up by Hossbach, the man who took the minutes:

The aim of German policy was to secure and preserve the Volksmasse, the racial community and to enlarge it. It was a question of space … German policy had to reckon with two hate-inspired antagonists, Britain and France, to whom a German colossus … was a thorn in the flesh.

Germany’s problem could only be solved by means of force, and this was never without risk … There still remain the questions of ‘when’ and ‘how’. In this matter, there were three cases to be dealt with:

Case 1: the period 1943–5. After this date only a change for the worse, from our point of view, could be expected … If the Führer was still living, it was his unalterable determination to resolve Germany’s problem of space by 1943–5 at the latest.

Case 2: If internal strife in France … should absorb the French completely, then the time for action against the Czechs had come.

Case 3: If France is so ambivalent in war with another state that she cannot proceed against Germany … our first objective, if embroiled in war, must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously …

Poland—with Russia at her rear will have little inclination to engage …

Military intervention by Russia was, in view of Japan’s attitude, more than doubtful…

It was to be assumed that Britain—herself at war with Italy—would decide not to act against Germany …

The Hossbach Memorandum has featured more than any other document in controversies over the origins of the Second World War. It was produced by Allied prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trial, and was used to accuse Goering and others for their part in planning the war 1939–45. However, the significance of the Memorandum was greatly deflated when a British historian demonstrated that the Memorandum did not support the views of the Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg. On the contrary, it showed that in November 1937 the Nazis had no concrete plans for war, and that Hitler had no clear assessment of the developing situation. It showed the Führer ranting rather vaguely about the possibility of a very limited war sometime before 1943–5:

Hitler’s exposition was in large part day-dreaming … He did not reveal his innermost thoughts … The memorandum tells us what we know already, that Hitler (like every other German statesman) intended to become the dominant Power in Europe. It also tells us that he speculated how this might happen. His speculations were mistaken. They bear hardly any relation to the actual outbreak of war in 1939. A racing tipster who only reached Hitler’s level of accuracy would not do well for his clients …2

A. J. P. Taylor’s analysis was all the more surprising since it came from a historian noted for his germanophobia.

Outraged critics denounced Taylor’s alleged disregard for ‘historical context’ and for the dynamics of Nazi expansionism. In mid-December 1937, they insisted, the German Army’s directives were changed to envisage military aggression against Austria and Czechoslovakia. They took this change as justification for their interpretation of the Memorandum, and the conference, as marking ‘the point where the expansion of the Third Reich ceased to be latent and became explicit’.3 They failed to notice that German military aggression against Austria and Czechoslovakia did not materialize any more than any of the Führer’s other faulty scenarios.

In effect, by overturning the ‘almost universal view that Hitler planned the Second World War’, Taylor was wrongly accused of trying to absolve Hitler from blame. What Taylor successfully demonstrated was the strange combination in the Führer’s make-up of a general aggressive intent and an inability to formulate systematic war plans.

Almost thirty years later, one of the striking features of the debate about the origins of the Second World War may be seen in the absence of any mention of Stalin, or of the dynamic interplay of German and Soviet policy. All the participants, including Taylor, confined themselves to a discussion of Germany’s intentions. None thought it worthwhile to comment on the intentions of the USSR. Historians were faced with the locked doors of Soviet archives. If a Soviet equivalent of the Hossbach memorandum exists, it has never yet seen the light of day. There is no way of knowing whether Stalin did or did not speculate about war in a similar way to Hitler. So, in the absence of documentary evidence about Stalin’s intentions, most commentators have preferred to assume that there is nothing to discuss.

The long tradition of documentary-history writing, therefore, has fostered two opposite extremes. One is to say, in effect: if no documents can be examined, then nothing happened. The other view, well expressed in ‘Taylor’s Law’ as formulated by Taylor’s detractors, says: documents do not signify anything. Both extremes are equally pernicious.

Chamberlain made three visits to Germany. At Berchtesgaden, on 15 September, he received a demand from Hitler for the secession of the Sudetenland—positively ‘the Führer’s last demand’. He promised to have it examined. At Godesberg, on the 23rd, he was faced by an unexpected ultimatum for the evacuation and annexation of the Sudetenland within five days. This was rejected by the British Cabinet, and by all concerned. France and Germany began to mobilize. At Munich, on 29–30 September, Chamberlain met the Führer for the final confrontation in the company of Daladier and of Mussolini, who had suggested the meeting. He handed over a memorandum accepting the substance of the (unacceptable) Godesberg ultimatum. With the help of his distinguished colleagues, he then gave an ultimatum to the Czechs, huddled in an adjoining room, pressing them to accept the unacceptable themselves or to pay for the consequences. His final contribution was to underline the Allied guarantee of a rump Czechoslovakian state, shorn of its magnificent frontier fortifications, and to draft a declaration on Anglo-German friendship. He alighted from his plane waving a paper which he claimed to bring ‘Peace in our time’. He did so in the same spirit which underlay the British Foreign Office’s advice to the England football team that same year—to give the Nazi salute at the start of their match against Germany in Berlin.

