HEINRICH AUGUST WINKLER

THE AGE OF
CATASTROPHE
A HISTORY OF THE WEST, 1914–1945
T R A N S L AT E D B Y S T E WA R T S P E N C E R
T H E AG E O F C ATA S T R O P H E

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ii
HEINRICH AUGUST WINKLER

THE AGE OF
CATASTROPHE
A HISTORY OF THE WEST, 1914–1945

Translated by Stewart Spencer

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

iii
First published in English by Yale University Press in 2015

English language translation copyright © 2015 Stewart Spencer

Originally published under the title Geschichte des Westens: Die Zeit der Weltkriege,
1914–1945 by Heinrich August Winkler © 2011 Verlag C. H. Beck oHG, Munich, the
second volume in the author’s trilogy Geschichte des Westens

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form
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ISBN 978-0-300-20489-6

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The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International –

Translation Funding for the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, joint
initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the
collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchandels (German
Publishers & Booksellers Association).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For Dörte

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vi
 CONTENTS

Introduction xi

1. The Twentieth Century’s Seminal Catastrophe:

The First World War

Battles and War Crimes: Military Action 1914–16 1

War Aims, Ideological Warfare, Opposition to the War 7
A Year to Remember: The Russian Revolution; the
United States Enters the War 19
Freedom for Civilized Nations: Woodrow Wilson’s New
World Order 52
Two Countries Lie in Ruins; One is Reborn: Germany,
Austria–Hungary and Poland at the End of the First World War 60
Trust Gambled Away and Violence Unleashed: The Legacy
of the First World War 86

2. From the Armistice to the World Economic Crisis: 1918–33

The Pace of Revolution Slows: Germany on the Way to the

Weimar Republic 92
A Blighted New Beginning: Austria and Hungary in 1918/19 105
The Struggle for Independence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
and Finland 110
The East Remains Red: The Russian Civil War and the
Foundation of the Third International 112
The Victors Move to the Right: The Western Powers on the
Eve of the Paris Peace Talks 118
A Fragile Peace: From Versailles to the League of Nations 122
Protest, Prohibition, Prosperity: The United States in the 1920s 151

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viii CONTENTS

The International Revolution is Delayed: The Rise of the Soviet

Union and the Divisions within Left-wing Parties in Europe 160
Three Elections and a Secession: Post-war Britain 180
Confrontations and Compromises: France 1919–22 188
A Democracy Self-destructs: Italy’s Road to Fascism 193
A Republic Put to the Test: Germany 1919–22 201
A Year of Decisions: 1923. From the Occupation of the
Ruhr to the Dawes Plan 223
Right Against Left: Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic 237
Authoritarian Transformation (I): The New States of
Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic Region 245
Authoritarian Transformation (II): From the Balkans to the
Iberian Peninsula 277
Democracy Evolves: From Sweden to Switzerland 301
Fascism in Power: Italy under Mussolini 320
From Poincaré to Poincaré: France between 1923 and 1929 338
From Empire to Commonwealth: Britain under Baldwin 351
From Dawes to Young: Germany under Stresemann 360
Socialism in One Country: The Soviet Union under
Stalin 1924–33 383
Boom, Crisis and Depression: The United States 1928–33 400
The Logic of the Lesser Evil: Germany under Brüning 412
Stagnation and Criticism of the System: France’s Third
Republic 1929–33 433
The Power of Continuity: Britain in the Early 1930s 442
Weimar’s Downfall: Hitler’s Road to Power 452
Storm Clouds in the Far East: Japan Invades Manchuria 477

3. Democracies and Dictatorships: 1933–9

A New Deal for America: Roosevelt’s Presidency 1933–6 484

The Process of Seizing Power: The Establishment of the
National Socialist Dictatorship 1933–4 502
Rome’s Second Empire: Fascist Italy and the War in Abyssinia 531
The Great Terror: Stalin Builds Up his Dominion over the
Soviet Union 540
Setting the Course for War: National Socialist
Germany 1934–8 553
 CONTENTS ix

Early Signs of Appeasement: Britain 1933–8 571

Mobilization of the Right, Popular Front on the Left:
France 1933–8 581
Battlefield of Extremes: The Spanish Civil War 1936–9 602
A Model for Germany: The Anti-Semitic Policies of Fascist Italy 621
Neighbours at Risk: Czechoslovakia, Poland and the
Third Reich 1935–8 624
Roosevelt’s Realpolitik: The United States from 1936 to 1938 632
Reaching Out Across Borders: From the Austrian Anschluss
to the Munich Agreement 639
The ninth of November 1938: The History and Consequences of
the Jewish Pogroms in Germany 651
An Alliance of Opposites: The Second World War is Unleashed 655

4. Fault Lines in Western Civilization:

The Second World War and the Holocaust

War as Annihilation: The Fifth Partition of Poland 673

From ‘Drôle de guerre’ to the Battle for Norway 679
France’s Collapse: The Campaign in the West 685
Tokyo, Washington, Berlin: A Change in International
Politics 1940–41 696
From ‘Barbarossa’ to Pearl Harbor: The Globalization of the War 711
Genesis of Genocide: The ‘Final Solution’ (I) 723
A Change of Direction: The Axis Powers go on the Defensive 736
Home Fronts: Nations at War 742
Occupation, Collaboration, Resistance (I): Eastern Central
Europe, South-east and North-west Europe 755
Occupation, Collaboration, Resistance (II): France 772
‘To cause this nation to vanish from the face of the earth’:
The ‘Final Solution’ (II) 783
Collapse of a Dictatorship: Italy 1943–4 797
The Allies Advance: Eastern Asia and Europe 1943–4 806
The twentieth of July 1944: German Resistance to Hitler 815
The Partition of Europe (I): The Allies’ Post-war Plans 822
Completion of a Mission: The ‘Final Solution’ (III) 832
The End of the War (I): The Fall of the Third Reich 837
The Partition of Europe (II): Radical Changes and Deportations 847
x CONTENTS

New Beginnings and Traditions: Germany after Capitulation 856

Potsdam: The Decision of the Three Great Powers 861
The End of the War (II): The Atom Bomb and Japan’s
Capitulation 870
Guilt and Atonement: The Caesura of 1945 (I) 878
West, East, Third World: The Caesura of 1945 (II) 894

From World War to World War: Retrospective

of an Exceptional Period 903

List of abbreviations 917

Notes 922
Index 938
 INTRODUCTION

T !ā ő$āŚ&$ĕ($ )( )!ăĕ g((,, Geschichte des Westens: Von den Anfängen

in der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, published in German in the autumn
of 2009, covered the history of the West from its earliest manifestations through
Jewish monotheism, late antiquity and Christianity to the outbreak of the First
World War. Central to my narrative in that work and in this is the evolution of
what I call the normative project of the West, by which I principally mean the
ideas of the two revolutions – the American and the French – of the late eight-
eenth century. These are ideas that the old European West struggled either
to assimilate or to reject until well into the twentieth century. These are also
ideas that the ‘inventor nations’ repeatedly violated, and yet they continue to
provide the yardstick by which the West must be judged whenever it seeks
to validate its values vis-à-vis the non-western world.
The current work deals with an exceptional period in world history, for the
three decades between 1914 and 1945 were dominated by conflicts, crises and
catastrophes in a way practically unprecedented in modern times – only the
Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648 had a remotely comparable impact.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century Germany was central to
developments taking place over a far wider area, just as it had been in the first
half of the seventeenth century. Indeed, its role was so central between 1914
and 1945 that this period can with some justification be described as the
German chapter in the history of the West. It was also the most terrifying
chapter in the history of humankind. It ended with the annihilation of European
Jews, the most rigorously implemented mass murder in the history of the
twentieth century – a period already particularly well stocked with state-
organized crimes. And it brought with it the downfall of the Third Reich.
Many writers, including the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, have seen the
Holocaust as the result of a specifically modern quest for ‘unambiguousness’, a
quest aimed at a functional rationality and concerned with the avoidance of
‘ambivalence’. As such, it is seen as a borderline instance of the technological
‘social engineering’ that occupied a significant place in the thinking of the

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xii INTRODUCTION

interwar period. Moreover, a large number of observers have long drawn atten-
tion to the basic experience of boundless violence of the First World War,
violence practised hitherto only in colonial wars and described by the American
historian and diplomat George F. Kennan as the ‘seminal catastrophe’ of the
twentieth century. Visions of what might be possible in terms of social policies
and an increasing willingness to accept mechanical methods of killing other
human beings were phenomena that no longer admitted of national bounda-
ries. Many of the developments that took place after 1918 can be viewed from
this perspective, and yet this still does not explain why the Holocaust was a
German crime against humanity. The present examination of the course of
German history between 1914 and 1945 should be seen as an attempt to explain
how a country that is culturally a part of the West could so obstinately refuse to
respect the West’s normative project and the idea of inalienable human rights
that it plunged not only itself but the rest of the world into a state that can be
described only as catastrophic.
If Woodrow Wilson had had his way, the period after 1918 would have
resulted in the European triumph of western democracy, and yet by 1925 the
German economist Moritz Julius Bonn was already referring to a ‘crisis in
European democracy’. Central to his analysis were the social and intellectual
changes brought about by the First World War: the workers’ increase in power
and the resultant fears on the part of the bourgeoisie, and the militarization of
thinking and the ensuing loss of faith in a civilian solution to conflicts on the
basis of uncontested norms and within the framework of acknowledged
institutions.
Of the new Continental European states that came into existence in the
wake of the First World War on the strength of democratic constitutions, only
two could still be described as western democracies two decades later:
Czechoslovakia and Finland. The others were by then being ruled by more or
less dictatorial regimes that had adopted those aspects of the western legacy
that reflected their rulers’ interests, while rejecting the idea of democracy in
the form of the principle of a ‘nation une et indivisible’. To the extent that these
new states were not pure nation states but in many cases clearly based on the
notion of nationality, this reception of western and, specifically, French ideas
contained within it the germ of serious conflict.
One novel aspect of the political systems of the interwar years was the
appearance of a new type of dictatorship in the form of totalitarian regimes.
The contentious term ‘totalitarian’ is intended to refer to states in which the
monopoly on power and the degree of repression go far beyond that normally
found in conventional dictatorships such as overt or covert military regimes.
What was new about these totalitarian regimes was the claim that they made
on every aspect of their inhabitants’ lives and the political aim of producing a
new kind of individual. No matter how much they may have differed on every
other point, the dictatorships established by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler were
 INTRODUCTION xiii

very similar in this regard. Western democracies saw in Russian Bolshevism a

far greater threat than they did in Fascism, which first came to power in Italy
in 1922 and which conservative politicians and liberal journalists long regarded
with a certain sympathy. It needed the experience of a far more radical, far
more aggressive and far more ‘totalitarian’ Fascist regime – that of National
Socialist Germany – before the Anglo-Saxon powers could be persuaded to
revise their view of Communism and form an alliance with its principal repre-
sentative, the Soviet Union.
It was National Socialist Germany that unleashed the Second World War.
With its end came the emergence of that ‘bipolar’ world that was to leave its
mark on the post-war period in general. Germany paid for its second attempt
to gain control of Europe by having to capitulate unconditionally, losing a
quarter of its pre-war lands and having its entire country occupied by the
Allies. The largest European colonial powers, Britain and France, were so
weakened by the war that they were no longer able to resist the progressive loss
of their overseas territories. Whereas the first of the two world wars had led to
a particularization of European states, the second resulted in their polarization:
the United States and the Soviet Union were the leading powers in the blocs
that waged a ‘Cold War’ with one another after 1947.
My plan is to deal with the history of the West after 1945 in a further
volume. The fact that I was able to publish the current volume only two years
after the earlier work is thanks to several institutions and individuals: the
Robert Bosch Foundation, the Hans Ringier Foundation and the Ebelin and
Gerd Bucerius ZEIT Foundation, all of which have supported my work since
2007; the Humboldt University in Berlin, which placed a room at my disposal,
together with all the necessary technical equipment; my colleague of many
years’ standing, Monika Roßteuscher, and my student assistants, Angela
Abmeier, Sarah Bianchi, Felix Bohr and Rahel Marie Vogel, without whose
tireless help I would never have been able to write this book. I am grateful to
Gretchen Klein, Monika Roßteuscher and Felix Bohr for the care with which
they turned my handwritten manuscript into a printable format.
The editor in chief at C. H. Beck, Dr Detlef Felken, has lavished the same
amount of care and attention on the present volume as he did on the first.
Janna Rösch, Tabea Spieß and Alexander Goller proved a great help at the
proofreading and indexing stages. I am grateful to all of them for their labours.
My final debt of gratitude should in fact have come first: I have been able to
discuss with my wife all the questions that have arisen in the context of my
work on this volume. Her advice, her encouragement and her criticisms have
left their mark on this book, too. That is why I have dedicated it to her.

Heinrich August Winkler, Berlin, March 2011

xiv
 1

The Twentieth Century’s Seminal Catastrophe:

The First World War
Battles and War Crimes: Military Action: 1914–16

T !ā ő$Ś ő&ĕ() ăā short and would end with their country’s victory. On
this point, at least, everyone was agreed as they cheered their departing
front-line troops in August 1914. And this was true whether the cheering
crowds were in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London or St Petersburg. But within
weeks a mood of sobriety had descended on them all, and by the end of 1914 it
was clear that the enemy would not be quickly defeated. From the outset, this
war assumed different, greater, proportions from any that had previously been
waged in Europe, wars in which many older contemporaries had themselves
played an active part.
During the first four weeks of the war the forces drawn up against each
other were, on the one hand, the two Central Powers of Germany and Austria-
Hungary and, on the other, the Triple Entente of Russia, France and Great
Britain, together with Serbia, Montenegro and Japan. Neutral Belgium became
Germany’s enemy when it refused to bow to an ultimatum from Berlin and
opposed Germany’s violation of international law. Turkey entered the war in
October 1914, Bulgaria in October 1915, in both cases siding with the Central
Powers. The Triple Entente was strengthened in May 1915, when Italy entered
the war, and in 1916, when Portugal, Romania and Greece followed suit.
During the early weeks of the war, nothing inspired public revulsion as much as
the German atrocities committed in neutral Belgium. The Belgian army put up
unexpectedly stiff resistance, and it is possible that non-uniformed members of the
Civil Guard were also involved in the fighting. Whatever the facts of the matter, the
German military quickly developed a fear of ‘franctireurs’ that led to the same
degree of panic that had been felt during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.
They responded by destroying private and public buildings, taking hostages and
indiscriminately executing civilians falsely accused of shooting German soldiers.
At the end of August large parts of the medieval town of Louvain, including the
Catholic University’s priceless library, were burnt to the ground. A total of 5,521

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2 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Belgian civilians were killed in the course of the massacres that took place between
August and October 1914. Countless Belgian women were raped by German
soldiers. It has also been claimed, but never proved, that children’s hands were
cut off and that other forms of mutilation were perpetrated, but these reports
are almost certainly invented, their psychological origins lying in the colonial prac-
tices known to have taken place in the Belgian Congo during the reign of King
Leopold II, who died in 1909.
John Horne and Alan Kramer, the authors of what is still the most thorough
investigation of the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans in 1914, describe the
Germans’ mistaken belief that the Belgians were conducting a ‘popular war’ as
an exceptional case of autosuggestion unique in any modern army. The actual
atrocities committed by German soldiers were so terrible that in Belgium,
France and England events that sprang, rather, from an overexcited imagina-
tion were taken to be true: as Horne and Kramer suggest, the severed hands
became ‘an allegory of the invasion, the enemy, and the war’.1 The brutality of
the German troops in Belgium and shortly afterwards in northern France was
seen as a typical expression of Prussian militarism, impossible to reconcile
with the Hague Convention signed by Germany in 1907 or with German claims
to be one of the world’s leading centres of civilization. From then on it was easy
for the Allies’ wartime propaganda machine to portray the barbaric enemy as
twentieth-century Huns and Kaiser Wilhelm II as a latter-day Attila.
In early October 1914, ninety-three well-known German academics, artists
and intellectuals signed an officially inspired ‘Appeal to the World of Culture’
protesting at such attacks. The signatories included the zoologist and social
Darwinian Ernst Haeckel, the philosopher and Nobel laureate for literature
Rudolf Eucken, the chemist Fritz Haber, the immunologist and Nobel laureate
for medicine Paul Ehrlich, the historians Eduard Meyer and Karl Lamprecht,
the painter Max Liebermann and the poet Gerhart Hauptmann. In putting
their names to this document, they not only denied that the Germans were
guilty of war crimes but even ignored the fact that Belgium’s neutrality had
been criminally violated, claiming that the lives and property of Belgian citi-
zens had not been affected, except in cases of extreme necessity; they denied
the destruction caused by German troops in Leuven; and they even found it in
themselves to state that ‘without German militarism, German culture would
long since have been wiped from the face of the earth’.2 The impact of this
appeal in countries that were hostile to Germany and even in those that main-
tained their neutrality was devastating: Germany’s cultural elite seemed to have
parted company with the ‘cultural world’ at which its patriotic manifesto was
primarily directed.
By September 1914 German advances in northern France had stalled, and
for no compelling reason a profoundly pessimistic chief of the general staff,
Count Helmuth von Moltke (‘the Younger’), abandoned the Battle of the Marne
as lost, ordering a precipitate retreat and finding himself replaced on 14
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 3

September by Prussia’s minister of war, Erich von Falkenhayn. This marked the
end of the ‘Schlieffen plan’, according to which the German army would break
through enemy lines in Belgium and Lorraine and defeat the French forces,
after which the bulk of the German troops would be sent to Russia. The
Germans failed to win control of the most important Channel ports, including
Dunkirk and Boulogne, where reinforcements of the British Expeditionary
Force were in consequence able to land. The battles fought in the autumn of
1914 brought successes to both sides in turn, but both suffered appalling losses
in the process. In the end the western front between Flanders and Upper Alsace
could best be described as a standoff.
To the east, by contrast, Germany reported a military triumph during the
early months of the war that it was never able to repeat in the west. At the end
of August 1914 the Eighth Army under the nominal command of the infantry
general Paul von Hindenburg – brought out of retirement for the occasion –
but under the actual command of the chief of the general staff, General Erich
Ludendorff, who had recently taken the city of Liège, succeeded in defeating
the Russian army at Ortelsburg following the latter’s incursion into East Prussia.
For reasons of historic symbolism the battle was named after the nearby town
of Tannenberg, where Poles and Lithuanians had defeated the army of the
Teutonic Order in 1410.
At the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes in September 1914, German forces
drove back the occupying Russian troops, but it was in February 1915 at the
Winter Battle of Masuria that the Russians suffered their worst and definitive
defeat in East Prussia. On the Polish front, too, the German and Austrian units
that were deployed there were able to make substantial territorial gains in the
autumn of 1914. But in the spring of 1915 an attempt by Austro-Hungarian
forces to drive the Russians back into Carpathia proved ineffectual, and the
Danube Monarchy, which had already lost 1.2 million soldiers in 1914 alone,
suffered further losses of 800,000 men, a blow from which Germany’s leading
ally had still not recovered by the end of the war.
In spite of this, the Central Powers were able to place immense pressure on
tsarist Russia, capturing Lithuania, Courland and Russian Poland between
May and October 1915, and driving the Russians from Galicia. In the course of
their retreat, the Russian troops deported more than 1.6 million Lithuanians,
Latvians, Jews and Poles, claiming that in doing so they were acting in the
interests of their own safety and security but in fact anticipating the even
crueller fate that was to be meted out to Turkmen and Kirghiz nomads in
1916 after both of these groups had refused to accept the decision to call up
all the Muslims living in tsarist Russia. Some half million Turkmen and
Kirghiz nomads were robbed of their herds and property and driven into the
mountains or deserts, where they died a pitiful death. By the autumn of 1915 a
tenacious standoff had developed along the eastern front, too, albeit one that
was broken in the summer of 1916 by the Russians’ Brusilov offensive. The
4 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Austro-Hungarian army suffered a devastating defeat at Bukovina, and between

then and the Russian February Revolution of 1917, the front remained largely
unchanged.
On 5 November 1916 the military situation made it possible for the two
Central Powers in the persons of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Kaiser Franz Joseph to
proclaim the establishment of a Polish state – the ‘Kingdom of Poland’ – on the
territory formerly occupied by Russian Poland, although the real executive
power lay not in the newly formed Polish National Council in Warsaw but in
the hands of the German governor general in Warsaw and the Austrian
governor general in Lublin. In consequence there could be no talk of an ‘inde-
pendent’ Poland, still less of a secure frontier: Germany retained the right to
annex a ‘border strip’ that was also to include Polish parts of the Upper Silesian
industrial region. The future of two other areas occupied by German troops
also remained open: Lithuania and Courland. Among the voices raised in
favour of the annexation of the Baltic States were not only the Pan-Germans
but also, and above all, the upper strata of German Balt society and many of the
German Balts who were living and working in Germany.
Meanwhile on the western front there were repeated attempts in 1915 and
1916 to end the military stalemate. At the end of April 1915 German troops
used poison gas for the first time at Ypres, and at the end of February 1916 Erich
von Falkenhayn launched an offensive aimed at capturing Verdun. By June the
German and French armies had each lost more than 200,000 men in sustained
and bitter fighting. Falkenhayn broke off the battle in mid-July in order to repel
the British offensive on the Somme. By November the British, German and
French armies had between them lost more than one million men here, the end
result being only the most insignificant gains for the Allies. Falkenhayn paid for
his failure by being replaced as chief of the general staff, and in August 1916
the Third Army High Command was appointed, with Hindenburg as chief
of the general staff and Ludendorff as quartermaster-general.
From now on, Ludendorff was the ‘strong man’ in the German military,
Hindenburg its popular figurehead. In the face of all the historical facts,
Ludendorff was even hailed as the ‘victor of Tannenberg’ by the army’s propa-
ganda machine and soon assumed the role of substitute Kaiser, Wilhelm II
being wholly unsuited to such a role – from August 1914 he rarely appeared in
public at all. True, neither of the two army commanders was able to bring about
an improvement in the situation on the western front, and between October
and December 1916 the French regained control of the fortifications at Verdun
that the Germans had previously wrested from them.
At sea, too, the stalemate between Germany and the two western powers
remained largely unchanged during the first two years of the war. At the insti-
gation of Winston Churchill, then the first lord of the Admiralty, Britain
imposed a blockade in the North Sea from the Shetland Islands to southern
Norway, cutting off Germany from supplies of raw materials and food and also
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 5

preventing the country from exporting its own produce overseas. Germany
responded by deploying submarines and mine ships, whereas its surface fleet
was kept on standby at the insistence of its commander in chief, Germany’s
secretary of state for the navy, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.
In March 1915 the German High Command gave orders for an unrestricted
submarine war, enabling its vessels to attack even neutral ships without
warning. The first fatal outcome of this new strategy was the sinking of the
British liner the Lusitania in May 1915, with the loss of 1,200 passengers
and crew, including 120 American citizens. The government in Washington
responded by issuing a series of ultimatums, leading in September 1915 to a
reduction in the scope of German submarine attacks. Not until late May 1916,
at the Battle of Jutland, was the surface fleet used to any greater extent. Although
the British fleet suffered more serious losses than its German equivalent, it was
none the less able to prevent the Germans from breaking through the naval
blockade. And while Germany’s naval leaders demanded a return to full-scale
submarine warfare, they were unable to persuade either Wilhelm II or his
chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, to accept their proposal. Tirpitz
responded to his defeat by resigning as secretary of state for the navy.

When compared with France and Russia, south-east Europe and the
Mediterranean were sideshows of the First World War. By the end of 1914 the
Central Powers had overrun the whole of Serbia. Montenegro capitulated in
January 1915. And in the autumn of 1916 large tracts of Romania fell into the
hands of the Germans and Austrians. But these successes were overshadowed by
Italy’s decision in May 1915 to enter the war on the side of the Entente. Prior to
taking this step, Italy had been in negotiations with Austria-Hungary and had
demanded that in compensation for its claims to the Balkans, Austria-Hungary
would cede Trentino, Görz, Gradisca, Istria (including Trieste) and several
Dalmatian islands, demands to which Austria, under pressure from Berlin,
largely agreed, but they stopped short of the concessions that Britain, France and
Russia had made in secret negotiations that were conducted in parallel. The
result was the secret Treaty of London of April 1915, under the terms of which
the Entente agreed that at the end of the war, Italy would receive reparations in
the form of the South Tyrol, Trieste and Istria (but without the Hungarian port
of Rijeka, or Fiume), north and central Dalmatia and the islands off its coast
and, finally, complete sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands. Italy was also to
acquire an area of influence on the Turkish Mediterranean coast and would be
given a protectorate over a reduced Albania.
The Italian prime minister, Antonio Salandra, and his foreign minister,
Sidney Sonnino, supported intervention on the side of the Allies, but they
had the majority of members of parliament against them, and so Salandra
resigned on 21 May 1915. His predecessor, Giovanni Giolitti, had championed
Italian neutrality and could count on a parliamentary majority but he had no
6 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

desire to govern himself. Ultimately, the decisive factor proved to be pressure

from the overwhelmingly middle-class demonstrators on the streets of Rome
and other large cities, many of whom were students. Among them were several
leaders emphatically on the side of intervention, including the nationalist poet
Gabriele D’Annunzio and the former radical Marxist and syndicalist Benito
Mussolini, who since his break with the decidedly anti-interventionist Socialist
Party in November 1914 had edited his own Popolo d’Italia, a newspaper
financed by industry and by the French government. King Victor Emanuel III
aligned himself with the vociferous nationalist minority, refused to accept
Salandra’s resignation and persuaded him to continue to run the country. In
turn, this meant that the liberal majority in parliament took the interventionist
line and granted the government the extraordinary powers that it demanded.
Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915, but waited until
August 1916 to declare war on Turkey and Germany. The first of a total of
eleven Battles of Isonzo began in June, leading to serious casualties and only
minimal territorial gains.
The Ottoman Empire had already been drawn into the war by this date. The
Turkish fleet had moved out of port at the end of October 1914 in order to
mine and attack Russian Black Sea ports in keeping with the terms of an agree-
ment signed with Germany on 2 August. Tsarist Russia replied on 3 November
by declaring war on Turkey. Two days later Britain and France took the same
step. By January 1915 the Russians had inflicted a serious defeat on the Turkish
army in the southern Caucasus, although the Turks were successful on another
front and in late April thwarted an Allied attempt to occupy the peninsula of
Gallipoli to the north of the Dardanelles. (It may be mentioned in passing
that the majority of the Allied troops comprised soldiers from the British
dominions of Australia and New Zealand.)
Meanwhile, on 24–5 April 1915, Turkey began to arrest and deport
more than 200 prominent Armenians, almost all of whom were murdered
shortly afterwards in what was arguably the worst chapter in the history of the
First World War: this was the Armenian genocide. Even under Sultan Abdul
Hamid II the Armenians had already been subjected to brutal terror, up to
200,000 men, women and children having lost their lives in pogroms between
1884 and 1896. Up to 20,000 more Armenians died during the pogroms of
early 1909, which coincided with the Young Turk revolution. Although there
was a feeling of kinship between the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire
and those who were living in Russia, there could be no question of any collec-
tive Armenian resistance to Turkish rule, even though there had been numerous
revolutionary groupings, some of them supported by Russia, which since the
end of the nineteenth century had fought against the oppressive rule of the
Turkish Islamists.
Under Talaat Pasha, the ruling party of the Young Turks, Ittihat ve Terakki
(Unity and Progress), was from the outset keen to do more than merely intimi-
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 7

date an ostensibly unreliable section of the population and destroy any

remaining independence enjoyed by the non-Muslim religious communities.
Ittihat ve Terakki wanted to create a homogenous Turkish state out of the
multiracial Ottoman Empire, and this could be done only by driving out or
annihilating the 2.1 million Armenians, who had been the largest Christian
minority since the loss of almost all the European part of Turkey in the Balkan
Wars of 1912–13. Their hatred was aimed not only at the Armenians who lived
in eastern Anatolia in regions bordering Russia but at every Armenian in the
whole of the Ottoman Empire. The war offered the best possible opportunity
to carry out this murderous plan.
Some 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children were massacred in
1915. They died on forced marches through deserts and as a result of torture
and executions. Others starved to death or were drowned or burnt alive. In
many respects, including their banishment to the wilderness, the eradication
of the Armenians resembled the annihilation of the Herero by the Germans
in South-West Africa in 1904 and 1905, the first systematic genocide of
the twentieth century. The German diplomats and military leaders who lived
and worked in Turkey were fully aware of the Armenian massacres, and they
duly passed on this information to their superiors in Berlin. Although indi-
vidual eyewitnesses such as Johannes Lepsius, an Evangelical theologian from
Potsdam, repeatedly urged the German government to lodge a complaint in
Istanbul, both the chancellor and his Foreign Ministry declined to register a
formal protest, being reluctant to antagonize an ally on whose assistance the
Reich was more than ever dependent. Instead, they merely made polite requests
that extreme violence be avoided.

The German colonies remained on the fringes of the war, during the early
months of which New Guinea and the Samoan Islands were occupied by
Australian and New Zealand troops respectively, while the Marshall Islands,
the Marianas, the Palau Islands and the Caroline Islands were taken by Japanese
forces. In November 1914 Japan also forced Qingdao to capitulate. In Africa
Togo fell into Allied hands as early as 1914, followed in 1915 by German South-
West Africa and in 1916 by Cameroon. The bitterest and most protracted
battles were fought in German East Africa. In September 1916 forces of the
British Empire captured Dar es Salaam, but even by the end of the war the
German colonial army under General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was able to
maintain its grip on the greater part of the colony and also to make incursions
into the Portuguese part of East Africa.

War Aims, Ideological Warfare, Opposition to the War

‘We are not driven by the love of conquest,’ Kaiser Wilhelm II had told the
Reichstag in his speech from the throne on 4 August 1914, thereby making it
8 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

possible for the Social Democrats to vote for the war loans demanded by the
country’s leaders. And yet the assertion that Germany was merely defending
itself was quickly called into question by a number of influential circles. Any
public discussion of the aims of the war was banned in Germany until
November 1916, but behind the scenes there was a lively debate in word and
print on the subject of the territorial gains, resources and power that might
accrue to Germany as a result of the war.
In September 1914 the chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg,
summed up his ideas in a programme that amounted to a German-dominated
central Europe and, hence, German hegemony on the Continent. The annexa-
tion of Longwy-Briey, with its ore mines in northern Lorraine, was as much
a part of this plan as the integration into a greater Germany of the fortified
town of Belfort, the annexation of Luxembourg and the reduction of Belgium
to a vassal state. As for Russia, the chancellor’s aims were for the present
couched in only the most general terms: the country should be ‘driven back
from the German border and its dominion over non-Russian vassal states
broken’. Neighbouring states, including Austria-Hungary, France and perhaps
even ‘Poland’, should join a central European economic union ‘under the
superficial equality of all its members but de facto under German leadership’.3
For the most part, the chancellor’s ‘September programme’ incorporated
ideas held to be necessary by the Deutsche Bank and by those sections of
German industry that were dependent on exports. Far more extreme notions
were proposed by the ultra-nationalist Pan-Germans and individual leaders of
the country’s heavy industries. Even as early as late August 1914, Heinrich Claß,
the president of the Pan-German League, was already demanding that Russia
should be driven back to the lands held by Peter the Great and that the Baltic
states, together with parts of Russian Poland, White Russia and north-west
Russia, should be occupied by German settlers, while Russian Jews should be
resettled in Palestine. In September 1914 the industrialist August Thyssen insisted
that Belgium, several of the départements of eastern France and Russia’s Baltic
provinces should all be part of a greater Germany. And in order to safeguard
the supply of raw materials for the future, the Reich should also take control of the
Crimea, of the areas around Odessa and Azov and, finally, of the Caucasus.
During the early months of 1915 leading business associations, together with
numerous German academics, civil servants and artists, came together under
the banner of the Berlin theologian Reinhold Seeberg, who hailed, coinciden-
tally, from the Baltic, and aligned themselves with the Pan-German programme,
while a significantly smaller number of more moderate intellectuals grouped
around the editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, Theodor Wolff, and the historian
Hans Delbrück argued in July 1915 that while ‘politically independent nations
used to their own independence to the west of Germany’ should not be ‘incor-
porated and annexed’, the country should not rule out territorial acquisitions to
the east.4 The most detailed expression of the aspirations of these moderate
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 9

imperialists was a book published in 1915 by the liberal left-wing politician

Friedrich Naumann, Central Europe. In it, Naumann, who had studied theology,
harked back to ideas associated with the Pan-German legacy of 1848 and with
the Holy Roman Empire that had finally come to an end in 1806, painting a
picture of an essentially German central Europe organized around the German
and Austro-Hungarian economic bloc, which should work together as a confed-
eration of states. On one point the more moderate and the more radical imperi-
alists were in agreement: the German colonies should be expanded, especially in
central Africa, otherwise Germany’s claim to be regarded as a world power was
impossible to sustain.
The contemporary debate on Germany’s war aims has been better researched
than that of the other leading participants in the war, not least because
Germany’s aims were the most far-reaching. In France, there was widespread
agreement on at least one such aim: Alsace and Lorraine, which had been
annexed by Germany in 1871, should be returned to France. Equally uncontro-
versial was the need to restore Belgium’s sovereignty and France’s right to
German reparations. Leading military figures, together with nationalist politi-
cians and intellectuals, went beyond this modest programme, as did the Comité
des Forges and its secretary general, Robert Pinot. At the top of their agenda
was the annexation of the Saarland, with its rich reserves of coal. In 1916 the
chief of the general staff, Joseph Joffre, also demanded as guarantees against any
future threat to France that Germany should cede the left bank of the Rhine, an
area that would be divided into several smaller states dependent on France,
and that a series of French bridgeheads be built on the right bank of the river.
The radically nationalist Action Française refused to content itself with this
neutralization of the left bank of the Rhine but demanded its annexation. In
1916, when France’s wartime aims were first debated in public, these demands
of Action Française met with fierce resistance from the Socialists.
The president of the French Republic, Raymond Poincaré, shared the
position of the nationalist right and, like the right, wanted to see Germany
broken up into smaller states. But out of regard for divided public opinion and
the views of his British allies, he refrained from setting down his ideas in
writing. On 10 March 1917 – only days before the February Revolution in
Russia – the French prime minister Aristide Briand signed a secret treaty with
the tsarist government enshrining Russia’s approval of France’s annexation of
the Saarland and the transformation of the left bank of the Rhine into a neutral
state independent of the Reich. In return Russia was to be allowed to expand its
territories in the west at the expense of Poland and the Central Powers and in
that way be given a free hand in annexing East Prussia. France and Britain had
already agreed in March 1915 that once Turkey was defeated, Russia could lay
claim to Constantinople and the Straits of Bosporus.
Britain and France were basically in agreement on the way in which
the Ottoman Empire might be divided up, and they staked out their intended
10 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

post-war spheres of influence in the Sykes–Picot Agreement of May 1916.

Those parts of the Ottoman Empire that were Arab-held were to become
nominally independent states or a confederation of states under Arab leader-
ship but with Franco-British control, France acquiring control of the Lebanon,
Syria and the area around Mosul, while Britain took over the rest of
Mesopotamia and Egypt. For Palestine, an international administration was
envisaged. But the most important document affecting the future of Palestine
was the Balfour Declaration, named after the British foreign minister and dated
2 November 1917: in keeping with Zionist aspirations it supported the creation
of a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, while respecting the
rights of existing non-Jewish communities. There was no doubting the ulterior
tactical motives of the British government, which hoped that in this way it
would gain the support of American Jews in its attempts to persuade the United
States to enter the war.
As for Europe, the Foreign Office limited itself in the autumn of 1916 to
drawing up a memorandum demanding the restoration of Belgian sovereignty
and the fulfilment of France’s wishes with regard to Alsace-Lorraine. Otherwise,
the national principle should be upheld, the whole of Poland should form
an alliance with Russia, and German Austria should be united with Germany
in compensation for Germany’s territorial losses. Although this last-named
demand ran counter to French interests, the memorandum merely reflected the
old maxim whereby a victorious France should not be too powerful or a defeated
Germany too weak. For the rest, Britain and France agreed that Prussia’s
military might should be curtailed and the German economy held in check.

Germany’s ideological warfare was conducted in the spirit of the ‘ideas of 1914’,
a term coined in 1915 by the Münster economist Johann Plenge, although it
was the Swedish constitutional lawyer and expert in the field of geopolitics,
Rudolf Kjellén, who put the phrase into wider circulation, not least on the
strength of the considerable popularity that he enjoyed in Germany as a cham-
pion of the German cause. The ‘ideas of 1914’ amounted to a rejection of liber-
alism and individualism, of democracy and universal human rights – in short,
a repudiation of western values. German values, conversely, were duty, order
and justice, all of which could be guaranteed only by a powerful state acting in
the interests of the community as a whole. ‘Not since 1789 has there been a
revolution to compare to the German revolution of 1914,’ wrote Plenge:

The twentieth-century revolution of the building up and unification of all

state powers vs. the destructive liberation of the nineteenth century. [. . .]
The pressure of war has driven the socialist idea into German economic
life. Its organization grew together in a new spirit, and in this way the self-
assertion of our nation gave birth to the new idea of 1914 for humanity, the
idea of German organization, the people’s cooperative of national socialism.5
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 11

‘Capitalist’ England was seen as the true antithesis of ‘socialist’ Germany.

Germany had been ‘socialist’ since the days of Bismarck’s national insurance
laws, while England was still said to hold the laissez-faire attitudes of Manchester
liberalism. There were two reasons why Britain began to assume an increas-
ingly central position in terms of ideological warfare. In the first place, Britain,
as a world power, differed from France in that it was not Germany’s historic
archenemy but an admired and envied model, resulting in a love–hate relation-
ship and in a dramatization of the relations between the two countries that
culminated in the greeting ‘God punish England!’ And, second, Russia no
longer had a part to play as Germany’s most dangerous foe following the
German victories of 1914 and 1915. Nothing, on the other hand, suggested that
the English would be defeated as quickly.
The Catholic philosopher Max Scheler was one of the first to advance the
claim that the war was ‘first and last a German-English war’.6 In his 1915 book
Shopkeepers and Heroes, the economist Werner Sombart drew a comparison
between English commercialism and German militarism, describing the latter
as ‘the spirit of heroism raised to the spirit of war’ and as ‘Potsdam and Weimar
in ultimate union’. That spirit was ‘Faust and Zarathustra and Beethoven’s score
in the trenches, for the “Eroica” and the Egmont Overture are arguably expres-
sions of the purest militarism’.7
Perhaps the most sophisticated account of the ‘ideas of 1914’ is Thomas
Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, which appeared in the final year of
the war. In it the author of Buddenbrooks described the war as the struggle
between German culture and western civilization. Mann defended the authori-
tarian German state on the grounds that it afforded protection for the country’s
deepest and innermost essence as expressed in music, poetry and philosophy.
In consequence the war was essentially designed to fend off the ‘trois pays
libres’ of the West – France, Great Britain and the United States – and to protect
against their democracy. ‘The politicization of the German concept of art
would mean its democratization, an important feature of the democratic level-
ling and realignment of Germany.’8
British and French intellectuals did not need persuading that their own polit-
ical systems were superior to their German equivalent. On the other hand, their
countries’ alliance with tsarist Russia prevented them from describing the war as
a struggle for democracy. And in the case of Great Britain, there was a further
obstacle: there was not yet universal male suffrage, a right that had existed
throughout Germany since 1871. In ideological debates with Germany, there-
fore, pride of place was given to a point that from the perspective of western
intellectuals was specifically German: Prussian militarism, which was felt to be
profoundly reactionary. In England, the three leading representatives of this
militaristic outlook were repeatedly quoted as being the writer on military
history, Friedrich von Bernhardi, whose study Dentschland und der Nächste
Krieg (Germany and the Next War) had appeared in 1912; the historian Heinrich
12 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

von Treitschke, who had coined the oft-cited description of the war as an ‘examen
rigorosum of states’; and, rather more questionably, Friedrich Nietzsche, who
was not a German nationalist at all. From 1914 onwards, there were also repeated
sightings of the old topos of two Germanys: one the idealistic land of poets and
thinkers, the other the power-hungry military state of the Hohenzollerns that
had dominated Germany since 1871.
One of the prominent writers to promote this view was the London-based
philosopher and sociologist L. T. Hobhouse whose book The World in Conflict,
first published in 1915, was based on a series of articles that had appeared in
the liberal Manchester Guardian. In it, Hobhouse explored the question of
Germany’s intellectual development and its deviation from the main current in
western thought. Germany, he wrote, had produced its own self-referential
culture based on a particular idea of the state and of its claims on the individual
and its rights vis-à-vis the rest of the world. But this was an idea of the state that
western civilization abhorred: ‘The whole movement of the reaction as we see
it expressed as early as Hegel is to the reassertion of the old ideal. The State is
master of the man, and it knows no laws of God or humanity to bind it in its
dealings with others.’9
But it was in France, far more than in England, that the old cliché of the
Germans as ‘barbarians’ was revived, especially in the wake of the atrocities in
Belgium and, shortly afterwards, the destruction of Reims Cathedral. The
philosopher Henri Bergson – famous for his theory of the élan vital – was one
of the first to refer to the Germans as barbarians in August 1914. The following
year the historian and journalist Ernest Lavisse and the Germanist Charles
Andler co-authored a volume titled Pratique et doctrine allemandes de la guerre,
in which Lavisse, taking issue with the wartime lectures of the Leipzig historian
Karl Lamprecht, wrote that German militarism was a ‘terrible set of material
interests, greed, natural and barbaric brutality, patriotism made worse by
insane arrogance and a multilayered and powerful mysticism in which every-
thing conspires to raise “Deutschland über alles” to new heights’. Two years
later, Lavisse expressed the hope that the world would recognize that in having
resisted the ‘barbarian onslaught’, France had made the common victory
possible. ‘In defending its own life, it will liberate humankind from the hated
yoke with which it is threatened by a power that places pride and its appetites
above justice and right.’10
Much the same tenor informed a publication, L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout
(Germany above all), by the famous sociologist Émile Durkheim. Heinrich von
Treitschke’s posthumously published lectures on politics were seized on by
Durkheim as a key to understanding a Pan-Germanism that was obsessed with
the pursuit of power and which he analysed as a case of social pathology.
Treitschke had taught that the state was synonymous with power and that it had
a duty to be strong. It was bound by international agreements only in the sense
of ‘clausula rebus sic stantibus’ – in other words, only as long as the conditions
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 13

that obtained when the agreement was signed remained in force. In the eyes of
the state no nation had the right of self-determination. And middle-class society
had to submit to it.
For Durkheim, the mentality championed and influenced by Treitschke
was a morbid will to power. Germany, he argued, had created for itself a
mythology that persuaded it to think that it was superior to all other nations
and ‘the supreme embodiment of divine power on earth’.11 But the world, he
went on, would never be enslaved by Germany:

Germany cannot fulfil its self-appointed task without preventing human-

kind from leading a life of freedom, but life cannot be fettered for ever.
Although it may be possible to restrict and paralyse our lives for a time by
means of some mechanical action, ultimately those lives will resume their
course and sweep aside the obstacles that prevent them from freely
unfolding.12

One of the most original contributions to the intellectual debate with Germany
came from the United States. Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution
was published in 1915 and was the work of the sociologist and economist
Thorstein Veblen, who was born in Wisconsin in 1857 to Norwegian immi-
grants. One of the most eloquent voices of the ‘progressive era’, Veblen had
already made a name for himself in 1899 with his Theory of the Leisure Class, a
trenchant and largely satirical critique not only of a leisured upper echelon
of society addicted to luxury but of society in general. In 1915 he turned his
sights on the authoritarian and militaristic Prussian state and the Germany
that that state had produced, while at the same time trumpeting the love of
freedom of the English-speaking peoples of the world. For all its exaggerations
and distortions, Veblen’s study offers a perceptive and even brilliant analysis of
the particular course taken by Germany, a concept that was to gain acceptance,
of course, only in the wake of the Second World War.
According to Veblen, Germany provided contemporaries with the para-
doxical example of a country that combined the most modern technological
developments with an extremely backward system of government. In terms of
its industrialization, Germany had taken its cue from England, but the liber-
tarian ideas and institutions that England had produced were not adopted by
the Germans, who inhabited a country that had never had a successful revolu-
tion, a land in which the Middle Ages lived on in the form of Junkers from the
east of the Elbe and their belligerent brand of feudalism: ‘The case of Germany
is unexampled among western nations both as regards the abruptness, thor-
oughness and amplitude of its appropriation of this technology, and as regards
the archaism of its cultural furniture at the date of this appropriation.’13 With
Prussia as a leading power, Germany had no other means of holding itself
together apart from blood and iron, while its only ideals were dynastic.
14 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

As a result, the Germans and the English had a different attitude to the
military:

The German ideal of statesmanship is [. . .] to make all the resources of the

nation converge on military strength; just as the English ideal is, per contra,
to keep the military power down to the indispensable minimum required to
keep the peace.14

The English and all other English-speaking peoples thought in the categories
of ‘popular autonomy’, while the Germans thought in those of the state and,
specifically, the dynastic state. In turn this meant that the English concept of
freedom was radically different from its German counterpart. From a German
standpoint, freedom meant giving orders and willingly obeying them, whereas
the English interpreted freedom in an almost anarchical spirit as the option of
not having to follow orders in case of doubt.
According to Veblen, the creation of the Reich under Bismarck meant that
Germany had fallen under the ‘hegemony of the most aggressive and most
irresponsible – substantially the most archaic’ of the German states,15 a state
incapable of denying its bellicose nature. Under Bismarck’s successors, it had
been able to rely on its great industrial potential and become a danger not only
to its neighbours but to the West in general. Veblen did not even need to speak
out explicitly in favour of the United States’ entry into the war, for his account
of the ‘Prussian-Imperial system’ as ‘the type-form and embodiment of this
reaction against the current of modern civilisation’16 could have only one
logical conclusion: the English-speaking nations of the world must stand
together and protect the achievements of the West from the threat that was
posed by a Prussian Germany.

Veblen was a radical liberal, but no Marxist. Marxist writers were bound to
find the deeper causes of the war in the contradictions inherent in the capitalist
system. Capitalism had entered an imperialist phase at the end of the nine-
teenth century. As the leader of the Russian Bolsheviks, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,
had noted in an essay written in exile in Zurich in the early part of 1916 and
published in Petrograd – the new name for St Petersburg – in April 1917, impe-
rialism was ‘the highest stage of capitalism’, a stage characterized by the conver-
gence of banking capital and industrial capital as finance capital, by the
replacement of free competition by monopolies and international cartels and
by the export of capital to underdeveloped parts of the world which, rich in raw
materials, were now subjected to the rule of capital.
Hand in hand with the transition from capitalism to monopoly capitalism
and finance capitalism went a struggle to divide up the world. If one agreed
with Lenin, then the exploitation of the developing world produced high
profits that allowed capitalists in major cities to lead parasitical lives and
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 15

enabled monopolists to corrupt whole sections of the working class. There was
a link, therefore, between imperialism and ‘opportunism’, the reformist and
revisionist abandonment of the pure Marxist doctrine. It was a theory that
could easily be exploded by reference to the war loans agreed to by Social
Democratic parties in Germany, France and Great Britain.
But imperialism could offer parasitical and degenerative capitalism no
more than a stay of execution. Although Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist
among German Social Democrats, had argued that the contradictions inherent
in imperialism could be resolved by peaceful means, notably within the frame-
work of international cartels, Lenin rejected this view as unworthy of Marx
and, appealing to Rudolf Hilferding, the Austrian author of Finance Capital
(1910), he predicted that the situation in the colonies would grow worse and
that there would be an increasing move towards national independence from
European capital in the colonies and other dependent regions. Imperialism
was characterized by the ‘disparity between the development of productive
forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colo-
nies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other’,17 leaving war the
only possible solution to the problem. In Lenin’s eyes, it was this that was the
true cause of the great international conflict that erupted in August 1914.
In terms of the theories that it advances, Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest
Stage of Capitalism was based for the most part on analyses by bourgeois,
socialist writers such as John Atkinson Hobson and Rudolf Hilferding, from
whom he also took over a number of miscalculations, including the financial
return from exploiting the colonies. But Lenin’s chief concern was revolutionary
praxis, which he was keen to justify with the help of the theory of imperialism.
He had already expounded the aim of revolutionary strategy in November 1914
in his article ‘The War and Russian Social-Democracy’, in which he had
described ‘the conversion of the present imperialist war into a civil war’ as ‘the
only correct proletarian solution’.18 The leaders of the socialist parties who
supported their governments were accused of a ‘downright betrayal of the cause
of socialism’:19 at a time of supreme importance in the history of the world, they
had sought to replace socialism by nationalism. Lenin’s harshest criticism was
reserved for the German Social Democrats as they had been the most powerful
and most influential party in the Second International. And he explicitly
repeated the charge of the Italian Socialists that the German Social Democrats
had ‘dishonoured the banner of the proletarian International’.20
If the German Social Democrats had voted for the war loans on 4 August, it
was because war with Russia was already a fait accompli, and their main aim
was now to prevent tsarist Russia, the most reactionary of all the major powers,
from winning the war. Their yes vote did not mean that they were acquitting
Germany and Austria-Hungary of all complicity in the war – they had attacked
the Viennese ultimatum to Serbia on 25 July as an act of frivolous provocation.
But at least by the time that Russia had mobilized its troops on 30 July, the
16 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

leaders of the German Social Democrats and the Free Trades Unions were
convinced that it was tsarist Russia that was the real aggressor. To have voted
no to the war loans would have risked a Russian advance on Berlin and the
most rigorous suppression of the workers’ movement by the state. The war
could have turned into a civil war, a prospect that filled the Social Democrats
with a mixture of fear and terror.
By the end of 1914, however, support for a party truce was crumbling, and
on 2 December the Berlin lawyer Karl Liebknecht, who was a son of the party’s
founder, Wilhelm Liebknecht, was the first Social Democratic member of the
Reichstag to vote against any new war loans. A further nineteen Social Democrats
joined him on 21 December 1915, among them the party’s co-chairman Hugo
Haase. Liebknecht was expelled from the party in January 1916. Following a
further ‘breach of discipline’, to which the majority of members responded by
expelling the dissidents from the party, eighteen members of the opposition
regrouped themselves in March 1916 as the Social Democratic Workers Union,
most of its members being drawn from the old pre-war left wing of the party. Yet
resistance to the official line that Germany was fighting a defensive war was by
no means limited to the left wing of the party, for the majority position was also
opposed by the ‘Centrist’ Karl Kautsky, who did not in fact have a parliamentary
mandate, and by the revisionist Eduard Bernstein.
For its part, the left wing was far from being a self-contained, coherent
grouping. Hugo Haase, who following the death of August Bebel in 1913 had
been elected co-chairman of the Social Democratic Party alongside Friedrich
Ebert, was among its more moderate representatives, as was Rudolf Hilferding,
whereas its more radical members numbered Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg
and Clara Zetkin, a pioneer of the socialist women’s movement. By the early
months of 1915 the extreme left wing already had its own organization, the
‘Group of the International’, which was renamed the Spartacus Group in the
course of 1916.
The radicalization of the left wing in Germany went hand in hand with
developments on the left wing of the Second International. In September 1915
a meeting of left-wing socialists was held in Zimmerwald in Switzerland: some
of those who attended were from countries such as Germany, France and Italy
that were already involved in the war, but others were from neutral countries.
All of them agreed on one point, rejecting support for the ‘imperialist war’
by socialist parties and denouncing such support as a betrayal of the principles
of the International. The idea of holding the conference had been proposed
by Italian and Swiss socialists in the middle of May 1915, a week before
Italy entered the war on the side of the Triple Entente. Moderate opponents of
the policy of a party truce were derided by Lenin as ‘socialist pacifists’ and
included men like Haase, Bernstein and Kautsky, none of whom was invited to
Zimmerwald. The left-wing extremists around Lenin, who wanted to abandon
the party truce in favour of civil war, sent only a handful of delegates, who
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 17

became known as the ‘Zimmerwald Left’. In a final communiqué agreed by

all the parties, all those present spoke out in support of a rapid end to
the war, peace without annexations or war reparations and the right of self-
determination on the part of all nations.
At the next international socialists’ meeting in Kienthal in the Bernese
Oberland in April 1916, Lenin and his supporters once again found themselves
in a minority. But on two points the resolutions agreed at Kienthal went further
than those at Zimmerwald. First, the delegates demanded ‘the rejection of all
support for war policies by the representatives of socialist parties’ and refusal
to agree any more war loans. And, second, they criticized the offices of the
International for having failed miserably and for being ‘complicit in policies of
the denial of principles, betrayal of the fatherland and of the party truce’.21
Although this did not lead to a schism in the Second International and to the
foundation of a new, revolutionary Third International, as Lenin hoped, it was
still symptomatic of the worsening situation within the international workers’
movement.
The French equivalent of Germany’s party truce was the ‘union sacrée’, which
meant that French Socialists were also formally involved in government from the
end of August 1914 – Marcel Sembat became the minister for public works and
Jules Guesde the minister without portfolio. There was less opposition to the war
in the French Socialist Party – the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière
(SFIO) – than in its German counterpart. The Zimmerwald conference was
attended by two leaders of the metalworkers’ union within the Confédération
Générale du Travail (CGT), Albert Bourderon and Alphonse Merrheim, but
none of the French parliamentarians. The SFIO’s annual conference in December
1915 produced broad agreement for the ‘patriotic’ line adopted by the party’s
leaders. A small minority aligned itself with the Zimmerwald resolutions, while
a more moderate and conciliatory position was taken by a group associated with
Jean Longuet, a grandson of Karl Marx. This was a group that in April 1916
chose a third of the delegates for the SFIO’s national council. At the end of
December 1916 only a narrow majority of the national council supported the
proposal that the new defence minister, Albert Thomas, the only socialist in
Briand’s cabinet, should remain in his post.
Members of the British Labour Party were prevented from attending the
Zimmerwald conference by the government’s refusal to grant them passports.
But there was socialist opposition to the war in Britain. Indeed, it was from the
outset even more vocal than in Germany. On 3 August 1914 the Daily Citizen,
the Labour Party’s official newspaper, described the mere idea of Britain
fighting alongside reactionary Russia as ‘simply appalling’. On the morning of
4 August the Labour Party executive issued a declaration stating that it was the
duty of the working class to end the war as quickly as possible by means of a
peace that would allow ‘the re-establishment of amicable feelings between the
workers of Europe’.22
18 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Shortly afterwards the Labour MPs in the lower house voted by a large
majority to agree to the war loans demanded by Asquith’s government, precipi-
tating the resignation of the most prominent opponent of the war, the party’s
leader, Ramsay MacDonald, who was also a leading member of the International
Labour Party. The International Labour Party maintained its pacifist position
until the end of the war, while avoiding any disciplinary measures on the part of
the majority. In mid-October the Labour Party justified voting in favour of war
loans and enlisting voluntary recruits by insisting that Germany was to blame
for the war not least by invading neutral Belgium and, more generally, by refer-
ence to the need to prevent Germany’s military despotism from triumphing.
The Labour Party went on to support the government of the Liberal prime
minister, Herbert Asquith, in all its executive decisions, starting with the Defence
of the Realm Act of 8 August 1914, which conferred emergency powers on the
government. By the end of May 1915 the military situation in the Balkans and the
Dardanelles had led to the formation of an all-party cabinet with the Labour
leader Arthur Henderson as education minister. At the beginning of 1916 Labour
even agreed to what in the context of English history seems a positively revolu-
tionary step: the introduction of conscription. In the spring of 1916 Britain had
to deal with its most testing internal challenge of the war, its bloody suppression
of the German-backed Easter Rising, mounted by the nationalist Sinn Féin
movement and which began with the proclamation of the Irish Republic in
Dublin on 24 April. Over 500 people were killed, including 300 civilians, and
around 2,000 were injured. The leaders of the uprising were executed. Among
them was Sir Roger Casement, a former British diplomat and international critic
of the appalling treatment of the indigenous population of the Belgian Congo
under King Leopold II of the Belgians. It was a German submarine that brought
Casement back to his native Ireland four days before the rising.
Nine months later, on 7 December 1916, the bullish war secretary, David
Lloyd George, replaced his Liberal colleague Herbert Asquith as prime minister.
From then on the true centre of power was a five-man cabinet committee made
up of the prime minister, three Unionists, including the far-right Viscount
Milner, and Labour’s Arthur Henderson, now minister without portfolio. As
Lloyd George began to move ever further to the Tory right, Henderson resigned
from the government in August 1917, but in spite of this, Labour remained a
part of the wartime coalition, and its members continued to hold ministerial
posts in the government of national unity.
Apart from the British Independent Labour Party, there were only two other
socialist parties among the countries engaged in hostilities that refused to support
the war. One was the Serbian Labour Party, whose two elected representatives
were the only members of the Skupgtina to vote against war loans on 31 July
1914, and the other was the Russian Socialist Party. Both of the groups that made
up the Russian Social Democrats – the relatively moderate Mensheviks and the
far more radical Bolsheviks – had agreed to abstain in the vote of confidence in
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 19

the Duma on 8 August and to refuse to consent to any war loans. Instead, they
both agreed to issue a joint declaration protesting against the war and to demon-
strate their international solidarity with the working class. The sharply worded
declaration was read out by a Menshevik deputy, after which the socialist
members left the plenary meeting and took no further part in the vote.
This attitude on the part of the socialist deputies did not reflect the mood
of patriotism among Russian workers. Nor did it conform to the line adopted
by leading exiled politicians, including the Menshevik Georgy Valentinovich
Plekhanov, all of whom wanted to support the war on the side of the Western
Powers. At the same time, Lenin’s catchphrase to the effect that the imperialist
war should be turned into a civil war was rejected by the majority of the
Bolsheviks. In the autumn of 1914 the mood in Russia was far from revolu-
tionary, and another two years were to pass before conditions had deteriorated
to the point where Lenin’s radical ideas began to gain widespread support.

A Year to Remember: The Russian Revolution;

the United States Enters the War
Nowhere did the initial euphoria sparked by the war vanish as swiftly as it
did in Russia. The defeats that the tsar’s armies suffered at the hands of the
Germans in 1914 and 1915 caused growing discontent with existing political
and social conditions, leading in turn to strikes, first in the textile industries
in the summer of 1915, then in the metal industry, in mining and in oil-rich
areas around Baku and in the Urals. In August 1915 all the parties in the
Duma with the exception of the extreme right and left joined a ‘Progressive
Bloc’ that demanded a new government based on the trust of the people.
Tsar Nicholas II had become supreme commander of the Russian armies
following his dismissal of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich in September
1915 and was strenuously opposed to any greater degree of parliamentary
democracy. During the tsar’s long absences from Petrograd, his wife, Alexandra
Fyodorovna, exerted a decisive influence on all important appointments,
including even ministerial posts, but for years she had been superstitiously
dependent on the suggestions of her favourite, the Siberian monk Grigori
Rasputin. Rasputin’s murder by two members of the aristocracy and a right-
wing member of the Duma on 30 December 1916 afforded dramatic evidence
of the fact that even in the upper echelons of Russian society support for the
tsar was waning.
This period also witnessed an increase in social unrest that assumed
distinctly alarming proportions. During the first two months of 1917 food
supplies practically ran out in the major cities and industrial centres. By January
the price of consumer goods had risen sixfold in Petrograd and fivefold in the
provinces when compared to pre-war prices. That same month the police
warned that famine riots could break out at any time. By early March protest
20 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

demonstrations were already gathering pace in the capital. On 8 March a

demonstration by women held to mark International Women’s Day was joined
by workers from the Putilov metalworks, quickly developing into a strike and
two days later into a general strike. In vain the president of the Duma, Mikhail
Rodzianko, urged the tsar to form a new constitutional government that would
enjoy the confidence of the country, but Nicholas continued to oppose the idea
and instead prorogued the Duma, an act of provocation that served to exacer-
bate an already tense situation. During the night of 11/12 March large sections
of the Petrograd garrison, including a number of officers, fired on demon-
strating workers and students, thereby marking the beginning of the February
Revolution, so called because according to the old Julian calendar it began on
23 February. Above all, the events that followed led to the collapse of a system
that had proved increasingly incapable of functioning efficiently.
In order to assert itself in the face of pressure from the streets, the majority
of members of the Duma took the revolutionary step of setting up a provisional
committee made up of representatives of the Progressive Bloc as well as
Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. On 13 March 1917 this committee
in turn appointed a provisional government under the liberal Prince Georgy
Yevgenyevich Lvov as prime minister and the historian Paul Milyukov, the
leader of the Constitutional Democrats (‘Cadets’), as his foreign minister.
The previous day, adopting the model established in 1905, a provisional execu-
tive committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies
had been formed in the Taurian Palace, the building where the Duma met.
Its deputy chairman, Alexander Kerensky, who was the leader of the socialist
Trudoviks, joined the Provisional Government as justice minister and for
a while acted as intermediary between the two centres of power. Urged to
step down by the Provisional Government and ultimately by his own head-
quarters, Nicholas abdicated on 15 March in favour of his brother Mikhail,
only for the latter to decline the crown, bringing to an end not only the
300-year rule of the Romanovs but also the thousand-year rule of the Russian
monarchy.
Working together with the Provisional Committee of the Duma, the
Petrograd Soviet settled a number of the most pressing matters immediately
after it was constituted, the agreements between the two groups extending to
preparations for elections to a body that would lay the foundations for Russia’s
democratic future, an immediate and comprehensive amnesty for all political
prisoners and exiles, complete freedom of speech, freedom of the press,
freedom of worship, freedom of assembly, the right to strike, the replacement
of the police by a national militia and democratic elections at a regional level.
The Soviet organized food supplies for the capital and formed a people’s militia.
Order no. 1 of 14 March placed troops under the political control of the Soviet.
Its officers had to seek legitimization from the newly formed committees, and
soldiers were instructed to obey only those orders that did not contradict the
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 21

decrees of the Petrograd Soviet. The aim was to do away with the old officer
caste and, hence, with the existing form of military discipline.
On 27 March there followed a manifesto addressed to the world’s prole-
tarian masses, in which the Petrograd Soviet hailed the victory of Russian
democracy as ‘the great victory of international freedom and democracy’,23 a
victory that had destroyed ‘the main pillar of international reaction and the
gendarme of Europe’. Democratic Russia could not pose a threat to freedom
and civilization. An appeal was being made, therefore, to the proletarian masses
to cast off the ‘imperious yoke’, just as the Russian workers had done. No longer
should they allow themselves to be used as ‘a weapon of annexation of brute
force in the hands of kings, landowners and bankers’.24 A congress of local
workers’ and soldiers’ soviets met in Petrograd between 11 and 16 April and
summed up this appeal in the memorable phrase about universal peace
‘without annexations and indemnities’.
The establishment of the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet
marked the beginning of what was known even at the time as a Dual Authority,
the contradictory character of which has been aptly described by the German
historian Dietrich Geyer, who writes that the soviets

did not try to penetrate the state bureaucracy. Instead they were satisfied
with tight, outside control. They could reduce it to paralysis, but they had
no intention of overthrowing it. [. . .] While the revolutionaries waited for
the Constituent Assembly to be convened, their determination to remould
Russia was held in abeyance. [. . .] The result of this attentisme was a curious
mutual dependence between the government and the Soviet. The term ‘dual
power’, coined to describe this situation, is rather misleading. Those who
were supposed to rule did not have the support of the masses and never
really held power while those on whom the Revolution had conferred
power did not want to exercise it.25

When the February Revolution broke out, most of the leading Bolsheviks
were still living in exile: Lenin, Zinoviev and Karl Radek were in Switzerland,
Bukharin in New York, where he was editing an émigré newspaper with
Trotsky, a former left-wing Menshevik who was by then growing closer to the
position taken by Lenin. Other leading Mensheviks, including Stalin, Kamenev
and Sverdlov, were living in exile in Siberia. They were the first to return to
Petrograd at the end of March, when they immediately took control of
the party newspaper, Pravda, and used it to forge a closer link between the
Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government and to demand immediate
peace talks with all sides in the war. Until then the soldiers were to remain at
their posts.
Lenin held a radically different view. Writing from his exile in Switzerland
at the end of March, he penned two ‘Letters from Afar’ addressed to the two
22 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

most important members of the Provisional Government, the foreign minister

Paul Milyukov and the war minister Alexander Guchkov, accusing them of
having been coerced into seizing power by the Anglo-French imperialists in
order to prolong the imperialist war. He demanded that all treaties with the
Allies be abandoned, that all secret negotiations be made public and that all
colonies be liberated. The workers of every country were urged to overthrow
their governments and transfer their powers to workers’ councils. In short, it
amounted to a call to the world’s proletarian masses to rise up in revolution.
In the specific case of Russia, Lenin was keen to see a clear division between
Communist and international elements on the one hand and petty-bourgeois
elements on the other. With the help of the Communist and international
elements, Soviets of the Workers’ and Farmers’ Deputies would be transformed
into the organs of a revolutionary force along the lines of the Paris Commune
of 1871. (In making this proposal, Lenin appealed directly to Marx’s essay, The
Civil War in France.) This meant destroying the old state machinery and
replacing it with a new body in which police, army and bureaucracy would be
‘merged [. . .] with the entire armed people’. The proletariat must ‘organise and
arm all the poor, exploited sections of the population in order that they them-
selves should take the organs of state power directly into their own hands, in
order that they themselves should constitute these organs of state power’.26
If he was to exert any real influence on the subsequent course of events in
Russia, Lenin first needed to bring his own Bolshevik party into line, an aim he
could not achieve in exile but only in Russia itself. Since France refused to grant
him a transit visa and declined to facilitate his journey back to Russia, he was
able to return home only with German assistance. The army’s supreme
command and the government of Theodor von Bethmann Hollweg had the
greatest possible interest in helping the most determined opponent of the war
among all the Russian émigrés in whatever way they could – not only by
enabling Lenin to return home through Germany but also by offering his
subversive movement generous financial support. From a German point of
view, the aim of using Lenin to bring an end to the war in the east in order to
be able to concentrate all the country’s forces on the western front justified the
extremely dangerous policy of bringing revolution to Russia under the leader-
ship of a man who was effectively a German agent at this period. On 8 April
Lenin left Zurich in the legendary and allegedly lead-lined train in the company
of a number of loyal supporters, including his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya,
Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek. The party travelled via Sweden and Russia-
controlled Finland, arriving in Petrograd’s Finland Station on 16 April, where
they were greeted by a large crowd.
Lenin’s radical ideas initially encountered incredulous astonishment and
tremendous opposition among the Bolsheviks in Petrograd and more espe-
cially among the Mensheviks, and the situation was no different on the
Petrograd Soviet, on which the Bolsheviks were far less powerfully represented
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 23

than the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. But Lenin refused to be

discouraged by their combined opposition and on 22 April published a piece in
Pravda headed ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’. These
‘April Theses’ rapidly became famous. Without the overthrow of capital, he
argued here, it was impossible to end the war by means of a truly democratic
peace. The first stage of the revolution was to bring the bourgeoisie to power,
but its second stage must be to place that power in the hands of the proletariat
and the poorest sections of the peasantry. The immediate task in hand was to
explain to the masses that the soviets were the only possible form of revolu-
tionary government.
Lenin’s new watchword was ‘Not a parliamentary republic [. . .] but a
republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies
throughout the country, from top to bottom’.27 It was a slogan that could be
reduced to the cry of ‘All power to the soviets’. Police, army and bureaucracy
were to be abolished, all landed estates were to be confiscated and ‘all lands in
the country’ were to be nationalized, control over them passing to the local
Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. At the same time, all
the country’s banks were to be merged into a single national bank controlled by
the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. According to Lenin, these measures still fell
short of the ‘introduction’ of socialism but were designed simply ‘to bring
social production and the distribution of products under the control of the
Soviets of Workers’ Deputies’.28
In a more detailed text on the ‘Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution’
that Lenin wrote in April but did not publish until September 1917, he explained
that ‘State power in Russia has passed into the hands of a new class, namely, the
bourgeoisie and landowners who had become bourgeois. To this extent the
bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed.’ The present situation was
characterized by a unique interlocking of two dictatorships, the dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie and that of the proletariat. Lenin held up the February
Revolution as an example of the metamorphosis of an imperialist war into a
civil war. Each and every concession to ‘revolutionary defencism’ was a betrayal
of socialism and tantamount to the total abandonment of internationalism. In
order to point up the break with the opportunistic Socialist Democrats, Lenin
invited the party to rename itself the Communist Party. Its principal task, he
argued, was to end the imperialist world war by means of a genuinely demo-
cratic peace, but this could be achieved only through the most violent over-
throw in the whole history of humankind: ‘The only way out is through a
proletarian revolution.’29
Within a matter of only a few weeks, Lenin had already managed to persuade
the Bolsheviks to adopt this line. In the middle of May Pravda published a
resolution on the agricultural question agreed to by the party’s April Conference,
demanding the immediate transfer of all the confiscated estates into the hands
of the peasants and the nationalization of the land. A further resolution on the
24 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

national question demanded that all the nations that made up Russia should
have the right to break free and form their own independent states. This right
did not mean, however, that it was advisable for any nation to adopt this course
either now or in the future. Rather, the question must invariably be solved by
the proletariat taking account of every social change and must be approached
from the standpoint of the class struggle’s impact on socialism. In the case of
the agricultural question, Lenin’s concern was to win over to the Bolshevik
cause the largest section of the population – the peasants who owned very little
land. In the case of the nationalist question he banked on the support of all the
non-Russian peoples who lived in Russia. Even if they took advantage of their
right to break away from Russia, he expected that in the wake of a successful
proletarian revolution they would want to rejoin the new Russia.
In Lenin’s view, the ‘dual power’ that had existed since March 1917 could be
no more than a transitional stage that must be ended as quickly as possible. As
he had noted in Pravda on 22 April, the Provisional Government was a govern-
ment of and for the bourgeoisie, while the soviets of the Workers’ and Soldiers’
Deputies in Petrograd and elsewhere represented a government of the prole-
tariat that was still too weak to be effective. The human race had yet to produce
a higher and better type of government. In order to achieve power, the class-
conscious workers needed to gain a majority. As long as force was not used
against the masses, there was no other route to power. ‘We are not Blanquists
[followers of the French socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui who advocated armed
insurrection], we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority. We are
Marxists, we stand for proletarian class struggle against petty-bourgeois intoxi-
cation, against chauvinism-defencism, phrase-mongering and dependence on
the bourgeoisie.’30 Only when the class-conscious workers united to form a
proletarian Communist Party and could rely on the support of the majority of
the poor peasants could they ensure the undivided power of the Soviets. This
meant bringing clarification to proletarian minds and emancipating them
from the influence of the bourgeoisie.
This ‘dual power’ quickly proved fraught with conflict. On 1 May 1917 the
foreign minister, Paul Milyukov, assured the Allies that Russia would continue
to fight the war, prompting violent protests among the left-wing parties.
Three days later, under pressure from the Petrograd Soviet, the Provisional
Government was obliged to explain that it was making no territorial claims.
Within days, the minister of war, Alexander Ivanovich Guchkov, had resigned,
followed by Milyukov two weeks later. On 18 May the Provisional Government
was joined by six men who enjoyed the trust of the Mensheviks and Socialist
Revolutionaries, a move roundly criticized by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at
the First All-Russian Congress of the Soviets in the middle of June. At the
end of the month, Guchkov’s successor as minister of war, Alexander Kerensky,
ordered a military offensive by Russian troops, an order supported by the
Soviets’ executive committee. Within three weeks – and in spite of General
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 25

Alexei Brusilov’s initial successes on the Galician front – this offensive had
proved an unmitigated disaster.
On 16 July an uprising broke out in Petrograd in which the leading
Bolsheviks were far from being the driving force. (Lenin was on holiday, some
distance from the capital.) They were unable to control the rabble and the anar-
chists or even their own military organization and received insufficient support
from the soldiers. Fighting broke out between, on the one hand, sailors from
Kronstadt, a pro-Bolshevist regiment from the Petrograd garrison, workers
from the Putilov Plant, supporters of the Bolsheviks and anarchists and, ranged
against them, pro-government troops. The skirmishes left 400 dead and injured
and led to looting, arbitrary arrests by Bolshevik supporters and finally an
assault on the Taurian Palace, where the Petrograd Soviet met. The uprising
lasted three days and effectively ended with the storming of the palace, after
which the Soviet appealed to the workers to return home peacefully, an appeal
that was largely heeded.
The following day – 19 July – the Provisional Government ordered the
arrest of the leading Bolsheviks. Lenin and Zinoviev were able to evade capture
by fleeing to autonomous Finland. Their flight coincided with reports in
Russian newspapers about the continuing high level of payments to Lenin by
the German general staff. The events of mid-July marked a serious setback for
the Bolsheviks, and for a few days they seemed to disappear from the scene
completely.
On 21 July the leader of the Provisional Government, Prince Georgy
Yevgenyevich Lvov, resigned and was succeeded by the energetic and eloquent
Kerensky. On 22 August it was announced that elections to the Constituent
Assembly that had been repeatedly postponed were finally to take place on
25 November 1917, but this announcement failed to calm the mood within
the country. There were ever more instances of soldiers either refusing to carry
out orders or deserting, and since there was still no sign of the land reform that
had been promised, peasants occupied land that was not their own. Meanwhile,
the supply situation was growing worse. In August, Kerensky convened a
national conference attended by more than 2,000 representatives of every class
and every party with the exception of the Bolsheviks, but it failed to achieve
any practical results. The response by the nationalist right to the Provisional
Government’s lurch to the left was an attempted putsch by General Kornilov,
the army’s supreme commander, on 9 September – six days after German
troops had taken Riga. The putsch failed as a result of the passive resistance of
the railway and telegraph workers. Kornilov and his generals were arrested. On
14 September Kerensky officially declared Russia a republic.
It was the extreme left wing in the shape of the Bolsheviks that benefited
most from the September crisis. In the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets their
successful deployment in the battle with Kornilov meant that they were able to
win over the majority of deputies. Leon Trotsky had joined the Bolsheviks
26 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

following his return from exile in America and now proceeded to build up an
armed paramilitary organization – the ‘Red Guard’ – with the active support of
the factory committees of workers that had been elected in the spring.
Lenin was still in Finland at this date. In mid-September he wrote to the
Central Committee of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Russia – in
other words, the Bolshevik leadership – and advanced the bold claim that the
Bolsheviks now had ‘the majority of a class, the vanguard of the revolution,
the vanguard of the people’ and, indeed, the majority of the people behind
them, which had not been the case in July. ‘All the objective conditions exist
for a successful revolution.’ Power must now be transferred to ‘revolutionary
democrats, headed by the revolutionary proletariat’.31 Under pressure from the
masses it was now a question of offering a choice to the ‘Democratic Conference’
that had been convened by Kerensky and that was intended as a kind of provi-
sional parliament. Either there should be an unequivocal acceptance of
the Bolshevik programme, which included first and foremost a peace without
annexations, an immediate break with the Entente imperialists and, indeed,
with all imperialists, or there should be an insurrection. As Marx had already
observed, insurrection was an art, hence Lenin’s detailed instructions for
carrying it out by occupying Petrograd’s central telephone exchange. As a
result, the history of the Russian Revolution was about to enter a new, second
phase: the aim of Lenin’s appeal was to make this clear to the Bolsheviks.
Lenin’s involuntary sojourn in Finland bore fruit in the form of his essay
‘The State and Revolution’, which he wrote in August and September 1917 and
published in early 1918. His central thesis was directed at the ‘opportunistic’
Social-Democrats and reads: ‘A Marxist is solely someone who extends the
recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the
proletariat.’32 In advancing this notion, Lenin was able to appeal to Marx
who in a letter of March 1852 had expressed the view that the class struggle
must necessarily lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat, a dictatorship that
was no more than a transitional phase culminating in the abolition of all classes
and the formation of a classless society. As such, it had always been central to
Marxist thinking. Another witness for the prosecution to whom Lenin was able
to appeal was Friedrich Engels, who had described the Paris Commune as an
example of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in his 1891 introduction to
Marx’s The Civil War in France.
For Marx, the Commune’s decision to abandon the distinction between
legislative and executive power in favour of a single ‘working body’ and to
deprive the judges of their ‘apparent’ independence was a great historical and
even revolutionary step. Lenin relied on this view in declaring war on the ‘venal
and rotten parliamentarism of bourgeois society’.33 He defined the dictatorship
of the proletariat as the ‘organisation of the vanguard of the oppressed as the
ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors’. The dictatorship of
the proletariat was not a simple expansion of democracy but ‘democracy for
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 27

the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags’.
‘Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e.,
exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people – this
is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to
communism.’34
Freedom had not yet been achieved. ‘So long as the state exists there is no
freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.’35 Only in the ‘higher’
phase of communist society could the state ‘wither away’, to quote Engels’s
famous expression, and the administration of objects and control of produc-
tion processes would replace control over people. Before that could happen,
equality must be achieved not just on a formal level, and a classless society
would become a reality. ‘By what stages, by means of what practical measures
humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know.’36 But
Lenin did think that it was possible to predict events closer to hand: the time
was ripe for the revolution of the proletariat, a revolution that would begin in
Russia and then spread to the rest of the world.
The idea that Russia – a backward and still predominantly agricultural
country – could be seen as the vanguard of a proletarian world revolution was
in stark contrast to the assumption of Marx and Engels that only the working
class in a largely industrialized society could defeat capitalism by means of a
revolution and build a socialist society in its place. After the 1905 Revolution,
Lenin, too, had assumed that Russia would have to go through a series of stages
involving capitalism and a bourgeois democracy, but in the summer of 1917 he
announced that the bourgeois-democratic revolution was for the most part
complete and in his ‘April Theses’ even claimed that Russia was at that time ‘the
freest of all the belligerent countries in the world’.37 The fact that following the
Kornilov Putsch the Bolsheviks were able to persuade most of the deputies in
the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets to join them was enough for him to
announce that his party was now the executive organ of the will of the majority.
Decisive throughout all of this was his will to power: he regarded the condi-
tions for an armed insurrection as given precisely because he was determined
to delay no longer in mounting the revolution that he himself regarded as
necessary.

While Russia’s tsarist regime was witnessing its final crisis, relations between
Germany and the United States were taking a dramatic turn for the worse. On
12 December 1916 the leaders of the German Reich announced their willing-
ness to enter into peace negotiations, but without going into detail about their
ideas on a post-war order. The declaration was addressed in particular to the
president, Woodrow Wilson, who had been re-elected with a narrow majority
only a few weeks earlier. Wilson was asked to inform the Entente powers about
the German initiative, and he responded by inviting all the countries involved
in the war to discuss a negotiated peace.
28 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

On 11 January 1917 Great Britain, France, Italy and Romania set out
their common war aims, including a restructuring of Europe along nationalist
lines, the removal of foreign troops from occupied territories and reparations
for damage caused by enemy action. More particularly, they demanded
the restoration of Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro, ‘the liberation of Italians,
of Slavs, of Rumanians, of Czecho-Slovaks from foreign domination; the
enfranchisement of populations subject to the bloody tyranny of the Turks’ and
the ‘expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, decidedly foreign to
western civilisation’.38 For their part, the Central Powers initially preferred not
to clarify their own position. In a note dated 26 December 1916 the leaders
of the German Reich informed Washington that they had no desire to see
the American president involved in the actual peace negotiations. In neither
of the opposing camps could there be any talk of a willingness to end the
fighting.
Wilson refused to be disheartened, and in a speech to the Senate on
22 January 1917 he set out his ideas on a future world order. His aim was
nothing less than the restoration of peace to the entire world and the formation
of an international League for Peace designed to secure that peace. ‘Only a
tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power,
but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common
peace.’ The precondition for all of this was ‘a peace without victory’:

No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the
principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of
the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about from
sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.

Wilson attributed an equally great importance to the ‘freedom of the seas’

and the ‘moderation of armaments’. These, he concluded, were American prin-
ciples and practices, but at the same time they were the common property of all
‘forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of
every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must
prevail’.39
The French politician Georges Clemenceau reacted to Wilson’s speech with
a degree of sarcasm not meant to reach a wider public: ‘Never before has any
political assembly heard so fine a sermon on what human beings might be
capable of accomplishing if only they weren’t human.’40 There is no doubt that
Wilson’s programme sounded extremely idealistic, but his speech reflected his
own Democratic views and was expressed in such a way so as to gain the
approval of the American people. In Europe his words echoed the sentiments of
all who were working for the self-determination of their respective nations, no
matter whether they were currently ruled by Austria–Hungary, Germany, Turkey
or Russia. True, the governments of Great Britain and France had no intention
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 29

of granting the right of self-determination to their various colonies, whereas it

was in London’s interest to ensure that the nations of the Habsburg Empire and
Poland gained a greater degree of autonomy, the details of which remained
vague. In Paris everything depended on whether right- or left-wing forces had
the ultimate say in peace negotiations. Wilson could expect far more support
from the left than from the right. Conversely, the Central Powers’ actions were
in such stark contrast to Wilson’s principles that Berlin and Vienna would simply
not have been believed if they had accepted a peace framework similar to the
one proposed by the president.
Nor had Germany’s leaders any intention of doing so. On 19 January 1917 –
three days before Wilson’s Senate address – Arthur Zimmermann, the Foreign
Office’s secretary of state, had written to the Mexican government to suggest that
if the United States declined to remain neutral, Germany and America should
form an alliance, promising at the same time to help Mexico regain New Mexico,
Texas and Arizona, which Mexico had lost in 1848. The British navy’s secret
service managed to intercept and decode the relevant telegram, the contents of
which were brought to the attention of the State Department on 24 February. Its
publication on 1 March triggered an outcry of indignation in the United States.
By this date, diplomatic relations between Germany and the United States had
already been broken off, Washington having taken this step on 3 February in
response to a German note of 31 January announcing a resumption of its policy
of unrestricted submarine warfare, which it justified by reference to Great Britain’s
naval blockade, claiming that the latter was in contravention of international law.
Germany could hardly have taken a more disastrous decision. The coun-
try’s naval commanders had never accepted the ending of unrestricted subma-
rine warfare, which Germany had temporarily abandoned in September 1915
only under massive pressure from the United States. On 9 January 1917 the
chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, had given in to the demands of
the army and navy supreme command as well as the Kaiser and agreed to the
resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. On that occasion he had been
persuaded to act by an assurance on the part of the admiralty staff that with the
help of submarines England would be defeated within a matter of only five
months. In 1917 the decision to resume such attacks could be taken only
because Germany grotesquely underestimated America’s economic strength,
military potential and moral resolve. That the chancellor not only informed
Wilson of the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare but at the same
time confided in him a list of Germany’s war aims was bound to be taken as an
additional affront by the president.
In November 1916 Wilson had sought re-election not least by arguing that
he was the president who had kept the United States out of the war. His Senate
address on 22 January 1917 contained a passage in which he clearly distanced
himself from all ‘entangling alliances’ with European powers – the phrase picks
up the famous formulation from Thomas Jefferson’s first inauguration speech
30 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

on 4 March 1801. Following Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine

warfare and the publication of the ‘Zimmermann telegram’, there could no
longer be any serious question of the United States remaining neutral. Germany
even snubbed Wilson in rejecting his request that American ships be allowed
to sail to England. By February the first American merchant vessels had been
sunk by German U-boats, leaving Wilson with no alternative but to ask both
houses of Congress to declare war on Germany, which they did on 6 April. The
Senate voted 82–6 in favour, the House of Representatives 373–50. It was not
until eight months later, on 7 December 1917, that the United States declared
war on Austria-Hungary.
Wilson’s speech on 2 April was one of the most important of his presidency.
Germany’s submarine war against merchant shipping, he declared, was a war
on humanity and on every nation. And he left his fellow Americans in no doubt
about the consequences for his country: the war that Germany was waging
against the government and people of the United States would oblige the
country to introduce universal conscription. In the war that had now become
inevitable, America’s goal was to defend the principles of peace and justice in
the world against selfish and autocratic power. Under the truly free and self-
governed peoples of the world, the United States should ‘set up such a concert
of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those
principles’.
Wilson’s ‘War Message to Congress’ culminated in his vision of a future
world without war and oppression. America, he insisted, was fighting for a
state of definitive peace in the world and for the liberation of all its peoples,
including the German nation. It was also fighting for the rights of nations great
and small, for the

privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience.

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted
upon the tested foundations of political liberty. [. . .] We seek no indemni-
ties for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely
make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall
be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the
freedom of nations can make them.41

If tsarist Russia had not fallen on 15 March 1917, Wilson would not have been
able to appeal only two and a half weeks later for the democratization of the
world, an appeal that allowed his speech to Congress to enter the history books.
Only since March 1917 had it been possible to see the First World War as an
ideological struggle between freedom and oppression, and only because of this
did the decision to go to war enjoy such widespread support in the United
States. American politics had always been powerfully fuelled by a desire to
realize the ideals of 1776 on a universal scale and in that way to assume a
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 31

leading role in the world. But this need had been hampered by the equally
long-standing realization that the United States would be seriously harmed by
becoming involved in dealings with the Old World.
The situation would change only if and when a European power or coali-
tion were to challenge the United States in such a way that a response became
inevitable. And this was the situation that resulted from Germany’s resumption
of its unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917. Wilson responded by
mobilizing a resource without which the Central Powers could never have been
defeated: America’s moral resolve. Moreover, his profession of faith not only in
the right of all nations to self-determination but in human rights and democ-
racy in general had every prospect of finding a powerful echo in the Poles and
all the Slav nations that were a part of the Danube Monarchy. Not least, Wilson
could hope that the Germans, too, would be impressed when he assured them
that the United States was not waging war on the German people but seeking,
rather, to liberate them.
But even before the United States succeeded in promoting the cause of
freedom in Europe, its own internal freedoms were drastically curtailed, and
they were restricted, moreover, in a way that made the German Reich seem
positively liberal at this time. The press was instructed to reprint all the govern-
ment’s anti-Germany war propaganda and to exercise self-censorship; and
non-English-language newspapers – especially those that were published in
German – were required to submit all articles dealing with the war to the
censor for approval. The Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of
May 1918 contained definitions that could be extended at will and used to stifle
any form of opposition to the war and even to the president and his govern-
ment. Among the organizations affected were the left-wing Industrial Workers
of the World and the Socialist Party, whose chairman and presidential candi-
date Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in 1918, a
sentence commuted by President Warren Harding in 1921. Many German
Americans had sided with the Central Powers in 1914 and now found them-
selves at the receiving end of a particularly vicious hate campaign. Anti-
German sentiments even extended to the American language, sauerkraut being
renamed ‘liberty cabbage’ and bratwurst ‘liberty sausage’.
Employers and consumers also had to endure restrictions on their tradi-
tional liberties. The trade embargos that were designed as a means of putting
pressure on neutral states and that began to take effect in June 1917 hit the
export industry and agriculture hardest of all. The Lever Food Control Act of
August 1917 created measures to regulate the supply of foodstuffs in such a
way as to meet the needs of the American troops and their allies first and fore-
most. From July 1917 the armaments industry was subjected to the controls of
the War Industries Board, a means of corporative self-administration in which
the representatives of major concerns should have the final say in all conten-
tious matters. The National War Labor Board was established in April 1918
32 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

with the task of using arbitration to prevent strikes in the armaments industry,
in return for which employers were forced to accept an eight-hour day,
minimum wages and the principle of equal pay for men and women, together
with the right to collective bargaining of wage agreements and the right to
strike. The financing of the war, including supplies to America’s European
allies on credit, was achieved largely by war loans (‘Liberty Bonds’) but also by
new contributions and taxes. By the end of the war in November 1918 the
Allies had run up debts of ten thousand million dollars.
Militarily speaking, the United States was far from being prepared to enter
the war in the spring of 1917. In May 1917 Congress voted to support Wilson’s
Selective Service Act introducing universal conscription. Almost three million
conscripted soldiers would find themselves fighting alongside professional
soldiers and volunteers – in 1917–18, 4.8 million Americans served in the
army, navy and the recently founded air force. Initially, the most important
contribution to the war was made by American destroyers that helped the
British navy to sink German submarines and to mine the North Sea, with the
result that the Germans, with their U-boats, were denied any further lasting
successes.
The United States began transporting a total of forty-two infantry divisions
to Europe in October 1917, and by the spring of 1918 more and more American
troops were being deployed on the front line in France. The words ‘Lafayette,
we are here!’ became something of a catchphrase. Often wrongly attributed to
General Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, they
were in fact first spoken by Colonel Charles E. Stanton of the Sixteenth Infantry
Division at the Paris grave of the Marquis de Lafayette on Independence Day
1917. Both France and the United States still remembered the help that France
had offered America in its War of Independence. Indeed, it was felt appropriate
to recall the legacy of the two revolutions of the eighteenth century and to
counter Germany’s ‘ideas of 1914’ with the far more attractive concepts of 1776
and 1789.

The Prussian version of ‘socialism’ that Germany’s wartime ideologues sought

to present as an alternative to western ‘capitalism’ acquired a legal form on
5 December 1916, when the Auxiliary Service Law was passed, obliging all
men between seventeen and sixty who had not already enlisted in the armed
forces to work in the armaments industry and other organizations that were
crucial to the war effort. In return, companies employing more than fifty
workers were required to agree to an early kind of worker participation in the
form of workers’ and employees’ committees and arbitration panels made up
equally of employers and employees. The Auxiliary Service Law was a part of
Ludendorff ’s ‘Hindenburg programme’ designed to force German industry to
switch to supplying armaments. Although the trade unions gained greater
influence under the new law, they were also brought increasingly under the
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 33

control of the state, the military and employers, with the result that in the eyes
of many they forfeited their claim to represent proletarian interests.
The Auxiliary Service Law was passed at a time of extreme hardship and
even widespread famine: this was the so-called ‘turnip winter’ of 1916/17.
Social deprivation increased the sense of political discontent on the left wing of
the Social Democratic Party, and the February Revolution in Russia provided
opponents of the party’s leadership, including those eighteen members of the
Social Democratic Workers’ Union who had been excluded from the Reichstag
party in March 1916, with their final incentive to break away from their old
roots: in April 1917 they formed the Independent Social Democratic Party in
Gotha and immediately launched an outspoken attack not only on the
prevailing system of government and the current policies of the country’s
leaders vis-à-vis the war but also on war loans and the truce between the
different political parties.
Wildcat strikes followed in many major cities, marking the first appearance
in Berlin’s metal industry of the Revolutionary Representatives who hailed
from the left wing of the Independent Social Democratic Party. The revolt was
ostensibly aimed at raising the level of bread rations but was in fact a part of a
much wider workers’ protest at the conduct of the war. It was the first great
protest of its kind. Nor was it only workers who protested, but soldiers too.
From June 1917 onwards there had been a noticeable increase in the number of
hunger strikes and unauthorized shore leaves among members of the navy. The
military courts reacted with draconian punishments, handing down sentences
on the ‘ringleaders’ that could not be legally justified. Ten sailors were sentenced
to death, and in two cases those sentences were carried out.
Germany’s rulers did little to calm the internal political situation. Although
the chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, was able to persuade the Kaiser,
on 7 April 1917, to deliver his ‘Easter Message’ in which Wilhelm II announced
constitutional reforms for the period after the war, including a reform of voting
rights in Prussia, it was impossible to interpret this as a promise to introduce
universal suffrage for men and women. This period also witnessed increasing
signs of a crisis among Germany’s leading allies. Kaiser Karl, the grand-nephew
and successor of Franz Joseph, who had died in November 1916, had spent the
months between January and April 1917 seeking a negotiated settlement with
France and raising the possibility that Germany might renounce its claims to
Alsace-Lorraine, an offer vehemently opposed by Berlin. The demarche came to
nothing, its failure serving only to make the Habsburg monarchy even more
dependent on Germany, while doing nothing to lessen Vienna’s desire to end the
war as quickly as possible in order to preserve the multiracial monarchy.
For Bethmann Hollweg the situation grew increasingly difficult during the
summer of 1917. On the one hand, two of the parties that had supported him
until then were urging him to break with the right, with its desire for annexa-
tion. These were the Catholic Centre Party, which was then being influenced
34 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

by the Württemberg deputy Matthias Erzberger, who had previously advocated

extensive territorial conquests, and the Majority Social Democrats, who were
responding to pressure from the Independent Social Democratic Party. In June
1917, at an international conference held in Stockholm at the instigation of
Dutch and Scandinavian socialists, the SPD claimed for itself the phrase ‘peace
without annexations and indemnities’ that had first been formulated by the
Petrograd Congress of local Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets. Soon afterwards
the Social Democrats responded to a new demand for war loans by inviting the
chancellor to provide a clear account of Germany’s war aims and internal polit-
ical intentions. Bethmann Hollweg refused to meet their demand and in doing
so lost the parliamentary majority on which he had relied since 4 August 1914.
But Bethmann Hollweg also found himself under pressure from a very
different quarter as the army’s supreme command felt that he was far too inde-
cisive in implementing measures that the military regarded as necessary. It was
in order to persuade the Kaiser to dismiss Bethmann Hollweg and appoint a
chancellor acceptable to the army’s supreme command that Hindenburg and
Ludendorff offered their own resignations on 12 July. Wilhelm II bowed to
their demands and on 14 July appointed Georg Michaelis, a former lawyer with
no political experience and hitherto responsible for the distribution of Prussia’s
crops, as Bethmann Hollweg’s successor. The army supreme command could
be confident that he would not pursue any independent policies of his own.
Two days previously, three parties in the Reichstag agreed on a ‘peace reso-
lution’. They had already worked together on the recently formed Cross-Party
Committee and were the Majority Social Democrats, the Centre Party and the
left-wing, liberal Progressive People’s Party. From now on, these were known as
the ‘majority parties’, their avowed aim being a peace of ‘understanding and
lasting reconciliation’ between peoples. Such a peace, they went on, was incom-
patible with ‘forcible territorial expansion’ and with ‘other kinds of political,
economic, and financial rape’. Such a formulation left scope for an increase in
Germany’s sphere of influence but was still far too ‘soft’ when viewed from the
standpoint of those parties that were even further to the right, parties that
ranged from the National Liberals to the German Conservatives. The army
high command protested vociferously at this resolution but was unable to
prevent the Reichstag from agreeing to it on 19 July by 212 votes to 126, with
seventeen abstentions. The new chancellor had declared in advance of the vote
that the aims of the country’s leaders could be ‘achieved within the framework
of your resolution, as I interpret it’.42
The nationalist right reacted to the Reichstag vote by founding the German
Fatherland Party in September 1917, a party that was designed to bring together
all the ‘patriotic’ forces in the country and that drew its greatest support from
those parts of Prussia that lay to the east of the Elbe. Its more active members
came largely from the Evangelical, educated middle classes and from the
region’s equally Evangelical landowning class, while its supporters in general
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 35

were drawn from the ranks of the Conservatives and National Liberals. By
attracting numerous ‘nationalist’ associations, the new party rapidly grew in
size and is said to have numbered 450,000 members by March and 800,000 by
September 1918. In its inaugural appeal, it claimed that German freedom
‘stands sky-high above sham democracy with all its supposed blessings, which
English hypocrisy and Wilson seek to wheedle the Germans into accepting, so
as to destroy Germany, which is invincible in arms’.43 The ‘peace without
annexations and indemnities’ advocated by the majority parties and described
by the right as the ‘Scheidemann peace’ after one of the two chairmen of the
Social Democratic Party was contrasted with a ‘Hindenburg peace’ by the
Fatherland Party, a peace that would be bought ‘at the price of tremendous
sacrifices and efforts’ but which would ultimately end in victory.
The founding of the German Fatherland Party was far from being an
expression of widespread enthusiasm for the war but, quite the opposite, was
an attempt to counter the growing sense of weariness occasioned by the
conflict. Disenchantment at the unexpectedly protracted hostilities found
expression at this time in the search for scapegoats who could be accused of
illicit trading and profiteering, of exacerbating class differences and of creating
signs of subversion in the military. From the standpoint of the extreme right,
no one was better suited to playing this role than the Jews, who without excep-
tion were suspected of being secretly in league with enemy forces. The Gießen
professor of chemistry, Hans von Liebig, a prominent Pan-German, even went
so far as to brand Bethmann Hollweg ‘the chancellor of German Jewry’ in
December 1915.44 In October 1916 the routine reproach, expressed in nation-
alist circles, that there was a significantly increased number of Jews among the
‘cowards’ who had refused to do military service persuaded the Prussian
Ministry of War to order a set of ‘Jewish statistics’ to be drawn up for the army.
The results comprehensively refuted the defamatory charge but were not
published until after the war. And yet the mere fact that the exercise had been
conducted at all already signified an official recognition and legitimization of
anti-Semitism.
In the autumn of 1917 Germany suffered its second change of chancellor in
four months. Michaelis’s fall from power was triggered by the immoderate
attacks launched against the leaders of the Independent Socialist Party on
9 October by Eduard von Capelle, secretary of state to the Reich’s Navy
Department, accusing them of supporting plans for a mutiny in the ocean-
going fleet. Together with the Majority Socialists’ leader Philipp Scheidemann,
Friedrich Ebert declared open war on the chancellor, who had by then lost the
support of the Centre Party, the Progressive People’s Party and, finally, the
National Liberals.
Michaelis was succeeded as chancellor and Prussian prime minister by the
Bavarian prime minister, Georg von Hertling, who took up his new post on 1
November 1917. Hertling was a committed federalist and fiercely opposed to
36 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the parliamentarianism of the Reich, but in spite of this he accepted as his vice-
chancellor a politician from the ranks of the Progressive People’s Party,
Friedrich von Payer, while Robert Friedberg, a Reichstag member of the
National Liberal Party, was appointed vice-president of the Prussian State
Ministry. Although Hertling gave no reason to assume that he would be
any better disposed to the Reichstag’s peace resolution than Michaelis, his
allegiance to the Centre Party meant that the right did not regard him as one of
their own. Indeed, those Conservatives, National Liberals and members of the
Fatherland Party who held staunchly Evangelical views felt that the appoint-
ment of a Catholic chancellor was a deliberate act of political provocation in a
year when the country was marking the 400th anniversary of Martin Luther’s
Reformation.
While the political truce was coming under pressure in Germany in 1917, a
similar situation was developing with the ‘union sacrée’ in France. Although
there had been increasing numbers of strikes since 1916, the workforce
remained for the most part ‘patriotic’. On 20 March, only days after the fall of
Nicholas II, Alexandre Ribot replaced Aristide Briand as prime minister. Ribot
had been the architect of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1891–2, with the result
that the majority of members of the National Assembly expected him to pursue
policies more energetic than those of his predecessor. The only Socialist
member of the cabinet was the armaments minister, Albert Thomas, who had
been appointed by Briand in December 1916. Shortly before this, General
Robert Nivelle, who became commander in chief of the French armed forces
on 26 December 1916 following General Joseph Joffre’s setbacks in the Battle of
the Somme, had put forward his ideas on an attack strategy that were approved
by the Supreme War Council in spite of misgivings not only on the part of the
government but also on the part of General Pétain and Field Marshal Haig. As
a result, a new offensive began to the north of Reims on 16 April. Within three
days it had been stopped in its tracks by the Germans at the Chemin des Dames,
the French having sustained heavy losses in making only the smallest of
advances.
This failure of so badly prepared a venture resulted in mutinies in some
160 regiments. In some cases socialist slogans were heard. Nivelle, who by now
was known to his soldiers and to the workers’ movement as a ‘leech’, was
relieved of his post by the minister of war, Paul Painlevé, on 15 May and
replaced by the popular figure of General Pétain, a convinced supporter of a
defensive strategy. The mutinies led to 3,400 convictions, including 554 death
sentences, forty-nine of which were carried out. This was also a time of more
widespread strikes, but thanks to the intervention of the country’s minister of
the interior, Louis Malvy, these were soon brought to an end.
When Painlevé replaced Ribot as prime minister in September 1917, the
French Socialists were no longer involved in government. (It is significant that
Thomas’s successor as armaments minister was a leading industrialist, Louis
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 37

Loucheur.) The decision to quit on the part of the French Section of the Workers’
International reflected the growing influence of the left wing of the party, which
had always been opposed to the war. But its departure from the government did
not spell the end of the ‘union sacrée’, for the vast majority of members of the
French Section of the Workers’ International continued to vote in favour of war
loans by relying on the support of the largest trades union, the CGT. For the
most trivial of reasons, the government of Paul Painlevé was toppled on 18
November 1917. His successor – the middle-class radical Socialist Georges
Clemenceau – was a man who towered above all his predecessors in terms of his
political stature and resolve. Known – respectfully – as ‘the Tiger’, he remained
in office until January 1920 and during the final year of the war proved an
outstanding political leader worthy of standing alongside David Lloyd George
in England and Woodrow Wilson in the United States. Of Germany’s wartime
chancellors, none enjoyed a degree of prestige that came anywhere close to
theirs.
In England, as in Germany and France, social unrest grew appreciably in
the course of 1917. The first major strikes had already taken place in February
1915, when the first elected shop stewards had come to prominence, organ-
izing walkouts and challenging business leaders to respond. Like the
Revolutionary Representatives in the Berlin metal industry and the Independent
Socialist Party of Germany, they worked closely with the emphatically anti-
militarist Independent Labour Party, accusing the trade unions and the
majority of members of the Labour Party of increasingly neglecting workers’
interests. Their criticisms grew even more vocal when in July 1915 the Labour
Party and the trade unions voted for a Munitions Act that curtailed workers’
freedoms in the same way that the Auxiliary Service Law was to do in Germany
in December 1916. In 1916 76,000 men and women went on strike in the
mechanical engineering industry, in the shipyards and in metal processing,
resulting in the loss of 346,000 working days. In 1917 the number of striking
workers rose to 386,700, and the number of days lost to strikes was reckoned to
be some three million.
Lloyd George’s government took the protests so seriously that in February
1917 it undertook a close inspection of profits in the coal industry and in June
established several commissions to examine the causes of the recent social
unrest. It was clear that the February Revolution in Russia had contributed in
no small way to the radicalization of the British workers’ movement. In July
1917 the miners’ union demanded the introduction of a six-hour day and a
five-day week. In October 1917 the war cabinet felt obliged to award certain
groups of specialized workers a wage increase of 12.5 per cent, but this did little
to calm the situation, and following a further major strike in Coventry, one of
the centres of the mechanical engineering industry, Winston Churchill, then
the minister of munitions, threatened the strikers with conscription if they
failed to return to work forthwith. A committee of inquiry set up by Churchill
38 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

noted that ‘It is obvious from the evidence before us that the great body of
workers are anxious to reduce, and, as soon as possible, to remove the war-time
regulations of labour conditions which at present exist.’45
The British army did not suffer from mutinies to the same extent as its
French counterpart in the spring of 1917, and this remained true even during
the fiercest fighting in the third Battle of Ypres at Passchendaele between June
and October 1917, when thousands of New Zealand and Canadian soldiers fell
alongside their British comrades. The offensive began only after Lloyd George,
under pressure from Field Marshal Haig, had abandoned his resistance to it.
Like the French offensive in the spring, it turned into a catastrophic disaster.
The total number of Allied soldiers who fell in Flanders between the end of July
and the beginning of November 1917 was 245,000 – the losses on the German
side can hardly have been any less serious.
Between February and December 1917 the number of desertions in the
British Expeditionary Force grew considerably, and that number continued to
increase in 1918, while still remaining relatively modest: in 1917 the number of
charges of desertion remained almost constantly well below 0.015 per cent of
the British military strength on the western front. British military justice was
meted out in more arbitrary and draconian ways than in the German army, a
situation reflected in the number of deserters who were executed. The most
obvious reason for this discrepancy is clear, for whereas compulsory military
service had long been the norm in Germany, it was only after 1914 that the
British army changed from a professional army to one of volunteers and finally
to one of conscripts, without any attempt being made to adapt the old discipli-
nary laws to the new situation. It is a German historian, Christoph Jahr, who
has best summed up the deeper reasons for the difference in attitudes between
Germany and Great Britain:

In Germany, with its tradition as an authoritarian state based on the rule of

law, civilian society and the army were in many ways a reflection of one
another, whereas in England there were two different normative systems,
one for civilian society, the other for the army.46

From a military point of view, the Central Powers were more successful than
the Triple Entente at this time. German troops entered Riga in January 1917
and in October, assisted by the ocean-going fleet, they captured the Baltic
islands of Ösel, Moon and Dagö. Only a few days later the two Central Powers
inflicted a devastating defeat on the Italians at Caporetto (now Kobarid in
Slovenia) on the upper Isonzo. The defeat was notable not least for mass deser-
tions and the capture of 275,000 Italian soldiers. In the Middle East, conversely,
the British were able to chalk up a number of victories: in March 1917 they
captured Baghdad; in October they advanced on Palestine from the direction
of the Suez Canal; and in early December the Turks vacated Jerusalem.
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 39

The Triple Entente was also able to report a political victory in the Balkans,
where in June France and Britain forced King Constantine I of Greece to
abdicate. He had been a staunch supporter of his country’s neutrality and was
replaced by his son Alexander, under whom a new government was formed by
the former prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos, whom Constantine had
dismissed in 1915 and who in the wake of regional uprisings had formed a
provisional government in Thessaloníki in 1916. At the end of June 1917
Venizelos broke off diplomatic relations with the Central Powers. The Triple
Entente had won a new ally.

The most important event in the second half of 1917 was one that had interna-
tional repercussions: the Russian October Revolution. (According to the western
Gregorian calendar, it was in fact a November Revolution.) A strictly secret
meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee took place in Petrograd on
23 October and was attended by Lenin, who had only recently returned to Russia
from his hideaway in Finland and who proposed that his comrades should waste
no more time but start an armed insurrection at once. After a tempestuous
debate, Lenin’s proposal was adopted in the face of opposition from two of the
most prominent Bolsheviks, Grigory Zinoviev and Leonid Kamenev. Following
the meeting, Lenin again went to ground. The preparations for the uprising were
placed in the hands of Leon Trotsky, who had been elected chairman of the
Petrograd Soviet on 5 October, returning to a position that he had already occu-
pied at the time of the 1905 revolution. From 22 October he spearheaded the
newly formed Military Revolutionary Committee of the capital’s Soviet.
On 4 November the committee assumed command of the Petrograd garrison,
a step that proved decisive on the Bolsheviks’ road to power. The government
signalled the start of the revolution on 6 November, when it occupied the Neva
bridges and closed down the Bolsheviks’ official newspaper. By the evening of
the following day most of Petrograd was in the hands of revolutionary troops
and of the Red Guard, a workers’ militia armed by the Bolsheviks. At the second
All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 7 November, the Bolsheviks and their allies,
the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries, had a clear majority. The Bolsheviks
demanded that delegates should approve the coup d’état as a fait accompli, and
following the walkout of the Mensheviks and the majority of the Socialist
Revolutionaries, the remaining delegates duly fell into line the very next day.
The decrees relating to peace and the land question submitted by Lenin in
the name of the newly formed Council of People’s Commissars – the new revo-
lutionary government – were unanimously approved. The first decree provided
for the immediate resumption of negotiations for a truce to be followed by peace
without annexations or reparations, while the second demanded that all land-
owners be dispossessed without redress, all their lands to be transferred to
regional committees and the Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies, the ultimate decision
over property rights remaining the preserve of the Constituent Assembly.
40 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

That same day – 8 November 1917 – pro-Bolshevik troops supported by

sailors from the cruiser Aurora, who provided covering cannon fire, stormed
the Winter Palace, and the members of the Provisional Government who
were meeting there were arrested. Absent from the meeting were the prime
minister and the minister of war, Alexander Kerensky, who had fled the city
and was currently seeking support from generals still loyal to the government.
The storming of the Winter Palace left six people dead – the only fatalities of
the October Revolution in the capital. In Moscow, conversely, the number of
dead was far higher, armed officer cadets resisting the Bolshevik forces for an
entire week. Elsewhere in the country the Bolsheviks rarely encountered any
determined resistance, the only real exceptions being Siberia and the agricul-
tural south and south-east of central Russia, where the soviets – to the extent
that they existed at all – were controlled by the ‘right-wing’ Socialist
Revolutionary Party.
Lenin had advocated an armed uprising, but the events that unfolded in
November 1917 scarcely deserve that name. As in the previous March, the
existing order simply collapsed. Although it was no longer the order of the
tsarist regime, it was a weak republican transitional order that was overthrown
by the forces of the revolution without any great effort or the mobilization of
large crowds of people. The Provisional Government had delayed dealing with
the more pressing internal problems, foremost among which was the agricul-
tural question. And far from seeking to end the war, it had ordered the Kerensky
offensive at the end of June that had failed miserably and by the middle of July
had brought Russia to the brink of military collapse. Kerensky’s government
survived September’s Kornilov putsch only with the help of revolutionary
workers and, not least, the Bolsheviks, who were able to enlist the support of the
majority of deputies in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets at this time. By
November the Provisional Government enjoyed little support among the popu-
lation at large as a result of the increasing tendency of the metropolitan prole-
tariat to side with the Bolsheviks, while the peasants were ever more inclined to
solve the agricultural problem by means of illegal land occupations. For their
part, the soldiers were no longer willing to obey their superiors’ orders. The
Bolsheviks were in this way able to seize power in a situation that could be
described, with little exaggeration, as amounting to a power vacuum.
Seizing power was one thing. Holding on to it was another. Lenin was
convinced that in a country as backward as Russia the proletariat could prevail
only if there were follow-up revolutions in central and western Europe. He
therefore appealed at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 8 November
to ‘the class-conscious workers of the three most advanced nations of mankind
and the largest states participating in the present war, namely, Great Britain,
France, and Germany’ to acknowledge their duty ‘to save mankind from the
horrors of war and its consequences’ by coming to the aid of Russian workers
and, by their ‘comprehensive’ and ‘determined’ action, ‘help us to conclude peace
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 41

successfully, and at the same time emancipate the labouring and exploited
masses of our population from all forms of slavery and all forms of exploita-
tion’.47 Lenin envisaged a process that began with a proletarian revolution
in Russia before taking in central and western Europe and finally the rest of
the world. It was a process that had already started in Petrograd in the spring of
1917.
From this point of view the October Revolution was the logical extension
of the February Revolution, namely, the second and decisive phase of the
Russian revolution when radical forces would succeed in liberating the people,
something that they could not have done under a more moderate regime. The
Bolsheviks hoped that they would find allies not only in the proletariat of
other powers involved in the war but also among the non-Russian nationalities
that made up the former Russian Empire. On 15 November the Council of
People’s Commissars issued a declaration concerning the rights of Russia’s
constituent nations, granting them the right to independence and hence to
secession and sovereignty. The wording reflected a resolution passed at the
Bolsheviks’ April Conference and repeated the position that Lenin had adopted
in 1914 in his article ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’. A week later
Georgia responded by declaring its independence, and on 28 November the
Estonian parliament took a similar step. For the present, it remained unclear
how an independent Georgia and Estonia would view the new Russia under
Bolshevik control.
This question also gave rise to widespread debate in Finland, which
until the fall of the tsars had been a grand duchy under Russian control and
which was still a part of Russia under international law. In the middle of
November 1917 the Finnish trade union had joined forces with the more leftist
Social Democrats and Otto Kuusinen’s Finnish Bolsheviks to trigger a general
strike aimed at seizing power. The armed Red Guards were resisted by para-
military organizations supporting the middle-class independence movement.
On 6 December the country’s parliament decided that with the agreement of
the new, purely middle-class government of Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, it would
declare Finnish independence. Civil war broke out in January 1918, a war in
which Russian Bolshevik forces stationed in Finland fought alongside the Red
Guards, capturing Helsinki almost without a fight at the end of January and
forming a Council of People’s Representatives that met in Vaasa. Svinhufvud
had remained in Helsinki and managed to flee to Tallinn on an icebreaker.
From there he made his way to Berlin. German intervention in the Finnish
civil war on the side of the ‘White Guards’ under their military leader Carl
Gustav Mannerheim was now only a question of time.
There was also a nationalist independence movement in the Ukraine, espe-
cially in the western half of the country. Ukrainian nationalism was actively
supported by the Central Powers, the Foreign Office in Berlin offering generous
financial help to the ‘League to Liberate the Ukraine’, an organization of socialist
42 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

émigrés eager to establish an autonomous, democratic and socialist Ukraine, a

desire to which they coupled the demand for comprehensive land reform.
Ukrainian prisoners of war were also recruited by the Germans, who saw in
them future participants in a national revolutionary uprising. In the event, there
was no such insurrection, not even after German troops had occupied a part of
western Ukraine. But in the course of the war the desire for greater autonomy
continued to grow until the Provisional Government saw itself obliged in the
summer of 1917 to grant the Ukraine the right of self-rule. From August onwards
the Central Council – a kind of provisional parliament formed in the wake of the
February Revolution – was acknowledged by Petrograd as the legitimate repre-
sentative of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Such concessions to Ukrainian
autonomy were far too little in the minds of Ukrainian nationalists, but the
Central Council was also placed under tremendous pressure by the Ukrainian
Bolsheviks whose principal strongholds lay in the industrial east of the country.
After a failed attempt to topple the government in Kiev, they declared a Ukrainian
Socialist Soviet Republic in Kharkov in December. Bolshevik troops marched
into eastern Ukraine from Russia to lend them their support.
The Bolsheviks continued to hope that central and western Europe would
be overrun by revolution, but until the end of 1917 there was no basis for any
such optimism. The German Majority Social Democrats had long been Lenin’s
most vocal critics among the parties of the Second International. Although
they welcomed his decree on peace on the grounds that it promised to bring
the end of the war a stage closer, they still had no intention of abandoning the
parliamentary truce that obtained in the Reich. The Independent Socialist
Party welcomed the Bolshevik revolution but declined to go any further than
calling for a general armistice and a peace without annexations.
In France the Socialists were no less concerned than the bourgeois parties
that Russia might sign a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers, with the
result that in the wake of the October Revolution the Section Française de
l’Internationale Ouvrière moved a little further to the right and would, indeed,
have drifted even further in the same direction if the nationalist policies of
Clemenceau’s new cabinet had not placed a barrier in the way of such inclina-
tions. Only the extreme left adopted a pro-Bolshevik position, but they repre-
sented no more than a tiny minority whose radical rejection of the ‘imperialist
war’ came close to Lenin’s attitude. Among the British labour movement, there
was even less support for the October Revolution than there was in France,
only the shop stewards evincing any sympathy for the Bolshevik cause. The
Independent Labour Party, which had always been opposed to the war, was too
indebted to the whole idea of parliamentary democracy to be able to accept
either the theory or the practice of the Leninists, and this was even truer of the
vast majority of members of the Labour Party.
Back in Russia, elections for the new constitutional assembly began on
25 November. Planned by the Provisional Government, they were conducted
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 43

on the basis of universal suffrage for men. The winners were the Socialist
Revolutionary Party, which presented a united front even though it had been
no such thing since early November, when its left wing had broken away from
the main party. If the right-wing Socialist Revolutionaries from all parts of the
country were counted together, they held an absolute majority of seats, with
380 out of a total of 703. Thirty-nine members of the Constituent Assembly
belonged to the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks received
barely a quarter of the votes and had 168 representatives. The Constitutional
Democratic Party and the Mensheviks fared even worse, with only seventeen
and sixteen seats respectively.
Lenin refused to be sidetracked by his party’s defeat, for he had never inter-
preted the term ‘majority’ in a literal sense. What mattered for him was that the
Bolsheviks had maintained their support among the metropolitan proletariat,
that they were the only party with a proper organization and a revolutionary
strategy and that thanks to their radical anti-war policies and agricultural plans
they did not have to fear the opposition of the mass of poor peasants.
As long as they could, the Bolsheviks found ways of delaying the constitu-
tive meeting of the Constituent Assembly and carried on as if the elections had
not taken place at all. On 27 November the Council of People’s Commissars
issued a decree on workers’ control that was interpreted in many quarters as
a licence to place the running of the factories in the hands of workers’ commit-
tees, an idea that had never been part of Lenin’s thinking. On 3 December
revolutionary troops captured the headquarters of the Russian forces in
Mogilev, and the chief of the general staff, Nikolay Nikolayevich Dukhonin,
who had refused to obey the country’s new rulers, was murdered. Two days
later, on 5 December, the Council of People’s Commissars abolished the coun-
try’s legal system and ordered the election of new judges either by the soviets or
by a popular vote. By 15 December a negotiated armistice had been agreed in
Brest-Litovsk (now in Belarus) after twelve days of deliberations. German and
Russian delegates began peace negotiations on 22 December, again in Brest-
Litovsk. The Germans were joined for these negotiations by their allies,
Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, but not – as the Bolsheviks had hoped
– the Central Powers and the Western Powers. The result could only be a
special, separate peace, not a comprehensive one.
The truce allowed the Bolsheviks to extend their power base within the
country. A decree dated 16 December and calling for the democratization
of the army placed all sections of the armed forces under the control of the
corresponding soldiers’ committee or soviet. All existing insignia of rank were
to be abolished and officers elected by means of a universal vote within their
units. The internal organization of the army had already been permanently
weakened by mass desertions following the overthrow of the tsar and was
now effectively destroyed altogether by this latest decree. On 15 December the
Central Economic Council was established to run the economy, followed on
44 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

20 December by the creation of a ‘special commission’ – the infamous Cheka,

or secret police – under Felix Edmondovich Dzerzhinsky or, to give him his
Polish name, Feliks Dzier,y-ski. Banks were nationalized a week later. If Lenin
had had his way, the nationalized banks would have overseen all the industrial
concerns that were still in private hands, but his plans were thwarted by the
decree on workers’ control of 27 November and by the urge to act on the part
of the local soviets and factory committees. This ‘socialization from below’ led
to a massive drop in discipline in the workplace and to an equally disastrous
reduction in productivity and industrial output.
In many places land reform had already been taken in hand by the peasants
even before the October Revolution, and by the end of 1917 it was complete in
parts of central Russia. Not until much later, conversely, were other regions
affected. On average the landless peasants and those who owned very little
land received 80 per cent of the land available for redistribution, while the
rest went to the state, the communes and the cooperatives. But land distribu-
tion on its own was not enough to solve the problems of the peasants, not least
because hunger and famine had driven innumerable city-dwellers into the
countryside during the war, swelling the numbers entitled to a share in the land
to around three million. In consequence, the peasants’ share in the land was
reduced to the point at which we can speak of a levelling of rural ownership
structures to a low and often unprofitable level. The creation of private owner-
ship among the peasants was not ‘socialist’ in the sense normally understood
by that term, but in Russia in 1917 this kind of land reform represented a
precondition for the seizure and maintenance of power on the part of the most
radical socialists: the Bolsheviks.
At the insistence of the Bolsheviks, the peace negotiations that were
launched in Brest–Litovsk on 22 December included a novel aspect in that they
were conducted in public. The Council of People’s Commissars had already
made public all the secret treaties between tsarist Russia and the Triple Entente
at the end of November, so that it was only logical to open up the peace nego-
tiations in this way. It also allowed the representatives of the new Russia to use
the negotiating table as a platform for revolutionary propaganda and to expose
the Central Powers as imperialists. On 18 December Germany’s privy council,
meeting at Kreuznach, had agreed on a wide-ranging programme that included
granting the right of self-determination to Poland, Lithuania and Courland.
Both Berlin and Vienna were keen to see the Ukraine gain its independence
not least in order to ensure that it would provide German heavy industry with
ores low in phosphorus and high in manganese, while Austria–Hungary was
interested primarily in Ukrainian grain supplies.
On 25 December the Austrian foreign minister Ottokar Czernin, after
consulting with the Germans and agreeing on a conciliatory approach, reacted
to the speech of the head of the Russian delegation, Adolf Joffe, with an impas-
sioned plea for a peace without annexations and reparations and for the right
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 45

of self-determination for all nations, including colonial nations. In reacting in

this way, he caused general confusion, and it was not until the following day
that Max Hoffmann, the German chief of the Oberost general staff, brought
any clarity to the situation, arguing that the Russian negotiators evidently had
a different understanding of the renunciation of violent annexations from
the Central Powers, who were insisting on the voluntary breaking away from
Russia of particular regions, namely, Poland, Lithuania and Courland. The
Russian delegation was outraged and threatened to break off the negotiations.
On 28 December they obtained a ten-day delay in order to obtain new instruc-
tions. This period was also to be used by the other powers to explain whether
they were willing to agree to a peace without annexations and reparations, the
Central Powers having linked their agreement to this condition. For a time it
was uncertain whether the negotiations would be resumed at all.
The Russian delegation returned to Brest–Litovsk on 8 January 1918, this
time under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, who had been people’s commissar
for foreign relations since the October Revolution. He seized the opportunity
to attack the Central Powers’ plans for annexation and to insist that the right to
self-determination of the Lithuanians, Latvians and Poles should be real and
not just specious and manipulated. Finally he appealed to the desire for peace
on the part of all nations, especially the Germans. By now Hoffmann’s demand
had become public knowledge, and this, coupled with Trotsky’s emotive views
on world revolution, resulted in mass demonstrations in Germany and Austria
that filled the Bolsheviks with feelings of the greatest optimism. In Vienna the
Austrian Social Democrats called for large-scale demonstrations on 14 January.
The wave of strikes that began that day soon affected large sections of the
country.
By 18 January the strike had spread to Budapest. That same day Czernin
received a deputation from the recently elected Vienna Workers’ Council and
assured its members that his government had no desire to make any territorial
gains at the expense of Russia and that it recognized without reservation
Poland’s right to self-determination. The following day Czernin confirmed
these statements in writing. Only then did the leaders of the Social Democrats
suggest that the strike be brought to an end, a suggestion seconded by the
Workers’ Council and finally implemented a few days later.
Reports of the strike in Austria encouraged the Revolutionary
Representatives in the Berlin metal industry to proclaim a general strike of
their own, and by 28 January more than half a million workers had already
walked out. Berlin was particularly badly affected, with several hundred
thousand workers in the metal industry – important for the armaments
sector – going on strike. In addition to leaders of the Independent Socialist
Party, several prominent Majority Social Democrats, including its two leaders,
Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann, allowed themselves to be elected to
the strike committee in the hope of bringing an end to the walkout, in which
46 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the trade unions were not involved. This aim had been achieved by 4 February.
Had the strike lasted any longer, it would have threatened the country’s
military power. The countermeasures undertaken by the military authorities,
police and judiciary were correspondingly draconian, and large numbers of
striking workers were arrested or conscripted.
Meanwhile, there had been another setback to the negotiations in Brest-
Litovsk, where Max Hoffmann had added to his previous demands by insisting
that the Russians should withdraw from Livonia and Estonia, even banging his
fist on the table in order to underline his point. As Joffe had done before him,
so Trotsky reacted by requesting a break in the talks and returned to Petrograd
with his delegation.
That same day the Russian Constituent Assembly met for its first and, as it
turned out, its only constitutional meeting. The Bolsheviks confronted the
non-Bolshevik majority by issuing an ultimatum and demanding that state
power be transferred forthwith to the soviets. The motion was defeated, where-
upon the Bolsheviks walked out of the meeting, leaving the remaining members
to pass laws affecting the abolition of property and the convening of a peace
conference. They also solemnly declared that Russia was a democratic federal
republic. Demonstrators seeking to show their support for the Constituent
Assembly were prevented from doing so by armed Bolshevik elite troops,
resulting in many dead and injured. When the deputies tried to continue their
deliberations the following day, they found their way to the Taurian Palace
barred by soldiers armed with rifles, machine guns and two field artillery guns.
Newspapers that had reported the previous day’s meeting were impounded
and either shredded or burnt by members of the Bolshevik troops.
The violent dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was entirely in line
with a decree issued by the All-Russian Executive Committee of Soviets drafted
by Lenin himself. It claimed that

To relinquish the sovereign power of the Soviets, to relinquish the Soviet

Republic won by the people, for the sake of the bourgeois parliamentary
system and the Constituent Assembly, would now be a step backwards
and would cause the collapse of the October workers’ and peasants’ revolu-
tion. [. . .] It was inevitable that the Bolshevik group and the Left Socialist-
Revolutionary group, who now patently constitute the overwhelming
majority in the Soviets and enjoy the confidence of the workers and the
majority of the peasants, should withdraw from such a Constituent
Assembly. [. . .] It is obvious that under such circumstances the remaining
part of the Constituent Assembly could only serve as a screen for the
struggle of the counter-revolutionaries to overthrow Soviet power.48

The breaking-up of the Constituent Assembly on 19 January 1918 marked

nothing less than the definitive break between the Bolsheviks and the
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 47

democratic majority of the European workers’ movement. The appeal to a

higher will than the one that found expression in elections represented Lenin’s
variation on Rousseau’s distinction between the true ‘volonté générale’ and the
relatively unimportant ‘volonté de tous’. It was a dialectical trick designed to
invest the assumption of power with a semblance of theoretical legitimacy. The
Bolsheviks’ coup d’état had a compelling inner logic when seen from the stand-
point of their premises and in the light of their situation in January 1918. Their
policies were a radical reaction to Russia’s extreme backwardness and to its
social and political culture. All of this helps to explain why their January putsch
initially encountered little real resistance in Russia. But wherever workers were
used to more freedom and more legal safeguards than in Russia, the Bolsheviks
could count on strenuous opposition to their ideas. Nor was it long before
such opposition made itself felt, finding its clearest and most fundamental
expression in the country on which the Bolsheviks had pinned their greatest
hopes: Germany.
Here it was not only the Majority Social Democrats but also the more
moderate members of the Independent Social Democratic Party who were
outraged by the events of 19 January. Karl Kautsky, who had joined the
Independent Social Democrats in protest at the Majority Social Democrats’
decision to support war loans, told Lenin in no uncertain terms that a dictator-
ship by one of several parties was not the same as a ‘dictatorship of the prole-
tariat’ in the sense understood by Marx and Engels but ‘the dictatorship of
one section of the proletariat over another section’. But the dictatorship of a
minority found its most powerful support in a dedicated army, and the more
the minority replaced the majority by force of arms, ‘the more it forces the
opposition to seek salvation by appealing to bayonets and fists, rather than to
the electoral system from which it is excluded: at that point civil war becomes
the only way in which political and social conflicts can be resolved’.49
For Kautsky, civil war was the most terrible form of war and as such a
disaster:

In a civil war every party fights for its own existence, threatening the
defeated with total destruction. [. . .] Some people confuse civil war with
social revolution, considering it its formal expression and tending to excuse
the acts of violence that are inevitable in such a war by claiming that no
revolution is possible without them. [. . .] If we were to adopt the example of
bourgeois revolutions and say that revolution is synonymous with civil war
and dictatorship, we should have to draw the logical conclusion and say that
revolution necessarily ends in the rule of a Cromwell or a Napoleon.50

Even in the far left Spartacus League, opinions were divided. Clara Zetkin, a
pioneer of the socialist women’s movement, and the historian Franz Mehring
were unreserved in their support of the violent suppression of the Constituent
48 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Assembly, Zetkin even commenting that not to have destroyed it ‘would have
been a crime coupled with an act of folly’.51 On the other hand, Rosa Luxemburg,
who had been in ‘protective custody’ since July 1916, felt that it was indefensible
that the Bolsheviks failed to call for new elections immediately after they had
abolished the Constituent Assembly, an action which in itself she too had justi-
fied. ‘Freedom only for the followers of the government, only for the members
of a particular party – no matter how numerous they may be – is no freedom.
Freedom is only ever the freedom of the person who thinks differently.’52 These
oft-cited sentences are taken from a piece, ‘The Russian Revolution’, that was
not published until after Rosa Luxemburg’s death. They were intended not as a
profession of faith in some liberal pluralism but in a revolutionary, socialist
pluralism. She was not thinking of ‘class traitors’ and bourgeois ‘revolutionaries’
when referring to the ‘freedom of the person who thinks differently’.
As for the abolition of the Constituent Assembly, Lenin could count on the
backing of the leading Bolsheviks, but in terms of the question of peace, the
situation was rather different, for Lenin was resolved to accept only the sort
of peace that would ensure the survival of the Bolshevik regime, which is
why he pleaded for the peace treaty to be signed without delay. Stalin expressed
a similar sentiment. Bukharin and Dzier,y-ski regarded the acceptance of
Germany’s conditions as a political disaster. Trotsky demanded that the Russian
delegation refuse to sign but also refuse to stop fighting and encourage the
subversion of the Central Powers’ armies: ‘neither war nor peace’ was his motto.
There were violent disagreements on the Central Committee, but in the end a
majority of its members adopted Trotsky’s line. By 10 February Trotsky was
back in Brest–Litovsk, where he declared that the war was over and broke off
all further negotiations. The German delegation responded on the 16th with
an ultimatum to the Soviet government that the latter simply ignored. Within
two days the Germans had gone on the offensive. Lenin continued to use all his
influence to press for an acceptance of the peace terms, and this time he
prevailed with seven of the thirteen votes on the Central Committee. The
German government was informed by telegram that the Council of People’s
Commissars was willing to accept the peace terms and to respond at once to
any new conditions.
The German answer of 22 February went further than ever. Russia was
required not only to abandon the whole of the Baltic region, including Finland,
but also to acknowledge the independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic
proclaimed by its Central Rada on 22 January, a step that Germany had already
taken by means of a separate treaty dated 10 February. (This demand also
included the withdrawal of the Bolshevik troops that had occupied Kiev on
9 February.) The Ukraine was now a German protectorate. During their offen-
sive, German troops occupied not only the rest of the Baltic states but also large
tracts of White Russia and the Ukraine, including the capital, Kiev, which they
entered on 2 March.
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 49

The following day the peace treaty was signed in Brest-Litovsk after Lenin
had threatened to resign as party leader and chairman of the Council of People’s
Commissars. The terms were brutal. Russia lost a third of its population and
arable land, more than half of its total industry, including three-quarters of its
heavy industry, four-fifths of its iron reserves and nine-tenths of its coal mines.
The creation of an independent Ukrainian state and the handing over of parts
of Georgia and Armenia to Turkey meant that its position on the Black Sea was
considerably weakened. And following the occupation of the entire Baltic
region by German troops it had only limited access to the Baltic Sea.
Once Russia had been defeated, the Central Powers, disregarding the Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk, continued their march on the Caucasus, resulting in a race
between the German Reich and the Ottoman Empire. German troops occu-
pied Tbilisi in June 1918, while Turkish forces captured Baku and its oilfields in
the September of that year. The humiliation of the defeated country continued
in other areas, too: as a result of further treaties Russia had to agree to the
payment of six thousand million gold marks at the end of August 1918 and
renounce for good the northern Baltic provinces of Livonia and Estonia. As
had already been the case with Courland, it was again the German-Baltic upper
stratum of society and its representatives in the Reich who were particularly
insistent that ‘their’ lands should be handed over and Germanicized.
Even without this pressure, public opinion in Germany would easily have
been convinced of the need to create a buffer zone of eastern central European
states to keep Soviet Russia at bay. One of these border states was Finland,
where German troops and a specially created Mannerheim auxiliary force
came to the aid of the ‘White Guards’ and helped them to victory in May 1918.
In another border state, the Ukraine, the German protectorate authority
dissolved the Socialist-dominated Central Rada in April 1918, replacing it
with a Conservative government under the hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky and
changing its name from the Ukrainian People’s Republic to the Ukrainian State.
Skoropadsky’s regime showed its gratitude for the Central Powers’ support by
providing them with large quantities of grain.
The Brest-Litovsk peace treaty brought Germany closer to its aim of domi-
nating central Europe than would otherwise have been thought possible in
early 1918. Although this aim could hardly have been further removed from
the Reichstag’s peace resolution of 19 July 1917, the representative body of the
people voted for the treaty by a large majority on 22 March 1918. Among those
who supported it were the two middle-class majority parties: the Centre Party
and the Progressive People’s Party. The Majority Social Democratic Party was
divided, and abstained. Only the Independent Social Democratic Party voted
against it. The Majority Social Democrats had previously joined forces with the
two other majority parties to pass a resolution expressing the hope that the
Reich would take account of the right of self-determination of Poland, Lithuania
and Courland.
50 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Two months later, on 7 May 1918, the Central Powers signed a peace treaty
with Romania in Bucharest that was entirely comparable to the one foisted
on the Russians at Brest-Litovsk. The conquered country was required to hand
over the whole of Dobrudja, of which the Central Powers’ ally, Bulgaria,
received only the southern half, while the northern half was placed in the
hands of the victorious powers. Germany and Austria-Hungary were granted
special rights to the oil reserves in the region, and the two countries also
ensured that they would receive all of Romania’s surplus agricultural produce
for a period of two years. By way of compensation, Romania was allowed to
keep Bessarabia, which had previously belonged to Russia and which had been
annexed in April 1918. Richard von Kühlmann, the secretary of state at the
Foreign Office, was entirely right to tell the Foreign Committee of the Bundesrat
that from an economic standpoint the principal result of the Bucharest treaty
was to reduce Romania to a colony of the Central Powers.
On 7 March 1918, four days after the signing of the peace treaty at Brest-
Litovsk, the Seventh Party Congress of the ‘Communist Party of Russia
(Bolsheviks)’, as the party now called itself, agreed to Russia’s capitulation.
Lenin was able to persuade the delegates that it was necessary to submit to
Germany’s conditions in order to give the Soviet system breathing space. As he
told the party conference, true salvation could come only from ‘revolution in
the whole of Europe’, beginning with Germany, but this was not happening
with the speed desired by the Bolsheviks. Even so, it was undoubtedly true, he
went on, that Russia would perish without a revolution in Germany. Inasmuch
as this revolution had not taken place and to the extent that Russia had no
deployable army (the decree founding a new Red Army had been issued only
on 20 February), the country had no choice but to accept a ‘Tilsit Peace’ of the
kind that Napoleon had imposed on a vanquished Prussia in 1807. It was now
necessary to build up a new army, to learn the art of warfare from the very first
principles and to create order on the railways. They could learn much from the
Germans. ‘Learn from the Germans their discipline, otherwise we are a doomed
people and shall forever be prostrate in slavery.’53
If need be, discipline had to be achieved by brute force and terrorism. On
21 February 1918, as the German offensive reached its climax, the Council of
People’s Commissars had issued a decree drawn up by Trotsky, the new
war commissar, and signed by Lenin, ‘The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger!’, a
title that alluded specifically to the famous appeal of the French National
Assembly on 11 July 1792. In it workers and peasants from Petrograd, Kiev
and all the regions close to the new front were required to form battalions
and dig trenches under the guidance of military experts. ‘These battalions are
to include all able-bodied members of the bourgeois class, men and women,
under the supervision of Red Guards; those who resist are to be shot.’ The
appeal ended with the words: ‘Enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans,
counter-revolutionary agitators and German spies are to be shot on the spot.
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 51

The socialist fatherland is in danger! Long live the socialist fatherland! Long
live the international socialist revolution!’54
Even after the treaty had been signed at Brest-Litovsk, the feeling of threat
did not recede, for it was well founded. On 9 March British forces landed at
the port of Murmansk on the Barents Sea, where war materials supplied by the
Western Powers were being stored, materials that the Triple Entente had no
wish to fall into the hands of its former ally. On 12 March the Council of
People’s Commissars moved its headquarters from the strategically threatened
city of Petrograd to the relative safety of Moscow, which was restored to its
former status as Russian capital, a title it had forfeited in 1712. The Fourth
(Extraordinary) All-Russian Congress of Soviets met here in the middle of
March and voted for the peace treaty in the face of embittered opposition from
the left wing of the Bolsheviks under Bukharin and the left-wing Socialist
Revolutionaries, who responded by walking out of the Council on which they
had been represented by two members since 22 December 1918. The Bolsheviks
thus lost an important ally that still enjoyed a mass following, especially in the
vicinity of the Volga. Other pockets of resistance were the Cossack region on
the Don and Transcaucasia, where the Bolsheviks had practically no support at
all and where the Mensheviks were more powerful than Lenin’s party, at least
within the socialist movement. The danger of an all-encompassing civil war
continued to grow, therefore, and with it came the danger of western interfer-
ence in Russia’s internal power struggles. The Brest-Litovsk treaty had given
the Soviet regime no more than a brief respite to catch its breath.
Of course, the Bolshevik reign of terror was more than just a reaction to the
extremely difficult situation in early 1918 both inside Russia and beyond its
borders, for it necessarily resulted from Lenin’s plan to create a new communist
society within a backward country. The weakness of the bourgeoisie had led
him to conclude that the Russian proletariat or, rather, its vanguard in the form
of the Communist Party needed to shoulder the bulk of the burden that Marx
had seen as the historic task of the bourgeoisie, namely, the removal of the
bases of the older society and its type of rule, which had been dominated for
centuries by ‘tsarist autocracy’ and the ‘Asiatic tyranny of the authorities’.
Lenin was a westerner to the extent that for him the West embodied
scientific, technological and industrial progress, in which regard it held up a
mirror in which Russia might glimpse its own future. The change from the
Julian to the Gregorian calendar that was decreed by the Council of People’s
Commissars on 6 February 1918 (New Style) and that came into force on
14 February was thus an act of supreme symbolic significance that served
notice of revolutionary Russia’s desire to raise itself up to the level of more
advanced nations. Nor was it any accident that Lenin appealed by preference to
the example of Germany: the German Reich was emblematic of an authori-
tarian, rather than a liberal, variant of western rule. For Lenin, learning from
Germany meant modernizing without liberalizing. From his point of view,
52 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the normative project of the West that had taken shape in the two revolutions
of 1776 and 1789 could offer nothing from which Russia could take its cue. As
had already been the case with Marx, the only aspect of the French Revolution
that interested him was its second, Jacobin phase notorious for its Reign of
Terror, rather than its first, more moderate phase. As Marx had observed
in 1847, the Reign of Terror of 1793–4 could ‘by its mighty hammer-blows
only serve to spirit away, as it were, the ruins of feudalism from French soil.
The timidly considerate bourgeoisie would not have accomplished this task
in decades.’55
It was on the strength of a historical analogy that Marx and Engels both drew
the conclusion that they did: just as the bourgeoisie had replaced a class – the
feudal aristocracy – that had ceased to have any function, so the proletariat must
now drive the bourgeoisie from power after the latter had served its purpose in
society. In fact, the ‘fourth estate’, or working class, had never become the
‘universal class’ in developed societies in the West that the ‘third estate’ had
been entitled to feel it was in 1789, and this was even more true of the Russian
proletariat. Only the structural weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie gave the
Bolsheviks – a group of professional revolutionaries largely drawn from the
intelligentsia – a chance to seize power in the name of the proletariat.
The Jacobin Reign of Terror had been a transitional stage that was to be
followed by Thermidor, a modern government of a more moderate hue, and
then by Napoleon’s rule. In order to prevent anything similar from happening
in Russia, the Bolsheviks, whom Lenin had dubbed the ‘Jacobins of modern
socialist democracy’ as long ago as 1905, were resolved to adopt an incompa-
rably stricter and more consistent approach to dealing with their enemies than
their historical predecessors had done. They also felt that they were justified
and, indeed, obliged to act in this way because, when judged by contemporary
standards, Russia in 1917–18 was far more backward as a country than France
had been in 1793–4 – so backward, in fact, that it was impossible to see the new
reign of terror ending. In the longer term, the Jacobins’ Reign of Terror had
been unable to obscure the ideas of 1789, whereas the Russian Revolution of
1905 and the February Revolution of 1917 had produced no ideas that could
have eclipsed those of October 1917. The Bolsheviks represented these new
ideas, and their reign of terror was therefore a part of their project from the
outset: it was to be the most radical alternative conceivable to the normative
project of the West.

Freedom for Civilized Nations: Woodrow Wilson’s New World Order

The events that took place in Russia itself and between Russia and the Central
Powers from October 1917 represented a threefold challenge to the Western
Powers. In the first place, the Bolshevik victory meant that the Central Powers
no longer had to fight a war on two different fronts: Germany could now
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 53

concentrate its forces entirely on the western front, Austria-Hungary on its war
with Italy. Second, Bolshevik propaganda demanded a response, and one,
moreover, that confronted its talk of a general peace rather than its call for a
proletarian revolution. The Russian revolutionaries had turned the peace talks
at Brest-Litovsk into a political platform, a move that could well have unwanted
consequences for western European workers and even for workers in America.
London, Paris and Washington all had to reckon on that possibility. Third, the
mere fact that the negotiations in Brest-Litovsk ignored one of the fronts in the
war was not without danger for the Western Powers, for the Central Powers
were giving the impression that they were the only countries that took seri-
ously the Bolsheviks’ appeal for peace.
Britain’s Liberal prime minister, David Lloyd George, was the first western
statesman to respond to the Bolsheviks’ demand that all the countries involved
in the war should publicly state their conditions for peace. At a trade union
congress in London on 5 January 1918, he first set out his government’s war
aims in detail. Great Britain, he explained, was not waging an offensive war
against the German people and had no intention of destroying either Germany
itself or its imperial constitution,

much as we consider the military, autocratic constitution a dangerous

anachronism in the Twentieth Century. Our point of view is that the
adoption of a really democratic constitution by Germany would be the most
convincing evidence that in her the old spirit of military domination had
indeed died in this war, and would make it much easier for us to conclude a
broad democratic peace with her. But, after all, that is a question for the
German people to decide.

Nor had Great Britain any wish to destroy Austria-Hungary or to drive Turkey
from those parts of Asia Minor and Thrace that were then inhabited by Turks.
What mattered was the right of self-rule of the peoples of the Danube Monarchy,
including the Italians who lived there. As for the Ottoman Empire, ‘Arabia,
Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine are in our judgment entitled to a
recognition of their separate national conditions.’
At the head of Britain’s demands were the ‘complete restoration, political,
territorial and economic, of the independence of Belgium’ and France’s insist-
ence on ‘reconsideration of the great wrong of 1871, when, without any regard
to the wishes of the population’, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were ‘torn
from the side of France and incorporated in the German Empire’. Turning his
attention to Russia, Lloyd George pilloried Prussia for seeking to annex the
Russian provinces that it had occupied.

The democracy of this country means to stand to the last by the democra-
cies of France and Italy and all our other Allies. We shall be proud to fight
54 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

to the end side by side with the new democracy of Russia. [. . .] But if the
present rulers of Russia take action which is independent of their Allies we
have no means of intervening to arrest the catastrophe which is assuredly
befalling their country. Russia can only be saved by her own people.56

Lloyd George went on to profess his faith in an independent Poland incorpo-

rating all truly Polish elements. He demanded international agreement on
the question of the German colonies respecting the wishes and interests of
their inhabitants. He further announced that Great Britain would insist on
reparations for the damage caused by Germany in violating international
law. And he ended by pleading for the establishment of an international
organization that would prevent wars by settling international conflicts,
limiting arms and facilitating a just and lasting peace. The British Empire was
fighting for these goals, and in order to secure the conditions necessary for
such a peace, its peoples were ready to make even greater sacrifices than they
had already done.
In making his speech, Lloyd George was not only anxious to ensure the
continuing support of the British workers’ movement, an aim in which he was
successful, as was clear from the friendly response of the trade unions and
the Labour Party; he was also keen to build bridges with America by more
or less repeating Woodrow Wilson’s insistence on the right of nations to self-
government and demand for a League of Nations. Since December 1917,
Wilson’s closest advisers, including Colonel Edward M. House, had been encour-
aging him to declare his country’s war aims. In House’s eyes, such a declaration
was all the more pressing in that he had failed in the face of French and Italian
opposition to persuade the parties at an Allied conference in Paris in November
1917 to agree to a generally worded Allied communiqué. The start of peace talks
at Brest-Litovsk was a further reason for clarifying the American position
without any further delay. Wilson responded by listing his famous ‘Fourteen
Points’ in a speech to both Houses of Congress on 8 January 1918. It was
consciously formulated in such a way that it was Wilson’s speech, not Lloyd
George’s, that has gone down in history as the West’s answer to the Bolsheviks’
appeal for peace, turning Wilson into Lenin’s true adversary.
Wilson’s address to Congress differed from Lloyd George’s speech not least
by flattering the Bolsheviks:

Their conception of what is right, of what is humane and honorable for

them to accept, has been stated with a frankness, a largeness of view, a
generosity of spirit, and a universal human sympathy which must challenge
the admiration of every friend of mankind.

Whether Russia’s then-leaders believed him or not, it was America’s ‘heartfelt

desire and hope that some way may be opened whereby we may be privileged
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 55

to assist the people of Russia to attain their utmost hope of liberty and ordered
peace’.
Wilson proceeded to set out fourteen points demanding ‘open covenants of
peace’ without any ‘private international understandings of any kind’; absolute
freedom of navigation; the removal of all economic barriers; universal disar-
mament; a free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colo-
nial claims that would take account of the interests of the populations concerned
as well as those of the colonial powers; and the evacuation of all Russian terri-
tory by foreign troops and a settlement of all questions affecting Russia that
would enable the country to decide its own future and ‘assure her of a sincere
welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing’.
Belgium must be evacuated and its sovereignty restored, and the same was true
of those parts of France that were currently occupied by foreign troops. The
injustice that Prussia had caused France in 1871 must be righted. Italy’s borders
must be redrawn ‘along clearly recognizable lines of nationality’. The peoples of
Austria-Hungary should be ‘accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous
development’. Romania, Serbia and Montenegro were to be evacuated, and
Serbia should additionally be ‘accorded free and secure access to the sea’.
As for the Turks, Wilson demanded a secure sovereignty, whereas the
other nationalities then under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted
security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous
development, while the Dardanelles should be permanently open as a free
passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guaran-
tees. Turning to Poland, Wilson asked that an independent Polish state be
established, one that should include ‘the territories inhabited by indisputably
Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the
sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity
should be guaranteed by international covenant’. Wilson finally suggested
setting up a ‘general association of nations’ with the aim of ‘affording mutual
guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small
nations alike’.
Towards the end of his speech, Wilson turned his attention to the Germans.
‘We have no jealousy of German greatness’, he insisted, and ‘we grudge her no
achievement or distinction.’ America had no wish ‘to block in any way her
legitimate influence or power’:

We do not wish to fight her either with arms or with hostile arrangements
of trade if she is willing to associate herself with us and the other peace-
loving nations of the world in covenants of justice and law and fair dealing.
We wish her only to accept a place of equality among the peoples of the
world, – the new world in which we now live, – instead of a place of mastery.
Neither do we presume to suggest to her any alteration or modification of
her institutions. But it is necessary, we must frankly say, and necessary as a
56 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

preliminary to any intelligent dealings with her on our part, that we should
know whom her spokesmen speak for when they speak to us, whether for
the Reichstag majority or for the military party and the men whose creed is
imperial domination.

Wilson ended by striking a note of entreaty: ‘The moral climax of this the
culminating and final war for human liberty has come, and they [the United
States] are ready to put their own strength, their own highest purpose, their
own integrity and devotion to the test.’57
Wilson could not have given his speech on 2 April 1917, in which he
announced his desire ‘to make the world safe for democracy’, if the regime of
Tsar Nicholas II had not been toppled two and a half weeks earlier. And his
speech of 8 January 1918 was able to assume the form that it did only because
it was not until the 19th that the Bolsheviks forcibly disbanded the freely
elected Constituent Assembly. Wilson’s praise for the still young Russian
democracy and what he referred to as the sympathetic openness of its leaders
attests to scant knowledge of what was actually happening in Russia but was
dictated by his desire to point up a clear distinction between Russia and
Germany. Whether or not the Bolsheviks were pleased at Washington’s recog-
nition of their achievements, they had no hesitation in exposing the president’s
misconception by their act of brutality only a few days later.
But Wilson’s illusions with regard to the new Russia were not the only ques-
tionable aspect of his speech, for several of his points ran roughshod over the
true facts of the matter. He can hardly have been unaware that if it was applied
indiscriminately, the principle of the rule of the democratic majority could
easily lead to violence against ethnic minorities in states made up of several
nationalities. He also made strategic demands such as free access to the sea for
Serbia and Poland without asking if this could be squared with the principle
of nationality. And his remarks on the legitimate interests of colonial peoples,
finally, were couched in such general terms that they will scarcely have trou-
bled the colonial powers, of which the United States had also been a member
since the Spanish-American War of 1898. Wilson came from the southern state
of Virginia and shared the American south’s prejudices against blacks. Like
most Americans and Europeans, he ultimately regarded only white nations as
truly ‘civilized’, so that against this background he could hardly be a credible
advocate of colonial freedom.
But none of this detracted from his speech in terms of its international
historical importance. He added to the controversial nature of his Fourteen
Points when, on 11 February 1918, he spoke in no less vague but equally inflam-
matory terms of the right of ‘self-determination’. Wilson’s vision of a community
of self-governing nations living at peace with each other echoed ideas already
found in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Kant’s Eternal Peace and was ulti-
mately aimed at calling into question the ‘Westphalian system’ that prohibited
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 57

interference in the internal affairs of a country by appealing to the sovereignty

of the state in question. (The term ‘Westphalian system’ is in fact something of a
misnomer.) Wilson’s vision was also a response to Lenin’s revolutionary variant
of a nation’s right of self-determination, and although Wilson meant nothing
more than ‘self-government’ when he spoke of ‘self-determination’, his phrase
could also be interpreted as propagating the right of ‘civilized’ nations to secede
and form their own states. Together with his message of 11 February 1918,
Wilson’s Fourteen Points contained within them the power to explode the old
order, a power felt as early as 1918 in the case of those European nations –
primarily the Poles, Czechs and the South Slavs living in the Habsburg Empire
– that strove for national independence. The same forces were also seen in the
desire for greater democratization within the German Reich.
In Berlin Wilson’s Fourteen Points were rightly interpreted as a call for a
radical democratization of the country as a whole, with the result that the reac-
tion in right-wing parties was correspondingly negative, but the same was true
of the country’s leaders, and on 24 January 1918 the chancellor emphatically
rejected those of Wilson’s specific demands that were addressed to Germany,
arguing that any new order in the east concerned Russia and the Central Powers
alone. The ‘violent annexation’ of Belgium, he went on, had never been a part of
Germany’s political agenda. And he categorically refused to countenance any
territorial sacrifices to the west or to the east. As for the freedom of the seas,
Hertling made it dependent on Britain’s willingness to relinquish Gibraltar,
Malta, Aden, Hong Kong, the Falkland Islands and other strategic bases.
In France the Socialists were grateful to Wilson for spelling out America’s
war aims or, rather, its peace goals. The persistent refusal of France’s prime
minister, Georges Clemenceau, to specify France’s war aims merely served to
deepen the rift between government and opposition. In France, the Section
Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière became the true ‘Wilson party’, a claim
that could also be made for the moderate majority of the Independent Social
Democratic Party in Germany and for the Labour Party in Great Britain.
Clemenceau’s obstinacy was due not just to his determination to reincorporate
Alsace-Lorraine without a plebiscite. (Neither Wilson nor Lloyd George nor the
French Socialists had as yet made any specific demands on this point.) He also
had no interest whatsoever in speaking publicly about his far-reaching demands
with regard to the Saarland and the Rhineland, demands supported by the chief
of his general staff, Joseph Joffre. In Italy, too, there was an equally determined
refusal to explain the country’s war aims on the part of the prime minister
Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and his foreign minister Sidney Sonnino: there was
too clear a discrepancy between Wilson’s advocacy of the principle of nation-
ality and Italy’s insistent claims to the Brenner frontier, to Istria and to large
parts of Dalmatia.
Orlando had succeeded Paolo Boselli in October 1917. It was under Boselli’s
administration that the two Reform Socialists, Leonida Bissolati and Ivanoe
58 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Bonomi, had assumed ministerial positions. Bissolati was the most eloquent
champion of the ‘Democratic Interventionists’ who supported the nation’s
right of self-determination in the Wilsonian spirit and who were opposed,
therefore, to demands for the annexation of the German-, Slav- and Greek-
speaking parts of the region. At least from a tactical standpoint, Orlando came
closer to the views held by the Democratic Interventionists when, at the insist-
ence of the chief of his general staff and in the face of opposition from Sonnino,
he began to work together with the South Slavs, a move that required a certain
restraint in terms of Italian demands for territorial expansion in the eastern
Adriatic. The semi-official Patto di Roma that was passed at a Congress of
Oppressed Nationalities in April 1918 took account of this new line in Italian
foreign policy. Conversely, no attempt was made, then or later, to revoke the
corresponding parts of the secret Treaty of London that had been drawn up
with the Entente in April 1915, the contents of which were made public by the
Soviet authorities in November 1917.
Among the émigrés from the Habsburg monarchy who championed the
independence of their own countries, none was as close to Wilson’s ideas as
the Czech philosopher Tomág Masaryk, who was born in Moravia in 1850
as the son of a Slovak carter and a German-Moravian peasant girl and who
went on to found the Realistic Party, which he represented in the Austrian
parliament from 1900 to 1914. But both he and his colleague Edvard Beneg
took exception to certain aspects of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, especially to the
fact that in order not to drive Austria–Hungary even further into the arms of
Germany, Wilson had avoided any calls for the dissolution of the Danube
Monarchy. (Much the same was true of Lloyd George, both men being moti-
vated by their hope of signing a separate peace treaty with Vienna.) From this
point of view, they had closer allies in Clemenceau and his foreign minister
Stéphen Pichon, neither of whom made any secret of the fact that they were
keen to see the unconditional capitulation and, with it, the end of Austria-
Hungary. In 1918 they adopted a more active approach to the question and in
doing so reflected Masaryk’s wishes by encouraging aspirations for national
independence within the Habsburg Empire.
Masaryk and Beneg were both able to contribute to this struggle, for together
they had founded the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris in 1916. Set up
with the agreement of the French government, this council worked for Czech
and Slovak independence, an aim initially agreed to by Czech and Slovak exiles
in Cleveland, Ohio, in October 1915 and later, in a more binding form, in the
Pittsburgh Agreement of May 1917. Under the terms of this last-named treaty,
Masaryk granted the Slovaks far-reaching autonomy. Following the February
Revolution, he travelled to Russia, where he organized the Czechoslovak Legion
made up of prisoners of war and deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army
and turned them into an army of liberation that was to be deployed on the
French side on the western front. Unable to travel directly through lands held
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 59

by the Central Powers, the army was forced to make a major detour via
Vladivostok, where Japanese troops had landed on 5 April 1918.
The Soviet government had initially approved of this plan but after several
untoward incidents it withdrew its support. Trotsky’s order that the legion be
disarmed could not be implemented, however, because of the resistance offered
by the soldiers, who now numbered over 40,000. Within weeks it had succeeded
in seizing control of a large part of the central Volga, the area around Ufa in the
southern Urals, part of south-western Siberia and a considerable stretch of the
Trans-Siberian Railway almost as far as Irkutsk. Their gains were made possible
only with the help of Russian opponents of the Bolsheviks, including the Socialist
Revolutionaries from the Volga region. The Legion entered Samara on 8 June
1918, prompting the local committee of Socialist Revolutionary members of the
Constituent Assembly to declare the Bolshevik government defunct and to
appoint itself the provisional government instead. Far from travelling to France,
as planned, the Czechoslovak Legion found itself actively engaged in the early
stages of the Russian civil war and is known to have committed a number of
atrocities, including looting from the civilian population and murdering
German and Austro-Hungarian officers who fell into its soldiers’ hands.
During the summer of 1918 the fall of the Bolshevik government seemed
for a time to be only a matter of days. In early July the left-wing Socialist
Revolutionaries triggered an uprising in Moscow and central Russia, in the
course of which the German ambassador, Wilhelm von Mirbach-Harff, was
murdered on 6 July. At around the same time the White Army under
Generals Anton Denikin and Pyotr Krasnov, the hetman of the Don Cossacks,
succeeded in driving the Bolsheviks from the floodplains of the Kuban and
the Don. In western Siberia Admiral Alexander Kolchak – a supporter of the
tsar – collected a band of counterrevolutionary forces that captured Kazan
with the help of the Czechoslovak Legion. The Bolsheviks responded by
murdering the royal family at Ekaterinburg (later Sverdlovsk) on 16 August
1918. Shortly beforehand the White Army had driven the Bolsheviks from
the ruling council in Archangelsk in the far north of Russia. The following day,
1 August, the city was handed over to the British and French who had marched
there from Murmansk in order to prevent Allied war materials stored in the
city from falling into German hands. (In Murmansk there had for some time
been the same sort of cooperation between the Allies and the local soviet,
which had broken off relations with the Council of the People’s Commissars in
Moscow on 29 June.) An act that had originally been directed at the Germans
gradually became an Allied intervention in the Russian civil war.
Seconded by Great Britain, France was particularly keen that the Allies
should take steps to oust the Bolsheviks: France, after all, had been imperial
Russia’s principal creditor and leading foreign investor. The plan was to invade
Russia from Vladivostok in eastern Siberia, where there were even greater
supplies of Allied war material than in Murmansk and Archangelsk. Hitherto
60 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

controlled by the Bolsheviks, Vladivostok was overrun on 29 June by an

isolated section of the Czechoslovak Legion that had reached this part of Russia
during the previous months. But it was only with the help of their allies in the
form of the United States and Japan that the soldiers who made up this section
of the Legion would be able to return to western Siberia and support their
comrades in their fight against the Bolsheviks.
Sympathy for the Czech cause was one of the main reasons why Woodrow
Wilson finally gave in to pressure from the French and British and agreed to send
a total of 7,000 American troops to Siberia. In the event, these American units
were rarely involved in any fighting with the Red Army, their principal task
consisting in guarding sections of the Trans-Siberian Railway that had previ-
ously been controlled by the Bolsheviks. But in spite of holding back in this way,
it was clear by August 1918 whose side the United States was on in the Russian
civil war: the side of the White Army that was seeking to overthrow the rule of
the Bolsheviks whom Wilson had courted as recently as the January of that year.

Two Countries Lie in Ruins; One is Reborn: Germany,

Austria–Hungary and Poland at the End of the First World War
The separate peace treaty signed with the Bolsheviks allowed the Germans to
move the bulk of their forces to the western front. In March 1918, 192 of the
country’s 240 divisions were based here, numbering 3.5 million men, and
during the weeks that followed these were joined by a further twenty-eight
divisions from the east, briefly giving the Germans a slight numerical advan-
tage over the Western Powers. ‘Operation Michael’ began on 21 March, a large-
scale offensive against the British and French in Picardy. The offensive was
briefly successful, but by the first week of April it had developed into a stale-
mate. Further offensives in Flanders, on the Chemin des Dames and on the
Marne likewise failed to achieve the hoped-for breakthrough.
The Allied counter-offensive began on 18 July under General – or, from
6 August, Marshal – Foch. This was also the first time that larger numbers
of American troops under General Pershing took part in the fighting. The
decisive factor proved to be the massive deployment of British tanks, allowing
them to break through enemy lines along a broad front at the Battle of Amiens
on 8 August, a day that Ludendorff is said to have described as a ‘black day
for the German army’. From 20 August the German lines were repeatedly
driven back by the hammer-blows of French, British and American assaults,
leading to a palpable decline in German morale.
This period also witnessed a series of serious setbacks for Germany’s allies.
During the second half of June an Austrian offensive on the Altipiano dei Sette
Comuni and on the lower reaches of the River Piave came to nothing. There
were also increasing signs of friction among non-German-speaking sections of
the army, so that from August 1918 Austria-Hungary became more insistent in
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 61

its demands that Germany bring the war to a rapid conclusion. When these
demands failed to achieve their desired result, Austria approached the United
States with a proposal on 14 September, suggesting a general peace conference,
only to be rebuffed by Wilson. During the second half of September the
Bulgarian army capitulated in Macedonia under the sustained assault of the
British, French, Italians, Serbs and Greeks, and on 30 September a truce was
agreed, forcing Bulgaria to demobilize and to consent to vacating all those
parts of Serbia and Greece that its troops had previously occupied. (Bulgaria
had been an independent kingdom since 5 October 1908, when Prince
Ferdinand I had declared himself tsar.)
Also in September, the British succeeded in breaking through the
Turkish and German front at Jaffa in Palestine, and in the course of the
weeks that followed British troops under Sir Edmund Allenby advanced to
Aleppo, Damascus and Beirut with the help of Arab forces assembled by T. E.
Lawrence – the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. The German army corps
managed to retreat to Anatolia, while fighting a rearguard action. The Ottoman
Empire laid down its arms on 30 October, the terms of its capitulation dictated
by the armistice agreement signed on a battleship in the port of Mudros on the
island of Lemnos.
Ludendorff – the strong man in the army’s supreme command – had by
now come to realize that Germany had lost the war and needed to approach
Wilson with a peace offer without delay, a realization due less to the fact that
his own troops had been forced to retreat than to the losses suffered by
Germany’s allies. But responsibility for this approach was to be assumed not
by the army’s supreme command but by a new government made up of the
majority parties in the Reichstag. On 29 September, the day of the armistice in
Bulgaria, Ludendorff and Hindenburg informed the Kaiser of their assessment
of the military situation and of the conclusions that this invited: ‘I have asked
His Majesty to bring into government those circles whom we mostly have to
thank for getting us into the present situation,’ the first quartermaster-general
informed a gathering of high-ranking officers on 1 October. ‘We shall now see
these gentlemen moving into the country’s ministries. Let them conclude the
peace that must now be concluded. Let them lie in the bed they made for us.’58
In this way Ludendorff promulgated the myth that he and his army had been
stabbed in the back.
In July 1917 the majority parties in the Reichstag had declared their willing-
ness to enter into peace talks that involved no compulsory territorial losses or
any other acts of political, economic or financial violation. By the early months
of 1918 there was an increasing readiness on their part to take upon themselves
the responsibility for ending the war. Although there had been violent debates
on this score within the largest of the German parties, the Social Democrats, by
23 September Friedrich Ebert, who with Philipp Scheidemann was co-chairman
of the party, had persuaded the leadership committees to accept that it was the
62 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Social Democrats’ ‘damned duty and obligation’ to reach an agreement with the
middle-class parties and the government, because without such an agreement
the country was threatened by the same kind of chaos, violence, terror and civil
war as were then laying waste to Russia. The left-wing liberal Progressive People’s
Party was of the same opinion, whereas the conservative wing of the Catholic
Centre Party still had serious reservations about a shift to a parliamentary
system, which was the logical consequence of having a share in government.
The Centre Party came round only after the National Liberals had spoken out in
favour of a complete change to a parliamentary system on 29 September.
If Germany was to become a parliamentary democracy, there was a
better chance that the peace terms imposed on it would be less severe than
would otherwise have been the case under the old authoritarian regime that
was effectively run by the army supreme command. Such terms, it was hoped,
would be in the spirit of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. This, then, was one of the
hopes that brought together the moderate middle-class parties and the Majority
Social Democrats in the autumn of 1918. And there was another point on
which these parties were in agreement: the parliamentarization of Germany by
the constitutional bodies of the Reichstag and Bundesrat would take the ground
from under a revolution of a kind that Ebert and others feared would quickly
lead to the sort of situation that had developed in Russia.
Parliamentarization meant a change of chancellor first and foremost. The
present incumbent, Count Hertling, was unwilling to usher in the new system
himself. Nor would the Social Democrats have accepted him as head of the new
government. And so he resigned on 30 September. As his successor, Wilhelm II
appointed Prince Max of Baden, a man regarded as a moderate and one whom
Ludendorff and the majority parties had already agreed was acceptable. The
new government included members of the Centre Party, the Progressive
People’s Party, the National Liberals and, for the first time, two Social Democrats:
Gustav Bauer, the deputy chairman of the General Commission of Free Trade
Unions, who headed the newly formed government Employment Exchange,
and Philipp Scheidemann, who was one of four secretaries of state without a
portfolio.
The change from constitutional to parliamentary democracy was sealed on
28 October 1918 by the necessary alteration to the country’s 1871 constitution.
From then on, the chancellor depended on the trust of the Reichstag: if the
Reichstag had no confidence in him, then he would have to step down. His
responsibilities extended to all actions of a political significance that the Kaiser
traditionally undertook in exercising his constitutional authority. As a result,
the Kaiser’s military power of command was now subject to parliamentary
control at least to the extent that acts of ‘political significance’ were involved.
Another change to the constitution was scarcely less significant: without the
agreement of the Reichstag it was no longer possible to declare war or to
conclude a peace deal.
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 63

As a result of these ‘October reforms’ and the retention of its existing form
as a monarchy, Germany became a traditional western democracy and, as such,
comparable to Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian
monarchies. Unlike these other constitutional monarchies, it had introduced
universal suffrage for men at a relatively early date (in 1867 in the North
German League and four years later in the new German Reich). Half a century
later, the German system of government was democratized in the narrower
sense, finally putting an end to the basic contradiction inherent in the Reich:
the clash between economic and cultural progress on the one hand and the
regressive nature of its pre-democratic form of government on the other.
For the present, however, the country’s parliamentarization was no more
than a formal act. Whether it would change the face of politics depended on
the old elite, foremost among whom was the military. The mere fact that the
parliamentarization of Germany was closely bound up with the country’s mili-
tary defeat meant that reforms, although long overdue, were compromised
from the outset. Even before the constitutional changes had come into force,
the extreme right had countered the formation of Germany’s first de facto
parliamentary government by declaring war on democracy and on the Jews.
On 3 October, the president of the Pan-German League, Heinrich Claß,
demanded the foundation of a ‘great, bold and dashing national party and the
most ruthless war on the Jews, at whom our good and misled people’s all too
righteous anger must now be directed’. Two and a half weeks later at a confer-
ence of the League’s leadership and executive committee on 19 and 20 October,
Claß called on his audience to ‘use the situation to hold up Jewry and the Jews
as lightning rods for all injustices’. Towards the end of his speech he assured his
listeners that he would shrink from nothing but heed the words of the poet
Heinrich von Kleist: ‘Strike them all dead! On Judgement Day / No court will
ever make you pay!’59
On 4 October 1918 and under pressure from the army high command, the
new government of Prince Max of Baden lost no time in asking Woodrow
Wilson for a truce. After various notes had been passed to and fro, the defini-
tive answer came on 23 October. Drawn up by Robert Lansing, the chief of the
State Department, it demanded nothing less than the abdication of Wilhelm II,
prompting the army high command to request that negotiations with the
United States be broken off and that the fighting be continued ‘until the bitter
end’. The following day it provoked a conflict with the new parliamentary
government by asking army commanders in a joint telegram to fight on. Given
the situation on the ground, this can only have been an attempt on Ludendorff ’s
part to avoid all responsibility for the subsequent course of events. On the 26th
he was relieved of his duties by the Kaiser at the government’s request. General
Wilhelm von Groener was appointed the new first quartermaster-general and
de facto head of the army high command. A native of Württemberg, he was
regarded as a level-headed leader.
64 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

In order to remove the Kaiser from the immediate sphere of influence of the
government and of the Reichstag, Hindenburg advised Wilhelm II to leave
Berlin for Spa in Belgium, the army’s current headquarters. On 29 October, a
day after signing the new laws altering the constitution, Wilhelm did as he had
been bidden by the popular general. The Evangelical theologian and religious
philosopher Ernst Troeltsch, who was a keen-eyed observer of contemporary
events, saw in this an important constitutional development: ‘The monarchical
and military power was now completely separated from the parliamentary
bureaucratic power, and the two were now in conflict.’60
An even greater challenge to the new parliamentary system came from
the navy high command. Germany had suspended submarine warfare on
20 October, giving the navy high command an excuse to announce that it had
won back its right to operate freely. When the chancellor received this news
from Admiral Reinhard Scheer, he was unable to appreciate its scope. Nor was
it intended that he should do so. The fleet had seen practically no operational
duties since the Battle of Jutland in late May 1916, but now it saw a chance to
inflict serious losses on England and in this way maintain its ‘honour’. That it
would suffer serious losses in turn was accepted as a price worth paying. The
inevitable conflict with the government and its majority in the Reichstag was
welcomed by the navy’s leaders, for if the new parliamentary system were to be
brought down by this move, this would be a gratifying side-effect of its English
escapade. The navy’s leaders were playing politics on their own initiative – and
in a way that invites us to speak of an attempted putsch.
The navy’s leaders had not expected any resistance on the part of their
sailors, but the first mutinies took place on 29 October on a number of ships
anchored off Wilhelmshaven. The naval command took drastic countermeas-
ures, but this merely fuelled the protest, and on 1 November a further mutiny
broke out in Kiel. Within two days shipyard workers had joined the action. On
the 4th the government intervened at the request of the local governor, Admiral
Wilhelm Anton Souchon. In an attempt to bring the situation under control as
quickly as possible, the government dispatched the state secretary without
portfolio, Conrad Haussmann of the Progressive People’s Party, and the Social
Democrats’ spokesman on naval affairs, Gustav Noske, who was able to calm
the sailors by promising them an amnesty, but he was incapable of containing
the situation. On the 4th only Kiel had been in the hands of the sailors, but
by the 6th they had seized control of Lübeck, Brunsbüttel, Hamburg, Bremen
and Cuxhaven.
By the 7th the mutiny had become a full-scale revolution. The first German
throne to be toppled was that of the Wittelsbachs. As chairman of the Munich
Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, Kurt Eisner – a journalist from Berlin who
represented the Independent Social Democrats – took control in Bavaria and
on 8 November declared it a ‘free state’. That same day a Workers’ and Soldiers’
Council in Cologne seized power, and on the evening of 8 November the
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 65

Prussian Ministry of War declared nine other cities to be ‘Red’, including Halle,
Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Osnabrück and Stuttgart.
In Berlin, meanwhile, the Social Democrats were trying to persuade the
Kaiser, who was also the king of Prussia, to abdicate. A few successes could be
recorded by this date, and some of the measures required by the war had been
lightened at the request of the majority parties. Karl Liebknecht, sentenced to
four years’ imprisonment for treason in July 1916, was released on 23 October,
while Rosa Luxemburg’s house arrest was lifted on 8 November, the day on
which sailors convicted of mutinying in 1917 were also released from prison.
On 7 November the Social Democrats responded to a ban on meetings by the
Independent Social Democrats imposed by the regional commander by issuing
an ultimatum to the war cabinet. Central to their demands was a reorganiza-
tion of the Prussian government to reflect the state of the parties in the
Reichstag, an increase in the Social Democrats’ influence within government,
the abdication of the Kaiser and a promise by the crown prince that he would
not ascend the vacant throne. If its conditions were not met, the Majority Social
Democratic Party threatened to withdraw its members from government with
immediate effect.
On the evening of 8 November the Social Democrats extended their ulti-
matum until such time as the armistice was signed. (The German negotiators
headed by the secretary of state Matthias Erzberger of the Centre Party had
left Berlin on 6 November and accepted the victors’ conditions at the Allied
headquarters at Compiègne to the north of Paris on the morning of the 8th.)
Important concessions by the middle-class majority parties made it easier for
the Social Democrats to put their names to the agreement: in Prussia and all
the other German states, universal suffrage was to be introduced on the basis
of proportional representation; Prussia would adopt a parliamentary system of
government without any further delay; and the Social Democrats’ influence
within government would be increased. At the very last moment the Progressive
People’s Party and the Centre Party agreed to the introduction of women’s
suffrage. In turn both parties also demanded the abdication of the Kaiser, and
even the National Liberals made it known that they would welcome it if
Wilhelm II were to step aside.
Revolution reached the streets of Berlin on 9 November, prompting the
capital’s Majority Social Democrats under their district secretary Otto Wels
to call a general strike at nine in the morning, a move designed to place their
own party in the vanguard of the movement for greater reform. An hour later
Philipp Scheidemann stepped down as secretary of state, and at the same time
the leaders of the Majority Social Democrats entered into negotiations with the
Independent Social Democrats, but the latter felt unable to negotiate as their
chairman, Hugo Haase, had gone to Kiel to see the insurrection at first hand
and had not yet returned to Berlin. For their part, the Revolutionary Stewards
on the left wing of the Independent Social Democrats had not wanted to
66 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

make their first move until the 11th. The temporary power vacuum to the left
of the Majority Social Democrats gave Ebert’s and Scheidemann’s party a
chance that they seized with both hands. In the course of an inflammatory
speech, Wels was able to persuade the battalion of the Naumburg Riflemen
stationed in Berlin that it was their duty to side with the people and with the
Social Democrats.
When the chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, learnt that soldiers hitherto
deemed implacably loyal to the Kaiser had defected to the opposition, he knew
that the tide had turned. At around eleven o’clock that morning he had been
informed by telephone that the Kaiser had decided to abdicate, and although
there was as yet no official confirmation, he revealed the Kaiser’s decision in a
communiqué to Wolff ’s Telegraph Office, adding that he himself was keen to
step down as soon as the question of his successor had been resolved. He was
planning to recommend that the new regent appoint Ebert as chancellor and to
propose elections for a national assembly that would provide the country with
a new constitution that would in turn decide on the type of state that Germany
should in future be.
But the attempt to salvage the monarchy by means of a regency was doomed
to fail, for shortly after 12:30 on 9 November a delegation from the SPD turned
up at the chancellor’s office and demanded that he and his assembled secre-
taries of state hand over power without further ado. Ebert justified his demand
by arguing that only in this way could law and order be maintained and blood-
shed avoided. He went on to explain that the Majority Social Democratic Party
had the backing of the Independent Social Democratic Party, which might
have a part to play in the new government, as could representatives of the
middle-class parties. But the preponderance of the Social Democrats had to be
safeguarded. When Prince Max remarked that the question of the regency still
needed to be addressed, Ebert replied that it was already too late, prompting
Max to invite Ebert to take over as chancellor, an invitation that had the backing
of all the secretaries of state. After hesitating briefly, Ebert agreed. For the first
time in its history, Germany had ‘a man of the people’ at its helm. A native of
Heidelberg, Ebert was then forty-seven. After working as a saddler, he had
gone on to edit the local paper of the Bremen SPD.
At two o’clock – an hour or so after this revolutionary change of
government – Philipp Scheidemann, the co-chairman of the Majority Social
Democrats, declared the foundation of the ‘German Republic’ from a balcony
of the Reichstag building. He had not been authorized by Ebert to do so.
Two hours later, the end of the monarchy was once again announced by a
politician with far more extreme left-wing views: Karl Liebknecht. From
his position in the main gateway to the Berlin Stadtschloss he proclaimed the
‘free Socialist Republic of Germany’. Ebert had wanted to leave it to the
Constituent Assembly to decide on the form that the new state would adopt.
The frenzied applause that greeted Scheidemann’s brief speech and the events
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 67

that took place during the hours that followed fully justified Scheidemann.
Liebknecht, as the leader of the Spartacus League, was too late to influence the
course of events.
Scheidemann graphically underlined the break with the old authoritarian
state, whereas Ebert stressed the sense of continuity, appealing to all German
men and women to respect the rule of law and calling on civil servants, judges
and army officers to continue to carry out their duties. He also tried to persuade
the Independent Social Democratic Party to agree to a form of government in
which the two Social Democratic parties were equally represented, while the
middle-class parties provided only junior ministers. When Liebknecht asked
the Independent Social Democrats to demand that ‘all executive, legislative
and legal power’ be handed over to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, the
Majority Social Democrats refused: ‘If this demand means the dictatorship of
one section of a class that does not have a popular majority, then we must reject
it since it does not accord with our democratic principles.’61 The Majority Social
Democrats also turned down the Independent Social Democrats’ demand that
the middle-class parties be excluded from government, arguing that it would
be difficult, if not impossible, to feed the nation in consequence.
The position of the Independent Social Democrats initially bore all
the hallmarks of Liebknecht and his Revolutionary Stewards. Following
the return of the party’s chairman, Hugo Haase, from Kiel late on the evening
of 9 November, more moderate voices were able to assert themselves. The
Independent Social Democrats no longer opposed the election of a Constituent
Assembly on principle, but wanted political power to be placed in the hands of
the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, who were to be invited to attend a plenary
meeting drawn from representatives from the entire country. In the expecta-
tion that they would have a majority there, the Majority Social Democrats
agreed to this demand and also accepted the three members of the new Council
of People’s Deputies proposed by the Independent Social Democrats. Two of
these members, Hugo Haase and Wilhelm Dittmann, were moderates, while
the third, Emil Barth, was a Revolutionary Steward. For their part, the Majority
Social Democrats nominated Ebert, Scheidemann and the Breslau lawyer Otto
Landsberg, who had been a member of the Reichstag since 1912.
The new government had not yet been formally constituted when, at
noon on 10 November, the three Majority Social Democrat members of the
Council of People’s Deputies held their first meeting with almost all the secre-
taries of state from the old government and a handful of members of the
Prussian government. The only item on the agenda was the conditions for an
armistice, conditions that Marshal Foch had handed to the German delegation
under Matthias Erzberger in the forest at Compiègne on 9 November. Among
the victorious powers’ demands was the handing back of occupied lands in
Alsace-Lorraine, France, Belgium and Luxembourg as well as the left bank of
the Rhine. As a result of the October Revolution in Russia, German troops
68 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

were not yet to be withdrawn from the former Russian territories. The peace
treaties of Brest–Litovsk and Bucharest were declared invalid. Germany also
had to hand over all its submarines and most of its airplanes, ships, weapons
and munitions as well as locomotives, railway carriages and lorries. The ocean-
going fleet was also to be disarmed. Hindenburg had already let it be known
that if easier terms could not be negotiated, he recommended acceptance
of these conditions. To this the participants at the meeting in Berlin agreed.
The three Independent Social Democrats on the Council of People’s Deputies
were subsequently informed of these developments, and they too consented
to the Allies’ terms. At six o’clock on the morning of 11 November the German
delegation signed the truce in a railway carriage at Compiègne. For the present,
it was to last thirty-six days and come into force at eleven o’clock that same
morning.
Before it could begin work and in keeping with its agreement with the two
Social Democratic parties, the new government had to seek confirmation of its
mandate from a meeting of some 3,000 representatives of the Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Councils from Greater Berlin that was held in the Busch Circus on the
afternoon of 10 November. Emil Barth’s demand that the government be moni-
tored by an action committee appointed by the Revolutionary Stewards almost
led to the break-up of the meeting, as did a physical threat to Ebert by members
of the Spartacus League, a threat that the soldiers’ representatives managed to
avert. Wels was able to persuade them to adopt the Majority Social Democrat
line, with the result that in the end they too demanded the principle of parity
for the action committee. The Revolutionary Stewards then fell into line. Seven
representatives of the Majority Social Democrats and seven Independent
Social Democrats were then elected to the Workers’ Council of the Executive
Committee. The fourteen-man Soldiers’ Council that was elected the following
day was dominated, conversely, by representatives who belonged to none of the
mainstream parties. Late on the evening of 10 November the Majority Social
Democrats and the Independent Social Democrats confirmed their coalition
agreement. Germany again had a government.
Until the evening of 10 November revolution had been largely bloodless in
Germany. On the previous day there had been a handful of skirmishes on the
Marstall and at the University. And on the 10th, Theodor Wolff, the editor in
chief of the left-wing, liberal Berliner Tageblatt, felt able to speak of ‘the greatest
of all revolutions’, a superlative justified, in his view, by the fact that ‘never had
a Bastille so solidly built and surrounded by such stout walls been taken in a
single attack’.62
Neither on the 9th nor the 10th could it be claimed that everything
belonging to the old order had been ruthlessly swept away. Public authorities
continued to function as before. True, they had been taken over by local
Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, most of which were controlled by the Majority
Social Democrats, but this tended to confer a new legitimacy on them, rather
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 69

than preventing them from operating. The judiciary, grammar schools and
universities had yet to be affected by the revolution. By the evening of
10 November the army’s supreme command had reached the point where it
could be described as a partner of the revolutionary government. In the course
of a telephone conversation that has been the source of many a later legend, it
has been claimed that the new first quartermaster-general, Wilhelm Groener,
suggested to Ebert, as the chairman of the Council of People’s Deputies, that
they enter into an anti-Bolshevik alliance, a suggestion to which Ebert is said to
have agreed. Whatever Ebert may in fact have said, he certainly needed the
help of the army’s supreme command in ensuring that German troops were
brought home as soon as possible in an orderly and expeditious manner.
Demobilization was a precondition of a rapid shift in the German economy,
allowing it to switch as smoothly as possible from wartime needs to those
dictated by peacetime. For that reason if for no other the People’s Delegates
were keen to ensure that Germany’s military collapse was not followed by a
collapse of the country’s military.
It was the political system associated with an authoritarian state that
collapsed in November 1918, a system that found expression above all in the
princes of the realm and of individual states. By the end of 1918 the old order
was held together only by minorities, and the number of people willing
to defend the monarchy by force of arms was infinitesimally small. But royal-
ists did still exist. They were more numerous among Protestants than among
Catholics, and nowhere more so than in Prussia to the east of the Elbe. True,
regional rulers had also been Church leaders in every German state, but
the sense of an inner bond with the idea of the unity of Church and state and
with the local prince as the ‘summus episcopus’ was a feature more especially
of Lutheranism in northern and eastern Germany. It was no accident that
in what was probably his final wartime sermon on 27 October 1918 Berlin’s
court preacher Bruno Doehring described Woodrow Wilson’s demand that
Wilhelm II should abdicate as a ‘satanic suggestion’. ‘The monarchy in Prussia’,
he confessed, ‘means infinitely more to us Evangelicals than any political
question, for to us it is a question of faith.’63
Shortly after the end of the war, the sociologist Max Weber observed with
reference to Germany that

the history of the dissolution of the old system of domination legitimate

in Germany up until 1918 is instructive in this connection. The War, on
the one hand, went far to break down the authority of tradition; and
the German defeat involved a tremendous loss of prestige for the govern-
ment. These factors combined with systematic habituation to illegal
behavior, undermined the amenability to discipline both in the army and
in industry and thus prepared the way for the overthrow of the older
authority.64
70 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Weber’s findings may be summed up in his argument that by the autumn of

1918 the German Reich had largely forfeited ‘the belief in legality’ that he
regarded as ‘the most common form of legitimacy’ and that he defined as ‘the
compliance with enactments which are formally correct and which have been
made in the accustomed manner’.65
According to Weber’s succinct analysis, there were three factors above all
that contributed to the collapse of the German Reich: the war had undermined
traditional values; the military defeat of the Central Powers was becoming
increasingly evident; and there was a growing black market as a result of the
failure of the existing economic system and of the policies associated with its
currency. And it was the German Kaiser and king of Prussia who most clearly
embodied the old system. In the eyes of the workers as well as members of the
lower middle class and the peasant class, it was he who bore the ultimate
responsibility for the duration and catastrophic outcome of the war as well as
for the privations suffered by the nation as a whole, and because of his refusal
to see this, he had to go. Wilson’s Fourteen Points had fuelled the belief that
Germany could hope for a just peace if it introduced a more democratic form
of government, with the result that the desire for peace encouraged Germans
to hanker after a democratic constitution. By the autumn of 1918 a broad
majority backed these goals, forming the nucleus of a consensus that may
not have been all-encompassing but which certainly included every social
class and religious denomination, bringing the country together on the eve of
9 November and for the weeks that were to follow.
Germany had been a de facto parliamentary monarchy since 3 October
1918 – by 28 October it was also legally so. And yet the autonomous actions
of the Kaiser and of the army and naval command in the days that followed
the country’s constitutional reforms made it clear that the new parliamentary
system existed only on paper. Revolution broke out from below because revo-
lution from above had foundered on military obstruction, making it impos-
sible to uphold the institution of the monarchy. The collapse of the existing
system, the obstruction of the military and revolutionary insurrection led to
the proclamation of the German Republic on 9 November 1919. But this did
not mean the end of revolution, for it was merely a new chapter in the history
of the German revolution that began on this day.