Chamberlain’s three rounds with Hitler must qualify as one of the most degrading capitulations in history. Under pressure from the ruthless, the clueless combined with the spineless to achieve the worthless. Chamberlain had no need to concede any part of the Führer’s demands without making cast-iron arrangements for Czechoslovakia’s security; but he did. Beneš, the Czechoslovak President, had no right to sign away his country’s integrity with nothing more than a personal protest; but he did. The outcome was to be summarized by Churchill in the House of Commons:

‘£1 was demanded at the pistol’s point. When it was given, £2 was demanded at the pistol’s point. Finally the Dictator consented to take £1.17s. 6d. and the rest in promises of goodwill for the future … We have suffered a defeat without a war.’

Elsewhere, Churchill wrote that Britain had a choice ‘between shame and war’; ‘we have chosen shame, and we will get war’. Within six months the remnant of Czechoslovakia disintegrated, and Hitler entered Prague.

Munich undoubtedly marked the crucial psychological moment in inter-war diplomacy. It did not yet make war inevitable; what it did do was to sow the confusion in which two fatal assumptions were born. First, it convinced Hitler, and probably Stalin too, that further peaceful aggression would bring further cost-free dividends. Secondly, it created the impression in the West that talking to the Nazis had been a mistake. In the next round of the game, where the map ensured that Poland would be. threatened, Munich ensured that Hitler and Stalin would seek to aggress by peaceful methods; that the West would seek to deter without negotiating; and that the Poles would seek to avoid the fate of Czechoslovakia at all costs. This was the deadly recipe.

In any number of European history books, 1939 is the year when ‘the world went again to war’, or words to that effect. In all chronologies except those once published in the USSR, it marks the ‘outbreak of the Second World War’. This only proves how self-centred Europeans can be. War had been on the march in the world for eight years past. The Japanese had invaded Manchuria in 1931, and had been warring in central China since 1937. From August 1938 they were embroiled in fighting on the Mongolian frontier against the Soviet Red Army. As part of this conflict, Japan had joined Germany and Italy as one of the Axis Powers. What happened in 1939, therefore, was simply the addition of Europe to the existing theatres of war. It gave a second, European dimension to campaigns which hitherto were summarized, to quote the Japanese slogan, as ‘Asia for the Asiatics’. In this sense, it turned a regional war into a global one. It has also been called ‘Hitler’s War’. This too is inaccurate.

By 1939 general rearmament was greatly adding to the strains. All the powers were rearming. Two years before, on Churchill’s insistence, Britain had taken the decision to expand and to re-equip the RAF. This was the decision which would ensure her survival. At the same time France had created a new Ministry of Defence, and had nationalized the great Schneider-Creusot concern. This was a sign that European governments were preparing for a protracted conflict in which industrial strength would be every bit as decisive as trained men. On this score, specialist studies indicated the dramatic changes which had occurred in the last decade.

	USA	UK	France	Germany	USSR
Production (1938) (1932 GNP = 100%)	153	143	108	211	258
Relative manufacturing strength(World output = 100%) 1929	43.2	9.4	6.6	11	5
1938	28.7	9.2	4.5	13.2	17.6
Military expenditure (1933–8) (£ million)	1,175	1,201	1,008	3,540	2,808
Relative war potential (1937) (World = 100%)	41.7	10.2	4.2	14.4	14.056

Estimates no doubt varied. But the British figures underlined several stark facts. The totalitarian powers had suffered from the Depression much less than the Western democracies had. Their military expenditure was twice as great as that of all the Western Powers put together. Their ‘relative war potential’—which was a calculation based on the ability to translate industrial strength into military power through indices such as machine-tool levels—was roughly equal, and was separately equivalent to that of Britain and France combined. Italy hardly entered the reckoning. The RWP of Japan, was put, somewhat derisively at 3.5 per cent. All the other countries in the world added up to barely 10 per cent.

It took no genius to draw the conclusions: Stalin and Hitler were already in possession of war machines that far outstripped anything else in Europe. If the USA remained aloof, the Western Powers would be hard pressed to contain either Stalin or Hitler. If Stalin and Hitler joined forces, the West would be powerless to stop them. All eyes were, or should have been, on Stalin and Hitler, and on the unhappy countries trapped between them. Everything else was secondary.

Stalin’s intentions in 1939 were governed by factors which are not always fully discussed. Professional historians, since they never gained access to the documentation, have often pretended that the subject does not exist. But it is not impossible to reconstruct its outlines. Generally speaking, the internal revolution of the USSR was reaching a plateau of relative stability, and the Vozhd’ could look forward with confidence to more active foreign involvement. The most vulnerable years of the first Five-Year Plans and Collectivization had been passed; the Great Terror was drawing to a close; and a rearmed Red Army could already be rated as one of Europe’s mightiest formations. However, two important inhibitions remained. The last phase of the Purges, which had been directed against the officer corps, was still incomplete; in 1939 the killing of the old military cadres was still in progress. And the Red Army was still engaged against the Japanese in Mongolia. Stalin, forever cautious, calculating, and secretive, was unlikely to commit himself to a major adventure in Europe until the new army cadres were trained and the Japanese conflict had been resolved. His obvious objective in the first instance was to lure Germany into a war with the Western Powers, whilst the USSR garnered its strength.57

Hitler’s position was not so cramped. He had recently gained full control of the Wehrmacht, and he had no military commitments. He now held the offices of both War Minister and Commander-in-Chief. He had cut out all opposition in the General Staff; and after the dismissal of Dr Schacht had taken direct control of German industry. His protégé in Spain was poised for victory, and his own triumph at Munich had wrecked the defence plans of his Eastern neighbours. His minions were stirring up trouble all along the line—in Klajpéda (Memel) in Lithuania, in the Free City of Danzig, in Poland’s German community, and in Slovakia, where a local nationalist movement was looking to Berlin for assistance. He had no definite war plans for the coming season; but as he pored over the outspread map in front of the plate-glass window of the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ at Berchtesgaden, it must have seemed that Europe was full of opportunities. On which miserable prey would the Eagle choose to swoop?

Early in 1939 Hitler’s preference was still for some sort of deal with Poland. Three weeks after Munich he had called the Polish Ambassador to Berchtesgaden and had outlined the possibilities. It was the culmination of long preparations which had taken Göring on several hunting trips to the Polish forests, and which had led communist propaganda to assume that a Nazi-Polish alliance was already in existence.58 Hitler’s proposals centred on the idea that if the Poles would cede their rights in Danzig, and permit the building of the Berlin-Königsberg autobahn across Polish territory, they could join in a favourable political and economic association directed against the Soviet Union. The unspoken threat did not have to be spelled out. If the Poles were foolish enough to refuse, then Hitler would take Danzig anyhow and might seek a political and economic realignment with the USSR, directed against Poland. One has to assume that Hitler’s well-known racial and ideological prejudices would have led him to expect an early acceptance. After all, since the Polish colonels had to contend with the largest Jewish community in Europe, and since Poland was fiercely anti-communist, it must have seemed to him that Poland and Nazi Germany were natural partners.

Unfortunately, neither Hider nor those who advised him knew much about Poland’s mettle. They did not know that Polish nationalism was every bit as hostile to Germany as to Russia. They did not know that Polish colonels could feel defensive about their handling of the Jewish Question, especially when foreigners interfered. Above all, they did not understand that the response of Marshal Pilsudski’s heirs would be completely different from that of Chamberlain and Beneš. The colonels were not going to bow and scrape to an ex-Austrian ex-corporal. Their instinct was to fight, and to go down fighting. Every single Polish official who had to deal with Nazi and Soviet threats in 1939 had been reared on the Marshal’s moral testament: ‘To be defeated, but not to surrender, that is victory.’

So the Fiihrer was kept kicking his heels. The weeks passed; Poland pointedly opened ‘trade and friendship talks’ with the USSR; Berlin’s proposals were left unanswered. On 21 March 1939, a week after the collapse of Czechoslovakia, the Polish Ambassador was called in again and told that the Führer was furious at the lack of progress. On 28 March Germany renounced the non-aggression pact with Poland. Nazi propaganda switched to the Danzig problem, and complained of the intolerable oppression of the German minority in Poland. On 31 March Poland received from Great Britain an unsolicited Guarantee of its independence. Hitler’s response, on 3 April, was to issue confidential directives for planning the seizure of Danzig and for possible war with Poland, [SUSANIN]

In the mean time, prize after prize fell into the Führer’s lap. On 10 March the autonomous Slovak Government was declared deposed by the central Czechoslovak authorities in Prague; and the offended Slovak leader, Father Tišo, appealed to the Führer for protection. Then the Czechoslovak President begged for an interview at Berchtesgaden. After a terrible drubbing before the plate-glass window, and one of Hitler’s most histrionic performances, during which the unconscious visitor had to be revived by injections, President Hācha meekly accepted that the break-up of his country was unavoidable. Bohemia and Moravia were to be turned into a Nazi Protectorate; Slovakia was to be a sovereign republic; Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia was to be ceded to Hungary. Hitler drove in triumph into Prague, as he had driven to Vienna, without a shot being fired. On the 21st German troops seized Lithuanian Memel. This was the point at which Chamberlain finally grasped the truth that Hitler was not’a man of his word’. The British Guarantee of Poland, an act of bluff taken from a position of weakness, was the product of his belated realization. To cap it all, the Hungarians seized Ruthenia without anyone’s permission. On Good Friday, 2 April, the Italian army invaded Albania. Europe was already at war.