Germany was not the only country to be rocked by national upheavals in the
autumn of 1918. On 12 November, three days after the German Republic had
been proclaimed, the German members of the Austrian Reichsrat proclaimed
the Republic of German Austria that they insisted was an ‘integral part of the
German Republic’. The history of the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy
stretches back to the years before the outbreak of the First World War. The
Reichsrat was prorogued on 16 March 1914 after the Czech Agrarians had
obstructed its workings and rendered it ineffectual. Not until 30 May 1917
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 71

did the government reconvene it, a decision inspired in part by the fear that
the Russian February Revolution might encourage imitators within the Danube
Monarchy.
The three years during which emergency decrees remained in force
contributed in no small way to the radicalization of the Austrian opposition,
and this was true not only of the nationalist opposition, especially those
who supported the Czechs, but also of the left wing of the Social Democrats.
On 21 October 1916 Friedrich Adler, the son of the party’s founder, Victor
Adler, shot the prime minister, Count Karl Stürgkh, in protest not only at the
war but also at the ‘Socialist patriotism’ of his own party. He was sentenced to
death by a special court, but the sentence was commuted to eighteen years’
hard labour. On 1 November 1918 he was released from prison under the terms
of an imperial amnesty. His actions made him a martyr in the eyes of his
political friends, but the hoped-for impact of those actions and of his speech to
the court failed to materialize, and there was neither a mass strike nor even any
protest demonstration.
The earliest instance of nationalist resistance to the government in Vienna
was a secret organization calling itself the ‘Mafie’ that was founded in Prague
in early 1915. At the heart of its circle of conspirators were the Russophile
leaders of the Young Czechs, Karel Kramá. and Alois Ragin, together with
the sociologist Edvard Beneg, who was a close colleague of Tomág Masaryk.
Their principal aim was to establish an independent Czech – and, if possible,
Czechoslovak – state. (As a representative of the Realist Party in the Reichsrat
Masaryk had yet to advocate a completely independent Czech state that would
have spelt the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire.) Beneg left the country in
early September on a forged passport and together with Masaryk worked on
his great project in exile in France. Kramá. and Ragin had already been arrested
for high treason in July 1915 but were released in July 1918 under the terms of
the amnesty decreed by Kaiser Karl. A third beneficiary of the Kaiser’s act of
clemency was the leader of the National Socialists, Václav Klofá/.
As long as Russia seemed to have any chance of defeating the Central
Powers, the pro-Russian supporters of Czech nationalism were more powerful
than the pro-western groups who supported Masaryk and Beneg. Kramá.
and the Russophiles could appeal to the fact that as early as 16 September
1914 the commander in chief of the Russian army, Grand Duke Nikolay
Nikolayevich, had informed the nations of the Habsburg Empire in the name
of Tsar Nicholas II that Russia had entered the war to liberate the nations of
Austria-Hungary and ensure that their nationalist aspirations were met. In the
wake of the February Revolution of 1917, staunchly nationalist circles hoped
that the Western Powers would now be more vocal in their support for the
right of national self-determination.
But for the vast majority of leading Czech politicians, it was not until 1918
that their catalogue of demands included the dissolution of the Habsburg
72 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Empire: only then did they come to hold views similar to those advocated
by the Empire’s émigrés and nationalist prisoners. Most Czech political parties
set up a National Committee in November 1916, while their representatives
in the Reichsrat formed a Czech Union. The first declaration by the National
Committee on 18 November 1916 included an acknowledgement of the signal
importance of the ‘monarchy and of the great historical task of the Empire’
and of the ‘complete equality of all its nationalities’. In an open letter dated
21 January 1917 and addressed to the foreign minister, Ottokar Czernin, the
Czech Union pilloried the western European allies for the fact that the ‘libera-
tion of the Czechs from foreign rule’ that they themselves demanded was an
‘insinuation based entirely on the wrong premises’. Just as it always had done
in the past, the Czech nation continued to see its future and the basis of its
development ‘only under the rule of the house of Habsburg’.66
Following the first of the two Russian revolutions of 1917 and America’s
entry into the war, the more moderate nationalists struck a rather more defiant
note. A ‘Manifesto of Czech Authors’ inspired by the ‘Mafie’ and signed by
222 writers in May 1917 described a ‘democratic Europe consisting of autono-
mous and free states’ as ‘the Europe of the future’.67 The Czech members of the
Reichsrat were invited to show themselves equal to the historic situation or else
resign their seats.
On 29 May, a day before the Reichsrat reconvened after an enforced break
lasting more than three years, the Czech delegates agreed on the wording of a
declaration that was read out the next day at the plenary session to the dismay
of the government and of the German members of the Reichsrat. In it, the
Czechs voiced more fundamental criticisms of the dualistic structure of the
dual monarchy than at any previous point in their history, arguing that it had
created ruling and subject nationalities and demanding

the transformation of the Habsburg monarchy into a federal state consisting

of free and equal national states. [. . .] Relying at this historic moment on
the natural rights of nations, on self-determination and free development,
[. . .] we shall demand the unification of all the branches of the Czechoslovak
nation in one democratic state; we must not forget the Slovak branch, which
forms a close historical unity with the Czech lands.68

The Slovaks spoke a language which, although very similar to Czech, was
not the same. Historically speaking, by contrast, the two nations had developed
along very different lines. Slovakia was a part of the Transleithanian, Hungarian
half of the Danube Monarchy, whereas Bohemia and Moravia – the home
of the Czechs – was a part of the Cisleithanian half. Bohemia had always
been regarded as a part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the same was true
of Moravia, which had been united to Bohemia since 1029 by feudal law.
The kings of Bohemia belonged to the Empire’s electoral curia, and in the
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 73

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, following the union of the house of Przemy0l
with that of Luxembourg, they served as German Kaiser on more than one
occasion. Bohemia and Moravia fell to the Habsburgs in 1526, and from 1815
to 1866 the two Habsburg crown lands – unlike Hungary and Galicia – were
part of the German League. During the First World War Czech and Slovak
politicians living in exile in America agreed on the constitution of a common
state, although for the present it remained unclear to what extent they spoke
for their respective peoples. And there was another problem that had still to be
resolved. In their dealings with Vienna and the rest of the world the Czech
nationalists appealed to the natural right of national self-determination. But
historical Bohemian constitutional law was to apply to the Germans living
in Bohemia and Moravia, most of whom were confined to self-contained
settlement areas, resulting in the insistence that the territory in question could
not be divided up.
The declaration of 29 May 1917 had not gone as far as demanding the disso-
lution of the Habsburg Empire, but nor had it advocated its preservation. In
the Reichsrat the Czech deputies worked closely with the South Slav – mostly
Slovenian – members from Carinthia, Styria, Carniola, Istria and the coastal
region around Trieste. These members of parliament formed the South Slav
Club and on 30 May they demanded that all the regions inhabited by Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes be united, a demand that spelt the end of Austro-Hungarian
dualism, since the Habsburg Serbs and most of the Croats – except for those in
Istria – lived in Transleithania. Outside the Reichsrat, too, there were attempts
to unite the South Slavs, attempts actively encouraged by Masaryk. The exiled
Serbian prime minister, Nikola Pagi1, and the exiled Croat politician Ante
Trumbi1, who was chairman of the South Slav Committee, signed the Corfu
Declaration on 27 July 1917, demanding a unified kingdom of Serbia, Croatia
and Slovenia, while not accepting the Croats’ suggestion that the state be
constructed along federalist lines.
The Ruthenian deputies in the Reichsrat shared these aspirations. On
30 May 1917 they expressed their conviction that the crown land of Galicia
was ‘an artificial administrative unit’ at odds with the region’s historical and
national rights. It must be replaced, therefore, by a union of Ukrainian lands
independent of Poland but including the areas of Russian Poland and White
Russia settled by Ukrainians. The Polish parliamentarians refrained from
expressing so extreme a view and contented themselves with announcing
that they would comment in due course on national questions in the light of
the unanimous agreement made in Kraków on 28 May. In this resolution, the
Polish-Galician members of the Reichsrat had declared their support for a
powerful Polish state with access to the sea.
With the start of 1918 the internal crisis in the Habsburg Empire began
to grow increasingly acute. On 6 January – Twelfth Night – the Czech Union
demanded a peace based on the nations’ right of self-determination, a peace
74 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

that would liberate all nations groaning beneath a foreign yoke. (This demand
enjoyed the support of the Socialists, a party now dominated by forces hostile
to the Habsburgs.) The January strikes to which we have already referred were
followed on 1 February by a mutiny on the part of the Fifth Fleet in the Gulf
of Kotor, when the navy band played the ‘Marseillaise’ and red flags were
hoisted on every vessel. In the words of the Czech historian Zbyn2k A. Zeman,
the demands of the leaders were ‘a mixture of Bolshevik slogans and the
programmes of the political exiles’.69 The uprising was not merely the result of
a spontaneous protest caused by hunger but was a carefully planned political
demonstration. The mutiny collapsed when the Third Fleet arrived in the Gulf
of Kotor on 3 February and the sailors refused to follow their leaders. Among
the forty sailors who were hauled before the courts following the suppression
of the uprising, the Czechs were the largest national group with seven members.
The others were German Austrians, Italians, South Slavs and Poles.
Subsequent developments were largely a consequence of the German
spring offensive in 1918 and of the closer cooperation between Germany and
Austria–Hungary, as agreed to by Kaiser Wilhelm II and Kaiser Karl when
the latter visited the German high command at Spa. The Western Powers
responded by demanding the full right of self-determination of the nations
that made up the Danube Monarchy, a demand tantamount to the dissolution
of the Habsburg Empire. In April exiled politicians from the whole of the dual
Monarchy met in Rome at the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities that was
supported by Italy and France and that demanded the end of the multiracial
state that was said to be an instrument of German domination. The representa-
tives of the Italian and ‘South Slav’ nation agreed on the wording of a declara-
tion – the ‘Patto di Roma’ – demanding the liberation of the Adriatic, an
amicable settlement of all territorial disputes and the protection of all minori-
ties. (Conversely, there was no mention of Italy’s claim to Trieste, Istria, several
Istrian islands and large sections of the Dalmatian coast, a claim acknowledged
by the Entente in the secret London Treaty of April 1915.) After hesitating at
length, Woodrow Wilson finally added his voice to these demands on 28 June
1918, when he insisted that all nations of Slavic origin be liberated from the
‘Austrian yoke’.70
Meanwhile, the economic situation in Austria-Hungary had taken a
dramatic turn for the worse. By the middle of 1918 real incomes among the
Empire’s workers were only around half of their pre-war level, whereas prices
had risen immeasurably. The whole population was suffering from hunger,
nowhere more so than in Cisleithania. The harvest of 1918 was less than 50 per
cent of the 1913 figure, while industrial production – leaving aside war items
– was around 40 per cent of its pre-war equivalent. Between 1914 and 1917 coal
production had dropped by 95 per cent. There was renewed discontent among
the working population; and such was the social hardship that revolutionary
slogans fell on fertile ground.
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 75

In Hungary the situation was complicated by local political conditions

that fostered radicalization. Until the final year of the war aristocratic land-
owners and the political forces close to them obstinately resisted the introduc-
tion of universal suffrage. In May 1917 Kaiser Karl finally forced the resignation
of one of the principal enemies of reform, the prime minister István Tisza, but
it was not until July 1918 that Tisza’s successor, Sándor Wekerle, managed in
the face of considerable parliamentary opposition to force through a modest
democratization of the electoral system: 13 per cent of the population was now
allowed to elect deputies to the national assembly. The industrial proletariat,
which until then had not been represented in parliament at all, remained
unimpressed by the prime minister’s plans, and on 20 June 1918, shortly before
the electoral law was passed, workers in the state-owned locomotive engi-
neering works in Budapest went on strike. When the city’s military commander
gave orders for the striking workers to be shot, the workers at all of Budapest’s
factories joined the revolt, which lasted nine days and ended only with the
intervention of the Social Democrats. The protesters’ principal demands
were political and included, first and foremost, an immediate peace deal and
the resignation of Wekerle’s government.
Austro-Hungarian dualism ended three months later. On 16 October 1918,
barely two weeks after Vienna had added its voice to Germany’s request for
an armistice, Kaiser Karl issued the Imperial Manifesto drawn up and counter-
signed by his last prime minister but one, Max Hussarek-Heinlein. In it he
called for the creation of national councils made up of the relevant members
of the Reichsrat and announced that the monarchy would be turned into a
federal state. As Adam Wandruszka has written, he had unwittingly ‘legiti-
mized the violent overthrow of the existing order and triggered the dissolution
of the monarchy’.71
Although Wekerle’s government had insisted that the integrity of the
Transleithanian half of the Empire should not be violated, it was unable to
prevent the Romanians, South Slavs and Slovaks from becoming more vocal in
their secessionist demands. On 24 October it was reported in Budapest that
Croatian troops had mutinied. That same day Hungarian officers demonstrated
for peace and for a new government under Count Mihály Károlyi, who was
regarded as a reformer, prompting Károlyi’s party – the Independents – to join
forces with the bourgeois Radicals and Social Democrats to form a National
Committee that began its work by demanding an independent Hungary and
acknowledging other countries’ right of self-determination, while at the same
time insisting on Hungary’s territorial integrity. On 29 October the Budapest
garrison swore an oath of allegiance to the National Committee. Two days later
Archduke Josef named Károlyi prime minister at the behest of Kaiser Karl.
Károlyi formed a government that included Social Democrats. That same day
the former prime minister, Count Tisza, was murdered. On 16 November
Károlyi’s government announced that all legal ties between Hungary and
76 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Austria were officially severed: the house of Habsburg no longer had a throne;
and Hungary was now a people’s republic. Károlyi was appointed the republic’s
interim president on 11 January 1919.
The change of government in Budapest could do nothing to prevent
the break-up of historical Hungary. A National Council was convened in
Czernowitz – the capital of the duchy of Bukovina – on 17 November, its aim
being to promote union with Romania. In their final declaration to the Budapest
parliament on 18 October, the Romanian deputies issued a similar demand for
Transylvania. On 5 and 6 October representatives of the South Slav parties from
both halves of the Empire had met in Zagreb and turned the existing National
Council that had been formed with Czech support into an expanded council
that proposed the union of all Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. On 20 October the
Croatian parliament passed a draft law declaring null and void all constitutional
ties between Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia and Fiume on the one hand and the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy on the other. From now on these lands were to be
part of ‘the state of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’. Slovenian independence was
proclaimed in Ljubljana on 29 October. And on 1 November the National
Council took over administrative control of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the
regional military commander.
The desired union with Serbia took longer to bring about. Prince Regent
Alexander, who had been living in exile on the island of Corfu, returned in
state to Belgrade on 6 November, and on 1 December he proclaimed the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. His ability to prevail over the National
Council in Zagreb was due in part to Italy, which, appealing to the secret Treaty
of London of April 1915, laid claim to large stretches of the Dalmatian coast
and which had in the meantime occupied Fiume, even though this was not
part of the London agreement. Italian advances along the eastern Adriatic were
also a consequence of the country’s military victory over the troops of the
Danube Monarchy in the nine-day Battle of Vittorio Veneto that had begun
on 24 October – the first anniversary of Austria–Hungary’s annihilating defeat
at Caporetto – and ended on 3 November with the capitulation of the Austrian
and Hungarian units and agreement to the terms of a ceasefire between the
Western Powers and the Danube Monarchy that was reached at Padua. Also on
3 November Trento fell into the hands of Italian troops. Italy’s victory over its
Habsburg archenemy seemed finally to offer the country the chance to carry
out its programme of integrating into a united Italy all of those ‘unredeemed’
borderline territories that had been omitted from the Unification settlement, a
programme known as Irredentism.
For the Czech protectors of South Slavic unity, the road to independence was
now a little easier. In Prague the National Council was dominated by middle-
class nationalists, whose desire for total severance from the house of Habsburg
received substantial support from a whole series of declarations acknowledging
a willingness to accept a future Czechoslovak state: Italy and France on 30 June,
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 77

Great Britain on 13 August and the United States on 3 September. When, on

27 October, the foreign minister in Heinrich Lammasch’s cabinet, Count
Julius Andrássy the Younger, approached the United States with a request for
an immediate ceasefire on the basis of an American note of 18 October, this
approach was interpreted by the National Council as precisely what it was: a
declaration of the end of the alliance with the German Reich and an acknowl-
edgement of the claim of the Czechs and South Slavs to national independence.
That same day – 27 October – the army’s commander in chief in Bohemia asked
the National Council to press Czech soldiers to remain at their posts at least
until such time as a ceasefire had been agreed. On 28 October the National
Council noted that an independent Czechoslovak state was a reality and assumed
command of the military in Prague, Plze3 and Litomeri/2. And on 30 October,
Lammasch acknowledged the new situation by welcoming an emissary from the
National Council to Vienna as the ‘ambassador from the Czechoslovak state’.
At this date it was in fact not yet clear if the Slovaks were willing to form a
union with the Czechs, a union which hitherto had been a predominantly
intellectual concern. On 30 October, immediately after it had been established,
the Slovak National Council had declared that ‘linguistically, culturally, and
historically’ the Slovaks were ‘a part of the Czechoslovak nation’,72 but at the
same time it had insisted on the Slovaks’ right of self-determination. The leader
of the Slovak National Party, Vavro 4robár, became head of the first Slovak
government. He had only recently been released from prison in Hungary and
was the only Slovak member of the Prague National Council to take part in the
vote establishing an independent Czechoslovak state. But it was more difficult
to get from Prague to Bratislava than 4robár and his Czech supporters had
imagined: since the Slovak capital was still in Hungarian hands, his govern-
ment had to hold its first session in Skalica in Moravia.
Resistance to the establishment of a Czechoslovak state came from the
Germans in Bohemia and Moravia, most of whom lived in areas bordering on
Austria or the German Reich. Since it was now the Social Democrats who set
the tone in Vienna, the middle-class deputies from Bohemia and Moravia
turned to the Workers’ Party in the hope of winning its support in their attempt
to oppose the formation of a new Czech state. In their response of 3 October,
the Social Democrats recognized the right of the Slav nations to form their own
national states, while adding that

we resist, resolutely and for good, the subjection, to these national states, of
German territories. We demand that all German territories in Austria
should be unified in one state which would regulate its relations to other
nations of Austria and to the German Empire according to its needs.73

This laid out the line that was to be adopted by the representatives of German
Austria during the ensuing months. On 21 October representatives of the
78 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

German-speaking parts of the Cisleithanian half of the empire met to consti-

tute themselves as a ‘Provisional National Assembly of the Independent
German Austrian State’. On the 30th it passed a provisional constitution. That
same day the Social Democrat Karl Renner was appointed chancellor, heading
a provisional government that included Social Democrats, Christian Socialists
and Pan-German German Nationalists. The Foreign Ministry was placed in
the hands of Victor Adler, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party, who
died suddenly on 11 November at the age of sixty-six.
The defeat of the imperial army at Vittorio Veneto and the resultant capture
of 400,000 prisoners by the Italian army was greeted with dismay in Austria and
this circumstance, coupled with the collapse of the monarchy in Germany, played
a leading role in promoting republican views in Austria, too. On 11 November,
at the urging of his advisers and of representatives of the Provisional National
Assembly, Kaiser Karl announced his decision to forgo all further involvement in
the affairs of state and his willingness to accept whatever decision German
Austria might take in respect of its future form of state. The following day the
Provisional National Assembly passed the aforementioned law declaring German
Austria a democratic republic and ‘part of the German Republic’.
With the abdication of Karl as Austrian Kaiser (he remained king of
Hungary, albeit in name alone), the history of the Habsburg Empire came to
an end. For four centuries it had exerted considerable influence on the old
Continent and throughout that time had intermittently enjoyed the status of a
major European power. In Germany the house of Habsburg (or, to give it its
official name, the house of Habsburg-Lorraine, a title acquired in 1736 with the
marriage of Maria Theresa and Duke Francis Stephen of Lorraine) was regarded
as the enemy of freedom, initially in its struggle with Protestantism, later in its
war on liberalism. The Germans could not achieve unity and freedom with
Austria – this was one of the reasons why the revolution of 1848–9 had ended
in failure. The impact of Habsburg rule on its own more immediate sphere of
influence was more lasting and not entirely negative, for the Danube Monarchy
had left its mark on the whole of east central Europe from Galicia to Dalmatia
and from the Sudetenland to Carpathia, an influence apparent in its adminis-
tration, its courts of justice and schools, its postal services and railway network,
its police and army and, not least, the dark yellow of its official buildings, a
colour known as ‘Habsburg yellow’.
The Habsburg Empire was not the ‘dungeon of peoples’ that the Czech and
South Slav nations claimed to see in it. But the Slav nations had suffered at its
hands since the dual monarchy was created in 1867, for they were granted only
inferior rights by the German Austrians and Magyars. From the late nineteenth
century onwards, the sense of bitterness caused by this situation progressively
undermined the Empire’s very foundations. So terrified was Austria that the
dual monarchy might fall apart that following the assassination of the Grand
Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo it reacted with exaggerated
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 79

severity to the challenge posed by pan-Serbian nationalism and, aided and

abetted by the government in Berlin, it pursued policies that were to lead
inexorably to the First World War.
In the crisis of July 1914 a leading role in Vienna’s ‘war party’ was played by
the elderly Kaiser Franz Joseph, whose immense popularity would in fact have
allowed him to play the part of a peacemaker. The federalist reforms that his
successor attempted to implement at the last minute came too late to save
the monarchy, the desire for independence being more powerful than the last
Kaiser’s statesmanship. Whether the new states that called themselves nation
states, even though, strictly speaking, they were no such thing, would be better
placed than the old monarchy to deal with the problems of a mix of nationali-
ties was one of many questions that remained open during the turbulent
months of 1918–19.

For much of the war, the Polish question, too, remained unresolved. Of its
three regions, the Austrian crown land of Galicia, together with the free city of
Kraków, which had been autonomous until 1846, felt the least threatened in
terms of its national identity. The Poles who lived there were Catholic, like the
Austrians, a denominational singularity that distinguished this part of Poland
from the other two regions and which had to deal with partitioning powers in
thrall to other faiths: Protestant in the case of Prussian Germany and Orthodox
in that of Russia. It was the local landed gentry in Galicia who set the tone,
forming part of the Habsburg’s ruling elite and in general proving ‘Austrian’ in
their thinking. Only the introduction of universal equal suffrage in Cisleithania
in 1907 gave members of the middle class as well as the region’s workers and
peasants the chance to express their interests within a political forum. The
government in Vienna regarded with mistrust the attempts on the part of
Ukrainian-speaking Ruthenians to gain their independence. Whereas the ‘old
Ruthenians’ felt an affinity with Greater Russia and Russian Orthodoxy and
were actively encouraged by pan-Slavic and militantly Orthodox circles in
Russia, most of the younger and predominantly Greek-Catholic Ukrainians
championed a national union of all Ukrainians and were therefore as implac-
ably anti-Russian as they were hostile to Austria. (‘Greek-Catholic’ implies a
Greek Orthodox rite but a commitment to the ecclesiastical laws of Rome.)
The Prussian part of historical Poland consisted of the Grand Duchy of
Posen and Western Prussia and was the most heavily industrialized, the most
affluent and most ‘middle-class’ of the three parts of Poland. (In 1921, following
the restoration of an independent Polish state, the number of people over the
age of ten who could not read or write was 4.2 per cent in the former Prussian
voivodeships, whereas the national average was 33.1 per cent. Ten years later
60.6 per cent of the entire Polish population capable of working was employed
in agriculture, whereas in Posen that figure was under 50 per cent.) The Poles
were represented by their own party in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies as
80 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

well as in the German Reichstag, and there were many family ties between the
Prussian aristocracy and its Polish counterpart. But Berlin politicians had been
increasingly eager to Germanize Poland since the 1880s, placing greater pres-
sure not only on the Polish language but also on major landowners in Poland.
There could be no question of the Poles growing closer to the German Reich,
at least if we ignore those Polish workers who had emigrated to the Ruhr Basin.
The part of Poland that had been incorporated into the Russian Empire was
divided into two very different regions: the historical Eastern Marches, which
were inhabited for the most part by Lithuanian, White Russian and Ukrainian
peasants, and the Kingdom of Poland that had been created in 1815 in the wake
of the Congress of Vienna and that was inhabited in the main by ethnic Poles,
with smaller minorities of Germans, Jews, Lithuanians and Ukrainians. The
Eastern Marches had been exposed to a systematic policy of Russification since
the 1860s, Congress Poland since the mid-1880s, and it was only with the
Russian Revolution of 1905 that the policy became less extreme. In the wake of
the region’s industrialization, a powerful workers’ movement had arisen, more
especially in the area around Warsaw and Lodz. This movement was made
up of two different parties: the first, strident in its Polish nationalism, was the
Polish Socialist Party under Józef Pi5sudski, while the second, far more interna-
tionalist in character, was the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of
Poland and Lithuania, the party of Rosa Luxemburg and, following her move
to Germany in 1899, of Feliks Dzier,y-ski. This second-named party exerted
a powerful influence on the left wing of the first-named party. The Polish
Social Democratic Party worked closely with the right wing of the Polish
Socialist Party in Galicia and Silesia under Ignacy Daszy-ski. The Polish Social
Democratic Party had considerable weight within the Cisleithanian Social
Democratic movement.
In the bourgeois camp, the most important group was the Democratic
League that had been formed in 1886 and six years later was turned into the
National League by the young Roman Dmowski, who saw Germany as the true
enemy of Polish aspirations. What was needed, in his view, was reconciliation
between Poland and Russia. Pi5sudski was a member of the lower Polish aris-
tocracy from the region around Vilnius and belonged to the ‘Jagiellonian’
tradition of a great Polish-Lithuanian federation similar to the one that had
existed before the first partition of Poland in 1772. Dmowski, conversely,
represented the ‘Piastic’ school of thought that wanted to take up and develop
the ostensible heritage of the Polish-Silesian family of rulers and expand Poland
to the west, at the expense of Germany.
The National Democratic Party, or Endecja, that Dmowski founded after
the 1905 Revolution and which proved extremely successful in the elections to
the Duma that were held the following year, was opposed not only to Germany
but also to the Jews, who were accused of dominating the urban crafts and in
that way preventing a healthy Polish middle class from evolving. They were
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 81

additionally at odds with the Socialists, the enemies of private property and
hence of bourgeois order. The increase in authoritarianism in tsarist Russia
after 1905 led many disillusioned National Democrats to break with Dmowski’s
party and join Pi5sudski, who in the meantime had begun to organize a move-
ment for Polish independence that went far beyond the programme of the
Polish Socialist Party.
Writing about Russian Poland, the German historian Hans Roos has
described the internal political fronts: ‘An anti-Russian camp was confronted
by an anti-German one; a socialist intelligentsia by a bourgeois group; a group
aiming at independence by one aiming at autonomy; a revolutionary one by
one favouring legal methods.’74 In Galicia the contrast between the National
Democrats and the Socialists was no less pronounced than in Russian Poland.
But there was a third force here in the form of the Kraków school that sought
closer cooperation with the most moderate of the partitioning powers, Austria.
The younger adherents of this movement in particular regarded Galicia as a
‘Polish Piedmont’: in the event of a war between Russia and Austria-Hungary,
which in the light of the growing conflicts between them seemed a distinct
possibility, Galicia was to play a role in the struggle for Polish independence
similar to the one taken by the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont in the war of
Italian unification. Pi5sudski likewise placed his hopes in a war between the
partitioning powers. As early as June 1914, he had revealed remarkable fore-
sight in predicting that in the event of such a conflict the Central Powers would
first defeat Russia, after which the Western Powers would defeat the Central
Powers. Pi5sudski was fifty-six when he made this prediction. As Roos puts it,
the supporters of the idea of a Polish state

should therefore first ally themselves with the Central Powers, and then,
when the change in fortunes occurred, go over to the West. [. . .] For him
August 1914 was the answer to the prayer which the famous poet Adam
Mickiewicz [. . .] had once addressed to God for a universal war to free the
oppressed Poles.75

In terms of Poland’s future course, two of the partitioning powers entered the
First World War with no clear aims. In August 1914 the German chancellor,
Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, drew up plans for a formally independent
Congress Poland that would none the less be closely allied to Germany, while
the Russian government hesitated to back Dmowski’s programme and agree to
a Congress Poland bound to Russia and enlarged to include Galicia and the
German provinces in the east. Only Austria-Hungary already had a clear idea
of what it wanted at the start of the war, namely, the union of Galicia and
Congress Poland, which would then become a crown land of the Habsburg
Empire. In Berlin, where the Baltic states were a matter of greater concern than
Poland, the ‘Austro-Polish’ solution for a time enjoyed some support, but the
82 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

military successes of the Germans and the defeat of the Austrians quickly led
the government in Berlin to turn its back on this model. As we have already
had occasion to remark, the German governor general in Warsaw and his
Austrian counterpart in Lublin declared the Kingdom of Poland to be a consti-
tutional monarchy on 5 November 1916. Essentially, this consisted of Congress
Poland. Politically, economically and militarily, it was a puppet state dependent
on the Central Powers.
Among Polish politicians, ‘passivists’ such as Dmowski were ranged against
activists such as Pi5sudski after 1914. Even the former group became active
when it seemed likely that the Central Powers would be defeated, whereas the
latter were determined from the outset to become involved in the war in order
to defend Poland’s interests. Militarily speaking, Pi5sudski was self-taught. On
6 August 1914 he crossed the border into Congress Poland to the north-east of
Kraków with a small army of volunteers but was unable to achieve anything
either politically or militarily. A week later an Austrian ultimatum persuaded
him to submit to the newly formed Supreme National Committee in Kraków.
Pi5sudski’s Western Legion of Polish volunteers was able to report a number
of impressive military victories in the winter of 1914/15 and in the spring
of 1915. The previous autumn he had established an underground movement,
the Polish Military Organization, with the help of some friendly officers in
Warsaw. By the autumn of 1916 his legion numbered around 1,000 officers
and some 20,000 men. He refused to see it turned into a Polish Auxiliary Corps
of the Central Powers and when this move went ahead in spite of his protesta-
tions, he resigned as its commander in chief. In January 1917 he decided to
join the provisional State Council convened by the German governor general,
Hans Hartwig von Beseler, and to take over the portfolio of military affairs.
He had no intention of submitting to Germany’s leaders but wanted to
strengthen Poland’s military might to the point where, following Russia’s
anticipated defeat, Poland could join the Western Powers in overthrowing
the Central Powers.
For Poland, too, the Russian Revolution of February 1917 proved to be an
important turning point. On 30 March 1917 the Provisional Government in
Petrograd declared its support for an independent Poland embracing all the
regions inhabited by Poles and united with Russia in a free military union.
In early June, in the wake of the intended federalization of the Russian Empire,
the Provisional Government decided to incorporate all non-Russian soldiers
in the Russian armed forces into national units. The newly formed Supreme
Polish Army Committee immediately gained the support of the National
Democrats, whom Dmowski had in the meantime persuaded to work closely
with the Western Powers. Dmowski travelled to London in early 1916 in order
to enlist the support of the Western Allies for his ideas for an independent
Poland enlarged at Germany’s expense. In Lausanne in August 1917 he formed
the Polish National Committee as a government in exile and placed himself at
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 83

its head. The internationally acclaimed pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski promoted
Dmowski’s ideas in the United States, appealing personally to Woodrow Wilson
and to the latter’s closest advisers.
For a time the Polish Socialist Party and Polish Military Organization
cooperated with the Warsaw State Council but in early May 1917 they joined
the opposition and by June were in open conflict with the Central Powers. At
the same time Pi5sudski formed an alliance between his own close supporters
and the Polish Socialist Party and the peasants’ People’s Party, naming his new
party the Democratic League. On 24 July 1917 he resigned from the provi-
sional State Council and instructed those of his volunteers in the Polish
Auxiliary Corps who were loyal to him to refuse to swear an oath of allegiance
to the German Kaiser. Some 4,000 out of 6,500 legionaries respected his wishes,
as did 164 of their 275 officers. All were immediately interned by the German
occupying power. Pi5sudski himself was arrested on 22 July and taken to the
Prussian fortress at Magdeburg, where he remained until early November
1918, unable to influence political events in Poland. But his enforced absence
left his political authority unaffected, and internment helped, rather, to turn
him into a national hero of positively mythical dimensions.
Shortly after Pi5sudski’s arrest, the governments in Berlin and Vienna
decided to give the Kingdom of Poland a provisional head in the form of a
Regency Council, a development accelerated by the demonstrative resignation
of the State Council on 25 August 1917 in protest at the way in which its
workings were constantly overseen and hampered by the occupying forces.
On 12 September the two Kaisers, Wilhelm II and Karl, jointly introduced a
provisional constitution, or patent, under the terms of which legislation, the
dispensation of justice and all administrative matters were largely placed in
Polish hands. On 27 October, a three-man Regency Council was appointed,
made up of the archbishop of Warsaw, Aleksander Kakowski, the mayor of
Warsaw, Prince Zdzis5aw Lubomirski, and the landowner Józef Ostrowski. On
7 December a Polish government was installed under the premiership of the
lawyer Jan Kucharzewski.
The Kingdom of Poland had barely become an autonomous state when the
second Russian Revolution of 1917 altered the international situation in an
altogether radical way. The Bolsheviks’ seizure of power dashed the hopes of
the ‘passivists’ that Russia would continue to work alongside the Western
Powers and help defeat the Central Powers. As part of the moves to dispossess
all the major landowners, Polish landowners in the Eastern Marches likewise
lost their estates. The First Polish Corps that was stationed there under General
Józef Dowbor-Mu0nicki took up arms against the Bolsheviks in order to protect
Polish possessions both in the countryside and in the towns and cities. In
January 1918 the fortress at Bobruisk fell into the hands of the Polish units that
were, objectively speaking, the allies of the Central Powers at this time. The city
of Minsk fell to them in February. The National Democrats likewise switched
84 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

sides, and one of their most prominent representatives, Jan Stecki, became
foreign minister in Kucharzewski’s government. Hans Roos has described the
influence of Russian events on Poland in the following terms: ‘If the February
revolution had alienated the Polish left-wing parties from the policy of the
Central Powers, the October revolution brought considerable numbers of
the right-wing closer to the occupation authorities and the Government set
up by them.’76
But this large measure of agreement between Poland and the Central
Powers proved to be of short duration. On 9 February 1918 Germany and
Austria-Hungary signed a separate peace treaty with the Ukraine, granting the
latter all those regions that were largely settled by Ukrainians, including the
Chelm region, which was a part of Congress Poland. A week later the Lithuanian
Regional Council installed by the German Supreme Command in the East
proclaimed an independent Lithuanian state that was officially recognized by
the Reichstag on 23 March. In this way the Germans were able to prevent a
restitution of the old Lithuanian-Polish union, or ‘Jagiellonian’ Poland, desired
by Pi5sudski and his supporters and latterly also by Dmowski’s National
Democrats. Poles of all shades of opinion were particularly unhappy at the fact
that Vilnius, a city largely inhabited by Poles, and the eastern half of Galicia,
with its Polish and Ukrainian populations, were not a part of the new Polish
state. On 14 February 1918 the Regency Council protested at the new division
of Poland, and Kucharzewski’s government resigned, as did the Austrian
governor general in Lublin, Count Stanislaus Maria von Szeptycki.
But there was no open breach between Poland and the Central Powers.
On 4 April a new government was formed in Warsaw under the Galician lawyer
and economist Jan Steczkowski and Prince Janusz Radziwi55, who ran the
Political Department. What united their government with the occupying forces
was their common interest in resisting the onrush of Bolshevism, although
such an ‘alliance’ was highly controversial in Poland, where the Socialists, and
especially the left wing of the Polish Socialist Party, were sympathetic towards
Lenin and his party. And so the left boycotted the (indirect) elections to the
State Council in June. (Only some of its members were elected by the regional
and municipal councils, the others being nominated by the Regency Council.)
By this stage of the war, few Poles still believed that the Central Powers
might win, and the military developments of August 1918 dispelled any
remaining doubts. At the end of September an army of volunteers in France
under the command of General Józef Haller and comprising around 20,000 men
was recognized by a Franco-Polish military convention as an Allied army. On
8 October Roman Dmowski, acting on behalf of the Polish National Committee
which the Allies had not previously recognized as a government in exile,
submitted to Woodrow Wilson a memorandum proposing the formation of
an independent Polish republic as a ‘buttress against the German drive towards
the east’.77 The new Polish state would include not only Congress Poland but
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 85

also Posen, West Prussia, Upper Silesia and parts of East Prussia, in the south,
Galicia and the small Silesian duchy of Teschen (Polish Cieszyn, Czech T2gin),
which was partly Polish-speaking, partly Czech-speaking, and in the east large
tracts of the historical Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Western Ukraine. The
previous day, and without seeking the consent of the two governors general,
the Regency Council had issued an appeal to the Polish people, invoking the
right of self-determination of all nations proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson and
announcing the formation of an all-party government and elections for a
constituent national assembly.
Events then came thick and fast. On 12 October, in an attempt to pre-empt
a feared insurrection by the Polish Military Organization, the Regency Council
put the Polish Defence Force under its own authority, a force that until then
had been under the control of the German governor general, and also called
for volunteers for this now purely Polish army. On the 26th a cabinet was
formed that was made up for the most part of National Democrats and that was
to offer the still interned Pi5sudski the post of minister of war. The following
day a Polish Liquidation Commission was established in Kraków on the basis
of Kaiser Karl’s ‘People’s Manifesto’. Made up of Socialists, National Democrats
and members of the Peasants’ Party, it was effectively the government of
Western Galicia. In L’viv and eastern Galicia, a Ukrainian National Council
assumed power on 30 October and 1 November respectively, in each case with
the help of Ukrainian rifle clubs. Having failed in its attempt to overthrow the
Regency Council, the new Warsaw government was forced to resign. On the
night of 6/7 November, the Polish Military Organization mounted a coup
in Lublin under the command of Edward Rydz-4mig5y, one of Pi5sudski’s
most loyal supporters. The following day a Provisional People’s Government
of the Polish Republic was formed under the Galician Socialist leader Ignacy
Daszy-ski, while Rydz-4mig5y was appointed commander of all the Polish
troops. The Regency Council was declared null and void.
Two days later, on 9 November, Józef Pi5sudski was released from prison on
the basis of orders issued by the last imperial government in the person of
Prince Max of Baden. He arrived in Warsaw by special train on the morning
of the 10th, and on the 11th declared the date on which the new state was
founded. The Regency Council placed him in charge of the army, entrusting
him with political power on the 14th. It was the Council’s final official action
before its resignation. In order to avoid any conflict with the government in
Lublin, the ‘chief of state’ – a title last borne by Tadeusz Ko0ciuszko during the
1794 uprising – named Daszy-ski his prime minister, only to replace him on
the 17th by a more moderate Socialist, Jedrzej Moraczewski, who formed a
government of Socialists and members of the Peasants’ Party. The move was
designed to silence protests from the right. A joint decree by the chief of state
and the government on 22 November, delimiting their respective areas of
competence, completed the process of creating the new state.
86 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

In November 1918 it was still completely unclear where the frontiers of

the new Poland would lie. What mattered for the present was that for the first
time since the third partition of Poland on 3 January 1795, there was again
an independent Polish state, a state that had not existed for almost 124 years.
All three partitioning powers – Russia, Prussia and Austria – were losers in the
First World War. Their defeat was necessary in order to make good, as far as
possible, the injustices brought about by the partitions of 1772, 1792 and 1795.
A world war was the precondition for Poland’s national liberation: Polish
patriots from Mickiewicz to Pi5sudski were convinced of this connection. The
First World War had not started because of Poland, but its outcome repre-
sented an example of poetic justice for the country. Poles regained their
freedom, a freedom for which they had fought in vain, not only under Napoleon
but in the insurrections of 1830/31, 1848 and 1863. If there can ever be a
triumph of historical nemesis, then Poland witnessed it in November 1918.

Trust Gambled Away and Violence Unleashed:

The Legacy of the First World War
At least sixty-five million soldiers were mobilized; 8.5 million were killed and
more than twenty-one million wounded. There were also 7.8 million prisoners
of war and missing persons, and more than five million civilian fatalities in
Europe, not including Russia. By the time that the First World War came to an
end with the ceasefire agreed at Compiègne on 11 November 1918, the victors
were no less profoundly affected than the nations that had been defeated. ‘La
Grande Guerre’, or the ‘Great War’, as the First World War continues to be
called in France and Great Britain, had proved to be very different from any of
the wars that had been fought in Europe in the nineteenth century. Between
1914 and 1918 the civilian population had suffered far more than in the strug-
gles to unify either Italy or Germany between 1859 and 1871. According to the
latest research, it remains unclear whether famine and wartime privations were
the immediate cause of the pandemic of ‘Spanish flu’ that killed between
twenty-five and fifty million civilians and soldiers between 1918 and 1923.
The First World War was the first in which human beings were destroyed
anonymously and in vast numbers by the resources of modern technology:
flamethrowers and mustard gas, torpedoes launched from submarines and
bombs dropped from aircraft. But most victims were killed by machine guns,
which had first been used in the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865
and afterwards in the colonial wars in Africa. The horror of automatic weapons
continued to haunt the survivors no less than the fascination of what massed
resources and technology were capable of achieving when allowed to strip
away the veneer of civilization and unleash hitherto unknown forces.
There was not just one experience of war, but several. Soldiers had a different
experience from civilians; those who served on the front reported different
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 87

reactions from those who served behind the lines; academics responded differ-
ently from ‘ordinary’ people; men differently from women; women who worked
in factories and offices in place of their menfolk serving in the armed forces
differently from women who were not in gainful employment; and adults,
finally, reacted differently from adolescents and children. And the way in which
people perceived the war and assessed it retrospectively depended also on their
own political standpoint. Those who had refused to be carried along on the
initial tide of enthusiasm or who in the course of the war had come to oppose it
could in the end adopt the most radical of left-wing positions and respond
to the war with the civil war necessary to remove the capitalist social order
that was ostensibly to blame for the ‘imperialist’ war. Those who accepted the
war as a necessity and who continued to hold the view that their own country
was in the right were scarcely willing to accept defeat as definitive: for them,
peace could only be an interim stage before the next armed conflict erupted
between nations. This was the position of the extreme right and, like that of the
extreme left, it was a minority view in 1918. In every country, the vast majority
had had enough of war without, however, converting to pacifism as a point of
principle. How lasting the peace would be depended above all on how just or
unjust it was felt to be.
Nations such as the Poles, Finns and Czechs who owe their longed-for
national independence to the First World War naturally look back on it with
feelings markedly different from those of the Germans, French and British,
none of whom can forget the terrible mass killings on the battlefields of
Flanders and northern France and who know that two decades later the First
World War was to be followed by a second global conflict. The famous remark
of the American historian and diplomat George F. Kennan, who referred to the
First World War as ‘the great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century,
reflects the dominant view of those countries that made up the Central and
Western Powers. But there is no single phrase that represents a consensus view
in Europe of the present day.
The longer the war lasted, the less the parliaments of the period enjoyed
the trust of the broad mass of voters, the only exceptions being the lower house
in Great Britain and the United States Congress. In most of the countries
involved in the war the elected assemblies lost influence after 1914. The
Austrian Reichsrat was unable to meet between March 1914 and May 1917; the
French Chamber of Deputies met only in private until the end of 1917; and
the Italian Chamber met only rarely and was in any case denied control of the
way in which the resources it sanctioned were used: there were no longer any
budgetary debates. And in Germany the concentration of executive power –
especially the military power that was vested in the army’s high command –
did little to inspire confidence in the state and its institutions. The authorities
were held responsible for shortages in foodstuffs, for inflation and for the black
market; omnipresent censorship encouraged a belief in rumours; and even
88 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

more than in peacetime the judiciary had to contend with the suspicion that in
the eyes of the law not everyone was equal any longer.
In the longer term, one of the biggest dangers was the undermining of faith
in the stability of the world’s currencies. Public debt mounted inexorably in all
the countries fighting the war, and the Western Powers in Europe were able to
finance their war effort only with war loans from the United States. (Concern
over repayment of these loans must have been one of the reasons why Woodrow
Wilson’s decision to enter the war proved so uncontentious at home.) In the
expectation that they would be victorious, all states took out war loans
with their citizens, particularly Germany. Even as early as August 1914 the
Reichsbank was issuing treasury bonds and bills – purely financial transactions
like commercial bills of exchange and, like these, used together with gold to
cover the Reichsmark. From then on there was effectively no limit on how
much money the Reichsbank could create: the country’s war loans could have
been repaid only by reparations by the country’s enemies. The Austro-
Hungarian Bank likewise contributed to the country’s inflation by issuing huge
numbers of banknotes.
Everywhere countries were turning their backs on the monetary systems of
the pre-war period. In the words of the German economic historian Wolfram
Fischer:

The gold standard, with its legally fixed parities, had provided stable condi-
tions for private finance. These were now lost. In terms of a country’s
domestic economy, people had to get used to increasing rates of inflation,
and in foreign trade they had to accept foreign exchange controls and
allocations and even import and export bans. At the very start of the war
most countries suspended their central banks’ obligation to redeem gold –
only Great Britain retained this obligation, at least on a formal level, while
making things more difficult for its citizens. They also banned the export
of gold – although, once again, there was no such ban in Britain, all such
dealings came to a virtual end. In France such exports were allowed only in
exceptional circumstances until July 1915. [. . .] Foreign trade, which prior
to the war had lain entirely in the hands of private firms, increasingly
became a matter of international agreements, especially of loan agreements
that no longer involved private bankers as creditors but which were reached
with central banks and state treasuries. Here Britain led the way, later
followed above all by America. In this way the international loan business
passed from private into public hands and was politicized in the process, a
development that was to have considerable implications after the war.78

The nationalization of foreign trade was in no small measure a result of

the dramatic shift in international trade routes caused by the British naval
blockade and the German U-boat war. As such, it was merely a particularly
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 89

crass example of a phenomenon described by the Marxist thinker Rudolf

Hilferding as ‘organized capitalism’. Hilferding was born in Vienna in 1877,
becoming editor in chief of the Berlin Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts
in 1907. It was in 1910, in his book Finance Capital, that he first developed his
ideas on the way in which a mere handful of banks dominated industry, which
was organized along the lines of a monopoly. In 1915 he took these ideas a
stage further, arguing that ‘the tremendous increase in the power of the state’
that had been produced by finance capital and its policies tended ‘to mitigate
the anarchy of production’ and contained within it

the seeds for a transformation of an anarchically capitalist economic order

into one marked by organized capitalism. [. . .] Instead of socialism, it seems
possible to have a society in which the economy is organized not demo-
cratically but powerfully, a society at the head of which would be the
combined forces of capitalist monopolies and of the state, under which the
working masses would be active as the civil servants of production struc-
tured according to a particular hierarchy. Instead of the defeat of capitalist
society by socialism we would have a society of organized capitalism better
suited to meeting the immediate needs of the different social classes.79

In Hilferding’s view this development gave capitalism a chance of survival and

could even have provided an alternative to socialism. Nor was this necessarily
the same as the downfall of the proletariat. To the extent that the proletariat
had organized itself and learnt to fight for its own concerns, it had altered the
face of capitalism and made it more bearable: ‘The counterrevolutionary effects
of the workers’ movement weakened the revolutionary tendencies of capi-
talism.’80 Although the transition to a qualitatively new socialist society
remained a task for politicians, the fact that the workers’ movement had made
it impossible for capitalism to commit its worst excesses and impoverish the
population clearly removed all the essential preconditions for a revolutionary
transformation of society in the spirit of Marx and Lenin. Indeed, Hilferding’s
remarkably optimistic analysis could be taken to mean that the rights that the
workers had acquired by means of their class struggle increased the prospects
of an evolutionary realization of socialism.
Hilferding’s ‘organized capitalism’ was described by his enemies in less flat-
tering terms as ‘state socialism’, ‘wartime socialism’ or simply ‘socialism’. In
every country involved in the war, including even the most liberal, the state
interfered in the economic life of the nation with increasing importunity after
1914, regulating and organizing it in ways not seen until then. The British
Defence of the Realm Act of August 1914, the establishment of a Department
for Wartime Raw Materials at the Prussian Ministry of War under the leader-
ship of Walther Rathenau, the president of AEG, that same month, the forma-
tion of wartime industrial committees in Russia in May 1915, the establishment
90 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of a State Secretariat for Weapons and Munitions under General Alfredo

Dallolio in Italy in May 1915, which two years later became a full Ministry, and
the creation of the American War Industries Board in July 1917 are only a few
examples of the way in which state and industry grew closer to one another
during the war years. Not only did state bodies influence business undertak-
ings, but the latter in turn left their mark on political decisions.
The organized workforce also became involved in the wartime economy: in
France, for example, the socialist Albert Thomas was appointed secretary of
state for artillery and munitions in May 1915, becoming armaments minister
in December 1916, while in Germany a similar development stemmed from
the enactment of the Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law in December 1916. The
relations between trade unions and the state also proved reciprocal, although
labour was invariably subordinated to the demands of the wartime economy.
(These priorities were especially clear in France, where the industrialist Louis
Loucheur replaced Albert Thomas as armaments minister in September 1917,
after the Socialists had turned their back on government.) When Hilferding
committed his thoughts to paper in 1915, it was still unclear which elements of
this ‘state socialism’ or ‘organized capitalism’ would survive the war, and it was
also extremely doubtful if state control of the economy and society, as practised
during the war, would make capitalism less prone to periods of crisis than had
been the case prior to 1914, even though Hilferding and many other Social
Democrats expected to see improvements in this regard.
Of all the experiences of the war years, arguably the most shocking was the
realization that the accustomed norms of bourgeois life so quickly lost their
validity. The killing of thousands of Belgian civilians and the destruction of
medieval Louvain by German soldiers in the late summer and early autumn of
1914, the murder of at least 1,000 Serbian civilians by Hungarian troops in
September 1914, the first use of poison gas by German troops at Ypres in April
1915, the mass deportation of Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians and Jews by the
Russian army and the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in
1915: the number of times that expectations of wartime ‘normality’ were trans-
gressed was legion.
For many ‘civilized’ Europeans, the atrocities committed during the two
Balkan Wars of 1912–13 still seemed specifically Balkan or oriental, but in
1914 it became clear that even nations that had contributed to the Age of
Enlightenment were capable of unspeakably barbaric acts in waging war on
their fellow Europeans, acts hitherto visited only on colonial nations. In
November 1914, fifteen months before he was killed at Verdun on 4 March
1916, the German Expressionist painter Franz Marc wrote an essay to which he
gave the title ‘Secret Europe’. For him, the claims made for the war by national-
ists in every country were no more than a tissue of lies. He, too, believed that
the war was a historical necessity, but he was also convinced that it had a deeper
meaning, a meaning hidden from its main actors:
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S SEMINAL CATASTROPHE 91

In this war it is not – in spite of what is written in the newspapers and

notwithstanding all that our politicians tell us – the Central Powers that are
fighting an external enemy, nor even is one race at war with another. Rather,
this great war is a European civil war, a war with the inner, invisible enemy of
the European spirit.81

But this war had to be fought not just by Europeans – and this was true well
before the United States of America entered the conflict. The great colonial
nations deployed troops brought to Europe from across the seas: France, in
particular, drew heavily on soldiers from North Africa, with 175,000 coming
from Algeria alone. (Algeria, it is true, was not an actual colony but a part of
the motherland.) Great Britain’s army was strengthened by 500,000 Canadians,
332,000 Australians and 112,000 New Zealanders, most of them volunteers of
British extraction. On all the fronts there were 1.5 million members of the
Indian volunteer army, together with 90,000 Chinese recruits from Weihai who
were forced to dig trenches in France for the Allies. Equally unwillingly, count-
less black African porters had to serve in the army. Of these, around 100,000
are believed to have been killed in the fighting in German East Africa.
But the most extreme eruption of violence in Continental Europe after 1917
was the Russian civil war, which would not have been possible at all without the
First World War and which in many respects represented its continuation with
only partly different means. The tendency to think in the categories of friend
and foe, of self-assertion and destruction, was now directed first and foremost
at an internal enemy, which it generally required little effort to make objec-
tively complicit with the external enemy. Nor was it only in Russia that a war
between nations turned into an internal civil war, for such a development
became a sign of the times, a hallmark of the era that began with the signing of
the armistice at Compiègne on 11 November 1918.
 2

From the Armistice to the World Economic Crisis:

1918–33
The Pace of Revolution Slows: Germany on the Way
to the Weimar Republic

T &ő$Ś)6 7!ā ā8) of the First World War, Europe underwent three
different kinds of upheaval. First, there was the nationalist, revolutionary
break-up of three multiracial states, namely, the Russian, Habsburg and
Ottoman Empires, of which only the first was to be reborn in a radically altered
form as the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. Second, there were the socio-
revolutionary upheavals, of which only that of the Bolsheviks was to prove
enduring. And, third, there was the revolutionary reconstitution of existing
states that made the change from a monarchy to a republic while retaining
their existing social order.
The third type of upheaval, involving a mere change of the state’s form, was
felt only by Germany. From the outset it was clear that the Majority Social
Democrats, the principal force for change here, were keen to avoid a civil war
of the kind seen in Bolshevik Russia. When they spearheaded the revolutionary
movement, Friedrich Ebert’s Social Democrats remained an established party:
it’s leaders leapt aboard a runaway train and brought it under control. If the
Social Democrats had behaved any differently at that time, they would have
jeopardized their party unity. They acted in the interests of self-preservation
and out of a sense of responsibility towards the country as a whole.
The Social Democrats may have been wary of unleashing the forces of revo-
lution, but they had an essential role to play in any democratic revolution in
Germany. The fear of chaos and civil war was well founded, as was the concern
that if civil war were to break out, the Allies would intervene, turning Germany
into the plaything of the victorious powers. It was a danger that could be exor-
cised only if by far the largest of the workers’ parties in Germany could steer the
movement along well-ordered lines. The leaders of the Social Democrats were
able to avoid their own worst fears, and yet they achieved very little of what they
had hoped for. It was a high price that they had to pay for an orderly transition

92
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 93

of power, and within only a few months of the events of 9 November 1918 even
large sections of the Social Democratic Party found it hard to recognize them-
selves in the republic that had emerged from all the upheavals that had taken
place in Germany.
Dubbed ‘the father of revisionism’, Eduard Bernstein, who had joined the
Independent Socialist Party in 1916 only to return to the bosom of the parent
party in December 1918, was one of the first to draw attention to the link
between social complexity and fear of the violent overthrow of existing condi-
tions. He published his analysis in 1921 under the title Die deutsche Revolution,
ihr Ursprung, Verlauf und Werk (The German Revolution: Its Origins, Course
and Work), arguing that the more a society is based on the principle of the divi-
sion of labour, the less it can sustain a radical restructuring. According to
Bernstein, a further reason for the political restraint of the weeks after 9
November 1918 lay in the advanced, if partial, democratization of Germany:
although the Reich had no government that was responsible to parliament
until October 1918, it had none the less had universal equal suffrage for men
for half a century.
In 1918, therefore, the only way forward was greater democracy in the form
of the extension of the democratic right to vote to women and to individual
states right down to the level of district councils and local communities,
together with a complete parliamentarization of the existing system of govern-
ment. The Social Democrats had been the most decisive champions of greater
democracy in the Reich and would have lost their credibility if they had devi-
ated from that line in 1918 and returned to the orthodox Marxist slogan of a
‘class struggle’. It was for the same reason that the Majority Social Democrats
responded with a clear and emphatic ‘no’ to the call ‘All power to the Councils’,
a call that amounted to a dictatorship of a minority.
The moderate Independent Social Democrats, including Hugo Haase and
Wilhelm Dittmann, both of whom were members of the Reichstag, and the
theorist Rudolf Hilferding, who was not, had no objections to a Constituent
Assembly but wanted to postpone the elections and use the delay to provide
democracy with a firmer social and political basis. As Hilferding noted in his
party newspaper, Freiheit, on 18 November 1918:

Democracy must be anchored in such a way that reaction is impossible. The

administration must not become a playground for counterrevolutionary
aspirations. Above all, however, we must prove that we are not just demo-
crats but socialists, too. The implementation of a whole series of important
transitional measures is possible without further ado; these must be carried
out in order to create positions unassailable by any capitalist countermove.1

There were good reasons for adopting a policy aimed at the cautious establish-
ment of a parliamentary democracy, but this did not mean that the elections had
94 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

to be postponed, and this was the view taken by the vast majority of delegates at
the First General Congress of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils of Germany,
which met in Berlin between 16 and 21 December 1918. Of the 514 delegates
representing local councils, some 300 Majority Social Democrats and around
100 Independent Socialists were inclined to hold this view. The remainder were
either left-wing liberals or independent. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht
had not been elected, and the proposal that they be allowed to attend the
proceedings in an advisory capacity was rejected by a large majority on the very
first day of the congress. The key decision was taken on 19 December: by 344 to
98 votes, the delegates rejected a proposal that the constitution of the Socialist
Republic be based on the system of councils. Conversely, the proposal that elec-
tions to the Constituent National Assembly be held on 19 January 1919 was
adopted by 400 votes to 50. This was even earlier than the Council of People’s
Deputies had agreed to on 29 November, namely, 16 February.
Two other votes made it clear that the majority of members of the Congress
were to the left of the provisional revolutionary government. By a large majority,
the Council of People’s Deputies was invited to nationalize all those branches of
industry, especially mining, that were deemed ready for such a move. And the
delegates unanimously approved the ‘Hamburg Points’ that transferred the
military command initially to the Council of People’s Deputies and then to the
still to be elected Central Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. Moreover,
all badges of rank were to be abolished and officers elected by their men. The
Soldiers’ Councils were to ensure discipline. And a people’s militia would
replace the standing army.
The Hamburg Points were a reaction to the failings of the People’s Delegates.
True, they had to work together with the army high command in the interests
of a speedy demobilization, but it was by no means necessary to treat the coun-
try’s military leaders as equal partners in the revolutionary government. If the
People’s Delegates had not accepted some of the Soldiers’ Councils’ more
moderate demands for reform such as the closure of officers’ clubs and the
abolition of the need to salute officers when not on duty, it is unlikely that the
Hamburg Points would have been adopted at all: some, after all, were positively
utopian in character. It would certainly have been difficult to create a repub-
lican militia since most workers would have found it profoundly abhorrent to
fire on their own comrades in the event of a putsch. But there were no moves
on the part of the Council of People’s Deputies to create a force loyal to the
Republic in spite of demands by a number of younger officers associated with
the newly formed Republican Leaders’ Union. The guidelines for implementing
the Hamburg Points passed by the Council of People’s Deputies on 19 January
1919 already bore the imprint of the army high command, and in the law
governing the formation of a provisional army that was passed by the National
Assembly on 6 March 1919, it was no longer possible to detect any signs of the
military resolution of the Congress of Councils.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 95

In terms of the country’s nationalization programme, the Majority Social

Democrats did not want to act unduly hastily during the difficult transitional
period between a wartime and a peacetime economy and, in spite of their
fundamental support for the idea of common property, they were willing to
leave the Constituent Assembly to decide on the exact nature of the future
distribution of property. They were also afraid that the Allies might treat any
nationalized industries as a security to be offset against any demands that
might be made in terms of reparations. A way out of their dilemma was the
formation of a nationalization commission made up of experts from both
Social Democratic parties and also from the middle classes. The Council of
People’s Deputies took this decision on 18 November 1918, and for the present
this delayed the need for any more immediate action. By the time that Karl
Kautsky’s commission had reported in the middle of February 1919 and offered
a majority view that coal-mining should be nationalized as a matter of economic
and political necessity, the National Assembly had already been elected, but it
did not enjoy the sort of majority that would have made it possible to imple-
ment the type of policy recommended by the commission.
An even more cautious approach was taken by the Free Trade Unions,
which were likewise Social Democratic in their outlook. They reached an
agreement with the employers’ leaders on 15 November aimed at establishing
a Central Cooperative Union of the Industrial and Commercial Employers’
and Employees’ Federations of Germany. Known as the Stinnes–Legien
Agreement after its two main signatories, the leading heavy industrialist Hugo
Stinnes and the chairman of the General Commission of Free Trade Unions,
Carl Legien, it accepted that salary agreements should be worked out by both
unions and management, that an eight-hour day should be regarded as the
norm, although this would be a permanent measure, of course, only if all
civilized countries were to follow the German example, and that workers’
committees be set up in all firms with more than fifty employees. The Central
Cooperative Union sprang from a common interest on the part of both trade
unions and employers, for neither side wanted the economy to be subjected to
the dictates of the state; and both were keen to avoid any kind of ‘unofficial’
nationalization from below. For the time being, then, there could be no possi-
bility of the kind of change to the distribution of property envisaged by the
majority of members of the Congress of Councils.
A final conflict that arose at the Congress of Councils and that was to leave a
lasting legacy concerned the division of responsibilities between the Council of
People’s Deputies and the future Central Council. The Majority Social Democrats
proposed that the Council of People’s Deputies be given legislative and executive
powers and that the Central Council should be entrusted with the role of parlia-
mentary watchdog. Hugo Haase was in full agreement with this proposal. All
laws should be submitted to the Central Council, which should also be consulted
on the most important ones. But the Independent Social Democrats wanted
96 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

more: the Central Council should have the full right to accept or reject laws
before they were promulgated. The Majority Social Democrats felt that if this
were to happen, the Council of People’s Deputies would find its ability to act
compromised, and so it issued an ultimatum: if the Independents’ motion were
accepted, then the Majority Social Democratic delegates would resign, together
with their secretaries of state and Prussian ministers. Once the Congress had
agreed to the term ‘parliamentary watchdog’ in the sense that Haase intended it,
the extreme left wing of the Independent Social Democrats carried out its threat
to boycott the elections to the Central Council, with the result that the twenty-
seven members who made up the Central Council of the German Socialist
Republic were without exception Majority Social Democrats.
The delegates from the Independent Social Democratic Party had thus lost
all basis for their work. The ‘Berlin Christmas Struggles’ led to the formal
abandonment of the coalition of 10 November. These struggles were the
dramatic high point of a conflict that had been smouldering for two weeks and
that concerned payment of the People’s Navy Division, a group of revolutionary
sailors that had occupied the Stadtschloss in Berlin. The mutinous sailors
detained the government on 23 December and ‘arrested’ Otto Wels, the city’s
commander, in the Marstall. The ensuing bloody fighting around the
Stadtschloss and the Marstall ended with the military defeat of the regular
troops and the political defeat of the government. The Independent Social
Democrats complained quite rightly that their Majority Social Democrat
colleagues had given a blank cheque to the minister of war whom they had
called on to help them and in doing so placed Wels’s life in jeopardy. When the
Central Council none the less approved the actions of Ebert and his party asso-
ciates on 28 December, the three representatives of the Independent Social
Democratic Party, Haase, Dittmann and Barth, took this as their excuse to
resign from the Council of People’s Deputies.
Two days later the inaugural meeting of the German Communist Party
opened in the Prussian House of Representatives. The new party was made up
of members from two different schools of thought: on the one hand, there was
the Spartacus League, which until then had formed the extreme left wing of the
Independent Social Democrats, and the International Communists of
Germany, a grouping drawn from left-wing radicals in Hamburg and Bremen.
The delegates’ mood could hardly have been more radical. Rosa Luxemburg
attempted in vain to persuade the conference that it was senseless and even
dangerous to agree to a motion committing the party to boycott the elections
to the Constituent National Assembly. The delegates passed the motion by
62 votes to 23. There was no escaping the anti-parliamentary thrust of the deci-
sion. The Marxist historian Arthur Rosenberg, who left the Communist Party
in 1927 after having been an active member for seven years, was quite right to
note in 1935 that the resolution was ‘indirectly a invitation to indulge in
putschist activities of an altogether foolhardy kind’.2
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 97

The impulse to overthrow existing conditions was strong and it did not take
long to find an excuse upon which to act. On 4 January 1919, three days after
the Communist Party’s inaugural congress had ended, the Prussian prime
minister, Paul Hirsch, who was a member of the Majority Social Democrats,
dismissed the Berlin chief of police, Emil Eichhorn, who was on the left wing
of the Independent Social Democrats. During the Christmas struggles,
Eichhorn’s force had sided with the mutinous sailors, so that his dismissal was
inevitable. No government could entrust the capital’s police force to a man who
had worked for the overthrow of that government. Left-wing radicals saw this
differently. For them, Eichhorn’s removal from office was a deliberate chal-
lenge, and by the evening of 4 January the executive committee of Berlin’s
Independent Social Democrats had consulted the Revolutionary Stewards
from the city’s metal industry and decided to hold a day of action in protest at
Eichhorn’s dismissal. The corresponding call to workers to demonstrate on the
5th was also signed by the central committee of the German Communist Party.
The number of demonstrators and the belligerence that they evinced went
far beyond anything that the organizers had expected, and within hours events
had got out of control. The Berlin Independent Socialists, the Communist
Party and the Revolutionary Stewards met at the city’s police headquarters to
discuss what they should do next, but even while they were doing so, armed
workers were occupying the printing works of the Social Democratic Vorwärts
and the left-wing liberal Berliner Tageblatt as well as the premises occupied by
the publishing houses of Mosse, Ullstein and Scherl, the Büxenstein printing
works and Wolff ’s Telegraph Office. It was rumoured – inaccurately – that all
the army regiments in Berlin and even garrisons from out of town, including
one from Frankfurt an der Oder, were ready to rise up in armed insurrection,
prompting Karl Liebknecht to give the fatal signal: ‘Down with the Ebert–
Scheidemann government.’ In the face of individual protests, the majority of
members decided to support the occupation of the newspaper offices, to call
out Berlin’s workers on a general strike and to bring the government to the
point of collapse.
The January uprising in Berlin continues – with questionable legitimacy –
to be called the ‘Spartacist revolt’. From the outset it was leaderless, but it was
not without a purpose. The watchword ‘Down with the Ebert–Scheidemann
government’ meant nothing less than the prevention of elections to the
Constituent National Assembly and the establishment of a dictatorship of
the proletariat. Even before elections for a Constituent Assembly could be held,
the German followers and sympathizers of the Russian Bolsheviks were keen to
achieve what the Russians had done in January 1918 when they had brought
their country’s freely elected Constituent Assembly to a brutal end. In this way
the Council of People’s Deputies was forced to take up the gauntlet thrown
down by the most radical minority of the Berlin proletariat and counter their
assault on democracy.
98 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The man responsible for carrying out this task was Gustav Noske, who had
joined the Council of People’s Deputies as recently as 29 December, the day
after the Independent Social Democrats had walked out. He was a trained
woodcutter who had later become the Social Democrats’ spokesman on naval
affairs in the Reichstag. In dealing with the present putsch, he was able to rely
on only a handful of replacement battalions in the city, together with sections
of the Republican Militia, the Charlottenburg security troops and, finally, the
recently formed auxiliaries of the Social Democratic Party. They were joined
by the right-wing volunteer corps that was formed on 7 January in response to
the government’s appeal for volunteers, and, from 8 January, by volunteer
troops from the army high command.
It was initially unclear whether there would be any armed fighting at all. At
the insistence of the executive committee of the Independent Socialists, the
government began negotiations with the rebels on 6 January. The Majority
Socialists demanded the immediate evacuation of the newspaper offices occu-
pied by the insurgents, while Karl Kautsky proposed a compromise to the more
moderate members of the Independent Socialists: the negotiations were to be
deemed a failure if they did not lead to the complete restoration of the freedom
of the press. It seems unlikely that those occupying the buildings in question
would have been prepared to cross this bridge. Their counter-demand, that
Eichhorn be reinstated, was impossible to meet. But the attempt was not
even made since the Majority Social Democrats rejected it, as did the Central
Council when it met on 7 January. The die had been cast for a violent resolu-
tion of the conflict.
Given the situation on the ground, there could be no doubt about the even-
tual outcome. The demonstrators who had occupied the Vorwärts building
were driven from the premises on 11 January, and later that same day govern-
ment troops regained control of the other press offices that had been occupied.
Also on 11 January the volunteer corps assembled by the army high command
on Noske’s instruction and placed under the orders of General Walther von
Lüttwitz began to march on Berlin. There was no compelling military reason
for them to do so since the uprising had for the most part been put down by
then, but Noske and the army high command were eager to make an example
in the hope of averting any further attempts at insurrection. Early victims of
the volunteer corps’ actions were Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the
two most prominent members of the Central Committee of the German
Communist Party. They were murdered by Freikorps officers on 15 January.
The uprising in Berlin in January 1919 was an attempted coup by a radical
minority. If it had not been put down, civil war would have spread to the whole
of Germany and triggered an Allied intervention. But there was no justification
for the violent excesses, which opened up an unbridgeable chasm between the
moderate and the radical elements in the German workers’ movement. The
ruling Majority Social Democrats had relied unduly on volunteer troops, most of
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 99

whom were as keen to foment a civil war as the Communists. The young officers
and students who set the tone in these units were not concerned with saving the
Republic. What drove them on was their hatred of the ‘left’. From their point of
view, it was only logical to continue the war that had previously been waged
against an external enemy and transfer the fighting to the country’s interior. After
all, it was the extreme left that they blamed most of all for Germany’s defeat.
The suppression of the January revolt opened up the way for elections to the
Constituent National Assembly, elections that were contested not only by the
two Social Democrat parties but also by several bourgeois parties. The Catholic
German Centre Party must have hoped that it could exploit the indignation
provoked by the Prussian minister of culture, the Independent Socialist Adolph
Hoffmann, with his radically anti-clerical policy for schools. Formerly known
as the Bavarian Centre Party, the Bavarian People’s Party also took part in the
elections. The German Democratic Party inherited the mantle of the left-wing
liberal Progressive People’s Party, while the German People’s Party under its
chairman Gustav Stresemann, who had demanded extensive German annexa-
tions during the war, took over from the more right-wing National Liberal
Party. The Reich’s two conservative parties had been the German Conservatives
and the Free Conservatives. Together with the various anti-Semitic parties,
they formed the German National People’s Party, which was even more strident
in its advocacy of the restoration of the monarchy than the German People’s
Party. Among the younger conservatives, especially members of the Prussian
aristocracy, there were, of course, many who felt aggrieved that the last
Hohenzollern ruler had not fought for his crown but decamped to the
Netherlands on 10 November 1918 in order to live in exile.
In the elections on 19 January 1919, when all women over the age of twenty-
five were allowed to vote for the first time, the turnout was 83 per cent. (In 1912
it had been 84.9 per cent.) It was above all the Majority Socialists who profited
from the introduction of proportional representation, winning 37.9 per cent of
the vote – 3.1 per cent more than seven years earlier, when the present two
Social Democrat parties had still been a single party. The Independent Socialists
won 7.6 per cent of the vote. Of the bourgeois parties, the German Democratic
Party was the most successful with 18.5 per cent of the vote – 6.2 per cent more
than the Progressive People’s Party had polled in 1912. The two Catholic
parties, the Centre Party and the Bavarian People’s Party, together polled 19.7
per cent. (In 1912 the undivided Centre Party had received 16.4 per cent of the
total number of votes cast.) The still relatively disorganized German People’s
Party had to settle for 4.4 per cent in contrast to the 13.6 per cent polled by the
National Liberals in the earlier elections. With 10.3 per cent, the German
National People’s Party also came out of the elections with a poorer showing
than the conservative and anti-Semitic parties, which in 1912 had polled 15.1
per cent of the total. Support for those parties that still championed the
monarchy was relatively weak, therefore. No doubt this was due in part to the
100 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

loss of personal esteem already suffered by the Kaiser before 1914 but more
especially during the war. The principal beneficiaries of women’s suffrage were
the German Democratic Party and those parties with strong links to the
Church that had previously been most obstinate in resisting the demands of
the suffragettes. In the case of Protestant women, especially in the German
territories to the east of the Elbe, it was the German Nationals who benefited,
whereas in the case of Catholic women, it was the Centre Party and the Bavarian
People’s Party.
All the decisions affecting the task of laying the foundations of the German
Republic were taken in Weimar between February and August 1919. A city
known popularly as a ‘Temple of the Muses’, Weimar was felt to be safer than
Berlin, which was wracked by unrest. And the principal actors hoped that as
the epitome of German classicism, it would meet with a positive response
abroad if it became the meeting place of the National Assembly. On 6 February
1919, Friedrich Ebert addressed the National Assembly in his capacity as the
former chairman of the Council of People’s Deputies and submitted a report in
which he explained that he and his colleagues were ‘the bankruptcy trustees of
the old regime’.3 This was both honest and apt. If the ruling Social Democrats
had felt that they were the founding fathers of a democracy, they would
undoubtedly have preserved less of the old regime and changed far more of it.
Their scope for action was limited, but not as restricted as they thought. They
could have shown more self-assurance in their dealings with the military and
with senior civil servants and they could have ensured that obvious opponents
of the new state did not remain in key positions, as was the case above all in
Prussia in every area of the administration right down to the level of the
regional councils.
Even as recently as November 1918 it was by no means certain that Prussia
would survive as a state. In the Catholic Rhineland there was a strong desire to
break free from the former Hohenzollern state – and also from the Reich. The
new secretary of state at the Ministry of the Interior was the left-wing liberal
constitutional lawyer Hugo Preuß, who, asked by the Council of People’s
Deputies to draw up a new constitution for the Reich, expressed the wish to
break up Prussia into several smaller states ‘in order to prevent one state from
becoming predominant and producing a new dualism’ between Prussia and
the Reich. Among the most vocal detractors of this proposal were the ruling
Prussian Social Democrats headed by the prime minister, Paul Hirsch. Their
arguments were compelling: only a united Prussia could form a buffer between
east and west and effectively resist, on the one hand, the secessionist aspira-
tions of the Rhineland that were being encouraged by France and, on the other,
the pressure exerted by Poland on East Prussia. Only in this way was it possible
to preserve the unity of the Reich and prevent any further politicization of
the denominational differences between Protestants and Catholics. In the
end, it was the ‘pro-Prussians’ who prevailed, much to the relief not only of
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 101

the Prussian Social Democrats but also of their most bitter opponents, the
Prussian conservatives and the latter’s most reliable supporters, the local major
landowners.
After November 1918 there could no longer be any serious question of
dividing up the estates of larger landowners in favour of farmers and agricul-
tural workers who owned little or no land since the revolutionary governments
in Prussia and in the country as a whole had no desire to jeopardize food
supplies, which were in any case extremely precarious as a result of the Allies’
continuing blockade of Germany. The People’s Delegates even allowed land-
owners to the east of the Elbe to form joint councils made up of larger land-
owners and farmers, a move that was tantamount to guaranteeing the existing
distribution of land in the countryside. Other long-standing elite groups also
took advantage of the political restraint of the new government: the judiciary,
universities and grammar schools were largely untouched by the revolution.
Even in 1918 it was well known that these institutions harboured many oppo-
nents of the Republic. But a large-scale political ‘purge’ would have antago-
nized the entire middle class, something that the Social Democrats refused to
contemplate.
As a result, the elite groupings in the German Empire were able to salvage
more of the social bases of their power than was good for the new Republic. For
Ebert and his political friends, avoiding civil war was a categorical imperative.
This demonstrated their sense of responsibility as clearly as their resultant will-
ingness to work closely with moderate middle-class elements, for this was the
only way to create a German democracy. That this would result in a democracy
characterized by the legacy of the old authoritarian state and in consequence
handicapped in advance was recognized more clearly by moderate Independent
Social Democrats like Haase and Hilferding than by Majority Social Democratic
practitioners such as Ebert and Scheidemann.
The National Assembly passed Hugo Preuß’s law on the new provisional
constitution on 10 February, and the following day the delegates elected Friedrich
Ebert as the country’s provisional president. That same day Ebert asked Philipp
Scheidemann to form a government. By the 13th the cabinet, made up of minis-
ters from the Social Democrats, Centre Party and German Democratic Party, was
able to begin work. The only member of the cabinet who did not belong to any
party was the foreign minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau.
In terms of its domestic policies, the government’s greatest challenge was
the series of strikes that shook Germany to its very foundations during the early
months of 1919. They had begun in the Ruhr Valley in late December 1918 and
by February 1919 had spread to central Germany. Their aim was the national-
ization of the mining industry, although the exact path this process would take
was far from clear. The strikes in central Germany ended on 8 March after
Scheidemann’s government had promised legislation introducing employees’
organizations and the nationalization of the coal and potash syndicates. In the
102 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Ruhr Valley the strike turned into a general strike, to which the government
responded by sending in troops. The most violent clashes took place in Berlin
in early March. On the 9th the new minister for the armed forces, Gustav
Noske, gave orders to shoot on sight anyone who was found holding a weapon
while fighting government troops. He had no legal backing for his measure,
which resulted in the deaths of around one thousand strikers in the city during
the March uprising.
The major strikes in the spring of 1919 were part of the second phase of the
German revolution, a phase that ended in early May. During this time the
radical section of the proletariat tried to use force to bring about the social
changes that the first phase had failed to achieve. The results lagged far behind
the expectations of the extreme left. The ‘nationalization’ that took shape and
form in a series of laws enacted in March and April 1919 did nothing to change
the way in which property was distributed in the coal- and potash-mining
industries. The principal achievement of the spring of unrest in 1919 and the
only lasting result of this whole period was the highly controversial law of
February 1920 governing the creation of factory committees, a move contested
by both the right and the extreme left. Works committees, or employee organi-
zations, were introduced in companies with at least twenty employees. Not
only did they have a say in hiring and firing workers, they also had far-reaching
claims to information about operational practices. This law became the Magna
Carta of worker participation and played an important role in turning Germany
into a pioneering home of economic democracy.
Another element in the second phase of the German revolution was the
creation of the two Munich soviet, or council, republics. The history of the first
can be traced back to the murder of the Bavarian prime minister Kurt Eisner
on 21 February 1919. He was shot by Count Anton von Arco-Valley, a law
student currently on leave from the army, while on his way to the Bavarian
parliament, where he was planning to hand in his resignation following the
annihilating defeat of his Independent Socialists in the elections on 12 January.
His murder resulted in a radicalization of politics that also affected sections of
the Majority Socialist Party. On 3 April the Augsburg Councils urged the crea-
tion of a council republic for Bavaria, a move prompted by the proclamation of
the Hungarian Soviet Republic under Béla Kun, and on the night of 6/7 April
the Central Council of the Bavarian Republic under the left-wing Social
Democrat Ernst Niekisch responded to this demand. The government of the
Majority Social Democrat Johannes Hoffmann, Eisner’s successor as prime
minister, was declared to be at an end.
The first Munich Soviet Republic was dominated by literati from Schwabing,
one of the city’s bohemian quarters, and within days had managed to make
itself the object of general ridicule. Breaking off diplomatic relations with
Germany, sending a message to Lenin informing the latter of the unification of
the proletariat in Upper Bavaria and announcing that ‘free money’ would be
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 103

issued in order to abolish capitalism – these were only three of the highlights of
this short-lived regime, which the Communists dismissed as a sham. On Palm
Sunday (13 April) Hoffmann’s government, which had in the meantime moved
to Bamberg, sent in the Republican Militia to quell the putsch, leading the
Communists to side with the ‘Red Army’ that had been formed by the Central
Committee of the Bavarian Republic. Together, they inflicted a serious defeat
on the militia. That same evening Eugen Leviné, the Russian leader of the
Bavarian Communist Party, assumed control of what was now the second
Munich Soviet Republic, a move undertaken without consultation with the
party headquarters in Berlin.
The attempt to impose a dictatorship by a small revolutionary clique on a
largely agrarian, Catholic and conservative country like Bavaria was doomed
from the outset. During the first week of May the ‘Red’ terror of the Communists
was followed by the ‘White’ terror of the Württemberg Volunteer Corps that at
Noske’s bidding came to the aid of the legitimate Bavarian government. By the
time that the second soviet republic was overthrown on 3 May, there had been
606 fatalities, including thirty-eight government soldiers and 335 civilians.
Leviné was indicted for high treason, condemned to death and executed on 5
June 1919.
The fact that Kurt Eisner was a Prussian Jew, that Eugen Leviné and his
party colleague Max Levien were east European Jews and that many of the
intellectual leaders of the first and second soviet republics, including the writers
Ernst Toller, Erich Mühsam and Gustav Landauer, who was murdered by
soldiers from the Volunteer Corps, all came from Jewish families gave powerful
impetus to what was already a particularly virulent form of anti-Semitism not
only in Munich and Bavaria but in the country as a whole. The most gifted and
ruthless of these anti-Jewish agitators, Adolf Hitler, began his political career as
an informant of the Bavarian Reichswehr’s group command. For him, the
conditions in post-revolutionary Munich, a city currently traumatized by the
experience of two soviet republics, proved seminal: nowhere else would he
have found such fertile soil for his slogans.
The impoverished son of a customs inspector from the Austrian town of
Braunau am Inn, he had left school with no qualifications and had received no
subsequent professional training but earned a pittance painting postcards and
doing odd jobs. In May 1913, when he was twenty-four, he had moved from
Vienna to Munich in order to avoid having to do military service in the Danube
Monarchy but in August 1914 he joined the Bavarian army as a volunteer and
worked on the western front as a dispatch runner, rising to the rank of corporal
and being awarded the Iron Cross. In September 1919 he joined a radical right-
wing organization, the German Workers’ Party, which changed its name in
February 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). By
then, his anti-Semitic view of the world was already fully formed, as he
explained to Adolf Gremlich in June 1919:
104 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

For the Jew, everything that makes people strive for higher things, be it
religion, socialism or democracy, is merely a means to an end, that end
being the satisfaction of his greed for money or domination. In its conse-
quences, its impact is the racial tuberculosis of nations, and this produces
the following: anti-Semitism for purely emotional reasons will find its ulti-
mate expression in the form of progroms [sic], but the anti-Semitism of
reason must inevitably lead to the systematic legal battle to combat and
remove those privileges that the Jews, unlike all the other foreigners who
live among us, are allowed to enjoy (legislation governing foreigners). There
is absolutely no doubt that the ultimate goal of this legislation must be the
removal of all Jews. Only a government of national potency is capable of
achieving both these aims, not a government of national impotency.4

Scheidemann’s cabinet met in March – after the street fighting in Berlin and
before the first soviet republic was proclaimed in Munich – to discuss the
response that Germany would adopt at the forthcoming peace talks to the ques-
tion of the country’s guilt for causing the war. As early as the previous November,
the Council of People’s Deputies had asked the Independent Social Democrat
Karl Kautsky, who was then working as a councillor at the Foreign Office, and
the Majority Social Democrat Max Quarck, a councillor in the Department of
the Interior, to redact the relevant documents. By the end of March, Kautsky
was nearing the completion of his task. In his capacity as president of Germany,
Ebert attended the cabinet meeting and recommended that ‘the sins of the old
regime be condemned in the strongest possible terms’5 and asked that the new
government’s position be presented in the form of a memorandum. Most of the
ministers present at the meeting agreed with Ebert, whereas the finance
minister, Eugen Schiffer of the German Democratic Party, who had been a
member of the National Liberals until 1918, warned his colleagues in no uncer-
tain terms not to admit to their guilt, for such an admission would rob the
Germans of all their remaining self-respect and allow their enemies to triumph.
Scheidemann did not consider it necessary to join in the debate.
By the time that the cabinet returned to the question of Germany’s war guilt
at its meeting on 18 April 1919, Kautsky’s redaction of the relevant documents
was already available. It left no doubt that in the crisis in July 1914 the country’s
leaders had driven Austria-Hungary into war with Serbia and were therefore
chiefly to blame for triggering the First World War. Eduard David, the Social
Democrat minister without portfolio, spoke out in favour of publication,
whereas the justice minister Johannes Bell of the Centre Party opposed it.
Scheidemann once again refused to become involved in the debate. In the end
he advised his colleagues to refrain from publishing the documents in the
shorter term, a recommendation opposed by Eduard David.
Publication would have meant a moral break with the old regime, which is
what Ebert demanded, but we can now only speculate on the political impact
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 105

that such a bold course of action would have had. The nationalist right would
have reacted to the admission that Germany was not only complicit in the war
but largely responsible for it with an outcry of indignation, while it would have
been difficult to claim that the Triple Entente had forced the war on Germany.
A public display of self-criticism by the Germans would presumably have
strengthened the hand of the forces on the left that were willing to show under-
standing, but it would scarcely have impressed the government representatives
who were advising on the peace treaty in Paris.
But there was another reason why there was no moral break with the
Kaiserreich: most Social Democrats were afraid of the reproach that they had
betrayed their country and of the critical debate that their policy of a party
truce would inevitably entail. Their silence had serious consequences. Left in
the dark by Scheidemann’s government as to Germany’s policies in July 1914,
the German public was in no way prepared for the outcome of the Paris delib-
erations on the Allies’ peace terms in early May 1919.

A Blighted New Beginning: Austria and Hungary in 1918/19

The early months of the immediate post-war period were no less turbulent in
Austria than they were in Germany. Here the government was made up of
Social Democrats, Christian Socialists and Pan-German German Nationalists.
Since 30 October 1918 the country’s chancellor had been the Social Democrat
Karl Renner, one of whose first official actions had been to receive submissions
from the regional assemblies, declaring their intention of joining the Republic
of German Austria. Following the death on 11 November of Victor Adler, the
Social Democrats’ long-standing chairman and the country’s foreign minister,
a new secretary of state was appointed on the 21st in the person of Otto Bauer,
a leading voice in Austrian Marxism, a left-wing advocate of the Slav nations’
right of self-determination and a vocal supporter of the policy of a union
between German Austria and Germany as unanimously agreed to by the
Provisional National Assembly at its meeting on the 12th.
On one important point, Austria differed from Germany in that the transi-
tional period between the fall of the monarchy and the election of a new
Constituent National Assembly witnessed a fundamental reform of the mili-
tary. As early as 8 November the Social Democrat Julius Deutsch, a former
artillery officer employed in the War Ministry, had proposed the relevant
guidelines, which he implemented as soon as he became minister for the army
on the 15th. A defence law passed by the Provisional Government on the 18th
provided for universal conscription for all men between the ages of eighteen
and forty-one. The new defence force also included officers from the Habsburg
army who were sympathetic to the Social Democrats, and in 1918/19 these
officers played an active and, indeed, decisive role in the fighting in southern
Carinthia, an area largely settled by Germans and currently occupied by units
106 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of South Slav troops. They were also instrumental in putting down several
attempted Communist putsches.
The Communist Party of German Austria was founded on 3 November
1918 with substantial political and financial support from the Bolsheviks and
the participation of left-wing radical intellectuals and soldiers returning from
Russia, but neither then nor later was the party able to build up a base in the
proletariat, with the result that the Social Democrats remained the party of
Austrian workers. This state of affairs was due above all to the enforced proro-
gation of the Reichsrat between 1914 and 1917: unlike the German Social
Democrats, their Austrian counterparts had no possibility of arguing over the
approval of war loans. Also in Austria, an organ of the soviet councils survived
the elections to the Constituent Assembly in February 1919, when the Central
Workers’ Council became one of the principal representatives of the Austrian
workforce. It was headed by Victor Adler’s son Friedrich, who, as we have
already noted, shot the prime minister, Karl Stürgkh, in October 1916 in protest
at the war and was released from prison on 1 November 1918. Together with
Otto Bauer, he set the Austrian Social Democrats on an emphatically left-wing
course at odds with the policies not only of an Austrian ‘Social Democrat
patriot’ like Karl Renner but also of the German Social Democrats.
At the time that Austria proclaimed itself a republic on 12 November, it was
still far from clear which regions would be a part of German Austria. Earlier
that month the Germans in Bohemia and Moravia had tried in their various
ways to assert their desire to enter into a union with German Austria. The
regions next to the border with Austria wanted to join as the Bohemian Forest
Gau and German South Moravia, while regional governments for German
Bohemia and the Sudetenland were formed in Reichenberg and Troppau.
Passed on 22 November 1918, an Austrian law confirmed German claims
to the whole of the self-contained area settled by Germans within the king-
doms and regions previously represented by the Reichsrat. On the 14th the
Provisional National Assembly elected Tomág Masaryk in his absence as presi-
dent of the Czechoslovak Republic – not until 21 December did he return
home from exile. In the meantime the leader of the ‘Young Czechs’, Karel
Kramá., took on the post of prime minister. In December his government sent
troops into the Sudetenland. It remained unclear how Vienna’s claims to the
annexation of the German-speaking parts of Bohemia and Moravia could be
implemented in the face of opposition from the new leaders in Prague as well
as from the Allies.
The same was true of the demand that German Austria become a part of the
German Reich. In Germany itself, the call for a realization of the pan-German
idea had widespread support, especially among Social Democrats, who saw
themselves as the true heirs and executors of the revolution of 1848–9. When
the Austrian ambassador in Berlin, Ludo Hartmann, stated Vienna’s wish to
join a greater Germany at a conference of the German regions on 25 November,
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 107

his request, although supported by a unanimous vote on the part of the National
Assembly, met with an emphatic rejection from Wilhelm Solf, the secretary of
state at the Foreign Office, who had retained his post from the previous admin-
istration and who backed up his objection by drawing his audience’s attention
to the forthcoming peace talks. He received support from the delegates who
were present, with Ebert at their head. In his speech to the German National
Assembly on 6 February 1919 Ebert was warmly applauded when he welcomed
German Austria’s wish to become a part of Germany and expressed the hope
that the Assembly would invite the future government to enter into negotia-
tions with German Austria as soon as possible with a view to bringing such a
union to fruition. Although Solf had retired in December 1918, his objection
remained valid: the plans for a Greater Germany could not be allowed to jeop-
ardize the peace talks with the victorious powers.
The elections for the Constituent National Assembly were held on 16
February. The Social Democrats won seventy-seven seats, the Christian
Socialists sixty-one and the German Nationalists twenty-six. The Germans
living in the Sudetenland were unable to vote and so they organized demon-
strations in all their towns and cities on the day when the Constituent Assembly
met for the first time, 4 March. Acting on the orders of Kramá.’s government,
the Czechoslovak police responded with particular brutality, even going so far
as to fire at demonstrators and killing fifty-two protesters in Kaaden (now
Kada3).
On 14 March the Constituent National Assembly passed two laws
concerning the representation of the people and the government that served as
a provisional constitution and at the same time repeated its belief that German
Austria was a part of the German Reich. The next day the chancellor, Karl
Renner, was able to name his new cabinet, which was made up of Social
Democrats, Christian Socialists and other ministers who belonged to no
particular political party. Among the latter was the eminent economist Joseph
Schumpeter as head of the finance department. One of the new government’s
most pressing tasks was to deradicalize the workers’ soviets, with their profound
sympathy for the soviet republics that had been proclaimed by Béla Kun in
Budapest on 21 March and by the Central Council of the Bavarian Republic in
Munich on 6/7 April. An attempted putsch on 17 April triggered by Kun’s
agents was put down by the army, but it was two Social Democrat politicians
who played the biggest part in calming the workers: the chairman of the Central
Council of Workers, Friedrich Adler, and Ferdinand Hanusch, who was the
minister, or secretary of state, responsible for social administration and who
steered through parliament a number of important socio-political laws,
including those governing an eight-hour day, the right to time off, the right of
wage agreements, a limit on the work that could be undertaken by women and
children and at night, health insurance, welfare for the disabled and the crea-
tion of chambers of commerce.
108 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

As with Austria, so with Hungary, the local Communist Party was for the most
part founded by prisoners of war returning from Russia. Among them was Béla
Kun, a Jewish journalist who had previously been active in the trade union
movement. The Social Democrats joined Mihály Károlyi’s coalition govern-
ment in late October. Károlyi assumed the office of provisional president on
11 January 1919, by which date Hungary had already lost more than half its
territory and population following the secession of large areas of land that were
mostly settled by South Slavs, Slovaks and Romanians and occupied by troops
from neighbouring states. The Entente actively encouraged this development,
persuading an embittered Károlyi to throw in his lot with Soviet Russia,
resulting in a change of direction in terms of Hungary’s foreign and domestic
policy. Internally, this meant a transfer of power to the workers. The decisive
factor proved to be a note handed to Károlyi by the Allies on 19 March, when
the victorious powers demanded a new demarcation line in Transylvania and
the creation of a neutral zone there.
In the meantime Kun had succeeded in gaining a considerable number of
supporters among workers who were not organized into trade unions and in
calling on both them and the country’s soldiers to rise up in armed rebellion
against the government and the latter’s principal bulwark, the Social Democrats.
After a number of bloody clashes he was arrested on 21 February 1919, together
with several other Communist leaders – not that this prevented him from
establishing a party secretariat in his prison cell, a move tolerated by the
government he was seeking to overthrow. On 21 March the Social Democrats
responded to pressure from Károlyi and the bourgeois parties to work together
with the Communists and decided that in order to avoid civil war and the
threatening hegemony of the Communists they should agree to Kun’s demands
for a merger between the two parties as the Hungarian Socialist Party and also
to the establishment of a council dictatorship and the formation of a govern-
ment in which each party would be equally represented. Its nominal head was
appointed that same evening in the person of the Social Democrat Alexander
Garbai, although the effective leader was the recently released Béla Kun in his
role as people’s commissioner for foreign affairs. The people’s commissioner
for education was the young Marxist philosopher György Lukács.
The Bolsheviks, who were then holding their eighth party conference in
Moscow, reacted enthusiastically: Kun was their representative, and Hungary
the first central European country to follow the Russian example. On 27 May
1919 Lenin wrote to congratulate the Hungarian workers on their success – by
this date the new Hungarian regime had been in power for over two months:
‘You have set the world an even better example than Soviet Russia by your
ability to unite all socialists at one stroke on the platform of genuine prole-
tarian dictatorship.’6 The Hungarian soviet government had indeed spent the
intervening period nationalizing large numbers of industrial concerns and
dispossessing major landowners, without, however, redistributing their lands
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 109

among the peasantry, but allowing their existing owners to administer them on
behalf of the state, leading to feelings of rank disaffection among the country’s
peasants.
On the other hand, the government’s emphatically ‘national Bolshevik’
policies proved popular with most Hungarians, for they aimed to re-establish a
Greater Hungary under the banner of a war on western imperialists and on
those of Hungary’s neighbours that supported them. Suggestions for a peaceful
resolution of border conflicts that were made by the British general (and later
prime minister of South Africa) Jan Christiaan Smuts in the name of the victo-
rious powers at their meeting in Paris in early April were rejected by Kun. On
20 April the Central Council of Soldiers, Workers and Peasants agreed to wage
a defensive war in order to protect the attainments of the proletarian dictator-
ship and ordered that half the workforce of all companies should take up arms
against Czech, Romanian and South Slav troops. In May the Red Army under
the command of the Social Democrat delegate Wilhelm Böhm succeeded in
defeating Czech units under French command, leading to the temporary
capture of large parts of Slovakia.
But this victory exhausted the military strength of the revolutionary army,
and in early June a ‘White’ counter-government was formed in Szeged in
southern Hungary, which was then under French military rule. Its leader was
Count Gyula Károlyi, a close relative of the former president, with Count Pál
Teleki as his foreign minister and Admiral Miklós Horthy, the former commander
in chief of the Austro-Hungarian navy, as his minister of war. Romanian troops
that had already started to invade southern Hungary in April continued to
advance on Budapest during the summer of 1919. Kun appealed to Lenin to
attack Romania in order to relieve the pressure on him, but his appeal fell on deaf
ears. At the end of July, the Red Army, routed by the Romanians, was disbanded,
and on 1 August Kun abandoned the system of councils, inviting the Workers’
Council to transfer power to a cabinet made up of moderate trade union leaders
and attributing the failure of the proletarian dictatorship to those workers who
were not sufficiently revolutionary and who would now have to learn from the
cruel dictatorship of the bourgeoisie what it meant to be revolutionary. On step-
ping down, Kun and a number of his followers left for Austria, where thanks to
the mediation of the Social Democrats he was given political asylum.
On 3 August Budapest was occupied by Romanian troops, and the following
day the trade union government was toppled by a right-wing group, prompting
the government in Szeged to resign in favour of the new bourgeois cabinet. On
5 August a mission from the Entente began work in Budapest, and although it
did not officially recognize the new government, it entered into negotiations
with Admiral Miklós Horthy, the commander in chief of the national army that
had been established in Szeged.
In the middle of November the Allies ordered the Romanian troops to leave
Budapest, allowing Horthy’s units to march into the city soon afterwards. Over
110 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the months that followed, they and a number of volunteer corps officers
brought a reign of terror to the city, attacking real and imagined supporters of
the old regime, while reserving their most brutal fury for Jews of all political
persuasions. More than half of the people’s commissars had been Jewish, a state
of affairs that lent particular virulence to the anti-Semitism that was in any case
widespread in Hungary. The ‘Red terror’ of the revolutionary tribunals had
caused some 120 deaths, whereas around 2,000 men and women fell victim to
the terror of the units commanded by Horthy. Another 70,000 individuals were
imprisoned or interned. Hungary was not only the sole country in central
Europe to see the Communists come to power; it was also the only one to move
in the direction of a right-wing authoritarian regime in the wake of the First
World War.

The Struggle for Independence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland

The overthrow of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was not the only political
setback that the Bolsheviks had to endure in 1919. Following the defeat of the
Central Powers, the Council of People’s Commissars in Moscow had declared
as early as 13 November 1918 that it no longer felt obliged to uphold the terms
of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The first nations to appreciate what this meant
in practice were the Baltic peoples. In Estonia, which included not only the
historical region of Estonia but also northern Livonia, the Maapäev – the
regional council formed in the wake of the Russian February Revolution – had
declared the country independent on 24 February 1918, only for the country to
be overrun by German troops a short time afterwards. Following the fall of the
monarchy, Germany recognized Estonia’s independence in November 1918,
Great Britain and France following suit in March 1919.
Scarcely had German troops left, however, when the Red Army marched
into Estonia. A handful of ‘Red’ Estonian units joined them. With the help of
weapons from Finland and the Triple Entente, the Provisional Government of
the prime minister, Konstantin Päts, was able to build up an effective national
army. The government gained the support of the country’s peasants by prom-
ising to distribute among them the lands owned by German Balts. By February
1919 the whole of Estonia was rid of its invaders from Soviet Russia.
Latvia at this date comprised the southern part of Livonia, Courland and
the region around Dünaburg (now Daugavpils) known as Latgale. Here the
Bolsheviks found more support among the peasant population than they had
done in Estonia. On 18 January 1918, the Latvian National Council that had
been formed at the time of the German occupation proclaimed the inde-
pendent Republic of Latvia and invited the chairman of the Farmers’ Union,
K9rlis Ulmanis, to form a government. This was recognized by the Council of
People’s Deputies in Berlin at the end of November 1918, but from the outset it
was placed under intolerable pressure by the local pro-Bolshevik movement
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 111

and by the Red Army, which marched into Latvia in January 1919 and occu-
pied the capital, Riga. Although Ulmanis was sympathetic to the Entente, he
felt obliged to ask for help from a military organization set up by the German
Balts and also from a number of German volunteer corps that were operating
in the Baltic region with the tacit approval of the victorious powers and that
received a promise from Ulmanis’s government that if they so desired their
dependants would be granted Latvian nationality and be allowed to settle
permanently in the country.
But Ulmanis’s refusal to allow the German Balts to play a significant role in
running the country led to the ‘Libau putsch’ that was undertaken on 18 April
by shock troops from the Baltic Land Defence. Ulmanis’s government was
deposed and replaced by a government loyal to the German Balts under the
nominal leadership of the Latvian pastor Andrievs Niedra. In May the Land
Defence recaptured Riga with the help of Latvian and German units. But
Ulmanis, who had in the meantime sought protection from the British, was in
no mood to quit the political stage, the violence of the Libau putsch having
assured him of the national solidarity of the Latvians that he had previously
lacked, and at the end of June Latvian troops loyal to him and his government
were able to defeat the combined forces of the German volunteer corps and the
Baltic Land Defence. An attempt by the German commander, General Rüdiger
von der Goltz, to use a counterrevolutionary army of German and Russian
volunteers to reverse the situation and to support the White army in the
Russian civil war was thwarted in October 1919 by the concerted efforts of
Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian troops supported in turn by an Allied
squadron.
Latvia’s southern neighbour, Lithuania, had declared its independence in
February 1918, a declaration that had had the support of the German
occupying power. (Conversely, the June election of the Catholic Duke Wilhelm
von Urach as King Mindaugas II did not have the approval of Germany’s
leaders or of the eastern military command and was reversed by the Lithuanian
parliament, the Taryba, in the wake of Germany’s defeat.) On 28 October 1918
the Taryba approved a provisional constitution, and on 5 November the
philologist and historian Augustinas Voldemaras formed the first Lithuanian
government.
The Lithuanian supporters of the Bolsheviks responded on 8 December by
establishing a Revolutionary Workers’ and Peasants’ Government in Dünaberg
that was formally recognized two weeks later by Soviet Russia but which did
not exercise any real power until the German troops left on 1 January 1919.
The official government had in the meantime been reorganized under Mykolas
Sle:evi/ius and met at Kaunas (Kovno). The Red Army overran Vilnius and the
surrounding area on 5 January and began work on forming the Socialist
Republic of Lithuania and White Russia. ‘Litbel’, as it was known for short, was
proclaimed on 27 February 1919.
112 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

In the event, Communist rule over even a small part of Lithuania proved to
be short-lived. At the end of April Polish units captured the capital without a
major struggle, not least because there were more Poles living there than
Lithuanians. Kaunas turned down an offer from the Polish prime minister, Józef
Pi5sudski, to cede Vilnius to Lithuania if the country was willing to enter into a
federation with Poland. By August 1919 the Red Army had – with the help of
German troops – been driven from those areas that it had occupied in the north-
east of the country. In November 1919 the Lithuanian army – by now a fully
operational fighting force – defeated anti-Bolshevik Russian troops under the
command of the ‘White’ general Prince Pavel Bermondt-Avalov, which had
entered Lithuania from Latvia the previous month. With this there began a
period of gradual stabilization for the new state, even though it continued to be
governed from the provisional capital Kaunas, rather than from Vilnius.
Like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Finland, too, had been part of the
Russian Empire until 1917. Here the local ‘Reds’ and their Russian supporters
had been defeated with German assistance in the civil war of early 1918. From
May 1918 the ‘Reich administrator’ of the new independent Finland was the
monarchist Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, while the Conservative government was
headed by Juho Kusti Paasikivi. Svinhufvud was intended merely to stand in
for a king who would come from Germany. The proposed candidate was Prince
Friedrich Karl of Hesse, but he withdrew following Germany’s defeat in the
war. In the wake of the withdrawal of all German troops, General Mannerheim,
who had defeated the ‘Reds’, became Reich administrator and on 17 June 1919
signed the constitution that turned Finland into a republic with a strong presi-
dent elected by the people and a government responsible to parliament. The
following month, the true father of the Finnish constitution, Kaarlo Juho
Ståhlberg, was elected the country’s first president. In October 1920 Soviet
Russia signed a peace treaty with Finland. It had been preceded by similar trea-
ties with Estonia in February, with Lithuania in July and with Latvia in August
1920.

The East Remains Red: The Russian Civil War and the Foundation of
the Third International
If the Bolsheviks had prevailed in the Baltic region, they would have found it
much easier to export their particular brand of revolution to central Europe
and above all to Germany, but the defeats in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
caused the Soviet Union serious difficulties, not least because this was not the
only major setback that the Bolsheviks had to endure in the area covered by
the former Russian Empire during the spring and summer of 1919. Once the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been torn up, the Red Army had felt free to march
into the eastern Ukraine in December 1918 and to take Kiev the following
February. The government of the Ukrainian ‘Directorate’ under Volodymyr
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 113

Vynnychenko that had seized power in December 1918 fled to Podolia, where
it organized resistance to the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Symon Petlura.
By the summer of 1919 the Red Army had been driven from the Ukraine by
units under the ‘White’ general, Anton Ivanovich Denikin. The following
October ‘White’ units under General Nikolai Nikolayevich Yudenich advanced
from the Baltic as far as the gates of Petrograd. The former capital could be held
only thanks to Trotsky’s iron will and to organized resistance on the part of the
city’s population. In the south the ‘White’ units under Denikin and Krasnov
advanced as far as Kursk and from there to Orel, so that the road to Tula and
Moscow seemed to lie open to them. In the east the opponents of Bolshevism
succeeded in advancing almost as far as the Volga under Admiral Kolchak,
who since June had been commander in chief of all the ‘White’ troops.
An additional factor was the intervention of the Western Allies who,
following the defeat of the Central Powers, were able to increase the number of
their troops operating on Russian soil. In November and December 1918 new
units were sent to Murmansk and Vladivostok. Marshal Foch drew up a plan
for an anti-Bolshevik ‘crusade’, and although this was rejected by the Allied
Supreme Council in Paris on 27 March 1919, the ‘Whites’ continued to receive
financial and technical support. The Western Powers recognized Kolchak’s
government in May 1919, several months after he had declared himself the
Reich administrator on 18 November 1918. The Allies imposed an economic
blockade on Soviet Russia on 10 October 1919, and yet the Bolsheviks’ fortunes
improved only a short time afterwards when the British fleet failed to intervene
in the Gulf of Finland and Yudenich’s offensive in the north-west collapsed. His
retreat was followed by that of Kolchak, who, under pressure from the Red
Army and Bolshevik partisans, was forced back to Irkutsk. Denikin, mean-
while, was driven back in the south, and in the west the Ukraine was recap-
tured. On 4 January 1920 Kolchak stepped down as Reich administrator, and
on the 16th the Allied Supreme Council lifted the economic blockade. Although
this did not mean the end of the Russian civil war, the outcome had for the
most part already been decided in favour of the ‘Reds’.
The Russian civil war was waged by both sides not only with extreme mili-
tary rigour but also with all the resources of political terror, the only difference
being that the ‘Red’ terror was more systematic than its ‘White’ counterpart.
On 31 August 1918 – a day after Lenin had been seriously injured in an assas-
sination attempt by the social revolutionary Fanny Kaplan – the Bolsheviks’
official newspaper, Pravda, announced that the time had come ‘for the destruc-
tion of the bourgeoisie’. On 5 September the ‘decree for the Red terror’ declared
that it was absolutely vital that the Cheka, or secret police, be strengthened,
that the class enemies of the Soviet republic be sent to concentration camps
and that all who were involved in organizations such as the White Guards or in
other conspiracies and uprisings were to be shot on sight. A few days later this
policy was summed up by Grigory Zinoviev, a prominent member of the party
114 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

leadership: ‘In order to liberate us from our enemies, we need our own socialist
terror. Some 90 million of the 100 million inhabitants of Soviet Russia need to
be brought round. There is nothing we have to say to the others. They must be
destroyed.’ Zinoviev told the soldiers of the Red Army: ‘The bourgeoisie kills
individuals, but we kill entire classes.’ This policy was confirmed by Martyn
Latsis, one of the Cheka leaders, in early October 1918 when he declared that
‘We are in the process of rooting out the bourgeoisie as a class.’7
Nor was it long before his words were matched by actions, and the taking
and execution of hostages became a routine occurrence. On 31 August 1918
141 hostages were executed in Nizhny Novgorod alone, with another 700 being
taken into custody over a three-day period. The revolutionary sailors in
Kronstadt murdered around 500 of the men and women whom they took pris-
oner. In September 1918 the Petrograd Cheka shot 512 hostages within a
matter of days. In the early autumn of 1918 the Cheka Association of the Urals
reported the execution of twenty-three former police officers, 154 ‘counter-
revolutionaries’, eight monarchists, twenty-eight ‘Cadets’, 186 officers and ten
Mensheviks and right-wing social revolutionaries, all within the space of a
week. A further thirty-nine executions were reported by the Tver Cheka and
fifty by that at Perm. In total it is believed that between 10,000 and 15,000 men
and women fell victim to the ‘Red’ terror in the autumn of 1918. The number
of ‘class enemies’ held in concentration camps had risen to 16,000 by May 1919
and to 70,000 by September 1921.
On 24 January 1919 the Central Committee of the Russian Communist
Party decided to embark on what it termed an ‘implacable war on the wealthy
Cossacks who must be rooted out and physically destroyed right down to the
very last man, this being the only politically correct measure’.8 Between the
middle of February and the middle of March 1919 more than 8,000 Cossacks
were executed. Reliable estimates suggest that the number of Cossacks who
were either executed or deported in 1919–20 was between 300,000 and 500,000
out of a total population of less than three million. The fact that most of the
Cossacks who were liquidated were by no means ‘wealthy’ was of no conse-
quence to their persecutors.
The ‘White’ terror was directed above all at the Jews whom the Cossacks
and many ‘Whites’ lumped together with the Bolsheviks. Divisions of Denikin’s
‘White Army’ and other Ukrainian units under the command of Symon Petlura
were responsible for pogroms that cost the lives of some 150,000 men, women
and children. In the Ukraine alone at least 30,000 Jews were killed in the course
of the civil war in 1919 and 1920. A far greater number were seriously injured
and robbed of all their possessions.
Anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism were especially rife among the well-
to-do peasants, the Kulaks, who were particularly numerous in the Ukraine.
Their protests were directed against the Red Army and its requisitioning
or seizure of corn, potatoes, meat, milk and eggs, all of them measures of
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 115

‘war-time Communism’. In August 1918 Lenin demanded ‘civil war in the

villages’ and ‘pitiless war on the Kulaks’, whom he described as ‘rabid enemies
of the Soviet power’. He threatened them not only with being taken hostage and
put to death but also made it clear in a telegram that he sent to the Penza Soviet
on 11 August exactly how he imagined their deaths: ‘You need to hang (hang
without fail, so that the people see) no fewer than 100 of the notorious Kulaks,
the rich and the bloodsuckers. [. . .] Telegraph us concerning receipt and
implementation.’9 In the ten provinces for which complete figures have
survived, it is clear that in September 1919 there were almost 49,000 deserters,
mostly peasants, more than 700 imprisoned ‘bandits’, 1,826 deaths and 2,230
shootings. Among party and state officials and the military there were 430
reported deaths.
There were widespread strikes in the spring of 1919, starting on 10 March
in the Putilov Works in Petrograd, which until 1917 had been a stronghold of
Bolshevism. The strikes were for the most part a desperate protest at the
rampant famine, low wages and the government ban on such actions. When
Lenin and Zinoviev appeared at the Putilov Plant on 12 and 13 March, they
were booed and greeted with shouts of ‘Down with the Jews and Commissars!’
(Some of the most prominent Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, Zinoviev,
Kamenev, Rykov and Karl Radek, were Jews.) The Putilov strike was put down
by Cheka units, 900 workers were arrested and around 200 summarily executed.
Mutinous soldiers joined the strikers in Orel, Bryansk, Gomel and Astrakhan.
Here, too, anti-Semitic chants were heard. In every case the Cheka responded
with violent reprisals and withdrew the strikers’ ration cards. In Tula, where
the head of the Cheka, Feliks Dzier,y-ski, intervened personally, twenty-six
alleged ringleaders were executed at the beginning of April 1919. Workers who
wanted to be reinstated had to sign agreements stating that going on strike was
tantamount to deserting and as a result was punishable by death. The following
year the Cheka even resorted to drowning convicts in the Dvina which ran past
the Kholmogory Camp. It was a practice that had been used by the Jacobins
during the French Revolution.
If the Reds ultimately defeated the Whites, this was due not only to the
effectiveness of the Communist reign of terror and to the – at best – half-
hearted support of the counterrevolution by the Western Powers. The decisive
factor was the attitude of the peasants, in whose eyes the counterrevolutionary
forces were the agents of the aristocratic landowners who were hoping for a
return to earlier property conditions. Such peasants represented the vast
majority of the Russian population and were grateful to the Bolsheviks for this
redistribution of the land. When compared with the Whites, the Reds were
thus the lesser of two evils. This assessment of the situation allowed the peasant
class to overlook its sense of bitterness at the requisitioning of crops and other
agricultural produce and its compulsory military service in the Red Army,
where it represented by far the largest group.
116 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Only a few days before the start of the strike at the Putilov Plant, the first
congress of the Third or Communist International met at the Kremlin between
2 and 6 March 1919. Lenin believed that the Second International had betrayed
the cause of Marxism and, hence, of the working class, with the result that for
him it went without saying that a completely new, truly revolutionary
International needed to be created. The decision was ultimately triggered by
the convening of the first post-war conference of the Second International at
Berne on 27 January 1919. In view of the threat that was posed to them by both
counterrevolutionary forces in Russia itself and by the military intervention of
the Allies, the Bolsheviks had to do everything in their power to prevent the
European proletariat from being led down an anti-Bolshevik road by right-
wing ‘social-chauvinists’ or by ‘Centrist’ politicians like Kautsky.
Some fifty-four delegates attended the first Congress of the Communist
International. Five of them came from abroad: from Germany, Austria, the
Netherlands, Sweden and Norway. A handful of other countries were repre-
sented by former prisoners of war or by revolutionaries who happened to be in
Russia. The euphoric mood of the participants was in stark contrast to the
Soviet state’s current situation, which was nothing if not desperate. Lenin and
the other leading Bolsheviks believed that revolution would very soon sweep
across Europe, bringing with it the victory of the international revolution.
Germany, they were convinced, would play a key role in this process. As soon
as the soviet republic had triumphed there, the Third International would
transfer its headquarters and offices from Moscow to Berlin in keeping with a
decision taken at the congress. The German Communists, who were repre-
sented by Hugo Eberlein in Moscow in March 1919, were initially opposed
to the foundation of a new International, a view that reflected the thinking of
the murdered Rosa Luxemburg, who had been afraid that an International
dominated by the Russian Bolsheviks would soon be entirely dependent on
Moscow. In the end Eberlein abstained. Following the foundation of the
‘Comintern’, as the Communist International soon became known, the German
Communist Party joined the International at Eberlein’s request. It was the first
party to do so.
In the congress’s resolutions, the ‘social patriots’ or ‘social-chauvinists’ on
the right wing of the socialist movement, together with the centre around the
Independent Labour Party as well as the new majority of the SFIO under Jean
Longuet and the moderate wing of the Independent Socialist Party of Germany
under Haase, Hilferding and Kautsky, were attacked with far greater virulence
than the capitalists and imperialists. According to the ‘guidelines’ drawn up
by Bukharin, the essential requirement for the victory of the working class
was a clean break not only with the right-wing Social Democrats, with ‘the
outright lackeys of capital and the hangmen of the Communist revolution’,
but also with the ‘centre’ of the ‘Kautskyites’, a centre that abandoned the prole-
tariat at critical moments. In a resolution that he submitted to the congress,
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 117

Zinoviev – elected president of the Communist International in Moscow –

even declared the centrists to be more dangerous than the ‘social-chauvinists’
who, he claimed, had murdered Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, because
the former were in fact striving for unity with the social-chauvinists and
attempting to hoodwink the revolutionary elements. ‘The organizational
break-away from the centre is an absolute historical necessity.’10
The decisive factor in establishing the Communist International had been
the Berne Conference of Socialist Parties that had met in the Swiss capital
between 27 January and 9 February 1919. On that occasion the German
Majority Socialists – in the eyes of Lenin and Zinoviev the most dangerous of
all the ‘social-chauvinists’ – had found themselves hard pressed. The workers’
parties of the victorious powers and also those of most of the countries that had
remained neutral during the war accused them of betraying the cause of the
international proletariat, whereas the Independent Socialist Party of Germany
was regarded as the guardian of the socialist tradition. Although the French
socialist Albert Thomas met with no agreement when he demanded the exclu-
sion of the Majority Socialists, Kurt Eisner received substantial backing when
he invited the Majority Socialists to acknowledge the error of their ways. The
representatives of the Majority Socialists duly conceded their mistake, albeit
only half-heartedly, demanding the publication of all the relevant documents
relating to the outbreak of the war in every country involved and admitting
merely that the German invasion of Belgium had been a breach of interna-
tional law.
In the end the desire to achieve a compromise proved decisive. Allowances
were made for the German Social Democrats, and the International’s verdict
on the ‘world-historical question as to responsibility’ for the war was reserved
for a later congress. The agreement was made easier by the universal hostility
to Communism. The left-wing socialists may have been able to prevent the
congress from voting on a resolution in favour of democracy and, hence,
against the Bolshevik dictatorship, but the majority left observers in no
doubt as to its rejection of the Russian road to socialism. This attitude was
underlined by the election of the Swedish party chairman, Hjalmar Branting,
as president of the Second International. The central point of the new
programme was by no means non-controversial, involving, as it did, the
approval of a League of Nations that would not be a debating club for the repre-
sentatives of the world’s governments but an international parliament with an
international government invested with the power to settle international
conflicts by peaceful means.
The Bolsheviks rightly saw in the resurrected Second International an
obstacle to their plans for world revolution. On 6 February 1919 Pravda
published an article expressing the Bolsheviks’ anger at the participants in the
conference, whom it upbraided as ‘lackeys’ and ‘social obscurantists’: ‘One
feeling unites them: a furious hatred for Bolsheviks. One slogan unites them:
118 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the slogan of war against the Bolsheviks. The first words of the Yellow
International were “Fight the Bolsheviks!”.’11

The Victors Move to the Right: The Western Powers on the Eve
of the Paris Peace Talks
Whereas it was the left-wing centre parties that came to power in the defeated
countries of Germany, Austria and Hungary, three of the four most important
victorious powers – the United States, Great Britain and Italy – underwent a
shift to the right at this time. In France the move to the right had taken place a
year earlier, in November 1917, when the ‘Jacobin’ nationalist Georges
Clemenceau was elected prime minister. In the United States the Republicans,
previously the party of opposition, won a resounding victory in the ‘off-year
elections’ of November 1918, when the House of Representatives and a third of
senators were elected. In the Senate, where the Democrats had previously had
six seats more than the Republicans, the latter now had a two-seat majority,
while in the House of Representatives they turned a minority of five into a
majority of forty-five seats. What counted most of all for the ‘Grand Old Party’
was its ferocious attacks on the ‘weak’ internationalism of the Democrat
Woodrow Wilson, who was accused of having been unduly lenient towards the
Germans.
Great Britain’s elections in December 1918 were a repeat of the ‘khaki elec-
tions’ of 1900, which had been overshadowed by the Boer War. On both occa-
sions, a jingoistic note was struck not only by the nationalistic mass-circulation
papers such as the Daily Mail and Morning Post but also by the Conservatives.
The most demagogic slogan came from a member of David Lloyd George’s war
cabinet, the minister without portfolio George N. Barnes, who at the end of
November demanded: ‘Hang the Kaiser!’ In a speech in Cambridge on 9
December the first lord of the Admiralty, Sir Eric Geddes, recommended that
Germany be stripped of all its gold and silver, together with its jewels, paintings
and libraries, all of which should be handed over to the Allies and to the neutral
powers. On another occasion Geddes demanded that his country ‘squeeze the
German lemon until the pips squeak’.12 Rising above party politics, Lloyd
George contented himself with demanding that Germany pay the entire cost of
the war.
The elections to the lower house were the first since December 1910 and
were three years overdue. This was also the first time that elections had been
held according to the new electoral law of February 1916, whereby all men over
the age of twenty-one and all women over thirty were entitled to vote. The
Conservatives – officially known since May 1912 as the Conservative and
Unionist Party following their merger with the Liberal Unionists, the party of
Joseph Chamberlain, who had died in 1914 – agreed to a national electoral pact
with the majority of the Liberals who were loyal to the government. This pact
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 119

was possible only because Lloyd George had declared his willingness to tone
down the Liberal demand for home rule for Ireland. A minority of Liberals
under the former prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, had voted against
the government in the vote of confidence proposed by Lloyd George on 9 May
1918 in protest at the prime minister’s policies, which were felt to be too
‘right-wing’. As a result, the British Liberals entered the elections a divided and
weakened force.
The Labour Party, too, was internally divided. The Independent Labour
Party was an important grouping within the main party. Under Ramsay
MacDonald, it had opposed the war from the outset. During the final year of
the war the main party had moved significantly to the left. In February 1918 a
party conference adopted a new statute according to which the Labour Party
officially acknowledged itself as a socialist party and demanded the reform of
society on the basis of property held in common by every member of that
society. In a programme agreed to at the same conference, the party also spoke
out in favour of nationalizing not only all land but also the railways, mines,
power stations, the armaments industry, canals, ports and shipping companies.
The influence of the Russian October Revolution was unmistakable, and
responses from the right were correspondingly hostile, the Labour Party being
accused of Bolshevik tendencies. In spite of its change of direction, it remained
a decidedly reformist party.
The elections on 14 December 1918 produced a clear victory for the right,
the Conservative and Unionist Party alone winning 382 seats, three-fifths of
the total. To their number may be added 136 coalition Liberals under the
former and future prime minister Lloyd George and a handful of nationalists.
Asquith’s Liberals won only thirty-three seats, while the Labour Party won
fifty-nine, or 20.8 per cent of the total votes cast. Almost all the well-known
Labour leaders left the lower house and were replaced by largely unknown
trade union officials with no parliamentary experience. Labour was no longer
represented in Lloyd George’s new cabinet.
Of the 105 members of the lower house who were elected in Ireland,
seventy-three were members of the republican Sinn Féin, which had been
founded in 1905, six were Irish Nationalists and twenty-six were Unionists
from the predominantly Protestant Ulster. The representatives from areas
outside Ulster did not take up their seats at Westminster, thereby continuing
the boycott that had started in April 1918 in protest at the introduction of
conscription in Ireland. On 21 January 1919 the elected Irish Nationalists met
in Dublin as a revolutionary constituent assembly, or Dáil Eireann, for Ireland.
It immediately declared an independent Irish Republic and on 1 April 1919
appointed Eamon de Valera the leader of its illegal government. De Valera had
been born in New York in 1882 to a Spanish father and an Irish mother and had
recently escaped from prison. Shortly afterwards the IRA – the successor of the
Irish Republican Brotherhood that had been formed by the nationalist Fenians
120 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

in the 1850s – began its armed struggle against British troops and agents of the
law in Ireland, a struggle that had been narrowly averted twice before during
the previous five years: first by the outbreak of the war in the summer of 1914
and, second, by the Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916, when British troops
were deployed on a massive scale.
On 13 December 1918 – the eve of the elections to the lower house –
Woodrow Wilson had arrived in the French port of Brest in Brittany on the
first leg of what was the first visit to Europe ever undertaken by an American
president. His visit had only one aim: to ensure that the United States exerted
the greatest possible influence in shaping the international order in the wake of
the First World War. No political welcome was as warm and, indeed, as enthu-
siastic as that extended by Socialist workers and their leaders, who saw in
Wilson an ally in their struggle for a peace based on understanding and for
more democracy and greater social justice.
The French Socialists did everything they could to persuade Clemenceau to
agree to Wilson’s Fourteen Points as the basis for a lasting peace, but in vain.
Clemenceau did not want to pre-empt the peace negotiations and concentrated
instead on securing America’s support for a cordon sanitaire – a buffer zone
of independent central and south-east European states that would help to
provide a bulwark against Bolshevism. In a speech to the Chamber of Deputies
on 29 December Clemenceau steadfastly refused to specify any concrete peace
aims. In doing so he could be sure of broad parliamentary support. As early as
the end of October most of the middle-class parties to the right and left of the
centre had joined the Entente Républicaine Démocratique with whose help
Clemenceau won a decisive vote on 29 December, when the budget was
accepted by 414 votes to six. The divided Socialists had agreed to abstain.
Wilson had meanwhile travelled on to England, where he received an over-
whelmingly warm reception for a speech in Manchester on 30 December, four
days after his arrival. He also found himself in far more agreement with Lloyd
George than he had with Clemenceau, although he was under no illusions
about the effect of the recent elections, for the advocates of a tougher line
against Germany, primarily the Conservatives, were now more powerful,
whereas the British ‘Wilsonians’ who supported a negotiated peace found that
their position had been weakened.
Wilson then passed through Paris, where he made no secret of his disap-
pointment at Clemenceau’s speech to the Chamber of Deputies, before heading
for Italy, a country that had not entered the war until 1915, when enthusiasm
for armed conflict had been markedly less pronounced than elsewhere and
which was now on the brink of economic and financial bankruptcy. In
Rome Wilson’s opposite number in his talks was the right-wing liberal prime
minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, who had taken office in October 1917
and whose government included several ministers with conflicting views:
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 121

whereas his right-wing liberal foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, demanded the
annexation of large tracts of land, especially Dalmatia, thereby winning the
backing of the nationalist right wing, there were others, such as the deputy
prime minister Leonida Bissolati, a reform socialist, and the left-wing middle-
class finance minister Francesco Nitti, who advocated a peaceful settlement
with the South Slavs.
The right’s most vocal mouthpiece was Mussolini’s Il Popolo d’Italia which
demanded the annexation of a large part of the Dalmatian coast and South
Tyrol as far as the Brenner Pass. A moderate left-wing politician like Bissolati
wanted the border with Austria to be drawn just to the north of Bolzano, while
on the eastern side of the Adriatic he hoped to gain possession of Gorizia and
Istria and to see the border with the South Slav state drawn close to Trieste;
Fiume would acquire the status of a free city under an Italian protectorate, but
otherwise few territorial claims would be made on Dalmatia. Unable to
persuade Sonnino to accept this relatively modest programme, Bissolati
resigned as deputy prime minister. Shortly afterwards, Nitti too asked to step
down on 4 January 1919, but out of respect for Wilson, whose state visit had
started the previous day, he remained in office at Orlando’s request until the
15th. Although the cabinet still included a number of moderate left-wing poli-
ticians such as the reform socialist Ivanoe Bonomi, the right emerged from the
crisis of 1918/19 with its strength significantly increased.
Throughout his visit to Italy Wilson was cheered whenever he appeared in
public, whether in Rome or Milan. He spoke not only to Orlando and Sonnino,
both of whom struck him as men of limited vision, but also to Bissolati and
Luigi Albertini, the liberal editor of the Milan-based Corriere della sera. In
Italy, too, the most outspoken ‘Wilsonians’ were left-wing politicians, including
the leaders of the Socialists in parliament, Filippo Turati and Claudio Treves,
who in spite of their opposition to Italy’s entry into the war had helped to
maintain the country’s war effort, albeit with a demonstrable lack of enthu-
siasm. But the Socialist Party and its officials had shifted to the left in the
wake of the Russian October Revolution, and since its conference in Rome
in September 1918 the party leadership was dominated by the left-wing
‘Maximalists’ under Giacinto Serrati, whose aim was the establishment of a
socialist republic and the dictatorship of the proletariat, with the result that
they refused to attend the Berne congress of the Second International. In their
eyes, Wilson was a bourgeois politician whom the proletariat should treat with
due reserve and caution.
The most prominent of the middle-class ‘Wilsonians’ was the Catholic
priest Don Luigi Sturzo, a Sicilian who in January 1919 founded the Christian
Democratic Partito Popolare Italiano, a move that had the backing of the
Vatican. It supported Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations and advocated far-
reaching social reforms, an improvement in conditions in the south of the
122 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

country and the introduction of votes for women. Sturzo’s party thus came
close to the position held by Bissolati, who after January 1919 was increasingly
targeted by Mussolini and his Popolo d’Italia. From the standpoint of the
nationalist right, Bissolati was the most dangerous of the rinunciatori, who
advocated a policy of renunciation. A meeting organized by the Reform
Socialists at La Scala was disrupted by Mussolini and his supporters, including
the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, their shouts and chanting effectively
preventing Bissolati from speaking.
On 15 January 1919 the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio published an ‘Open
Letter to the Dalmatians’ in Il Popolo d’Italia. It was a manifesto of Irredentism
and, being incompatible with a nation’s right of self-determination, it ended in
a declaration of war on the ‘Wilsonians’ of all countries, especially those of
D’Annunzio’s native Italy. The writer hailed his country as the most triumphant
of all nations because it had triumphed not only over its enemies but also over
itself. It should not allow any peace to be imposed on it, whether those terms
be Gallic, British or American. Rather, it should establish a ‘Pax Romana’ over
the Alps and the sea. ‘If necessary we will meet the new plot in the fashion of
the Arditi, a grenade in each hand and a knife between our teeth.’13 The ‘Arditi’
were a volunteer force made up of former elite soldiers. On 16 April 1919, the
day of a general strike called by the Socialist trade unions, the Arditi stormed
the building containing the offices of the Socialist Avanti in Milan, setting it on
fire and provoking clashes that resulted in five deaths and numerous injuries.
They then decamped to the offices of Il Popolo d’Italia and offered a public
tribute to Mussolini. A new age was dawning in Italy, its long shadows already
casting their pall over the coming period.

A Fragile Peace: From Versailles to the League of Nations

The Paris peace conference began on 18 January 1919, the forty-eighth anni-
versary of the day on which King Wilhelm I of Prussia had been proclaimed
the German Kaiser. Thirty-two states – the ‘Allies and associated powers’ –
were represented with full voting rights. The ‘Allies’ were the powers that made
up the Entente Cordiale, namely, Great Britain and France, while the ‘associ-
ated powers’ included the United States, Japan, Belgium and Italy. Also present
with full voting rights were the ‘additional members of the British Empire’ –
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India – as well as new states
such as Poland and Czechoslovakia and others that had merely broken off
diplomatic relations with the Central Powers, and Romania, which had entered
the war on the side of the Allies in November 1918, six months after the Treaty
of Bucharest. Conversely, the countries that had been defeated were not
represented. Nor was Russia, which had cut itself off from the Central Powers
in the spring of 1918 as a result of the Bolshevik revolution.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 123

There were only eight plenary sessions attended by all the participating
states. Until 24 March 1919 the decisions were taken by the Council of Ten, on
which the major powers of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and
Japan were represented by their heads of state or government and by their
foreign ministers. After 24 March an even smaller committee, the Council of
Four, had a say. It consisted of the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy,
although not even Italy was involved in the talks between 23 April and 6 May
1919, when open disagreement broke out between the victorious powers over
the future of Fiume, and the Italian prime minister and his foreign minister,
responding to pressure from the nationalist right, decided to lend dramatic
expression to their demand for the annexation of the Adriatic port by returning
home. One of the most important participants in the negotiations, Woodrow
Wilson, was unable to attend the conference between 14 February and 14
March as he had to return to Washington to fight for his survival in Congress.
During this time he was represented by his secretary of state, Robert Lansing.
The heads of state and government chiefs were assisted by some sixty commit-
tees, only one of which could report directly to the plenary sessions. This was
the committee set up to discuss the League of Nations.
The League of Nations was intended to provide the organizational frame-
work necessary to safeguard peace and security in the world, hence its insist-
ence that in the case of disagreements between them, member states should be
obliged to appeal to the Permanent International Court in The Hague or to a
court of arbitration set up by the parties in question. The Assembly should
include all member states, each of which would have a single vote and as many
as three delegates. With a two-thirds majority, it would have the power to
impose sanctions on its members. The same was true of the Council of the
League of Nations, which was made up of permanent and non-permanent
members. Permanent members were the major powers, assuming they joined
the League: the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan. Non-
permanent members were elected for a term of three years, their number being
open. The Assembly could exclude members and accept new ones, again with
a two-thirds majority.
The Assembly had at its disposal a Permanent Secretary General’s Office
under a secretary general. Its headquarters were in Geneva. It appointed the
commission which was to oversee the mandated territories, namely, the former
German colonies and the Arab parts of the former Ottoman Empire, including
Palestine. It also set up the High Commission for Refugees and special organi-
zations such as the one that dealt with all matters of health. It also oversaw the
International Labour Office, the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation in Paris
and other international bodies. The Assembly additionally gave a direct
mandate to the Government Commission for the Saar region and to the High
Commission for the newly created Free City of Gda-sk.
124 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Whether the League of Nations could really help establish peace and settle
disputes in the way that Wilson envisaged was debatable from the very outset.
The member states of this system of collective security remained absolutely
sovereign. And in the light of their divergent interests, especially those of
the larger states, it was hard to see how any consensus could be reached on the
question of sanctions. Among the privileged permanent members of the
Council of the League of Nations, the larger European colonial powers had
the upper hand. (In the spring of 1919 no one could have suspected that the
United States would not become a member of the League of Nations.)
If the League of Nations could be expected to make any significant contri-
bution at all, then it would most likely be in the field of humanitarian endeavour,
whereas it was inherently unlikely that a body from which the colonial nations
were by definition excluded would ever be able to form a single representative
‘world government’ or even a ‘federation of free states’ of the kind that Kant
had envisaged as the basis of a new type of international law that he had advo-
cated in 1795 in his essay Eternal Peace. The League of Nations began life as an
assembly of victors of the First World War and of states that had remained
neutral during that conflict. For the present the defeated powers were excluded.
At best, they could hope that things would soon change, a state of affairs that
applied not only to Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey but also
to Soviet Russia.
While in Paris, Wilson had urged his fellow leaders to contain the revolu-
tion in Russia by sending in food supplies and at the same time holding talks
not only with the Allies, but also with the Communist government in Moscow
and the counterrevolutionary governments set up by the ‘Whites’. The attempt
initially foundered in February 1919 on the Whites’ refusal to sit down at the
same table as the Reds. Then, in April 1919, following clandestine contacts
between the Americans and the Bolsheviks, when the question of food supplies
seemed almost to have been resolved, further problems arose, the Bolsheviks
finding themselves unable to meet western conditions, including the Allies’
demand that the Russian transport network be taken out of the control of
the government in Moscow. Germany, by contrast, received substantial
shipments of corn and fats after the French had ended their opposition to
Anglo-Saxon proposals in this regard. As a result the Allied blockade was
lifted, although this was the consequence not so much of humanitarian consid-
erations as of the fear that the starving Germans might turn to Russia and
embrace Bolshevism.
The main bone of contention at the Paris Peace Conference was Germany.
It soon became clear that France held very different views from those of the
Anglo-Saxon delegates and that there were in turn differences of opinion
between Washington and London. Although his demands were couched in less
strident terms than those of Marshal Foch, Clemenceau none the less insisted
that the Saarland and the rest of Germany situated along the left bank of the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 125

Rhine be partitioned off from Germany and form an autonomous state

dependent on France. In the interest of a ‘balance of power’ Lloyd George had
no wish to see France become unduly powerful and so he resisted France’s
expansionist ambitions in the west, just as he resisted Polish expansionism in
the east. Wilson was all in favour of punishing Germany, a desire in which he
drew little distinction between the old Kaiserreich and the new government.
But he had no wish to come into conflict with his own principle of self-
determination and not least as a result of this he felt unable to bow to French
pressure.
The result of this tenacious struggle was a compromise that respected both
France’s need for national security and the principles of the Anglo-Saxon dele-
gates. In order to satisfy France’s need for national security the United States
and Great Britain agreed to a treaty guaranteeing France against an unpro-
voked German attack. Alsace-Lorraine was handed back to France without a
plebiscite, a move that had previously been far from uncontroversial among
the victorious powers. The Saarland was not ceded to France but was placed
under the administration of the League of Nations for a period of fifteen years,
at the end of which term the local population would have the right to deter-
mine its own future. France also had to backtrack in respect of its claims to the
Rhineland. The area to the west of the Rhine was not partitioned off from
Germany. Instead the peace terms provided for Allied occupation of the area,
which was divided into three parts to be administered for periods of five, ten
and fifteen years respectively. There would also be a number of bridgeheads on
the right bank of the Rhine and a permanent ‘demilitarization’ of those parts of
Germany that lay on the left bank. In partial recompense for the political and
material wrong that it had suffered at Germany’s hands, Belgium was handed
the region of Eupen-Malmedy, with its predominantly German-speaking
population. The ballot that was organized to this end involved public lists
inviting voters to state whether or not they wanted to remain part of Germany.
This was hardly an appropriate way of establishing the will of the population,
and the result was correspondingly compromised.
Incomparably more painful for the Germans were their territorial losses in
the east. It was widely anticipated that Poland would fall heir to the former
grand duchy of Posen, but Poland was also to receive the whole of Upper Silesia
and – as a result of Wilson’s promise in his Fourteen Points that the country
would have free and secure access to the Baltic – most of West Prussia, together
with a port to the west of Gda-sk, meaning that East Prussia was now cut off
from the rest of the country. Gda-sk became a free city governed by a commissar
appointed by the League of Nations, while the area of Memel bordering on
Lithuania fell under the administration of the Entente.
In two regions – Masuria in East Prussia and in the area of West Prussia
around Marienburg (modern Malbork) and Marienwerder (now Kwidzyn) to
the east of the Vistula – the population was left to decide whether it wanted to
126 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

remain part of Germany or to become a part of Poland. A further referendum

was planned for the largely Danish-speaking Northern Schleswig. This duly
took place in February and March 1920 and led to the region’s being divided
between Denmark and Germany along linguistic lines. In Masuria and in the
area around Marienburg and Marienwerder the population decided almost
unanimously in favour of remaining a part of Germany in July 1920.
At the insistence of France the peace treaty firmly closed the door on any
attempt to compensate Germany for its territorial losses by sanctioning the
union of Germany and Austria. According to Article 80 of the Treaty of
Versailles, Germany had to recognize Austrian independence. A change was
possible only with the agreement of the Council of the League of Nations.
Under the terms of the peace treaty Germany lost a seventh of its lands and a
tenth of its population. And it also lost its colonies. Economically speaking, the
reduction in the country’s size meant that, if we also take into account the divi-
sion of Upper Silesia in 1921, Germany lost a third of its income from coal and
three-quarters of its iron ore revenue. The victorious powers were unable to
agree on a sum that might be paid by way of reparations. For the present,
Germany had to hand over its trunk cables and nine-tenths of its cattle. For the
next ten years it also had to provide France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Italy
with forty million tons of coal annually.
The military terms that the Allies imposed on Germany were even more
draconian. Conscription was abolished and the army reduced to 100,000 men,
the navy to 15,000 professionals with several years’ service. The country was no
longer permitted to maintain an air force or a submarine fleet, while tanks and
gas weapons were likewise banned. The general staff was disbanded. And, with
few exceptions, the ocean-going fleet had to be handed over, a provision that
the navy pre-empted by scuttling its fleet at Scapa Flow on 21 June.
No article in the peace treaty met with such impassioned opposition as
Article 231, which was drawn up by John Foster Dulles, a legal adviser to the
American delegation who became secretary of state between 1953 and 1959.
Under its terms, Germany was obliged to accept ‘responsibility for causing all
the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and
their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon
them by the aggression of Germany and her allies’. Neither Dulles nor the
Americans were interested in condemning Germany from a moral point of
view but wanted only to find a binding legal title for the Allies’ claims to repa-
rations. The terms ‘war guilt’ and ‘sole responsibility’ do not occur in this
article, but this is exactly how it was interpreted in Germany, an interpretation
that was all the easier to read into the clause in that the idea that Germany and
its allies had led a war of aggression also lay behind the demand that Germany
must hand over its war criminals and those statesmen who were responsible for
the outbreak of the war.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 127

The peace terms of the Allies and their associated governments were
presented to the German peace delegation on 7 May 1919 in Versailles. As pres-
ident of the peace conference Clemenceau gave a short introductory speech, to
which the German foreign minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, felt
the need to respond with a deliberately arrogant address of his own, which he
delivered from his seat, in contrast to Clemenceau, who had stood. He rejected
the claim that Germany was solely to blame for the war and accused the victors
of having cold-bloodedly murdered hundreds of thousands of non-combatants
even after the Armistice of 11 November as a result of their blockade. The effect
was devastating: Wilson regarded the speech as a personal affront and felt that
his negative opinion of Prussian Junkers was fully justified.
The Germans as a nation had still been hoping for a ‘Wilson peace’ on the
basis of every nation’s right to self-determination and reacted to the announce-
ment of the peace terms with outrage and indignation. In the camp that con-
sisted of the ruling parties of the ‘Weimar Coalition’, namely, the Majority Social
Democrats, the Centre and the German Democratic Party, the initial response
was to declare the terms unacceptable. At a rally held by the National Assembly
in the Great Hall of the University of Berlin on 12 May, the prime minister
Philipp Scheidemann asked the rhetorical question: ‘What hand shall not
wither that binds itself and us in these fetters?’ The Prussian prime minister,
Paul Hirsch, who like Scheidemann was a Majority Social Democrat, coined the
phrase: ‘Better dead than a slave!’ And the president of the National Assembly,
Konstantin Fehrenbach, who was a member of the Centre Party, called the
treaty a ‘perpetuation of the war’ and threatened the Allies with a second
world war: ‘In the future, too, German women will give birth to children, and
these children will smash the chains of bondage and cleanse the disgrace that is
to be smeared on our German face.’14
But only one of the three ruling parties was more or less resolved to reject
the peace treaty: the German Democratic Party. The Social Democrats and the
Centre were both internally divided. The proponents of Realpolitik, including
three ministers, Matthias Erzberger of the Centre party and Gustav Noske and
Eduard David of the Social Democrats, were aware that if the Germans rejected
the treaty, the Allies would occupy Germany which, with its weakened military
resources, would be unable to prevent them, a view shared by the acting first
quartermaster-general, Wilhelm Groener. But the German negotiators were
still able to achieve a number of concessions after they had submitted their
‘observations’ on the treaty in Versailles on 29 May: on 16 June the victorious
powers, acting at the instigation of Lloyd George, agreed to a plebiscite in
Upper Silesia, allowing the local population to decide whether it preferred to
be a part of Germany or Poland. As for the Rhineland, the Allies accepted that
the occupation of the region might end prematurely if the Germans behaved
themselves. But the Allies rejected the German account of the question of who
128 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

was guilty of causing the war, a rejection couched in terms as unequivocal as

they were exhaustive.
As a result of these concessions and the arguments put forward by Erzberger,
the following few days witnessed the emergence of a majority consensus
in the National Assembly and, with it, a willingness to sign the Treaty of
Versailles on two conditions: neither the article on the question of war guilt
nor the obligation to hand over war criminals was to be regarded as binding.
But both Scheidemann and Brockdorff-Rantzau were so implacably opposed
to acceptance that Scheidemann saw no alternative but to resign, which he
did on 26 June. He was succeeded by Gustav Bauer, a politically colourless
Majority Social Democrat who had previously been labour minister and,
before that, the co-chairman of the General Commission of Free Trade
Unions. The new foreign minister was the multilingual Hermann Müller,
who had only just been elected chairman of the Social Democrats. Unlike the
Centre Party, the German Democratic Party was no longer a part of Bauer’s
government.
On 22 June the National Assembly voted to sign the treaty by a majority of
237 votes to 138, with six abstentions. Again, it refused to accept sole culpa-
bility for the war and to extradite German war criminals. The Allies responded
swiftly with an ultimatum: Germany had to sign the treaty unconditionally
within twenty-four hours. In short, the National Assembly had to decide again
on 23 June, this time definitively.
Everything now depended on the Centre. The members of the Catholic
party found it easier to agree to an unconditional acceptance of the terms of the
peace treaty in that Groener, in a telegram, had stressed the hopelessness of
military action, while the right-wing opposition parties – the German Nationals
and the German People’s Party – expressly declared their acquiescence in the
‘patriotic’ motives of those delegates who voted in favour of acceptance. The
two Social Democratic parties, the majority of the Centre Party and a minority
of the German Democrats finally voted in favour of acceptance, while the
German National People’s Party, the German People’s Party, a majority of the
German Democratic Party and a minority of the Centre Party voted against.
Five days later the treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where
Wilhelm I had been proclaimed the German Kaiser in 1871. The German
signatories were the foreign minister Hermann Müller of the Social Democrats
and the transport minister Johannes Bell of the Centre Party.
The profound and long-lasting sense of outrage at the ‘diktat of Versailles’
stemmed not least from the refusal of Scheidemann’s government to publish
the German documents collected by Kautsky on the outbreak of the war and in
that way to prepare the German people for what they could expect from the
victorious Allies. It was a refusal that flew in the face of President Ebert’s
entreaties. During the spring and summer of 1919 the majority of Social
Democrats were reluctant to confront the question of the country’s guilt in an
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 129

open, self-critical way. When Eduard Bernstein, at the Social Democrats’ first
post-war party conference in Weimar between 10 and 15 June 1919, appealed
to his fellow delegates to face up to the question of guilt and responsibility and
to stop being prisoners of the vote of 4 August 1914, when the Social Democrats
in the Reichstag had voted in favour of war loans, he was severely criticized,
especially so by Hermann Müller, whose putdown was manifestly anti-Semitic
in tone. But Scheidemann trumped Müller by calling Bernstein an ‘advocate of
the devil’ who in his overdeveloped sense of justice would defend even the
country’s imperialist enemies.
The reluctance to consider the policies of the German leadership during the
July crisis of 1914 in a remotely impartial way soon turned into a denial on the
part of the political right to accept any responsibility at all for Germany’s culpa-
bility in causing the war. In an attempt to deny the Allies’ ‘lie’ about the coun-
try’s guilt, the Germans began to promote a legend about their innocence
which, like its twin sister, the legend of the stab in the back, proved to be a
dangerous weapon in the struggle not only with Versailles but also with
Weimar. The claim that the Germans were ‘undefeated on the field of battle’
had been promoted by Ebert when, as chairman of the Council of People’s
Deputies, he had told the returning troops on 10 December 1918: ‘No enemy
has defeated you!’ The legend of the stab in the back was given classic expres-
sion on 18 November 1919, when Hindenburg, who together with Groener
had stepped down as chief of the army supreme command at the end of June,
had addressed a parliamentary committee examining the causes of the coun-
try’s collapse and quoted an unnamed English general as having said that the
German army had been ‘stabbed in the back’. For the German right, this inevi-
tably meant the German left, the ‘Marxists’ and ‘Bolsheviks’ and, even more
simplistically and frequently, the Jews.
It was not only the question of Germany’s complicity in causing the war that
most Germans chose to repress, however, but also the diktat imposed on Russia
by the Reich in 1918. In terms of the economic and territorial losses that it
inflicted, Versailles was less severe in its impact than Brest-Litovsk. Of course,
neither peace treaty was just or astute. While working on the Paris treaties, the
representatives of the victorious powers were under pressure from their own
citizens, who demanded that the former Central Powers, and principally
Germany, should be punished and that they be compensated for the losses
that they had endured. In order to punish the vanquished, the victors violated
individual nations’ right of self-determination, notably in the case of the
‘Polish corridor’ that henceforth divided East Prussia from the Reich. In the
northern part of West Prussia it was the German-speaking population, rather
than its Polish counterpart, that was in the majority. But had the Germans not
done exactly the same when they were the victors? Had they not contested
Poland’s claim to be treated as an independent state ever since the late eight-
eenth century? And was it possible to imagine a viable Polish state without
130 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

access to the Baltic – in other words, at the expense of those areas settled by
Germans?
As soon as the peace terms became known in Germany, Wilson, on whom
so many hopes had been placed, was accused of betraying his own highest
principle, that of a nation’s right of self-determination, and from then on he
was as hated a figure in Germany as Clemenceau. He had had to make conces-
sions to France, but France had had to make far greater ones. Great Britain and
America protected Germany from many of the indignities that it would have
suffered if the peace had been dictated by France alone. Throughout the nego-
tiations in Paris, Wilson had to take account of the American public and espe-
cially of the Republican-dominated Senate, for only if the latter agreed to the
treaty by a two-thirds majority could this and other international treaties be
ratified. If Wilson had returned to Washington prematurely by way of protest,
he would have abandoned the field to Clemenceau, and the result would have
been chaos in Europe. During the final weeks of the conference, the alternative
facing Wilson was, in the words of the historian Klaus Schwabe, no longer
either a ‘compromise peace’ or a ‘Wilson peace’ but a ‘compromise peace or no
peace at all’.15
The Treaty of Versailles was harsh, but few people in Germany realized that
it could all have turned out very much worse. The Reich was preserved, and the
Rhineland remained a part of Germany. Germany was still the most heavily
populated country to the west of the Russian border and, economically
speaking, the most powerful force in Europe. In certain ways it could even be
argued that the country’s external situation had improved when compared
with the period before 1914, for the conflict between the Western Powers and
Soviet Russia meant that Germany no longer had any reason to feel encircled.
And even in Versailles the first cracks had already appeared in the relations
between the Western Allies, with France on one side and Great Britain and the
United States on the other. For the present Germany was denied membership
of the League of Nations, but this was a situation that would surely change with
time, and Germany had a good chance of once again becoming a major
European power. It needed only a sober assessment of the new situation to see
‘Versailles’ from a realistic standpoint.
Germany was not the only country to criticize the peace treaty. In the victo-
rious states it was above all left-wing parties and newspapers that expressed
dissent. Once the terms of the peace treaty had been made known, the Daily
Herald – the official paper of the British Labour Party – argued that those
terms violated every pledge and that the planned League of Nations was ‘a
mechanical League of Victors without a soul’. For its part, the Labour Leader,
the organ of the Independent Labour Party, felt that Wilson’s Fourteen Points
had been treated with ‘callous contempt’. The leader of the majority of French
Socialists, Jean Longuet, compared the draft treaty to Tilsit in 1807 and Brest–
Litovsk in 1918, two other peace treaties imposed by diktat. The mouthpiece of
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 131

the Partito Socialista Italiano, Avanti, described the draft treaty as a ‘diplomatic
Caporetto’, a reference to the humiliating defeat of the Italian army in October
1917, and it pronounced the collapse of the democratic ideology which capi-
talist governments had used to justify a world cataclysm that had cost twelve
million lives. In the United States, the left-wing liberal Nation claimed that
Wilson had accepted terms that betrayed all his promises, thereby proving
himself to be no more than an ‘arrogant autocrat and a compromising politi-
cian’. The New Republic declared ‘this Punic treaty’ ‘the prelude to quarrels in a
deeply divided and hideously embittered Europe’.
But there was also criticism from the political right among the victorious
nations, even if such criticism was radically different from that expressed by
the left. The historian Jacques Bainville, one of the leading figures of Action
Française, argued that the peace was ‘too soft for being too hard’. Germany, he
went on, would survive as a major power and could some day hope to free itself
from the conditions that military defeat had compelled the country to accept.
After fifteen years – by 1934 – Germany would demonstrate its newfound
strength by wreaking vengeance on Poland and Czechoslovakia rather than on
France. The British right-wing press was relatively restrained in comparison:
the Morning Post, the Daily Mail and the News Chronicle all conceded that on
the whole the naval, military, territorial and colonial terms were better than
expected, whereas only the financial provisions fell short of the promises made
at the time of the elections to the lower house in December 1918.16
The economist John Maynard Keynes came to a very different conclusion.
A financial expert, he represented the British chancellor of the exchequer at the
deliberations of the Great Economic Council in Paris, only to resign in early
June 1919 in protest at the Treaty of Versailles. The following year he published
The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he justified his critique of
the peace conference’s work. The book was quickly translated into German and
encountered widespread support in Germany. According to Keynes, ‘Paris was
a nightmare, and every one there was morbid.’ Turning to Clemenceau, whom
he saw as the evil genius of the peace conference, he noted wryly that ‘he had
one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen,
and his colleagues not least’.17 The aim of the French prime minister and, hence,
of France had been to turn back the clock as far as possible and invalidate all
the progress that Germany had made since 1870. Keynes portrayed Wilson as
an unworldly realist who from the outset was browbeaten by Clemenceau and
Lloyd George, two intellectually volatile and astute power politicians who
ensured that the American president was the conference’s real loser.
Keynes’s principal aim was to show that ‘the Carthaginian Peace is not prac-
tically right or possible’.18 In his view, the reason for this impossibility was the
flagrant contradiction inherent in the peace treaty’s goals: on the one hand it
contained everything that could rob Germany in the short term and every-
thing that might prevent it from evolving in the future, while on the other the
132 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

country was required to pay reparations that in Keynes’s eyes were an expres-
sion of mere wishful thinking. He ascribed the participants’ politico-economic
illusions to their manifest lack of interest in a viable international economic
and financial order:

The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues, being preoccupied

with others, – Clemenceau to crush the economic life of his enemy, Lloyd
George to do a deal and bring home something which would pass muster
for a week, the President to do nothing that was not just and right. [. . .]
Reparation was their main excursion into the economic field, and they
settled it as a problem of theology, of politics, of electoral chicane, from
every point of view except that of the economic future of the States whose
destiny they were handling.19

Keynes castigated the French for the enormous shortfall in their budget, a
result, he argued, of their failure to raise taxes and a cause of the continuing
devaluation of the franc. In comparison, the British had financed the war
along far sounder lines. The misguided policy on reparations on the part of
the Allies affected not only the vanquished nations but sooner or later would
also have consequences for the victors: ‘An inefficient, unemployed, disorgan-
ised Europe faces us, torn by internal strife and international hate, fighting,
starving, pillaging, and lying. What warrant is there for a picture of less sombre
colours?’20
Keynes went beyond mere criticism and made a number of suggestions
aimed at remedying the situation, including the demand that Germany should
pay a lump sum of forty million gold marks as a realistic contribution to the
war reparations. He also proposed an international loan combined with inter-
national currency reform. The Allies should also work with Germany to ensure
Russia’s economic recovery. No less revolutionary was Keynes’s suggestion that
the Allies’ war debts be written off completely. The United States and Great
Britain would have to make sacrifices: the former as a pure creditor nation
whose financial contributions had made it possible for the Western Powers to
win the war at all, Great Britain as a state that had given more war credits to its
European allies than it had received from America.
Keynes believed that Great Britain should refuse to accept German repara-
tions and that these should be channelled instead into the new states of eastern
central and south-east Europe. This, he was convinced, was a precondition for
a forward-looking solution to the problem of the Allies’ debts that had been
caused by the war, a problem that weighed on Italy no less than on France.
Keynes regarded the economy of the United States as strong enough to be able
to afford to forgo the repayment of what it was owed by the Allies. Whether
Washington would share this conclusion was doubtful in the extreme, and
Keynes could do little more than hope that time would work in his favour and
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 133

that his insight would ultimately gain acceptance: ‘Europe, if she is to survive
her troubles, will need so much magnanimity from America, that she must
herself practise it.’21
The keenest criticism of the peace treaty with Germany came from Moscow,
where in July 1919 the executive committee of the Communist International
that had been formed four months earlier compared Versailles with Brest-
Litovsk in an appeal to the workers of the world. The full weight of the treaty,
it argued, fell primarily on Germany’s working class. ‘If the Peace of Versailles
were to prove at all long-lasting, this means that the working class of Germany
would have to groan beneath a double yoke: beneath that of its own bour-
geoisie and beneath that of foreign slave owners.’ The German government
may have protested verbally at the peace treaty, but in fact it was helping the
imperialists of the Entente to carry out its diabolical plan with regard to
Germany’s working class:

In Germany the henchman Clemenceau has no more faithful servants than

Scheidemann and Ebert. [. . .] The proletarian world revolution is the only
salvation for the downtrodden masses of the world. [. . .] As long as capi-
talism lives, there can be no lasting peace. A lasting peace will be built on
the ruins of the bourgeois order. Long live the uprising of the workers
against their oppressors! Down with the Peace of Versailles! Down with
Brest! Down with the government of the social traitors! Long live the soviet
power of the whole world!22

The peace treaties drawn up in the wake of the pioneering treaty with Germany
paid no heed to Keynes’s warning. The second of the Paris suburban treaties
was signed in St-Germain on 10 September 1919 and was a peace treaty with
Austria. According to Article 80 of the Versailles Treaty, Austria could not be
annexed by Germany, a point underscored by Article 88 of the St-Germain
Treaty, which decreed that the name ‘German Austria’ had to be changed to the
‘Republic of Austria’. The principle of a nation’s right to self-determination was
also undermined by the decision to draw the border at the Brenner Pass,
dividing the Tyrol and apportioning the German-speaking South Tyrol to Italy.
The same was true of the Allies’ earlier decision to create a Czechoslovak state
that would include the whole of Bohemia and Moravia, thereby incorporating
those regions where the population spoke German.
The Western Powers attempted to secure the rights of national minorities
such as the Germans and the Hungarians living in Slovakia by means of a treaty
with Czechoslovakia that was signed on the same day as the peace treaty with
Austria: 10 September 1919. Two plebiscites were held to decide two other
border disputes: the first took place in October 1920 in Carinthia, which had
previously endured a violent struggle between German and Slovene nationals,
resulting in the intervention of Serbian troops and ending with the region
134 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

remaining Austrian, while the second took place in December 1920 in

Ödenburg (now Sopron), which opted to be a part of Hungary. Those parts of
western Hungary that bordered Austria and that were settled by Germans fell
to Austria at the insistence of the Italians and were thenceforth known as
‘Burgenland’. It was a move that prevented the establishment of a ‘Slav corridor’
between Czechoslovakia and the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes,
a corridor that had been one of the aspirations of Czech and South Slav nation-
alists and based on scattered Croat settlements in western Hungary.
The peace with Hungary was signed at Trianon on 4 June 1920. The
Kingdom of Hungary had been an agglomeration of different nationalities, but
the enforced loss of parts of its territory to Romania, Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia meant that it now became a largely Magyar national state, albeit one
that was far from providing a home for all ethnic Magyars, some 3.5 million of
whom were obliged to become citizens of Romania, Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia. Hungary also lost two-thirds of its historic lands and population, a
loss far more serious than the reduction in size of its territory as demanded
by the Treaty of Versailles. Predictably, the result was a radical form of nation-
alism aimed at revising the Treaty of Trianon and destined to shape the coun-
try’s fortunes throughout the interwar period.
When compared to Hungary’s, the territorial losses suffered by Bulgaria
appeared to be less dramatic. The peace treaty signed at Neuilly on 27 November
1919 meant not only that Bulgaria had to relinquish all the lands that it had
won during the First World War but also that it no longer had any access to
the Aegean Sea: the region in question – Southern Thrace with the port of
Alexandroupoli (Dedeagatch) – initially fell under the control of the Allies,
who in turn passed it on to Greece in April 1920 under the terms of the Treaty
of San Remo. Turkey and Bulgaria agreed to a reciprocal exchange of popula-
tions in those regions that were ethnically mixed.
As a result of the Treaty of Neuilly, Bulgaria was reduced in size from 44,000
square miles in 1915 to 39,000 square miles in 1919. In future the country was
allowed to maintain only a small army of 10,000 men and had to pay repara-
tions of £100 million. The peace treaty was signed by a coalition government
led by the Agrarian Union and also including the Socialists. The prime minister
at this time was Alexander Stamboliyski, whose Agrarian League remained the
most powerful force during the immediate post-war period in a country that
was still predominantly agrarian. Its most powerful opponents were,
on the political left, the Communist Party which enjoyed growing support
among the poorest peasants and, on the right, the army, which was the most
important ally of all the forces that urged a renegotiation of the terms of the
Treaty of Neuilly.
The negotiations leading to a peace agreement with Turkey proved to be the
most protracted. The truce that was signed at Mudros on 30 October 1918
turned out to be a mere intermezzo. In the middle of May 1919 Greek troops,
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 135

supported by the British and armed with a mandate from the Supreme Council
of the Allied and Associated Powers in Paris landed in Smyrna (Izmir), where
they caused a terrible bloodbath among the fez-wearing inhabitants and used
the city as a base from which to launch an invasion of western Anatolia. The
troops had only recently belonged to an anti-Bolshevik interventionist force in
southern Russia and were allegedly intended to pre-empt an Italian attack on
southern Anatolia but were in reality an instrument in the far more ambitious
policies of the Athens government, the aim of which was to ensure Greek
control over the coastal region of Asia Minor that was partly Greek and partly
Turkish, its ultimate goal being the creation of a Greater Greece.
This Greek intervention soon met with stout resistance on the part of
General Mustafa Kemal, the most successful military commander of the war
years and later the founder and leader of the Turkish Republic. The govern-
ment of Sultan Mehmed VI had entrusted him with the task of demobilizing
sections of the Ottoman army. In the summer and early autumn of 1919 two
national congresses in Erzurum and Sivas elected him their chairman. His
programme was the ‘national pact’ concluded in Sivas on 22 September 1919,
the aim of which was the formation of a Turkish national state that was to
include not only those regions inhabited by ethnic Turks but also those parts of
Anatolia and Thrace populated by Armenians, Kurds and Greeks.
With its headquarters in Ankara, Mustafa Kemal’s Representative
Committee may have claimed to be protecting the Sultanate and the Caliphate,
but it was in fact an alternative government to that of the sultan. Mustafa
Kemal’s principal concern was the organization of the struggle for independ-
ence, a struggle waged against the Greeks in the west of Anatolia, against the
British-protected ‘peace-keepers’ or ‘Caliphate’s army’ in the north, against the
Armenian independence movement in the east and against the French troops
that had occupied Cilicia in the south. When Sultan Mehmed VI began to draw
closer to the line adopted by Mustafa Kemal in early 1920 and the parliament
that had been newly elected at his behest decided to adopt the national pact,
the British reacted decisively and on 16 March placed Istanbul under their
military control. Mustafa Kemal then ordered the election of a new Grand
National Assembly with extraordinary powers. Meeting in Ankara, it declared
itself the provisional instrument of Turkish sovereignty on 23 April and asked
Mustafa Kemal to form a new government, the sultan having been effectively
interned. In a truce intended to last twenty days and to lead to the evacuation
of Cilicia, France was the first foreign power to recognize the government in
Ankara. On 18 July the Grand National Assembly swore a solemn oath
upholding the national pact and in doing so declared an end to the peace terms
proposed by the Allies in Sèvres on 10 June.
In spite of this, the sultan’s representatives signed the Treaty of Sèvres on
10 August 1920, albeit under protest. This document confirmed the loss of all
non-Turkish – in other words, Arab – parts of the Ottoman Empire, a loss
136 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

already agreed to by the Allies during the war. Mesopotamia – later the
kingdom of Iraq – and Palestine were handed over to Great Britain as mandated
territories of the League of Nations, while Syria and Lebanon fell to France on
similar terms. Greece was to receive south-eastern Thrace as far as the Chatalja
line some thirty miles from Istanbul and also, for an initial period of five years,
Smyrna. Armenia was for the present to become independent, while Kurdistan
was to become an autonomous region. The Straits of Bosporus were placed
under international administration and control, which represented a profound
infringement of Turkish sovereignty. International military courts were to
prosecute Ottoman war crimes, especially the mass deportation and murder of
Armenians in 1915–16, and in that way bring to an end the work started with
the ‘Young Turk trials’ in April 1919, trials undertaken under extreme pressure
from the Entente and in the absence of the leading defendants. (The former
Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha, the former war minister Enver Pasha and the former
navy minister Djemal Pasha had all fled to Germany in order to escape the
death sentences handed down to them. Talaat Pasha was murdered in Berlin
on 15 March 1921 by an Armenian student who belonged to a group of nation-
alist conspirators.)
The Treaty of Sèvres did not mark a new beginning or herald an age char-
acterized by the idea that every nation had the right of self-determination.
Instead, it represented a reversion to the heyday of European imperialism. It
was the last of the treaties signed in Paris and its environs – and the only one
that never came into force, for the Grand National Assembly refused to ratify
it. In order to counter the Entente in an effective way, Mustafa Kemal had in the
meantime sought a tactical alignment with Soviet Russia, the tedious negotia-
tions for which were made even more difficult by the fact that for a time
Moscow supported the Democratic Republic of Armenia that had been
proclaimed in May 1918 and against which the Turkey of Mustafa Kemal began
to wage war in 1920. By March 1921 Soviet Russia and Turkey were ready to
sign a friendship agreement that led to the partition of Armenia between the
two countries and brought to an abrupt end the brief period of Armenian inde-
pendence. (The agreement also provided for Russia to supply gold to Turkey.)
This period also witnessed a number of important military successes for
the Turkish national army under the chief of the general staff, Ismet Pasha. On
two occasions – in January and March 1921 – the Turkish army defeated the
Greek troops that had in the meantime captured a third of the country. Both
victories were won at a small town halfway between Ankara and Istanbul called
Inönü, allowing Mustafa Kemal to grant Ismet Pasha the name Inönü in 1934,
when family names became obligatory in Turkey. Ismet Pasha was later three
times the country’s prime minister and, from 1938 to 1950, its president.
Mustafa Kemal could pride himself on a major political victory in October
1920, when France saw itself obliged to sign a treaty with the government in
Ankara that was effectively a special peace treaty. Italy, too, openly sided with
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 137

Mustafa Kemal – under the terms of the secret Treaty of London of April 1915,
it had acquired an area of influence in southern Anatolia. In September 1922
the Turkish national army under Mustafa Kemal advanced as far as Smyrna,
which fell on the 12th of that month. So precipitate, indeed, was the Turkish
advance that the fleeing Greek soldiers and civilians were driven into the sea,
many of them drowning before they could reach the safety of boats and escape
to the nearby Greek islands of Chios and Mytilene.
The Greek presence in Asia Minor that had lasted for three millennia thus
came to a bloody end. In the wake of revolutionary unrest in Greece itself,
King Constantine I was forced to abdicate in favour of his son George II on
27 September. (This was in fact the second time that he had abdicated, the
Entente having already obliged him to do so in June 1917, but he had returned
to the throne in December 1920 following the death of his son and successor
Alexander and an ensuing plebiscite.) There had almost been a direct clash
between Turkish and British troops in early September 1922, when the former
approached Chanak in the neutral zone of the Dardanelles, but it was averted
thanks to the circumspection of the British commanding officer, General
Charles Harrington, and the deliberate restraint of the Turks. Lloyd George,
who had until recently been urging the Greeks to attack the Turks, had to
pay a high price for his obstinacy when the Conservatives abandoned the
wartime coalition and emerged as victors from the elections to the lower house
on 15 November.
The Turkish victory in Asia Minor was followed on 10 October by the
Truce of Mudanya and, nine days later, by the occupation of eastern Thrace
by the national army. Peace talks began in Lausanne on 1 November 1922.
Since the Allies had invited the sultan’s government to take part in the neg-
otiations, the Grand National Assembly declared the abolition of the Sultanate
that very same day. Following Mehmed VI’s flight from Istanbul, the Assembly
elected Abdülmecid his successor on 18 November and, hence, made him
leader of the Muslim world, while denying him all political powers.
Mustafa Kemal’s government was able to achieve its main political objec-
tives at the Lausanne conference, and in the peace treaty signed on 24 July 1923
the Allies recognized Turkey’s independence and sovereignty, the ‘capitula-
tions’ were abolished, and foreign troops were withdrawn from Istanbul. On
only two points was Mustafa Kemal unable to get his way: full sovereignty over
the Straits of Bosporus and the restitution of the oil-rich province of Mosul.
For its part, Turkey agreed to grant the same rights to non-Muslim Turks as to
Muslims, including the right of religious freedom.
As for Greece, agreement had already been reached in January 1923 with
regard to an exchange not only of civilian prisoners and prisoners of war but
also of almost the whole of the Muslim population of Greece and the Greek
Orthodox population of Turkey, the only exceptions being the Greeks in
Istanbul and the Turks in western Thrace. The agreement was formally ratified
138 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

by the Treaty of Lausanne. In total, some 1.5 million Greeks and 400,000 Turks
were resettled. Four years earlier, a similar exchange of populations between
Turkey and Bulgaria had been provided for in the Treaty of Neuilly of
November 1919.
This kind of mass relocation of ethnic minorities, rendered compulsory by
the state, enshrined in a treaty, internationally sanctioned and riding rough-
shod over the will of the individuals concerned, was a new feature of interna-
tional politics and international law. The agreement reached between Turkey
and its south-east European neighbours with the consent of the western
European major powers was intended to facilitate the creation of ethnically
homogeneous states but was in fact an early example of what was later to
become known as ‘ethnic cleansing’, a concept already adumbrated in the mass
expulsions during the Balkan War of 1912–13 and the annihilation of the
Armenians in 1915–16 and, as the history of the second half of the twentieth
century was to demonstrate, it set a dangerous precedent.
On 13 October 1923, eleven days after the Allied troops had left Istanbul,
Mustafa Kemal declared Ankara the Turkish capital. On 29 October the Grand
National Assembly proclaimed the country a republic and elected Mustafa
Kemal its president, marking the start of a historically unique modernization
process involving the fundamental social, political and mental reform of an
Islamic country. The former Ottoman Empire had been made up of numerous
peoples, while at the same time reigning supreme over the Muslim world. It
was now to become a western state and, as its founder declared at the economic
conference in Izmir in March 1923, the ‘most modern nation’ in the world.
The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the end of its dominion over the Arab
world were necessary if Turkey was to free itself from its Arab past, a legacy
that Mustafa Kemal saw as reactionary, hence not only the abolition of the
Caliphate on 3 March 1924 but also the closure of faith schools and Islamic
courts, the gradual extension of women’s rights, progressive industrialization,
the Europeanization of clothing, including headgear, the ban on dervish semi-
naries, the conversion of monasteries into museums, the introduction of the
Christian calendar and Latin script, the purification of the language by
removing Arab and Persian elements and, last but not least, the abandonment
of Islam as the state religion under the constitution of 20 April 1924, which
described the Turkish state as ‘republican, national, populist, statist, reformist
and laic’.23
In many ways the regime of Mustafa Kemal, on whom the National
Assembly bestowed the honorary title of ‘Atatürk’ (Father of the Turks) in 1934,
recalls the systems of government associated with the age of enlightened abso-
lutism. Although Turkey could not be described as a fully fledged dictatorship,
neither was it a fully developed democracy. Mustafa Kemal’s party, the
Republican People’s Party, maintained a dominant position in parliament, only
briefly tolerating rival parties. And Atatürk’s Turkey systematically adopted
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 139

European ways, taking over Swiss civil law, German commercial law and
Fascist Italy’s criminal law, while ignoring the West’s normative project in the
form of the inalienable human rights of individualism and pluralism.
In the words of the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, the
end of the Ottoman Empire ‘left Islam without a core state’.24 Kemal Atatürk’s
Turkey was neither able nor willing to assume this role, its official ideology
being that of a secular nationalism aimed at homogeneity in terms of both
politics and philosophy. And in spite of the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne,
this nationalist philosophy was opposed to any religious or linguistic deviation
from the majority’s cultural norm. The Christians, few of whom were left
after 1923, the Kurds and the Alawites were repeatedly made to feel just how
different they were. But not even Muslims enjoyed any religious freedoms:
although Islam was no longer the state religion after 1924, religious practices
were subjected to strict state control. The persecution and murder of the
Armenians affected the very foundations of the new state no less than the
expulsion of the Greeks. The politicians and military leaders who stood accused
of the genocide of 1915–16 were granted a political amnesty in March 1923.
From then on, the period running up to the foundation of the new state was
surrounded by a taboo for the genocide contradicted the idealized picture of
Kemal Atatürk’s revolution.
In modernizing the country from the top, the main support came from the
military, which served as a bulwark against all attempts to reimpose Islam on
the country and against all that might threaten the new state’s rigid centraliza-
tion. A powerful state was necessary to bridge the gulf between the developed
urbanized western half of Turkey and the backward agrarian eastern half of the
country. The willingness to learn from Europe was more highly developed in
Turkey than in any other society marked by Islam. The result was impressive,
but ultimately it amounted to no more than a partial westernization of the
country, for the Turkey of Kemal Atatürk took over from the West everything
that could be reconciled with the goals and ideals of Kemalism, while rejecting
everything that might have presented a serious challenge to the country’s new
understanding of itself.