SUSANIN

ON 26 February 1939 the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow resounded to a lavish revival of Russia’s most popular opera. Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836) had lain dormant since the Bolshevik Revolution; and a brief production of it in 1924, under the title of For Hammer and Sickle, had not prospered. But re-equipped with a politically correct libretto and yet another title, Ivan Susanin, it could now recover the vast popularity of pre-revolutionary decades.1 It was the clearest sign that the Party’s line had shifted to embrace traditional Russian nationalism.

Glinka’s opera had been an ideological creature from the start. Described as a ‘patriotic, heroic-tragic opera’, it had been composed in the aftermath of the Polish Rising of 1830–1, reflecting the composer’s ‘determination to embody state ideology in symbolic sound’.2 The libretto is set in the year 1613, at the moment when the founder of the Romanov dynasty was struggling to bring order from the chaos of the Time of Troubles (see p. 557). In the best tradition of ‘rescue opera’, it tells the tale of a good Russian peasant, Susanin, who saves the Tsar from the clutches of the dastardly Polish invaders. In this, it closely follows a patriotic textbook, Russian History for the Purposes of Upbringing (1817), compiled by the composer’s brother.

Glinka’s aesthetic concept was to use the dichotomy of Russian heroes and Polish villains throughout the spectacle. There are two sets of leading characters, two alternating choruses—Polish and Russian: two contrasting scenographic and musical styles. The faceless Poles are characterized by excess, singing and dancing exclusively in a formal collective to the melodies of the polonez, the mazurka, and the krakowiak. The Russians sing either charming folk-songs or romantic lyrics in the fashionable ‘Italo-Russian style’. Nothing is spared to stress the political message.

After Susanin’s murder, the epilogue reaches a climax with the scene of Mikhail Romanov’s triumphant entry into Red Square. Here the music changes to that of a sacred ‘hymn-march’, the words to those of a super-patriotic anthem:

Slav’sya, slav’sya, nash ruskiy Tsar’,
Gospodom danniy nam Tsar-gosudar.
Da budet bessmyerten tvoy tsarskiy rod.
Da im blagodenstvuyet russkiy narod.

(Glory be to our Russian Tsar, | To our God-given Tsar-Ruler. | May thy imperial clan be deathless! | May the Russian nation grant them blessing.)

In the 1939 production the anthem was duly modified:

Slav’sya, Slav’sya ty Rus’ moyal
Slav’sya ty, russkaya nasha zemlyal
Da budet vo veki vekov silna
Lyubimaya nasha rodnaya strana.

(Glory be to Thee, my Rus’ | Glory to Thee our Russian land | May our beloved native country | For ever and ever be strong.)

The power of opera harnessed to nationalism is most frequently discussed in relation to Wagner. But with Glinka the connection is still more explicit. Indeed, sensitivity to Russian nationalism determined where and when the opera could be staged. In Tsarist Russia it became the automatic choice for the opening night of each operatic season in Moscow and St Petersburg. By 1879 it had attained its 500th performance. It was staged in Prague, in Czech, in 1866; in Riga, in Latvian, in 1878; and at the German Theatre in Posen, Prussia, in 1899. But it never found an audience in Warsaw or Cracow. Most significantly, in February 1940, on the first anniversary of its revival in Moscow, it received its première under Nazi auspices in Berlin.

Faced with a specific commitment to Poland, the Western Powers now sought to put some practical measures into place. In April and May an inter-Allied mission visited Warsaw. It established a firm understanding that, in the event of a German attack on Poland, the task of the Polish army was to hold back the Wehrmacht whilst an Allied counter-attack was prepared in the West. General Gamelin was quite specific: on the fifteenth day after mobilization at the latest, ‘le gros de nos forces’, ‘the bulk of our forces’, would be thrown across the Franco-German frontier. Another military mission was sent to Moscow, to discuss cooperation with the Red Army. Long before they sailed on 5 August on a slow boat to Leningrad, in blissful ignorance of the main play, Hitler and Stalin had decided to settle the Polish Crisis on their own.

A Nazi-Soviet rapprochement was in the offing from the first week of May, when one of Stalin’s closest henchmen, Molotov, emerged as Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Molotov’s Jewish predecessor, Litvinov, who had an English wife, Ivy, was closely connected with the West and with the ailing policy of collective security. His last throw, for an Anglo-Soviet defensive alliance, had fallen on stony ground. Molotov was appointed with a view to reactivating the line to Berlin. Direct negotiations began in Moscow in June under the cover of ‘trade talks’.

Once Stalin and Hitler had cast their suspicions aside, and their representatives had began to talk, they must rapidly have realized the scale of the opportunity. Given the indecisions of the West, Poland was the only serious obstacle to the prospect of dividing up Eastern Europe between them. With such a glittering prize in view, neither Hitler nor Stalin can have worried too much about the later prospect of Russia and Germany fighting over the spoils. Nor can they have cared to guess the long-term reactions of the West. Given Stalin’s blessing, Hitler reckoned that he could deal with Britain and France single-handed and greatly strengthen Germany in the process; and Stalin was more than content to let him try. Given Hitler’s blessing, Stalin reckoned that he could clean up the states of Eastern Europe single-handed, and greatly strengthen the USSR in the process. They probably both believed that it was better to solve Europe’s problems before the USA, whose present military expenditure was less than Great Britain’s, was alerted to the dangers. The opportunity had to be grasped; it might not recur. One week after the British mission made its leisurely way to Moscow, Herr von Ribbentrop flew smartly in from Berlin.

In those summer days, when the weather was as sunny as the political forecast was grim, Hider’s ebullience grew. His rearmament record, which had increased the Wehrmacht’s front-line divisions from 7 to 51 in three years, excelled that of the Kaiser’s army in the decade before 1914. He felt sure that the West could be fooled as usual, that the ungrateful Poles could be punished in isolation. With the great Stalin thinking the same way as himself, he was ready for limited war, without knowing whether war would be needed. He had little inclination to listen to the whingeing Western diplomats, nor to those in his own camp, like Göring or Mussolini, who wanted to prolong the peace. At a military conference on 23 May he had ranted on about Lebensraum in the East and the inevitability of war sooner or later. On 14 June he had set a timetable for his generals to be ready in eight weeks’ time. On 22 August, when the eight weeks were up, he told another conference at the Berghof that ‘War is better now’. His notes ran: ‘No pity—brutal attitude—might is right—greatest severity.’

The final piece of the preparations fell into place the very next day. On 23 August the news broke from Moscow that those mortal enemies, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, had followed up their recent trade agreement with a pact of non-aggression. What is more (though no one outside Moscow or Berlin was to know for certain until the Nazi archives were captured six years later), the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact had been supplemented by a secret protocol:

Moscow, 23 August 1939

On the occasion of the Non-Aggression Pact between the German Reich and the USSR, the undersigned plenipotentiaries … discussed the boundaries of their respective spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. These conversations led to the following conclusions:

1. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania will form the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR. In this connection, the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognised by each party.

2. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Vistula, Narew, and San. The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish State, and how such a state should be bounded, can be definitely determined in the course of further political developments. In any event, both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement.

3. With regard to Southeastern Europe, attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia. The German side declares its disinterest in these areas.

4. This protocol shall be treated by both parties as strictly secret.

For the Gov’t of the German Reich	Plenipotentiary of the Gov’t of the USSR
‘J. VON RIBBENTROP’	‘V. MOLOTOV’

Hitler and Stalin had carved up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Their so-called ‘pact of non-aggression’ was the perfect blueprint for aggression.

Neither party had a good word for the Western Powers. Ribbentrop was confident that Germany could deal with the French army. As for Great Britain, ‘The Reich Foreign Minister stated that … England was weak and wanted others to fight for its presumptuous claim to world domination. Herr Stalin eagerly concurred … [but he] further expressed the opinion that England, despite its weakness, would wage war craftily and stubbornly.’

The German–Soviet pact is often described as Hitler’s licence for war. This is true, but it is only half the story, for the pact was equally Stalin’s licence for war. From the moment the ink was dry, each of the signatories was free to assault its neighbours without hindrance from the other. Which is exactly what both of them did.

The Wehrmacht was due to march on 24 August; but the Führer, in one of his fits of nerves, failed to give the final order. He was also curious to see if a second Munich was possible. The Nazi press was publishing stories about Poles castrating Germans; and Göring was urging him to contact London. On the 25th the British Ambassador was summoned and handed a set of unlikely proposals. A Swedish friend of Göring’s was sent to talk directly with Whitehall. But then Chamberlain missed his cue by guaranteeing Poland’s independence once more in a formal Anglo-Polish Treaty. After that, the diplomats were wasting their time: there could be no second Munich. Hitler issued Directive No. 1 for the conduct of war against Poland at 1 p.m. on the 31st. [GENOCIDE]