Turkey could balk at the Treaty of Sèvres without having to fear any armed
intervention on the part of the Allies. If Germany, by contrast, had decided
against ratifying the Treaty of Versailles, it would immediately have been
overrun by troops from the Allied and associated powers, an occupation
already planned in case of just such an eventuality. This war did not take place
in central Europe in the wake of the First World War. Another war that did take
place was the Russo-Polish War of 1920. On 23 November 1918, shortly after
the end of the Great War, Józef Pi5sudski’s army had wrested L’viv (Lemberg)
from the Ukrainians, and by the end of December the city of Poznan (Posen)
and the Polish-speaking parts of the province of the same name had likewise
140 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

been captured with little in the way of a struggle. On 31 July 1919, as a precon-
dition for the annexation of the new areas in the west of the region, the Polish
lower house – the Sejm – ratified a treaty guaranteeing protection for the
minorities living there and promising the Germans and other minorities the
right to a minimum of teaching in their own languages in school. (Many of
the National Democrats in the national assembly voted against this move.)
With the acceptance of the peace treaty by Germany, Poland’s western border
was now fixed, the only exceptions being those regions where plebiscites were
still planned.
Conversely, the question of the country’s eastern border was still unre-
solved, but the Russian Civil War gave Poland the chance to extend its territory
eastwards by engaging with one or other of the two sides in the conflict.
Pi5sudski initially saw the pan-Russian ‘Whites’ as a far greater danger than the
Bolsheviks, who advocated a country’s right of national self-determination, for
all that that support was manifestly tactically motivated. As a result, the first
marshal of Poland, as Pi5sudski was known after being acclaimed as such by his
legionaries on 14 November 1918, refused to answer Denikin’s appeal for help
in November 1919. But this situation changed during the winter of 1919/20,
when it seemed increasingly likely that the ‘Reds’ would win. Pi5sudski assumed
that the Red Army would soon be launching a western offensive: in February
1920 the general staff of the Soviet Russian army did indeed work on a plan to
attack Poland. In order to pre-empt the assault, Pi5sudski decided to attack the
Red Army, in spite of warnings from the Grand Council in Paris.
Pi5sudski’s only possible ally was Symon Petlura’s Ukrainian People’s
Republic, and on 21 April 1920 the two men signed a deal that handed the
People’s Republic of the Ukraine to the east of the Dnieper to Petlura’s govern-
ment, which for its part declared its willingness to enter into a federation with
Poland, a move that would have left Poland covering almost the same area as it
had done before the first partition of Poland in 1772. Five days later the offen-
sive was launched under Pi5sudski’s personal leadership. The Polish and
Ukrainian troops quickly advanced as far as Kiev but failed to find the support
that they had hoped for among the local population, and by June the Red Army
was on the march. So successful was its advance that by the middle of June they
had already taken Vilnius and Grodno. It was a development that seemed to
prove Lenin right: against Trotsky’s advice he had urged a Bolshevik offensive
that would take the Communist revolution to Warsaw and from there to
Germany and to the whole of central and western Europe.
The situation became so serious that Poland’s new prime minister, the
National Democrat W5adys5aw Grabski, travelled to Spa to ask for the Allies’
help. But the latter were willing to assist the Poles only on certain conditions:
Poland was required to accept in advance the terms of the Supreme Council
with regard to the frontiers with Lithuania and Czechoslovakia; it had to
cede Vilnius to Lithuania; and it had to withdraw its troops to a line that was
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 141

essentially that of Congress Poland in 1815. This line, which was also to form
Poland’s future eastern border, was communicated by telegram to the Soviet
Russian government by the British foreign minister, George Curzon, on 11 July
after Poland had given its agreement. Termed the Curzon Line by the
Bolsheviks, it began in the north with the railway line linking Dünaburg,
Vilnius and Grodno, then passed via Brest along the Bug to Krylów, before
cutting through Galicia to the west of Lemberg and to the east of Przemy0l.
Only if the Red Army were to cross this line would Poland receive western help.
Only a short time afterwards the terms of the treaty had to be invoked, but
in the event western help, especially in the form of the provision of war goods,
was thwarted by various factors, including protests from the political left and
the organized workforce not only in Great Britain, where the Labour Party
and the unions even threatened a general strike, but also in France, Italy and
Germany, all of which were opposed to the idea of a war with the Soviet Union.
Dockworkers in Gda-sk refused to unload munitions from Allied vessels. And
the governments in Berlin and Prague both declined to allow troops and war
materials to be transported across their respective territories. As a result,
Poland was largely left to its own devices. A new ‘government of national
defence’ under the peasants’ leader Wincenty Witos that included politicians
from all parties except for the Communists mustered a volunteer army of
80,000 men armed with scythes adapted to be used as weapons. For a time the
Polish army numbered 900,000 men in total.
It was Pi5sudski who, with the help of a French contingent under General
Weygand, turned the fortunes of war in favour of Poland. (Among Weygand’s
troops was the young Charles de Gaulle, who had been serving as a staff officer
in the Polish army since 1919.) Pi5sudski decided to mount an offensive on 6
August. The battle for Warsaw lasted from 13 to 25 August 1920 and has gone
down in the history books as the ‘miracle on the Vistula’. It ended with victory
for the Poles, followed a few days later with a further victory on the Njemen,
forcing the Red Army to retreat. By September Polish troops had already
advanced far into White Russia and the Ukraine and by 9 October they
had captured Vilnius without a struggle, consciously – and with Pi5sudski’s
approval – disregarding an agreement signed only two days previously between
Poland and Lithuania, under the terms of which Vilnius was to remain a part
of Lithuania.
Cowed by the Polish advance, Soviet Russia agreed to a preliminary peace
treaty that was signed in Riga on 12 October 1920, bringing the war to an end.
The definitive peace treaty that was signed on 18 March 1921, again in Riga,
granted Poland an eastern border more than 125 miles to the east of the Curzon
Line. Pinsk, L’viv and Ternopil were now a part of Poland, as were areas with a
White Russian and Ukrainian population that were members of the Orthodox
or Greek United Church. ‘Central Lithuania’ – the area around Vilnius inhab-
ited by Poles, Lithuanians and Jews – was united with Poland in March 1922,
142 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

after attempts to mediate on the part of the Council of the League of Nations
had failed to produce any results. Lithuania, which regarded Vilnius as its
historic capital, refused to recognize this unilateral action, with the result that
there were no diplomatic ties between the two states, a situation that both
parties aptly described as ‘neither war nor peace’.
Of the twenty-seven million men, women and children living within
Poland’s borders in 1922/3, only nineteen million – or around 70 per cent –
regarded themselves as Polish nationals. Four million were ethnic Ukrainians,
and more than two million were Germans and White Ruthenians, not to
mention the smaller groups of Russians, Czechs and Tartars. The Poland of
1923 was no longer a ‘national state’ but, to quote the historian Hans Roos, a
‘conglomeration of minorities’ and ‘a multi-national state with a uni-nationalist
ideology’.25 And it was surrounded by enemies keen to change all this. On this
one point, at least, there was agreement between three of Poland’s neighbours:
Germany, Soviet Russia and Lithuania. Czechoslovakia, too, looked askance at
the present balance of power: Poland refused to accept a decision taken by the
Allied Ambassadors’ Conference at the end of July 1920 that divided the
disputed region of Teschen along the River Olsa between Poland and Prague,
leaving some 70,000 Poles citizens of Czechoslovakia.
The ‘miracle on the Vistula’ was a historical turning point not only for
Poland, for Poland’s victory dramatically reduced the chances that revolution
would be carried from East to West. France, which had taken upon itself the
role of Continental Europe’s pre-eminent power and Soviet Russia’s principal
enemy, was able to reap the rewards of its military support for Pi5sudski, and
Poland now became the cornerstone of the cartel of medium- and small-sized
states that served as a cordon sanitaire designed to prevent both Bolshevik
Russia and Germany from extending their influence to central and southern
Zwischeneuropa – the states in eastern and south-east Europe situated between
Germany and Russia.
On 20 March 1921, two days after the Peace of Riga was signed, the plebi-
scite demanded by the Treaty of Versailles was held in Upper Silesia. Just 60 per
cent voted for Germany, 40 per cent for Poland. There were 597 communes
with a Polish majority as against 664 with a German majority. Germany imme-
diately demanded the whole of Upper Silesia for itself, whereas Poland and the
Allies were in favour of partition. In order to lend weight to its demands, the
Warsaw government secretly supported an uprising led by the former Reichstag
deputy Adalbert Korfanty, in the course of which Polish insurgents occupied
large sections of the area covered by the plebiscite.
The German and Prussian governments responded by arming the Upper
Silesian Self-Defence League, a paramilitary organization that had existed
since 1920 and that joined forces with the Bavarian free corps Oberland to
storm the Annaberg – the region’s highest point – on 23 May. The Inter-Allied
Commission persuaded the armed parties in the conflict to withdraw at the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 143

end of June. On 20 October 1921 the Supreme Council of the League of Nations
settled the question of the division of Upper Silesia in a way that reflected the
Council’s own report: four-fifths of Upper Silesia’s industrial region, including
the cities of Kattowitz (Katowice) and Königshütte (Chorzów), went to Poland
in spite of the large majorities in both cities that had voted on 20 March to be a
part of Germany. Germany could do no more than register its objection to this
interpretation of the right of self-determination, for it had no means to insist
on a more equitable solution.

Poland was not the only country in the victors’ camp to dispute the Allies’ deci-
sions. Italy did so too. Although it had received the South Tyrol, the Julian
March (Julijska Krajina), Trieste, Istria and the Dodecanese Islands, it had not
been granted the former Venetian lands on the Dalmatian coast as far south as
the Bay of Cattaro, an area demanded by the radical Irredentists but given
instead to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Equally unrealized
was the goal of turning Albania into an Italian protectorate and of acquiring a
stake in the former German colonies. The more vocal among the nationalists
also regarded it as particularly humiliating that the eastern Adriatic port of
Fiume (Rijeka), in which there were more Italians than Croats and which
Italian troops had occupied in early November 1918, was not ceded to Italy but
made an independent free city. The bitterness felt by the radical right found
expression in the term vittoria mutilata – a mutilated victory.
On the Italian side, responsibility for the outcome of the peace talks was
taken by the prime minister Francesco Nitti, the successor of Vittorio Emanuele
Orlando, who had been toppled from power on 19 June 1919, and the foreign
minister Tommaso Tittoni, who had succeeded Sidney Sonnino. When Nitti
ordered the withdrawal of a number of army units stationed in Fiume following
clashes between Italian and French occupying troops in September, the units in
question mutinied and joined the irregular volunteers under the leadership of
the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who marched into Fiume on 12 September and
persuaded the Italian commander to hand over control of the town and
surrounding area. Nitti’s initial reaction was outrage, but he was eventually
forced to realize that the army’s leaders were not prepared to act against a
man described as the Garibaldi of the early twentieth century. It was not long
before Nitti was supporting D’Annunzio’s government with financial aid and
food supplies.
In the parliamentary elections in November 1919 both the Socialists and
the new Christian Democratic ‘Popolari’ achieved excellent results, together
holding more than half the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The grand old
man of pre-war Italian liberalism, Giovanni Giolitti, formed the new govern-
ment and initially continued to give undercover help for D’Annunzio. In
November 1920 Giolitti signed a treaty with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes in Rapallo, granting Fiume the status of a free city and allowing the
144 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

town of Zara (Zadar) and four of the Dalmatian islands to pass into Italian
hands. After serious clashes between the Italian military and units loyal to
D’Annunzio, Giolitti’s government gave the army an official order to attack in
December 1920, whereupon D’Annunzio capitulated. Three years later the
status of Fiume was changed yet again when Mussolini, in the second year of
his rule, signed a friendship agreement with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes, granting them control over parts of the port and the whole of its
hinterland, while the city of Fiume became a part of Italy.

It was Woodrow Wilson’s wish that the creation of the League of Nations should
be the most positive signal to emerge from the Paris peace conference. On
10 January 1920 the act establishing the League of Nations came into force
with the Treaty of Versailles, and that same day the League began work in
Geneva. A good two months later, on 19 March, the American Senate failed to
ratify the treaty, falling seven votes short of the required two-thirds majority, a
development that will not have surprised attentive observers after a majority
had voiced American ‘reservations’ about the treaty when it was discussed
there on 18 November 1919. The vote was taken, of course, on a bill that
contained the ‘reservations’ rejected by Wilson, so that even a two-thirds
majority would not have helped the president. It was not the parts of the treaty
that affected Germany that caused Wilson’s great plan to fail but the charter for
the League of Nations that was also contained in the treaty. The defeat of the
president was the work of ‘isolationists’ led by Republican senators such as
William E. Borah from Idaho and Henry Cabot Lodge from Massachusetts,
whose main argument was their concern that if the United States were to
become a member of the League of Nations, it would be increasingly drawn
into the ‘entangling alliances’ that Thomas Jefferson had decried in his first
inauguration address on 4 March 1801. But Wilson’s enemies saw the danger of
involvement in European affairs not only in the United States’ entry into the
League of Nations but also in the guarantee treaty that Wilson and Lloyd
George had agreed to at the Paris peace conference in order to save France
from an unprovoked German attack. This treaty, too, was invalidated by the
vote on 19 March 1920.
In the wake of his return to Washington from the Paris peace conference,
Wilson sought to elicit support for the League of Nations both in the Senate on
8 July 1919 and in countless nationwide rallies. Following a speech in Pueblo,
Colorado, on 25 September he collapsed with exhaustion, and the rest of his
tour was cancelled. A few days later he suffered a stroke in Washington, with
the result that for eight weeks he was unable to carry out his duties at all.
Although he recovered, the final eighteen months of his presidency were over-
shadowed by illness.
It is questionable whether concessions to his critics in the Senate might
have helped to turn over a new leaf. Wilson refused to compromise, arguing
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 145

that this would lead to other unilateral changes to the wording of the treaty. In
keeping with current practice he would in any case have been unable to contest
the 1920 presidential elections as he had already completed two terms in office.
Although he had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, he was regarded as a
failed president by March 1920, having foundered in an almost tragic manner
on the yawning gulf between his own high ideals and the reality of the situation
on the ground in both Europe and the United States.
The role of global leader that Wilson hoped that his country would assume,
ultimately ensuring a Pax Americana, was not accepted by large sections of the
American public, especially the country’s political and financial elite. With
its war loans, supplies and troops, America had helped Britain and France to
defeat Germany and its allies but was not prepared to assume the political
responsibility on the world’s stage that this victory required it to assume. In
refusing to join the League of Nations, America did not turn its back completely
on Europe for it continued to maintain a powerful economic and financial
presence in the Old World. In doing so, the United States to a certain extent
made up for the greater weakness of Great Britain, which until then had been
the world’s banker but which both during the war and afterwards had grown
dependent on American aid. But no European power could close the gap
opened up by the Senate’s veto on joining the League of Nations.
Before 1914 a Pax Britannica had existed only on the colonial margins, not
in Continental Europe, where France was now the most powerful country. But
once France had failed to achieve its two main aims along the Rhine, it had
banked on receiving guarantees of assistance and security from both Anglo-
Saxon powers. When America voted against joining the League of Nations and
rejected the Treaty of Versailles, it was obliged to abandon this hope. As
Theodor Schieder has concluded, France’s outwardly powerful position within
the international system was no more than a ‘sham hegemony’26 that was
threatened in part by the appalling state of the country’s finances and in part by
the possibility that Germany might recover and join forces with another ‘revi-
sionist’ state – Soviet Russia – that would likewise call into question the status
quo in the rest of Europe, a nightmare that Lloyd George had already foreseen
at the Paris peace conference.
In short, France did not feel secure after 1919 even though it was one of the
victorious powers. And the fact that it did not feel secure meant that it tried to
achieve that sense of security by means of German reparations. Throughout
the post-war period, French nationalism was so pronounced that there could
be no thought of a Pax Gallica. A French-influenced peace framework would
have required Paris’s willingness to subordinate its own national interest to a
larger, overriding concern, and this willingness was lacking.
France would also have had to find sufficiently powerful allies to share the
feeling of a genuine partnership. Prior to 1917, Russia had been one such
partner, but since the time of the October Revolution it was no longer available
146 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

to fulfil this function. After 1918, Great Britain, its partner in the 1904 Entente
Cordiale, no longer had any interest in making France even stronger and
Germany yet weaker. France’s partners were now Poland and the states of the
‘Little Entente’ made up of Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Kingdom of
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, all of whom joined forces under French patronage
in order to counter Hungarian revisionism. Poland concluded a mutual assist-
ance pact with France in February 1921, but even after the Peace of Riga it
remained a revisionist state, at least in terms of its western border and, above
all, its border with Czechoslovakia, while the states of the Little Entente with
whom the Quai d’Orsay signed alliances and friendship agreements between
1924 and 1927 were in greater need of French help than the other way round.
Italy was embittered at the vittoria mutilata and far too preoccupied with its
own affairs to be seriously considered as an ally. In short, the post-war situation
in Europe was precarious and peace was fragile, a state of affairs regarding
which French politicians could be under no illusions.
The task facing the peace conference of 1919–20 differed fundamentally
from the one that had confronted the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15. On that
occasion France, although defeated, had taken its place at the negotiating table
and was invited to accept peace terms that had nothing to do with vengeance
and retribution but were aimed at achieving stability and balance. The politi-
cians responsible for restoring peace in 1814–15 did not have to take account
of their peoples’ sensitivities. With the exception of Great Britain, they were all
agreed that a nation’s right to having a political say could largely, if not entirely,
be ignored. A century later democratic ideas had become so firmly entrenched
that it was impossible for politicians to sign peace treaties that disregarded the
will of their people. The peoples who made up the victorious powers wanted to
punish the country – Germany – that they blamed for the war and to demand
the maximum possible compensation for the suffering, damage and privations
that the war had caused them. Any government that rejected this demand by
appealing to reasons of state would have been toppled without further ado. As
a result, Germany could not take part in the peace conference and had to accept
conditions that the victorious powers had worked out among themselves.
With regard to eastern central Europe, the Paris peace conference had to
deal with a number of problems that had already been on the agenda during
the revolutions of 1848–9. At that date few of the Slav nations that formed
part of the Habsburg monarchy had aspired to sovereign statehood but had
insisted, instead, on an appropriate place within the empire, turning them into
the enemies of all those forces that were either eager to see its dissolution or
at the very least content to accept that consequence. These groupings included
the Austrian Germans, at least to the extent that they supported the creation
of a unified German state; the Poles who were seeking an end to their country’s
partition and working for an independent Poland; and the Hungarians
who rebelled against the role of the Kaiser in Vienna. This opposition led
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 147

to the formation of an alliance with the Habsburg counterrevolution and

contributed in no small way to the failure of the revolution in the whole of
central Europe.
Seven decades later not a single Slav nation wanted to retain the Habsburg
Empire any longer. Their aim was now the creation of independent nation
states, an aim that revived problems that had first emerged in 1848–9, when the
Magyars had set out to create an autonomous state independent of Vienna and
in the process provoked resistance on the part not only of the Slav nations but
also of the Romanians and Germans who did not belong to the Hungarian
titular nation. The western, or, to be more precise, the French idea of a ‘nation
une et indivisible’ presupposed a large measure of national homogeneity, and
where this quality did not exist, then it was brought about by force. In eastern
central and south-east Europe, conversely, a national mix was not so much the
exception as the rule. Here the unconditional application of the majority prin-
ciple was bound to mean that the most powerful nationality would assert itself
at the expense of the others and in that way threaten their very identity.
The Western Allies saw this problem and tried to solve it by means of
treaties designed to protect minorities. Their ratification was a precondition
for full recognition under international law of the states in eastern central and
south-east Europe that were either new or reborn or territorially much
enlarged. The first of the treaties intended to safeguard a minority was signed
with Poland on 28 April 1919, and in the course of the months that followed,
similar treaties were signed with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes,
with Czechoslovakia and with Romania. A treaty with Greece was concluded
in August 1920. All of the countries concerned saw these treaties as serious
infringements of their sovereignty and did all they could to oppose them.
Certainly, these treaties contained only the most minimal demands with regard
to the equal rights of all citizens and demanded certain cultural rights for those
who did not belong to the titular nation, including – under certain conditions
– the right to be taught at school in the minority’s mother tongue.
Few of the treaties contained a collective right to national identity. The
Romanian treaty enshrined certain exceptions that favoured the region’s
Hungarian and German minorities. And in the Memel Convention of 8 May
1924, Lithuania was required to grant autonomous status to the Memel region,
together with its own parliament and government, as a price for international
recognition of its de facto annexation of the region in January 1923. Estonia
went the furthest down this particular road and in 1925, on its own initiative,
granted full cultural autonomy to its national minorities, allowing them to
form associations recognized under public law and enjoying the right to levy
their own taxes. Both the German and the Jewish minorities took advantage of
this right, but the Estonian example did not set a trend, and most of the new
national states were content to meet the minimum conditions guaranteed by
the League of Nations. In their own ‘mother countries’ the German and
148 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Hungarian minorities had protectors who ensured that the subject of minority
protection was not forgotten, but other nationalities did not have such influen-
tial protecting powers to assist them.
The historian Theodor Schieder has distinguished between three different
phases in the formation of nation states. During the first phase, existing states
are reshaped by integrating their territories into centrally governed national
states. The two classic examples of this phase are England following the revolu-
tions of the seventeenth century and France after the French Revolution of
1789. The second phase is best illustrated by Italy after 1859 and by Germany
after 1866: in these cases the nation state came into existence as a result of the
merger of several smaller states, a development aided by liberal unification
movements and a single historical state – Piedmont in the case of Italy, Prussia
in that of Germany. In the first phase the geographical focus was western
Europe, in the second central Europe. The creation of a further series of nation
states in 1918 and 1919 belongs to the third phase in Schieder’s system. Its
beginnings can be traced back to the liberation of Greece and Serbia from the
hands of the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. The
new nation states all arose as a result of secessionist movements directed
against a multiracial state, whether it be the Ottoman, Habsburg or Romanoff
Empire. This third and final phase was centred on eastern central and south-
eastern Europe.
The western or, rather, the French principle, according to which a nation
rests on the political decision of many individuals, so that its existence is – to
quote the famous remark made by Ernest Renan in 1882 – ‘un plébiscite de
tous les jours’, becomes increasingly unimportant the further east one goes.
Even in Germany there had been a predominant belief since Herder’s day that
membership of a particular nation was based on objective factors such as a
common language, culture and tradition, rather than subjective expressions of
an individual’s will. And this was even truer in the new nation states that were
to be found further to the east.
During the interwar years, the deeper cause of the crisis of the nation state
in eastern central and south-east Europe was to be found in this widespread
view of the way the individual and the nation regarded themselves. No matter
what the treaties designed to protect minorities may have said, anyone who
did not belong to the titular nation was less ‘equal’ than the members of the
hegemonic or principal nation. The whole idea of taking over the western prin-
ciple of the democratic majority decision was from the outset associated with
the danger that national minorities would be discriminated against. In order
for it to survive in the new nation states, this principle had to be restricted,
and national minorities had to be protected in ways that prevented them
from being exploited by the majority. In fact, almost all the new states lacked
this insight to a greater or lesser extent, impeding the progress of democracy
in most.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 149

Only the most cursory examination could make it appear as if the First
World War had produced the world of which the extreme left had dreamt
during the revolutions of 1848–9. The ‘prisons of nations’ had been abolished,
including the most reactionary of the European powers, tsarist Russia; there
were free democratic nation states in most of Europe, and over them was a
League of Nations whose very creation was influenced by the idea of a nation’s
right of self-determination. But even on the left, few could see a progressive or
libertarian system in the Communist regime that had come to power in Soviet
Russia in November 1917, while the rest of the left, often in league with
conservative forces, did everything in its power to prevent Soviet Communism
from spreading westwards, incurring the same reproach as the one that had
been levelled at moderate liberals in 1848, namely, that they had betrayed the
revolution. Even as early as 1919–20 there were already good reasons to doubt
whether freedom rested on firm foundations in the states that had come into
being in the wake of the dissolution of the multiracial Ottoman, Habsburg and
Russian Empires, with the result that it was equally unclear whether these
states could support a new peace framework that would encompass the whole
of the world, an aim enshrined in the charter of the League of Nations.
One of the fathers of the League of Nations was the South African politician
General Jan Christiaan Smuts, who from 1917 represented the Dominions in
the newly established Imperial War Cabinet. He had originally suggested that
the new nation states in eastern central and south-east Europe be mandated
territories of the League of Nations, a suggestion which, if realized, would have
dramatically curtailed the sovereignty of these new states, with the result that
the states in question vigorously rejected the idea. But Smuts’s notion of
mandated territories was applied to the Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire and
to the former German colonies.
The notion of a mandate by the League of Nations was also a concession to
the powerful anti-colonial lobby in the United States, a lobby that Woodrow
Wilson had only reluctantly taken into consideration in Paris out of regard for
his European allies and out of personal indifference. If the League of Nations
were to entrust one of its members with guardianship over a dependent terri-
tory, this might be viewed as a milder form of colonialism and imperialism
than colonialism pure and simple. In principle the mandate was conceived as a
transitional phase leading to eventual independence, but in reality this pros-
pect was likely to be achieved only in the first of the three categories into which
the regions in question were divided. This category, A, included the Arab parts
of the former Ottoman Empire, of which three – Iraq, Transjordan and
Palestine – were mandated to Great Britain, while two others – Syria and
Lebanon – were entrusted to France. Mandated territories in category A were
regarded as sufficiently developed to allow them to be granted independence
within a relatively short period of time. The first of these territories to be
granted its independence was Iraq, which since 1921 had been a kingdom
150 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

under Faisal I, the son of Hussein ibn Ali, the sharif of Mecca, and which
became independent in October 1932.
Category B included countries whose independence lay some distance
away in the unforeseeable future. With the exception of German South-West
Africa, it was made up of the German Empire’s former African colonies. Togo
and Cameroon were divided up between Great Britain and France. Most of
German East Africa fell to Great Britain, while Belgium received the provinces
of Rwanda and Burundi, and the Kionga Triangle passed to Portuguese East
Africa – present-day Mozambique. At the urging of General Smuts, German
South-West Africa was assigned to category C, a category with even less pros-
pect of ever achieving independence than category B. As such, it was entrusted
to the Union of South Africa, which pursued the same policy of discriminating
against the country’s black population as that which obtained in its own terri-
tory. Also included in category C were the German colonies in Polynesia.
Those which lay to the south of the equator were assigned to Australia and
New Zealand, while the ones to the north fell to Japan, which also acquired
Germany’s former rights in China, albeit with the proviso that Jiaozhou be later
returned to China. This was agreed to in the wake of an international disarma-
ment conference organized by the United States and held in Washington
between November 1921 and February 1922. There Japan accepted not only a
reduction in the strength of its fleet (in a proportion of 5 to 5 to 3 when related
to the capacities of the United States, Great Britain and Japan) but also recog-
nized Chinese independence and agreed to an open-door policy which in the
eyes of many Japanese nationalists and members of the military amounted to a
humiliating concession to the Western Powers.
The League of Nations’ actions with regard to the former colonies and the
Arab parts of the former Ottoman Empire were a continuation of the earlier
practices of colonialism and imperialism. With the exception of the mandated
territories in the Middle East, the ‘new’ colonies had practically the same
chance of becoming independent as the ‘old’ colonies of the victorious and
neutral powers. As a result of the relative privileges granted to the mandated
territories in category A and the discrimination shown to all the other colonies,
the European colonial powers unwittingly fostered the desire for independence
on the part of all the territories dependent on them, most of all in those coun-
tries such as India and Egypt where nationalism had already gained a consider-
able following before 1914.
By 1919 Egypt was already suffering from revolutionary unrest that was
fomented by the Wafd Party and triggered by Britain’s refusal to allow an
Egyptian delegation (‘wafd’) to attend the Paris peace conference. By the
following year the anti-colonial unrest had spread to other mandated territo-
ries in the Middle East: in Syria and Iraq the Arabs protested at the decision by
Britain, France and the League of Nations to prevent the formation of a larger
Arab state, while Palestine objected to plans to create a national homeland for
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 151

the Jews envisaged by the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. In 1921 the
Rif began an insurrection first in Spanish Morocco, then in French Morocco,
that was not definitively put down until 1926.
In India, bloody clashes broke out between the colonial power and the local
population within six months of the end of a war to which the country had
made a huge military contribution. In April 1919 Gurkha troops under the
command of a British general fired on an unarmed crowd in Amritsar
protesting at the Rowlatt Act, so called after a British judge, Sir Sidney Rowlatt,
that had made the wartime curtailment of civil liberties a permanent feature of
India’s peacetime constitution. The confrontation resulted in the deaths of 379
protesters and some 1,200 injuries. The events in Amritsar and other places in
the Punjab, where aircraft and machine guns were used against the local popu-
lation, left India profoundly shaken and led to a radicalization of the independ-
ence movement. After 1920 its hitherto moderate leader, Mahatma Gandhi,
was likewise radicalized by these events. British rule was now placed under a
greater threat than at any time since the uprising of 1857–8, a warning sign to
all who believed that it was possible to pursue the same imperialist policies in
Asia and Africa after 1918 as those that had been adopted before the First
World War.
When the war began in August 1914 the English writer H. G. Wells – a
member of the socialist Fabian Society – had spoken of a ‘war that will end
war’, unwittingly taking up a remark by the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge, who
in a speech in St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt on 22 July 1848 had referred to
what he and his listeners hoped would be a European war of liberation against
autocratic Russia as ‘the last war, the war against war, the war against the barba-
rism that is war’.27 Wells’s interpretation of the war found a powerful response
not only in Britain and France but also on the other side of the Atlantic, in
the United States. As such, it chimed with the ideas of bringing peace to the
world that Woodrow Wilson had invoked in his attempts to persuade American
voters that their country needed to enter the war and to persuade Europe that
America had a mission to perform. The post-war order that emerged from
the Paris peace talks offered little hope that an era of lasting peace was about
to dawn.

Protest, Prohibition, Prosperity: The United States in the 1920s

The United States lost 115,000 soldiers in the First World War, a figure far
lower than that for the European powers: Germany lost 1.8 million, Russia 1.7
million, France 1.4 million, Austria-Hungary 1.2 million and Great Britain
one million. Even so, the war represented a significant turning point in
American lives, for in 1917–18 Americans broke with much that until then
they had taken for granted: not only had they fought in Europe but for a
time had abandoned their traditional principles of free enterprise and freedom
152 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of expression, including freedom of the press. With the end of hostilities,

therefore, nothing seemed more pressing than to return as quickly as possible
to pre-war normality.
For employers, normalization meant first and foremost an end to the
concessions that they had had to make to workers and their trade unions
during the war. For their part, the workers who had been called up wanted
their old jobs back, jobs that had in the meantime been done by women and by
the blacks who as part of the Great Migration had moved from the rural south
to the industrial north. In 1919–20 all workers suffered the economic conse-
quences of the war in the form of rampant inflation. Prices rose by up to 15 per
cent, far in excess of the modest wage increases of 1917–18.
In 1919 several waves of strikes swept across the whole country from west
to east. In Seattle a walkout by dockworkers in January turned into a general
strike lasting several days and was supported by the radical Industrial Workers
of the World – known for short as the ‘Wobblies’ or IWW – but not by Samuel
Gompers’s umbrella organization, the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
Following the intervention of federal troops, it was brought to a rapid and
bloodless end. In September even the Boston police refused to work in protest
at their low salaries, resulting in riots and looting that persuaded the Republican
governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, to call in the National Guard.
When Gompers suggested that the wage demands of the striking policemen be
met, Coolidge responded with a remark that earned him the approval of many
conservative Americans: ‘There is no right to strike against public safety by
anybody, anywhere, anytime.’28
Within days of the end of the Boston police strike, 365,000 workers in the
steel industry in the Midwest went on strike. As in Seattle, their action was
backed by the IWW but not by the AFL. Bloody clashes between striking
workers and the military in Gary, Indiana, in early October resulted in nine-
teen deaths among the strikers. But steel production was unaffected because an
unorganized – mainly black – workforce was drafted in to take over from the
striking workers. The strike collapsed in January 1920 without the workers
achieving any of their demands.
Black Americans had fought just as bravely as their white comrades during
the war, but their goal of equal rights remained as remote as ever. Blacks who
had found work in industry after 1917 were quickly replaced by returning
white veterans after the end of 1918. The fact that black workers generally
earned far less than their white counterparts meant that they were accused by
the latter of keeping wages artificially low, fuelling the increasing resentment at
the country’s black minority. The number of blacks who were lynched by white
Americans rose from forty-eight in 1917 to sixty-three in 1918 and to seventy-
eight in 1919. In Chicago, where there had already been several bomb attacks
in black districts of the city during the early months of 1919, racial tensions
boiled over in July and assumed the proportions of a civil war, with 537 injuries
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 153

and thirty-eight deaths, most of them blacks. The race riots of the summer of
1919 cost a total of 120 lives.
The largest organization that represented black Americans was the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It concluded from the
escalation of violence against blacks that the latter could no longer be content
to call on the authorities for help but must defend themselves against the white
mob. Radical blacks associated with Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey went
further and advocated a complete break with white society and a return to
Africa. A few years later the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ began in New York, a move-
ment of black writers and artists that sought to raise black awareness by
recalling their African roots and their cultural identity as black Americans.
In April 1919 the American public was alarmed by a series of parcel bombs
sent to prominent economists and politicians, although nearly all were inter-
cepted by the postal services before they could reach their intended recipients.
(The parcel that did get through blew off the hands of a senator’s domestic
servant.) On 2 June, conversely, bombs went off almost simultaneously in eight
different towns and cities. One of them caused considerable damage to the
front of the house occupied by Woodrow Wilson’s justice minister, A. Mitchell
Palmer. The press immediately began to inveigh against a large-scale and
complex conspiracy led by the Communist International in Moscow and
designed to overthrow the existing political and social order in the United
States. Most of the country’s states responded to this ‘Red Scare’ by passing
anti-sedition laws, and in many cities, schools and universities political purges
were launched against alleged or actual revolutionaries.
As justice minister, Palmer reacted to the ‘Red Scare’ with extreme rigour
and in early November gave orders for 250 members of a Union of Russian
Workers to be arrested and deported by sea to Soviet Russia. But it was in
January 1920 that Palmer, aided and abetted by his young assistant J. Edgar
Hoover, struck his most decisive blow, when he ordered the newly established
Federal Bureau of Investigation to arrest and interrogate over 6,000 ‘radicals’,
including strike agitators, members of two small Communist parties and a
number of self-declared anarchists. Some 500 foreigners were deported, even
though there was no evidence that they had committed any criminal acts or
even that they held extreme views. And around 250 individuals who had come
to America from tsarist Russia were sent back to its Soviet successor.
These ‘Palmer raids’ initially met with widespread support among the
American public, with only a handful of liberal and left-wing protests at such a
crass violation of civil rights and liberties. Among the most notorious victims
of this general suspicion of left-wing ‘aliens’ were two Italian immigrants, the
shoemaker Nicola Sacco and the fishmonger Bartolomeo Vanzetti, neither of
whom made any secret of his anarchist leanings. In May 1920 they were accused
of jointly robbing and murdering the chief accountant of a shoe factory in
Braintree, Massachusetts, and on 14 July 1921 condemned to death on the basis
154 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of highly questionable evidence. Liberals, socialists and Communists organ-

ized worldwide demonstrations in their support. Many prominent intellec-
tuals, including Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Albert Einstein, all expressed
their sympathy. But all they achieved was a temporary stay of execution, and on
23 August 1927, in spite of international protests, Sacco and Vanzetti were
executed in the electric chair. Not until July 1977, half a century later, were they
rehabilitated, when the governor of Massachusetts, the Democrat Michael
Dukakis, formally pardoned them.
If there was any subject that exercised the American public more than the
‘Red Scare’ in 1919–20, it was prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment to the
1787 constitution came into force on 16 January 1920 after the necessary
majorities had been achieved in both Congress and the individual state assem-
blies. It banned the manufacture, sale and shipment of alcoholic drinks in the
United States. Prohibition was a long-standing aim not only of the members of
the Anti-Saloon League and of Evangelical fundamentalists, especially in the
rural south and Midwest, but also of many women’s associations and, finally, of
the Progressive Movement, the great reform movement of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. The required majorities could be achieved at
national and state level only because senators and representatives were placed
under tremendous pressure by the anti-alcohol lobby.
In practice the ban proved unworkable as the vast majority of the popula-
tion rejected and ignored it and the banned saloons were replaced by illegal
bars – ‘speakeasies’ – disguised as private clubs. Organized crime profited from
illicit stills and from smuggling alcohol across the Mexican and Canadian
borders. The German political scientist and jurist Ernst Fraenkel judged prohi-
bition to be ‘perhaps the greatest act of political stupidity in the whole of
American history’, a judgement as severe as it is apt. In Fraenkel’s view it under-
mined ‘the nation’s legal morality, encouraged gangsterism, corrupted the state
apparatus and brought the country to the brink of administrative chaos’.29
Prohibition came to an end in 1933 with the start of the presidency of Franklin
D. Roosevelt, when public opinion forced the adoption of the Twenty-first
Amendment, rescinding the Eighteenth Amendment, while allowing indi-
vidual states to pass laws banning the shipment or importation of alcoholic
drinks.
In August 1920, eight months after the Eighteenth Amendment had passed
into the statute books, the Nineteenth Amendment came into force. This
finally brought women the right for which American suffragettes had fought
for decades and which they had already won in eleven states: to vote in elec-
tions under the same conditions as men. The first presidential elections in
which women were able to vote were held in November 1920, when the
Republicans emerged as victors, even though their candidate, the conservative
senator from Ohio, Warren G. Harding, was politically undistinguished and
inexperienced. His running mate for the office of vice-president was the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 155

governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, the ‘hero’ of the Boston police

strike of September 1919. The Democratic candidates – the governor of Ohio,
James M. Cox, and, as his vice-presidential running mate, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who was then the assistant secretary of the navy – received only 34
per cent of the votes cast, the lowest percentage ever polled until then by a
presidential candidate of either of the two main parties. The Republicans’
triumph was the expression of an overwhelming desire to return to normality:
the American ‘normalcy’ of which Harding was fond of speaking and which
amounted to a rejection of the idealistic internationalism of the Woodrow
Wilson years.
Harding’s term of office lasted only a little over two years, ending with his
death on 2 August 1923 as a result of two heart attacks. The period was over-
shadowed by scandals over fraud and corruption involving both the Depart-
ment of the Interior and the Justice Department. The most spectacular case
was that of the secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall, who had previously been
the senator for New Mexico and to whom Harding had given control over the
navy’s oil reserves in Wyoming and California, which he had then secretly
leased to private contractors in return for substantial bribes. The case came to
light in the summer of 1923, shortly after Harding’s death, and earned Fall a
year’s imprisonment. Harding was succeeded by Coolidge, who in November
1924 easily won the presidential election in his own right, polling 54 per cent
of the votes cast, while the Democratic candidate, John W. Davis, a financial
lawyer from New York, polled 29 per cent and Senator Robert M. La Follette
from Wisconsin, standing for the League for Progressive Political Action, won
17 per cent.
During the 1924 election campaign the Democrats had considered going
on the offensive against the Ku Klux Klan but decided against doing so out of
consideration for their voters in the south. The secretive and racist KKK dated
back to the time of the American Civil War but had died out in the 1870s, only
to be resurrected in 1915. Its violence was directed not only against blacks but
also against Jews, Catholics and ‘left-wing’ foreigners. After the war it found
increasing support not only in the south itself but also in smaller towns in the
Mid- and far west, Indiana becoming its new stronghold. Its followers were for
the most part heavily indebted farmers, small shopkeepers and other inde-
pendent and self-employed individuals. At its height, in 1924, it is said to have
had four million members. Its preferred methods of intimidation included
beatings, tarring and feathering, and whipping and lynching. During the years
of American prosperity in the mid-1920s it lost some of its appeal, while
remaining the most powerful organization of its kind among extreme right-
wing groups. By 1928 it had abandoned all pretence at secrecy.
The Ku Klux Klan represented the most extreme expression of American
‘nativism’ during the post-war period, turning itself into the mouthpiece
of widespread fears and resentment that were also reflected in the country’s
156 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

legislative programme. In 1921 Congress passed a law limiting immigration:

no more than 3 per cent of people of the same nationality as those who had
lived in the USA in 1910 could enter the United States from another country.
The number of immigrants who were admitted officially sank from 800,000
to 300,000, although nativists regarded this figure as no more than a step in the
right direction.
A further law followed in 1924: the National Origins Act went even further
than Canada’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 and prohibited all immigrants
from eastern Asia from entering the United States, reducing the quota from
European countries from 3 per cent in 1921 to 2 per cent. But the base figure
was now that for 1880, rather than for 1910, a change that discriminated in
particular against Jewish immigrants from eastern and central Europe.
Immigration was further curtailed in 1929, when the upper limit of immi-
grants was reduced to 150,000 a year. Throughout the years that followed the
number of immigrants admitted to the country was generally well below this
limit. There is no doubt that such a policy was rooted in racist motives. One of
the ‘experts’ to whom the House of Representatives appealed when drafting the
legislation in 1924 was the eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin, who never tired of
warning his fellow Americans of the dangers of ‘mongrelization’. One of the
law’s principal champions was the Democrat R. E. Allen from West Virginia,
who in a speech to a plenary session of the House on 5 April 1924 even went so
far as to speak of ‘purifying and keeping pure the blood of America’ as the only
way of saving the country from the threat of Bolshevism.30
In no other western country was the fear of Communism less well founded
than it was in the United States. In 1919 two Communist parties had broken
free from what was already a tiny Socialist Party: the Communist Labor Party
had 60,000 members, nine-tenths of whom were immigrants, while the
Communist Party had around 10,000 members, most of whom had been born
in America. In May 1921, at the urging of the Communist International, the
two groups merged to form the Communist Party of America, which was
repeatedly shaken by violent internal arguments until Trotsky’s supporters
were expelled in 1928. Even then the Communist Party of America was never
anything more than a splinter group – in 1929, for example, it had fewer than
10,000 members. Only the bomb attacks by anarchists and the sympathy for
the Bolshevik cause initially shown by members of the IWW suggested that
they may have posed a revolutionary threat in 1919–20.
The Socialist Party strenuously rejected the brutal methods of the Bolsheviks
but it, too, remained no more than a marginal phenomenon, enjoying its
greatest support among voters at the 1920 presidential election, when it polled
almost one million votes for its candidate, Eugene V. Debs, who was still in
prison at that date. The vast majority of American workers continued to be
indifferent to any fundamental changes to the existing capitalist system. What
they wanted were higher wages and shorter working hours: to them ‘bread
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 157

and butter’ were more important than placing the means of production in
public ownership.
The way in which large sections of the American public reacted to the chal-
lenge of Communism can be explained by reference to their past history. In no
other large country was democracy as firmly rooted in everyday culture as it
was in the United States, and nowhere was private property as sacrosanct as it
was here. A system that sought to establish a completely new society based on
common property and run in the name of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’
was tantamount to the most radical declaration of war on the American way of
life. Even worse: such a system seemed to call into question the divine order of
things. For the Christian right, the militant atheism of the Bolsheviks turned
them and their followers into a modern manifestation of the Antichrist. It was
no accident, therefore, that those who were the most outspoken in their anti-
Communist views were Evangelical fundamentalists.
It was not necessary, of course, to be a Communist or a socialist to draw
down the concentrated hatred of this profoundly religious minority. Such
hostility could be incurred by anyone expressing doubts in the literal truth of
the Biblical story of the Creation, no matter whether such doubts were voiced
by liberal theologians or by the supporters of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In
March 1925 the fundamentalists in Tennessee scored a spectacular victory in
their battle against what they saw as a heretical doctrine, passing a law that
banned teachers from promoting any view of the Creation that departed from
the one set forth in the Bible. This declaration of war on enlightenment and
free thinking prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to act. This organi-
zation, that had been formed in 1917, encouraged a young biology teacher
from Dayton, John T. Scopes, who was unwilling to abide by the new law, to
mount a challenge in the form of a test case for which the Union provided the
defence in the form of the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow and paid for the
cost of the proceedings. The fundamentalists’ case was represented by William
Jennings Bryan, who repeatedly stood for election as a presidential candidate,
first for the Democrats, later as a progressive.
Scopes, who had in the meantime been dismissed from his teaching post,
was fined $100, although this was later quashed by a higher court on the
grounds of a procedural error. The exchange of blows between Darrow and
Bryan was followed with tremendous interest both in America and further
afield, Darrow emerging as the clear victor. Even though a number of other
southern states followed Tennessee’s example, the advocates of freedom of
expression had won a clear moral victory with the Scopes case and put the
fundamentalists firmly on the defensive.
Material conditions also left a mark on the development of the social, polit-
ical and intellectual climate of post-war America. The social unrest of 1919 was
a reflection of the devaluation that to a greater or lesser extent affected all the
countries that had been involved in the war and that had run up debts in
158 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

financing it. Inflation initially stimulated the economy, but by the end of 1920
the growing gap between high prices and low wages had caused the market for
consumer goods to collapse, marking the start of a period of post-war depres-
sion that quickly enveloped the entire world, the only notable exception – as we
shall see in due course – being Germany. In the United States the gross national
product fell by almost 10 per cent between 1920 and 1921; some 100,000
companies filed for bankruptcy; and around five million workers lost their
jobs. Only in the second half of 1922 did the economy start to recover.
During the next seven years, the United States enjoyed a period of higher
growth that was due above all to two factors: the building industry, where, as a
result of the war, there was a tremendous need to catch up on investment, and
the car industry which thanks to immense technological progress during the
previous decade could now produce vehicles so cheaply that the market for
new cars grew in ways that no one had previously seen. In 1917 1.7 million cars
were produced; by 1929 that figure had risen to 4.5 million. In 1929 – the last
of America’s boom years – there were twenty-six million private cars and lorries
on the country’s roads. The car had become a luxury item that most house-
holds could afford. In the country of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, one
person in five owned a car by the end of the decade, whereas in Great Britain
the figure was one in forty-three, in Italy one in 325 and in Russia one in 1,000.
In the 1920s America became a pioneering country in terms of mass consump-
tion, a development that had already begun before 1914 but which was able to
unfold along a broad front only after the war, encouraging contemporaries to
speak enthusiastically of a ‘new era’.
The boom in the car industry stimulated other areas of the economy,
including road building, the construction industry, the steel industry, tyre
manufacturing and numerous other supply industries, oil companies, petrol
stations and restaurants. The car reduced distances and brought Americans
closer together, facilitating commuting between the suburbs and the cities,
increasing individual mobility and, together with long-distance coaches and
the country’s ever-faster trains, giving a boost to mass tourism. Scarcely less
dramatic was the triumphant progress of another means of mass communica-
tion, the radio, which in America – unlike Europe – was run by private broad-
casters rather than by the state. In 1925 there were around two million radios
in the United States. Within five years almost every American household had
one. Newspapers remained a competitive force thanks to the speed with which
they were able to disseminate news, while radio stations vied with theatres,
opera houses and music halls for their audience’s favours.
But radio was unable to compete with the cinema in terms of popularity
and entertainment value. In 1922 American cinemas had a combined audience
of forty million; eight years later that figure had climbed to 100 million. After
1927 talking pictures gradually replaced the silent film. Hollywood used the
temporary weakness of the European film industry that resulted from the war
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 159

to assert its claims to global domination. However much America may have
learnt from Europe in this regard, stars such as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin,
Laurel and Hardy and Rudolph Valentino and the cartoon films of Walt Disney
helped the United States’ own particular brand of popular culture to triumph
all over the world, a triumph that no other country could contest. Hollywood
also allowed European film stars such as Pola Negri and Greta Garbo to enjoy
international careers. Sound films additionally proved an excellent vehicle for
exporting another American product, jazz from New Orleans as embodied by
Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. The 1927 film The Jazz Singer with Al
Jolson in the title role was the first talkie ever made. Jazz finally conquered
Europe in the 1920s, while dividing opinion there between admirers and
contemptuous critics of this revolutionary kind of American music.
The ‘roaring twenties’ began in America and soon gripped the whole of the
world, but nowhere were the 1920s as ‘golden’ as in the United States. Not only
big business profited from the prosperity of the new era after 1923, so too did
the bulk of the population. Henry Ford, the head of the Ford Motor Company,
stuck rigidly to the philosophy of Fordism that included passing on the benefits
of rationalization in the form of increased wages and shorter working hours.
Ford’s welfare capitalism included social insurance and trade unions but no
salary agreements with independent unions. Instead, big business was increas-
ingly able to implement an open-shop policy after 1919, meaning that no
member of their workforce was obliged to join a trade union. In turn the
number of trade union members fell from over five million to under three
million between 1920 and 1929, a development also due, of course, to the fact
that the AFL continued for the most part to represent the interests of white
skilled workers and did relatively little for unskilled workers and for the blacks
who made up the bulk of this group.
Calvin Coolidge’s administration was as business-friendly as any Republican
government was expected to be. A practising Protestant from New England, he
adopted the maxim, ‘The man who builds a factory builds a temple, the man
who works there worships there.’31 His trade minister, Herbert Hoover, system-
atically encouraged the voluntary merger of whole branches of industry to
form associations linked by shared interests and, he hoped, conducive to stabi-
lizing prices.
In keeping with Republican tradition, the economic policies of the 1920s
were liberal within the country and protectionist in terms of America’s deal-
ings with the outside world. Even during Harding’s presidency, the Republican
majority in Congress had introduced the highest import tariffs in American
history in the form of the Fordney–McCumber Tariff Act in an attempt to
protect the rural economy as well as the chemical and metal industries from
what they feared would be the dumping of foreign goods on America. Farmers
were by now suffering from massive over-production as a result of progressive
mechanization and demanded far greater protection, a demand that met with
160 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

widespread support in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Under

the impact of the international decline in farm prices Congress voted for the
McNary–Haugen Bill in 1927 and 1928, providing for the government purchase
of wheat, cotton, tobacco, rice and maize, which would then be sold on at the
lower international prices. On both occasions, however, Coolidge used his veto
to prevent the bill from becoming law as he was afraid of sweeping retaliatory
measures on the part of the overseas countries affected.
Even without the McNary–Haugen Bill, America’s policy on foreign trade
throughout the Republican administrations of the 1920s would still deserve to
be labelled highly protectionist. The country’s protective tariffs encouraged
economic nationalism in those countries that were particularly harmed by the
isolation of the American market. Germany was especially badly affected
because it was forced to finance its reparations bill by means of exports. The
United States had signed a separate peace treaty with Germany in August 1921.
This was a logical consequence of the Senate’s refusal to ratify the Treaty of
Versailles. Both as a trading partner and as the scene of American investments,
Germany was far too important for the United States to regard its development
with indifference – another reason why Coolidge twice stood up to Congress
over the McNary–Haugen Bill.
American isolationism would in any case have prevented the country
from joining the League of Nations, but it was clear to those responsible in
Washington that the economic interests of the United States needed a
supporting policy in Europe and especially Germany. The question of German
reparations was closely associated with the problem of Allied debts, a problem
that could be solved only by the United States. A stable Germany in a stable
Europe was of supreme importance for the United States, a view that imposed
certain limits on its isolationist policies and ensured that the protectionists did
not overreach themselves. America was to maintain a far greater presence in
post-war Europe than Wilson’s enemies expected in 1919/20.

The International Revolution is Delayed: The Rise of the Soviet Union

and the Divisions within Left-wing Parties in Europe
The country that most Americans would almost certainly have described as
the most dangerous in the world – Soviet Russia – could not be certain that it
would overcome its internal enemies until the end of 1919. The Red Army had
been advancing on all fronts since October of that year. Admiral Kolchak, for a
time the most dangerous of the ‘White’ leaders, was forced to retreat to Irkutsk,
where he was handed over to Bolshevik supporters by war-weary members of
the Czechoslovak Legion and shot on 7 February 1920. In April, following
several major defeats, General Denikin stepped down as the commander
in chief of the ‘Whites’ in southern Russia and was succeeded by Pyotr
Nikolayevich Wrangell, whose autumn offensive, supported by the British and
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 161

launched from the Crimea, ended in disaster. The evacuation of his remaining
troops on Allied ships in November 1920 effectively marked the end of the
Russian civil war and, with it, the end of the half-hearted intervention on
the part of the Allies, who had sided with the ‘Whites’ in 1918.
The defeat of the disorganized ‘Whites’ was due mainly to the inability of
the counterrevolutionaries to gain broad support among the Russian popula-
tion. The industrial proletariat more or less closed ranks against them; they
were hated by the peasants, who regarded them as hangers-on of the old order,
keen to overturn the recent redistribution of the land; and as pan-Russian
chauvinists they could never be reliable allies of the Ukrainian nationalists. All
that harmed the ‘Whites’ benefited the Reds, who enjoyed their greatest support
among the workers and who, compared with the ‘Whites’, seemed the lesser of
two evils to most peasants, complaints about the impounding of corn and
foodstuffs being more than offset by gratitude towards the Reds for ending
large-scale landownership; and non-Russian nationalities, finally, expected the
Bolsheviks to safeguard their interests more than the ‘Whites’, who had always
advocated a powerful central state.
The year 1920 witnessed not only the end of the Russian civil war but also
Soviet Russia’s recognition of the independence of Estonia, Lithuania and
Latvia, the cessation of hostilities in the Russo-Polish War in October and
peace with Finland. In March 1921, as we have already noted, Russia concluded
the Peace of Riga with Poland. The western border of the Russian Soviet
Federative Socialist Republic, as the country officially became known in July
1918, together with that of the independent White Russian and Ukrainian
Republics, now ran much further east than that of tsarist Russia but incorpo-
rated the greater part of the Ukraine, including the areas on the right bank of
the Dnieper that Russia had acquired in the second half of the seventeenth
century under the terms of the Russo-Polish Truce of Andrusovo in January
1667. This region was predominantly Russian in character.
In the Caucasus, conversely, the Bolsheviks were able to add considerably to
their Soviet Russian territories, and Soviet regimes were imposed on both
Azerbaijan and Armenia after the British troops withdrew in 1920. In Georgia
the Mensheviks had established an independent state in 1918, and this had
been officially recognized by Moscow in May 1920, only for it to be overrun by
the Red Army in February 1921. In spite of widespread international protests,
especially on the part of the non-Communist left, the country was declared the
Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic which, subsumed into the Transcaucasian
Federation the following year, played a role in the foundation of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics in December 1922. The USSR made further territo-
rial gains in the Far East in November 1922 when it incorporated two states
that had come into existence during the Japanese occupation but which were
now vacated by the Japanese: the Far Eastern Republic and the Coastal
Republic. For the present the two central Asiatic soviet republics that had been
162 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

created with Bolshevik assistance in 1920 in the form of the khanate of Khiva
and the emirate of Bukhara remained independent.
Soviet Russia’s civil war may have been over, but the country was still far
from having achieved a state of internal stability. On 10 July 1918 the Fifth All-
Russian Soviet Congress had approved a constitution that enshrined the soviet
system, but constitutional reality looked very different. During the civil war the
eastern soviets had lost much of their existing authority to extraordinary
bodies armed with comprehensive powers. One such body was the All-Russian
Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage,
known as the Cheka for short. Its measures were very soon aimed at all suspi-
cious members of the soviets. For a time the coordination of all political, mili-
tary and economic tasks was entrusted not to the Council of People’s
Commissars but to the Council for Workers’ and Peasants’ Defence, an organi-
zation established in November 1918. All ordinary and extraordinary bodies
were controlled by the Communist Party, which dictated the revolutionary
process on every level. By March 1921 it had 730,000 members, of whom
workers represented an ever smaller percentage, while the number of white-
collar workers and other professionals grew.
The civil war witnessed a period of ‘War Communism’, a primitive form of
controlled economy that forced workers, peasants and tradesmen to perform
the tasks imposed on them, where necessary with the resources of terror. The
government had to do all it could to make up for the dramatic fall in industrial
production. Not least as a result of the nationalization of large farms in the
early summer of 1918, production at the end of 1918 was only a fifth of what it
had been in 1913. Where necessary, the workforce was recruited by force. Since
inflation had largely destroyed the purchasing power of incomes, workers were
paid in kind, including rations. In the Urals 37 per cent of workers returned to
the countryside in 1920. By the following year metalworking plants had lost up
to half of their employees. There was no longer any private commerce after the
autumn of 1918.
In the course of the civil war the granaries in southern Russia had fallen into
the hands of the ‘Whites’. The subsequent requisitioning of corn in the areas
controlled by the Bolsheviks was implemented by the newly formed Committees
of Poor Peasants (kombedy) and by the Red Army and meant that the farmers
stopped ploughing their land and produced only what they needed for their own
personal use. By 1921 the area of land under cultivation had shrunk to 62 per
cent, the harvest yield to 37 per cent of its pre-war total. The logical consequence
of the enforced measures undertaken both in cities and in the countryside was a
growing bureaucratization that paralysed individual initiative.
But the end of the civil war did not mean the end of War Communism. This
end was closely bound up with the growing protests at the continuation of a
controlled economy and of terror. During the first half of 1921 there were
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 163

innumerable peasants’ revolts and hunger strikes by workers, especially in

Moscow and Petrograd. In January distribution of bread was cut by a third in
the towns and cities; and in Petrograd 60 per cent of the largest factories had to
close through lack of fuel. On 22 February workers at other major concerns in
Petrograd held a demonstration at which a number of Mensheviks and Social
Revolutionaries spoke, demanding the abolition of the Bolshevik dictatorship
and the restoration of basic freedoms and calling for a general strike in pursuit
of these aims. The Cheka responded two days later by firing on the participants
in a second demonstration, leaving twelve people dead. Mass arrests followed.
Even so, thousands of soldiers joined the striking workers. Russia seemed to be
on a brink of a new revolution.
On 2 March 1921 Moscow’s worst fears were realized when 15,000 sailors
mutinied in Kronstadt on the island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland – effectively
at the very gates of Petrograd. In 1917 the sailors at Kronstadt had been the
Bolsheviks’ most loyal and radical supporters. Three and a half years later they
were demanding not only far-reaching material improvements but a return to
the constitution of July 1918, secret new elections for the soviets, the restoration
of the freedoms fought for during the Revolution, including freedom for the
supporters of the anarchists and left-wing Socialist parties, and, finally, the
removal of all Communist commissars from the army and navy.
Lenin saw this as a counterrevolutionary attack and gave orders for an
assault on Kronstadt on 7 March. Trotsky, who had been defence commissar
since March 1918, ordered General Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky to
turn his heavy artillery on the island and then to take it with land troops. The
result was a bloodbath that ended the mutiny on 18 March, the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the Paris Commune. Three months later, in June 1921, Tukhachevsky
adopted equally brutal tactics in suppressing the largest and longest of the
peasants’ revolts in the province of Tambov. Its leader, Alexander Antonov, was
taken prisoner and murdered, while 15,000 of his supporters were imprisoned
or deported.
While Kronstadt was under siege and under fire, the Tenth Party Congress
of the Russian Communists was held in Moscow. In the face of considerable
opposition, Lenin forced through a motion that banned the formation of
factions within the party, thereby putting a definitive end to the phase of rela-
tive internal democracy that had been introduced a year earlier in the wake of
violent arguments. The ban – for which Trotsky, Bukharin, editor in chief of
Pravda, and, ultimately, Lenin were jointly responsible – was directed in the
main at the ‘Workers’ Opposition’ supported by trade union officials and
distinguished by its outspoken critique of the ‘militarization of work’.
An equally far-reaching decision affected the transition to the New
Economic Policy, as it came to be called only after the Tenth Party Conference
had ended in late May 1921. The change of policy represented Lenin’s response
164 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

to the failure of War Communism. From now on farmers were no longer to be

obliged to give up their corn and other produce but paid a tax in kind and were
allowed to keep everything they had produced that exceeded that amount. The
nationalization of small businesses that had been agreed to only a short time
earlier, in late November 1920, was effectively reversed by this measure and
the economic scope of manual work was extended. The main areas of the
economy – the major banks, large businesses, foreign trade and transport – all
remained under state control: from February 1921 this meant the state plan-
ning commission, or Gosplan.
Crucial to Gosplan were the members of the State Commission for the
Electrification of Russia, a committee largely made up of ‘bourgeois’ – non-
Communist – experts that had submitted its ambitious project in time for the
Eighth Soviet Congress at the end of December 1920. ‘Communism is Soviet
power plus electrification of the whole country,’ Lenin famously declared.32 As
the historian Heiko Haumann has noted, his words were carefully chosen:

Electrification was understood not just in the narrow technological sense, it

was also intended to simplify the running of the economy and speed up the
growth of the forces of production. Before them was the goal of removing
the difference between town and country and turning the executive func-
tion of the worker into an organizational function. Not least of their
aims was the promotion of ‘education through light’, especially in the
countryside.33

The partial return to capitalist economic methods helped to smooth the path
to trade deals with western nations. The first to be signed was with Great
Britain on 16 March 1921, followed in May by a trade agreement with Germany
and shortly afterwards one with Italy and with most of the other European
states. Only France and the United States turned down the Soviet demarche.
Currency was stabilized in the wake of the New Economic Policy, and indus-
trial production rapidly increased. But the party and government were power-
less in the face of the failed harvest of 1920 and the widespread drought of
1921. The result was a catastrophic famine that reached its climax during the
winter of 1921/2 and according to reliable estimates cost the lives of between
four and five million men, women and children. The number of victims would
have been much higher if Fridtjof Nansen, the famous polar explorer and
League of Nations’ commissioner for refugees, together with the American
trade minister Herbert Hoover and the Communist and non-Communist
workers’ parties in Europe, had not organized generous relief action in support
of Soviet Russia’s famine-stricken population.
In April 1921 Lenin wrote a pamphlet in which he described the recent
introduction of the tax in kind as marking a transition from War Communism
to a regulated socialist exchange of products and the reintroduction of free
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 165

trade as ‘capitalism’, which, he went on, would help the Communists by

preventing the fragmentation of small producers and to a certain extent also
help to combat bureaucracy. He quoted at length from an earlier pamphlet, ‘On
Russia’s Present Economy’ (1918), in which he had hailed state capitalism as a
transitional phase between the capitalism of private industry and socialism. He
continued to regard socialism without the techniques of big business as
unthinkable. War Communism had been forced on the country by war and by
financial ruin but was not a policy that reflected the economic tasks of the
proletariat as it was merely a temporary measure:

The correct policy of the proletariat exercising its dictatorship in a small-

peasant country is to obtain grain in exchange for the manufactured goods
the peasant needs. That is the only kind of food policy that corresponds to
the tasks of the proletariat, and can strengthen the foundations of socialism
and lead to its complete victory.34

The Bolsheviks’ mass terror, which was the dominant feature of War
Communism, shared many of the characteristics of the Reign of Terror perpe-
trated by the French Jacobins. Indeed, Lenin, an ardent pupil of Marx, regarded
the Jacobins as his historical model. In 1793–4, as in 1918–20, the connection
between counterrevolution inside the country and intervention from outside
had a radicalizing effect, challenging the most decisive revolutionaries to
engage in a struggle in which the very existence of the new order was at stake.
In each case the dynamics of terror led to a point where the terror threatened
to become self-destructive. The Jacobin Terror was followed by Thermidor,
when more moderate voices prevailed. But the New Economic Policy was not
the Thermidor of the Bolshevik Revolution, for the previous revolutionary
leaders remained in control, fine-tuning their own policies and declining to
turn their backs on terror. Instead, they merely limited its scope and applied
it only in those cases where the situation seemed to them to require it,
legalizing actions that had previously been outside the law in order to remove
what they termed ‘class enemies’. In short, the Bolshevik terror was not a tran-
sitional stage in their revolution but remained their means of ruling the country
even after the immediate internal and external threat had passed. It could
be reactivated at any time, whenever the centre of power deemed it necessary
to do so.
The centre of power of the Communist Party of Russia – the Bolsheviks –
was the Politburo. It was elected by the Central Committee, which in turn was
appointed by the party conference. Within the Politburo, the members who
wielded the greatest power after Lenin were the leaders of the party organiza-
tions in Petrograd and Moscow, Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev and Lev
Borisovich Kamenev. To their names must be added that of Stalin, whom the
Central Committee appointed its secretary general in April 1922. Trotsky had
166 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

no firm organizational support within the party, whereas Bukharin, experi-

enced as an economist and a theorist, gradually acquired this support for
himself. Lenin suffered a stroke in May 1922, followed by a second one in the
December of that same year and by a third in March 1923, after which he effec-
tively quit the political stage in Russia.
The Russian Communist Party grew in size in 1920 when it merged with a
number of rival groups, including large sections of the ‘maximalist’ Social
Revolutionaries, the General Jewish Workers’ League and the Revolutionary
Communists. The most active Menshevik officials were arrested for their part
in the workers’ protests in 1921, and their party was banned, as was that of the
Social Revolutionaries. A show trial of forty-seven Social Revolutionaries was
held in July 1922, when they were accused of counterrevolutionary activities in
connection with the peasants’ uprisings. Fourteen of the accused were
sentenced to death, although following international protests from the non-
Communist left, the sentences were not carried out. Instead, the accused were
sent to the Solovki labour camp on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. By
then, Russia’s one-party state felt sufficiently strong to meet its critics halfway.
The Communist Party of Russia also set the tone in the soviets that had had
only minimal influence during the first two years after the October Revolution
but which were granted extended rights at the Seventh All-Russian Soviet
Congress in December 1919. Its newly formed executive committee gradually
usurped the influence of the Extraordinary Commissions, including the one
set up to combat counterrevolution and sabotage, and created the new organi-
zation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection that was intended to replace
the People’s Commissariat for State Control. Since the peasants were more
powerfully represented in the soviets than in the Communist Party, the soviets
were better suited to implementing the New Economic Policy, central to which
was a new approach to agriculture that favoured the peasants. The soviets
could claim some success in abolishing the death penalty in January 1920, only
for it to be reintroduced in May 1922 in time for the trial of the Social
Revolutionaries. In the future, too, the Soviet state was keen to be able to draw
upon the ultimate sanction in dealing with its political enemies and with others
whom it branded ‘criminals’.
For many years the role of the trade unions remained controversial. The
‘Workers’ Opposition’ sought an independent role in representing the prole-
tariat’s interests, whereas Trotsky and Bukharin wanted the trade unions to be
dependent on state institutions. At the Communist Party’s Ninth Party
Conference in late March and early April 1920 a moderate line represented by
Vyacheslav Molotov gained support: the trade unions were to remain inde-
pendent organizations and form a ‘transmission belt’ between workers and
party. In other words, they would inform the Communist Party of workers’
wishes and convey the party’s instructions to the workers. In practice this
concept placed the trade unions in a subservient position: their task was to
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 167

educate the proletarian masses and train them to be good Communists, while
at the same time working for greater productivity. Lenin had initially been
inclined to adopt Trotsky’s position, but by the end of 1920 he had come round
to Molotov’s way of thinking, at which point the question of the trade unions
ceased to be contentious. In March 1921 the Tenth Party Conference defined
the new role of the trade unions as a ‘transmission belt’.
The logic of the New Economic Policy also concealed within it a more
elastic policy towards nationalities that did not detract from the supremacy of
the central power. The constitution of July 1918 had made no reference to the
reciprocal relations between the individual Soviet Republics, whether Russian,
White Russian or Ukrainian. Once the Bolsheviks had brought Azerbaijan and
Armenia under their control in 1920–21, followed by Georgia in 1922, and
merged them all in the Transcaucasian Federation, the way was open for the
formation of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, or USSR, known for short
as the Soviet Union. A state treaty between the Ukrainian, Byelorussian and
Transcaucasian Soviet Republics on the one hand and the Russian Soviet
Federated Socialist Republic on the other was ratified at the First All-Union
Soviet Congress on 30 December 1922. (This congress was in fact nothing
more than the expanded and renamed Seventh All-Russian Soviet Congress.)
The two central Asian soviet republics of Khiva and Bukhara were still
sovereign states at this date, but in the wake of ‘national delimitation’, as it
was called, they were merged with the general governorships of the Steppe
and Turkestan and turned into the Union Republics of Uzbekistan and
Turkmenistan. The Tajik part of the former general governorship of Turkestan
was granted the status of an autonomous republic in 1924. Five years later
Tajikistan became a union republic in its own right.
The constitution of the USSR was worked out in the first half of 1923 and
was approved by the Central Executive Committee in July and ratified at the
Second All-Union Soviet Congress at the end of January 1924. It did not
contain a single article that defined or guaranteed human and civil rights and
no division of powers that could be characterized as ‘bourgeois’. Protests at
decisions by the supreme court could be lodged with the Central Executive
Committee of the Soviets, which grew out of the All-Union Soviet Congress
and consisted of two chambers, the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of
Nationalities.
Foreign policy and foreign trade were in the hands of the central authority,
as were the military, transport, postal services and telegraphy. In terms
of state control over the economy and the nation’s finances, welfare and work,
the central authority’s powers were so comprehensive when compared with
those of the individual republics that there was no question as to the relative
weighting: formally, the Soviet Union may have been a federalist state, but in
practice it was centralized. If we ignore the territorial losses in the west, its land
mass was similar to that of tsarist Russia. Both were multinational states.
168 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Whether the Soviet Union would be more just towards the needs of non-
Russian nationalities than the monarchy had been was a question that only the
reality of the constitution could answer.
The early years of the Soviet Union were dominated by the principles of
korenizacija (taking root) and ‘national reconstruction’. Members of non-
Russian ethnic groups were to be won over to the new revolutionary state and,
hence, to Communism by express consideration of their unique cultural values.
In the Islamic republics, for example, the Arabic alphabet was replaced not by
Cyrillic but by the Latin alphabet, and regional administrative posts and party
offices were filled by local forces, except in the case of the very highest
positions.
In the Ukraine this new policy led to a revival of the Ukrainian language
in those regions that had spoken a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian. Having
suffered oppression at the hands of the Romanoffs, many Jews had thrown in
their lot with the Bolsheviks, and it was Jews who now made up many of
the leading Bolshevik officials, including Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky.
All enjoyed the right, granted to them in the wake of the 1917 February
Revolution, to settle anywhere in the Soviet Union, including areas outside
the ‘settlement area’ in thirteen western governorships of the old tsarist
empire. The policy relating to individual nationalities between 1922 and 1926
was in theory geared to the principle of cultural self-determination, but
in practice it came into conflict even at this early date with the pan-Russian
traditions of the party apparatus, a problem that became progressively worse
with the passage of time.
Aspects of this policy that seemed at this time to be liberal were in keeping
with the relative pluralism of the pre-Stalinist period. Only in the case of the
Soviet Union’s policy towards the Church does the label ‘liberal’ seem unde-
serving. Its relation to the Orthodox Church was compromised from the outset
by the Church’s own reactionary tradition and by the militant atheism of the
Bolsheviks. During the revolution Church lands had been confiscated and a
radical division between Church and state was implemented. The violent
attacks on godless Bolshevism by Tikhon, the Metropolitan of Moscow and
Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, merely provoked the revolutionary
regime into closing churches and persecuting priests through the courts.
During the civil war, thousands of Orthodox Christians and at least twenty-
eight bishops were murdered, and in 1922 and 1923 the total number of
Orthodox priests who were killed amounted to over 8,000.
In 1922 a bitter power struggle broke out between the ‘reformers’, who were
loyal to the regime, and the patriarch, who had almost the entire clergy behind
him. In April 1923 a council dominated by the ‘reformers’ voted to abolish the
office of patriarch, prompting Tikhon to intervene and to publish a declaration
of loyalty in the government newspaper Izvestiya, with the result that in June
1923 the house arrest under which he had been placed since May 1922 was
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 169

lifted, ushering in a period during which the Russian Orthodox Church was
tolerated by the state. But in the wake of Tikhon’s death in April 1925 a further
power struggle broke out between the state and the Church. It ended only
when the Metropolitan of Novgorod, Sergey Stragorodski, swore comprehen-
sive allegiance to the Soviet state.
The position adopted by Alexandra Kollontai, an early champion of
women’s rights, on the questions of marriage and the family was regarded as
unduly radical not only by devout Christians but even by many Bolsheviks. She
defended the right of free love, which was also to be practised in the communes
that she proposed. As people’s commissar for social welfare between November
1917 and March 1918, she was the world’s first female government minister.
Both in this function and as head of the women’s section of the Central
Committee, she strove to relax marital and family law, to improve the legal
protections available to expectant and nursing mothers and to fight for the
right to terminate a pregnancy. Conversely, she was unable to achieve her
demand for the collective upbringing of children, while her views on marriage
and the family were not shared by Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks. Her
political influence waned when she joined the left-wing ‘Workers’ Opposition’
and demanded greater democracy within the party. The Central Committee
tried to exclude her, but its attempts were thwarted by the resistance of the
delegates at the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922. The following year she
was appointed the Soviet Union’s ambassador to Norway, which proved to be
the first stage in a long diplomatic career. The liberal marriage and family laws
that she had championed in 1918 were ratified in 1926.
Early Soviet cultural politics were also comparatively liberal. From 1917 to
1929 they bore the imprint of the people’s commissar for education, Anatoly
Lunacharsky. Lenin had charged him with eradicating illiteracy, and although
the lack of suitable teachers prevented him from introducing universal compul-
sory education, which the Central Committee did not enact until July 1930,
he was none the less able to reduce the rate of illiteracy from between 60 and
70 per cent in 1919 to 49 per cent in 1926. An important role in this develop-
ment was played by workers’ faculties (‘Rabfak’) established not only in colleges
but also in factories and intended to teach reading and writing and the basic
elements of a general education in three-year courses.
Schooling was also extended. Even during the period of the civil war from
1918 to 1921, some 8,500 new schools were built. As part of the National
Economic Plan, Lunacharsky placed greater importance on teaching basic
knowledge than on ideological indoctrination, for all that the latter was not for
a moment neglected, for teachers were regarded as the principal mediators of
socialism in the country’s villages. Lunacharsky could not, of course, prevent
the number of primary schools dropping from 76,000 to 50,000 in the wake
of the economic crisis of 1921–3, when the number of pupils fell from 6.1 to
3.6 million, and it was not until 1926 that the figure was restored to its pre-war
170 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

level. By 1927 the number of children attending school was around three
million more than it had been in 1914.
The struggle to combat illiteracy was only one aspect of Lunacharsky’s
work, for in October 1920 the Politburo placed him in charge of ‘Proletkult’, a
cultural movement for workers that until then had been independent and
which the philosopher and physician Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov had
summoned into existence with Lunacharsky’s help before the war. Bogdanov’s
aim had been to introduce workers to ‘middle-class’ culture through their own
clubs, libraries and theatres and at the same time to turn them into the repre-
sentatives of a new proletarian culture. During the civil war anti-bourgeois
feelings grew within the movement and eventually demanded a radical break
with tradition. Proletkult inherited all manner of avant-garde ideas, from
Expressionism to Cubism and Futurism. It also produced a significant kind of
poster art and a sophisticated type of political theatre, influencing the work of
writers and film directors, notably Sergei Eisenstein, whose film Battleship
Potemkin of 1925 did much to invest the October Revolution with quasi-
mythical status in the eyes of the rest of the world.
If it was to be innovative, then Proletkult needed to be artistically inde-
pendent, and Lunacharsky was prepared to grant it a considerable degree of
freedom even after it had been disbanded as an independent organization, but
in the longer term he was unable to prevail over Lenin and the Politburo. When
Proletkult was placed under the additional control of the trade unions in 1926,
its decline was inevitable, and under Stalin the movement lost everything that
until then had constituted its international fascination. This development also
marked the end of the period when Bolshevism and avant-garde art had
seemed to be two sides of the same coin, a time when ‘fellow travellers’ and
even émigrés returning from abroad had found it possible to contribute to
Soviet art without the fear of censorship and the secret police, and the Academy
of Science had still been able to enrol declared critics of the teachings of Marx
and Lenin.
But even the early Soviet Union already had its secret police, the
Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniy (GPU), which was created in
1922 under the overall control of the Ministry of the Interior and replaced the
earlier Cheka. By 1923 the GPU had in turn been replaced by the OGPU, the
Joint State Political Directorate, which enjoyed the status of a supreme authority,
having a seat and a vote on the Council of People’s Deputies. Like the Cheka, it
was run by Polish-born Felix Dzerzhinsky. The OGPU also shared its head-
quarters with its predecessor, the notorious Lubyanka in Moscow. As Manfred
Hildermeier has written, the OGPU had the authority to combat

‘counterrevolution’, espionage and banditry throughout the entire country.

It was able to establish branches in every Soviet Republic and also station
troops and open camps. It was responsible solely to the Council of People’s
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 171

Delegates and the Executive Committee of Soviets but to no regional

authority. By enhancing the status of what had once been the quintessential
makeshift organization, the constitution granted normalcy to the excep-
tional in the central area of securing both power and the newer order. The
OGPU became the third pillar of the revolutionary regime alongside the
monopolistically authoritarian party and the increasingly loyal and elitist
army, which was notable for its awareness of the needs of the state as
a whole.35

By the time the Soviet Union was founded, the Bolsheviks were by no means as
isolated with regard to other states and within the international workers’ move-
ment as they had been in 1918–19. This became clear at the Second World
Congress of the Communist International, which met in Petrograd on 19 July
1920 and in Moscow between 23 July and 7 August. The Third International
had grown considerably in size since its inaugural meeting in March 1919 and
was now attended by 217 delegates from thirty-six different countries repre-
senting 152 Communist parties and organizations. The most important dele-
gations were not Communist, however, but left-wing socialists with widespread
support among their countries’ voters: the Italian Socialist Party, the French
Socialist Party, the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany, which
had only recently won a sensational 18.6 per cent of the vote in the Reichstag
elections on 6 June 1920, and the Norwegian Workers’ Party. Two of these
parties – the German Independents and the French Socialists – were not even
members of the Comintern but had sent negotiators in an advisory role and
with the authority to discuss the conditions under which their parties might
join the International.
There were many reasons why the workers’ movement in Europe lurched to
the left: among them were disenchantment at the course of the revolutions in
central Europe, where in the view of more extreme thinkers, there had been a
noticeable lack of any real change to social and political conditions; the failure
of the great strikes of 1919 and 1920; anger at the ineffectual nature of the
Second International in the war and an unwillingness on the part of many of its
members to examine the reasons for this ineffectuality in a self-critical manner;
and, not least, admiration for the one party that had achieved a proletarian
revolution, managing to hang on to power in its struggle against the counter-
revolution and the intervention of the Allies and which now, at the start of the
Second World Congress that coincided with the climax of the Russo-Polish
War, was apparently on the point of carrying Communism into the heart of
central Europe.
At their party conference in Bologna in the autumn of 1919, the Italian
Socialists voted to join the Third International, the majority of members under
Serrati carrying the day in the face of opposition from the reformists under
Turati and Treves, who none the less remained in the party. At their own
172 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

conference in Strasbourg at the end of February 1920 the French Socialists, it is

true, had come out against joining the Communist International, but they had
voiced their agreement with its basic principles, especially the dictatorship of
the proletariat, and they had severed their links with the Second International.
In Germany the Independent Social Democrats had already met in Berlin in
March 1919 and asserted their allegiance to the soviet system, to the dictator-
ship of the proletariat and to an uncompromising class struggle, but its
members were deeply divided between sympathizers and opponents of
Bolshevism.
Lenin prepared for the Second World Congress by writing ‘Left-Wing
Communism: An Infantile Disorder’ in April and May 1920. It was not only a
sharply worded critique of putschist, syndicalist and, principally, anti-
parliamentary deviations from the true spirit of Marxism but also a manifesto
in which Lenin raised the doctrines of the Bolshevik revolution to the level of
universals. One of its central theses runs:

The experience of the victorious dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia has

clearly shown even to those who are incapable of thinking or have had no
occasion to give thought to the matter that absolute centralisation and
rigorous discipline of the proletariat are an essential condition of victory
over the bourgeoisie.36

This doctrine found practical application in twenty-one conditions for

membership of the Comintern that were largely drafted by Zinoviev and that
the Congress passed practically unanimously on 6 August, only two delegates
voting against it. It provided for a state of total subordination of all its members
to the decrees of the Congress and Executive Committee of the Third
International. All Communist parties – this name, too, now became obligatory
– were to assume the Soviet principle of ‘democratic centralism’:

The Communist party will be able to fulfil its duty only if its organization is
as centralized as possible, if iron discipline prevails, and if the party centre,
upheld by the confidence of the party membership, has strength and
authority and is equipped with the most comprehensive powers.

Regular purges of party organizations must be undertaken in order to prevent

the spread of aberrant ideas. ‘Reformist’ politicians and moderate left-wing
socialists – so-called ‘Centrists’ – must be replaced by ‘reliable Communists’. In
addition to the legal party apparatus, an illegal party organization must also be
set up in order to pave the way for the revolution. ‘Notorious opportunists’
such as Kautsky and Hilferding as well as socialist leaders like Turati, Longuet
and MacDonald could not be members of any Communist party. An ‘unyielding
struggle’ must be waged against reformist trade unions. Propaganda and
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 173

political agitation must reflect the programme of the Communist International,

with the result that new or revised party programmes must be ratified by the
Congress or the Executive Committee of the Comintern.
In keeping with the decrees passed by the Second Congress, the Executive
Committee, or ECCI, was the leading organ of the Comintern between its
world congresses. Its principal burden of work was to be shouldered by the
‘party of that country where, by the decision of the world congress, the
Executive Committee has its seat’: in other words, the Russian Communists. In
consequence, that country was entitled to send five representatives to the ECCI
and to appoint Zinoviev their secretary general. They would be joined by
representatives of the ‘ten to thirteen most important Communist parties, the
list to be ratified by the regular world congress’.37 Each representative would
have a casting vote. The other Communist parties could each send a repre-
sentative to the Executive Committee, but they would attend only in an advi-
sory capacity.
The aim of these twenty-one points and of the Second Congress’s statutes
was clear: all Communist parties were to accept the directives of the ECCI in
Moscow. But this committee was controlled by Bolsheviks, which meant that
anyone accepting these twenty-one points was obliged to make a radical break
with the democratic traditions of the western workers’ movement and accept
the privileged position of a party whose structure and policies could be
explained only by reference to the specific conditions in Russia. Tsarist Russia
had been largely unaffected by the great movements in European emancipa-
tion from the Renaissance and Reformation to the Enlightenment, to the
‘bourgeois’ revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, finally,
the classic liberalism of the later period. In Russia there was no bourgeoisie
in the European sense but only millions of peasants who, lacking any land
of their own, were only too keen to acquire some and who had ceased to be
serfs only in the 1860s. A brutal police state had driven the early workers’
movement underground and encouraged the formation of a secret alliance of
conspirators.
The Bolshevik party was the expression of extreme economic and political
backwardness. Before 1917 it would never have occurred to a socialist to be
ruled by the ideas and by the battle strategies of such a party, and even as late as
1919 the Russian leaders had assumed that the centre of the coming world revo-
lution would shift westwards to Germany as soon as the proletariat seized power
there. It required the failure of the revolutionary movements outside Russia and
the Bolsheviks’ own powers of self-assertion to make the non-Russian move-
ments see that in 1920 there was only one way to achieve a proletarian revolu-
tion, and that was to follow the course that they themselves had adopted.
Many workers’ parties in the west were torn apart by their inability to decide
whether or not to accept the twenty-one points. The first of these parties
to confront the problem was the Independent Social Democratic Party of
174 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Germany. Most of its officials and the majority of its newspapers were emphati-
cally opposed to the idea of being subject to the dictates of the Moscow party,
but its members saw things differently, and a decision was taken at the primary
election of the delegates to the party conference, which was held in Halle in
October 1920. The delegates of both camps were elected by members meeting
according to the principle of proportional representation, who travelled
to Halle with an imperative mandate. The advocates of acceptance of the
twenty-one points received not quite 58 per cent of the vote, its opponents
42 per cent. The former owed their majority in the main to workers who were
not born into the social-democratic tradition but had been politicized only
during the war and its aftermath.
At the party conference the delegates witnessed a dramatic exchange
between Grigory Zinoviev and Rudolf Hilferding and a moving indictment of
the Bolsheviks’ bloody terror by one of the most respected leaders of the perse-
cuted Mensheviks, Julius Martov. But the outcome of the vote was clear even
before it had been taken: there were 236 votes for acceptance of the twenty-one
points, 156 against. In December 1920 the left-wing majority of the German
Communist Party joined the United Communist Party of Germany at a confer-
ence in Berlin. The defeated minority initially remained an independent party
and retained its existing name.
In the case of the left-wing majority of the French Socialists, the twenty-one
points found less unquestioning support than they did with the left wing of the
Independent Social Democrats in Germany. The party’s secretary general,
Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, and the editor in chief of the party’s official newspaper,
L’Humanité, Marcel Cachin, had both attended the Second World Congress and
at the party conference in Tours in December 1920 initially refused to exclude
representatives of the recalcitrant minority, including ‘Centrists’ such as Jean
Longuet and Paul Faure. But a telegram signed by Lenin, Zinoviev and other
members of the ECCI made it clear to delegates that Moscow would not tolerate
such a violation of the Comintern edict. The party therefore agreed to join the
Communist International by a clear majority of 3,028 votes to 1,022. The Parti
Communiste (Section Française de l’Internationale Communiste) had around
140,000 members, Longuet’s SFIO only around 30,000. But the relative figures
changed in the course of the following years, and by 1924 the SFIO had almost
100,000 members, the Parti Communiste only 68,000. At the parliamentary
elections in May 1924 the Socialists also proved to be the stronger party, polling
almost 1.7 million votes against the Communists’ 800,000.
Some six months after the old Socialist Party split, the Confédération
Générale du Travail (CGT), the umbrella organization of all the socialist trade
unions in France, had to decide on its future course. At its congress in Lille in
July 1921, shots were fired before a relatively small majority decided not to join
the Red Trade Union International that had been founded only a short time
earlier in Moscow at the same time as the Comintern’s Third World Congress.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 175

The minority under the leadership of the rail and construction workers refused
to accept defeat and declared the CGT a divided organization. In St-Étienne
in June 1921 an independent Communist trades union was founded, the
Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire (CGTU), which joined the Red
Trade Union International in 1922. The split involved a massive loss of
members: in 1920 the socialist trade unions had had around two million
members, but by 1924 the CGT and CGTU combined had fewer than half that
number, of whom around two-thirds belonged to socialist trade unions, the
remaining third to their Communist counterpart.
In many ways developments in Italy resembled those in France. Like
Frossard, Serrati refused to exclude more moderate members from his party.
Lenin, who thought that Italy was on the eve of a proletarian revolution,
insisted on unconditional acceptance of all twenty-one points and also
demanded the expulsion from the party not only of Turati but also – in the
event of his remaining obdurate – Serrati. Lenin’s message was relayed to their
Italian comrades by a delegation from the ECCI under the Hungarian
Communist Mátyás Rákosi, a former member of Béla Kun’s government, and
the leading Bulgarian party theorist Christo Kabakchiev.
Apart from Serrati and his allies, the principal negotiators were the Pure
Communists within the Socialist Party. But these were divided into three
groups: to the left stood the anti-parliamentarian forces ranged around
Amadeo Bordiga, the editor of Il Soviet; in the middle was the group associated
with L’Ordine Nuovo and its founder Antonio Gramsci, who whole-heartedly
supported the twenty-one points and agreed that the Communists should take
part in the elections and work in parliament; and the third group of Andrea
Marabini and Antonio Graziadei, who largely agreed with Gramsci but felt that
a split in the party was premature. Ranged against the Pure Communists were
the Unitarian Communists around Serrati and the Concentrationists around
Turati, Treves and Modigliani, who also commanded the support of the secre-
tary general of the Trade Union Federation, Ludovico d’Aragona. The emis-
saries of the ECCI were able to persuade the Pure Communists to agree to
unconditional acceptance of the twenty-one points, whereas they had no
success with Serrati’s Unitarian Communists.
The decision was taken at the party conference in Livorno in January 1921.
Serrati won 98,000 votes, the Pure Communists 59,000 and Turati around
15,000. Delegates casting a total of 981 votes abstained. When the result of the
vote was announced, the representatives of the Pure Communists left the
conference hall and went with Kabakchiev and Rákosi to the Teatro San Marco,
where they constituted themselves into the Partito Comunista Italiano.
Lenin saw in the split in the party a major success for the revolutionary
cause, but in the parliamentary elections in May 1921 it emerged that the
Communists had the support of only a tiny minority of the Italian proletariat,
winning only thirteen seats against 128 for the Socialists. (At the previous
176 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

elections in November 1919 the undivided Socialist Party had won 156 seats.)
But unlike their French counterparts, the Italian trade unions were not split,
and from now on the Communists were a part of the Confederazione Generale
del Lavoro. At the same time the split in the Socialist Party was enough to
prevent them from offering any joint resistance to Mussolini’s Fascists, who
were resorting to ever more extreme forms of violence. Lenin had won no
more than a pyrrhic victory in Livorno.
The attempt to split the British labour movement proved a total failure. At
the Labour Party’s annual conference in Scarborough in July 1920 a proposal
by the small British Socialist Party, which was affiliated to the Labour Party,
that the party should join the Third International was rejected by an over-
whelming majority. Later that same year another grouping within the Labour
Party, the Independent Labour Party, voted by a large majority not to join the
Comintern; and in March 1921 the party conference, meeting in Southport,
rejected the twenty-one points by 618 to 97 votes. For the Labour Party as a
whole, it went without saying that its members would refuse to be subjected to
the dictates of Moscow. At its party conference in 1923, its president, the Fabian
Sidney Webb, declared that it was not Karl Marx who had founded British
socialism but Robert Owen, ‘who preached not the class struggle but the time-
honoured doctrine of the brotherhood of all mankind’.38
In his History of the International Julius Braunthal drew attention to the
evolutionary nature of English history since the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9,
seeing in this quality the main reason why the British workers’ movement
aligned itself with neither Marx nor, at a later date, Lenin. The concentration of
all power in parliament and the extension of suffrage ultimately opened the
gates to power to the working class as well:

The British labour movement was imbued with the spirit of humanitarian
pacifist Socialism. The idea of civil war as a means of furthering the struggle
of Socialism was alien to the minds of British Socialists. Bolshevik theories,
which idealized violence as a creative force of Socialism, civil war as an
inevitable stage in the struggle for Socialism, and terroristic dictatorship as
an inexorable instrument for its realization, could awake no sympathetic
echoes among British Socialists. Such ideas ran counter to their traditional
feelings and ideas.39

In the light of all this, it is unsurprising that the British Communist Party,
which was founded in 1920, never rose above the status of a left-wing splinter
group.
For those members of the socialist left who were unwilling to submit to the
twenty-one points, the events of 1920 left them feeling the need to close ranks.
There was no question, therefore, of their joining the Second International –
sometimes described as the London International on account of the leading
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 177

role of the Labour Party and the seat of its secretariat. At its congress in Geneva
in early August 1920 the Second International had given its unconditional
backing to the idea of parliamentary democracy and branded the Communist
system the tyranny of a small minority. It was above all the Independent Labour
Party, the German Independent Social Democrats and the Swiss Social
Democrats who urged closer cooperation between those parties that belonged
to neither the Moscow nor the London International. (In the spring of 1920 the
Independent Labour Party had severed its links with the Second International
at its Glasgow conference.)
A preliminary conference was held in Berne in December 1920 and attended
not only by the foregoing parties but also by the Socialist parties from France,
Austria and Czechoslovakia, together with the Russian Mensheviks, who at
that date were not yet merely a party in exile. They formed their own
International – the International Working Union of Socialist Parties, mock-
ingly dismissed by the Comintern as ‘International 2;’ – in Vienna in February
1921. The meeting was attended by twenty Socialist parties from thirteen
different countries represented by seventy-one delegates. At the head of the
Vienna International, as it has come to be called, was the Austrian Socialist,
Friedrich Adler, who came to prominence as its secretary. The new International
distanced itself from ‘reformist ministerialism’ as emphatically as it did from
the sectarianism of the Comintern parties but later did not exclude the possi-
bility of working with the two rival Internationals, whenever the situation
demanded.
By the date of its Third World Congress, which was held in Moscow between
22 June and 12 July 1921, the Comintern, for its part, had abandoned all
attempts at working with its rivals. Forced on to the defensive in almost every
country apart from Soviet Russia, the Bolsheviks insisted that in December
1921 the ECCI pass a series of guidelines for a ‘united front policy’ involving
Communists, Social Democrats and trade unions, the new tactics inevitably
involving continuing attacks on the ‘reformists’ of all shades of opinion, their
main aim being to persuade the mass of workers who were currently members
of the parties belonging to the two other Internationals to switch their alle-
giance to the various Communist parties. In mid-January 1922, the Vienna
International invited the executive committees of the Moscow and London
Internationals to attend a joint conference, but the items on the agenda were
not the ideological differences between Social Democrats and Communists
but, first, the economic situation in Europe and the political actions of the
working class and, second, the proletariat’s resistance to the politics of
reaction.
The conference convened by the Vienna International took place in early
April 1922 in the Reichstag building in Berlin. The Third International attended
since it hoped to muster support for its united front policy, while the Second
International took part in order to avoid giving the impression that it was
178 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

seeking to sabotage the attempts to find common ground. But in accepting the
invitation, it made clear its reservations, insisting that the conference should
also discuss the fate of political prisoners in Soviet Russia and the fate of
Georgia, where the Bolsheviks had toppled the Menshevik regime the previous
year as a result of their military intervention and installed a Communist
system. The Communists were also to give their guarantee that in future they
would not attempt to form cells within the trade unions.
In spite of all attempts to mediate by the two Austrian Socialists Friedrich
Adler and Otto Bauer, the Berlin conference became little more than an arena
in which the Social Democrats were able to trade blows with the Communists
who were present. The principal spokesman of the Third International was
Karl Radek, who was unwilling to jeopardize his main aim of using a major
congress of international workers as a platform for international Communist
propaganda, and so he was ready to compromise with the reformers. On the
Georgian question he agreed to the setting up of a commission of inquiry
appointed by the executive committees of the three Internationals. As for the
forty-seven Social Revolutionaries currently in Soviet prisons awaiting trial
and facing the death sentence, the two other Internationals were allowed to
send defence counsels to Moscow; no prisoners would be executed. The confer-
ence then decided to form a Committee of Nine whose principal task was to
prepare the way for a ‘general conference’. The workers of all countries were
invited to organize mass demonstrations in support of an eight-hour day, the
‘Russian revolution’, famine-struck Russia, the ‘restoration by all countries of
political and economic relations with Soviet Russia’ and ‘a united front of the
workers in every country and in the International’. At the same time they would
protest at the ‘capitalist offensive’.40
On their return to Moscow, the Comintern delegates faced a severe dressing
down by Lenin, who accused them of making concessions to the ‘shrewd
bourgeois diplomats’ and to the ‘representatives of the Second and Two-and-a-
Half Internationals’ without receiving any concessions in return.41 By agreeing
that representatives from all three Internationals would be admitted to the
trial of the Social Revolutionaries and that no death sentences would be passed,
the Comintern delegation had, in Lenin’s view, paid too high a price. As
a result, the ECCI’s ratification of the Berlin agreement was of dubious value
at best.
The first meeting of the Committee of Nine was held in Berlin on 23 May
1922 under the chairmanship of Friedrich Adler. It was also the committee’s
last meeting. By way of an ultimatum, Radek demanded the immediate
convening of a world labour congress, a demand rejected by the representatives
of the two other Internationals, who argued that the Comintern had failed to
keep its promises. At that point the Moscow delegates announced that they had
done what they had come to do. The following day the Comintern accused the
London and Vienna Internationals of deliberately sabotaging the Committee
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 179

of Nine. The new watchword for the workers of all countries was ‘Form the
united front from the ground upwards.’ If necessary, then, they were to oppose
the leaders of the ‘reformist’ parties and trade unions.
The Comintern had clearly lost interest in a world labour congress now that
Soviet Russia had found another way of overcoming its external isolation. Only
a few days after the Berlin conference of the three Internationals had ended, a
world economic conference opened in Genoa, the first international congress
to which the Western Powers had invited Soviet Russia. From Moscow’s stand-
point it was useful to represent its own interests on all levels. In Soviet eyes
there was no irreconcilable contradiction between Realpolitik in the relation-
ship between the Soviet government and the capitalist powers and revolu-
tionary subversion which, massively supported by Moscow with both money
and manpower, did not shy away from violent attempts to overthrow the
governments of the countries with which it was currently dealing: the two,
after all, could be seen as dialectically linked. And however important Europe
may have been for the cause of world revolution, there were other parts of the
globe where the capitalist system could – and should – be challenged: in the
colonies and half-colonies of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where there was
an even more urgent need for national bourgeois revolutions than for any
Communist overthrow.
As early as September 1920 the ECCI had organized a ‘congress of oppressed
peoples of the East’ in Baku, where Zinoviev had taken the opportunity to
declare a ‘holy war’ on imperialist England. In January 1922 the First Congress
of the Communist and Revolutionary Organizations of the Far East met in
Moscow and then in Petrograd. Among the delegates were representatives of
the Communist parties of China, Japan, Korea and the Dutch East Indies as
well as revolutionary groups from Mongolia and the revolutionary Kuomintang
from southern China. They passed a resolution that added an anti-colonial
dimension to the classic slogan from the Communist Manifesto: ‘Proletarians
of all lands and oppressed peoples of the whole world, unite!’ The appeal
culminated in what amounted to a declaration of war on Japanese, American,
British, French and sundry other imperialists:

We declare a life-and-death war on the venal imitators and lackeys of our

subjugators in China. We declare a life-and-death war on hypocritical
American imperialism and the rapacious British robbers. Get out of China
and Korea, get out of Indochina and the Dutch East Indies! Get your hands
off the islands of the Pacific! Down with all intruders in the Far East!42

The Fourth World Congress of the Communist International met in Moscow

in November 1922 at a time when the country was celebrating the fifth anni-
versary of the October Revolution. In his address to the conference, Lenin,
who had barely recovered from his first stroke, defended the New Economic
180 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Policy, criticized a resolution of the Third World Congress concerning the

organizational structure of the Communist parties as being too permeated by
the Russian spirit, and drew conclusions from post-revolutionary events that
were notable for their lack of revolutionary euphoria. Their foe, he insisted,
could easily provoke the Communists into attacking them and in that way set
back their cause by many years:

For this reason, I think, the idea that we must prepare for ourselves
the possibility of retreat is very important, and not only from the theoretical
point of view. From the practical point of view, too, all the parties which
are preparing to take the direct offensive against capitalism in the near
future must now give thought to the problem of preparing for a possible
retreat.43

Lenin had not abandoned his goal of world revolution, which he continued to
advocate even in his final Comintern conference speech, but he had by now
come to see that the journey there would be longer and more difficult than he
had thought at the time of the October Revolution.

Three Elections and a Secession: Post-war Britain

When Zinoviev called on all Communists to rise up in a ‘holy war’ in September
1920, he was declaring hostilities not only on the British presence in the Near
East but on the Empire in general. In Europe, France, too, might have been
deemed a leading enemy of Soviet Russia, but there was an additional reason
why Soviet ire was directed at Britain first and foremost: the City of London
remained the world’s chief financial centre, which in Moscow’s eyes made
Great Britain the leading force in the capitalist world.
In Britain itself the First World War left the people wondering if the coun-
try’s international standing had been undermined for good. Although it had
taken over control of most of Germany’s colonial possessions in Africa, Indian
and Arab nationalists had been radicalized in consequence, so that the very
existence of the Empire seemed to be threatened. During the war 1.3 million
Indian soldiers had been deployed on all fronts, making it highly unlikely that
the survivors would be satisfied with their country’s continuing colonial status
in the longer term.
Unlike the colonies, the white Dominions had on their own initiative
provided soldiers to support the mother country. Canada had sent half a
million, 57,000 of whom were killed in action, while Australia sent 332,000 and
New Zealand 112,000. The number of those killed was 59,000 in the case of
Australia, 17,000 in that of New Zealand. After 1917 representatives of the
Dominions were able to influence the newly created Imperial War Cabinet,
which also included three representatives for India, one for Newfoundland, the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 181

five members of the British war cabinet and the minister for the colonies and
secretary of state for India.
Four years after the war had ended Britain was forced to realize that it
would never again be able to count on such a willingness for self-sacrifice. In
early September 1922, when Turkish troops fighting in the Greek-Turkish War
approached Chanak in the Dardanelles neutral zone, there was the very real
threat of a military escalation and even of war between Turkey and Great
Britain. (France and Italy had already withdrawn their units from the neutral
zone during the Chanak Crisis.) In London Winston Churchill, then the
minister for the colonies, was particularly insistent that the British government
should act decisively against Turkey, and he knew that he had the backing of
the prime minister, Lloyd George. The Canadian prime minister, William Lyon
Mackenzie King, who ran his country from 1921 to 1930 and again from 1935
to 1948, immediately announced that if Britain declared war on Turkey, Canada
would not automatically regard itself as also at war, as it had in 1914. The South
African prime minister, General Smuts, expressed himself in similar terms.
These warnings did much to weaken the ‘party of war’ in London and contrib-
uted to a peaceful solution to the conflict between Britain and Turkey.
A year later Canada took a further step in the direction of emancipation
and in March 1923 signed a fishing agreement with the United States without
consulting the British Embassy in Washington. Meeting in London shortly
afterwards, the Imperial Conference confirmed the right of the Dominions to
sign treaties with third parties. For the white Dominions, this opened the way
to their establishing missions in all those countries with which they wanted to
have diplomatic relations, a right that Australia and New Zealand, unlike
Canada, initially ignored. For its part, Great Britain created a new government
department, the Dominions Office, which enjoyed equal rights to those of the
Colonial Office. For the present they shared a common head.
In terms of the country’s internal politics, the early post-war period in
Britain was overshadowed by bitter labour disputes and social unrest. At the
end of January 1919 70,000 shipyard workers, dockworkers and miners in
the Clyde industrial area and in Belfast held a wild-cat strike to demand a
forty-hour week. In the course of violent unrest in Glasgow workers unfurled
the Red flag on the city’s town hall, prompting the government to declare a
state of siege and to send in 10,000 heavily armed troops backed up by tanks.
When hundreds of thousands of miners and railway workers threatened to
strike in the rest of the country and the miners’ union additionally demanded
the nationalization of the coal mines, a nationwide general strike seemed
inevitable.
The army soon restored order in Glasgow and elsewhere, but threats
of force were insufficient to stem the tide of social unrest. The Liberal–
Conservative coalition under Lloyd George responded by setting up a royal
commission under the chairmanship of Sir John Sankey, a High Court judge
182 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

entrusted with the task of examining the mining industry. Not only employers
and experts but the trade unions and the Labour Party took part in this
commission as they did in the National Industrial Conference convened in
late February 1919. Sankey’s preliminary report, submitted in March 1919,
bore the imprint of all these groups whilst meeting many of the demands of the
miners in respect of their working hours and wages. The final report came
out in June 1919 and by a majority of one – Sankey’s own vote – recommended
the nationalization of the mines. But the government declined to accept the
recommendations, although it met some of the miners’ demands, leading to a
brief period of calm.
In June 1919 the workers in the cotton factories went on strike, followed in
July by the Welsh miners, prompting the government to send in the army in
Wales, too. The autumn months saw strikes among railway workers and among
workers employed in the armouries of both the army and the navy. Whenever
the government negotiated directly with the trade unions, it did what it could
to accommodate the workers’ demands concerning higher wages and shorter
working hours. But it remained obdurate on the question of nationalization
and turned down the recommendations of the Royal Commission.
During the war the mines had been placed under state control, but when
they reverted to their former ownership in the spring of 1921 – a year of depres-
sion – their owners seized the opportunity to announce lower wages. The
Miners’ Federation responded by demanding state supervision of earnings and
a national wage pool, a demand that also had the support of the railway unions
and transport workers, the two unions that had formed a ‘Triple Alliance’ with
the miners in 1914. A general strike was threatened in response to the swift
rejection of this demand by the government and employers alike, but in the
event this was averted when, faced by the government’s threat to send in troops,
the general secretary of the Miners’ Federation, Frank Hodges, agreed to a
suggestion that wages be increased at least temporarily, while describing the
day – 15 April 1921 – as the ‘Black Friday’ of the British trade union move-
ment. Although his own executive rejected the proposal, it was accepted by the
railway and transport workers, who no longer felt bound by any feelings of
solidarity, bringing the Triple Alliance to an end.
Isolated, the miners went on strike, a strike that ended only in July 1921
with an agreement that for the individual mining regions there would be a
link between minimum wages and output. The Miners’ Federation paid for its
failure with a dramatic drop in its membership figures and the loss of the
leading position that it had held until then at the Trades Union Congress.
In general, the trade union movement had gained in strength in the course
of the war, membership rising from four million in 1914 to 6.5 million in 1920
and 8.3 million in 1926. And just as the trade union movement grew in size, so,
too, did the Labour Party, numbering 1.6 million members in 1914, 3.5 million
in 1919 and almost 4.4 million by 1920. The number of votes that it received
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 183

increased from half a million in the last pre-war election in 1910 to 2.2 million
in December 1918 and 4.2 million in the elections to the lower house in
November 1922.
Even after it had left Lloyd George’s all-party government in December
1918, the Labour Party continued to exert considerable influence on politics
and legislation. The two most important socio-political laws of the early
post-war period would probably not have been passed without pressure from
the Labour Party and the trade unions. The Housing and Town Planning Act
of July 1919, often named after Christopher Addison, the first minister of
health, introduced council houses for working-class people. And in 1920 a law
was passed covering unemployment insurance, extending to every branch of
industry the provisions of the 1911 National Insurance Bill that required
employers in the construction, machine-building and ship-building industries
to insure their employees. It provided for contributions from employers and
employees alike where the latter earned less than £50 a year. Once they had
paid their contributions for at least twelve weeks, they could, in the event of
their becoming unemployed, claim unemployment benefit for fifteen weeks.
When the economy collapsed shortly after the law had been passed and the
number of unemployed men and women rose dramatically, the state had to
intervene, which it continued to do even after the period of support required
by law had elapsed.
The most explosive problem faced by British politicians between 1919 and
1921 was the struggle for Irish independence, which began on 21 January 1919
with the proclamation of the Irish Republic by the revolutionary Irish parlia-
ment, the Dáil Éireann. The Sinn Féin government under Eamon de Valera
managed to build up powerful support among the Catholic population, a
development in which they received considerable help from the new Dáil
Courts. Ranged against the Irish Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army
(IRA) in their war of independence were the United Kingdom police and
the Royal Irish Constabulary and their volunteers, most of whom were
ex-officers who had fought in the First World War. The bloody guerrilla war
was waged with great brutality by both sides in the conflict and lasted until well
into 1921.
London hoped that the Government of Ireland Act of December 1920
would bring a political solution to the conflict. This provided for a division of
the island into two states, the larger of which would also include three of
Ulster’s predominantly Catholic counties. Under the Act the king of England
would be the head of both states. The two-chamber system provided for in the
legislation was also designed to ensure that the Protestant landowners in the
south were represented in the upper house of the new state. But the Act was
ratified only by the new parliament in Ulster, whereas in the south Sinn Féin,
having won 124 of the 128 seats in the lower house, refused to carry out its
mandate, with the result that parliament was unable to operate. Instead of
184 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

seeking a military solution to the conflict, London decided to negotiate with

the Irish Republicans.
The initial outcome of the talks between the governments of Lloyd George
and Eamon de Valera was an armistice agreed to on 11 July 1921. It was partic-
ularly hard to find common ground between the Republican creed of the Irish
and the British insistence that Ireland should be granted the status of a
dominion. (Ulster, if it so wished, could remain a part of the United Kingdom.)
At the head of the Dublin delegation that in the autumn of 1921 held talks
concerning the links between Ireland and the Empire were the moderate
Arthur Griffith and one of the leaders of the armed uprising, Michael Collins.
On 6 December both men agreed to the wording of a treaty stipulating that
Ireland, as a dominion, would remain a part of the Empire and that the king of
England would continue to be king of Ireland. Britain also secured a number of
navy bases in Ireland but granted the free state independence, including fiscal
autonomy.
In Ireland the agreement encountered violent opposition on the part of
staunch Republicans. The greatest cause of indignation was the oath of alle-
giance that civil servants, judges, ministers and members of parliament would
be required to swear to the British throne as supreme head of the nations that
together formed the British Commonwealth of Nations. Following a heated
debate, the Irish parliament passed the treaty by a narrow majority of sixty-
four votes to fifty-seven on 7 January 1922, whereupon de Valera, who had
always opposed full membership of the Empire and, hence, ratification of the
treaty, resigned as prime minister and was replaced by Griffith. The general
public, the Catholic bishops and the majority of the Irish Republican
Brotherhood – the political umbrella organization of the Irish Republicans –
welcomed the treaty as it brought Ireland as close to independence as was
possible in the present circumstances.
The radical minority remained unimpressed. In April 1922 a group of IRA
officers occupied a number of public buildings in Dublin, thereby signalling
the start of the Irish civil war. De Valera formed an alternative government,
while Collins placed himself at the head of the government troops. With the
help of cannons loaned by the British Collins was able to suppress the rebellion
in the capital, albeit only after a series of bloody confrontations. He himself was
killed in a Republican ambush in August 1922. After the radical Republicans
had suffered a number of crippling defeats, de Valera finally ordered a ceasefire
on 24 May 1923.
But divisions within the independence movement continued. The first free
elections took place in the summer of 1923 when, in keeping with the constitu-
tion of December 1922, women had the same voting rights as men. Those
opposed to the treaty won thirty-five of the 128 seats but refused to take their
seats. The moderate wing of Sinn Féin, which formed an independent party
under the name of Cumann na nGaedheal, won fifty-eight seats, while the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 185

remaining supporters of the treaty, including the Irish Labour Party, together
won thirty-five. The new prime minister, replacing the late Arthur Griffith,
was the moderate William T. Cosgrave. In 1926 a group of staunch Republicans
formed a new party under de Valera, Fianna Fáil, and in 1927 backed the
Anglo-Irish Treaty. The forty-four representatives of Fianna Fáil who were
elected to the Dáil in 1927 swore an oath of allegiance to the king of England,
arguing that this was a mere formality, and the Irish Free State now began to
develop in the direction of a ‘normal’ western democracy.
Relations between the Irish Free State and the largely Protestant North
remained tense. A boundary commission was set up with the aim of redrawing
the border between the sixteen southern counties and the six northern coun-
ties in favour of the former, but when this failed to reach a consensus, the Irish
Free State signed an agreement with Great Britain, confirming the existing
border with only a handful of minor changes. The Catholics of Northern
Ireland, who represented a third of the population, first took up their seats in
the lower house in Belfast in 1925. Here the pro-British Unionists enjoyed an
unassailable majority that merely fuelled the enmity between Protestants and
Catholics, a hostility that increased when the advocates of Irish unification
gained ground in the south with the rise of Fianna Fáil. The radical Republicans
in Ulster refused to work with their parliamentary colleagues. In their rivalry
with the paramilitary units of the Protestant Orange Order, the Republicans,
through the military wing of the IRA, ensured that for decades Ulster remained
Great Britain’s principal source of unrest.
The Republic of Ireland’s new status as an independent state marked an
important turning point in the country’s history, bringing to an end four centu-
ries of English rule that had begun with Henry VIII’s subjugation of the island.
Ever since Gladstone’s day the Conservatives had thwarted every Liberal
attempt to grant Ireland home rule and even after 1918 had opposed the end of
the Union with England. But in the wake of the First World War very few Tories
were still willing to become embroiled in a major conflict to prevent Irish
secession, with the result that at the urging of Lloyd George they agreed to a
solution that allowed the English crown at least to preserve the semblance of
British rule over Ireland. Most Tories must have suspected that this was merely
a transitional phase on the road to complete independence.
The decision to grant Irish independence was the last major achievement of
Lloyd George’s cabinet, for by the autumn of 1922 there were increasing signs
that the Liberal–Conservative coalition was about to end. On 7 October The
Times published a letter from Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative Party
leader and lord privy seal, distancing himself from the prime minister’s policy
towards Turkey, a policy felt to be confrontational and dangerous. And for
many in the party it was an open secret that the foreign minister, Lord Curzon,
was no longer willing to support Lloyd George. On 19 October 275 Conservative
MPs met at the Carlton Club to discuss their party’s future. By the end of the
186 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

meeting there was a clear majority of 185 to eighty-eight in favour of ending

the coalition. Within hours Lloyd George had resigned as prime minister and
was succeeded on the 24th by Bonar Law. Curzon remained foreign minister,
and Stanley Baldwin, until then the trade minister, took over as chancellor of
the exchequer. Baldwin was regarded as a rising star in the Tory Party, or the
Conservative Party as it became known in the wake of Irish independence.
The new government’s first action was to dissolve the lower house. The
Conservatives emerged as clear victors from the election in November 1922,
winning 347 seats – an eighty-seven-seat majority over the opposition. But
the Labour Party, too, enjoyed a major success, increasing the number of
its members of parliament from seventy-five to 142. The Liberals of both
camps – Asquith and Lloyd George – together won 147 seats, forty-five fewer
than in the election in December 1918.
Bonar Law remained in office for only six months, resigning on health
grounds in May 1923 and dying in the October of that same year. He was
succeeded by Stanley Baldwin, who was maintain a strong grip on the Tory
Party until 1937, even though he had previously failed to distinguish himself in
British politics. The most urgent problem to be faced by his first cabinet was the
high rate of unemployment, which he planned to combat with high protective
tariffs of a kind that had been introduced on cars, clocks and musical instru-
ments during the war. In October 1923 he announced a comprehensive protec-
tive tariff for the British economy. Since his predecessor, Bonar Law, had promised
only a year earlier that no fundamental changes would be made to the tariff
system, Baldwin felt that new elections were unavoidable. The general election
that was held on 6 December 1923 left his plans in ruins, for although the
Conservatives remained the largest party, they had ninety fewer seats. The elec-
toral victors were the Labour Party and the Liberals, both of whom had demanded
a return to free trade. Labour increased the number of its representatives from
142 to 192, while the Liberals now had 158 instead of 117 seats.
This meant that, taken together, Labour and the Liberals had more seats
than the Conservatives. Baldwin had failed to achieve a majority which meant
that George V asked the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, to form a govern-
ment. MacDonald duly became leader of the first Labour government which,
although it lacked a parliamentary majority of its own, was at least tolerated by
the Liberals. The new cabinet’s policies were liberal rather than socialist. The
chancellor, Philip Snowden, abolished the wartime protective tariffs and
lowered taxes, but he was unable to reduce unemployment in this way. If the
government’s policies could be described as ‘social’, then it was its practice of
encouraging the building of council houses for working-class families – a
policy pursued with considerable success by the health minister Arthur
Greenwood – to which this label would apply.
This first Labour government had been in office for only a week when it
took the spectacular step of recognizing the Soviet Union on 1 February 1924,
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 187

a move followed by lengthy negotiations over a new trade agreement and a

treaty designed to deal with the question of Russia’s pre-war debts and the
rights of British citizens living in the Soviet Union. In turn this treaty was
intended to provide the basis on which to offer Russia a British loan. When the
relevant agreements were signed on 6 August 1924, there was a storm of protest
from the Conservatives and from Lloyd George’s Liberals, who accused the
Labour government of acting against vital British interests.
It was doubtful if MacDonald would obtain a majority in the lower house in
support of these agreements. Against this background, the cabinet can hardly
have welcomed a letter, allegedly written by Harry Pollitt, the chairman of the
British Communist Party, which appeared in J. R. Campbell’s Communist
Workers Weekly, in which British workers were asked not to take part in wars
in which they would have to fight their own comrades. An accusation of incite-
ment to mutiny was quickly withdrawn by the attorney general – in response,
the Tories maintained, to pressure from the government. In a debate that was
held in the lower house on 30 September, MacDonald denied that he had tried
to influence the judiciary but was unable to avoid a censure motion by the
Conservative opposition. As a result he tied the vote to a question of confi-
dence. On 9 October, however, MacDonald was forced to concede that he had
spoken to the attorney general about the case, with the result that in the ensuing
vote on the Conservative motion, the government lost by 368 votes to 128.
MacDonald responded by dissolving parliament and calling for new elections,
the third within two years.
On 25 October, four days before the election, The Times published a letter
purporting to have been written by Grigory Zinoviev on 15 September. In it the
secretary general of the Executive Committee of the Communist International
called on British Communists to bring the Labour Party to heel and prepare for
the coming revolution. A copy of the letter was also sent to the Daily Mail and,
on 10 October, to the Foreign Office, which duly informed The Times, adding
a note of protest and questioning the document’s authenticity. The letter was in
fact a forgery drawn up by Russian émigrés in Vienna. To what extent it influ-
enced the course of the election must remain an open question.
Although the Labour Party gained a few votes at the expense of the
Liberals, the number of its seats fell from 192 to 151. The Liberals, who
had voted against MacDonald’s government on 10 October, returned only
forty-two MPs, their share of the vote falling from 30 per cent to barely 18 per
cent. The Conservatives won 48 per cent of the vote and 414 seats, a gain of
161. One prominent Liberal, Winston Churchill, who had held numerous
cabinet posts since 1906, including minister for trade, war and the colonies,
was elected as a ‘Constitutionalist’ with the support of many Conservative
voters. He now moved back to the Tories, the party to which he had belonged
before joining the Liberals in 1904. In the new government he became chan-
cellor of the exchequer. Baldwin was again the prime minister, a post he
188 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

retained until the date of the next elections to the lower house, almost five years
later, on 30 May 1929.
The elections to the lower house in October 1924 not only spelt the end of
the post-war period in Britain but also marked what Baldwin, echoing President
Warren Harding, called a ‘return to normalcy’. The election victory also
heralded the start of the new two-party system: it was no longer the Liberal
Party but the Labour Party that was the Tories’ principal adversary. The Liberals
had decided to work closely with the growing labour movement in the later
nineteenth century, but they remained a party of middle-class dignitaries and
notables, incapable, therefore, of forming any lasting links with the mass of
working people. The Conservatives, conversely, managed to transform them-
selves into a right-of-centre people’s party and to appeal to a considerable
section of the workers by their populist rhetoric and social promises. Even in
October 1924 they won more working-class votes than the Labour Party,
although it was soon to become clear that the latter had by no means grown to
its full size. Following the elections of May 1929, Baldwin had to hand over his
office of prime minister to the man whom he had replaced in November 1924
– Ramsay MacDonald.

Confrontations and Compromises: France 1919–22

As in Great Britain, so in France, the sense of national unity that had been
solemnly and regularly invoked since 1914 had largely disappeared within
months of the end of the war. When measured by the number of its inhabitants,
France had suffered more war dead than any other country: over 10 per cent of
its adult male population had perished. By the end of 1918 the purchasing
power of the franc had fallen to 28 per cent of its pre-war value, and by 1919
real wages were between 15 per cent and 20 per cent lower than in 1914. An
eight-hour day was introduced in April 1919 in an attempt to placate the work-
force, but such concessions proved ineffectual in preventing strikes. In the
spring of 1919 the mineworkers went on strike, followed soon afterwards by
workers from the metal industry and by the capital’s public transport workers,
but their protests produced few practical results of any note.
Yet the fact that revolutionary slogans were heard in the course of a number
of these strikes, especially in Paris, served to instil a sense of fear in the middle
classes, who were convinced that the strikers’ actions heralded the spread of
Bolshevism. And no politician was keener to combat Communism than the
prime minister, Georges Clemenceau. Shortly before the elections to the
Chambre des Députés on 19 November 1919 the majority of the parties that
supported the government formed an electoral pact, the Bloc National, which
succeeded in winning 437 of the 616 seats in the chamber. Their success was
also due to the electoral reforms that guaranteed that the joint lists of candidates
would receive all the seats that could be allocated if they gained an absolute
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 189

majority in any one of the eight most heavily populated départements. The other
parties were left high and dry. The left-wing opposition won 180 seats, including
eighty-eight for the middle-class Radical Socialists and sixty-eight for the
Socialists of the SFIO. The centre right won 130 seats, the centre left 100. As in
the past, only men were entitled to vote for their elected representatives, women’s
suffrage having been rejected by the French Senate.
Shortly afterwards, in January 1920, elections for the post of president were
held. Having emerged victorious from the November elections, Clemenceau
hoped to succeed Poincaré but was dismayed to discover that many of the
deputies who had supported him in the past now had very different aims and
wanted a malleable head of state, with the result that they chose the politically
colourless president of the Chambre des Députés, Paul Deschanel. Clemenceau
responded by resigning as prime minister and retiring to the provinces, an
embittered man. He was succeeded by Alexandre Millerand, a former Socialist
who had switched allegiance to the political right. When Deschanel fell
seriously ill a few months later and was obliged to step down on health grounds
in November 1920, Millerand was voted his successor. By January 1921, after a
brief interregnum, Aristide Briand was appointed the new prime minister, he,
too, a former Socialist who had moved to the political right.
Millerand’s period in office was marked by further industrial action on a
grand scale. In February 1920 the railway workers demanded not only higher
wages but also the nationalization of the railways. An indefinite general strike
was called for 1 May, when the CGT – the umbrella organization of all the
socialist trade unions – persuaded workers from other public industries,
including mineworkers, metalworkers and construction workers, to join them.
Even so, by no means all workers took part, and not even all the railway workers.
Millerand accused the CGT of planning a coup. Students and grammar school
pupils made themselves available as strike-breakers. The railway companies
remained unyielding.
By the end of May the CGT had been forced to abandon its action. Many of
the railway workers who had been dismissed were not re-employed. In January
1921 the supreme court of the département of the Seine ordered the CGT to be
disbanded, and although the sentence was not carried out, the union’s political
defeat was not in doubt. The experiences of 1920 led to splits first in the SFIO
and then in the CGT. (This latter split has already been mentioned in the
context of the Second World Congress of the Third International.) It was the
Communists who profited most from the disaffection and bitterness among
the French proletariat, but others exploited the divisions within the labour
movement, principally the employers’ confederations who in 1919 had formed
an umbrella organization, the Confédération Nationale de la Production
Française (CNPF), under the aegis of the minister for trade, Étienne Clémentel.
France’s non-Communist left was much further to the political left than the
German Social Democrats. At its first post-war conference in Paris in April
190 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

1919, the SFIO endorsed the proletarian class struggle, insisting that it
demanded ‘unyielding opposition to bourgeois power’ and condemning ‘all
involvement in the exercise of this power’.44 In this way the Socialists drew a
line under the ‘Union sacrée’ of the war years and returned to the ‘Kautsky
Resolution’ agreed to by the Second International at its congress in Paris in
September 1900. According to this resolution, any socialist involvement in a
bourgeois government was a ‘dangerous experiment’ permissible only as a
temporary expedient if a country was faced by a particular dilemma.
Ever since the party had split into Socialists and Communists at its confer-
ence in Tours in December 1920, the SFIO’s leading spokesman had been the
forty-eight-year-old Léon Blum, who hailed from a family of middle-class Jews
in Paris and who had made a name for himself as a man of letters and a theatre
critic. He sought to depict the rivalry with the Communists not as irreconcil-
able but as a ‘family squabble’ that could yet be resolved. He was a firm believer
in the dictatorship of the proletariat, but, unlike the Communists, who inter-
preted this as the dictatorship of a handful of party leaders, he saw it as the
dictatorship of an entire class or party. The only form of power that the
Socialists regarded as legitimate until such time as the working class seized
power was the willingness to tolerate a left-wing middle-class cabinet first seen
in the wake of the elections of May 1924 in the form of a ‘cartel des gauches’.
The difference between the French ‘cartel des gauches’ and the German
Social Democrats was striking: if, after 1918, the latter had withdrawn to their
pre-war position and refused to enter into a coalition with the moderate bour-
geois parties, there would have been no Weimar Republic. In France the
Socialists relied on the fact that the forces of the republican bourgeoisie to the
left of centre were sufficiently powerful to be able to govern with the parlia-
mentary connivance of the SFIO, assuming that the electoral results permitted
them to do so.
After 1918, practically every aspect of French politics was affected by the
arguments that raged between the divided left and the right. Indeed, there was
not even a comprehensive national consensus on how to deal with the prov-
inces of Alsace and Lorraine following their return to France, the Communists
insisting on the region’s virtual autonomy and finding themselves completely
isolated in consequence. Some 200,000 former Germans who had settled in the
area only after the annexation of the region in 1871 and who included teachers
at the ‘Reich University’ of Strasbourg and all higher-ranking civil servants
were evicted in 1918/19, a move that gave rise to little public debate in France.
(In response to massive American pressure about half of those who were exiled
were later granted the right to return to their former homes.)
Even the enforced linguistic and cultural reassimilation of the Alsatians and
the German-speaking inhabitants of Lorraine was regarded as largely uncontro-
versial. Schools and universities were entrusted with this challenge as their
principal task in hand. For committed laicists, conversely, it was a source of
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 191

annoyance that the separation of Church and state enshrined in a law of 5

December 1905 marking the end of the French struggle between these two
institutions was not introduced into Alsace-Lorraine lest it offend the sensibili-
ties of the largely Catholic population. Catholic and Protestant clerics hence-
forth received their stipends from the secular French state. As a result,
Alsace-Lorraine was the only part of France in which Napoleon Bonaparte’s
Concordat of 1801 continued to apply.
This regional deal with the Catholic Church chimed with the policy towards
the Church adopted by all the governments in the Bloc National. In order to
offer the conservative right a positive signal, Briand began his term in office by
renewing diplomatic relations with the Vatican that had been broken off in
1904, a move ratified by the Senate in May 1921. For his part, Pope Pius XI,
who was elected head of the Catholic Church in February 1922, demonstrated
his willingness to accept the separation of Church and state, except in Alsace-
Lorraine, and in that way achieved tacit toleration of the activities of monastic
orders that had been dissolved under the law of 1901. There was also a symbolic
act at this time that helped to resolve the tension between Church and state: in
1920, Joan of Arc – the Maid of Orleans – was canonized and declared France’s
second patron saint alongside the Virgin Mary, a move that was welcomed
even among patriotic circles otherwise hostile to the Church.
Any rapprochement between Church and state was as vigorously contested
by the secular left as it was by the tradition-conscious sections of the clergy, who
were afraid that the clear dividing line between the two would become blurred.
But as far as the political middle ground was concerned, this development
allowed the formation, in 1924, of a Christian democratic party, the Parti
Démocrate Populaire (PDP), which solicited votes within the framework of the
Republic as it then existed and would undoubtedly have been even more
successful if women had had the vote at this time, a right they did not acquire in
France until 1944. One of the PDP’s leading parliamentarians was a lawyer from
Metz, Robert Schuman, who in the wake of the Second World War was to
become one of the pioneers of western European integration. Catholic workers
loyal to the Church found their trade-union home in the Confédération
Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens (CFTC) that was founded in February
1920 and which rejected the class struggle but not the negotiating lever of
strikes, appealing in the process to the manifesto of Catholic social teaching, the
encyclical Rerum Novarum, promulgated by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. In 1920 it
had only 150,000 members and as such was dwarfed by the two million members
of the still undivided CGT. In a number of regions, however, it was powerful
enough to be regarded as a serious negotiator by employers’ confederations.
It was not only in its dealings with the Catholic Church that Briand’s
government deserved the label ‘moderate’, for in the most important area of its
foreign policy – its relations with a defeated Germany – Briand, who was also
France’s foreign minister, sought a compromise starting in the summer of 1921.
192 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

His first such attempt was the Wiesbaden Agreement that was signed after
lengthy negotiations on 6 October 1921. The two signatories were Louis
Loucheur, the minister for the liberated territories, and Walther Rathenau, the
minister responsible for German post-war reconstruction. The agreement stip-
ulated that German reparations could be paid for the most part not in gold
marks but in kind, a move designed to counter any further fall in the value of
Germany’s currency. But most French industrialists were able to get round this
agreement, with the result that a measure vehemently criticized by the political
right made little practical difference.
When, only a few months later, Germany demanded a moratorium on the
payment of its reparations, Lloyd George responded positively, and when
Briand visited London in December 1921 he asked his French colleague to
agree to the German request. Briand was ready to do so, but he did not have the
backing of President Millerand, who in the absence of his prime minister
chaired all the cabinet meetings. The subject was again discussed at an inter-
Allied conference in Cannes in early July 1922, when Lloyd George suggested
resolving the problem at a world economic conference to which Germany and
the Soviet Union would also be invited. He offered to honour French compli-
ance on the matter of reparations by providing a British guarantee on the
borders of France and Belgium but not on those of the states of eastern central
and south-east Europe that were allies of France.
Briand gave his consent, whereupon the participants agreed to convene a
world economic conference in Genoa on 10 April, only for their plans to be
thwarted by Millerand and Raymond Poincaré, the president of the Senate’s
Foreign Committee, who telegraphed their disavowal of Briand’s proposal.
Briand returned to Paris, where he resigned on 12 January without even waiting
for the all too predictable outcome of the vote of no confidence in the Chambre
des Députés. Three days later he was replaced by his keenest critic, Poincaré,
who, like Briand, also held the office of foreign minister.
The new cabinet was markedly more right-wing than its predecessor.
Poincaré insisted that the British offer of a guarantee be linked to conditions
that amounted to a rejection, demanding a reciprocal allegiance that also guar-
anteed the borders of the eastern central and south-east European states and
that would additionally apply in the event of Germany’s marching into the
Rhineland’s demilitarized zone. Nor could there be any deal linking repara-
tions with the British guarantee pact.
The world economic conference opened in Genoa on 10 April and ended
on 19 May 1922. Most European states were represented, including Germany
and the Soviet Union. Also represented were Japan and the British Dominions,
but not the United States or Turkey, even though they had been invited. The
French delegation was headed by the justice minister, Louis Barthou. Acting on
Poincaré’s instructions, he demanded that Germany waste no more time but
comply with its obligations with regard to reparations. Soviet Russia was also
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 193

required to acknowledge the pre-war debts incurred by its tsarist predecessor

and to compensate the foreign shareholders of nationalized companies. In this
way France once again thwarted British willingness to make concessions to the
two ‘pariah’ states that were taking part in an international conference for the
first time since the war ended. In turn, Paris unwittingly laid the foundations
for the Russo-German Treaty of Rapallo, about which we shall have more to
say in due course. That the world economic conference produced no tangible
results was in no small measure a consequence of French intransigence.
France’s abiding hostility to Germany also influenced debate within the
country concerning a new defence act in the spring of 1922. Poincaré’s govern-
ment insisted on a standing army of 400,000 men, but reduced their period of
military service by half, from thirty-six to eighteen months. The Socialists who
were in opposition had no chance at all of implementing their own policy of a
people’s militia involving only a brief period of military service.
By the summer of 1922, just as the period of post-war depression was grad-
ually drawing to an end, further major strikes hit the country, albeit no longer
on the scale of those witnessed in 1920. The French currency remained weak:
between December 1920 and April 1922 the rate of exchange with the pound
sank from 59 francs to 48. The French economy recovered only slowly in 1922,
whereas the export-orientated German economy seemed to prosper, a state of
affairs due to the far greater devaluation of the German mark. Poincaré believed
that German inflation was politically intentional and, indeed, a trick designed
to allow the Reich to avoid its obligation to pay reparations. As a result, he
remained obdurate on the question and emphatically rejected a further German
request for a moratorium in July 1922, a request to which Lloyd George had
responded with some sympathy and understanding. Four years after the end of
the war there was nothing to suggest that Franco-German relations had in any
way thawed. Instead, a new period of confrontation seemed to be looming. The
‘policy of productive securities’ that was used to justify the Franco-Belgian
occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923 was already casting its long shadows.

A Democracy Self-destructs: Italy’s Road to Fascism

The social struggles of the post-war years assumed far more dramatic propor-
tions in Italy than they did in France or Great Britain. Here the two years 1920
and 1921 have gone down in history as the biennio rosso, a time of frequent
major strikes and the occupation of country estates and factories. In the
summer and autumn of 1919 railway workers, postal workers, the day labourers
of the Po Valley, the mezzadri (métayers, or share-croppers) of central Italy and
even ministerial officials came out on strike; in Lazio and other parts of central
Italy peasants occupied the estates of the larger landowners; and in many places
the protests against rising prices even turned into open revolt. When parlia-
mentary elections were held in November 1919, the system of proportional
194 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

representation was used for the first time in Italy, enabling the Socialists to
emerge as the largest party with 165 seats, followed by the Christian Democratic
Popolari with 100. The liberal prime minister, Francesco Nitti, was able to cling
to power until June 1920 only with the help of the Catholic People’s Party and,
in the end, only by dint of a series of emergency measures. He was then replaced
by Giovanni Giolitti, the grand old man of the Liberals, who had already held
the post in 1892–3 and then again between 1903 and 1914.
The Socialists’ principal strongholds were in the industrial north, and
nowhere were they as powerful as in the capital of Piedmont, Turin, with its
influential circle of political theorists associated with L’Ordine Nuovo and
including Antonio Gramsci, Angelo Tasca and Palmiro Togliatti. In August
1917 the city had witnessed a workers’ rebellion that had been bloodily
suppressed but which resonated in Italian minds as a myth worthy of the strug-
gling proletariat. The first Italian soviets had been established here on the
Russian model. Following a split in the Socialist party at its rally in Livorno in
January 1921, the extreme left had formed the Italian Communist Party and
now expected that Turin would be the starting point of the proletarian revolu-
tion on the Italian peninsula, turning it into an Italian Petrograd. In April 1920
the city’s metalworkers went on strike, a move which, although deliberately
provoked by their employers, was at the same time the focus of attention of the
radical left, which placed great hopes in this development, and yet the revolt
turned into a total failure thanks to the carefully planned and highly effective
countermeasures of the newly formed industrial confederation, Confindustria.
The employers and the political right could draw only one conclusion from
this failure: the left could be defeated and the Red revolution stopped in its
tracks.
Social unrest increased in September 1920, when, following the breakdown
of tariff negotiations in the northern Italian metal industry, the employers
locked out their workers, a move to which the latter replied by occupying some
of the largest factories and raising the Red flag. Their actions were not dictated
by the Socialists but were spontaneous. Giolitti decided against sending in the
police but decided simply to wait, and his assumption that this experiment in
self-government by the workers would founder on its own inefficiency proved
all too accurate. Even so, large sections of the Italian public felt that the govern-
ment’s passive stance was tantamount to capitulating to a radical minority that
had not shied away from openly breaking the law. As a result, the state’s
authority was much reduced, initiating a process of erosion that continued
when new strikes and bloody reprisals affected Turin and Tuscany in the
autumn and winter of 1920/21. Once again the government reacted as if it were
some neutral observer and did nothing.
This impression of a power vacuum benefited a group of individuals deter-
mined to make up for this decline in the authority of the state by systematically
deploying physical and psychological force against the left: this group was the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 195

Fascists, or fasci di combattimento, that Benito Mussolini had summoned into

existence in Milan on 23 March 1919 and that took their name from the fasces,
or bundles of rods, carried by the Roman lictors. Mussolini had been born in
Predappio in the province of Forlì-Cesena in 1883 and, a failure as a teacher,
had moved to Switzerland in 1902, where he eked out a living by doing odd
jobs, sleeping in shelters for the homeless or under bridges. Here he came into
contact with the Russian revolutionary Angelica Balabanoff, read Georges
Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence, Gustave Le Bon’s La Psychologie des foules and
the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and attended some of the lectures given by
the antiparliamentary and antidemocratic theorist Vilfredo Pareto in Lausanne.
On completing his military service in Italy in 1906, Mussolini moved to
Trento but the following year was deported by the Austrian authorities and
returned to Italy, where he began his career as a radical syndicalist, becoming
editor in chief of the party’s newspaper Avanti in 1912. But he broke away from
the Socialists in October 1914, switching his allegiance to the Interventionist
camp and shortly afterwards founding his own newspaper, the nationalist
Il Popolo d’Italia, which he set up with financial help from the armaments
industry and French backers. Between 1915 and early 1917 he served as a
soldier on the Isonzo front but was discharged from the army after sustaining
injuries in an explosion. With that he resumed his journalistic and political
struggle on the home front and after the war ended became one of the
most eloquent champions of Italian Irredentism, with its talk of a ‘mutilated
victory’.
In Mussolini’s case the radical shift from the political left to the extreme
right was not as astonishing as it may seem at first sight, for the later ‘Duce’ was
never a Marxist in the strict sense of that term. Rather, he was an eclectic, an
actionist and a voluntarist. Sorel’s doctrine of action directe impressed him not
least because it could be interpreted from both a left-wing and a right-wing
standpoint, Sorel himself spending his entire life vacillating between these two
extremes. All that mattered for Mussolini was where he could find the greatest
opportunity for self-expression and acclamation. After 1914 the cult of nation-
hood seemed to him to be the most appropriate way of increasing his political
influence and ultimately coming to power. And it was this that influenced his
choice of followers and allies. Since the political left was internationalist, anti-
imperialist and anti-militaristic, these supporters could only be found on the
right of the political spectrum – men such as Gabriele D’Annunzio and the
Arditi, those former elite troops who in April 1919 set fire to the building in
Milan that housed the offices of the newspaper that Mussolini had once edited,
Avanti, in order to signal the start of a national uprising.
In addition to Milan, Trieste was another city where the activities of the
Fascists made themselves felt from an early date. Here they found a national
enemy in the Slovenes, who were unwilling to trade Austrian for Italian sover-
eignty without a fight. The destruction of the Balkan Hotel, the headquarters of
196 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the Slovenes’ umbrella organization, Narodni Dom, on 14 July 1920 was an

early instance of Fascist terror. But it was not until 21 November 1920 that the
Fascists’ shock troops – the squadre – achieved their first significant break-
through in Bologna, a Socialist stronghold. This was the day on which the
newly elected Socialist town council took up office, an opportunity that
Mussolini’s followers seized to unleash bloody riots and engineer a mood close
to that of a civil war. During the weeks and months that followed, the Fascist
Blackshirts proceeded on a systematic basis to attack institutions and officials
of the political left in the whole of Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and, eventually,
many other parts of Italy, too.
Violent assaults on Socialists and Communists were soon followed by
increasingly frequent attacks on the Popolari. Among the methods regularly
used to humiliate their political opponents was forcing them to drink retsina.
In Emilia it was the local landowners who financed the Blackshirts, using them
in their attempts to intimidate and punish recalcitrant peasants whose sympa-
thies were with the political left. The squadre described their attacks as
spedizioni punitive (punitive raids) designed to inflict bloody retribution on
Communists or Socialists who they felt had provoked them or when one of
their own number had been the victim of left-wing violence. From the begin-
ning of 1921 the biennio rosso was replaced by a biennio nero, two years of
blackshirted terror.
The Fascists suffered a humiliating defeat in the elections of November
1919, managing to put forward a candidate of their own only in Milan, where
he polled a mere 4,000 votes. The political situation within the country changed
in the spring of 1921 when – at the urging of the Vatican – the Popolari with-
drew their parliamentary support for Giolitti’s government. The reason for
their action was a law that was passed in September 1920 and designed to
reduce the country’s huge budgetary deficit. Until then church possessions had
not been subject to the same fiscal rules as the rest of the country but were now
liable to taxation, a move that the Curia opposed with all the vigour it could
muster. Giolitti responded by dissolving parliament and calling for new elec-
tions in May 1921. In order to ensure that he won a majority he entered into an
electoral pact with the Nationalists and Fascists, who formed a National Bloc
with Giolitti’s Liberals. Mussolini’s movement received an emphatic boost from
its de facto merger with Giolitti’s Liberals and gained a semblance of social
respectability that it had previously not commanded.
Throughout the electoral campaign the Fascists’ widespread reign of terror
effectively prevented the Socialists and Communists from electioneering in
many parts of the country, and the actual day of the election, 15 May, was
overshadowed by countless bloody incidents triggered by the Fascists and
resulting in dozens of deaths. The election result proved a bitter disappoint-
ment for Giolitti, his National Bloc winning only 120 out of a total of 535 seats,
thirty-six of which went to the Fascists – a spectacular result for a party that
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 197

had previously not had a single representative in parliament. Among the other
winners were the Popolari, with 108 deputies, and the bourgeois Radicals, with
sixty-eight. The biggest losers were the Socialists, who won only 123 seats,
while the Communists returned fifteen members.
In the circumstances, there could be no talk of a stable coalition. Giolitti fell
back on the obvious idea of implementing all the necessary measures by means
of emergency legislation, including a reduction in the vast numbers of civil
servants, but he was unable to obtain a parliamentary majority and so he
resigned on 27 June 1921. His successor was Ivanoe Bonomi, until then the
minister of war, a former Socialist who had been excluded from his party for
supporting the war against Libya in 1911–12. In order to ensure himself of
Mussolini’s good will he accepted the Fascists’ acts of violence with the same
degree of indifference as that previously shown by Giolitti. In this he found
himself in the best possible company, for a similar attitude was struck by all his
other ministers as well as by the military and by the country’s prefects. In many
places army officers even worked together with the squadre and made weapons
and lorries available to them. When Bonomi suspended the tax law that was so
unwelcome to the Church following the stock exchange crash in August 1921,
he was able to enjoy the support of Mussolini, who shortly afterwards ensured
that the Act was permanently repealed.
Mussolini may have headed the Fascist movement in Italy, but he was not
its only leader, for considerable influence was wielded not only by the repre-
sentatives of the ‘Agrarian Fascism’ of northern and central Italy (the term was
coined by contemporaries but fails to do justice to the movement’s aims) but
also by three radical regional leaders, Roberto Farinacci in Cremona, who was
a former Socialist, the left-wing republican Dino Grandi in Bologna and Italo
Balbo in Ferrara. These and other regional leaders resisted Mussolini’s attempts
to run the party along excessively rigid lines, and they rebelled against him in
August 1921 when on the insistence of Bonomi he concluded a ‘pacification
pact’ (patto di pazificazione) with the Socialists. But the truce had no practical
effect as the regional leaders were supported in their resistance to the agree-
ment by the larger landowners and employers, and at the Fascists’ congress in
Rome in November 1921 Mussolini saw himself obliged to draw a line under
this particular chapter in his party’s early history.
In spite of this setback, the congress turned out to be a major success for Il
Duce, who, in the face of widespread opposition from several different quar-
ters, was able to turn the Fascist movement into a coherent party, the Partito
Nazionale Fascista, leading in turn to a formal explosion of Fascist brutality
involving attacks not only on left-wing institutions but also on those of the
Popolari and Liberals; Socialist deputies were ‘expelled’ from their constituen-
cies without the police coming to their assistance. By the spring of 1922
increasing numbers of towns and cities were being occupied by squadristi,
D’Annunzio’s actions in Fiume serving as a model. In April and again in May
198 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Ferrara, for example, was overrun by squadristi, who for a time cut off the city
from all contact with the outside world. The local police forces proved
completely powerless in the face of such concentrated brutality on the part of
tens of thousands of Blackshirts trained as paramilitaries.
This Fascist terror culminated at the end of July 1922, when Italo Balbo led
a large number of squadristi in a military campaign against the left-wing city of
Ravenna, where he found covert support from certain sections of the state. The
newly formed Alleanza del Lavoro (Alliance of Labour) enjoyed the support of
the proletariat, Socialists, Communists and even anarchists but in the absence
of any state help was unable to offer any effective resistance to the right-wing
violence and was quickly defeated by the Fascists. Figures cited by left-wing
sources and claiming that between October 1920 and October 1922 300 Fascists
and 3,000 anti-Fascists were killed in the unrest, including street fighting and
other excesses, may be debatable, but there is no doubt that the squadristi
adopted a far more systematic approach to their violent activities than the
left-wing Arditi del Popolo, who were created in an attempt to defend their
members from the brutality of such attacks.
While large parts of Italy descended into chaos and anarchy, governments
continued to change in Rome. In early 1922 the Socialists decided to topple
Bonomi. At their party conference in October 1921 they had categorically
refused to countenance any form of ‘collaboration’ with the bourgeois parties
and since there was no conceivable political alignment that would allow them
to gain any political influence, their actions proved to be a dangerous contribu-
tion to the country’s continuing destabilization. The election of a new pope in
February 1922 exacerbated this process when Pius XI lost no time in with-
drawing his pontifical support from Don Sturzo’s Popolari. Bonomi was
replaced on 25 February 1922 by Luigi Facta, a friend of Giolitti from the right
wing of the Democratic Party, who for a time was able to rely on the support of
the Fascists but who enjoyed no parliamentary majority.
Facta’s government fell on 19 July 1922, and King Victor Emanuel III invited
all the party leaders, including the Socialists, to take part in talks. At the request
of the majority of Socialist parliamentarians, Filippo Turati was also invited to
speak to the king, a step that was unprecedented since the Socialists had hith-
erto refused to kowtow to the court. But the Socialist Party executive responded
at once by excluding Turati and his group from the party, forcing Turati to
appeal to the party conference in Rome in October 1922. By a small majority
the conference confirmed the executive’s decision, prompting the outlawed
group to form a new party, the Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiani, under
the leadership of Turati, Emanuele Modigliani and Claudio Treves, with
Giacomo Matteotti as its secretary general. As a result, there were now three
socialist parties in Italy: the new grouping, which soon renamed itself the
Partito Socialista Unitario, the old Socialist party, which became the Partito
Socialista Massimalista, and the Partito Comunista Italiano.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 199

Exploratory talks having foundered on the Socialists’ refusal to negotiate,

Victor Emanuel III reappointed Facta the prime minister on 1 August, and
this time Facta received a broad parliamentary majority. The anti-Fascist
Alleanza del Lavoro had called a general strike for that day, resulting in a
complete breakdown of the rail network and almost all of the country’s
economic life. Mussolini reacted by issuing an ultimatum to the government: if
Facta did not end the revolt within twenty-four hours, the Fascists’ military
units would. True to their word, the squadristi again set fire to the Avanti
building in the course of bloody street fighting in Milan. Elsewhere, too, they
stormed socialist buildings in Ancona, Livorno and Genoa, occupying the rail-
ways and brutally forcing back into the factories those workers who had not
already returned to work of their own accord. Socialist workers suffered their
most severe defeat to date, while the Fascists had taken an important step on
their ruthless road to power.
On 24 October 1922 the Fascists organized a large-scale demonstration in
Naples that was attended by many high-ranking public figures. Three days
later, on the evening of 27 October, Mussolini ordered his paramilitary cohorts
to ‘march on Rome’, prompting Facta to ask the king to declare a state of emer-
gency. Victor Emanuel initially agreed, but the following morning refused to
sign the order even though the proposed measure was already public knowl-
edge. It was now left to Mussolini to take the initiative. Until then his only
thought had been to participate in a right-wing government under Salandra,
but now he demanded for himself the post of prime minister. Only when the
king had bowed to this demand in a telegram did Mussolini make the legen-
dary train journey that took him to Rome during the night of 29/30 October.
There he formed a government in which he assumed not only the role of
prime minister but also those of foreign minister and interior minister, while
the former chief of the general staff, Armando Diaz, became minister of war
and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile was appointed the new minister for
education.
The ‘march on Rome’ had been no more than a threat and as such was very
different from its classical model, when the consul Lucius Cornelius Sulla had
captured the city with the help of Roman legionaries in 88 ăG. Victor Emanuel’s
pusillanimity had saved the Fascists from actually having to confront the forces
of the state. When Mussolini arrived in Rome on the morning of 30 October
1922, his 25,000 or so troops, only partially armed, were still encamped some
thirty miles from the capital. Had the political will existed, it would have been
easy for the military and the police to defeat them, but with the king’s gracious
permission they were allowed to demonstrate outside his palace on 31 October.
They played no active role in the transfer of power. The intimidated chamber
of deputies expressed its confidence in the new prime minister by 306 votes to
116. Among those who voted for Mussolini were Giolitti, Bonomi, Orlando,
Salandra and the then forty-one-year-old Alcide de Gasperi of the Popolari,
200 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

who was later to be the country’s prime minister and leader of the Democrazia
Cristiana after the Second World War.
Mussolini and his Fascists had learnt much from Lenin and the Bolsheviks:
what mattered was not the support of a majority of the electorate but the firm
resolve to strike fear and terror in their opponents and to seize power as soon
as the right moment presented itself. If this will was there, even a resolute
minority could gain political control. The Italian Fascists found it far easier to
achieve their aims than the Russian Communists since they had allies in the
country’s civilian and military institutions as well as financial and political
backers among the industrial and agricultural elite and were able to convince
those bourgeois Liberals who set the tone and even intellectuals of the stature
of Benedetto Croce that Fascist rule was the lesser of two evils when compared
with the continuing chaos of the post-war period.
The only counterforce that could be taken seriously was the socialist
workers’ movement, but this had been fatally weakened by the split in its ranks
fomented by Lenin’s supporters and by the refusal of the non-Bolshevik left to
work together with moderate bourgeois forces. The widespread tendency on
the part of many workers to pursue their ends by anarchistic means without
regard for the law was actively encouraged by the Communists but it played
into the hands of the Fascists and gave them a perfect pretext systematically to
ignore the law of the land in turn.
The representatives of the state accepted the escalation of violence, first
from the left, then, on a far more massive scale, from the right, as if it were
some natural force about which they could do nothing. As early as January
1921 the young Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti had complained in the
chamber about the progressive abandonment of the state’s grasp of power:

The government and local authorities are assisting unmoved at the over-
throw of law and order. Private justice is in operation, substituting public
justice. [. . .] So the workers are saying that the bureaucratic state is just a
joke, and has renounced its duty of guaranteeing the same law for everyone.45

Within four years of the end of the war the Fascists had achieved their goal and
persuaded the bulk of bourgeois Italy that they alone were in a position to end
the state of lawlessness that they themselves had caused by means of excesses
far worse than those perpetrated by the extreme left.
The legend of the ‘mutilated victory’ that they promoted as enthusiastically
as the middle-class nationalists of the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana with
whom they joined forces in February 1923 provided them with an important
psychological tool with which to fashion their success, but it was by no means
the only one. Fascism would not have acquired the significance that it did after
1918 if Italian democracy had not already been seriously impaired. Among the
other factors that played a part here were illiteracy, which was still rife among
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 201

large sections of the rural population in southern Italy, the gross material
disparity between the developed industrial north and the underdeveloped
agricultural south, the Curia’s long-standing – and for the most part closely
heeded – instruction to devout Catholics not to vote in elections and the refusal
of many Socialists to agree to any compromise with bourgeois forces in keeping
with the rules of the parliamentary system. As a result, it was impossible to
build up trust in the democratic state, and there was nothing that helped the
Fascists’ cause more than the absence of this necessary basis for the legitimacy
of a system that rested on free elections.
That the Fascists would be ruthless in exploiting the power that was handed
to them in October 1922 was one of the few certainties of this period in Italian
history. It could be assumed that a new type of dictatorship would be estab-
lished if there was even a grain of truth in all that Mussolini and his regional
leaders had declared in previous years. All that remained unclear was how long
the Fascists would need to enforce their claim to total control. There was,
however, another question that only the future could answer: were the events
that unfolded in Italy in the autumn of 1922 a purely national phenomenon or
might they turn out to set an example that would be followed in countries that
were equally torn by social, political and philosophical conflicts similar to
those on the Italian peninsula?
Even at this early date, there was at least one perceptive observer who
already suspected what the answer to this question would be. On 29 October
1922 the German journalist Count Harry Kessler wrote in his diary:

The Fascists have mounted a coup d’état in Italy and seized power. If they are
able to hold on to it, this will be a historic event that may have incalculable
consequences not only for Italy but for the whole of Europe as well. Will it
prove to be the first move in the victorious advance of the counterrevolu-
tion? Until now the counterrevolutionary governments in France, for
example, have at least pretended to be democratic and peace-loving. But
here an antidemocratic, imperialistic form of government has quite openly
returned to power. In a certain sense Mussolini’s coup can be compared
with Lenin’s in October 1917, albeit as its antithesis. Perhaps it will usher in
a period of renewed turmoil and war in Europe.46

A Republic Put to the Test: Germany 1919–22

Germany had already put behind it the revolutionary battles of early 1919 and
the violent internal political arguments over whether or not to accept the
Treaty of Versailles when, in the course of the summer of 1919, public interest
began to shift towards fundamental questions concerning the constitution on
which the National Assembly had been working since the February of that
year. By June many decisions had already been taken. The state of Prussia was
202 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

preserved but in a way that prevented it from asserting itself at the expense of
the other states: whereas it contained three-fifths of the Reich’s population, it
could take up only two-fifths of the seats in the federal constitutional body,
the Reichsrat. Half of these seats were filled by government representatives, the
other half by delegates from the provincial administrations. The Reichsrat
had far less influence on legislation than its predecessor, the Bundesrat of
the old Kaiserreich. And the southern German states no longer enjoyed the
discretionary powers that they had had between 1871 and 1918. Constituted
as a republic, the new Reich was ultimately more unitarian than the federalist
states would have wanted and more federalist than the unitarians would
have wished.
For a long time there were arguments over the relative importance of parlia-
ment and the head of state. The bourgeois parties wanted a more powerful
president as a counterweight to the Reichstag, while the Social Democrats,
who had initially been opposed to this idea, became reconciled to it after the
conflicts of the early months of 1919, when the country had effectively been
torn apart by what amounted to a civil war. They voted for the direct election
of the president by the people, for a seven-year term in office, for the possibility
of his unlimited re-election and finally also for the definitive form of Emergency
Decree 48, according to which the president could, in the event of a substantial
disruption or threat to public order, take measures that the Reichstag did not
have to sanction but which it could repeal. For his part, the president could
insist that an act passed by the Reichstag should be the subject of a plebiscite.
A plebiscite could also be ordered if a tenth of the country’s population
demanded as much in a referendum. As a result the principle of a parliamen-
tary and representative democracy was limited not only by the president as a
replacement legislator but also by the possibility that the public at large could
also enact legislation.
The chancellor was not elected by the Reichstag but if he was appointed by
the president he needed the trust of the Reichstag and would have to step down
if the Reichstag no longer had any confidence in him. All of this meant that the
president had considerable leeway when choosing his head of government.
When we also recall that the president was commander in chief of the country’s
entire armed forces and had the right to dissolve parliament, it will be clear
why contemporaries spoke of a ‘substitute Kaiser’ or ‘Kaiser substitute’. The
Reichstag could assume that the head of state would step into the breach if the
parties in government were unable or unwilling to agree on a compromise. In
this way parliamentary opportunism and presidential ‘Bonapartism’ could
easily lead to a silent change to the constitution, as power shifted from the body
elected to represent the people to the head of state, who owed his legitimacy to
a plebiscite and who might even head a dictatorship which in a time of crisis
might seem to guarantee stability in the eyes of those who championed this
particular construction of the situation.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 203

There was an impassioned debate over the colours that would represent the
Reich. The political right had the support of the majority of members of the
German Democratic Party and a minority of the Catholic Centre Party in its
desire to retain the black, white and red of the flag associated with Bismarck
and his empire, while the Social Democrats and sections of the bourgeois
middle ground were keen to return to the colours of the revolution of 1848–9:
black, red and gold. The result was a compromise fraught with conflict: the
colours of the Reich were black, red and gold, but a special merchant flag was
introduced ostensibly because it was more clearly visible at sea. This was black,
white and red with a black, red and gold canton in its upper inner corner. No
less controversial was the restructuring of the school system. The Social
Democrats insisted on interdenominational schools as the norm, but these
could be replaced by faith schools or by non-denominational schools at the
request of those who were entitled to be educated in them.
The section of the constitution that dealt with basic rights was an expanded
and more up-to-date version of the corresponding provisions of the 1849 consti-
tution. With the necessary two-thirds majority, the Reichstag could depart from
the wording of the constitution without the constitution itself being affected. The
National Assembly placed no obstacles in the way of changes to the constitution
except for that of a qualified majority: two-thirds of its members had to be
present, and two-thirds of those present had to agree. As a result, the constitution
contained no guarantee that it would not be abolished, assuming that the neces-
sary majority could be found. Constitutional restrictions on the majority will of
the assembly would have struck the progenitors of the 1919 constitution as a
relapse into the bad old days of the authoritarian state.
In the final vote on 31 July 1919 a broad majority spoke out in favour of the
new constitution: of the 420 members, 338 took part in the vote, 262 voting yes,
seventy-five no, with one abstention. The yes votes were those of the ‘Weimar
parties’, the Social Democrats, the Centre and the German Democratic Party,
while the no votes came from the Independent Social Democrats, the German
Nationalists and the German People’s Party. The country’s president, Friedrich
Ebert, who had remained in office for the duration, signed off the constitution
on 11 August, and it came into force three days later. Not until 21 August 1919,
however, did president, National Assembly and cabinet bid farewell to Weimar.
From then on Germany was ruled from Berlin.
Germany was now ‘the most democratic democracy in the world’. Nowhere
had democracy been as comprehensively and rigorously introduced as in this
constitution. When the Social Democrat minister of the interior, Eduard
David, hailed the adoption of the Weimar constitution with these words on
31 July 1919, he was thinking above all of those provisions for direct democ-
racy contained in the Republic’s basic laws. The public at large reacted by
noting the existence of the new constitution rather than by welcoming it with
open arms, and it became a symbol of the Republic only in the wake of the
204 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

campaigns of hatred and violence waged by the extreme right. The gain in
political freedom that the Weimar constitution brought the Germans was great,
but the constitution contained no guarantee that that freedom would not be
taken away again when things became difficult. The ‘most democratic democ-
racy in the world’ was threatened not only by the forces that rejected and
opposed it but also and above all by the fact that it was drafted in such a way
that it could effectively abolish itself.
The Weimar constitution was just seven months old when on 12 March
1920 the German defence minister Gustav Noske informed the cabinet of the
chancellor, Gustav Bauer, that moves were afoot to topple the government.
The driving forces behind the planned putsch were said to be Wolfgang Kapp,
the director general of the Agricultural Credit Institute of East Prussia, and
Captain Waldemar Pabst. These were the two men who had jointly been
responsible for the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January
1919. The coup, which has gone down in history as the Kapp–Lüttwitz Putsch
or the ‘Kapp Putsch’, had the backing of considerable sections of the armed
forces. Ever since the Treaty of Versailles had come into force on 10 January
1920, prominent members of the military under Walther von Lüttwitz, supreme
commander of Group Command 1 in Berlin, had been spoiling for a fight with
the government. For many officers, the very idea of caving in to Allied demands
and hauling German war criminals before German courts of law seemed
impossible to reconcile with the idea of national honour. There was also the
still unresolved matter of reducing the strength of the army to 100,000 men, a
move that would have affected the Freikorps regiments above all, especially the
regiments from the Baltic who after the end of the war had fought the Bolsheviks
in Latvia and Estonia with Allied approval. Noske named one of the regiments
in particular: the Ehrhardt Marine Brigade.
The civilian wing of the conspiracy was made up of German Nationalist
politicians from the extreme right, landowners from the area to the east of the
Elbe and officials from the former Prussian provinces who had once supported
the monarchy. Its centre of operations was the National Association formed
in Berlin in October 1919 under the patronage of Erich Ludendorff, and its
short-term aim was the establishment of an authoritarian regime which,
initially not monarchical, would pursue an actively revisionist policy on the
international stage.
Noske’s attempts to counter the planned coup proved ineffectual, and on
the morning of 13 March the Ehrhardt Brigade marched on Berlin. By around
seven Kapp had already taken the Imperial Chancellery. Since most of the
generals, including the head of the Troop Office, Hans von Seeckt, believed
that military countermeasures were pointless, the president, Friedrich Ebert,
his chancellor, Gustav Bauer, and the majority of his ministers had already left
for Dresden, where Noske assumed that the local commanding officer would
still be loyal to the government. Meanwhile, back in Berlin, the government’s
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 205

Social Democratic press officer had called a general strike and invited the
proletariat to unite, an appeal said to have been signed by Ebert and the Social
Democrat members of his government, all of whom, however, quickly distanced
themselves from the move.
A general strike was a risk because it could easily get out of control and turn
into open civil war. It was a foregone conclusion, after all, that neither the
Communists nor the syndicalists would be satisfied with restoring Bauer’s
government. On the other hand there were good reasons for banking on a
successful general strike in the spring of 1920: in the wake of the economic
boom that had resulted from inflation, there was practically full employment
in Germany, so that workers who went on strike had no need to fear that the
unemployed would be drafted in to replace them. A general strike aimed at
resisting a military putsch and restoring the constitutional power of the state
had an undeniable democratic legitimacy. And there was much to be said for
the view that it needed a powerful signal on the part of the workers and other
employees to persuade officials to unite against the putsch and force its leaders
to capitulate.
The task of organizing the strike was assumed by the Free Trade Unions, in
which the Majority Social Democrats were still working together with the
Independent Social Democrats. The Communist Party joined the strike only
after its members had ignored their leaders’ original instructions and taken
part in demonstrations against the putsch, support for which was largely
limited to conservative forces to the east of the Elbe. Since most of the ministe-
rial officials boycotted the coup, it was clear by 14 March that it would fail. In
the circumstances it was all the more surprising that Gustav Stresemann, the
chairman of the right-wing liberal German People’s Party, should blame Bauer’s
government for causing the putsch and that he should then offer to mediate
between the enemy camps. Republicans must have been even more puzzled
when the vice-chancellor, Eugen Schiffer, of the German Democratic Party,
which had again become involved in government in October 1919, together
with several Prussian ministers, including a number of Social Democrats, met
‘Chancellor Kapp’ and ‘Commander in Chief Lüttwitz’ halfway and, in the
event of their withdrawal, promised to form a grand coalition government, to
hold new elections to the Reichstag as soon as possible and to move swiftly
to the direct election of a new president.
Bauer’s government, which had in the meantime decamped to Stuttgart,
refused to compromise with the rebels and in doing so did the best that it could.
Under pressure from the military, both Kapp and Lüttwitz stepped down on
17 March. The Ehrhardt Marine Brigade withdrew from the government quarter
to the strains of the German national anthem, while chanting its usual slogan
(‘With the swastika on our helmets and a black, white and red armband, we are
called the Ehrhardt Brigade’), but it then proceeded to cause a bloodbath among
civilian protesters, leaving twelve people dead and a further thirty injured.
206 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The end of the putsch did not mean the end of the general strike, however.
On 18 March the umbrella organizations of the Social Democratic unions
decided to prolong the strike until a series of demands was met: these included
the dismissal of Noske, who had stood idly by while the armed forces fomented
sedition against the Republic, the disbandment and disarming of unreliable
military units and a republican restructuring of the armed forces. The Free
Trade Unions also demanded that all who had been involved in the putsch
should be punished, that disloyal units within the security services be
disbanded, that the country’s administration be fundamentally democratized,
that the mining and energy industries be nationalized and that a number of
Prussian ministers be dismissed on the grounds that they had been too indul-
gent towards the perpetrators of the putsch. Among these ministers was
Wolfgang Heine, the Social Democrat minister of the interior. Only when there
was evidence that the most important of these demands would be met did the
three umbrella organizations declare the general strike at an end on 20 March.
(In the case of the nationalization of the mining and energy industries, this
meant that the commission set up in November 1918 was obliged to recon-
vene.) The USPD did not follow suit until three days later, by which time the
chancellor had made a number of additional concessions.
The government reshuffle was completed on 27 March 1920. Bauer was
replaced as chancellor by Hermann Müller, who, well known for his command
of multiple foreign languages, had until then been his country’s foreign
minister. Together with Otto Wels, he was one of the two chairmen of the
German Social Democrats. The new defence minister was Otto Geßler, who
had previously been responsible for post-war reconstruction and who was on
the right wing of the German Democratic Party. Hans von Seeckt, who on 13
March had refused to allow his soldiers to fire on their own comrades, took
over the running of the army.
The repercussions of the Kapp–Lüttwitz Putsch proved even more far-
reaching in Prussia than in the Reich. Here the politically undistinguished
prime minister, Paul Hirsch, was replaced by the far quicker-witted Social
Democrat Otto Braun, the country’s former minister of agriculture, who hailed
from Königsberg and who had trained to become a printer. As his new interior
minister Braun appointed the Social Democrat parliamentarian Carl Severing,
a trained metalworker from Westphalia who had proved his usefulness as the
Reich and Prussian commissar in the troubled Ruhr Valley. In his new post
Severing undertook a major reshuffle among the chairmen of the regional
councils, the regional councillors and the police chiefs. Officials who had
collaborated with the leaders of the putsch were replaced by men who the new
minister of the interior trusted would defend the Republic more resolutely
than their predecessors had done. With this, there began a new chapter in
Prussian history, allowing the former Hohenzollern state to develop within
only a few years into a bulwark of the German Republic.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 207

Developments in Bavaria, conversely, took a very different turn. Munich

witnessed its own particular kind of coup on 14 March 1920, when Arnold von
Möhl, the commanding officer of Group IV of the German armed forces, deliv-
ered an ultimatum to the Social Democrat prime minister, Johannes Hoffmann,
demanding that in the interests of law and order he should transfer all his exec-
utive powers to Möhl, a demand for which he, Möhl, had the backing of royalist
politicians and of the paramilitary civil guard. In spite of Hoffmann’s opposi-
tion, the Bavarian cabinet – a minority government made up of Social
Democrats, the Bavarian Farmers’ League and independents – complied with
Möhl’s request, and on 16 March the regional assembly elected a new prime
minister in the person of Gustav von Kahr, the president of Upper Bavaria and
a committed supporter of the house of Wittelsbach. Among members of his
government were parliamentarians from the Bavarian People’s Party, the
German Democratic Party and the Bavarian Farmers’ League. The Social
Democrats became the party of opposition, a situation that was to remain
unchanged until the end of the Weimar Republic. By the spring of 1920 Bavaria
had become a hotbed of right-wing politics and hence the very opposite of
republican Prussia, which remained in the hands of the Social Democrats.
Bavaria thus became a stronghold for all those forces that sought to bring about
a shift to the right in the country as a whole and to replace parliamentary
democracy by a more authoritarian regime.
The government reshuffles in Prussia and Bavaria as well as the Reich in
general by no means drew a line under the Kapp–Lüttwitz Putsch, and it
required the suppression of the Ruhr uprising to put a bloody end to it all.
In the industrial region of Rhineland-Westphalia a Red Ruhr Army had
been formed in the wake of the coup. This was the armed wing of a mass move-
ment that commanded proletarian support among Communists and non-
Communists alike, assuming control of all the larger towns and cities. Its
leaders had no intention of abandoning their positions once law and order
had been restored in Berlin. In the ‘Wild West’ of the mining region, where
left-wing Communists and syndicalists had the final say, local executive coun-
cils were far more radical than in the eastern and southern areas of the Ruhr
Valley, where the metal industry was paramount and the Independent Social
Democrats set the tone.
The governments in both the Reich and in Prussia exploited this situation
to drive a wedge between the different fronts. On 24 March Severing negoti-
ated the ‘Bielefeld Agreement’ with the more moderate executive councils, but
this failed to satisfy the more radical elements. A number of towns and cities in
the western part of the area, especially Duisburg, were for a time reduced to a
state of chaos and anarchy, bringing a military solution to the conflict ever
closer. The army also sent in units that had only recently supported the putsch.
The total number of fatalities caused by this civil war within the country’s
industrial region has never been precisely established, but more than one
208 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

thousand miners lost their lives, while the army recorded 208 deaths and 123
missing in action. A total of forty-one police offers were also killed.
The uprising in the Ruhr industrial region marked the end of the prole-
tarian movement in Germany that had begun with the wild-cat strikes of 1917.
There is much to be said for the argument that the uprising of the spring of
1920 was the third stage of the German revolution that had entered a latent
phase in May 1919 following the suppression of the second Munich Räterepublik.
The radical workers’ protests were directed in part at a political and social
system that they blamed for the war and at the people who wanted to restore
this system after 1918, and in part at outdated workers’ organizations that the
radical left reproached for having in the meantime become a part of the capi-
talist system.
The wish to see a radical shift in social conditions survived the end of the
revolutionary period, and yet the experiences of these weeks and months in the
spring of 1920 had a sobering effect. The general strike had been successful to
the extent that it had brought a rapid end to the putschists’ aspirations, but it
had also developed a momentum of its own, in the face of which the trade
unions and Social Democrats were powerless. Riding roughshod over the will
of the moderates, the radical left turned the political strike into an armed
struggle from which the military, rather than the workers, emerged victorious.
The uprising in the Ruhr Valley was followed by several attempted putsches on
the part of German Communists, including one fomented by the Comintern in
central Germany in March 1921, but like all the others it was quickly put down
by the Prussian police and led to no mass uprising by the proletariat. There
were no more general strikes in the Weimar Republic after 1920.
The rebels in the Ruhr Valley were punished far more severely than the
participants in the previous putsch, most of whom, including Kapp and
Lüttwitz, were allowed to settle abroad. Although he had a price on his head,
Ehrhardt enjoyed the support of the authorities in Bavaria and was able, there-
fore, to prepare the next stage in the counterrevolution. Meanwhile, few of the
promises made to the trade unions by central government were kept, and the
work of the newly established commission on nationalization remained as
ineffectual as it had been in 1919. Unreliable police forces were disbanded only
where the Social Democrats had the necessary means to do so. Politically
speaking, the army kept its distance in order to avoid the suspicion that it was
supporting activities hostile to the Republic, but at the same time Freikorps
officers who had played an active role in the putsch and who had been amnes-
tied in August 1920 were accepted into both the army and the navy. An
outspoken anti-republican attitude was no impediment to a career in the mili-
tary, a ‘state within a state’, as it became under Seeckt.
The first elections to the Reichstag to be held after the war took place on 6
June 1920 and turned into a debacle for the forces of the Republic. The parties
that made up the Weimar coalition had had a two-thirds majority in the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 209