The outbreak of the Polish campaign was stage-managed in best Nazi style. There was no declaration of war. Instead, SS Sturmbann führer Alfred Helmut Naujocks received orders to round up a detachment of convicts, code-named Konserven or ‘Tin Cans’, and to take them to a German radio station at Gleiwitz in Silesia close to the Polish frontier. The studio was duly stormed by men dressed in Polish uniforms, and a rousing Polish chorus was broadcast to the sound of pistol shots. Once outside, the Tin Cans were mown down by the machine-guns of their SS minders, and their blood-soaked bodies were dumped where they would soon be found by the local police. The first casualties of the campaign were German convicts killed by German criminals. Before the night was out, the Nazi news service was announcing that the Polish Army had launched an unprovoked attack on the Third Reich.63

The Second World War in Europe, 1939–194564

The invasion of Poland which began on 1 September 1939 did not mark the start of fighting in Europe. It had been preceded by the German attack on Lithuania in March 1939 and by the Italian invasion of Albania in April. But it transformed a series of essentially local wars into the setting for world-wide conflict. By involving the USSR, which was already engaged against the Japanese in Mongolia, it established the link between the European and the Asian theatres of operations. In theory Japan belonged to the Nazi system of alliances, even when the Nazi-Soviet pact put a clamp on the anti-Comintern club. But the fact that Japan, the USSR, Poland, Germany, and the Western Powers were all enmeshed in the web of conflict makes the best argument for contending that a Second World War had really begun.

The Red Army’s role in Poland remained uncertain until the confrontation with Japan was resolved. The decisive Soviet victory at Khalkin-gol on 28 August, achieved by the armour of an unknown general called Zhukov, seems to have been the precondition for an active Soviet policy in Europe. It was perhaps no accident that Stalin delayed his entry into Poland until a truce was signed in Mongolia on 15 September, and Zhukov’s divisions could return across the Urals.65

The German–Soviet Pact had created a new geopolitical framework in Europe. The Great Triangle was now turned round, with the Western Powers (Britain, France, and Canada) facing a combination of the Centre and the East (see Appendix III, p. 1312). The Triangle was not quite complete, however, since the Western Powers and the USSR both avoided direct confrontation. This meant that the West would close its eyes to Stalin’s aggressions, so long as Stalin would limit his anti-Western activities to propaganda and to logistical support for Germany.66 None the less, the German-Soviet Pact transformed the European scene. It enabled Germany and the USSR to destroy Poland and to re-establish the common frontier which had existed throughout the nineteenth century. After that, it permitted them to clear away all the minor states which cluttered their path. In the slightly longer term, it gave Hider the chance to attack the West with Stalin’s support and encouragement.

Map 26. Europe during the Second World War, 1939–1945

In later years the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact was to be justified on the grounds that it gave the Soviet Union time to construct its defences. Given what happened two years later, the argument looks plausible; but this could be yet another classic case of reading history backwards. In 1939 there was indeed a possibility that Hitler would turn on the USSR after defeating the West; but this was only one contingency, and not necessarily the most likely or the most immediate one. At least three other scenarios had to be considered. One was the possibility that Germany would be defeated in the West, as in 1918. Another was the prospect that Germany and the West would fight each other to a bloody stalemate, after which the USSR could emerge as the arbiter of Europe without firing a shot. This was Goebbels’s view of the Soviet game. ‘Moscow intends to keep out of the war until Europe is … bled white,’ he noted. ‘Then Stalin will move to bolshevize Europe and impose his own rule.’ A third possibility was that Stalin would use the interval of Hitler’s western war to prepare and launch an offensive of his own.

Thanks to the closure of the relevant Soviet archives, historical knowledge on these matters remains tentative. But two indications are important. First, there is very little evidence to show that the Red Army gave priority after August 1939 to preparing defence in depth. On the contrary, it favoured a theory of revolutionary attack. Stalin had often stressed that communism was not the same as pacifism; speaking to cadets in 1938, he stressed that the Soviet state would take the military initiative whenever required. Secondly, studies of the Red Army’s dispositions in the early summer of 1941 suggest that the two previous years had been spent creating a distinctly offensive posture.68 They go a long way to explaining the disaster which then overtook it (see below). In that case, one would have to conclude that Stalin entered his pact with the Nazis, not to win time for defence, but to outplay Hitler in the game of calculated aggression.69

What is certain is that the German–Soviet Pact led Europe into events which no one could have foreseen. In the first phase, 1939–41, whilst the pact still held, Nazi and Soviet adventures proceeded apace in each of their designated spheres. The Red Army met with varied fortunes; but the Wehrmacht’s stunning conquest of Western Europe came more swiftly than the most starry-eyed German general could have imagined. In the second phase, 1941–3, the Nazi war-machine was thrown into the East. The German–Soviet war constituted the central military contest whereby Europe’s fate would be decided. The Western Powers, reduced to the control of one embattled island, could only exert a peripheral influence. In the final phase, 1943–5, the Soviet Army in the East combined with growing British and American forces in the West to ensure Germany’s downfall.

The Nazi–Soviet Partnership (September 1939–June 1941). Thanks to the secret protocols of the German–Soviet pact, many participants in the opening campaign of the Second World War entered the fray on false premisses. The Western Powers thought that they had guaranteed an ally under threat from Nazi aggression; in fact, they had guaranteed an ally which was to be attacked by the Soviet Union as well as the Third Reich. The Poles thought that their task was to hold off the German advance for fifteen days until the French crossed the German frontier in the West; in feet, they faced the impossible task of holding off both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army on their own. The French launched no offensive; the British limited their assistance to dropping leaflets over Berlin.

In this constellation Poland’s invaders enjoyed every possible advantage. The German Command possessed roughly the same 60 divisions as its Polish adversary, but, thanks to the occupation of Czechoslovakia, it had Poland surrounded from three sides at once. It enjoyed a decisive superiority, both in mechanical forces and in air power, which would inflict a hundred Guernicas on Poland in the opening days. Above all, it could confidently launch its Panzer divisions deep into Polish territory, secure in the knowledge that its Soviet partners would take any Polish counter-measures in the rear. The Soviet Command held the trump card. Declining any joint timetable with the Germans, the Soviet generals could watch and wait until Poland was stretched on the German rack before marching in to deliver the coup de grâce. In the Polish campaign of September 1939, therefore, military operations were overshadowed by politics and treachery. The Poles did their duty, fighting on for five weeks against hopeless odds. The Western Powers declared war on Germany, but declined to confront the Soviet Union, even when Soviet complicity became evident. Nor did they intervene in the fighting. The British could not, and the French would not. French mobilization procedures had been designed to prepare for a long war: they required all front-line divisions to be stripped down to the status of temporary cadres, during a long period of reorganization which precluded any immediate offensive operations. So Hitler and Stalin had everything their own way.

At dawn on 1 September, German columns stormed into Poland from the north, the west, and the south. The Polish defence lines close to the frontier were circumvented. Warsaw was surrounded from the 9th. The civilian population was subjected to unprecedented bombardments. A German fifth column was operating behind the lines. Nazi Einsatzgruppen appeared in the rear, shooting resisters, stragglers, and Jews. Screaming Stuka dive-bombers destroyed railways, roads, and bridges, together with the refugees that crammed them. Warsaw, half-reduced to rubble, dug in for a long siege. The Polish army regrouped in the south-east for the defence of Lwów, whilst mounting a determined counter-attack in the centre on the Bzura. On the 15th a Nazi communiqué falsely announced that Warsaw had fallen. (It held out for two more weeks.) But Stalin may have thought that he was losing out. The blow was struck on the 17th, when Red Army troops poured over the eastern frontier. They sowed total confusion by their own false communiqués about saving Poland from the Nazis. In fact, they drove straight to the agreed demarcation line on the River Bug, and to the southern frontier with Romania and Hungary to seal it off. The Germans and Soviets held a joint victory parade in Brześć (Brest-Litowsk) before fixing the details of their victory.

The German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Demarcation signed on 28 September reached much further than the pact of five weeks before. It redrew the demarcation line, putting Lithuania into the Soviet sphere in exchange for a slice of central Poland. And it contained yet another secret protocol which envisaged joint action against Polish ‘agitation’. These measures were put into place as Warsaw finally surrendered. The Polish Government had escaped into exile. Large numbers of Polish troops took to the woods, or fled abroad. The final capitulation took place on 4 October, the day when Hitler arrived in Warsaw to receive the salute of his admiring legions. Everything to the east of the Bug was taken by the Soviets.

Hitler’s thoughts at this juncture were recorded by his faithful propaganda chief:

The Fuehrer’s verdict on the Poles is damning. More like animals than human beings, completely primitive and amorphous. And a ruling class that is an unsatisfactory result of a mingling between the lower orders and an Aryan master-race. The Poles’ dirtiness is unimaginable. Their capacity for intelligent judgement is absolutely nil…

The Fuehrer has no intention of assimilating the Poles … Had Henry the Lion conquered the East … the result would certainly have been a strongly slavicised race of German mongrels. Better the present situation. Now we know the laws of racial heredity and can handle things accordingly.70