National Assembly, but they lost that majority in the election. The Majority
Social Democrats’ share of the vote dropped from 37.9 per cent to 21.6 per
cent, while the Independents’ share rose from 7.6 per cent to 18.6 per cent. The
German Communist Party, which was contesting an election for the first time,
won 1.7 per cent. The German Democratic Party’s share dropped from 18.5 per
cent to 8.4 per cent, whereas that of the German People’s Party rose from 4.4
per cent to 13.9 per cent. The German Nationalists also improved their standing
from 10.3 per cent to 14.4 per cent. The Centre Party, finally, suffered only
modest losses, dropping from 15.1 per cent to 13.6 per cent outside Bavaria.
At its simplest, the elections brought a shift to the right among the bour-
geoisie and a move to the left among the workers. Electors rewarded those
parties that bore no responsibility for the compromises involved in forming the
Republic, while punishing the moderates for what they had done or not done
since the beginning of 1919. On the left the previous governments of the
Republic were punished for allegedly allowing the forces of reaction to gain in
strength, while the right blamed all the Weimar parties for everything they felt
impugned national honour and jeopardized the interests of property-owners.
Versailles and a tax reform implemented by the former finance minister
Matthias Erzberger and involving a graduated income tax and a one-off prop-
erty levy designed to help the country’s ailing finances, the Kapp-Lüttwitz
Putsch and the subsequent fighting – all of these factors affected the decision of
the electorate, a decision that ultimately amounted to a vote of no confidence
in Weimar.
But there was no sight of a majority that was capable of forming a govern-
ment. Inconceivable from a political point of view, at least for the present, were
a ‘bourgeois bloc’ that would include the German Nationalists and a grand
coalition encompassing the MSPD at one end of the political spectrum and the
German People’s Party at the other. Only two types of minority government
remained as viable alternatives: either a Weimar coalition tolerated by the
German People’s Party and by the USPD or a bourgeois minority cabinet
supported in parliament by the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats
preferred the second alternative as it seemed to offer them a better chance to
demonstrate their Social Democratic credentials. President Ebert named the
Baden Centrist politician Konstantin Fehrenbach his country’s new chancellor
on 25 June. Until then the president of the National Assembly, Fehrenbach
formed a cabinet made up of members of the Centre Party, the German
Democratic Party and the German People’s Party, together with two inde-
pendent ministers. This was the first time since October 1918 that Germany
had had a government without any Social Democrats. But the country could
not be governed without the Social Democrats, a point of which the latter were
well aware and on which the bourgeois minority cabinet relied.
Fehrenbach’s government survived for barely a year, two crises conspiring
to topple it in the early months of 1921. The first – the conflict surrounding the
210 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

future of Upper Silesia – has already engaged our attention in the context of the
events in Poland after 1918, while the second concerned the question of the
country’s wartime reparations, which proved such a burden on the economy
that any ‘normal’ way of dealing with the problem in the form of higher taxes
was unthinkable. As a result, inflation grew worse. The peace treaty had not
fixed the level of reparations, and this vagueness was to have disastrous conse-
quences, for it robbed potential private investors of any possibility of realisti-
cally assessing the country’s creditworthiness. In turn this meant that Germany
was unable to accept any further long-term foreign loans.
On 5 May 1921, acting on behalf of the Allies, Lloyd George handed the
German ambassador in London an ultimatum, demanding the phased repay-
ment of 132,000 million gold marks, together with 6,000 million for Belgium,
which Germany had overrun in 1914. These sums did not include any interest
that would accrue to them in future. An instalment of 1,000 million gold marks
was to be paid within twenty-five days, namely, by 30 May. The Allies also
demanded the payment of the balance of 12,000 million gold marks out of the
total of 20,000 million due on 1 May 1921 under the terms of the Treaty of
Versailles. The country must also disarm in keeping with the Allies’ earlier
demands. And German war criminals were to be tried and sentenced. If these
conditions were not met, the Allies threatened to start occupying the whole of
the Ruhr beginning on 12 May. (Düsseldorf, Duisburg and Ruhrort had already
been occupied on 8 March 1921 to punish Germany for its failure to comply
with the terms of the earlier ultimatum.)
Fehrenbach’s government had announced its resignation on the day before
the London ultimatum was handed over since it had been unable to persuade
the United States to intervene in the matter of reparations. (The United States
and Germany signed a separate peace treaty only several months later, on 25
August 1921.) As a result the crisis over reparations coincided with a crisis in
government, and the two could only be solved together. The German National
People’s Party, the Germany People’s Party and the German Communist Party
demanded that the ultimatum be rejected, whereas the Social Democrats, the
Centre Party and the Independent Social Democrats were in favour of accepting
it in view of the threatened sanctions. The German Democratic Party was
divided on the issue.
If the advocates of a hard-line approach had prevailed, the result would
have been Germany’s economic collapse. The right-wing parties were fully
aware of this fact, but, as had been the case with the vote on the Treaty of
Versailles in June 1919, they could assume that even without them there would
still be a majority in favour of the lesser of the two evils. And their calculations
proved to be correct: the Social Democrats, the Centre Party and the German
Democratic Party assumed responsibility for accepting the ultimatum and
together formed a government, the first minority cabinet of the Weimar coali-
tion. With effect from 10 May it was headed by the Baden Centrist politician
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 211

Joseph Wirth. A former mathematics teacher, he had succeeded Erzberger as

finance minister in March 1920. He was a brilliant orator and an ardent nation-
alist but also an impassioned republican. In terms of the country’s internal
politics he occupied a position on the left of the Centre Party. Wirth’s appoint-
ment marked the start of what was to become known as the Weimar Republic’s
‘policy of fulfilment’.
The ‘policy of fulfilment’ meant taking the payment of reparations to such
absurd lengths that Germany’s economy was stretched to breaking point, and
the catastrophic consequences were all too predictable. But this predictability
at least persuaded the victorious powers to revise the London repayment
schedule. Not only did Wirth see the logic of this, so, too, did the majority of
members of the Reichstag, which on 10 May 1921 voted for acceptance of the
London ultimatum by a majority of 220 votes to 172. The Majority Social
Democrats, the Independent Social Democrats and the Centre Party all voted
for acceptance, as did a sizeable minority of the German Democratic Party and
smaller minorities of the German People’s Party and the Bavarian People’s
Party. Wirth’s government had survived its first major test.
Of the political demands of the London ultimatum – political in the
narrower sense of the term – one was not really met at all, and this affected the
sentencing of German war criminals. Between May and July 1921 twelve
defendants had been tried in nine separate trials in Leipzig, but only in half of
these cases was a verdict reached. The greatest stir was caused by the sentences
handed down to two naval lieutenants, who had taken part in the sinking of the
life boats sent out by a torpedoed steamer. Both men were sentenced to four
years’ imprisonment, a sentence that provoked vehement indignation on the
part of the navy. In January 1922 these sentences came to an abrupt end when
members of the right-wing Consul Organization led by Hermann Ehrhardt
forcibly freed the two officers from their cells. The Allies protested at the small
number of convictions and at the lenient sentences handed down but failed to
act on their objections. With the exception of these six convictions in 1921,
Germany’s war crimes went unpunished.
At least in principle the Allied demand that Germany should disarm was
met in the early summer of 1921 and affected the Bavarian civil guard above
all. The previous year the government in Munich had vigorously resisted its
disbandment, but by early June 1921 the Allied pressure on the prime minister
had reached the point where he could no longer resist the calls to order his
country’s disarmament. Three weeks later, on 24 June, the national govern-
ment declared not only the Bavarian civil guard but also the related organiza-
tions in East Prussia and the paramilitary organization run by Georg Escherich
in Bavaria to be permanently disbanded.
But this move was far from putting an end to paramilitary activities, for
Bavaria remained the home of countless ‘patriotic associations’ much more
radical than the disbanded civil guard. In the Germany of the Weimar Republic
212 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the state’s monopoly on violence continued to be a far more effective force than
was the case in Italy between 1918 and 1922. Even so, paramilitary associations
and partisan armies still had their heyday ahead of them. Indeed, the enforced
demilitarization of the country was to a certain extent more than compensated
for by the paramilitarization of German society. Works of literature glorifying
the war also played a part in keeping alive the spirit that was intended to build
a new body for itself in the form of a militarily powerful Germany capable of
wreaking vengeance on its enemies for the events of 1918.
The hard core of the demands enshrined in the London ultimatum could
not be watered down, and in 1921 Germany had to pay 3,300 million gold
marks in reparations, 1,000 million by 30 May. In the event the country could
pay only 150 million marks in cash and had to finance the rest by means of bills
of exchange that could be redeemed only with extreme difficulty when they fell
due three months later. The inflationary impact of this operation was clear for
all to see and on 19 May 1921 it prompted the Social Democrat minister of
trade and industry Robert Schmidt to demand that the country’s finances be
placed on a new footing by expropriating 20 per cent of the capital assets of
agriculture, industry, trade, banking and home ownership.
With his demand that material assets be seized Schmidt proclaimed the end
of the tacit ‘inflation consensus’ that had characterized Germany’s economic,
financial and social policies since 1919. High wages were one way in which
governments and employers had tried to counter social radicalization. The
Social Democrats and the trade unions had helped to support this line, but by
the early months of 1921 they were starting to see that devaluation was causing
a progressive shift in the balance of social power and that it was the workers
who were paying the price for this. At the same time they recognized that the
country’s finances could be turned around only with massive government
intervention. Employers and the bourgeois parties, including the SPD’s coali-
tion partners, refused to accept this insight. Walther Rathenau, the minister for
post-war reconstruction and a member of the German Democratic Party and
former president of the supervisory board of AEG, was the first to criticize
Schmidt. He was soon followed by the chancellor, Joseph Wirth, who also ran
the country’s finance ministry. In this way the demarche by the Social
Democratic minister of trade and industry was comprehensively thwarted.
From the standpoint of the political right, the ‘policy of fulfilment’ was
reprehensible not least because ‘Marxists’ in the guise of the Majority and
Independent Social Democrats lay behind the acceptance of the London ulti-
matum. But even the political centre ground came into the right’s line of fire as
a result of its decision to work with the moderate left. Violent verbal attacks
were soon followed by murderous actions, and on 9 June 1921 the chairman of
the Independent Social Democrats in the Bavarian regional parliament, Karl
Gareis, was shot dead by an unknown gunman in Munich. Ten weeks later, on
26 August, two members of the Consul Organization and of the Munich-based
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 213

Germanic Order shot dead the former finance minister Matthias Erzberger
near Griesbach in the Black Forest. Erzberger, it will be recalled, was one of the
signatories of the armistice on 11 November 1918. The gunmen escaped to
Hungary via Munich. The assassination had been ordered by the leader of the
Germanic Order, Lieutenant Commander Manfred Killinger, who was
acquitted of the charge of being an accessory to the murder when the case was
heard before a jury at Offenburg in June 1922.
Most of the country’s nationalist newspapers expressly defended Erzberger’s
murder, the German Nationalist Kreuz-Zeitung, for example, comparing the
culprits to Brutus, William Tell and Charlotte Corday (who killed the Jacobin
leader Jean-Paul Marat in 1793). The political left responded to this glorifica-
tion of violence on the part of the political right by holding mass demonstra-
tions that were also attended by the German Communist Party. By 29 August a
meeting of the national government chaired by President Ebert felt obliged to
pass emergency legislation according to Article 48 of the country’s constitu-
tion, authorizing the minister of the interior to ban publications, assemblies
and organizations deemed hostile to the Republic.
The subsequent ban on several radical right-wing newspapers, including
the Völkischer Beobachter, the official paper of the National Socialist German
Workers’ Party that had been founded in Munich in 1919, triggered a bitter
row with Bavaria, where the regional government refused to implement the
order. A second emergency decree followed on 28 September in the wake of
negotiations with the Bavarian government under the premiership of the
moderate Count Hugo von und zu Lerchenfeld, who belonged to the Bavarian
People’s Party and who had been elected to the post only a week previously.
The new decree no longer protected only ‘representatives of the republican and
democratic state’ but ‘all persons in public life’. The regional authorities were
responsible for carrying out all injunctions and undertaking all seizures
designed to protect the Republic. For its part, the Free State of Bavaria agreed
to lift the state of emergency that had been in force since November 1919 and
to do so by 6 October 1921 at the latest.
At the end of October Wirth’s cabinet became involved in a major crisis that
could and should have been avoided. Its origins lay in the decision by the Allies’
Supreme Council to partition Upper Silesia. Determined to show the world
that they would not tolerate any disregard for the Germans’ right of self-
determination, the German Democrats and, with less conviction, the Centre
Party demanded the immediate resignation of the national government. The
Social Democrats regarded such a step as both dangerous and pointless but
were unable to persuade the others to back down, and on 22 October Wirth
informed the country’s president of his cabinet’s resignation.
The various parties then began talks with the aim of forming a grand coali-
tion, a solution to the crisis that the Social Democrats were on this occasion
willing to accept. The German People’s Party, conversely, was not prepared to
214 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

do so and as the reason for its refusal cited its doubts as to whether the SPD
would really be willing to join a ‘national united front’ on the question of Upper
Silesia. When the German Democrats, too, decided to play no part in the new
government, the only remaining option was a rump coalition made up of the
SPD and the Centre Party. The German Democrats now accepted that one of
their members, Otto Geßler, would continue to be responsible for the armed
forces, thereby exposing their previous antics as little short of farcical. Wirth
returned to the post of chancellor on 26 October 1921. For a time he was also
responsible for the Foreign Office but on 31 January 1922 he handed over this
post to the former minister for post-war reconstruction, Walther Rathenau. As
a result, the German Democratic Party was once again a party of government
after a three-month interruption.
Two weeks before Rathenau took up his new appointment, Germany had
received an invitation from the Allies’ Supreme Council to attend the interna-
tional conference in Genoa to which reference has already been made. This
was the first time that both the victors and the defeated – including Germany
and Soviet Russia – were to have a chance to discuss the problems of post-war
economic reconstruction. An agreement between Berlin and Moscow, the two
‘have nots’ in international politics, was close. True, the government of Prince
Max of Baden had broken off diplomatic relations with Russia on 5 November
1918 in protest at Russian payments to German revolutionaries, with the result
that neither country had any diplomatic representation in the other, but both
had exchanged trade missions since May 1921. These had been established
shortly after the uprising in central Germany, a sign of the fact that in the eyes
of Soviet Russia an attempted coup by the Comintern was by no means the
same as Moscow’s official policy: while the ‘Internationalists’ were preparing a
world revolution, the representatives of Realpolitik were attempting to consoli-
date their country’s position in capitalist states such as Germany.
This was particularly true of the military situation, for in September 1921
the German armed forces began to work together with the Red Army in a
highly secretive and increasingly systematic way, a policy dictated on the one
hand by Soviet Russia’s interest in profiting from superior German technology
and on the other by Germany’s wish to use Russian help in ridding itself of the
fetters of the Treaty of Versailles, especially in the areas of the air force and
poison gas production. And then there was the matter of their joint opposition
to Poland, neither Russia nor Germany having taken kindly to its territorial
losses to the new Polish state. As early as February 1920, on the eve of the
Russo-Polish War, the chief of the army command, General von Seeckt, had
expressed the view that only in a strong alliance with a Greater Russia did
Germany have any hope of recovering those of its territories that it had lost
to Poland and regaining its status as a ‘world power’. As finance minister, Wirth
had actively encouraged the secret military cooperation between the German
armed forces and the Red Army. He shared Seeckt’s opinion and in 1922
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 215

repeatedly demanded that Poland be destroyed and that Germany and Russia
be neighbours once again.
The true architect of Germany’s policy towards Russia was the head of the
Eastern Section of the Foreign Office, Ago von Maltzan, whose diplomatic
background had been shaped by Wilhelmine Germany. In early 1922 he and
Karl Radek, the Soviet leadership’s expert on all things German, worked
together on the draft of an agreement that respected the Russian wish for closer
economic cooperation with Germany but without being monitored by an
international syndicate of a kind proposed by the Allies for Soviet Russia’s
post-war reconstruction. Rathenau initially declined to follow this line, for,
unlike Wirth, Seeckt and Maltzan, he was emphatically western-orientated,
something he shared with Ebert and the Social Democrats. Keen to prevent
Germany and Russia from going it alone, he supported the idea of an interna-
tional economic consortium, with the result that negotiations between the two
countries ground to a standstill and were not resumed until early April, when
the Russian delegation under the country’s foreign minister, Georgy Vasilyevich
Chicherin, stopped off in Berlin on its way to Genoa. No agreement was
reached at this time, but there was enough common ground on so many points
that it seemed likely that a treaty would be signed in the not too distant future.
In Genoa nothing went as Ebert and Rathenau had planned, for although
the Allies’ experts agreed with the German view that reparations had led to a
fall in the value of the German mark and should not be allowed to exceed the
country’s ability to pay, an unsettling rumour began to circulate to the effect
that in separate negotiations between the Allies and the Russians there were
signs that an agreement would be reached at Germany’s expense. Although this
rumour later proved to be unfounded, it persuaded Rathenau to accede to
Maltzan’s demands and to invite the latter to resume the interrupted negotia-
tions with the Russians.
This decision was reached on the night of 15/16 April 1922 at the legendary
‘pyjama party’ in Rathenau’s hotel room, where the foreign minister allowed
the head of the delegation – Chancellor Wirth – and Maltzan to talk him into
signing a deal with the Russians the very next day and to do so, moreover,
without the explicit instructions of the German president and without
informing the British prime minister, Lloyd George. This agreement has
become known as the Rapallo Treaty after the Upper Italian resort where it was
signed. Under its terms Germany and Soviet Russia jointly agreed to forgo any
claims for compensation that might have been caused by the war, to resume
diplomatic relations and to accord each other the status of most-favoured
nation, granting each other trading advantages that they were later to accord to
other states, automatically benefiting the other partner in the treaty.
In Berlin the agreement met with a mixed response that was none the less
predominantly positive in tone. Ebert, it is true, was annoyed that his chan-
cellor and foreign minister had ignored his instructions, but he supported the
216 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

government in public, and the Reichstag adopted the treaty at its third reading
on 4 July, with only a handful of votes against it from the German National
People’s Party. One of those who warned against it was Rudolf Breitscheid from
the rump of the Independent Social Democrats, who at the end of April 1922
described the treaty as a serious threat to German interests, arguing that it
harmed the country’s emerging economic cooperation with the West.
The Western Powers and especially France were profoundly alarmed at the
way in which the Germans and Russians had reached their accord. And while
the treaty contained none of the secret military clauses that its critics initially
feared, the almost conspiratorial manner in which it had been signed was
calculated to provoke mistrust, a mistrust that would have been even greater if
the Allies had been aware of the secret cooperation between the German and
Russian armies. Whether there would have been any substantive progress on
the question of reparations in Genoa if there had been no treaty is debatable,
given America’s refusal to attend the talks. But in the wake of the events in
Rapallo, any Allied concessions were remoter than ever. The Genoa conference
ended without agreement on 19 May 1922, the Soviets continuing to refuse to
accept any responsibility for their country’s pre-war debts.
By 24 April – a week after the Treaty of Rapallo had been signed – France’s
prime minister, Raymond Poincaré, gave a speech in Bar-le-Duc in which he
was already indicating the possibility of his country’s military intervention. On
2 May, the commander in chief of the allied troops in the Rhineland, Jean
Degoutte, wrote to the minister of war, André Maginot, stating that in the light
of the rapprochement between Germany and Soviet Russia, France should
waste no more time but should occupy the Ruhr Basin without delay. The Treaty
of Rapallo marked a return to the risky policies of Wilhelmine Germany and
was driven by forces still in thrall to the thinking of that period. When Wirth
spoke to Chicherin in Genoa and urged a ‘restoration of the borders of 1914’, he
knew that he had the backing of large sections of Germany’s ruling class.
The man who as Germany’s representative had reluctantly signed the Treaty
of Rapallo with Chicherin did not live to witness its ratification. Late on the
morning of 24 June 1922, Walther Rathenau was shot by two men who over-
took his car on its way from his villa in Grunewald to the Foreign Office. The
perpetrators – a retired navy lieutenant, Erwin Kern, and a reserve lieutenant,
Hermann Fischer – were arrested by the police at Saaleck Castle near Kösen on
17 July. Kern died from gunshots sustained while trying to escape and Fischer
immediately took his own life. Both men were members of a militantly anti-
Semitic nationalist organization that had around 170,000 members and also of
the Consul Organization that was behind Erzberger’s murder. Other members
of the same secret organization that had planned the more recent attack were
quickly arrested by the police.
For those who had instigated the attack on Rathenau, the country’s foreign
minister embodied the policy of fulfilment and, indeed, the Weimar Republic
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 217

as such: no other public figure was such a potent symbol of all that they hated.
He was a critic of the old Germany and as a Jew could not have become his
country’s foreign minister without the revolution. He upheld the policy of
fulfilment towards the West without the ulterior motives towards the East that
characterized a man like Joseph Wirth. At the same time, however, Rathenau
was a product of Wilhelmine Germany and a patriot who as recently as October
1918 had called upon his fellow countrymen and women to rise up in a ‘levée
en masse’. Since the summer of 1919 he had also done what he could to circum-
vent the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. It was not least the contradictions that
he represented that made him the target of all who wanted to topple the Weimar
Republic by means of a right-wing revolution.
The murder of Walther Rathenau shook the Weimar Republic to its very
foundations, leaving almost as great a mark on the country as the Kapp–
Lüttwitz Putsch had done, and yet the increase in left-wing violence that the
extreme right had hoped would ensue failed to materialize. Major demonstra-
tions were called by the General German Trade Union Association and
attended by members of the Majority and Independent Social Democrats and
also by the Communists. On 25 June Wirth delivered a tribute to his dead
minister in the Reichstag and at the end of it, to tempestuous applause from the
majority of members of the house and their guests in the gallery, he accused
the political right of complicity in the murder in words that left a deep impres-
sion on contemporaries: ‘There stands the enemy, dripping poison into a
nation’s wounds. There stands the enemy – and there is no question about it:
the enemy stands on the right.’47
Rathenau’s murder also forced the government to take a number of admin-
istrative and legislative countermeasures, initially in the form of two emer-
gency decrees, then in the guise of a law to protect the Republic, which received
the necessary two-thirds majority at its third reading in the Reichstag on 18
July 1922, after Gustav Stresemann’s German People’s Party had voted for it. All
actions hostile to the Republic, from insulting the national flag to murdering
the country’s official representatives, were now subject to the severest penal-
ties. A special court was established in Leipzig to deal with all such crimes.
As had been the case following Erzberger’s murder the previous year, the
sanctions imposed by the government triggered a conflict with Bavaria, which
repealed the act the following day and replaced it by a decree that took over the
act’s material regulations but transferred the powers of the Leipzig court to the
Bavarian courts. The national government’s reaction was weak but ultimately
successful, offering to negotiate in talks that led to a compromise on 11 August,
the third anniversary of the Weimar constitution: to the new federal court
was added a second supreme court with jurisdiction over crimes committed
in southern Germany, such cases to be tried by southern German judges.
On 25 August 1922 the Bavarian government responded by repealing the
decree that it had issued on 24 July. But Lerchenfeld was punished for this
218 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

tactical retreat by the right-wing majority in the regional parliament and on

2 November he was obliged to resign. He was succeeded a week later by Eugen
von Knilling, a man far more sympathetic than Lerchenfeld to the ‘Patriotic
Associations’ and to Hitler’s National Socialists.
The new law was designed to protect the Republic, but its impact fell far
short of the expectations of its proponents. The judiciary was still in thrall to
the mentality associated with the authoritarian state that Germany had been
until recently and had no interest in availing itself of the resources enshrined in
the act. If it chose to do so at all, then it was by preference against left-wing
political criminals rather than against their right-wing counterparts. To take
an example: a Communist who referred to the ‘robbers’ republic’ was sentenced
to four weeks’ imprisonment, whereas a defendant from nationalist circles
who had used the phrase ‘Jews’ republic’ as a term of abuse was fined only
seventy marks.
All attempts to counter the fanatical anti-Semitism that had found expres-
sion in the unprecedented hate campaign against Rathenau and that had finally
led to his murder proved ineffectual. In the eyes of the extreme right, the Jews
were to blame for Germany’s defeat in the war because they had allegedly fed
the workforce a divisive diet of pacifist, Marxist and Bolshevik ideas or grown
rich at the expense of the German people. They were depicted as fomenting
and exploiting revolution, inflation and the policy of fulfilment. In this way
they served as scapegoats for everything that Germany had had to endure – or
which it thought it had had to endure – since November 1918.
Anti-Semitism was particularly rife among students and academics, many
of whom saw the Jews as their rivals in the struggle to climb the social ladder.
Many would-be academics and even their established counterparts felt it as a
personal affront that the ‘Marxist’ workers’ movement had come to power in
1918: their claim to be their country’s true leaders was being called into ques-
tion by forces which they felt lacked the requisite intellectual and moral fibre.
The role played by Jews on the political left was in itself sufficient to lend anti-
Semitic weight to the feeling that the Germans had forfeited their status and
suffered a loss of prestige. Nationalist students and young academics saw them-
selves as a part of the tradition of the Wars of Liberation in the early nineteenth
century and, above all, as the natural heirs of such nationalist writers as Johann
Gottlieb Fichte, Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, in whose writ-
ings they found what they were looking for: a view of a German nation that
would last for ever, while the Jews were the representatives of a foreign sense of
nationhood and the embodiment of the Weimar Republic, whose very nature
they were said to encapsulate.
Rabid anti-Semites were to be found not only in anti-Jewish organizations
but also among royalist German Nationalists, especially on their völkisch wing.
Their official newspaper was the Konservative Monatsschrift, which in June
1922 published an article by one of the Reichstag deputies, Wilhelm Henning,
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 219

claiming that ‘German honour’ was ‘not a commodity to be bartered by inter-

national Jews’48 and that Rathenau and his henchmen would be held to account
by the German nation. In the wake of Rathenau’s murder, the party leaders of
the German Nationalists, including the former Prussian finance minister
Oskar Hergt, felt it appropriate to draw a line under the activities of their
more extreme völkisch elements. By stripping Henning of his party member-
ship, the German Nationalist People’s Party aimed to demonstrate to other
bourgeois parties that it was capable of governing. But the decision was left
to the party’s representatives in the Reichstag, who felt that it was sufficient
to exclude Henning from their own ranks but not from the party. Henning
himself and two of his like-minded associates took this step voluntarily only a
short time later, founding the German People’s Workers’ Cooperative in
September 1922. Three months later this party became the German Nationalist
Freedom Party.
Munich became one of the new party’s strongholds, a development due to
the party’s ability to merge with the local German nationalists. Here in the
Bavarian capital there was particularly fertile ground for right-wing German
nationalist ideas but also a rival whose hatred of Jews and ‘Marxists’ could
simply not be equalled. This rival was Hitler’s National Socialist German
Workers’ Party (NSDAP), a party whose meetings and methods struck many
contemporary observers as modelled on those of the Italian Fascists. The
NSDAP reacted to the murder of the country’s foreign minister by circulating
flyers during a Social Democrat rally in honour of the dead minister: ‘Rathenau,
now he’s dead!! Ebert and Scheidemann, however, are still alive.’49 For the
German National People’s Party, the loss of its radically right-wing völkisch
element had more advantages than disadvantages, for the German Nationalists
were by now coming a little closer to their principal goal, namely, inclusion in
a bourgeois coalition that would govern without the Social Democrats and
drive them into opposition.
The left, too, regrouped following Walther Rathenau’s murder: in July 1922
the Reichstag members of the Majority and Independent Social Democrats
joined forces to work together in the Reichstag as a cooperative union, and in
the September they once more came together to form a single party. By 1922,
of course, the Independent Social Democrats were no longer the party that
they had been in 1917. At its conference in Halle in October 1920, the left-wing
members of the party had voted to join the Communist International and
hence the German Communist Party. Those members who in 1922 were
reunited with the Majority Social Democrats belonged to the moderate
minority and included the party’s leaders Wilhelm Dittmann and Artur
Crispien and its intellectuals Rudolf Hilferding and Rudolf Breitscheid as well
as former Communists associated with the party’s former chairman, Paul Levi,
all of whom had been thrown out of the Communist Party in 1921 and moved
further to the political right. It required the experience of growing right-wing
220 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

radicalism and the murder of Walther Rathenau on 24 June 1922 to convince

the Majority and Independent Social Democrats that they could no longer
afford to maintain their damaging divisions.
The merger of the two parties in September 1922 considerably strength-
ened the political and, above all, the parliamentary importance of the Social
Democrats in Germany, and yet it also had a drawback, for the previous year,
at its party conference in Görlitz in September 1921, the Majority Social
Democrats had adopted a predominantly reformist programme largely drafted
by Eduard Bernstein and designed to promote the party’s image as ‘the party of
all working people in town and country’ and as an ‘action group for democracy
and socialism’. As such, the party was open to all like-minded individuals,
regardless of their class. From the standpoint of the rump of the Independent
Social Democrats such a watering down of its views on the class struggle could
not be reconciled with its continuing tradition as a Marxist party. The wording
of the programme of action agreed to at its joint conference in Nuremberg was
far more reminiscent of the old Erfurt programme of 1891 than the more
recent Görlitz programme, while Rudolf Hilferding’s Heidelberg programme
of 1925 was likewise couched in much more ‘Marxist’ terms than its prede-
cessor of 1921 had been.
Another factor that contributed to the changes to the party’s ideological
outlook was the hardening of its attitude to the role of government. The crea-
tion of a cooperative union between the two Social Democrat parties in the
Reichstag meant that any attempt on the part of right-wing Social Democrats
to form a grand coalition now had to be put on hold, for most members of the
Independent Social Democrats and the left wing of the Majority Social
Democrats would not have helped to support a coalition with a party as friendly
towards the employers as the German People’s Party. Even so, Stresemann’s
party was now a silent member of Wirth’s government. On 19 July 1922, five
days after the Majority Social Democrats and Independent Social Democrats
had merged, the German People’s Party, the German Democratic Party and the
Centre Party formed a coalition which, loyal to the constitution, occupied the
middle ground and was intended to counterbalance the new preponderance of
the Social Democrats. The previous day the German People’s Party had voted
for the law designed to protect the Republic and in doing so signalled its shift
to the political centre ground. On 24 October the party was able to ensure that
the Reichstag could extend Ebert’s term as president until 30 June 1925, the
house now having the necessary two-thirds majority required to take this step.
This meant that the direct election by the people that had been planned to take
place in early December 1922 was now unnecessary, as it was an election that
the moderate bourgeois parties preferred to avoid lest it disturb the country’s
internal peace. (In the case of the German People’s Party there was an addi-
tional motive in that they were keen as far as possible to avoid voting directly
for or against Ebert.)
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 221

In the autumn of 1922 there would have been compelling reasons to form a
grand coalition. Rathenau’s murder had destroyed what little confidence was
left in the mark: Germans and foreigners alike were panicked into disposing of
their credits in marks, and the flight of capital assumed gigantic proportions. It
was also at around this time that the inflationary boom that had protected
Germany from the world economic crisis of the early 1920s came to an end.
The interest in cheap German imports sank in direct proportion to the ability
of local industry to return to its former levels of production. As a result German
exports lost the advantage that they had had when global production fell after
1920. Inflation, which turned to hyperinflation in July 1922, was finally robbed
of its economic appeal, objectively raising the chances of a currency reform.
Politically speaking, however, such a reform was feasible only if employers and
trade unions worked closely together with both the moderate bourgeois parties
and the Social Democrats.
In the summer of 1922 large sections of the German employers’ organiza-
tions were still refusing to accept this. They included Hugo Stinnes, who had
used inflation to build up a vast industrial empire and who since 1920 had
represented the German People’s Party in the Reichstag. He expressed his ideas
on currency reform in a speech that he gave, significantly, on 9 November, the
fourth anniversary of the revolution, to the Provisional Economic Council, a
professional body anchored in the constitution but without the power to reach
any decisions of its own. In demanding that German workers should work
two hours longer each day for no extra income over a period of between ten
and fifteen years he unleashed a veritable storm of indignation on the political
left. Stinnes’s views were shared by the industrial wing of the German
People’s Party, but not by the rest of the party, including its chairman, Gustav
Stresemann, who was now convinced that the more moderate forces in the
bourgeoisie needed to work more closely with their moderate counterparts in
the country’s workforce. On 26 October he therefore voted for the chancellor’s
proposal to set up a commission made up of the parties in government and the
German People’s Party in order to create a common platform that would take
all necessary politico-economic decisions, including that of the question of
reparations.
The German People’s Party elected the electrical industrialist Hans von
Raumer, an architect of the Central Cooperative Union of November 1918, to
sit on the commission, while the SPD sent its leading theorist, Rudolf Hilferding,
whose book Finance Capital had appeared in 1910. Both men played a decisive
part in the decision to draw up a list of measures that the government used in
its note on reparations on 13 November 1922. The one real sensation of the
commission’s proposals was a compromise on the controversial question of the
length of the working day. The eight-hour day was to remain the norm, but
legally binding exceptions were to be allowed as long as they had the agreement
of the workers and the authorities. Although the commission did not entirely
222 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

call into question one of the most important social gains of November 1918,
it none the less recommended that for certain sections of the economy a
temporary increase in the number of hours that could be worked in a week
should be considered in order to facilitate a reform of the country’s finances
and, with it, Germany’s economic recovery and its peaceful coexistence with its
neighbours.
This was the spirit behind Wirth’s note on reparations of 13 November
1922. As the Allies had demanded, it proposed that the German Federal Bank
should take vigorous steps to support the mark. If an international loan were to
raise 500 million marks, then the bank would provide matching funds. This
note had the agreement not only of the chairmen of the coalition partners – the
SPD, the Centre Party and the German Democratic Party – but also of the
representatives of the German People’s Party.
In this way it seemed as if the foundations of a grand coalition had been
laid, but appearances proved deceptive, and by 14 November the Reichstag
members of the United Social Democratic Party of Germany voted by an over-
whelming majority to boycott such a coalition. It was above all the Prussian
prime minister, Otto Braun, who had advocated such a move, but he was
fighting a losing battle: so soon after the two Social Democrat parties had
merged, the party’s leaders were unwilling to risk a trial of strength with the
former Independents, most of whom – unlike Hilferding – remained vehe-
mently opposed to a merger with the German People’s Party, which was
regarded as the party of big business.
In keeping with an agreement made with the centre-ground parties, Joseph
Wirth resigned as chancellor later that same day and was replaced on 22
November by the general manager of the Hamburg-America Line, Wilhelm
Cuno, a Catholic who had been born in Suhl in Thuringia in 1876 and, although
he had no party affiliations, clearly stood to the right of centre. Ebert will have
hoped that with an experienced businessman at the head of his cabinet he
would be able to bring German employers closer into line with the Republic
and also make a good impression on the international community. In addition
to Cuno, four other members of the cabinet belonged to no single party. They
included Essen’s former mayor Hans Luther as the minister with special
responsibility for nutritional and dietary matters and Wilhelm Groener, the
country’s former quartermaster-general, who had already served under both
Fehrenbach and Wirth and who now became minister for transport. The other
cabinet posts were held by members of the Centre Party, the Bavarian People’s
Party, the German Democratic Party and the German People’s Party. Cuno’s
bourgeois minority cabinet was far from enjoying a parliamentary majority
and could survive only if it was tolerated by the Social Democrats.
No other ministerial team in any other Weimar government bore such
striking similarities to a cabinet of pre-war civil servants as Cuno’s, and never
had the country’s president exerted such influence on the choice of chancellor
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 223

as was the case in November 1922. It would be no great exaggeration to call

Cuno’s government a presidential cabinet in disguise. But it was not just a
mistake on Ebert’s part that allowed the country to relapse into the ways of an
authoritarian state. Rather, it was the Social Democrats who had established
the Weimar Republic who were largely to blame for this development.
Concerned for their survival as a party, they had refused to countenance a
parliamentary solution to the crisis that beset the country but had opted instead
for what we can only call a presidential solution.

A Year of Decisions: 1923. From the Occupation of the Ruhr

to the Dawes Plan
Cuno’s government had been in power for less than two months when French
and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr on 11 January 1923, triggering the most
serious international confrontation since the Russo-Polish War of 1920, if not
since the end of the First World War. The reasons given for the move were little
more than a pretext, Germany standing accused of violating its commitment to
provide timber, telegraph poles and coal under the terms of the Allies’ demands
as formulated by its commission on reparations.
This failure was due to the previous cabinet of Joseph Wirth, which since
August 1922 had consciously upheld the popular slogan ‘First bread, then repa-
rations’. The delay was irresponsible, since France had been waiting for an
opportunity to occupy the Ruhr ever since the Treaty of Rapallo. By overrun-
ning the region, France hoped to secure its frontiers against its neighbour to
the east, a move that it had been unable to make in Versailles thanks to the
opposition of the two Anglo-Saxon countries represented there. But more than
just the country’s security was at stake, namely, the desire to bolster French
claims to be regarded as the dominant power in Continental Europe. France’s
actions were close to declaring war. In the event, Paris received no support
from the Allies: Great Britain lodged a formal protest, while the Vatican
condemned it unequivocally.
The German response to this act of aggression was a policy of passive resist-
ance in the form of a refusal to comply with the orders issued by the occupying
powers. In this, Cuno’s government had the backing of the vast majority of
members of the Reichstag and the active support of the trade unions, only
the extreme left and the extreme right refusing to join the united front. On
22 January the Communists adopted the slogan ‘Defeat Poincaré and Cuno in
the Ruhr and on the Spree!’ But in the weeks that followed, they stressed their
opposition to Poincaré rather than Cuno, an emphasis dictated by the Soviet
Union’s anti-imperialist policy towards France. A more extreme position was
taken by the National Socialists. On 11 January 1923, at a meeting in the Zirkus
Krone in Munich, Hitler told his followers that their watchword should be
‘Down with the November criminals!’ not ‘Down with France!’
224 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

As a result of the German boycott, neither France nor Belgium was able to
obtain any reparations until March 1923, and to that extent the policy of passive
resistance achieved its principal aim, at least for the present. But then the occu-
pying forces began to seize the coal mines and coking plants and to take control
of the railways. Germany still had to pay the wages of the railway employees
who were driven from the occupied areas and also paid millions of marks in
credits to the coalmining industry and the iron and steel industry in order to
ensure that wages could still be paid after these facilities had all been shut
down. From a financial point of view, the policy of passive resistance meant
that the Ruhr Valley became a bottomless pit. Hyperinflation spiralled out of
control. The mark’s foreign value, which the German Federal Bank had stabi-
lized at around 21,000 marks to the dollar between February and April 1923 by
selling gold reserves and foreign currency, fell to 48,000 marks in May 1923
and to 110,000 marks in June 1923.
The more it became clear that the policy of passive resistance had failed, the
greater became the tendency on the part of the radical right to switch to active
resistance in the form of acts of sabotage. In March and April 1923 several
railway installations in the occupied region were blown up. One of the perpe-
trators, the Freikorps officer Albert Leo Schlageter, was arrested by the French
police in Essen in April. On 9 May he was found guilty of espionage and sabo-
tage by a French war tribunal in Düsseldorf and sentenced to death by firing
squad, a sentence carried out on 26 May.
Schlageter’s execution triggered a storm of protest in Germany that was
heard as far away as Moscow. In a speech to the Enlarged Executive Committee,
Karl Radek – the Communist International’s expert on Germany – described
him as a ‘martyr of German nationalism’ and a brave soldier of the counter-
revolution who deserved ‘to be honoured by us soldiers of the revolution’.
But men like Schlageter would become ‘travellers into the void’ – the
expression is borrowed from a contemporary Freikorps novel by Friedrich
Freksa – unless they learned to fight for the cause of the great mass of German
workers, who were a part of the larger family of nations fighting to gain
their freedom.50
Radek’s speech was an attempt to drive a wedge between the nationalist
masses and their leaders and to turn the nationalist revolution into a socialist
revolution. From the standpoint of the Soviet Union and the Comintern, the
Franco-German confrontation of 1923 offered an unexpected chance to under-
mine the whole of the post-war order. If Germany were to be supported by
Soviet Russia, a national war of liberation could prove to be a decisive battle in
the world revolution, always assuming that the national masses currently under
‘Fascist’ control could be persuaded to unite with the Communists under
Communist leadership. To give practical expression to this strategy was the
goal of the ‘national Bolshevik’ agitators among the supporters of the nation-
alist right, a course of action adopted by the German Communist Party in the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 225

summer of 1923, when they made remarkable rhetorical concessions to

anti-Semitism but still failed to make a significant breakthrough.
Among the workers, conversely, the Communist Party’s slogans found a far
more immediate response. The Communists may not have caused the wild-cat
strikes that took place in the Ruhr in the middle of May, but they certainly
knew how to turn them to their own advantage. In works committee elections,
trade union elections, local elections and the elections to the Landtag in the
summer of 1923 the Communists recorded substantial gains, and the number
of party members rose between September 1922 and September 1923 from
225,000 to 295,000. By August 1923 there were signs of an imminent political
explosion as the increase in social deprivation had produced a mood of despair
that found expression in what became known as the ‘Cuno strikes’. The Free
Trade Unions did what they could to prevent the state-owned printing works
that were also responsible for printing banknotes from being affected by the
walkout, but their efforts proved futile. The presses stopped rolling for only
a day – 10 August 1923 – but the resultant shortage of paper money was
immediately felt throughout the whole country.
Until then the Social Democrats had at least tolerated Cuno’s government.
Opposition on the left of the party to cooperation with the German People’s Party
was so pronounced that the party leadership saw no alternative but to continue
to accept the most right-wing of Germany’s post-war cabinets. There was also the
fear that if at the height of the crisis the Social Democrats were to assume respon-
sibility for governing the country and abandon, what turned out to be, the disas-
trous policy of passive resistance, the party would again be accused by the
nationalists of stabbing their country in the back. It required the ‘Cuno strikes’ to
convince the Social Democrat leaders that continuing to tolerate the Cuno
government was no longer the lesser of two evils but, compared with a grand
coalition, the greater.
By now dissatisfaction with the government had reached a critical point
with the bourgeois parties and the employers, too, leading to a sudden and
overdue resolution of the crisis within a matter of days. In their negotiations
with the existing governing parties the Social Democrats tabled a whole series
of demands, including a rapid containment of inflation, preparations for the
introduction of a gold currency, a clear dividing line between the regular army
and all illegal military organizations and a change in foreign policy designed to
resolve the question of reparations. For some time the chairman of the German
People’s Party, Gustav Stresemann, had been touted as a new chancellor, a
proposal with which the Social Democrats were in agreement because they had
their own internal reasons for not wanting to occupy this key position. The
most powerful party was content to provide the finance minister, the business
secretary, the home secretary and the justice minister. Within twenty-four
hours of Cuno’s resignation, Ebert had replaced him as chancellor by Gustav
Stresemann. A day later – 14 August 1923 – the new chancellor, who also held
226 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the post of foreign secretary, won a vote of confidence in the Reichstag. Around
a third of the Social Democrat and German People’s Party representatives
absented themselves from the vote, a clear sign that the grand coalition
remained hugely controversial in both of these parties.
The Social Democrats’ return to government was greeted with outrage on
the political right in Bavaria and in the occupied Ruhr, two of its cabinet
members bearing the brunt of the hostility: the finance minister Rudolf
Hilferding, who was reviled because he was Jewish, and the justice minister
Gustav Radbruch who was loathed because he had filled the same post under
Wirth and embodied the hated law passed to protect the Republic. But the
workers were reassured by the formation of a grand coalition, and the number
of ‘Cuno strikes’ gradually dropped. There could no longer be any talk of a
revolutionary situation in Germany.
Back in Moscow, the Comintern saw things differently. Under the impact of
the ‘Cuno strikes’, the secretary general of the Third International, Grigory
Zinoviev, wrote to the German Communist Party in the middle of August and
urged it to prepare for the coming revolution. On 23 August the Politburo of
the Russian Communist Party met in secret session. In the face of opposition
from Stalin in his role as party secretary, Zinoviev, Radek and the people’s
commissar for defence, Leon Trotsky, pushed through a resolution setting up a
committee with the task of systematically preparing for a Communist revolu-
tion in Germany.
Trotsky believed that the ‘German October’, as it was known, should take
place on 9 November 1923, the fifth anniversary of the revolution that had
brought a republic to Germany in 1918. This decision was taken on 1 October,
the same day that Zinoviev instructed the central committee of the German
Communist Party to form a pact with the minority government in Saxony that
was led by the left-wing Social Democrat Erich Zeigner and that had been
supported by the Communists since March. The next step was to be the arming
of the Saxon proletariat. Saxony, then, was to be the launch pad for the German
revolution, the starting point of a civil war whose end would be marked by the
victory of the Communists over not only the Fascists but also the bourgeois
Weimar Republic.
While the Communists were preparing the ground for the revolution, the
political crisis in Germany continued to worsen. On 26 September, after hesi-
tating for a long time, the president and his government announced the end of
the country’s policy of passive resistance. The Bavarian government reacted to
this development that same day by proclaiming a state of emergency and trans-
ferring the state’s executive powers to the president of Upper Bavaria, Gustav
von Kahr. In turn the federal government responded on the evening of 26
September by declaring a state of emergency in the whole of the Reich and by
transferring executive power to the country’s defence minister who for his part
could delegate that power to regional military commanders. From a purely
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 227

legal point of view, Bavaria would have had to repeal its emergency measures if
the Reich’s president or the Reichstag had so demanded, but Stresemann and
his ministers assumed that Kahr would refuse to comply with such a request
and so they thought it better not to raise the matter at all with Munich.
In the days that followed, the weakness of the Reich’s position became
clearer. On 27 September the Völkischer Beobachter – the National Socialists’
official newspaper – attacked ‘the dictators Stresemann and Seeckt’ with
particular viciousness, the former on the grounds that he was married to a
‘Jewess’, the latter because his wife was ‘half Jewish’, prompting the Reich’s
defence minister, Otto Geßler, to order Kahr to ban further publication of the
paper. Kahr refused, and in this he had the support of Otto von Lossow, the
commander of the federal troops that were stationed in Bavaria. It was a clear
case of insubordination but, as had been the case during the Kapp–Lüttwitz
Putsch in March 1920, the army’s commander in chief, Hans von Seeckt, had
no intention of ordering federal troops to fire on their comrades, preferring to
play the same sort of role in the Reich as Kahr was doing in Bavaria. In this he
found widespread support, prominent industrialists such as Hugo Stinnes and
all those who regarded the German Nationalists as their natural political home
demanding a ‘national dictatorship’ under a ‘directorate’ led by Seeckt.
A different type of dictatorship was proposed by the Centrist labour
minister Heinrich Brauns and the finance minister Rudolf Hilferding at the
cabinet meeting on 30 September, when they demanded an enabling act that
would allow the government to do whatever was needed from a financial and
political standpoint. Both believed that it was necessary to extend the working
day, a point that had the support of the employers but which placed them on a
collision course with the unions. But not even Hilferding’s party, the SPD, was
willing to agree to their demands for the statutory power to fix the length of the
working day. Opposition to the policies of Stresemann’s cabinet assumed far
more extreme forms on the right wing of the grand coalition: on 2 October, the
leader of the German People’s Party, Ernst Scholz, having consulted with the
right wing of his party and especially with Hugo Stinnes, demanded a compre-
hensive rejection of the eight-hour day, a ‘break with France’ and the inclusion
of German Nationalists in the grand coalition. Given the situation at that time,
this amounted to a declaration of war on the chancellor and a tacit acceptance
of the idea of a ‘national dictatorship’. Stresemann drew the logical conclusion
and handed in his resignation later that same day.
Within four days, however, Stresemann was back in office, again in charge
of a grand coalition cabinet. Ebert had been instrumental in renewing the old
allegiances, an aim in which he was successful because the moderate forces in
the German People’s Party were unwilling to bow to the pressure exerted by
Stinnes and to topple Stresemann from power. The party leaders achieved their
decisive breakthrough during the night of 5/6 October, agreeing to a formula-
tion on the matter of the length of the working day that their experts had
228 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

already proposed on 13 November 1922, on the eve of the collapse of Wirth’s

cabinet. The eight-hour day was to be retained in principle but could be
extended either by mutual agreement or else by legislation.
The Social Democrat Party, too, was now comfortable with an enabling act
that avoided all mention of the length of the working day and that would
remain in force only for the duration of the present coalition, and on 13
October the Reichstag passed the new law with the majority needed to alter the
constitution. It formed the basis of ordinances on welfare for the unemployed,
on staff cutbacks in the public services and on a measure enforcing govern-
ment mediation in the matter of wage disagreements. In this way the state
became the supreme judge in labour disputes. There were clear parallels with
the extraordinary powers of Article 48.
While the fate of the grand coalition was being decided in Berlin, right-
wing forces and Communists alike were working for regime change. In Bavaria
Hitler had himself elected leader of the German Combat League, a new
umbrella organization for the patriotic associations. Four days later Kahr
repealed the law designed to protect the Republic and, from the middle of
October, gave instructions for large numbers of eastern European Jews to be
deported from Bavaria, a move designed to ingratiate himself with the National
Socialists. On 20 October the country’s defence minister, Otto Geßler, ordered
the long-overdue dismissal of Otto von Lossow, the Munich district commander,
prompting Kahr to launch his most spectacular blow against the Reich, when
he appointed Lossow regional commander of the Bavarian armed forces and
declared the Seventh Division of the Reichswehr, which was stationed in
Bavaria, under the direct control of his own government in Munich.
Neither Kahr nor Lossow nor their ally, the commander in chief of the
Bavarian regional police force, Hans von Seißer, wanted to drive a wedge
between Bavaria and the Reich. Rather, their aim was to remodel the Reich
along Bavarian lines. A ‘march on Berlin’ modelled on Mussolini’s ‘march on
Rome’ was to provide a fitting climax to the establishment of a ‘national dicta-
torship’. The National Socialists were to be allowed to join in, but the role of the
‘Duce’ was to be taken not by Hitler but by Kahr and later, on a federal level, by
a man who shared Kahr’s outlook. One possibility was Seeckt, and yet no one
knew whether in a crisis a man who was regarded as a stickler for the law
would oppose the declared will of the federal president.
The Communists focused their activities on central Germany. On 10
October three Communists, including the party leader Heinrich Brandler as
head of the state chancellery, joined the Saxon government led by the left-wing
Social Democrat Erich Zeigner. On 16 October a coalition made up of Social
Democrats and Communists under the Social Democrat August Frölich was
formed in Thuringia, too. The formation of left-wing united front govern-
ments in Dresden and Weimar was in keeping with the constitution, and both
were based on parliamentary majorities. Nor did the cabinets of Zeigner or
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 229

Frölich take any steps that could be described as hostile to the Reich. Even so,
there was no doubt in the minds of the ruling Social Democrats in Berlin that
the Communists were planning to extend their struggle for power from Saxony
and Thuringia to the rest of the country, with the result that on 13 October the
Saxon district commander, Alfred Müller, who exercised executive control,
banned the Communist Party’s paramilitary Proletarian Centuries. Three days
later, after consulting with Geßler, he placed the Saxon police under the control
of the federal army, thereby depriving the government in Dresden of its only
real instrument of power.
On 21 October an attempt to stage a Communist revolution failed even
before it had begun. At a labour conference in Chemnitz convened by the
German Communist Party the Social Democrats refused to heed the
Communists’ call for a general strike that was to mark the start of a proletarian
uprising. In doing so they thwarted the plans for a ‘German October’, with the
result that the attempt to repeat the events set in train by the Bolsheviks in
November 1918 never got off the ground. Only in Hamburg was there a putsch-
like uprising by the Communists, but after three days of bloody fighting the
police were able to restore order to the city on 25 October.
At the same time the whole of Saxony was placed under the control of the
federal army, leading to bloody clashes in a number of towns and cities. On 27
October Stresemann issued an ultimatum demanding that Zeigner should
form a government without any Communists, but within twenty-four hours
Zeigner had rejected this demand, whereupon Stresemann, without convening
his cabinet, appointed Karl Rudolf Heinze of the German People’s Party as
civilian commissioner for Saxony. By the 30th Heinze had forced Zeigner to
resign. At the urging of the Social Democrat leadership a moderate politician,
the former business secretary Alfred Fellisch, formed a Social Democrat
minority government that was tolerated by the German Democrats. The
following day, immediately after the Landtag had confirmed the cabinet, Ebert
responded to a request from his chancellor and ended Heinze’s mandate as
commissioner.
Stresemann’s ultimatum of 27 October had had the support of the SPD.
Only later did the party start to harbour serious doubts about its response,
doubts that it justified by pointing out that the cabinet had had no opportunity
to confer on Zeigner’s rejection of the ultimatum. Under tremendous pressure
from its own left wing and in the face of stern warnings from the Prussian
minister of the interior, Carl Severing, the Social Democrat members of the
Reichstag drew up an ultimatum of their own on 31 October, demanding that
Stresemann’s government lift the state of emergency, declare the actions of the
Bavarian authorities unconstitutional and take whatever steps were necessary
to put Bavaria in its place. The bourgeois members of Stresemann’s cabinet
were convinced that neither militarily nor politically was a civil war with
Bavaria desirable and, as was only to be expected, they rejected the SPD’s
230 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

demands, prompting the Social Democrat ministers to resign their posts on

2 November. Four days after the end of the grand coalition federal troops
marched into Thuringia with Ebert’s approval and forced the local Proletarian
Centuries to disband. New elections were called for February 1924. Until then
Frölich remained in office as head of a Social Democrat minority cabinet.
The Bavarian crisis escalated on the evening of 8 November, when Hitler
used a meeting of Kahr’s supporters in the Bürgerbräukeller to proclaim a
‘national revolution’. At gunpoint the National Socialist leader extorted a
promise from Kahr, Lossow and Seißer that they too would take part in the
action. But Hitler’s co-conspirator, Erich Ludendorff, who had been the
German military’s strong man during the First World War and whom Hitler
had only recently appointed commander in chief of his ‘national army’, quickly
restored the triumvirate’s freedom to act, allowing the Bavarian authorities to
retaliate. Hitler’s putsch ended at midday on 9 November when the Bavarian
regional police fired on the Munich Feldherrnhalle. Hitler himself was able to
escape but was arrested two days later. Sixteen of his followers paid for the
‘national revolution’ with their lives.
The events in Munich had dramatic consequences in Berlin, where Ebert
immediately transferred command of the country’s armed forces to Seeckt and,
altering the ordinance of 26 September 1923, invested him with executive
power. Ebert and Stresemann evidently felt that this transfer of power to Seeckt
was the only way to persuade the Bavarian army to oppose the rebels, although
there was, of course, no guarantee that Seeckt himself would not support the
putsch. Ebert presumably thought that if Seeckt was directly responsible to the
head of state, the Republic was less at risk than it had been previously, when it
had little or no control over Seeckt.
Hitler’s putsch marked a turning point not only for Bavaria but for the
country as a whole. The plans for a ‘serious’ dictatorship on the part of Kahr
and his allies were discredited for good by the events of 8 November and Kahr’s
authority severely undermined. And without solid support from the Bavarian
triumvirate there was little prospect of a ‘national dictatorship’ in Germany. In
short, Hitler’s putsch achieved the opposite of what he had intended, the leader
of the National Socialists contributing substantially to the consolidation of a
Republic that had been under extreme threat.
On 15 November, a week after the Munich putsch, Stresemann’s rump
cabinet succeeded in pulling off what has become known as the ‘Rentenmark
miracle’. The new currency that was introduced on this day was intended to
be a temporary measure designed to last only until the new and definitive
gold-backed currency came into force at some future date. Under proposals
put forward by the new finance minister, Hans Luther, who had replaced
Hilferding on 6 October, debenture bonds and loans taken out on industrial
and agricultural land would guarantee the value of the Rentenmark until then.
On 20 November, the mark’s exchange rate, which had been 1,260 billion to the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 231

dollar on 14 November, was stabilized at 4,200 billion, whereupon the Federal

Bank set an exchange rate of 1,000 billion paper marks to 1 Rentenmark,
re-establishing the pre-war exchange rate between the mark and the dollar.
It was the occupied Rhineland that suffered most from the introduction of
the Rentenmark, for until the gold-backed Reichsmark came into force on 30
August 1924 the region was largely abandoned by the Reich and had to contend
with communal emergency funding. Cologne’s mayor, Konrad Adenauer, who
was a member of the Centre Party, protested in vain on 13 November, arguing
that ‘the Rhineland must be worth more than one or two or even three new
currencies’.51 The federal government evidently felt that the Rhineland’s tempo-
rary autonomy, whatever form that independence may take, was the lesser of
two evils when compared with the economic collapse that would threaten
Germany if the new currency was undermined by the continuing subsidization
of the occupied territory.
By 25 October 1923 there were signs that another miracle was about to take
place, for this was the day on which the French prime minister Raymond
Poincaré sent word to his British counterpart, Andrew Bonar Law, that under
certain conditions he was prepared to agree to a re-examination of the question
of reparations. In announcing this willingness, he was responding to a sugges-
tion that the American secretary of state Charles Hughes had put forward in a
speech made to the American Historical Association in New Haven at the end
of December 1922, when he proposed that the question of reparations be
discussed at a conference of international experts, taking account of Germany’s
ability to pay. This was an idea that had first been mooted in London. Poincaré’s
conditions were as follows: a panel of experts was to be appointed by the Allied
Reparations Commission; the amount owed by Germany, as set down in the
London ultimatum of May 1921, was to be independent of the findings of the
inquiry; and a second panel of experts would ascertain the amount and where-
abouts of Germany’s foreign assets. Once the United States had agreed to this
suggestion, Paris formally proposed that the two commissions be set to work at
a meeting of the Reparations Commission on 13 November. This move
prepared the way for the Dawes Plan, named after the American banker Charles
G. Dawes who chaired the Reparations Commission. This plan was to be
inseparable from Germany’s economic upturn in the mid-1920s.
There were several reasons for Poincaré’s change of heart: his country’s
occupation of the Ruhr had turned into a crippling burden that was jeopard-
izing the French economy; there was increasing resistance at home, above all
from the Socialists and Communists; and in terms of the country’s foreign
standing, France was becoming increasingly isolated, especially with regard
to its worsening relations with Great Britain. But there was another reason
that was even more critical, for on 23 October the American secretary of state
had made it clear to Poincaré that the United States would allow France to be
represented on the international panel of experts and discuss the question of
232 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

reparations only if France agreed to address the problem of inter-allied debts.

In short, France could expect that if it made certain concessions to its own
debtor Germany, its own position as one of America’s debtors would improve
in turn.
Poincaré’s concession on the question of reparations did not, however,
mean that France had abandoned its goal of cutting the Rhineland off from the
rest of Germany, and on the day that he informed the British government of
France’s new political line, Poincaré also decided to adopt a policy of active and
official support for the occupied territory’s struggle for independence. Starting
on 21 October, there had been a number of attempts to declare a ‘Rhenish
Republic’ in Aachen, Trier, Koblenz, Bonn, Wiesbaden and elsewhere. These
subversive activities on the part of local separatists were supported by the
French and Belgian troops that were occupying the region, but such activities
did not have the backing of the vast majority of the local population. Even as
early as November 1923 it was already clear that neither the Prussian Rhineland
nor the Bavarian Palatinate would ever voluntarily break free from the Reich.
By December Poincaré had instructed Paul Tirard, the head of the Allied High
Commission for the Rhineland, to stop supporting the separatists.
There were signs, therefore, that the situation was becoming progressively
less tense both inside the country and abroad, only for another government crisis
to erupt in Berlin. On 22 November the Social Democrats, ignoring all the presi-
dent’s warnings, brought a motion of no confidence against Stresemann’s bour-
geois minority cabinet, justifying their action by arguing that the federal
government had taken draconian steps to deal with Saxony and Thuringia while
doing little about the unconstitutional situation in Bavaria. The motion was
worded in such a way that the German Nationalists, on whose attitude every-
thing depended, would be unable to vote for it. In other words, the Social
Democrats were not interested in toppling Stresemann but in making a political
point designed to placate the left wing of their party. But the chancellor was
unwilling to accept a further weakening of his position and responded to the
SPD’s initiative by calling for a vote of confidence. On 23 November the Reichstag
rejected the motion by 231 votes to 156, with seven abstentions. As Stresemann
later told foreign correspondents, this was the first time in the history of the
German Republic that a government had fallen ‘on the open field of battle’.52
Attempts to form a new government proved extremely difficult and took an
entire week. Not until 30 November 1923 did the leader of the Centre Party, the
Cologne lawyer Wilhelm Marx, replace Stresemann as prime minister, while
Stresemann himself became foreign minister, a post he already held since
August 1923 and which he was to retain until his death on 3 October 1929.
Marx’s minority cabinet was dependent on the grudging support of the party
that had toppled its predecessor, the Social Democrats. But Ebert, acting
behind the scenes and threatening the party with Article 48, even managed
to persuade them to pass an enabling act on 8 December. Timed to run until
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 233

14 February 1924, this gave the government a chance to introduce all the meas-
ures it needed by parliamentary means. One such measure affected the length
of the working day, which was in urgent need of regulation since the demobili-
zation ordinances that had been in force since the revolution had expired on
17 November, with the result that pre-war conditions once again applied wher-
ever the working day was not already regulated by formal written agreements.
Major changes were introduced in Germany during the three months that
the enabling act was in force. Although the eight-hour working day continued
as the norm, a ten-hour day was now legally permissible in large areas of the
economy. In January 1924 the Free Trade Unions responded to this defeat by
declaring an end to the Central Cooperative Union that had been established
in November 1918, although the announcement amounted to little more than
a symbolic protest. And in December 1923 the salaries of civil servants were set
at a level far below that of pre-war Germany. On 14 February 1924, the day on
which the enabling act expired, an emergency tax law made it possible to start
reducing the amount of state control that existed in the housing market. This
was an important step in doing away with the ‘war socialism’ that had survived
the war by more than five years.
This same measure also affected the highly controversial revaluation of
outstanding debts from certain types of capital investment such as savings
accounts, mortgages, bonds and life insurance that had been destroyed by
inflation. The flat revaluation rate of 15 per cent of their value in gold marks
was tantamount to an admission that Hans Luther’s long-championed prin-
ciple of ‘mark for mark’ was in flagrant disregard of the most elementary sense
of justice. But repayment of the revalued debts was delayed until 1932, that of
the war loans until the burden of reparations had finally been lifted – in other
words, sine die. The embittered protests by the millions of Germans affected by
this measure failed to alter its wording. But Marx’s government had no alterna-
tive if it was not to jeopardize the new currency. In short, it was savers and
those who had underwritten war loans who were the real victims of inflation.
It was not the middle classes as a group who faced financial ruin as a result
of devaluation or who were at least substantially affected by it but large sections
of that group, all of whom had been used to getting by on their savings or by
relying on the interest on stocks and shares. Householders and landowners,
conversely, were the beneficiaries, since they were now debt-free and able to
profit from the privileged status of material assets. But the real winners were
the owners of large industrial fortunes and large landowners, most of whom
had been heavily in debt, only to see those debts evaporate as a result of devalu-
ation. Materially speaking, the state benefited from inflation, but in a non-
material sense it was among the losers. Devaluation helped by freeing it from
its debts but harmed it in the longer term by undermining confidence in it. It
was the Republic that bore the brunt of the Germans’ disappointed hopes, not
the monarchy, even though it was the monarchy that started the process of
234 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

devaluation. Five years after the end of the war the old empire began to appear
to many Germans in a transfigured light.
Inflation had a levelling effect: the difference in the incomes of the highest-
and lowest-paid civil servants and between those of civil servants in general
and of workers shrank, but it was certainly not the workers who gained from
this situation, for in December 1923 real wages were barely 70 per cent of their
pre-war level. And unemployment was high. The unions had to pay a high
price for the role they had played during the Ruhr conflict, the number of
members of the General German Workers’ Association falling from 7.7 million
in September 1923 to 4.8 million in March 1924. Everything pointed to the fact
that the proletariat’s potential for protest was far greater by January 1924 than
it had been twelve months earlier.
At the same time, however, there were also signs that the political situation
was growing calmer. By the end of November 1923 things had returned to
normal on the labour front in the Ruhr, and once the economic situation in
that region had been stabilized there was no longer the same desire to imple-
ment the plan for a loosely structured Rhineland state of the kind advocated by
Stinnes and Adenauer at the end of 1923. By January 1924 the country’s foreign
minister, Gustav Stresemann, was able to turn down Adenauer’s proposal in no
uncertain terms, prompting the latter to shelve the idea once and for all.
The military state of emergency was lifted on 29 February 1924 at the
urging of Hans von Seeckt, who was anxious to ensure that the authority of the
armed forces was not undermined in a running battle with civilian agencies,
especially in Saxony, Thuringia and, above all, Prussia. More especially he was
afraid of the malign influence of radically right-wing defence organizations. In
short, the internal consolidation of the army was more important to him than
the mere exercise of power with no political benefits.
As head of the executive, Seeckt had banned the Communist Party, the
NSDAP and the German Nationalist Freedom Party under the terms of a
decree dated 23 November 1923, and there was initially some debate over
whether or not this ban should continue in force. Seeckt wanted it to be main-
tained, whereas Severing was in favour of its being lifted, and it was Severing
who as Prussian minister of the interior eventually prevailed, with the result
that the bans on all three parties were lifted at the same time as the military
state of emergency. For the present, however, open-air public gatherings were
as a rule still proscribed. Not until 25 October 1924 was the civilian state of
emergency lifted.
By February 1924 the conflict between the Reich and Bavaria had officially
been settled. Under the terms of an agreement dated 14 February 1924, the
regional commander of the Reichswehr in Bavaria could be recalled only with
the agreement of the regional government. The wording of the oath of alle-
giance to the army and navy was also changed so as to include a pledge of
loyalty to the recruit’s home state, thereby settling the question of the use of
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 235

Reichswehr troops by the government in Munich. Four days later Kahr resigned
as general state commissar, Lossow as commander in chief in Bavaria. Their
unconstitutional actions in the autumn of 1923 had no legal consequences
whatsoever.
The dissidents who had taken part in the putsch on 8/9 November 1923
were sentenced on 1 April 1924, when the People’s Court in Munich acquitted
Ludendorff of the charge of high treason. Five other leaders of the putsch,
including Ernst Röhm, who went on to organize the National Socialists’ SA
brigades, were sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and a fine of 100
marks. Together with three of his co-conspirators, Hitler himself received a
five-year sentence and a fine of 200 marks. All the prisoners, however, were
eligible for parole after only six months, with the result that Hitler was released
from Landsberg Prison at Christmas 1924 after spending his time there writing
his programmatic and propagandist autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle).
In the case of all the accused, the court accepted the defence plea that they had
‘acted in a purely patriotic spirit and according to the noblest of selfless motives’,
believing that ‘they were compelled to act in order to save their country, merely
doing what leading figures in Bavaria had intended to do only a short time
earlier’.53 Morally speaking, the sentence and the justification for it amounted
to an acquittal, which is how they were interpreted in Bavaria and, indeed, in
the country as a whole.
The furore caused by the sentence passed on Hitler had not yet abated when
a further incident hit the headlines on 9 April 1924: the publication of the
report by Charles Dawes’s commission set up in January to examine the ques-
tion of Germany’s reparations. It was to have a lasting impact on all future
developments in the Weimar Republic. Its authors did not indicate the total
amount that Germany should pay, but they clearly set out from the assumption
that the figure of 132,000 million gold marks stipulated by the London ulti-
matum of May 1921 was excessive. In order not to endanger the country’s
currency, the report recommended that a reparations agent be appointed by
the creditor nations to arrange for ‘transfer protection’, a method of payment
designed to safeguard the external stability of the mark. The initial repayment,
or annuity, of 1,000 million marks would rise to 2,500 million within a time-
scale of five years. In order to meet French demands for guarantees, the German
railways were to become a limited company with certain obligations, its super-
visory board to include members of the creditor nations. (The same stipulation
applied to the German Federal Bank.) Further guarantees were to be provided
in the form of a number of other sources of federal revenue and an interest-
bearing mortgage on German industry to the tune of 5,000 million marks.
The restrictions on German sovereignty that were provided for under the
terms of the Dawes Plan were far-reaching and yet still far less burdensome
than the territorial guarantees demanded by France and Belgium when they
occupied the Ruhr in January 1923. And the Dawes Plan was also good news
236 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

for the German economy in another way inasmuch as a foreign loan of 800
million marks was to provide the basis of a new bank, the proceeds of which
were initially intended to finance only domestic payments to the Allies such as
material supplies and the costs of the occupation. But behind the provision lay
the prospect of future American credits and investments, a prospect that had a
stimulating effect on the country’s economy. Germany had been one of the
leading markets for American exports before 1914 and could now bank on the
fact that the United States had recognized the opportunities that lay in dealing
with a country which, however much it may have needed capital, had a highly
efficient economy.
The Dawes Plan was America’s contribution to the stabilization of the
German economy. Such an act was designed to demonstrate that the world’s
most powerful economy was finally acknowledging its sense of responsibility
towards the rest of the world, a responsibility so successfully denied by
American isolationists when they had voted against the League of Nations in
1919. Another contribution to German stability that was made at this time
came from a very different quarter – the Soviet Union. Lenin had died after a
long illness on 21 January 1924. (He had played no part in the decisions that
led to the ‘German October’ uprising.) He was replaced as his country’s most
powerful leader by the party official whom he had most mistrusted on account
of his coarseness and capriciousness, so much so, indeed, that in a codicil to his
will dated 4 January 1923 he had explicitly instructed his comrades to relieve
Stalin of his post as secretary general of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union. As Stalin’s position grew stronger, so the desire for world revolution
grew markedly less pronounced in Moscow. Instead, Stalin focused on what
he termed ‘the growth of socialism in one country’, namely, the Soviet Union.
The improvised putsches that the Comintern had tried to stage in Germany,
most recently in the autumn of 1923, could not be reconciled with a motto that
Stalin officially proclaimed in 1925 but which he had already adopted before
this date.
Meanwhile, major political changes were also taking place in London and
Paris. In Great Britain the Labour Party and Liberals had triumphed over the
Conservatives in the elections to the lower house on 6 December 1923, and in
January 1924 the country had its first Labour prime minister in the person of
Ramsay MacDonald, who headed a minority cabinet at the mercy of the
Liberals. In the event MacDonald remained in office for only nine and a half
months, but this period witnessed the London conference of July and August
1924, when the Allies accepted the Dawes Plan and Germany was subsequently
invited to attend the proceedings. MacDonald, who was also the foreign secre-
tary, played a conciliatory role and contributed substantially to the successful
outcome of the talks and to the London Agreement that was based upon it.
In France Poincaré’s Bloc National lost its majority to the Cartel des
Gauches – an electoral pact of Socialists and bourgeois Radical Socialists – on
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 237

11 May 1924, when a new prime minister and foreign minister were appointed.
Tolerated by the Socialists, the Radical Socialist Édouard Herriot was an advo-
cate of German idealist philosophy, with the result that Germany might expect
a greater show of understanding from the new government than from its
various right-wing predecessors.
By the early months of 1924 it was clear that France’s attempt to change the
post-war order by force had failed. Germany may have been economically
weakened by the Ruhr conflict, but thanks to American intervention it was
now politically stronger. Between November 1923 and April 1924 the post-war
period in Europe effectively came to an end, and it was impossible not to see
that there was now a new, albeit relative, stability not only in Germany but also
in the relations between the leading European states.

Right Against Left: Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic

A certain stabilization in economic and political conditions was a necessary
precondition for the Goldene Zwanziger (Golden Twenties) – the term was not
in fact coined until the following decade, when it sprang from a spirit of dewy-
eyed nostalgia. In the United States, prosperity returned in 1922. Only later did
Europe follow suit, while it was not until the winter of 1923/4 that the Germans
again felt anything like firm ground beneath their feet. The period is nowadays
associated with the international triumph of American jazz, the Charleston
and the shimmy, the dances of Josephine Baker and the films of Charlie
Chaplin. We also think of the montages of the Dadaists, art deco, the deliberate
breaking of taboos by artists critical of society such as George Grosz and surre-
alist writers like André Breton and Louis Aragon. Other salient features of the
time include mass consumerism, aggressive advertising and functional archi-
tecture, the heyday of the culture associated with the labour movement and the
breakthrough of a new and more permissive sexual morality.
The term ‘Weimar culture’ has long been used to describe the German
variant of the spirit of the 1920s, and yet the incessant questioning of tradi-
tional values, which the political right saw as a sign of cultural decline, had
started well before 1918: as Peter Gay has noted,54 the ‘Weimar style’ predated
Weimar. This is certainly true of the revolutionary Expressionist movement in
painting, literature and the theatre, a movement whose origins can be traced
back to the first decade of the twentieth century. And it is also true of the no
less revolutionary shift to atonality in music as well as the great revolutions in
science, in Freudian psychoanalysis, in Einstein’s theory of relativity and the
sociology of Max Weber. All of the pioneering studies associated with these
disciplines date from the years before 1914. Even the ‘New Objectivity’ that
displaced Expressionism in every branch of the arts after 1923 can be traced
back to the pre-war period. Walter Gropius, who in 1926 designed the Bauhaus
in Dessau and created a model of the new functional aesthetics that was reviled
238 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

as much as it was admired, had already developed his style before the First
World War. In short, all the constituent features of Weimar culture were already
in place when the Republic came into being. But the change of political regime
had a liberating effect, opening up opportunities to innovative spirits that they
had not enjoyed under the old system and permitting them to achieve a more
widespread impact that allowed ‘Weimar’ to be seen retrospectively as a large-
scale experiment in classical modernism.
In terms of culture in its widest sense, it was Berlin that was the capital of
Europe in the 1920s. Here, after 1918, modernism seemed almost literally to
explode into life. Avant-garde artists from Europe and America were repeat-
edly drawn to either Berlin or Paris, the latter continuing a tradition for cutting-
edge experimentation that had been established before 1914. Berlin was the
first city to articulate ideas that later became a trend elsewhere. Jews played a
leading role in the cultural life of the German capital, whether in journalism,
the cinema, the theatre or the cabaret, and it was this aspect in particular that
turned the new Berlin into the quintessential embodiment of all that conserva-
tive Germany hated about the state of Weimar. Intellectual Jews were mostly
liberal in their outlook or were on the left wing of the political spectrum – in
many cases on the extreme left wing. The ground to the right of the political
centre was in any case closed to them as this was occupied by anti-Semites.
Anti-Semitism was almost always synonymous with anti-modernism, anti-
urbanism and anti-intellectualism. It was this that made Weimar culture an
elite project that was endangered from the outset, a culture that could vanish at
a moment’s notice.
The fate of the Bauhaus – that stronghold of modern architecture – is a
barometer that allows us to measure the pace of cultural and political reaction
in Germany. Originally based in Weimar, it had been obliged to move its head-
quarters in 1925 when the Thuringian parliament halved its grant to the insti-
tution, effectively making it impossible for it to continue to operate. (Since the
early months of 1924 Thuringia had been ruled by a bourgeois cabinet toler-
ated by the extreme right in the form of the Nationalist Socialist Bloc.) But
even in its new home in Dessau, where a Social Democrat prime minister held
office almost continuously from 1918 to May 1932, the Bauhaus remained a
thorn in the flesh of right-wing forces. When a housing settlement for workers
and employees of the Junkers Works in Dessau-Törten designed by Walter
Gropius was officially opened in 1929, the occasion prompted protests from
National Socialists and German Nationalists at the ‘Moroccan huts’ of the
‘nigger colony’.55 The attacks were triggered by the fact that the buildings did
not have pitched roofs in the German tradition but flat roofs typical of the
architecture of the New Objectivity.
Attempts to combat the spirit of the new age might also assume more high-
brow forms. In Germany as elsewhere in Europe, the intellectual right felt that
it was threatened by a levelling collectivism that privileged the mass over the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 239

individual. In 1927, three years before the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y
Gasset described the threat posed to civilization by ‘the mass man’, by the ‘intel-
lectual plebs’ and by a new barbarism, Martin Heidegger published his main
philosophical study Being and Time, in which he spoke of a ‘dictatorship of
the “they” ’:

The ‘they’ is there alongside everywhere, but in such a manner that it has
always stolen away whenever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because the
‘they’ presents every judgment and decision as its own, it deprives the
particular Dasein of its answerability. The ‘they’ can, as it were, manage to
have ‘them’ constantly invoking it. It can be answerable for everything most
easily, because it is not someone who needs to vouch for anything. It ‘was’
always the ‘they’ who did it, and yet it can be said that it has been ‘no one’.
In Dasein’s everydayness the agency through which most things come about
is one of which we must say that ‘it was no one’.56

No less current than the cliché of oppressive collectivism was the idea of a
corrosive pluralism that was destroying the parliamentary system and leading
to the disintegration of the state. In his 1926 foreword to the second edition of
his book The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, the lawyer Carl Schmitt
claimed that parliament was no longer a forum where arguments could be
openly and freely exchanged but only a place where vested interests collided.
Rational argument had been replaced by ideological polarization, with the
result that the present parliamentary system had lost the ability to produce any
sense of political unity:

In a few states, parliamentarism has already produced a situation in which

all public business has become an object of spoils and compromise for the
parties and their followers, and politics, far from being the concern of an
elite, has become the despised business of a rather dubious class of persons.57

In Germany, criticism of parliamentary democracy – the ‘rule of the inferior’

as invoked by the Young Conservative Edgar Jung in a widely read study in
1927 – was aided and abetted by the frequent crises and changes of government
that revealed the abiding legacy of monarchical constitutionalism. Even when
they put forward ministers, all parties regarded the government as their enemy,
just as the country’s leaders had been under the Kaiser, not as the executive
committee of the parliamentary majority that needed to be supported and
defended in the face of the opposition, an attitude that would have reflected the
logic of a parliamentary democracy. But doubts in the efficiency and relevance
of the parliamentary system were by no means restricted to Germany and
other recent democracies, most of which had been established after 1918. Such
doubts were also to be found in older democracies such as England and France,
240 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

and, as we shall see, they became worse at a later date than in central Europe
thanks to the world economic crisis of 1929. In every case the critics of the
ostensible decline of the parliamentary system contrasted that system with an
ideal picture that had never existed in real life: if ever a regime deserved to be
described as ‘government by corruption’, it was Walpole’s regime during the
early days of British parliamentary rule in the first half of the eighteenth
century.
Specifically German, by contrast, was another way of dealing ideologically
with the nation’s defeat in the First World War and the post-war crisis that
ensued, and this was the renaissance of the myth of the Reich. The first salvo
was fired in 1923 by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in his programmatically
titled book The Third Reich. The term had been coined by a twelfth-century
Italian theologian Gioachino da Fiore but only now was it launched on its
questionable political career. The first Reich was the Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation that had ended in 1806, while the second was Bismarck’s
Reich of 1871, which Moeller van den Bruck dismissed as an imperfect ‘inter-
mediary empire’. The third, conversely, was to be a pan-German empire that
would also incorporate Austria. The German nationalists were acclaimed as
‘the champions of the ultimate empire’:

It is always being prophesied. And yet that promise is never kept. It is

perfection, which can be reached only through imperfection. [. . .] There is
only One Reich, just as there is only One Church. Everything else that lays
claim to this name is a mere state or a community or a sect. There is only
The Reich.58

The German Empire as the power that would protect Latin Christianity had
from time immemorial been associated with the idea of salvation. According to
the myth of the German Reich, the Holy Roman Empire was identical to the
Roman Empire following its conversion to Christianity and, hence, to the kate-
chon, the force which according to St Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians
maintained the rule of the Antichrist. Among the writers and scholars who after
1918 contributed to the spread of the myth of the German Reich were many
associated with the poet Stefan George, notably George himself, as well as
Catholic thinkers, the proponents of the Conservative Revolution who influ-
enced public opinion around 1930 and, last but by no means least, the National
Socialists. According to this myth, the Germans had a historical mission, their
task being to play a leading role in the European struggle to resist the advance
not only of Bolshevism in the east but of democracy in the west.
Like many advocates of the ‘ideas of 1914’, the adherents of the Conservative
Revolution sought to reinterpret the term ‘socialism’ in an anti-Marxist and
anti-western sense. Oswald Spengler is best remembered as the author of the
two-volume Decline of the West, the two parts of which were published in 1918
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 241

and 1922 and immediately translated into several other languages. In 1919 he
published a further title, Prussianism and Socialism, in which he argued that
the great question that exercised the present-day world concerned the choice
between Prussian and English ideas, between socialism and capitalism, and
between state and parliament:

Prussiandom and socialism stand together against the inner England, against
the world-view that infuses our entire life as a people, crippling it and
stealing its soul. [. . .] The working class must liberate itself from the
illusions of Marxism. Marx is dead. As a form of existence, socialism is
just beginning, but the socialism of the German proletariat is at an end. For
the worker, there is only Prussian socialism or nothing. [. . .] For conserva-
tives, there is only conscious socialism or destruction. But we need to
liberate ourselves from the form of Anglo-French democracy. We have
our own.59

As interpreted by Spengler and other Conservative Revolutionaries, socialism

had nothing to do with the redistribution of property. Rather, it was a question
not so much of financial order as of financial attitudes, and in this regard there
were no fundamental differences between the Young Conservatives and the
National Socialists. And yet the latter really wanted a revolution, whereas the
former were merely playing with the idea of one. Before 1933 the Young
Conservative intellectuals were more sympathetic to the Italian Fascists than to
the German National Socialists, who struck them as excessively populist, not to
say vulgar, in their outlook.
But even describing the Conservative Revolutionaries as ‘Fascists’ is prob-
lematical. Fascists and National Socialists mobilized masses and used organ-
ized violence, whereas the agents of the ‘right-wing revolution’ discussed by the
sociologist Hans Freyer in his 1931 study remained within the sphere of influ-
ence of the educated public in all that they thought and wrote. This was the
audience they addressed with their writings; and this was the circle to which
they themselves belonged. Traditional conservatives regarded their natural
home as the German National People’s Party, differing from most Young
Conservatives in that the latter lost interest in restoring the monarchy once the
last Kaiser had fled to the Netherlands, preferring a state with a strong leader
that was structured according to profession and legitimized by a plebiscite but
at the same time under the rule of law.
As a rule, Young Conservatives were anti-Semitic but they regarded the
Jewish question as less important than the National Socialists did. Although
they were radical nationalists, their nationalism was less extreme than that of
the National Socialists, whose nationalism found classic expression in a piece
that Hitler wrote in early 1924 in an attempt to justify his failed putsch of 8/9
November 1923. In it the National Socialist leader wrote that
242 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Marxist internationalism can be broken only by means of a fanatically

extreme National Socialism of the highest social ethics and morality. We
cannot take the false gods of Marxism away from the people without giving
them a better god in return. [. . .] It is to the credit of Benito Mussolini that
he recognized this as clearly as he did and put that conviction into practice
with the greatest logical consistency by deciding that international Marxism
needed to be eradicated and by replacing it with fanatical national Fascism,
with the result that almost every Marxist organization in Italy has now been
disbanded.60

At about the same time as Hitler was committing these programmatic lines to
paper, a conference convened by the praesidium of the Executive Committee of
the Communist International was meeting in Moscow. Its aim was to examine
the lessons that could be learned from the failure of the ‘German October’
uprising. Karl Radek spoke of the ‘victory of Fascism over the November
Revolution’, but his thesis was rejected by Zinoviev, the secretary general of the
Communist International, who argued that since 1918 Germany had been
dominated by a ‘bloc’ in which the Social Democrats had assumed the role of
co-regents. It was, Zinoviev claimed, a ‘Fascist wing’, ‘a Fascist Social Democratic
Party’. A few months later, Stalin, too, described the Social Democrats as ‘the
moderate wing of Fascism’: social democracy and Fascism were ‘not antitheses
but twins’.61 This speech marked the birth of the doctrine of ‘Socialist Fascism’
that was to influence the actions of the Comintern and of the German
Communist Party during the final phase of the Weimar Republic.
Unlike the Social Democrats, the German Communists enjoyed a substan-
tial following among artists and intellectuals. George Grosz and the master of
the photographic montage, John Heartfield (whose real name was Helmuth
Herzfeld), are both said to have been members of the German Communist
Party from its very inception on 31 December 1918. Ten years later Communist
painters and sculptors founded ASSO, the Association of Revolutionary Artists,
while Communist writers formed the Union of Proletarian and Revolutionary
Writers, defining ‘proletarian and revolutionary literature’ as one ‘that wins the
hearts and minds of the working class and of the broad working masses, helping
them to prepare for the proletarian revolution and organizing their develop-
ment’. A further aim was to ‘win over the middle classes, whether they toil with
their hands or their brains, and enlist their support for the proletarian revolu-
tion or at the very least neutralize them’.62
By joining the Union of Proletarian and Revolutionary Writers, a number
of prominent contemporary authors proclaimed their allegiance to the afore-
mentioned goals. Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, Arnold Zweig and Ludwig
Renn all became members, as did Erich Weinert, Hans Marchwitza, Willi
Bredel, Johannes R. Becher and Friedrich Wolf. The Union’s journal, Linkskurve,
attempted on the one hand to reach out to an intellectual readership by
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 243

publishing theoretical articles by Georg Lukács criticizing the literary

Proletkult and by the Sinologist Karl August Wittfogel on Marxist aesthetics,
while at the same time holding competitions designed to foster novels and
plays aimed at a mass working-class audience.
Indeed, many of the writers and artists who nailed their colours to the
Communist Party’s mast were notable for their wish to reach as broad an audi-
ence as possible: Brecht, for example, helped to write the script for the first
German proletarian feature film, Kuhle Wampe, of 1931–2, while Hanns Eisler
wrote the music for it and Ernst Busch sang the moralizing ballads in it. The
‘Agitprop’ works of all these writers and artists were by no means limited to
targeting the bourgeoisie and the forces of reaction but also pilloried the Social
Democrats, the social grouping which, according to the Comintern’s prescrip-
tive definition of March 1931, was the ‘bourgeoisie’s principal support’.63
Independent left-wing intellectuals such as Kurt Tucholsky were not as
hostile to the Social Democrats as the Communists, but they made no attempt
to conceal their contempt. Tucholsky was the best-known contributor to the
left-wing periodical Die Weltbühne, and when the Social Democrats adopted a
new reformist programme in Görlitz in 1921, he dismissed the party delegates
as ‘a band of skat-playing brothers who have read Marx’. Five years later he
portrayed them as ‘modest radishes, red on the outside and white on the inside’.
For Tucholsky, the Social Democrats’ compulsive need to compromise when-
ever they were in government was ‘a matter of parliamentary routine’.64
The intellectuals who championed the Weimar Republic were generally
fully aware of its lack of internal stability. In October 1922, Thomas Mann, who
right up until the end of the war had defended the idea of the authoritarian
state, marked the sixtieth birthday of Gerhart Hauptmann by professing his
faith in the German Republic in a widely reported speech to a not entirely
sympathetic student audience in Berlin. And in late November 1926, by
which date he was living in Munich, he expressed his anger and sadness at the
way relations between Munich and Berlin had taken a turn for the worse since
the pre-war period. The occasion was an event convened by the German
Democratic Party. Before the war, he told his audience, Munich had been
democratic, Berlin military, but the situation was now the exact opposite:

We have felt shame at the refractory pessimism that the people in Munich
have used to offset the political insights of Berlin and the political longings
of an entire world. It is with dismay that we have seen its healthy and
cheerful blood poisoned by anti-Semitic nationalism and God knows what
other kinds of dark folly. We were forced to stand by while Munich was
decried not only in Germany itself but also in the wider world as a hotbed
of reaction, as the seat of all stubbornness and of the obstinate refusal to
accept the will of the age and we were obliged to listen while it was described
as a stupid city and, indeed, as the stupidest city of all.65
244 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Mann hoped to improve the situation by calling a spade a spade, an attitude he

shared with the academic champions of the Republic, for all that the latter were
no more than a minority among the upholders of German academe. Within
this minority, the largest group was formed by the ‘republicans by reason’ who
had turned their backs on the monarchy and accepted the new situation only
after mature consideration. Among their number were scholars such as the
Lutheran theologian Adolf von Harnack, the expert on constitutional law
Gerhard Anschütz and the historian Friedrich Meinecke. At a meeting of the
Association of Democratic Students in Berlin in early 1925 Meinecke recalled
the law under which the Weimar Republic had first come into existence:

The Republic is the great escape valve for the class struggle between workers
and bourgeoisie, it is the constitutional form of the social peace that exists
between them. [. . .] Social discord no longer exists between workers and
bourgeoisie in general, but the rift has shifted to the right and now passes
right through the bourgeoisie itself.66

Meinecke could also have argued that the rift had shifted both to the right and
to the left and that it passed through both the bourgeoisie and the workers, for
political divisions were now even less likely to coincide with class divisions.
Between the bourgeois ‘republicans by reason’ and the extreme right there was
a yawning gulf, but the same was true of the relationship between the Social
Democrats and the Communists. Both workers’ parties continued to use the
same terminology, but their interpretation of it could not have been more
different. For the Communists, the term ‘class struggle’, for example, implied a
deliberate attempt to exacerbate social conflict with the aim of fomenting the
proletarian revolution, whereas for the Social Democrats and the Free Trade
Unions it meant a pluralist policy dictated by the interests of the workers.
In German society in the Weimar Republic, as in other post-war European
societies, the bourgeoisie and nobility no longer set the tone to the extent that
they had done before the war. Post-war societies were more ‘proletarian’ than
their pre-war counterparts had been. In Germany there were particularly
obvious signs of the material decline of broad sections of the middle classes as
a result of inflation. The worsening economic situation went hand in hand with
a profound sense of personal shock at the loss of all that had previously
provided a sense of security, namely, a modest amount of wealth, the individu-
al’s ability to predict his or her future prospects and those of the next genera-
tion with some degree of certainty, and trust in the existing order and ultimately
in the state. The feeling of a threat ‘from below’ produced a defensive response
in the form of a mentality that merely served to deepen the differences between
the social classes. Grammar schools and universities remained class-orientated
institutions to which members of the working class struggled hard to gain
admittance. A ‘class bias to the legal system’ was not just a polemical slogan of
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 245

the left but a social and political reality. A ‘bourgeois bloc’ directed against the
Social Democrats was a goal championed by powerful forces within all the
bourgeois parties with the partial exception of the German Democratic Party.
But even after five turbulent years these forces had not yet gained complete
control of the field. There were still those who strove to reach an understanding
between the bourgeoisie and the workers. If it had not been so, then it would
have been impossible for governments of a grand coalition and, from April
1925, a Weimar coalition to maintain a grip on power in the largest German
state, Prussia. By the middle of the 1920s there were already signs of a return to
the ‘class compromise’ of 1918/19 and at the same time of developments that
tended, rather, to indicate a polarization of the political scene. Only one thing
was certain: any stabilization of the Weimar Republic after 1923 was no more
than relative when compared with the instability of the previous years. Internal
threats to democracy had not gone away completely but had merely faded into
the background.

Authoritarian Transformation (I): The New States of Poland,

Czechoslovakia and the Baltic Region
Germany was not the only new democracy in Europe. The term ‘Zwischen-
europa’ (literally ‘between Europe’) was coined by the Young Conservative
German journalist Giselher Wirsing in 1932 to describe the new democracies
between Germany and Russia that had either come into existence in the wake
of the First World War or that owed their independence to that conflict or, as
in the case of Poland, had succeeded in re-establishing their independence at
that time. All were democracies at least on paper, and yet only two of them –
Czechoslovakia and Finland – were able to survive as democracies beyond the
crises of the immediate post-war period. Sooner or later all the others were
transformed into more or less authoritarian states, although there were many
reasons for this change. Most of the new states were agricultural economies
with few industrial centres and no powerful urban bourgeoisie; few succeeded
in implementing the sort of land reforms that would have made an appreciable
difference to the hardships endured by local smallholders; in practically no
case was a satisfactory balance achieved in reconciling national differences;
and in every case the shift to a more authoritarian form of government repre-
sented a reaction to the twofold experience of an economic crisis and of polit-
ical instability.
The new states included one that did not even want to claim that status for
itself: the Republic of Austria. Here the three largest parties – the Social
Democrats, the Christian Socialists and the Pan-Germans – all wanted their
country to unite with Germany. Otherwise, there were only deep divisions
within the coalition government, which was made up of Social Democrats and
Christian Socialists and which came to power in March 1919. The Social
246 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Democrats were centralists who strove for a new type of society based on the
notion of common property and were eager to grant the workers’ councils that
had been set up in 1918/19 a leading role in controlling the people’s militia,
whereas the Christian Socialists were federalists who wanted to maintain the
status quo and reduce the socialist influence on the military. The grand coali-
tion under the Social Democrat Karl Renner finally foundered on the question
of the future of the soldiers’ councils and ended on 10 June 1920, when it was
replaced by a government elected by proportional representation and headed
by the Christian Socialist historian Michael Mayr, who had previously been the
minister for constitutional and administrative reform. It included members of
both parties, together with a number of ministers with no political affiliations
chosen by a consensus between the two partners in the coalition.
The new cabinet’s most pressing task was the ratification of the federal consti-
tution that had been drafted by Hans Kelsen, a Viennese expert on constitutional
law. It established a federal state with a two-chamber system of government
consisting of a National Council elected by universal equal suffrage and a
Bundesrat, or Federal Council, in which the eight regional governments of
Burgenland, Carinthia, Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Salzburg, Styria, Tyrol
and Vorarlberg were all represented. Even though it was a part of Lower Austria,
the federal capital, Vienna, enjoyed special status, being treated as an autono-
mous region in the Bundesrat. (A change to the constitution on 30 July 1925
meant that the city acquired the same rights as all the other regions.) The two
chambers together elected the head of state – the federal president – at a joint
session: not until 7 December 1929, following a further change to the constitu-
tion, was the president elected by the people in keeping with the German model.
The Constituent National Assembly adopted the law enshrining the new consti-
tution on 1 October 1920. It came into force on 10 November.
Elections to the National Council were held on 17 October 1920, when the
Christian Socialists won eighty-five seats, the Social Democrats sixty-nine, the
Pan-Germans twenty-one and the German Peasants’ Party seven. The former
foreign minister Ottokar Czernin was elected as a ‘Bourgeois Democrat’. The
cabinet, which was made up of Christian Socialists and Independents, was
once again headed by Michael Mayr, but he was forced to resign on 1 June
1921, when the Pan-Germans withdrew their support. The reason for this
change of heart on the part of the country’s third-largest party was an extremely
unpopular measure by the government which, responding to intense pressure
from the Allies, had banned an unofficial plebiscite in Styria on the question of
its annexation by the German Reich, a vote in which an equally high number
of yes votes was expected as had been the case in the recent plebiscites in the
Tyrol and Salzburg, where around 99 per cent of the local populations had
opted to become part of Germany. Mayr was replaced by Johann Schober, an
Independent who had been chief of the Viennese police and now headed a
cabinet of bourgeois bureaucrats.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 247

But Schober, too, was fated to spend only a few months in office, for the
increasing devaluation of the Austrian currency had persuaded the Christian
Socialists and Pan-Germans of the need to act quickly and form a stable
government sustained by a solid parliamentary majority. The leader of the
Christian Socialists, Ignaz Seipel, was elected the new chancellor on 31 May
1922. His cabinet included ministers from both the main parties. In October
1922, under the terms of the Geneva Protocols, he received a guaranteed loan
of 650 million gold crowns from Great Britain, France, Italy and Czechoslovakia,
the use of which would be monitored by a commissioner general to be
appointed by the League of Nations. In return the country agreed not to forfeit
its independence for twenty years and to maintain public order by means of
extraordinary powers ratified by parliament. The Social Democrat opposition
protested with all the vigour it could muster at this abandonment of its pan-
German aspirations, while the rigorous economies implemented by Seipel’s
government failed to achieve their desired result. The Christian Socialists
emerged as victors from the elections to the National Council in October 1923,
winning eighty-two seats against the sixty-eight of the Social Democratic Party
of German Austria.
But if the Social Democrats were powerless on a federal level, they partly
made up for this state of affairs by dint of the position that they had in the
meantime acquired in the Austrian capital, where the city was known as ‘Red
Vienna’ throughout the 1920s, a centre of the European workers’ movement
with exemplary welfare organizations and housing developments such as the
fortress-like Karl-Marx-Hof in the district of Döbling, the largest single
complex of residential buildings in the world. The class conflict between prole-
tarian and bourgeois Austria became dramatically worse in Vienna in the
second half of the 1920s. An important stage in the process of political radicali-
zation was the Social Democrats’ party conference in Linz in November 1926,
when the party adopted a programme that sounded more extreme than it was
actually intended to be. In order to meet halfway the demands of its left wing,
the party announced that if the working class emerged victorious from the
forthcoming elections and if the bourgeoisie opposed the idea of social change,
then it was prepared to break down that resistance by all the means available to
a dictatorship.
Such radical remarks on the part of the Social Democrats were a boon to
the bourgeois parties, allowing them to contest the elections in the spring of
1927 on a single ticket as an anti-Marxist ‘bourgeois bloc’. The results of the
election on 24 April turned out to be a disappointment for the Christian
Socialists, who lost nine seats when compared to 1923, while the Social
Democrats won three, giving them a total of seventy-one, only two seats fewer
than the Christian Socialists. Even so, Seipel was able to form a ‘bourgeois bloc’
government with the help of the Pan-Germans and the Rural Federation (the
‘Landbund’).
248 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

By this date both camps had long since had an armed wing: the Social
Democrats in the form of the Republican Defence League that had been created
in 1923, the bourgeois parties with a whole array of defence leagues equipped
with arms from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The two sides
clashed in Schattendorf in the Burgenland at the end of January 1927, a bloody
confrontation that was to have serious repercussions for both sides, when
members of the right-wing Association of Frontline Soldiers fired on workers
from the Republican Defence League. Among their victims were a war veteran
and a child. On 14 July 1927 the three men who were accused of the crime were
acquitted by a jury in Vienna, triggering mass demonstrations the very next
day by socialist workers, all of whom were determined to vent their anger at
such a blatant example of class bias within the legal system. After a number of
bloody clashes with the police, a handful of protesters set fire to the Palace of
Justice in the Ringstraße, whereupon Seipel’s government armed the police
with army carbines in an attempt to clear the square in front of the building.
When the protesting workers began to throw stones, the police responded with
gunfire. At the end of the fighting, eighty-five protesters and four policemen
lay dead. The number of injured ran into the hundreds.
For the Social Democrats this outbreak of anarchy and violence in the
summer of 1927 was a serious setback. A nationwide one-day general strike
and a transport strike that ended after three days were symbolic acts designed
to demonstrate that party and trade unions were still in control of the work-
force. But their chances of power-sharing were permanently reduced after the
events of 15 July 1927. In a way the Social Democrats were paying the price for
their specifically ‘Austro-Marxist’ lurch to the left, a move that had enabled
them to thwart their Communist rivals and prevent them from growing in size
and influence. It was all too clear, after all, that their openness to the sort of
left-wing ideas to which the party had paid tribute in the revolutionary-
sounding statements in its Linz programme was among the deeper causes of
the Viennese debacle. Among the consequences of 15 July was the impetus
given to right-wing paramilitary organizations within Austria, all of which
enjoyed a considerable boost in their membership at this time, as well as an
increase in the number of their donations from employers both at home and
abroad, notably from Italy and Hungary.
Three years later, on 9 November 1930, elections were held for the National
Council – as it turned out, they were the last to be held during the First
Republic, although no one could have known this at the time. The bourgeois
camp entered the campaign rent by internal divisions. The former Independent
chancellor, Johann Schober, who had once again headed the government
between September 1929 and September 1930, had formed around himself a
Schober bloc that included the Pan-Germans. Together they won nineteen
seats. The Christian Socialists lost ground, returning sixty-six representatives,
seven fewer than in 1927, while the ‘Homeland Bloc’ headed by one of the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 249

leaders of one of the defence organizations, Rüdiger von Starhemberg, returned

eight deputies. The largest party, with seventy-two rather than seventy-one
seats, was the Austrian Social Democrat Party, which was able, therefore, to
nominate the first president of the National Council in the person of Karl
Renner.
But the Social Democrats were as far away as ever from governing the
country. The country’s president, Wilhelm Miklas, invited the head of the
regional government of Vorarlberg, the Christian Socialist Otto Ender, to form
a cabinet. Schober became vice-chancellor and foreign minister, retaining both
posts in June 1931 when Ender was replaced by another Christian Socialist, the
former head of the regional government of Lower Austria, Karl Buresch. As
foreign minister, Schober also bore much of the responsibility for the failure of
a project that he finally set in motion in March 1931 with his German counter-
part, Julius Curtius, who was the foreign minister in Heinrich Brüning’s first
cabinet: this was the plan for an Austro-German customs union.
Unsurprisingly, the project foundered on the determined opposition of the
Western Powers, especially France. At the request of Great Britain, the Council
of the League of Nations asked the International Court in The Hague to assess
the legality of the plan on 19 May 1931. The Court delivered its verdict on 5
September 1931, arguing by eight votes to seven that the customs union ran
counter to the Geneva Protocol of 1922, which had been drawn up to regulate
Austria’s economic and financial reconstruction. In short, it was unconstitu-
tional. Two days earlier Curtius and Schober had announced that they would
not pursue the plan, a decision that was the price that Austria had to pay for
international loans. If it had not received this help, the collapse of the Austrian
Credit-Anstalt Bank on 11 May 1931 resulting from the withdrawal of short-
term French loans would have triggered a major economic catastrophe and led
directly to the bankruptcy of the entire country. Even after it had received these
foreign loans, Austria continued to languish in a state of deep economic depres-
sion: until 1938 the unemployment rate was invariably above 20 per cent of the
working population as a whole.
By late January 1932 Buresch’s cabinet had been undermined by the mutual
mistrust between the Christian Socialists and the Pan-Germans, who were the
most eloquent advocates of the customs union. Buresch remained in office
until the end of May as the head of a bourgeois minority government. His
second term in office coincided with the elections to the Landtag on 24 April
1931, when the National Socialists recorded a marked increase in their share of
the vote and entered parliament for the first time. Local elections that were
held on the same day in Carinthia and Styria likewise saw National Socialist
gains. Buresch was replaced on 20 May 1932 by the former Christian Socialist
agriculture and forestry minister, Engelbert Dollfuß, whose cabinet included
members of the Rural Federation and Homeland Bloc, giving his coalition a
single-vote majority over the Social Democrat and Pan-German opposition.
250 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

On 15 July 1932, under the terms of the Lausanne Protocol, the League of
Nations agreed to loan Austria the sum of 300 million schillings on condition
that it refrained from entering into any economic or political union with
Germany for a period of thirty years. The following month the agreement was
debated by the lower house, Dollfuß’s government surviving the vote by only
the narrowest of margins. In October he used the enabling act of 1917 – passed
as a wartime expedient and still in force fifteen years later – in order to avoid
the risks involved in the normal legislative process. It was a clear sign of the
crisis that now beset the parliamentary system and of the chancellor’s determi-
nation to place the affairs of state on a new, authoritarian basis.
On 4 March 1933, the presidium of the National Council unwittingly did
the government a favour when the Social Democrats forced Karl Renner to
resign in order for him to be able to vote with his party, something he was
prevented from doing as president. The move came in the wake of an argument
over the correct interpretation of a point of order during a vote on a planned
amnesty law. Since both of Renner’s acting representatives followed their presi-
dent’s lead, the National Council was no longer capable of acting. Dollfuß saw
in this his chance to continue to rule without the approval of parliament. He
prevented the constitutional court from intervening by forcing the resignation
of all those judges who supported the Christian Socialists, thereby paralysing
the country’s Supreme Court. On 31 March 1933 the government banned the
Republican Defence League and transferred the functions of the auxiliary
police force to those sections of the Home Guard that were deemed loyal to the
government.
The actions of Dollfuß’s government amounted to nothing less than a coup
d’état. Its reliance on the Home Guard units under Starhemberg and his ally
Emil Fay that were supported by Fascist Italy implied a rapprochement with
Mussolini’s state in terms of the country’s domestic and foreign policies. By
March 1933, only weeks after Hitler had come to power in Germany, Austria
began to witness the growth of an authoritarian system decried by its critics as
‘Austro-Fascist’ but more clearly dependent on the Catholic Church than its
Italian model, not least in its appeal to Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical
Quadragesimo anno as the basis of an ideal Christian corporate state. But only
certain sections of the Home Guard movement had sided with Dollfuß. Both
the emphatically Pan-German Styrian Home Guard and the Pan-German
People’s Party reacted to events in Germany by forming an alliance with the
Austrian National Socialists, who in the local elections in Innsbruck in late
April 1933 won 41.2 per cent of the vote, making them the largest party.
The Social Democrats seemed paralysed. Following Renner’s resignation
they had ensured that the National Council no longer had any part to play in
politics and in doing so provided Dollfuß’s government with a chance to side-
line parliament for the foreseeable future. In the circumstances active resist-
ance would have been an act of democratic self-defence designed to salvage the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 251

constitution and, as such, entirely legitimate: if there were ever the prospect of
preventing the establishment of a dictatorship, this was it. The fact that the
Social Democrats accepted not only the putsch but also its immediate conse-
quence – the ban on the Republican Defence League – without lifting a finger
to avert it was due no doubt to the lingering trauma of July 1927 and to the
continuing fear of a renewed outbreak of undiscriminating mass violence. By
the time that the Social Democrats finally announced a policy of armed resist-
ance at their party conference in October 1933, their threat sounded distinctly
hollow. And by February 1934, when Austria’s socialist workers did indeed
have recourse to arms, it was too late, for by then the Austro-Fascist regime
already had at its disposal all the means of power needed to suppress the
insurrection.

Until 1918 Austria and Hungary had been linked together in a personal and
real union. The development in the direction of an increasingly authoritarian
state began at a much earlier date in Hungary than in the former heartland of
the Cisleithanian half of the empire. The course was set on 1 March 1920, when
the commander in chief of the Hungarian army, Admiral Miklós Horthy of
Nágybánya, was elected imperial regent. The Social Democrats had refused to
take part in the elections in January 1920, this being their way of protesting at
the ‘White’ terror that was itself a reaction to Béla Kun’s short-lived Communist
soviet dictatorship, with the result that all the parties to their right felt at home
together in parliament. As early as March Horthy proclaimed Hungary a
monarchy with a vacant throne. In 1921 Karl I, the last Habsburg emperor, who
had not, however, abdicated as the king of Hungary in November 1918, made
two failed attempts to enlist the support of sections of the army in order to win
back the crown, but Horthy had no wish to see the monarchy restored in the
spirit of the Habsburgs because such a restoration would inevitably have culmi-
nated in an Allied intervention. A law passed in October 1921 ended the house
of Austria’s right to the throne of Hungary once and for all.
The Treaty of Trianon meant that for Hungary there was no longer any
question of nationality in the narrower sense of the term, for nine-tenths of the
region’s inhabitants, including even the Roma, defined themselves as Magyars,
while barely 7 per cent gave German as their mother tongue. There remained
the problem of the Jews, who made up around 6 per cent of the population but
who comprised around half of the country’s lawyers and doctors, exerting
tremendous influence on trade and banking. The anti-Semitism that had
already been widespread in nineteenth-century Hungary was given a decisive
boost by the soviet dictatorship – the same was true of Bavaria. The Jews had
played a prominent role in the Communist-led government, and so they were
comprehensively suspected of plotting to overthrow the status quo and of being
the sworn enemies of the Hungarian people. Even under Count Pál Teleki – the
first of three counts to run the country between 1920 and 1932 – Hungary
252 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

began to drive Jews from the apparatus of state and to restrict their access
to higher education, leading to a reduction in the number of Jewish students
and academics.
There was no land reform worthy of the name. Although the poorest
farmers received a little additional land at the insistence of the Smallholders
Party, the rural economy, with its tiny farms, was hardly viable, while the larger
landowners remained unaffected by any such reforms, their social and political
power unbroken.
Count Teleki was succeeded in 1921 by Count István Bethlen, who devel-
oped a more tolerant attitude to the Social Democrats after the latter had
agreed not to foment dissent among civil servants or farmworkers and to
eschew political strikes and republican propaganda, both promises forming
part of a secret deal between Bethlen and the Social Democrats’ anti-
Communist leader, Károlyi Peyer. By 1922 Bethlen had managed to bring
together all the larger parties in the National Assembly and to create a united
party, but a new electoral law curtailed the right to vote to such a drastic extent
that only half the adult population still enjoyed that entitlement. And from
then on the principle of a secret ballot applied only to the larger towns, not to
the rural constituencies.
The results of the elections in May and June 1922 turned out to be every-
thing that the government could have wished for: although there was a Liberal
and Social Democrat opposition and a free press, the position of Bethlen’s
government, which remained in office until 1931, was now unshakeable. The
Western Powers rewarded the country for its new political stability by
welcoming Hungary into the League of Nations in September 1922 and by
helping it to deal with its rampant inflation by granting it a loan in 1924. During
the years that followed, the Hungarian economy recovered, and the country
enjoyed a growth in industrialization that lasted until the world economic
crisis in 1929.
Hungary’s foreign policy was dictated in no small way by its desire to revise
the terms of the Treaty of Trianon. Bethlen began by demanding the return of
those territories that were home to a more or less purely Hungarian popula-
tion. Behind his demand lay an ambitious programme that had the support of
almost every party and social group: a return to the country’s pre-1914 borders.
Bethlen saw Fascist Italy as a possible partner in realizing his vision and signed
a friendship treaty with Mussolini in April 1927. He also approached Great
Britain, but London was unwilling to take a similar step.
Bethlen’s government came to an end in 1931, when Hungary came close to
going bankrupt in the wake of the world economic crisis. Bethlen’s successor,
Count Gyula Károlyi, fell from power in September 1932, when he failed to
find sufficient parliamentary support for his austerity measures. Horthy
replaced him with a former army captain, Gyula G=mb=s de Jákfa, who had
previously helped him to suppress Karl I’s second attempt to reclaim the throne
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 253

in October 1920 and who remained in office until his death in October 1936,
enjoying widespread support among the middle classes. The leader of the Party
of National Unity, he was an ardent nationalist and a rabid anti-Semite who
made no secret of his sympathy for Italian Fascism and, later, for German
National Socialism. In 1932 the battle to alter the terms of the Treaty of Trianon
became the ultimate goal of Hungarian politics.
The same policy was pursued by G=mb=s’s two successors, Koloman
Darányi and, from May 1938, Béla Imrédy. Imrédy was forced to resign in
February 1939, when it was rumoured that one of his great-grandmothers had
been Jewish. Count Pál Teleki returned as prime minister in May 1939 and
introduced strict anti-Semitic legislation, while also acting decisively against
the Hungarian followers of the German National Socialists, Ferenc Szálasi’s
Arrow Cross Party. His attempt to distance himself from the Third Reich was
to end tragically early in 1941: when, in the face of the prime minister’s deter-
mined opposition, Horthy and the country’s military leaders became accom-
plices to Hitler’s attack on the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Teleki
took his own life.

The years between the end of the First World War and the world economic
crisis witnessed the development of a yet more critical situation in the Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes than had been the case even in Hungary.
Internally, by far the most serious problem turned out to be the relations
between the Orthodox Serbs and the Catholic Croats, who had been lumped
together in the 1921 census as a single Serbo-Croat nation. They made up
around four-fifths of the total population, while the Slovenes comprised
8.5 per cent. There were also a handful of smaller German, Magyar and
Albanian minorities. (The Montenegrins, Macedonians and Muslim Bosnians
were not counted separately but included with the Serbo-Croats.) Under the
terms of the electoral law of July 1920, all men over the age of twenty-one were
entitled to vote regardless of their level of literacy, which ranged from 91.2 per
cent in Slovenia to 16.2 per cent in Macedonia, with a nationwide average of
48.5 per cent. Proportional representation meant that the party system was
fragmented, making it difficult to form stable majority governments. Between
1920 and 1928 there were no fewer than twenty-eight cabinets in Belgrade, no
parliament succeeding in staying in office for the full four-year term.
It was the centrist parties that emerged as the victors from the elections in
November 1920, while the federalists were the losers. The kingdom’s constitu-
tion was adopted on 28 June 1921 by a narrow Serbian majority. Since the
federalist Croat Peasants’ Party had refused to take part in the discussions, its
wording proved more unitarian than the make-up of the country’s parliament,
the Skupgtina, might have led observers to expect. The former, largely histor-
ical administrative units of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Dalmatia,
Croatia-Slavonia, Slovenia and Vojvodina were replaced by administrative
254 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

regions, or oblasti, that were modelled on the French départements and had no
independent rights. The most militant opposition party was the Communist
Party, with fifty-eight seats out of a total of 401. They were the third largest
party after the Democrats and Old Radicals. After its followers had made
several attempts to assassinate members of the government, all Communist
organizations were banned on 3 August 1921 and Communist members of
parliament barred from holding office. Shortly afterwards, on 16 August, King
Peter died and was succeeded by his son, the prince regent, who became King
Alexander I.
By November 1925 it seemed as if an agreement between Serbia and Croatia
was within reach, when the leader of the banned Croat Peasants’ Party, Stjepan
Radi1, entered prime minister Nikola Pagi1’s cabinet as education minister, but
the differences between the centrists and the federalists were impossible to
reconcile, and in February 1926 Radi1 fell out with Pagi1’s successor, Nikola
Uzunovi1. By February 1927 his party was no longer represented in the govern-
ment. On 20 June 1928 a member of the Serbian Old Radicals shot three depu-
ties from the Croat Peasants’ Party and seriously wounded two others inside
the parliament building. Among the dead was Stjepan Radi1’s brother, Pavle,
while Radi1 himself was among the injured. He died of his injuries on 8 August.
From then on the Croats no longer attended any parliamentary sessions. On
6 January 1929 – the day of the Orthodox Christmas festivities – King Alexander
drew the most radical conclusion from the recurring government crises and
dissolved parliament, at the same time suspending the constitution of 1921. An
apolitical general, Pera yivkovi1, was appointed prime minister, ushering in an
new phase in the history of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, namely,
a monarchical dictatorship kept in place by military backing.
Relations between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, as it was officially known
after October 1929, and its neighbours continued to be strained. Belgrade and
Sofia were at loggerheads over the question of Macedonia, which had been
divided up between Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria following the Second Balkan
War of 1913. Meanwhile Hungary had laid a historical claim to Vojvodina,
which was principally settled by Magyars, while the South Slavs had their eyes
on large tracts of Albania along its Mediterranean coast, only for their ambi-
tions to be thwarted by a conference of Allied ambassadors in November 1921,
when Albania’s borders were settled. Italy had secured areas in Istria and on the
Dalmatian coast that were inhabited by powerful Slovene and Croat minorities
totalling around half a million in all. The kingdom had agreed to uphold the
rights of its own minorities in a treaty drawn up in 1919: the ‘Little Entente’
masterminded by the French and signed by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes on the one hand and by Czechoslovakia on the other was intended to
provide protection from the aspirations of Hungarian revisionists, and in June
1921 a similar treaty followed with Romania, a country which for its part had
formed an alliance with Czechoslovakia two months earlier.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 255

The new kingdom was willing to negotiate with Italy, agreeing under the
terms of the Treaty of Rapallo that Rijeka, or Fiume, should become a free state
and that Zadar, or Zara, be ceded to the peninsula. It did not insist on a treaty
to protect the local minorities similar to the one granted to ethnic Italians
living within its territories. In January 1924, by which date Mussolini was
already in power, the Treaty of Rome was signed between Belgrade and Rome,
agreeing to Fiume’s annexation by Italy in return for which Belgrade received a
part of the former free state, including the port at Porto Baross. Both states also
agreed to work together for a period of five years, to retain the status quo and
to maintain their respective neutrality in the event of an unprovoked attack.
The treaty was accepted by the Skupgtina by only the slenderest of margins
– the same was true of a later treaty with Italy on the matters of trade and ship-
ping. Several additional technical agreements known as the Nettuno
Conventions encountered such widespread public opposition that the govern-
ment initially withdrew them. Mussolini reacted by signing a treaty with
Albania in November 1926 and a friendship and arbitration treaty with
Hungary in April 1927, both treaties being seen in Belgrade as provocative
gestures and as a way of isolating the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
As a result the Treaty of Rome was not renewed when it expired in January
1929, even though the government had in the meantime ratified the Nettuno
Conventions. In November 1927 the kingdom had signed a pact of alliance
with France, which to a certain extent compensated it for the loss of Italy as
a partner.
By the summer of 1926, relations with Bulgaria were similarly being
compromised by a series of attacks by a group of Macedonian guerrillas, the
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, that in 1927 led to the
complete closure of the border between the two countries, and it was not until
1934 that the situation improved, when a number of army officers mounted a
coup in Sofia and the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization was
removed from the scene. As for Greece, Belgrade was unable to persuade
Athens to agree to its demands for a sovereign territory in Salonika and an
agreement to protect ethnic minorities. An arbitration treaty was signed by
Belgrade and Athens in March 1929, two months after the monarchy had
become a dictatorship, but it contained no mention of these aims. Nor did it list
any obligations associated with the alliance. In February 1934 the existing
bilateral agreements between Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece and Turkey were
renegotiated as the Balkan Pact between all four countries. From then on the
signatories were committed to assist one another if one of the Balkan states
were to take part in a non-Balkan attack on another Balkan state.
Among the socio-political problems that needed to be addressed, the
agrarian question was no less urgent in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes than it was elsewhere. In May 1922 parliament agreed to compensate
the larger landowners for the expropriation of their lands, a move that affected
256 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the former Habsburg regions first and foremost. A quarter of the land area
acquired in this way was newly settled, a further area of woodland became
the property of the state, and the remaining half was transferred to tenant
farmers. In this way the problem of agricultural overpopulation and of the
fragmentation of the land into farms too small to be financially viable remained
as far away from a settlement as in other parts of south-eastern and central
eastern Europe.
Alexander I’s personal dictatorship began in 1929 with his abolition of press
freedom, his ban on all political parties and his attempt to form a single South
Slav nation by creating larger administrative regions – banonina – and by
rigorously centralizing the state. From October 1929 the state’s new name was
the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a change designed to further this same goal of
greater centralization. But Alexander’s plans were far from all being realized:
his aim of introducing the Latin script and Gregorian calendar to the whole of
his kingdom foundered on opposition from Serbia’s Orthodox Church, with
the result that the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets continued to exist side by side,
as did the Gregorian and Julian calendars, meaning that the major Christian
feasts were still celebrated on different days in different parts of the country.
The old antagonism between the Eastern and Western Church and between
those parts of the new state that reflected Byzantine influence and those still
marked by Habsburg history went deeper and continued to leave a more
powerful impression than the people responsible for building a single Yugoslav
nation were willing to accept.
In September 1931 Alexander announced a new constitution which
enshrined some of the older basic rights but perpetuated the ban on political
parties and at the same time forbade the formation of religious, national and
regional organizations. Secret ballots were abandoned. And elections to the
Skupgtina were henceforth conducted on the basis of a list of national candi-
dates with a unified minimum number of backers in every constituency, a
change that lent massive support to the strongest list, which now received two-
thirds of the seats. At the same time it gave broad scope to electoral fraud. In
addition to the National Assembly the new constitution also provided for a
Senate whose members would in part be appointed by the king and in part be
elected by the people.
Even under Alexander’s personal dictatorship, the greatest challenge
remained Croatian nationalism. At the beginning of 1929 the Zagreb lawyer
Ante Paveli1 founded an underground terrorist organization that was initially
called Domabran (Home Guard), then Ustaga (Uprising) and that demanded
the complete independence of Croatia and, with it, the break-up of Yugoslavia.
In its radicalism and ideology it was no less extreme than the Internal
Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Backed by Fascist Italy and Hungary,
the supporters of Ustaga also sought to pursue their goals by means of foreign
propaganda, while in Croatia itself they undertook a number of bomb attacks,
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 257

starting in 1931. One such attack was launched on the Orient Express. An
attempt to foment an uprising in the summer of 1932 failed through lack of
support among the peasants. The group also planned to assassinate Alexander
I during his visit to Zagreb in December 1933, but in the event the assassin
ultimately chose not to carry out his attempt on the king’s life.
Not until 9 October 1934 did these Croatian extremists achieve their goal
when they murdered both Alexander and the French foreign minister Louis
Barthou in Marseilles. The assassin was a member of the Internal Macedonian
Revolutionary Organization acting on the orders of a group of Ustaga exiles.
Alexander was succeeded by his son, the underage Peter II, who was to be the
last king of Yugoslavia. The actual task of running the country passed to the
government, which after 1935 was led by the businessman and politician Milan
Stojadinovi1. Since France resisted Belgrade’s demands that Italy and Hungary
be punished for supporting the Ustaga movement and since the Council of the
League of Nations was unable to agree on any sanctions against either of these
two countries, Yugoslavia began to draw closer to a third country on which it
was now increasingly dependent from an economic point of view: National
Socialist Germany.
Under Stojadinovi1, too, Croatian nationalism remained the most difficult
problem to solve. In the elections in May 1935 the Ma/ek List named after the
leader of the Croat Peasants’ Party and Stjepan Radi1’s successor, Vladko
Ma/ek, won 35.4 per cent of the vote, while the government list won 62 per
cent. But because the electoral law favoured the ruling party, the latter returned
301 members to parliament, the opposition only sixty-seven. Ma/ek and
his supporters responded by boycotting the Skupgtina. In the elections in July
1938 the Ma/ek List increased its share of the vote to 40.2 per cent but won
even fewer seats than three years previously, namely, sixty-one out of a total
of 371. Under the terms of the constitution of June 1921 all men and women
over the age of twenty-one had the right to vote as long as they enjoyed all
civil rights.
But there were also compelling reasons why the makers of Yugoslavia’s
foreign policy felt a greater need to come to some arrangement with the move-
ment for Croat independence. Chief of these reasons was Austria’s annexation
by the German Reich in March 1938, which meant that Germany and
Yugoslavia now shared a common border. It was Stojadinovi1’s successor,
Dragiga Cvetkovi1, who in August 1939 agreed to Ma/ek’s demands that
Croatia should become a banship with its own regional assembly and its own
government and with a ban at its head. The central government in Belgrade
lost some of its authority in consequence and was reshaped, Ma/ek taking
over as prime minister in Cvetkovi1’s government, while four members of his
party assumed important ministerial positions. Yugoslavia seemed to be set for
a shift in the direction of a multinational federation of independent states, but
in the event the country’s new identity could not be put to the test as the
258 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

outbreak of the Second World War prevented the ‘Sporazum’ – the agreement
reached by Cvetkovi1 and Ma/ek in August 1939 – from ever being fully
implemented.

Unlike Yugoslavia, Poland was not a recent creation. In the wake of the First
World War it regained the national independence that it had lost following the
third partition of the country in 1795. Poland had always been a part of the old
Latin West and, unlike Yugoslavia, it was not burdened by the continuing
schism between Rome and Byzantium. But in terms of its internal develop-
ment, it suffered a series of crises no less serious than those endured by most of
the other countries in eastern central and south-east Europe.
Poland’s new borders had already been established when the second elec-
tions to the Sejm were held on 5 and 12 November 1922. As in the previous
elections in January 1919, none of the parties contesting the election could
claim a clear parliamentary majority. The political left, which included the
Wyzwolenie Polish Peasants’ Party as well as the Socialists, lost a considerable
number of votes, while the right in the form of the National Democrats and
two smaller parties won a much-increased share of the vote. The parties that
had previously occupied the middle ground had shrunk to next to nothing.
Only if the nationalist minorities, which between them had won around a fifth
of all the seats, were to work together could a majority government be formed.
The first task facing the Senate and the Sejm was the election of a president.
The country’s former president, Józef Pi5sudski, declined to put forward his
name as a candidate because under the terms of the constitution of 17 March
1921, the head of state had little real authority. Nor did he have any wish to be
dependent on his enemies, the National Democrats. Gabriel Narutowicz, a
member of the Polish Peasants’ Party, was finally elected in the fifth round of
voting on 9 December 1922. He owed his election to non-Polish and, above all,
Jewish deputies, triggering a violent anti-Semitic hate campaign on the polit-
ical right that cost him his life: on 16 December, only a week after his election,
he was assassinated by a fanatical National Democrat supporter. The two
chambers elected Stanis5aw Wojciechowski his successor on 20 December. An
undistinguished politician from the right wing of the Polish Peasants’ Party,
Wojciechowski remained in office until May 1926 and, as a former Socialist,
enjoyed cordial relations with Pi5sudski. Conversely, it was impossible to find a
parliamentary majority for a prime minister, so that on 17 December the leader
of the Sejm finally invited General W5adys5aw Sikorski to form a small cross-
party cabinet that was tolerated by the Sejm for only five months.
On 28 May 1923 the leader of the right-wing Piast Peasants’ Party, Wincenty
Witos, who had already been prime minister in 1921–2, succeeded in forming
a centre-right cabinet. Pi5sudski took the opportunity to resign his posts as
chief of the general staff and president of the Inner War Council and to retire
to his estates at Sulejówek. Witos’s second cabinet marked the start of a period
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 259

of parliamentary supremacy that was to last until Pi5sudski’s military putsch in

May 1926. These three years saw three different cabinets, for all that they were
invariably made up of bureaucrats. Domestic issues preoccupied public interest
in the form of the fight against inflation, the agrarian question and the matter
of nationality.
The government led by the financier W5adys5aw Grabski succeeded in
stabilizing the country’s currency. The z5oty was introduced in April 1924 and
initially fixed at parity with the Swiss franc. Its purchasing power and exchange
rate were to be overseen by the Bank Polski, which in principle was inde-
pendent. Conversely, agrarian reform remained extremely modest in scope,
since Polish landowners had a highly effective advocate in the powerful polit-
ical right. Once the Land Reform Act came into force in December 1925 it was
really only the German landowners in the western parts of the country who
had to hand over any land, but this was insufficient to create a broadly based
class of medium-sized farmers, so Polish agriculture continued to be marked
by the contrast between the larger landowners who owned vast tracts of land
and also exported their produce and the subsistence farming of smallholders
whose working methods were simply not financially viable. The Poland of the
interwar years remained an agrarian country that saw few real signs of indus-
trialization. And it continued to be beset by a problem typical of all societies in
eastern central Europe, that of the fragmentation of property caused by the
divisions of the country’s real estate and rural overpopulation.
Non-Polish minorities were granted the same rights as the rest of the popu-
lation under the 1921 constitution, but in practice the political right regarded
the parliamentary representatives of national minorities as inferior, no matter
whether they were Germans, Jews or Lithuanians. In the case of Ukrainians
and White Ruthenians, there were signs of an attempt at assimilation, but this
was made more difficult by the emergence of a powerful anti-Polish movement
in eastern Galicia that boycotted the 1922 elections with some success. The
Jews were viewed with extreme distrust by the National Democrats and by
other right-wing parties, including the Piast Peasants’ Party, and suffered all
manner of discrimination, while the Germans living in the areas around
Pozna- and Pomerania on the lower Vistula were encouraged to move to
Germany: more than half the Germans living there, around half a million in all,
took this step. Not one of the interwar governments included a minister from
a national minority, and the same was true of most of the top administrative
posts in the regions, whether voivodes (‘warlords’) or starostas (‘elders’). Polish
politicians sought to establish a homogeneous national state that was western
in character, an aim that could never be reconciled with the country’s de facto
ethnic variety.
Of paramount importance in terms of Poland’s foreign policy was its
dependence on France, with which Warsaw signed a treaty of alliance and a
secret military agreement in February 1921. Poland additionally signed a treaty
260 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of alliance with Romania in March 1921 and a friendship treaty with Latvia
and Estonia in March 1922. In every case there was an anti-Soviet thrust behind
the move. A similar treaty with Finland was not ratified by the parliament in
Helsinki. Conversely, an agreement signed by the foreign ministers of Poland
and Czechoslovakia in November 1921 and providing for limited cooperation
between the two countries failed to achieve the required majority in the Sejm,
and although an agreement with Prague dealing with the contested area of
Teschen was ratified in April 1925, it still fell far short of the failed agreement
of 1921.
Following the annexation of the area around Vilnius in March 1922, rela-
tions with Lithuania remained extremely tense, a situation exacerbated by the
lack of any diplomatic relations between the two countries. With Germany, by
contrast, such relations did exist, and yet even here they were no guarantee of
international normality. Germany refused to accept the loss of its former terri-
tories to the east, notably West Prussia and the southern part of Upper Silesia,
but increasingly questioned the legitimacy of its eastern neighbour and in June
1925 started a trade war with Poland that left the free city of Gda-sk particu-
larly badly affected. Poland responded by systematically expanding the port of
Gdynia. By the middle of the 1920s there seemed no prospect of any improve-
ment in German-Polish relations. If Poland, still profoundly Catholic as a
country, could draw any consolation from Germany’s lack of recognition of its
territorial possessions, then this took the form of the concordat of February
1925, when the Vatican reorganized the Polish bishoprics in keeping with the
country’s post-war national borders.
Given the antagonisms between the parties and the frequent changes of
cabinet, there could be no question of any continuity in government after 1918.
Generally it was personal intrigues and tactical manoeuvres that led to the fall
of one government and its replacement by another. On 13 November 1925
Pi5sudski sought out President Wojciechowski in person and tried to persuade
him of the need for some control of parliament but was unable to overcome the
latter’s constitutional scruples. Two days later, in a speech that he delivered at a
rally of Legion officers, Pi5sudski implied that in future he would use more
than mere words against those who, in his view, ‘were making the state power-
less and holding back the punitive hand of justice’.67
Pi5sudski found an ally in General Lucjan Zeligowski and was able to engi-
neer his appointment as minister of war in Aleksander Skrzy-ski’s cabinet in
November 1925. Zeligowski helped Pi5sudski with the military preparations
for his planned putsch by gathering together regiments loyal to the marshal. A
further government crisis, this time triggered by Skrzy-ski’s resignation and by
the formation of a centre-right cabinet under Wincenty Witos on 5 May 1926
that was vigorously opposed by the political left, provided Pi5sudski with his
chance to take the decisive step. On 12 May he placed himself at the head of a
group of fifteen regiments and occupied the Praga part of Warsaw on the right
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 261

bank of the Vistula. For two days there was fierce fighting with government
troops, the decisive factor in Pi5sudski’s victory proving to be the intervention
of the party that he himself had once led but from which he had long since
distanced himself: the Polish Socialist Party, which called a general strike
and in that way prevented troops loyal to the government from travelling to
the capital. Wojciechowski and Witos resigned on the evening of 14/15 May.
Pi5sudski ended the fighting on 22 May 1926 with an appeal for reconciliation
in which he paid tribute to the patriotism of his defeated opponents.
Pi5sudski’s military putsch of May 1926 marked the first stage of his ‘moral
dictatorship’. It was to last four years. Initially he did not govern himself but left
others to do so for him. At his bidding, Kazimierz Bartel, a teacher of mathe-
matics who led the small Workers’ Party, was appointed prime minister,
Pi5sudski himself becoming minister of war in the new cabinet. On 31 May
both the Senate and the Sejm, backed by a two-thirds majority, named him
state president, but just as he had done four years previously, he turned down
the highest office in the land and ensured that Ignacy Mo0cicki, a chemistry
teacher, was nominated in his place. With right-wing help an amendment
was made to the constitution on 2 August 1926, giving the president the right
to dissolve parliament and, during parliamentary recesses, to issue decrees
with the force of law, such decrees being subject to subsequent ratification by
the National Assembly. The government could also spend money on the scale
of the previous year’s budget if parliament had not ratified the current budget
on time.
Pi5sudski had assumed power in a revolutionary way reminiscent of a
Spanish pronunciamiento. The changes to the constitution in August 1926 were
not revolutionary as such. The president’s emergency powers were no more
permissive than those enjoyed by the German president under Article 48 of the
Weimar constitution. The clause dealing with the emergency budget was by no
means unusual in parliamentary democracies. Parliament was not dissolved,
the opposition was not suppressed, and the press was not censored. Although
it had been brought about by force, the change of regime produced internal
stability that initially bore all the signs of a conservative democracy, certainly
not a military dictatorship, still less the sort of ‘Fascist’ dictatorship that
Pi5sudski loathed.
Pi5sudski took over as prime minister in October 1926 and formed a largely
conservative cabinet that led to a cooling of relations between himself and the
Polish Socialist Party. The rift deepened when he visited the home of the
Radziwi55s in late October 1926 and, himself a member of the lower aristoc-
racy, demonstratively underlined his closeness to the landed gentry in the east
of the country. But it was the National Democrats under Roman Dmowski and
Wincenty Witos’s Piast Party who proved his most implacable enemies. In
order to establish a unifying basis on which to work in parliament, he asked
Walery S5awek, a colonel loyal to him, to form an independent bloc that would
262 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

work closely with the government. This non-party bloc, or BBWR, was formed
shortly before the elections to the Sejm and Senate in March 1928, and although
it had no clearly outlined programme, it gained considerable support among
the peasants and urban middle classes.
The BBWR won a total of 122 out of 444 seats in the 1928 elections and was
the biggest party, inflicting dramatic losses on the National Democrats and
Piast Party, whereas left-wing parties were able to report major gains, winning
a total of some 140 seats. Since the composition of the Sejm was no guarantee
of a firm majority for the government, Pi5sudski entrusted the post of prime
minister to a series of personal and political confidants: first, Kazimierz Bartel,
then the former education minister Kazimierz ?witalski, then Bartel again and,
finally, in March 1930, Walery S5awek. He himself remained minister of war
and, as such, the dominant figure in the regime. One of his keenest critics was
the newly elected marshal of the Sejm, the Socialist Ignacy Daszy-ski. The
government’s ‘strong man’ felt that the increasingly close parliamentary coop-
eration between the left-wing and centrist parties, which entered into a formal
partnership, the Centrolew (‘Centre Left’), in October 1929, represented a
threat that needed to be addressed. Pi5sudski reacted by lambasting parliament
and the opposition parties, attacks backed up by extreme attempts at
intimidation.
?witalski’s government was toppled by a vote of no confidence on
5 December 1929, leading to a worsening of the power struggle between the
executive and the legislative. In June 1930 the opposition parties met in Kraków,
a meeting that was to be followed in September by nationwide demonstrations
on behalf of freedom and against dictatorship. On 25 August Pi5sudski himself
took over as prime minister, and four days later the country’s president, Ignacy
Mo0cicki, dissolved parliament. In early October, Pi5sudski ordered the arrest
of eighteen of his parliamentary enemies, including Witos, as well as a number
of deputies representing the Ukrainian minority and several prominent
Socialists. All were subsequently imprisoned in the fortress at Brest-Litovsk,
where they were subjected to humiliating ill-treatment.
The parliamentary elections on 17 and 23 September were no longer free
but took place in a climate of political intimidation and military tyranny,
producing a result that largely reflected the wishes of the government. With
243 out of a total of 444 seats the government bloc was assured of a majority in
the Sejm, whereas the Centrolew and the national minorities had to contend
with major losses. The government majority was even more pronounced in the
Senate, and yet the government failed to achieve the two-thirds majority
needed to change the constitution, so that for the present there could be no
thought of enacting a new constitution of the kind that Pi5sudski was striving
to enforce. From December 1930 he contented himself once again with the
post of minister of war, while giving the position of prime minister to men
whom he could trust, all of them army colonels.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 263

The ‘regime of the colonels’ attempted to counter the world economic crisis,
which by now had engulfed Poland, with emergency laws and deep financial
cuts. Massed strikes that the Socialists organized in the country’s principal
industrial regions, starting in February 1932, led to restrictions on the right of
assembly and to a deliberate curtailment of the independence of the judiciary.
On 23 March 1933 – the same day as that on which events entirely similar in
character unfolded in Hitler’s Germany – the Sejm passed an enabling act that
gave the government the power to enact ordinances and decrees with the force
of law, with the result that parliament was almost completely sidelined.
By the autumn of 1930 Poland was in the second stage of its transformation
into an authoritarian state, a transformation described by its perpetrators as a
sanacja (‘cleansing’) but the outcome might be more accurately termed a dicta-
torship. Admittedly, the press was still relatively free, there was still a multi-
party system and individual liberties were still protected, but there could be no
talk of a government legitimized by free elections. It was the military that effec-
tively wielded power, parliament having been reduced to a shadowy existence
at least since the time of the enabling act of March 1933. The new constitution
of 23 April 1935 did nothing to alter this state of affairs, for it merely invested
the authoritarian presidential state with a new legal basis. Barely three weeks
later the man who had done more than any other to re-establish an inde-
pendent Poland but who had then been uniquely responsible for restricting the
country’s political liberties was no more: the first marshal of Poland, Józef
Pi5sudski, died on 12 May at the age of sixty-seven.

Like Poland, Lithuania – its neighbour to the north-east – was an agrarian

country with a largely Catholic population. In April 1919 Antanas Smetona, a
journalist from the nationalist right, was elected the country’s president. A year
later elections were held for the Constituent Assembly and resulted in an abso-
lute majority for the country’s Christian Democrats, with fifty-nine out of a
total of 112 seats. The Popular Socialists won twenty-nine, the Social Democrats
fourteen and the national minorities nine. (The Jews made up the largest of
these national minorities with 7.5 per cent of the population, while, according
to the 1923 national census, the Poles accounted for at least 3.25 per cent, the
Germans for 1.5 per cent.) The Tautininkai Nationalist Party won no seats,
while the Communist Party was banned.
Government and parliament met in the provisional capital of Kaunas. The
constitution of 1 August 1922 provided for a president who was for the most
part a figurehead with little real power. He did, however, have the right of veto
over laws that did not have a two-thirds majority from the single chamber, or
Seimas. And he also had the right to dissolve parliament. Under the terms of
the 1922 constitution, the capital was Vilnius, but this had been annexed by
Poland following Warsaw’s unilateral action in the previous March. The Vilnius
question was a permanent obstacle to any normalization of relations between
264 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Lithuania and Poland, exerting a traumatic influence on Lithuanian politics

throughout the interwar period.
The desire to obtain some kind of compensation for the loss of the area
annexed by Poland also played a role in the occupation of the Memel region by
Lithuanian troops on 10 January 1923, the day before the French occupied the
Ruhr. Once the Treaty of Versailles had come into force, the Memel region,
which had previously belonged to Germany, had been placed under joint Allied
control. According to the 1910 census, there were 71,000 German-speaking
inhabitants and 67,000 who spoke Lithuanian. In February 1923 a conference
of Allied ambassadors transferred sovereignty over the Memel region to
Lithuania but attached two conditions to the transfer: the region should be
granted independent status, and Poland should have use of the port of Memel
(Klaipeda). In the wake of the contested status of Vilnius, Lithuania declined to
meet the second of these demands but respected the first by signing the Memel
Convention with the Allies on 8 May 1924.
Under the terms of this convention, the Memel region acquired its own
regional parliament and, in the form of a five-man directorate, its own govern-
ment. Although the first elections in October 1925 gave the German parties an
overwhelming majority, with twenty-seven out of twenty-nine seats, only
Lithuanians from outside the region were placed at the head of the directorate
by the governor appointed by the Lithuanian president, a situation that lasted
for ten years and that flew in the face of the wishes of the regional assembly. It
also meant that in the longer term relations with Germany were adversely
affected. And yet there was an important difference from the conflict with
Poland, for diplomatic relations existed between Kaunas and Berlin but not
between Kaunas and Warsaw.
The occupation of the Memel region coincided with a period of internal
political instability. In the elections of October 1922 the Christian Democrats
lost their absolute majority, which they regained only in May 1923 after the
president, Aleksandras Stulginskis, had dissolved parliament. The main
domestic concern at this time was agrarian reform, but this was hardly a conten-
tious issue, such was the predominantly rural character of the region. A law
passed in April 1922 provided for compensation for ecclesiastical, aristocratic
and private landowners if they lost lands of over eighty hectares. In 1928 the
upper limit was raised to 150 hectares. During the early stage of land reform, it
was the smallholders who owned little or no land who benefited most from this
redistribution process. During the second phase it was also communes and
non-profit-making institutions. The landowners most affected by these changes
were generally Poles or Russians, with the result that there was not only a social
but also an ethnic dimension to this redistribution of the land, which served to
confirm the Lithuanians’ sense of national identity. Further parliamentary elec-
tions were held in May 1926, and on this occasion the Memel region was able to
take part for the first time. This time it was the left-wing parties that were the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 265

victors: the National Socialists won twenty-two seats, the Social Democrats
fifteen, making a total of thirty-seven out of eighty-five. The Christian
Democrats won only thirty seats. With the backing of the Jewish and Polish
deputies, two National Socialists were elected to high office: Mykolas Sle:evi/ius
became the state president, Kazys Grinius the prime minister.
The left-wing government encountered the keenest conceivable opposition
from the Christian Democrats and from the nationalist Tautininkai, which
entered parliament for the first time with five representatives. But the greatest
danger came from the military, their opposition provoked not least by a non-
aggression pact signed with the Soviet Union in September 1926. General Povilas
Plechavi/ius mounted a putsch on 17 December 1926, a move clearly inspired by
Pi5sudski’s coup the previous May. The parliament building was occupied, the
government deposed and the post of state president given to Antanas Smetona,
while that of prime minister passed to Augustinas Voldemaras, the chairman of
the radically nationalist organization Gele:inis Vilkas (Iron Wolf), who had
already been prime minister in 1918. He now proceeded to form a government
made up of Christian Democrats and Tautininkai. Four months later, President
Smetona dissolved the Seimas on 12 April 1927 but without calling for new elec-
tions. This marked the beginning of a nine-year period of authoritarian rule
during which Lithuania no longer had an elected parliament.
With the support of the army, Smetona spent this period bolstering his own
position of power. A new constitution that was proclaimed on 15 May 1928
concentrated all the state’s power on the president. Styling himself the ‘nation’s
leader’, Smetona replaced Voldemaras in September 1929 with his own brother-
in-law, Juozas Tubelis. Following a failed military coup in June 1934 and a strike
by farmers in the summer of 1935, the regime exercised even tighter control of the
country. By February 1936 a new law meant that the opposition parties had to
suspend operations, and the elections in June 1936 – the first for ten years – were
organized in such a way that only Tautininkai could field candidates. On 11
February 1938 the one-party parliament approved a new authoritarian constitu-
tion that provided for a presidential regime with parliamentary trimmings and
stressed the duties of its citizens rather more than their rights. Although the state
committed itself to upholding freedom of conscience and of religion, there was no
mention of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and press freedom.
The new constitution had no practical consequences. A month after it
came into force, Poland issued an ultimatum forcing the country to resume
diplomatic relations and to recognize the existing border. In short, it had to
renounce Vilnius and the surrounding area. Lithuania was not to enjoy the sort
of parliamentary elections based on proportional representation for which the
constitution provided.

Like the Lithuanians, the Letts were members of the family of Baltic nations, a
family that including the Old Baltic Prussians who had either been eradicated
266 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

or assimilated into the East Prussians. The Republic of Latvia that had been
established in 1918/19 included Latgale, Courland and southern Livonia, areas
that until the downfall of the tsars had been subjected to Russian rule. Latvia’s
northern neighbour, the Republic of Estonia, included the former Russian
province of the same name and the four northern districts of Livonia. Estonian,
like Finnish, belongs to the Finno-Ugric family of languages. Unlike Lithuania,
which remained Catholic, Estonia, Livonia and Courland converted to
Protestantism at the time of the Reformation, a change that found expression,
not least in the fact that practically the entire population was able to read and
write. The upper class was made up of German Balts, and almost all the larger
estates were owned by members of the German Baltic nobility. By the end of
the nineteenth century the term ‘Baltic states’ was used to describe Estonia,
Livonia and Courland. After 1918, it covered Estonia and Latvia. Not until the
1930s was Lithuania included in this group of countries. The ‘Baltic Entente’
gained acceptance as a linguistic term after 12 September 1934, when Lithuania
joined an alliance between Latvia and Estonia dating back to 1923.
The constitutions of Estonia (June 1920) and Latvia (February 1922) gave
their respective parliaments more power than their governments. Estonia had
no state president, the prime minister acting as head of state. In Latvia the
president was elected by the country’s parliament, or Saeima. He was also the
commander in chief of the army and could issue emergency decrees but was
unable to dissolve parliament. In both countries elections were contested
according to the rules of proportional representation. And in Lithuania, all
men and women had the right to vote. Initial fragmentation of the party system
was followed by a concentration on three camps: a peasants’ party, a bourgeois
centre party and the Social Democrats. As in Latvia, the most powerful parties
were the peasants’ parties, who produced the two most important leaders of
the interwar years: the Estonian prime minister and later president Konstantin
Päts and the Latvian president and prime minister K9rlis Ulmanis. In Latvia
the Communist Party was banned by way of a reaction to the civil war of 1920,
while a similar ban was imposed in Estonia at the end of 1924 following the
suppression of an attempted Communist putsch by Johan Laidoner, the hero of
the struggle for liberation and the commander in chief of the Estonian troops.
Neither country was a pure nation state. The second-largest ethnic group
was made up of Russians, with 10.6 per cent of the population in Latvia in 1935
and 8.2 per cent in Estonia in 1934. At this same period Germans made up 3.2
per cent of the population in Latvia and 1.5 per cent in Estonia. As we have
already observed in the context of the treaties designed to protect national
minorities, it was only in Estonia that the question of nationalities was solved
in a way that was widely regarded as a model of its kind: this was the settlement
of 1925, which gave non-Estonians complete cultural autonomy, assuming that
they wanted to claim this right for themselves. Both the German and the Jewish
minorities made use of it. Latvia, by contrast, pursued a policy of Latvianization,
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 267

a policy that after 1930 led to increasing tensions with the region’s German
minority.
Estonia and Latvia were the only states in eastern central Europe that
adopted a policy of radical agrarian reform. In both countries the major estates,
which were mostly owned by German Balts, were expropriated, and some two-
thirds of the arable land was distributed among new settlers from the peasant
class, while forests and woodlands passed into state ownership. In Estonia
the major landowners who took part in the scheme were given back around
3.6 per cent of their lands. In 1926 they received compensation amounting
to around 3 per cent of its actual value. Later they were also allocated any
remaining lands up to an area of fifty hectares. In Latvia there was no such
compensation, although former landowners could retain up to fifty hectares of
the lands that they had previously owned. Both states remained largely agrarian
in character: in Estonia only around 17.4 per cent of the working population
was employed in industry in 1930, while the equivalent figure for Latvia was
13.5 per cent.
Like most eastern central European states, Estonia and Latvia were affected
by the world economic crisis, leading them to turn their backs on parliamen-
tary democracy and establish authoritarian regimes. It was a process that took
a far more radical turn in Latvia than in Estonia. In May 1934 Ulmanis mounted
a coup that excluded the extreme right and the extreme left from politics. The
constitution was rescinded, the activities of parliament and parliamentary
parties suspended, a government formed that was made up of representatives
of the more moderate parties and legislative authority was transferred to the
executive. In April 1936 Ulmanis assumed the role of state president in addi-
tion to that of prime minister.
In Estonia the government sought to escape from the pressure exerted by a
radical right-wing antiparliamentary movement called ‘Vapsen’, a band of
freedom fighters inspired by Fascist models, especially that of the Finnish
Lapua movement, about which we shall have more to say in due course. A
plebiscite on the question of constitutional reform was initiated by Vapsen,
73 per cent of the population voting for a presidential regime in place of the
existing parliamentary system, but it was the prime minister, Konstantin Päts,
who most benefited from the constitutional changes that were introduced in
1933. He took over the new powers of head of state, ordered a state of emer-
gency designed to prevent the appointment of a radical right-wing president,
transferred the supreme command of the armed forces to Laidoner, who had
stepped down as commander in chief in 1925, ordered the arrest of the leaders
of Vapsen and postponed sine die both parliamentary elections and the appoint-
ment of a new president. The representative body agreed to the state of emer-
gency, even the Social Democrats regarding a dictatorship under Päts as the
lesser of two evils when compared to a Vapsen-led dictatorship. Parliament did
not meet again after October 1934, and the parliamentary parties ceased their
268 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

activities. From then on Päts ruled by means of decrees. Vapsen was banned in
1935 after the discovery of plans to mount a putsch.
Päts organized a referendum in February 1936 that confirmed him in his
existing course of action. A new constitution was passed by a Constituent
National Assembly in August 1937 and ushered in a system with a powerful
president and a two-chamber national assembly: a chamber of deputies elected
according to the first-past-the-post system and a national council made up of
elected and appointed members. In April 1938 Päts was elected president of the
republic. The ‘controlled dictatorship’ that he practised differed on the one
hand from the unstable parliamentary system that had prevailed between 1919
and 1933, when governments had remained in office for an average of less than
nine months, and the authoritarian dictatorship of 1934–5. By the eve of the
outbreak of the Second World War, Estonia was, therefore, by far the most
liberal of the three Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

On the other side of the Gulf of Finland, too, the fate of parliamentary democ-
racy hung in the balance more than once during the interwar years. Until well
into the 1930s Finland had to contend on more than one occasion with the
threat of a violent overthrow of the government by the radical right, while the
Finnish Communist Party that had been established in Russia in August 1918
but which was banned from the very outset repeatedly tried to enlist the help
of the masses in fomenting a second Red revolution, an aim it sought to achieve
by means of cover organizations and by deliberately targeting the country’s
trade unions. Under the leadership of Väinö Tanner, conversely, the Social
Democrats turned their backs on the radicalism of the civil war and espoused
a reformist agenda typical of the other Scandinavian workers’ parties. It was a
move that was a necessary precondition of their parliamentary cooperation
with the moderate bourgeois and peasants’ parties to which the country owed
a whole series of laws designed to protect workers’ rights, as well as a law
requiring pupils to attend school for six years and the land reforms of 1922,
carried out at the expense of the larger Finnish and Swedish landowners. In
1926–7 Tanner was appointed the country’s prime minister, heading a Social
Democrat minority government that was at the mercy of the Swedish People’s
Party and that survived for barely a year.
The governments of the liberal prime minister Kaarlo Ståhlberg, who
remained in office from 1919 to 1925, and his successor Lauri Kristian Relander
of the Agrarian Union, who was prime minister from 1925 to 1931, were almost
all minority governments, and all were subjected to tremendous pressure by
the state-supported, largely right-wing and virulently anti-Communist Civil
Guard, an organization set up during the civil war with the aim of defending
the country and claiming almost 100,000 members in 1919. It was at the
bidding of this organization that Kyösti Kallio’s government took particularly
harsh reprisals against the Communist-backed Finnish Workers’ Party in
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 269

August 1923, when the party’s twenty-seven parliamentarians and several

party officials were arrested and sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment
for planning acts of high treason. The party itself was disbanded.
The ban caused the Communists no more than a temporary setback, for a
new cover organization, the Socialist Electoral Organization of Workers and
Smallholders, first entered parliament in 1927 and again, this time with a
marked increase in its representation, in 1929. Within the trade unions, the
Communists had already gained a majority by 1920. An eight-month dock
strike in 1927–8 led to new and even more draconian measures on the part of
the state: most of the leaders of the banned Communist Party were arrested in
April 1928 and, accused of fomenting treason, sentenced to forced labour in
the Tammisaari Prison Camp. A year later, in May 1929, the Social Democrats
walked out of the management committees of the Finnish trade unions and
founded the new Central Association of Finnish Trade Unions. The left-wing
association that had in the meantime severed its links with the Communist
Party was banned by a court order in July 1930. The Communists regrouped as
part of the banned Red Trade Union that had been founded in 1929, but in
spite of this, they were unable to persuade the masses to join them in their
public demonstrations.
During the first ten years of Finnish independence the right-wing threat
was embodied by the Civil Guard whose members were for the most part made
up of peasants but which also recruited civil servants and white-collar workers.
The Civil Guard was particularly vocal in its criticism of the policies of the
country’s foreign minister, Rudolf Holsti, who was keen to promote closer
cooperation not only with the Baltic States but also with Poland and the
Western Powers. Ståhlberg responded by dismissing the Civil Guard’s
commander in chief, Colonel Georg Didrik von Essen, in the summer of 1921,
but when the Civil Guard proposed General Carl Gustav Mannerheim as
Essen’s successor, the minister of war, Bruno Jalander, emphatically rejected
the idea. In order to pre-empt a possible coup by the political right, Per Evind
Svinhufvud, the country’s former regent, sought to mediate, and his compro-
mise solution was finally accepted in September 1921: Jalander resigned, the
Civil Guard was given greater powers of self-administration, and Lauri
Malmberg, a colonel in the country’s air force, was appointed its commander in
chief, a post he held until the Civil Guard was disbanded in 1944.
On 14 February 1922, the country’s minister of the interior, Heikki
Ritavuori, was assassinated by right-wing radicals after he had become the
target of Finnish nationalists critical of what they saw as his unduly lenient
attitude to Soviet Russia. Behind his murder lay the crisis in Eastern Karelia,
where an uprising against Soviet encroachment on this largely Finnish-
speaking region had begun in 1921, encountering widespread support in
Finland and leading to a movement advocating the annexation of Eastern
Karelia and even the deployment of Finnish volunteers across the border with
270 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Soviet Russia. The conflict was settled, but only superficially, when a peace
treaty was signed with Russia in the summer of 1922.
The Eastern Karelia question also played a part in the power struggle within
the Civil Guard that flared up in 1924 between the former tsarist officers who
were regarded as conservative in their political outlook and the younger air-
force officers who had been trained in Germany. The latter group enjoyed the
support of Malmberg, who in 1924 also assumed the defence minister’s port-
folio. The armed forces’ commander in chief, Major General Karl Fredrik
Wilkman, was initially required to spend a lengthy period of study abroad
before being dismissed by Relander in May 1926. He was replaced by the
thirty-six-year-old air force major Aarne Sihvo, whose appointment repre-
sented a clear victory of the younger and more radical camp over its more
moderate elders.
Founded in 1922, the Academic Karelia Society ensured that the question
of Eastern Karelia and the idea of a Finnish linguistic community were not
forgotten. Indeed, it was not long before the society had enlisted the support of
the vast majority of Finnish-speaking students. The champions of such a union
also included Russian-owned Ingria, the Norwegian Finnmark and the Swedish
Västerbotten in their new pan-Finnish culture group. After 1924 the group’s
efforts were concentrated entirely on eradicating the Swedish language from
Finnish culture. (Around 11 per cent of the Finnish population spoke Swedish,
a figure that rose to 25 per cent among students at the University of Helsinki
and 50 per cent among its teaching staff.) A new law was passed in 1922 that
aimed to respect the demands of the moderate representatives of the linguistic
minority and which specified the extent to which Swedish could be used in
dealing with the authorities and the courts as well as on a communal level. At
the insistence of the Academic Karelia Society, a draft law relating to the formal
organization of the University of Helsinki was changed so that in future only a
small percentage of its teachers could conduct their courses in Swedish. The
ultimate aim of the ‘authentic Finnish’ movement, with the Academic Karelia
Society as its hard core, was a monolingual Finland, but at this date in its
history it was an aim that was still far from having been achieved.
In terms of its economy, the Finland of the interwar period was still largely
an agrarian country: in 1920 75 per cent of the working population was
employed in agriculture, and even as late as 1940 that figure still stood at 63 per
cent, with the result that the agricultural crisis that affected the whole world in
the late 1920s had a particularly devastating impact on Finland, temporarily
eclipsing the language question, especially in the countryside, and resulting in
a series of political and social conflicts between ‘White’ and ‘Red’ Finns. In
November 1929, at a commemorative event held by the Communist Youth
Association in the Ostrobothnian town of Lapua, the red shirts worn by the
participants were torn from their backs by enraged nationalists, marking
the start of the Lapua Movement which, largely supported by the peasant
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 271

population, was very soon radicalized. By December 1929 it was already

demanding that Kyösti Kallio’s government take legal steps to combat the
Communists and all other organizations that they felt had violated the law and
offended against common decency.
Parliament met most of these demands in January 1930, although the limits
on press freedom that the Lapua Movement had demanded were rejected,
prompting radical right-wing activists to respond by destroying the printing
presses of a left-wing socialist newspaper in Vaasa. The next step was the
abduction of hundreds of politicians, officials and supporters of the radical left,
who were taken to the border with the Soviet Union and told to cross over it in
order to return to their ostensible political homeland. Three of these abduc-
tions during the summer of 1930 ended with the victim’s death. The trials of
the perpetrators were taken to the most absurd lengths when hundreds of
Lapua members pleaded guilty.
Kallio’s cabinet shied away from any vigorous intervention as it feared that
the Civil Guard would close ranks with the supporters of the Lapua Movement.
The government was able to avoid a threatened putsch by the extreme right
only by means of a concession negotiated by Svinhufvud, a concession
amounting to a promise to ban all Communist organizations once and for all.
After passing a new law designed to protect the Republic, Kallio’s third cabinet
resigned on 2 July 1930, when Relander appointed Svinhufvud his new prime
minister. No sooner had the new cabinet been formed when two deputies from
the Socialist Workers’ and Smallholders’ Party were abducted at a meeting of
the constitutional committee. The government was able to obtain their release
only by agreeing to arrest all the Communist deputies.
But parliament was unwilling to follow the government down its confron-
tational road, and so Relander dissolved the house and ordered new elections
for 1 and 2 October 1930. The real winners proved to be the right-wing coali-
tion party. The Social Democrats were able to win a few more seats, but they
could not prevent the government camp from obtaining the two-thirds
majority needed to change the constitution. Once the anti-Communist laws
had been passed, the Lapua Movement abandoned its plans to stage a putsch,
which it had intended to set in motion if the laws were not approved.
The autumn of 1930 marked the culmination of the threats posed to
Finland’s democratic institutions by the Lapua Movement. When its supporters
abducted the country’s former president, Kaarlo Ståhlberg, and his wife in
October 1930, thereby violating a directive issued by the movement’s leaders,
public opinion turned decisively against these representatives of Finnish
Fascism. The narrow victory that Svinhufvud won in the presidential election
on 1 March 1931 – 151 votes for him and 149 for Ståhlberg – robbed the Lapua
Movement of many of its targets. Svinhufvud entrusted Mannerheim with the
task of chairing the reorganized defence council. And in September 1931 a new
attempt to overthrow the government by the Lapua Movement was crushed by
272 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

legal means, means that parliament had been obliged to agree to under pres-
sure from the extreme right. Since most members of the Civil Guard remained
loyal to the government, the minister of the interior was finally able to disband
the Lapua Movement in March 1932.
The Lapua Movement was succeeded by the Patriotic People’s Movement,
which promised to operate within the framework of the law. It adopted the
forms of combat and symbols associated with the Italian Fascists and German
National Socialists, including black shirts and blue ties. Its Youth Movement
even took over the typical ‘Hitler greeting’. The Patriotic People’s Movement
won fourteen seats in the elections in July 1933, while the coalition slumped
from forty-two seats to eighteen. It was the Social Democrats, however, who
proved most successful, returning seventy-eight members to parliament, an
increase of twelve over their previous total. In April 1934 parliament banned
the wearing of all uniforms. Shortly afterwards, the language question flared
up once again. A draft bill designed to reorganize the University of Helsinki
was obstructed by supporters of the movement for an ‘authentic Finland’. In
1937 a federal law finally made Finnish the official language for teaching at the
University of Helsinki, although Swedish continued to remain the language
spoken by most of the country’s educated upper-middle classes.
In February 1936, the prime minister, Toivo Kivimäki, who had been in
power since 1932, lost the support of the Swedish People’s Party and with it his
parliamentary majority. The victors in the elections in July 1936 were once
again the Social Democrats, who now had eighty-three seats in parliament.
Väinö Tanner’s party declared its willingness to return to government for the
first time since 1927, but Svinhufvud turned down its approach and appointed
Kyösti Kallio of the Agrarian Union to the post of prime minister, the fourth
time that he had held the appointment. On 1 March 1937, with the backing of
the Social Democrats, Kallio was elected the country’s new president, thereby
overcoming the one remaining obstacle that lay in the way of a coalition
government made up of Social Democrats, Agrarian Unionists and the
Progressive Party. It was the small National Progressive Party that provided the
prime minister for this broadest alliance since the country’s independence in
the person of Aimo Cajander; the Social Democrat Väinö Tanner became
finance minister, and Rudolf Holsti of the Progressive Party again became
foreign minister. With the agreement of the cabinet, the minister of the inte-
rior, Urho Kekkonen of the Agrarian Union, banned the Patriotic People’s
Movement’s youth brigade in May 1938, whereas an attempt to ban the radi-
cally right-wing parent organization the following November was frustrated
by the Helsinki District Court.
The agreement between the Social Democrats and the Agrarian Union was
the most important factor in the stabilization of the democratic system, while
the country’s gradual economic recovery also played its part in preventing the
Patriotic People’s Movement from making any further electoral gains and in
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 273

avoiding the danger of a right-wing coup. By the middle of the 1930s Finland
was drawing visibly closer to the level of development found in the other
Nordic democracies, with which it shared not only linguistic ties but also
denominational links in the form of its Protestant faith and, finally, its high
level of literacy. Changes which, thanks in no small part to the Social Democrats,
had already been implemented in Denmark, Sweden and Norway were now
introduced on an even greater scale in Finland, laying the foundations for a
welfare state that was emphatically northern European in character.
In terms of their foreign policies, too, the Nordic democracies drew closer
together. Finland and Sweden had long argued not only over the language
question but also over the sovereignty of the Åland Islands, whose Swedish
population wanted to be Swedish. But they remained Finnish with the agree-
ment of the League of Nations, which imposed certain conditions on its
consent, including a ban on the building of fortifications. In the autumn of
1933 Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Belgium and Luxembourg formed
the Oslo States, which agreed to work together closely in matters of customs
and trade. Finland first attended a ministerial meeting of the Scandinavian
states in 1934, and the following year Kivimäki’s government agreed to closer
cooperation with the Scandinavian states in the interests of security and
joint neutrality, a move that was a reaction to the threat of a major new war in
Europe.
Relations with the Soviet Union remained complex. In January 1932
Finland signed a non-aggression pact with Moscow – Estonia and Latvia
followed suit later that same year – but in the summer of 1935 a campaign
aimed at Finnish nationalists began in Soviet Karelia, finally involving most of
the leaders of the illegal Finnish Communist Party who were living in the
Soviet Union. The few Finnish Communists to survive Stalin’s terror were
those locked up in Finnish prisons. According to later estimates, 20,000 Finns
died in Stalinist labour camps in the infamous Gulag Archipelago. Pan-Finnish
propaganda played into the hands of Moscow, allowing it to accuse Finland of
wanting to annex Eastern Karelia and Ingria. Conversely, Finland felt threat-
ened by the construction of strategically important railway lines in Eastern
Karelia. As long as the conservative forces under Svinhufvud remained in
control in Finland, Hitler’s Germany was regarded as by far the lesser of two
evils when compared with Stalin’s Russia. And yet even after the Social
Democrats had returned to government, fear of Moscow and international
Communism was still powerful enough to discourage Finland from adopting
any kind of anti-German stance.

Unlike Finland, Czechoslovakia suffered no internal crises in the twenty years

between 1918 and 1938, certainly none that posed a serious risk to the coun-
try’s parliamentary system. The Republic of Czechoslovakia was the most
heavily industrialized, most middle-class, most politically stable and, in this
274 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

sense, the most ‘western’ of the new states of eastern central Europe. And, like
France, it was also the most secularized of those European states that had
previously been staunchly Catholic. The constitution of 29 February 1920
described the country in words that echoed the famous French formula of a
‘nation une et indivisible’, only the former Hungarian territory of Podkarpatská
Rus enjoying a special status with at least a nominal degree of self-rule and its
own governor. The country’s legislative power lay with its House of
Representatives, which was elected by all adult men and women for a period of
six years on the basis of proportional representation, and also with its Senate,
whose members were likewise elected by the population at large, although in
this case they remained in office for eight years. The president was elected by
both houses for a seven-year period and enjoyed a right of veto over laws
adopted by both chambers. The government was answerable to the House of
Representatives and could be forced to resign by a vote of no confidence.
Under the terms of a law enacted at the same time as the constitution, the
official language was Czechoslovak, which in fact was made up of two closely
related languages, Czech and Slovak. Other linguistic groupings were allowed
to use their own languages in dealing with the authorities, including the courts,
and to establish their own schools if their language was spoken by at least
20 per cent of the population in a particular juridical district when measured
by the latest census. In 1921 the Czechs and Slovaks together numbered
8.8 million and made up 64.35 per cent of the country’s population,
followed by the Germans with 22.94 per cent (3.1 million), the Hungarians
with 3.38 per cent (745,000), the Carpathian Ukrainians with 3.4 per cent
(461,000), the Jews with 1.32 per cent (180,000) and ‘Poles and others’ with
0.75 per cent (102,000).
Proportional representation favoured a large number of different parties.
On the Czechoslovak side there were two right-of-centre parties, the National
Democrats and the Agrarians; two socialist parties, namely, the Social
Democrats and the largely petty-bourgeois National Socialists; and the Catholic
People’s Party as the classic centre party. It was these five parties – known as the
p!tka – that helped to found the new state and, more often than not, provided
the government of the day. In Slovakia there were two additional parties: the
Catholic Slovak People’s Party and the Slovak National Party which, its extreme
right-wing views notwithstanding, remained insignificant as a political force.
The main parties in the Sudetenland were the Social Democrats, the Farmers’
Union and the Christian Socialists. Ideologically speaking, all were far too
divided to be able to form a unified bloc. The Hungarians who were living in
Slovakia formed a Social Democrat Party and a Christian Socialist Party. The
only party whose interests remained consistently supranational was the
Communist Party that had been founded in Russia in 1918: its most active
members were Czechs and Germans. In the country’s first elections in 1920, it
fielded no candidates but was represented in parliament by members who
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 275

defected from the left wing of the Social Democrats. Its first representatives
were returned in the country’s second elections, which were held in 1925.
The two leading Czechoslovak politicians of the interwar years were Tomág
Masaryk, who was president from 1918 to 1935, and Edvard Beneg, who held
the post of foreign minister continuously during the same period, succeeding
Masaryk as president in 1935. Prague’s cabinets were at no time either purely
bourgeois or purely Social Democrat but coalition governments that tran-
scended class distinctions. In the six years that followed the adoption of the
constitution in 1920, there were several minority cabinets and others made up
of civil servants, each of which remained in office for only a short period of
time. In October 1926 Antonín 4vehla of the Agrarian Party managed for the
first time to persuade two bourgeois German parties, the Christian Socialists
and the Farmers’ Union, to join his cabinet. Four months later, concessions on
the subject of greater autonomy allowed him to bring in the Slovak People’s
Party, too.
As early as 1920 – far sooner than was to be the case with the German bour-
geois parties – the German Social Democrats had declared their willingness to
work more closely with the government of the day, but it was not until the end
of 1929 that they first had a place at the cabinet table, when their chairman
Ludwig Czech was appointed minister for welfare in Frantigek Udr:al’s second
term of office. Udr:al was a member of the Peasants’ Party. Land reform had
been agreed in 1921 without the participation of the German parties but, in
contrast to what happened in Poland, it did not place an unduly heavy and one-
sided burden on the major landowners of a national minority – in this case the
Germans and the Hungarians. Administrative reforms undertaken in 1927–8,
conversely, proved something of a disappointment for the Germans living in
the Sudetenland, for the amalgamation of Moravia with what had been the
Austrian half of Silesia meant that it was no longer possible to create a Silesia in
whose national assembly Germans and Poles would presumably have had a
majority. In general the Sudeten Germans were far better integrated into the
Czechoslovak state in the late 1920s than either the Hungarians or the Poles.
The greatest danger to national cohesion was posed by the proponents of
Slovak autonomy in the form of the Slovak People’s Party centred on a Catholic
priest by the name of Andrej Hlinka. The party won twelve seats in the new
republic’s first parliamentary elections in April 1920, doubling that number
five years later and becoming de facto leader of all the Slovak parties. Relations
with the government in Prague broke down over the trial of Vojt@ch Tuka,
a Slovak member of parliament who founded the Rodobrana, a Slovak
defence league that called into question the whole idea of a common state
embracing Czechs and Slovaks. In October 1929 he was accused of treason and
sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, a sentence that triggered violent
protests in Slovakia and prompted the Slovak People’s Party to resign from the
government and pursue an aggressive policy of opposition. Hlinka now
276 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

demanded cultural and political autonomy and as a result came to be seen as a

separatist.
The Sudetenland was particularly dependent on processing industries and
was severely affected by the world economic crisis, leading in turn to a radicali-
zation of political views in the region. The most right-wing group was the
German National Socialist Workers’ Party, or DNSAP. Originally founded in
1904 as the German Workers’ Party, it won eight out of sixty-six seats in the
Prague House of Representatives in the 1929 elections and soon gained
increasing support from voters disenchanted with the other German parties
that were in principle willing to work with the government of the day. When
they began to build up a paramilitary organization modelled on Hitler’s Storm
Troopers, they were taken to court. A ban on the party seemed inevitable, but
the DNSAP pre-empted the ban by disbanding in the autumn of 1933 and
regrouping on 1 October 1933 as the Sudeten German Home Front under the
gymnastics teacher and leader of the Sudeten German Gymnasts’ Organization,
Konrad Henlein.
Nothing gave such a boost to the new organization as the Third Reich’s
alleged or real successes in its attempts to combat mass unemployment,
successes that were abundantly exploited for the purposes of propaganda. In
the parliamentary elections in May 1935, Henlein’s Sudeten German Party, as it
came to be officially known in late April 1935, won forty-four seats: two-thirds
of all the German seats. For the present, it proposed regional autonomy for the
Sudetenland, rather than devolution and annexation by Germany. In total, the
groups that for various reasons rejected the whole idea of the Czechoslovak
state or sought to reorganize it in a spirit of national autonomy made up more
than a third of all the members of parliament in Prague: in addition to the
forty-four campaigning for German autonomy, there were twenty-two in
favour of Slovak independence, nine Hungarian nationalists, six who belonged
to the Czech Fascist Party led by the former chief of the general staff Radola
Gajda, and thirty Communists, who since 1929 were led by a self-declared
Stalinist, Klement Gottwald, who was to become prime minister from 1946 to
1948 and state president from 1948 to 1953. When threatened by arrest in
1938, he fled to the Soviet Union. The growth of left- and right-wing opposi-
tion groups may have been the sign of an impending crisis, but it did not
prevent the formation of a majority government. Even after 1935 the ‘activist’
German parties had at least two ministers with cabinet portfolios.
In respect of its foreign policy, Czechoslovakia enjoyed particularly close
ties with France, forming a regular alliance with the country in January 1924.
Within the ‘Little Entente’ – the system of treaties linking Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia and Romania and signed in 1920–21 – Prague enjoyed the role of
first among equals, a privileged status that became even more important in the
context of the greater political, military and economic cooperation that began
in 1929 and culminated in February 1933 with an organizational pact under a
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 277

permanent council made up of the region’s foreign ministers, with a permanent

secretariat and a joint economic council. Relations with revisionist Hungary
remained tense, and much the same was true of Poland, albeit on a smaller
scale, the two countries remaining at loggerheads over Teschen. A bilateral
agreement in April 1925 provided only a superficial solution to the conflict.
Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles Germany had had to cede the
tiny region of Hultschin (Hlu/ín) to Czechoslovakia. In spite of this, relations
between the two countries improved to such an extent during the years of the
Weimar Republic that they could almost be described as good, but following
the National Socialists’ seizure of power in January 1933, the situation inevi-
tably took a turn for the worse, the feeling that Germany posed a threat leading
to a rapprochement with Soviet Russia: the two countries established diplo-
matic relations in June 1934 and signed a mutual assistance pact in May 1935
that was, however, tied to the condition that France, too, would provide simul-
taneous military support.
When the eighty-five-year-old Tomág Masaryk stepped down as president
in December 1935 and was replaced by Edvard Beneg, Czechoslovakia’s posi-
tion both internally and on the world stage was far less secure than it had been
even five years previously. And yet, when compared with the other new states
in eastern central and south-eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia still seemed to be
a paragon of democratic stability. The wave of authoritarian transformations
that swept across the region, affecting countries even as far away as Finland,
was prevented from doing any real damage in the most highly developed of
these new states by the well-established political practice of pragmatic coop-
eration between the Social Democrats on the one hand and the bourgeois and
agrarian forces on the other, a situation that sheds important light on the close
connection between social backwardness and an authoritarian solution to the
crises that beset the countries in question.