The double occupation of Poland brought two laboratories of totalitarianism into being side by side. For two years the Nazi and Soviet vultures feasted on Poland’s fallen body undisturbed. In the German zone the Western districts were annexed to the Reich, and subjected to an intense regime of racial screening and germanization. All other districts were thrown into a so-called General Government of Poland under SS and military rule. This ‘Gestapoland’, subject neither to Polish nor to German law, became the ultimate test-bed of Nazi ideology. It was the only part of occupied Europe where, in pursuit of their eastern Lebensraum, the Nazi planners had the time to apply their racial policies with full vigour to the whole population. After Himmler’s first inspection, the aged and mentally handicapped were seized from the hospitals, orphanages were raided for boys and girls suitable for the stud programme of the Lebensborn organization;71 and concentration camps were organized at Auschwitz and Majdanek to deal with the Resistance. In an act of cold-blooded genocide, the so-called AB-Aktion, some 15,000 Polish intellectuals, officials, politicians, and clergy were selected for shooting or for consignment to concentration camps. As from late 1939, Poland’s large Jewish community was ordered into designated ghetto districts, which were then gradually walled, locked, and totally segregated; Jewish councils, supported by a Jewish police force, were recruited to run the ghettos under Nazi supervision.72 [AUSCHWITZ]

In the adjoining Soviet zone, phoney referenda were staged to justify the claim that ‘western Byelorussia’ and ‘western Ukraine’ had opted for annexation. This ‘GPU-land’, which remained cordoned off from the rest of the USSR, was scourged by the full force of the Stalinist terror. Some forty categories of people, from policemen to philatelists, were selected for instant arrest and deportation. By the summer of 1941 between 1 and 2 million individuals had been transported either to the Arctic camps or to forced exile in Central Asia. The Terror was directed not only at all former Polish state officials, down to village teachers and foresters, but equally at all communal organizations of Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and Jews. The peoples who had supposedly been ‘liberated from Polish rule’ were scourged as mercilessly as everyone else. In an act of cold-blooded genocide, some 26,000 Polish prisoners of war—mainly reserve officers, and hence intellectuals, officials, politicians, and clergy—were taken from their camps and shot in a series of massacres known under the collective name of Katyń. On the frontier bridge over the Bug at Brest, people entering the USSR met others, including Jews, who were seeking haven in the Reich. ‘Where on earth are you going?’ exclaimed an SS-officer on one occasion; ‘we are going to kill you.’

The full extent of co-operation between the SS and the NKVD in these years has never been properly established. The Nazi files went missing; and Soviet archives remained closed. Even so, a high-ranking Soviet liaison officer was attached to SS HQ in Cracow right up to 1941. Nazi and Soviet delegations attended joint conferences; prisoners were exchanged; Nazi and Soviet propaganda worked in unison, and at full blast. As from 24 August the Soviet press reversed its previous policy, and took to quoting the Völkischer Beobachter as a credible source of information.Pravdaannounced that ‘German-Soviet friendship is now established forever’.74 [KATYO]

The impotence of the Western Powers undoubtedly gave encouragement to Hitler and Stalin. What a French politician dubbed the drôle de guerre or ‘phoney war’ was only droll for those not directly involved. In the 20 months after the fall of Poland, 13 European countries were due to be overrun—8 by Hider, 5 by Stalin. Stalin took the lead by sending the Red Army into Finland on 30 November 1939.

The ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40 revealed serious deficiencies in the Red Army, whilst testing the tolerance of the Western Powers to the limit. For five months, well-motivated Finnish troops held off the Soviet invader. In the early months they inflicted bloody slaughter on clumsy Soviet attempts to storm the Mannerheim Line. Soviet tactics and equipment were made to look inferior, Soviet policy was condemned for blatant aggression. When the League of Nations expelled the USSR, the Western Powers could no longer pretend, as with Poland, that Stalin’s depredations were somehow more legitimate than Hitler’s. In the spring, as the Red Army prepared for an overwhelming assault, the British Government was obliged to consider Finnish pleas for aid and assistance via Narvik and the Lapland railway. There was even a scheme to bomb the Baku oilfields in retaliation for Soviet supplies to Germany. Squadrons of British bombers, repainted with the swastika emblem of the Finnish air force, were standing by when news of a Finno-Soviet Treaty saved London from its dilemma. Finland was to remain independent and neutral, though forced to cede a large tract of eastern territory, in Karelia. The German General Staff can hardly have missed the implications about the USSR’s apparent weakness.

The Finnish campaign exposed the vulnerability of German interests in Scandinavia, notably in the Swedish iron ore exported via Narvik. Hitler struck on 9 April 1940. Denmark was quickly overrun, and Norway invaded shortly afterwards. An Allied expeditionary force sent to Narvik was repelled with heavy loss. This was the first occasion on which British intelligence chose to withhold life-saving information rather than betray their knowledge of the Nazis’ Enigma Code, whose secrets had first been penetrated by the Poles.75 Henceforth, Scandinavia lay firmly under German control. Denmark retained its King and government; Norway was handed over to a native collaborator, Vidkun Quisling; Sweden was to retain its neutrality, so long as the iron ore continued to flow. Here were signals that German policy in the West was to be incomparably more lenient than in the East.