Authoritarian Transformation (II): From the Balkans

to the Iberian Peninsula
It was not only most of the new states of Zwischeneuropa that underwent an
authoritarian transformation during the interwar years but also many that had
existed before 1914, including the Balkan states that had achieved independ-
ence in the nineteenth or, in the case of Albania in the early twentieth, century,
and the two countries that made up the Iberian peninsula, both of which were
among the older states of the Catholic West. (The Balkan states, conversely,
were either Orthodox in their denominational orientation or, in the case of
Albania, Muslim.)
Romania, Czechoslovakia’s partner in the ‘Little Entente’ and, from a strictly
geographical point of view, not a part of the Balkans, came to play an increas-
ingly prominent role in the interwar years in spite of its defeat in the struggle
278 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

with the Central Powers. In April 1918, shortly before the humiliating Treaty of
Bucharest, it had annexed Bessarabia. Thanks to the victory of the Western
Powers, it soon acquired extensive territories in what had been Hungary,
including Transylvania and, following a violent struggle with Serbia, two-thirds
of the Banat. With a population of almost sixteen million, the new Romania was
a multiracial state. According to pre-war census returns, only two-thirds of the
population were ethnic Romanians. The largest minority was the Magyars, who
made up 12 per cent of the population. Between 1914 and 1930 the emigration
of non-ethnic Romanians helped to tip the balance further in favour of the titular
nation, ethnic Romanians now making up some 72 per cent of the population,
while the Magyar minority was reduced to 8 per cent, the German minority to a
little over 4 per cent. It was the Magyars who called into question the very foun-
dations of the new state by demanding annexation by Hungary, while the Bulgars
of Dobrudja sought unification with Bulgaria. Only the Germans living in
Transylvania regarded themselves as loyal citizens of Romania.
The constitution of 1866 provided the basis of the country’s whole legal
system until 1923, defining Romania as a constitutional monarchy. The new
constitution came into force on 29 March 1923 and left things as they were.
Under both constitutions, elections almost always led to the victory of the
party whose prime minister was appointed by the king. After 1923, only men
over the age of twenty-one were entitled and, indeed, obliged to vote in spite of
the continuing high level of illiteracy. The electoral law of 27 March 1925
ensured that the party that received at least 40 per cent of the votes cast was
automatically given at least 70 per cent of the seats in parliament. As a rule the
influence exerted by the government of the day on the outcome of the elections
was practically unchecked, so that the term ‘parliamentary democracy’ cannot
really be applied to the Romania of the interwar years.
King Ferdinand I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen died on 20 July 1927 after
a reign of thirteen years. Crown Prince Carol had already renounced his claim
to the throne following an extramarital affair with Magda Lupescu, the Jewish
wife of a Romanian army officer, with the result that it was Carol’s younger
brother, the fifteen-year-old Prince Michael, who succeeded Ferdinand, his
powers initially assumed by a regency council. In June 1920 Carol temporarily
renounced his affair with Magda Lupescu and was declared king by the
National Assembly.
One of the most pressing domestic problems that required a solution was
the agrarian question, and nowhere more so than in the Regat, the old kingdom
where 5 per cent of landowners owned more than 60 per cent of the land.
Several laws containing different regulations for different regions led to a redis-
tribution of the land, resulting in the loss of most of the larger estates, which
were divided up and apportioned to farmers and smallholders. Even so, the
result was unsatisfactory, for the overwhelming majority of farmers – almost
85 per cent – each had less than five hectares of agricultural land to cultivate.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 279

Most farms were reduced to subsistence level, with only a small minority
capable of producing enough produce for export. Following the introduction
of the relevant acts in 1918 and 1921, agricultural exports declined dramati-
cally in quantity.
In the elections of December 1928, which, exceptionally, were free from
official interference, the National Peasants’ Party under Iuliu Maniu emerged
as the front runner, but Maniu’s failure to deal with the repercussions of the
serious agrarian crisis meant that he forfeited the sympathies of the farming
community and he was stripped of his powers as prime minster following
Carol II’s accession. He resigned in October 1930. The elections of June 1931
were rigged from above like most of those that had been held before 1928. The
National Peasants’ Party suffered a serious defeat.
Maniu returned briefly to power as prime minister in October 1932. During
1933 several governments succeeded one another in quick succession, but
none was able to provide a lasting solution to the country’s deepening economic
crisis. In November 1933 the king appointed the leader of the National Liberals,
Ion Duca, as the new prime minister. Duca was murdered six weeks later, on
29 December, by members of the Iron Guard, an extreme right-wing, viru-
lently anti-Semitic militant organization. He was by no means the first victim
of this Romanian Fascist organization, whose insignia included a blue, yellow
and red ribbon with a swastika: in October 1924, the organization’s founder
and leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, had shot the chief of police, Constantin
Manciu. Codreanu was the son of a Polish father called Zelinski and a German
mother. His crime went unpunished, his judges evincing a show of blatant
solidarity and acquitting him of all charges.
Duca was succeeded by Gheorgiu TAtArescu, who remained in office until
1937, bringing a degree of financial and economic stability to the country. The
Iron Guard, which had originally been called the Legion of St Michael, was
banned, only for it to reconstitute itself as All for the Country, which won 16 per
cent of the votes cast in the elections in December 1937. No party won more than
40 per cent of the vote in this election and so none was able to form a majority
government, prompting Carol to appoint a prime minister of his own choosing.
He chose the poet and rabid anti-Semite Octavian Goga, the leader of the Christian
Nationalists, which had won 9 per cent of the votes. But Goga was unable to form
a parliamentary majority, and so the king dissolved parliament and, emulating the
actions of Alexander I in Yugoslavia in 1929, established a monarchical dictator-
ship. He convened a cabinet of resolutely nationalist hue under the patriarch
Myron Cristea, suspended the constitution and banned all political parties. A
rigged plebiscite gave the king’s putsch a semblance of legitimacy, and a new
constitution dated 27 February 1938 allowed the authoritarian regime to wear a
fig leaf of legality. The illegal Iron Guard that had perpetrated numerous acts of
terror was once again persecuted, its leader, Codreanu, arrested and, on the king’s
instructions, ‘shot while trying to escape’ in late November 1938. In other words,
280 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

he was murdered. The following year the minister of the interior, Armand
Calinescu, who had been one of the implacable enemies of the Iron Guard, was
assassinated by Codreanu’s followers.
As we have already noted, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia had
formed the Little Entente in 1921, the same year as Romania concluded an alli-
ance with Poland. Five years later alliances and friendship treaties were signed
with France, Italy and, again, Poland. Relations with Germany improved once
the National Socialists had come to power, the Third Reich being particularly
interested in importing agricultural produce and petroleum from Romania,
while at the same time making south-eastern Europe in general, including
Romania, dependent on German exports.
Carol II also sought to consolidate his political alliance with France by way
of countering the increased economic cooperation between his country and
Germany. Related to this policy was the Balkan pact that TAtArescu’s govern-
ment signed with Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia in February 1934. Later that
same year – after Moscow had recognized Bucharest’s sovereignty over
Bessarabia – Romania also established diplomatic relations with the Soviet
Union, but it could not bring itself to sign a mutual assistance pact with Russia
similar to the one that it had concluded with Czechoslovakia in May 1935: such
a pact would have been regarded as too much of a challenge by National
Socialist Germany and flown in the face of the anti-Communist sentiments
harboured by large sections of the population. The radical anti-Semitic right
may have been plunged into retreat by the royal dictatorship, but it remained a
powerful social and political force that enjoyed considerable support among
students, farmers and members of the petty bourgeoisie.

Romania’s southern neighbour, Bulgaria, was the quintessential Balkan

country: geographically, it belongs to the Balkan peninsula, while culturally it
was marked by its Orthodox faith and by centuries of Ottoman rule. Unlike
Greece, Albania and parts of Yugoslavia, it had not turned to embrace the
Mediterranean world. An agricultural country, it suffered like all the Balkan
states from its economic backwardness and from widespread illiteracy. Of the
various problems raised by the question of nationality, that of Macedonia was
the most serious. As we have already observed, the subversive activities of the
terrorist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization placed a severe
strain on relations with Yugoslavia. In 1920 83.4 per cent of a population of 4.8
million were ethnic Bulgarians. The largest national minority – 11 per cent –
was made up of Turks. An exchange of population was agreed with Greece in
the context of the Treaty of Neuilly of November 1919, an exchange imple-
mented in the course of the years that followed. Bulgaria was particularly
pained by the loss of southern Dobrudja to Romania, a region largely settled by
Bulgarians: ratified by the Treaty of Neuilly, this was one of the outcomes of the
Second Balkan War of 1913.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 281

Even after 1918 Bulgaria remained a constitutional monarchy under the

terms of its constitution of 1879. From 1918 to 1943 the head of state was
King Boris III of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. All men over the age of
twenty-one were entitled to vote. In the years around 1920 four-fifths of the
population still lived in the countryside, with the result that the peasants’
movement played a significant role in the political life of Bulgaria, but here –
unlike in Romania – the Communists were successful in winning the support
of a considerable proportion of the rural population. Following the elections in
August 1919 Boris appointed the leader of the regional Peasants’ Party,
Alexander Stamboliyski, to head a coalition government that also had the
backing of the Social Democrats. The main opposition party was the
Communist Party, which recorded extensive gains in the local elections in
December 1919. Shortly afterwards they called a transport strike that lasted
until February 1920, inflicting serious damage on the country’s economy.
Made up entirely of members of the Peasants’ Party, Stamboliyski’s second
cabinet took office in May 1920. One of its first legislative acts was the
introduction of universal labour service in June 1920: men were required to
work for twelve months, women for six. It was a move that the National
Socialists were to introduce to Germany thirteen years later. Even more contro-
versial were the agrarian reforms undertaken in May 1921, when all privately
owned lands measuring more than thirty hectares were expropriated. Since
Stamboliyski’s policies were emphatically anti-urban, they met with increasing
opposition in the towns and cities. But his enemies also included large sections
of the officer corps, and from their ranks came the leaders of the putsch who in
June 1923 toppled Stamboliyski’s government with the king’s approval. A
proponent of greater ties with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes,
Stamboliyski himself was assassinated on 14 June by fanatical supporters of the
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. His successor was Alexander
Zankov, who taught economics at the University of Sofia and had no political
affiliations.
The officers’ putsch of June 1923 was followed in September 1923 by a
Communist uprising led by the party’s chairman, Georgi Dimitrov, and by the
Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party’s Central Committee, Vasil
Kolarov, whom the Comintern had sent back to his Bulgarian homeland. The
uprising was bloodily suppressed after only a few days, although Dimitrov,
Kolarov and a number of leaders of the Peasants’ Party who had taken part in
the fighting were able to escape abroad. The elections of November 1923
resulted in a victory for the official government party, the Democratic Union,
which enjoyed the support of the Social Democrats. The Democratic Union
remained in power until 1931, allowing Bulgaria to enjoy a degree of internal
stability that was little short of astonishing by Balkan standards.
And yet not even Bulgaria was spared a number of major upheavals, most
of which were caused by the Communist Party. After fomenting further unrest,
282 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the party was banned in 1924 but remained active as an underground organi-
zation. A series of political assassinations was followed on 16 April 1925 by the
bombing of St Sophia’s Cathedral, an atrocity aimed at the ministers and
officers assembled there, together with the king. Although Boris and the
members of his government all escaped, there were more than 100 fatalities,
including several generals and the mayor of Sofia, and over 300 injured. A state
of emergency was declared and remained in force for the next six months.
Following their act of terror, the Communists forfeited much of their previous
popularity; the Peasants’ Party distanced itself from the extreme left, and it
took two years for a new Communist organization to replace its predecessor:
the Independent Workers’ Party was even able to take part in parliamentary
elections.
In the elections in 1931, the opposition parties that had formed a National
Bloc under the leadership of the Peasants’ Party emerged as the victors in spite
of the government’s sustained and determined attempt to influence the elec-
torate. But the internal divisions within the National Bloc were so deep that by
May 1934 the government of the prime minister, Nikola Mushanov, had already
lost its parliamentary majority. The dissolution of parliament was seized on by
an anti-parliamentary alliance of army officers, intellectuals and politicians
from the Peasants’ Party that was known as ‘Zveno’ to mount a putsch on 19
May 1934. The new government under Colonel Kimon Georgiev proclaimed a
state of emergency, declared sections of the 1879 constitution null and void and
introduced a number of draconian measures designed to make financial
savings. Its greatest efforts were directed at defeating the Internal Macedonian
Revolutionary Organization, whose leader, Ivan Mihaylov, and a number of his
comrades in arms managed to flee abroad, where they sought to revive the
movement. Militant left-wing opposition was systematically suppressed by
means of an emergency measure dated 31 August 1934.
Georgiev’s government was no less internally divided than its predecessor,
the National Bloc, had been, with committed monarchists and convinced
republicans squaring up to each other. In January 1935, King Boris, who had
merely tolerated the putsch of May 1934 rather than actually supporting it,
actively interfered in events by removing Georgiev from his post as prime
minister. His replacements changed frequently, on each occasion having to
reshuffle their cabinets. In October 1937 Boris passed a new electoral law that
reduced the size of parliament, introduced women’s suffrage and allowed only
individuals, not parties and other political organizations, to submit candidates.
Voting in the elections of March 1938 was relatively free and fair and gave a safe
majority to those candidates who were closest to the government and who won
104 seats as against the opposition’s fifty-six. The authoritarian regime of Boris
III that was established in 1935 undoubtedly amounted to a dictatorship, and
yet it was the most liberal of the region’s interwar regimes, at least when meas-
ured against Yugoslavia under Alexander I and Romania under Carol II.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 283

In justifying their coup in May 1934, the officers who staged it argued that
the country’s political situation was so serious that they had been left with no
alternative. They were referring to Bulgaria’s political isolation as a result of the
Balkan Pact signed by Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia and Romania in February
1934, the anti-Bulgarian thrust of which was unmistakable. King Boris was
particularly keen to reach an agreement with Yugoslavia, and in January 1937,
after negotiations that had often proved extremely difficult, he signed a friend-
ship treaty and a non-aggression pact with his neighbour, a goal that he had
been pursuing for some considerable time. When coupled with the Balkan Pact
that was concluded in Salonika in July 1938, a non-aggression treaty freed
Bulgaria from the terms of the Treaty of Neuilly that had placed restrictions on
its rearmament programme and enabled the country to station troops in the
demilitarized zone on the border with Greece.
Like Romania, Bulgaria spent the 1930s building up its trade links with
Germany, which had traditionally been the leading market for agricultural
produce from the country. In turn, Bulgaria imported most of its industrial
products from Germany. But Boris avoided any closer political ties with the
Third Reich, a policy he was able to maintain even after the outbreak of the
Second World War.

No Balkan country suffered as many violent upheavals and attempted coups

during the interwar years as Greece. Turkish victories in the Graeco-Turkish
War were followed by a period of revolutionary unrest in the early autumn of
1922 that swept the supporters of the former prime minister, Eleftherios
Venizelos, back into power – Venizelos had already held the post from 1910 to
1915 and again from 1917 to 1920. King Constantine I was forced to abdicate
on 27 September 1922 in favour of his son, George II. The new junta has gone
down in the annals of Greek history thanks to a show trial that it held against
five leading politicians from the toppled government and the last commander
in chief of the Greek armed forces in Asia Minor: although there was no
evidence to condemn them, all the accused were sentenced to death and
executed in November 1922 in the face of international protests. The death of
the country’s legal system exacerbated the disastrous polarization between
supporters and detractors of Venizelos, establishing a dichotomy that was to
leave its mark on Greek politics for the next two decades.
In October 1923 sections of the military, angered by an electoral law that
placed Venizelos’s enemies at a disadvantage, mounted a putsch, but it was
suppressed after only a few days. The anti-Venizelists did not take part in the
elections to the Constituent National Assembly in December 1923. The Liberals
and Republicans formed an electoral pact and following their victory they
effectively forced George II to abdicate. In March 1924 the Constituent
Assembly proclaimed a republic, a decision ratified by a plebiscite the following
month. But in spite of a certain economic upturn between 1924 and 1926,
284 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Greece failed to become the stable parliamentary democracy that it had aspired
to be ever since its liberal constitution was enacted in 1863. General Theodoras
Pangalos mounted a putsch in late June 1925 and, in spite of the promises that
he had made to the government of Alexandros Papanastasiou of the Social
Democrat Republican Union, he dissolved the National Assembly in September
without calling new elections. Instead, he had himself elected the country’s
president in April 1926.
The period of Pangalos’s dictatorship coincided with a serious political
crisis on the international stage, when a border incident led Greece to occupy
the demilitarized zone that lay close to the border with Bulgaria. The League of
Nations forced Greece to withdraw at the end of October 1925 and to pay repa-
rations. Greece’s economic and financial problems grew dramatically worse
under Pangalos, prompting General Georgios Kondylis to topple the regime in
August 1926. Elections were held the following November and resulted in a
victory for the republican parties. A new constitution – the third since 1925 –
came into force on 2 July 1927, creating a two-chamber system comprising a
legislative Chamber of Deputies (Boulé) and a Senate (Gerousía) whose
members were made up for the most part of elected representatives, the rest
consisting of members chosen jointly by the Chamber and by the Senate.
Venizelos returned to power in May 1928 after a grand coalition govern-
ment made up of republican and moderate royalist parties foundered on
economic and financial arguments. With this there began a four-year period of
relative stability, when legal certainty grew not least as a result of the creation
of a Supreme Administrative Court and Greece signed friendship treaties
with Italy, Yugoslavia and Turkey. But internal tensions remained, and under
the impact of the world economic crisis the Greek currency, the drachma,
lost around three-quarters of its value. Venizelos considered strengthening
the country’s executive along the lines of the German presidential cabinets
since 1930 but in the event he did nothing to get in the way of a democratic
change of government in the parliamentary elections that were held in
September 1932.
The winner in these elections was Panagis Tsaldaris’s royalist People’s Party,
which formed a government with the help of the smaller republican parties,
but his majority proved extremely precarious, persuading President Pavlos
Kountouriotis to dissolve parliament five months later and call for new elec-
tions, which were now conducted according to the recently introduced system
of proportional representation. The new elections were held on 5 March 1933
and saw the People’s Party and two smaller right-wing parties win an outright
majority, prompting the Venizelist general, Nikolaos Plastiras, to mount a coup
the very next day. With little support from the officer corps, it was quickly
suppressed. Under Tsaldaris’s new government, tensions between the
Venizelists and the anti-Venizelists continued to mount, and in March 1935 the
supporters of Venizelos made one further attempt to stage a coup, only to fail
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 285

as a result of lack of mass support and inadequate military preparations.

Venizelos fled abroad and died in Paris in March 1936.
The Venizelists’ failed putsch gave the anti-parliamentary and anti-
republican forces in the government camp the incentive that they were waiting
for. Although the moderate royalists won the parliamentary elections in June
1935, Tsaldaris was forced to step down by radical monarchist officers in the
October of that year. He was replaced by General Georgios Kondylis, who also
assumed the role of regent. Once the moderate majority of members repre-
senting the royalist People’s Party had walked out of the Chamber, the latter
proclaimed the restoration of the monarchy and a return to the constitution of
1911. A rigged plebiscite that was held in November 1935 produced a majority
of almost 98 per cent in favour of a restoration of the monarchy and, hence, for
a return to power of King George II.
On the other hand, the elections that were held in January 1936 were gener-
ally considered to be fair and free. The result was an approximate parity
between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists, while the Communists, with their
fifteen seats, held the balance of power. Since the military was unwilling to
tolerate any government dependent on the Communists, George II, who
returned to Greece from exile on 25 November 1935, took steps to restore
discipline in the army by appointing Ionnis Metaxas minister for the army in
March 1936. Metaxas, who was the leader of the Freethinkers’ Party, succeeded
the moderate Independent prime minister Konstantinos Demertzis on the
latter’s death in April 1936.
From the outset, Metaxas was determined to break completely with the
parliamentary system. Strikes were put down by the police with extreme
brutality, and in August 1936 he mounted a coup with the aim of introducing
an authoritarian dictatorship modelled in many ways on that of Fascist Italy.
Political parties were banned, newspapers and magazines subjected to censor-
ship, and trade unions, associations and universities were purged of opposition
forces. The newly established security services persecuted political opponents
with unprecedented ruthlessness, relying in the process on an extensive
network of spies. Paramilitary organizations, including a national youth
brigade, and a radical and ideological nationalism completed the picture of a
right-wing dictatorship whose hard core comprised the indoctrinated military.
But, however much Metaxas may have drawn closer to the power structures
and means of control of a Fascist regime, he took care not to become dependent
on either Rome or Berlin, preferring, rather, to maintain good relations with
the Western Powers.
The frequency with which putsches were mounted in Greece between 1922
and 1936 recalls the republics of Latin America. A deeper reason for the coun-
try’s peculiar blend of parliamentary instability and authoritarian stability lay
in the fundamentally reactionary attitude of the Orthodox Church, whose
privileged status was demonstratively highlighted in the very first article of the
286 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

1927 constitution. Related to the influence of the Orthodox clergy was the low
level of education: even as late as 1928, 23 per cent of the male population and
58 per cent of the female population were unable to read or write. Between
1920 and 1928 the proportion of the population working in agriculture, forestry
and fishing rose from 58 per cent to 61 per cent. Many of the tiny farms were
unprofitable and prevented the economy from growing. A handful of families
set the tone, in every case tending to serve the interests of their own particular
clientele.
Although Metaxas’s regime brought the country a handful of social
improvements such minimum wages, a shorter working week and national
insurance, it is impossible to describe it as a modernizing dictatorship: even
after 1936, Greece not only remained socially backward but was still domi-
nated by profoundly hostile camps, by a politicized military and by widespread
corruption.

The foregoing comments apply even more to Albania than to Greece. Here
political developments during the interwar years were a permanent reflection
of a backward society. Even as recently as 1945 80 per cent of the population
was illiterate. In the years around 1918 the country had been almost exclusively
agricultural in character as well as being the only predominantly Islamic state
in Europe. Around 70 per cent of the population was Muslim, 20 per cent was
Greek Orthodox and 10 per cent was Catholic Christians. The higher echelons
of Albanian society were made up of Muslim landowners, or beys, from whom
the leading families recruited their members; the vast bulk of the population
was made up of farmers and shepherds who were nominally free but economi-
cally dependent on the families of the leading landowners. Tirana was declared
the country’s capital in 1920, when it had a population of 15,000, compared
with under a million Albanians in the country as a whole. Albania had gained
its independence in 1912 in the wake of the First Balkan War. During the First
World War the south of the country was occupied by Greek, Italian and French
troops, the north by Serbs and, later, Austro-Hungarian forces. After the depar-
ture of the latter, units of the South Slav army repossessed the region.
After 1918, Albania’s borders and, indeed, its whole survival as a country
were jeopardized by claims raised by two neighbouring states, Greece and the
newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as well as by Italy, which
regarded Albania as a future protectorate and occupied Valona (Vlorë) as a
security, only to have to abandon this bastion in the wake of fierce fighting in
the summer of 1920. Rome recognized the integrity and independence of
Albania on 2 August 1920 and agreed to withdraw all its troops from the
region. As a result, Albania was now free, the only exceptions being a small
number of border areas occupied by Greek and South Slav units. It became a
member of the League of Nations in December 1920.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 287

During the months leading up to this moment, the governments of

Suleiman Bey Delvina and, after November, of Elias Bey Vrioni had extended
their authority over the whole of Albania from their centre of operations in
Tirana. The parliament that was elected in April 1921 on the basis of equal, but
indirect, male suffrage was made up of two parties, the Progressive Party domi-
nated by the country’s major landowners and the slightly more left-wing
People’s Party. In October a new government under Pandel Evangheli was
installed in an attempt to avert an uprising by the Catholic Mirdites. Its domi-
nant figure was the minister of war, Ahmed Bey Zog, who put down the
uprising both promptly and energetically. By December 1921 he was the
minister for the interior in the new cabinet of Xhafer Ypi, in which capacity he
overthrew a further uprising in the spring of 1922, this one directed at him
personally. In December he became Albania’s prime minister. Thanks to the
decision taken at a conference of Allied ambassadors in September 1922, the
country’s borders were now clearly demarcated: essentially they were the ones
that had existed in 1913; the Kingdom of the South Slavs and Greece both had
to withdraw their troops from Albanian soil.
Inseparable from Albania’s political climate were the political murders
which, in keeping with the tradition of blood vengeance, were perpetrated by
members of the rival clans. An attempt on the life of Ahmed Bey Zog in
February 1924 in which he was merely wounded was followed in April by a
fatal attack on a member of parliament, Avni Rustem, which was ordered by
Zog himself. It triggered a further uprising that on this occasion affected the
whole country and ended with the rebels marching into the capital, forcing
Zog, who had already stepped down as prime minister, to flee to the neigh-
bouring Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
From there Zog headed a force which, armed by Yugoslavia, regained power
in Tirana in December 1924. In the middle of January 1925 he persuaded the
rump parliament to appoint him prime minister and commander in chief of
the Albanian armed forces, and on 22 January parliament proclaimed the new
republic, thereby clarifying the as yet unresolved question of the type of state
that Albania was to become. On 31 January Zog had himself appointed presi-
dent for a seven-year period and passed a constitution that granted the head of
state extraordinarily wide-ranging powers.
This marked the beginning of a fourteen-year dictatorship whose hallmarks
were not only an outspoken nationalism but also political assassinations that
Zog personally ordered. Economically speaking, he sought to strengthen his
country’s standing by granting concessions to Italian and Anglo-Persian oil
companies; and in terms of his foreign policy he relied increasingly on Italy in
an attempt to avoid undue dependence on his South Slav neighbour. In 1926
and 1927 he concluded two Tirana Pacts, the second of which committed both
signatories to defend one another in the event of an invasion by a third party,
although the military weakness of Zog’s Albanian militia meant that the treaty
288 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

amounted to little more than an Italian obligation to protect the country on the
eastern side of the Adriatic.
Zog dissolved both chambers of parliament in the summer of 1928 and
replaced them with a Constituent Assembly that altered the 1925 constitution
in such a way as to allow him to be elected king of Albania on 1 September
1928. The new constitution of 1 December 1928 defined Albania as a ‘demo-
cratic, parliamentary and hereditary monarchy’ which, like the Turkey of
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, adopted the statute books of other countries, including
France’s Code Civil and the penal code of Fascist Italy. The administration was
reorganized along the lines of the centralized French state. The agrarian
reforms of 1930 looked more radical on paper than they did in practice: indi-
viduals were not allowed to own more than forty hectares of private land, with
a further fifteen hectares for the owner’s wife and for each of his children. But
landowners had to sell a third of their lands to the state-owned Agrarian Bank.
If they agreed to modernization, they could retain the remaining land for a
period of fifteen years.
Albania became increasingly dependent on Italian loans during the world
economic crisis. Mussolini wanted a customs union in order to guarantee
further loans, but Italy was unable to force through this measure in spite of a
demonstration of its naval might off the coast at Durazzo – Albanian Durrës
– in June 1934. On the other hand, it was able to impose conditions that repre-
sented a severe incursion on Albania’s sovereignty. From 1935 the country was
an economic protectorate of Fascist Italy, but other international factors were
needed to ensure Albania’s political subjugation, and these conditions were not
to be created until the crisis that engulfed the whole Continent of Europe on
the eve of the Second World War.

If there was any Western country which in the first quarter of the twentieth
century repeatedly invited comparisons with a Balkan state, then it was
Portugal. The revolution of 1910 may have turned the monarchy into a republic
but it certainly did not lead to greater stability, and governments changed with
a frequency seen nowhere else in Europe. Uprisings dignified with the name of
‘revolutions’, coups d’état and bombings were so frequent that they largely went
unnoticed outside Portugal. In January 1915 the country experienced its first
dictatorship under General Joaquim Pereira Pimento de Castro, but it lasted
only until April, when it was toppled by a ‘revolution’ mounted by sections of
the army and navy.
During the First World War Portugal initially remained neutral in spite of
its traditionally close ties with Great Britain, not joining in the hostilities until
1916, when it sided with the Entente and sent some 100,000 soldiers to Flanders
and the African colonies. The country’s decision to go to war proved costly,
with a total of 35,000 dead and injured combatants. Coupled with increasing
food shortages, this led to violent unrest and, from the summer of 1917, to
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 289

strikes backed by the anarcho-syndicalists. The Democratic Party government

responded by declaring a state of emergency but failed to restore order. The
general discontent persuaded a group of officers and civilians to mount a coup
in December 1917. The leader of the conspirators was Sidónio Paes, a mathe-
matics professor at the University of Coimbra and a former ambassador in
Berlin. It was he who became the country’s new prime minister.
Paes introduced universal suffrage for men, had himself elected president,
founded his own National Republican Party and established a kind of presi-
dential dictatorship sanctioned by a plebiscite. By suppressing rival parties and
the trade unions, he won the backing not only of the Catholic Church but also
of employers, landowners and the army. In December 1918 two attempts were
made on his life. The first misfired, but in the second he was fatally shot.
However brief Paes’s dictatorship may have been, it continued to rever-
berate for a long time afterwards as an early form of an interwar Fascist regime.
Among the precursors of such a regime was the Portuguese Integralismo
Lusitano, whose principal ideologue, António Sardinha, modelled his thinking
on that of Charles Maurras and Action Française. Following the return to the
constitution of 1911, similar views were promoted by the radically right-wing
National Crusade that sought the abolition of parliamentary democracy and its
replacement by an authoritarian regime. The existing order was opposed not
only by integralists and nationalists but also by monarchists, who made several
attempts to topple the regime. The republicans responded by calling for a
people’s militia. This internal unrest reached a bloody climax on the night of
19/20 October 1921.
In the eyes of many members of the property-owning classes, especially the
major landowners and Catholic Church, the military seemed the most reliable
antidote to the political chaos that was sweeping across the country. In April
1925 sections of the army that shared this view attempted a coup, but it was
thwarted by a number of regiments and by the Republican National Guard.
The military mounted a further putsch in May 1926, and this time it was
successful: the government of the Democratic Party was toppled from power.
The uprising had been led by General Gomes da Costa, a relatively unpolitical
figure, who was replaced by General Antonio Carmona in July 1926. Carmona
established a military dictatorship and in April 1928 had himself elected presi-
dent, a post he retained until his death in 1951.
The biggest challenge facing the new regime was the task of restoring the
country’s finances, a task which in April 1928 was entrusted to Antonio de
Oliveira Salazar, who taught economics at the University of Coimbra and
whose policies proved so successful that he quickly came to be seen as the
government’s strong man, becoming prime minister in July 1932 and retaining
the post for thirty-six years, until September 1968.
The new constitution of 19 March 1933 formally turned Portugal into a pres-
idential regime in which the prime minister was responsible solely to the state
290 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

president. In fact it was Salazar who as prime minister was the dominant figure.
The country’s elected representatives in the National Assembly owed their seats
to a graduated and, therefore, unequal right to vote on the part of the electorate.
The upper house was divided according to professional class, employers and
employees being separately represented. A labour law of September 1933 banned
strikes and lockouts. Other laws enacted in 1933 covered press censorship and
placed limits on the freedom of assembly. Both laws contributed significantly
to the fact that the elections always favoured the government. Like Austro-
Fascism, Salazar’s Estado Novo borrowed many of its concepts from the ideal of
a Christian corporate state as promoted by Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo
anno of 1931. The term ‘clerical Fascism’ came close to summing up the situa-
tion, while failing to take account of the fact that state and Church remained
separate. Since the Church was not recognized as a person in law, there were
repeated conflicts that were not resolved until the concordat of 1940.
If the government enjoyed the support of the masses, this was due above all
to the official party, the União Nacional, which was founded in 1930, and to
two organizations established six years later, the paramilitary Legião Portuguesa
and the Mocidade Portuguesa, a national youth movement. But the official
party served only to bolster the government and, unlike the situation in fully
developed Fascist – and Communist – regimes, it was not an independent
factor in the balance of power. The chief instrument in intimidating and
repressing the opposition was the secret police, the Policia de Vigilância e de
Defesa do Estado that was established in 1933 and that changed its name in
1945 to the Policia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado. Its resources included
special courts, its own prisons and an extensive network of spies. The national
ideology revolved around a mystic nationalism centred in turn on a cultic
belief in the Catholic mission of Portugal and of its colonial empire.
Portugal remained an agrarian country under the Estado Novo: even as late
as 1950 only a fifth of the working population was employed in industry. The
country’s economic policies were aimed as far as possible at self-sufficiency but
unwittingly encouraged stagnation. In 1911 70 per cent of the population had
been illiterate, and this figure fell only slowly. In short, the ‘new state’ was far
from being a dictatorship bent on modernization, but nor did it possess the
ideological dynamism typical of totalitarian systems. Salazarism adopted a
defensive attitude towards the outside world. The support that the authori-
tarian system enjoyed both at home and abroad was not just a consequence of
repression and propaganda but was also a reaction to the lasting experience
of instability and chaos in the years before 1926. Both, moreover, were a result
of the social backwardness of the country, a legacy for which reactionary
Iberian Catholicism was in no small measure to blame.

Unlike Portugal, Spain retained its neutrality throughout the First World War
– even after German submarines torpedoed Spanish merchant vessels in 1917
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 291

as part of their all-out war. That same year the kingdom’s oligarchical system of
government was repeatedly placed under pressure. Ever since the constitution
of 1812 had opened up the army to every social class, it had been the bourgeois
officers who had set the tone. In 1916 they had closed ranks as juntas de defensa
and attacked the major aristocratic landowners, together with the government
and the parliamentary system, in no uncertain terms. In August 1917 they
demanded that King Alfonso XIII should conspire with them and all forces
bent on reform in order to topple the regime, which they blamed for their low
pay and for the chaos and corruption at home. The king refused to put his
name to a putsch, but the juntas insisted, continuing in consequence to pose an
abiding threat to the constitutional order.
A further challenge came from a parliamentary faction led by the Catalan
Lliga Regionalista under Francesc Cambó, the Republicans of Alejandro
Lerroux and the Socialists associated with Pablo Iglesias. The opposition MPs
would almost certainly have achieved at least some of their aims if they had
formed an alliance with the juntas, but the latter were too cautious to agree to
any kind of a merger with Catalan regionalists, Republicans and Socialists.
The situation grew markedly worse in the summer of 1917, when social
protests at the economic beneficiaries of the wartime economy – the exporters
of raw materials, together with agricultural and industrial produce – took a
more radical turn. In August a strike by railway workers and dockworkers that
enjoyed widespread support from Socialists such as Francisco Largo Caballero
and Julián Besteiro was turned into an indefinite general strike. The govern-
ment of the conservative prime minister, Eduardo Dato e Iradier, responded by
declaring a state of siege and within only a few days had overthrown the mili-
tant workers with the help of the army. The actions of the police and military
were particularly bloody in Barcelona and the Asturias mining region, where
the young Major Francisco Franco attracted attention with his firm actions
directed against the striking workers. The proletarian uprising also failed
because it received no support from the forces of reform in parliament and in
the army, neither group being willing to make common cause with Socialists
who were bent on class warfare.
New elections to the Cortes were held in February 1918. As usual, they were
rigged by the local caciques. The following month a grand coalition was formed
from conservatives and liberals under Antonio Maura y Montana, but irrecon-
cilable differences between the two camps meant that it was able to hold on to
power for barely eight months. There followed a series of short-lived cabinets
that felt threatened by strikes by the Andalusian agricultural workers who for
the first time in their country’s history were heard to shout Bolshevik slogans,
hailing Lenin and the soviets and demanding the collectivization of the land.
The unrest continued during the period of Dato’s last cabinet, which took
office in May 1920 and sought to deal with the state of anarchy not only by
calling in the Civil Guard but also by means of a socio-political offensive that
292 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

included establishing a ministry of labour and introducing national insurance.

But Dato failed to convince the radical left, and on 8 March 1921 he was assas-
sinated by Catalan anarchists in Madrid.
Between 1919 and 1921 Spain seemed more than once to be on the brink of
civil war. In Barcelona, pistoleros hired by the employers clashed with militant
anarcho-syndicalists, while in Andalusia there were countless instances of land
being occupied. At the same time there were increasing signs of the influence
of the Russian Bolsheviks. The socialist umbrella trade union, the Unión
General de Trabajadores, and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español refused to
join the Third International but were unable to avert a split within the Marxist
workers’ movement. Spain’s first Communist Party was formed in April 1920,
with a second one following in 1921. Both merged in March 1922 as the Partido
Comunista de España. The anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional de
Trabajo adopted a policy of agrarian communism but did not regard the
Russian October Revolution as a model and declined to join the Third
International and the Red Trade Union International.
The year 1921 also witnessed an annihilating defeat for the country’s troops
in its colonial war with Spanish Morocco, a war that had begun in 1909 only to
be interrupted by the First World War. The uprising of the Rif tribes under
Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Karim came to a bloody climax in July 1921 with the
Desastre de Annual that cost the lives of more than 12,000 Spanish soldiers.
The sense of international shock caused by this incident contributed in no
small way to the ever more positive response to the call for a dictatorship that
would restore order to the country, ideally under the military.
Two years later, on 13 September 1923, the captain general of Barcelona,
Miguel Primo de Rivera, mounted a coup against the government of Prime
Minister Manuel García Prieto. In this, he had the backing of a group of high-
ranking officers in Madrid and, above all, leading members of the Catalan
upper middle classes. Since the government could not count on the support of
the military, it resigned, prompting Alfonso XIII to ask Primo de Rivera to
form a new government. Alfonso decided against civil war and in favour of a
military dictatorship, thereby giving the putsch a formal legality and investing
the new regime with a validity that was initially entirely negative: the parlia-
mentary system was no longer capable of maintaining a monopoly of state
power and of safeguarding law and order, making its failure complete. The
fact that the pronunciamiento – the Spanish term for a military revolt – had
sidelined a system that had for a long time no longer been capable of func-
tioning meant that the coup received a largely positive response in the press
and in public opinion, and this was also true of the first official action of
Primo de Rivera’s government: the suspension of some of the most important
articles pertaining to basic rights in the 1876 constitution, including those
guaranteeing the freedom of the press, the right of assembly and the freedom
of association.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 293

Within Spanish society, the principal pillars of the military dictatorship

were the major landowners, the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie and the Catholic
Church, which enjoyed far-reaching privileges in the field of education. The
vast majority of the military initially maintained its distance, and it was only
Primo de Rivera’s military successes in a coordinated Franco-Spanish offensive
in North Africa following Abd al-Karim’s attack on French Morocco that led
them to change their allegiance: by 1927 the colonial war could for the most
part be regarded as over.
Remarkably, the Socialist Party and the Unión General de Trabajadores
were willing to work together in government, a state of affairs due not least to
the broadly based social appeal of Primo de Rivera, who maintained good
personal relations with Largo Caballero, the Unión’s secretary and subse-
quently the leader of the Socialists, and who was able to impress the moderate
left by encouraging the building of cheap council flats and by settling wage
disputes by means of committees made up equally of employers and employees.
Conversely, those sections of the proletariat that were deemed incapable of
integration were actively opposed, starting with a ban on the anarcho-
syndicalist Confederación Nacional de Trabajo, while the Communist leaders
were arrested following a series of general strikes in Biscay and Asturias in
1927. The ban also affected the Catalan Lliga Regionalista. The royalist parties
disbanded soon after the putsch, and many of their members joined the
government Unity Party, the Unión Patriotica, which had been formed in 1924.
By December 1925 Primo de Rivera had established a military directorate
that included civilian ministers who were responsible to it. Among the govern-
ment’s most important tasks were a protectionist economic policy that helped
with Spain’s industrialization process, and a modernization of the country’s
infrastructure achieved by building modern motorways, channelling the
course of rivers, building dams and bringing artificial irrigation to some of
Spain’s more arid regions. Attempts were also made to reafforest regions eroded
by centuries of deforestation; even today this remains one of Spain’s most
serious environmental problems. But the government failed to tackle the
problem of agrarian reform, which was no less pressing than that of deforesta-
tion. In this case, any attempt to intervene would have resulted in a conflict
with the country’s major landowners, a powerful elite whose support Primo de
Rivera believed was essential to his own continuing rule.
The wishes of another important group were not treated as seriously by the
prime minister: that of the Catalan bourgeoisie, whose members had sided
with the general in 1923 because they saw in him a champion of regional
autonomy. But he began to move away from this policy in 1925, leading to an
increasing sense of alienation between him and one of his most important
support groups. He set even less store by the approval of the country’s intel-
lectuals, many of whom, including the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, had
expressed support for the military putsch in 1923. But this initial enthusiasm
294 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

soon faded when the entirely non-intellectual Primo de Rivera expressed his
public opposition to the university teachers and students who were against
him. In 1928 he even shut down the University of Madrid in the wake of anti-
government protests. Several professors, including Ortega, resigned their
chairs, while the philosopher Miguel Unamuno y Jugo and the historian
Gregorio Marañon y Posadillo opted for temporary exile.
With the beginning of the world economic crisis in the autumn of 1929,
Spain’s economy suffered a dramatic decline. In January 1930 the country’s
finance minister, José Calvo Sotelo, resigned in the face of the mounting
national debt, rising prices and the devaluation of the peseta. A further sign of
the crisis that beset the country at this time was the evident helplessness of the
government in the matter of the constitution. At the insistence of Alfonso III,
Primo de Rivera had convened an assembly of predominantly conservative
dignitaries in September 1927. A little under two years later, in July 1929, they
submitted a draft constitution, a document that departed in important ways
from the unpopular constitution of 1876 but which was rejected almost unani-
mously by liberals, monarchists and Republicans since it included no provi-
sions for a government responsible to parliament. For his part, Alfonso had his
own reasons for rejecting the draft for its authors were keen to withdraw certain
prerogatives from him. The fate of the draft was sealed, and so the government
withdrew it.
A constitution that took account of the weaknesses and failure of the former
parliamentary system and laid the foundations for a fully functional represent-
ative democracy, together with an electoral law that prevented ballot-rigging
on both a local and national level and counteracted the fragmentation of the
different political parties, would have spelt the end of the military dictatorship,
while at the same time lending it a kind of belated justification. Primo de Rivera
was unwilling to take this historic step and was probably incapable of doing so.
Ultimately, his position was fatally compromised by the loss of the support that
he had received from the military, a situation caused by reforms to the army
designed drastically to reduce the number of officers both commissioned and
non-commissioned. On 26 January 1930 Primo de Rivera saw himself obliged
to ask the country’s ten regional captains general whether they still had confi-
dence in him. They responded in the negative, with the result that on 28
January Alfonso forced his dictatorial prime minister to resign. Primo de
Rivera went into voluntary exile in Paris, where he died of diabetes barely seven
weeks later.
Primo de Rivera was succeeded by General Dámasco Berenguer, a political
opponent of his predecessor and until then the head of the Royal Military
Cabinet. He reversed the army reforms and dismissed many of the civil serv-
ants whom Primo de Rivera had appointed. He also announced a return to the
1876 constitution, but this failed to provide a solution to the crisis. In August
1930 Republican and Socialist politicians led by the Catalan left formed the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 295

Pact of San Sebastián whose aim was sweeping reform and the establishment of
a republic. Leading intellectuals such as Ortega and Marañon, who had in the
meantime returned to Spain, spoke openly in favour of a republic, and in the
army, too, officers who held republican views began to organize support for
such an idea.
Berenguer was replaced by Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar on 18 February
1931. Aznar included in his cabinet the former Liberal prime minister Count
Alvaro de Romanones and retained Berenguer as his minister of war. On
12 April 1931 the government organized local elections in order to delay having
to hold national elections for as long as possible. The Republicans and Socialists
gained sizeable majorities in the larger towns and cities, whereas the monar-
chists won the upper hand in the country – and, hence, in Spain in general.
Aznar’s government was panicked into regarding the outcome of the election
as a plebiscite in favour of a republic, and a republic was indeed proclaimed in
a number of cities, including Madrid. It was the country’s second republic after
the short-lived first republic of 1873–4. On 14 April Alfonso III bowed to an
ultimatum from a revolutionary committee under Niceto Alcalá Zamora, and
he left Spain, travelling by sea from Cartagena to Marseilles, but without
renouncing his right to the throne.
The fall of the monarchy was the direct result of the inability of the military
dictatorship to solve the problems that had brought about the end of the parlia-
mentary system in 1923, namely, the agrarian question, the relations between
central government and the regions, the position of the Church and the mili-
tary and the implementation of the state’s monopoly on power in the face of the
forces of anarchy. Shortly after the change of regime, these forces demonstrated
that they had learnt nothing from history: responding to rumours that the
monarchists were planning to attack the Republic, they burned down countless
monasteries and churches on the night of 11/12 May 1931 in Madrid and
subsequently in other parts of Spain, especially Andalusia.
It was the Socialists who, with 117 votes, emerged as the largest party from
the elections for the constituent Cortes on 28 June 1931. Together with the left-
wing Republican parties, which together won eighty seats, and with a number
of regional groups, they had a majority that allowed them to form a govern-
ment. The opposition was made up of 100 anti-socialist and anti-clerical radi-
cals and eighty Liberals, right-wing Republicans, Agrarians and Carlist
traditionalists. The monarchists had demanded a boycott of the polls and as a
result were not represented in the Cortes.
The Constituent Assembly adopted the Spanish Republic’s new constitu-
tion on 9 December 1931 by 175 votes to fifty-nine. It was liberal and strictly
secular, explicitly stating that the Spanish state had no official religion, granting
denominational groups the status of associations, abolishing the previous
budget for the clergy, giving all men and women over the age of twenty-three
the same active and passive voting rights, protecting private property, while
296 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

allowing for the possibility of expropriation, usually in return for compensa-

tion and for purposes of the social good, and providing for the formation of
autonomous regions within the united Spanish state. The president of the
Republic was elected for a six-year term by the members of the Cortes and by
a similar numbers of electors, male and female. He had the right to dissolve
parliament, but otherwise he was a figurehead with no real powers of his own.
His ministers were dependent on the trust of the Cortes. In the interests of state
security the government could overrule certain basic rights by means of a
decree as long as it gained the subsequent approval of the Cortes.
It seemed that Spain had completed its transition from an authoritarian
state and could look forward to a democratic future. But although the anti-
Republican right had refused to be represented in parliament, it still
commanded considerable support in Spanish society – and not just within its
upper echelons. For their part, the Republican forces were deeply divided, a
point that emerges with particular clarity from the agrarian reforms of 1932.
Bourgeois Republicans wanted to redistribute the land stripped from the major
landowners and give it to peasants who owned no land at all, whereas their
Socialist partners in the coalition government preferred to nationalize the
land, which they wanted to be collectively farmed. The law of September 1932
was a compromise, giving the government wide-ranging powers of acquisition,
while leaving the question as to the private or collective cultivation of the
expropriated lands to the discretion of rural communities, leading to substan-
tial delays in implementing the reforms and resulting in growing discontent
among the rural population.
But the Socialists, too, were split: the party chairman and leader of the
Cortes, Julián Besteiro, preferred to leave the realization of a socialist order to
the democratic process, which effectively meant abandoning it to the distant
future. The minister for labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, conversely, who
headed the Partido Socialista Obrero Español from 1932, shifted his position
to the left under the influence of the growth of the anarcho-syndicalist
Confederación Nacional de Trabajo and came increasingly to champion an
uncompromising class struggle and even the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Only on the question of Catalonia were the Socialists and left-wing Republicans
in agreement. (It was the last-named party that from October 1931 provided
the coalition government’s prime minister in the person of the keenly anti-
clergy Manuel Azaña y Diaz.) On 9 December 1932 the Catalan Institute
declared Catalan, as well as Spanish, the region’s official language; and Catalonia
was granted its own parliament, its own government made up of generals, and
far-reaching administrative autonomy.
In February 1933 a moderate right-wing party emerged under the leader-
ship of the lawyer José Maria Gil Robles y Quiñones: the Confederación
Española de Derechas Autónomas, or CEDA, was a Christian Conservative
party that left open the question of a republic or a monarchy, taking its cue
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 297

from papal doctrine on social matters and advocating a reform of society based
on professional principles. The CEDA was a part of the Acción Popular, a
conservative umbrella organization in which Gil Robles likewise played a
leading role. To the right of the CEDA were the royalists, some of whom formed
the Renovación Española that was loyal to Alfonso XIII, while others – the
Carlists – advocated the principle of an absolute monarchy.
Far more radical were the militia-like Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-
Sindicalista that were summoned into existence in October 1931 and that
demanded the comprehensive re-Catholicization of Spain. Even so, it was not
they that formed the most extreme right-wing party but the Falange Española
founded in October 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of the
country’s former dictator. This was a combat organization modelled on those
of the Italian Fascists. In February 1934 the Juntas de Ofensiva and the Falange
Española merged under the leadership of José Antonio Primo de Rivera and
formed a single organization, the Falange Española de la Juntas de Ofensiva
Nacional-Sindicalista. Among its outward hallmarks were the blue shirts worn
by its members. There was also a right-wing faction within the military, the
Unión Militar Española, which was keen above all to challenge the reforms
undertaken by Azaña, especially his reduction in the size of the officer corps
and the subordination of the military to the control of the government, which
in turn was controlled by parliament.
The coalition of Socialists and Republicans imploded in September 1933,
and it was the political right that emerged victorious from the new elections,
winning a total of 217 seats, while the centre parties won 163, the left only
ninety-three. Even so, the right did not have a sustainable majority, and it was
only after a series of difficult negotiations that a minority government was
formed. Made up of Radicals and Independents, it was led by the bourgeois
Radical Alejandro Lerroux but remained at the mercy of the CEDA. Lerroux’s
first government marked the end of the Spanish Republic’s two years of reform
– the bienio de reformas – and the start of its bienio negro, when many of the
earlier reforms were rescinded. The principal beneficiaries of this period of
reaction were the Church and the major landowners: anti-clerical laws were
repealed, and expropriated land was returned to its former owners.
The growth in power of the right was also a reaction to the increasing mili-
tancy of the anarcho-syndicalists of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo,
which gained in support in the course of 1933 and in December attempted a
regular putsch. The reversal of the country’s agrarian reforms increased the
radicalism of the political left. In May 1934 the trade unions called a strike
among agricultural workers. It was joined by Largo Caballero’s Unión General
de Trabajadores and by the hitherto moderate socialist Agricultural Workers’
Trade Union, which now adopted a policy of social revolution. The govern-
ment declared the uprising illegal and organized emergency measures to deal
with the harvest. The strike movement spilled over for a time to Madrid and
298 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

other cities but achieved none of its goals, contributing, rather, to the contin-
uing social and political polarization of Spain.
In early October the Radicals entered into a regular coalition with the
CEDA. Lerroux was once again appointed Spain’s prime minister. Since Gil
Robles had moved increasingly to the right during the previous months, Largo
Caballero declared the Confederación’s entry into government to be the first
stage in Fascism’s rise to power along Italian and German lines, at the same
time calling on the masses to begin a general strike. In the majority of towns
and cities the proletarian demonstrations that did not have anarchist backing
ended after only a few days, but the situation was different in Catalonia and
Asturias. On 6 October the generals under Lluis Companys, the leader of the
Esquierra Republicana de Catalunya, declared Catalonia an independent state
within a Spanish federal republic. The government responded by suppressing
the uprising with the help of the military, and Catalonia’s bid for independence
was over.
In Asturias the general strike escalated into insurrection among the mining
community, even descending to the level of a local civil war in the course of
which the cities of Oviedo and Gigon fell into the hands of the proletarian
revolutionaries, who proclaimed a soviet republic. Here, too, the government
sent in troops, including – on the advice of the two commanding generals,
Manuel Goded Llopis and Francisco Franco – the Foreign Legion, which had
already played a major role in the victory over the Rif tribes in Spanish
Morocco. Up to 30,000 mineworkers took part in the uprising, which was put
down after two weeks. The numerous atrocities committed by the ‘Reds’ were
followed by even worse excesses by the ‘Whites’. There were 1,300 reported
deaths and 3,000 injuries. Tens of thousands of arrests were made in the wake
of the failed ‘October Revolution’. Twenty leaders of the uprising were sentenced
to death, and two of them were executed. The others, including Companys,
were pardoned by President Alcalá Zamora, prompting a protest on the part of
the CEDA, which temporarily left the government. Caballero and several of his
comrades in arms were sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment, although few
believed that they would serve out their sentences to the full.
There followed heated and embittered parliamentary debates between the
left and the right over the suppression of the October uprisings, leading in
turn to the revocation of further reforms, to the appointment of Gil Robles as
minister of war in May 1935 and to the latter’s naming of General Franco as his
chief of the general staff. Then, at the end of 1935, a number of scandals were
exposed involving corruption among leading radical politicians. The resultant
instability left President Zamora with no alternative but to dissolve parliament
on 7 January 1936. Just over a week later, on 15 January, left-wing Republicans,
Socialists and Communists formed a Popular Front with a list of joint candi-
dates. At Caballero’s urging, the Socialists took the disastrous decision not to
accept any ministerial portfolios in the event that the left-wing parties won the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 299

election. The anarchists, who had previously boycotted the elections, took part
in the electoral process for the first time on 16 February 1936.
The Popular Front was the clear winner, polling 4.7 million votes, while the
right-wing National Front won barely four million, the centre parties only
449,000. The electoral law favoured the largest list and helped the left-wing
parties to return 277 members to the Cortes, giving them an absolute majority.
Of these, the Socialists made up ninety seats, the Izquierda Republicana
eighty-six, the Catalan left thirty-six and the Communists seventeen. The
opposition parties had 132 representatives, the centre parties fifty-two. Since
the largest party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, stuck to its electoral
promise and refused to put forward any names for ministerial appointments,
the parties of the Popular Front agreed that the bourgeois Republican Manuel
Azaña y Diaz, who had been prime minister from 1931 to 1933, should again
be invited to become the country’s prime minister. One of the new govern-
ment’s first official acts was to relocate Generals Franco and Goded and place
them in command posts as far removed as possible from the centre of political
power: Franco was sent to the Canary Islands, Goded to the Balearics.
Nothing in the spring of 1936 suggested that Spain’s domestic situation was
becoming any more stable. Many left-wing victory parades descended into
riots, with churches, newspaper offices and prisons all being attacked. Among
the prisoners freed in this way were Companys and Caballero. In the country-
side farmworkers turned to looting, leading to violent clashes with the Civil
Guard; and pistoleros of the Falange Española and Federación Anarquista
Iberica made attempts on the lives of their political opponents. Led by Franco’s
brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Suñer, large numbers of younger members of
the CEDA joined the Falange Española. And Largo Caballero, who had been
chairman of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español since 1932, gave speeches
all over the country, proclaiming the imminent proletarian revolution and
garnering applause from Socialists and Communists alike. At around this time
conspirators in the military acting under the aegis of General Emilio Mola
Vidal were planning to topple the Popular Front government. Among the
conspirators’ other leaders were Franco, Goded and General José Sanjurjo,
who had already attempted to overthrow the government in August 1932,
when his putsch was quickly put down. The Falange Española of the impris-
oned José Antonio Primo de Rivera and the two monarchist groupings – the
Carlists and the supporters of Alfonso XIII – were also implicated in the plan-
ning. Gil Robles knew about Mola’s intentions but played no active part in
preparations for the coup.
Azaña stepped down as prime minister in May 1936 and became the coun-
try’s president. His replacement as prime minister was the left-wing Republican
Santiago Casares Quiroga, whose thinking was markedly more left-wing than
that of his predecessor. The new government forced through the agrarian
reforms that had either stalled or been reversed but was still unable to prevent
300 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

continuing strikes among farmworkers and the illegal occupation of farmland.

During the first half of July barely a day passed without a political assassination
being committed. On 12 July José Castillo, a lieutenant in the Republican
Guardia de Asalto, was murdered by members of the Falange Española in a
revenge attack after Castillo had killed a prominent Falangist in a gun battle the
previous April. The Guardia de Asalto responded by killing one of the best-
known right-wing politicians, the monarchist deputy and former finance
minister, Calvo Sotelo, who was dragged from his Madrid apartment by
uniformed members of the Guardia on the night of 12/13 July 1936, forced into
a car and shot in the back of the neck.
The murder of Calvo Sotelo shocked bourgeois Spain to the core and added
urgency to the military’s plans for a coup. At the same time, the Carlists were
persuaded to overlook their remaining differences with the conspirators. Mola
set a time and a date for the attack: five o’clock in the afternoon of 17 July. The
signal for the national insurrection against the Spain of the Popular Front was
to come from the garrison at Melilla in Spanish Morocco. Plans were therefore
in place for an action that was to turn the Spanish crisis overnight into one of
European dimensions: that action was the start of the Spanish Civil War.
To quote the German historian Walther L. Bernecker, it was between 1931
and 1936 that

the basic problem of Spanish society became apparent, a problem that

prevented Spain from being modernized and made it impossible for a
‘bourgeois’ revolution to take place in the country: this was the clash
between, on the one hand, the landowning oligarchy that was still rooted in
archaic structures and those of its allies who were unwilling to brook any
changes to their nineteenth-century attitudes, and, on the other hand, those
sections of the farmworkers and industrial workers who saw in the Republic
a means by which to overcome their traditional disadvantages and who,
having been disappointed in their hopes of a swift change to their situation,
had turned their backs on the bourgeois and democratic Republic with the
same resolve that their ‘class enemies’ had already shown. The Civil War
was the result of these irreconcilable antagonisms and of the desperate
attempt of the right and then, by way of a reaction, of the left to put in place
their social, economic and national model by violent means once they had
failed to achieve their ends by dint of more peaceful reforms.68

But it was not only social structures and collective mentalities that clashed with
each other at the time of the Second Republic. It was also men of flesh and
blood who bore the responsibility for the country’s increasing polarization:
they included politicians such as Manuel Azaña who, with the support of the
whole of the political left, declared war on Catholic Spain and in doing so
intimidated men and women who may have been won over to the cause of the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 301

Republic by a rather more sensitive policy; Gil Robles, who was willing to
realize his vision of a professionally organized society with the help of the mili-
tary if he was unable to obtain a parliamentary majority; and Largo Caballero,
who regarded himself increasingly as a ‘Spanish Lenin’, encouraging others to
acclaim him as such and, following his shift to the left, occupying a position
that was Communist rather than Social Democrat. As a result of this radicali-
zation of forces that had once been relatively moderate, there could no longer
be any question of a compromise, whether in the form of an alliance between
the centre ground and the political right or between the centre ground and
the left. Left- and right-wing extremists took advantage of this situation: the
anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists on the one hand and the united Fascists
and National Syndicalists on the other. The nationalist wing of the officer
corps could also be included under the heading of the extreme right. And
it was they who in the summer of 1936 provided the decisive impetus for the
bloody civil war that was to last for the next three years and bring to the
surface internal conflicts that had been building up in Spain over a period of
many years.

Democracy Evolves: From Sweden to Switzerland

When compared with the Mediterranean and Balkan states that we examined
in our previous section, the three Scandinavian kingdoms presented the world
with an almost idyllic picture of domestic stability throughout the interwar
period. Sweden, Norway and Denmark had all remained neutral during the
First World War, initially profiting from the dramatic increase in their exports
to the countries that were waging the war, but then suffering badly as a result
of the German submarine attacks that began in 1917. The years between the
end of the post-war slump and the world economic crisis of 1929 were marked
by high rates of growth, and in spite of mass unemployment after 1929, none of
their democratic systems was ever at serious risk. After 1918 the Social
Democrats were able more or less continuously to extend their influence in
Denmark, Sweden and Norway. During the 1930s they were the most powerful
political force in northern Europe, allowing far-reaching social reforms to be
introduced in all those countries in which they held sway.
In the immediate post-war period there had in fact been little initially to
indicate such a development, for in Scandinavia, as elsewhere, the workers’
movement was split. Sweden was the first country to witness this phenom-
enon: here, in 1917, the left wing of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party left
the main party in protest at the formation of a coalition of Liberals and Social
Democrats and assumed an autonomous identity as the Independent Socialist
Party. Four years later, this party, too, split, the majority of its members joining
the Third International as the Swedish Communist Party. And yet not even
this marked the end of the process of fragmentation, for in 1923 the party’s
302 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

leadership under Carl Höglund and some 3,000 of his supporters were excluded
from the Communist International after they had expressed dissent at the line
taken by the Comintern. They founded the Independent Communist Party,
which was initially loyal to Moscow, but in 1929 this Independent Communist
Party, now led by Karl Kilbom, suffered exactly the same fate as its predecessor
and was excluded from the Comintern on account of its shift to the right. From
then on it was known as the Swedish National Communist Party. The rump of
its members remained no more than a splinter group. The left-wing Socialists
had already rejoined the Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1923.
In Norway, conversely, radicals took over the running of the Norwegian
Workers’ Party in the spring of 1918. This party helped to found the Communist
International in March 1919, while its moderate wing reconstituted itself as the
Norwegian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1921, though representing
only a minority of the country’s workers. The Workers’ Party itself underwent
a shift to the left. Like his Swedish counterpart, its chairman, Martin Tranmael,
was no Bolshevik but a champion of internal party democracy. The definitive
break with Moscow came in September 1923, when a Workers’ Party congress
decided to leave the Comintern, while their remaining colleagues formed the
Norwegian Communist Party, which, like its Swedish equivalent, remained a
tiny splinter group. In 1927 the Workers’ Party and the Social Democratic
Party merged to form a single party, in that way laying the foundations for
the party’s growth until it became the country’s largest party. Denmark’s
Communist Party was not founded until 1922, far later than its counterparts in
Sweden and Norway, and it never rose beyond subsistence level: in the 1924
elections, it polled only 6,000 votes, compared with 470,000 for the Social
Democrats.
Sweden entered the post-war period with two important constitutional
innovations: in 1919 universal equal male suffrage was introduced for the first
chamber, women’s suffrage for the second chamber. The following year the
Swedish Social Democratic Workers’ Party adopted a new, reformist programme
whose demands included a more progressive form of income tax, a higher level
of inheritance tax and national insurance, the nationalization of major indus-
tries and state control over private enterprise. In March 1920 King Gustaf V
invited the leader of the Social Democrats, Hjalmar Branting, to form a govern-
ment. It was the world’s first Social Democratic government to come to power
without a coup d’état. Its minister of war was Per Albin Hansson, a newspaper
editor who was one of the authors of the party’s new programme.
Branting’s first cabinet survived in office for only a few months, its
programme of local taxes proving its undoing. The Social Democrats emerged
as the largest party from the elections in 1920, and Branting again formed a
government, resigning in April 1923, when he failed to push through his plan
for national insurance. He was succeeded by the Conservative Ernst Trygger,
who was likewise forced to step down when the elections in the autumn of
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 303

1924 left substantially unchanged the balance of power in the second chamber.
There followed a series of minority cabinets led in turn by Social Democrats,
by the Freeminded People’s Party from 1926 to 1928, by the Conservatives
from 1928 to 1930 and again by the Freeminded People’s Party from 1930 to
1932. The first pure Social Democratic government was formed in 1932 by Per
Albin Hansson, who had become leader of the Social Democratic Workers’
Party on Branting’s death in 1925.
Throughout these years one of the country’s most pressing domestic
concerns was prohibition. Among the proponents of a complete ban on the
production and sale of alcoholic drinks was the leader of the Freeminded
People’s Party, Gustaf Ekman, who held the post of prime minister from 1926 to
1928 and again from 1930 to 1932. In August 1922 a consultative referendum
made possible by a change to the constitution undertaken at the time of
Branting’s second government had merely produced a state monopoly and a
strict ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages. (Prohibition laws had already been
passed by Norway and Finland in 1919 but the ban was lifted in 1926 in the case
of Norway and in 1932 in that of Finland. In Norway public opinion polls had
on each occasion determined the government’s actions.)
After 1929 Sweden, too, was drawn into the eddying vortex of the
world economic crisis and two years later was obliged to follow Great Britain’s
lead in abandoning the gold standard. In the autumn of 1932 Sweden’s biggest
employer, Ivar Kreuger, who was the head of the world’s largest dealer in
matches, Svenska Tändsticks AB, and, unknown to most of his contempo-
raries, a fraudulent speculator on a massive scale, committed suicide in Paris,
his death triggering a stock market crash that spelt the end of his financial
empire.
Following the elections of September 1932 the Social Democrats were
returned to power, albeit without an overall majority. With the exception
of a brief spell in 1936, they continued to provide the country’s prime ministers
until 1976. Until his death in October 1945, it was Per Albin Hansson who
held the post. Under him, the country moved increasingly quickly away from
an agrarian society and towards its industrial counterpart: in 1920 44 per cent
of the working population had been employed in farming, forestry and fishing,
whereas that figure had fallen to 29 per cent by 1940, while the number of
those employed in industry rose from 35 per cent to 36 per cent. Unemployment,
which peaked in March 1933, was brought down by the ruling coalition of
Social Democrats and Agrarians by means of emergency measures, including
financial support for agriculture and restrictions on imports. Hansson’s
social vision of a folkhem, or people’s home, was set forth in a speech that he
delivered to the second chamber in 1928 and revolved around the idea of a
society based on reconciliation between the social classes and of patriotism
tinged by specifically Social Democratic convictions. ‘In a good home’, Hansson
explained,
304 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the basic rules are those of equality, consideration, cooperation and the
willingness to help others. If this concept is transferred to the home of a
nation and to each and every one of its citizens, then this will mean the
disappearance of those social barriers that nowadays keep our citizens
apart.69

The concept of the folkhem can be traced back to the world of ideas of peasants
and conservatives in the early twentieth century and was in part a response to
the traumatic experience when a quarter of the country’s population emigrated
in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to escape from poverty at
home. By the 1930s the term had become, in the words of the German writer
on Scandinavia Bernd Henningsen, ‘the topos of a secular theology based on
the idea of a welfare state’ and, as such, a feature not only of the Scandinavian
Social Democrats but also of ‘Scandinavian consensual democracy’.70 The
central idea was that of trygghet, a sense of security that it was the state’s duty
to safeguard and that demanded the redistribution of the country’s resources
and an emphasis on social equality. Against this background social expendi-
ture was no longer viewed as a financial burden on the state but as an invest-
ment designed to boost the economy and to ensure a peaceful society and a
stronger democracy.
In 1934 Hansson’s government was able to introduce a voluntary form of
national insurance that was supported by the state; it was followed in 1935 by a
pension law that replaced the universal but wholly inadequate state pension of
1913. These were two pillars of the Swedish welfare state that was being created
at this time. Further laws were enacted in 1937, covering antenatal help, child
welfare and the limited legalization of abortion. In 1938 all workers were guar-
anteed two weeks’ annual paid leave. No less fundamental to the Swedish
model was the cooperation between labour and capital as agreed by trade
unions and employers’ organizations at the resort of Saltsjöbaden near
Stockholm in 1938: contentious questions were to be settled on a voluntary
basis by agreement, if possible without recourse to strikes and lockouts. The
state was not directly involved in such talks, but it encouraged the two parties
involved in any wage agreements to work more closely together by facilitating
the creation of a denser network of organizations based on the idea of
trygghet.
And yet the concept of a folkhem had its drawbacks in terms of the pressure
to conform that is an integral part of even the mildest form of collectivism.
And there was one respect in which the Swedish type of collectivism was far
from being mild, namely, the social Darwinism that excluded and even eradi-
cated all individuals regarded as socially inferior. The world’s first state insti-
tute for racial biology was established in Uppsala with broad cross-party
support in 1922: behind it lay the widespread conviction on the part of right-
and left-wing eugenicists that it was the responsibility of all to ensure that the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 305

next generation was based on a process of healthy selection. Left and right also
agreed that the declining birth rate needed to be counteracted by means of a
pro-natal policy that included measures designed to help those parents who
were regarded as making a valuable genetic contribution to society.
Eugenicists regarded the feeble-minded as inferior, such a definition
increasingly coming to include asocial types and women who were markedly
promiscuous. The first sterilization law was passed by Hansson’s government
in 1935 and was followed by a second and even stricter law in 1941. Meanwhile
it became increasingly unimportant for the individuals affected in this way
to give their consent. Those who were deemed incapable of making up their
own minds did not have to give their consent at all. But even in the case of
those who were fit to decide, there could be no question of a voluntary choice,
for the indirect pressure on them to opt for sterilization was far too great to
resist.
Conservative eugenicists tended to view the higher echelons of society as
the most genetically valuable and to deny this label to the lower orders. Right-
wing racial biologists drew a distinction between superior and inferior races.
Among the Social Democratic proponents of social engineering were Alva and
Gunnar Myrdal, both of whom were later awarded the Nobel Prize, Gunnar for
economics in 1974, his wife Alva for world peace in 1982. Under the influence
of American Taylorism, they too thought in terms of the categories of ‘superior’
and ‘inferior’ parents but rejected the idea of a racial hierarchy and also the
equation of higher social status with higher genetic value. Instead, they advo-
cated improvements to living conditions, public health and education.
At the same time, there was a considerable degree of agreement between
left- and right-wing eugenicists inasmuch as both groups believed in the idea
of biological selection, both wanting to reduce the number of ‘inferior types’
and subject the personal will of the individual to the ostensible interests of the
collective. In the words of the German historian Ann-Judith Rabenschlag: ‘For
racial biologists this collective was race, whereas for social engineers it was the
folkhem.’71
There was, however, one conclusion that Swedish eugenicists failed to draw
from the belief in selection that underpins social Darwinism: they did not
support the sort of euthanasia that was advocated at this time by two German
scientists, the expert in criminal law Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred
Hoche, whose book, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens,
appeared in 1920, long before the National Socialists came to power. (An
English translation was published in 2012 under the title Allowing the
Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life.) In writing it, Binding and Hoche were
also belatedly justifying a practice that had been common in Germany and
elsewhere since 1914: during the years of famine between 1914 and 1918 the
mentally ill were deliberately left undernourished, leading to a marked rise in
the number of reported deaths in mental institutions.
306 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

In Norway, which had become an independent state only when its

union with Sweden was severed in 1905, the country’s bourgeois parties were
able to maintain their predominance for longer than in Sweden. Until the
middle of the 1930s the dominant figure was the leader of the bourgeois
Venstre Party, Johan Ludwig Mowinckel, who headed the government from
1924 to 1926, from 1928 to 1931 and, finally, from 1933 to 1935. Not until
January 1928, when they became the largest party in the Storting, was a Social
Democrat able to fill the post of prime minister, and yet the party was unable
to win a parliamentary majority for its socialist programme, Christopher
Hornsrud’s government being toppled by a vote of no confidence after only
two weeks in office, at which point Mowinckel returned briefly to the post of
prime minister.
As a maritime nation, Norway was more seriously affected than Sweden by
the world economic crisis: during the winter of 1932/3, 42 per cent of the
organized workforce was for a time unemployed. The elections in 1930 had led
to a shift to the right, and the country’s political leadership passed into the
hands of the Bondeparti, or Peasants’ Party. Under its prime minister, Peter
Kolstad, the extreme right-wing major in his general staff, Vidkun Quisling,
was appointed defence minister. Quisling left the cabinet in 1933 and formed
his own party, the Nasjonal Samling, which was modelled on both the Italian
Fascists and German National Socialists but failed to gain a single seat in
parliament in either 1933 or 1936.
It was the Workers’ Party that emerged victorious from the 1933 elections,
with around 40 per cent of the vote. Even so, it was not until March 1935 that
it was able to supplant Mowinckel, when it formed a coalition with the Peasants’
Party. The new prime minister was Johan Nygaardsvold, who had previously
been employed in a brickworks and who headed the government until Norway
was invaded by Germany in March 1940. The post of foreign minister was
given to the historian Halvdan Koht, that of justice minister to the lawyer
Trygve Lie, who won universal acclaim between 1946 and 1952 as the first
secretary general of the newly established United Nations.
It was under Nygaardsvold, who was a committed reformer, that Norway
began its journey down the road to a welfare state characterized by Social
Democratic ideas. The introduction of a state pension for all Norwegians over
the age of seventy met with widespread support, as did the national insurance
provisions that came into force in 1938. For the most part the new social poli-
cies were financed by higher taxes. Even so, unemployment fell only slowly: as
late as 1939 it was still 18 per cent of the working population. In the meantime
Norway’s social fabric had undergone a fundamental change, as the country
moved away from a rural economy to a society dominated by urban industry
and the service sector. In 1920 36 per cent of the working population was
employed in agriculture, 27 per cent in trade and industry. The equivalent
figures for 1950 were 26 per cent and 35 per cent respectively.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 307

Denmark witnessed a similar shift in the interwar period. Here 33 per cent
of the working population had been employed in agriculture in 1920, 29 per
cent in the secondary sector. Two decades later the secondary sector was
responsible for employing 33 per cent of the working population, agriculture
for only 29 per cent. Since 1924 it was generally Social Democrats who ran the
country, and it was they who provided the prime minister in the person of
Thorvald Stauning, who held the post from 1924 to 1926 and again from 1929
to 1942. Even as a member of the coalition government made up of the bour-
geois Radical Venstre and Social Democrats, Stauning, the first Nordic labour
minister, had persuaded his colleagues to accept an eight-hour day, initially in
state industries, then, from 1920, in private concerns. In general, Danish social
policy had made significant progress even before 1924 in terms of disability
insurance, unemployment benefit and old age pensions. The cabinet that
Stauning formed in April 1924 was a coalition government made up of Social
Democrats and politicians from the Radical Venstre. For the first time, it
included a woman, the historian Nina Bang, as minister for education. After
1918 the main problem facing Denmark’s politicians was the high rate of
unemployment: by the winter of 1925/6 around 30 per cent of the organized
workforce was without work. Stauning’s long-term attempt to deal with the
crisis was deemed too ‘socialist’ by his coalition partner, with the result that the
Social Democrats walked away from government in December 1926 but
returned to power under Stauning’s leadership in April 1929 following major
election successes. Unemployment peaked four years later at 40 per cent,
largely thanks to the import restrictions imposed first by Germany and then by
Great Britain, Denmark itself having already made these restrictions. The
coalition of Social Democrats and the Radical Venstre financed the growing
need for social benefits by reducing the defence budget.
On 30 January 1933 – the day on which Hitler came to power in Germany –
the Kanslergade Agreement was signed in Stauning’s Copenhagen apartment.
The signatories were the government and opposition parties. It was a reformist
document enshrining many of the features of a planned economy and entrusting
the state-run Central Exchange with the task of steering the country’s finances.
The 1933 programme included a new law relating to national insurance, another
raising contributions for old age pensions and disability insurance and a reform
of the old age pension that had been introduced in 1922 and that applied to all
Danes over the age of sixty-five: from then on it was the state that decided on
the level of contributions. Throughout the 1930s the Social Democrats were the
victors in every one of the country’s national elections. But neither they nor the
Radical Venstre could reform the constitution in such a way as to abolish the first
chamber, or Landsting: a referendum in May 1939 failed to produce the neces-
sary agreement of 45 per cent of the electorate.
Denmark was the only Nordic country able to expand its territories in the
wake of the First World War: following a plebiscite organized in February and
308 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

March 1920 under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the kingdom reac-
quired the largely Danish-speaking region of North Schleswig – Südjütland in
Danish – that it had lost in the German-Danish War of 1864 and which,
psychologically speaking, represented a degree of compensation for the loss of
the Virgin Islands to the United States, a decision confirmed by the left-wing
Liberal government of the prime minister, Carl Theodor Zahle, in 1917. On 1
December 1918 Iceland became an independent state, while retaining its links
with Denmark. The North Atlantic island, which could boast having the oldest
parliament in the world (the Althing dates back to 930), had become a Danish
dependency in 1541 but had been granted the right of self-administration in
1904. Its newly won sovereignty was confirmed by a plebiscite. Its independ-
ence became complete in June 1944, when a further plebiscite ended the union
with the Danish crown, and Iceland became a republic.
The question of Greenland proved contentious. Following the dissolution
of the union of Denmark and Norway in 1815, Greenland – the largest island
in the world – had remained a part of Denmark and in 1917 was recognized as
a Danish colony by the United States in the context of the latter’s purchase of
the Danish part of the Virgin Islands. But Norway laid claim to Greenland’s
eastern coast, its claims dictated in no small measure by its whaling interests. A
treaty signed by Oslo and Copenhagen in 1924 went some way to meeting the
demands of Norway’s whalers but failed to satisfy them in the longer term. The
conflict grew markedly more serious in 1931 when the Peasants’ Party govern-
ment in Oslo gave its official recognition to the occupation of Myggbukta
(Mosquito Bay) by a group of Norwegians. Denmark appealed to the
International Court in The Hague, which in April 1933 declared that both this
occupation and a second one in 1932 were illegal. The majority of members of
the Norwegian Storting aligned themselves with international law and thus
found themselves at odds with their own government, but the disagreement
between the two Scandinavian states was at last finally resolved.
Twelve years earlier, in June 1921, a further dispute between two Nordic
lands had again been resolved by international intervention, when Sweden
accepted a decision on the part of the League of Nations and agreed that the
Åland Islands that were inhabited by ethnic Swedes should remain with
Finland. Taken in Geneva, the decision was complemented later that year by a
treaty signed by ten states insisting on the islands’ military neutrality. Less
controversial, conversely, was the recognition of the status of Spitsbergen, a
whole series of countries, including the United States, Great Britain, France
and Denmark, all agreeing that Norway should own this group of coal-rich
islands situated in the Arctic Ocean. The Soviet Union added its name to the
agreement only after Norway recognized its existence four years later. Norway
officially took possession of Spitsbergen in 1925.
The 1930s were notable for increasing cooperation between these Nordic
democracies. In 1930 Norway, Sweden and Denmark agreed to work more
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 309

closely with the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg on questions of trade

and customs tariffs: Finland joined this Oslo Convention in 1933. On the other
hand, the countries in question were unable to agree on a common defence
alliance, which Denmark, alarmed by developments in National Socialist
Germany, was particularly keen to see implemented but which Sweden, deter-
mined to maintain its neutrality, refused to support.
All the Nordic countries continued to be closely linked not just by the fore-
going treaties but by their shared political beliefs. Among their most basic
principles were a free, self-confident peasant population, a pragmatic workers’
movement insistent upon concrete improvements and, last but not least, an
educational system marked by the spirit of Lutheranism. It was the confluence
of all these factors that ensured that after 1918 Scandinavia was a safe haven for
democracy and, indeed, for the growth of a new, specifically Nordic type of
modern democracy, namely, a form of representative government based on
social partnership rights and the peaceful settlement of competing interests.

In the light of developments in Scandinavia in the years before 1918, it is no

surprise that democracy was able to thrive there during the interwar period.
More astonishing is the fact that the parliamentary system was able to survive
in a country that did not become independent until 1921 and that was shaken
to its very foundations by a violent civil war that lasted from 1921 to 1923: the
country in question was the Free State of Ireland. Not until 1927 did it acquire
a degree of political stability, when Eamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil party accepted
the terms of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1921 and took over the role of
parliamentary opposition following its growing success in the elections that
were held in June and September 1927.
The ruling conservative party, Cumann na nGaedheal, under its leader
William T. Cosgrove had signed an agreement with Great Britain in 1925 that
laid down the existing border with Ulster, which remained British. During the
years that followed, the Dublin government focused in particular on the use of
the Irish language, which became compulsory in schools and which would-be
civil servants had to have mastered before they could begin their careers. And
yet in spite of this measure English remained the dominant language in large
sections of the country. On the international stage, Ireland worked closely with
Canada and South Africa to ensure that the independence of the British
Dominions was recognized by Britain, a goal gradually achieved, first at the
Imperial Conference of 1926 and later by the Statute of Westminster of 1931. In
terms of Ireland’s economic policies, Cosgrove tended in the direction of free
trade, which helped in exporting Irish agricultural produce to Great Britain
but not with the country’s industry, which continued to remain very weak.
The world economic crisis led to increasing criticism of Cosgrove’s liberal
trade policy and to a change of attitude on the part of the electorate that was
exploited by the openly protectionist Fianna Fáil, which emerged as the largest
310 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

party from the elections in January 1932 and which, together with the Labour
Party, formed the new government under Eamon de Valera, who was repeat-
edly confirmed as the Irish prime minister between then and 1948.
Relations with Great Britain worsened dramatically following the election
victory of the Republicans. One of de Valera’s very first acts was to abolish the
oath of allegiance to the British throne that until then had been sworn by Irish
members of parliament. An even more momentous decision was that of halting
the annual payments to the United Kingdom that were used by the latter to
compensate the Irish landowners who in the wake of the land reforms at the
end of the nineteenth century had had to abandon their estates in Ireland.
London responded by imposing higher import duties on Irish agricultural
produce, leading de Valera in turn to raise the level of duties on industrial goods
imported from Great Britain, a move fully consonant with the policy of indus-
trial protectionism that was one of Fianna Fáil’s chief articles of faith.
This trade war damaged Ireland’s agrarian economy far more seriously than
it harmed an industrial power like Great Britain, with the result that the Irish
gross national product fell by 3 per cent between 1931 and 1938, while Great
Britain’s rose by 27 per cent. In February 1937 Dublin was forced to sign a trade
deal with Great Britain that was designed to remove some of the measures that
were so harmful to both their economies. Not until April 1938 was the trade war
finally resolved, when de Valera’s government declared its willingness to make
one final payment to Great Britain to compensate Irish landowners. In return
London handed back its naval bases in Ireland. A new trade treaty opened up
not only the British market to Irish agriculture but also the Commonwealth
countries that were dependent on Great Britain. The closure of the remaining
military installations allowed Ireland to remain neutral in the Second World
War, the only Commonwealth nation to do so.
Not even Ireland was spared a process of political radicalization at the time
of the world economic crisis. In February 1933, the former head of the Irish
police, Eoin O’Duffy, formed the Army Comrades Association, a paramilitary
organization whose members wore blue shirts similar to those of the Spanish
Falangists. It was initially made up for the most part of army veterans and
served to protect the halls used by Cosgrove’s party, regarding its principal
enemy as the Irish Republican Army, or IRA, which found itself increasingly at
odds with de Valera’s government, and committed a series of atrocities during
the election campaign in the winter of 1932/3.
In September 1933, by which time it had rebranded itself as the National
Guard, the Army Comrades Association joined forces with Cosgrove’s Cumann
na nGaedheal and other smaller parties to form Fine Gael under O’Duffy’s
leadership. In spite of a number of superficial influences, the right wing of Irish
politics could not be accused of the sort of Fascist mentality that characterized
its Continental models. Fine Gael remained a conservative party that for the
most part operated within the ambit of parliament, especially after Cosgrove
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 311

became party leader in 1935. In the absence of a Marxist or Communist move-

ment in Ireland, it was the IRA that made up the extreme left of Irish politics.
Following a new wave of political assassinations, it was banned by de Valera’s
government in 1936 but continued to lead an underground existence on both
sides of the border with Ulster.
Ireland acquired a new constitution on 1 July 1937. From now on the name
of the country was Eire. The constitution was intended to apply to the whole of
Ireland, including Ulster. There was no reference to the British crown. The head
of state was a president, or Uachtarán na hÉireann, who was elected for a seven-
year term of office, while the government was headed by the prime minister, or
Taoiseach. Irish was the first official language, English the second one.
Parliament consisted of two chambers, a lower house – the Dáil Éireann –and a
Senate – the Seanad Éireann. As had already been the case with the 1922 consti-
tution, all men and women over the age of twenty-one were entitled to vote in
the elections for the lower house. The constitution defined Ireland as a sover-
eign, independent and democratic state. The preamble appealed to the Holy
Trinity as the source of all authority, the Catholic Church being accorded a
special position within the country in spite of the claim expressed elsewhere in
the constitution that the Irish were free to practise whatever religion they
wanted. On the other hand, neither the Catholic Church nor any other recog-
nized religion received any financial support from the state. In keeping with
Catholic teaching, the family was regarded as the natural and original basic unit
of society, marriage as indissoluble. Divorce was consequently ruled out.
No other twentieth-century European constitution was as Church-
orientated as the Irish one. From the standpoint of Ireland’s politicians, the
Catholic Church was an indispensable part of the national identity and, indeed,
its principal spiritual support. In the words of the German historian Michael
Maurer, this spirit helps to explain

a particular feature of Ireland in the twentieth century, a feature that largely

sets it apart from European and American modernism, namely, restrictive
censorship and a curtailment of the freedom of the political press. The list of
writings banned in Ireland amounts to a catalogue of the modern world; sexu-
ality and birth control were forbidden subjects, but even topics felt to be politi-
cally or scientifically offensive were withheld from Irish readers for decades.72

It is no accident that one of the greatest Irish writers of the twentieth century,
Samuel Beckett, left his native country in 1937, the year in which the country’s
new constitution came into force, and, following the example of Bernard Shaw
and James Joyce, wrote his later works abroad, mostly in Paris.
The counterpart to the Catholic variant of the backward-looking mentality
found in Eire was the Protestant fanaticism of the Unionists and their paramili-
tary arm, the Orange Order. Even though more than a third of the population
312 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of Ulster was Catholic, there could be no question of the two denominations

enjoying equal rights. The parliament in Belfast was elected on the first-past-
the-post system, even though this system ignored the will of London and flew
in the face of the terms of the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1921, which had
demanded that elections be held on the basis of proportional representation.
The first-past-the-post system clearly favoured the Protestants, producing an
effect similar to that of the infamous gerrymandering that was used to manipu-
late the boundaries of electoral constituencies. In terms of their employment in
the public sector, Catholics were far worse off than Protestants. In the years
before 1925, Catholics boycotted the elections, increasing the predominance of
the Protestant majority.
Fianna Fáil’s rise to a position of political power in the south led to a further
worsening of the denominational conflict in the north. A special law granting
the police far-reaching powers, albeit for a limited period, was extended in
1933: now no time limit was attached to it. The economy of Ulster – a region
that was industrialized from a relatively early date – had for a long time been in
decline; Belfast’s slums were among the worst in Europe; and without subsidies
from London, the partially autonomous province would not have survived at
all. The boost given to the armaments industry by the Second World War
helped the north to recover economically, with the result that by 1950 the
standard of living in the north was some 75 per cent higher than in the south.
When compared with the rest of north-west Europe, both halves of Ireland
during the interwar years gave the impression of being economically, socially
and intellectually backward. In Ulster the denominational divide ran so deep
that the conflict between Protestants and Catholics overshadowed all others,
including the one between capital and labour. More than nine-tenths of the
population of the south was Catholic, so that the election of a Protestant – the
founder of the Gaelic League, Douglas Hyde – as the country’s first president
in 1937 seems a distinctly demonstrative act, serving as a counterweight to the
‘ultramontane’ elements in Eire’s new constitution.
In independent Eire, it was not the clash between two different religions but
arguments over the right way to assert itself as a nation that eclipsed the
modern class conflict. Presumably a radical left wing bent on fomenting class
warfare would have led anxious voters from the middle classes to seek refuge in
a Fascist right in Ireland, too, but there was in fact a further reason why the
Free State of Eire clung to the parliamentary system, and this was the country’s
debt to the political culture of Great Britain, whose influence was so powerful
that it survived the long and ultimately successful struggle for independence
and the division of the island into a predominantly Catholic south and a largely
Protestant north.

Unlike Ireland, the Kingdom of the Netherlands was one of the few countries
in Europe whose development was remarkable for its unbroken continuity
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 313

between the pre-war years and the post-war period. Unlike its southern neigh-
bour Belgium, the Netherlands had been able to maintain its neutrality
throughout the First World War. In terms of the country’s domestic politics,
the most important year was 1917, when universal male suffrage was intro-
duced. Women were granted the same right five years later, when the first-past-
the-post system was replaced by proportional representation.
Every Dutch government of the interwar period was ‘bourgeois’, a state
of affairs due not least to the fact that the Social Democratic Workers’
Party, which became the second-largest party after the electoral reforms of
1922, steadfastly refused to take part in any of the coalition cabinets until
August 1939. Throughout this time, moreover, the Communist Party never
rose above the status of a splinter group, polling 36,000 votes in the
parliamentary elections in 1925, when the Social Democrats won 706,000.
The bourgeois parties were generally denominational in character: on the
Protestant side there were the Christian Historical Union and the Anti-
Revolutionary Party, on the Catholic side – from 1926 – the Roman Catholic
State Party.
By the early 1930s not even the Netherlands could avoid the impact of
the world economic crisis. In the face of a dramatic fall in stock market prices
and wholesale prices combined with rising unemployment figures, the leader
of the Anti-Revolutionary Party, Hendrikus Colijn, formed a crisis cabinet in
May 1933 that quickly agreed on a series of measures designed to deal with
the financial crisis. These measures included new rules on production and
sales as well as protective tariffs for agriculture. On the other hand, there were
no job creation schemes. The government refused to devalue the gulden,
but by September 1936 Colijn’s third government was forced to abandon the
link between the gulden and the price of gold, leading to a devaluation of the
Dutch currency of 20 per cent, a correction that allowed the country’s economy
to compete internationally again within a very short period of time. On the
other hand, unemployment sank only slowly, remaining above that of every
other European country for which statistics are available between 1935 and
1939.
Colijn remained his country’s prime minister until July 1939. From the very
outset he saw it as one of the central tasks of his cabinet to resist the radicalism
of the political right with all the energy he could muster. Head of this faction
was the National Socialist Movement founded in Utrecht at the end of 1931 by
the engineer Anton Adriaan Mussert. His was an organization that saw the
German National Socialists as its model, one it imitated in many respects,
including in the wearing of uniforms. By the autumn of 1933 they had around
20,000 members, polling 8 per cent of the votes in the 1935 elections for the
first chamber of the federal assembly and a further 4.2 per cent in the elections
for the second chamber two years later. The government’s ban on the wearing
of uniforms was specifically aimed at Mussert and was backed up by a further
314 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

ban prohibiting civil servants from joining his movement. Catholic bishops in
the Netherlands repeatedly warned against the movement in their pastoral
letters. But if Mussert never achieved mass support, this was due above all to
the common stance adopted by the major bourgeois parties and the Social
Democrats, together with the newspapers that were close to them.
In the Netherlands, too, fear of the extreme left played a role in mobilizing
the supporters of the radical right. In January 1933 a mutiny on the warship
Zeven Provincien provoked widespread disquiet and was much exploited for
propagandist purposes by the National Socialist Movement, not only Mussert
and his supporters but whole sections of the population seeing in the incident
an attack on the fleet by the Third International and hence an assault on the
Netherlands as a colonial power.
Communist uprisings in Java and Sumatra, two of the largest islands in the
Dutch East Indies, were suppressed in 1926–7 only after heavy fighting, leading
to a period during which leadership of the independence movement in the
region fell increasingly into the hands of the radical nationalists associated
with Ahmed Sukarno. The 1930s witnessed a second threat in the form of
Japan’s increasing aggression. But the Netherlands were as yet far from grasping
the unsustainability of colonial rule and accepting the legitimacy of the anti-
colonial struggle for independence, preferring instead to see in their colonial
possessions in south-east Asia a token of their national greatness. By the 1930s
the fear of losing possessions that they had owned since the early seventeenth
century was no less great than the entirely justified fear that if Mussert was not
opposed, the Netherlands could all too easily fall victim to National Socialist
Germany’s expansionist ambitions.
While the Netherlands was struggling to hold on to its colonial possessions,
Belgium was able to expand its own colonies in the wake of the First World
War. In 1916 the Force Publique of the Belgian Congo – a group of mercenaries
led by white officers – had succeeded in capturing a part of German East Africa
in the context of a British offensive in the region. The area in question, Ruanda-
Urundi (now the states of Rwanda and Burundi), passed into Belgian hands in
May 1919 following an agreement with Great Britain. Six years later Ruanda-
Urundi became an administrative part of the Belgian Congo.
Under King Leopold II, the local population of the Belgian Congo was
exploited and oppressed in such barbaric ways that there were international
protests. In 1908 Leopold II had finally been obliged to relinquish his personal
control over the ‘free state’, but this move did little to reduce the colonial exploi-
tation of this vast region with its plentiful natural resources. A leading role
within this system fell to the Union Minière du Haut Katanga which in 1906
had started to mine Katanga’s vast copper reserves. In turn, the Union Minière
was controlled by the Belgian Société Générale, half of whose shares were state-
owned. Following its merger with the Banque d’Outre-Mer in 1928, the Société
Générale owned 70 per cent of all the capital invested in the Belgian Congo.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 315

The result of this confluence of state and private enterprise was the emergence
of the largest industrial region in Africa, a place where black workers on starva-
tion wages boosted the profits of white owners.
The Union Minière began its self-styled policy of creating a ‘stabilized
workforce’ in the mid-1920s: black workers and their families were housed in
the most primitive conditions close to the mines, where they were subjected to
far stricter controls than when they had been migrant workers. There was no
lack of attempts to oppose this development, prophetic movements such as
Kimbanguism and the Kitwala Cult appealing to the Bible to justify the down-
trodden population’s right to resist. Belgium’s Catholic Church, which enjoyed
a privileged position in its missionary work in the Belgian Congo as a result of
the Concordat of 1906, was emphatically opposed to this kind of Biblical
exegesis. But its contribution to the region’s education at its missionary centres
was limited to training support teachers for the simplest tasks in all types
of production and the service industries. Even after the First World War the
Belgian Congo remained a byword in the imperialist exploitation of a colonial
region in which the interests of the black workers were completely overshad-
owed by those of the capitalists who controlled them.
Belgium itself moved closer to greater democratization with universal male
suffrage in 1919. (Women, though they were now eligible for political office
right to the vote, did not receive equal suffrage with men until 1949.) Most of
the short-lived cabinets of the interwar period were either made up of the
three main parties, namely, the Catholics, Socialists and Liberals, or were
Catholic-Liberal coalitions. The three parties were jointly in power from 1918
to 1921, in 1926 to 1927 and from 1936 to 1939, while Catholic-Liberal coali-
tions ran the country from 1921 to 1925, from 1927 to 1935 and again from
April to September 1939. Only in 1925 and 1926, and in February 1939 were
there Catholic-Socialist cabinets. The Communists first entered parliament in
1925 but never played more than a marginal role.
The dominant theme of Belgium’s domestic politics was the cohesion of the
country as a binational state. (For the purposes of the present discussion we
shall ignore the tiny German minority in Eupen-Malmedy.) During the First
World War, the occupying German troops had encouraged the separatist aspi-
rations of Flanders and found in a minority of Flemish activists a group of
individuals willing to collaborate with them. After 1918 the moderate wing of
the movement for Flemish autonomy, which supported a federalist restruc-
turing of the country and especially the use of Dutch in preference to French,
gained the upper hand, reporting a number of successes, including the meta-
morphosis of the University of Ghent into a purely Flemish institution in 1930.
(The German occupiers had already issued a decree in this regard in March
1916.) Between 1932 and 1938 a series of laws was passed determining the
official language to be used in Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels and in that way
reflecting the wishes of the more moderate activists.
316 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

But this was by no means enough for the radical wing of the Flemish move-
ment associated with the Vlaamsch Nationaal Verbond, which increased its
number of representatives from eight to sixteen in the 1935 elections. Instead,
the group demanded independence for Flanders. An even more extreme line
was adopted by the Verbond van Dietsche Nationaalsolidaristen founded in
1931 by Joris Van Severen, a former member of the Flemish Front Party. He
supported the idea of a greater Dutch national state that would also include the
French-speaking part of Flanders and, together with the Dutch and Belgian
colonies, have more than fifty million inhabitants. (Wallonia and Luxembourg
were later added to this list under the banner of the ‘Grand Burgundian’ idea.)
Van Severen’s organization also maintained its own militia, the Dinasco (short
for Dietsche Nationaalsolidaristen), whose members wore dark green uniforms
and greeted each other with the words ‘Heil t’Dinasco’, while raising their right
arms by way of a salute. But this Belgian brand of Fascism never managed to
enlist more than a few thousand members in western Flanders.
More of a threat to the Belgian state was the Rexist movement named after
the right-wing Catholic publishing house of Rex in Leuven. Its leader was Léon
Dégrelle, a demagogic orator who was a follower of Charles Maurras’s Action
Française and who from 1935 onwards attacked with unprecedented fury the
politicians of all parties and their allegedly corrupt system, holding up his own
organization as the only effective alternative to Marxism and Bolshevism: ‘Rex
or Moscow!’ was one of the movement’s catchphrases that appeared in large
letters on hoardings and posters throughout the country. The group waged an
aggressive campaign in the 1935 elections and was rewarded with twenty-one
seats out of a total of 200 in the new parliament.
Two years later Dégrelle represented the Rexists in a by-election in Brussels
in April 1937, when the tables were turned. On this occasion the prime minister,
Paul Van Zeeland, of the Catholic Bloc, who until then had not had a mandate
of his own, put his name forward as the candidate for all the main political
parties, winning 275,000 votes against Dégrelle’s 70,000. An important factor
in Van Zeeland’s victory was the intervention of Cardinal Josef Ernst Van Roy,
who, invited by the challenger to give him his vote of approval, spoke out
against Dégrelle. After that, the Rexist movement quickly fell apart. Middle-
class and rural voters who had supported the movement returned to the bour-
geois fold. It is debatable whether the Rexist movement of the years between
1935 and 1937 can really be described as ‘Fascist’, for however militant and
demagogic Dégrelle may have been, his movement had none of the other
characteristics traditionally associated with Fascism including, first and fore-
most, a paramilitary uniformed guard and the use of force against its political
opponents.
The fleeting successes of these radical right-wing organizations were in
part a reflection of Belgium’s severe economic crisis and its consequences:
high unemployment, lower wages for miners, major strikes and the repeated
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 317

devaluation of the Belgian franc. A slow economic recovery began under Paul
Van Zeeland, who was in charge of the Catholic-Liberal-Socialist coalition
cabinets between March 1935 and October 1937, helping him to push Dégrelle
into second place in the 1937 by-election. Even more important, however, was
the solidarity of the three main parties, a feature that demonstrated that for the
majority of Flemings and Walloons there was something more important than
the cultivation of their own linguistic and cultural identity, namely, their shared
interest in preserving freedom and democracy and, hence, the constitution of
the Belgian state that safeguarded both of these ideals.
Like Belgium, Luxembourg had discovered in August 1914 that its neutrality,
although guaranteed by international law, was no bar to a German invasion. In
Belgium King Albert I and his government fled to the small area in western
Flanders that had not fallen into German hands, while in Luxembourg, Grand
Duchess Marie Adelheid and her government continued their work at least to
the extent that this was possible in the prevailing conditions. (Unlike Belgium,
Luxembourg had not declared war on Germany but merely insisted on main-
taining its neutrality.) The arrival of the Allies in November 1918 plunged the
country into a major crisis. On 10 November the Socialists formed a workers’
and peasants’ soviet inspired by events in Russia and Germany and demanded
the abdication of the grand duchess, the nationalization of heavy industry and
the introduction of an eight-hour day. At the same time a pro-French move-
ment began to agitate for the country’s annexation by France. On 13 November,
the majority of members of the Luxembourg chamber of deputies voted in
favour of a referendum to decide on the form of the future state and agreed to
establish a parliamentary commission to examine the question of the neutrality
of the crown and government since 1914.
In January 1919 an attempt by the radical left to establish a provisional
republican government failed to produce the desired result, but on 14 January
Grand Duchess Marie Adelheid abdicated in favour of her sister Charlotte and
took the veil. By September 1919 Allied agreement meant that it was finally
possible to hold a referendum on the future form of the state. The result was a
narrow four-fifths’ majority in favour of independence and the retention of the
royal family as the head of state.
The customs union with France that Luxembourg had wanted failed to
materialize. For its part, Belgium sought a customs union with Luxembourg
for which it was willing to pay a high price in the form of a secret military alli-
ance with France dated 7 September 1920. Belgium’s agreement to act in the
event of an unprovoked attack by Germany meant that it had to abandon the
neutrality that had been one of the conditions of its foundation in 1831. A
customs union between Belgium and Luxembourg was signed in July 1921,
marking the first stage in the creation of the union between Belgium, the
Netherlands and Luxembourg that came into force as the ‘Benelux’ treaty on 1
January 1948. The referendum of September 1919 marked the start of a period
318 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of internal calm that was further helped by the introduction of universal

suffrage for men and women at the end of the year. In the ensuing elections the
Catholic Party won an outright majority. From 1925 the duchy was ruled by a
coalition of Catholics, Liberals and Conservatives. Until May 1940, when it was
again overrun by German troops, Luxembourg was spared any further serious
upheavals.

Unlike Belgium and Luxembourg, Switzerland had been able to maintain its
neutrality unchallenged throughout the First World War, only to succumb
to a serious internal crisis in the autumn of 1918, when plans by the federal
parliament to introduce compulsory community service triggered violent
protests among the workforce. When troops were mobilized in Zurich in early
November with the aim of preventing a planned demonstration from taking
place to mark the first anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia, the
recently founded Olten Action Committee under the leadership of the left-
wing member of the National Council, Robert Grimm, called on all workers to
mount a general strike. (The Olten Action Committee had been established as
a rival to the committee set up by the Social Democratic party leaders.)
The walkout began on 12 November and prompted the upper and lower
houses to deploy army units under the command of Colonel Emil Sonderegger
and to issue an ultimatum to the Olten Action Committee that was timed to
expire on 14 November. Not every section of the workforce had taken part in
the strike, and so the Committee bowed to the pressure placed on it by the
state, and by 15 November the strike was over.
There was, however, one demand that the strikers made that was met in
1919, and this was the introduction of the forty-eight-hour week. By contrast,
the call for immediate new elections and for women to be given equal voting
rights went unheard. On 10 April 1919 three of the strike’s organizers, including
two members of the National Council, Robert Grimm and Fritz Platten, were
sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for mutiny. A further consequence of
the strike was the end of diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia, which the
government in Berne accused of being actively involved in the events in
Switzerland in November 1918.
The elections for the National Council in October 1919 were the first to be
held according to the principle of proportional representation, which had been
introduced a year earlier following a referendum on the subject. The losers were
the Liberal Freethinkers who had dominated Swiss politics until then and who
had won 105 seats in the 1916 elections, a figure that fell to sixty in 1919. The
other losers, albeit on a smaller scale, were the Catholic Conservatives. The
winners, conversely, were the new Peasants’ Party and the Social Democrats.
The former won twenty-nine seats at its first attempt to enter parliament, while
the latter increased the number of its seats from twenty-two to forty-one.
For the present, however, the victorious parties were not allowed to take up their
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 319

mandates. The Peasants’ Party representatives had to wait until 1929, the Social
Democrats until 1943, a punishment meted out to them for their participation
in the nationwide strike in 1918. In 1920 the Social Democrats had declined to
join the Third International, leading to the formation of a Swiss Communist
Party in March of the following year, although it never acquired any great polit-
ical significance. The year 1921 also saw the end of the powers introduced in
1914 that were designed to extend the authority of the Federal Council at the
expense of the National Council and Upper Chamber.
Internationally, the most important question to exercise the Swiss during the
interwar period was their relationship with the League of Nations. In view of the
‘perpetual neutrality’ that Switzerland had espoused since the early sixteenth
century, it was by no means a matter of course that the country would join the
League of Nations, and this remained the case even after it had become known
that Geneva would be the seat of its principal institutions. In November 1919
the newly elected National Council recommended joining on condition that the
country retained its neutrality and that the Council’s decision was ratified by a
referendum. The London Declaration of the Council of the League of Nations
on 13 February 1920, which limited the imposition of sanctions to non-military
areas, helped persuade the Swiss to vote yes in the referendum.
In spite of this, the question of Switzerland’s entry into the League of
Nations continued to stir up controversy. The leaders of the bourgeois parties
adopted a positive attitude but in doing so they were speaking for only a section
of their members, while the left wing of the Social Democrats was emphatically
opposed to membership. The referendum on 16 May 1920 resulted in a clear
majority in favour of entry, by 415,000 votes to 323,000. The victory of the yes
campaign was due above all to the positive vote of the Francophone cantons in
the west of the country, whereas the German-speaking cantons were opposed
to such a move. As a result, the proponents of entry won by only a slender
majority in the upper house.
The official interpretation of Switzerland’s neutrality changed after the
country had become a member of the League of Nations: its neutrality was no
longer ‘integral’ but ‘differential’, limited, as it was, by its obligation to impose
economic sanctions to protect the peace of nations. In part as a way of compen-
sating for the weakening of the principle of neutrality, the country’s foreign
policy, which between 1920 and 1940 was dictated by the foreign minister
Giuseppe Motta, stressed good relations with those of its neighbours that were
most expected to break international law: Fascist Italy and, after 1933, National
Socialist Germany.
Switzerland’s dependence on exports and foreign labour left the country
badly hit by the world economic crisis, leading to the formation of a militant
opposition hostile not only to the parliamentary system but to all that was left
wing and liberal. Although its membership included a number of workers, it
was above all middle-class industrial workers who set the tone in the National
320 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Front movement of the early 1930s. Two of its slogans were ‘Middle class, wake
up!’ and ‘Switzerland for the Swiss!’ The largest of the country’s radical right-
wing organizations, it took its cue from Italian and German models in terms of
its cult of its leader, its uniforms, its forms of greeting and its symbols. Its leader
in Switzerland was Rolf Henne, a vocal opponent of ‘Jewish cultural Bolshevism’
who demanded that restrictions be placed on the number of Jewish students at
the country’s universities. When, for tactical reasons, the National Front
adopted a less anti-Semitic tone and in general began to moderate its behav-
iour, Emil Sonderegger, the ‘hero’ who had suppressed the nationwide strike in
November 1918, founded the Volksbund, or National League, in 1933. Its anti-
Semitism and anti-parliamentarianism were much more openly expressed. On
Sonderegger’s death in 1934 the National League was subsumed into the
Federal Front. Even more radical were the National Socialist Confederates who
demanded annexation by Germany, while the Swiss Fascists were notable for
their cult of Mussolini and for organizing an international congress of Fascists
at Montreux in December 1934.
Only one of these radical right-wing organizations – the National Front –
enjoyed any success in local elections in 1933, notably in Schaffhausen, where it
won more than 26 per cent of the votes cast. Within three years hardly any of these
groups still existed. Their greatest defeat was their failure to bring about a root-
and-branch revision of the federal constitution in a referendum in September
1935, when their supporters won only 194,000 votes in favour of a more authori-
tarian, corporate state as against 510,000 votes against such a change.
The Social Democrats emerged as the largest party from the elections to the
National Council in 1935. They now advocated a national defence policy,
which they had not done since 1914, leading to a gradual easing of tension in
their relations with the bourgeois parties. Two years later, the trade unions,
starting with the metalworkers and watchmakers, began to sign peace agree-
ments with the employers’ organizations, and the country’s economic recovery
likewise played its part in calming the political situation, with the result that by
the second half of the 1930s there was no longer any danger from the right. The
parties of moderation, including the Social Democrats, had asserted their sway,
and the National Ring of Independents founded in 1936 by the businessman
Gottlieb Duttweiler, who advocated complete economic freedom, was far more
successful politically than the National Front and similar organizations had
ever been. Swiss democracy emerged a more potent force from the years of
crisis, and the country was able to maintain its independence throughout the
Second World War.

Fascism in Power: Italy under Mussolini

By the 1930s the term ‘Fascist’ had long since broken free from its Italian
origins and was being used by many observers to describe the Swiss National
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 321

Front and numerous other right-wing organizations of the interwar years.

Whenever Marxist or liberal critics spoke of ‘Fascism’, they were referring
to right-wing movements and regimes distinguished from traditional conserv-
atism by the extreme militancy with which they countered their left-wing
enemies and by their ability to win over the masses by means of demagogic
and, above all, nationalist slogans. Most contemporary authors regarded the
urban and rural middle classes as the Fascists’ principal source of support, that
social group between the bourgeoisie and the working class that felt threatened
by big business on the one hand and by the industrial proletariat on the other
and which had not yet managed to create an independent political organiza-
tion of its own.
In Italy, the left-wing reformist writer Giovanni Zibordi was one of the first
to attempt a detailed examination of the social basis of Fascism, describing
Italy in 1922 as a country in which the petit bourgeois was ‘superfluous’. In
Fascism Zibordi saw, first, a ‘counter-revolution of the bourgeoisie proper in
response to a red revolution which only threatened but never took place (as an
insurrectionary act)’; second, ‘a revolution, or rather an upheaval, of the middle
classes, of the disoriented, the deprived and the discontented’; and, third, a
‘military revolution’. This last-named term was used by Zibordi to refer to those
sections of the officer corps, together with the carabinieri and the police, who,
like many former soldiers, were sympathetic to Fascism because for them it
signified ‘a prolongation of the state of war internally, and a possibility of war
externally’. The great strength of Fascism lay in the fact that

it brought into combination against the socialist proletariat both the cold,
calculating hostility of the authentic bourgeoisie, and the fanatical hatred of
these middle classes who were overwhelmed in the post-war crisis, and who
directed all the ferment and rancour of their distress on to the proletariat
rather than on to the class, or rather regime, that was socially dominant.73

By drawing attention to the bourgeois, middle-class and militant elements of

Fascism, Zibordi was seeking to avoid a one-sided sociological interpretation
of the term. In his view, Fascism was also, but not exclusively, a movement on
the part of the ceti medi, or middle classes. This is an assessment that is
confirmed by professional statistics for the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) in
1921, when 24.3 per cent of its members were farmworkers and 15.4 per cent
were employed in industry. Students and schoolchildren accounted for 13 per
cent of the total, peasants and smallholders for 11.9 per cent, the privately
employed 9.9 per cent, businessmen, craftsmen and dealers 9.2 per cent, the
self-employed 6.6 per cent and public employees 4.7 per cent.
These figures for 1921 indicate the way in which Fascism had made broad
inroads into society, while failing to explode the theory that the movement had
a particular appeal for the middle classes. When measured against the makeup
322 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of the population in general, farmworkers and industrial workers were under-

represented in the PNF, while the middle class and, in particular, the ‘new
middle class’ of white-collar workers was overrepresented. This was especially
true of schoolchildren, students and teachers, three groups in which the lack of
available jobs had led to a widespread fear that, far from climbing the social
ladder, they were condemned, instead, to descend it.
The German historian Jens Petersen has described the PNF as ‘the first bour-
geois mass party in Italy’.74 But the fact that almost 40 per cent of its membership
was made up of workers suggests that it might be better described as a people’s
party or even as a nationalist party. The Fascists differed from other parties by
dint of the fact that their ranks included many young people: in 1921 around a
quarter of their members were under the age of twenty-one. In October 1922 the
average age of members in the province of Reggio Emilia was twenty-five. By the
date of the ‘March on Rome’ in October 1922, the PNF had more members than
any other party in Italy, and during Mussolini’s first year in power its numbers
increased dramatically: by December 1923 it had 783,000 members.
But Mussolini’s government included more than just Fascists, for the Duce,
who held the posts of prime minister, foreign secretary and home secretary,
also gave cabinet appointments to independent experts such as the former
chief of the general staff, Armando Diaz, whom he appointed minister of war,
and Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel, who became minister for the navy. Other
cabinet ministers were members of the Christian Democrat Popolari, the
Democratic Party and the Liberal Party. The most prominent Liberal was the
philosopher Giovanni Gentile, although even by this date Gentile was already
moving away from his Liberal convictions in the direction of Fascism.
One Fascist member of Mussolini’s cabinet was the finance minister from
1922 to 1925, Alberto De Stefani, who taught economics and also ran the
Italian Exchequer from 1923 to 1925. His laissez-faire economic policy was
supportive of business leaders and meant that industry closed ranks behind the
new government. He was particularly admired for sorting out the country’s
finances with the help of the special powers that the Chamber of Deputies and
Senate granted the government for a twelve-month period. But the Liberals’
hope that Mussolini would keep his promise of normalizzazione in general and
disband his storm troops in particular proved to be misplaced, and in January
1923 his squadre were incorporated into the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza
Nazionale, a new and voluntary reserve army that was initially not based in
barracks or required to swear an oath of allegiance to the king. Financed by the
state, it lent its support to Mussolini as ‘il Duce del Fascismo’. The PNF’s
Supreme Advisory and Executive Council, the Gran Consiglio del Fascismo,
had been created the previous month, in December 1922, a development that
marked the start of a process typical of Fascism, with the Supreme Council in
competition with parliament, while the Fascist militia provided a pillar of
support alongside the Italian army.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 323

In March 1923 the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana that Enrico Corradini

had founded in 1910 as a radically nationalist defence league merged with the
Fascist party. Two of its leaders, Luigi Federzoni and Alberto Rocco, later
assumed key roles in the government, Federzoni becoming minister of the
interior in June 1924, Rocco taking over the Ministry of Justice in January
1925. The ministers from the Popolari Party were dismissed from the cabinet
at the end of April 1923 after a Catholic Party congress in Turin had criticized
the Fascists’ continuing acts of violence and questioned their ideology, as well
as opposing the electoral reforms introduced by Mussolini. The new electoral
law – the Legge Acerbo – was passed in July 1923, its sole function being to
provide a solid majority for the joint list of Fascists and their bourgeois allies,
or Fianchegiattori. If it received at least a quarter of the votes cast, then the
most successful list was allotted two-thirds of the seats. In the Chamber of
Deputies 235 members voted for the measure, 140 against it. In the Senate the
votes were 165 in favour, forty-one against.
Among those who voted against the new bill were the Communists and the
Socialists, the Reform Social Democrats associated with Ivanoe Bonomi and
the members of Giovanni Amendola’s Democratic Party. Most of the Popolari
members abstained, while the thirty-nine who voted for or against the bill were
excluded from the party. A number of members of the Senate who were partic-
ularly close to the Vatican then proceeded to leave the party of their own voli-
tion, a move interpreted as the Curia’s rejection of the party. The Liberals,
including three former prime ministers, Giolitti, Salandra and Orlando, voted
for the Legge Acerbo and were guilty, therefore, of rejecting the parliamentary
system. They continued to regard Mussolini’s government as the lesser of two
evils when compared with the chaos of the early post-war period. They
accepted the reign of terror on the part of local Fascist leaders because it was
directed not against them but against the political left.
The ‘March on Rome’ brought no respite from the Fascists’ reign of
terror in the streets, and long after Mussolini had come to power his party
members continued to commit countless acts of violence against their political
enemies. Between 18 and 20 December 1922, for example, between eleven
and twenty-two Communists, anarchists and Socialists were murdered in
Turin by way of reprisal for the death of two Fascists. (Sources cannot agree on
the exact figure.) Few members of the squadre were ever arrested and sentenced,
whereas large numbers of Communist officials were rounded up: between
December 1922 and February 1923, 2,235 such officials were taken into
custody, 252 of them in connection with the arrest of Amadeo Bordiga, the
ultra-left-wing leader of the Communist Party and a man vehemently opposed
to all forms of cooperation between Communists and Socialists. He was
relieved of his position in April 1923 by the Executive Committee of the
Communist International, which had adopted the tactics of the left-wing
United Front in the wake of the Fascists’ seizure of power. Bordiga’s group no
324 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

longer had a majority in the new party leadership that was put in place by the
Comintern.
The first elections to be held after the new electoral law had come into force
took place on 6 April 1924. The election campaign was marked by acts of violence
committed by the squadre and visited on the left-wing opposition. But in spite of
vote-rigging and sustained attempts to intimidate their opponents, the Fascists
and their allies still won only 65 per cent of the votes cast, returning 374 members
to parliament as against the opposition’s 140, a total that included thirty-nine
Popolari, twenty-four Reformists from the Partito Socialista Unitario, twenty-two
Socialist Maximalists and nineteen Communists. In the northern regions of
Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy and Venetia the opposition parties were actually
in the majority, only elsewhere did the government listone prevail.
On 30 May 1924, barely two months after the elections, Giacomo Matteotti,
the secretary of the Partito Socialista Unitario, delivered a speech in the
Chamber of Deputies in which he inveighed against the Fascist terror during
the election campaign and demanded that the election be declared invalid, a
call repeatedly interrupted by shouts from the Fascists and their allies. Nor did
the Fascists limit their response to verbal attacks, for on 10 June Matteotti was
attacked by five squadristi under Amerigo Dumini while on his way to the
parliament building on the Lungotevere Arnaldo di Brescia, dragged into a car
and stabbed through the heart. His body was not recovered until 16 August,
when it was found in the Macchia della Quartarella, a forested area in the
parish of Riano outside Rome.
Matteotti’s disappearance plunged Italy into a state of extreme disquiet and
presented the ruling Fascists with their most serious crisis to date. With the
exception of the Communists and a few independent Liberals, including
Giolitti, the opposition members of the second chamber under Amendola,
walked out of the building and in doing so followed the legendary classical
example of the secessio plebis at the beginning of the fifth century ăG, repairing
to the Aventine in order to constitute a body truly representative of the common
people. On 13 June Mussolini told the chamber that only one of his enemies
could have thought up and perpetrated a deed as dastardly as the one committed
on 10 June, and the following day he dismissed a number of his discredited
officials, including his chief press officer, Cesare Rossi, and the undersecretary
of state at the Ministry of the Interior, Aldo Finci. On 16 June Mussolini stepped
down as minister of the interior and transferred his powers to the former
Nationalist politician, Luigi Federzoni. In the course of the weeks that followed,
the chief of police, Emilio de Bono, ensured that the squadristi who had
committed the murder and who in the meantime had been arrested were able
to flee and avoid punishment. De Bono was then relieved of his duties and
placed in charge of the militia.
No matter how many denials the Fascists may have issued, few Italians were
in any doubt as to who was ultimately responsible for Matteotti’s murder, and
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 325

by the middle of August it was clear beyond peradventure that the guilty party
was Mussolini. And yet his enemies failed to act. The Aventine opposition may
have established a precarious unity, but it remained ineffectual. A general strike
demanded by the Communists did not take place because the majority of anti-
Fascist representatives in the lower house felt that this would be playing with
fire and risked causing a civil war. Instead, many Italians, including Amendola,
placed their hopes in the intervention of King Umberto II, but the latter merely
shifted the burden of responsibility to the Chamber of Deputies, which had
been a rump parliament since the withdrawal of the opposition, and to the
Senate, which expressed its confidence in Mussolini’s government on 26 June
and again on 5 December.
On 27 December, Amendola’s newspaper, Il Mondo, published a ‘Memoriale’
by the dismissed Rossi that incriminated Mussolini, claiming that shortly after
Matteotti’s speech on 30 May, the Duce had asked Rossi: ‘Cosa fa questa Ceka?’
(What is this Cheka doing?) Mussolini had allegedly gone on: ‘What is Dumini
doing? After a speech like that, this man should be taken out of circulation.’75
Amerigo Dumini was in charge of an organization similar to the Bolsheviks’
secret police force, or Cheka. If this is what Mussolini really said, then his
comment could be interpreted only as an invitation to silence an opposition
member of the lower house. Rossi’s article, accusing the head of government of
commissioning a murder, seemed to lend credence to the anti-Fascists’ suspi-
cions and turn it into a certainty.
Mussolini had spent much of the late summer and autumn of 1924
hesitating over whether he should pay greater heed to radical Fascists such as
Roberto Farinacci, who were urging him to deal more decisively with the
opposition, or whether it would be better to continue to work closely with his
Liberal supporters, which would mean adopting a more moderate policy. At a
Liberal Party conference in Livorno in early October, the government position
was in a minority. In November, Giolitti and Orlando turned against the
government and were joined by Salandra at the end of December, following the
publication of Rossi’s piece in Il Mondo. In the wake of the defection of his
former partners, Mussolini was left with only the hard core of the Fascist move-
ment to support him. His position was now compromised, and his only way of
remaining in power was to end the crisis by what effectively amounted to a
coup d’état – his second, if we also count his ‘March on Rome’.
On 2 January 1925 Mussolini discussed his intentions with the king, and on
the 3rd he appeared before the Chamber of Deputies, delivering what was his
most important speech to date and taking complete ‘political, moral, and
historical responsibility for all that had happened’:

If Fascism has been nothing more than castor oil and the rubber truncheon,
instead of being a proud passion of the best part of Italian youth, then I am
to blame! If Fascism has been a criminal association, then I am the chief of
326 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

this criminal association! [. . .] When two irreducible elements are locked in

a struggle, the solution is force. [. . .] Italy wants peace, tranquillity, calm in
which to work. We shall give her this tranquillity and calm, by means of love
if possible but by force if necessary. You may be sure that within the next
forty-eight hours after this speech, the situation will be clarified in every
field.76

In order to provoke his listeners even further, Mussolini directed their atten-
tion to the potential use of Article 47 of the constitution of March 1848, which
gave them the right to indict ministers of the king and hale them before the
country’s Supreme Court.
The events of 3 January 1925 marked a turning point in the history of Italian
Fascism. The regime was now established as the open dictatorship that had
been the aim of every move since the ‘March on Rome’ in October 1922. Within
the forty-eight hours that Mussolini referred to in his speech, the last remaining
Liberal ministers were dismissed. The former Nationalist Alfredo Rossi was
placed in charge of the Ministry of Justice. Countless opposition newspapers
were impounded and afterwards placed under strict censorship. The country’s
most important newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera, had already adopted the
government line in November 1924, when the Crespi family which owned the
paper, responding to intense pressure, sacked its liberal editor in chief, Luigi
Albertini. Shortly afterwards the Fascists also took control of the Turin-based
La Stampa.
On 7 January 1925 the minister of the interior, Luigi Federzoni, reported on
the steps that he had taken: numerous political clubs had been closed down,
allegedly seditious organizations had been disbanded, many suspicious
premises had been searched and dangerous troublemakers had been arrested.
The Aventine opposition protested in a manifesto dated 9 January, complaining
at the infringement of civil liberties and describing events as the final stage of
the conflict between Fascism and the people. When a number of opposition
members of the Chamber of Deputies tried to enter the building, their passage
was barred. On 18 February, Roberto Farinacci, the driving force behind
attempts to suppress the independent press, was elected secretary general of
the Fascist Party by the Gran Consiglio. Appealing to Mussolini, he declared
that hitherto Fascism had won only a single victory and still had to win the war.
The opposition could not have been crushed so comprehensively if it had
realized in good time that it could be politically effective only if it agreed on a
common policy and stuck to that plan. The belated critique of Mussolini’s poli-
cies that was voiced by Giolitti, Orlando and Salandra was unconvincing not
least because they had already forfeited their moral credibility by collaborating
with the Fascists. The bourgeois Liberals were additionally weakened by the fact
that their main supporters in society – industrialists and major landowners –
had no intention of crossing swords with a system that protected their interests
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 327

far more effectively than any previous government had done. Those of Italy’s
previous representatives who eschewed all further political involvement were
generally left in peace by the new dictatorship. Prominent figures in the coun-
try’s intellectual life such as the philosopher Benedetto Croce, who did not turn
unequivocally against the Fascist regime until the beginning of 1924, were
treated with relative forbearance, and his journal, La Critica, was able to continue
publication without being subjected to Fascist control.

The measures undertaken in the early months of 1925 were merely the first
step on the road to a Fascist dictatorship. It was a development that was driven
in no small part by the Fascist trade unions, or Sindacati Nazionali, which
merged as the Confederazione Nazionale delle Corporazioni Sindacali in early
1922 under the leadership of Edmondo Rossoni. While arguing for an end to
the class struggle and for cooperation between capital and labour, the Sindacati
also maintained the right to strike, in which respect they differed from the
‘yellow’ trade unions that were friendly to employers and that existed in other
countries. Within the PNF they were always on the side of the extremists asso-
ciated with Roberto Farinacci and Italo Balbo.
The insistence on the right to strike was not merely theoretical, for in the
early months of 1925 the Sindacati Nazionali unleashed an anti-capitalist
campaign that culminated in a strike by Fascist metalworkers in February and
March. Six months later, on 2 October 1925, the Fascist trade unions signed a
deal with the employers’ umbrella organization, or Confindustria: under the
terms of the Patto di Palazzo Vidoni, they agreed not to strike as long as the
employers’ organization refrained from locking them out. Both parties also
agreed on the need to sideline the Commissioni Interne that the Fascists had
never managed to bring under their control. The Sindacati Nazionali ensured
that they enjoyed the sole right to negotiate collective wage agreements and in
doing so robbed the other trade unions of their entire raison d’être. The socialist
Confederazione Generale del Lavoro duly disbanded itself. In April 1926 the
agreements signed in October 1925 were given legal form by the minister of
justice, and the specialist organizations of employers and employees were
accorded state recognition as long as at least one-tenth of their members were
professional members of those organizations.
On 4 November 1925, a month after the Patto di Palazzo Vidoni was signed,
Tito Zaniboni, a former member of the Chamber of Deputies who had repre-
sented the Partito Socialista Unitario, made an attempt on Mussolini’s life.
Although the attempt was thwarted at the last minute, it had major repercus-
sions when the government banned the PSU (one of Zaniboni’s fellow conspir-
ators, General Luigi Capello, was a Freemason) and Rocco rushed the
Leggi fascistissime through parliament. The most important of these laws
concerned the Capo del Governo and his new and comprehensive extraordi-
nary powers, while at the same time depriving parliament of its right to initiate
328 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

laws. A law dated 31 January 1926 gave the executive the right to pass
ordinances with the force of law whenever it felt that it was appropriate to do
so, a move that effectively abolished the previous division of power. A series of
laws was then enacted that consolidated the position of the prefects, abolished
local government (elected mayors were replaced by a podestà appointed by the
state), forced all journalists to join a regulatory organization and allowed polit-
ically unreliable civil servants to be dismissed from their posts without further
ado.
The Leggi fascistissime were nothing if not statist: in other words, it was not
the Fascist movement that set the tone, but the state. And yet it was not the
existing state that used the Fascist Party as its instrument of power but the
Fascist state led by the Capo del Governo e Duce del Fascismo, namely, Benito
Mussolini. In 1926 the movement’s mouthpiece, Roberto Farinacci, was forced
to step down as its secretary general, and many of his followers lost their posi-
tions within the party. At the same time, many regional party leaders were
stripped of their powers. Only those who adopted the new party line were
allowed to remain in their posts. Farinacci was replaced by Augusto Turati,
who retained his position until 1930, gradually turning the Partito Nazionale
Fascista into an instrument of government.
In 1927 membership of the Fascist Party passed the one million mark. On 5
January Mussolini placed the regional party secretaries under the direct control
of a prefect, a development that Wolfgang Schieder has described as

a turning point in the history of the PNF from a united party that governed
the country to one that was directed in turn, a bureaucratic mass organiza-
tion of careerists and conformist fellow travellers whose motivation was not
primarily political. In the process it lost the aggressive thrust that extremists
had brought to the party. At the same time, however, it turned out that
Mussolini’s plans for integration could only partially be realized. The tradi-
tional elites remained largely remote from the Fascist Party and as a result
were not under the Fascist dictator’s direct political control.77

A further attempt on Mussolini’s life in the autumn of 1926 resulted in yet

more repressive measures. It took place in Bologna on 31 October and was
carried out by the fifteen-year-old Anteo Zamboni, who immediately after-
wards was lynched by a Fascist mob. By 5 November the regime had disbanded
all political parties, banned opposition newspapers, created not only a special
political police force – the Divisione Polizia Politica, known as ‘POLPOL’ for
short – but also an actual secret police, the Organizzazione di Vigilanza e
Repressione dell’Antifascismo (OVRA), and cancelled all travel permits.
Opposition groups were banned, their members arrested and often tortured on
one of the so-called isole maledette that included Ustica and Lipari. One of the
eminent individuals sent into internal exile in this way was the writer and
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 329

general practitioner Carlo Levi, who in 1945 described his experiences in his
novel Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli).
On 9 November the Fascist majority in the Chamber of Deputies declared
that all the members on the opposition benches had forfeited their seats. On
the strength of a law designed to protect the state and rushed through parlia-
ment on 25 November, a special court was set up to deal with political offences:
new and retroactive punishments, including the death sentence, were intro-
duced for crimes that were regarded as anti-Fascist; and individuals could be
detained by the police without recourse to the courts. On the basis of the new
law, the de facto leader of the country’s Communists, Antonio Gramsci, who
had already been arrested on 8 November 1926, was haled before the special
court in July 1928 and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. All left-wing
politicians and dignitaries who had not yet emigrated or been imprisoned now
tried to leave the country. By November 1926 Italy was officially a one-party
state and more than ever a police state.
The politics of repression could work only because it was accompanied
by a politics of integration. Created in 1925, the leisure organization Opera
Nazionale Dopolavoro set out to win over the workers, its manifold lures in the
field of sports, culture and tourism seeking to compensate the masses for their
loss of political freedom and for their lower wages. To a certain extent it
did indeed achieve this aim, its membership rising from 280,000 in 1926 to
1.6 million in 1929 and finally to 4.6 million in 1940.
Far less effective were attempts to overcome class differences and deal with
the class struggle in the new stato corporativo. On 21 April 1927, the anniver-
sary of the legendary foundation of Rome, the Grand Fascist Council passed
the Carta del Lavoro, which provided for the incorporation of all the state-
recognized professional associations of employers and employees – the confed-
erazioni – within a series of corporazioni. The aim was for representatives of
capital and labour to work together under the guidance of state and party in the
national interest in order to regulate and plan industrial production. In May
1928 a new electoral law gave the confederazioni the right to propose candi-
dates for the Fascist list in parliamentary elections, a right which, given the
crucial influence of the PNF, existed only on paper.
The first election to take place on the basis of the new law was held in March
1929 and produced the expected result, 8.5 million voters supporting the
Fascist list, with only 136,000 against it. Five years were then to pass before
another law was passed on 5 February 1934, defining the formation and tasks
of the corporazioni and creating a national assembly for the total of twenty-two
such bodies. Within the stato corporativo it was no longer possible for autono-
mous interests to be represented. Throughout this period it was the Fascist
centre of power around Mussolini that proved decisive: with their ponderous
apparatus, the confederazioni and corporazioni, together with the one-party
parliament, served only as a legitimizing façade. It was a situation that remained
330 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

unchanged even after parliament and the corporations merged in January 1939
as the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni.
The Lateran Pacts of 11 February 1929 were also intended to promote the
regime’s policy of integration. The first of them restored the Church state that
had ceased to exist in October 1870, when Rome had been annexed by
the kingdom of Italy. The recognition of the pope’s sovereignty and rule over
the Città del Vaticano allowed the See of Rome to declare that the ‘Roman
Question’ – the status of the pope – was now finally settled. The second treaty
was a financial agreement that offered the Vatican generous compensation
for the loss of its temporal power in 1870. The third treaty, or Concordat,
granted the Catholic Church privileges that it would never have enjoyed under
a liberal government and included the acknowledgement of Catholicism as
the country’s official religion; a guarantee that the Church could teach religion
and assume responsibility for the spiritual welfare of the nation’s schools;
and the recognition that marriages concluded in church were also valid under
civil law.
One obstacle that lay in the way of any agreement was the monopoly
enjoyed by the Fascist Youth Organization, or Opera Nazionale Ballila, a move-
ment established in 1926 and named after a fifteen-year-old boy who in 1790
had thrown a stone that marked the start of the uprising against the Austrians
in Genoa. All boys between the age of seven and fourteen could be members of
the Opera Nazionale Ballila, during which time they were to receive physical
and military training and a political education. Membership was not compul-
sory. Parallel organizations were the Piccole Italiane for girls of between eight
and fourteen and the Avanguardisti and the Giovani Italiane for girls and boys
between fourteen and eighteen. The Church was able to ensure that its own
youth movement, the Associazione di Azione Cattolica, was granted special
status and was allowed to continue on condition that its members refrained
from engaging in any of the activities that were the legal preserve of the Opera
Nazionale Ballila. At universities, conversely, Catholic and all other non-Fascist
societies were banned. Practically all male students were members of the
Gruppi Universitari Fascisti.
The Lateran Pacts drew a line under a long-standing conflict that had
soured relations between Church and state for almost six decades. With the
restoration of the pope’s secular rule and the new privileges accorded to the
Catholic Church in Italy, one of the fundamental decisions of the Risorgimento
– its support for a secular nation state – was reversed. Of course, Fascism had
no intention of declaring itself ‘Catholic’ or even ‘Christian’. But the Pacts of
1929 allowed it to consolidate its position not only internally by binding the
country’s Catholics even more firmly to the new order but also abroad, where
the prestige of Fascist Italy and its leader was substantially enhanced:
throughout the rest of the world Catholics now had a reason to feel a certain
fondness for Mussolini and his regime.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 331

If Mussolini’s government acquired any real legitimacy in the years after the
‘March on Rome’, then this was due above all to the economic upturn that the
country enjoyed after December 1922. Although this development reflected
events taking place in the international economy, it was helped in no small way
by the liberal economic policies and rigorous budgetary planning of the finance
minister, Alberto De Stefani. (Italy did not yet have its own Finance Ministry.)
Between 1922 and 1929 industrial production increased by 50 per cent, and
agriculture, too, recorded impressive growth rates thanks, not least, to the
government’s battaglia di grano, which boosted cereal production. For ideo-
logical reasons, too, agriculture enjoyed the regime’s attention, for the Fascists
were so convinced that industrialization had inflicted untold social and mental
harm on the country that they encouraged a policy of ruralizzazione, or rurali-
zation. The growth of the cities was felt to be unhealthy and had to be stopped,
while rural areas needed to be developed. In this way the government also
hoped to stem the tide of Italians leaving the country to work abroad.
The sort of agrarian reforms that would have damaged the interests of the
major landowners and that might have included a redistribution of wealth or
the abolition of the metayage system in Tuscany were ruled out from the very
beginning: the owners of the latifundia were the Fascists’ principal allies and so
they could not be antagonized, for without their help Mussolini’s party would
not have come to power. In turn this meant that the process of ruralization
could assume the form only of internal colonization, and here the only areas
that came into question were the Maremma in Tuscany, the Maccarese to the
north of Rome and the Pontine Marshes to the south of the capital.
The task of draining the Pontine Marshes began in 1930. It was a project
that had long been planned but which at the time of the world economic crisis
additionally became a state-funded job-creation scheme designed to boost the
economy. Five new towns were created here in the course of the 1930s: Littoria,
present-day Sabaudia, Pomezia, Aprilia and Pontina. All were conceived as
communal rural centres and were modelled on the ideal Fascist city: at the
centre of each of them stood the town hall facing the Catholic church, both of
which were dwarfed by the local party headquarters, or Casa del Fascio, with
its lictors’ tower. As a rule, the heart of the new town also featured a barracks
for the local militia and a leisure centre for the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro.
Like the battaglia di grano, the country’s ruralization programme benefited
from a vast amount of political propaganda, and yet it still failed to achieve the
desired results. Between 1921 and 1930 the number of people in work rose by
1.1 million, whereas in the agricultural sector it fell by 530,000. By 1940 only
100,000 people had been resettled in newly cultivated areas. Since Fascism had
no wish to present itself as a backward-looking movement, it could not system-
atically privilege the countryside over the towns, and in order to counter the
crisis of 1929 and later, it was required to boost industrial production which,
adopting the practices of previous governments, it achieved by means of
332 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

protectionist measures that were now dictated by the utopian goal of economic
self-sufficiency: the country’s steel industry produced goods worth between
50 per cent and 100 per cent more than those on the international market.
The principal instrument of the Fascists’ industrial policies was the Istituto
per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI) that was established in 1933 and that for
a time controlled 42 per cent of the capital of all public limited companies and
all the industries that would be important in wartime. With a management that
was part private, part nationalized, the IRI presumably helped to ensure that in
the 1930s the growth rates of Italy’s gross domestic product exceeded those of
the European average for the first time, which meant that in 1938 Italy’s share
of world industrial production reached 2.8 per cent, slightly higher than the
1928 figure of 2.7 per cent.
Fascism sought to impose its imprint not only on the newer towns but also
on the older ones. Under the watchword sventramento, historic city centres
were torn down wherever possible in order to make room for monumental
Fascist buildings and new axial roads. But it was Rome that bore the brunt of
the regime’s policy of urbanization. Here the entire road network in the inner
city was redesigned in the shape of a star by Mussolini’s chief architect, Marcello
Piacentini. At the centre of the star was the Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini’s head-
quarters since 1929. The wide new streets were not only suitable for parades
but also allowed crowds to converge on the Palazzo Venezia, from whose
balcony the charismatic Duce harangued his audiences.
Of the older buildings in Rome, only those from the city’s imperial past
struck Mussolini as worth preserving. Buildings were demolished in order to
grant an unimpeded view of the remains of imperial Rome: the Capitol, the
Forum Romanum, the Palatine, the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus. All of
these were to be transformed into a single vast memorial. This was also the aim
of the project that revolved around the Via dell’Impero, now the Via dei Fori
Imperiali: the old centre of Rome’s imperial rule was in this way surrounded by
a broad ring road that Mussolini was equally keen should be used for parades.
Under Mussolini, the ancient city of Rome was radically redesigned, as
Wolfgang Schieder has noted:

Topographically speaking, the Rome of classical antiquity, above all impe-

rial Rome, was henceforth present only in a Fascistically alienated form. In
order for visitors to get to know the ancient monuments in their authentic
guise, they must first remove the Fascist layers that have been superim-
posed on them. Or at the very least they need to know what these layers are.
As long as this is not the case, then Roman antiquity will continue to be
represented only by Fascism.78

The Fascists’ cult of Rome – romanità fascista – was a reflection of the

regime’s desire to enhance its reputation by appealing to a historic model both
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 333

unparalleled and peerless. The Roman Empire was regarded as the prototype
of the new impero fascista that was still to be created. Most of Fascism’s symbols
and concepts derived from ancient Rome, from the fasci and lictors’ towers to
the hierarchical structure of the militia in the form of manipoli, centurie, coorti
and legioni and including the right arm raised in salutation. In 1926 Mussolini
visited Libya, where Italy was involved in a series of struggles with the local
independence movement and where he had himself acclaimed as a latter-day
Scipio Africanus. Following the Abyssinian War of 1935–6 he modelled himself
on the Emperor Augustus and proclaimed himself a peacemaker. To mark the
two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of the first Roman emperor, he recon-
structed the Ara Pacis of $) 9 as part of a modern pavilion between the
completely rebuilt Mausoleum of Augustus and the Tiber. Italy and the world
were to be left in no doubt as to the identity of Augustus’s legitimate heir, a man
uniquely qualified to preserve his forebear’s spirit: il Duce del Fascismo.
Unlike Communism, Fascism did not have a detailed ideology that could
lay claim to scholarly validity, its propagandists’ pronouncements being based
for the most part on an irrational philosophy dating back to the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, notably Henri Bergson’s theory of the existence
of an élan vital and Georges Sorel’s plea for ‘direct action’ and for the courage
to embrace myth. In March 1925 a conference of Fascist intellectuals in Bologna
agreed on a manifesto written by Giovanni Gentile and addressed to the ‘intel-
lectuals of all nations’:

Like all great individual movements, fascism is becoming stronger all the
time, more able to attract and to absorb, more effective and integrated in the
complex of souls, ideas, interests, and institutions that compose it (the vital
merger of the Italian folk). For this reason, it is now beside the point to
count and measure mere individuals. The time has come to look at the idea
itself and to evaluate it. Like all true ideas, this one is alive and powerfully
vibrant. It is not made up by man but made for man.79

In a response published shortly afterwards, Benedetto Croce dismissed the

manifesto as ‘brimming over with half-baked notions worthy of a schoolchild.
At every turn one encounters philosophical confusions and faulty reasoning.’80
Not until 1932 did Mussolini think that the time had come to comment on
the ‘doctrine of Fascism’, which he did in an article he contributed to the
Enciclopedia Italiana. In his view, ‘the man of Fascism’ led ‘a life in which the
individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own
private interests, through death itself, realizes that completely spiritual exist-
ence in which his value as a man lies’. Fascism was

a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship

with a superior law and with an objective will that transcends the particular
334 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

individual and raises him to conscious membership in a spiritual society.

Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing
but mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a
system of government is also, and above all, a system of thought. [. . .] In
this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and
unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life
of the people.

The concept of Fascist authority had nothing to do with a police state: ‘A party
that governs a nation in a totalitarian way is a new fact in history.’81
According to this horse’s mouth definition proffered by Mussolini, Fascism
amounted to a repudiation of enlightened reason and set store instead by the
power of the instinctual will. Fascism was anti-individualistic, anti-liberal and
anti-materialist. It opposed the whole idea of a democracy that equated the
people with the majority and claimed to embody a purer form of democracy
because it had a qualitative understanding of the people. Fascism saw in the
state an absolute, whereas individuals and groups were relative. It was nation-
alist, bellicose and expansionist and rejected the whole idea of the interna-
tional brotherhood of man:

War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts
the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.
[. . .] For Fascism the tendency to Empire, that is to say, to the expansion of
nations is a manifestation of vitality. [. . .] Peoples who rise or re-rise are
imperialist, people who die are renunciatory.

Mussolini had no hesitation in calling Fascism ‘the doctrine of the present age’,
a claim he justified by arguing that the nations of his own day wanted authority,
guidance and order. Indeed, he even insisted that Fascism now had a univer-
sality that was shared by all doctrines that ‘have significance in the history of
the human spirit’. In short, Mussolini seemed to believe in 1932 that Fascism
was no purely Italian phenomenon but a particular type of regime that could
be adopted by other nations prepared to accept a radical break with the illu-
sions of the age of liberalism and the promises held out by Marxism.82
But whenever he struck a more concrete note, Mussolini invariably empha-
sized the uniqueness of Italy and its historic mission. It was, rather, the anti-
Fascists on the political left who stripped the term ‘Fascism’ of its Italian
connotations in order to characterize a particular type of violent, right-wing
movement, with the result that the term no longer had the same meaning as it
had in the case of Italy, for whatever lessons might be learnt from Italian expe-
riences beyond the confines of the Italian peninsula could be effective only
when wedded to an equally powerful nationalism that stressed that particular
country’s uniqueness. ‘Fascist’ regimes might form alliances of convenience to
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 335

resist third parties and strive to enlist sympathizers outside their own coun-
tries, but a ‘Fascist International’ would have been a contradiction in terms.
When Mussolini used the word ‘totalitarian’ in his 1932 article for the
Enciclopedia Italiana, this was not the first time he had done so, for he had
referred to the ‘feroce volontà totalitaria’ of Fascism seven years earlier. Nor was
the word a neologism on his part, for liberal critics such as Giovanni Amendola
and Socialists such as Lelio Basso had been describing the Fascist regime as
totalitarian since 1923. But what Mussolini had in mind was a state created by
a unified will and unthreatened by any opposition in keeping with his motto:
‘Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contra lo Stato’ (Everything
in the State, nothing outside the State, no one against the State).83
From the 1930s onwards, those regimes were regarded as totalitarian for
which politics was essentially a struggle between friend and foe, where all
forms of opposition were violently suppressed and all who held divergent views
were intimidated by an omnipresent secret police, and where a single party
maintained a monopoly of power, using ideology, propaganda and terror to
gain the acclamatory approval of the masses it needed to achieve legitimacy
both at home and abroad. Fascist Italy had evolved in this direction by stages:
ever since the establishment of a one-party state at the end of 1926, Mussolini’s
Italy had been drawing ever closer to a totalitarian regime, the only comparable
country being the Soviet Union, where Stalin was currently in the process of
eradicating all his remaining rivals.
And yet Mussolini’s rule was by no means absolute, for alongside the Duce
there was also the king who, if lacking in any personal charisma, enjoyed the
status of his office and remained the commander in chief of his country’s
armed forces. There was also the military, which was never under the complete
control of the Fascist Party. And there was the civilian apparatus of the state
and the Catholic Church, which commanded considerable respect among large
sections of Italian society. Nor was this society ‘aligned’ in the spirit of
Germany’s Gleichschaltung. Although the regime had succeeded in neutral-
izing the workforce, it was never really able to integrate it. And if we may draw
general conclusions from the behaviour of Liberal politicians and from
Benedetto Croce’s change of attitude, then objections to the regime were even
more pronounced after 1924 than they had been before the Matteotti crisis.
The Fascist state’s supporters continued to include major landowners and
industrialists, whose help had been decisive in ensuring Mussolini’s election as
prime minister in October 1922. But far from determining the regime’s policies,
they found themselves increasingly put on the defensive by the growing influ-
ence of the Fascist apparatus. At no point did the famous definition of Fascism
proposed by Georgi Dimitrov at the Thirteenth Plenary Session of the Executive
Committee of the Communist International in December 1933 apply to Italy:
‘In power, Fascism is the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary,
generally chauvinist and generally imperialist elements of financial capital.’84
336 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

A far better account of the reality of Fascist Italy was proposed in 1930 by a
right-wing Communist deviant from Germany, August Thalheimer, whose
starting point was Karl Marx’s analysis of the Bonapartist regime in France as
expounded in his 1852 article ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’,
according to which the political system of Louis Bonaparte – later the Emperor
Napoleon III – was ‘the executive authority which has made itself independent’.
Total control of the state had fallen into Louis Napoleon’s lap because the bour-
geoisie and the proletariat were by then so battle-weary that neither class was
strong enough to fight a new battle. The bourgeoisie had come to realize that if
it was to salvage its social power, it would have to forgo any further attempt to
exert its political influence over parliament and must seek refuge, rather,
behind a powerful executive authority.
As a result, Thalheimer was able to observe a number of parallels with the
present age. Like Bonapartism in France, the Fascist dictatorship in Italy was
an example of an

‘executive authority which has made itself independent’ and of the political
subjugation of the masses, including the bourgeoisie, to the authority of the
Fascist state, for all that the upper middle classes and major landowners
have retained their social dominance. At the same time, Fascism, like
Bonapartism, claims to be the universal benefactor of every social class,
hence the way in which one class is constantly played off against the next,
and hence, finally, the endless internal contradictions.85

Can Mussolini really be seen as a reincarnation of the second emperor from

the house of Bonaparte? In spite of all the differences between Bonapartism
and Fascism, none of which Thalheimer denied, there were undoubtedly a
number of striking parallels between the two systems. Neither in France in the
1860s nor in Italy seventy years later was the proletariat successful in its
attempts to come to power. In both cases broad sections of the bourgeoisie
were weary of an unstable parliamentary system and correspondingly recep-
tive to the promise of a powerful state. In both cases the usurper had at his
command a private army that was willing to use force: Louis Napoleon’s
army was his ‘Society of 10 December’, Mussolini’s his squadre. Mussolini was
far more charismatic a leader than Louis Napoleon and capable of mobilizing
the masses. He knew that he needed to manipulate his audiences in order to
appear in the eyes of the masses as the man he wanted to seem: a strong-willed
and dynamic leader whom nothing and no one could unsettle. As long as
he remained in control of his apparatus of state, with the Gran Consiglio
del Fascismo at its head, and as long as he remained successful, he could be
certain of the Italians’ acclamation, not least because terror and vote-rigging
were even more widespread in Fascist Italy than they had been in Second
Empire France.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 337

It was initially in its dealings with the outside world that Mussolini’s Italy
differed most markedly from the France of Louis Napoleon, who repeatedly
tried to stabilize his rule by pursuing foreign policies that were aimed at
enhancing his prestige, often by means of wars, but which involved a high
degree of risk. Mussolini, conversely, had recourse to military action only once
during his early period in office, and that was in the summer of 1923, following
the murder of General Enrico Tellini, the Italian delegate at an international
conference set up to rule on the Graeco-Albanian border. Tellini and his
companions were killed on Greek soil. In order to ensure that Italy had a secu-
rity in case of claims for compensation and also to enhance his country’s inter-
national standing, Mussolini sent Italian troops to occupy the Greek island of
Corfu but quickly withdrew them in response to pressure from the League of
Nations and especially Great Britain after a conference of Allied ambassadors,
meeting in Paris, had fined Greece fifty million lire.
During the years that followed, foreign acts of violence were confined to
Italy’s colonies in Africa, namely, Eritrea, Somalia, Tripoli and, above all,
Cyrenaica. Here the chief of the general staff, Pietro Badoglio, who had been
governor general of Tripoli and Cyrenaica since 1929, and his deputy, Rodolfo
Graziani, both of whom were veterans of the Libyan War of 1911–12, spent
much of 1930–31 waging a ruthless war against insurrectionists in the north of
the country and ultimately against the local nomadic population in general.
Poison gas was used, tens of thousands of North Africans died in concentration
camps, and the rebel leader, Omar Al-Mukhtar, was publicly executed in
September 1931 following a show trial. Shortly afterwards Badoglio was able to
inform Rome of the successful outcome of his campaign.
In Europe, conversely, Italy’s foreign policy was much more measured and
in some cases even decidedly cooperative in character. In January 1924 the
country reached an agreement over Fiume with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes. (It had annexed the region in September 1923, during the Corfu
crisis.) Friendship treaties were signed with Romania in 1926 and with Hungary
in 1927. As we have already observed, Albania, by contrast, received rather
shorter shrift, the two Treaties of Tirana of 1926 and 1927 serving only to make
the country more dependent on Italy both politically and militarily. And
Mussolini paid no heed to Austrian sensitivities when in the summer of 1923
he began his scheme rigorously to Italianize the South Tyrol and to make
Italian the official language in administration and schools. By 1925 Italian had
also been declared the official language in the region’s courts, and in early 1926
the inhabitants of the South Tyrol were legally required to Italianize their
names. By 1927 German political parties and other associations had all been
banned. Italy’s actions provoked impassioned cross-party protests not only in
Austria but in Germany, too, and yet German policy remained essentially unaf-
fected by these developments, Germany arguing that Rome’s actions in Alto
Adige were an internal matter for the Italians themselves to decide. Only once,
338 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

in February 1926, did Germany’s foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, object

with some force in the Reichstag to one of Mussolini’s anti-German outbursts.
In the mid-1920s attitudes to Fascist Italy within the rest of Europe were
divided. The Social Democrats and Communists saw Mussolini as a tyrant
who in the interests of the capitalists was bloodily suppressing the working
class. On the extreme right, conversely, there was enthusiastic approval for his
overthrow of the ‘Marxists’ and his removal of a weak parliamentary system.
Even among conservative politicians, however, Mussolini was widely admired.
During the winter of 1926/7, for example, Winston Churchill, at that date the
chancellor of the exchequer in Stanley Baldwin’s second cabinet, visited Italy
and reported that ‘this country gives the impression of discipline, order, good-
will, smiling faces’.86 Following an audience with Mussolini in January 1927, he
told a press conference that in view of a system that had been so willingly
adopted, it would be absurd to claim that the Italian government was not
broadly based or that it was unable to rely on the active support of the masses.
‘If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly from start
to finish with Fascism’s triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and
passions of Leninism.’87
Liberals, too, admired the Fascist system of Italy and its leader. On 11 May
1930, Theodor Wolff, the editor in chief of the Berliner Tageblatt, described
Mussolini as a moderate exponent of Realpolitik with no ‘nationalistic vanity’.
When, in the course of an extended interview that he conducted with the Duce,
Wolff ventured to criticize the repression and imprisonment of people who
disagreed with him, Mussolini had merely replied that he needed to establish
an ‘authoritarian democracy’.88
In the early months of 1932, another German liberal, the writer Emil
Ludwig, conducted a series of interviews with Mussolini which he went on to
publish in book form. In it he hailed the Italian leader as a ‘great statesman’ and
‘genuine dictator’ who was ‘polite to a fault’ and ‘the most natural man in the
world’. Questioned as to the dangers of his dictatorship, Mussolini had offered
an explicit assurance that Fascism was ‘not an article for export’.89 Both Ludwig
and Wolff were Jewish, and both were reassured by Mussolini’s insistence that
Fascism was not anti-Semitic, a claim that stemmed from the Italian leader’s
unspoken wish that he should not be lumped together with his most passionate
German admirer, Adolf Hitler.

From Poincaré to Poincaré: France between 1923 and 1929

A year after the Fascists came to power in Italy, France, too, seemed to be on
the verge of a crisis that threatened the country’s entire political system. On 14
October 1923, the president of the Republic, Alexandre Millerand, gave a
speech in Évreux near Paris in which he unambiguously demanded an increase
in his presidential powers and aligned himself so clearly with the ruling Bloc
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 339

National under the prime minister, Raymond Poincaré, that the left-wing
opposition interpreted his address as a thinly veiled attack on the existing
parliamentary system. The gulf between Millerand – a former Socialist – and
the opposition parties could no longer be bridged. Criticism of Millerand was
underpinned by a large-scale campaign by the bourgeois Radical Socialists
directed against the government’s foreign, domestic and, above all, economic
policies. During the winter of 1923/4, the leader of the Radicals, Édouard
Herriot, even went so far as to demand an end to the Franco-Belgian occupa-
tion of the Ruhr Valley. The bourgeois left wanted to replace the confronta-
tional approach of the Bloc National by closer cooperation with Great Britain
and greater understanding with Germany.
In this regard there was widespread agreement between the Radicals and the
Socialists, with the result that in January and February 1924 the Radical Socialists
and the SFIO signed an electoral pact in the form of the Cartel des Gauches that
proved extremely successful in the elections for the Chamber of Deputies in the
May of that same year. Although the Bloc National polled more votes than
the political left – 4.5 million as compared with 4.4 million – the electoral law
that was then in force and the left wing’s electoral agreements meant that the
latter won a safe parliamentary majority: the parties of the Cartel returned 287
deputies, including 139 Radicals and 104 Socialists, whereas the right could
muster only 228. The Communists had twenty-six deputies, a figure due in no
small measure to such traditional strongholds as Paris. The radical right, in the
form of Action Française, remained an altogether insignificant force.
The Cartel’s victory made Millerand’s position untenable. He had ignored
the non-party stance required of the president and had to pay a correspond-
ingly high price, bowing to pressure from the left and resigning on 11 June.
Two days later he was replaced by Gaston Doumergue, a right-wing Radical
who was leader of the Senate and who enjoyed Poincaré’s support. Immediately
after becoming president, Doumergue invited Herriot to form a government.
Herriot, who had taught literature at the lycée in Lyons and for many years
been the city’s mayor, wanted to include Socialists in his cabinet, but as long
ago as April 1919, at their first post-war party conference in Paris, they had
refused to be a part of any coalition government on the grounds that they
supported the proletarian class struggle. The SFIO maintained this stance
under Léon Blum, arguing that any deviation from the party line would risk
splitting the party: its left wing could no longer be prevented from founding a
left-wing socialist party or even from joining the Communists. The most that
the SFIO would agree to countenance was cooperation with the progressive
bourgeois parties in the form of support for a Radical government, which is
what the SFIO announced it would do in June 1924.
The transfer of power in 1924 meant a radical break in France’s foreign
policy. Herriot, who was foreign minister as well as prime minister, could count
on the Socialists’ support when, at the London Reparations Conference in July
340 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

and August 1924, he agreed to accept the Dawes Plan and vacate the Ruhr
within a year, promises he had already given to Ramsay MacDonald in prelimi-
nary talks at Chequers at the end of June 1924. France received no guarantees
from Britain or America, nor even any recognition of the link between German
reparations and the debts run up by the Allies during the war. But in view of the
weakness of the franc and France’s resultant dependence on British and
American goodwill, not even a more ‘nationalist’ government than Herriot’s
could have afforded to become embroiled in a conflict with either London or
Washington. The occupation of the Ruhr had proved to be a blatant miscalcu-
lation, and by the summer of 1924 there could no longer be any doubt on that
particular score.
To the east, France established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union at
the end of October 1924, a move announced by Herriot in his government’s
first official pronouncement and one that had the support of the ruling Radicals
and the Socialists who kept them in power. France had been the main creditor
of tsarist Russia and had been opposed to the Bolshevik regime not least
because the latter had refused to repay the country’s pre-war debts. But in 1924
Moscow signalled its willingness to enter into negotiations over compensation
for French investors and to renounce any further interference in France’s
internal politics. (In the event, neither promise was kept.) For France’s emphat-
ically anti-Communist employers the question of reparations had in the mean-
time lost its significance, their main concern now being to improve economic
ties with the Soviet Union, with the result that this change of political direction
in October 1924 triggered no storm of protest in middle-class France.
In terms of the country’s financial policies, conversely, there were funda-
mental differences of opinion between the Radicals and the Socialists. The
former were keen to protect savers, who had been hit by the fall in the value of
the franc, a fall due at least in part to international speculators, whereas the
latter wanted to restore the value of the country’s currency by means of a capital
gains tax of 10 per cent. France’s minister of finance, Étienne Clémentel, rejected
this demand and resigned on 2 April 1925. He was succeeded by Anatole de
Monzie, a Radical member of the Senate, who announced that he would agree
to the SFIO’s demands, precipitating a flight of capital to Switzerland. On 10
April the Senate voted down a finance bill and in doing so brought down
Herriot’s government.
Herriot’s resignation marked the start of a period of political instability in
French politics, six different governments holding office between April 1925
and July 1926. Only the Quai d’Orsay remained calm throughout this period,
the former Socialist Aristide Briand retaining the office of foreign minister
practically uninterruptedly from 17 April 1925 to 12 January 1932. Among the
most notable achievements of his first year in office were the Locarno Treaties
of 10 October 1925, which finally acknowledged Germany’s western border.
The treaties, about which we shall have more to say in due course, marked the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 341

beginning of a new chapter in Franco-German relations that was dominated by

Briand and his German counterpart, Gustav Stresemann, and that was hailed
by many contemporaries – but certainly not by all – as a new dawn in the
Continent’s history.
None of the governments of this period was able to stabilize the currency.
Indeed, the franc’s exchange rate sank dramatically in the summer of 1926: in
the middle of 1925 the rate had been £1 to 91 francs (in 1914 it had been only
25), whereas it reached 200 in July 1926, plummeting within days to 240. On 17
July France’s minister of finance, Joseph Caillaux, proposed that the govern-
ment – Briand’s ninth cabinet – be granted special powers, but his request was
turned down by the Chamber of Deputies thanks in no small part to a speech
by Herriot, who was, however, unable to achieve a parliamentary majority for a
new government under his own leadership. With that, the Cartel des Gauches
was over after twenty-five months in office. Its inability to prevent the fall of the
franc struck most French people as an admission of defeat on the part of the
political left, while at the same time appearing to supporters of the radical right
as proof of the inadequacies of the parliamentary system in general.
In France the extreme right was traditionally spearheaded by the monar-
chist and radically nationalist Action Française and for the most part owed its
political significance to the support that it received from the French clergy,
including a number of prominent bishops and cardinals. In the mid-1920s the
ultra-right-wing thrust of French Catholicism gained further, if temporary,
impetus from the Cartel des Gauches’ plans to do away with the special position
of the Church in Alsace-Lorraine, where the Concordat of 1801 remained in
force even after the region had been reintegrated into France in 1918. A meeting
of French cardinals and archbishops in March 1925 responded to Herriot’s
move by condemning the country’s progressive secularization and, with it, all of
the country’s secular laws. In turn the government withdrew its proposal in the
face of opposition in the Chamber of Deputies, with the result that the Church’s
own opposition to Herriot’s policies quickly evaporated.
In the autumn of 1926 Action Française, which had stood on the side of the
Church in the struggle against secularization at the time of the Third Republic,
suddenly found itself the object of a bull of excommunication, Pope Pius XI
having finally seen in the ‘integral nationalism’ preached by Maurras and his
supporters a substitute religion of a militantly secular kind. Maurras’s writings
were added to the Index of banned publications and Catholics risked excom-
munication if they read the group’s daily newspaper. There followed a purge of
the clergy and, above all, of the episcopacy: bishops who continued to support
Action Française were replaced, and a cardinal who sympathized with Maurras
was defrocked.
The break with Action Française left the nationalist movement perma-
nently weakened. The principal beneficiaries of the Church’s change of direc-
tion were those Catholics who since the ralliement of the 1890s had supported
342 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the Republic as a state and pursued a Christian Democratic Realpolitik. For its
part the Vatican had no scruples in giving its public backing to Briand’s foreign
policy of peaceful understanding with Germany, which it did in a particularly
demonstrative manner in the early part of 1927, only months after the fall of
the Cartel des Gauches, when the papal nuncio in Paris declared the Vatican’s
support for the French foreign minister’s approach.
In the mid-1920s Action Française was, of course, only one expression
among many of right-wing radicalism in France. Among the other organiza-
tions that sprang up in the wake of the struggle to deal with the Cartel des
Gauches were the Ligue Républicaine Nationale associated with the former
president Alexandre Millerand; Faisceau founded in 1925 by the journalist and
former committee member of Action Française, Georges Valois, the very name
of whose organization reflected its debt to Italian Fascism; and Jeunesses
Patriotes, set up in 1924 by the extreme right-wing member of the Chamber of
Deputies, Pierre Taittinger, and an offshoot of the much older Ligue des
Patriotes. Millerand’s Ligue had around 300,000 members in 1926, Valois’s
Faisceau 60,000 and Taittinger’s Jeunesses Patriotes 65,000. Many of Taittinger’s
members were still at school and university. Like the Camelots du Roi, the
shock troops of Action Française, they engaged in running street battles with
the left-wing Ligue d’Action Universitaire Républicaine et Socialiste in Paris’s
Latin Quarter. Action Française, Faisceau and Jeunesses Patriotes were united
in their desire to bring down the Third Republic. When the Cartel des Gauches
collapsed in the summer of 1926 and France entered a period of domestic
stability under Poincaré, there was a temporary drop in the number of new
members joining these radical organizations, and Faisceau was even disbanded
in 1928. But the danger from right-wing extremism was far from over, as was
to become clear during the world economic crisis after 1930.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the Communists at this period
were seeking to displace the Socialists as the major party of the proletarian
masses. Although the Communist Party’s membership had fallen from 130,000
to 30,00 between its formation in Tours in December 1920 and 1931, the hard
core of militant members still consisted of determined fighters who followed
their leaders’ orders with iron discipline, toeing the Comintern line and refusing
to be intimidated by the repressive measures of the French state. Indeed, the
Communists went out of their way to be confrontational but paid the price for
their countless clashes with the police and their party leaders, including Marcel
Cachin, Maurice Thorez and Jacques Duclos, spending frequent periods behind
bars. On 30 April 1929 – the eve of May Day – 4,000 members of the Communist
Party were taken into preventive custody; and in the October of that year the
whole of the Central Committee and board of editors of the party’s principal
newspaper, L’Humanité, were haled before the country’s courts.
The Communists categorically refused to countenance electoral pacts with
the Socialists or bourgeois left, with the result that they were unable to turn
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 343

their growing support in elections into electoral gains: in the elections for the
Chamber of Deputies in 1924 the party received 875,000 votes; by 1928 that
figure had risen to 1.06 million, but the introduction of the first-past-the-post
system and the party’s self-ordained isolation meant that the number of seats
that it held in the Chamber dropped from twenty-six to twelve.
The active members of the Communist Party were for the most part
recruited from the ranks of mineworkers, metalworkers and railway workers.
They were also members of the Communist trade union, the CGTU. The
strongholds of Communism were to be found in the heavily industrialized
regions of Seine and Seine-et-Oise, as well as the suburbs of Paris, which soon
became known as the banlieue rouge. Here the Communists won control of
several town halls in the local elections in 1925, including St-Denis, where
Jacques Duclos became mayor. At the same time the party was able to win over
many farmers and peasants in rural areas with a long-standing anti-feudal
tradition, notably in the Massif Central and the surrounding area. Here the
Communists were particularly successful in the départements of Corrèze,
Dordogne, Haute-Vienne, Allier, Cher and Lot-et-Garonne. Unlike the radical
right, the Communists gained increasingly broad support among the masses
through the second half of the 1920s, a situation that was noted with mounting
concern by large sections of the middle classes.
For three years, starting on 23 July 1926, French politics bore the imprint of
a single man: the Conservative Republican Raymond Poincaré. Once Herriot
had failed to find a parliamentary majority for his cabinet, Poincaré formed a
‘grand ministry’ that included no fewer than six former prime ministers:
among them were Briand as foreign minister and Herriot as minister of educa-
tion. Poincaré himself combined the roles of prime minister and minister of
finance. Also included in his government were left-wing Radicals and members
of the right-wing Fédération Républicaine under Louis Marin. Among the
Radicals, only a left-wing minority under Édouard Daladier refused to support
Poincaré. Thanks to his expertise and reliability, the prime minister also
enjoyed strong support from industry and the banking sector. A mere change
of government was enough to help the franc gain in value against the pound,
and within a week the exchange rate of the latter had fallen from 245 to 184
francs.
In his attempt to stabilize the economy, Poincaré began by raising taxes to a
level above that recommended by a commission of experts, by making compre-
hensive savings to the national budget and by drastically reducing the number
of civil servants. In this way he reduced first the deficit in the budget, then the
deficit in the balance of payments. The Banque de France raised the basic
interest rate from 6 per cent to 7.5 per cent. The special powers that Poincaré
needed to implement the new rate were granted him by a large majority, a
situation that differed markedly from that of the previous government. On
16 August 1926 he called a joint session of the Chamber of Deputies and Senate
344 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

designed to reassure not only the signatories of war loans but also small savers:
its ultimate aim was to establish a Caisse d’Amortisation that would deal with
public debt.
Poincaré initially hoped to restore the franc to its pre-war rate of £1 = 25
francs but such was his fear of social unrest that he quickly abandoned this
plan. On 20 December 1926 the Banque de France was authorized to buy as
much foreign currency as was necessary to hold the franc at a rate of 122 francs
to £1. The period of prosperity in which the western world found itself in the
winter of 1926/7 also played a substantial part in ensuring that the French
economy could be stabilized without any major upheavals. Only a minority of
its members took part in strikes organized by the Communist CGTU.
The next elections to the Chamber of Deputies were due to take place in
1928. Poincaré used his remaining time in office to undertake a number of far-
reaching reforms, including the gradual introduction of free lessons for ten- to
thirteen-year-olds in grammar schools and obligatory national insurance for
illness, pregnancy, old age and death, although these latter reforms, which
came into force on 1 July 1930, were largely ineffectual thanks to the procrasti-
natory resistance on the part of most businesses. In 1927 the Chamber of
Deputies restored the first-past-the-post system that had been in operation
until 1919 and that involved two rounds of elections. At the urging of Léon
Blum, the Socialists, who tended to support proportional representation,
agreed to accept the change. At the elections in April 1928, the centre and
right-wing parties formed a single bloc under the slogan ‘Unité Nationale’,
while the Radicals and Socialists formed electoral pacts in a sizeable number of
constituencies.
The first round of elections took place on 22 April 1928, when the Socialists
emerged for the first time as the largest party, with 1.69 million votes. The
Radicals polled 1.66 million, the right-wing parties 2.4 million and those on
the centre right 2.1 million. In the second round a week later many Radical
voters switched to the Unité Nationale parties, giving them a clear advantage in
the form of 325 out of a total of 610 seats. If the Communists had supported the
Socialist or Radical candidates in the second round of voting, rather than
leaving their own candidates in the running, the result would presumably have
been very different.
Poincaré used the result to stabilize the franc, which on 24 June 1928 was
set at an exchange rate of 124 francs to the pound and 25.5 francs to the
American dollar, once again making it a gold-based currency. This amounted
to a devaluation of 80 per cent when compared with the pre-war exchange rate.
It was the signatories of war loans and small savers who were the real victims
of France’s currency reform, but few of them complained at the inevitability of
their fate. The Banque de France spent the following period hoarding gold
reserves on such a scale as to invite British and American disquiet. For a time
it seemed as if Poincaré had turned France into an island of stability.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 345

But the government of national unity fell apart within months of the deval-
uation of the franc. The left wing of the Radical Party associated with Daladier
and Caillaux insisted that it cut its ties with Poincaré, arguing that the right
wing’s support for the Church made it impossible for the party to remain in
government any longer. Herriot was unable to prevent the party from adopting
a motion at its conference in early November 1928 that demanded the resigna-
tion of its ministers. The Radical ministers duly resigned, whereupon Poincaré
formed his fifth and final cabinet, this time without any Radical members and
much further to the right than its predecessor had been. Two of its members
were particularly notable for their right-wing views: the minister of the inte-
rior, André Tardieu, and the minister for the colonies, André Maginot.
This shift to the right had no impact on France’s foreign policy. Poincaré had
placed no obstacles in the way of Briand’s attempts to reach a peaceful settle-
ment with Germany, and he maintained this stance in the new government too.
A new reparations agreement in the form of the Young Plan committing France
to withdrawing prematurely from the Rhineland was accepted by a narrow
majority on 12 July 1929. Two weeks later, on 26 July, Poincaré announced his
resignation on health grounds in order to undergo an urgent operation. Since
1926 he had shifted from being a determined nationalist to being a proponent
of Realpolitik willing to reach an understanding with his enemies. Throughout
this period the parliamentary system had functioned better than ever in France,
where the country’s ability to restore order to its finances had enhanced its
reputation in the eyes of the world at large. Whether or not this development
would continue after Poincaré’s resignation depended on more than merely
political factors at home.
France’s political stabilization since 1926 coincided with a marked upturn
in the country’s economy. Between 1924 and 1929 the gross national product
had grown by around 3 per cent a year, productivity by around 2.4 per cent.
The driving force behind the country’s newfound prosperity was industry,
whose production had grown by an average of 9.5 per cent a year between 1921
and 1929. If we take 1913 as the base year, then the index of industrial produc-
tion was 140 by 1929. During the second half of the 1920s there was a compre-
hensive rationalization of French industry inspired by the Taylorism that had
been taken over from America. Particularly remarkable was the growth in
mechanical engineering, aircraft construction, car manufacture and the chem-
ical industry. Production methods developed in the armaments industry
during the war were now applied to the production of top-of-the-market
consumer goods such as private cars.
In spite of the widely held view that French society remained static throughout
the interwar period, there was in fact a continuous, if slow, change from an
agrarian society to one dominated by industry and the service sector. In 1906
43 per cent of all the country’s workers were employed in the primary sector,
agriculture, whereas that figure had fallen to 30 per cent by 1932. During the
346 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

same period the numbers of those employed in the secondary sector – industry
and trade – rose from 30 per cent to 34 per cent, while the corresponding figures
for the service sector were 27 per cent and 30 per cent. Agriculture played
little part in the process of modernization but remained in a state of decline
throughout the 1920s: only in four years – 1924, 1925, 1927 and 1929 – did the
level of agricultural production surpass that of 1914. Between 1913 and 1929
wages of workers in Paris rose by 12 per cent, those in the provinces by 21 per
cent. During the same period employers’ profits went up by 50 per cent. And
whereas the workforce was divided both politically and in terms of its trade
union affiliations, their industrial bosses had the advantage of a unified organi-
zation to represent their interests: the Confédération Nationale de la Production
Française was formed in 1919 at the suggestion of the then minister of trade,
Étienne Clémentel.
Protectionist customs policies meant that the French colonies, too, played a
part in the economic growth of the mother country during the interwar period.
The colonies’ exports doubled between 1913 and 1933. In 1929 they imported
goods to the value of 19,000 million francs, 3,000 million of which came from
France. Their exports were valued at 14,000 million francs. Of these, almost
half were exported to France. That year France’s total imports amounted to
53,000 million francs, its exports to 51,000 million. The most important export
market was Algeria, which, legally speaking, consisted of three French départe-
ments. All three were represented in both the upper and the lower house of the
French parliament, and the same was true of Cochin-China, the old colonies of
Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, four towns in Senegal and the French
possessions in India, including Pondicherry, Chandernagore and Mahé. Apart
from Senegal and the French possessions in the Caribbean, none of the native
populations had the right to vote.
With the exception of the mandated territories of Syria and the Lebanon,
France more or less consistently withheld the right of self-determination
from all of its colonies, banking on the cultural assimilation of the elite and
in this regard enjoying greater success in its black African colonies than in
North Africa. France did more for colonial schooling than any other colonial
power.
In the course of the 1920s and 1930s French colonial rule was questioned
and challenged in south-east Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and the
French Congo. In Indochina, the bourgeois revolutionary Vietnamese
Nationalist Party that had been founded in Tonkin in 1927 attempted an insur-
rection in February 1930, the Yen Bay Mutiny, which was bloodily suppressed.
Leadership of the independence movement passed increasingly into the hands
of the Communists. In 1930 Nguyên Ái Quôc – later to become known as
Ho Chi Minh – founded the Communist Party of Indochina in Hong Kong,
having been converted to Marxism–Leninism during his years in France. In
May 1930 the killing of several demonstrators in the northern city of Annam
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 347

triggered a Communist uprising that quickly spread and that was not put down
until 1931. Countless independence fighters were killed, and tens of thousands
were deported to the plantations of Cochin-China. But the Communist Party
regrouped as an underground organization and laid the foundations for the
partisan struggle that was to prove such a challenge to the region’s Japanese
occupiers during the Second World War and, later, to France and finally to the
United States of America.
In the Middle East France had to confront the problem of increasing Arab
nationalism soon after the end of the First World War. In the mandated terri-
tories of Syria and the Lebanon, Paris initially banked on the Christian
minority, thereby incurring the wrath of the Muslim majority. The Lebanon
was occupied immediately after the end of the war, whereas it was not until the
summer of 1920 that French troops drove King Faisal from Syria following his
recent election by a gathering of notables in Damascus. An independent state
was created in the Lebanon. Here a Christian majority faced a powerful Muslim
minority. In Syria the French initially created two states, one in Damascus, the
other in Aleppo, before establishing two autonomous administrative regions
for two Islamic sects, the Druze and the Alawi, or Shiites.
In 1923 the Druze mounted a revolt that by 1925/6 had grown into a full-
scale Syrian uprising. At its height the French bombarded Damascus, provoking
outrage even in France itself: as in other questions of colonial policy, it was the
Communists who were the government’s sternest critics. The high commis-
sioner who was responsible for this decision, Maurice Sarrail, was replaced by
a Liberal member of the Senate, Henri de Jouvenel. The Druze uprising was
over by 1927, and the following year Jouvenel’s successor, the diplomat Henri
Ponsot, convened a constitutional assembly, only for France to reject its conclu-
sions, which included a joint Syrian and Lebanese state, with no mention of the
rights of the mandatory power. In 1930 France imposed a constitution on Syria
that reflected its own wishes. It was on the basis of this constitution that the
first Syrian parliament was elected in 1932.
The mandatory power also convened a constituent assembly in the Lebanon,
which in May 1926 proclaimed a constitutional Lebanese Republic. Its consti-
tution guaranteed the rights of the mandatory power but did nothing to regu-
late the division of power between the various faiths, whose differences made
it almost impossible for parliament to function, with the result that the consti-
tution was repeatedly repealed and rewritten. The creation of a republic in
1926 brought the Lebanon a major step closer to independence, while addi-
tionally fuelling Syrian nationalism. Its principal organization was the National
Bloc, whose president, Hashim el-Atassi, was a proponent of pan-Arabism.
Another group within the National Bloc strove principally for a Greater Syria
that would include not only the Lebanon but also Palestine and Transjordan,
two British mandated territories. A treaty signed by France and the Syrian
government in November 1933 provided for Syrian independence within the
348 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

framework of an alliance with France. Due to come into effect in 1937, the plan
was thwarted in 1934 by nationalists in the Syrian parliament, which was
immediately dissolved by France, delaying Syria’s independence for the fore-
seeable future.
Throughout the interwar year, pan-Arabism found a certain degree of
support not only in the Middle East but also in North Africa. The movement’s
intellectual spokesman was the writer and historian Shakib Arslan, a Druze
who had been born in the Lebanon and who settled in Geneva after the First
World War. Writing in the newspaper La Nation Arabe, he advocated the union
of all Arabs of all nations. For the Maghreb he demanded a unified state inde-
pendent of France and based on Islamic orthodoxy, a demand that echoed the
even more far-reaching ambitions of the pan-Islamic movement. Considerable
influence was also exerted by the Egyptian Wafd Party, which had been the
main force in the country’s domestic politics since 1924. In the spring of 1919
the party had issued a manifesto addressed to Woodrow Wilson, inviting him
to speak out in favour of the Arab people’s right of self-determination.
The same demand was made by Sheikh Abdelaziz Tâalbi of Tunisia, who
founded the Constitutional Liberal Party, or Destour Party, in June 1920. The
party repeatedly called on the Tunisian people to demonstrate against the
French authorities. Soon afterwards it adopted a more pragmatic stance and
recognized the French protectorate, whereupon the country’s nominal head,
the Bey of Tunis, aligned himself with the party, leading to a series of heated
confrontations with the French resident-general, Lucien Saint. In 1922 the
protectorate power allowed the Tunisians to form local committees made up of
Europeans and Tunisians and invested with certain powers in terms of their
trade policies. In 1928 there was a reorganization of the Grand Council that
had emerged from the Advisory Conference of 1896 and that consisted of a
section directly elected by the French and another, Tunisian, section whose
members were appointed by local councils and chambers.
For the younger generation of Tunisian nationalists such a symbolic divi-
sion of power was far too little. The Destour Party split in 1934, when the New
Constitutional Liberal Party, or Neo Destour Party, led by the then twenty-one-
year-old Habib Bourguiba, demanded Tunisian sovereignty and a parliament
based on universal suffrage in which Europeans and Jews would be represented
in accordance with their own particular percentage share of the population.
The Neo Destour Party was culturally closer to France and was also more
secular – in other words, less Islamic – than the old Destour Party, with the
result that it quickly gained the support not only of intellectuals but also of
broad sections of the Tunisian middle classes.
The reaction of the far right resident-general, Marcel Peyrouton, was a
series of repressive measures that included a ban on meetings and newspapers
and the removal of Bourguiba and other party officials to the south of the
country. By March 1936, the government in Paris had replaced Peyrouton by
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 349

the Liberal Armand Guillon, and Bourguiba and his followers were released,
but the clashes between the Tunisian nationalists and the French protectorate
forces continued, escalating to bloody confrontations on 9 April 1938 between
the police and demonstrators from the Neo Destour Party and to the declara-
tion of a state of emergency. Even before the outbreak of the Second World
War, French rule in Tunisia had already been rocked to its very foundations.
After 1918 the most violent struggles with an indigenous population were
the ones that France had to face in Morocco, the more recent of the country’s
two protectorates in North Africa. The region was rich in raw materials and
had already been partially industrialized. The number of Europeans in the
region was relatively small when compared with the local population: some
300,000 out of a total of more than eight million. (In Tunisia there were around
200,000 Europeans out of a total of some three million, the majority of the
Europeans being Italian rather than French.) The Rif rebellion against Spanish
rule in north-eastern Morocco began in 1920 under the leadership of
Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Karim. Three years later the Spanish abandoned their
opposition and handed over much of their former protectorate to the rebels,
whereupon Abd al-Karim turned his attentions to French Morocco. French
and Spanish troops under Philippe Pétain launched a series of attacks on the
Rif tribes, starting in 1925, forcing Abd al-Karim to capitulate in March 1926.
His rebellion was too clearly modelled on older ‘tribal’ patterns of Berber
insurrection for us to be able to label it an example of a modern anti-colonial
movement, but there is little doubt that it inspired anti-colonial forces not only
in Morocco but further afield as well.
Following the death of Sultan Yusef in 1927, the French resident-general
Théodore Steeg persuaded the Ulema – the sultanate’s supreme council of
scholars and lawyers – to appoint the eighteen-year-old Mohammed as the
new sultan, rather than any of his father’s older sons. It was hoped that as
Mohammed V he would follow the protectorate power’s orders unquestion-
ingly, and for the most part the young sultan met these expectations.
In 1930 Mohammed V triggered a major crisis when, at the urging of the
new resident-general, Lucien Saint, he granted the Berber tribes autonomous
jurisdiction on the basis of their own common law but limited this independ-
ence to the field of civil law, while the French judiciary continued to be liable
for the region’s penal legal system. This meant that the Berbers were no longer
subject to sharia or Islamic law, causing violent protests on the part of Moroccan
Arabs. It was not long before secular nationalists joined the protests, the privi-
leged status accorded to the Berbers striking them as a deliberate attempt to
prevent the emergence of a unified Moroccan nation. The countermovement
was partially successful and in April 1934 the sultan and pasha were once again
given jurisdiction over penal law.
The nationalist movement remained unimpressed by this concession, a ban
on its newspaper likewise failing to deter it from continuing its protests. At the
350 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

end of 1934 a Moroccan Action Committee that had been established earlier
that year demanded that the protectorate’s powers be curtailed, that the educa-
tional system be improved and that representative institutions be introduced.
But the nationalist movement now found a new leader in Allal al-Fassi, a man
with close links to the pan-Arabist Shakib Arslan and a proponent of a strictly
Islamic state. After 1935 he enjoyed the sympathy of the masses to a far greater
extent than the champions of secular nationalism.
Unlike Morocco and Tunisia, Algeria was officially a part of France, having
been divided into three départements since 1848 and in 1936 numbering
950,000 French settlers, most of whom lived in major cities such as Algiers and
Oran. Algeria was also the home of six million Arabs and Berbers. Some 175,000
Muslim Algerians had fought in the First World War, and 25,000 of them had
fallen in battle, representing the highest loss among all the non-European
nations that had fought alongside the French between 1914 and 1918. In recog-
nition of their contribution to the Allies’ victory over the Central Powers, a law
was passed in February 1919 guaranteeing that French and Muslims were
treated as equals for tax purposes. The same act gave Arabs and Berbers the
right to elect representatives on local councils, but the French continued to be
in the majority here. Only in the Financial Agencies was there parity between
the two groups.
Discontent with the discrimination practised against Arabs and Berbers
found expression in an initiative backed by the French Communist Party,
namely, the Étoile Nord-Africaine that was formed in 1926 with demands
that focused from the outset on Algerian independence. Under the influence of
the charismatic Ahmed Messali Hadj the group gradually broke free from
Communist influence, while remaining a revolutionary organization that drew
most of its support from the working class. Messali Hadj was repeatedly arrested
and his organization banned, but such official acts failed to weaken his influ-
ence. In the mid-1930s he joined the pan-Arab movement under Shakib Arslan
and began to forge links with the extreme right in France. Following the defini-
tive ban on the Étoile Nord-Africaine by Léon Blum’s government in January
1937, Messali Hadj founded the Parti Populaire Algérien, only for this party,
too, to be proscribed shortly after the start of the Second World War.
Unlike the Étoile Nord-Africaine, the Association des Oulémas Musulmans
Algériens that was founded in 1935 by Abdelhamid Ben Badis and supported
in the main by scholars and lawyers was an emphatically Islamist independ-
ence movement. Central to its activities was the building of Koranic schools
and the attempt to revive traditional Islamic values. With a programme like
this, the organization could no more hope to win over the masses than its
diametrical opposite, the Fédération des Élus Algériens formed in 1930 by a
general practitioner, Mohammed Saleh Bendjelloul, and a dispensing chemist,
Ferhat Abbas. Its members were mostly Algerians with an academic training
and a French education, their aim being equal rights for Arabs, Berbers and
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 351

French within a French framework and, especially, the cultural assimilation of

Algerian Muslims.
This line chimed with the ideas held by the French Socialists but met with
violent opposition on the part of the Étoile Nord-Africaine and the Association
des Oulémas Musulmans. The plan to grant French civil rights to Arabs and
Berbers that was proposed by the French government, starting in 1936, when
the move was intended to cover between 20,000 and 30,000 Algerians, was
thwarted by the determined opposition of the country’s French settlers,
resulting in a radicalization of the movement for Algerian independence: more
and more members joined Messali Hadj’s Parti Populaire Algérien; the assimi-
latory forces that were supportive of France felt rejected; and Ferhat Abbas
became an advocate of complete Algerian autonomy within the framework of
a federation with France. There were already early signs of the Algerian War of
Independence that was to break out in 1954.
Unlike the Maghreb, French colonial possessions in black Africa were
largely unaffected by any serious upheavals during the interwar years, the main
exception being the French Congo. The French writer André Gide paid an
extended visit to the colony between July 1925 and February 1926 and on his
return to France drew public attention to the brutality with which the local
population was treated by colonial officers as well as by white traders and plan-
tation owners. His report, which was published in 1927, caused something of a
sensation. By this date the religiously coloured, anticolonial protest movement
of Kimbanguism that had started in the Belgian Congo had already spread to
the neighbouring colony and in June 1928 took the form of violence against
colonial officers and European travellers in the area around Gbaya in the Haute
Sangha district. The charismatic leader of the movement was a man known
only as Karnu, who together with his brother was murdered by colonial troops
from Senegal in December 1928. In 1930 the authorities arrested André
Matswa, the founder of the anticolonial Société Amicale des Originaires de
l’Afrique Équatoriale Française, who was held responsible for fomenting unrest
among the black population. His arrest was followed by strikes and further
protests that were put down in the usual manner. Superficially, order had been
restored, but the black population retained its sense of anger at the continuing
discrimination. Although French colonial rule may have been more securely
grounded in black Africa than in other parts of the world, there was no doubt
that even here the first cracks were already appearing.

From Empire to Commonwealth: Britain under Baldwin

Like their French counterparts, the three British mandated territories in the
Middle East – Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine – belonged to Category A among
the League of Nations’ mandates: they were all regarded as sufficiently well
developed to be granted their independence within a relatively short space of
352 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

time. Since 1921 Iraq had been ruled by King Faisal of the Hashemite dynasty
that had briefly ruled over Syria, and by 1924 it was a constitutional monarchy,
the first mandated territory to be granted independence. The treaty of 30 June
1930 that made this possible imposed close military and political ties with
the United Kingdom that included leaving two air force bases in British hands.
In Transjordan, the eastern part of the former Turkish province of Palestine,
a new emirate was established in 1921 under Faisal’s brother, Abdullah.
Transjordan remained dependent on Great Britain to a far greater extent and
for a much longer period than Iraq, not achieving its nominal independence
until 1946, when it became the kingdom of Jordan.
Developments in Palestine proved far more fraught with conflict. The
Balfour Declaration of November 1917 had promised the Jews a national
homeland in this region, leading to increasing numbers of Jews migrating to
the country. London backed such immigration, but obstacles were placed in its
way by civil servants in the mandated territory, who were concerned at a
possible backlash on the part of the majority Arab population. (By the early
1920s the 84,000 Jews made up just over a tenth of the total population.) The
first Arab protests against Jewish immigration took place in 1920 and 1921.
The treaty under whose terms the League of Nations entrusted Palestine to
Great Britain in 1922 granted the Jews the right to play a part in founding a
national homeland, which was to be achieved through the Jewish Agency. That
same year a Supreme Muslim Council was established under the mufti of
Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin el-Husseini. In 1931, by which time he was
already grand mufti of Jerusalem, el-Husseini convened a General Islamic
Congress in Jerusalem, turning the conflict between Jews and Palestinian
Arabs into a matter of concern for the whole of the Arab and Islamic world.
Meanwhile tensions between the two sections of the population had grown
markedly worse. In May 1924 the United States had introduced strict quotas on
immigration, leading to a sudden and dramatic rise in the number of Polish
Jews arriving in Palestine. The first bloody uprising by the Arabs took place in
1929 and ended with the deaths of 133 Jews and eighty-seven Arabs. Four years
later a flood of Jewish refugees began to arrive from Germany. In 1936 the
Arabs organized a general strike with the aim of putting an end to immigra-
tion, banning the sale of land to Jews and electing a Palestine parliament,
demands that led to further violent clashes. In view of the persecution of Jews
in National Socialist Germany, the mandated power was neither able nor
willing to prevent more Jews from migrating to Palestine. By the eve of the
Second World War, Jews comprised some 30 per cent of the population of
Palestine. The British dream of establishing a joint state for Jews and Arabs
had proved an unrealizable utopian vision, leaving the Palestinian problem
unresolved.
Unlike Palestine, Egypt was not a mandated territory but a British protec-
torate, a status that it had enjoyed since 1914. In 1922 Great Britain, reacting to
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 353

pressure from the nationalist Wafd Party under its charismatic leader Saad
Zaghloul, unilaterally declared Egypt independent, but retained the right to
guarantee the safety of the Suez Canal, to defend Egypt as a whole and to protect
foreign interests in the country. The following year Egypt became a constitu-
tional monarchy under King Fouad I. In the elections that were held that same
year the Wafd Party emerged as the most powerful political force. In November
1924 the governor general of the Sudan and commander in chief of the Egyptian
army, Sir Lee Stack, was murdered by Egyptian nationalists, prompting London
to exclude Cairo from the administrative process, while continuing to charge it
for the cost of jointly running the country. In 1936 violent nationalist unrest
forced the British to give way and restore joint control over the Sudan and end
the military occupation of Egypt. But the United Kingdom retained the right to
station troops along the Suez Canal for a period of twenty years. In the event of
war, Great Britain committed itself to helping the country. In return, Egypt had
to make its territories available to the British. Egypt joined the League of Nations
in March 1937.
Egypt was the only African country that largely broke free from British rule
during the interwar years. Tanganyika consisted of the bulk of the former
German colony of East Africa and was a Category B mandated territory. Here
the United Kingdom attempted to maintain control through a policy of indi-
rect rule, which involved transferring powers to traditional authorities. The
first move in the direction of independence came in 1929 with the formation
of the Tanganyika African Association that was not to come of age until after
the Second World War. In neighbouring Kenya an independent mouthpiece
for the indigenous population had been established four years earlier in the
form of the Kikuyu Central Association under Jomo Kenyatta. That same year
also marked the foundation of the West African Students Union in London, a
breeding ground for the independence movement in Nigeria. In Southern
Rhodesia, which had been a British crown colony since 1923, a small white
minority used the land distribution act of 1930 to secure 52 per cent of the
territory, as well as all the towns and cities, including the black townships, and
all of the country’s natural resources. Racial segregation along the lines prac-
tised in South Africa helped to maintain discrimination, a fate also suffered by
the black population in the former German South-West Africa, a Category C
territory that had been governed by the Union of South Africa – a member of
the British Empire – since 1920. Uprisings by the Bondelswarts and Rehoboths
were bloodily suppressed between 1922 and 1924.
It was in India, however, that the British Empire was most severely shaken
during the interwar period. Since December 1919 the Government of India
Act had provided a constitution for the subcontinent. It drew a distinction
between central government, which was responsible for foreign policy, defence
and penal law and answerable only to London, and the country’s provincial
governments. It was here that the principle of diarchy, or double rule, was to
354 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

apply in the future. The ‘reserved subjects’, including police and finance, were
administered by a British governor general and an executive committee made
up of two Britons and two Indians, whereas ‘transferred subjects’, chief of which
was education, were entrusted to Indian ministers who in turn were answer-
able to elected legislative councils in the Indian provinces. The new corpus of
laws came into force in June 1921.
The practical effects of these reforms were modest in scope. The refusal of
a British commission to condemn the bloodbath at Amritsar in April 1919, to
which we have already referred in another context, prompted the Indian
National Congress to set up its own commission of inquiry and to boycott the
new constitution. In 1920 Mahatma Gandhi led the National Congress in its
campaign of non-cooperation – asahayoga – with the new institutions,
including civil disobedience and the demand for home rule, or Swaraj. The
campaign was called off in February 1922 following the murder of twenty-two
policemen in Uttar Pradesh. Gandhi, a Hindu from the merchant class, had
studied law in London but had moved to South Africa in the 1890s and organ-
ized resistance to the discriminatory laws against Indian immigrants. Arrested
in March 1922, he was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment but pardoned on
health grounds at the end of 1924.
The rejection of the 1919 constitution by the vast majority of Indians
persuaded the British government of the need to propose further reforms. But
the second commission set up to deal with this question was made up exclu-
sively of Britons, prompting the Congress Party to protest in the strongest
possible terms and in August 1928 to demand that India be granted the status
of a dominion within a year. A counterproposal for an Indian constitution
drawn up at a conference of all the Indian parties in Calcutta in December
1928 was vetoed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League. Since the govern-
ment in London was unwilling to meet the Congress Party’s demands, the
latter called for complete independence – purnasvara – in December 1929.
In March 1930 Gandhi began a new campaign of civil disobedience aimed
at lifting the British monopoly on salt production that had existed since 1836.
After leading a 240-mile march to the coast at Dandi, he symbolically picked
up a few grains of salt on 6 April 1930, whereupon he and his closest supporters
were arrested. There followed the mass arrest of thousands of other Indians
who, inspired by his actions, boiled salt in the country’s marketplaces. By
March 1931 all political prisoners had been released following an agreement
between Gandhi and the British viceroy, Lord Irwin, later Lord Halifax. From
then on, Indians were allowed to boil salt for their own domestic use.
A round-table conference in London in the autumn of 1931 was attended
by Gandhi in person but brought no solution to the conflict since it proved
impossible to help those minorities who were entitled to vote and who included
Muslims and casteless Hindus to be shielded from the electoral preponderance
of the Hindu majority. An attempt by Ramsay MacDonald to solve the problem
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 355

by dividing the Hindus into caste members and those outside the caste system
was vehemently opposed by Gandhi, who went on hunger strike, threatening
to starve himself to death. The British octroi was finally revoked on
24 September 1924 in what became known as the Poona Pact.
The beginning of the end of the conflict came on 4 August 1935 in the form
of a constitution forced on India and providing for a federation made up of the
provinces of British India and the Indian principalities which were contractu-
ally bound to the British crown. But most princes refused to join the federa-
tion, with the result that only the non-federal part of the constitution could
come into force in 1937, marking the end of diarchy on a provincial level and
meaning that the provinces were now ruled by ministers responsible to elected
parliaments. At the same time Burma ceased to be a part of the Indian empire
and was granted partial autonomy, a success due to the nationalist student
movement associated with Aung San. With the approval of Gandhi, who had in
the meantime withdrawn from active politics in order to devote himself to
social questions, the Congress Party took part in the elections to the provincial
parliaments. But India seemed as far away as ever from the goal of national
sovereignty – certainly further away than the island of Ceylon off the southern
coast of India, which in 1931 had been granted a constitution of its own on the
basis of universal suffrage for men and women and a two-chamber system,
laying the foundations for its eventual independence.
The six Dominions of the Empire where English was the principal language
and which were all marked by European influence had long since achieved
their independence: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland and the
Union of South Africa had all become independent between 1867 and 1910,
with Ireland following suit in 1921. During the Chanak Crisis of September
1922, Lloyd George had been forced to accept the fact that neither Canada nor
the Union of South Africa was willing any longer blindly to follow Great Britain
into its war with Turkey. An Imperial Conference in 1923 failed to provide an
answer to the question of the Dominions’ claims on sovereignty, but at a follow-
up conference in London in October and November 1926 the delegates agreed
on a formula proposed by the former prime minister Arthur Balfour, according
to which the Dominions were ‘autonomous Communities within the British
Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of
their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the
Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of
Nations’. This last-mentioned term had been coined not by Balfour but by Jan
Smuts, the South African general and air force minister in Lloyd George’s war
cabinet, at a banquet of members of the upper and lower houses in May 1917.
The Balfour Declaration laid the foundations for the Statute of Westminster
that was drawn up at a further Imperial Conference in December 1931. It
served as a joint constitution for all the Dominions and granted exclusive
legislative authority to the parliaments of all of these members of the
356 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Commonwealth. The Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865, which had prevented
the colonies from passing laws that departed from those of Great Britain, was
repealed. By 1931 at the latest the Dominions were sovereign states, even if
they had no elected heads of state but were governed by governors general who
represented the British crown. Whatever agreements they reached with Great
Britain or between themselves were voluntary, notably when, at an Imperial
Economic Conference in Ottawa in 1932, they agreed to favour mutual trade
and to use the pound as the principal currency in the sterling zone. There were
also ideological links between the former colonies in terms of their common
values, to which Britain could appeal in 1939, when it was more seriously chal-
lenged by Germany than at any point since the Napoleonic Wars at the start of
the nineteenth century.
By transforming the Empire into the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom
managed to achieve the unique feat of retaining its international standing while
eschewing the outdated formal dependence of those parts of its Empire that
were the most advanced in terms of their development. Not since the ‘Augustan
threshold’ of the Roman Empire – the term was coined by the American polit-
ical scientist Michael W. Doyle to describe the far-reaching imperial reforms of
the emperor Augustus in the decades before and after the birth of Christ – had
an empire demonstrated such an ability to learn from its mistakes as the British
Empire did in the early twentieth century. It was a remarkable achievement,
given the actual decline in the economic potential of the mother country,
whose share of world trade had fallen from 25 per cent in 1860 to 14 per cent
in 1938. No less remarkable was the fact that this period also witnessed the
gradual shift of financial, military and political power in the Anglo-Saxon
world from London to Washington.
The 1926 Imperial Conference took place during Stanley Baldwin’s second
cabinet. Baldwin had been born in the Midlands in 1867 and worked in the
iron industry before entering politics, leading the British government from
November 1924 to June 1929 and embodying the desire to return to what was
thought of as pre-war normality. The dominant figure in his cabinet was his
chancellor Winston Churchill, who had returned to the Conservative fold as
recently as 1924, having abandoned it for the Liberal Party twenty years earlier.
Churchill’s chief contribution to the normalization process was his return to
the gold standard that had been abandoned in 1914. He announced its return
in his budget speech to the lower house on 28 April 1925. But the move had the
opposite effect of creating economic stability: the pound was overvalued, the
British export industry had serious difficulties finding markets for its goods,
and social unrest increased.
It was the mineworkers who were the most radicalized. In June 1925 their
employers announced massive cuts to their wages. Baldwin tried to gain time
by setting up a Royal Commission to examine the economic situation in the
coal-mining sector, and he also gave the mines’ owners temporary subsidies.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 357

The Commission submitted its report in March 1926, rejecting the nationaliza-
tion of the mines demanded by the miners and confirming the need for lower
wages, but not for longer working hours. The miners responded by calling a
strike on 1 May 1926. Two days later the leaders of the Trades Union Congress
(TUC) declared a general strike, which began at midnight on 3/4 May 1926.
The TUC had moved much further to the left in the preceding period.
More than the trade union movements in other countries, it had sought to
reach an agreement between the ‘Amsterdam’ – reformist – trade union move-
ment on the one hand and its Communist counterpart on the other. In April
1925 it had helped to create a Permanent Anglo-Russian Trade Union
Committee that was hailed in Moscow as an important staging post on the
road to world revolution. The general strike in Great Britain had the support
not only of these two rival international trade union movements but also of the
Socialist Workers’ International that had been established in Hamburg in May
1923 following a merger between the Second International and the more left-
wing Vienna International, also known as the International 2;. Finally, it had
the backing of the Communist International. Dockworkers in France, Germany,
the Netherlands, Belgium and Scandinavia refused to load coal on to British
vessels, while railway workers and sailors declined to transport coal to Great
Britain. In his history of the International, Julius Braunthal described the
European coal blockade against Britain as ‘almost total’.90
In Britain itself the call for a general strike received widespread support
among the organized trade unions. On 5 May 1926 the writer Virginia Woolf
noted in her diary: ‘Everyone is bicycling; motor cars are huddled up with extra
people. There are no buses. No placards, no newspapers. [. . .] Gas & electricity
are allowed, but at 11 the light was turned off.’91 Two days earlier Churchill had
told the lower house that either parliamentary institutions and, with them, the
nation would emerge victorious from this encounter, or the existing constitu-
tion would be ‘fatally injured’ and ‘some Soviet of trade unions’ would be estab-
lished and gain control of the economic and political life of the country.92 The
Times spoke of ‘the gravest threat that has hung over the country since the fall
of the Stuarts’, while the Daily Mail inveighed against a ‘revolutionary move-
ment’ that sought to subject the nation to its violent thrall at the cost of the
population as a whole.93
Baldwin’s government was determined to end the general strike as quickly
as possible by means of emergency measures that it had already passed on 1
May. Hyde Park became a distribution centre for milk and other foodstuffs; in
the East End soldiers were deployed to resume operations in the docks; the
police patrolled the streets and station forecourts, where they were supported
by volunteers from the semi-private Organization for the Maintenance of
Supplies that had been formed in September 1925 and by special constables in
khaki uniforms and armoured cars; and Buckingham Palace and other royal
buildings were protected by additional guards. After nine days the general
358 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

strike came to an end on 12 May with the TUC’s unconditional surrender. The
government and public opinion had proved more powerful than the organized
workforce.
The success that was enjoyed by the Conservative cabinet allowed it to
abolish the eight-hour day and on 23 June 1927 to pass the Trades Disputes and
Trade Unions Act that declared general strikes and sympathy strikes illegal: to
call such a strike was punishable by two years in prison. Civil servants and local
government employees were banned from joining a union that was affiliated to
the TUC. The intimidation of workers by their striking colleagues was also
declared illegal. From then on, trade union contributions to the Labour Party
required the consent of members. In the wake of the act, the number of working
days lost to strikes fell dramatically as did the number of trade union members,
which dropped from 5.2 million in 1926 to 4.8 million in 1928. But it was the
mineworkers who suffered the greatest defeat. Not until December 1926 did
they finally end their strike, having attained none of their intended goals.
Instead they had to work longer hours for lower wages.
For the British workers’ movement, the events of May 1926 marked an
important turning point. The general strike brought to an end the mass strikes
of the post-war period, and never again did the country suffer another general
strike. The TUC drew from its defeat at the hands of the government the conclu-
sion that in future the trade unions must not allow observers to doubt their
loyalty to parliamentary democracy. The Communist Party of Great Britain,
which had supported the strike but exerted no influence upon it, was briefly
able to report an increase in membership from 6,000 in May to 10,730 in
October, but by the end of 1928 this figure had fallen to 3,500. In 1927 the
Labour Party closed twenty-three of its local party offices, including fifteen in
London and the surrounding area, all of which had been infiltrated by
Communists. In the elections to the lower house in May 1929 the Communists
received 50,000 votes, 5,000 fewer than five years previously, and as a result they
lost the only seat that they had won in 1924. Following the failure of the general
strike, the Comintern and the Russian Trade Union Federation branded the
British trade unions ‘downright traitors’, prompting the TUC to return a dona-
tion to the striking miners from the Russian trade unions and to disband the
Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. This period also marked the start of
talks between the trade unions and employers that culminated in a joint confer-
ence in July 1928 and in mutual agreement on the need to rationalize British
industry and preserve peace in the workplace.
If the Communists played only a small part in the general strike, the extreme
right did even less to suppress it. In March 1923, six months after Mussolini’s
March on Rome, a militantly anti-Communist and anti-Semitic organization
calling itself the British Fascisti had been formed, renaming itself the British
Fascists in 1924. In the early months of 1926 its members flocked in large
numbers to the aforementioned Organization for the Maintenance of Supplies
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 359

and to the special constables but in general they were kept at arm’s length by the
authorities. A far greater influence on public opinion was exerted by ultra-
Conservative press barons such as Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere,
the owners of the Daily Express and Daily Mail respectively, together with the
Duke of Northumberland, who financed the Morning Post and The Patriot as
well as the relatively highbrow English Review that became more and more of a
mouthpiece of the extreme right wing of the Tory Party after 1925. But the way
in which Baldwin’s government had dealt with the general strike also
commanded the respect of even the most radical Conservatives. In the opinion
of the English Review, the strike proved that England still had men who knew
how to govern, and even the Duke of Northumberland felt obliged to praise the
‘vigour and resourcefulness’ of the government.94
Whereas the anti-trade unions act of June 1927 was entirely to the liking
of Conservative diehards, another law that Baldwin’s government passed trig-
gered widespread disquiet: this was the law of July 1928 that gave equal rights
to men and women and at the same time removed the discriminatory provi-
sion of the electoral act of 1918 that allowed women to vote only after they had
turned thirty, whereas men were entitled to vote from the age of twenty-one.
According to William Sanderson, who went on to found the esoteric and influ-
ential English Mistery [sic], women were guided purely by their instincts,
instincts that were sexually conditioned. ‘She has a total ineptitude for politics,
for she lacks political virtue.’ And since women allegedly had no social instincts,
they were incapable of developing their intellectual abilities and applying them
to creativity or organization.95 Like Sanderson, other leading right-wing intel-
lectuals such as Douglas Jerrold, who from 1931 edited the English Review, and
Anthony Ludovici, who was a prominent contributor to the journal and an
admirer of Nietzsche, saw in feminism and in the alleged feminization of
society a danger threatening all that had made Britain great. Above all, it was,
in Ludovici’s view, a danger for women themselves since their only purpose in
life was to foster life and propagate the species.
The first elections to take place under the new electoral law were held in
May 1929. With their 8.25 million votes, the Conservatives won marginally
more votes than the Labour Party’s 8.04 million. The Liberals won 5.1 million.
But the Labour Party won more seats – 287 – than the Conservatives’ 260 and
the Liberals’ 59. The Labour Party’s success was due in no small part to the fact
that Baldwin’s government was regarded as hostile to the workers – and this in
spite of a handful of socially progressive measures such as the Widows,
Orphans, and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act of 1925, which provided for
equal contributions for employers and employees alike, and the reform of the
poor laws by means of the Local Government Act of 1929. At the same time,
the Labour Party was helped by the fact that under Ramsay MacDonald’s lead-
ership it had held back during the general strike in 1926. In its new programme,
‘Labour and the Nation’, that was drawn up by the historian R. H. Tawney and
360 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

adopted after lengthy discussion at the party’s annual conference in Birmingham

in October 1928, the party declared its desire to see an evolutionary change
from a capitalist to a socialist society. Urban and rural lands were to pass into
state ownership by a slow and steady process, while mining, electricity works,
the railways and the transport system were to be nationalized and the Bank of
England placed under state control.
The election results could hardly be interpreted as a mandate to put this
programme into action. If it was to govern at all, the party was dependent on
the goodwill of the Liberals, just as it had been when forming its first cabinet in
January 1924. As on that occasion, so in 1929 King George V invited Ramsay
MacDonald to form a cabinet. MacDonald’s foreign secretary was Arthur
Henderson, who had already served as home secretary in MacDonald’s first
cabinet. His chancellor was Philip Snowden, a committed advocate of the gold
standard, free trade and a balanced budget, while the minister for the colonies
was the Fabian, Sidney Webb. The minister for education was Sir Charles Philip
Trevelyan, a notable member of the party’s left wing. The cabinet also included
its first woman, the minister for labour, Margaret Grace Bondfield. The govern-
ment’s most pressing problem was the high level of unemployment, which the
lord privy seal, James Henry Thomas, was asked to reduce. In this he was helped
by the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the then thirty-two-year-old Sir
Oswald Mosley, who at that date belonged to the left wing of the party and who
sought to revive the stagnating economy by raising consumer spending,
awarding contracts for public works and ensuring customs protection for the
Empire. (The Liberals had entered the election campaign with a very similar
programme drawn up by their former prime minister, Lloyd George.)
By the spring of 1929 unemployment had already passed the one million
mark. Reducing that number had been the Labour Party’s key promise in the
election campaign. The new cabinet began work with a series of social reform
laws, including a public works programme totalling £2,500 million. Not only
did Mosley and Lloyd George demand that more should be done, so, too, did
the economist John Maynard Keynes and the Fabian historian G. D. H. Cole,
two members of the government’s economic council. But MacDonald, Snowden
and Thomas refused to act even after the New York stock exchange crash of
October 1929, which caused unemployment to climb even higher. Within
months of Ramsay MacDonald’s second cabinet starting work, the first cracks
had already appeared in his minority government. They were the harbingers
of a deeper crisis into which the Labour Party was to be plunged in 1930 and
1931.

From Dawes to Young: Germany under Stresemann

Unlike Great Britain, Germany enjoyed something of a golden age between
1924 and 1929. There was again a stable currency; production, consumption
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 361

and national income continued to grow; and the federal budget showed a size-
able surplus in 1924 and only a small deficit in the years between 1925 and
1928. And yet, as the economic historian Wolfram Fischer has pointed out,
Germany’s economic recovery remained at risk:

The investments on which the growth and contraction of a country’s

economy largely depend reveal no consistent upward trend between 1924
and 1929, for although fixed asset investments continued to rise every year
until 1928, the volume of goods that was being stored during this period
fluctuated to such an extent that the total internal gross investments – fixed
asset investments and the value of goods in storage – actually sank in 1926,
1928 and 1929 when compared with the figures for the previous year. Only
in one year, 1927, was there an ‘investment boom’. The trade balance, which
had been almost entirely passive before the war, likewise showed a surplus
only in 1926. And although the balance in the service sector invariably
showed a surplus, helped in particular by the merchant fleet, this was too
small to offset the balance of payments deficit, still less to produce a surplus
to pay for reparations.96

If Germany was still able to meet its obligations to pay reparations under the
terms of the Dawes Plan, then this was due to the surplus on movements in
capital in the form of foreign and, more especially, American loans. After 1924
Germany was a country hungry for capital: its high interest rates and the credit
restrictions imposed by the Reichsbank made the country attractive to foreign
investors, and to that extent the economic upturn in the second half of the
1920s was not just an illusory boom for the dollar. But the use to which foreign
investments were put was problematical in the extreme, for most of them were
handed out as short-term loans – in 1927–8 this was true of around half the
total – but then passed on by German banks as investment loans and used by
the German regions and by local government for long-term purposes on which
there was no immediate return. Local government, which not unfairly felt itself
to be the victim of Matthias Erzberger’s economic reforms of 1919, used such
loans to finance the building of schools, town halls, hospitals and sports centres
or, as in Konrad Adenauer’s Cologne, the city’s famous ‘green belt’. As long as
the economy grew, these short-term loans were generally extended without
difficulty. But even in the ‘good’ years of the Weimar Republic, experts such
as the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, and the American finan-
cial expert, Parker Gilbert, who was the agent-general for reparations, were
already warning against the unsound financial practices of local government:
if the economy were to slip into the red, then a serious financial crisis was
inevitable.
It was not only the regional and local authorities who drew down on them-
selves the criticism of the agent-general for reparations and of the president of
362 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the Reichsbank but also the Reich itself. In December 1927 a salary reform
raised the salaries of civil servants by 16–17 per cent on average, effectively
making up for the losses that they had incurred as a result of inflation and
acknowledging the fact that since 1924 the salaries of civil servants had gone
up much less than the wages of the rest of the workforce. By 1927 German
industry was making bigger profits than it had done at any other time during
the Weimar Republic. Gilbert was not alone in pointing out that if tax revenues
were to fall, the state would not be able to continue to pay such high salaries;
so, too, did Heinrich Brüning, the Centre Party’s budgetary expert in the
Reichstag. He abstained from voting in the debate on the budget on 15
December 1927.
But it was not on account of the level of civil servants’ salaries that the year
1927 has gone down in the annals of German history. More important was the
greatest increase in social security ever enjoyed by workers and employees
in the Weimar Republic, which they owed to the introduction of statutory
national insurance. The relevant law was passed by an overwhelming majority
in the Reichstag on 7 July and transformed the existing system of state welfare
for the unemployed into a form of insurance that required both employers
and employees to contribute equally – at the time in question, this amounted
to 3 per cent of the employee’s gross salary. But it was not only capital and
labour that had to bear the cost of insurance but also – and entirely in the
spirit of Bismarck – the state: the Reich was obliged to agree to a loan to the
newly created body responsible for running the country’s labour exchanges
and benefit offices if their financial needs could not be met from their own
emergency reserves. In 1927, few observers seem to have realized that a situa-
tion might arise in which the Reich would be plunged into serious financial
difficulties.
Throughout the Weimar Republic the state was an extremely active partici-
pant in the economic life of the nation. A decree passed on 13 October 1923
under the terms of the enabling act had introduced compulsory arbitration for
wage disagreements, thereby making the state the supreme arbiter in labour
disputes. As the Social Democratic theorist Rudolf Hilferding noted in 1927
when discussing the term ‘political salary’, this decree was the expression of a
highly developed ‘organized capitalism’ and a step in the direction of socialism,
largely invalidating the right to free collective bargaining and riding rough-
shod over market forces.97
The theory of the economic historian Knut Borchardt that compulsory
state arbitration contributed to higher wages and hence to the ‘sickness’ of the
Weimar economy98 has led to a lively and continuing debate among scholars,
but what remains undeniable is that the role of the state as supreme arbiter was
at least one of the factors that weakened Germany’s market economy. Other
factors involving the state include the subsidies paid to farmers to the east of
the Elbe in the form of protective tariffs on cereals and other agricultural
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 363

produce, which the Reichstag reintroduced in August 1925 in response to pres-

sure from the German National Party, and direct payments – ‘help for the
east’ – that were a major bone of contention during the latter part of the Weimar
Republic.
But market laws were also undermined by industrial employers who formed
a comprehensive cartel that they claimed was justified by the need for ration-
alization and, hence, to help Germany to compete in international markets but
which in fact reduced domestic competition. The end result of this enforced
rationalization was considerable overcapacity and high levels of unemploy-
ment even before the great crisis in the autumn of 1929: during the third
quarter of that year the number of job-seekers registered at the country’s labour
exchanges was 1.53 million. Hilferding’s phrase, ‘organized capitalism’, proved
to be a euphemism: in the circumstances, it would be more accurate to speak
of badly organized capitalism.
Politically speaking, the relative stabilization of the Weimar Republic began
with an occurrence that pointed, rather, in the direction of instability: the
Reichstag elections of 4 May 1924, when right- and left-wing radicals reported
large gains, while most of the moderate parties recorded substantial losses. The
royalist German Nationalists, who during the election campaign had appealed
above all to those sections of the middle classes who were the hardest hit by
inflation, increased their share of the vote from 15.1 per cent in June 1920 to
19.5 per cent, making them the largest of the bourgeois parties and the second-
largest party in all. The German Nationalist Freedom Party that had joined
forces with the leaderless National Socialists won 6.5 per cent of the vote at
their first attempt to enter parliament. In short, more than a quarter of German
voters had opted to support the anti-Republican right.
To the left of centre, there were two points worth noting. First, there was a
remarkable shift from the Social Democrats to the Communists and a sizeable
drop in ‘Marxist’ votes overall. In 1920 the workers’ parties had received 41.7
per cent of the total vote, whereas now it was 34 per cent. The SPD’s share fell
from 21.7 per cent to 20.5 per cent, which may seem to represent only a small
loss, but it was in fact catastrophic, for the reunited Social Democrats received
fewer votes in 1924 than the Majority Social Democrats had done in 1920. Of
the 17.9 per cent who had voted for the Independent Social Democrats on the
earlier occasion, most had presumably transferred their allegiance to the
Communist Party, which was now able to assert itself for the first time on a
national level as the proletarian party of the masses. The liberal parties, namely,
the German People’s Party and the German Democratic Party, suffered serious
losses, whereas those sustained by the Catholic Centre Party and the Bavarian
People’s Party were relatively small in comparison. With 8.5 per cent of the vote,
the bourgeois splinter groups all did remarkably well.
Following their devastating defeat, the Social Democrats could not seri-
ously consider a role in government in the form of a grand coalition, for all that
364 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

they were still the largest party. If the party leadership had agreed to such a
deal, the SPD would have been destroyed by its left wing, which was made up
of former Independent Social Democrats. On the other hand, the moderate
bourgeois parties had no inclination to enter into a coalition with the radical
nationalist German National People’s Party and to leave the latter to fill the
post of chancellor, a post for which the German Nationalists proposed Alfred
von Tirpitz, who had singlehandedly created the German fleet. The result of all
this was the formation of another bourgeois minority government under the
centrist politician Wilhelm Marx, with Gustav Stresemann – the leader of the
German People’s Party – again as his foreign minister. The government could
count on the support of the Social Democrats at least on important questions
of foreign policy such as ratification of the Dawes Plan.
But the votes of the Social Democrats were not sufficient to pass all the
legislation needed to deal with the question of reparations. One of these laws
concerned turning the state railways into a company saddled with certain obli-
gations and overseen by a supervisory board whose members would include
representatives of the countries to which Germany owed money. The Railways
Act was a serious encroachment on German sovereignty and had implications
that affected the constitution, hence the need for a two-thirds majority.
To achieve this majority required the support of at least a number of German
Nationalists. In order to overcome opposition from the German National
People’s Party, the government offered a markedly ‘nationalist’ explanation of
the question of its alleged guilt in causing the war, an explanation proffered on
29 August 1924, the day before the signing of the London Agreement. There
was also pressure exerted by two powerful interest groups, the Confederation of
German Industry, which, formed in 1919, was the main body representing
German employers, and the Agricultural League, the powerful successor of the
Agrarian League. For its part, the bourgeois camp weighed in with a mixture of
threats and promises. If the bill was rejected, then the government threatened
to prorogue parliament, whereas if it was passed, the German People’s Party
would invite the German Nationalists to join them in government. On 29
August, fifty-two members of the German National People’s Party voted to
reject the bill, while forty-eight voted in favour of it. This was enough to give
the Railways Bill a two-thirds majority and enough for the government to
accept the terms of the London Agreement.
But this was far from ensuring a working majority for the government’s
day-to-day business, with the result that on 20 October Marx’s government
decided to ask the president to dissolve parliament. Ebert responded immedi-
ately, setting the date for new elections as 7 December 1924. These second
elections to the Reichstag within a matter of months took place against a back-
ground of economic recovery. The temporary Rentenmark had been aban-
doned on 30 August and replaced by the new Reichsmark, 40 per cent of which
was covered by gold and currency. Once the London Agreement had been
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 365

implemented, foreign loans flowed into Germany and unemployment numbers

fell sharply, as did the length of the average working day, while contractually
agreed hourly wages rose considerably.
These improvements to the country’s economy were reflected in the politi-
cally deradicalized election results. The extreme wings of the various parties –
on the one hand, the German People’s Party, which had campaigned as the
National Socialist Freedom Party, and, on the other, the Communists – were
both weakened by the results, while the Social Democrats reported gains. The
SPD’s share of the vote rose from 20.5 per cent to 26.5 per cent, that of the
German National People’s Party from 19.5 per cent to 20.5 per cent, whereas
the Communists’ share fell from 12.6 per cent to 9 per cent, that of the combined
National Socialists and German People’s Party from 6.5 per cent to 3 per cent.
The centre parties and the moderate right more or less retained their existing
share of the vote.
The election results allowed one of only two kinds of government to be
formed: either a grand coalition or a bourgeois right-of-centre cabinet. The
German People’s Party refused to govern with the Social Democrats, while
the German Democrats were unwilling to enter into a coalition that included
the German Nationalists, although this did not necessarily preclude a bourgeois
bloc, which would have a majority even without the left-wing Liberal Party.
Following lengthy negotiations, the first national government to include
German Nationalists was formed on 15 January 1925. At its head was the former
finance minister, Hans Luther. Stresemann stayed on as foreign minister, while
Otto Geßler became minister of defence, even though his party, the German
Democrats, was not a part of the government. The German National People’s
Party provided the ministers of the interior, finance and business, while the
minister of agriculture, Count Gerhard von Kanitz, was at least close to this
last-named party.
Soon after the cabinet had been formed, the German Nationalist business
secretary, Karl Neuhaus, found himself forced to disappoint large numbers of
his party’s supporters: at the end of January, with the support of a unanimous
vote on the part of the leading organizations in agriculture, industry, trade and
banking, he explained in a memorandum that a revaluation of the savings
accounts and war loans at more than 15 per cent above their former value in
gold marks that had been settled in February 1924 but violently resisted by the
German National People’s Party could not be expected of the asset holders in
question and was therefore impossible to implement.
Friedrich Ebert died on 28 February 1925, only six weeks after the forma-
tion of the first bourgeois bloc cabinet. He was fifty-four. The immediate cause
of his death was appendicitis and peritonitis. But during the final months of his
life the one and only Social Democrat to hold the highest post in the Republic
had had to contend with the charge of treason levelled against him by a nation-
alist journalist by the name of Erwin Rothardt on account of his role in the
366 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Berlin munition workers’ strike in January 1918. (At that date Ebert had been
leader of the Socialist Party and had joined the strike leaders simply in order to
end the unrest as quickly as possible.) In turn, Ebert sued the journalist
for libel. The sentence handed down by the Magdeburg District Court on
23 December 1924 was a blatant example of judiciary anti-Republicanism, for
although Rothardt was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for insulting
Ebert, the court, in justifying its verdict, noted that Rothardt’s claim that Ebert
had been guilty of treason by participating in the strike was in a legal sense
valid so that it was impossible to convict the journalist of defamation.
Wilhelm Marx’s cabinet immediately declared its support for Ebert, and
leading voices in German society quickly followed suit, including the theolo-
gian Adolf von Harnack, the historians Friedrich Meinecke and Hans Delbrück
and the jurists Gerhard Anschütz and Wilhelm Kahl. But in spite of their
attempts to rescue Ebert’s reputation, the judgment had a pernicious effect and
contributed to the president’s illness by undermining his mental and physical
health. Only after his death did his political opponents, foremost among whom
were the German Nationalist members of the new government, concede that
he had administered the office of president conscientiously in difficult times,
demonstrating an exemplary lack of partisanship. The extreme right, conversely,
remained silent on the issue, while the Communist member of the Reichstag,
Hermann Remmele, had no hesitation in recalling the president in a speech on
1 March 1925 in which he declared that Ebert had ‘gone to his grave with the
curse of the German proletariat ringing in his ears’.99
The first direct election of a national president by the German people took
place on 29 March 1925. The candidate for the government right was Karl
Jarres, formerly the minister of the interior and currently mayor of Duisburg.
He had the backing of the German People’s Party, the German National People’s
Party and the small Economic Party that had been formed in 1920 and was
made up of members of the German middle classes. The Social Democrat
candidate was Otto Braun, who had recently resigned as prime minister of
Prussia in the wake of a government crisis in the region. The Centre Party was
represented by the former chancellor Wilhelm Marx, the German Democratic
Party by the state president of Baden, Willy Hellpach, and the Bavarian People’s
Party by Heinrich Held, who had been prime minister of the Free State of
Bavaria since 1924. The Communists put forward the name of their party
leader, Ernst Thälmann, a former dockworker from Hamburg, while the
National Socialist candidate was Erich Ludendorff. In the first round of voting
none of the candidates received the required absolute majority. Jarres polled
the best result, with 38.8 per cent of the vote, with Braun in second place on
29 per cent and Marx in third place with 14.5 per cent.
For the second round, the ‘Weimar’ parties – the Social Democrats, Centre
Party and German Democrats – all agreed to endorse Marx, in return for which
the Centre Party committed itself to re-electing Braun as prime minister of
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 367

Prussia. Jarres stood no chance against Marx, with the result that the political
right set out to find a more popular candidate. Under the law of 4 May 1920,
which laid down the terms for the election of a new president, this candidate
could also be someone who had not taken part in the first round of elections.
The choice fell on the former field marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who had
been born in Posen on 2 October 1847 and, now seventy-seven years old, was
living in retirement in Hanover following his resignation from the army
supreme command in the summer of 1919.
It was above all the German Nationalists and the Agricultural League who
championed Hindenburg, a legend in his own lifetime who as the ‘victor of
Tannenberg’ had been viewed as a substitute Kaiser during the First World
War. Leading industrialists and the German People’s Party headed by Gustav
Stresemann initially had serious misgivings, Stresemann fearing particularly
adverse criticism abroad. But once Jarres had withdrawn his candidacy, the
German People’s Party, too, accepted Hindenburg, not least because there was
a good chance that he would emerge as victor from the second round of voting.
He could count on the votes of committed royalists and most Evangelical
Christians. The Bavarian People’s Party also agreed to back the Prussian
Protestant Hindenburg, an agreement due in no small part to their dislike of
the Catholic Marx, who was supported by the Social Democrats. It also helped
Hindenburg that the Communists continued to pin their hopes on Thälmann,
who had won only 7 per cent of the vote in the first round and stood no chance
whatsoever of being elected.
The second round of voting took place on 26 April 1925, when Hindenburg
won 900,000 more votes than Marx: his total share of the vote was 48.3 per
cent, that of Marx 45.3 per cent, while Thälmann managed only 6.4 per cent.
Although Hindenburg had narrowly failed to win an outright majority, this
was not necessary in the second round of voting.
Hindenburg’s election was tantamount to a conservative realignment of
the Weimar Republic. His victory was not a plebiscite in favour of a restoration
of the monarchy but nor was it a vote against the only form of parliamentary
democracy that Germany had known since 1919. Disenchantment with the
Republic’s uninspiring daily round went hand in hand with a nostalgic trans-
figuration of the past. The liberal Frankfurter Zeitung regretted ‘the romantic
yearning for the glory and greatness of the past’, while the equally liberal
Berliner Tageblatt spoke of a ‘surprise victory of reactionary forces achieved by
the Communist betrayal of the Republic’.100 Like the two bourgeois papers, the
Social Democratic Vorwärts also likened Hindenburg’s election to the victory
of a clerical monarchist, Patrice de MacMahon, as president of the French
Republic in 1871, implying the expectation that Germany would survive the
present danger just as surely as France had done half a century earlier.
Such hopes were by no means groundless. Hindenburg’s promise to respect
the Republic’s constitution made it hard for those who had previously despised
368 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the Republic to maintain their hostility towards the new state. The Evangelical
Church’s Realpolitik was significant in this regard: only now did it accept the
Republic as a fact, albeit one that it disliked. But it was above all the milieu
from which Hindenburg himself hailed and to which he continued to feel very
close that had the greatest cause for satisfaction: this was the world of the mili-
tary and of the Prussian aristocracy. For the army and the country’s major
landowners, it was of some significance that they would once again have imme-
diate access to the head of state, for in times of crisis the only real power was
wielded by the president. The social and political balance of power did not shift
suddenly after 26 April 1925, but from that day onwards the old Prussian elite
from pre-Republican Germany once more had a hand on the reins of power,
which they could seize whenever the Reichstag refused to see what the country
needed. From the standpoint of the political right, this represented a major
step forward.
For the Weimar Republic, Hindenburg’s election was one of two striking
events in 1925. The other was the signing of the Locarno Treaties on 26 October
1925, thereby sealing Germany’s return to the fold of the major European
powers. The Locarno Treaties were intended to consolidate the status quo of
the post-war order but, in keeping with Germany’s express wishes, they did so
in what may be termed an asymmetrical fashion. Only the country’s western
borders were secured under international law, Germany, France and Belgium
agreeing not to use force to alter the existing frontier, which was guaranteed
by both Britain and Italy. But with its eastern neighbours Poland and
Czechoslovakia, Germany signed only arbitration treaties. France, conversely,
committed itself to assisting Poland and Czechoslovakia militarily in the event
of a German invasion.
In short, the Locarno Treaties certainly did not rule out a peaceful solution
to the question of Germany’s eastern border, and in his capacity as foreign
minister, Stresemann left observers in no doubt that he was working towards
this goal and doing so, moreover, in complete agreement with public opinion
in Germany. On 19 April 1925 he told the German Embassy in London that a
peaceful solution to the question of Germany’s border with Poland could be
achieved ‘only if the economic and financial predicament in which Poland
finds itself at present degenerates to the point where Poland as a whole is
reduced to a state of impotence’. It was necessary, therefore, to ‘delay Poland’s
definitive and lasting recovery until the country is ready for a border agree-
ment that respects our wishes and our own position of power is sufficiently
consolidated. [. . .] Only the unqualified restitution of sovereignty over the
territories in question can satisfy us.’101
In the Reichstag the Locarno Treaties were ratified on 27 November 1925
only because the Social Democrats voted with the majority of other deputies.
The German Nationalist ministers had walked out of Hans Luther’s cabinet on
26 October because the concessions regarding the western border had not gone
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 369

far enough in the eyes of the German National People’s Party, with the result that
the German Nationalists voted against the treaties. If the Social Democrats had
attached a condition to their approval and demanded a place in government, it
is unlikely that Luther and Stresemann would have been in a position to turn
them down. But the Social Democrats were internally divided not only in the
latter half of 1925 but on two further occasions in 1926 and in consequence they
refrained from making any demands with regard to power-sharing.
Luther’s bourgeois minority cabinet had to resign on 12 May 1926 in the
wake of an argument over the flying of flags, an argument that stemmed from
a cabinet decision taken on 1 May, according to which ambassadorial and
consular agencies had the right to fly the navy’s black, white and red ensign
alongside the Republic’s black, red and gold flag. Luther’s bourgeois minority
cabinet was replaced by one under Marx that was definitely interested in sharing
power with the SPD, but the Social Democrats now paid the price for their
active support of a Communist Party-backed nationwide plebiscite demanding
that the former German princes be stripped of their property with no recourse
to compensation. Although the referendum on 20 June 1926 failed to achieve its
goal, since only 36.4 per cent, rather than the required majority, voted for the
draft bill, the SPD felt that in the wake of its extra-parliamentary dalliance with
the Communists, it could not without further ado return to the politics of class
compromise with the bourgeois centre ground. As a result, the grand coalition
that Stresemann, too, had championed did not come about.
In mid-December 1926 there might have been a further opportunity to move
from a bourgeois minority government to a parliamentary majority government,
if the centre and the left could have come to some agreement. At Stresemann’s
urging, Marx’s government offered the SPD a grand coalition in order to avoid a
defence debate tabled by the Social Democrats, but the SPD was unwilling to
agree to such a deal. On 16 December 1926 Philipp Scheidemann delivered
himself of a spectacular speech in the Reichstag, instilling a sense of outrage in
all the bourgeois parties by talking about a clandestine armaments programme,
the financing of which had been cloaked in a veil of secrecy. He described how
the army was working closely with radical right-wing organizations and
mentioned the ‘Black Reichswehr’ in the form of the small-calibre rifle clubs that
the army used to circumvent the limit of 100,000 men. In particular, Scheidemann
alarmed the Communists by claiming that their cell at the port of Stettin was
fully aware of the arms and munitions shipments that Soviet vessels had unloaded
there in September and October 1926.
The very next day – 17 December 1926 – the Reichstag brought down
Marx’s government by 249 votes to 171. The vote of no confidence was tabled
by the SPD and received the support of the two People’s Parties, the German
Nationalists and the Communists. The question of a grand coalition had been
settled by the former prime minister’s speech. There was no one else in any of
the bourgeois parties who would have advocated such a solution to the crisis or
370 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

even seriously considered it. The outcome of the government crisis of the
winter of 1926/7 was a centre-right government under Wilhelm Marx that
began work on 29 January 1927. The German Nationalists provided the minis-
ters of the interior, justice, agriculture and transport. The Ministry of the
Interior was now run by Walter von Keudell, who as a regional councillor in
Königsberg had worked with the Kapp–Lüttwitz government in March 1920.
Thanks to its tactics, the SPD had involuntarily brought to power the most
right-wing cabinet of any that served under the Weimar Republic.
Stresemann remained the foreign minister in this second bourgeois bloc
cabinet and as a result was closely associated with two events that took place in
1926 in the wake of the Treaties of Locarno, namely, the Berlin Treaty with the
Soviet Union and Germany’s membership of the League of Nations. The
German-Soviet treaty was accepted almost unanimously by the Reichstag on 10
June 1926 and was designed in part to dispel Moscow’s mistrust of Germany’s
actions at Locarno, but the agreement was also intended to increase pressure on
Warsaw. The partners to the treaty committed themselves to remaining neutral
in the event that one or other of them was attacked by a third party. They also
agreed not to enter into any coalition with a country that planned to impose an
economic or financial boycott on another power. Germany promised not to
take part in any sanctions that the League of Nations might impose on the
Soviet Union, a promise already exacted from the Western Powers the previous
year. In all other respects the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 was to remain the basis of
German-Soviet relations for the foreseeable future.
The second major event in terms of Germany’s foreign policy took place in
Geneva on 10 September 1926, when Germany joined the League of Nations,
also becoming a member of its most important body, the Council of the League
of Nations, whereas Poland, its principal rival in the struggle to gain this status,
had to settle for a non-permanent seat and the promise that it would be
re-elected to this committee. The Social Democrats, who had advocated this
move sooner and more consistently than any other German party, celebrated
their achievement as an important moment in the country’s history, Vorwärts
even speaking of a ‘giant leap forward in the history of the world’.102
On 17 September 1926, a week after the official ceremony at the Palace of
the League of Nations in Geneva, the foreign ministers of France and Germany,
Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, met at a restaurant in the nearby
village of Thoiry for a general discussion. The good food and abundant flow of
fine wines put both men in a euphoric mood, and they agreed that in return for
material help in stabilizing the franc – specifically, the early repayment of a
further tranche of German reparations – France would make a number of
political concessions, chief of which were the early return of the Saarland, the
withdrawal of troops from the Rhineland by September 1927 and France’s
consent to the German-Belgian agreement concerning the return of Eupen-
Malmedy to Germany.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 371

The mood of elation was followed by one of sobering disenchantment, for

Raymond Poincaré, who until then had loyally supported Briand’s policy of
rapprochement, failed to back him on this occasion. Legally speaking, Briand
had acted without his authority in Thoiry. In Germany, too, there were serious
misgivings concerning the high price that Stresemann was willing to pay the
Western Powers for any political concessions. In the end the meeting on 17
September 1926 produced little more than an agreement that the International
Military Commission overseeing the implementation of the military provisions
of the Treaty of Versailles would leave Germany on 31 January 1927. Thoiry had
raised expectations that on closer examination were simply unrealistic.
Germany’s joining the League of Nations was the high point of the
Stresemann era. At the time of the First World War, Stresemann had been an
ardent supporter of annexation, and even as recently as the Kapp–Lüttwitz
Putsch he had been seen as an opportunistic tactician, but now he had matured
into a ‘republican of reason’ and become a statesman. As chancellor during the
crisis of 1923, he did more than anyone else to maintain the unity of the Reich
and the survival of the country as a democratic republic. As foreign minister he
was an early champion of the idea of peaceful coexistence with the West.
Towards Poland, it is true, Stresemann was just as nationalistic as most other
German politicians, whether from the right or the left. From 1923 to 1929 he
was an enlightened advocate of a policy designed to show Germany as a great
power, while also championing closer ties between the states of Europe. He
could reconcile these aspirations because from his point of view they were
not mutually exclusive. No other German politician of the post-war period
enjoyed such a high level of international respect: on 10 December 1926 he and
his French colleague Aristide Briand were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in Oslo.
Marx’s centre-right government was the eighth that Stresemann served
in as foreign minister. All in all, this second bourgeois bloc government was
less reactionary than left-wing politicians had feared. In May 1927, under
the aegis of the German Nationalist minister of the interior, Walter von
Keudell, and with the backing of the German National People’s Party, the
Republikschutzgesetz that was designed to protect the Republic was extended
for a further two years. And in December 1927 the aforementioned law relating
to national insurance was steered through parliament by the Centre Party
minister of labour, Heinrich Brauns, who had held this post continuously since
August 1923.
By now there were clear signs that the centre-right government was falling
apart. Since July the coalition partners had been arguing over a bill drafted by
Keudell and designed to place Christian interdenominational schools and faith
schools on the same legal footing. The bill had the support of the Centre Party,
the Bavarian People’s Party and the German National People’s Party but was
opposed by the German People’s Party, which had inherited the mantle of the
372 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

National Liberals who had played a major role in the Kulturkampf at the end of
the nineteenth century. They justified their stance by pointing out that
according to the country’s constitution interdenominational schools must be
given priority over all others. By 15 February 1928 the leader of the German
National People’s Party and chairman of the coalition committee’s meetings,
Count Kuno von Westarp, was forced to announce that no agreement on the
question was possible and that the coalition was therefore over.
Throughout the Weimar Republic, all forms of minority government clearly
contained within them the seeds of their own destruction. In any grand coali-
tion, it was socio-political questions that were the areas of disagreement, while
centre-right coalitions foundered on matters of foreign policy and education.
Parties that dated back to the days of the constitutional monarchy had never
been used to compromise and tended, therefore, to regard individual goals as
non-negotiable. Even established parties that represented the interests of the
state continued to behave as if the battle lines were between the government
and the Reichstag, as they had been before October 1918, rather than between
the government majority and the opposition, as the logic of the parliamentary
system demanded. The government was often felt to be hostile even by those
whose own party was involved in government. The legacy of the Kaiserreich
helps to explain the instability that remained a feature of the German parlia-
mentary system even during the few relatively calm years of the first German
Republic. But the ‘false consciousness’ of parliamentarians was also encour-
aged by the constitution of the Weimar Republic, for if a coalition government
foundered on a failure to compromise on the part of the parties in power, they
could still fall back on the president’s ‘reserve constitution’ in the form of the
emergency decrees enshrined in Article 48.
Hindenburg dissolved parliament on 31 March 1928 and set 20 May as the
date for new elections. Also on 31 March the Reichsrat took a decision that was
to plunge the next government into a major crisis. The German navy was plan-
ning to build Battleship A as the first of a series of replacement vessels, which
meant committing the legislature to a long-term programme that would extend
over several parliamentary terms. Led by Prussia, the Reichsrat had opposed
any spending on the project the previous December, but by the end of March a
majority of the bourgeois bloc in the Reichstag had approved the first budg-
etary instalment. The Reichsrat responded on 31 March by asking Marx’s
cabinet to delay work on the battleship until the financial situation had been
re-examined and to do nothing before 1 September 1928. The new defence
minister, Wilhelm Groener, who had replaced the battle-weary Otto Geßler on
19 January 1928, agreed to this condition.
For the left-wing parties in the Reichstag, Battleship A was a rallying call.
Ernst Thälmann had earlier become an increasingly pliant puppet of Stalin,
and he now demanded free school meals for primary schoolchildren instead
of the construction of an armoured cruiser. (The bourgeois majority in the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 373

Reichstag had already turned down a request for the five million marks needed
for such a subvention.) It was a popular demand, and the Social Democrats,
too, took up the catchphrase of ‘School meals instead of battleships’, in the
process appearing to be more radical than they actually were. At its conference
in Kiel in May 1927 the SPD had left observers in no doubt as to its wish to
prevent the formation of a new right-wing cabinet and, if it was to do well in
the elections, to assume responsibility for governing the country.
On the extreme right wing of the political spectrum, it was a newly consoli-
dated NSDAP that entered the election campaign in the spring of 1928. The
National Socialists’ undisputed leader was Adolf Hitler, the left wing of the
party, which been stronger in northern Germany and centred on the brothers
Otto and Gregor Straßer, having ceased to provide a counterweight to the
‘Brown House’ in Munich since the Bamberg Party Conference in February
1926. Although the NSDAP continued to affect support for the labour move-
ment and to parade its ‘socialist’ credentials, it was clear even before the
Reichstag elections that its greatest support was to be found not in the larger
towns and cities but in those rural areas that had been particularly badly hit by
the sudden drop in the price of pigs in 1927, a fall that marked the start of a
global crisis in agriculture. It was the rural population that Hitler had in his
sights when on 13 April 1928 he offered a new and binding interpretation of
point 17 in his party’s programme: the expropriation of land for community
purposes was now said to apply only to those lands that had been acquired ille-
gally, chief of which were ‘Jewish land speculation companies’.103 No compensa-
tion was to be paid for such expropriations.
Within German society at large, however, there was no sense of a looming
crisis on the eve of the elections. The economy was continuing to grow, and
unemployment was lower than in 1927. In the run-up to no other Reichstag
election under the Weimar Republic did democratic forces have such grounds
for optimism as they did before 20 May 1928.
It was the Social Democrats who emerged as clear victors from this fourth
set of elections to the Reichstag since the creation of the Weimar Republic,
winning 29.8 per cent of the vote – 3.8 per cent higher than their share of
the vote in the previous election on 7 December 1924. The main losers were
the German Nationalists, whose share of the vote fell from 20.5 per cent to 14.3
per cent. Of the moderate bourgeois parties, the Centre Party suffered the
greatest losses: 1.5 per cent. The two liberal parties each lost 1.4 per cent. If,
under the terms of the Weimar constitution, there had been a clause requiring
parties to poll at least 5 per cent of the votes in a particular area to have a
stake in the allocation of seats, then the German Democratic Party would have
failed to qualify, for it won only 4.9 per cent – 0.3 per cent more than the
Economic Party. The NSDAP won on average only 2.6 per cent in the country
as a whole, although it chalked up sensational gains in a number of regions
hit by the agricultural crisis. These regions included the western coast of
374 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Schleswig-Holstein, North Dithmarschen, where they won 28.9 per cent of the
vote, and South Dithmarschen, where the figure was 36.8 per cent.
The election result effectively ruled out any form of majority government
with the exception of a grand coalition, which finally came together after
lengthy negotiations on 28 June 1928. For the present, it was not, however, a
formal coalition but was what was described as a ‘cabinet of individual person-
alities’, and yet the political independence implied by this name is misleading:
misgivings among members of the German People’s Party, who objected to an
alliance under the leader of the SPD, Hermann Müller, were so pronounced
that Stresemann had to exert extreme pressure to persuade his party to accept
two members of the German People’s Party into his cabinet: Stresemann
himself as foreign minister and Julius Curtius as business secretary.
Müller’s government had been in power for only a few weeks when it was
plunged into a major crisis: on 10 August 1928, the cabinet approved the
construction of Battleship A, which the Social Democrats had vigorously
opposed in the election campaign of only a short time earlier. The Social
Democrat finance minister, Rudolf Hilferding, was unable to raise any fiscal
objections to the project since the costs were covered by cuts made in other
areas of the defence budget, so that confirmation of the decision taken by the
previous government was a correct one. Moreover, a veto by Social Democrat
ministers would have spelt the immediate end of Müller’s government. Many
members and supporters of Germany’s largest political party took a different
view. Foremost among them was Otto Wels, who, as long as his co-chairman
was chancellor, was effectively running the SPD on his own. On 31 October,
after parliament had returned from its summer break, Wels, acting on behalf of
all the Social Democrat members of the Reichstag, proposed a motion
demanding that work on the battleship be suspended and that the money
released in this way be spent on free school meals.
But worse was in store for the Social Democrats, for on 16 November 1928
Wels forced them to toe the party line and vote against the cabinet decision of
10 August. The chancellor, Hermann Müller, together with his minister of the
interior, Carl Severing, his finance minister, Rudolf Hilferding, and his labour
minister Rudolf Wissell, were in this way obliged, as it were, to declare their
lack of trust in themselves. In the event, the government was not defeated in
the vote, since all the bourgeois parties and National Socialists voted against
the SPD’s motion, but the impression left on the public at large was little short
of devastating. Echoing the whole of the liberal press, the Berlin-based Vossische
Zeitung accused the SPD of a lack of credibility: ‘It wishes to continue in power
simply to save face. [. . .] Shall we be content to allow the Social Democrats to
pound the table in the house, while hoping that others will prevent things from
being smashed to pieces?’104
In April 1929 the government parties finally confounded expectations and
formed a grand coalition. This was preceded by agreement on the federal
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 375

budget for 1929, an agreement facilitated by the fact that first Hilferding and
then the various experts from the other parties had adjusted upwards the
preliminary estimates for tax revenues. But the main reason for this sudden
rapprochement between the parties was related to the country’s foreign policy,
for talks on Germany’s wartime reparations had opened in Paris in early
February. The Dawes Plan of 1924 was only a temporary ruling, leaving open
the actual amount that Germany would have to pay. In 1928/9 the annual
payments due under the plan first reached their full amount: 2,500 million
marks.
Given the country’s worsening financial situation, all the government
parties were keen to reduce this burden. The agent-general for reparations,
Parker Gilbert, was also seeking to revise the plan. As long as it remained his
remit to decide whether or not the German balance of payments and the
stability of the mark could justify a transfer of funds by way of reparations, the
Germans could, as it were, hide behind his decisions. Gilbert himself felt that
this situation was harmful and wanted a new agreement that would force
Germany to become economically and financially independent.
The result of the Paris talks was the Young Plan, so called after the American
banker Owen D. Young who chaired the conference of financial experts that
ended on 7 June 1929. They all agreed that Germany would have to continue to
pay reparations until 1988: that is, for nearly sixty years. During the first ten
years the annual payments would remain below the average of 2,000 million
marks, but would then rise, before falling again after thirty-seven years. No
further foreign monitoring of Germany’s finances was planned, nor were mort-
gages on industry and federal revenues.
Moreover, the agent-general for reparations would no longer be responsible
for the transfer. His place would be taken by the federal government, which
would be able to choose between the ‘protected’ and ‘unprotected’ part of the
reparations: ‘unprotected’ payments had to be made on time, whereas
‘protected’ ones could be delayed for up to two years. The payments would also
be received by a new body, the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. If
Germany had difficulty meeting its obligations, it could appeal to a committee
of international experts, which would have to suggest ways of revising the
Young Plan to deal with Germany’s economic situation. Provisions were also
made for a further eventuality: if the United States were to reduce the amount
of money owed to it by its inter-Allied debtors, two-thirds of this sum was to be
offset against Germany’s reparations bill.
For Germany the Young Plan had one major advantage over the Dawes Plan
in that it restored the country’s sovereignty in the field of political economics.
But it also had a disadvantage in that the removal of transfer protection meant
that it would still have to pay reparations even during a period of economic
depression. The prospect of having to make payments to the country’s former
wartime enemies for the next fifty-eight years was a depressing one, and yet
376 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

there was political compensation for this: the German government’s accept-
ance of the Young Plan persuaded France to meet Germany halfway on the
question of the Rhineland. On 30 August 1929, at the end of a conference in
The Hague attended by Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Japan and Germany, an
agreement was signed providing for the early withdrawal of Allied troops from
the Rhineland. Allied troops had already withdrawn from the first zone during
the winter of 1925/6: the second zone was to be returned by 30 November
1929, the third by 30 June 1930, five years earlier than the date stipulated by the
Treaty of Versailles.
Germany’s right-wing extremists did not even wait for the talks in The
Hague to be concluded but convened a National Committee for a German
Referendum in Berlin on 9 July 1929. Its members included Heinrich Claß of
the Pan-German League; Franz Seldte of the Stahlhelm, a paramilitary League
of Frontline Soldiers founded at the end of 1918; the film and press magnate
Alfred Hugenberg, who had become leader of the German National People’s
Party in October 1928; and Adolf Hitler of the NSDAP. Together they signed a
declaration calling on the German people to rise up against the Young Plan and
the ‘lie concerning Germany’s war guilt’ and announcing plans for a refer-
endum on the subject.
While the right wing was mustering its forces, the gulf between the moderate
and radical left was widening. Ever since the Sixth World Congress of the
Communist International in the summer of 1928, about which we shall have
more to say in due course, the most pressing task of every Communist party
was the need to combat the Social Democrats who had ostensibly become
more bourgeois and were growing ever closer to Fascism. It is entirely possible
that this slogan would have remained an abstract formula for the German
Communist Party if, in the spring of 1929, the Social Democrat chief of police
in Berlin, Karl Friedrich Zörgiebel, had not used measures against the extreme
left that gave a semblance of justification to the new ‘ultra-left’ line adopted by
the Comintern. Zörgiebel had banned all open-air demonstrations and meet-
ings in the wake of a wave of violent clashes in December 1928 but had then
upheld the ban the following May Day, which was the workers’ traditional ‘day
of action’. The Communists ignored the ruling and erected a number of barri-
cades, thereby giving the police an excuse to move against the extreme left,
which they did with the utmost brutality, using armoured cars and firearms.
Thirty-two civilians were killed in addition to almost 200 injuries and well over
1,000 arrests.
The intervention of the police in Berlin was followed by an administrative
measure which, starting out from Prussia, soon engulfed the country as a
whole and took the form of a ban on the Red Frontline Fighters’ League, a
Communist defence organization founded in 1924. The Communist Party
reserved its most violent response for Wedding, the quarter of Berlin where
the bloodiest clashes had taken place in May and where it convened a party
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 377

conference the following month, relocating it from Dresden, where it was orig-
inally scheduled to be held. The bloody events of early May and the ban on the
Red Frontline Fighters’ League were taken by the party leaders as proof that the
Social Democrats were turning into ‘Social Fascists’. Thälmann, who was
acclaimed at the rally as the leader of the revolutionary German proletariat,
went even further, describing the ‘Social Fascism’ of the Social Democrats as a
particularly dangerous form of Fascism.
The radicalization of the political left was closely connected to the increasing
rate of unemployment, the worsening economy causing the number of unem-
ployed to rise above three million for the first time in February 1929, while the
usual recovery in the spring proved only weak: by March there were still 2.7
million men and women out of work. The federal agency for unemployment
had enough funds to pay only 800,000 of those entitled to primary support and
was forced to take out a loan. Since the exchequer itself had insufficient funds,
it was obliged in turn to ask for help from a consortium of banks. Only in this
way was it possible to avoid a total collapse of the Federal Unemployment
Agency in March 1929.
By now it was clear that unless the national insurance system was reformed,
the country’s finances in general could not be restored to an even keel, but
nowhere were the standpoints of the coalition partners as far apart as in the
field of social security: after conferring with the Free Trade Unions, the SPD
advocated an increase in the contributions from employers and employees
alike, but the German People’s Party, out of respect for the employers, rejected
this and instead demanded a lower rate of contributions.
Despite numerous discussions among experts there was still no sign of any
agreement by the end of September 1929, prompting the chancellor to
announce on 1 October that if the government failed to find a solution to the
problem, he would resign from office. The German People’s Party fell into line
that very same day, declaring that if the SPD and the Centre Party were willing
to delay the implementation of their demand for an increase of 0.5 per cent
until December, the German People’s Party would abstain from voting on a bill
lowering the rates of support and correcting anomalies in the system, thereby
helping the bill to complete its passage through parliament. The Social
Democrats and the Centre Party agreed to this compromise, with the result
that the bill was passed on 3 October. The grand coalition had survived its
most difficult test to date.
By now the politician who had done the most to keep Müller and his
government in office was dead: Gustav Stresemann had succumbed to a stroke
in the early morning of 3 October 1929 at the age of fifty-one. He had been in
failing health for some time and had exhausted his last reserves of strength
preventing a change of government that would have undermined his policy of
rapprochement with France. In order to protect his foreign policy from right-
wing interference, he had occasionally struck a more nationalist note than his
378 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

opinions actually merited. But he remained firmly convinced that renegotia-

tion of the Treaty of Versailles did not justify another war. The prerequisite for
a foreign policy based on this belief was closer cooperation with the more
moderate forces within the bourgeoisie and working class. Stresemann knew
this, which made him his party’s most committed advocate of a grand coali-
tion. His death considerably weakened this alliance. The only true statesman to
be produced by the Weimar Republic was soon to prove irreplaceable in terms
of his country’s domestic and foreign policy.
By 2 November 1929 – four and a half weeks after Stresemann’s death – it was
clear that the attempt by the extreme right to engineer the rejection of the Young
Plan by means of a referendum had cleared its first hurdle, albeit narrowly, when
4.1 million Germans, or 10.02 per cent of those entitled to vote, had demanded a
referendum: this was 0.02 per cent more than was required by the country’s
constitution. The draft bill drawn up by the Federal Committee for the German
Referendum threatened the ‘chancellor, his ministers and those of their author-
ized representatives’ who had signed the Young treaty with the charge of treason,
the punishment for which was a prison term of no less than two years. It was
clear, of course, that the Reichstag would reject this move by an overwhelming
majority, the only uncertainty being the way that the German National People’s
Party would vote. After a debate lasting several days, the vote was taken on 30
November. Of the seventy-two German Nationalist members who attended,
only fifty-three voted to send the chancellor and his associates to prison. The
countermeasures that Hugenberg took in an attempt to punish those deputies
who had deviated from the party line served only to divide the party. Twelve of
them, including the former minister Walter von Keudell, the landowner Hans
von Schlange-Schöningen, the chairman of the Association of German
Nationalist Shop Assistants,105 Walter Lambach, and the former lieutenant
commander Gottfried Treviranus, all announced that they were leaving the party
and founding the German Nationalist Cooperative Union. The party leader in
the chamber, Kuno von Westarp, resigned in protest at Hugenberg’s policies.
It was only after the Reichstag had rejected the bill that the unavoidable
referendum was held on 22 December, when 5.8 million – 13.8 per cent of
those entitled to vote – signalled they were in favour of it. In order for it to be
accepted, it would have required twenty-one million yes votes, making the
National Committee’s failure all too apparent. But in nine of the thirty-five elec-
toral districts more than one-fifth of voters had supported the proposal. Even
more important was that, through his work on the committee, Hitler had made
himself socially acceptable. In turn, his party profited from the support that
heavy industry and farming had given the referendum.
And there were other signs in the late autumn of 1929 that the National
Socialists were in the ascendant. In the regional and local elections in November
and December they recorded substantial gains. In Thuringia, they even filled a
cabinet post in a government that also included the German National People’s
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 379

Party and the German People’s Party: Wilhelm Frick was the minister for the
interior and education. During this time Hitler’s National Socialists also began
to win over the universities. The National Socialist German Students’
Association was the big winner in the elections for the General Student
Committees during the winter of 1929/30. In Würzburg it won 30 per cent of
the vote, at the Technical University in Berlin 38 per cent and in Greifswald as
much as 53 per cent.
This lurch to the right on the part of the country’s students was a form of
social protest: here was a young generation of academics rebelling against
attempts to turn it into a proletarian mass and declaring war on a system they
blamed for their material hardship and uncertain career prospects. Hatred of
the state of Weimar went hand in hand with anti-Semitism, for although Jews
made up only 1 per cent of the country’s population, they accounted for
between 4 per cent and 5 per cent of students, with even higher percentages in
disciplines such as medicine and law, especially in cities like Frankfurt and
Berlin. In the eyes of many of their non-Jewish colleagues, this simply meant
that the Jews enjoyed an unjustifiably privileged position in German society.
The advances made by the National Socialist student organization rested not
least on the mass mobilization of feelings of social envy.
By the end of 1929 the economic reasons for the increasing support for the
extreme right were clear. The agricultural crisis had worsened and in northern
Germany at least had led to a radicalization of the farming community: starting
in the spring of 1929, bomb attacks on tax offices and local government build-
ings, especially in Schleswig-Holstein, repeatedly made the headlines. The
number of job-seekers in Germany as a whole rose from 1.5 million in
September to 2.9 million in December, around 350,000 higher than in the same
month in 1928. If we take 1924–6 as the starting point, then share prices rose
by 58 per cent during the boom year of 1927, falling by 10 per cent in 1928 and
by a further 14 per cent in 1929. But it was from America that the most strident
alarm signals could be heard: on 24 October 1929 prices on the New York
Stock Exchange crashed, triggering a seismic reaction. American banks imme-
diately limited the export of capital to Europe and especially to Germany.
It became increasingly difficult not only for local and regional government
but for the country as a whole to obtain credit. For the president of the
Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, who had helped to found the German
Democratic Party at the end of 1918 only to gravitate to the political right, the
country’s financial problems were a godsend, and he used the looming deficit
to issue an ultimatum and demand that the grand coalition sort out the coun-
try’s finances in the longer term. With the support of Parker Gilbert, he forced
the government and the Reichstag to set aside the sum of 450 million marks for
debt repayment in 1930.
Only after the Reichstag had agreed to this demand on 22 December did
the government receive a bridging loan from a consortium of German banks
380 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

headed by the Reichsbank that saved the country from bankruptcy. The
programme of financial measures agreed to by the grand coalition and passed
by the Reichstag only with considerable reservations could finally come into
force. It included an increase in national insurance contributions from 3 per
cent to 3.5 per cent, an increase in the duty on tobacco and a reduction in
direct taxes designed to help in creating capital. By now Rudolf Hilferding was
no longer the country’s finance minister: he had resigned on 21 December in
protest at Schacht’s intervention and was replaced by the economist Paul
Moldenhauer of the German People’s Party, who had become a government
minister only a few weeks earlier, on 11 November, after the previous incum-
bent, Julius Curtius, had succeeded Stresemann as foreign minister.
By the winter of 1929/30 there was no longer any doubt that parliamentary
democracy was in crisis in the Weimar Republic, a crisis illustrated by more
than simply the conflict between the president of the Reichsbank and the
government, for there were also signs that large sections of the country’s most
powerful elite were beginning to turn their backs on the government and even
on parliamentary rule as such. From the outset large-scale agricultural inter-
ests, aided and abetted by the Agricultural League, had been opposed to the
grand coalition. In December 1929 the Confederation of German Industry
sent Müller’s government a memorandum headed ‘Rise or Fall?’ and making
demands that amounted to an ultimatum: social policies should be adapted to
economic production and the government should have the right to veto
spending increases authorized by parliament. Since the end of 1929, the defence
minister, Wilhelm Groener, and his closest adviser, the head of the newly
created Ministerial Office, Kurt von Schleicher, had been working closely with
Otto Meissner, the secretary of state in the president’s office, to establish a
government that did not include the Social Democrats. In the circumstances,
such a government could be only a presidential cabinet.
Hindenburg had already expressed his support for such a change of direc-
tion in the spring of 1929. Westarp, at that date still leader of the German
National People’s Party in the Reichstag, was one of the first to learn of the
president’s aims. Hindenburg expressed himself more clearly at the beginning
of 1930, enquiring of Hugenberg on 6 January and of Westarp on the 15th
whether – in the event of a government crisis triggered by the financial reforms
– the German Nationalists would support a cabinet that did not include the
Social Democrats and that he himself, Hindenburg, would form. Hugenberg
said that his party would not do so, whereas Westarp was in favour of such a
move.
The government camp was still held together at this date by their mutual
interest in passing the Young laws. The plan was passed in The Hague on 20
January 1930 following months of detailed discussions on the experts’ various
subcommittees. For Germany it was supremely important that the payment
schedule and the amount to be paid were the same as those proposed by the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 381

panel of experts in June 1929. The final chapter in the story of the grand coali-
tion began on 28 January. At the suggestion of Heinrich Brüning, who had
been elected leader of the Centre Party in the Reichstag the previous month,
the Centre Party decided to make its backing for the Young Plan dependent on
agreement on the country’s financial reforms. Brüning’s proposed deal was a
rejection of neither the grand coalition nor the new reparations agreement but
represented an attempt to use the coalition’s shared goal on foreign policy as a
means of placing the country’s finances on a much firmer footing.
There were a number of SPD deputies who demanded an alternative deal: if
they were to agree to the Young laws, then the financial reforms should bear a
Social Democratic stamp. But the vast majority rejected such linkage between
domestic and foreign policy and in doing so involuntarily weakened the nego-
tiating position of the largest government party. On the right wing of the coali-
tion the German People’s Party refused to make any further concessions on the
question of national insurance and to raise direct taxes. They also declined to
introduce an emergency levy on civil servants and others on fixed salaries, a
proposal that had the support of Hindenburg himself. But on 5 March, much
to the surprise of the parties in question, agreement was reached in cabinet on
ways of covering the federal budget for 1930: Moldenhauer agreed to a proposal
put forward by the SPD for a direct property tax in the form of an increase to
the levy on industry from 300 to 350 million marks, a levy that was to be aban-
doned once the Young Plan had come into force. At the same time the Federal
Unemployment Agency was able to raise national insurance contributions
from 3.5 per cent to 4 per cent. In return the SPD ministers agreed that there
would be no income tax refund in 1931.
The agreement in cabinet was a triumph for the moderates in every polit-
ical camp, and yet it was built on sand, for on 6 March the German People’s
Party deputies in the Reichstag, encouraged by the Employers’ Association and
the Confederation of German Industry, rejected the government compromise
on all its essential points. The Bavarian People’s Party, which was represented
in Müller’s cabinet by the postmaster general, announced that it would not
accept the planned increase on beer duty. Hindenburg again played a part in
the discussions on 10 and 11 March, informing Brüning and Müller of his will-
ingness to grant the government the powers contained in Article 48 of the
federal constitution. This seemed to meet Brüning’s demand that the question
of reparations be linked to financial reform, and the Young laws were passed at
their third reading on 12 March by 256 votes to 192. Almost all the Centre
Party members voted in favour of the bill.
But whatever Hindenburg may have had in mind in his discussions with
Brüning and Müller, his closest circle of advisers – his notorious Camarilla –
was resolved to use the new situation to engineer a change of direction to the
right, taking it away from a parliamentary system and closer to a presidential
one. By 18 March the country’s heavy industrialists who were members of the
382 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

German People’s Party had been informed that Hindenburg, no doubt at the
insistence of Groener and Schleicher, had decided not to allow Müller’s govern-
ment to use the emergency laws enshrined in Article 48. The following day
Hindenburg peremptorily demanded measures to help agriculture in the east
of the country. His secretary of state, Otto Meissner, commented on this change
of heart in a message to Kurt von Schleicher: ‘This is the first stage of your
solution! It also lays the foundation for the best thing we can have, namely,
Hindenburg’s leadership.’106
Now that the German People’s Party knew the president’s aims, it could
afford to adopt a more moderate tone towards the Social Democrats at its
conference in Mannheim on 21 and 22 March. On the 26th and 27th Brüning
again sought a compromise aimed at postponing the arguments over the
national insurance reforms: the Federal Unemployment Agency was to intro-
duce savings, whereas the government would decide only at a later date whether
it would raise contributions, reduce benefits or raise indirect taxes in order to
finance government loans.
This proposal, which weakened the cabinet decision of 5 March at the
expense of the unemployed, was accepted by the majority of German People’s
Party deputies on 27 March, but when the Social Democrat deputies met, most
of them, including those who represented the trade unions and the labour
minister, Rudolf Wissell, spoke out against what they called the ‘Brüning
compromise’. The chancellor and the other SPD ministers were among a small
minority that backed the Centre Party proposal. The cabinet was left with no
alternative but to minute its failure and tender its resignation to the president.
The events of 27 March 1930 mark one of the major turning points in the
history of the Weimar Republic. In retrospect we can see very clearly that it was
on this day that the period of relative stability in Germany came to a definitive
end and the first German Republic began to fall apart. But even contempo-
raries were aware of the changes that were taking place. On 28 March the
Frankfurter Zeitung spoke of a ‘black day, doubly disastrous because the trivial
cause of the argument is so grotesquely disproportionate to the fatal conse-
quences that may arise from it’.107 Even members of the Social Democrat Party
whose decision had sealed the fate of Müller’s government were not slow to
voice their criticism: in the May issue of his own theoretical journal Die
Gesellschaft, Rudolf Hilferding explained why he could not agree with the
argument that if Brüning’s proposal had been accepted, it would no longer
have been possible to avoid a reduction in benefits in the autumn of 1930:

In terms of ring-fencing national insurance, resigning from the government

represents no perceptible gain. The fear that the situation would have dete-
riorated in the autumn does not seem sufficient to justify such a momen-
tous step; it makes no sense to commit suicide because of one’s fear of
death.108
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 383

The shift in power from parliament to the president could already be foreseen
on 27 March. The political right both inside and outside parliament had wanted
this development, because to them there seemed no other way of destroying
the Weimar welfare state. This was the short-term goal of the proponents of
presidential government – their aim was not just to prevent a trivial increase in
national insurance contributions. As a result, the political right bore most of
the responsibility for all that was to follow on from the fall of Müller’s
government.
The moderate left accepted this rejection of parliamentary democracy as a
price worth paying and cannot therefore be acquitted of the charge of complicity
in the shift to a presidential system. The Social Democrats could have prevented
the disintegration of the grand coalition at the end of March 1930, albeit at the
price of party unity. And their actions would in any case have been effective
only in the shorter term, for the government alliance would almost certainly
not have survived once its principal goal – the ratification of the Young laws –
had been achieved. Even so, it would have been only right and proper for them
to accept the solution held out to them by Brüning, for now the Social Democrats
could only reproach themselves in the bitterest of terms: at the decisive moment
they had not done everything in their power to preserve parliamentary democ-
racy and prevent Germany’s relapse into an authoritarian state.

Socialism in One Country: The Soviet Union under Stalin 1924–33

While the capitalist countries of the West were being sucked into the mael-
strom of a world economic crisis in 1929, the Soviet Union was devoting itself
to what Joseph Stalin called ‘building socialism in one country’. ‘Undoubtedly,
things would be vastly easier if the victory of socialism in the West came to our
aid,’ the secretary general of the Russian Communist Party explained to an
audience of students at Moscow’s Sverdlov University on 9 June 1925. ‘But,
firstly, the victory of socialism in the West is not “happening” as quickly as we
would like; and, secondly, those difficulties can be surmounted and we are
already surmounting them, as you know.’
Misguidedly appealing to Lenin, Stalin claimed that in 1915 the latter had
already given a basically affirmative answer to the ‘question of the possibility of
building socialism in one country’ at the time of the ‘imperialist war’.109 In his
article ‘On the Slogan for a United States of Europe’, Lenin had declared that
‘the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist
country alone’ if the ‘victorious proletariat of that country’ were to succeed in
‘attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring upris-
ings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even
armed force against the exploiting classes and their states’.110
Lenin had fallen out with Stalin in 1922, accusing him of being ‘too rude’
and in a codicil to his will of 4 January 1923 asking the Communist Party to
384 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

strip Stalin of his position as its secretary general. The man without whom
there would have been no October Revolution in Russia and no Soviet Union
had certainly not become a liberal when he invited his comrades to replace
Stalin after his – Lenin’s – death with someone who would be ‘more patient,
more loyal, more polite, and more attentive to comrades, [and] less capri-
cious’.111 Even during his own lifetime, it was thanks chiefly to Lenin that the
Bolshevik state had become a party dictatorship in which internal party oppo-
sition to the majority view of the Politburo was possible to only the most
limited degree. But the Communist Party had not yet become the organization
that Lenin was most anxious to avoid when issuing his warning about Stalin:
it was not yet dominated by a single man exercising his tyrannical rule by
means of an apparatus of party officials blindly devoted to him, with a secret
police bent on persecuting all who held divergent views and even where the
evidence was dubious in the extreme pursuing those people with the most
deadly rigour.
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was born in Gori in Georgia in 1879, the
son of a shoemaker who had once been a serf. He joined the Social Democrat
Workers Party in 1898 and the following year was expelled from the seminary
where he was studying for the priesthood on account of his political activities,
which included organizing strikes. It was around this time that he took the
name of Stalin, which is derived from the Russian word for ‘steel’. By 1904 he
had escaped from exile to Siberia and was working for the Bolsheviks as part of
the revolutionary underground movement in the Caucasus, a task that included
political murders, abductions, the springing of prisoners from gaols, extortion,
stealing weapons, robbing banks and attacking people transporting money, all
for the financial good of the party. Following the Bolshevik victory, he became
the people’s commissar for workers’ and peasants’ inspection and during the
civil war was appointed political commissar with the Red Army. In terms of his
later power base, it helped that from 1919 he belonged to both the Politburo
and the Organizational Bureau of the Russian Communist Party and became
the party’s secretary general in 1922. With regard to Marxist theory, the other
leading Bolsheviks – Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin – were
all his superiors. Stalin’s strength lay not only in his organizational gifts but also
in his instinctive ability to identify his rivals’ weaknesses and to forge alliances
that consolidated his position of power.
Even before Lenin died on 21 January 1924 one such alliance had already
been forged in the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev that was
directed at Trotsky, the only one of the leading Bolsheviks who could compete
with Lenin intellectually. The creator of the Red Army and from March 1918
the commissar for war, Trotsky was accused of ‘Bonapartist leanings’ by all
three men: in other words, they were convinced that he was seeking to establish
a personal dictatorship based on the military. Moreover, the first generation of
Bolsheviks held it against him that he had waited until July 1917 to join the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 385

party and align himself with Lenin’s cause. In May 1924 – four months after
Lenin’s death – the former leader’s will was read out at a plenary session of the
Central Committee. Also read out was the later codicil relating to Stalin. On
this occasion it was Zinoviev who saved Stalin, claiming that Lenin’s fears
about the party’s secretary general had proved unfounded, and at the urging of
Zinoviev and Kamenev Stalin remained in office, while Lenin’s will was with-
held from the general public and consigned to the party’s secret archive.
With his confirmation as secretary general, Stalin had already achieved his
principal goal, a goal he had been pursuing with Zinoviev and Kamenev. When,
in the autumn of 1924, he began to steer the party in the direction of ‘building
socialism in one country’, the thrust of his new policy was directed not only
against Trotsky, the principal proponent of ‘permanent revolution’, but also,
indirectly, against Zinoviev, the secretary general of the Communist International
and party secretary in Leningrad, and against Kamenev, the party’s leading
figure in Moscow. Like Trotsky, all three men had actively promoted the ‘German
October’, and its total failure left them politically weakened, albeit not to the
same extent as Karl Radek, the Comintern’s expert on Germany, who was one of
Trotsky’s supporters. In January 1925 Trotsky had to stand by while the Central
Committee dismissed his theory of ‘permanent revolution’ and give up his post
as commissar for war, although he remained a member of the Politburo after
Stalin turned down Zinoviev’s request to have him excluded from the party.
Zinoviev and Kamenev were regarded as two of those left-wing members of
the party who were urging world revolution, whereas the right wing included
Nikolai Bukharin, the editor in chief of Pravda and principal advocate of the
New Economic Policy that Lenin had introduced in 1921, Alexei Rykov, the
chairman of the Council of People’s Deputies, and Mikhail Tomsky, the leader
of the trade unions. These three right-wing members of the seven-man
Politburo demanded a policy that was supportive of the country’s peasants
following a peasant uprising in Georgia in the summer of 1924. Shortly before
the Fourteenth Party Conference in late April 1925 Bukharin even went so far
as to echo a slogan ascribed to the French liberal François Guizot and to
demand: ‘Enrich yourselves, develop your farms, do not fear that you will be
subjected to restrictions.’112 Stalin disapproved of this appeal but at the party
conference he voted for a lowering of taxes on agriculture and for other meas-
ures demanded by right-wing party members and designed to help the coun-
try’s peasants.
Not until the second half of 1925 did Zinoviev and Kamenev begin to
appreciate the danger inherent in Stalin’s strategic volte-face and openly to
resist the right wing’s attempt to change Soviet agricultural policy. In doing so
they cast themselves in the role of opponents of the new and informal alliance
between Stalin on the one hand and Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky on the other.
At the Fourteenth Party Conference in December 1925, when the Communist
Party of Russia renamed itself the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the
386 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

delegates approved the doctrine of ‘building socialism in one country’ as well

as the new agricultural policy. Immediately afterwards the party’s leaders began
to purge the party organization in Leningrad of all of Zinoviev’s supporters. A
leading role in this process was played by the thirty-nine-year-old Sergei Kirov,
who was soon to replace Zinoviev as party secretary in Leningrad. Stalin
brought out his book Problems of Leninism in January 1926, using the occasion
to launch a violent attack on Zinoviev and Kamenev, while avoiding all mention
of Trotsky.
The catchphrase about ‘building socialism in one country’ was a popular
one inside the Soviet Union since it appealed to a feeling later described as
‘Soviet patriotism’ involving a sense of pride at the fact that the Soviet Union
was the only country where the ‘Red’ revolution had triumphed and asserted
itself in the face of an entire world of enemies. In terms of the country’s foreign
policy, the new right-wing line led to a whole series of tactical alliances with
reformist trade unions and workers’ parties. The earliest example of this devel-
opment was the formation of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee in
April 1925. Others include the cooperation between the German Communist
Party and Social Democrat Party at the time of the 1926 referendum calling for
the princes of the realm to be dispossessed. Neither kind of proletarian joint
action achieved what it set out to do, but this did not help the left-wing element
in the Soviet Communist Party in its struggle with the political right.
In the spring of 1926 Zinoviev and Kamenev made the serious mistake of
allying themselves with Trotsky, a move that merely served to precipitate their
own downfall. Trotsky was removed from the Politburo in October 1926, and
at the same time Zinoviev was replaced by Bukharin as secretary general of the
Comintern. By November 1927 both men had been expelled from the party,
with Kamenev following suit at the Fifteenth Party Conference of the Soviet
Communist Party a month later. The opposition was now split. Zinoviev and
Kamenev recanted, allowing them to be readmitted to the party in 1928,
whereas Trotsky refused to defend himself and in December 1927 was exiled to
Alma Ata in Kazakhstan before being deported from the Soviet Union in
January 1929, marking the start of an eleven-year exile that ended with his
murder by an agent of the Soviet secret police in Mexico on 21 August 1940.
Stalin’s foreign policy suffered two serious setbacks in 1927. In May Great
Britain broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union after a search of
the Soviet Trade Mission revealed incriminating evidence relating to propa-
ganda and other subversive activities. (Relations were resumed in 1929 under
the new Labour administration.) And Soviet Russia’s policy towards China, for
which Stalin had been mainly responsible since 1924, took a catastrophic turn.
Since 1923 the Bolsheviks had been urging the Chinese Communist Party to
involve itself in the civil war that had been going on since 1916, but only in
close cooperation with the nationalist Kuomintang under Sun Yat-sen.
Following Sun Yat-sen’s death in March 1925, Chiang Kai-shek began his
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 387

inexorable rise to power and in 1926 embarked on a campaign of systemati-

cally excluding and persecuting the Communists in his country.
The bloody climax of this development came in April 1927 with the
Shanghai Massacre. The city had been taken by Kuomintang troops only the
previous month after a Communist uprising against the local military
commander. Immediately after his entry into the city, Chiang Kai-shek ordered
all the Communists in Shanghai and Nanking who had not fled to be executed.
A further workers’ uprising was bloodily suppressed, an alternative govern-
ment to the left-wing Kuomintang government in Wuhan was set up in
Nanking, and relations with the Soviet Union were broken off.
At the behest of both the Comintern and Stalin, the Chinese Communists
responded with a series of putsch-like demonstrations, the last of which was
a workers’ uprising in Canton that was suppressed in December 1927 with the
same brutality as that already witnessed in Shanghai. The failure of the Chinese
Communist Party was also a personal failure for Stalin. It was from this debacle
that the young Mao Zedong – a peasant’s son who had trained as a librarian and
who, like all early Chinese Communists, was influenced by the anti-imperialist
movement of 4 May 1919 – drew lessons of his own. As early as 1925 he had
already come to believe that the Communists would come to power in China
only if they revolutionized the peasants. Two years later he urged the Communist
Party to create its own fighting force and began to establish a Communist order,
first in the Jinggang Mountains and then, after he was driven back there, on the
border between the provinces of Jiangxi and Fujian in south-west China. China’s
first Communist state was created here in November 1931, the Soviet Republic
of Jiangxi, with Mao as its head of state.
Once the left wing of the party had been destroyed, Stalin’s alliance with the
right had served its purpose, and by the end of 1927 there were signs that the
Communist Party’s secretary general was moving to the left. One of the factors
that triggered this shift was the poor harvest of 1927, when yields fell far short
of the overoptimistic expectations: cereal sales on the Soviet domestic market,
for example, were a quarter lower than the previous year. In any case, most of
the smaller farmers were producing only enough for their own use, while the
kulaks, exploiting their market power to the full, demanded prices beyond the
reach of the bulk of the population, and so the Central Committee of the Soviet
Communist Party decided in December 1927 to take exceptional, if temporary,
steps to deal with the kulaks in an attempt to improve supply.
In the middle of February 1928 Stalin wrote to the Communist Party to
explain that the kulaks would now be placed under greater pressure to ship
more wheat to the towns and cities. Moreover, Stalin’s claim that the peasants
were hoarding agricultural produce was undoubtedly true. In short, his letter
marked a radical rejection of Bukharin’s policy of adding to the wealth of the
villages, a policy vehemently criticized by the left. Clearly Stalin was deter-
mined to break with Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky. His personal desire to
388 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

increase his own power and his fear of a nationwide famine were inextricably
intertwined in his change of political direction at the beginning of 1928.
Practical measures designed to stop the peasants from hoarding kulak food
supplies and sell them on the open market were agreed to at the plenary session
of the Central Committee and Central Control Committee of the Soviet
Communist Party in early April 1928. Shortly afterwards Stalin informed the
Central Committee that he was striving to achieve far more than an end to the
present crisis and wanted a rapid collectivization of agriculture. A further
announcement followed in May: Stalin wanted the rate of industrialization to
be speeded up, especially in heavy industry. In the absence of any other sources,
the money needed for such investment could come only from the kulaks. For
right-wing Bolsheviks there was no longer any doubt that if Stalin got his way,
then the days of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, with its calculated protection of
private property, were numbered, which in turn meant that they too would
soon be ousted from power.
This move against right-wing elements in the Soviet Communist Party
demanded a parallel action on an international scale. At the ninth plenary
session of ECCI in February 1928 the relevant guidelines were put in place with
the announcement that the Social Democrats and reformist trade unions were
henceforth to be regarded as the Communists’ principal enemies. The Sixth
World Congress of the Comintern, which was held in Moscow between 17 July
and 1 September 1928, was given over in its entirety to the implementation of
the new left-wing course of action, a course soon described by its critics as
‘ultra-left’.
There is a certain irony in the fact that it was the right-wing secretary
general of the Communist International, Nikolai Bukharin, who was obliged to
shore up the radical shift to the left by means of a series of theoretical
pronouncements. According to Bukharin, a new historical period had begun
in international post-war developments. The period of an acute revolutionary
crisis that had lasted from the spring of 1917 to the autumn of 1923 had been
followed by one when the capitalist system was partially stabilized, but that
period was now over. The third period was that of capitalist reconstruction,
when production forces outstripped their pre-war values, but when forces
hostile to capitalism also began to grow in strength.
In this context Bukharin drew attention to the great economic progress that
had been made in the Soviet Union as well as to the Chinese revolution and the
unrest in India. The contradictions inherent in capitalism were said to be
growing more and more acute and at the same time the danger of war was
allegedly increasing. The Comintern must take a stand here:

And when the hour approaches in which the flags of imperialism are raised in
war, our Communist International, together with all our parties and the
countless masses of workers throughout the world, will speak their weighty
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 389

word. This word will be our cue for civil war, for our life-and-death battle with
imperialism, a cry of victory on the part of the Communist International.113

The resolutions passed by the Sixth World Congress were fully in keeping with
Stalin’s wishes. In one resolution on the international situation and the chal-
lenges facing the Communist International, it was said that the leaders of the
state and of the employers’ organizations were ‘in a process of growing closer
together’ with the heads of the workers’ organizations under Social Democrat
control:

This process whereby the heads of the workers’ bureaucracy are becoming
increasingly bourgeois is being consciously supported and encouraged by
the Social Democrats. [. . .] Throughout the whole of the recent period the
Social Democrats have, as the bourgeois workers’ party, played the role of
the bourgeoisie’s final reserve. [. . .] The ideology of class collaboration,
which is the official ideology of Social Democracy, has many points in
common with the ideology of Fascism. Embryonic forms of the sort of
Fascist methods that are employed against the revolutionary workers’
movement may be found in the practices of many Social Democrat parties
as well as in the bureaucratic practices of reformist trade unions.114

The suggestion that Fascism and Social Democracy were ideologically closely
related was not new, for as early as January 1924 Zinoviev had called Social
Democracy a ‘wing of Fascism’, and in the September of that year Stalin had
insisted that Social Democracy and Fascism were ‘not opposites but twins’. In
the summer of 1928 Stalin had a second reason for declaring war on the
reformists: not only did he have to contend with the battle between the
opposing wings of the Soviet Communist Party, but the formation of a grand
coalition under Hermann Müller in Berlin meant that the most western and
most Francophile German party had come to power in the form of the Social
Democrats. Stalin felt that any rapprochement between France and Germany
was dangerous because in his eyes France was still the most anti-Bolshevik
country in the world. Nor could Moscow pin its hopes on Great Britain now
that the trade unions and the Labour Party had clearly shifted to the right in
the wake of the failure of the general strike in May 1926. If the Sixth World
Congress of the Communist International invoked the danger of an ‘imperi-
alist war’ with the Soviet Union, this was not, however, the result of a serious
analysis of the international situation but the product of a strategic calculation:
the Communist parties of the entire world were obliged to have recourse to a
bogeyman that reflected the struggle with the right within the Comintern’s
party leadership.
It was above all the German Communist Party that was the target of these
criticisms: it had the largest membership and the greatest following among the
390 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

electorate of any Communist party outside the Soviet Union. After 1924 all
Communist parties had had to toe a more Bolshevik line and model them-
selves ideologically, politically and organizationally on the Soviet Communist
Party, including the formation of subversive, military underground organiza-
tions that were centrally controlled from Moscow. But ECCI was rarely satis-
fied with the practical results of this process, and this was true even in the case
of the German Communist Party. First ‘right-wing’ deviations from the official
line had to be combated, but then, following the rift between Stalin and
the Zinoviev–Kamenev faction, it was ‘left-wing’ aberrations that needed to be
dealt with, before the shift in the Soviet Union in the direction of the ultra-left
meant that it was again the ‘right wing’ that had to be resisted. In October 1928
Stalin took steps to ensure that Ernst Thälmann was reinstated as party
chairman, a post he had forfeited following his involvement in an embezzle-
ment affair within the party. Under Thälmann, the party continued on its
journey down the road of greater Stalinization, and from 1929 onwards no
party was as dogged and as spiteful in combating ‘social Fascism’ as the German
Communist Party.
Toeing the new ultra-left party line did little to help Bukharin, who
committed the twofold failing of siding with the left-wing Kamenev in his
battle with Stalin and of publicly criticizing the secretary general of the Soviet
Communist Party, thereby unwittingly precipitating his own downfall. In July
1929 he was replaced as secretary general of ECCI by Dmitry Manuilsky, a
party official who was blindly devoted to Stalin. Shortly beforehand, one of
Bukharin’s two most important comrades-in-arms had lost his position, when
Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik replaced Tomsky as leader of the Soviet trade
unions in early June. The last member of the right-wing troika to be ousted was
Rykov, who in January 1930 was replaced as chairman of the Council of People’s
Commissars by Vyacheslav Molotov. Bukharin and Tomsky were expelled
from the Politburo in November 1929, Rykov at the end of 1930. Rykov and
Tomsky confessed their ‘mistakes’ at the Sixteenth Party Conference in the
summer of 1930, while Bukharin expressed his remorse at the Seventeenth
Party Conference in February 1932. At least for the present, they had ceased to
represent a threat to Stalin.
By the end of 1929 Stalin’s position seemed unassailable now that he had
successively stripped each of his rivals of power, and on 21 December he cele-
brated his fiftieth birthday with a degree of pomp and circumstance that turned
this day into an early example of the cult of his personality. Throughout the
Soviet Union he was hailed as vozhd, or ‘leader’, and as the ‘Lenin of our day’.
Statues of him were erected in public places, while busts appeared inside
town halls; his image was displayed in every town and city and even in many
villages, invariably alongside that of Lenin, who in the wake of his death had
become the leading cult figure in the country. His breach with the right had
consolidated his position in the Politburo, allowing him to devote himself with
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 391

increased vigour to his great goal, which was to destroy the New Economic
Policy by means of a second revolution even more radical than Lenin’s.
The preconditions for this large-scale transformation were already encap-
sulated in the First Five-Year Plan. According to its draft, which had been
submitted by the State Planning Commission in March 1929 on the basis of the
relevant resolution from the Fifteenth Party Conference in December 1927,
gross industrial production was to rise by at least 135 per cent within a five-
year period. If conditions were favourable and there was a good harvest in each
of the five years covered by the plan, this figure might even rise to 180 per cent.
But the country’s political leaders decided to commit themselves to the opti-
mistic higher alternative as the aim of their programme of industrialization,
and it was this figure that was enshrined in the First Five-Year Plan that was
ratified by the Fifth Soviet Congress in May 1929. During the summer it was
announced that the whole project should be completed within four, not five,
years. At the same time the target figures were raised still further in certain
areas of heavy industry, shifting industrial policy even further away from
consumer goods and towards investment. When the favourable conditions in
the agricultural market failed to materialize, the plan was not revised. Instead,
pressure on producers was increased in an attempt to oblige them to meet the
requirements of the plan.
At the plenary session of the Central Committee in July 1928 Stalin had not
yet been able to force through his new plans for agriculture and industry in the
face of opposition from Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov. But by the winter of
1928/9 his battle with the kulaks and his struggle to bring about the collectivi-
zation of agriculture had assumed a new quality as resistance from the kulaks
in the form of local uprisings, violations of the law and even the murder of
government officials was greeted by extreme reprisals by the state, including
the security services and the Communist Party. The authorities seized crops,
prompting the farmers to respond by destroying wheat and feeding meal to
their pigs. On the middle section of the Volga the peasants rose up in huge
numbers.
Even before the Soviet Union had begun its policy of buying up grain
supplies in the summer of 1929, large areas of the country were already in the
grip of a crisis tantamount to a civil war and recalling the ‘War Communism’
of the years before 1921. Stalin signalled the start of his offensive against the
kulaks on 27 December 1929. His aim, he declared, was ‘to smash the kulaks,
eliminate them as a class. [. . .] To launch an offensive against the kulaks means
that we must prepare for it and then strike at the kulaks, strike so hard as to
prevent them from rising to their feet again. That is what we Bolsheviks call a
real offensive.’115
It is reckoned that there were between 1.5 and two million kulaks in 1929,
while the farmers operating medium-sized farms numbered between fifteen
and eighteen million. The number of smallholders, or muzhiks, working with
392 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

wooden ploughs, was between five and eight million. The total of Russian peas-
ants was therefore between twenty-five and twenty-eight million. Statistically
speaking, collectivization was a complete success. Between October 1929 and
the end of January 1930, the number of collective farms rose from 4.1 per cent
of all farms to 21 per cent, and by 10 March 1930 that figure had risen to 58 per
cent. But the methods used to nationalize agricultural concerns were brutal.
‘Kulak families were dispossessed and resettled,’ writes the German historian
Helmut Altrichter:

The farmers killed off their own cattle before joining the newly founded
collective farms, or kolkhozy. Wave after wave of party and soviet officials,
militia, brigades of urban industrial workers and groups of the Communist
Youth Movement, Komsomol, swept through the villages in their attempt to
accelerate the process of collectivization. Village assemblies had to pass the
relevant resolutions and anyone who spoke out against them was regarded
as a kulak or kulak labourer. The activists became intoxicated by their own
success, and the government did nothing to restrain them.116

In early March 1930 the unexpectedly vociferous protests by the farmers forced
Stalin to condemn a number of illegal excesses on the part of his agents and to
order a halt to the violence against the muzhiks. In the wake of this announce-
ment, many of the new kolkhozy were disbanded, and the collectives’ share of
the market fell from 58 per cent to 21 per cent between March and September
1930. Mass demonstrations followed in the western half of the Ukraine, the
Central Black Earth Region, the northern Caucasus and Kazakhstan, leading
in turn to a return to the policy of collectivization and to a rise in the number
of kolkhozy: by 1931 they made up more than half of all the farms in the country
and by 1934 they accounted for around three-quarters of all farms.
Stalin had evidently never asked himself the question of what he should do
with the dispossessed kulaks who, together with their families, numbered
between eight and ten million. During the winter of 1929/30 the Secret Police,
or GPU, divided the kulaks into three categories: those who had been involved
in counterrevolutionary activities were arrested and deported to labour camps
or, if they resisted, were liquidated on the spot; a second group consisted of
farmers who, although opposed to the regime, had not been engaged in any
overtly counterrevolutionary activities but who were arrested and together
with their families deported to remote parts of Siberia; and, thirdly, there were
kulaks loyal to the government who were resettled away from the collective
farms and set to work on improvement schemes.
By the summer of 1930 the GPU had built up an extensive network of
camps, chiefly on the Solovetsky Islands off the Karelian coast and stretching
as far north as Archangelsk. More than 80,000 prisoners were forced to work
on the Stalin Canal linking the White Sea and the Baltic as well as on roads and
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 393

railways. Other tasks included peat-digging and wood-cutting, while 15,000

prisoners from the Far Eastern camps built the railway line to Boguchachinsk.
The 25,000 prisoners in the Vishera group of camps had the task of constructing
the large chemical works at Berezniki in the Urals. The system of penal colo-
nies described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ was
already taking shape at this time. Kulaks in the second category had to settle in
uninhabited areas of Siberia, where the land needed to be improved but where
the deported farmers were generally sent without provisions or tools. The
homes intended for them had been built in only the rarest cases, although
farmers forced to resettle in the vicinity of major building sites had at least a
chance of finding accommodation in primitive barracks.
By the start of 1934 at least half a million men, women and children were
imprisoned in Soviet concentration camps and by 1935 that figure had risen to
almost 790,000. Not included in these figures are the 280,000 prisoners in
labour camps for criminals serving sentences of up to three years and a further
160,000 prison inmates, most of whom were farmers. The number of people
who between 1930 and 1932 lost their lives as a result of being deported as part
of the programme to eliminate kulaks as a class is reckoned by the French
historian Nicolas Werth to have been around 300,000.117
The total number of kulaks who were executed is unknown. According to
the records of the GPU, in 1930 alone 20,200 people were sentenced to death
by the secret police’s special courts. A secret report dated 15 February 1930
recorded 65,000 deaths. Not all the victims were kulaks, of course, but included
other ‘alien elements’ such as police officers from the old regime, ‘White
officers’, priests, nuns, peasants who also worked as craftsmen, former traders
and members of the ‘village intelligentsia’. Along the central section of the
Volga and also in the Ukraine and Caucasus, rebellious peasants were dealt
with by units of the Red Army using artillery and poison gas. Tens of thou-
sands of men, women and children were killed in this way in the Caucasus in
1930.
A direct consequence of the collectivization of agriculture was the great
famine of 1932/3. Harvest yields had fallen dramatically since 1928, not least as
a result of the brutal intervention of the regime and of resistance to it, and the
lack of food was made worse by the export of grain to the ‘capitalist’ West. (In
1933, 1,800 million kilos of wheat were lost in this way.) Even when the famine
was at its worst, the Soviet leaders continued their policy of exporting grain to
the West, partly in order to obtain the foreign currency needed to mechanize
agriculture and especially to buy tractors.
The principal victims of the famine were the dispossessed peasants in the
richer agricultural regions such as the Ukraine and northern Caucasus. In a
number of these areas both the GPU and foreign diplomats reported cases of
cannibalism in 1933. As far as possible, the proletarian population of the cities
who continued to be the Bolsheviks’ main support still received food supplies,
394 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

but peasants who sought refuge there were left empty-handed, and in December
1932 the government reintroduced the internal passes that had last existed
under Pyotr Arkadevich Stolypin in the decade before the First World War.
The peasants from the kolkhozy were not granted such permits but remained
tied to their farms. Anyone in the towns and cities who was found not to have
an internal pass was deported. In Moscow alone 300,000 individuals were
affected by such measures in 1933.
Western and, since 1991, Ukrainian historians have occasionally claimed
that the famine was a means that Stalin deliberately used to break the resistance
of the peasants and destroy Ukrainian nationalism, but this is untrue. Rather, it
was a consequence of the collectivization of agriculture and of enforced indus-
trialization for which he was willing to pay the price: his plans could simply not
have been realized without the forced labour of former peasants. Werth believes
that more than six million men, women and children died during the great
famine of 1932/3. Of these, four million came from the Ukraine, the region with
the highest density of kulaks. There were also a million deaths in Kazakhstan,
most of them nomads who were forced to lead sedentary lives when their cattle
were seized. A further million deaths occurred in the northern Caucasus and
Central Black Earth Region.
The way in which collectivization was implemented caused lasting damage
to Soviet agriculture. In 1933 the grain harvest fell 5 million tonnes short of its
1928 figure, and a quarter of a century was to pass before the keeping of live-
stock returned to the level seen in 1928. Not until the 1950s did the figures for
per capita agricultural production reach the level found before collectivization.
If agriculture began to recover after 1933, this was due to far-reaching conces-
sions to the farmers. Stalin broke up most of the state-owned sovkhozy and
transferred their land to the kolkhozy. It was entirely Stalin’s intention that
there should be rich and poor kolkhozy and rich and poor peasants. The
kolzhozy did not become Communist communities but cooperatives in which
the peasants were able to farm a small scrap of land covering perhaps 5 per cent
of the arable area, and they could also keep a few head of cattle. Until well into
the 1950s these priusadebnyj učastok provided more than 70 per cent of pota-
toes, around 70 per cent of milk and 90 per cent of eggs. If the farmers had been
dependent exclusively on the money they received from the kolkhozy, they
would never have survived. It was the priusadebnyj učastok that ensured their
survival.
The regime also had to lower its expectations in the field of industrializa-
tion when the overambitious aims of the First Five-Year Plan proved unachiev-
able. In 1930 Stalin had demanded that coal and steel production be increased
by around a half within the space of a year, but, as the secretary general of the
Soviet Communist Party was obliged to concede in 1931, the increase had been
in the order of between 6 per cent and 10 per cent. Nor was the process of
industrialization in any way helped by the fact that in 1928 the regime began to
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 395

wage war on ‘bourgeois specialists’, or spetzys. This was a development that was
triggered by the discovery of a case of alleged ‘industrial sabotage’ in a concern
belonging to the Donugul Trust in the Shakhty region, a coalmining area in the
Donets Basin. A show trial resulted in death sentences being handed down to
eleven of the fifty-three accused, who were mostly engineers and company
directors. Five of them were executed.
There followed further arrests of the leaders of industry, chiefly in the metal
industry, all of whom had to serve out their sentences on building sites and in
businesses that were a part of the First Five-Year Plan. In August and September
1930 the campaign against ‘bourgeois specialists’ also impinged on prominent
university teachers who were working in ministries, the state bank and Gosplan.
One of them was Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kondratiev, the internationally respected
discoverer of ‘long waves’ – ‘Kondratiev waves’ – in economic cycles and until
1928 head of the Economic Institute of the People’s Commissariat. The fact that he
credited capitalism with the ability to recover from a cyclical crisis similar to the
one that occurred in 1929 made him a dangerous deviant in the eyes of orthodox
Bolsheviks. After eight years in solitary confinement he was sentenced to death by
a military tribunal on 17 September 1938 and executed later that same day.
Although the results of the First Five-Year Plan fell far short of the goals
that Stalin had set, a Second Five-Year Plan was agreed in 1933. In 1938 its
rather more modest goals were declared to have been met and a Third Five-
Year Plan was announced. The reliability of Soviet data relating to the success
of industrialization is contested. It is claimed, for example, that between 1928
and 1940 industrial production rose from 100 per cent to 587 per cent, whereas
western estimates place the second figure at between 250 per cent and 450 per
cent. Purely quantitatively, the Soviet Union overtook Germany, Great Britain
and France in terms of its volume of industrial production and was second
only to the United States. But the increase relates only to a growth in volume:
as for productivity, the Soviet Union continued to lag far behind western indus-
trialized nations, a situation that could never be changed by the combination of
terror, force and proletarian enthusiasm that were typical of the Soviet Union
under Stalin.
Stalin explained his reasons for undertaking a second revolution designed
to transform a backward agrarian country into a developed industrialized
nation within a matter of only a few years in a remarkable speech that he deliv-
ered to an audience of business executives in Moscow on 4 February 1931:

It is sometimes asked whether it is not possible to slow down the tempo

somewhat, to put a check on the movement. No, comrades, it is not possible!
The tempo must not be reduced! On the contrary, we must increase it as
much as it is within our powers and possibilities. This is dictated to us by
our obligations to the workers and peasants of the U.S.S.R. This is dictated
to us by our obligations to the working class of the whole world.
396 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall
behind get beaten. We do not want to be beaten. [. . .] One feature of the
history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her
backwardness. [. . .] All beat her – because of her backwardness, because of
her military backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backward-
ness, agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and
could be done with impunity. [. . .]
We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must
make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.118

The political voluntarism that marked the decision to collectivize Soviet agri-
culture and embark on the First Five-Year Plan was based on a correct diag-
nosis: Russia was every bit as backward as Stalin said it was. His reference to an
external threat was an effective argument designed to win over those who were
urging a slower rate of industrialization. None of the capitalist powers had any
intention any longer of engaging in military action against the Soviet Union or
of reversing the effects of the October Revolution, but the country was threat-
ened by the most radical of all the Fascist movements, namely, German
National Socialism, and it was precisely this movement that Stalin encouraged
by urging the Communist parties of foreign countries – especially the one in
Germany – to redouble their attacks on the Social Democrats in the wake of
the shift to the ultra-left in Soviet politics.
And there were other ways, too, in which Stalin was undermining his
own aims: his campaign against ‘bourgeois experts’, for example, meant that his
plan for industrial growth lacked any rational, scientific basis. All that remained
was pure will and brute force, resulting in the loss of countless human lives and
the squandering of material resources on the grandest scale. When, in June
1931, Stalin declared that his war on ‘bourgeois experts’ was over, the key
economic posts were already in the hands of Bolsheviks whom he felt he could
trust.
At the beginning of 1926, two years before the lurch to the left, Stalin had
argued that ‘the main task of the bourgeois revolution consists in seizing power
and making it conform to the already existing bourgeois economy, whereas the
main task of the proletarian revolution consists, after seizing power, in building
a new, socialist economy’.119 This amounted to a complete reversal of Marx’s
theory of the relationship between base and superstructure, but it also implied
something else, namely, a further increase in the dialectics of backwardness
and radicality, a debate to which the young Marx had already contributed in
his 1843 introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which he
had invited Germany to face up to the challenge of carrying out the most
radical of all revolutions: the proletarian revolution.
Lenin had ascribed this very task to backward Russia but had also argued
that the proletarian revolution would be completed only in the wake of
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 397

successful revolutions in developed capitalist countries. Although Stalin did

not abandon the idea of world revolution when proclaiming his doctrine of
‘building socialism in one country’, he did not think that the working class and
Communist parties in the West were capable on their own of helping the prole-
tariat to triumph, nor did he regard such revolutions as the necessary precon-
dition for building socialism in the Soviet Union. The more powerful the Soviet
Union became, the more it could bend other, non-Russian Communist parties
to its will and in that way influence the policies of other countries where those
parties were active. The world revolution could wait because it was worth
striving for only if it bore the hallmarks of the Soviet Union. As Stalin put it in
1926, the aim was now

the utilisation of the rule of the proletariat for the suppression of the
exploiters, for the defence of the country, for the consolidation of the ties
with the proletarians of other lands, and for the development and victory of
the revolution in all countries.120

As for the matter of political voluntarism, Stalin and Lenin were kindred spirits,
both men believing that socialism could and, indeed, must address the whole
person if it was to produce a new, socialist man or woman. This totalitarian
claim demanded a totalitarian system. Lenin had laid the foundations for this
development, and Stalin proceeded to build on them. His regime amounted to
a permanent state of civil war, a dictatorship based on the mobilization of the
masses carried out by a class of professional revolutionaries for whom terror
was second nature. Under Lenin, it had still been possible to voice dissent
within the collective leadership of the Communist Party, but this possibility
was much reduced under Stalin. If need be, it was he who embodied the collec-
tive will of the party. What he had achieved in this respect during the decade
after Lenin’s death was impressive but by no means everything that it was
possible to accomplish from such a position of power.
To create the new Soviet man and woman required a cultural revolution
which in the words of the historian Jörg Baberowski was no mere episode in
Soviet history but the ‘very hallmark of Stalinism’. The agents of the socialist
counterrevolution were above all men and, to a lesser extent, women eager to
climb the social ladder, people who had entered their professions through
‘workers’ faculties’ that had previously been the preserve of ‘bourgeois’
academics. All who were reckoned to be ‘socially alien elements’ no longer had
any access to higher forms of education. The ‘new man’ had to keep proving his
credentials by denouncing the alleged enemies of socialism, including bour-
geois teachers. He needed an enemy to understand what exactly constituted
him as the new socialist man. He had to satisfy a new, socialist morality in
order to evolve into an intellectually and physically perfect human being of a
kind that had never existed in any class-based society.121
398 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The struggle to create the new Soviet man implied the defeat of the older
type of Russian who indulged his immoderate love of vodka and the opium of
traditional religion. Hand in hand with the collectivization of agriculture went
the closure of countless churches, leading in turn to resistance within the
villages affected. Church bells were melted down and used in industry. Nowhere
was the clash between the new quasi-religion of a socialist utopia and recalci-
trant reality as blatant as in the Islamic societies in the central Asian republics
on the periphery of the Soviet Union. Sharia law was abandoned here in 1927.
Gangs of Komsomol youths stripped women of their veils, while women who
had voluntarily cast aside the veil and joined the Communist Party had to
contend with the embittered opposition of devout Muslims. In Uzbekistan
some 400 women were killed between the spring of 1929 and the spring of
1930. A far greater number of these women were mutilated and raped by tradi-
tionalists or subjected to collective punishments or banished from their village
communities.
The Bolsheviks responded to violent resistance with increasingly repressive
measures, as Baberowski explains:

They sent mobile courts to the regions in questions, executed men who had
killed or raped women and staged show trials to demonstrate to the popula-
tion how the regime dealt with counterrevolutionaries and class enemies.
For the Bolsheviks, these women had not been murdered but had fallen in
battle with the counterrevolution.122

While the regime was inflicting a reign of terror on kulaks and other counter-
revolutionaries, the Soviet Communist Party was waging an internal war against
unreliable elements within its own ranks. In April 1929 the Central Committee
ordered a purge of the party with the aim of ridding the socialist offensive of
‘capitalist’ and ‘petit bourgeois’ acts of sabotage. Around 11 per cent of members
and candidates were expelled from the party, most of them on account of minor
infringements of party discipline, ‘un-socialist behaviour’ and the careless
execution of directives. At the end of 1930 Stalin once again found himself
facing a challenge from a right-wing group within the party leadership. At its
head were two officials who had previously supported the secretary general in
his battle with the right: they were the chairman of the Council of People’s
Commissars of the Russian Federated Soviet Republic, Sergei Ivanovich Syrtsov,
who had the temerity to mock a showcase tractor factory near Stalingrad as a
‘Potemkin village’ and to describe the alleged breakthrough in the field of indus-
trialization as ‘eyewash’; and the secretary of the Transcaucasian Communist
Party, Vissarion Vissarionovich Laminadze, who criticized the regime for its
‘seigneurial and feudal’ treatment of the peasants.123
Even worse was the criticism levelled at the regime by the district secretary
of the Moscow party, Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin, in 1932. Together with other
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 399

like-minded individuals, he drew up a programme in which he described Stalin

as ‘the evil spirit of the Russian revolution’, a man whose thirst for revenge and
desire for power had driven the regime to the edge of the abyss.124 Stalin was
beside himself with fury and in the autumn of 1932 demanded that Ryutin be
executed but was unable to persuade the Politburo to heed his request. The
majority of its members, including the Leningrad party secretary, Sergei Kirov,
were willing only to expel Ryutin from the party and banish him from the
capital. Clearly criticism of Stalin’s policies and leadership style was far more
widespread within the Communist Party than even well-informed observers
were aware. A second purge was agreed to in early January 1933 and led to the
expulsion of a further 17 per cent of party members and candidates, and yet
not even this was capable of satisfying Stalin’s need to exercise total control.
The fact that he could rely on only a minority of Politburo members associated
with Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich served merely to spur him on
yet further: his power was still not absolute.
The parties that made up the Comintern knew next to nothing about the
differences of opinion within the Soviet Communist Party’s leadership. Nowhere
did Stalin’s Soviet Union have such ardent defenders as in the Communist
parties in the West. The more that social hardship grew in capitalist countries
after 1929, the brighter was the light put forth by the country that had cast aside
capitalism in revolutionary fashion. All that the Soviet Union did seemed exem-
plary not only in the eyes of the leaders of the world’s Communist parties but
even in those of the broad mass of their proletarian supporters. This was true of
the books, plays and films that emanated from the home of socialism, and it was
also true of the methods used to defeat the class enemy. ‘Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!’
was the banner headline of Die rote Fahne in Berlin on 25 November 1930.
Although not an invitation to German Communists, it was said to be ‘the voice
of the people in the factories’ of Berlin responding to the show trial in Moscow
against the ‘party of industry’, an alleged group of saboteurs who according to
the prosecution were acting on behalf of the French chief of the general staff and
of the French government and preparing for a war of intervention against the
Soviet Union. Yet it was German voices that the official newspaper of the
German Communist Party invoked in the form of a questionnaire that left its
readers in no doubt that in the event of a Communist overthrow in Germany the
German counterrevolutionaries would ‘hear Russian spoken’.125
But there was also sympathy for the Soviet Union outside the confines of the
international Communist parties. At the Congress of the International
Federation for Human Rights in Paris in 1927 the movement’s president, Victor
Basch, who had once defended Alfred Dreyfus, invited all those who were
present not to fear the word ‘revolution’, adding, to sustained applause, ‘And let
us be clear in our own minds that every revolution must necessarily involve
a temporary interruption of legality.’126 According to Basch, the October
Revolution in Russia was a revolution mounted by those classes that had not
400 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

profited from the bourgeois revolution. From this point of view, events that
were currently unfolding in the Soviet Union were comparable to the Reign of
Terror of the French Revolution and, as such, a transitional stage on the road to
a new legality. Many on the French left seemed unconcerned by the fact that the
Russian ‘1793’ was lasting far longer than its French counterpart.
Not even visits to Russia could be counted upon to inspire a more sober
insight into the reality of the situation. When, in September 1933, Édouard
Herriot, the leader of the French Radicals, returned from a tour of the Ukraine
that had been carefully planned and stage-managed by the local authorities, he
noted how impressed he had been at all that his hosts had permitted him to see:

I crossed the Ukraine. So! I assure you that it looked like a garden in full yield.
You tell me that this land is reputed to be going through a depression right
now? I cannot speak of what I have not seen. And heaven knows, I made
them take me to afflicted areas. All I witnessed, however, was prosperity.127

A number of British Fabians who visited Soviet Russia during the early 1930s
returned home with even more favourable impressions than those reported by
Herriot. Two of them, Bernard Shaw in 1932 and H. G. Wells in 1934, even had
the opportunity to speak at length with Stalin and were impressed by his
candour and shrewdness. Shaw reported afterwards that he had not seen a
single malnourished person in the Soviet Union. Sidney and Beatrice Webb,
both of them already in their seventies, visited the country in 1932 and wrote
of their experiences in Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, published in
1935, insisting that the Soviet Communist Party was a democratic mouthpiece
of the Russian people and that Stalin had ‘not even the extensive power which
the Congress of the United States has temporarily conferred upon President
Roosevelt. He is only the General Secretary of the Party.’128 The picture of the
Soviet Union promoted by the Webbs was that of a democracy of cooperative
producers who had rid themselves of large-scale landownership and capitalism
and were creating a new society and a new type of human being in the name of
science. In later editions of their book, the authors even removed the question
mark after their subtitle: A New Civilisation.
The conservatives and liberals from Churchill to Emil Ludwig who had
been impressed by Fascist Italy and its leader had fallen victim to the same
deceit as the British and French left following brief visits to the Soviet Union,
where they found confirmation of what they wanted to believe, cutting them-
selves off from all that might have shaken their preconceived ideas.

Boom, Crisis and Depression: The United States 1928–33

Nowhere in the Western world was there so little enthusiasm for ‘building
socialism in one country’ as in the United States of America, a country described
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 401

by the German economist Werner Sombart in 1906 as ‘the Canaan of capitalism,

the land of promise’.129 And yet even here there were a number of intellectuals in
the ‘progressive’ tradition who gazed at the Soviet Union’s achievements with
respect and admiration. (Such sentiments were shared, of course, by the regis-
tered members of the Communist Party, who in 1929 numbered under 10,000.)
The most prominent of these American intellectuals was the philosopher
John Dewey, who visited the Soviet Union in 1928 and took a particular interest
in the country’s schools. Writing in New Republic in November 1928 he
described a land ‘freed from the load of subjection to the past’ and seemingly
‘charged with the ardor of creating a new world’.130 In May 1930 the political
scientist Frederick L. Schuman argued in the pages of the same periodical that
the Soviet Union would achieve not Marxist but ‘progressive’ ideals and insisted
that Stalin’s regime was an administrative agency through which economic
chaos and exploitation would be replaced by ‘intelligently directed planning
and cooperation’.131 Well-known writers like John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser
and Upton Sinclair went even further. All three had been involved in founding
the Workers’ Cultural Federation in May 1931, a crypto-Communist Party
initiative; and all three served as honorary presidents of what in the event was
to prove a short-lived organization.
Fascist Italy had far more sympathizers in the United States than Soviet
Russia. The Fascist League of North America drew its members from the most
radical followers of Mussolini in ‘Little Italy’ – those districts in the major towns
and cities where Italian immigrants lived. Admittedly, it attracted only a tiny
minority – at its inaugural rally on Staten Island on Independence Day in 1928,
350 Fascists faced a crowd of some 1,000 anti-Fascists, and the organization was
disbanded at the end of 1929 in the wake of internal wrangling – but in the
higher echelons of American society and even among intellectuals, Mussolini
was the man who had rescued Italy from chaos and Communism and who was
held in correspondingly high regard. In 1924, Irving Babbitt, a leading repre-
sentative of the ‘New Humanists’ who were critical of democracy and of compe-
tition, wrote that ‘we may esteem ourselves fortunate if we get the American
equivalent of a Mussolini; he may be needed to save us from the equivalent of a
Lenin’.132
Like the majority of right-wing intellectuals, the American administrations
of Harding and Coolidge turned a blind eye to the terror of the Italian Fascists,
and at no point were relations between Italy and the United States as cordial as
they were under Hoover between 1929 and 1933. Hoover’s secretary of state,
Henry L. Stimson, later recalled that in Mussolini he and his president had
found a ‘sound and useful leader, no more aggressive in his nationalism than
many a democratic statesman’.133
Herbert Hoover had been secretary of commerce since 1921. In 1928, when
Coolidge decided not to stand for re-election, Hoover was selected as the
Republican presidential candidate. His Democrat rival was the governor of
402 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

New York, Alfred (‘Al’) E. Smith, a Catholic and an emphatic opponent of

prohibition. The turnout in the election was barely 57 per cent. Hoover won a
resounding victory with 58.2 per cent of the vote, as compared to Smith’s 40.7
per cent. Hoover had 444 delegates, Smith eighty-seven. Among the other
candidates, the Socialist Norman Thomas was the most successful, with 268,000
votes, or 0.7 per cent of the total. The Communist candidate, William Z. Foster,
had to make do with 49,000 votes (0.1 per cent). The vast majority of Americans
were happy with the existing social order and with the way in which their
country had been governed during the last eight years: no other interpretation
can be placed on such unambiguous election results. And another finding, too,
was incontestable: Protestant America still had no desire to be run by a Catholic
president.
Coolidge delivered his final State of the Union address to both houses of
Congress on 4 December 1928:

No Congress of the United States [. . .] has met with a more pleasing pros-
pect than that which appears at the present time. In the domestic field there
is tranquility and contentment, harmonious relations between management
and wage earner, freedom from industrial strife, and the highest record of
years of prosperity. In the foreign field there is peace, the good will which
comes from mutual understanding, and the knowledge that the problems
which a short time ago appeared so ominous are yielding to the touch of
manifest friendship.

The country could regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future
with optimism: ‘The main source of these unexampled blessings lies in the
integrity and character of the American people.’134
In terms of American foreign policy, the Kellogg–Briand Pact initiated by
the secretary of state Frank B. Kellogg and his French counterpart, Aristide
Briand, is a good example of the sort of policy of détente advocated by Coolidge:
an American note dated 23 June 1928 summed up the pact’s essential point,
condemning ‘recourse to war for the solution of international controversies’
and denouncing it ‘as an instrument of national policy’.135 The right of self-
defence remained unaffected by this, and there was no attempt to define the
concept of the aggressor or to regulate sanctions. None the less, the agreement,
which had been signed by fifteen states, including Germany, by the end of
August 1928 and by a further forty-eight by 1939, provided indirect legitimacy
for a war involving sanctions against an aggressor and against anyone who
disturbed the existing world order.
Within the western hemisphere, in its Central American backyard, the United
States had again been active as an interventionist force since the summer of
1926: with the help of US marines, the country was currently supporting the
conservative president of Nicaragua, Adolfo Diaz, against an uprising by the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 403

Partido Liberal and its ally, the Grupo Armado Liberal, under Augusto César
Sandino, who was later to be dubbed the ‘General de Hombres Libres’. The
fighting in Nicaragua was still continuing when the Pan-American Conference
convened in Havana in January 1928 and the United States made an important
concession to the states of Latin America, renouncing the ‘Roosevelt Corollary’ to
the Monroe Doctrine of 1904, namely, the right that the United States claimed
to intervene in Latin America as a police force if the countries there were unable
to maintain law and order and national sovereignty by themselves. This conces-
sion laid the foundations for Hoover’s ‘good neighbor policy’, a policy of main-
taining peaceful relations with Latin America to which Franklin D. Roosevelt,
too, felt committed after 1933.
The optimism that Coolidge felt as he prepared to leave office seemed to be
additionally justified by the economic figures from the boom years. Between
1925 and 1929 the number of industrial concerns rose from 184,000 to 207,000
and the value of their output from $60.8 million to $68 million. The production
index of the Federal Reserve Board rose from 100 in the years between 1923
and 1925 to 110 in July 1928 and to 126 in June 1929. Car production went up
from 4.3 million in 1926 to 5.4 million three years later. Between 12 March and
16 June 1928 the volume of trading rose from 3,875,910 to 5,052,790 shares.
Herbert Hoover was born in Iowa in 1874 and had trained as an engineer.
He was an eloquent advocate of what, in a campaign speech in New York on 22
October 1928, he described as ‘rugged individualism’. By this he meant the
essential character of the American system when compared to the European
doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. It was not in Europe but in
America, he insisted, that liberalism had demonstrated its true spirit:

We are nearer today to the ideal of the abolition of poverty and fear from
the lives of men and women than ever before in any land. And I again repeat
that the departure from our American system by injecting principles
destructive to it which our opponents propose, will jeopardize the very
liberty and freedom of our people, and will destroy equality of opportunity
not only to ourselves but to our children.136

As secretary of commerce, Hoover had promoted the concept of ‘association-

alism’ – the voluntary national amalgamation of individual branches of industry
– since he believed that this provided the means by which to increase efficiency
in both production and sales. As president, he drew on these experiences to
address the problem of agricultural overproduction by means of the Agricultural
Marketing Act of June 1929. This problem was a result of the rapid mechaniza-
tion of the agricultural sector during the 1920s. Hoover’s aim of stabilizing agri-
cultural production by means of state-funded but voluntary farming
cooperatives was far less protectionist than the idea of the state buying agricul-
tural produce, a policy twice proposed by Congress in 1926 and 1928 in the
404 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

form of the McNary-Haugen Bill but twice successfully vetoed by Coolidge.

And yet not even Hoover’s initiative in the summer of 1929 produced any real
results, and American farmers remained the biggest problem for the country’s
national economy.
By the early part of 1929 fluctuating stock market prices were a favourite topic
of conversation not only in the newspapers but also among people whose profes-
sional jobs were not primarily concerned with the economy. As John Kenneth
Galbraith observed, it was then the ‘stock market’ that ‘dominated culture’.137
There was no shortage of signs that the economy was overheating: on 14 February,
for example, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York asked for the discount rate to
be raised from 5 per cent to 6 per cent in order to rein in speculation but was
unable to persuade the Federal Reserve Board in Washington to agree. In June the
industrial share index of the New York Times rose by fifty-two points, by a further
twenty-five in July and by thirty-three in August, making a total of 110 points in
three months, going up from 339 to 449. In the whole of 1928 the increase had
been only 86.5 points. Even the Federal Reserve Board now felt that the time had
come for it to take the steps that it had refused to contemplate the previous
February, and on 9 August the discount rate was raised by one percentage point.
It was above all investment trusts that encouraged speculation on the stock
market, a form of amassing capital that had been introduced in England and
Scotland in the 1880s and in the United States only at a much later date. By early
1927 there were around 160 such trusts in America, with a further 140 being
added in the course of that year. In 1928 186 more investment funds were estab-
lished, and in 1929 a further 265. The volume of shares that they sold amounted
to $400 million in 1927, a figure which by the autumn of 1929 is reckoned to
have reached $800,000 million. In December 1928 Goldman, Sachs and
Company created the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation to specialize in the
investment business. On 26 July 1929 this last-named corporation founded its
own trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, with a capital of more than $102
million, followed on 20 August by the even bigger Blue Ridge Corporation with
$142 million. Both trusts shared a common board of directors under John
Foster Dulles, who was later the American secretary of state. Within only a few
months, therefore, Goldman Sachs had risen to the top of the American invest-
ment business.
By this date there were already serious signs that the economy was in crisis.
For years the profits of the construction industry had been falling, followed in
June by the steel industry and in October by freight-car production. The indus-
trial production index of the Federal Reserve Board fell from 126 in July to 117
in October 1929. A sober analysis indicates that a stock market crash was only
a question of time. Share prices began to fall on 21 October. By the 24th – Black
Thursday – they were plummeting at such a rate that there was already a state
of panic in New York; some speculators took their own lives. A joint declara-
tion by the biggest banks served to calm the market at least for a time.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 405

But on 29 October, Black Tuesday, the market could no longer be shored up,
and sixteen million shares were sold on the New York Stock Exchange, the
index of industrial shares falling by forty-three points, or almost 10 per cent,
thereby wiping out all the gains of the previous twelve months. Worst affected
were the investment trusts, with shares in Goldman Sachs falling from sixty to
thirty-five points. In early September Blue Ridge had stood at twenty-four
points, but on 24 October it fell to twelve and by 29 October it was trading at
only three, before recovering a little. Other trusts were completely wiped out.
In October 1929 the world entered a period of sustained and serious depres-
sion, although it was really only very much later that contemporaries became
aware of this fact – and this in spite of the global shockwaves emanating from
the crash on the New York Stock Exchange.
Many reasons have been adduced for the crisis that broke out in the autumn
of 1929 in the world’s largest economy. The historian Alan Brinkley has
adduced five reasons that strike him as particularly important. First, there was
only a weak diversification in the American economy in the 1920s, meaning
that prosperity depended on the well-being of only a handful of sectors, notably
the construction and car-making industries. The second factor in Brinkley’s
view was the way in which mass consumption lagged behind production as a
result of the extremely unequal distribution of income. Thirdly, there was the
credit structure, by which Brinkley means the fraudulent behaviour of many
who owed money to small banks as well as the irresponsibility of large banks
when lending money to their customers. Fourthly, there was the worsening
situation of the United States in international trade, which Brinkley believed
was due above all to the rationalization of industry and agriculture in Europe
and the resultant drop in imports from America. And, fifthly, there was the
international debt structure: in other words, the double problem of British,
French and Italian war debts that were owed to the United States and of the
German reparations which for their part could be paid only by means of
American loans. Brinkley also drew attention to the high American tariffs that
made it difficult for Europeans to sell their goods on the American market.138
Brinkley’s list is instructive, but we may add to it by including a number of
other factors: the investment trusts’ tendency to encourage literally bottomless
speculation; the failure of the Federal Reserve Board, which raised the discount
rate too little and too late, while at the same time not having sufficient assets to
pursue a genuine open-market policy and in that way to be able to influence
the scope for credit on the part of the credit banks; and ‘blind’ rationalization
and mechanization of industry and agriculture that failed to see market condi-
tions and as a result created overcapacity; and the lack of distance between
Republican governments and the wishes of big business in the 1920s.
Failings in America before and after the events of the autumn of 1929 are
not in themselves sufficient to explain the world economic crisis but at best
help to account for why it lasted so long. And the same is true of some of the
406 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

long-term effects of the First World War, which had severed old trade links
and created new ones, while causing some branches of industry to wither and
others to grow. Overproduction in the textile industry was largely a conse-
quence of the war, and at least in part much the same may be said of overpro-
duction in agriculture. Not only in the United States but in Canada, Argentina
and Australia, the rapid mechanization of farming – a purely technological
development – made this development come about. Agricultural prices began
to fall throughout the world in 1925 and by 1927 had caused an international
crisis in agriculture.
Like the world economic crisis that began in 1929, the agricultural crisis was
cyclical in nature. The most plausible explanation for the Great Depression is
the one proposed by the Austrian (and from 1939 American) economist Joseph
Schumpeter, who was briefly his country’s finance minister in 1919. According
to Schumpeter, it was in the autumn of 1929 that three periods of recession of
varying length coincided, namely, a Kitchin cycle, a Juglar cycle and a Kondratiev
cycle. Named after its inventor, a Kitchin cycle is a forty-month cycle that
describes the time that employers need to build up and run down their stock or,
to put it another way, it is a kind of buffer between pre-production and
processing. The Juglar cycle is an eight- to ten-year wave triggered by techno-
logical innovations in the field of consumer goods. The Juglar upturn had
started in 1925 and came to an end in 1929. According to Schumpeter, its origins
were to be found in the opening up to new classes of customers of electrical and
chemical goods and of the products of the motor industry, most notably the
motor car.139
A Kondratiev cycle describes a long wave of around sixty years, the first half
of which is given over to the upturn, the second half to the ensuing downturn,
in the economy. If we combine Kondratiev’s theory of long waves with
Schumpeter’s analysis of fluctuating lead sectors, we shall arrive at the following
sequence of cycles: the first Kondratiev cycle from 1782 to 1842 was that of the
Industrial Revolution in which the cotton industry was the lead sector, and the
second long wave from 1843 to 1897 was the cycle of iron and steel, with railway
construction as the economic motor behind the development.
The third Kondratiev cycle began around 1898 and was determined by the
new growth industries of electricity, chemistry and car manufacture. The
upturn in this cycle ended in the years before the First World War, the period
between 1914 and 1929 representing the downward turn in Kondratiev’s third
cycle, a period characterized by numerous innovations, not least those of
Juglar’s cycle. They were no longer ‘basic’ in nature, however, but constituted
merely a refinement and perfection of existing innovations. The crisis of the
early 1920s, the rapid rationalization programme and the resultant high levels
of unemployment: these were all typical manifestations of a long upturn wave
that had already passed its peak, as was the speculative overproduction that
ultimately led the New York Stock Exchange to crash in October 1929, ushering
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 407

in the downturn phase in Kondratiev’s third cycle. If we accept the theories of

Kondratiev and Schumpeter, then this account may sum up the long prehistory
of the greatest economic crisis in the history of the world.
The Great Depression affected the United States particularly badly. Between
1929 and 1932 America’s foreign trade fell from $10,000 million to $3,000
million, its gross national product from $104,000 million to $76,400 million,
dropping by a quarter in the space of only four years. Between 1930 and 1933
more than 9,000 banks ceased trading. The income of the country’s farmers
dropped by 60 per cent between 1929 and 1932. A third of all farmers lost their
land, a situation also caused by an extreme drought that lasted throughout the
1930s and turned the Great Plains between Texas and the two Dakotas into a
vast dust bowl described by John Steinbeck in his 1939 novel The Grapes of
Wrath. By 1932 at least a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, and even by
the end of the decade the number of those out of work remained above 15 per
cent. The black population of the southern states was particularly badly hit,
more than half being without work in 1932. That year there were 250,000 fewer
weddings than in 1929, and the birth rate fell from 18.8 to 17.4 per thousand.
With no prospect of earning a living, many Americans were in no position to
start and feed a family.
According to the American historian William E. Leuchtenburg, the coun-
try’s first reaction to the Great Depression was a sense of fatalism: inflationary
cycles were inevitable, the fatalists argued, and all that Americans could do was
wait for this latest disaster to end.140 But the government could not afford to
adopt such a simplistic view of the situation, and Hoover began by trying to
persuade the representatives of industry and agriculture as well as the trade
unions to agree to work together on a voluntary basis in the interests of the
country’s economic recovery. He appealed to the employers to maintain
existing production levels and not lay off any workers, while warning the trade
unions not to demand higher wages and shorter working hours. But such
appeals had no practical effect to speak of.
Hoover’s first major economic decision in the wake of the great crash was
to sign a bill introducing the highest tariffs in American history. Enacted on 17
June 1930, the Smoot–Hawley Tariffs were named after their two proponents,
the Republican senator Reed Smoot from Utah and the Republican congressman
Willis C. Hawley from Oregon. Both men were committed protectionists
whose aim was a largely autonomous national economy, an aim that they
hoped would be served by raising customs duties on seventy-five agricultural
products and on a whole series of industrial goods. The Republican majority
leader in the Senate, Jim Watson from Indiana, even claimed that once this bill
had become law, the American economy would recover within a month and
that the country would again be uniquely prosperous within a year.
Around 1,000 economists warned the president in vain that if he did not
use his veto to prevent this bill from passing into law, the countries affected by
408 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

it would retaliate by raising taxes on American exports, which in turn risked

jeopardizing the repayment of inter-Allied debts. There is no doubt that the
Smoot–Hawley Tariffs played an important role in increasing worldwide
protectionism and hence in exacerbating the world economic crisis. As early as
1931 the twin problem of inter-Allied debts and German reparations proved so
burdensome that Hoover was forced to perform a volte-face in order to safe-
guard American credits in Germany. This took the form of the Hoover
Moratorium of 20 June 1931 which proposed a twelve-month moratorium on
payments of fixed-term state debts.
There were a number of other occasions when Hoover did indeed make use
of his presidential veto. In March 1931, for example, he blocked a public job-
creation programme submitted by the Democratic senator Robert F. Wagner of
New York that would have cost $2,000 million, not including national insur-
ance. A similar fate befell two other senators in February 1932: the Republican
Robert M. La Follette, Jr, from Wisconsin and the Democrat Edward P. Costigan
from Colorado had wanted the government to grant an extra $375 million to
individual states to be used in public services.
But in the wake of the elections in November 1930 the Republican Hoover was
no longer able to respond with a categorical no to publicly financed programmes,
for the Democrats now had a majority in the House of Representatives in addition
to gaining a number of extra seats in the Senate. In January 1932 he created a new
authority, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that could give federal loans
to endangered banks, railway companies and other businesses. In 1932 it had
$1,500 million at its disposal for public works. Hoover wanted only those schemes
to be supported that ultimately promised to be self-financing: toll roads and
council housing, for example. But there was too little money to have any major
effect on the American economy. For Hoover, it was a golden rule to stick to the
gold standard, and anyone who demanded otherwise was, in his view, risking
inflation.
In the course of 1932 public protests at Hoover’s policies assumed an
increasingly strident quality. From its base in Iowa, the Farmers’ Holiday
Association called for a boycott of the markets, amounting to a strike on the
part of the nation’s farmers. War veterans demanded an immediate start to the
bonus payments of $1,000 agreed to by Congress but not due to come into
force until after 1945. In June 1932 20,000 members of their Bonus Expeditionary
Force took part in a march on Washington, where they built a series of camps
and announced that they would not leave until their demands had been met. A
group of Communists struck a more radical note but were ignored by the
leaders of the Bonus Expeditionary Force.
The House of Representatives sided with the veterans, whereas the Senate
rejected their demands. Hoover replied at the end of July by sending in
the district police. On 28 July some of the demonstrators threw stones at the
police who were trying to clear the government buildings occupied by the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 409

veterans; the police responded by firing on the demonstrators, two of whom

were killed.
But Hoover had no intention of giving in and later that same day was
persuaded by his secretary of war, Patrick J. Hurley, to deploy army units under
General Douglas MacArthur in order to clear the largest of the camps at Historic
Anacostia some two miles from the Capitol. Among MacArthur’s officers were
his adjutant Dwight D. Eisenhower and a man who was to earn military fame
during the Second World War, George S. Patton. MacArthur’s forces included a
cavalry regiment, two infantry regiments, a machine-gun unit and six tanks.
His actions on the evening of 28 July went far beyond anything envisaged by
Hoover, including, as they did, the use of tear gas and bayonets. The veterans set
fire to their own temporary shelters; panic spread; a small child was killed; and
hundreds of members of the Bonus Army were injured.
The events of 28 July 1932 did much to destroy Hoover’s remaining
standing. In the eyes of those who suffered most from the crisis, the erstwhile
organizer of humanitarian aid for famine victims in Europe had become a
cold-hearted cynic. During the winter of 1931/2 there were many ‘Hoovervilles’
– shanty towns for the homeless unemployed – on the edges of numerous
larger towns and cities; men with no roof over their heads slept on park
benches, covering themselves with newspapers that became known as ‘Hoover
blankets’; and empty pockets turned inside out were called ‘Hoover flags’. Few
initiates knew that MacArthur’s troops had dealt with the bonus marchers far
more ruthlessly than the president had ever intended. All that mattered for the
broad mass of the population was that he had ordered the military to be
deployed, with the result that he now had to bear the political responsibility for
his actions.
Presidential elections were due to be held in November 1932. Hoover
wanted to put his name forward, and so the Republicans adopted him as their
candidate at their convention in Chicago in the middle of June. Two weeks
later, the Democrats held their own convention, again in Chicago. The outcome
of their deliberations remained undecided until the very last moment, but on 2
July they selected the governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR,
a cousin, five times removed, of the former president, Theodore Roosevelt. He
had been born in New York on 30 January 1882 as the son of an old and well-
respected family that owed its considerable wealth to trade with China.
Admitted to the New York Bar in 1907, he turned to politics soon afterwards
and served as a state senator from 1910 to 1913, then as assistant secretary of
the navy from 1913 to 1920. In 1921 he was stricken by polio and paralysed,
leaving him with a permanent disability. But in 1928 he succeeded ‘Al’ Smith,
the Democrats’ presidential candidate, as governor of New York and was
confirmed in the post in 1930, this time by election.
When accepting the presidential nomination, Roosevelt demanded that the
Democratic Party must be ‘a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of
410 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest

number of our citizens’. He promised to ease the burden on all sections of
society, whether at the top or the bottom of the social pyramid. He advocated
‘retrenchment and economy’ and announced an end to prohibition, stricter
banking laws, public works, a shorter working week, reforestation, planned
agricultural production and a lowering of tariffs. The American people, he went
on, wanted nothing more than work and security. Unless they turned away
from the ‘era of selfishness’, there was no saving them. But the sentence that left
the deepest impression on delegates and on the public at large was this: ‘I pledge
you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.’141
The term ‘new deal’ was not Roosevelt’s but had been coined by the jour-
nalist Stuart Chase, who began a series of articles in the left-wing liberal New
Republic on 28 June with a piece headed ‘A New Deal for America’. Chase
wanted to break with capitalism, to reflate the economy by means of public
investment even if this increased inflationary pressures, to plan production
and to introduce universally binding minimum wages and maximum working
times. In the case of FDR, conversely, it remained open what exactly the ‘new
deal’ offered. He gave only a vague indication of his desire for social equality,
merely pointing in the same general direction as his reference to the ‘forgotten
man’ whom he had frequently invoked in his election speeches, a man he
claimed should be the increasing concern of all American politicians.
During the election campaign Roosevelt had clearly made promises that
were mutually irreconcilable: generous work creation schemes on the one
hand and public economies and a balanced budget on the other. His two prin-
cipal advisers on economic matters were Rexford G. Tugwell and Adolf A.
Berle of New York’s Columbia University, but neither of them was an outspoken
advocate of an anti-cyclical ‘deficit spending’ programme requiring the state to
spring into the breach as an investor in times of stagnation in order to bring the
economy closer to full employment, an idea that the British economist John
Maynard Keynes was to promote in 1936 in his book The General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money, in which he elaborated concepts already put
forward in his earlier writings. It was impossible to tell from Roosevelt’s elec-
tion speeches how he planned to finance the public works that he had already
announced.
For some observers on the intellectual left, the differences between Hoover
and Roosevelt seemed negligible. In their eyes the Democrat candidate merely
embodied a variant of the existing system, not an alternative to it. Indeed, he
was not even the lesser of two evils when compared with the previous incum-
bent. To claim the opposite was ‘suicidal’, according to John Dewey, the
chairman of the League for Independent Political Action that had been founded
in 1929.142 Among Dewey’s colleagues were Stuart Chase and the Evangelical
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. All three supported their fellow League member,
the chairman of the Socialist Party, Norman Thomas, in the 1932 election
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 411

campaign. More radical intellectuals such as Theodore Dreiser, John Dos

Passos, the political scientist Frederick L. Schuman and the former ‘muckraker’
Lincoln Steffens advocated the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist
economic and social order and championed the Communist candidate William
Z. Foster. For Steffens this appeal cannot have been entirely unproblematic, for
he had previously expressed his very public admiration not only for Lenin but
also for Mussolini.
Roosevelt emerged as the clear winner from the presidential election on 8
November 1932, polling 57.4 per cent of the votes, representing 472 delegates,
while Hoover’s 39.7 per cent share was reflected in fifty-nine delegates. Existing
incumbents were returned in only Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut,
Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. In every other state it was the challenger
who made the running. Thomas won 2.2 per cent of the vote, Foster 0.3 per cent.
Only 56.9 per cent of the electorate voted, the same as in 1928. If the 1928 elec-
tions had been a plebiscite for the status quo, the country showed equal determi-
nation four years later in voting for the reform of existing social conditions
within the framework, and on the basis, of the American constitution. An end
to prohibition was an important aspect of the changes promised by Roosevelt.
As was traditional, four months elapsed between the election and the new
president’s inauguration, which took place on 4 March 1933. This intervening
period witnessed the withdrawal of American forces from Nicaragua in early
January 1933. Barely four years earlier, in May 1929, the country’s rebellious
liberals had signed an agreement with Washington ensuring that they would
take over the presidency of Nicaragua. The Grupo Armado Liberal under
Augusto César Sandino continued its armed struggle against the American
marines in the north of Nicaragua, ending the conflict only after the American
forces had withdrawn, as agreed, in January 1933. Sandino was murdered in
February 1934 by members of the National Guard under Anastasio Somoza
García. Three years later the dictatorship of the Somoza family began with the
presidency of Somoza García and lasted until 1979.
Foreign policy was the only area of agreement between the old US govern-
ment, represented by its secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, and the president
elect. Conversely, Roosevelt rejected all attempts by Hoover to make him
commit to the principles of the country’s previous economic and financial
policy. The crisis in the American banking system came to a sudden head on
the day before Roosevelt’s inauguration and, early in the morning of 4 March
1933, only hours before the new president was due to be sworn into office, the
governor of the state of New York, Herbert H. Lehman, ordered the closure of
all the banks in his state. Illinois followed shortly afterwards.
Roosevelt’s inauguration address was delivered in keeping with tradition on
the steps of the Capitol building and was a classic example of grand political
rhetoric. Within minutes he had uttered a sentence that was to ingrain itself on
the hearts and minds of contemporaries and acquire the status of a catchphrase:
412 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ The nation was calling for imme-
diate action. Specifically, Roosevelt referred to the need for a national transport
and communications system and a national energy supply. Americans must
stop speculating with other people’s money and ensure the stability of the dollar.
Restoring the country’s economy was more important than cultivating interna-
tional trade relations. The maxim underpinning his practical politics was ‘the
putting of first things first’. Only in time of war had there been the sort of
national discipline that was needed now. If necessary, he would ask Congress to
grant him the ‘broad executive power to wage a war against emergency’ – the
kind of power that would be granted the president in the event of an attack by a
foreign power.
Roosevelt spoke only briefly about international politics, merely commit-
ting the United States to a ‘policy of the good neighbor’: such a neighbour
demonstrated a high degree of self-esteem and respected the rights of others by
fulfilling his obligations and by upholding the sanctity of contractual agree-
ments within a world of neighbours. The phrase had already been used by
Roosevelt’s predecessor to describe his country’s relations with Latin America,
but by extending its application to the rest of the world, he was indirectly giving
a signal to Europe, a part of the world nowhere explicitly mentioned in his
speech.
Roosevelt ended his inaugural address by invoking the legacy and ethos of
American democracy:

We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of the
national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious
moral values, with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern perform-
ance of duty by old and young alike. [. . .] We do not distrust the future of
essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In
their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous
action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They
have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift
I take it.143

The solemn tone was appropriate to the occasion. The speech raised hopes,
and there was nothing that America needed more than this in March 1933. The
new president had survived his first challenge.

The Logic of the Lesser Evil: Germany under Brüning

No country in Europe was as badly affected by the world economic crisis as
Germany, which was one of the most highly industrialized nations in Europe.
Its economy was already in recession when the crisis erupted in America.
National income fell slightly in 1929, and, if we take 1924–6 as the base, then
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 413

share prices fell from 158 in 1927 to 148 in 1928 and to 134 in 1929. By the
summer of 1929 there were some 250,000 more workers registered as unem-
ployed than in the previous year. In September 1928 there had been 1.16
million Germans out of work. By September 1929 that figure had risen to 1.52
million. When the world economic crisis struck, the basic rate of unemploy-
ment was therefore far higher in Germany than in the United States, where
there had been almost full employment on the eve of the Great Depression. In
1929 the average unemployment rate for the whole year was 9.3 per cent,
whereas in the United States it was only 3.2 per cent.
We have already examined the problems affecting the German economy in
the 1920s, problems that included the restrictions on a market economy caused
by the creation of an industrial cartel, protective tariffs in agriculture, compul-
sory arbitration by the state, ‘political wages’, the reparations that could be paid
for only by means of foreign loans and the tendency of the banks to pass on
short-term, foreign – mostly American – loans as investment loans to
Germany’s regions and local authorities as well as to industry.
German banks had lost more of their investments as a result of inflation
and had therefore needed to draw on foreign capital, mostly in the form of
foreign loans, in order to be able to offer loans of their own. In 1929 the relation
between a bank’s own resources and foreign resources was 1:10.4, rather than
the 1:3 predicated by the classic rule. And in the case of the major banks in
Berlin it was 1:15.5. In consequence the German banking system could quickly
be shaken to its very foundations by the withdrawal of foreign investments, a
situation that arose soon after the great crash. Moreover, German credit abroad
was heavily dependent on estimates of the political situation in Germany, with
the result that the extreme right wing’s opposition to the Young Plan in the
autumn of 1929 led swiftly to a perceptible reluctance on the part of foreign
banks to meet Germany’s requests for credit.
Unemployment rose as quickly in Germany as it did in the United States:
during the first quarter of 1930, 3.47 million were registered as unemployed at
the country’s labour exchanges, a figure that rose to 4.97 million in the first
quarter of 1931 and to 6.13 million in the same period in 1932. If we include
‘invisible’ unemployment in the form of those Germans too embarrassed to
admit that they were out of work, the figure for February 1933 was, in the esti-
mation of contemporary experts, 7.78 million, an all-time high that takes no
account of the widespread practice of short-time contracts. In September 1932
22.7 per cent of the members of 100 trade unions were on short-time contracts,
while 43.6 per cent were unemployed. In a word, only a third of the population,
33.7 per cent, was in full-time employment. A census in June 1933 revealed that
32.2 per cent of workers were in industry and business, 15.5 per cent in trade
and transport, 14.4 per cent in domestic services and 3.3 per cent in agriculture
and forestry. It is understandable, therefore, that in agriculture Germany was
less badly affected than the United States: in Germany agricultural production
414 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

fell by 36.7 per cent between 1929 and 1932, whereas the equivalent figure for
the United States was 53.6 per cent. Conversely, industrial production during
the same period fell by 55 per cent in Germany – rather more than the 46 per
cent in the United States. In terms of national income in general, American
losses were far greater than those in Germany: 54 per cent as compared with 40
per cent.
In many respects, the social repercussions of the Great Depression were
similar in Germany and the United States. Germany, too had its ‘Hoovervilles’
in the form of shanty towns inhabited by the homeless and the unemployed
who lived in primitive wooden shacks on land leased for the purpose on the
edge of the larger towns and cities; there were the same streams of homeless
workers drifting from one part of Germany to another in search of employment
and a roof over their heads; many of these men and women were seasonal
workers in agriculture who worked on the estates to the east of the Elbe during
the summer months; there were also municipal soup kitchens and worsening
dietary conditions that in 1931 persuaded the physician and nutritionist Helmut
Lehmann to speak of ‘a concealed famine of the greatest imaginable extent with
the danger of the most serious consequences for body and soul alike’.144
Unlike their counterparts in America, most German workers were insured
against unemployment after 1927, even if only for a limited period. As a result,
they were not dependent on voluntary charitable support or on alms payments
from individual states and local authorities, as was the case in the United States.
After October 1929, unemployed men and women who were willing and able to
work and who had spent at least fifty-two weeks of the last two years in a form of
employment that was subject to compulsory insurance could also claim support
from national insurance. Such support was initially available for twenty-six
weeks, although this period was reduced to twenty weeks in October 1931, and
from June 1932 it was dependent on a means test after six weeks. The payments
were made up of primary support for the insured and, where necessary, addi-
tional support for family members who were entitled to such assistance.
For those times when the situation in the labour market was particularly
bad, the country’s labour minister also allowed crisis payments to be made,
although whether people received such payments depended on a means test
undertaken by the employment exchange. Workers who were unable to claim
emergency welfare payments or who had already exhausted that possibility
could in certain circumstances receive welfare support, which was intended to
cover ‘vital needs’. Among such needs were shelter, food, clothing, medical care
and, where applicable, funeral costs. Welfare support might consist of monetary
payments or benefits in kind that the recipients were required to pay back as
quickly as possible. After the spring of 1931 the number of recipients receiving
primary support fell, while that of the men and women in receipt of emergency
welfare payments rose. During the economic crisis, not only was the length of
time during which the unemployed were entitled to support repeatedly reduced,
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 415

but the level of support was also lowered. And those who had lost their jobs had
to contend with longer and longer waiting times, resulting in progressive
impoverishment on the lowest levels of the social pyramid.
From the very outset, protests at worsening conditions in Germany during
the great crisis were not purely social, as they were in the United States, but had
a radical political dimension to them, with the Communists, above all, turning
themselves into the mouthpiece of the unemployed, while those groups that
were afraid of sliding down the social ladder were championed by the National
Socialists. After 1929, bloody street battles between the extreme forces on the
left and right of the political spectrum became increasingly frequent, as did
clashes between Hitler’s ‘brown battalions’ – his Storm Troopers – and the
republican, predominantly Social Democrat Reichsbanner that had been
founded in 1924. Other clashes took place between Communists and the
Reichsbanner and between Communists and the Stahlhelm.
Unlike Hitler’s Storm Troopers, the Communists were also involved in
direct confrontations with the police, with the result that from the standpoint of
the authorities and the bourgeois parties, it was the Communists who, compared
with the National Socialists, were seen as the greater danger in terms of law and
order. Following the ban on the Red Frontline Fighters’ League in May 1929, the
Communists no longer had a formal paramilitary wing at their disposal. After
March 1931 only the party’s secret protection unit was still armed, whereas the
members of the Battle League against Fascism that was formed in 1930 were not
allowed to bear arms. The state’s monopoly on violence was challenged by these
violent paramilitary groups, but, unlike the situation in Italy between 1920 and
1922, it was not rendered increasingly ineffectual: in general, federal and local
government could still rely on the loyalty of the police during the dying years of
the Weimar Republic.
Following the collapse of Germany’s grand coalition in late March 1930, the
country’s fate had been in the hands of a bourgeois minority cabinet rather than
a parliamentary majority government. It was headed by the former leader of the
Centre Party in the Reichstag, Heinrich Brüning, an ascetic forty-four-year-old
bachelor from Münster in Westphalia who had studied history and the social
sciences before taking his doctorate with a study on the national economy and
serving as a front-line soldier in the First World War, when he had been wounded
and decorated. His work as general secretary of the Christian National Trade
Unions, which he started in 1920, meant that, unlike Ludwig Kaas, who took
over as party leader at the end of 1928, he avoided being branded ‘right-wing’ by
his party. At the other end of the political spectrum, Brüning’s work in the
Reichstag as its budgetary expert from 1924 ensured that he was also held in
high regard in conservative circles. The fact that he was a Catholic may have
harmed him in the eyes of those liberals who espoused the ideas of the
Kulturkampf, but from the standpoint of Hindenburg and his circle, the new
chancellor’s denomination was an advantage, because it meant that politically
416 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

engaged Catholics were willing to support a silent change to the constitution

that the country’s president and his entourage were hoping to effect.
Brüning’s government was initially only covertly a presidential cabinet. In
addition to the independent defence minister Wilhelm Groener, it also included
representatives of the bourgeois parties that had previously held cabinet posts,
together with individual ministers from the German National People’s Party,
the Economic Party and the new People’s Conservative Association that was
made up of former German Nationalists and deputies from the Peasants’ and
Farmers’ Party. The German Nationalist minister for dietetics, Martin Schiele,
resigned his seat in the Reichstag on entering government, so that it remained
unclear, at least for a time, how the party of the press baron Alfred Hugenberg
would react to Brüning’s cabinet. In fact the German Nationalists repeatedly
voted inconsistently in April 1930, so that the government, much against
Hugenberg’s wishes, had a narrow majority in several votes in the Reichstag.
Some three months after Brüning’s appointment a situation finally arose
that Hindenburg had envisaged when he had entrusted him with the post of
chancellor: a government bill designed to deal with the budget was rejected by
the Reichstag’s taxation committee, whereupon the president let it be known
that his chancellor had his full authority to pass the budgetary programme
under Article 48 of the constitution if the Reichstag failed to enact it. He also
announced that he would dissolve the Reichstag if it voted to suspend the
emergency measures or passed a vote of no confidence in his chancellor.
Protests by the Social Democrats could not prevent the government from
mutating into a regime that ruled by emergency decree. After the budget bill
was rejected at a plenary session of the Reichstag on 16 July, Brüning announced
that his government saw no point in continuing the debate, and the first
two emergency measures came into force later that same day, although in the
event they lasted only two days, for on the 18th the Reichstag accepted the
Social Democrat motion to lift them. Hindenburg immediately dissolved
parliament, setting 14 September 1930 as the date of the new elections. On
26 July Hindenburg issued a new emergency measure designed to deal with
all financial, economic and social problems and introducing a civic tax grad-
uated according to social class, in which respect it differed from previous
emergency measures. The new emergency decree also formed the legal basis
for enforced protection for heavily mortgaged agricultural estates in the east
of the country, federal help for those on fixed incomes, an income tax increase,
a tax on unmarried people and – unavoidable in view of the higher level of
unemployment – an increase in unemployment contributions from 3.5 per cent
to 4 per cent.
There was a certain inevitability to the change from a covert to an open
form of presidential government in 1930. After Hindenburg had rejected the
concept of government by parliamentary majority in March 1930, the July
crisis merely witnessed the implementation of the law that had brought Brüning
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 417

to power in the first place. He could not accommodate the Social Democrats
without alienating the president and the right wing of the government camp,
and he was unable to do this because it would have contravened the very logic
of his appointment. For their part, the Social Democrats could not accept the
non-graduated civic tax on which the government had been insisting right up
to the time when the Reichstag was dissolved without violating their own
supporters’ sense of justice and handing the Communists a cheap victory. In
short, the main protagonists in the July crisis had so little room for manoeuvre
that a simple solution to the conflict was now all but impossible.
The new elections to the Reichstag were preceded by attempts to focus the
forces of the bourgeois parties, but these had modest success. The German
Democratic Party merged with the People’s National Reich Association, which
was the political arm of the conservative and, by contemporary standards, only
moderately anti-Semitic Young German Order as the German State Party, a
move that upset not only many of their Jewish supporters but others, too. By
the beginning of October the Young Germans had abandoned the party, citing
irreconcilable ideological differences, but its new name was retained. The
Conservative People’s Party was formed at the end of July by a merger between
the People’s Conservative Party under Gottfried Treviranus and the anti-
Hugenberg faction under Kuno von Westarp and had the backing of industry.
On the political left, nothing changed organizationally, the only novel
feature being the aggressive nationalism displayed by the German Communist
Party. In its ‘Declaration on the National and Social Liberation of the German
People’ of 24 August 1930 it had described the leaders of the Social Democrats

not only as the henchmen of the German bourgeoisie but at the same time
the willing agents of French and Polish imperialism. All the actions of the
treacherous and corrupt Social Democrats are tantamount to a continuous
act of high treason against the vital interests of the working masses of
Germany.145

The elections on 14 September 1930 witnessed a turnout of 82 per cent, more

than in any other Reichstag election since 1920. But the real sensation was the
showing of the National Socialists, who polled 6.4 million votes compared with
just over 800,000 in May 1928, a rise from 2.6 per cent to 18.3 per cent and
from twelve to 107 seats in parliament. Communist gains were also sizeable, if
less dramatic: their share of the vote increased from 10.6 per cent to 13.1 per
cent, their number of seats from fifty-four to seventy-seven.
The other parties were all among the losers. The German Nationalists were
reduced by half, falling from 14.3 per cent to 7 per cent of the vote, while the
German People’s Party dropped from 8.7 per cent to 4.5 per cent, the German
State Party – formerly the German Democratic Party – from 4.9 per cent to 3.8
per cent. Conversely, the losses suffered by the Catholic parties were relatively
418 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

insignificant: the Centre Party, which had polled 12.1 per cent of the vote in
1928, won 11.8 per cent in 1930, while the Bavarian People’s Party polled 3 per
cent as compared with 3.1 per cent two years earlier. Rather greater were the
losses sustained by the Social Democrat Party, which was still Germany’s largest
party and which saw its share of the vote fall from 29.6 per cent to 24.5 per cent.
Even after its electoral pact with the regional German Hanover Party, the newly
formed Conservative People’s Party could manage no more than 1.1 per cent.
But it was the National Socialists who were the principal beneficiaries of the
increased turnout, and yet those voters who had not exercised their franchise
in previous elections were by no means the main reason for the party’s success.
Most of the NSDAP’s supporters had previously voted for other parties, gener-
ally the German Nationalists and Liberal parties. Protestants were twice as
likely to vote for the NSDAP as Catholics, while their supporters included
more farmers, government employees, pensioners, self-employed workers and
men and women of independent means than might have been assumed from
their percentage share in the population at large, whereas the opposite was true
of workers and white-collar employees. The unemployed, who in September
1930 numbered around three million, played only a relatively minor role in the
rise of the National Socialists, unemployed workers tending to vote for Ernst
Thälmann’s Communist Party rather than for Hitler’s National Socialists.
The National Socialists’ powerful appeal to the middle classes persuaded a
number of contemporary observers to suggest that National Socialism was a
middle-class movement. In fact, the catchment area of Hitler’s party extended
so far beyond this social class that it would be more accurate from a sociolog-
ical standpoint to describe the NSDAP as a ‘people’s party’. By 1930 the fault
lines between the old social and denominational classes in Germany were
starting to become obscured as the gramophone, cinema and radio had begun
to prepare the ground for a new mass culture that transcended the boundaries
between these different groups. And yet the ‘old’ parties scarcely acknowledged
the challenge that lay within this development, whereas the National Socialists
consistently exploited the resources of modern mass communications and
took account of the widespread need for a sense of community that extended
beyond the confines of class and denomination, a need that was especially
pronounced in the younger generation but which had lain dormant until then.
Although much that the NSDAP promised its voters was backward-looking, its
success was due in no small part to its ability to adapt to the conditions of the
era of mass culture and in that sense to demonstrate its ‘modernity’.
The National Socialists’ answer to this national need for a sense of commu-
nity was the same in 1930 as it had been previously: an extreme nationalism
that was directed above all at a home-grown enemy in the guise of Marxism in
all its manifestations, pillorying those parties that supported the Young Plan
and, with them, the hated Weimar Republic. Nationalism was intended to
provide an overarching structure bridging the divisions between the different
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 419

groups of Germans. Anti-Semitic slogans that included attacks on the alleged

‘yoke of international finance’ often went hand in hand with an appeal to
nationalist instincts but were less prominent during the 1930 election campaign
than they had been previously, not least because the NSDAP was keen to win
over working-class voters who, to the extent that they tended to support the
Social Democrats and Communists, were largely impervious to anti-Semitic
propaganda. The word ‘socialism’, which risked frightening off many bourgeois
electors, especially the older ones among them, was consistently reinterpreted
by the NSDAP: as understood by Hitler, socialism meant not the abolition of
private property but equality of social opportunity and an economic policy
based on the party’s 1920 manifesto: ‘the common good before private interest’.
The distribution of seats in the new Reichstag forced Brüning’s cabinet to
cast round for allies. In the eyes of the bourgeois centre-ground parties, it was
inconceivable that the government would move further to the right by inviting
the National Socialists to join the cabinet, while the armed forces and German
industry likewise regarded the NSDAP as unfit for government. This attitude
remained unaffected by Hitler’s spectacular intervention in the trial of three
army officers from Ulm who were National Socialist sympathizers accused of
high treason. Appearing before the federal court in Leipzig on 25 September
1930, Hitler declared under oath that his party would take power only by
legal means, although when asked by the presiding judge to explain what he
meant by this, he admitted that on coming to power he would establish a court
through the normal legislative process with the aim of trying all those who
were guilty of the events of November 1918: in other words, they would be
executed by legal means.
But if a National Socialist role in government was ruled out, so too was a
return to a grand coalition, for both the country’s president and the right wing
of the government camp were vehemently opposed to such a solution. Even the
Social Democrats were unwilling to consider any kind of collaboration with
Brüning and the forces behind him. On the left wing of the Social Democrat
Party, the Centre Party chancellor was regarded as a man whose policies were
no less ‘Fascist’ than those of the National Socialists. Since neither the NSDAP
nor the Social Democrats could be considered a party of government, the
bourgeois minority cabinet could form a majority only by enlisting the support
of one or more of the other parties. Here, too, the Nationalist Socialists were
ruled out from the standpoint of foreign policy, quite apart from the fact that
even Hitler himself would have refused to countenance such a situation. In
short, there was no realistic alternative to an agreement with the Social
Democrats.
The leaders of the Social Democrat Party shared this view. From a Social
Democrat point of view, there were three reasons above all why, in the wake of
the September elections, they should tolerate Brüning. First, this was the only
way to avoid a more right-wing government dependent on the National
420 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Socialists. Second, the Weimar coalition in Prussia under the Social Democrat
Otto Braun would be put at extreme risk if the Social Democrats in the country
as a whole were to bring down the Centre Party chancellor. But the loss of
government officers in the largest German state would also have meant losing
control of the Prussian police, the state’s most important resource in its clashes
with National Socialists and Communists alike. And, third, there was a broad
field of agreement between the Social Democrats and the government camp
based on the realization that the consequences of an unstable ‘credit economy’
after 1924 had been overcome only by means of a policy of rigorous cost-
cutting. This consensus on the best way to turn round the economy did not
exclude the possibility of disagreement on the best way to share the social cost
of such savings, but at least the consensus itself was not called into question.
The foundations of the new policy of toleration were laid in the course of
talks between Brüning and the Social Democrats in the Reichstag that were
held at the end of September. On 3 October the Social Democrats passed a
resolution declaring their intention of supporting Brüning’s minority cabinet
on the grounds that in the wake of the Reichstag elections their prime concern
was to uphold democracy, safeguard the constitution and protect the parlia-
mentary system. Social Democrats were fighting for democracy in order to
protect social policies and raise the living standards of working people: ‘While
safeguarding the vital interests of the working masses, the Social Democrat
faction in the Reichstag will continue to ensure that the parliamentary basis of
our society is assured and that the most pressing fiscal concerns are addressed.’146
The debates that took place in the Reichstag on 17 and 18 October 1930 were
among the stormiest that the Weimar Republic had witnessed until then. But
there was no doubt about their outcome, for in the vote on 18 October the govern-
ment had the backing of the Social Democrats, voting first on a government bill
concerning debt repayment, then on the transfer of proposals to suspend the
emergency decree of 26 July to the budgetary committee and, finally, on a govern-
ment motion to pass over all the proposed votes of no confidence and proceed to
the business of the day. To furious protests from the National Socialists and
Communists, the Reichstag was then adjourned until 3 December. The govern-
ment had not only won a battle but, equally importantly, it had gained time.
With the help of the Social Democrats, Brüning’s cabinet also survived the
equally tempestuous December session of parliament. The price that the
government had to pay for this was a number of concessions in the field of
social welfare: the civic tax was more sharply graduated and the unemployed
were granted free health insurance. In return the Social Democrats assumed
partial responsibility for raising unemployment contributions from 4.5 per
cent to 6.5 per cent, a 6 per cent cut in the salaries of government employees
and new measures to protect agriculture, including higher duties on wheat
and barley. On 7 December the Reichstag was again adjourned, this time until
3 February 1931.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 421

The Social Democrats’ official newspaper welcomed the move, noting in its
edition of 13 December that three months after the elections everyone must
have felt ‘that this Reichstag is a failure and that we can be glad to see and hear
nothing more of it’.147 The party’s leader in the Prussian Landtag, Ernst
Heilmann, who also had a seat in the Reichstag, argued that a house with 107
National Socialists and seventy-seven Communists could not function effec-
tively: ‘A nation that elects such a Reichstag effectively renounces all claim to
self-governance, and its legislative right is automatically replaced by Article
48.’148 In a radio broadcast on 17 December, Otto Braun expressed the view that
if the Reichstag, partly as a result of its infiltration by antiparliamentary groups,
was unwilling and unable to perform the tasks conferred on it by the constitu-
tion, ‘then, but only then, a political SOS must be sounded and the safety valve
of the constitution must be opened long enough to deal with the acute emer-
gency that parliament is unable or unwilling to confront’. Vorwärts published
Braun’s speech under the headline ‘An Education in Democracy’.149
When the Social Democrats met in Leipzig at the end of May 1931 for their
first party conference after their departure from power, there was much criti-
cism from their left wing of their policy of cooperation, but such criticism was
outweighed by delegates’ approval for the main argument of its proponents:
‘We have kept the National Socialists from gaining power,’ declared Wilhelm
Sollmann, the party’s deputy leader in the Reichstag,

and if, in October 1930, the National Socialists were prevented from taking
over the army and the police, then I believe that no criticism on points of
detail should attach to us and discourage us from saying that this was not
just a major success, but a European success, for Germany’s Social
Democrats.150

Given the balance of power in the Reichstag in the wake of the elections in
September 1930, there was really no responsible alternative for the Social
Democrats but to give their backing to Brüning’s government. But their policy
had a disadvantage that by the spring of 1931 could no longer be ignored. The
fact that the Reichstag now met only infrequently – on 26 March it had adjourned
until 13 October – played into the hands of the anti-parliamentary forces on the
extreme right and the extreme left, and no one was more adept at exploiting this
chance than Hitler, who could now appeal both to the widespread resentment at
the western and, hence, ‘un-German’ parliamentary democracy of the years
after 1919, which by the autumn of 1930 had become a mere sham, and to the
people’s right to have a say in politics in the form of universal equal suffrage, a
right codified under Bismarck but rendered largely ineffectual by Brüning’s
presidential cabinet. In this way Hitler benefited from Germany’s lopsided
process of democratization: on the one hand, the early introduction of a demo-
cratic right to vote and, on the other, the late transition to a type of government
422 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

that was responsible to parliament. And not only that: since the Social Democrats
tolerated Brüning’s unpopular austerity measures, the leader of the National
Socialists could present his party as the only popular opposition movement to
the right of the Communists and at the same time as an alternative to ‘Marxism’
in both its Bolshevik and reformist manifestations.
On 5 June 1931 – the day on which the Social Democrats ended their party
conference in Leipzig – Hindenburg announced a new emergency decree that
had long been expected but whose social impact was far worse than had been
feared: unemployment benefit was reduced by on average between 10 per cent
and 12 per cent; the salaries of government employees were cut by between 4 per
cent and 8 per cent; and payments to invalids and disabled veterans were
reduced. The Social Democrats joined in the universal outcry of indignation,
but Brüning turned down their request that the Reichstag or at least its budg-
etary committee be reconvened, not least because he could see that the country
was on the verge of bankruptcy, if not of civil war. All that he could offer the
Social Democrats was a promise to mitigate the negative impact of some of the
emergency measure’s social consequences. In an attempt to force the Social
Democrats to back down, Hindenburg threatened to end the Prussian coalition.
His threat worked, and on 16 June the representatives of the Social Democrat
group in the Reichstag withdrew their motion to convene the budgetary
committee.
The left wing of the party revolted and on 1 July published an open letter
inveighing against any further continuation of the party’s policy of coopera-
tion. This was to become the starting point for a new political grouping, the
Socialist Workers’ Party that was founded in early October. But the majority of
Social Democrats were not prepared to break with Brüning or to give up power
in Prussia. In the July issue of Die Gesellschaft Rudolf Hilferding referred to the
‘tragic situation’ in which his party now found itself, arguing that this tragedy
stemmed from a combination of the country’s grave economic crisis and the
exceptional political state caused by the elections on 14 September:

The Reichstag is a parliament at odds with the parliamentary principle, its

very existence a threat not only to democracy but also to the working class
and to our country’s foreign policy. [. . .] To defend democracy against a
majority that rejects democracy, and to do so by recourse to the political
resources of a democratic constitution that presupposes a fully functioning
parliamentary system, is tantamount to squaring the circle, a task that the
Social Democrats have been asked to solve – this is truly an unprecedented
situation.151

Only in the course of 1931 did Germans begin to see that the low point of the
economic crisis was still to come and that the world was in the middle of a great
depression. On 20 June there was what appeared to be a ray of hope, when
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 423

Herbert Hoover proposed a year-long international ‘holiday from debt’, during

which governments would have a respite from the repayment of their inter-
national debts, including German reparations. Pending ratification by the
American Senate, the Hoover Moratorium to which we have already referred
came into provisional force on 6 July after the United States had overcome French
resistance to the proposal, but within days Germany had been shaken by a severe
banking crisis whose immediate cause was the collapse of the Darmstadt and
National Bank (‘Danatbank’) on 13 July, resulting in turn in a serious loss of
confidence in capitalism and in a market economy. Two days later foreign
exchange transactions were rigorously curtailed by the government and by the
federal bank, which effectively meant abandoning the gold standard for private
industry. The drastic increase in the discount rate and in the Lombard rate had
disastrous repercussions for an already stagnant economy. Public taxes were
used to restore the banks to an even keel, which effectively amounted to a
partial nationalization.
In September 1931 Brüning’s government suffered a humiliating defeat in
terms of its foreign policy, when the customs union planned jointly by
Stresemann’s successor as foreign minister, Julius Curtius, and by Austria’s
chancellor and foreign minister Johann Schober was declared illegal by the
International Court at The Hague. In full agreement with Brüning, Curtius
and his secretary of state, Bernhard von Bülow, had seen in the customs union
a way of consolidating German influence in central and south-east Europe
and of laying the foundations for a later union between the two German-
speaking states, which is why the plan ran into such massive opposition from
the French.
The embarrassing failure of his policy towards Austria meant that Curtius’s
position as foreign minister was no longer tenable, and on 3 October he asked
the chancellor to accept his resignation. By now, however, more was at stake
than a mere change at the top of the Foreign Office. The previous month, first
Kurt von Schleicher, chief of the ministerial office at the Defence Ministry and
Wilhelm Groener’s political adviser, and then Hindenburg had demanded from
the chancellor an emphatic shift to the right, a demand that Brüning sought to
meet by reshuffling his cabinet on 9 October. He himself took over as foreign
secretary, while Groener assumed the dual responsibility of defence minister
and home secretary, the latter post as the successor to the left-wing Centre
Party politician and former chancellor Joseph Wirth. The ultra-Conservative
secretary of state Curt Joël became justice minister.
The German People’s Party – Curtius’s party – was no longer represented in
Brüning’s second cabinet. On 3 October, its industrial wing had demanded that
the party join the opposition and table a motion of no confidence in the govern-
ment. A week later the party executive and its members in the Reichstag agreed
to do precisely that, with the result that a year after the policy of toleration
had been implemented the chancellor had to pay the price for the occasional
424 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

concessions that he had made the Social Democrats on whose mercy he

depended: the right wing of the employers’ camp broke with Brüning because
his policies were insufficiently right-wing for the industrial right.
On 11 October 1931 the conservative industrialists in the Ruhr had the
chance to go one step further and publicly align themselves with the ‘national
opposition’. This was the day on which the various political parties and other
associations that were emphatically right-wing in their outlook organized a mili-
tary parade in Bad Harzburg, although no well-known industrialists attended
the event, which had been planned by Hugenberg; the only exception being
Ernst Brandi, one of the directors of the United Steel Works. Evidently even
Brüning’s sternest critics among German employers were still reluctant to join
the radical right.
The Harzburg Front was made up of the NSDAP, the German National
People’s Party, the Stahlhelm, the National Land League and the Pan-German
League as well as countless members of former ruling houses, the former head
of the army, Hans von Seeckt, who had represented the Germany People’s Party
in the Reichstag since 1930, and the former president of the Reichsbank,
Hjalmar Schacht, who had resigned his post in March 1930 in protest at the
Young Plan. With his attacks on the Reichsbank, Schacht succeeded in trig-
gering a heated debate that went on for days. Hitler, who had been received
for the first time by Hindenburg only the previous day, caused a stir during
the march-past by reviewing his own Storm Troopers, then demonstratively
leaving the platform before the Stahlhelm units could follow: it was his
deliberately provocative way of proving his independence from the ‘old’
right wing.
The Harzburg conference made it easier for the Social Democrats to work
with Brüning’s second cabinet, which was clearly to the political right of its
predecessor. The violent attacks on the government by the ‘reactionary forces
of Fascism’ were in themselves enough to make the government seem tolerable
in the eyes of the Social Democrats. Schacht’s comments on the government’s
monetary policy inspired Vorwärts to publish a piece on 12 October under the
headline ‘The Harzburg Inflation Front’. On this point Vorwärts was in full
agreement with Brüning, who was equally critical of all experiments with the
country’s currency, and in the brief session of parliament that took place two
days after the Harzburg conference he was again able to rely on the Social
Democrats, helping him to reject all the motions of no confidence tabled
against his government on 16 October.
Brüning’s position was much strengthened by this development, allowing
him to issue a new emergency measure on 9 December that linked wage and
price reductions in such a way as to ensure that the purchasing power of the
masses was not significantly impaired, while increasing the attractiveness of
German exports. Its negative effect, however, was to curtail the freedom
of employers and reduce the scope for free collective bargaining. The move
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 425

was also a reaction to Great Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard on

21 September 1931, which had led to a devaluation of the pound vis-à-vis the
mark by around 20 per cent and a corresponding advantage for British exports.
In Brüning’s eyes, it was not possible to respond to London’s move by devaluing
the mark not only because to have done so would have played on Germany’s
traumatic fear of inflation but also on account of Germany’s dependence on
American loans, together with its obligations with regard to reparations and, not
least, questions of national prestige.
Brüning continued to reject out of hand a loan-financed job creation
programme of the kind demanded by sections of industry from the summer of
1931 and, from December, by experts from the General German Trade Union
Association, for such a programme would have flown in the face of his funda-
mental belief in the need for a balanced budget and at the same time contra-
dicted his priorities in terms of Germany’s foreign policy: Germany could not
give the impression that it still had financial resources at its disposal, for this
would have undermined its argument that the burden of reparations was crip-
pling the German economy. But the end of reparations was the short-term goal
that Germany had to achieve if it was to rid itself of all the other shackles asso-
ciated with the Treaty of Versailles, not least the military constraints, and win
back its old status as a major power.
When, at the end of 1931, it seemed as if there was a chance to reach a compro-
mise on the question of reparations, it was only logical, therefore, that Brüning
did not seize it. On 22 December the American Senate voted for the Hoover
Moratorium after a lengthy debate. The following day the Special Advisory
Committee of the Bank of International Settlements in Basel submitted a report
that the German government had asked it to draw up the previous month in
keeping with the procedures laid down in the Young Plan. The committee came
to the conclusion that, in order to avoid any further financial problems, all of the
existing debts between states, including the German reparations, would have to
be adjusted without further delay so as to take account of the present parlous state
of the international economy.
This was tantamount to a plea that the Young Plan be renegotiated from
start to finish. But Brüning was not interested in attending the conference on
reparations that was due to discuss this report in Lausanne in January 1932,
since he believed that it would lead only to a new moratorium and to a reduc-
tion in the burden of reparations – a half-hearted, temporary solution that fell
far short of the definitive end of all reparation payments that he was striving to
achieve. As a result his government banked on delaying the conference, which
was due to start on 25 January and which was finally postponed sine die on the
20th. The price that Brüning had to pay at home for this foreign-policy deci-
sion was huge: the rigorous deflationary course continued unabated, and the
country’s decline in living standards grew progressively worse, as did the degree
of political radicalization.
426 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

By the early months of 1932 the main topic of political conversation within
the country was the presidential election that was due to take place in the
spring. For Brüning, it was clear from the outset that Hindenburg, now eighty-
four years of age, would have to contest the post again in order to prevent an
extreme nationalist and possibly even a National Socialist from winning,
whereas Hindenburg himself was naturally willing to stand only if he could be
certain of gaining sufficient support on the political right.
It was by no means certain that this condition would be met. The ‘Hindenburg
Committee’ that met on 1 February 1932 to call for the re-election of the elderly
field marshal comprised, among others, the writer Gerhart Hauptmann, the
painter Max Liebermann, the chairman of the Confederation of German
Industry, Carl Duisberg, and two former defence ministers, Otto Geßler and
Gustav Noske. But the appeal was signed by none of the leaders of national
organizations or major agricultural interests. Since the Stahlhelm, of which
Hindenburg was an honorary member, was reluctant to vote for the incumbent,
another veterans’ association, the Kyffhäuser League, likewise hesitated to back
its honorary president. Not until 14 February did the full committee of the
Kyffhäuser League declare its loyalty to Hindenburg, with the result that the
very next day the president let it be known that, conscious of his ‘responsibility
for the fate of our fatherland’, he was available for re-election.152
Hindenburg’s announcement persuaded the parties of the moderate right
and centre ground to declare their public support for him, whereas the Harzburg
Front fell apart: the Stahlhelm and German Nationalists were unwilling to
accept the National Socialists’ claims to leadership and on 22 February proposed
their own alternative candidate: the deputy leader of the Stahlhelm, Theodor
Duesterberg. That same day Joseph Goebbels, the NSDAP’s Gauleiter in Berlin,
declared in the city’s Sportpalast: ‘Hitler will be our country’s president.’153 Four
days later Hitler had himself named government councillor at the Brunswick
legation in Berlin, a legation which represented a region that since October
1930 had been ruled by a coalition cabinet of German Nationalists and National
Socialists. In this way, Hitler, who had been born in Austria but who since April
1925 had been stateless, obtained the last thing that stood in the way of his
candidacy as German president: German citizenship.
On the extreme left there had already been a presidential candidate since 12
January: Ernst Thälmann. Both the Comintern and the leaders of Thälmann’s
own German Communist Party expected that if the Social Democrats were to
back Hindenburg, Thälmann might be able to win over a sizeable number of
Social Democrat workers. Nor were their calculations entirely unfounded, for
even if members and supporters of the Social Democrats had had to bear
responsibility for much that ran counter to the party’s traditional ideas since it
had first backed the government in October 1930, many Social Democrats will
have felt that they could hardly be expected to accept a recommendation that
they throw their weight behind as committed a monarchist as Hindenburg.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 427

The Social Democrats finally announced their official support for

Hindenburg on 26 February 1932, the final day of another brief and tempes-
tuous session of parliament. In its appeal to voters in the election on 13 March
1932, the party’s executive committee declared that the German people faced a
stark choice: Hindenburg or Hitler.

Hitler instead of Hindenburg means chaos and panic in Germany and,

indeed, in the whole of Europe, a radical worsening of the economic crisis
and of the plight of the unemployed, and the utmost threat of bloody clashes
both among our own people and also with other nations. Hitler instead of
Hindenburg means the victory of the most reactionary forces over the most
progressive elements within the bourgeoisie and the working class, the
destruction of all civil liberties as well as of the press and of political, trade
union and cultural organizations, increased exploitation and slave wages.
[. . .] Defeat Hitler! Vote for Hindenburg!154

Hindenburg’s most impassioned advocate within the government camp was the
chancellor, Heinrich Brüning. On 11 March, at Hindenburg’s last major elec-
tion rally in the Berlin Sportpalast, Brüning drew a picture of the president that
was positively hagiographic. He would, he claimed, like to see the man who was
Hindenburg’s equal in ‘assessing a situation as keenly and as quickly as the pres-
ident and in summing it up in only a few sentences’. Brüning reckoned that
Hindenburg was a ‘true leader’, a ‘man sent by God’ and a ‘symbol of German
power and unity in the whole world’. He ended by declaring that ‘Hindenburg
must win because Germany must live’.155
By the evening of 13 March it was clear that a second round of voting would
be necessary, for Hindenburg had narrowly failed to win the necessary outright
majority, having polled 49.6 per cent of the vote. Hitler was second with 30.1
per cent, followed some distance behind by Thälmann on 13.2 per cent and by
Duesterberg on 6.8 per cent. A mere 173,000 extra votes would have been suffi-
cient to ensure the incumbent’s victory. Unlike the situation in 1925, he fared
well in all the Social Democrat strongholds and in all those parts of the country
where the Catholic share of the population was disproportionately high. In
Protestant areas and rural communities, conversely, where he had been the
clear victor seven years earlier, Hindenburg’s results were far below the national
average. If we exclude Bavaria, then Hindenburg had lost out with his tradi-
tional voters, while increasing his support among his former enemies.
Although Hitler had polled five million more votes than his party had
managed in the Reichstag elections in September 1930, he stood little chance
of defeating Hindenburg in the second round of voting. The Communists
decided to send Thälmann back into the ring and, in keeping with a directive
from Stalin, who had argued in November 1931 that ‘the main thrust of the
working class’ should be directed against the Social Democrats, the Communist
428 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Party insisted that the principal aim of Thälmann’s campaign was ‘to make
voters clearly aware of the character of the Social Democrats as the moderate
wing of Fascism and as the twin brother of Hitler’s own particular brand of
Fascism’.156 Duesterberg did not take part in the second round of voting. The
Stahlhelm advised its members to abstain. And the German Nationalists
decided not to play an active role in the second ballot.
The second round of voting took place on 10 April 1932. By the evening it
was apparent that Hindenburg had a clear mandate for a second term as presi-
dent: he had received 53 per cent of the vote, Hitler 36.8 per cent, Thälmann
10.2 per cent. Above all, Hindenburg’s victory was a direct result of the Social
Democrats’ policy of supporting Brüning’s government, for if the party’s
supporters had not had an opportunity since the autumn of 1930 to grow used
to a ‘policy of accepting the lesser of two evils’, they could hardly have allowed
themselves to be convinced in the spring of 1932 that they had to elect a dyed-
in-the-wool monarchist as their country’s president in order to prevent a
National Socialist dictatorship from materializing, for this was the only choice
available to voters: apart from Hindenburg, there was no one else in a position
to enlist the support of the traditional right and in that way to relegate Hitler to
second place. The Social Democrats knew better than anyone that Hindenburg
was no democrat, but until then the second president of the Weimar Republic
had at least shown himself to be a champion of law and order and a man who
respected the unloved constitution. In the circumstances, this was the most that
could be hoped for, but when compared with what was avoided on 10 April –
the proclamation of a ‘Third Reich’ – this was already a great deal.
Hindenburg himself felt no real joy at the outcome of the election, for it pained
him deeply to think that he owed his victory not to the right but to the Social
Democrats and Catholics. He took out his resentment on the one man who had
been his most active campaigner, Heinrich Brüning. The ‘emergency decree to
safeguard the authority of the state’ that was passed on 13 April and that banned
Hitler’s two private armies, his Storm Troopers (SA) and Protection Squadrons
(SS), was Hindenburg’s excuse to berate his chancellor in no uncertain terms. The
ban had been urged on him by the most important German regional govern-
ments, Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hessen and Saxony, and was based
on material concerning the National Socialists’ secret military plans seized by the
Prussian police during house searches conducted in the middle of March.
This material had initially persuaded the head of the ministerial office in
the Defence Ministry, Kurt von Schleicher, to support the ban on the SA and
SS, but he changed his mind before the second round of voting for the presi-
dency, and he managed to persuade his former regimental comrade, Oskar von
Hindenburg, to convince the latter’s father, Paul von Hindenburg, that a ban on
the SA and SS was politically inadvisable since it was bound to lead to a conflict
between the president and the political right. Hindenburg reluctantly signed
the emergency decree, but two days later he went behind the back of his defence
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 429

minister, Wilhelm von Groener, and asked the head of the army command,
Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, to obtain compromising material about the
Reichsbanner that would incriminate this republican defence organization and
justify a ban.
Nothing came of this. Groener, who was acting minister of the interior as
well as minister of defence, felt that the material from the Ministry of Defence
was worthless and agreed to a tactical measure with the Reichsbanner’s leader,
Karl Höltermann, whereby the organization’s elite units were sent away on
leave. The emergency decree of 13 April remained in force, but as a result of
these disagreements, Groener now had three influential enemies: his former
political adviser, Kurt von Schleicher, and the Hindenburgs, father and son.
On 24 April 1932, two weeks after the second round of presidential elec-
tions, the majority of Germans once again went to the polls in the regional
government elections in Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg, Anhalt and the Free
City of Hamburg. In all five regions, the National Socialists recorded substan-
tial gains and became the largest party, the only exception being Bavaria, where
the Bavarian People’s Party maintained a two-seat lead. In Prussia, the Weimar
coalition lost its majority, although none of the right-wing parties – the NSDAP,
the German National People’s Party or the German People’s Party – was able to
win a majority of its own.
The old Landtag had pre-empted this possibility at its final meeting before
the elections on 12 April, altering its election procedures with the help of the
three parties in government: the Social Democrats, the Centre Party and the
German State Party. Until then the election of the prime minister had been a
runoff between the two candidates with the best chances of success and had
been held during the second round of elections, when a relative majority was
all that the successful candidate needed to win. Following the change, an abso-
lute majority was needed in the second and every subsequent ballot. The
impact was that of a constructive vote of no confidence, for the Landtag could
remove the incumbent from office only by voting for his successor by a majority
of the votes cast. The newly elected Landtag met for its first session on 24 May.
That same day the coalition government of the Social Democrat Otto Braun
announced its resignation but remained in office as a caretaker cabinet as no
majority could be found willing to restore the old procedure.
A four-day session of the Reichstag began on 9 May 1932 and was to prove
the immediate prelude to Brüning’s dismissal. It was Groener who on 10 May
set events in motion when he delivered an unfortunate speech that was
drowned out by scornful heckling from the ranks of the National Socialists.
The following day Brüning himself gave a speech in which he drew attention to
the forthcoming reparations conference in Lausanne and warned parliament
and the general public alike not to lose their composure ‘during the last one
hundred metres before the finishing line’.157 But as a damage limitation exer-
cise, it was only partially successful.
430 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

On 12 May the government again won every vote thanks to the help of the
Social Democrats, but by now the leaders of the army, with Schleicher at their
head, were determined not only to break with Groener but also to bring down
Brüning. Groener himself announced on 12 May that he wanted to step down
as minister of defence and concentrate on the Ministry of the Interior, which
until then he had overseen in only a temporary capacity. This would have
required Hindenburg’s agreement, but under Schleicher’s influence, the presi-
dent insisted on Schleicher leaving the government completely. When he set
off for his Whitsun break on 12 May, Hindenburg made it a condition that
Brüning would not undertake any changes to his government while he,
Hindenburg, was away.
Schleicher’s change of attitude towards Brüning was due only in part to the
ban on the SA, for by April 1932 he had come to believe that the national crisis
that was affecting Germany could be solved only with the help of the National
Socialists. He held secret talks with Hitler on 28 April and 7 May, and at least
in the second of these discussions the question was raised as to the conditions
under which the NSDAP would be willing to accept a more right-wing cabinet.
By 7 May Schleicher knew the price that Hitler was asking: the dissolution of
the Reichstag, new elections and the lifting of the ban on the SA and SS.
Hindenburg knew about these talks. Brüning’s position was further under-
mined in the eyes of both Hindenburg and Schleicher by the fact that he had
returned practically empty-handed from the disarmament talks in Geneva on
30 April. The press had good reason to assume that Brüning would not be able
to hang on to power for much longer now that Groener had announced his
resignation as minister of defence.
While Hindenburg was vacationing on his estates at Neudeck in East Prussia,
another elite group long eager to see Brüning’s fall from power was at work: the
landowners to the east of the Elbe. The National Land League, which had been
controlled by the ‘national opposition’ in the form of the German Nationalists
and National Socialists since the autumn of 1930, was the only economic interest
group of any significance to have come out in support of Hitler before the
second round of presidential elections. On 21 May it was the government itself
that provided the leading agricultural umbrella organization with its cue to start
a large-scale campaign against Brüning, when Hans Schlange-Schöningen, the
national commissioner with special responsibility for assisting the eastern part
of Germany, submitted a cabinet-approved draft of a settlement decree providing
for the possibility of acquiring lands that were no longer redeemable either
privately or by means of a compulsory auction and of using the lands so acquired
for the purposes of creating farming settlements.
Immediately after the contents of the draft became known, the presidents of
the National Land League and German Agriculture Day, together with several
regional offices of the Land League, lodged complaints with Hindenburg. Each
of their submissions made the same point: in the words of the director of the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 431

East Prussian Land Society, Baron Wilhelm von Gayl, the right to hold compul-
sory auctions represented a further ‘descent into state socialism’ and weakened
the ‘resistance of those groups which until now have embodied the national
will to defend Germany against the Poles’.158
The pressure soon had the desired effect, and on 25 May Hindenburg
informed Schlange-Schöningen that he could not agree to the decree in its
present form. Two days later, the German Nationalists in the Reichstag described
the measure as ‘unqualified Bolshevism’. By 27 May Hindenburg could no longer
go back on his word, and in the face of opposition from the German Nationalists
the shift to the right that he had wanted to see was no longer possible.
On his return to Berlin, Hindenburg received Brüning on the evening of
Sunday 29 May in order to tell him that he expected the government to resign.
The following morning Brüning informed his cabinet of his conversation with
the president, and shortly before noon Brüning submitted his government’s
resignation to the head of state. The exchange lasted only a few minutes. At
midday Hindenburg had to appear on the steps of his presidential palace for a
march-past by the Skagerrak Guard, a guard of honour in the navy.
Of all the chancellors who served under the Weimar Republic, none is as
controversial as Heinrich Brüning, none whose image has been so distorted by
partisan praise and hostility. By some he is seen as a man who systematically
undermined democracy in Germany and in that way unwittingly prepared the
ground for Hitler, while others see in him a conservative alternative both to a
failed parliamentary system and to a National Socialist dictatorship. According
to this second reading, Brüning’s policies were for long periods historically
necessary: only with his fall from power did the country begin its downward
spiral into disaster.
It is certainly true that parliamentary democracy had already failed in the
Weimar Republic by the time that Brüning became chancellor on 30 March
1930. Once the grand coalition had broken down, it was only a question of time
before an openly presidential system took over. Brüning became, as it were, the
executor of policies whose basic thrust was ultimately determined by the presi-
dent and his entourage. Until well into 1931, Brüning represented a consensus
which, transcending party and factional lines, was aimed at reforming the coun-
try’s finances but which led in the final analysis to deflation. Moreover, there
was until the winter of 1931/2 an objective obstacle in the way of an alternative,
anti-cyclical economic policy, and this was the unresolved problem of German
reparations. Only when it became clear that there was no possibility of returning
to the Young Plan could Brüning have changed his economic course. But he had
no wish to do so since he rejected any kind of compromise on the question of
reparations for reasons of national prestige and of his more far-reaching foreign
policy objectives. But he would presumably have been prevented from pursuing
a less revisionist foreign policy during the winter of 1931/2 as he would almost
certainly have met with Hindenburg’s veto.
432 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Hindenburg’s position was so unassailable that the question of Brüning’s

own long-term goals is of only limited interest. Both in exile and in his memoirs,
which appeared in 1970 shortly after his death, Germany’s chancellor from
1930 to 1932 claimed that he had worked consistently for the restoration of the
monarchy in an attempt to erect a barrier that would have prevented the
National Socialists from establishing a dictatorship. There is no doubt about
Brüning’s sympathy for the old German Empire that had vanished in 1918. But
if as chancellor he had really wanted to restore the Hohenzollerns to the throne,
we would need evidence in support of this claim, and no such evidence exists.
Brüning’s belated attempt to justify himself was manifestly designed to enhance
his own reputation and to raise a monument to what he believed were his
achievements as a conservative statesman with a far-reaching vision.
The truth of the matter is that Brüning was the half-willing, half-unwilling
executor of policies that cannot be adequately described as ‘conservative’. The
true centre of power during the latter part of the Weimar Republic consisted of
Hindenburg and his camarilla, their joint aim being to create an authoritarian
state in which the will of the people would find only muted expression. Brüning,
conversely, was willing to accept a restriction on the rights of parliament, espe-
cially with regard to national expenditure, an aim he was indeed able to imple-
ment through appropriate reform measures in February 1931. He believed that
the National Socialists could be tamed but attached conditions to their partici-
pation in government, conditions that the party was unable to accept without
radically altering its very identity. Like the leader of the Centre Party, Ludwig
Kaas, he endorsed a shift to the right in German politics, while wanting to
adhere strictly to the country’s constitution. When, in the early months of
1932, Hindenburg and his circle decided to ignore the Social Democrats’ policy
of cooperation and to make more concessions to the National Socialists than
Brüning felt were advisable, Brüning was forced to go.
Brüning’s fall from power marked a turning point in German history: the
first and more moderate phase of the presidential system came to an end on 30
May 1932, a phase that had still been tolerated by parliament. The second
phase was authoritarian and openly hostile to parliamentary values. The army
leadership and the major landowners who had helped to bring about the
change of regime wanted to enlist the National Socialists as their junior part-
ners – not to be dominated by them but to turn them into a prop that would
support their own regime. Meeting Hitler’s conditions for the acceptance of a
right-wing cabinet presupposed the dissolution of the Reichstag, whose legisla-
tive period was not due to end until September 1934. If new elections had
taken place at that time, then Germany would have looked very different from
how it did in the summer of 1932. In the wake of the economic recovery that
we may assume would have taken place by September 1934, unemployment
would have fallen and the popularity of the extremist parties would have
waned. With their shift from a moderate to an anti-parliamentary presidential
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 433

system, Hindenburg and the old Prussian elite destroyed that opportunity,
bringing the crisis affecting Germany to a head and in that way placing the
country in a situation that was practically impossible to deal with any longer by
purely constitutional means.

Stagnation and Criticism of the System:

France’s Third Republic 1929–33
While the United States, Germany and Great Britain were badly hit by the
world economic crisis, France was able to bask in a state of relative prosperity
in 1930. The country’s leading industrial sectors reported even better results
than in 1929: with 254,000 cars rolling off the production lines each year, car
production, for example, was second only to the United States. Not until 1931
did the crisis make itself felt in France. Prices fell, and output dropped: in 1931
the production index in the iron industry was seventeen points lower than it
had been in 1929, and by 1932 it was forty-eight points lower. In 1934 whole-
sale prices were only 46 per cent of what they had been in 1929. In 1931 the
Banque Oustric collapsed amid scandal. In 1934 Citroën went into receiver-
ship and following state intervention was taken over by the tyre manufacturer
Michelin. Unemployment rose, but at no point did it reach the levels seen in
Great Britain, Germany and the United States. In 1935, 12.5 million French
men and women were in work, while the number of unemployed is reckoned
to have been around half a million.
If France was less badly affected by the Great Depression than more highly
developed industrialized countries, then this was due to its relative backward-
ness when compared with Germany, Great Britain and the United States. Up to
the time of the 1931 census the majority of the population lived in municipali-
ties numbering fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. Agriculture and small and
medium-sized businesses in trade and crafts suffered from the worldwide
depression more than large-scale industry that was well supplied with capital.
But if the crisis started at a later date in France than it did in Germany, then it
also lasted longer here than to the east of the Rhine. The early 1930s witnessed
the start of a period of industrial stagnation that lasted until the early 1950s.
The French historians Serge Berstein and Pierre Milza have spoken in this
context of a twenty-year obstacle, or barrier, to modernization that had its
counterpart in the archaic economic thinking of the country’s rulers and of
public opinion in general, reflecting attitudes that were fundamentally protec-
tionist in character.159
Up until the time of the elections to the Chamber of Deputies in May 1932,
governments in Paris relied on the support of the centre right. In the three
years between Poincaré’s resignation in July 1929 and the elections in May
1932, France had no fewer than eight cabinets, three of which were led by
André Tardieu. Born in Paris in 1876 and long regarded as Clemenceau’s heir
434 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

apparent, Tardieu was an astute advocate of the upper middle classes in France.
He was fully conscious of the country’s economic backwardness and banked,
therefore, on increasing industrial capacity but also on extending social legisla-
tion, including the gradual introduction of free grammar school education in
1930 and of universal child benefit in 1932. Two cabinets were headed by Pierre
Laval who was born in Châteldon in the département of Puy-de-Dôme and
began his political career with the Socialists, but, like Tardieu, he moved
progressively further to the right during the country’s economic crisis.
Until January 1932 the foreign minister was Aristide Briand, whose prin-
cipal goal throughout this period was Franco-German accord as the guarantor
of a peaceful Europe, an aim that earned him the continuous parliamentary
support of the Socialists who until 1910 had been his own political party and
who were now the party of opposition. In Germany, conversely, the death of
Gustav Stresemann meant that after 1929 Briand no longer commanded the
degree of support that he needed to pursue his foreign policy with any degree
of success. After 1930 the tone in Berlin was set by two politicians and a
diplomat keen above all to change the post-war world order: the chancellor
Heinrich Brüning, his foreign minister Julius Curtius and the secretary of state
at the Foreign Office, Bernhard von Bülow.
In May 1930 Briand wrote to every European government with his
‘Memorandum on the Organization of a System of Federal European Union’,
refining ideas that he had developed in a speech to the League of Nations on
5 September 1929, while Stresemann was still alive. His memorandum sketched
out his vision of a union of sovereign states closely working together and
agreeing on their common economic and political interests by regularly
consulting with one another in the hope that they could speak with a single
voice when representing those interests at the League of Nations. But in Germany
and Great Britain, Briand’s ideas were greeted with reserve, at least as far as their
specifically political component was concerned: in Berlin the government was
unwilling to abandon its determination to revise the conditions of the Treaty of
Versailles, while in London the Commonwealth represented a far more obvious
form of international community than a ‘federal’ Europe. Even so, it would be
wrong to describe French foreign policy during this period as naive. In late 1929
the country began work on the Maginot Line, named after the country’s minister
of war at this time. It was a system of fortifications along its north-east border
and also on its frontier with Italy and was designed to protect the country in the
event of an attack from the east or south-east.
In France as elsewhere, the world economic crisis led to a radicalization of
the political scene. On the right, the earliest unequivocally pro-Fascist organiza-
tion, Georges Valois’s Faisceau, was disbanded in 1928. Other right-wing groups
that survived were Action Française, whose shock troops, the Camelots du Roi,
had a reputation for naked brutality, and the Jeunesses Patriotes associated with
the parliamentarian Pierre Taittinger. All these right-wing organizations lost
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 435

members and forfeited public support in the wake of the country’s economic
and financial stabilization, but this picture began to change in the early 1930s.
The Croix de Feu, a frontline fighters’ league founded in 1927 and led since 1929
by Colonel Casimir de La Rocque, became the most powerful of these radical
right-wing organizations after 1931. Its members were not Fascists, however, but
radical nationalists who enjoyed the financial support of right-wing industrial-
ists such as François Coty and Ernest Mercier, while also having the backing of
politicians like André Tardieu, who from March to December 1930 was not only
France’s prime minister but also its minister of the interior.
By 1933 the Croix de Feu had some 80,000 members, almost all of whom
were ex-soldiers, with a further 40,000 youths who made up its Volontaires
Nationaux. According to the organization’s own estimates its membership rose
to between two and three million in 1936. A paramilitary organization, they
claimed to be French nationalists and sought to establish a regime in which
power lay not with parliament but with the president of the Republic. On the
other hand, its members were not interested in the violent overthrow of the
existing government. Founded in September 1933 and funded by François Coty
and by Mussolini’s Italy, Francisme, conversely, was a self-declared Fascist
organization, as was Solidarité Française, a paramilitary grouping that likewise
received support from Coty and was formed in 1933. Neither of these last two
organizations managed to muster more than a few thousand followers.
As in the mid-1920s, so in the early 1930s a favourite place for violent
clashes between the right and the left was the Sorbonne and, indeed, French
universities in general. Jeunesses Patriotes and the Camelots du Roi vied with
each other in their campaigns against left-wing and pacifist teachers and
students known to support the Radicals and Socialists. These militant leagues
also received ‘intellectual’ support from non-conformist organizations such as
Jeune Droite and L’Ordre Nouveau, the first of which had emerged from Action
Française, while the spokesmen of the second sympathized with socialist ideas.
Among the party newspapers of these various groups were Cahiers, Réaction,
La Revue Française, L’Ordre Nouveau and Plans. In December 1932 Robert
Aron sought to encapsulate the views of L’Ordre Nouveau:

We are neither on the right nor on the left, but if we are to be pigeonholed
according to a traditional parliamentary taxonomy, then we would stress
that we occupy the middle ground between the extreme right and the
extreme left, behind the president and with our backs to the National
Assembly.160

That L’Ordre Nouveau was in fact a right-wing party and not one associated
with the political centre ground is clear from two books that Aron and his
comrade-in-arms, Arnaud Dandieu, published in 1931 under the titles
Décadence de la Nation Française and Le Cancer Américain. Both writers felt
436 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

that Europe was under threat not only from Russian Bolshevism but also from
American capitalism. In their eyes, the Hoover Moratorium was an attempt to
subject the old Continent of Europe to the hegemonic control of the New
World. It was France’s mission to save the West, but to do so, it needed a rapid
internal change involving a rejection of the parliamentary system and an
increase in the power of the president. The followers of the Jeune Droite move-
ment were agreed in opposing Briand’s policies, and in 1931 202 intellectuals
signed a ‘Manifeste des jeunes intellectuels mobilisables contre la démission de
la France’, rejecting any further attempts to undermine the peace established in
1919 and warning of the risk of yet another partition of Poland.
In spite of this, a number of right-wing French groups with predominantly
young members, including L’Ordre Nouveau, maintained close links with
right-wing intellectuals in Germany, including young National Socialists like
Otto Abetz, who was to be the German ambassador in occupied France during
the Second World War. A leading spokesman of this pro-German school was
Alexandre Marc, whose real name was Aleksander Markovich Lipiansky and
who had been born into a Jewish family in Odessa in 1904. He and his family
fled to France in the wake of the October Revolution. He studied philosophy in
Germany, where he was particularly influenced by Max Scheler’s ‘ethical
personalism’ and by The European Revolutions and the Character of Nations
that was published in 1931 by the Breslau historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
and that accorded the French Revolution of 1789 a far less significant role in
world history than other writers were inclined to ascribe to it. Hand in hand
with a critique of the French Revolution went an advocacy of regional
autonomy, a view that Marc shared with Aron and Dandieu and that has points
in common with the Neo-Thomism of Jacques Maritain and especially with
the subsidiarity principle of Catholic social teachings as developed by Pope
Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo anno.
L’Ordre Nouveau and Jeune Droite had much in common with the propo-
nents of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, even if Rosenstock-Huessy
had little to do with this particular school of thought. Suffice it to mention its
anti-parliamentary thrust, its positive interest in the Italian stato corporativo,
its outspoken anti-liberalism and anti-Marxism and its critique of the ration-
alism of the Enlightenment and of eastern materialism and western utilitari-
anism. And yet there was one important point on which the younger members
of the French and German far right held widely divergent views, for in France
there was none of the glorification of the war that was to be found to the east of
the Rhine.
The trauma of the First World War continued to be felt in France, while at
the same time acting as a warning: this was a war that in no circumstances
could be allowed to repeat itself. The French of all political persuasions were
unsettled by the demographic stagnation that left their country at a disadvan-
tage when compared with Germany, which had a larger population and a
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 437

higher birth rate than theirs. In the years around 1930 only 35 per cent of
French families had three or more children. The percentage of men and women
over sixty – 13.5 per cent – was far higher than in Germany, Great Britain and
Italy, where it was around 9 per cent. There was still a widespread fear of over-
population (‘Malthusianism’). If France’s population increased from 39.2
million in 1919 to forty-two million in 1939, then this was due exclusively to
immigration from other European countries and North Africa. A war, it was
feared, would cause further blood-letting. As one of the victorious powers,
France was almost entirely lacking in the sort of bellicism that was currently
being promoted by right-wing groups in Germany.
On the extreme left of the political spectrum, the French Communist Party
and, indeed, all the parties that belonged to the Third International were forced
to undergo a strict process of Bolshevization after 1924, leading to the resigna-
tion of many of their members. In the wake of the shift to the ultra-left decreed
by the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in the summer of 1928, the
French Communist Party distanced itself increasingly from the reformists in
the SFIO and in the French Trades Union Congress and was obliged to pay the
price for this with its political isolation and parliamentary marginalization. In
the elections to the Chamber of Deputies in April 1928, there were only twelve
Communists, fourteen fewer than during the previous legislative period.
The clashes with the police that were deliberately orchestrated by the French
Communist Party resulted in repeated court appearances and prison sentences
for its leading officials. Maurice Thorez, a former coalminer, took over as the
party’s leader in the spring of 1930, immediately after his release from prison,
becoming its general secretary the following year. All of his political decisions
were taken only in close consultation with the Comintern’s official representa-
tive, the Czech Communist Eugen Fried. Thorez was an eloquent orator and as
popular with French militants and with many of the country’s workers as Ernst
Thälmann was in Germany. Neither man gave Stalin any reason to doubt his
willingness to toe the party line.
In those areas where the Communists enjoyed their greatest support – the
banlieue rouge in Paris and the rural communities of south-west France,
including those in the département of Corrèze – a vote for the French
Communist Party was above all a form of social protest at French society, which
was still dominated by class divisions. Political extremism was less pronounced
among French Communists than among their German counterparts, largely
because there was less mass poverty in France, and although there were radical
right-wing tendencies, there was no mass following for Fascism: the bourgeois
republican Radicals were still sufficiently powerful in the 1930s to prove effec-
tive as a barrier to any major right-wing radicalization process.
Like all Communist parties, the French Communist Party numbered several
intellectuals among its members, including the co-founder of the Surrealist
movement, Louis Aragon. But it also had many intellectual sympathizers, most
438 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of whom were more committed to the Soviet Union than to the French
Communist Party. The most outspoken of these sympathizers was Henri
Barbusse, the author of the anti-war novel Le Feu (1916), but other writers who
belong in this group, albeit with reservations, were Romain Rolland, André Gide
and André Malraux, all of whom were members of the pro-Communist
Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires and contributors to its
journal, Commune. The majority of these intellectuals owed their conversion to
Communism to the rise of National Socialism in Germany: in their view, the best
way to combat National Socialism was by joining forces with the Communists.
Only after Hitler had come to power were they confronted with the reality of
Soviet Communism.
The rise of National Socialism and the growth of right-wing movements in
France was a challenge for the Socialists, who had polled more votes than any
other party in the 1928 elections, while failing to win the most seats. At a party
conference in Paris in January 1926, Léon Blum, the leader of the Socialists in
the Chamber of Deputies and also the party’s de facto leader, had expressed the
SFIO’s motto: within the parliamentary system the exercise of power must be
carefully distinguished from the revolutionary seizure of power. In keeping
with the ‘Kautsky resolution’ agreed to at the International Socialist Congress
in September 1900, the exercise of power in the form of a coalition with bour-
geois parties was something that the Socialists could countenance only in
exceptional circumstances such as wartime or the need to avert a danger like
Fascism or counterrevolution. In Blum’s view the exercise of power was
dangerous because it could lead workers into thinking that it might produce
results that were in fact only achievable through the violent seizure of power.
In Blum’s view, the German Social Democrats could be excused for behaving
differently and for forming alliances with the country’s bourgeois parties.
Indeed, such alliances were even to be welcomed for reasons of Germany’s
foreign policy. The danger of what he termed ‘confusion’ was less pronounced
in Germany than in France for the Social Democrats’ partners were Catholics
and Liberals who were clearly distinguished from the Socialists, not bourgeois,
progressive, republican and secular radical Socialists, who in many areas held
views relatively close to those of the Socialists proper. In France, conversely, the
only form of support that as a rule came into question was that of a government
explicitly opposed to the forces of reaction. For the French Socialists, the law of
self-preservation dictated that they should not cross the line that would lead to
power-sharing. During the later period, Blum argued that this position might
change only if the SFIO, like the German Social Democrats, were to become
the largest party in parliament.
Within the SFIO, Blum’s doctrine was by no means uncontroversial, and in
October 1929 the party’s deputies voted by a large majority to accept ministe-
rial posts, a vote taken in the face of bitter opposition from their leader. Only
his veto was able to prevent a coalition of Radicals and Socialists from being
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 439

formed, leading directly to Tardieu’s first cabinet. The spokesman of those

members of the party who were in favour of power-sharing was the right-wing
thinker Pierre Renaudel, who refused to be discouraged by this setback. He
invited Kautsky himself to write a brilliant article championing a coalition that
appeared in Vorwärts in January 1930 and in Renaudel’s own La Vie Socialiste,
the official paper of the reformists, in February 1930. ‘There are situations’,
wrote Kautsky, justifying his stance by reference to the foreign policy of both
countries, ‘when the evil of a coalition government is the lesser or two such
evils when compared to the greater one that threatens us whenever we entrust
control of the state’s immense power to our worst enemies, even though we
could reduce this danger by entering into a coalition.’161
At the Socialists’ party conference in late January 1930 those who advocated
power-sharing were once again defeated. When the right-wing delegate Marcel
Déat announced that the minority would continue to advocate their own posi-
tion, the secretary general of the SFIO, Paul Faure, threw down the gauntlet,
declaring war on his opponents in such strident terms that many feared for
party unity. Much to the dismay of those who wanted power-sharing, the inter-
nally divided SFIO had demonstrated to the world that it was incapable of
ruling the country. At their party conference in Tours in May 1931, a group of
reformists under the deputy Joseph Paul-Boncour seized upon another conflict
– the question of the country’s defence – as an opportunity to draw a line under
the matter, when he and his followers left the SFIO and founded a new party,
the Républicains Socialistes, who, unlike the Socialists, advocated a policy of
maintaining a level of military strength adequate to the country’s defence needs.
The first round of elections to the Chamber of Deputies took place on 1
May 1932. In advance of the vote the ruling parties had ignored the protests of
the political left and changed the rules on voting, with the result that a candi-
date could now be elected if he won at least 40 per cent of the votes in the first
round of voting, making a second round unnecessary. Even so, the left-wing
parties won around one million votes more than the right, the SFIO polling
1.96 million compared to the Radicals’ 1.84 million. The Communists dropped
from 1.06 million to 797,000 votes. The radical right did not take part in the
election. On 7 May – the day before the second round of the ballot – the coun-
try’s president, Paul Doumer, who had been elected only the previous year, was
assassinated by an anti-Communist Russian émigré at a book fair in protest at
France’s failure to bring down the Soviet regime. On 10 May the Senate and
Chamber of Deputies jointly elected the conservative president of the Senate,
Albert Lebrun, as the new French president.
Thanks to regional pacts between the Socialists and Radicals, the second
round of elections on 8 May produced a centre-left majority. Together, the
Radicals and Socialists won 157 seats, pushing the SFIO into second place with
129. On the political right there were three relatively large parties: the Union
Républicaine Démocratique with seventy-six seats, the Républicains de Gauche
440 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

with seventy-two and the Radicaux-Indépendants with sixty-two. The

Communists won only twelve seats, the Socialistes-Communistes who occupied
the political ground between the SFIO and the French Communist Party, eleven.
Paul-Boncour’s Républicains-Socialistes returned thirty-seven deputies to the
lower house.
The bourgeois Radicaux-Socialistes were far from united as a party. The
party’s leader, Édouard Herriot, who had been invited to form a government,
had in the meantime gravitated from the left to the centre. The left wing of the
party now included the ‘Young Turks’ Pierre Cot, Pierre Mendès-France and
Jean Zay, and formed a minority within the party. It augured badly for the
coalition that in the presidential election most of the Radicals voted against the
Socialist candidate Paul Faure, preferring to back Albert Lebrun instead.
Herriot offered the Socialists an equal share in government, and at a party
conference that they convened in Paris the latter declared their fundamental
willingness to accept this offer, only to attach strict conditions to their agree-
ment, conditions which, drawn up in consultation with the Reformist Marcel
Déat, became known as the ‘Cahiers d’Huyghens’ and included nationalization
of the country’s rail network and of all other transport companies and insur-
ance firms, stricter banking controls, the introduction of a forty-hour week
and a reduction in military spending. Since Herriot was unable to accept this
catalogue of demands, he formed a cabinet made up for the most part of
Radicals and a handful of representatives of the centre ground. Herriot himself
assumed the role of foreign minister in addition to that of prime minister,
while the former Socialist Paul-Boncour became minister of war. Herriot’s
cabinet won a vote of no confidence thanks to the support of the Socialists.
Herriot’s brief period in office witnessed the Lausanne conference on repa-
rations, about which we shall have more to say in due course. On 9 July he
made the costly mistake of agreeing to a treaty effectively ending German repa-
ration payments without first having obtained American agreement for an end
to the repayment of inter-Allied debts. Unlike most of the members of the
Chamber of Deputies as well as those in his own party, Herriot was willing to
transfer to the United States all instalments for 1932 that were still due following
the end of the Hoover Moratorium in the December of that year. Having
suffered a parliamentary defeat on this point on 14 December 1932, he was left
with no alternative but to resign.
Following Herriot’s fall from power, France endured four short-lived
governments under Joseph Paul-Boncour, Édouard Daladier, Albert Sarraut
and Camille Chautemps, a period of political instability that ended only in
late January 1934 and that was due, above all, to the profound differences of
opinion between Radicals and Socialists on the economy. The left-wing bour-
geois cabinets pursued a policy of deflationary cost-cutting and, in spite of its
drawbacks for exports and its high social costs, they insisted on maintaining
the gold standard that Great Britain had abandoned in September 1931, the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 441

United States in April 1933. The Socialists thought differently, the party’s
leaders taking an even more anti-governmental view than its members in the
Chamber of Deputies.
In May 1933 a serious disagreement broke out between the SFIO’s party
executive and its members in the Chamber of Deputies after the latter had
wilfully ignored the party whip and voted for the budgetary measures contained
in a government bill. The reformist group associated with Pierre Renaudel and
Paul Ramadier and three of the younger members of the chamber, Marcel
Déat, Adrien Marquet and Barthélemy Montagnon, justified their position in a
statement in which they declared their willingness to work more closely with
the bourgeois left, advocating a greater sense of ‘social patriotism’ and a readi-
ness to be more receptive to the middle classes. Déat in particular felt that
courting the middle classes was the principal lesson that could be learnt from
the failure of the German Social Democrats and ultimately from the downfall
of the Weimar Republic: if the Socialists wanted to block the progress of the
Fascists, they needed to win the support of those classes that were the basis of
the Fascists’ mass following not only in Germany but in every part of Europe.
The ‘Neo-Socialism’ of Déat and his followers was a reaction to the ideo-
logical sterility and political stagnation of the party’s official line, a line
embodied in its purest form by Léon Blum. Ever since it had been reconstituted
in 1920/21 Blum had sought to preserve party unity by bringing together its
two opposing and increasingly fractious wings. The academic distinctions that
he drew were an expression of this attempt to achieve a balance. But to the
extent that the majority of the ‘militants’ were on the left of the party, Blum felt
that he needed to take greater account of the traditional left than of the reformist
ideas of the right-wing minority. The worse the economic crisis grew in France
in the course of 1931, the more it became clear that the SFIO was politically out
of its depth, giving old answers to the new challenges and reacting to the
demands of the right-wing activists by adopting a largely administrative
response. By early 1933 the Neo-Socialists had abandoned all hope of reforming
the party from within. Like their opponents, they regarded a split in the party
as inevitable.
It was predictable, therefore, that the party conference in Paris in July 1933
would prove to be a crucial test of its unity. The leaders of the Neo-Socialists
made it completely impossible for the majority to reach any kind of agreement
with them, so determined were they to learn from their Fascist enemy that they
gave the impression that they themselves were on the way to becoming Fascists.
And when Marquet, in a conference speech, acknowledged the values of ‘ordre,
autorité, nation’, Blum expressed his outrage by heckling him. His feeling that a
number of Neo-Socialists were indeed proto-Fascists was by no means
misplaced, for both Déat and Marquet later joined a movement that they were
still opposing in 1933. Other Neo-Socialists, conversely, returned to the party
fold many years after the split.
442 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The party conference in Paris condemned the behaviour of its parliamentar-

ians by a large majority, encouraging Renaudel to protest at their verdict on
behalf of the Neo-Socialists, while Blum wrote a series of articles for the party
newspaper in which he sought to underscore his charge of Fascism, in the
process perpetuating the ideological divide. The definitive breach came in the
autumn of 1933: in a vote on Daladier’s proposed budget on 24 October,
ninety-one Socialist deputies voted against the government, twenty-eight for it,
with eleven abstentions. On 4 and 5 November the SFIO’s National Council
voted to exclude the leading Neo-Socialists from the party. Among them were
Renaudel, Déat, Marquet and Montagnon.
Twenty-seven members of the Chamber of Deputies and seven members of
the Senate joined the Parti Socialiste de France that was founded by the Neo-
Socialists in early December 1933, but the new right-wing Socialist party failed
to win mass support. Even so, the break with the Neo-Socialists harmed the
SFIO far more than the German Social Democrats had been damaged by the
split in the Socialist Workers’ Party only two years earlier. It was clear that each
and every Socialist party could be beset by crisis not only if it adopted a
reformist stance but also if it maintained an orthodox anti-reformist line.

The Power of Continuity: Britain in the Early 1930s

The world economic crisis hit Great Britain sooner and more deeply than
France. The United Kingdom had had a high level of unemployment throughout
the 1920s: the proportion of men and women out of work rose above 10 per
cent for the first time in 1921 and sank below that level only once, in 1927.
By 1929 it was 10.4 per cent and by 1932 it had reached an all-time high of 22.7
per cent. Thereafter it continued to drop, but not until 1940 had it again
fallen beneath 10 per cent. In absolute terms, unemployment – at three million
– was at its worst between August 1931 and January 1933. In the summer of
1931 it had stood at 2.5 million, falling again to a little over two million by June
1932.
The older industrial regions in central and northern England, south Wales,
Scotland and Northern Ireland were particularly badly affected by the crisis. In
the coal-mining districts, the number of people out of work was as high as 70
per cent of the workforce. The decline of mining, steel-making, shipbuilding
and cotton manufacture had already begun long before 1929, of course: the
cotton mills of Lancashire were the main victims of the loss of overseas markets,
especially India, during the First World War. In 1913 one million miners had
produced 787 million tons of coal, but by 1933 the number of miners had fallen
to half a million and the amount of coal produced to 207 million tons. Between
1929 and 1932 steel production fell from 9.6 to 5.2 million tons. After 1925 the
United Kingdom’s export industry was hit by a return to the gold standard,
which led to a 10 per cent overvaluation of the pound. The gradual economic
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 443

recovery after 1933 was part of a more general trend, the depression having
reached its low point in the summer of 1932.
The economic policies pursued by Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour
cabinet were not substantially different from those adopted by Heinrich
Brüning’s government in Germany. It took office in June 1929 and, like its
predecessor in 1924, it remained at the mercy of the Liberals. The chancellor,
Philip Snowden, was a convinced advocate of a balanced budget and of free
trade, with the result that he emphatically rejected all calls for a generous state-
funded job-creation programme, for protective tariffs and for a transition to
flexible exchange rates. In February 1930 the minister without portfolio, Sir
Oswald Mosley, and the minister for public works, George Lansbury, submitted
a memorandum seeking to increase mass consumerism by means of public
works such as road-building schemes, but the idea encountered almost
universal opposition on the part of their cabinet colleagues.
Mosley had begun his political career as a Conservative, entering the lower
house at the end of 1918 at the age of only twenty-one. His first wife, Cynthia
(‘Cimmie’), was the daughter of Lord Curzon, the former viceroy of India and
later foreign secretary. Mosley soon fell out with the Tories over the Irish ques-
tion, and in the elections of 1922 and 1923 he stood as an Independent, in both
cases successfully. In March 1924 he joined the Labour Party, playing an active
role on its left wing, the Independent Labour Party. When his memorandum
was rejected, he resigned his ministerial post but in October 1930 tried to
persuade the party conference to adopt his line, failing by only the narrowest of
margins. Within the parliamentary party he enjoyed the support of a number
of leading MPs at this time, not least of whom were Aneurin Bevan and John
Strachey.
Mosley left the Labour Party on 28 February 1931 and the very next day
founded the New Party, with a programme designed to deal with the economic
crisis. In it he demanded state control of the country’s banks, a publicly funded
work creation programme and a plan to develop agriculture. A reduced cabinet
was to be given extraordinary powers similar to those held by the War Cabinet
from 1914 to 1918. He attracted the support of four Labour MPs, including
Lady Cynthia Mosley and John Strachey, while he was also able to enlist the
services of the writer Harold Nicolson to edit his party’s official newspaper,
Action. In the by-election in Ashton-under-Lyne, which had previously been
held by the Labour Party and where 46 per cent of the workforce was unem-
ployed, his New Party won 16 per cent of the vote. The by-election was won by
the Tories.
Even if the Labour government’s attempts to deal with the problem of
unemployment were far too little in the eyes of Mosley and other critics,
MacDonald’s government could not be accused of inactivity in this regard. The
Unemployment Insurance Act of December 1930 increased national insurance
benefits and made it easier for the unemployed to claim them, with the result
444 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

that state support for unemployment insurance continued to rise inexorably: in

1929 it amounted to £51 million but had risen to £125 million within only two
years. By the beginning of 1931 Snowden had come to the conclusion that
national expenditure needed to be drastically cut. In response to Conservative
and Liberal motions, he established an independent committee in February
1931 under the chairmanship of the departing president of the Prudential
Insurance Company, Sir George May. Its task was to suggest savings.
The committee had yet to complete its work when a Royal Commission that
had been set up to examine the problem of unemployment insurance submitted
an interim report in June, recommending a rise in contributions and a reduc-
tion in benefits. In July the May Committee, in the face of opposition from its
two Labour Party members, submitted a report that was deliberately couched in
dramatic terms. The deficits incurred by national insurance and by the budget
in general persuaded the panel of experts that the United Kingdom was on the
brink of financial disaster. It recommended a reduction in state expenditure by
around £96 million and in national insurance by no less than £66.5 million.
Unemployment benefits would have had to be cut by 20 per cent to take account
of this second recommendation. The committee also recommended a cut in
teachers’ salaries and in the expenditure on public works.
The government immediately set up a finance committee that was to convene
under the chairmanship of the prime minister and examine ways of imple-
menting the May Committee’s recommendations. Among the consequences of
the report was a flight away from the pound to gold, exacerbating a development
that had already begun in May with the collapse of the Austrian Credit Bank.
When the Bank of England tried to obtain further foreign loans from New York
and Paris to the tune of £80 million, it was faced by the condition that the British
government must accept the recommendations of the May Committee and in
any event agree to rigorous savings and to the retention of the gold standard.
MacDonald and Snowden informed the leaders of the Labour Party and
TUC of the planned changes to national insurance on 20 August 1931. The
TUC’s reaction was negative, its chairman, Walter Citrine, and the leader of the
transport workers’ union, Ernest Bevin, both announcing that they were unable
to agree to the cuts. Three days later the cabinet met to discuss the programme
and voted by a narrow majority of eleven to nine to accept the changes proposed
by the prime minister and his chancellor. MacDonald felt that he needed more
support for his plans and on the morning of 24 August drove to Buckingham
Palace to inform George V of his resignation. The king responded by inviting
him to form a cabinet made up of Labour, Conservative and Liberal ministers,
an invitation that MacDonald accepted without hesitation.
The new National Government took up office on 25 August. It comprised
four ministers from the previous Labour cabinet, including MacDonald himself
and Snowden, both of whom retained their existing portfolios, four Tories,
including Stanley Baldwin as lord president of the council and effectively
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 445

deputy prime minister, and two Liberals, one of whom, Sir Herbert Samuel,
was the new home secretary. Presented with these changes as a fait accompli,
the Labour Party rebelled, and by the end of the day the trade unions and the
party organizers outside parliament had effectively assumed control. Only four
members of MacDonald’s old cabinet attended the meeting of Labour MPs on
25 August, when the former foreign secretary, Arthur Henderson, was elected
the new chairman. On 28 August the party excluded MacDonald, Snowden
and the two other Labour members of the National Government, the minister
for the colonies, James Henry Thomas, and the lord chancellor, John Sankey.
From then on MacDonald, Snowden and their followers were regarded as
traitors by supporters of the Labour Party.
The way in which Labour MPs and trade unions behaved in late August
1931 was in many respects reminiscent of the revolt staged by the Social
Democrats in the Reichstag and the Free Trade Unions against the chancellor,
Hermann Brüning, and against two of the three other Social Democrat members
of the German government on 27 March 1930 after the latter had voted for
Brüning’s compromise on the question of reforms to national insurance in
Germany. In both cases party and trade unions opposed changes to social
welfare that the governing minority felt were necessary. In Germany, the
confrontation between the two groups led to the downfall of the last parlia-
mentary majority government and the transition to a presidential regime, while
in Britain the trade union veto and the split within the Labour Party resulted in
the formation of an alternative majority government. At a time when the small
right-wing minority of the workers’ party in Britain was reconstituting itself as
the National Labour Organization, the Socialist Workers’ Party in Germany was
splitting away from the left wing of the Social Democrat Party in protest at the
main party’s policy of keeping the government in power. The new party was to
find even less support among voters than the National Labour Organization. In
both countries the crisis within the party and within government meant that
social democracy lost some of its power, leading to a shift to the right. In
Germany parliamentary democracy was immediately placed at risk, whereas in
Britain the parliamentary system was able to weather the crisis.
Events suddenly gathered pace in the United Kingdom in 1931. New loans
were taken out in an attempt to support the pound. Snowden announced an
emergency budget that reduced the salaries of government employees by 10
per cent and of teachers by as much as 15 per cent. In the case of police officers,
the reduction was limited to 5 per cent out of fear for public safety. On 15
September the navy mutinied off the coast at Invergordon. On the 21st, on the
advice of the Bank of England, the government was forced to abandon the link
between the pound and the gold standard, resulting in a devaluation of the
former, which immediately fell from $4.86 to $3.80 and then to $3.40. The
government could hardly have devised a more effective means of dealing with
the crisis, and if the British economy began to recover after the summer of
446 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

1932, then this was due entirely to the increased competitiveness of the coun-
try’s export industry, especially car manufacture.
For the outside world, conversely, the decision taken by the government in
London had disastrous consequences, as the British economic historian Adam
Tooze explains:

The anchor of the global financial system had torn loose. Britain’s abandon-
ment of gold turned a severe recession into a profound crisis of the interna-
tional economy. By the end of September, twelve countries had followed
Britain in allowing their currencies to float freely. Eleven more currencies
had devalued their exchange rates while retaining a gold peg; whilst those
that stayed on gold at their old parities, like Germany, France and the
Netherlands, had no option but to defend their balance of payments by
adopting draconian restrictions on currency convertibility and trade.162

Tooze believes that it was essentially as a result of the devaluation of the British
pound that the volume of German exports fell by a further 30 per cent in
1931–2.
It was a reflection of the British understanding of democracy that in spite of
its parliamentary majority the National Government wanted an electoral
mandate at the earliest available opportunity. Elections were set for 27 October
1931. The government parties pooled their resources and agreed on a single
candidate in each constituency. In the course of the election campaign no one
attacked the Labour Party as stridently as Philip Snowden, who insisted that elec-
tors had a choice ‘between prosperity and ruin’ and accused his former friends
in the party of ‘bolshevism run mad’.163 The Conservatives openly advocated
protective tariffs, while twenty-nine out of Sir John Simon’s fifty-nine Liberals
added their voices to this demand as an emergency measure, campaigning as the
National Liberal Party. Conversely, thirty Liberal parliamentarians, under the
leadership of Sir Herbert Samuel, continued to champion free trade. The National
Government parties jointly asked electors for a ‘doctor’s mandate’ in the form of
powers to do whatever they thought was necessary.
The outcome of the elections was a triumph for the ruling parties, who won
67 per cent of the votes cast, returning 554 MPs to the lower house. The
Conservatives won a 55 per cent share of the vote, with 473 MPs, while the
National Liberal Party returned thirty-five MPs, the Liberal Party thirty-three
and the National Labour Organization thirteen. The three smaller government
parties won 3.7 per cent, 6.5 per cent and 1.5 per cent of the total votes cast.
The Labour Party, which had had 288 seats in May 1929, now had only fifty-two,
although its share of the vote – 30.8 per cent in 1931 compared with 37.1 per
cent two and a half years earlier – fell rather less dramatically than these figures
might suggest. The Independent Liberals in opposition won four seats, other
parties five. The Communist Party and the New Party returned no MPs at all,
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 447

the former polling 70,000 votes, or 0.3 per cent of the total, the latter around
40,000, or 0.2 per cent. It is possible that more voters would have supported the
radical parties on the extreme right and extreme left if the electoral system had
been based on proportional representation, but the traditional first-past-the-
post system meant that every vote for an extreme party seemed to the voter to
be wasted, encouraging a trend to support the centre-ground parties that voters
trusted to form the next government or at least to play a part in government.
In spite of the Conservatives’ success, Ramsay MacDonald remained the
country’s prime minister with the agreement of the parties in government. Sir
John Simon, who was the leader of the National Liberals, became foreign secre-
tary, while the Tory Neville Chamberlain took over as chancellor of the
exchequer. The protective tariffs promised in the election campaign were intro-
duced in February 1932 in the form of a 10 per cent surcharge on imported
goods, a move that marked Great Britain’s rejection of its Victorian legacy of free
trade. As for the Commonwealth nations, a system of preferential tariffs was
established at the Empire Conference in Ottawa in August 1932, and the pound
was elevated to the status of the leading currency within the sterling zone. In the
wake of the Ottawa resolutions, the share of British exports to the nations and
colonies of the Empire rose between 1934 and 1938 from 35 per cent to 41.3 per
cent of the pre-war figures, while the share of imports from the Empire went up
from 29.6 per cent to 41.2 per cent, an important factor in overcoming the
depression not only in Great Britain but also in the Commonwealth, but not in
the rest of the world.
The National Government turned its back on economic liberalism in the
domestic market, too. Two acts passed in 1931 and 1933 established supervi-
sory bodies to oversee the marketing of potatoes, milk, pork and other types of
agricultural produce. In 1932 a Wheat Act established a nationally guaranteed
standard price for this particular cereal crop, while the next three years
witnessed the enactment of laws designed to encourage the economic recon-
struction of those regions particularly badly hit by the crisis and to improve
production and market conditions in the cotton industry and the country’s
shipyards. But at the height of the depression the unemployed did not have the
impression that the government in London was doing enough to mitigate their
plight. In 1931 hunger marches in around thirty British towns and cities,
including Rochdale, Belfast and Liverpool, were marred by clashes with the
police and army units deployed to control the unemployed demonstrators. In
comparison with Germany, these clashes were, admittedly, generally harmless.
A national hunger march in October 1932 was particularly widely reported.
Like many other similar marches, it was organized by the National Unemployed
Workers Movement (NUWM), an organization founded in 1921 and led
initially by Wal Hannington and later by Sid Elias, two members of the
Communist Party. In other such groups, too, Communists set the tone. In the
course of the demonstrations in October 1932, public buildings and welfare
448 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

offices in many towns and cities were besieged, and in London, Manchester,
Glasgow and south Wales there were clashes with the police. By December
1932 some 1,300 members of the NUWM had been arrested, and 421 of them,
including Hannington and Elias, were imprisoned for affray. In January 1933
the TUC made a half-hearted attempt to form an unemployed association of its
own, but without any real success.
The Labour Party drew a clear distinction between itself and the Communists
when in 1930 it declared that membership of pro-Communist organizations
such as the League against Imperialism, the Left Wing Movement, the Friends
of Soviet Russia and the NUWM was incompatible with holding elected office
within the Labour Party. The left wing of the party felt that such measures were
far too defensive. Starting in the summer of 1930, the Independent Labour
Party, which hoped to give the party as a whole a clear-cut socialist profile,
began to distance itself increasingly from the Labour Party and at the elections
for the lower house in October 1931 it put forward its own candidates, who
were independent of those of the Labour Party itself, although following their
election, all five of the ILP MPs joined the Labour benches. The definitive break
came in 1932, when the majority of members of the ILP decided to part
company with the Labour Party, leading to a rapid fall in ILP membership from
17,000 in 1932 to 4,400 in 1935.
Shortly before the Labour Party conference in Leicester in October 1932,
when George Lansbury took over the running of the party following Henderson’s
resignation, several ILP activists under their chairman Frank Wise joined forces
with Ernest Bevin’s Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda that had been
formed the previous year and founded the Socialist League that was led initially
by Wise, then, following his death in 1933, by the left-wing Labour MP Sir
Stafford Cripps. In spite of this, the Labour Party did not move to the left as the
Socialist League had hoped. In opposition, too, the Labour Party pursued a
policy of moderation, advocating social reform within the framework of the
existing political system.
In 1931–2, the changes that took place on the right of the political spectrum
were more far-reaching than those on the left. Little remained of Mosley’s New
Party following the debacle of the elections to the lower house, and in January
1932, Mosley visited Italy in the company of Harold Nicolson and other
comrades-in-arms. Here he had a chance to get to know Mussolini’s Fascist
regime at first hand and to meet the Duce in person. He was deeply impressed
by all that he saw and heard. In April he broke with Nicolson, whose response
to Fascism was as cool as that of Lady Cynthia Mosley. In the summer of 1932
Mosley drafted a programme with the title ‘The Greater Britain’, a title first
used in 1868 by Sir Charles Dilke in his bestselling book. In it Mosley attacked
Britain’s technological backwardness, demanded a consistently protectionist
economic policy and criticized the present parliamentary system for its failure
to adapt to the needs of the twentieth century. The alternative could be only an
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 449

authoritarian state, a modern dictatorship in which a corporative parliament

would from time to time receive reports from the government and if necessary
respond to them with a vote of no confidence, in which case the king, not
parliament, would have the power to appoint a new government.
Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists, or BUF, on 1 October 1932.
According to its own estimates, it had built up a membership of between 40,000
and 50,000 within a matter of only two years, but it never achieved a higher
figure than this. With their black party uniforms, Mosley’s followers attracted
as much attention as they did with their violence towards their political oppo-
nents, chief of whom were the Communists, to say nothing of their attacks on
Jews. Until 1935 Fascist Italy and Mussolini’s regime remained Mosley’s ideal
but, following his meeting with Hitler in April of that year, he looked increas-
ingly to National Socialist Germany.
Mosley was encouraged in his sympathy for National Socialism by Diana
Mitford, the daughter of Lord Redesdale, who became his mistress in early
1933 and his wife in 1936, three years after Lady Cynthia’s death. For a time the
right-wing broadsheets gave the British Union of Fascists their unstinting
support: ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ ran the headline of the first of a series of
articles about Mosley that appeared in Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail on 15
January 1934. On 7 June, during a speech that Mosley delivered at a major rally
organized by the BUF at Olympia in London, his supporters launched a well-
organized attack on left-wing hecklers. The general public reacted with consid-
erable shock to this demonstration of violence, which was in stark contrast to
the traditional style of political debate in Britain. Public support for the BUF
began to ebb away, and within a short space of time the organization had lost
the majority of its members.
Apart from the British Union of Fascists, there were two other organiza-
tions in Great Britain that flaunted their Fascist credentials: the British Fascists
were formed in 1923–4 and supported Mosley’s movement, while the Imperial
Fascist League of 1928 claimed to feel repulsed by the plebeian appearance of
his Blackshirts. But sympathy for Italian Fascism went beyond the confines of
those organizations that called themselves Fascist, applying in particular to the
‘Neo-Tories’ associated with the journalist Douglas Jerrold, who edited The
English Review from 1931 to 1935, historians Charles Petrie and Arthur Bryant,
the Nietzschean Anthony Mario Ludovici, the acting editor in chief of the
crypto-Fascist journal Everyman, Francis Yeats-Brown, and Conservative MP
Viscount Lymington. This group of individuals influenced the intellectual life
of the country from the late 1920s, not least through their contributions to the
aforementioned journals. (The term ‘Neo-Tories’ was in fact coined by George
Orwell in 1945.)
The position adopted by these Neo-Tories was in many respects similar to
that taken by the advocators of the Conservative Revolution in Germany. Both
groups were in regular contact with one another and both shared a characteristic
450 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

wholly lacking from groups such as Jeune Droite and L’Ordre Nouveau in France,
namely, the tendency to glorify the experience of war. The Neo-Tories’ critique
of liberalism and democracy was no less radical than that of the Young
Conservatives in Germany. Both groups regarded parliamentarianism as an
outmoded political system that needed to be replaced by a well-organized
authoritarian state. But unlike most German Young Conservatives, the Neo-
Tories had no desire to see this state backed by a mass plebiscite: rather, the
monarchy was to be strengthened at the expense of the existing representation of
the people. Their ideal was not a charismatic leader but a king of the kind that
England had known before the Glorious Revolution of 1688. And eugenics
played a more significant role with the Neo-Tories than it did with the authors of
the Conservative Revolution inasmuch as they were afraid of the progressive
biological degeneration of British society. Both groups were anti-Semitic, but
both shied away from physical violence against Jews.
Fascist Italy fascinated the Neo-Tories above all on account of the resolve
with which it curtailed the activities of the political left. Like many of the Young
Conservatives in Germany, the Neo-Tories saw in the stato corporativo an alter-
native to a parliamentary system that they felt had outlived its usefulness. Their
expert on Fascism was Charles Petrie, whom Jerrold appointed the foreign
affairs editor of The English Review in 1931. In November 1932 Petrie and
Lymington attended an international conference on Fascism organized by the
Fondazione Volta. Among other conference visitors were the two economists
Werner Sombart and Erwin von Beckerath, the former president of the
Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, and two prominent National Socialists, Hermann
Göring, who at that date was the leader of the Reichstag, and Alfred Rosenberg,
the editor in chief of the Völkischer Beobachter. Petrie gave a speech on ‘The
Fundamental Unity of European Civilisation’ that amounted to a sustained
attack on the spirit of the French Revolution and that met with Mussolini’s
explicit approval. Petrie called Fascist Italy, with its combination of tradition
and modernity, a ‘microcosm of the continent’, describing his homecoming to
Great Britain as ‘returning to nonsense from sense’.164
For all their admiration of Mussolini (and, in the case of other Neo-Tories
such as Bryant and Yeats-Brown, of Hitler, too), the Neo-Tories kept their
distance from the Fascist and, more especially, the National Socialist tendency
to mobilize street protests, don paramilitary uniforms and glorify violence.
They were not interested in introducing the Fascist system to their own country
or in any form of violent overthrow of the existing system. Central to their
arguments was a critique of the status quo at home as embodied, in their view,
by the Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, who was perpetually at pains to
reconcile opposing factions.
Baldwin’s willingness to allow India to slide gradually into independence
met with indignant opposition not only from the Neo-Tories but also from
Tory diehards such as Churchill and Lord Lloyd, the former governor of
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 451

Bombay and later the high commissioner in Egypt and the Sudan. In January
1931 Churchill resigned from Baldwin’s shadow cabinet in protest at its policy
towards the subcontinent, and in November 1933 Lord Lloyd caused a stir with
his radically Conservative catalogue of demands including autarchy for the
Empire and national labour service. But he was unwilling to mount a putsch to
oust Baldwin from power, as the Neo-Tories hoped he would.
Baldwin’s Conservative critics enjoyed journalistic support from both
Beaverbrook and Rothermere, who used their newspapers and their United
Empire Party, which they founded in 1931, to demand the transformation of
the Empire into a free trade zone, while at the same time resisting the idea of
any further weakening of the British Empire. Their mass-circulation newspa-
pers – principally Beaverbrook’s Daily Express and Rothermere’s Daily Mail –
reached an audience of millions. By 1933/4 they had abandoned all pretence of
defending parliamentary democracy and turned, instead, to lauding the advan-
tages of right-wing dictatorships such as those in Italy and Germany, prompting
the New York Times to draw the conclusion in October 1933 that they were
hoping to introduce a similar system into Great Britain. But if this were to
come to pass, the paper went on, the change would find symbolic expression
not in ‘the black shirt of Italy’ or ‘the brown of Germany’ but in ‘a dash of
scarlet to suggest the ceremonial robes which Viscount Rothermere and Baron
Beaverbrook wear in the House of Lords on spectacular occasions’.165
The Neo-Tories were no mere marginal phenomenon in British politics but
commanded firm support among Conservative grandees and, like them, had
no hesitation in maintaining links, however infrequent, with Mosley’s Fascists,
which they did through elitist circles such as the January Club that was formed
in early 1934. Like many Conservative diehards they were encouraged by
Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, which first appeared
in 1931, to reject what they regarded as the Liberal falsification of English
history since Magna Carta and to propose in its place a transfiguring image of
a medieval and chivalric ‘Merry England’. With their bellicose cult of manhood,
they consorted with the chauvinist gutter press to oppose the widespread paci-
fism that found expression not only in the lively public interest in the American
film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s German anti-war novel, All Quiet on
the Western Front, but also in the legendary resolution of the Oxford Union in
February 1933, ‘This House will not fight for King or country’.
In no other area did the differences between the political climate in Great
Britain and that in Germany find such stark expression in the early 1930s as in
the arguments between pacifists and bellicists. In Germany, all public screen-
ings of All Quiet on the Western Front were banned at the end of 1930 following
violent protests by the National Socialists, the government arguing that any
further showings risked ‘jeopardizing Germany’s standing’. Books that glori-
fied the war found a mass readership in Germany, but not in Britain. (From a
purely literary point of view, most of these novels were on a substantially lower
452 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

level than Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel of 1920.) At more or less the same time
as Oxford’s students were declaring their unconditional desire for peace, the
Student Committees of the German Universities had long since been taken
over by the National Socialist German Students’ Union.
In Germany it was Young Conservative writers who represented the domi-
nant intellectual trend in the early 1930s, whereas the British Neo-Tories’
appeal remained restricted to the upper classes and, within those classes, to the
generation of military officers who had fought on the front line in the First
World War. It was beyond their means to acquire any kind of cultural hegemony
in Britain. Bloomsbury was the stronghold and epitome of left-wing intellec-
tual England and continued to be even more influential than the circle of
writers associated with The English Review. The Left Book Club of the publisher
Victor Gollancz had 50,000 subscribers, substantially more than the Right
Book Club, which, formed in 1937, never had more than 20,000.
The differences between Great Britain and Germany in the early 1930s can
be traced back to different political traditions in general and to the fact that
political liberalism proved more resilient in Britain than in Germany, where,
almost without exception, liberal voters switched to the National Socialists
between 1930 and 1933. In Britain, conversely, liberalism had, as it were, long
since subverted both the Conservatives and the Labour Party. In short, the
decline of the Liberal Party was by no means synonymous with the decline of
English liberalism, which continued to thrive in both of the major political
parties and remained the dominant political force even during the crisis of
1929 and later, guaranteeing the continuity of the country’s institutions.

Weimar’s Downfall: Hitler’s Road to Power

On 1 June 1932 the evening edition of the Social Democrats’ party newspaper
Vorwärts carried a banner headline that has entered the history books: ‘The
Cabinet of the Barons’. The cabinet that took over from Heinrich Brüning after
the latter had been toppled from power comprised a count, four barons, two
other aristocrats and only three bourgeois ministers. At its head was a politi-
cian who had been specially chosen by the new defence minister Kurt
Schleicher: Franz von Papen, a former officer in the general staff, who had
been born in 1879 and who later served as military attaché at the German
Embassy in Washington. He owned lands in Westphalia, was a keen horseman,
a major shareholder and chairman of the supervisory board of the Centre
Party’s official newspaper Germania and a board member of several agricul-
tural organizations. Through his wife he was also closely associated with heavy
industry in the Saarland.
Right up until the elections of 24 April 1932, Papen had been a member of
the Prussian Landtag, a Centre Party backbencher who was on the extreme
right of the party. Schleicher reckoned that Papen would bind the Centre Party
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 453

to the new government just as effectively as Brüning had done before him. But
on 31 May, immediately after Hindenburg had invited Papen to form a new
government, the leader of the Centre Party, Ludwig Kaas, made it clear to Papen
that his party would regard him as a traitor if he attempted to succeed Brüning.
Hindenburg responded by appealing to Papen’s sense of honour, whereupon
the latter accepted the post of chancellor and resigned from the Centre Party. In
order to invest the new government with a sense of cross-party unity, three
German Nationalist members of the cabinet resigned from their party: the
minister of the interior, Baron Wilhelm von Gayl; the minister for nutrition,
Baron Magnus von Braun; and the justice minister, Franz Gürtner. Two other
ministers who were close to the German Nationalists were the foreign minister,
Baron Konstantin von Neurath, who had previously been the German ambas-
sador in London, and the finance minister, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk.
The defence minister, Kurt von Schleicher, was generally regarded as the most
powerful figure in the government.
On 4 June, two days after Papen had named his cabinet, Hindenburg met
one of the conditions laid down by Hitler in return for his support for the new
government: he dissolved the Reichstag and set a date for new elections on 31
July. And on 14 June he signed Papen’s first emergency decree: based on
preliminary work by Brüning’s government, it reduced unemployment benefits
by an average of 23 per cent and shortened from twenty to six weeks the period
for which such support was payable, effectively removing any claim to welfare
and replacing it with a system that came nowhere near providing a subsistence
level of income. Two days later the government made good on a second promise
that Schleicher had given Hitler on 4 June, lifting the ban on the SA and SS that
Brüning’s government had imposed on 13 April 1932. The ban on the wearing
of uniforms, which had been in place since December 1931, was likewise lifted.
That same day, 16 June 1932, the reparations conference that should have
begun in January but which had been postponed at Brüning’s request finally
opened in Lausanne. Papen was now able to reap the rewards of his predeces-
sor’s policy of holding out, and the agreement that the new chancellor signed
on 9 July provided for a final German payment of a maximum of 3,000 million
Reichsmarks only after three years at the earliest or over a longer period of time
in the form of national debenture bonds – always assuming that the country’s
finances had in the meantime been restored to an even keel. Ratification of the
agreement by the parliaments in Paris, London and Rome still depended on
the United States’ willingness to accept a satisfactory settlement of inter-Allied
debts, with the result that the Lausanne agreement never actually came into
force. In practice, however, it spelt the end of both German reparations and
inter-Allied war debts.
The outcome of the Lausanne conference was a triumph for Papen’s foreign
policy, and yet it was acknowledged as such only by the liberal press and by the
Social Democrats, with the result that it did little to calm the situation at home.
454 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The Reichstag elections of July 1932 were the bloodiest ever seen in Germany,
most of the acts of violence being committed by Communists and National
Socialists. The lifting of the ban on the SA was followed in many parts of the
country by bloody clashes that were particularly violent in the industrial regions
of the Rhine and the Ruhr. During the first half of June there were three fatali-
ties in political rioting in Prussia: two National Socialists and one Communist.
During the second half of the month – following the lifting of the ban on the SA
and on the wearing of uniforms – the number of politically motivated deaths
rose to seventeen: twelve National Socialists and five Communists. Sundays
were particularly bloody, and on 10 July, for example, there were seventeen
fatalities throughout the country, not including ten individuals who later died
of their injuries and 181 who were seriously injured.
There was a clear connection between the end of the ban on the SA and the
escalation of violence, and yet Papen’s cabinet consistently blamed the Prussian
police and, with it, the Prussian government for the reign of terror that threat-
ened to engulf the nation’s streets. At the cabinet meeting on 11 July, the minister
of the interior, Wilhelm von Gayl, demanded the appointment of a federal
commissioner for Prussia, recommending Papen for the post and suggesting
that he then appoint a series of assistant commissioners. The federal govern-
ment agreed to the proposal and the very next day set a deadline of 20 July, only
for Prussia’s minister of the interior, the Social Democrat Carl Severing, to
counter this plan by issuing a decree on the 12th that made it easier to ban
open-air meetings and processions and requiring the police to proceed with the
utmost rigour against the illegal bearing of weapons. For the present, the blow
that was aimed at Prussia seemed to have been averted.
In the event, however, the government was able to stick to its original time-
table thanks to the events of Bloody Sunday in Altona on 17 July. An unusual
combination of poor decisions by politicians, bureaucrats and the police meant
that a march by the SA through Communist strongholds in Altona – at that date
still a part of Prussia – ended in nineteen civilian deaths, most of them caused
by police bullets. Severing’s failure to impose a state of emergency and to demon-
strate his strength of purpose allowed the federal government to step in, and on
18 July, without consulting any of the regional assemblies, it issued a total ban on
outdoor meetings and invited three members of the Prussian cabinet – the
welfare minister, Heinrich Hirtsiefer of the Centre Party replacing the prime
minister Otto Braun, who was on sick leave; the minister of the interior, Carl
Severing; and the independent finance minister, Otto Klepper – to attend a
meeting at the federal chancellery at ten o’clock in the morning of 20 July.
Papen greeted the three ministers with what amounted to the announce-
ment of a coup against Prussia: appealing to Article 48 of the federal constitu-
tion, Hindenburg appointed Papen the commissioner for Prussia, empowering
him to dismiss the members of the Prussia state ministry, to take over the
duties of the prime minister and to appoint other commissioners to run the
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 455

various Prussian ministries. Papen then announced that on the basis of the
decree he was relieving Braun and Severing of their posts and appointing the
mayor of Essen, Franz Bracht, as the Prussian minister of the interior.
The Prussian government responded by lodging an appeal with the Federal
Court in Leipzig, arguing that the measures violated both the national and the
Prussian constitution. On the other hand there was no attempt on the part of the
Prussian government to appeal to the nation as a whole or to the working
masses. Nor did the Social Democrats, the Free Trade Unions or the Reichsbanner
issue any such call to arms, the Social Democrats merely announcing that the
‘Cabinet of Barons’ would receive its just deserts in the Reichstag elections on 31
July. Young Reichsbanner activists in particular were appalled at the lack of any
real resistance, seeing in it a capitulation to violence, a judgement subsequently
repeated by history.
And yet there were compelling reasons for the Social Democrats’ actions. The
majority of Germans were no longer behind the Prussian government, having
demonstrated their lack of trust in it in the elections on 24 April, in the process
dealing a fatal blow to the Social Democrats’ sense of democratic legitimacy. A
general strike was unthinkable in the light of mass unemployment: in June 1932
it stood officially at 5.5 million but in reality was rather higher. To that extent the
situation in July 1932 was completely different from the one in March 1920 when
a general strike had been organized against the Kapp–Lüttwitz Putsch, at a time
of almost full employment in Germany. On that occasion, moreover, the striking
workers had known that they had the backing of the state’s legitimate authority.
But the Prussian coup had been ordered by a president whom the nation had
elected only a short time previously, making it unlikely that government employers
or police officers would rebel in any appreciable numbers.
Meanwhile, the workforce was more divided than ever. In the summer of
1931 the Communists had tried to bring down the coalition in Prussia by
supporting a call for a referendum demanding the dissolution of the Landtag
and initiated by the nationalist right. Although it was ultimately unsuccessful,
it was simply inconceivable that the Social Democrats and Communists would
join forces to reinstate Braun’s government, making the Communists’ question
as to whether the Social Democrats and Free Trade Unions were willing to take
part in a general strike with them a mere exercise in empty rhetoric. Moreover,
the Reichsbanner was unprepared both militarily and psychologically for an
armed struggle against the country’s armed forces. In this regard the Republican
Reichsbanner lacked the muscle of right-wing paramilitary organizations such
as the SA, SS and Stahlhelm, all of which would undoubtedly have played an
active role in any confrontation with the ‘Marxists’. In the summer of 1932 a
civil war would inevitably end badly for the democratic left and involve the
most terrible sacrifices.
The reasons for this dilemma can be traced back to much earlier events.
The Social Democrats’ supine acceptance of the Prussian coup was also a
456 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

consequence of their having spent the previous twenty months propping up the
Prussian government and, indeed, of having played a leading role in govern-
ment over a much longer period. Objectively speaking, it was impossible for the
Social Democrats to be both a party of government – formally in Prussia and
informally in the country as a whole – and at the same time a party preparing
for civil war. On 20 July 1932 the Social Democrats forfeited all their remaining
power, which they had been able to maintain for so long only because they had
staked everything on a single card since the autumn of 1930, namely, their
ability to defeat the National Socialists on the basis of the constitution and in
league with the moderate forces of the bourgeoisie. When the SPD decided to
adopt this policy, it remained true to its underlying principles, its vote for a
legally binding course of action deriving from its view that a civil war, which it
saw as the greatest of all evils, had to be avoided at all costs. It had followed this
belief on the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914 and again
during the revolution of 1918/19. And it clung to this creed even when there
was practically no one left, apart from the Centre Party and its own members,
willing to defend the Weimar constitution any longer and when the democratic
parties knew that they still had only a minority of the German people behind
them.
The removal from office of Braun’s government brought to an end an excep-
tional chapter in Prussian history. After 1918 the Hohenzollern state had turned
into the Republic’s most reliable prop. The old state of Prussia had not disap-
peared completely from the map but until the spring of 1932 it remained domi-
nated by the three Weimar coalition parties. The great purge began immediately
after the Prussian coup. Secretaries of state and ministerial heads were pensioned
off, as were all the heads of regional councils and police chiefs who had belonged
to the previous coalition parties. All of them were replaced by Conservative
officials, most of whom were German Nationalists. Of the four Social
Democratic regional presidents, only one remained: Gustav Noske, who headed
the provincial administration in Hanover. In the view of the federal govern-
ment, the former Social Democratic defence minister occupied a position so far
to the right of his party that he was allowed to retain the post that he had held
since July 1920.
The Social Democrats hoped that in the Reichstag elections on 31 July 1932
they would be able to give Papen’s government the reply that they felt it deserved
in the wake of the Prussian coup, but in the event their hopes remained unful-
filled. At first sight, at least, the result was a triumph for Hitler. Some 84.1 per
cent of the electorate took part, the highest turnout since 1920, with the NSDAP
polling 37.4 per cent of the total, an increase of 19.1 percentage points when
compared with the previous elections to the Reichstag on 14 September 1930.
The number of National Socialist seats went up from 107 to 230. The
Communists recorded far more modest gains, climbing from 13.1 per cent to
14.3 per cent. The two Catholic parties also improved their showing: the Centre
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 457

Party’s share of the vote rose from 11.8 per cent to 12.5 per cent, that of the
Bavarian People’s Party from 3 per cent to 3.2 per cent. The other parties all lost
votes. The Social Democrats dropped from 24.5 per cent to 21.6 per cent, the
German National People’s Party from 7 per cent to 5.9 per cent, the German
People’s Party from 4.5 per cent to 1.2 per cent and the German State Party from
3.8 per cent to 1 per cent. Between them, the other parties polled 2.5 per cent of
the total votes cast.
The National Socialists had succeeded in taking votes from the Liberal
centre ground and the moderate right as well as from the various splinter
parties, while also attracting the votes of numerous first-time voters and of
Germans who had never voted before. The north and east of the country
showed a far greater swing to the National Socialists than the south or the west,
but even in Hessen, Franconia, the Palatinate and northern Württemberg, the
NSDAP had outstripped all the other parties. Among all the thirty-five constit-
uencies the National Socialists’ front runner was Schleswig-Holstein, where
the NSDAP received 51 per cent of the votes.
As had been the case in 1930, Catholics and, to a lesser extent, the internally
divided ‘Marxist’ camp remained relatively untouched by the slogans of the
National Socialists. Among middle-class Protestants, only conservative voters
had maintained a modicum of independence from the NSDAP. Liberalism
had been practically wiped out and could no longer rely on any fixed group of
voters but was so marked by nationalism as to be susceptible to the promises of
the National Socialists. The NSDAP was now the biggest protest party opposed
to the Weimar Republic and derived support from all who did not hold strong
convictions to the contrary. Few noticed that Hitler and his party were making
such contradictory promises. All that mattered for them was the hope that in
the wake of a ‘national revolution’ Germany and the Germans would fare better
than they felt was the case at present.
But the elections failed to produce a parliamentary majority. There was a
negative majority for the two totalitarian parties, the National Socialists and
the Communists, who together polled 51.7 per cent of the votes, winning 319
out of a total of 608 seats in the Reichstag. If we add together the seats of all the
right-wing parties, namely, the NSDAP, the German National People’s Party,
the German People’s Party and a number of smaller groups, they still did not
have a majority. A coalition between the NSDAP and the two Catholic parties
was ruled out when the latter insisted on constitutional guarantees that Hitler
was unwilling to provide.
In spite of their electoral successes, the National Socialists were bitterly
disappointed at the fact that they were manifestly no closer to political power
than they had been before the election. Their anger found expression in a wave
of bloody confrontations with their political opponents in early August, the SA
orchestrating a series of particularly violent attacks in the area of Germany
where it was strongest: the east of the country. By 9 August the government had
458 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

accepted the need for a new emergency decree aimed at combating political
terror, extending the death penalty to counts of political murder and setting up
special courts in the areas that were especially at risk.
Three days earlier Hitler had met the country’s defence minister for secret
talks near Berlin. In the course of their meeting, he was able to persuade Schleicher
to let him run the government and to entrust the NSDAP with a whole series of
posts ranging from prime minister of Prussia to joint appointments of the posts
of minister of the interior, education and agriculture in both Prussia and the
country as a whole. The National Socialists, Hitler insisted, must also be allowed
to run the federal ministry of justice and a new ministry of aviation. In agreeing
to Hitler’s demands, Schleicher was guilty of a dramatic volte-face, for as recently
as the beginning of August 1932 he had felt that it was sufficient for him to ensure
that the armed forces did not fall into National Socialist hands.
Hindenburg, who was currently on holiday on his estates at Neudeck in
East Prussia, took a very different view of the situation and rejected Schleicher’s
proposal in no uncertain terms, maintaining his position on his return to
Berlin, when Papen suggested appointing Hitler chancellor at the head of a
majority government that also included the Centre Party. This was the occa-
sion when Hindenburg made his oft-cited remark that people were deluding
themselves if they thought that he was going to make a ‘Bohemian private’ the
chancellor of Germany.
In government circles, too, there was widespread disagreement on the best
way to deal with Hitler. The minister of justice, Franz Gürtner, and the finance
minister, Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, both supported the idea of the National
Socialists’ playing a part in government, whereas the minister of the interior,
Wilhelm von Gayl, was emphatically opposed to it. He was even ready to fight
a life and death battle with the NSDAP, preferring to advocate a ‘revolution
from above’ involving the dissolution of the Reichstag, a delay to new elections
beyond the sixty days demanded by the constitution and the imposition of a
new law affecting franchise.
The following day, 11 August, the government’s traditional constitutional
celebrations were held in the presence of the president. This was the first time
in this history of the Weimar Republic that a speaker inveighed against the
1919 constitution, the minister of the interior, Wilhelm von Gayl, beginning
his address by observing that the Weimar constitution, far from uniting his
fellow countrymen and women, was driving them apart. He advocated changes
to the constitution in the direction of greater authoritarianism, such changes to
include raising the voting age, additional votes for breadwinners and mothers,
greater independence for government authorities and the creation of a new
first chamber made up of professionals as a counterweight to the Reichstag.
Gayl’s proposals looked forward to the ‘new state’ that was described at greater
length by the journalist Walther Schotte in an official pamphlet with the same
title and with an introduction signed by the chancellor. They also encapsulated
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 459

the internal reforms long envisaged by the proponents of the Conservative

Revolution and discussed in particular by the Ring Movement associated with
Heinrich von Gleichen-Russwurm, the founder of the Gentlemen’s Club, and
with the group of contributors to the journal Die Tat (Action) and its editor,
Hans Zehrer.
Hitler planned to hold talks with the chancellor on 12 August and with
Hindenburg on the 13th. In order to underline his claim to power he had
summoned several units of his SA to Berlin and deployed them around the
capital. But on the morning of the 13th he learnt from Schleicher and Papen that
Hindenburg was unwilling to offer him the post of chancellor. Acting without
authority, Papen offered him the post of deputy chancellor and even promised
to step down in favour of Hitler after a suitable period of time had elapsed. But
Hitler turned down the offer and continued to insist on the post of chancellor.
The meeting with Hindenburg on the afternoon of 13 August was also
attended by Papen and the president’s secretary of state, Otto Meissner, together
with two representatives of the National Socialists, the chief of staff of the SA,
Ernst Röhm, and the leader of the NSDAP in the Reichstag, Wilhelm Frick. It
proved to be Hitler’s worst political defeat since his failed putsch of 8/9
November 1923. According to Meissner’s minutes of the meeting, Hindenburg
rejected Hitler’s demand to be appointed chancellor with a ‘clear and emphatic
no’: ‘He could not answer to God, to his conscience or to his country for
granting complete control of the government to a single party, especially a
party unilaterally opposed to all who thought differently.’166
The official account of the meeting was so brief that Hitler felt publicly
humiliated, too. Even before he saw a copy of the communiqué, he was already
reproaching Papen for his alleged failure to make it clear that Hindenburg had
already reached a decision. And he threatened Papen and Meissner, claiming
that subsequent developments would lead inexorably to the solution that he
himself had proposed or, alternatively, to Hindenburg’s fall from power. The
government, he went on, would be placed in a serious predicament, with
increasingly outspoken opposition. He refused to accept responsibility for the
consequences. It was a clear case of blackmail: if Hitler’s claim to power was not
met, he threatened to abandon his former promise to rely on the legal process
and to resort instead to revolutionary violence and civil war.
On 30 August, Papen, Gayl and Schleicher descended on Neudeck to
discuss the situation with Hindenburg. Papen spoke of the need to dissolve the
Reichstag and recommended delaying the new elections beyond the sixty-day
deadline demanded by the constitution. Although such a delay violated Article
25 of the constitution, there was a ‘national emergency’ that justified such a
course of action: ‘In his oath the president has taken it upon himself to defend
the German people from harm, and new elections in these politically charged
times, with all their acts of terror and murder, would undoubtedly cause great
harm to the German people.’167 A similar view was expressed by Gayl, who at
460 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the cabinet meeting on 10 August had been one of the first to propose a delay
in holding the new elections.
Hindenburg had no hesitation in agreeing to Papen’s and Gayl’s recommen-
dation, declaring that ‘in the state of national emergency following the dissolu-
tion of the Reichstag’, his aim was to avoid making things worse for the German
people and that he could square it with his conscience ‘that the provisions of
Article 25 be interpreted in such a way that in the current situation new elec-
tions be postponed to a later date’.168 For Papen, Gayl and Schleicher, Hindenburg’s
agreement was no less important than the authorization to dissolve the Reichstag,
which the president granted unconditionally and signed at once.
The emergency meeting at Neudeck took place on the same day – 30 August
1932 – as the constituent session of the newly elected Reichstag. In keeping with
an unwritten ruling, the candidate from the largest party was elected its leader:
the National Socialist Hermann Göring. The second session took place on 12
September 1932, when the only item on the agenda was the acceptance of a
government statement, but the Communists opened the session by asking for a
change to the agenda, proposing that the house begin by dealing with their
party’s motions to revoke two new decrees – the emergency decree of 4
September designed to stimulate the economy, the other a related decree dated
5 September and intended to increase and preserve job opportunities – and
then to proceed to a series of votes of no confidence in Papen’s cabinet. It would
have been enough for a single member of the Reichstag to object to this proposal
for it to be rejected in its entirety, but not a single voice was raised in opposition.
The NSDAP asked for a half-hour delay in order to consult with Hitler. A
majority of members agreed to this request.
Papen was taken by complete surprise by this move on the part of the
Communist Party and spent the half-hour break getting hold of Hindenburg’s
order dissolving the Reichstag, which he then placed in front of the leader of
the house after Göring had twice deliberately ignored his, Papen’s, attempts to
take the floor. Göring also proceeded to ignore the file from Hindenburg and
instead asked the house to vote on the two Communist Party motions together,
announcing the outcome of the vote long after the members of the government
had left the chamber: of the 560 votes cast, one was invalid; 512 delegates had
voted yes, forty-two no and five had abstained. The no votes were those of the
German National People’s Party and the German People’s Party; the represent-
atives of a handful of smaller parties had absented themselves from the vote.
All other parties, from the National Socialists to the Communists, had voted in
favour of the Communist Party’s motions.
The vote was invalid because the Reichstag had been dissolved the moment
the chancellor placed the order for its dissolution on Göring’s desk, but the
political impact of the vote could not be ignored, more than four-fifths of all
delegates having expressed their lack of confidence in Papen’s government.
Indeed, it was Papen’s negligence that had led to this debacle.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 461

By the time the cabinet met two days later to decide on its next move, Papen
no longer felt equal to the trial of strength for which he had gained Hindenburg’s
support in Neudeck on 30 August. Only Gayl and Schleicher now supported an
indefinite delay to the new elections. Schleicher pointed out that three experts
on constitutional law, Carl Schmitt, Erwin Jacoby and Carl Bilfinger, all of
whom had defended the government in the case of Prussia vs the Reich, agreed
that in the present case there was indeed a ‘true state of emergency’, but Papen
and his other ministers were not convinced that the time had come to depart
from the constitution. On 17 September the cabinet decided to propose 6
November as the date of the new elections. This was the last possible date that
they could offer the president, who signed the relevant decree on 20 September.
In spite of his defeat in the Reichstag, Papen was still keen to make sweeping
changes to the constitution, and on the evening of 12 September he used a
radio address to announce that he was working on a revised constitution in
keeping with the proposals put forward by Gayl on 11 August. A referendum
would be held to decide the matter. A month later, Papen used a conference of
the Association of Bavarian Industrialists in Munich on 12 October 1932 to
present his ideas on conservative reform within a wider historical and, indeed,
theological framework. In this he was almost certainly inspired by the Young
Conservative writer Edgar Jung, a High-Church Protestant whose anti-
parliamentary, anti-democratic book, The Rule of the Inferior, had appeared in
1927. In particular, Papen appealed to the ‘invisible floodwaters of the sacrum
imperium, the indestructible idea of the Holy German Empire’.
Throughout this crisis, the myth of the German Empire continued to
increase in potency, while at the same time support for the Republic increas-
ingly ebbed away. But the idea of the Reich also served to justify Germany’s
claim to be seen as more than just a national state in the western, post-1789
sense. In 1932, the editor of the Young Conservatives’ Deutsches Volkstum,
Wilhelm Stapel, announced that ‘Only a Germany led by Germans can be a
Europe at peace.’ For his part, the Catholic journalist Waldemar Gurian, a critic
of the new political romanticism, proclaimed that

The Reich is becoming a watchword both at home and abroad, a watchword

for the Reich and against Versailles and parliamentary democracy. [. . .] The
Reich may be described as the German image of humanity, an image
contrasted with western humanitarianism but different from eastern apoca-
lypticism by dint of its close links with European history.169

In the course of the early 1930s the idea of the Reich underwent a renaissance
that extended well beyond its traditional denominational confines and was
regularly accompanied by pan-German aspirations and by a belief in the
German nation – the Volk – that transcended all national boundaries. Now that
the Habsburg Empire no longer existed, Protestant and Catholic ideologues
462 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

were in any case not interested in drawing a distinction between kleindeutsch

and großdeutsch, a distinction they regarded as superannuated, and in this they
were in agreement with contemporary German historians. In proposing a ‘posi-
tive’ answer to the West and to the state of Weimar, it was possible to appeal
either to the idea of a supranational German Reich as a force for order in central
Europe or to the Prussia of Frederick the Great. But it was also possible to
appeal to both of these myths at once, which is what most of the authors of the
Conservative Revolution did. So, too, did a number of eminent German histo-
rians. And yet the mystical glorification of the sacrum imperium was above all
a hallmark of those right-wing Catholics whose number included Papen. It
was a quasi-religious belief that gave many Germans, not least the chancellor’s
political enemies, good reason to harbour doubts about his grasp on reality.
Political reality caught up with Papen on 25 October 1932, the day on which
the Federal Court in Leipzig delivered its verdict on the ‘Prussian coup’ of 20
July. The presidential decree was constitutional, it was decided, to the extent
that Papen had appointed his chancellor commissioner for Prussia and author-
ized him temporarily to strip Prussian ministers of their powers and assume
those powers himself. But, to quote the court’s ruling, this did not mean that
the commissioner had the right ‘to prevent the Prussian State Ministry and its
members from representing the state of Prussia in the Reichsrat or vis-à-vis the
Landrat, the State Council and other countries’.170
The Leipzig verdict did not end the dualism between Prussia and the Reich
that had been the source of so many complaints but declared that both the
plaintiff and the defendant were in the right. This meant that the authority of
the Prussian state was divided between Braun’s caretaker government and the
temporary government installed by the Reich. The latter enjoyed the real exec-
utive authority, while the former’s principal right was to represent Prussia in
the Reichsrat. Although Braun’s cabinet regained no real power in conse-
quence, it could at least feel vindicated that it had not been found guilty of any
violation of its duties. The federal government continued to retain control over
the authorities of Germany’s largest individual state, including its police, but
had to accept that it had acted unconstitutionally when it dismissed the
Prussian government on 20 July. This verdict also applied to the federal presi-
dent in whose name the measure had been taken. However one looked at it, the
verdict announced on 25 October 1932 represented a setback for all of those
who advocated an authoritarian reform of the German constitution.
The Leipzig verdict had little impact on the outcome of the second elections
to the Reichstag in 1932, but the same cannot be said of a second event
that took place that year and that hit the national headlines only days before
the country went to the polls. The event in question was a public transport
strike in Berlin that began on 3 November and was notable for the fact that
Communists and National Socialists were united in their opposition to both
the state and the trade unions. Three people were killed by police bullets in
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 463

rioting on 4 November, and eight were seriously injured. Not until 7 November,
the day after the elections, did public transport return to normal in the capital.
The most notable aspect of the elections on 6 November was the poor
showing of the NSDAP not only in Berlin but in the country as a whole. They
lost a total of more than two million votes when compared with the results on
31 July, while their share of the vote fell from 37.3 per cent to 33.1 per cent.
Among the other losers were the Social Democrats, who polled 700,000 fewer
votes than in July and fell from 21.6 per cent to 20.4 per cent. The winners were
the German Nationalists and the Communists, Hugenberg’s party adding more
than 900,000 votes to its tally, a rise from 5.9 per cent to 8.9 per cent, while the
Communist Party rose from 14.5 per cent to 16.9 per cent, its 600,000 extra
votes allowing it to return the magical figure of 100 members of parliament, an
increase of eleven on its previous tally of eighty-nine. There were few changes
among the other parties, although it is noteworthy that only 80.6 per cent of
the electorate turned out to vote, compared with 84.1 per cent in July.
The result was a reflection of the sense of political frustration that was felt
by the country as a whole. If we include the two rounds of presidential elections
and the five regional assembly elections on 24 April, the elections on 6 November
were the fifth time that most Germans had gone to the polls in 1932. The
NSDAP had previously been the greatest beneficiary of the politicization of
non-voters and was now the most affected by the lower turnout, for ‘non-
political’ voters must have felt particularly disillusioned to discover that their
vote had had almost no influence to speak of on practical politics.
Nor could it be overlooked that Papen’s cabinet had marginally improved
its rating, a point evident from the relatively good showing of the German
National People’s Party and the German People’s Party, whose share of the vote
rose from 1.2 per cent to 1.9 per cent. The government and the parties that
supported it benefited from the early signs of an economic recovery, which
could be seen as a result of the active stabilization policy that Papen had intro-
duced in September 1932. There was also a sense of disillusionment at the
political and social radicalism of the National Socialists, their cooperation with
the Communists in the Berlin transport strike not only proving a shock in the
capital’s leafy suburbs but also acting as a deterrent to many middle-class voters
in the country as a whole. Even so, the government had no cause to feel trium-
phant, for almost nine-tenths of all Germans had voted for parties opposed to
the ‘cabinet of barons’.
The drop in the National Socialists’ share of the vote was a source of some
satisfaction for their political opponents, especially the Social Democrats, who
thought that Hitler was now beaten. But the increase in the Communist vote
was bound to be unsettling, for the gap between the Social Democrats and the
Communists had shrunk from 7.1 percentage points in July to a mere 3.5 in
November. Leading officials in the party expressed their fears that if more elec-
tions were held in early 1933, when unemployment reached its peak, the Social
464 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Democrats might be overtaken by the Communists. And once the Communists

were the largest working-class party, the Social Democrats were afraid that the
situation might take a dramatic turn for the worse and end in revolution, which
is precisely what the Communists were hoping for.
Astute observers were aware, of course, that the confluence of Communist
gains and National Socialist losses meant that Hitler was better placed than
Thälmann to take advantage of the new situation. On 8 November, Julius Elbau
noted in the liberal Vossische Zeitung:

One hundred Communists in the Reichstag! Transports of joy on the

fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution in Moscow! Eighty-nine
made no difference, either in parliament or in the country, but one hundred!
That is something else, at the very least a nice round number! And for Hitler
a veritable Godsend!

Elbau was convinced that Germans would be ‘frightened out of their wits’ and
‘seek refuge in the arms of the one true patent saviour’.171 Fear of civil war was
now Hitler’s most powerful ally. Elbau’s analysis was accurate to a fault, and it
reflected the calculations of the leading National Socialists in the weeks after the
elections on 6 November.
In October 1932, the constitutional lawyer Johannes Heckel had spoken of
‘constitutional paralysis’, and the November elections did nothing to change this
situation, for there continued to be a negative majority of National Socialists
and Communists, with the result that not even a coalition of the NSDAP, Centre
Party and Bavarian People’s Party would have produced a parliamentary
majority. As things stood, the Reichstag was not fit for purpose. At the cabinet
meeting on 10 November, Gayl proposed a return to the national emergency
plan of 30 August, which would have meant dissolving parliament without
setting a date for new elections within the sixty-day period required under the
constitution, but he failed to find any support among his fellow ministers.
As in August 1932, so in November Papen pursued a twin-track policy, on
the one hand informing Hindenburg of his willingness to continue with a pres-
idential cabinet under his own – Papen’s – leadership, while at the same time
working behind the scenes and throwing his weight behind a submission
signed by National Socialist supporters, prominent among whom were middle-
class industrialists, bankers and landowners, demanding that Hitler be
appointed chancellor. The letter in question was handed to Hindenburg on 19
November. Among its signatories were the president of the National Land
League, Count Eberhard von Kalkreuth, the former president of the Reichsbank,
Hjalmar Schacht, the Cologne banker Kurt von Schröder and two major indus-
trialists, Fritz Thyssen and August Rosterg. Two other industrialists, Paul
Reusch, the chairman of the board of the Good Hope Iron and Steel Works,
and Fritz Springorum, who was the director general of Hoesch, sympathized
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 465

with the contents of the letter, but declined to add their signatures because they
had no desire to open up divisions in the industrial concerns of the Ruhr Valley.
In short, the submission was not a vote on the part of all the country’s employers.
On 17 November the government announced its resignation, attempts by
the chancellor to enter into negotiations with all the different parties having
failed to produce a positive outcome. At Hindenburg’s request the government
remained in office in a caretaker capacity. The next day Hindenburg himself
began talks with a number of selected party leaders. The most important of
these discussions were with Hitler and took place on 19 and 21 November, but
the outcome was negative. Hugenberg was vehemently opposed to Hitler’s
chancellorship, and so there was no prospect of the NSDAP obtaining a parlia-
mentary majority. Nor was Hindenburg prepared to ask Hitler to head a presi-
dential cabinet. Hitler was not even able to persuade Hindenburg to change his
mind by threatening that if the present system of government were allowed to
go on, it would lead within a matter of only a few months to a new revolution
and a descent into Bolshevik chaos.
On 24 November Hindenburg sent a written message to Hitler via his secre-
tary of state, Otto Meissner, the contents of which were also made public. In
essence, it repeated the terms of his earlier declaration of 13 August: in the
present circumstances, the writer was bound to fear that

a presidential cabinet under your [Hitler’s] leadership is bound to turn into

a party dictatorship, with all the attendant consequences for an exceptional
worsening of the antagonisms within the German people, a situation which,
if he [Hindenburg] were to bring it about, he could not reconcile with his
oath and with his conscience.172

Hindenburg drew the only possible conclusion from his talks with Hitler: it
was no longer possible to avoid proclaiming a state of national emergency. But
Papen and his cabinet were by no means as resolute as Hindenburg, and on 26
November Schleicher sought and obtained permission to undertake a further
round of exploratory talks, which on this occasion included the Free Trade
Unions and the Social Democrats. Encouraged by the journalist Hans Zehrer,
Schleicher was keen to find cross-party agreement extending from the reformist
left to the National Socialists, or at least the latter’s Realpolitik wing as repre-
sented by the leader of the NSDAP’s national organization, Gregor Straßer.
The talks with the leader of the General German Trade Union Association,
Theodor Leipart, were held on 28 November and proved useful, since Schleicher
was willing to promise to lift the contentious decree of 5 September, which
allowed employers to pay less than the contractually agreed wages to new
workers. Conversely, the leader of the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, Rudolf
Breitscheid, reacted very differently to a similar approach from Schleicher later
that same day. The critical point was reached when Schleicher asked how the
466 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Social Democrats would react to a possible delay to new elections until the
spring of 1933. Schleicher demanded to know ‘whether the Social Democrats
would immediately mount the barricades’. Breitscheid later recalled the ensuing
exchange:

I said that I wouldn’t commit myself to the barricades but that I was
compelled to inform him that the Social Democrats would resist such a
violation of the constitution and that they would do so with all their might.
In the circumstances, Schleicher replied, the future looked very bleak.173

On the right of the political spectrum, Schleicher’s efforts to broker a deal were
even less successful than those on the left. Hitler cancelled a meeting with the
defence minister at the last minute, and not even Straßer was able to persuade
his leader to change his mind. On 30 November Hitler also turned down an
offer of the post of vice-chancellor in a Schleicher cabinet, although even if he
had accepted the post, this would not, of course, have ensured that the danger
from the political left had been averted, for the appointment of National
Socialist ministers would inevitably have encountered emphatic opposition
from the Social Democrats and, regardless of the differences between the Trade
Union Association and the Social Democrats, it would also have been resisted
by the Free Trade Unions. In short, the polarization that Schleicher was trying
to avoid would simply have become much worse: his policy of trying to recon-
cile left and right was tantamount to attempting to square the circle.
Even so, Schleicher enjoyed broader political and social support than
Papen, for he enjoyed good relations with the parties of the centre ground and
with the Christian-Nationalist and liberal trade unions and, more recently,
with those trade unions that had links to the Social Democrats. Much the same
was true of his relations with the Reichsbanner. Even with Gregor Straßer he
had forged a working relationship, though it remained unclear if this would be
of any real value in an emergency. In general, Schleicher was regarded as far
less reactionary than the current chancellor, and he had made it clear that he
had no time for authoritarian experiments with the constitution. All of this
could be important if the Reichstag were to remain dissolved and a military
state of emergency continued for any length of time. In November 1932 neither
Schleicher nor Papen ruled out the expedient of declaring a national state of
emergency, but Schleicher had a more realistic view of the risks of a military
dictatorship, however veiled that dictatorship might be, which is why he was
anxious to do everything that seemed to him necessary to avert a civil war.
In acting in this way, Schleicher set himself on a collision course with
Hindenburg, who by the end of November 1932 was determined to cut the
Gordian knot by once again dissolving the Reichstag and delaying new elec-
tions, which effectively meant proclaiming a state of emergency that would be
above the law. Papen was willing, albeit reluctantly, to go down this particular
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 467

road but failed to win support for it when the cabinet met on 2 December and
Schleicher invited Lieutenant Colonel Eugen Ott to spell out to his ministerial
colleagues the lessons to be drawn from a ‘war games’ exercise that the
Reichswehr had conducted only a short time earlier. According to this report,
the country’s armed forces could not win a war fought on two different fronts
against the Communists and the National Socialists, especially if it simultane-
ously had to resist a Polish attack on Germany’s eastern border, as the study
presupposed. The cabinet was deeply impressed by this, and when Papen
reported on the meeting to Hindenburg, the latter abandoned his opposition to
Schleicher’s chancellorship, saying: ‘I’m too old to assume responsibility for a
civil war at the end of my life.’174 According to Papen’s report of their meeting,
it was with these words that Hindenburg justified his decision to turn his back
on a standpoint that he had been advocating only twenty-four hours earlier.
Schleicher was appointed chancellor on 3 December 1932, at the same time
retaining his old post of defence minister in the new government. With
Schleicher’s agreement, his predecessor, Papen, who still enjoyed Hindenburg’s
confidence, was allowed to retain his official residence in the Wilhelmstraße,
allowing him to continue to enjoy the privilege of direct access to the president,
a privilege that might prove to be more important than any official government
position. Papen’s ministers retained their old cabinet posts, the only exception
being the Ministry of the Interior, where Wilhelm von Gayl was replaced by the
deputy commissioner for Prussia, Franz Bracht.
Schleicher had little difficulty clearing his first official hurdle, for no vote of
no confidence was tabled at the brief session of the Reichstag that began on 6
December. With the chancellor’s agreement, the Reichstag lifted some of the
emergency laws that had been in place since 4 September, when the govern-
ment had been granted the power to suspend the right to free collective
bargaining. The house also passed an amnesty law, again with the agreement of
the government. And in response to a motion from the NSDAP, it altered the
wording of Article 51 of the constitution, which appointed the chancellor the
president’s replacement in the event of the latter’s being prevented from exer-
cising his office in person. Hindenburg had celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday
on 2 October 1932. If he were to fall seriously ill or die during Schleicher’s
chancellorship, then the powers of the president, chancellor and defence
minister would all devolve on a single person, General Kurt von Schleicher. In
order to prevent this from happening, the National Socialists proposed that the
president of the Federal Court replace the president and in this they won the
backing of most of the bourgeois parties as well as the Social Democrats, who
viewed with dismay a further increase in Schleicher’s power. With the neces-
sary two-thirds majority, the motion was passed on 9 December, the last day of
the current parliamentary session.
Schleicher used a radio address on 15 December 1932 to announce his
government’s platform, giving priority to work creation programmes, stressing
468 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

his antipathy to both capitalism and socialism and labelling himself a ‘social
general’, while calling his predecessor a ‘fearless and blameless knight’ but at the
same time distancing himself from him: ‘It is uncomfortable to sit on the point
of a bayonet, which is to say that in the longer term it is impossible to govern
without broad popular backing.’175 As a result, he concluded, the new govern-
ment would adopt as its guideline the motto of the former chief of the general
staff, Count Helmuth von Moltke the Elder: ‘Look before you leap.’
Papen – the ‘fearless and blameless knight’ – was far from sharing Schleicher’s
view that his successor was a better chancellor than he was, and in an attempt
to lever himself back into a position of power he joined forces with another of
Schleicher’s enemies, meeting Hitler at the Cologne home of the banker Kurt
von Schröder on 4 January 1933. The participants had intended their delibera-
tions to remain secret, but within days their contents were making headlines in
the national and international press. Their aim was to bridge the gap between
the leader of the National Socialists and the country’s president and prepare the
way for Schleicher’s downfall, a further point on which Hitler and Papen were
in agreement. But before Papen could mediate between Hitler and Hindenburg,
he first had to clear up his personal relationship with Hitler, which had been
strained since 13 August. Once this had been achieved, the two men were able
to agree on a ‘duumvirate’, although it was still unclear exactly who would head
the new government.
It seems likely that Hitler repeated his claims to the chancellorship at his
meeting with Papen in Cologne. In the light of all that we know about Papen’s
attitude in August and November, we may assume that he will not have insisted
on heading a ‘cabinet of national unity’. But at his meeting on 4 January he will
not have failed to mention Hindenburg’s continuing misgivings at the idea of
Hitler’s chancellorship. In the course of their discussions, Hitler clearly did not
rule out a temporary alternative to his own chancellorship involving National
Socialists taking over both the defence ministry and the home office. This
conclusion receives some support from an entry in Goebbels’s diary dated 10
January 1933 and is also confirmed by Papen’s remarks to four leading indus-
trialists in Dortmund on 7 January, namely, Krupp, Reusch, Springorum and
Vögler. When Papen reported to Hindenburg on 9 January, the president
gained the impression that Hitler was no longer insisting on the transfer of all
the government’s powers to the NSDAP but would be content to play a part in
a right-wing coalition government. Hindenburg accordingly authorized Papen
to remain in contact with Hitler on a strictly confidential basis.
On 11 January 1933, two days after the talks between Hindenburg and
Papen, the National Land League, which eight months earlier had played an
active role in toppling Brüning from power, returned to the fray. Immediately
before a meeting with the president that was also attended by the chancellor,
the economics minister, Hermann Warmbold, and the minister of nutrition
and agriculture, Magnus von Braun, the League informed the press of a
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 469

decision that amounted to a declaration of war. In it the signatories maintained

that with the connivance of the government German agriculture, especially
animal husbandry, had suffered a catastrophic decline of a kind that would
scarcely have been thought possible under a Marxist regime. After that the
government broke off all contact with the National Land League. Only
Hindenburg, who had always felt personally close to the landowners to the east
of the Elbe, refused to join the boycott, and on 17 January he wrote to the prae-
sidium of Germany’s largest agricultural pressure group to say that he hoped
that the measure he had just signed for improvements in enforcement protec-
tion would help to reassure the agricultural community.
The spectacular breakdown of relations between the government and the
National Land League was followed within days by a further headline-grabbing
event in the form of the regional elections in the second-smallest German state
of Lippe-Detmold, where the National Socialists had mounted an unprece-
dented wave of demonstrations, all of them under Hitler’s personal supervision
and all of them designed to make amends for the party’s loss of votes in the
Reichstag elections on 6 November. Their efforts were rewarded by an addi-
tional 6,000 votes and a rise in the share of the vote from 34.7 per cent to 39.6
per cent. The victory was much exploited for propagandist ends. And from now
on it was unthinkable that Hitler would refuse to accept the post of chancellor
in a ‘national government’. On 16 January he had a serious falling-out with his
former national organizer, with the result that Gregor Straßer no longer had any
supporters left and Hitler’s position within the party was now so strong as to be
practically unassailable.
That same day the government agreed that in the event of a vote of no
confidence it would dissolve the Reichstag and delay new elections till October
or November 1933. An alternative to this violation of the constitution, which
demanded new elections within sixty days, would have meant ignoring the vote
of no confidence on the part of a negative majority that was incapable of forming
a government and leave the toppled government in office in a caretaker capacity.
During the winter of 1932/3 several political practitioners, including eminent
constitutional lawyers such as Heinrich Herrfahrdt and Carl Schmitt, had
advised the chancellor to adopt this policy, which they argued to be fully justi-
fied, and a report to this effect was added to the minutes of the ministerial
meeting on 16 January. But Schleicher clearly felt that a vote of no confidence
represented such a serious loss of prestige for his government that he never
really considered this option as a solution to his difficulties. It was extremely
unlikely that the president would have agreed to the incomparably more risky
solution to the crisis that the cabinet proposed and delayed the new elections
until the end of the year: with his ‘Ott plan’ Schleicher had unwittingly given
Hindenburg grounds to oppose the government on this very question.
Within days of the cabinet meeting, the press had begun to speculate that a
state of emergency was about to be declared, and on 19 January the leader of
470 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, Rudolf Breitscheid, told a meeting of

party officials in Friedrichshain in Berlin that as early as 28 November
Schleicher had mentioned that new elections might be delayed. He also quoted
his own response on that occasion: ‘Such a provocation will undoubtedly cause
the greatest conceivable convulsions.’176
An even greater stir was caused by another revelation later that same day at
a meeting of the Reichstag’s budgetary committee, when the Centre Party
member of parliament, Joseph Ersing who was one of the secretaries of the
Christian-Nationalist trade unions, reported the misuse of public funds that
had been intended to help heavily indebted manorial estates, especially in East
Prussia. If the groups behind the National Land League, which had received
huge sums of money from the German nation as a whole, adopted the kind of
language that they had recently used in their dealings with the government,
then the Reichstag would have to look into the matter. And, Ersing went on, if
the federal funds had been used not to cover debts but to buy luxury cars and
race horses and to fund trips to the Riviera, the government must demand the
repayment of such sums. The major landowners, Ersing concluded, were
attempting to prevent any further parliamentary deliberations on the question
of help for eastern Germany, hence the intense efforts that were being made
behind the scenes to dissolve the Reichstag as quickly as possible.
The very next day, the Reichstag’s Council of Elders agreed to postpone
the full session of parliament planned for 24 to 31 January, the delay being
demanded by the National Socialists, who had every reason to avoid a plenary
session at least for the present: nothing was to get in the way of the political
negotiations that Hitler had resumed shortly after the regional elections in
Lippe-Detmold. He met Hugenberg on 17 January and Papen on the 18th, but
neither meeting produced any concrete results. On 21 January the German
Nationalists in the Reichstag declared their formal opposition to Schleicher’s
cabinet, citing as their reason the argument that the country’s economic poli-
cies were increasingly straying into the field of ‘socialist-internationalist ideas’,
in the process adding to the ‘threat of Bolshevism in the countryside’.177 It
was a charge that the German Nationalists had already levelled at Brüning in
May 1932.
On 22 January Papen and Hugenberg met for the third time in as many
weeks. As on 18 January, the meeting took place in the Dahlem villa of Joachim
von Ribbentrop, a champagne dealer who additionally dabbled in politics. The
meeting was given added weight by the fact that it was also attended by the secre-
tary of state, Otto Meissner, and by Hindenburg’s son, Oskar, while the National
Socialists were represented by Göring and Frick. Crucially, Hitler had sent word
to the meeting, seeking to reassure the participants that he was willing to include
a sizeable number of bourgeois ministers in a presidential cabinet under his
own leadership, even if those ministers would not be answerable to their own
individual parties.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 471

By the time that Hindenburg received Schleicher on 23 January, he already

knew about the Dahlem meeting. Schleicher reported on the cabinet’s plans for
a state of emergency but met with a rebuff. Hindenburg insisted that he was
still deliberating on the question of the dissolution of the Reichstag, but for the
present he was unwilling to agree to a delay in holding new elections:

Such a step would be interpreted on all sides as a violation of the constitution.

Before deciding on such a step, the party leaders would have to be consulted
in order to ascertain if they would recognize the state of national emergency
and not complain that it represented a violation of the constitution.178

By 27 January Berlin was buzzing with rumours that a dictatorship was to be

established, not under Schleicher, but under Papen. It was certainly true that
Hindenburg still wanted Papen rather than Hitler to succeed Schleicher, but he
was counting on the support of the National Socialists and on sufficient backing
in the Reichstag. The German Nationalists, conversely, were proposing the
idea of an anti-parliamentary emergency cabinet. On 27 January Hugenberg
and Hitler came to blows over the contentious question of which party would
run the Prussian ministry of the interior, with the result that Hitler, in a fit of
pique, cancelled a meeting with Papen arranged for later that day. A public
declaration by the NSDAP that it would resist a dictatorship under the former
chancellor with all the resolve that it could muster left such a profound impres-
sion on Papen that on the evening of the 27th he told Ribbentrop that he was
now more firmly in favour of a Hitler-led cabinet than he had been until then.
Schleicher resigned the very next day, 28 January 1933. The most obvious
reason for his resignation was Hindenburg’s refusal to ask him to dissolve the
Reichstag. (By now there was no longer any question of postponing the new
elections.) The general public, however, was less exercised by the news of
Schleicher’s dismissal than by the announcement that Hindenburg had invited
Papen to talk to the various parties, clarify the political situation and establish
the possibilities that were open. The two leaders of the Confederation of
German Industry and the Association of German Chambers of Industry and
Commerce, Ludwig Kastl and Eduard Hamm, as well as Otto Meissner, were all
profoundly alarmed at this development and warned of the dangers threat-
ening the German economy as a result of the political crisis engulfing the
country, while trade unionists of every shade of political opinion expressed
their fear that the appointment of a ‘socially reactionary government hostile to
the working class’ would be seen as a provocation by workers up and down the
country.179
For the present the general public remained in the dark about Papen’s true
intentions, namely, a cabinet headed by Hitler with Papen himself as his vice-
chancellor enjoying special privileges. Several former ministers, including the
foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, and the finance minister, Lutz
472 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Schwerin von Krosigk, declared their willingness to serve in such a cabinet, and
when Papen informed Hindenburg of this new development on the evening of
28 January, he was suitably impressed and for the first time seemed prepared to
overcome his doubts about Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Papen encoun-
tered substantially more difficulty with the German Nationalists, many of
whom were still resolutely opposed to such a move. Hugenberg continued to
have profound misgivings about the National Socialists’ demand for new elec-
tions but was irresistibly tempted by the fact that Hindenburg was ready to offer
him the posts of minister of economics and of nutrition both in the country as
a whole and, on a regional level, in the state of Prussia.
In the National Socialist camp, Hitler had to come to terms with the fact
that it was Papen, not he, who would become commissioner for Prussia, but
by way of compensation Göring was appointed assistant commissioner with
special responsibility for the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and, hence, for
the Prussian police. On a national level Göring became minister without port-
folio and commissioner for aviation, while Wilhelm Frick became minister of
the interior. In short, the cabinet contained only three National Socialists. The
conservatives, including the Stahlhelm leader Franz Seldte as labour minister,
had a clear numerical advantage.
Hindenburg himself chose one cabinet member, General Werner von
Blomberg, the military commander for East Prussia, who on 29 January was
still in Geneva as technical adviser to the German delegation at the disarma-
ment conference that was being held there. At Hindenburg’s behest, Blomberg
was appointed Schleicher’s successor as defence minister. Rumours to the effect
that the Potsdam garrison was planning a putsch persuaded the president to
summon Blomberg to his presidential palace as soon as he arrived back in
Berlin on the morning of 30 January and to appoint him defence minister
without further delay, although in the event the rumours proved to be
unfounded. Since the president was able to appoint ministers only on the chan-
cellor’s recommendation and since the chancellor himself had not yet been
appointed, Hindenburg was guilty of violating the constitution.
For a long time it remained unclear whether Hindenburg would accede to
National Socialist demands and dissolve parliament and call for new elections.
Hitler justified his demand by pointing out that he had no majority in the
Reichstag and that he needed such a majority for the enabling law that he
believed was vital. On 29 January Papen seems to have persuaded Hindenburg
to agree to this move in the event that it proved impossible to gain the support
of the Centre Party and the Bavarian People’s Party for the new government.
It was not hard for Hitler to announce talks with the two Catholic parties.
Once Hugenberg had capitulated on the question of new elections, Hitler and
the members of his cabinet could be sworn in by the president during the late
morning of 30 January 1933. Hindenburg ended the brief ceremony with the
words: ‘And now, gentlemen, onward with God!’180
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 473

There was no resistance whatsoever to the appointment of the new govern-

ment. During the days leading up to the events of 30 January rumours of a
‘putsch cabinet’ run by Papen and Hugenberg had caused more disquiet among
the general public, as well as among employers’ organizations, trade unions,
centre-ground parties and even the Social Democrats, than the possibility of a
government led by Hitler. The dangers of the Papen–Hugenberg alternative
were equated – not without good reason – with those of a civil war, for a presi-
dential cabinet dominated by German Nationalists would have been opposed
by nine-tenths of the population and violently resisted by Communists, Social
Democrats, trade unions and National Socialists. If a ‘national government’
under Hitler were to gain the parliamentary support of the Catholic parties,
then most observers, including the out-of-office Schleicher, would have
regarded this as the lesser of two evils. Even the Social Democrat Vorwärts had
expressed this view in its evening edition on 28 January.
On the morning of 30 January 1933, while Germany’s fate was being decided
in the presidential palace in the Wilhelmstraße, the party leaders of the Social
Democrats were meeting their members of parliament and representatives of
the Free Trade Unions in the nearby Reichstag building. The Social Democrats
present reacted to the news of the appointment of Hitler’s cabinet with an
appeal warning against ‘undisciplined and independent actions on the part of
individual organizations and groups’ and insisting that the situation called for
‘cool heads and determination’.181 The following day, Rudolf Breitscheid,
standing in for his ailing leader Otto Wels, emphatically rejected non-
parliamentary action, arguing that if Hitler remained within the framework of
the constitution, it would be wrong to give him an opportunity to violate the
terms of that constitution.
The Communists, conversely, believed that the time had come for direct
action. For the first time since the Prussian coup of 20 July 1932, the Central
Committee of the German Communist Party spoke directly to the leaders of
the Social Democrats and trade unions. The Social Democrats, the German
Trade Union Association, the Cooperative Union of Free Employees’ Federations
and the Christian trade unions were all urged to ‘join forces with the
Communists in holding a general strike in protest not only at the Fascist dicta-
torship of Hitler, Hugenberg and Papen but also at the destruction of workers’
organizations and in that way demonstrate their support for the freedom of the
working class’.182
But a united front among the proletariat was an even more hopeless pros-
pect on 30 January 1933 than it had been on 20 July 1932. At a time when more
than six million Germans were officially registered as unemployed, a protracted
general strike was clearly out of the question, while a general strike of limited
duration would be seen by the new government as a sign of weakness rather
than a demonstration of strength. It was also extremely unlikely that the
Communists would have heeded a call to end the walkout. The Communist
474 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Party had for years been attacking the Social Democrats, reviling them as the
‘principal social buttress of the bourgeoisie’ and as ‘social Fascists’, while Die
Rote Fahne had as recently as 26 January 1933 dismissed the suggestion put
forward by Vorwärts that the Social Democrats and Communists should agree
on a ‘non-aggression pact’, labelling the idea an ‘infamous insult aimed at anti-
Fascist Berlin’.183 In short, the Communist slogan about working-class soli-
darity was fundamentally lacking in credibility. The Social Democrats and Free
Trade Unions had to assume that the Communists would resort to the kind of
revolutionary force that the National Socialists were waiting for in order for
them to invest their reign of terror with a semblance of legitimacy. And a civil
war could end only with the bloody suppression of all workers’ organizations:
the divided left stood no chance in the face of the combined forces of right-
wing paramilitary associations, the police and the army.
By the evening of 30 January, the streets in Berlin and many other German
towns and cities belonged to Hitler’s ‘brown battalions’. The following day Hitler
held talks with the Centre Party, as he had promised Papen he would do. But the
exercise was merely for show and designed simply to demonstrate that it was
impossible to govern the country with the parliament that had been elected on
6 November 1932. The Centre Party, by contrast, was interested in a genuine
coalition with the NSDAP and far less concerned at Hitler’s appointment as chan-
cellor than at the ‘reactionary’ makeup of his cabinet. But the leader of the Centre
Party, Ludwig Kaas, had no choice but to turn down Hitler’s demand that the
Reichstag be adjourned for a whole year, and in doing so he gave Hitler an excuse
to declare the talks on 31 January a failure and to trigger his cabinet’s first impor-
tant decision, which was to ask Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag. The rele-
vant decree was issued on 1 February, together with a second one, setting 5 March
1933 as the date of the new elections. Until then Hitler’s cabinet had to rely on the
emergency powers that it enjoyed under Article 48 of the constitution.
Hitler’s appointment as chancellor was not the only possible solution to the
crisis that beset Germany at this time, a crisis that had begun with the break-
down of the grand coalition on 27 March 1930 and become dramatically worse
following Brüning’s dismissal on 30 May 1932. Hindenburg was no more
obliged to break with Schleicher than he was forced to replace Brüning with
Papen, for even after a vote of no confidence in the Reichstag, he could still
have invited Schleicher to stay on as the head of a caretaker government or else
he could have replaced him with a chancellor who, enjoying cross-party
support, would not have polarized opinion. He was not barred from dissolving
the Reichstag again within the constitutional limit of sixty days, while a delay
in holding new elections until the autumn of 1933 was scarcely less risky than
it had been a year earlier, especially when we take account of the relevant decla-
rations from the centre-ground parties and the Social Democrats. There was
nothing that forced Hindenburg to appoint Hitler the new German chancellor.
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 475

True, Hitler was still the leader of the largest party, even after his defeat in the
Reichstag elections on 6 November 1932. But he did not have a majority in the
Reichstag.
Until January 1933 Hindenburg had opposed the whole idea of Hitler’s chan-
cellorship, so keen was he to avoid a National Socialist dictatorship. If Hindenburg
changed his mind on this point, it was because his closest advisers urged him to
do so and because he believed that the risk of a dictatorship was reduced, if not
entirely removed, by the preponderance of conservative ministers in Hitler’s
cabinet. Presumably his personal disappointment at Schleicher also played a
role here, for Schleicher had never explicitly countered the charges levelled at
the president and his entourage in connection with the scandal surrounding the
subsidies to help the eastern parts of Germany. Influential elements among
landowners to the east of the Elbe, who had been receiving state support since
Bismarck’s day, had been advocating Schleicher’s dismissal and Hitler’s appoint-
ment for some time, as had right-wing industrialists in the Rhineland and
Westphalia. Almost everyone with access to the president exerted pressure on
him to act, and the eighty-five-year-old Hindenburg was simply not strong
enough to resist. By January 1933 the centre of power around the president had
thrown its weight behind Hitler, and Hindenburg was merely one part of this
centre of power, albeit its most important element.
In short, the events that unfolded on 30 January 1933 were neither the inevi-
table outcome of earlier political developments nor the result of mere chance.
The mass support that Hitler enjoyed made his appointment a possibility, but
if he became chancellor, it was thanks to Hindenburg and the political milieu
that the president embodied. Like the increase in NSDAP support, the political
strength of the ancient elite that was urging a government of national unity
under Hitler had a long prehistory that included, first and foremost, the erosion
of trust in the democratic state. If a ‘belief in legality’ – in Max Weber’s eyes the
most important abstract resource of any system of rule184 – had always been
relatively weak in the Weimar Republic, then the reasons for this can be traced
back to the birth of the Republic from the ashes of the First World War and even
to events that preceded the outbreak of the war by many years. If there is a
single root cause for the collapse of Germany’s first democracy, then it must be
sought in the nineteenth century’s repeated refusal to deal with the question of
freedom or, to put it another way, the fact that the modernization process in
Germany had never been properly synchronized, the democratization of
suffrage coming at a much earlier date than the democratization of a parlia-
mentary system of government. In this contradiction lay the deeper reason for
the success that Hitler enjoyed after 1930 with his pseudo-democratic political
agitation designed to overthrow a semi-authoritarian presidential system.
In his attempt to destroy the Weimar Republic, Hitler exhausted all
the possibilities that the Weimar constitution had to offer him. His tactical
476 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

insistence on legality was incomparably more successful than any advocacy of

revolutionary force of the kind that he had espoused ten years earlier at the
time of his Beer Hall Putsch on the night of 8/9 November 1923 and that
the other totalitarian party – the Communists – continued to champion.
Since the Communists were openly propagating the idea of civil war, they
allowed the National Socialists, who maintained the largest army capable of
being deployed in a civil war, to portray themselves as the defenders of the
constitution and as the agents of law and order ready to call in the army in
order to put down any left-wing attempt to overthrow the government. At the
same time, of course, Hitler could himself threaten the country’s rulers with
revolutionary violence and civil war if they broke the law or changed it to the
disadvantage of the National Socialists, as had been the case with the emer-
gency legislation designed to combat political terror that had been enacted on
9 August 1932.
Ever since the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century there was
nothing that the Germans feared more than civil war. Hitler’s tactical appeal to
legality was a skilful way of taking account of that fear, and his conditional
promise to respect the due process of law served its purpose, while also
containing an implied threat of blackmail. The fear of the National Socialists’
revolutionary character that was felt by the right-wing establishment gradually
gave way to the belief that the leader of the ‘nationalist’ masses would create the
necessary popular basis for his authoritarian policies. The illusions felt by the
authoritarians were aided and abetted by the illusions felt by the democrats. In
order to ensure that the state remained under the rule of law, its advocates
would have had to violate the letter of a constitution that was ultimately neutral
with regard to its own validity, even if that violation had taken the form of a
tactical disregard of a negative vote of no confidence. But such a course of
action was at odds with a ‘functionalist’ view of legality, a view that Carl Schmitt
pilloried in the summer of 1932 in his book Legality and Legitimacy, where he
argued that it ‘insisted on its own neutrality even to the point of suicide’.185 This
view was shared by the Social Democrat lawyer Ernst Fraenkel, who in an
article published in Die Gesellschaft in December 1932 criticized the wide-
spread ‘fetishization of the constitution’.186 Weimar had fallen into the trap of
legality that the authors of its constitution had unwittingly set.
Hitler launched the Reichstag election campaign with a speech in the Berlin
Sportpalast on 10 February 1933 and began by attacking ‘the parties of decline,
of November and of revolution’, parties which for fourteen years were said to
have destroyed, fragmented and torn apart the German people, after which he
appealed to his audience to give his new government four years before judging
him. His final words were inspired by the Bible and, more especially, by the
Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer. In this way Hitler sought to equate his
own will to power with service to his country and with the fulfilment of a
divinely appointed task:
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 477

For I cannot rid myself of the conviction that this nation will one day rise
up again, I cannot put aside my love for this people of mine, and I am utterly
convinced that the hour will come when the millions who hate us today will
stand behind us and, together with us, will welcome the new and hard-won
German Reich that we have created together and that has been so painfully
achieved, a kingdom of greatness and honour and strength and glory and
justice. Amen!187

Exactly what he planned to do if the Germans were to heed his appeal Hitler
had already explained in some detail a week earlier in a secret speech that he
delivered in the presence of army and navy commanders in the official resi-
dence of the army chief, General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, and that
covered most, if not all, of his plans for the future of Germany:

The root-and-branch eradication of Marxism. [. . .] The strictest authori-

tarian leadership. The removal of the cancer of democracy! [. . .] The
building up of the army as the most important precondition for achieving
the goal of regaining political power. Universal compulsory military service
must be reintroduced. [. . .] How should political power be used once it has
been achieved? Cannot yet say. Perhaps by winning new export opportuni-
ties, perhaps – and arguably even better – by conquering a new Lebensraum
in the east and ruthlessly Germanicizing it.188

Storm Clouds in the Far East: Japan Invades Manchuria

Another war over Lebensraum had already begun at around this time in a
different part of the world, a conflict that was likewise to culminate in the
Second World War. This was the war with which Japan had been seeking to
extend its sphere of influence into mainland Asia since 1931. Many of the polit-
ical developments that took place in the far eastern empire after 1918 bore
striking parallels with events that were unfolding in Europe at this time. Japan
was one of the victorious powers in the First World War, but, like Italy, it felt
that it had been robbed of its deserts. At the insistence of its western allies it
had handed back the former German colony of Kiaochow to China in 1921,
committing itself to an ‘open-door policy’ towards China, and under the terms
of the Washington Naval Treaty of February 1922 it agreed to limit the size of
its fleet. For the nationalist right these various treaties were an important
reason for public hostility to the West, which was accused of pursuing a policy
of racial prejudice.
There is no doubt that during the interwar years the United States in partic-
ular treated Japan in a way that fully supports this assessment. At the Paris
Peace Conference in 1919 the United States and Great Britain prevented the
League of Nations from including in its statutes a ban on racial discrimination,
478 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

as demanded by Japan. In 1921 California introduced segregated schools for

whites and Asians. In 1922 the Supreme Court made it illegal to confer
American citizenship on Japanese nationals. And in 1924 a federal law
placed a total ban on Japanese immigration, which was already severely
restricted at this date. America’s undisguised racism was grist to the mill of
Japanese nationalists. The ‘West’ became a propagandist bogeyman for the
radical Japanese right, just as it was for right-wing Germans at the time of the
Weimar Republic.
Ever since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan had pursued a policy of
modernization unique in Asia. Technologically and industrially, its models were
Great Britain and the United States, whereas its political and constitutional
template was Prussia. Like the German Empire, Japan was a constitutional
monarchy. In 1919 the right to vote in elections to the lower house was extended
to include all male taxpayers, and in March 1925 universal equal franchise for
men over the age of twenty-five was introduced. A week later the lower house
passed a bill designed to maintain public order and directed at Communist,
anarchist and internationalist tendencies, throwing the gates wide open for
police brutality against anyone deemed guilty of left-wing activities. Throughout
the 1920s socialist and Communist parties had practically ceased to play any
role at all in the political life of Japan. The ‘rice riots’ that shook the country in
1918 were not politically motivated but were the direct result of famine and led
to no lasting mobilization of workers, peasants or smallholders.
The two leading parties were the older Seiyukai party and the more recent
Minseito party. Both described themselves as liberal but both were right-wing
groups. They maintained close links with the major industrial concerns, the
zaibatsu, but enjoyed no organized mass support. The end of the First World
War marked the start of a de facto process of parliamentary democratization in
Japan, even if many governments were effectively run by cabinets of civil serv-
ants. By the end of the 1920s the upturn in the Japanese economy had led to a
period of relative political stability: the production index rose – if we take the
years between 1920 and 1924 as the base, then the average had reached 313 by
1925–9. The value of imports rose by 199 per cent between 1913 and 1929,
while exports during the same period increased by 205 per cent.
The parliamentary system that was in operation at least for a time was never
fully accepted by Japanese society. The British historian W. G. Beasley saw the
reasons for the widespread hostility to this western practice

in those ideas and institutions which had turned the Japanese people away
from the pursuit of individual freedoms and towards the attainment of
collective goals: the formative pressures of the education system; an
emperor-centred state religion; conscription, with its accompanying indoc-
trination; and the persistence of traditional authoritarian attitudes in
important areas of bureaucratic and family behaviour.189
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 479

Parliament was regarded as un-Japanese because it encouraged a call for civil

rights and individual freedoms. During the Meiji era, everything that was taken
over from the West was seen as the price of affluence and strength. Moreover,
Japan had been successful in defending essential elements of its native tradi-
tions, including the imperial system, Confucian ethics and the Samurai tradi-
tion in public service. But during the 1920s it seemed increasingly as if these
traditions, too, were at risk and that the very essence of all that was Japanese was
threatening to become a victim of modernization.
As early as 1919 Kita Ikki, a writer whom Germans would have numbered
among the supporters of the Conservative Revolution, had demanded far-
reaching social changes, including the nationalization of major industries, the
confiscation of personal fortunes greater than one million yen and land reform,
while at the same time expressing his backing for a military coup designed to
promote an expansionist foreign policy on the Asian continent and provide an
effective defence of Asian interests vis-à-vis the West. In spite of a police ban on
its distribution, An Outline Plan for the Reconstruction of Japan found a wide-
spread following. Like the founder of the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana,
Enrico Corradini, Kita Ikki based his imperialist claims on the argument that
Japan was a proletarian nation and must continue the class struggle on an inter-
national level.
In 1921 Kita Ikki joined forces with Okawa Shumei to found the Society for
the Preservation of the National Essence (Yuzonsha), an organization that
influenced the thinking of leading military figures and of clubs friendly to the
military. Two slogans played a particularly important role in this Japanese
manifestation of the Conservative Revolution: the ‘imperial way’, or kodo; and
the ‘Showa Restoration’, or Showa Ishiu. (Showa Tenno was the title of the young
Emperor Hirohito, who ascended the Japanese throne in 1926.) A group of
officers inspired by Kita Ikki’s ideas took the name of Kodo, while another
organization called itself the Tosei (Control) Faction and was distinguished
from its rival organization by its less socialist, more employer-friendly attitudes.
Its aim was to prepare Japan for total war by means of a dense network of state
controls. But on the question of territorial expansionism, Kodo and Tosei were
in total agreement.
The first elections to the lower house based on the new rules for universal
male suffrage took place in January 1928 and produced a narrow majority for
the Seiyukai party under General Tanaka Giichi. In June 1928 Japanese officers
in Manchuria, the southern half of which had been under Japanese influence
since 1905, murdered a local Chinese warlord, Zhang Zuolin. Although Tanaka
generally took a hard line towards China, he insisted in the present case on a
thorough investigation of the affair and in doing so put himself on a collision
course with his general staff, with the result that in July 1929 he was obliged to
resign under pressure from the army. His successor was Hamaguchi Osachi,
the leader of the Minseito party.
480 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Under Hamaguchi Japan agreed to the London Naval Treaty of April 1930,
which imposed further restrictions on the country in terms of its ability to
rearm. The ratio agreed to in Washington in 1921, which provided for a rela-
tionship of 5:5:3 for the larger warships of the United States, Great Britain and
Japan, was now extended to smaller vessels, while the ratio between American
and Japanese naval vessels in general was raised to 5:3.5, a ratio more favourable
to Japan. At their cabinet meeting, every minister, including the navy minister,
voted to accept this ruling, but the supreme commander of the navy, backed by
ultra-nationalist organizations, vetoed it, arguing that by signing the treaty the
government had ignored the will of the emperor as enshrined in the 1889 consti-
tution. In the event Emperor Hirohito sided with the government and signed
the agreement in October 1930. The following month a young nationalist made
an attempt on Hamaguchi’s life. He died of his wounds in August 1931 and was
succeeded by Wakatsuki Reijiro, a Minseito politician who the military expected
to be less confrontational than his murdered predecessor.
In the meantime the world economic crisis had hit Japan. The price of its
principal export, raw silk, which had stood at 100 points in 1914, fell from 225
in 1925 to 151 in 1929 and to sixty-seven in 1931. At the same time demand for
Japanese cotton goods fell, leading to increasing unemployment in the textile
industry and widespread poverty in rural areas, especially the north and north-
east of the country, which were the army’s favourite recruiting grounds.
In Japan as elsewhere, the depression led to a mounting radicalization of
the political climate. In May 1931, Ishiwara Kanji, who since 1928 had been
responsible for the strategic planning of the Kwantung Army that was deployed
in southern Manchuria to protect the local railways, wrote an Outline on the
Question of Manchuria and Mongolia in which he expressed the view that
Manchuria and Mongolia were of signal importance not only for the defence of
Japan but also for the control of Korea, the influencing of China and the revival
of the Japanese economy, concluding that in view of the international situation
Japan’s very survival depended on the annexation of both of these regions:

The world, which in the wake of the Great War in Europe, is in the process of
forming five superpowers, will undoubtedly continue with this development
and in the end form a single system. Where there is control over the centre
of this system, there will be a struggle for supremacy between the representa-
tive of the West, the United States of America, and the master of the East,
Japan. That is why our country must lose no time in developing the basics of a
national policy that allows it to acquire the status of master of the East. In order
to deal with the present situation and achieve mastery in the East, we must
extend our sphere of influence as far as is necessary and do so without delay.190

Ishiwara’s demand for action did not go unheeded, and after detailed prepara-
tions the Kwantung Army staged a bomb attack on the South Manchurian
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 481

Railway on 18 September, blaming it on Chinese bandits and using the incident

as a pretext to attack strongholds of the regional warlord Zhang Xueliang, an
ally of the Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek and son of the murdered Zhang
Zuolin. They also overran several Manchurian towns and cities, including
Mukden (now Shenyang). Wakatsuki’s government was not informed of these
plans. A putsch financed by the Kwantung Army and involving Hashimoto
Kingoro, a Japanese army officer, and the ultra-nationalist Okawa Shumei, was
discovered and thwarted at the last minute by the military police. Against the
wishes of Emperor Hirohito, the Kwantung Army brought the last Chinese
emperor, Puyi, who had been deposed in 1912, to Manchuria and established a
puppet government under his nominal rule. Wakatsuki’s government resigned
in December, and Inukai Tsuyoshi of the Seiyukai party was appointed the new
prime minister. Throughout this period the Kwantung Army continued to
occupy Manchuria.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, in the United States of America, there
were differing attitudes to the question of the best way to deal with Japanese
aggression. The secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, saw in Japan’s actions a
‘deadly threat to the authority of the great peace treaties’ of 1919–20,191 while
Hoover argued that they ‘do not imperil the freedom of the American people,
the economic or moral future of our people’.192 Even so Hoover agreed to work
with the League of Nations, which for its part set up a commission of inquiry in
December 1931 under the chairmanship of the British diplomat Victor Lytton.
On 7 January 1932 Stimson announced the doctrine that bears his name,
declaring that the United States refused to acknowledge any change to the status
quo that Japan had undertaken in violating the open-door principle in China.
The League of Nations unanimously adopted the Stimson Doctrine on 11 March
1932.
In China itself there was massive unofficial opposition to Japan’s occupa-
tion of a region that under international law was still a part of China, and in
several Chinese towns and cities Japanese businesses were attacked and a
boycott on Japanese goods was imposed. After a particularly serious incident
in Shanghai, the Japanese navy, with support from the marines, bombarded the
city from sea and air. In February Inukai’s government sent additional troops
to the region. After fierce fighting involving considerable loss of life, the mili-
tary intervention was brought to an end on 2 March 1932, when an agreement
was signed with Chiang Kai-shek. But it was no more than a temporary truce,
for it was clear that in occupying Manchuria Japan had achieved only a small
part of its expansionist aspirations at the expense of mainland China.
Two weeks earlier, on 18 February 1932, the new ‘state’ of Manzhuguo that
had been created by the Kwantung Army declared its independence from
China, and in March Puyi was named head of state. Inukai’s government
refused to recognize the new state. A particularly implacable opponent of the
Kwantung Army’s actions, the country’s finance minister, Inoue Junnosuke,
482 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

was assassinated on 9 February by members of a band of conspirators associ-

ated with the radical nationalist Inoue Nissho. A similar fate overtook the
prime minister on 15 May 1932. His assassination was part of a planned coup
mounted by another radical right-wing group that also involved Okawa
Shumei, the co-founder of Yuzonsha. The new prime minister, Admiral Saito
Makoto, was sworn in that same month and remained in office until July 1934,
when he was replaced by another general, Okada Keisuka, marking the end of
a series of governments led by party politicians. In none of the following cabi-
nets was there any civilian resistance to the army’s expansionist plans. In
September 1932 the lower house unanimously recognized the de facto protec-
torate of Manzhuguo as an independent state.
The Lytton Commission set up by the League of Nations submitted its report
in October 1932. It could detect no signs of a struggle for national autonomy in
the region occupied by Japan and recommended that Manzhuguo be granted
autonomous status within China, with the Japanese police given the right to
patrol the region. The League of Nations voted to accept these recommenda-
tions on 24 February 1933. Japan, which had been a permanent member of the
Council of the League of Nations since its establishment in 1919, was the only
country to vote against acceptance, while only Siam abstained. Japan responded
by resigning from the League of Nations on 27 March 1933: it was not the last
resignation that year, for on 14 October National Socialist Germany followed
Japan’s example.
By 1932–3 Japan had become an authoritarian, militaristic and radically
nationalist state bearing many similarities to Mussolini’s Italy, while stubbornly
defying the label ‘Fascist’, for it lacked most of the essential qualities typical of a
Fascist regime, namely, a single party run along rigorous lines, the constant
mobilization of the masses, a systematic reign of terror exercised by an omni-
present secret police and a single leader at the centre of power and the object of
a cult of personality pursued with propagandist zeal. In Japan, the political
participation of the people was far less advanced than in Italy, to say nothing of
Fascist Germany. And there were none of the militant proletarian mass move-
ments that the upper and middle classes might have regarded as a threat to their
social status. As a result the military elites in Japan were able to place their
stamp on a regime that was growing increasingly authoritarian without having
to depend on any pseudo-plebiscitary acclamation to legitimize their rule.
Like many European states of the interwar years, Japan turned its back on
parliamentary democracy during this time. Almost everywhere that this
system had not been firmly rooted in society in the years leading up to the First
World War, parliamentary democracy was replaced by authoritarian or totali-
tarian regimes in the course of the 1920s and 1930s. Of the new states that
came into existence in Europe after 1918, only three – Czechoslovakia, Finland
and Eire – were still parliamentary democracies by the end of the 1930s. With
a single exception the countries ruled by right-wing dictatorships were
 FROM THE ARMISTICE TO THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS 483

predominantly agricultural in character, the one exception being Germany, a

highly industrialized country which with the transfer of power to the leader of
the National Socialists drew a radical line under the fourteen years of the coun-
try’s first democracy and under a much older tradition of a constitutional state
governed by the rule of law. What kind of a future western democracy and,
with it, the entire normative process of the West could look forward to in 1933,
the fourth year of the Great Depression, when Hitler came to power in Germany
at almost the same time as Franklin Delano Roosevelt in America, was still an
open question.
 3

Democracies and Dictatorships:

1933–9
A New Deal for America: Roosevelt’s Presidency 1933–6

A GG&Ś)B8C 7& $ DŚāāE proverb quoted by Aristotle in his Politics, ‘Well

begun is half done.’ If ever a government abided by this insight, then it was
Roosevelt’s first administration, beginning in 1933. During his famous first
hundred days in office, he addressed Congress no fewer than fifteen times and
introduced fifteen major reform bills. The day of his inauguration, 4 March,
was a Saturday. The government agreed that banks in the capital would be
closed for a long weekend, thereby following the example of New York and
Illinois, which had already closed their banks on the morning of 4 March.
The Emergency Banking Act was rushed through Congress on 9 March,
giving the government comprehensive powers to deal with any private bank at
risk of collapse and allowing it to monitor all gold movements and to issue new
banknotes through the Federal Reserve. The government’s resolute actions
prevented panic from affecting the markets and avoided a complete collapse of
the American banking system. They were followed by the Glass–Steagall Act,
named after its sponsors, Senator Carter Glass from Virginia and Congressman
Henry B. Steagall from Alabama, and designed to separate business banks from
investment banks with the aim of curbing speculation, at the same time creating
the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation guaranteeing savings up to $2,500.
Roosevelt’s government had been in office for barely seven weeks when on
19 April 1933 it was forced to take a decision that had worldwide repercussions
and that involved abandoning the gold standard. Roosevelt hoped that in this
way he would be able to counter his government’s unpopular price rises and
avoid the dangers of further deflationary pressures. Agriculture and the export
industry did indeed profit from the fall in the rate of the dollar, but imports fell.
And Roosevelt paid no attention to the impact of his measures on any of the
world’s other economies. On 3 July he informed the World Economic
Conference that had been meeting in London since 12 June that the value of
the dollar would henceforth be measured by its domestic purchasing power.

484
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 485

The aim of this ‘bombshell message’ was clear: the United States had no inten-
tion of allowing other nations to shackle its movements in terms of its currency.
The large number of socio-political innovations associated with the concept
of the ‘New Deal’ began on 31 March 1933 with the creation of the Civilian
Conservation Corps, which was designed to help unemployed young men
between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to work for the common good at
a symbolic wage of one dollar a day. Central to the scheme’s activities was envi-
ronmental protection in the form of farming and reforestation. Its camps were
set up by the Department of War. By September 1935 the number of young
people living in these camps was over half a million, and by 1941 a total of 2.5
million youths and young men had spent time with the CCC.
The country’s trade unions viewed the experiment as dangerous, claiming
that it threatened to exacerbate the tendency to reduce wages and to disem-
power the labour force. William Green, the president of the American Federation
of Labor, complained that it ‘smacked of Fascism, Hitlerism and a form of
Sovietism’ when he appeared before a joint session of the House and the Senate
in 1933.1 There had indeed been a similar scheme in Germany since 1931, the
Volunteer Labour Service, which in June 1935 gave way to the National Labour
Service in which all Germans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five had
to do six months’ voluntary service. The Civilian Conservation Corps, on the
other hand, was a voluntary organization, adding substantially to its popularity,
although both organizations had a paramilitary aspect to them. In the United
States this aspect seemed distinctly out of place, whereas in National Socialist
Germany it fitted seamlessly into the general scheme of things.
On 12 May the Civilian Conservation Corps was followed by the
Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration, or ‘Triple A’. The former was run by Roosevelt’s long-term
colleague, Harry Hopkins, and had the task of coordinating social assistance
measures for the unemployed. Under Hopkins, the Civil Works Administration
was set up with the aim of creating public work schemes paying minimum
wages. By mid-January 1934 it was employing more than four million workers
building roads, schools, children’s playgrounds, sports facilities and airports.
‘Triple A’ aimed to raise the prices of agricultural produce from wheat
and maize to cotton, dairy produce and pig farming by working together
with farming organizations and limiting the amount of produce that reached
the market, leaving fields fallow and in some cases even destroying produce,
including the mass slaughter of pigs. These measures increased farmers’
income, but the principal beneficiaries were not those who worked the land
but the major landowners. A related scheme was the Emergency Farm Mortgage
Act that was passed on 12 March 1933 at the same time as the Agricultural
Adjustment Act and designed to place rural mortgages on a new financial
footing. Agricultural credits were reformed under the terms of the Farm Credit
Act of 16 June 1933.
486 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The most spectacular project undertaken by Roosevelt during his first

hundred days in office was the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, or
TVA, on 18 May 1933. With this gigantic scheme for creating energy, the
Roosevelt administration was responding to a demand by progressive reformers
to use the country’s vast reserves of water to generate cheap electricity. The
TVA was authorized to revive a project that had been initiated during the First
World War but never completed, namely, the building of a dam at Muscle
Shoals in Alabama, in addition to building other dams and power stations
in the Tennessee Valley and in that way helping the economy of one of the
country’s largest underdeveloped regions. This last-mentioned aim was only
partially achieved, but the TVA was none the less able to bring electricity to
parts of the state where it had not previously been available and at the same
time to force energy suppliers throughout the country as a whole to reduce
their prices.
Roosevelt’s first hundred days were barely over when the National Industrial
Recovery Act came into force on 16 June 1933. In turn, the National Recovery
Administration was established on its basis under General Hugh Johnson. The
NRA was an umbrella organization for self-governing bodies in individual
branches of the economy, where employers and employees enjoyed equal repre-
sentation. Its ‘codes’ were specific to individual branches of the economy and
governed minimum wages (between 30 and 40 cents an hour), the length of the
working week (no more than forty hours), a ban on child labour and general
regulations covering employment and production. Under Paragraph 7(a)
employees had the right to organize themselves in trade unions and to agree on
wages through a process of free collective bargaining. On the other hand, the
relevant section of the act included no provision for measures to enforce wage
negotiations. The NRA received $3,300 million to finance public works that
were offered out for tender under the highly effective symbol of the Blue Eagle.
Less apparent were the shortcomings inherent in the system from the outset,
including the tendency to favour large firms at the expense of smaller ones and
the arbitrary way in which wages and prices were frequently fixed.
There was no unifying philosophy underpinning the New Deal. Most of the
ideas that it enshrined sprang from the ‘progressive movement’ of the early
twentieth century. The intellectuals who advised Roosevelt all shared a
common conviction, which was the belief that market mechanisms were not
enough to help America out of its present crisis, meaning that the state had
to intervene. Neither the president nor the economists to whom he listened
were Keynesians. Rather, Roosevelt’s overriding aim was to balance the books.
At least one of the early New Deal laws had a markedly ‘pro-cyclical’ quality:
the Economy Act of 20 March 1933 reduced war veterans’ pensions and the
salaries of federal employees by 15 per cent and in that way reduced the
spending power of the masses. Roosevelt ended the Civil Works Program
abruptly in 1934, when he found that it was too expensive to maintain. In
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 487

1933–4 he certainly did not accord public work creation schemes the same
degree of importance that Keynes and his colleagues felt that such programmes
should enjoy.
On 31 December 1933 the New York Times published an open letter from
Keynes in which the economist invited the president to offset the lack of
consumer demand by introducing a generous policy of ‘deficit spending’ in
order to reflate the economy. Five months later, on 28 May 1934, Keynes was
received at the White House, but he was unable to persuade his host to revise
his economic policies. Shortly afterwards Roosevelt told his labour minister
Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet minister in American history, that
Keynes had bombarded him with numbers and was a mathematician rather
than an economist. For his part, Keynes was left with the impression that
Roosevelt understood nothing about economics.
The vast majority of the American people were impressed by the way in
which the new government tackled the problems that it faced. Roosevelt, his
ministers and administrative chiefs exuded dynamism and vigour, setting them
gratifyingly apart from the fatalism that seemed retrospectively to be the salient
feature of Hoover’s regime. Roosevelt had a gift for using his regular radio
broadcasts from the Oval Office – his legendary ‘fireside chats’ – to address
Americans directly and to turn the new mass medium into an effective means of
government. He was a gifted, charismatic orator who time and again succeeded
in putting his political enemies and hostile journalists on the defensive and in
turning himself into a direct mouthpiece of the people. The fact that he had few
unassailable convictions and preferred to avoid clear statements but opted for
the line of least resistance was well known to all who had access to him, but these
qualities did nothing to detract from his standing among the wider public.
In every country the world financial crisis encouraged isolationism, and the
United States was keener than most to espouse this tendency, concentrating on
domestic policies even more than it had done under Hoover and playing into
the hands of the isolationists. In order not to be drawn into further dealings
with Europe, Washington was content to leave the dictators in Rome and Berlin
to pursue their policies unchecked, and although the anti-Jewish riots in
Germany in April 1933 were noted with some concern, they elicited no major
protests. During the early years of his rule, Hitler was seen for the most part as
a relatively moderate representative of the National Socialist movement. In
November 1933 the United States was the last major power in the West to
resume diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, a step that earned Roosevelt
the lively approval of those economic circles that were interested in foreign
trade.
Under Roosevelt, the United States continued its good-neighbour policy
towards Latin America, a policy already inaugurated by Hoover. In December
1933, in the course of a visit to Montevideo, the secretary of state Cordell Hull
expressly declared that no state had the right to meddle in the affairs of another.
488 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

To the delight of the peoples of Latin America, Roosevelt underlined this asser-
tion only a few days later, when he issued an emphatic rejection of a policy of
armed intervention. Of course, this line also applied to brutal dictatorships like
that of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, a country entirely dependent
on the United States. The United States had only one overseas colony, the
Philippines, which it had acquired from Spain in 1898. In March 1934 it passed
the Tydings–McDuffie Act, granting the country the status of an autonomous
commonwealth, with full independence after ten years. It was above all finan-
cial reasons that prompted this step. In Japan, of course, Congress’s decision
was interpreted to mean that America had decided to withdraw from Asia.
Within a year of the first New Deal laws coming into force, the initial wave
of euphoria had vanished. It was the National Recovery Administration that
received the most criticism: the trade unions were unhappy that most of its
provisions affecting free collective bargaining remained ineffectual, while
employers complained at the fact that the government was constantly inter-
fering in their affairs. For their part, consumers took exception to rising prices.
Progressives among the Republicans such as senators William Borah of Idaho
and Gerald Nye of North Dakota regarded the codes as a way of suppressing
small businesses and encouraging the growth of monopolies, and even
Roosevelt himself increasingly came to believe that the NRA was a step too far
in the direction of overregulation, with the result that in September 1934 he
forced General Johnson to step down and replaced him with one of his closest
confidants, Donald Richberg. From then on Roosevelt sought only solutions
that he was sure would win the support of big business. By then, the Public
Works Administration under the direction of the secretary of the interior,
Harold Ickes, had been re-established as a separate organization from the NRA.
In the first year of the New Deal there was widespread support for the
government’s measures, but this support began to wane in 1934. Roosevelt’s
‘broker state’ – an American variant of corporatism – was opposed not only by
the major industries and banks but also by Conservative Democrats, including
even the 1928 presidential candidate, ‘Al’ Smith. Their protests found articulate
expression in August 1934 in the foundation of the American Liberty League, in
which companies such as Du Pont and General Motors were hugely influential.
The Democrats who joined the League included many who held it against
Roosevelt that his government, in fulfilling one of its election promises, had
passed the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933, ending prohibition.
The American Liberty League invoked the spirit of the American constitu-
tion, arguing that that spirit was far superior to all foreign systems of govern-
ment, be they Communist, National Socialist or Fascist. In November 1934 its
leader Jouett Shouse declared that its aim was to uphold ‘fundamental
Americanism’ in the face of all subversive theories and foreign doctrines. By
‘fundamental Americanism’ he meant a free entrepreneurial economy in the
spirit of Manchester capitalism that was not regulated by state bureaucracy: a
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 489

liberal idyll that necessarily assumed reactionary qualities in the wake of the
world economic crisis, when the League in all seriousness proposed that all
cases of direct welfare be transferred to the Red Cross, while ‘self-help’ was
prescribed as the panacea in every other instance.
The reactionary activities of the Liberty League were eclipsed, however, by
the politicking of the press baron William Randolph Hearst, who in 1933
abruptly switched from Roosevelt’s ally to one of his fiercest critics. The mere
fact that the government ‘interfered’ in private business opened it up to the
suspicion that it had been infiltrated by Communists, and Communism needed
to be resisted in every possible way. It was to the credit of Hitler and Mussolini
that they had done precisely that in Europe. As Hearst explained in November
1934 to the editors in chief of the thirty or so newspapers and magazines that
he owned, there was ‘as yet’ no genuinely Fascist movement active in the United
States, but he was by no means willing to exclude the possibility of the need for
such an organization in the future. The clear aim of Fascism, he explained, was
to defeat Communism and render it harmless and in that way to prevent the
least capable and least credible class from gaining control of the country:
‘Fascism will only come into existence in the United States when such a move-
ment becomes really necessary for the prevention of communism.’2
Hearst did not regard this development as desirable. As long as the existing
social order could be maintained by traditional means, Hearst was inclined to
prefer the American system of government to all ‘crazy isms’, but in order to
preserve this system it was necessary, he argued, to reduce the number of what
he deemed to be un-American activities. Academic freedom, for example, was
‘a phrase taken over by the radical groups as a new camouflage for the teaching
of alien doctrines’.3 In the autumn of 1934, immediately after his return from a
visit to Hitler, Hearst organized a press campaign in support of the violent
suppression of a general strike in San Francisco. Admiration for the Fascist
regimes in Europe turned increasingly into the promotion of a policy designed
to bring America into line with those systems.
Opposition to Roosevelt outside government circles began to form in 1934
not only among the upper classes but also in much broader swathes of the
population. The earliest signs of this development appeared in Louisiana, a
stronghold of the southern Democrats that was effectively a one-party state
governed by Huey P. Long, a Ciceronian lawyer who at the time of his election
in 1928 was only thirty-five and who owed his electoral success to the popula-
tion in rural areas where the ‘populists’ had been powerful before the turn of
the century. His image was that of an advocate of the white lower orders, and
there is no doubt that he had little time or patience for the existing system
whereby the state was dominated by plantation owners and by the Standard Oil
Company. His political achievements at home included taxation legislation
that benefited the poor, an extensive road-building programme and the intro-
duction of free learning aids at state-run schools; these ensured that he
490 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

commanded widespread support not only among whites but among the black
population too. He brought the administration under his control by means of
a system of improved patronage, quickly taking charge of the legislative and
judiciary and acquiring such exhaustive opportunities for vote-rigging that it
would be no exaggeration to speak of a personal dictatorship. None of this
changed when he stepped down as governor in 1932 and represented Louisiana
in the Senate.
Huey P. Long became a factor in national politics only when he stopped
supporting Roosevelt and became his political enemy in the summer of 1933.
In Long’s view, the president’s policies were insufficiently radical, prompting
Roosevelt to regard the senator from Louisiana as a political demagogue and a
dangerous rival. His decision to exclude Long’s supporters from the autocratic
distribution of official posts merely intensified the breach between the two
men. From then on Long lost no opportunity to criticize Roosevelt for reducing
war veterans’ pensions, for a lack of willingness to redistribute the nation’s
wealth and for a growing dependence on banks and business concerns.
From January 1934 onwards Long’s national platform was built upon his
Share Our Wealth programme, a random collection of eye-catching principles
often lacking in any real grasp of economics. He believed that every family
should be guaranteed a debt-free minimum income of $5,000. In order to achieve
this goal, no single individual should be allowed to possess a fortune worth more
than $5 million. All persons over sixty should receive a monthly pension and all
should be guaranteed an annual income of at least $2,000. The working week
should be cut, agricultural production offset by government purchases, and
gifted children should receive a free college education. Share Our Wealth clubs
quickly spread across the whole country, with the result that by February 1935
there were 27,000 of them. In addition, Long’s successful advertising campaigns
attracted such strong support among farmers in the Midwest that the White
House was obliged to take seriously the senator’s obvious ambitions in terms of
the highest office in the land. In the event, however, Long was never to be a presi-
dential candidate, for on 8 September 1935 he was shot in Baton Rouge by a
young left-wing doctor. He died of his injuries two days later.
Many of Long’s contemporaries saw him as a potential American Hitler,
though the most frequent reproach that was levelled against him was his alleged
desire to establish a Fascist regime à la Mussolini in the United States. And yet
the large-scale removal of all those elements that guaranteed a democratic
representative constitution in the state of Louisiana is scarcely enough to
describe his regime as Fascist. His governorship was distinguished from Fascist
dictatorships not least by the fact that it was not directed at the organized
workforce. In his wish to remove the traditional upper echelons of society from
their role as political leaders he was in fact faithful to a far more populist tradi-
tion. Indeed, his regime bore a number of the features typical of a Latin
American dictatorship and could have come into existence only because of the
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 491

special conditions that existed in Louisiana. Any attempt to extend that regime
to the rest of the United States would almost certainly have failed.
Long was not the only figure who sought to mobilize the masses against the
policies of the Roosevelt administration in the course of 1934, for a similar aim
was pursued with considerable success by Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic
priest from Holy Oak in Michigan, whose nationwide radio broadcasts, starting
in 1930, reached an audience of up to forty million Americans. Like Long,
Coughlin had initially been a supporter of Roosevelt and his New Deal but by
1934 his language was growing increasingly critical. Annoyed at the lack of appre-
ciation that he had received for lending his backing to Roosevelt, he henceforth
concentrated his attacks on what he regarded as the unduly slow rate of progress
in the president’s struggle to deal with the Great Depression and also on the inad-
equacy of Roosevelt’s measures to protect farmers and the continuing power of
finance capital. In consequence he targeted his campaign on rural America,
which was constitutionally hostile to modern capitalism, and also on the urban
lower classes who felt neglected by the New Deal. It was here that Coughlin found
most of his supporters after he had created a political platform for himself in
November 1934 with his National Union for Social Justice. Central to his support
group were farmers in the Midwest and badly paid workers and the unemployed
in the north-east, whereas small businesses were relatively poorly represented.
The new organization’s programme demanded, among other things, a fair
minimum wage for every type of work, fair prices for farmers, the acceptance
that Congress alone should be able to decide on questions of monetary policy
and, finally, guaranteed rights for workers combined with a duty on the part of
the state to protect workers’ organizations from the ‘vested interests of wealth
and intellect’. The most radical point in the organization’s programme was the
demand for the nationalization of those branches of the economy that were by
nature too important to be controlled by private individuals. In particular
Coughlin meant energy suppliers and mineral resources. In every other area
private property was to remain inviolate.4
Among the National Union for Social Justice’s regional strongholds were
Catholic districts in towns and cities in the states of Massachusetts and New
York, where in 1935 there were four times more local subgroups than in the
agricultural and Protestant states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. In this way
Coughlin was able to go far beyond the catchment area of the agrarian populism
of the years before 1900. In his speeches and writings he played off the unspoilt
folk against the corrupt ruling classes, while his call for a silver-backed currency
– in effect a policy of creating easy money – and his direct appeal to the
spokesmen of the agricultural protest movement of the late nineteenth century
made it clear in which tradition Coughlin saw himself. No one could have
called him a ‘Fascist’ in 1934 or 1935. And if he sympathized with the Fascist
regimes in Europe at this time, he never revealed this in his speeches and public
statements.
492 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

In the extreme west of the country, too, there were protests at the rule of
government during Roosevelt’s second year in office. In January 1934 Francis
Townsend, a sixty-seven-year-old physician, and an estate agent by the name of
Robert Clements established an organization calling itself Old-Age Revolving
Pensions, Ltd. Its central demand was an old age pension of $200 a month for
everyone over the age of sixty as long as they had retired from gainful employ-
ment and agreed to spend the sum in question within a month on American
soil. The pension was to be financed by a 2 per cent tax on all business transac-
tions, the money in question to be paid into a national pension pot described
as a ‘revolving fund’. Townsend and his colleagues believed that in this way they
could overcome mass unemployment. Young unemployed people would take
over their elders’ jobs once the latter had become vacant and stimulate the
economy through increased demand. Although experts soon raised their
voices in protest at the idea, many Americans of the older generation clearly
felt that the Townsend Plan offered a solution to their material hardship, and
by the end of 1934 there were already 1,200 clubs promoting the idea of the
revolving fund, most of them in the west of the United States.
The major strikes that swept the country in 1934 and that often involved
violence were directed less at the government than at individual businesses. In
Milwaukee, for example, a walkout by tram workers descended into rioting.
In Philadelphia and New York the taxi drivers went on strike, in Des Moines
power station employees stopped working, and in California and southern
New Jersey it was the farmers who went on strike. In May a lorry drivers’
strike in Minneapolis ended in bloodshed when two of the strike-breakers
paid for by the employers were killed, while two more striking workers were
killed in the general strike in San Francisco in July. Labor Day – the first
Monday in September, which had been a public holiday since 1894 – marked
the start of a walkout by textile workers that turned into the biggest strike in
American history. In Rhode Island, fifty workers were injured in violent clashes
between strikers and the police, and in Honea Path in southern California six
workers were killed by paid blacklegs. Almost every labour dispute ended in
defeat for the workers. In many cases the driving forces were socialists,
Communists or Trotskyists. But there can be no question of a revolutionary
movement designed to do away with the capitalist economic system: in 1934
the mass of workers were interested solely in higher wages and better working
conditions.
From an economic point of view, the year 1934 was still overshadowed by
the Great Depression. At 11.3 million, the number of unemployed workers was
around 1.5 million fewer than it had been in 1933, when unemployment had
reached its all-time high. As a proportion of the workforce, the percentage of
unemployed fell from 24.9 per cent to 21.7 per cent between 1933 and 1934. In
1934 national income was some 25 per cent higher than in 1933 but was still
only a little over half of what it had been in 1929. Roosevelt’s government could
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 493

not interpret these data as signs of a successful economic policy, but nor could
they be used by his enemies as arguments against the New Deal.
The year 1934 also witnessed the country’s mid-term elections. The govern-
ment was under no threat from any forces outside parliament, since such forces
were nowhere organized as effective parties. The Republicans had still found no
convincing alternative to the New Deal. Traditionally, opposition parties did
well in mid-term elections, but not on this occasion, when the Republicans won
thirteen fewer seats in the House of Representatives and recorded their worst
ever results. A third of the seats in the Senate were due for re-election, and here
the Republicans’ losses were even more dramatic, the Democrats winning a
comfortable two-thirds majority – the best result that any party ever achieved.
One of the new Democrat senators was Harry S. Truman from Missouri, who
was to be his country’s president from 1945 to 1953.
The Democrats’ election victory was a personal triumph for Roosevelt,
which not even his enemies could dispute. And yet his great success had a
negative aspect to it, for there was now a tendency on the part of the Democrats
to urge FDR to adopt more radical policies than he had pursued until then. His
party was more interested in maintaining its mass support than in enlisting the
sympathies of the elite. Roosevelt, conversely, refused to accept that big busi-
ness had more or less closed ranks in its opposition to him, and so he continued
his attempts to reach an agreement with the banks and major industries. But he
was no doubt aware that he could not avoid a modest shift to the left and even
a Second New Deal.
Among the laws enacted under the terms of the Second New Deal in the
early months of 1935 was one that was indeed aimed at corporate interests,
namely, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, the aim of which was to
break up those holding companies in the field of energy supply that were
unable to demonstrate their social necessity to the Securities and Exchange
Commission by 1 January 1940. In response to pressure from the affected
concerns, the House of Representatives ended up leaving the SEC to take what-
ever decisions it deemed appropriate.
The Social Security Act overseen by Frances Perkins’s Department of Labor
was even more interventionist in its impact inasmuch as it prescribed federal
aid for the elderly of $15 a month and created a retirement insurance scheme
financed by additional taxes paid by employers and employees alike. The
payments were to start in 1942 and provide anyone over sixty-five with between
$10 and $85 a month. Agricultural workers and domestic servants were
excluded from these provisions. All those who did not have insurance were to
be assisted by welfare payments from the federal government and from the
individual states. The act also included provisions for a rudimentary national
insurance scheme to be set up by the federal government and by the individual
states, the costs of which were to be borne by employers alone, together with
regulations covering federal aid for single mothers and the disabled and, finally,
494 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

public work in the health service. When judged by European standards, these
measures were extremely modest and even meagre, but for the United States
the introduction of obligatory national insurance represented a breakthrough
in the direction of a welfare state.
The continuing high level of unemployment meant that the government felt
obliged to continue its ambitious efforts in the field of work relief, evincing a
more Keynesian approach to politics than had been the case until then.
Responsibility for implementing this new policy devolved on the Works Progress
Administration, or WPA, that was run by Harry Hopkins. Under its aegis more
than 600,000 miles of new roads were built, including multi-lane national park-
ways through areas of great natural beauty, as well as almost 125,000 bridges,
more than 125,000 public buildings, over 800 parks and 850 airports. The WPA
was able to draw on funding of $5,000 million and on average employed more
than two million people at any one time. A sub-department at the WPA, the
Emergency Housing Division, was entrusted with the task of encouraging the
building of council houses using federal funds, while the Rural Electrification
Administration took on the challenge of bringing electricity to rural America: in
1935 nine out of ten farms had no electricity, a figure that had fallen to six out of
ten by 1941 and to one in ten by 1950.
The WPA also provided aid for individual organizations that helped not only
young people but also artists and writers. The National Youth Administration
provided charity work for unemployed young people, including part-time work,
and also awarded college grants, while the Federal Writers Project helped unem-
ployed writers. A similar service was provided for unemployed musicians and
theatre workers by the Federal Music Project and the Federal Theater Project.
Among the government commissions awarded to unemployed painters and
sculptors by the Federal Art Project were many murals that still adorn the walls
of public buildings such as libraries and post offices, all of them built by the
WPA. A favourite motif was that of workers in heroic poses vaguely reminiscent
of the Proletkult of the Soviet Union and of contemporary ‘works of art’ in
Germany and Italy at this period.
By the end of May 1935 only one of the laws associated with the Second New
Deal had been passed by Congress: the Relief Bill. All the other acts were
delayed in the main because of resistance from ‘progressive’ senators and repre-
sentatives who felt that the president’s policies were too employer-friendly. In
this context Roosevelt’s government suffered its worst defeat to date on 27 May
1935, when the Supreme Court declared in a unanimous decision that the
National Industrial Recovery Act was unconstitutional. The case had been
brought by Schechter Poultry Corp. of Brooklyn, which supplied live poultry to
kosher slaughterhouses and which had been sentenced under Paragraph 7(a) of
the act of 16 June 1933 to a substantial fine for violating codes relating to
minimum wages and the length of the working week. The Supreme Court
declared the economic activities of Schechter Poultry to be ‘intrastate commerce’
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 495

rather than ‘interstate commerce’ and argued, accordingly, that the state had no
right to legislate in the matter. By placing this restrictive interpretation on the
definition of commerce in Article 1 of the American constitution, the court
called into question most of the laws passed under the New Deal. The headline
in the Daily Express hit the nail on the head: ‘America Stunned: Roosevelt’s Two
Years’ Work Killed in Twenty Minutes.’
Behind the judgment of 27 May 1935 were not only the conservative
judges who, together with the middle-of-the-roaders, were in a small majority,
but also self-appointed progressives such as Louis D. Brandeis and Benjamin
N. Cardozo. For them, the provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act
weakened competition by encouraging monopolies, inviting the Supreme
Court’s intervention. In subsequent rulings on New Deal legislation the
conservative judges stuck together, the court’s decisions commanding a
majority of five to four or six to three. Public opinion was almost entirely
against the Supreme Court’s decisions, but there was also hostility to the presi-
dent’s plans to raise the number of judges by appointing a further judge for
each of them who had reached the age of seventy, and in March 1937 Congress
rejected a draft bill to this effect. Shortly afterwards the conflict between the
Supreme Court and the government came to a sudden and surprising end
when one moderately conservative judge, Owen J. Roberts, switched sides and
joined his liberal colleagues. Soon afterwards several of the judges who had
been in the majority retired and were replaced by liberals, with the result that
the Supreme Court ceased to be a bulwark of opposition to the New Deal.
Shortly before the Supreme Court announced its decision on 27 May 1935,
Roosevelt had realized that he could no longer avoid an open confrontation
with big business, a realization prompted by a clear declaration of war by the
United States Chamber of Commerce at the beginning of that month. The
quashing of the National Industrial Recovery Act by the Supreme Court was
merely the last straw, prompting a new political offensive often described by
historians as Roosevelt’s ‘second hundred days’. In early June he informed
Congress that he was keen for several important new laws to be passed with
immediate effect, laws that included the Social Security Bill, the Public Utility
Holding Company Bill and the draft of a new banking bill. The Senate and
House of Representatives responded positively to his appeal, with the result
that all of these laws had been enacted by the end of 1935.
Surprisingly Roosevelt now committed himself to a project that he and
Frances Perkins had initially viewed with scepticism. The draft of a National
Labor Relations Act had been submitted by the Democrat senator Robert
Wagner, who had been born in Germany in 1877 and whose bill was the most
radical of any during the New Deal era, raising the principle of collective
bargaining to the level of a legally binding provision and obliging employers
not to place any obstacles in the way of workers wanting to form trade unions.
The draft did not make any provisions for comparable conditions for trade
496 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

unions, thereby incurring the wrath of conservative critics. The Senate had
already approved the bill on 2 May, and it was passed by a large majority in the
House of Representatives on 27 June. Roosevelt signed the new legislation on
5 July.
The Wagner Act increased the power of the unions, which at this date in
their history were suffering from a serious organizational crisis. The unions’
largest umbrella organization, the AFL, had always looked after the needs of
skilled workers, while neglecting the untrained workers in those branches
of industry that relied on mass production. In 1934 a minority of supporters of
the president of the United Mine Workers of America, John L. Lewis, with the
backing of barely 30 per cent of all members of the AFL, openly opposed the
one-sided emphasis on support for the craft unions and proposed instead
the more modern principle of an industrial union that was not limited to a
particular profession.
The AFL’s congress in Atlantic City in October 1935 turned into a trial of
strength, with the majority of delegates emphatically rejecting the principle of an
industrial union, prompting those unions that had been in the minority, namely,
the mineworkers and workers in the clothing and textile industries, to form an
organization of their own, the Committee for Industrial Organization, or CIO.
When the majority refused to accept this, the conflict escalated, and in 1936
membership of the rival unions was suspended. Attempts to reverse this measure
by legal means proved unsuccessful, and in October 1938 the Committee for
Industrial Organization declared its independence and changed its name to the
Congress of Industrial Organizations, allowing it to retain the abbreviation CIO.
The CIO reached far more female and black workers than the AFL and in
general adopted a more militant stance than the older umbrella organization.
But it never developed into an anti-capitalist force even though its ranks
included many socialists and Communists. The opportunities for development
contained in the Wagner Act meant that both the CIO and the AFL helped
in fact to bring stability to the system. In time the differences between the
two unions were eroded, opening up the way for their reunification as the
AFL-CIO in 1955.
Among the left-wing signals emanating from the president in the early
summer of 1935 was the announcement of a tax bill on 19 June. In his message
to Congress Roosevelt proposed a national inheritance tax, levies on particu-
larly high net incomes, a gift tax and a tax on joint-stock companies graduated
according to the size of the businesses in question. Roosevelt left his adviser
Raymond Moley in no doubt about the motive behind his demarche: he wanted
to ‘steal Long’s thunder’.5 William Randolph Hearst lost no time in suggesting
that his editors launch a campaign and ascribe the ‘bastard’ plan to a ‘composite
personality which might be labeled Stalin Delano Roosevelt’ and that they
speak not of a ‘New Deal’ but of a ‘Raw Deal’ by accusing the president of
pursuing a policy of ‘soaking the successful’.6
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 497

In the House of Representatives the president’s message found widespread

support among the Democrats, whereas the Senate reacted with a demonstra-
tive show of silence. By the end of the legislative process all that the president
still had to show was a weakened bill with no inheritance tax and a far lower
rate of taxes on joint-stock companies. In the view of the historian William E.
Leuchtenburg, the Wealth Tax Act did little to help the tax affairs of smaller
businesses or to redistribute affluence on a more equitable basis, still less to
increase federal income:

Yet since the act stepped up estate, gift, and capital stock taxes, levied an
excess profits tax, which Roosevelt had not asked, and increased the surtax
to the highest rates in history, it created deeper business resentment than
any other New Deal measure.7

All the laws that Roosevelt personally championed in 1935 were simultane-
ously designed to improve his chances of being re-elected the following year.
Following his break with big business, the outlines of the Roosevelt coalition
became far clearer, embracing, as they did, workers, Catholics, women, ethnic
minorities and black Americans. Organized workers were the target group that
the Wagner Act was intended to help, while unemployed workers were the
intended beneficiaries of a whole series of other aid programmes. The presi-
dent’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, took a particular interest in women’s issues.
Catholics and those ethnic minorities that had not yet been fully assimilated
into American society were generally among those social groups that were less
well-off and as a result more remote from the Republicans, who were famously
well disposed to employers. The Democrats, after all, had always been keen to
present themselves as the party of the ‘little people’.
The black population benefited from the New Deal at least to the extent
that these policies helped the lower strata in society in general, but Roosevelt’s
policies did not extend to granting civil rights to blacks. He turned a blind eye
to the fact that the Civilian Conservation Corps established separate camps for
black Americans, that the National Recovery Administration put its name to
wage agreements that gave lower wages to black workers for doing the same as
their white colleagues and that the Works Progress Administration regularly
gave the worst-paid jobs to blacks. He did not even champion an anti-lynching
bill proposed by the Democrat senators Robert F. Wagner from New York and
Edward P. Costigan from Colorado. (In 1935 alone there were no fewer than
eighteen lynch-mob murders in the southern states.) He was afraid that by
committing himself to such legislation he would forfeit the support of southern
Democrats and in that way jeopardize the New Deal in general. If he succeeded
none the less in including blacks in his Roosevelt coalition, it was simply
because from their point of view the Democrats were now the lesser of two
evils when compared with the party once led by Abraham Lincoln.
498 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The Republican candidate in the 1936 race for the presidency was the
governor of Kansas, Alfred M. Landon. As a Canadian, Coughlin was prevented
from entering the race, while Francis Townsend and Gerald L. K. Smith – the
latter having replaced the murdered Huey Long as the head of the Share Our
Wealth movement – formed a new party, the Union Party, in June 1936. Their
candidate was the nominally Republican congressman from North Dakota,
William Lemke, but there could be no talk of a united campaign, for Coughlin
and Smith both frightened away moderate voters with their anti-Semitic
outbursts, and – Smith even more than Coughlin – with their manifest
sympathy for Fascism, prompting Lemke and Townsend to distance them-
selves from Long’s successor. The Socialist candidate was again Norman
Thomas, while the Communists fielded their party leader, Earl Browder.
The Republican campaign suffered from the fact that it lacked both a charis-
matic candidate and any rousing slogans. Lemke appealed above all to workers’
fears that wages would fall as a result of the deductions for old-age insurance
that were due to come into force on 1 January 1937. In his acceptance speech at
the Democrat Convention in Philadelphia on 27 June, Roosevelt – or at least his
speech writer and chief press officer, Thomas Corcoran – coined a phrase that
has gone down in the history books: ‘This generation of Americans has a rendez-
vous with destiny.’ As he went on to explain, ‘We are fighting to save a great and
precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.’8
The elections were held on 3 November 1936, when Roosevelt’s share of the
vote – 60.8 per cent – was the highest ever won by a presidential candidate and
was reflected in the Democrats’ record results in the Senate and House of
Representatives. The Republican Landon won 36.5 per cent, polling more votes
than the incumbent in only two states, Maine and Vermont. The Unionist
William Lemke won 2 per cent of the votes, the Socialist Norman Thomas 0.4
per cent and the Communist Earl Browder 0.2 per cent.
During the election campaign Coughlin had announced that he would make
no more radio broadcasts if he failed to persuade nine million Americans to
vote for Lemke, but in the event the Unionist candidate had to settle for fewer
than 900,000 votes. Coughlin briefly kept his promise but it was not long before
he was promoting even more extreme messages than before both through his
speeches and through his writings. By 1938 he was openly describing himself as
an anti-Semite and dismissing Communism and international finance capital as
different manifestations of the same Jewish conspiracy. In his own journal Social
Justice he published an anti-Semitic forgery under the title ‘Protocols of the
Elders of Zion’. He founded a new right-wing radical militant organization, the
Christian Front, which held anti-Semitic demonstrations, hid caches of arms
and celebrated Hitler, Mussolini and Franco as the saviours of western culture.
The organization was banned in 1940, but it was not until 1942 that Coughlin
ended his radio broadcasts in response to public pressure and a church ban,
bringing to a close the political career of the parish priest from Holy Oak.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 499

Roosevelt’s re-election coincided with a period in American history when it

seemed as if the country had weathered the economic storm. When compared
with 1933, the national income had risen by around 50 per cent, while the
number of people out of work fell for the first time since 1932, dropping to
under the ten million mark, and although it still represented 16.9 per cent of
the working population, this was 8 percentage points lower than its peak in
1933. By 1936 the Dow Jones Industrial Index was 80 per cent higher than it
had been three years earlier. For the automobile industry 1936 was the most
successful year since 1929. The upturn was so remarkable that Winthrop
Aldrich, who was in charge of the Chase Manhattan Bank, was already warning
of the dangers of inflation.
The economic recovery was only relative and, as Americans were soon to
discover, it was premature to talk of a definitive end to the years of depression.
It is impossible to say exactly how effective were the government’s laws and
other measures in boosting the economy. Conversely, we can say with some
certainty what the New Deal failed to achieve: there had been no redistribution
of income and no real measures to ensure equality between men and women;
racial discrimination continued unabated; the lowest echelons in society such
as slum dwellers, unemployed blacks, seasonal workers in agriculture and
smallholders had few, if any, organizations to champion their cause, with the
result that they played no part in shaping public opinion; and although Native
Americans had been granted the right to own communal lands and elect their
own tribal assemblies under the terms of the Indian Reorganization Act of
1934, the land that they owned was generally of such poor quality that white
Americans had no interest in acquiring it.
In part it was political resistance that prevented the proponents of the New
Deal from achieving more than they did, and in part it was their continuing
attachment to the American way of life that deterred them from striving to
implement more radical changes. Even so, they could pride themselves on the
fact that the risk of starving to death was now much reduced. In short, they had
brought America a little closer to a welfare state of the kind that existed in
Europe. And they had helped to modernize America by bringing electricity to
large areas of the countryside. But their greatest success was in overcoming the
psychological depression that had plagued the United States since 1929. And
because America began to believe in itself again soon after Roosevelt became
president, the country’s democratic system was never at serious risk during the
world economic crisis. Herein lies the fundamental difference between the
United States and those European nations that were transmogrified into dicta-
torships in the course of the 1920s and 1930s.
Of course, many contemporaries believed that under Roosevelt, America
was developing in a direction that invited comparisons with the Fascist Italy of
Mussolini and the National Socialist Germany of Hitler. Even as early as 1933
a left-wing liberal journalist like I. F. Stone – the pen-name of Isidor Feinstein
500 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

– was already claiming that Roosevelt’s policies were understandable only if

one assumed that the president was moving ever more clearly in the direction
of Fascism, while the leader of the Socialists, Norman Thomas, argued in 1934
that the economic policies of the New Deal were indistinguishable from
Mussolini’s corporatism and Hitler’s totalitarianism. That same year the leader
of the American Communist Party, Earl Browder, wrote that Roosevelt’s poli-
cies were ‘a program of hunger, fascization and imperialist war. [. . .] In polit-
ical essence and direction it is the same as Hitler’s program.’9
But it was not only left-wing observers who equated the New Deal with
Fascism and National Socialism. In 1933 the Democrat senator Carter Glass
from Virginia complained in the context of the National Recovery Admin-
istration’s codes of the ‘utterly dangerous effort of the federal government at
Washington to transplant Hitlerism to every corner of this nation’.10 And in
1934 an isolationist Republican like Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan
had no hesitation in describing Roosevelt’s decision to lower customs tariffs
according to the principle of reciprocity as ‘Fascist in its philosophy, Fascist in
its objective’.11 Congressman James Willis Taylor, a party friend of Vandenberg’s,
declared in a speech that he gave in the House of Representatives on 18 June
1934, marking Lincoln’s birthday, that ‘I have seen a dictatorship spring up
which must have made the noses of Herr Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Mustapha
Kemal of Turkey turn green with envy. Independence in private business is a
thing of the past, and individual liberty is only a memory.’12
Roosevelt’s American opponents were not the only ones to see close links
between the New Deal on the one hand and Fascism and National Socialism on
the other. Mussolini himself read a review of the Italian edition of Roosevelt’s
Looking Forward in Il Popolo d’Italia of 7 July 1933 and discovered striking
similarities between Italian Fascism and the America of the New Deal:

The appeal to young people and the resolve and manly sobriety with which
the struggle has been taken up here recall the manner in which Fascism
awoke the Italian people. [. . .] No less reminiscent of Fascism is the fact that
the state no longer abandons the economy to its own devices since its well-
being is now identical to that of the people. The mood of this change is
undoubtedly similar to that of Fascism. But it is impossible to say any more
than this at present.13

The official newspaper of the German National Socialists, the Völkischer

Beobachter, expressed itself in equally positive terms in its edition of 17 January
1934: ‘We German National Socialists likewise turn to America and see
Roosevelt undertaking experiments that are bold indeed. We too fear the
possibility that they may fail.’ And on 21 June 1934 the same paper reported
that ‘on a narrow and inadequate basis Roosevelt has done everything humanly
possible’.14
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 501

There is no doubt that there are a number of similarities between the

America of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini.
The increase in the power of the executive, the state control of the economy, the
cult of labour and the bellicose rhetoric used in the attempt to deal with the
economic crisis, and the emotionally charged appeal to the historic mission of
the nation in question: all of these factors existed not only in Italy and Germany
but also in the United States after 1933. Anyone visiting the National Mall in
the centre of the American capital will still find it dominated by neoclassical
monuments dating for the most part from the period between 1933 and 1939
and bearing a marked likeness to the state architecture of Fascist Italy and
National Socialist Germany. These buildings include the Federal Triangle with
the National Gallery, the National Archives, the Supreme Court, the complex
of buildings associated with the Smithsonian Institution, the Jefferson
Memorial and many ministries and administrative offices.
But the architects of the New Deal did not need to mimic their colleagues
working under European dictatorships to design monumental buildings, for
they were developing plans first mooted in the early years of the twentieth
century and in some cases at the end of the eighteenth century, plans that
reflected the neoclassical tradition in autochthonous American architecture. In
many countries, not just the United States, the world economic crisis encour-
aged a propensity for monumental architecture intended to underscore the
increased importance of state control and to that extent created a ‘post-liberal’
impression. In the words of the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch,

It makes no difference whether we are dealing with societies shaken by

Bolsheviks and Fascists or with others restored to an even keel by capitalism
and democracy, they all needed a kind of architecture that conveyed a sense
of confidence, respect and even quasi-religious meaning and cohesion to
the community over which that architecture raised its temple-like struc-
tures, while at the same time making it clear to the rest of the world exactly
who those societies were.15

The similarities between these different kinds of architecture, all of which were
intended to discourage thoughts of economic depression, are a reflection of the
challenges that all these countries faced during these years of crisis. But the
answers given in Rome, Berlin and Washington could hardly have been more
different, at least where the political foundations of the community in question
were concerned. There was no regime change in the United States but, instead,
a series of reforms designed to strengthen the country’s democracy. America
retained its constitution, which by 1933 was 146 years old, and it abandoned
none of the principles that had seemed so important to its founding fathers.
Few European countries had experienced such an unbroken democratic tradi-
tion and a political culture marked by such a tradition. Italy and Germany were
502 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

certainly not among them. Had the situation been different, they would presum-
ably have been more effective in resisting the establishment of a dictatorship.

The Process of Seizing Power: The Establishment of the

National Socialist Dictatorship 1933–4
With effect from 30 January 1933 the German government was headed by a
man who saw himself as the saviour of the German people and, with them, the
entire Germanic race. Believing himself appointed by divine providence, he
hoped to free the Germans not only from the shame of the Treaty of Versailles
but also from Marxism, liberalism and parliamentarianism and, indeed, from
evil in all its manifestations, evil which sought to disguise itself behind mani-
fold masks in an attempt to conceal its corrosive work but which may be
summed up in two words: international Jewry. In Hitler’s eyes, Marxism was
only one of the Jews’ disguises, albeit the most successful, since it had helped
the Jews to dominate the workforce. Rescuing workers from the influence of
international Marxism and winning them over to the cause of the nation’s best
interests could succeed only with the help of a movement and of a leader that
were resolved to combat the Jews in the most ruthless ways imaginable.
Hitler believed that he himself was that leader. During his months of
imprisonment in Landsberg in 1924 he had summed up his belief in his mission
in words that were intended to be every bit as apocalyptic as they sounded:

If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other
peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and
this planet will, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether
devoid of men.
Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the
Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the
work of the Lord.16

The religious phraseology makes it clear what its leader intended National
Socialism to be: a worldly ecclesia militans that had a monopoly on salvation, a
totalitarian religion comparable in its all-embracing claims only to Italian
Fascism on the one hand and to Soviet Communism on the other. As a totali-
tarian regime, National Socialist Germany was a new kind of dictatorship that
clearly differed from all other authoritarian systems such as the military dicta-
torships of Europe and Latin America. Among its innovatory features was its
mobilization of the masses and its claims to address each and every citizen in
his or her entirety, its aim being to create a ‘new man’. Such a system did not yet
exist in Germany on 30 January 1933 or even in the weeks immediately after-
wards. But anyone familiar with Hitler’s public pronouncements from his ‘time
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 503

of struggle’ knew that he was eager to establish a system that would be at least
as totalitarian as the Fascist system of Benito Mussolini.
German National Socialism had much in common with Italian Fascism:
radical nationalism, anti-Marxism and anti-liberalism, the militarization of the
political struggle at home, the cult of youth, manhood and violence and the
central role of the charismatic leader. Both movements can trace back their
origins to the traumatic experience of the outcome of the First World War: just
as the National Socialists blamed their country’s military defeat on the ‘stab in
the back’ by the ‘November criminals’, so the Italian Fascists blamed the weak-
ness of the liberals and the internationalism of the left for the country’s ‘muti-
lated victory’ and for the Western Allies’ abilities to thwart its ambitious plans
for annexation. Both parties were adept at exploiting the widespread fear of a
‘Red revolution’ like the one mounted by the Russian Bolsheviks, and both
took advantage of the split in the Marxist workers’ movement in the wake of
the First World War and the October Revolution.
The similarities between Mussolini’s Fascists and Hitler’s National Socialists
were so pronounced that many contemporaries, especially on the political left,
regarded National Socialism as no more than a German manifestation of
Fascism, and there is no doubt that this was true to the extent that the term
‘Fascism’ is used to describe a new kind of militant mass movement on the part
of the extreme right and, therefore, a type of movement that had not existed
anywhere in Europe in the years before the war. But National Socialism was not
just ‘German Fascism’: far more than Italian Fascism, it was a political religion
that sought to appeal to the whole man, in which regard it was in fact closer to
its antithesis, Soviet Bolshevism. It was in every regard more extreme and more
totalitarian than its Italian model, and it was able to draw on a mythological
scapegoat unavailable to Mussolini or to his movement and his regime: Italian
Fascism was largely innocent of the all-consuming hatred of the Jews that was
central to Hitler’s view of the world.
A counterpart to the war on the Jews was the fight for the racially pure pan-
German Reich of the future behind which Germany’s two previous empires –
the Holy Roman Empire and Bismarck’s Reich – paled into insignificance. ‘The
boundaries of the year 1914 mean nothing at all for the German future,’ wrote
Hitler in Mein Kampf:

Neither did they provide a defence of the past, nor would they contain any
strength for the future. [. . .] Germany will either be a world power or there
will be no Germany. And for world power she needs that magnitude which
will give her the position she needs in the present period, and life to her
citizens.
And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign
policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six
hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and
504 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

west, and turn our gaze towards the land of the east. At long last we break off
the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil
policy of the future.17

For Hitler, the ‘east’ meant Russia and ‘her vassal border states’. Hitler was
convinced that fate itself had sought to give a sign to Germany by abandoning
Russia to Bolshevism. From his point of view, the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power
had resulted in the replacement of the country’s previous rulers, who were
quintessentially Germanic in origin, with Jews incapable in the longer term of
holding together so vast an empire:

The giant empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule
in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state. We have been chosen by
Fate as witness of a catastrophe which will be the mightiest confirmation of
the soundness of the folkish theory.18

Hitler regarded the largest major power in the west, the United States of
America, with a mixture of admiration and concern. In his ‘Second Book’,
which he wrote in 1928 but which was not published during his lifetime, he
had described the United States as ‘a new power of such dimensions [. . .] as
threatens to upset the whole former power and orders of rank of the States’.19 In
America he saw a ‘young, racially select Folk’ and argued that only ‘a conscious
Folkish race policy would be able to save European nations from losing the law
of action to America, in consequence of the inferior value of European Folks
vis-à-vis the American Folk’.20 Elsewhere in the same text he writes that

in the far future it may be possible to think of a new association of nations,

consisting of individual States with a high national value, which could then
stand up to the threatening overwhelming of the world by the American
Union. For it seems to me that the existence of English world rule inflicts
less hardships on presentday nations than the emergence of an American
world rule.21

In the same context Hitler refers to Great Britain – the other major Anglo-
Saxon power – with nothing but respect:

If today the globe has an English world empire, then for the time being
there is also no Folk which, on the grounds of its general civil political char-
acteristics as well as its average political sagacity, would be more fitted
for it.22

Hitler felt that an alliance between Germany as a land power and Great Britain
as a maritime power was not only conceivable but also so desirable that he was
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 505

willing to forgo any German colonial aspirations in the future. France, conversely,
remained Germany’s ancestral enemy inasmuch as it had spent the last 300 years
actively seeking the breakup of Germany. Its antithesis was Fascist Italy, which
was the natural choice for an alliance with National Socialist Germany, with the
result that it went without saying that Hitler would not venture to criticize Italy’s
policy towards the South Tyrol, still less to question that region’s status. On this
point the National Socialists held very different views from all the other German
parties, be they right- or left-wing.
Hitler’s public pronouncements between 1930 and 1933 revealed little about
his core convictions, which is also one of the reasons for the mass appeal of the
National Socialists. It was its combination of nationalism and socialism that
set Hitler’s movement apart from all the right-wing movements in pre-war
Germany. The NSDAP was not a party of dignitaries but owed its electoral
successes to the demagogic abilities of its leader and to the commitment of its
supporters rather than to financial assistance from right-wing industrialists and
bankers. The ‘socialism’ of the National Socialists deterred many bourgeois
voters, especially those members of the middle classes with independent means.
As late as December 1932 the newly formed Battle League for middle-class
tradesmen and women felt that it was necessary to assure smaller businesses
that the aim of the National Socialists’ economic and social policy was to ‘depro-
letarianize’ the German workers: ‘The whole meaning behind the Socialist idea
is to make owners out of those who own nothing. Adolf Hitler’s Socialism is
thus in the sharpest possible contrast to the sham Socialism of the Marxists
whose goal is expropriation.’23 But for ‘nationalist’ blue- and white-collar
workers, for students and younger academics, ‘National Socialism’ was attrac-
tive, for by rallying under its banner they could distance themselves from both
international Marxism and the nationalist forces of reaction and in that way
occupy a third position that seemed to point the way forward beyond the prole-
tarian class struggle and the protection of middle-class vested interests.
It was the nationalism of the NSDAP that provided a link between the party
and bourgeois Germany, or least seemed to provide such a link. There was no
party that defended the Treaty of Versailles or rejected the notion of a Greater
Germany. The National Socialists demanded equal rights for Germany and
unification with Austria, adopting a more radical tone than any other party.
But as far as reforming the post-war order was concerned, there seemed on the
surface to be a broad national consensus. It certainly helped Hitler that as a
Pan-German from Austria he had no difficulty in demanding that his country
be annexed by the German Reich or in combining that demand with his profes-
sion of faith in the Prussian tradition of Frederick the Great and Bismarck. Nor
did it harm him that he had been brought up a Catholic. At least to the extent
that they were not Marxists or religious, younger Germans felt that the denom-
inational divide was no more relevant than the class struggle. Hitler’s chance
lay in the fact that many trusted him to reconcile existing antinomies that had
506 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

until then seemed irreconcilable: not just nationalism and socialism but also
Lutheran and Catholic Germany.
The mantras of this major synthesis were ‘folk community’ and ‘Reich’.
The first writer to use the term Volksgemeinschaft was probably Friedrich
Schleiermacher in a manuscript dating from 1809. Within decades it had found
its way into jurisprudence and sociology, and by the end of the First World War
all political parties, with the exception of avowed Marxists, were using the
term, conservatives and liberals availing themselves of it with the same enthu-
siasm as trade union leaders and Social Democrat reformers.
The term could acquire the most disparate meanings depending on who
was using it: a profession of faith in the peaceful resolution of social differences
in a free people’s state or the call for an authoritarian order, whereby decisions
affecting the common good were imposed on the nation from above. But the
National Socialists were the most radical proponents of this slogan, demanding
that Marxism be crushed because the call for a class struggle was tantamount
to a denial of the ‘community of the folk’. And, unlike all the other parties
during the Weimar Republic, the National Socialists also interpreted the term
in keeping with their ideas on race: in the National Socialist community of the
folk there was room only for ‘Aryan’ Germans, not for Jews, Roma and the
members of other races deemed to be inferior.
In the years before 1933 the ‘Reich’ had increasingly become a right-wing
slogan directed against the Weimar Republic, while at the same time acquiring
associations that pointed both back into the past and forward into the future. As
a term, it had always had soteriological connotations, which emerged with
particular force whenever the Germans referred to the ‘Third Reich’, a phrase to
which we have already drawn attention in the context of the 1923 book The Third
Reich by the Young Conservative journalist Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.
It was not long after Moeller van den Bruck’s book had appeared in print
that the National Socialists adopted the term in the belief that it encapsulated
their own aspirations to particularly memorable effect. Gregor Straßer’s brother
Otto is believed to have passed on the phrase to Hitler. Otto broke with Hitler
in July 1930, alleging that the latter had abandoned the ‘socialism’ enshrined in
the party’s 1920 programme. Only much later did Hitler begin to entertain
doubts about the term and to argue that it could lead observers to speculate
about a ‘fourth Reich’ and to question the continuity of the German Reich. In
June 1939 the Chancellery informed the world of the Führer’s desire that the
term ‘Third Reich’ not be used any longer. By then, of course, its impact could
no longer be denied, many Germans having come to see Hitler as their saviour.
Even after 1939, Hitler himself continued to speak of the ‘Reich’. On the
night of 17/18 December 1941 – almost nine years after he had come to
power – he tried to see the events of 1933 as part of a wider historical context.
He was staying at the time at his headquarters, the Wolfsschanze near
Rastenburg in East Prussia.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 507

I was faced with the question when we first took power. Should we preserve
the Christian chronology, or should we inaugurate a new era? I reasoned
that the year 1933 merely renewed our link with a military tradition. At that
time the notion of the Reich had been, so to speak, lost, but it has again
imposed itself on us and on the world. When one speaks of Germany, wher-
ever one may be, one no longer says anything but ‘the Reich’.24

Hitler was guilty of overestimating the importance of his own contribution to

this development, because for most educated Germans in the years leading up
to 1933, the ‘Reich’ had already acquired a new, as yet merely conceptual, gran-
deur, allowing Hitler to reap the benefits of what others had already sown.
Like the notion of a ‘folk community’ and the myth of the ‘Reich’, the ‘idea
of the Führer’ was not a National Socialist invention, for terms such as ‘Führer’
and ‘Führerschaft’ (leadership) had enjoyed a boom not only on the nationalist
right but also in the bourgeois centre during the final phase of the Weimar
Republic. On the right the idea of a strong leader was contrasted with the
anonymity of bureaucrats, the fragmentation of political parties and the frac-
tiousness of the parliamentary system. Many Young Conservative writers even
regarded a prospective Führer as a national Messiah, an agent of history and the
proponent of a national dictatorship. When Hitler had himself hailed as
the country’s ‘Führer’, he was merely banking on a widespread discontent with
the Weimar Republic and counting on a longing for release for which others
had already prepared the ground. But only a man as charismatic as Hitler could
produce the impression that he alone was destined to assume the role of the
country’s saviour in its hour of need. Without that quality he would never have
been in a position to become chancellor and remain in office for twelve years.

The Reichstag election campaign that was conducted against the background
of a ‘national revolt’ was the first in which the NSDAP was generously supported
by the whole of German industry and all the major banks, rather than just by a
handful of business leaders like Fritz Thyssen, Friedrich Flick and the directors
of IG Farben, as had been the case in the past. Another novel element was the
party’s ability to use the public airwaves for its propaganda. The campaign was
overshadowed by countless acts of terror committed by the SA, most of them
ending with the death or injury of Communists and Social Democrats. On 17
February, Hermann Göring, the acting Prussian minister of the interior,
instructed the police to use their firearms ruthlessly in case of doubt. Five days
later he appointed the SA, SS and Stahlhelm as volunteer police officers, the
more effectively to combat the alleged increase in left-wing violence. On
27 February the Reichstag building went up in flames.
Without being able to offer any proof in support of their claim, Hitler,
Göring and Goebbels immediately declared that the crime was the work of
Communists seeking to give ‘the signal for bloody rebellion and civil war’.25 On
508 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the other hand, there is no evidence to support the view taken by many contem-
poraries and later commentators that it was the National Socialists themselves
who set fire to the building. The overwhelming majority of writers now tend to
the opinion that the fire was the work of one man, the Dutch anarchist Marinus
van der Lubbe, who was seeking to express his hatred of National Socialism
and Fascism and who was taken into custody at the scene of the crime.
That same night, 27/8 February 1933, the cabinet passed an emergency
decree designed to protect the people and the state and removing the most
important basic rights until further notice, granting the government new
powers to deal with the individual regions and introducing the death penalty
for acts of terror such as arson. This new measure under Article 48 of the
constitution spelt the end of Germany as a state governed by the rule of law.
Among the earliest victims of this arbitrary act were Communist officials and
well-known intellectuals. On 28 February the editor in chief of Die Weltbühne,
Carl von Ossietzky, the writers Erich Mühsam and Ludwig Renn, the ‘raging
reporter’ Egon Erwin Kisch, the sexologist Max Hodann and the eminent
defence lawyer Hans Litten were taken into ‘protective custody’. By 3 March the
leader of the Communist Party, Ernst Thälmann, had been arrested at a secret
hideout in Charlottenburg, as also were a number of his closest colleagues.
Acts of terror and propaganda proved effective, and Hitler’s government
emerged as the victor from the Reichstag elections that were held on 5 March
1933, the two groups that made up the cabinet between them polling 51.9 per cent
of all the votes cast: the NSDAP won 43.9 per cent, while the union of German
Nationalists, Stahlhelm and non-aligned conservative politicians, including
Papen, that campaigned as the Black, White and Red Battle Front won 8 per cent.
Persecuted with particular brutality by the National Socialists, the Communists
fared badly, their share of the vote falling by 4.6 per cent, while that of the Social
Democrats dropped by 2.1 per cent. The two Catholic parties, conversely, did
relatively well, the Centre Party winning 11.2 per cent of the vote, the Bavarian
People’s Party 2.7 per cent. The two liberal parties remained no more than splinter
groups, the German People’s Party winning 1.1 per cent, the German State Party
0.9 per cent of the vote. Not only did the NSDAP enjoy a dramatically increased
share of the vote – up by 10.8 per cent – but the turnout, too, rose from 80.6 per
cent of the electorate on 6 November 1932 to 88.8 per cent.
Hitler’s electoral victory was followed by what the National Socialists
termed a ‘national revolution’. One of its principal results was the alignment, or
coordination – Gleichschaltung – of the individual regions, where governments
that had been either purely bourgeois or kept in power by the Social Democrats
were replaced by cabinets led by National Socialists. This process was the result
of combined pressure exerted from above by the minister of the interior,
Wilhelm Frick, and from below by the columns of SA and SS. The transfer of
power took longest in the stronghold of German federalism, Bavaria, but by
16 March the National Socialists were the ruling party in Munich, too.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 509

At the same time as the regional governments were being brought into line,
the National Socialists were also seizing power in towns and local communi-
ties. The SA and SS occupied town halls and in many places arrested ‘Marxist’
– that is, Social Democrat – councillors, while forcing mayors whom they
disliked to step down. Labour exchanges and local health insurance offices
were subjected to similar interference.
Many, but by no means all, of the National Socialists’ political enemies who
were arrested in this way were handed over to the police, but the SA and SS often
meted out their own forms of punishment. In Berlin and the surrounding area
the first unofficial concentration camps sprang up soon after the Reichstag elec-
tions. In these camps old scores were settled with ‘Bolsheviks’ in particularly
brutal ways. The first official concentration camps followed in March 1933,
beginning with Dachau in Bavaria. Run by the SA and SS, they quickly became
detention centres not only for Communists but also, and increasingly, for Social
Democrats and other opponents of the regime. By the end of July 1933, by which
time the SA’s reign of terror was already beginning to abate, there were, according
to official estimates, 27,000 individuals in ‘protective custody’ within the country
as a whole. No figures are available for the number of those who died in the
torture chambers of the SA and SS during the early months of the Third Reich.
The ‘national revolution’ also involved countless pogroms. In Breslau, for
example, the SA mounted a putsch against Jewish lawyers and judges.
Elsewhere, too, Jewish doctors were told that they were no longer able to prac-
tise, and Jewish theatres, cabarets, jewellers, clothing outlets, banks and depart-
ment stores were stormed. Protests from German nationalists forced Hitler to
ask his supporters on 10 March to desist from any further acts ‘likely to incon-
venience individuals, to impede the passage of private cars or to disrupt the
business life of the nation’.26 Two days later he delighted conservative Germany
by using a radio broadcast to announce an unconstitutional presidential decree:
until the colours of the Reich had been definitively decided, the black, white
and red flag of the Kaiserreich could be flown alongside the flag bearing the
National Socialist swastika.
This announcement was a prelude to ‘Potsdam Day’. The official ceremony
marking the opening of the newly elected Reichstag was held in the Garrison
Church in Prussia’s unofficial capital on 21 March. ‘Marxists’ did not attend,
those Communist members of the chamber who had not already been arrested
having gone to ground, while the Social Democrat members had met the
previous day and decided in the absence of nine of their colleagues who were
in ‘protective custody’ that they would absent themselves from the event, which
was designed to underscore Hitler’s profession of faith in the link between
‘ancient greatness’ and ‘youthful strength’. Weimar was finally laid to rest with
the active participation of the country’s two leading Christian churches. When
Hindenburg descended on his own into the crypt containing the tomb of
Frederick the Great in order to commune in silence with the monarch, many
510 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Germans felt the same degree of patriotic emotion that had been evoked for
many years by the Fridericus films made by Hugenberg’s UFA company.
The Reichstag met in its new home at the Kroll Opera on the Platz der
Republik on 23 March to discuss the draft of a bill nominally presented by the
NSDAP and German National People’s Party and designed to ‘alleviate the
sufferings of the people and country’: this Enabling Act gave the government
unrestricted powers to pass whatever unconstitutional laws it wanted in the
course of the next four years, the only proviso being that such laws were not to
impinge on the institutions of the Reichstag and Reichsrat as such or to affect
the rights of the president. In short, neither the Reichstag nor the Reichsrat
could lay claim any longer to a share in the legislative process, and this was also
the case with treaties with foreign countries. All that was now needed for the
government’s laws to come into force was the signature of the chancellor and
an announcement in the National Law Bulletin.
In order to achieve the majority needed to change the constitution, the
government had violated the said constitution even before the law had passed
through parliament. It treated the Communist members as non-existent,
thereby reducing the legal number of members by eighty-one. The Reichstag
then proceeded to change its order of business on 23 March: delegates absent
without permission could be excluded from debates for up to sixty daily
sessions, but delegates excluded in this way were still counted as if they were
present. Even if the Social Democrats had boycotted the session en bloc, they
could still not have prevented the remaining deputies from meeting the condi-
tions necessary to change the constitution, when two-thirds of those present
were required to vote for the change.
Hitler gained the support of the Centre Party and the Bavarian People’s
Party by working into his inaugural speech a number of unctuous phrases on
the relationship between Church and state associated with the leader of the
Centre Party, Ludwig Kaas, and by making a handful of additional promises to
the Catholic party’s negotiators. (The Centre Party waited in vain for these
promises to be confirmed in writing.) It had been calculated in advance of the
vote that the ninety-three Social Democrats present in the chamber would vote
against the bill, a veto justified by the party leader, Otto Wels, in a speech that
went some way to salvaging the honour not only of his own party but of
German democracy in general: ‘You can take away our freedom and our lives,
but not our honour,’ he declared in a famous sentence that has since become
part of the Germans’ collective consciousness.27 The representatives of
the smaller bourgeois parties, including the German State Party, all voted
for the bill, with the result that the necessary two-thirds majority was comfort-
ably achieved, with 444 votes for the measure, only ninety-four against it. In
short, this hurdle would have been overcome even without the unconstitu-
tional manipulation of the legal number of members required to take part in
the vote.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 511

The yes vote of the bourgeois parties was the result of deception, self-
deception and blackmail. From their point of view the ‘legal’ dictatorship
desired by the majority was still the lesser of two evils when compared with an
illegal dictatorship, a very real possibility if the draft bill had been thrown out.
The semblance of legality promoted a semblance of legitimacy and ensured
that the regime had the loyal support of the majority, which crucially included
the country’s government employees. This tactic of gaining their loyalty had
been an important precondition for Hitler’s seizure of power and had not yet
fully served its purpose on 30 January 1933 but proved its worth once again on
23 March, when it was effectively used to do away with the Weimar constitu-
tion. From then on Hitler could sideline the Reichstag and make his actions
seem as if he were following the Reichstag’s own instructions.
The regime’s first major action after the Enabling Act had come into force
was its boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933. In organizing this boycott,
the National Socialist leadership hoped that in this way it would not only
provide an outlet for the pressure from within its own ranks but at the same
time offer a response to the criticisms levelled at the March pogroms by Jewish
organizations as well as by liberal and socialist newspapers all over the
world. Julius Streicher, the NSDAP’s Gauleiter in Franconia and editor of the
anti-Semitic Der Stürmer, was given the task of spearheading the campaign
against what Goebbels called the ‘abominable global persecution’ of the ‘new
Germany’ mounted by the Jews. It was Goebbels himself who masterminded
the campaign following his appointment as minister of public enlightenment
and propaganda on 14 March. He was more than happy with the outcome
of the one-day nationwide boycott. ‘The outside world is slowly coming to
its senses,’ he wrote in his diary on 2 April. ‘The world will realize that it
isn’t a good idea to let Jewish émigrés enlighten it about Germany.’28 There
was no mistaking his implied threat to Germany’s Jews, and from then on the
possibility of their exclusion from the business life of the country hung like
a sword of Damocles over the whole of the Jewish community. The regime
retained the right to decide on the time and the extent of the steps that it
would take against the economic influence of the Jews: this was the message of
1 April 1933.
Even before they were excluded from business and commerce, the country’s
Jews had already been driven from public office. On 7 April 1933 the govern-
ment passed a law reintroducing a professional civil service that was aimed at
all government employees who were regarded as unreliable in the eyes of the
ruling National Socialists: employees who owed their appointments to acts of
political patronage at the time of the Weimar Republic, especially those who
were members of left-wing parties, who had links with such parties or who
were ‘non-Aryans’. They were all pensioned off, the only exceptions being
frontline fighters, the fathers or sons of soldiers killed in the war and employees
who had been civil servants prior to 1 August 1914. These exceptions were
512 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

made at the request of Hindenburg, who had been asked by the Federal League
of Frontline Jewish Soldiers to intercede on their behalf.
The act of 7 April 1933 brought an end to the unofficial pogroms and
ushered in a period of comprehensive purges organized by the state. Among
those affected were hundreds of university teachers. The universities of Berlin
and Frankfurt lost almost a third of their teaching staff, Heidelberg a quarter
and Breslau more than one-fifth. Among those driven from their posts were
several Nobel Prize winners, including the physicists Albert Einstein and
Gustav Hertz and the chemist Fritz Haber. Others who were dismissed for racist
or political reasons – or both – included the philosophers Theodor Wiesengrund
Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Helmuth Plessner, the lawyers Hermann Heller,
Hans Kelsen and Hugo Sinzheimer, the sociologists Karl Mannheim and Emil
Lederer, the economists Moritz Julius Bonn and Wilhelm Röpke, the psycholo-
gist Erich Fromm, the Evangelical theologian Paul Tillich and many others.
Most of them emigrated, with the result that entire research centres such as the
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research were lost, as were whole areas of exper-
tise that included Freudian psychoanalysis.
Not only the teaching staff was purged, so too was the student body at univer-
sities up and down the country. On 28 April the number of ‘non-Aryan’ students
was reduced to 1.5 per cent of the total in order to bring it into line with the
percentage of Jews in the population as a whole. Students who had belonged to,
or sympathized with, the German Communist Party were obliged to abandon
their studies. University deans who had fallen out of favour with the government
were replaced by others more acceptable to the regime. Martin Heidegger was
elected dean of Freiburg University on 20 April 1933, Hitler’s forty-fourth
birthday. He joined the NSDAP on 1 May – the same day that the constitutional
lawyer Carl Schmitt took the identical step. On 27 May, in his inaugural speech
as dean, Heidegger invited teachers and students alike to uphold the three virtues
of labour service, military service and hard work in the pursuit of knowledge.
The fight against everything that the National Socialists deemed
‘un-German’, ‘decadent’ and ‘corrosive’ was directed not only at the living but
also at the dead. Public book burnings were held in German cities and univer-
sity towns on 10 May 1933, when members of the National Socialist German
Student Association set fire to writings by left-wing, pacifist, liberal and Jewish
authors, including works by Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky, Sigmund
Freud, Alfred Kerr, Heinrich Mann, Erich Kästner, Lion Feuchtwanger, Erich
Maria Remarque, Arnold Zweig, Theodor Wolff, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Tucholsky
and Carl von Ossietzky. Most of those victims of the campaign who were still
alive had already left Germany. One of them, Carl von Ossietzky, had been
arrested on 28 February, while another, Erich Kästner, attended the nocturnal
ceremony outside Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University incognito.
This literary auto-da-fé was followed by other campaigns directed at all
forms of ‘degenerate art’ in literature, music, painting and architecture. Within
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 513

months, radio, the cinema, the theatre and the press had all been purged and
brought into line, although the government revealed a certain degree of nuance
in its attitude towards the newspapers. It was, after all, in the interests of the
Third Reich that an internationally respected paper like the Frankfurter Zeitung
should adopt a more factual style than the Völkischer Beobachter and might
even venture limited criticisms. A façade of professional probity and calculated
diversity was expedient not only for reasons of the country’s foreign policy but
for domestic reasons too. What mattered was that in the case of matters of any
real importance, the linguistic rules of the Ministry of Propaganda were
respected and applied in keeping with Goebbels’s diktat.
In addition to restoring a professional civil service on 7 April 1933, the
government also placed the relationship between Reich and regions on a new
legal footing. An initial law passed on 31 March had altered the composition of
the regional parliaments in order to reflect the outcome of the Reichstag elec-
tions on 5 March – the Communist votes were, of course, ignored – and the
regional governments were empowered to pass laws and make constitutional
amendments without regard for their regional assembly. On 7 April the institu-
tion of Reich governor was created, a figure that henceforth represented the
highest authority in each individual region. In most regions it was the local
Gauleiter whom Hitler invited to fill the post, Hitler himself becoming the
governor in Prussia, where a new regional assembly had been elected on 5
March. On 11 April he appointed a new prime minister for Prussia, Hermann
Göring, who added the premiership to his existing posts of leader of the
Reichstag and minister without portfolio in the federal government.
The National Socialists’ main political enemy was ‘Marxism’, which, although
substantially weakened by the Enabling Act, was not yet completely destroyed.
Only the Communists may be said to have been definitively excluded from
power. Their parliamentary mandates were revoked on 31 March, although by
then this had little more than symbolic significance. The Social Democrats,
conversely, survived as an organization. Some of their leaders who were at
particular risk of arrest had already left the country, including Otto Braun,
Rudolf Hilferding and Philipp Scheidemann, and others had been arrested. A
number of the party’s senior officials played for time, while refusing to align
themselves with the new regime in the way that the General German Trade
Union Association was currently doing. On 15 April the Association’s national
leader expressly welcomed the government’s decision to declare 1 May ‘National
Labour Day’ and to make it a public holiday.
Black and white flags were flown from trade union buildings on 1 May 1933.
At the central demonstration organized by the regime at Tempelhof in Berlin
the Textile Workers’ Union even marched beneath a swastika flag. Hitler used
the occasion to deliver a major speech that was broadcast by all the country’s
radio stations. Referring to the ‘gigantic task’ of road building, he insisted that
manual work and mental work formed an indivisible unity, while at the same
514 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

time emphasizing his desire for peace. But the opportunism of the trade union
leaders did not pay off, and the very next day the regime struck a blow against
the Free Trade Unions that had long been planned by the general staff.
Throughout the country union buildings were occupied by the SA and SS, as
were the unions’ newspaper offices and the Bank of Manual Workers, White-
Collar Workers and Civil Servants, together with all its branches. Theodor
Leipart and other union leaders were taken into ‘protective custody’, which in
most cases lasted two weeks, although Leipart and his deputy, Peter Grassmann,
were not released until June. Less prominent officials were told to continue their
work under the leadership of the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization.
Intimidated by the fate of the Free Trade Unions, who were closest to the
Social Democrats, the other two unions – the Christian-Nationalist Unions and
the Liberal Hirsch-Duncker Unions – unconditionally accepted Hitler’s leader-
ship on 4 May. Two days later, Robert Ley, who had replaced Gregor Straßer as
the NSDAP’s national organizer, announced the formation of the German
Workers’ Front, whose inaugural congress was held in Berlin on 10 May under
the aegis of Hitler himself. He used the occasion to describe himself as an ‘honest
broker’ mediating between the different strata of German society. Ley was
appointed the Front’s chairman, while leadership of the Workers’ Associations
was entrusted to Walter Schumann, the leader of the National Socialist Factory
Cell Organization. The Third Reich was now in control of the labour market. By
4 May 1933 there were no longer any independent workers’ organizations. Wage
agreements, too, were a thing of the past. Under a law passed on 19 May 1933
trustees appointed by the chancellor were henceforth to set all legally binding
conditions governing contracts.
Unlike the trade unions, the employers’ organizations were able to maintain
their organizational independence. Admittedly, they had to dismiss their leading
officials, be they Jewish or otherwise politically compromised in the eyes of the
National Socialists, but they were at least able to retain a high degree of corporate
continuity. In June 1933 the Confederation of German Industry and the
Association of German Employers’ Organizations merged to form the Reich
Estate for German Industry. The word ‘estate’ was a nod in the direction of
National Socialist middle-class ideologues, although the concession did little to
compensate them for the defeat that they suffered in the summer of 1933, when
they failed to reduce big business to their overall control after they were forced to
abandon their campaign against ‘Jewish’ department stores and ‘Marxist’ coopera-
tive societies, a move dictated by Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Heß. Crushing these
organizations would have resulted in the dismissal of countless manual and white-
collar workers and was no longer a viable option. It made no difference for middle-
class officials in the NSDAP to draw attention to contradictory statements in the
1920 party programme: now that the party was in power, it had other priorities.
The country’s agricultural organizations suffered a rather different fate.
The National Land League, which had contributed substantially to Hitler’s
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 515

appointment as chancellor in January 1933, was amalgamated with the newly

formed Reich Food Estate in the July of that year. This was headed by Richard
Walther Darré, the NSDAP’s head of agrarian policy, who had succeeded
Hugenberg as minister of economics and agriculture the previous month.
Darré increased his power at the expense of the major landowners to the east
of the Elbe, a pressure group that for years had left its mark on the policies of
the National Land League and the German National People’s Party. This shift
in power from the larger landowners to peasant farmers was a part of Hitler’s
strategy to create as much economic independence as possible as the precursor
of a war over Lebensraum designed to make Germany self-sufficient in every
area of the economy. From this point of view, the restructuring of those organi-
zations that represented agricultural interests was as logical as the decision not
to implement radical changes in industrial organizations.
The crushing of the Free Trade Unions was bound to affect the country’s
Social Democrats, and on 4 May the party’s executive committee decided that
three of its full-time members, led by Otto Wels, should leave Germany in
order to continue their fight against Hitler from abroad. The committee in
exile initially established itself in Saarbrücken, at that date the capital of the
French-run Saar territory established under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
The move marked the fragmentation of the German Social Democrats, with
Wels leading the party in exile, while the party at home found an unofficial
spokesman in the former leader of the Reichstag, Paul Löbe.
It was not long before the two camps were in open conflict. The Reichstag
met on 17 May, its first session after the adoption of the Enabling Act. Hitler
intended to use the occasion to state his government’s position on the Geneva
Disarmament Conference and hoped that a show of national unity would help
to counteract the country’s diplomatic isolation, but the Social Democrat
leaders in Saarbrücken planned a rather different kind of demonstration and
advised their deputies not to attend the session of the Reichstag. In the event,
only a minority of members under Kurt Schumacher did as they were asked,
whereas the majority succumbed to the blackmail exerted by the minister of
the interior, Wilhelm Frick, who threatened that Social Democrats currently
interned would be murdered if their colleagues refused to back the joint decla-
ration and approve the government statement.
Hitler’s speech on 17 May 1933 was the most moderate and placatory that
he ever delivered. He expressed his understanding of his neighbours’ security
needs, mentioning in particular the French and the Poles, and professed his
desire for peace in terms more insistent than those used by any of his predeces-
sors. For Germany he demanded only the same right. Even a veiled threat
sounded defensive: ‘As a nation for ever being defamed, we should find it diffi-
cult to remain a member of the League of Nations.’29 The government state-
ment was cheered to the rafters, after which Göring, as leader of the house,
read out the resolution submitted by the NSDAP, German National People’s
516 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Party, Centre Party and Bavarian People’s Party. Those members in favour of
the resolution were asked to stand. Everyone did so, including the Social
Democrats. All then joined in the German national anthem, which was after-
wards sung by the upper house, too. Conversely, only the National Socialists
joined in the subsequent rendition of the Horst Wessel Lied, which famously
begins with the line ‘Flag high, ranks closed’.
The vote for Hitler resulted in a breakdown of relations between the Social
Democrats still in Germany and the Socialist Workers’ International, which
disapproved of the way the Social Democrat deputies had voted. By 17 May the
party’s leader, Otto Wels, was convinced that the Reichstag sitting marked the
start of a life-and-death struggle that the party’s committee could win only with
the help of the International. On 21 May it decided to move its headquarters from
Saarbrücken to Prague, a move dictated by strategic considerations: it was easy to
slip across the densely wooded mountains in the west and north of the country
that marked the border with Bavaria, Saxony and Silesia, an important precondi-
tion for the illegal activities that the party’s exiled leaders now saw themselves
obliged to undertake. The first issue of Neuer Vorwärts was published in Karlsbad
(Karlovy Vary) on 18 June and included an appeal from the party’s leadership
under the heading ‘Break your chains!’ It was the most outspoken declaration of
war on Hitler’s regime that the Social Democrats had uttered until then.
The following day Löbe’s Social Democrats in the Prussian Landtag met to
discuss the situation, prompting their leader, Ernst Heilmann, to spell out the
majority line by declaring that ‘We must continue to spin the thread of legality
for as long as it can be spun.’30 A six-man directorate, entirely ‘Aryan’ in its
makeup, was entrusted with the task of conducting party business and immedi-
ately sought to distance itself from the old committee, arguing that party
members who had gone abroad could not issue statements on the party’s behalf:
‘The party expressly disclaims responsibility for all of their declarations.’31
As minister of the interior, Frick was left distinctly unimpressed by this
declaration and on 21 June he ordered a comprehensive ban on all of the Social
Democrats’ political activities, citing in his defence the ‘treasonable actions’
undertaken against Germany by the exiled committee. The decree came into
force on 22 June. That same day four members of the new directorate, including
Löbe, were arrested as part of a large-scale wave of arrests that extended to
party officials and even to members of the Reichstag and Prussian Landtag.
One member, the former prime minister of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Johannes
Stelling, was brutally murdered by the SA in the wake of the Köpenick Week of
Blood, and on 6 July the Gestapo arrested the Reichstag deputy Kurt
Schumacher, who had been the keenest critic of Löbe’s whole approach. In
August he was sent to the Gestapo’s first concentration camp at Heuberg near
Stuttgart and was not released until ten years later.
The elimination of the Social Democratic Party was the prelude to the
dismantling of the party system in general. On 21 June Frick not only banned
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 517

the Social Democrats from undertaking any further political activities, he also
proscribed the paramilitary arm of the German National Front, which was
known as the German National Battle Rings. (The German National Front was
the name adopted by the German National People’s Party after the middle of
May.) His scarcely credible rationale was that the organization had been infil-
trated by Communist elements and by other individuals hostile to the state.
Hugenberg, who only a few days earlier had incited Hitler’s anger by demanding
a German colonial empire in Africa at the world economic conference in
London, announced on 27 June that he was resigning all his ministerial posts
not only in Prussia but in the national government, too. The German National
Front was disbanded that same day, when it signed a ‘friendship agreement’
with the NSDAP, ensuring that its members of parliament were able to sit on the
National Socialist benches. In this way German conservatism lost its political
arm by capitulating to the revolutionary movement that it had set out to tame.
Over the next few days, the country’s two liberal parties – the German State
Party and the German People’s Party – were likewise disbanded. The fate of
political Catholicism was sealed in Rome during negotiations conducted by
Papen since April 1933. An important role in these negotiations for a Reich
Concordat with the Holy See was played by Ludwig Kaas in his capacity as
papal house prelate. In return for the assurance that the Church would have
scope to develop in Germany, the Curia abandoned the political, social and
professional organizations of German Catholicism. On 5 July, three days before
the Concordat was initialled, the Centre Party disbanded itself. The Bavarian
People’s Party had taken the same step the previous day.
On 14 July 1933 – the 144th anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille –
Hitler’s government passed a law that meant that from then on there was only
a single political party in Germany, namely, the NSDAP. Anyone who tried ‘to
maintain the organizational support of another political party or to form a new
political party’ was threatened with imprisonment.32 It had taken the National
Socialists less than half a year to establish their monopoly of power. Of course,
they still shared that power with the armed forces, with senior civil servants
and with the major industries, but the elimination of all competition from
other political parties was an important milestone in Hitler’s seizure of power,
a process that had begun on the day that he was appointed chancellor.

If the new government was to prove at all popular, it needed to be able to report
a number of palpable successes in its struggle to deal with mass unemployment.
The National Socialists were fortunate in that they did not need to formulate any
new job creation schemes, for previous cabinets, most notably Schleicher’s, had
already planned most of the projects that the NSDAP was now able to imple-
ment. One such project was an emergency programme backed by a federal guar-
antee of 500 million marks and designed to create new jobs financed in advance
by extendable bills of exchange that were guaranteed by the government and
518 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

covered by a rediscount agreement from the Reichsbank. As had been the case
with Schleicher, so the present administration’s initial concern was to encourage
the population to settle in rural areas once the land there had been improved.
Another project that dated back to the days of the Weimar Republic was a road-
building programme that was used by the National Socialists for propagandist
purposes and designed from the outset to serve a military end by allowing rapid
troop movements. But road-building played only a small part in reducing unem-
ployment: by the end of June 1934 no more than 38,000 labourers were working
in this area of the economy in the entire country. In general, the job creation
schemes undertaken by Hitler’s government meant that unemployment did not
rise substantially above the four million mark during the winter of 1933/4,
having peaked at this figure in September 1933.
Germany’s economic recovery was made more difficult by the devaluation
of the American dollar that had resulted from Roosevelt’s abandonment of the
gold standard in April 1933. The German trade balance immediately fell into
the red and the Reichsbank’s foreign exchange reserve rapidly drained away.
On 8 June 1933 the government agreed to a unilateral moratorium on all long-
term foreign debts at least to the extent that those debts were not subject to
earlier moratoria. Ostensibly as a sign of ‘good faith’, German debtors would
go on making payments in Reichsmarks into accounts administered by the
Reichsbank, but the Reichsmarks accumulated in the creditors’ accounts would
no longer be transferred into foreign currency. Adam Tooze has rightly
described this suspension of debt repayments as ‘the first overtly aggressive
foreign policy move by Hitler’s government’.33
This period also witnessed the decision to adopt an extremely risky means
of financing Germany’s rearmament programme in the form of a scheme
devised by Hjalmar Schacht, who in March 1933 had returned to his former
position as president of the Reichsbank: special bills of exchange with the
Metallurgical Research Company (Mefo) were to be used to pay all armaments
contractors from April 1934 onwards. These IOUs were a central element in
Schacht’s ‘New Plan’ to boost the economy and could be redeemed at a small
discount by any company that had a defence contract but they generally
remained in circulation for a considerable period of time because of the high
rate of interest that they paid. The first of these Mefo bills was issued in the
autumn of 1933, but it was not until April 1934 that the payments started to
be made on any appreciable scale – conveniently timed to coincide with the
renewed propaganda surrounding the second wave of work creation schemes.
The bills of exchange were also backed up by a rigorous policy of foreign
exchange controls and by a state-subsidized export offensive.
The moratorium on debt repayments and the new policy of forcing the pace
of rearmament were followed on 14 October 1933 by the Third Reich’s most
spectacular move to date: its withdrawal from both the Geneva Disarmament
Conference and the League of Nations. In taking this step, Hitler was reacting
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 519

to the western proposal for a system of controls that would have prevented
Germany from rearming for an eight-year period. His demonstrative declara-
tion of war on the Versailles system was popular at home, helping him to turn
a foreign policy defeat into a domestic victory. On 12 November 1933 the
Germans had an opportunity to vote on their country’s withdrawal from the
League of Nations and at the same time to elect a new Reichstag. Of the votes
cast in the referendum on the matter, 95.1 per cent were in favour of with-
drawal, meaning that 89.9 per cent of the electorate agreed with the move. In
the Reichstag election the NSDAP candidates won 92.1 per cent of the votes
cast, representing a share of 87.8 per cent of all those who were entitled to vote.
Two months after the referendum and Reichstag election, Germany was
able to offset its political isolation by forming a surprise alliance with Poland.
During the years of the Weimar Republic, the country’s eastern neighbour had
been seen almost exclusively as a threat, its borders and even its very existence
being regarded as irreconcilable with Germany’s interests. When Hitler became
chancellor, Poland’s ‘strong man’, Józef Pi5sudski, had taken soundings via
strictly confidential channels that were almost certainly opened up in April
1933 and possibly even the previous month, his aim being to establish whether
France would join in a preventive plan similar to the one used when the Ruhr
was occupied in 1923 and to take temporary control of Danzig, East Prussia
and German Upper Silesia in order to force Germany to abide by the terms of
the Treaty of Versailles at least to the extent that those terms applied to rearma-
ment and the position of Poland’s borders. But the reply he had received had
not been encouraging. On 2 May 1933 Pi5sudski sent Hitler an ultimatum,
asking him what plans the chancellor might have for revising the terms of the
treaty. In his reply, Hitler sought to reassure Warsaw and stated that Germany
intended to respect its existing borders with Poland.
In December 1933 Pi5sudski took further soundings in Paris but again to no
avail, and it was then that he decided to come to an agreement with Germany.
The result of the ensuing negotiations was the German-Polish Non-Aggression
Pact signed on 26 January 1934. For a native Austrian like Hitler, this sensa-
tional volte-face in terms of Germany’s foreign policy was easier to stomach
than it was for the traditionally anti-Polish Foreign Office, which was essen-
tially Prussian in outlook. Hitler was in fact more exercised by another enemy:
the Soviet Union. From his point of view the anti-Communist, anti-Russian
Poland was most certainly capable of taking on the role of junior partner in
Germany’s anti-Russian foreign policy, a perspective that would have been
completely unthinkable before 1933.
Four days after the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact was signed,
Germany marked the first anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power with much
pomp and ceremony, and the government used the occasion to force through
the Reichstag a new law which, changing the constitution, was designed to
restructure the Reich by abolishing the representative assemblies in the
520 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

different regions and transferring their sovereign jurisdiction to the Reich

itself. From then on the regional governments came under the jurisdiction of
the federal government, while the regional governors were placed under the
supervision of the minister of the interior. The result was a far-reaching change
that marked the definitive victory of unitarian forces over their particularist
counterpart.
The more powerful governors had little or no inclination to submit uncon-
ditionally to ministries in Berlin, and since they were repeatedly able to win
over Hitler to their point of view, their opposition was by no means ineffectual.
Hitler was in any case fixated on his ultimate goals and had no clear ideas on
questions of internal government, with the result that he preferred to avoid
having to take any decisions at all. In consequence he repeatedly frustrated
tendencies that a National Socialist regime would logically have followed,
notably the systematic centralization demanded by Wilhelm Frick at the
Ministry of the Interior. But in a certain sense there was a method even to this
lack of coherence, Hitler’s policies being directed more at ‘movement’ than at
‘order’, perpetual dynamics being impossible to reconcile with the formation of
stable structures. Rivalries between his followers also had the advantage that he
himself would have to be called on to arbitrate, and even if he took no decision,
this still meant that he remained in charge of the game.
In his relations with the country’s Christian Churches, Hitler likewise tried
to present himself as the ultimate authority in the event of conflict. Papen, as
his vice-chancellor, had largely been left to deal with relations between the
Reich and the Catholic Church. The result was the Concordat which, signed
in the Vatican on 20 July 1933, came into force on 10 September 1933. The
Catholic Church was allowed to continue to regulate its own internal affairs
and received an assurance from the state that it would be able to go on running
faith schools, to teach religion and to organize Church societies, including
youth groups. In return the Curia agreed that the Catholic clergy should no
longer undertake any political activities. In this way the government had won
a partial victory, for the political neutralization of the Catholic Church was
necessary if the National Socialists were to reduce its ideological influence.
In Evangelical Germany, the National Socialists had already taken control of
a number of powerful bastions even before 30 January 1933, although their
influence was more widespread among local parishioners than among Church
leaders, who were predominantly German Nationalist in their outlook. In the
Prussian Church elections in November 1932 the National Socialist German
Christian Faith Movement, which occasionally styled itself the ‘SA of Jesus
Christ’ and the ‘Church SA’, had already won one-third of the seats. In advance
of the Evangelical Church elections in July 1933 Hitler – nominally still a
Catholic – broadcast an appeal from Bayreuth, where he was attending that
summer’s Wagner Festival, inviting his radio audience to vote for the Christian
Faith Movement. His appeal produced the desired result, the movement
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 521

winning a two-thirds majority in the elections on 23 July. Hitler then turned his
attention to the Evangelical Church, which initially seemed to offer little resist-
ance, with the result that at the end of September the head of the German
Christians in East Prussia and Hitler’s personal adviser on all matters relating to
the Church, Ludwig Müller, was elected Reich Bishop of the newly established
German Evangelical Church at the German National Synod in Wittenberg.
But the Wittenberg synod also witnessed the first signs of a countermove-
ment in the form of the Pastors’ Emergency League established by three promi-
nent figures in the religious life of the nation: Martin Niemöller, a former
submarine commander and Freikorps member who was now the local pastor in
the Berlin suburb of Dahlem; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an outside lecturer at the
University of Berlin; and Otto Dibelius, who in June 1933 had been removed
from his post as superintendent-general of the Kurmark. Within months
the Pastors’ Emergency League had spawned the ‘Confessing Church’, which
by the end of 1933 numbered around a third of all Evangelical pastors among
its ranks.
The Confessing Church did not see itself as the voice of political opposi-
tion, and this remained the case even after May 1934, when it broke with the
German Christians at the Barmen Synod. Rather, it merely opposed the politi-
cization of the Gospel, which also meant resisting political pressure within the
Church and opposing the ‘Aryan paragraph’ demanded by the German
Christians and aimed at removing all Jewish Christians from ecclesiastical
appointments. But this was far from being synonymous with a declaration of
war on the general policies of the National Socialist leadership or with a decla-
ration of solidarity with those Jews who had not converted to Christianity.
From the standpoint of the German Christians, however, even this limited
level of resistance was seen as political in character since it flew in the face of
the National Socialists’ claim to address the individual in his or her entirety.
Hitler, too, saw the situation in this light, but he was a realist and as a result felt
that other goals were more pressing than the subversion of the Evangelical
Church from within. In the autumn of 1934 the unexpected strength of the
forces lined up against him persuaded him to reassess the situation. Bishops
who had been removed from their positions by the German Christians were
able to return to their bishoprics, and the Reich Bishop retained his title, even
though he no longer exerted any actual influence upon the Church.
Although the battle over the Church may have suffered a setback, the
struggle to win the hearts and minds of Protestants and Catholics alike went
on and was coordinated by Alfred Rosenberg, the editor of the Völkischer
Beobachter, who since January 1934 had been the commissar for supervision of
intellectual and ideological education of the NSDAP. God-fearing Lutherans
and Catholic believers alike regarded Rosenberg as the quintessential embodi-
ment of the National Socialists’ ‘neo-paganism’. His book The Myth of the
Twentieth Century was placed on the papal see’s index of banned books in
522 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

February 1934. Hitler himself was particularly keen to ensure that young people
were not exposed to the influence of the Church itself or of parental homes with
strong ties to the Church. In this respect the battle with the Church was by no
means a failure, for by the end of 1933 the 1.2 million members of Evangelical
youth groups had been absorbed into the Hitler Youth movement and could
now begin their education and be inducted into the tenets of National Socialism.
Hitler’s decision to withdraw from the battle over the Church enhanced his
reputation in the eyes of the Church and especially of the conservative educated
middle classes whose most important standard-bearers continued to be univer-
sity teachers. Following the removal of their Jewish and left-wing colleagues
they had no need to make any fundamental changes to their teaching or to
their research: all who had been nationalists before 1933 were left alone as
long as they did not criticize National Socialism or the way the country was
being run. Nor were they required to proclaim their support for anti-Semitism,
although many did so voluntarily, no longer making any secret of their anti-
Jewish sentiments.
As in the country’s two main Churches, so it was the younger generation of
academics who made up the bulk of committed National Socialists. Many of
the younger lecturers had been influenced by the Bündische Jugend – the
youth movement established in the wake of the First World War by those of its
leaders who were disillusioned by their recent experiences – and by the ideas of
the Conservative Revolution. Their espousal of National Socialism was by no
means a foregone conclusion, but once the National Socialists had seized
power, they needed to be powerfully convinced not to join the movement. By
1933 few young academics had the intellectual and moral fibre to resist such a
move.
The whole of German culture was affected in this way, the removal of Jews
and left-wing thinkers of every hue going hand in hand with an increasingly
universal tendency to fall into line with the regime. Goebbels was able to set up
the Reich Culture Chamber in September 1933, a vast umbrella organization
for all who were involved in cultural activities in every shape and form and
subdivided into numerous specialist chambers responsible for the political and
ideological indoctrination of the individuals concerned. They were required to
become members of a particular chamber – whether for writers, journalists,
broadcasters or artists working in the theatre, music or visual arts – if they
wished to continue to contribute to the cultural life of the nation. By including
the desirables, the regime was also able to exclude the undesirables, who were
driven from the country’s academies and in the case of those who fled abroad
and continued to criticize Germany in exile stripped of their German citizen-
ship under a law passed on 23 August 1933, when their property was also
impounded. Among those affected by this move were not only many left-wing
politicians but also the theatre critic Alfred Kerr, the writer Lion Feuchtwanger
and the journalists Kurt Tucholsky and Leopold Schwarzschild.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 523

By the autumn of 1933 most of the urban intelligentsia had already been
driven from Germany. Their complete opposite, at least according to National
Socialist ideologues, were the farmers, who were regarded as the sons of the
earth, and it was the aim of the Reich Farm Law of 29 September 1933 to
preserve and support this group. The bill bore the signature of Richard Walther
Darré, the minister of food, head of the Reich Food Estate and a prominent
representative of the myth of ‘blood and soil’. It applied to around a third of
agricultural concerns – neither the largest farms nor the very smallest, but
medium-sized family-run farms. The heir, who in most cases was the youngest
son, had no choice but to become a farmer. His property could be mortgaged
only within certain limits and could no longer be divided up among other
members of the family, as tended to be the case in south-west Germany.
The inevitable consequence of this new law was an increase in the numbers
of agricultural workers leaving the countryside and moving into the towns.
Although this move flew in the face of the NSDAP’s slogans, with their romanti-
cally coloured view of the countryside, it served a higher goal, for the new
industrial ‘reserve army’ provided the labour needed for the armaments industry,
where the wages were much higher than in agriculture. The resultant shortage
of farm labourers was met by the 1931 Volunteer Labour Service, a precursor of
the paramilitary Reich Labour Service in which all Germans between eighteen
and twenty-five were intended in principle to work for six months. The scheme
came into force in June 1935. In turn the Labour Service offered the government
an opportunity to keep a promise that Hitler had made in a speech on 1 May
1933, according to which ‘brainworkers’ too had to undertake some form of
physical labour at least once in their lives.
This attempt to enhance the value of work from a psychological point of
view went hand in hand with a de facto erosion of workers’ rights. On 20
January 1934 the government passed a new law governing labour relations in
the country as a whole. As such, it may be described as the Magna Carta of
industrial relations in the Third Reich. Under its terms a ‘company leader’ was
responsible for the welfare of his workforce, now known as the Gefolgschaft
(literally, followers) and charged with the task of taking all the decisions relating
to running the company. In this he was assisted by a committee whose role was
purely advisory and whose members were chosen from a list made up of candi-
dates selected in advance by the company leader and a representative of the
German Labour Front. These committees had nothing in common with the
works committees of the Weimar Republic. The principal beneficiaries of this
new arrangement were the employers who could once again feel that they were
masters in their own homes – assuming, at least, that they did not fall foul of
the German Labour Front. There was little sign of any opposition to the new
system on the part of the country’s workforce for the decline in unemployment,
which fell from 4.1 million to 2.3 million between December 1933 and
November 1934, was generally credited to the Third Reich and its leader.
524 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Workers were no longer afraid of losing their jobs, which more than made up
for the loss of political and trade union freedoms.
This was also true of most female workers. Admittedly, the National
Socialists had declared war on double incomes even before 30 January 1933,
but after this date they continued to do so in words alone. Their rhetoric about
a woman’s place being in the home taking care of her husband and children had
few practical implications. Under the Third Reich more married women were
in work than ever before, and only in the academic field were women in general
systematically excluded from important positions. The government was also
able to call on a federal law passed on 25 April 1933 and designed to reduce
class sizes in German schools and universities in order to reduce the number of
female students to its historically lowest rate of 11.2 per cent in the summer of
1939. Most of what Germany had achieved before 1933 in terms of women’s
legal and actual equality was reversed. In short, National Socialism was radi-
cally anti-emancipatory: the theory proposed by a number of historians and
sociologists that willingly or otherwise the Third Reich contributed to a
comprehensive modernization of German society is simply untenable.
Within a year of the National Socialists’ seizure of power, their interpreta-
tion of a ‘folk community’ had begun to take on clearer outlines. In essence the
‘folk community’ was intended to remove the differences in Germans’ minds
between Protestants and Catholics, between the urban and the rural popula-
tions and between those who worked with their brains and those who toiled
with their hands. It was dominated by men, divided into estates, chambers and
the German Labour Front and subjected to the Führer principle. Employers
had become company leaders, while workers had been turned into ‘followers’.
At the same time, the elected representatives of agricultural organizations
made way for local farmers’ leaders appointed by the Reich Food Estate; the
country’s universities were now run by their dean, who was appointed by
the Ministry of Education; and under the terms of a law of 4 October 1933 the
editors of all newspapers and magazines assumed responsibility for everything
that their colleagues wrote or said. There were also a huge number of minor
and middle-ranking leaders of the NSDAP from the block leader and cell
leader to the local group leader, the district leader and the Gauleiter, to say
nothing of the officials in charge of the party’s organizations and affiliated soci-
eties such as the National Socialist Women’s Association, the National Socialist
People’s Welfare Association and the National Socialist Motor Corps. All were
dependent on the will of a single leader, while at the same time they were
able to feel that they somehow had a proprietorial share in that leadership.
Anyone who was critical of Hitler and of his leadership could expect to be
denounced to the authorities and, depending on the severity of the criticism,
might be sent to one of the country’s concentration camps. In order to keep
the population under a tight rein, the regime was not only reliant on paid spies
and the relatively few officials of the Gestapo but could also depend on the
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 525

countless ‘national comrades’ who believed that they were helping their Führer
whenever they reported alleged ‘enemies of the people’ to the authorities.
Within twelve months of the National Socialists’ coming to power, faith in
Hitler and in his historical mission had become the most important element
holding together the ‘folk community’. The myth of the Führer could not be
permitted to lose its potency since the Third Reich was simply unthinkable
without it. It was on this entirely appropriate insight that Goebbels based his
propaganda, propaganda that no German citizen was ultimately able to avoid.

If Hitler’s rule was threatened a year after he had seized power, the threat came
not from any subversive activities on the part of a banned party like the
Communists or the Social Democrats, but from within the National Socialist
movement itself: from the SA. As early as June 1933 the SA’s chief of staff, Ernst
Röhm, had published an article in the National Socialists’ monthly journal,
demanding an end to the ‘national’ revolution and the launch of a ‘National
Socialist revolution’. The SA had at least 1.5 million members after it merged
with the Stahlhelm in July 1933. But Röhm continued to regard himself as the
spokesman of the ‘old warriors’ who in turn felt that it was they who had brought
Hitler to power on 30 January 1933. They were unhappy with the changes that
had taken place in Germany since then and demanded a second revolution that
would give Hitler’s ‘brown battalions’ control over state and society.
But Hitler knew that he could not achieve his long-term goals without the
help of the army, the civil service and the business community. On 6 July 1933
he responded to Röhm’s challenge by telling a meeting of regional governors in
Berlin that the revolution was not a permanent state but must be channelled
into the secure bed of evolution. ‘The party has now become the state. All
power lies in the hands of the Reich authority. The focus of German life must
not be allowed to shift back into separate areas, much less into separate
organizations.’34
This public reprimand had as little effect on Röhm as his appointment to
the post of minister without portfolio on 4 December 1933, a move that Hitler
hoped would help to curb the SA. Röhm now demanded that the SA should
also play a key role in building up the country’s offensive and defensive capa-
bilities and form the nucleus of a future militia. On 1 February 1934 he sent a
memorandum to the defence minister, Werner von Blomberg, relegating the
army to the level of a mere training organization. Röhm’s aim was clear: the
army and the SA were to exchange roles.
Blomberg had no difficulty persuading Hitler to take the side of the mili-
tary, and on 28 February the chancellor emphatically rejected Röhm’s plans for
a militia at a meeting of the heads of the army, SA and SS. He was resolved, he
announced, to ‘set up a people’s army based on the Reichswehr, thoroughly
trained and armed with the most modern weapons’.35 This new army, he went
on, must be ready to defend the country within five years and to assume an
526 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

offensive role within eight. The SA must obey Hitler’s orders. For the present
its task would be to defend the country’s borders and to undertake pre-military
training. For the rest, only the Wehrmacht must be allowed to bear arms. The
army responded to Hitler’s concession by issuing a decree dated 28 February
1934 in which Blomberg committed the army to adopt the ‘Aryan paragraph’ in
the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.
During the next few weeks Röhm made no attempt – at least in public – to
question his Führer’s new guidelines. But in conversation and especially in the
presence of the Diplomatic Corps on 18 April his remarks remained as revolu-
tionary as ever, while incidents involving the SA and the army continued to
increase. Among the population at large these were the first signs of weak lead-
ership, creating a mood of discontent that Goebbels sought to counter in May
1934 with his campaign against ‘killjoys and criticasters’. The continuing
disquiet caused conservative circles associated with the vice-chancellor, Franz
von Papen, to demand clarification on the question of power. A suitable means
to this end seemed to them to be the restoration of the monarchy following the
death of Hindenburg, an eventuality that appeared to be increasingly likely,
given the elderly president’s worsening health in the early months of 1934.
On 17 June 1934 Papen gave a speech at the University of Marburg that was
designed as a rallying cry calling for the formation of a conservative front
against the radical forces within the National Socialist movement. The speech
had been written by one of the vice-chancellor’s closest allies, the Young
Conservative journalist Edgar Jung, who placed in Papen’s mouth a profession
of faith in the values of humanity, freedom and equality before the law, values
said to be Germanic and Christian rather than liberal. It was impossible not to
interpret his remarks as a declaration of war on those who were advocating a
second revolution:

No nation can tolerate a perpetual revolution from below if it wishes to

assert itself in the face of history. At some point the movement must come
to an end, and at some point a firm social structure must come into being,
held together by an incorruptible system of justice and by the uncontested
authority of the state. Germany must not become a train steaming off into
the unknown, with nobody knowing when it may stop.36

Papen’s speech was well received by the overwhelming majority of his audience
in Marburg and would no doubt have met with an equally positive response in
the country as a whole if Goebbels had not taken immediate steps to ban its
broadcast and publication. Edgar Jung was arrested by the Gestapo on 25 June.
By then Hitler had realized that he was fighting a domestic battle on two polit-
ical fronts and that his only chance of success lay in defeating both of his oppo-
nents – Röhm’s ‘revolutionary’ SA and the monarchist forces of reaction – with
a single blow. If he turned on only Papen and his circle, then this would have
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 527

represented a triumph for the SA that would have placed Hitler in grave danger,
whereas a move against the SA would have strengthened the hand of his own
bourgeois confederates, a development that he cannot have wanted either.
Papen’s speech in Marburg gave him the opportunity to launch a two-pronged
surprise attack and resolve the internal crisis in a radical way.
The events of late June and early July 1934 were described by contemporaries
as the ‘Röhm revolt’ – this was the National Socialists’ term – and by posterity as
the ‘Röhm putsch’, although the truth of the matter is that the chief of staff of the
SA was guilty of neither. Following a lengthy conversation with Hitler, Röhm
had taken sick leave in early June and ordered the SA to go on leave of absence
in July, making it much easier for Hitler to side with the Reichswehr and SS –
formally still linked to the SA – and launch an attack on his comrade-in-arms,
who had been his friend for many years. On 30 June, with Hitler’s personal
involvement, Röhm and other SA leaders were arrested at Bad Wiessee in
Bavaria and taken to Stadelheim Prison in Munich, where all of them, with the
exception of Röhm, were summarily executed that same day. Röhm himself was
shot on Hitler’s order on 1 July.
The leaders of the SA were not the only victims of the alleged ‘Röhm putsch’,
for Hitler, Göring and Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, seized the oppor-
tunity to liquidate political enemies from the most disparate camps. The former
Bavarian general state commissioner Gustav von Kahr was murdered on
30 June, as were the chairman of the Catholic Action Group, Erich Klausener,
who had close links with Papen, Papen’s two colleagues Herbert von Bose and
Edgar Jung, the former national organizer of the NSDAP, Gregor Straßer, and the
former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his colleague General Ferdinand von
Bredow. Hitler accused Schleicher of high treason for helping Röhm, while
Bredow was said to have helped Schleicher in matters of foreign policy – both
charges were completely groundless. Fully authenticated, conversely, is the
number of individuals known to have been murdered as part of this clean-up
operation: eighty-five, some fifty of whom were members of the SA.
On 30 June, in addition to SA leaders, Hitler also managed to get rid of a
number of conservatives to whom he had taken a personal dislike. Papen, who
had been a temporary, if largely passive, figurehead of the resistance, escaped
relatively lightly. Göring had him placed under house arrest, but after two days
Hitler responded to his request for a personal declaration vindicating his
honour. He resigned as vice-chancellor on 7 August and at Hitler’s request
became special ambassador in Vienna, where, with the Führer’s approval, the
Austrian National Socialists had already mounted a coup on 25 July and shot
dead the country’s chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuß – which had not been a part
of the plan. Although the coup was quickly put down, it triggered an interna-
tional crisis, when Mussolini, whom Hitler had met for the first time in Venice
only a short time earlier, deployed troops to the Brenner Pass in order to warn
Germany against annexing Austria. Papen’s mission was to restore Germany’s
528 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

credibility in Vienna. In this way Hitler hoped that there would be no repeti-
tion of an incident like his speech in Marburg.
On 3 July 1934 the German government passed a law retroactively declaring
its actions on 30 June, 1 and 2 July to be legally justified inasmuch as they were
ostensibly required to suppress acts of high treason as part of a national emer-
gency. Hitler justified his actions to the Reichstag on 13 July:

If anyone were to reproach me for not using the regular courts to pass
sentence on the perpetrators, I can say only that at that moment I was
responsible for the fate of the German nation and hence the supreme judge
of the German people!37

It was left to the constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt, who since November 1933
had been the head of the section for university teachers in the League of
National Socialist German Jurists, to provide a semblance of legitimacy for a
series of murders said to have been sanctioned by ‘the healthy instincts of the
folk’ and effectively to undermine the independence of the country’s judiciary.
Under the heading ‘The Führer Protects the Law’, Schmitt helped himself to
Hitler’s phrase about the ‘supreme judge’ and used it as the starting point for his
own line of argument, such as it was:

The true leader is always a judge, too. From the office of leader stems that of
the judge. Anyone who tries to separate the two or, worse, to set one against
the other turns the judge into a counter-leader or into the tool of a counter-
leader and seeks to use the state to overturn the state. [. . .] The truth of the
matter is that the Führer’s action was a genuine judicial act. Not subject to
justice, it was itself the highest form of justice. [. . .] The Führer’s legal
authority issues from the same source of the law as that from which every
law of every nation issues. It is in our greatest emergency that the supreme
law proves its true worth, and the highest degree of the law’s avenging
justice is realized. All laws stem from the people’s right to exist.38

Apart from Hitler himself, the principal beneficiaries of the crisis in the SA
were the army and the SS. The leaders of the army had made themselves
complicit in a crime designed to ensure that they alone had the right to bear
arms for their country. In order to achieve that goal they were even willing to
countenance the murders of two of their generals. From that moment on they
were susceptible to moral blackmail. On 20 July 1934 Hitler acknowledged the
SS’s help in eliminating the SA leadership by making it an independent organi-
zation within the NSDAP. As a result, Heinrich Himmler, who had been head
of the Political Police in Germany since April 1934, moved up a rung on the
ladder of the Third Reich’s hierarchy, and his SS was able to embark on the
process of becoming a state within a state.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 529

Since early June Hindenburg had been staying at his country house at
Neudeck in East Prussia, and it was there that the eighty-six-year-old president
died on 2 August 1934. The Weimar Republic’s second head of state had treated
Hitler with deep mistrust right up until the end of January 1933, but once
Hitler had become chancellor, all his objections had evaporated. Only twice
between 30 January 1933 and 2 August 1934 did Hindenburg exert a moder-
ating influence on the events unfolding in Germany: first, when the anti-Jewish
provisions of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service were
toned down in April 1933 and, second, in the struggle with the Church in the
summer of 1933. Under Hitler’s chancellorship, the elderly president finally
felt that the country had found the inner peace that it so fervently desired.
Hindenburg had always felt a profound personal loathing of the SA’s homo-
sexual chief of staff and greeted the suppression of the ostensible ‘Röhm putsch’
by sending congratulatory telegrams to both Hitler and Göring. All that he
learnt about the events in question was calculated to increase his estimation of
his chancellor.
At the time of his death, Hindenburg had yet to achieve his own personal
political ambitions. As a young Prussian officer he had been present when
Wilhelm was proclaimed Kaiser at Versailles on 18 January 1871. In May 1934
he had signed a document headed ‘Last Wish’, professing his desire to see the
Hohenzollerns restored to the throne. It was addressed to his country’s new
chancellor with instructions that it be handed to Hitler on the president’s death.
Hitler had long been familiar with the letter’s contents when Papen, acting on
behalf of Oskar von Hindenburg, handed it to him in Berchtesgaden on 14
August 1934. But it was only Hindenburg’s last will and testament that he
released to the press the following day. It too had been passed on to him by the
country’s former vice-chancellor and referred in the most glowing terms to ‘my
chancellor Adolf Hitler and his movement’, but said nothing that hinted at the
late president’s ‘Last Wish’.
As always, Hitler acted according to his own best interests. He refused to
contemplate a restoration of the monarchy because it was incompatible with his
interpretation of his own leadership. Hindenburg’s death gave him the chance
to cement that position still further. On 1 August – even before Hindenburg
was dead – the government had already decided to combine the posts of presi-
dent and chancellor, in the process proposing a solution diametrically opposed
to Hindenburg’s ‘Last Wish’ and also flying in the face of the Enabling Act,
which had explicitly left the president’s authority inviolate. At the same cabinet
meeting, moreover, Blomberg had announced that on Hindenburg’s death the
armed forces would immediately swear an oath of allegiance to their ‘Führer
and Chancellor’.
On 2 August 1934 the country’s soldiers were required to repeat the new
oath, which had no legal backing and contained no commitment to defend
country, fatherland or constitution but merely bound them to a single man:
530 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

I swear this sacred oath by God, that I shall unconditionally obey the leader
of the German Reich and nation, Adolf Hitler, the supreme commander of
the armed forces and that as a brave soldier I shall risk my life in fulfilment
of this oath.39

By 2 August 1934 Hitler wielded a degree of personal power greater than

anything seen in Germany since the age of absolutism. Institutionally speaking,
the process of seizing power was now at an end. All that remained was for
Hitler to receive the acclamation of the people. On 19 August 1934, four days
after the publication of Hindenburg’s last will and testament, the Germans had
an opportunity to express their views on the Law Concerning the Head of State
of the German Reich that had been passed on 1 August. As was to be expected,
the vast majority – 89.9 per cent – voted for the law, representing acceptance of
the legislation by 84.3 per cent of the electorate.
At first sight, the result represented a resounding victory for Hitler, but a
comparison with the referendum of 12 November 1933 invited a rather more
sober assessment, for the number of those who had registered their discontent
by not voting had increased, while the number of those who agreed had fallen
from 89.9 per cent to 84.3 per cent of all those who were entitled to vote. The
number of no votes was particularly high in urban centres such as Hamburg
(20.4 per cent), Aachen (18.6 per cent) and Berlin (18.5 per cent). In the capital,
the no vote was in double figures in every district, the former Communist
stronghold of Wedding topping the poll with 19.7 per cent.
Clearly Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations was a far more
popular move than the merger of its two most important offices of state. Hitler’s
prestige was not seriously impaired by the announcement that he was
mistrusted by a minority of the population, but when measured by his own
expectations, the outcome of this second plebiscite still represented a failure
which Goebbels recorded as such in a diary entry of 22 August.40
This temporary setback in the regime’s popularity was also a reflection of
economic factors, for in spite of massive export grants Germany felt the effects
of the decline in the country’s exports in 1934, a decline due in part to interna-
tional protectionism but also to German measures designed to protect its trade
with the rest of the world. The attempt to make up for the collapse of trade with
the United States and Great Britain was only gradually rewarded by a realign-
ment of trade with south-eastern Europe and Latin America. On 14 June 1934
the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, announced a complete mora-
torium on foreign debt repayments and the introduction of foreign currency
allocations on a daily basis. According to surviving Gestapo reports, the
Germans were more unsettled by the economic problems stemming from the
foreign exchange crisis than by the so-called ‘Röhm revolt’.
By 1934 it was above all the armaments industry that profited from state
commissions: during the second year of the Third Reich military expenditure
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 531

made up more than half of all state expenditure on goods and services, with the
result that between 1933 and 1934 the part played by military expenditure in
the growth of the gross domestic product rose more than tenfold from 4.2 per
cent to 47 per cent. If unemployment fell during 1934, this was due for the most
part to the expansion of the military sector, not to any job creation schemes
among the civilian population. And if wages rose a little above their all-time
low in 1929, then this was simply because Germans were working longer hours.
It was no accident, therefore, that there was such a large percentage of no votes
in working-class districts of the larger cities in the plebiscite on 19 August.
In spite of this, there could be no question of any widespread proletarian
opposition to National Socialism in the summer of 1934. The leisure organiza-
tion Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) that was established under the
aegis of the German Workers’ Front by analogy with the Italian Opera Nazionale
Dopolavoro offered a wide range of holiday trips, sports, concerts, theatre
visits and social events and played a large part in helping to make the Third
Reich popular with workers. Soon after the ‘Röhm putsch’ a Berlin confidant of
the exiled leader of the Social Democrats reported that ‘The attitude of the
workforce to the regime must continue to be described as benevolently neutral
– even in the wake of recent events there has been no perceptible change to this
situation.’41

Rome’s Second Empire: Fascist Italy and the War in Abyssinia

There was no other country in Europe to which Hitler felt as ideologically close
as he did to Fascist Italy and no other political leader whom he respected and
even admired as much as Benito Mussolini. When Hitler became German
chancellor on 30 January 1933, Italy was the only country whose newspapers
reacted positively to the change at the top. In its edition of 31 January, Il Popolo
d’Italia headed its report: ‘The collapse of the world’s old democratic and
liberal systems. Adolf Hitler takes over the government in Germany in coali-
tion with nationalist forces and defence leagues.’ Il Resto del Carlino appeared
later that same day with the headline, ‘On the trail of Fascism. Chancellor
Hitler brings the young forces of renewal to power in Germany.’42
In the wake of the Reichstag elections on 5 March 1933, when Hitler’s posi-
tion was confirmed, Mussolini attempted to impress the world by mediating
between Germany and the Western Powers, playing an active role in plans for a
consultative pact between Britain, France, Germany and Italy that Ramsay
MacDonald had already put forward in the summer and autumn of 1932 and
that was finally initialled in Rome on 7 July 1933. In the event, of course, the
treaty was ratified only by Italy and Great Britain in August and September
1933, its failure largely due to the aggressive policies that Germany had adopted
towards Austria: Mussolini was keen for Austria to retain its independence as he
had no wish to see the German Reich as his immediate neighbour to the north.
532 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The conflict between the Austrian National Socialists and the authoritarian
regime of the Christian Socialist chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß grew dramati-
cally worse in May and June 1933, when assassinations, bombings and the
blowing up of bridges brought the republic to the brink of civil war. The govern-
ment responded with arrests, house-to-house searches and a ban on public
assemblies. After several incendiary speeches in Vienna and Graz, Bavaria’s
National Socialist justice minister Hans Frank was expelled from the country at
the end of May. On 27 May the German government introduced a measure
requiring all German tourists entering Austria to pay 1,000 marks – around
£4,000 at today’s prices. In this way Berlin hoped that Vienna would be forced
to capitulate within a very short period of time.
At the end of July, in its attempts to cling to power and prevent Germany
from annexing the country, the Austrian government appealed to London and
Rome to urge Berlin to abandon a policy that violated international law. Until
then Mussolini had sought to avoid taking sides and even now he preferred to
attempt to influence the German government unilaterally, but he had no more
success than London and Paris with his demarche of 4 August. Drawing the
lessons from his failure, Mussolini adopted a policy that was aimed at a fascisi-
zation of Austria and its reduction to an Italian satellite state. On 19/20 August
1933, in the course of his third visit to Italy within four months, Dollfuß met
Mussolini in Riccione and was left with no choice but to commit himself to
giving his government an emphatically dictatorial character, leading to
increased attacks on his country’s Social Democrats.
The Austrian government had already disbanded the Social Democrats’
Republican Protection League the previous March, driving it underground. In
October the Social Democrats convened a special party conference at which
they resolved to adopt a policy of armed resistance if any of four different
contingencies arose: if the party was banned; if the trade unions were
proscribed; if there was an attack on ‘Red Vienna’; or if a Fascist constitution
were to be introduced. On 18 January 1934, the Italian undersecretary of state
at the Foreign Ministry, Fulvio Suvich, travelled to Vienna as Mussolini’s repre-
sentative to demand that Dollfuß implement the terms of the agreement that
he had signed at Riccione and adopt a course that was both rigorously anti-
parliamentary and strenuously anti-Marxist. The paramilitary militia groups
adopted a similar line in late January and early February.
On 12 February the police moved against the Linz Workers’ Home,
prompting the banned defence league to resort to desperate measures and fire
at the forces of law and order from the besieged building. When news of these
events reached Vienna, the Social Democrat party executive proclaimed a
general strike, leading to an armed uprising in the capital. It took the police,
army and militia groups three days to break down the resistance of the workers
who had barricaded themselves in large tower blocks such as the Karl-
Marx-Hof in Döbling, from where they had fired on the forces of law and
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 533

order. The latter sustained heavy casualties: more than 100 were killed and
almost 500 injured, while the defence league and civilian population incurred
equally substantial losses: 200 dead and more than 300 injured. The rebels were
rounded up and summarily executed, all Social Democratic organizations were
banned, and the mandates of the party’s parliamentarians were revoked. The
victors were Dollfuß’s Austro-Fascist regime and the two powers that had lent
it their substantial support: Fascist Italy and authoritarian Hungary under its
governor Miklós Horthy and the country’s radically right-wing, anti-Semitic
prime minister, Gyula G=mb=s.
A month later, on 17 March 1934, all three states agreed to work together
politically and economically under the terms of the Rome Protocols. Dollfuß’s
regime passed a new constitution in May, and this was ratified by the rump
parliament, appealing to Almighty God and declaring Austria a ‘Christian,
German, federal state on a corporative basis’. Insisting on the authoritarian
nature of the Austrian state was scarcely calculated to pacify the population, and
on 25 July 1934 the Austrian National Socialists mounted a putsch. They were
responding to instructions from Theo Habicht, who had been sent to Austria in
1931 to oversee the reorganization of the Austrian National Socialists. Following
his deportation in 1933, he established his headquarters in Munich, where he
worked in close consultation with Hitler himself. Dollfuß was killed when the
National Socialists stormed the chancellor’s office. In total the attempted putsch
resulted in 269 deaths and between 430 and 660 injured.
Dollfuß’s violent death had not been a part of the plan, and it caused the
putsch to fail. On 25 July Mussolini sent four divisions to the Brenner Pass and
to Tarvisio, while Hitler disavowed his amateurish followers and that very
night demonstratively dismissed Habicht and disbanded the Austrian leader-
ship of the NSDAP. Dollfuß was succeeded by the minister of education, Kurt
von Schuschnigg, who continued to pursue his predecessor’s authoritarian,
pro-Fascist policies. As a result of the National Socialists’ failed putsch, rela-
tions between Germany and Italy reached a new historical low.
Austria was not the only bone of contention between the German National
Socialists and the Italian Fascists. Another area where the interests of the two
regimes clashed was the neighbouring Danube region, the Third Reich
regarding the agrarian lands in the southern part of east central and south-east
Europe as ripe for the picking, an area of economic importance worth incorpo-
rating into Germany and subjecting to its political control. In particular, Berlin
sets its sights on Hungary and Yugoslavia, signing a trade deal with Budapest
in July 1933 that was clearly aimed at making Hungary part of a large-scale
economic region under German hegemony. By the beginning of 1934 Germany
was making a sustained attempt to woo Belgrade and to redirect Hungary’s
revisionist aspirations away from Yugoslavia and towards Czechoslovakia. The
Rome Protocols of March 1934 led Berlin to fear that its own strategy in south-
east Europe was about to be thwarted and, indeed, there is no doubt that for
534 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

some time Rome had been trying to ensure that Hungary and Yugoslavia were
increasingly dependent on Mussolini’s Italy.
As Yugoslavia had been a member of the Little Entente since 1920–1 and
a direct ally of France since 1927, Paris viewed with suspicion Italian and,
in particular, German policy towards Belgrade. By the autumn of 1934 the
National Socialist putsch in Austria and Germany’s increasing influence in
Yugoslavia had persuaded Rome to seek a rapprochement with Paris, a move
not anticipated by Berlin but one which in the French camp was encouraged by
the sympathy for Mussolini and the Italian Fascists felt by France’s foreign
minister, Pierre Laval, while Mussolini’s desire for colonial expansion in Africa
played a significant role in his attempt to win over France as an ally. Mussolini
and Laval signed a series of protocols in Rome in January 1935, marking what
the historian Jens Petersen has called ‘Italy’s definitive defection to the camp of
anti-revisionist forces’.43 If Germany were to violate the terms of the Treaty of
Versailles, then France and Italy would confer on whatever countermeasures
they deemed should be taken. The same was true of the threat posed by
Austrian independence.
Central to the agreements, however, was a secret arrangement regarding
North Africa, France giving Italy a free hand in Abyssinia, including the right to
use military force. This offered Rome the chance finally to deal with ‘the shame
of Adua’, namely, the defeat inflicted on Italy by Abyssinian troops in 1896. This
was a goal to which Mussolini had been systematically working since the early
summer of 1932. His imperialist designs were intended to turn Italy into one of
the leading colonial powers and help the country achieve the status of an impero,
or empire, something that Italy had long aspired to become. From the stand-
point of Italy’s Fascists, this was the most effective answer to the ‘mutilated
victory’ of 1918 and the crippling experience of economic depression.
This was not the only time that Hitler contributed to Italy’s rapprochement
with the Western Powers, for in March 1935 he twice violated the terms of the
Treaty of Versailles: on 1 March he declared his intention of rebuilding his
country’s air force and on the 16th he reintroduced general military conscrip-
tion. The Italian press reacted to this second provocation with an outcry of
indignation, and Mussolini agreed to French demands for a summit confer-
ence that would condemn Hitler’s actions. The summit was held on Italian soil
– at Stresa on Lago Maggiore – between 11 and 14 April. The prime ministers
of Britain, France and Italy – Ramsay MacDonald, Pierre-Étienne Flandin and
Benito Mussolini – agreed ‘to use all appropriate means to counter all unilat-
eral revocations of treaties that could jeopardize peace in Europe’ and ‘to work
together to that end in a spirit of friendly cooperation’.44
Among the few practical consequences of the Stresa conference were mili-
tary agreements between France and Italy designed to resist any German moves
against Austria and a German invasion of France. The subject of Abyssinia was
not mentioned at Stresa. Soon afterwards London made it clear that it had
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 535

serious misgivings about Italy’s aims in north-east Africa, prompting Mussolini

to change his foreign policy and move closer to Hitler. By now the Reich was by
far Italy’s most important trading partner in terms of both imports and exports.
There was also the ideological affinity between Italian Fascism and German
National Socialism. Mussolini’s aggressive expansionist policy was likely to
encounter far greater understanding north of the Alps than in either of the two
western democracies that had sat round the same table in Stresa.
For Mussolini, there was no question of forgoing a war with Abyssinia. As
the historian Hans Woller has noted, there were expansionist forces at work
not only within the Fascist party, but also in the wider population, which was
emphatically imperialist in its outlook:

Mussolini had a national mission to fulfil, but he was unwilling to leave it

merely at that. Rather, his aim was to combine that mission with another
large-scale national concern: the creation of a new man, whom he wanted
to mould entirely in his own Fascist image. Mussolini wanted to make his
nation harsher and more implacable towards itself and other nations,
nations that the Italians were ostensibly called upon to rule. Unless it
expanded and proved itself in war, his regime would sink into a state of
stagnation and its destiny would remain incomplete, his anthropological
revolution no more than a dream.45

On 21 May 1935 Hitler, too, took a major step closer to Mussolini, declaring in
a speech to the Reichstag that Germany had no intention of interfering in
Austria’s domestic concerns, still less of annexing the country. He explicitly
regretted that the conflict with Austria had soured relations with Italy, espe-
cially because there were no other areas of disagreement between the two
countries. Five days later Mussolini told a German diplomat that the Franco-
Soviet Assistance Pact signed on 2 May had introduced an entirely new factor
to international politics, necessitating a fundamental reappraisal of his coun-
try’s stance. At the end of May Germany and Italy agreed that their respective
presses would stop sniping at one another, and soon afterwards Mussolini
recalled his German ambassador, Vittorio Cerruti, from Berlin, where he had
proved an unpopular figure, and appointed him to the Italian Embassy in Paris.
But Hitler had no intention of helping Italy to gain a quick victory in
Abyssinia. Although he had no wish to see Mussolini defeated, he was keen that
the war should be sufficiently protracted to divert the Western Powers’ atten-
tion from Germany and central Europe. In July 1935, after consulting with his
foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, he responded positively to an appeal
from the emperor Haile Selassie for military help. Under the terms of a highly
secretive agreement, Ethiopia received 10,000 rifles, ten million rounds of
ammunition, machine guns, hand grenades and around seventy artillery pieces,
for which the country paid some three million marks in credit. Throughout the
536 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

months that followed, Berlin sought to give the impression that it was a wholly
impartial observer in the matter of Abyssinia.
In preparing the ground for war, Mussolini and Fascist propagandists fell
back on the old argument, once advanced by pre-war nationalists, that there
was a fundamental antagonism between capitalist and proletarian nations, and
on 2 October 1935 – the day before Italy launched its assault on Ethiopia –
Mussolini used the phrase ‘Italia proletaria e fascista’ to justify Italy’s claim to
colonial expansion. The war against the Empire of Abyssinia – a member of the
League of Nations – began without any declaration of hostilities. The League of
Nations condemned Italy as the aggressor but at the insistence of the French
imposed only moderate economic sanctions on the country, rather than any
military sanctions. There was no ban on the supply of petrol, steel and all the
most important metals. And few countries heeded the embargo on weapons
and raw materials or respected the credit restrictions. Germany declared its
neutrality on 7 November and at the same time announced a ban on the export
of armaments to the countries involved in the war, but provided Italy with huge
amounts of raw materials, albeit at a very high price.
The Conquest of Abyssinia was a racist war of extermination bordering on
genocide, the first such war to fall into this category in the twentieth century
and at the same time the greatest colonial war until then. Between 350,000 and
760,000 Ethiopians out of a total population of some ten million fell victim to
the war itself and the ensuing occupation, which lasted until 1941. As the Swiss
historian Aram Mattioli has observed, the war against Haile Selassie’s hope-
lessly inferior forces witnessed

the most massive and most brutal use of air power that the world had seen
until this point in its history. With the authority of the highest powers in the
land, squadrons of the Regia Aeronautica undertook thousands of missions,
dropping fragmentation bombs, incendiary bombs and gas bombs on
human targets. Before Italy, only Spain had dropped poison gas from aero-
planes on its protectorate in northern Morocco. Italy was thus only the
second country to use this weapon of mass destruction from the air.

In Mattioli’s view, the Abyssinian campaign was ‘a “bridge” between the colo-
nial wars of the imperialist age and Hitler’s war over Lebensraum’.46
In June 1925 Italy had ratified the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of
the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases and of Bacteriological
Methods of Warfare, but by December 1935 Marshal Pietro Badoglio was
systematically deploying poison gas in the Abyssinian uplands not only against
soldiers but increasingly against the civilian population, including spraying
rivers, waterholes and pastureland. Not even the field hospitals of the Red
Cross were safe from air attacks. Fleeing soldiers and civilians were mown
down from the air by machine gun fire. The Ethiopians – the oldest nation in
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 537

Africa – were regarded as uncivilized savages and as such could be attacked

using resources that would never have been deployed against European nations.
The Italian military also used Muslim mercenaries from Eritrea and Libya
against Christian Abyssinians, who were the victims of particularly cruel and
barbarous treatment at their enemies’ hands.
The use of poison gas was ordered by Mussolini and the Italian supreme
command as a reaction to the unexpectedly stiff resistance from the Ethiopians.
Italian war correspondents were banned from reporting on its use. The protests
on the part of Haile Selassie and the imperial government in Addis Ababa
against the systematic violation of international law went unheard. If sanctions
were to have worked, they would have had to have been applied to fuel, above
all oil, and the Suez Canal, which was under British control, should have been
closed to Italian troops and military transports. Neither step was taken.
Although the British foreign minister, Samuel Hoare, was forced to resign on
18 December 1935 after an offer to mediate that had been worked out between
him and his French counterpart, Pierre Laval, and that made extensive conces-
sions to Mussolini was deliberately leaked, causing a violent storm of protest in
the British press, Great Britain failed to act decisively even under Hoare’s
successor, Anthony Eden. Italian troops entered Addis Ababa on 5 May 1936,
formally marking the end of the war but by no means signalling the end of
Ethiopian resistance to Italy’s occupation.
Within weeks of the fall of his capital, Haile Selassie travelled to Geneva
from his exile in the south of England and on 30 June 1936 was the first head
of state to address a plenary session of the League of Nations:

There is no precedent for a Head of State himself speaking in this assembly.

But there is also no precedent for a people being a victim of such injustice
and being at present threatened by abandonment to its aggressor. Also,
there has never before been an example of any Government proceeding to
the systematic extermination of a nation by barbarous means, in violation
of the most solemn promises made by the nations of the earth that there
should not be used against innocent human beings the terrible poison of
harmful gases.47

Haile Selassie appealed in vain to the world’s conscience. The League of Nations
had lost its remaining moral authority during the Abyssinian conflict, so that it
was only logical when on 4 July 1936 it lifted all the sanctions that had been
imposed on Italy. Most nations quickly followed suit and recognized the
conquest and annexation of Abyssinia by Fascist Italy. The few exceptions were
the United States of America, the Soviet Union, Mexico, New Zealand and
Haiti. Aram Mattioli’s verdict hits the nail on the head: ‘For the sake of peace in
Europe, Abyssinia was sacrificed to a dictator’s expansionist aspirations. In this
way the Western Powers sent a signal encouraging copy-cat murderers.’48
538 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

As a result of government restrictions, the war in Ethiopia was covered

by the Italian media to only a limited extent and as a result enjoyed the
support not only of dyed-in-the-wool Fascists but of all Italian nationalists. It
was seen as revenge for the defeat that the country had suffered four decades
previously in Adua and enhanced Mussolini in the eyes of his people, proving
a personal triumph for the Duce and making Fascism more popular than ever.
Within hours of the fall of Addis Ababa, Mussolini had appeared on the balcony
of the Palazzo Venezia and told a jubilant crowd that their country was again
at peace:

Ethiopia is Italian! It is Italian in practical terms because it has been occu-

pied by our own victorious army, it is Italian in legal terms because with the
sword of Rome ours is the civilization that has triumphed over barbarism,
ours is the justice that has triumphed over cruel tyranny, it is we who have
liberated the downtrodden masses and triumphed over thousands of years
of slavery.49

Four days later, on 9 May 1936, Mussolini delivered himself of another speech
which, frenetically acclaimed by the masses, proclaimed the new Roman
Empire, the Impero:

The Italian people has created the Impero with its blood. It will make that
empire fertile with its labours and defend it against its enemies with its
arms. In this supreme certainty, O legionaries, raise your insignia, your
swords and your hearts in order to welcome the Impero to the destined hills
of Rome after fifteen centuries.50

From 9 May 1936 King Victor Emanuel III bore the title of ‘Emperor of
Ethiopia’. Italy was now the third largest colonial power after Britain and
France. The increase in prestige that accrued from the war went hand in hand
with the growth of racism in Italy, starting with the feeling of superiority over
the dark-skinned Africans with whom there could never be any question of
racial interbreeding. In turn this feeling gave rise to a cult of racial purity that
led to the exclusion of the Italian Jews as well, producing a rabid sentiment
close to the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists in Germany.
The Africa Italiana Orientale was created by the Legge Organica of 1 June
1936 and comprised Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, a single vast colony ruled
by a viceroy. In reality, it was in marked contrast to the lofty tone struck by the
Fascist propaganda of the period. Between 1935 and 1940 the region devoured
more than 20 per cent of the total Italian budget. Only around 300,000 Italian
settlers found a home here, eking out pitiful existences that were repeatedly
placed under threat as the continuing resistance of the Ethiopians soon
assumed the form of a guerrilla war, in turn provoking increasingly violent
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 539

waves of brutal repression on the part of the colonial power. Mussolini himself
set the tone of the reprisals in a telegram to the viceroy, General Rodolfo
Graziani, dated 8 July 1936: Italy’s foremost representative in Ethiopia was
authorized ‘to initiate and systematically conduct policy of terror and extermi-
nation against rebels and population in complicity with them. Without the law
of ten eyes for one we cannot heal this wound in good time.’51
The viceroy did as was expected of him. When two intellectuals from Eritrea
tried to assassinate him on 19 February 1937, killing seven bystanders and
leaving Graziani himself with shrapnel wounds, the latter unleashed an orgy of
violence of positively pogrom-like proportions in which he was aided and
abetted by Fascist militiamen and many members of the Italian colony: within
three days some 3,000 innocent men, women and children had been butchered.
Further reprisals were undertaken in May, when the medieval monastery town
of Debre Libanòs was attacked on the grounds that members of its religious
community were suspected of complicity in the assassination attempt. Between
1,000 and 2,000 monks, deacons and visitors to the monastery lost their lives in
the massacre.
The chauvinism that was encouraged by the Conquest of Abyssinia was
shared by bishops, cardinals and intellectuals, including the writer Luigi
Pirandello, as well as by a number of liberal and left-wing anti-Fascists such as
the philosopher Benedetto Croce, the journalist Luigi Albertini and the former
Socialist Arturo Labriola. Only exiled Italian leaders, whether Communist,
Socialist or left-wing Liberal, remained unwavering in their opposition to
Fascism and the war. The most influential mouthpiece of the émigrés was the
journal Giustizia e Libertà that was established by Carlo Rosselli following his
escape from the island of Lipari, where he had been held since 1927. Set up
with the help of like-minded intellectuals such as Gaetano Salvemini and
Emilio Lussu, it enjoyed a reputation that extended beyond its émigré reader-
ship and impacted on domestic Italian politics. ‘Everything about Fascism is
war,’ wrote Rosselli in 1936,

its origins, its mentality, its view of the world. [. . .] Since 1925 Fascism has
been nothing more than preparation for war. [. . .] Fascism is a class war
that begins at home and then turns on the outside world, a development
that is by no means fortuitous because this is the only way in which it can
survive.52

Together with his brother Nello, Carlo Rosselli was murdered by members of a
radical right-wing secret organization in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne on 11 June 1937.
Their assassins were presumably acting on the orders of the Italian foreign
minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, who was Mussolini’s son-in-law. Their double
murder was the regime’s most brutal blow against Italian anti-Fascists since the
murder of Giacomo Matteotti on 10 June 1924.
540 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The Great Terror: Stalin Builds Up his

Dominion over the Soviet Union
Throughout the 1930s no country was more politically at odds with Fascist
Italy than the Soviet Union – not that their ideological differences prevented
Stalin from responding positively to an offer from Mussolini and signing a
non-aggression pact with him in September 1932. Between 1925 and 1927 the
Soviet Union had already signed similar treaties with Turkey, Afghanistan,
Lithuania and Persia, followed in 1932 by a veritable avalanche of non-
aggression pacts, including contractual agreements not only with Italy but with
Finland, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and finally, on 29 November, with France.
In May 1933 – three months after Hitler seized power in Germany – the
German-Soviet Neutrality and Non-Aggression Pact of April 1926 was renewed
for a further three years, bringing to an end a ratification process that Brüning’s
government had begun but never pursued with any real seriousness of purpose.
On the other hand, Hitler demonstratively ended the secret cooperation
between the Reichswehr and the Red Army in July 1933. In 1934 the Soviet
Union’s non-aggression treaties with the Baltic States and also with Poland and
Finland were extended, in part as a reaction to the German-Polish Non-
Aggression Treaty of January 1934. The following September the Soviet Union
became a member of the League of Nations, transforming the erstwhile pariah
state of 1917 into a member of an international group of countries that at least
in theory claimed to exist for reasons of collective security.
The Western Powers reacted positively to the Soviet Union’s new official
foreign policy, which was deliberately designed to appear more moderate. In
1929 Great Britain resumed diplomatic relations, which it had broken off two
years earlier, and in November 1933 the United States accorded the Soviet
Union its diplomatic recognition. The following year Moscow renounced its
claims to Bessarabia and recognized its existing borders with Romania, thereby
normalizing its relations with Bucharest. But it was his mutual assistance trea-
ties with France and Czechoslovakia in 1935 that marked the greatest triumphs
of Russia’s foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, who was regarded as particularly
pro-western. Both treaties were clearly designed to send a clear signal to
National Socialist Germany and its non-aggression pact with Poland in January
1934.
Initially at least the policies of the Communist International were unaf-
fected by the Soviet Union’s attempts to draw closer to the West and even after
the National Socialists’ seizure of power it continued to insist that its ‘general
line’, including its struggle with ‘bourgeois’ democracy and with the ‘social
Fascists’ of the Second International, remained the only proper one, even
denying that the German Communists and working class had suffered a defeat.
Not until 26 January 1934 – a year after Hitler had become chancellor – did
Stalin first comment on ‘the victory of Fascism in Germany’, insisting that it
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 541

must be regarded not only as a symptom of the weakness of the working

class and a result of the betrayals of the working class by Social-Democracy
[. . .]; it must also be regarded as a sign of the weakness of the bourgeoisie,
a sign that the bourgeoisie is no longer able to rule by the old methods of
parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy, and, as a consequence, is
compelled in its home policy to resort to terrorist methods of rule – as a
sign that it is no longer able to find a way out of the present situation on the
basis of a peaceful foreign policy, and, as a consequence, is compelled to
resort to a policy of war. Such is the situation. As you see, things are heading
towards a new imperialist war as a way out of the present situation.53

The various non-aggression and mutual assistance pacts that the Soviet Union
signed after 1933 with a select number of European nations, including Fascist
Italy, were an attempt to drive a wedge between the ‘imperialist’ powers and to
divide the less aggressive among them from the most aggressive one, namely,
National Socialist Germany, thereby providing Moscow with what might be
called reinsurance cover. The Soviet Union’s official foreign policy was a classic
case of Realpolitik, whereas on the level of the Communist International the
ideological and political struggle with the bourgeoisie could – and must – be
continued at least in the shorter term. Not until eighteen months after Hitler
had come to power did Moscow realize that this act of calculated schizophrenia
was weakening the anti-Fascist forces in the West, while proving highly benefi-
cial to the most extreme form of Fascism, National Socialism.
France’s was the first Communist Party to enter into a pact with the Socialists
that was designed to defeat Fascism. The pact dates from July 1934. By February
1935 the exiled German Communist Party was demanding the formation of a
‘united anti-Fascist people’s front’ that would provide a rallying point for all
‘who are willing to work towards the overthrow of the Hitler government and
the Fascist barbaric regime’. The Communists’ ultimate goals were not laid out
at this time:

The united proletarian front is the lever for the popular front and for the
people’s revolution. The Communist and Social Democrat workers and
officials hold this lever in their hands, they can turn the united front into a
people’s front and hence into a massed struggle, the struggle of the broad
masses of the working people that will lead to the overthrow of the Fascist
dictatorship.54

In August 1935, the secretary general of the Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov,

speaking at the Seventh World Congress of the Third International, repeated a
phrase first used at the Thirteenth Plenary Session in December 1933, when
Fascism had been described as ‘the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reac-
tionary chauvinist and imperialist elements of finance capital’.55 New, by
542 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

contrast, was Dimitrov’s appeal to the followers of the Second International to

merge with the Third International to create an ‘anti-Fascist popular front’:

We need to create a united front made up of all sections of the working

class, no matter which party or organization they belong to, even before the
majority of members of the working class have united in the struggle to
overthrow capitalism and to achieve the victory of the proletarian
revolution.56

With Dimitrov there was no hint of any Communist self-criticism. The

reformers were to forget that for years they had been dismissed by the
Comintern and their affiliated parties as ‘the main social support of the bour-
geoisie’ and as ‘social Fascists’. If they failed to forget this, then from the stand-
point of the Communists they would be guilty of sabotaging their principal
aim, which was to ensure a comprehensive merger of all anti-Fascists under the
leadership of the working class.
The Comintern’s new general line did not imply the abandonment of the
goal of the Communist revolution but merely indicated a new way of
approaching that goal. More than ever, since 1935 the Third International had
been a tool of Soviet foreign policy. Its leading officials were soon to become
the latest victims of Stalinist terror and, whenever it seemed appropriate, liqui-
dated in the same way that leading Bolsheviks had been disposed of in the past.
From this point of view the Seventh World Congress was the beginning of the
end for the Comintern, which was finally disbanded in May 1943.

For a time it seemed as if the Soviet Union had entered a phase of moderation
and consolidation that could be described as a Russian Thermidor. In March
1933 the right to vote was restored to the children of kulaks, and in May 1934
it was agreed to grant civil rights to those farmers who had been resettled, at
least to the extent that they had in the meantime given credible proof of their
loyalty to the Soviet state. In July, the Secret Police – OGPU – was formally
disbanded and merged with the Ministry of the Interior. In February 1935 the
Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Congress
proposed changing the 1934 constitution with the aim of introducing ‘further
democratization’ in the form of universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret
ballot. A commission set up to examine the question reported in July 1936 with
a draft proposal that was discussed in countless assemblies in the course of the
following months, the discussions proving broadly based, open and remark-
ably outspoken, clearly revealing the level of mistrust and hostility felt towards
the Soviet regime by large sections of the rural population.
The draft bill had been slightly emended by the time that it was adopted by
the Soviet Congress on 5 December 1936. The new constitution provided the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with a joint parliament elected by direct,
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 543

secret ballot: the Supreme Soviet, which was divided into the Soviet of the
Union and the Soviet of Nationalities, thereby abolishing the All-Russian
Soviet Congress and the Central Executive Committee. The Soviet Union was
defined as a ‘socialist state of workers and peasants’ whose political basis was
the Soviets of Working People’s Deputies, which ‘grew and attained strength as
a result of the overthrow of the landlords and capitalists and the achievement
of the dictatorship of the proletariat’. In the section on social order, work was
described as a duty and a question of honour for every citizen capable of
working in keeping with the principle: ‘He who does not work shall not eat.’
Under the heading ‘Fundamental Rights and Duties of Citizens’, the constitu-
tion guaranteed the right to work, to recreation, to material provision in old
age and in the case of illness, to education, to freedom of conscience, to freedom
of religious worship and to freedom from anti-religious propaganda. Also
guaranteed were freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right of
assembly, sexual equality, the equality of all nationalities and races, the inviola-
bility of the person and residence and the independence of judges and state
lawyers.
However liberal many of these articles may have seemed, the constitution
also contained provisions that made it clear that the existing balance of power
was by no means open to renegotiation. The Communist Party’s claim to leader-
ship was enshrined in Article 126, which described the party as ‘the vanguard
of the working people in their struggle to strengthen and develop the socialist
system’ and ‘the leading core of all organizations of the working people, both
public and state’. Articles 130 and 131 stated that it was the duty of every Soviet
citizen to maintain discipline in the workplace, to perform all public duties and
‘to respect the rules of socialist intercourse’. Citizens were also enjoined to ‘safe-
guard and strengthen public, socialist property’. All who failed to do so were
declared ‘enemies of the people’. According to Article 141, the right to nomi-
nate candidates for public office was reserved for ‘public organizations and
societies of the working people: Communist Party organizations, trade unions,
cooperatives, youth organizations and cultural societies’. There was no recourse
to the law in the case of any violation of an individual’s fundamental rights by
party or state organs, while the courts were independent on paper only,
allowing the powers that be to interpret the constitution in whatever ways they
thought fit.
The 1936 constitution was undoubtedly also intended to lend credence to
the country’s attempts to improve its relations with western democracies. But
for Stalin something else was presumably more important: a lasting and
outwardly legal institutional validation of all the social and political changes
that he and the Soviet regime had undertaken in the barely two decades since
the October Revolution. For a time Stalin seems to have hoped to achieve the
same effect by proposing several candidates for the elections to the soviets, but
warnings from local party organizations that this might result in hostile
544 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

elements growing more influential were sufficient to persuade him to abandon

the experiment in the autumn of 1937 and to revert to the former system, with
its sham election of only a single candidate. As for the reality of the party’s
dictatorial rule, the 1936 constitution produced nothing that could be inter-
preted as a historic change to the status quo.
Nothing reveals the specious character of the constitution as clearly as the
fact that a new wave of terror had begun even while the bill was being discussed
and passed. On 1 December 1934 Sergei Mironovich Kirov, the Communist
Party’s popular secretary in Leningrad and a man widely regarded as a ‘liberal’,
was gunned down by a young unemployed Communist. The local branch of
the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the minister of the interior,
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda, and Stalin himself immediately alleged an anti-
Soviet conspiracy, while Kirov’s enemies quickly suspected that it was Stalin
who had ordered the assassination, a suspicion that increased when the
members of the Cheka who were involved in the investigation were themselves
killed off in often mysterious ways. On the other hand, there is no evidence to
link Stalin directly to the crime.
Kirov’s murder was the signal for a large-scale persecution of real or
imagined enemies of the regime both inside and outside the party apparatus.
By 1 December 1934 Stalin had already issued orders allowing the People’s
Commissariat for Internal Affairs to deport and kill suspects without trial. And
if ‘terrorism’ cases did come to court, then Stalin specifically ruled out the
possibility of the accused’s defence and appeal against his or her sentence.
Cases brought before the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court had to be
completed on the day of the arraignment and death sentences carried out
without delay. By a decree of April 1935 the death sentence was extended to
adolescents who had reached their twelfth birthday.
Immediately after Kirov’s assassination in Leningrad, Stalin’s former adver-
saries, Zinoviev and Kamenev, were arrested, tried in secret and sentenced to
ten years’ imprisonment. Both were accused by the People’s Commissariat for
Internal Affairs of complicity in Kirov’s murder. Their trial was followed by a
purge initiated by Nikolai Ezhov, a native Lithuanian who had succeeded
Yagoda as commissar for the interior and who was now secretary of the Central
Committee. In the course of his initiative supporters of both Zinoviev and
Kamenev as well as Trotskyites and other dissidents were tracked down,
expelled from the party and arrested. In the summer of 1935 110 employees of
the Kremlin were arrested after being accused of responding to orders from
Trotsky and Zinoviev and of detaining and murdering the party leaders.
By the summer of 1936 a whole series of show trials had been initiated against
well-known former party leaders, beginning with Zinoviev and Kamenev, then,
in 1937, moving on to Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda and many others. The accused
stood no chance in court, where Stalin’s chief prosecutor, Andrey Januarevich
Vyshinsky, systematically intimidated his victims. Vyshinsky had made a name
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 545

for himself in the early 1930s as the advocate of a relatively independent judi-
ciary, but from 1936 he put his name to Stalin’s show trials, confronting defend-
ants with absurd accusations and persuading them to admit to the charges
brought against them, perhaps in the hope that in doing so they might escape
with their lives. Bukharin, for example, confessed to being responsible for polit-
ical crimes but denied any personal responsibility. Many, including Bukharin
himself, wrote to Stalin to plead for clemency, while assuring him of their
unfailing loyalty and affection. All their appeals were in vain. In his final letter of
10 December 1937 Bukharin even begged to be allowed to take his own life with
morphine rather than face a firing squad.
Most of these show trials ended with death sentences and the execution of
the accused, only very few of whom received prison sentences instead. One
such prisoner was the Comintern’s former German specialist, Karl Radek, who
died in prison in 1939. Many leading Bolsheviks were also panicked into taking
their own lives, such was their fear of a show trial or of being denounced by
innocent third parties who were blackmailed into incriminating them. The
most prominent of these figures was the people’s commissar for heavy industry,
Grigory (‘Sergo’) Ordzhonikidze, who shot himself on 18 February 1937. The
doctors who, acting on orders from on high, diagnosed ‘paralysis of the heart’
as the cause of death were later haled before the courts and executed in turn.
These show trials went hand in hand with a radical purge of the party appa-
ratus directed at spies, saboteurs, members of the White Guard, Trotskyites,
alcoholics and corrupt elements in general. According to Ezhov, a third of all
banned members of the party were categorized as spies, as members of the
White Guard and as Trotskyites in the second half of 1935: this represented a
total of 43,000 members of the Soviet Communist Party. The party’s first secre-
tary in 1956, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, admitted that ninety-eight of the
139 members of the Central Committee who had been elected in 1934 were
liquidated in 1937–8: more than 70 per cent of the total. Others affected by the
great purge were Communist parties in exile, especially those members who
had fled to the Soviet Union from Germany. In 1937 619 members of the
German Communist Party were arrested. Most of them died, presumably in
custody. Eighty-two are known to have been executed, while 132 were handed
over to the German authorities in 1939–40.
By the spring of 1937 the army high command, too, was suspected of
being in league with spies and saboteurs. The first to be arraigned was one of
the heroes of the civil war, the deputy defence minister, Marshal Mikhail
Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, who was accused of being a German agent. The
incriminating material consisted for the most part of forgeries provided by
the German secret service, which passed the documents to the Soviet side via
the unsuspecting Czech president Edvard Beneg. The popular marshal would
probably have been stripped of his powers and liquidated even without the
complicity of the German secret service, for both Stalin and Ezhov had long
546 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

regarded Tukhachevsky as responsible for the many shortcomings of the Red

Army. He was tortured while in prison, condemned to death by a military
tribunal and executed on 12 June 1937 by being shot in the neck. Six other
high-ranking generals suffered the same fate as his alleged co-conspirators.
In the wake of the purported ‘military conspiracy’ at least 33,400 officers
were drummed out of the army in 1937–8. At least 7,280 were arrested, including
three out of five Soviet marshals, fifteen out of sixteen army commanders and
sixty out of seventy corps commanders. Some 5,000 officers were executed. By
the end, the Red Army’s officer corps had been almost entirely wiped out, the
victim of a party leadership that believed the armed forces had been infiltrated
by their enemies and that was determined to ensure unconditional loyalty by
means of a systematic show of terror.
While suppressing the alleged ‘military conspiracy’, the party leaders waged
a simultaneous and equally murderous campaign against party and state offi-
cials whom they suspected of subversive activities. Under Nikolai Ezhov, the
People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs provided Stalin with almost daily
lists of candidates for execution, starting in June 1937. In most cases the party’s
general secretary complied with his ministry’s suggestions. In the course of
1937 and 1938 Stalin received 383 such lists, and around 39,000 of the suspected
officials, including numerous members of the Cheka, were summarily executed
on Stalin’s instructions. In this the Russian dictator was acting according to the
motto that he had passed on to his security organizations in June 1937: every
Communist, no matter how well he may disguise himself, was potentially a
‘covert enemy’. And because enemies were not always instantly identifiable, as
many people as possible had to be killed. The aim of the exercise would be
achieved even if only 5 per cent of all the murdered individuals had in fact been
actual enemies.57
In the case of the terror inflicted on business leaders, activists of the
‘Stakhanovite campaign’ played a significant role. The mineworker Alexey
Stakhanov from Irmino in Kadievka had become a celebrity in 1935 when, as
part of the ‘socialist competition’, he had mined a record 102 tonnes of coal in
a single shift, fourteen times his quota. The ‘Stakhanovite movement’ recruited
its members from unskilled workers willing to emulate his example, workers
who were used by the Communist regime to break down the resistance of
factory managers to the raised production targets. Hated by the other workers,
these Stakhanovites applied themselves to their task with such enthusiasm that
the number of officials denounced by them and called to account by the coun-
try’s security organizations suddenly shot up exponentially. By April 1938 a
quarter of all engineers and managers in Kadievka had been arrested and
liquidated.
The Stakhanov movement had an additional raison d’être in that the rate of
Soviet industrial production had slowed down between 1933 and 1936. This
was due in part to the fact that the production figures envisaged under the
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 547

second Five-Year Plan of 1933 had been lowered when compared with the
figures for 1929, but it was the result, above all, of the vast influx of unskilled
workers from the outlying villages, who flooded into the towns and factories
but were unused to industrial factory discipline. The regime responded with
draconian punishments for idling in the workplace and also for bungled work
and alcoholism. In the countryside the reign of terror was directed in the
main at kolkhoz managers and agricultural technicians, who at show trials were
held to account for poor harvests and for discontent among the peasant
population.
By the second half of the 1930s the regime again had to confront the
problem of the kulaks. From 1935 onwards, many former kulaks returned to
their villages following an amnesty in August 1935 that applied to 78,000
kulaks and members of the clergy. In most cases the villagers accepted these
kulaks into their kolkhozy. A far greater problem was posed by the almost
400,000 former kulaks who between 1931 and 1937 had fled from the special
settlements allocated to them in Siberia. To the east of the Urals in particular,
refugee kulaks, escaped prisoners, vagrants and common criminals banded
together to attack kolkhozy, trains and police stations, frequently not recoiling
from rape and murder. In the northern Caucasus such violence was generally
perpetrated by armed bands of Chechens and Ingushetians.
In June 1937 the Politburo of the Siberian Communist Party gave orders for
all members of ‘counterrevolutionary rebel organizations of exiled kulaks’ to
be registered and for all activists to be shot. Stalin fine-tuned these orders in
a telegram of 3 July 1937, specifying that the most hostile of the kulaks, priests,
criminals, former officers and members of the pre-revolutionary parties were
all to be liquidated. The Central Committee was to be informed within five days
who was to be deported and who was to be shot. The leaders of the Western
Siberian People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs recommended that 11,000
individuals be shot and 15,000 sent to labour camps. In Moscow, the party’s
leader, Nikita Khrushchev, advised the Politburo that 8,500 individuals be shot
and 32,000 sent to concentration camps. On the basis of these figures the
Politburo issued its secret ‘Order 00447’ on 31 July 1937, coincidentally the
same day that Stalin ordered free elections by secret ballot. Under the terms of
this order kulaks who had returned from exile or who were living in hiding, as
well as members of former anti-Soviet parties, members of the clergy, sectar-
ians, members of the White Guard and former officials of tsarist Russia, bandits,
criminals and imprisoned recidivists were all to be taken into custody. Of these
75,950 were to be executed and 193,000 sent to one of the Gulag camps.
Regional leaders of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs subse-
quently sought to increase their quotas for killing their real or perceived
enemies, encouraging the Politburo in turn to revise its figures upwards. At the
end of January 1938 Stalin gave instructions for a further 57,200 enemies of the
people to be arrested by the middle of March and for 48,000 of them to be shot
548 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

in an effort to reduce the number of prisoners in the country’s labour camps.

The order resulted in around 30,000 executions, mostly of men and women
who had been convicted of political crimes or who had violated one or other of
the camp rules. In Moscow the mass killings were extended to include invalids
and amputees, people who were blind and others who were suffering from
tuberculosis, while in Leningrad deaf mutes were also rounded up and shot. All
were expendable on the grounds that they were unable to work in the camps.
From 1936 ethnic minorities suspected of anti-Soviet activities were
also included in this campaign of collective persecution. Among such groups
were Germans, Poles, Letts, Armenians, Koreans and Chinese. In July 1937 all
Germans working in the Soviet armaments industry, including members of the
German Communist Party, were arrested and deported. These measures led
directly to the deaths of 42,000 men, women and children. At the end of
December 1937 a Leningrad court sentenced 992 Letts to death. In the summer
of 1938 35,000 Poles were deported from the border region between Poland
and the Ukraine. In 1937 and 1938 143,810 individuals – mostly Poles – were
accused of spying for Poland and arrested. Of these, 111,091 were executed. By
the end of 1938 almost a quarter of a million members of persecuted ethnic
minorities had been shot. According to the People’s Commissariat’s own
figures, well over 1.5 million people were arrested and 668,305 of them were
shot between 1 October 1936 and 1 November 1938, when the mass terror was
finally brought to an end on Stalin’s instructions.
The reasons for Stalin’s sudden decision to end this orgy of mass executions
are unclear. He had first criticized the use of excessive force in the struggle
against party members at a plenary session of the Central Committee in
January 1938. In the November of that year Ezhov was replaced by Stalin’s loyal
henchman Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria. Perhaps it was the growing threat of war
that persuaded Stalin to end the mass terror, but it is also possible that as
general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party he was afraid that the coun-
try’s security services were growing increasingly autonomous and that their
power was increasing at the expense of his own position. In February 1940
Ezhov was accused at a secret trial of leading a foreign conspiracy within the
People’s Commissariat and was condemned to death and shot, as were his
closest colleagues and their families, including women and children. In total
346 went to their deaths in this way.

The German historian Jörg Baberowski has made a compelling attempt to

explain Stalin’s reign of terror in structural and socio-psychological terms,
describing the Soviet Union at this time as a ‘medieval feudal state ruled by
powerful cliques and their followers’, a state in which the provincial potentates
were Stalin’s vassals ‘who, if they obeyed their leader, were allowed to maintain
their own feudal networks’. According to Baberowski, Stalin’s social model took
the form of
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 549

the bands of robbers whose members survived in brutal reality only if they
remained loyal to each other through thick and thin. [. . .] The Stalinist offi-
cial came from the villages and was a product of that culture, which he
pursued with fire and sword. [. . .] Stalinism was a violent process designed
to establish unambiguous conditions, an attempt to create the new man
through the physical annihilation of the old one. But Stalinism triumphed
through the ceaseless exercise of excessive violence, a violence that stemmed
from the very traditions that it was seeking to combat. [. . .] It was the alli-
ance of Manichaean delusions and archaic traditions of brutality that made
it possible for Stalinism to indulge its worst excesses, which is why the idea
of cultural homogeneity led to mass terror when subjected to Bolshevist
conditions.58

Stalin was no lone culprit but needed like-minded individuals at every level of
his hierarchical power structure, from the very top right down to the many
who saw it as their civic duty to denounce ostensible enemies of the socialist
order. And he also needed the masses who, responding to orders, demanded
the severest punishment – death by firing squad – for traitors and saboteurs.
The fact that the secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party enjoyed such
widespread support among his comrades-in-arms was due in no small measure
to the extremely backward nature of a political culture that had itself produced
both Stalin and the Bolsheviks. Stalin exploited the category of class warfare, as
developed by Marx and adapted by Lenin to the conditions in Russia, in order
to settle internal party rivalries to his own advantage: anyone who opposed
him or whom he suspected might oppose him in the future was ‘objectively’ in
league with Russia’s class enemies and needed, therefore, to be eliminated.
Whereas Lenin had still been able to invoke the distant goal of freedom from
domination by rendering the state superfluous, Stalin could not envisage a
world beyond mass terror. Terror had become the raison d’être of his regime,
time and again justifying its existence by exposing enemies who had to be
liquidated. As a result, periods of moderation were not destined to last. For
Stalinism, a Soviet Union without external and internal enemies represented
the most dangerous of all threats, for such a situation would have robbed the
regime of its meaning.
Later apologists have repeatedly claimed that unlike Italian Fascism and,
more especially, German National Socialism, Stalinism was a dictatorship
notable for its programme of modernization, and there is no doubt that it was
an enormous achievement on the Soviet Union’s part to move from being an
agrarian society to an industrialized society within a little over a decade. In
terms of its volume of industrial production, the Soviet Union was second only
to the United States on the eve of the Second World War, outstripping Germany,
Great Britain and France. Such a rapid increase in growth would have been
inconceivable without forced labour on the most massive scale.
550 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The institutional embodiment of this forced labour was what Alexander

Solzhenitsyn called the ‘Gulag Archipelago’, in which 821,000 prisoners worked
in 1938 – by 1940 that figure had risen to 1.5 million. Without their slave
labour, the Soviet Union would not have been able to complete such major
construction projects as the White Sea–Baltic Canal and the Moscow–Volga
Canal within the space of only a few years. Shortly after the first of these had
been opened in August 1933 as the Stalin Canal, 120 Soviet writers headed by
Maxim Gorky undertook a cruise along the new artificial waterway, and in a
volume titled The White Sea–Baltic Canal Known as the Stalin Canal they
praised the organization of ‘human raw materials’ in the form of forced labour
and described the system of concentration camps that provided the workforce
for this and similar projects as ‘beacons of progress’.59 When the Moscow–
Volga Canal – one of the largest projects to be undertaken as part of the second
Five-Year Plan – was formally handed over to general freight and passenger
traffic in July 1937, state propaganda fell over itself in its praise. The thousands
of workers who had perished during its construction were nowhere mentioned.
On its completion 55,000 convicts who had worked on the canal were released
from the Gulag and others received official recognition. Conversely, many of
the technicians and engineers who had overseen the project were charged with
sabotage and political agitation before being arrested and shot.
Most employers were fully aware of the fact that theoretical attempts to
increase production did not automatically lead to an actual increase. The
Stakhanovite movement meant not only the excessive use of forced labour, it
also led to the disruption of the production process, to the overloading of
machines and to countless industrial accidents. There is much to be said for the
argument that less brutal methods would have resulted in a higher rate of
sustained growth. Less amenable to rational criteria is the wholesale annihila-
tion of large sections of the Red Army’s officer corps. If – as many of Stalin’s
later advocates have maintained – the Soviet dictator had really been interested
in arming his country against the threat of an attack from National Socialist
Germany, such a weakening of his own armed forces would have ruled itself
out. But the need to identify enemies wherever problems arose and the desire
to find scapegoats were both more powerful than any sober calculation.
In 1936 a failed harvest provided the authorities with an excuse to blame
saboteurs for the resultant food shortages. By the second half of the 1930s
black market trade and queues outside shops were a regular feature of Soviet
life, while housing shortages continued to be crippling. On the other hand,
those who were spared Stalin’s terror must have found their lives relatively
‘normal’. Rationing had ended in 1935, and peasant uprisings were now a thing
of the past. There was no shortage of work. ‘Normality’ included the all-
pervasive cult of the great leader, Stalin, the emotionally charged glorification
of workers and peasants by the painters, sculptors and writers of ‘Socialist
Realism’, a state-run movement promoting the cult of the body, apparently
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 551

apolitical films such as Jolly Fellows, Volga-Volga and Circus, music, dance and
sporting activities in Moscow’s Gorky Cultural and Recreational Park, which
opened in 1937, architecture both heroically monumental and kitschily orna-
mental, the 1935 ban on the writings of Boris Pasternak and the first perform-
ance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in Leningrad’s Philharmonic Hall on 21
November 1937.
By contrast, many aspects of Soviet life in the mid- to late 1930s were reac-
tionary. Here one thinks of period films such as Vladimir Petrov’s Peter the
Great and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky; the new ‘Soviet patriotism’ that
complemented and relativized ‘proletarian internationalism’; the populariza-
tion of some of the classics of Russian literature, including, first and foremost,
Alexander Pushkin; the reintroduction of army ranks that had been abolished
at the time of the Revolution; and the new emphasis placed on family values.
According to the census of 1937, there were still more believers than non-
believers in the Soviet Union: 56.7 per cent against 43.3 per cent of the popula-
tion aged over sixteen. Atheism assumed less militant forms than in the
previous decade, but the Church remained the victim of persecution. Older
estimates drawn up by dissidents claimed that between 1936 and 1938 800,000
members of the clergy were arrested and that 670 bishops were murdered, but
more recent figures suggest that in 1937 alone 150,000 believers were arrested
and 80,000 murdered. Of 80,000 Orthodox churches only 20,000 still served
their original purpose as places of worship. Many, such as the Cathedral of
Christ the Saviour in Moscow, were blown up or destroyed in other ways.
Soviet citizens remained in the dark about the spread of religious beliefs
within their own country since the results of the 1937 census were never made
public, no doubt because to have released them would have meant allowing
Russians to draw conclusions about losses due to collectivization, famine,
executions and deportations. In 1934 the country’s population officially stood
at 168 million, whereas it 1937 it was only 162 million. But the authorities were
not content merely to suppress and sometimes destroy statistical information,
for many of the statisticians employed by the Central Archives of the National
Economy and involved in gathering material for the census were rounded up
and shot as ‘Trotskyite-Bukharinist spies’ and ‘enemies of the people’.

Stalin’s reign of terror evoked disparate responses in western democracies. The

show trials were condemned by conservative, liberal and Social-Democrat
newspapers, while reports of forced labour in Soviet camps led to calls for
Russian goods to be boycotted in the United States. But even in the mid-1930s
left-wing intellectuals generally continued to regard the Soviet Union as a
bulwark of progress and anti-Fascism. According to François Furet, the French
writer Romain Rolland’s visit to Moscow in 1935 ‘bestowed on the Soviet
Union the blessing of democratic universalism’.60 A committed pacifist and the
winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1915, Rolland was granted the
552 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

honour of a two-hour interview with Stalin and returned to France under the
impression that thanks to the leadership of an enlightened ruler, the Soviet
Union had answered the clarion call of the French Revolution and overseen the
rebirth of humankind. Another French writer who had sympathized with the
October Revolution, André Gide, arrived in Moscow in June 1936 but it was in
a state of total disillusionment that he left Stalin’s empire on 23 August 1936 –
the day on which the sentences were handed down on Zinoviev, Kamenev and
other alleged enemies of the party. His book Return from the USSR appeared in
October 1936. In it he summed up his reaction to his visit: ‘I doubt’, he wrote,
‘whether the spirit of any other country today, except for Hitler’s Germany, is
less free, more curbed, more fearful (terrorized), more reduced to vassalage.’61
Gide’s book triggered an outcry of indignation among French Communists,
and the party’s intellectual leaders accused the eminent author of a frivolous-
ness that stemmed from his evident debt to Trotskyism. Raymond Rosenmark,
the reporter and legal expert for the Ligue pour les Droits de l’Homme, did
not have to contend with reproaches of this kind, for in his account of the
first of the Moscow show trials against Zinoviev, Kamenev and other old
Bolsheviks, he declared in October 1936 that it was out of the question that the
confessions extorted from the sixteen defendants could possibly have stemmed
from torture or the threat of torture. He regarded the existence of a National
Socialist plot as proven beyond doubt and came to the remarkable conclusion
that

It would be a negation of the French Revolution, which, according to a

famous saying [by Georges Clemenceau], was a ‘bloc’, if we were to deny a
nation’s right to take strong measures against agitators for civil war, against
conspirators with foreign connections.62

An equally pro-Soviet response was that of the writer Lion Feuchtwanger, who
left National Socialist Germany in 1933 and settled in the French resort of
Sanary-sur-Mer. He visited the Soviet Union during the winter of 1936/7 and,
like Gide, was invited to spend several hours talking to Stalin. He too wrote up
his experiences and impressions in a book. Although he was critical of the
excesses of the cult of Stalin and reported on various problems in Soviet society,
he saw nothing frightening about the show trial of the assistant people’s
commissar for heavy industry, Georgy Piatakov, Karl Radek and other alleged
members of an anti-Soviet Trotskyite circle:

The whole thing was less like a criminal trial than a debate carried on in a
conversational tone by educated men who were trying to get at the truth.
Indeed, the impression one received was that the accused, prosecution, and
judges had the same, I might almost say sporting, interest in arriving at a
satisfactory explanation of what had happened, without omitting anything.63
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 553

Since the accused, almost all of whom were condemned to death, admitted to
having committed the crimes of which they were indicted and which included
sabotage and the preparation of acts of terror, Feuchtwanger saw no reason to
doubt the validity of their admissions.
Feuchtwanger’s book was published in the summer of 1937 under the title
Moscow 1937: My Visit Described for My Friends. It appeared in German and
English, the German edition issued by the Amsterdam firm of Querido, the
English edition by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club in London. Among left-
wing intellectuals positive accounts of conditions in the Soviet Union found a
far greater response than critical testimony of the kind submitted by Gide. And
this was true not only in Paris and London but also in New York, where Viking
Press brought out an American edition of Moscow 1937. When compared with
the Fascist dictatorships in Rome and Berlin, the Soviet Union appeared to be
the lesser of two evils, even at the time of the Great Terror, and in some cases
was even seen as the repository of all the hopes of those who wanted to save
Europe and the world from Fascism.

Setting the Course for War: National Socialist Germany 1934–8

National Socialist Germany was able to celebrate something of a triumph on 13
January 1935, when the referendum provided for under the terms of the Treaty
of Versailles finally took place in the Saarland, resulting in an overwhelming
majority – 90.8 per cent – voting for a return to Germany. Only 0.4 per cent
wanted to form a union with France, while 9.8 per cent responded to the
slogans of the Social Democrats and German Communist Party and voted for
the continuation of the status quo, whereby the region continued to be admin-
istered by the League of Nations. Both parties hoped that in this way the
Saarland, at least, would be protected from National Socialist rule. The regime
was able to interpret the result as proof of its powerful support among the
workers, while the workers’ parties, conversely, had to admit that they had
suffered a major defeat.
By this date only a minority of Germans were still opposed to National
Socialism. Even smaller was the number of those who actively resisted the
regime by issuing illegal appeals or painting anti-government slogans on houses
and bridges. The Communist opposition groups that were particularly active in
this regard were among the first to be infiltrated by the Gestapo, with the result
that other oppositional forces kept their distance. By the end of 1934 around
2,000 Communists had been killed. In 1933–4 the number of Communists
under arrest was around 60,000, with a further 15,000 joining them in 1935.
The Social Democrats adopted a more cautious approach than the
Communists, remaining a cohesive force by meeting at gatherings of consumer
groups or – as in the days of Bismarck’s Socialist Law – at the funerals of
colleagues. Bolder members maintained links with the ‘Sopade’, the party’s
554 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

leaders in exile in Prague, and helped to distribute their writings, which were
generally disseminated under fake titles, including those of classical plays and
cookery books.
By 1935 the number of arrests of ‘Marxist’ opponents of the regime had
shown a marked increase, as did the successful strikes against illegal groups of
Social Democrats and trade unions. Those arrested were sentenced at mass
trials: on one occasion 400 Social Democrats, on another 628 trade union
members and yet again, in Cologne, 232 Social Democrats. As before, the regime
continued to set its sights on organized Christianity, at least to the extent that its
representatives sought to circumvent its policy of coordination. In 1936–7
Catholic priests and members of religious orders were subjected to a wave of
trials on the grounds of immorality, a move backed up by press campaigns
against the Catholic Church. At around the same time, schools were ordered to
remove crucifixes, although this requirement triggered so many protests from
the faithful that the National Socialists were forced to back down and repeal the
decree in question.
There was similar resistance from the Protestants who belonged to the
Confessing Church. On 1 July 1937, Martin Niemöller, who had repeatedly
used his sermons at St Anne’s Church in Dahlem to chastise Hitler for breaking
his promises to the Evangelical Church, was arrested by the Gestapo. The
sentence handed down by a special court in Berlin on 2 March 1938 – a fine of
2,000 marks and a prison sentence of seven months that was deemed to have
been served by the time spent by Niemöller in custody – and, more especially,
the reasons given by the court for its judgment were tantamount to an
acquittal, but Hitler refused to accept the judges’ decision, and as a ‘prisoner of
the Führer’ Niemöller was taken straight from the court house in Moabit to the
concentration camp at Sachsenhausen near Oranienburg. In July 1941 he was
transferred to the camp at Dachau, where he remained until the end of the war.
The Evangelical pastor was a privileged prisoner – up to a point he was
protected by his standing within the Church and by the international protests
that his two arrests had caused. But the vast majority of concentration camp
prisoners had to endure far worse conditions. In particular Communists and
Social Democrats were made to suffer for their opposition to National Socialism
both before and after 1933. Humiliating treatment, beatings, torture and the
risk of being shot ‘while fleeing’ were all part of the daily routine for them. A
former Social Democrat member of the Reichstag, Kurt Schumacher, who had
lost an arm in the First World War, was forced to haul heavy rocks in Dachau.
Only after a four-week hunger strike did the camp leaders abandon their
attempt to destroy Schumacher by work. He was finally released in March
1943. Two of his party colleagues, Julius Leber and Carlo Mierendorff, were
released in 1937 and 1938 respectively. As a Jew, Ernst Heilmann, who had
been the leader of the Social Democrats in the Prussian Landtag and a member
of the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic, was subjected to particularly
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 555

sadistic forms of torture. He was murdered in Buchenwald in early April 1940

on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, who since 1936 had been the chief of the
German police. Another Buchenwald victim was Ernst Thälmann, the long-
standing chairman of the German Communist Party, who was arrested in
March 1933 and murdered on Hitler’s orders on 18 August 1944.
At the end of July 1933 there had been around 27,000 political prisoners in
the whole of Germany. By June 1935 the number of prisoners in concentration
camps was fewer than 40,000, a figure that might be interpreted to suggest that
the National Socialists’ rule had acquired a certain degree of stability. In 1937
there were still four concentration camps in the country as a whole: Dachau,
Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Lichtenburg. They were run by the SS, which
stationed a Death’s Head Unit of between 1,000 and 1,500 men at each camp.
After 1934 ‘political’ prisoners were joined by a number of other categories:
‘elements injurious to the folk’ included those defined as ‘asocial’, ‘work-shy’,
homosexual, Jehovah’s Witnesses, émigrés who had returned temporarily or
permanently to Germany and Jews, who were numbered among one or more
of these groups. Under the laws as they existed at this time in Germany, there
was no place for these ‘elements’, still less was there any place for them in the
‘folk community’ of National Socialism. The National Socialist answer to the
dilemma was to ship them off to a concentration camp.
In 1941 the Social Democrat jurist Ernst Fraenkel, who had managed to flee
to the United States three years earlier, published a study under the title The
Dual State, in which he drew a distinction between the ‘Normative State’ that
continued to exist at this time and the constantly expanding ‘Prerogative State’
that found its most striking expression in the country’s concentration camps.
At the same time these camps were increasingly becoming the backbone of the
SS’s economic empire. The work done by the prisoners was so lucrative that the
need for prisoners continued to grow. The quarries worked by concentration
camp prisoners provided much of the building material for the National
Socialist monumental buildings designed by Hitler’s chief architect Albert
Speer and erected in Nuremberg, Munich and Berlin. New camps were set up
for reasons of convenience in the vicinity of granite quarries, notably at
Flossenburg in the Upper Palatinate and, following the annexation of Austria,
at Mauthausen near Linz. As in Germany, the prisoners at Mauthausen were
made up of such disparate groups as criminals, the ‘asocial’, homosexuals,
Roma, Jews and opponents of the regime whose hostility to National Socialism
was motivated by their religious and political beliefs.
A wide range of attitudes existed between, at the one extreme, resistance to
Hitler’s regime aimed at bringing it down and, at the other end of the spectrum,
unconditional support for National Socialism. Often enough, admiration for
the ‘Führer’ went hand in hand with contempt for the ‘little Hitlers’ who
surrounded him, a gulf that affected broad sections of the NSDAP, which many
Germans joined for reasons of professional expediency. (By the end of the war
556 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the party had 8.5 million members.) Many ‘national comrades’ gave their
backing on the whole to National Socialist policies but had misgivings about
measures in individual areas such as the National Socialists’ policies towards
the Church and schools. In some cases these reservations were taken to the
point where, as far as possible, the individuals in question avoided giving the
Hitler salute, refused to fly the swastika flag and either declined to join National
Socialist organizations or, where it was unavoidable, became members of rela-
tively harmless groups such as the National Socialist People’s Welfare organiza-
tion. Although this was not in itself a form of resistance, it did represent a sense
of distance, a refusal to go along with the regime. Privately, Germans could
express doubts in, and criticism of, Hitler, at least when they were certain that
no one was listening who was not supposed to be, but for the vast majority of
their fellow countrymen and women, the Führer was sacrosanct: Hitler’s
triumphs and his popularity largely made up for all the objections that Germans
may have entertained about daily life under the Third Reich.
Hitler’s popularity with most Germans increased, the longer the country
remained at peace, but the same was not true of many right-wing intellectuals.
Those who in 1933 had welcomed Hitler’s seizure of power were subsequently
so appalled at the plebeian tenor of the movement and so disillusioned at the
mediocrity of its ‘intellectual’ representatives that they abandoned their public
support for National Socialism. This was certainly true of the writer Gottfried
Benn, for example, and of the sociologist Hans Freyer, whose Right-Wing
Revolution of 1931 is one of the few intellectually remarkable books by a Young
Conservative writer, as well as the philosopher Arnold Gehlen and, with reser-
vations, Martin Heidegger, who was subjected to repeated attacks on the part
of radical National Socialists declaring him philosophically unreliable.
In the case of the constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt, it was less a question
of his losing faith in National Socialism than of National Socialism losing faith
in him. In October 1936, in his capacity as head of the organization of univer-
sity teachers within the National Socialist Jurists’ Association, Schmitt organ-
ized a conference on ‘Jewry in the Legal Profession’ and in his concluding
remarks appealed directly to Hitler’s tenet: ‘In resisting the Jew, I am upholding
the work of the Lord.’ Schmitt also demanded that if the works of a Jewish
writer were cited, then their author’s Jewish background should be explicitly
mentioned. And he expressed the hope that ‘the mere mention of the word
“Jewish” ’ would ‘serve as a salutary exorcism’.64
Schmitt’s speech combined a deep-seated loathing of Jewry with a syco-
phantic and opportunistic appeal to the regime. But his submissive gesture
proved useless, and in early December 1936, in response to criticism from
German émigrés, he was attacked by Das Schwarze Korps, the SS’s official
publication, for his earlier links with Jews and Catholic politicians and for his
opposition to National Socialism before 1933. Schmitt was stripped of all his
political appointments with the exception of his membership of the Prussian
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 557

State Council, which he owed to Göring, and his professorship in Berlin. But he
continued to be associated with the Third Reich through his publications.
The intellectuals who had remained in Germany in 1933 but had not
embraced National Socialism withdrew into themselves, a state generally
described by writers on the subject as an ‘inner emigration’. They included
some of the country’s best-known writers such as Ernst Jünger, Ricarda Huch,
Reinhold Schneider, Ernst Wiechert and Werner Bergengruen. As long as they
kept their political views to themselves, they were allowed to continue to
publish. Even veiled criticism of National Socialism sometimes slipped past the
censor, notably in the case of Bergengruen’s The Great Tyrant and the Court
(1935) and Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs (1939). The works of these writers
were ignored by the party-controlled press but were still read by the public at
large. Officially, however, it was other writers who set the tone: Hans Friedrich
Blunck, for example, the author of prose works on north German myths and
for a time president of the Reich Writers’ Chamber; Hans Grimm, who wrote a
colonial novel, A Nation Without Space; and Werner Beumelburg, whose novels
on the experience of war viewed the events of 1914–18 in a transfigured light.
‘Inner emigration’ remained a phenomenon confined to the middle and
older generation: younger intellectuals tended, rather, to see in National Socialism
a force that would lead to a comprehensive rejuvenation of Germany. By the
mid-1930s key positions in the SS, in its security service and in the Gestapo were
held by young academics who had completed their studies under the Weimar
Republic. The lawyer Werner Best, for example, a civil servant’s son who had
been born in Mainz in 1903, worked for the Gestapo as organizer, head of
personnel, legal adviser and ideologue.
The ‘experience of war’ of the young National Socialist technocrats was
limited to the internal conflicts in Germany in 1919–20 and between 1930 and
1933, but above all to the conflict in Upper Silesia and the occupation of the
Ruhr Valley in 1923. Young National Socialist intellectuals were marked by
völkisch nationalism and determined to create a racially homogeneous commu-
nity using the resources of a totalitarian state. The exclusion of ‘Bolsheviks’,
‘Marxists’ and other ostensible enemies of the state was their area of responsi-
bility, and after 1933 they felt that they were making good progress in this field.
But the removal of Jews was a challenge that remained unresolved. The young
academics in the SS, the secret service and the Gestapo, whom the German
historian Michael Wildt has described as the ‘uncompromising generation’,65
knew this, and so they set about trying to resolve the matter.

In theory the ‘Jewish question’ could have been resolved in the spirit of National
Socialism if the country’s Jewish population had been forced to emigrate, and
an attempt to bring about this solution was indeed made in 1933: in the August
of that year the Reich Ministry of Finance signed the Haavarah Agreement
with Zionist representatives from Germany and Palestine, making it easier for
558 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Jewish émigrés to transfer at least a part of their wealth to Palestine. (The rest
was appropriated by the Reich, which was additionally able to export more
goods to Palestine in consequence.) For most of the 60,000 Jews who emigrated
to Palestine between 1933 and 1939, the agreement provided a degree of mate-
rial assistance. But anyone wanting to take advantage of this option needed to
have considerable financial resources, and few German Jews had access to such
means. And even in the case of wealthy Jews, only a small minority regarded
their situation in Germany as so dangerous at this time that they thought of
emigrating at all. Between 1933 and 1937 some 129,000 out of a total of 525,000
Jews left Germany, most of them heading for western Europe.
Anti-Semitic pressures increased in the early months of 1935, when National
Socialist members of the middle class took part in spontaneous demonstra-
tions, seeking to rid themselves of unwelcome competitors by attacking Jewish
shops, for example. The economic damage was considerable and the negative
reaction abroad so great that in August 1935 the regime decided to channel
these protests along legalistic lines, a decision prompted above all by Hjalmar
Schacht, who since August 1934 had been Germany’s finance minister in addi-
tion to president of the country’s federal bank.
The result of this move was the Nuremberg Laws that the Reichstag enacted
on 15 September 1935 during the NSDAP’s party conference in Nuremberg.
The Reich Flag Act repealed the earlier act of March 1933, whereby the swas-
tika flag and the black, white and red flag of the old Reich were flown alongside
each other. In their place the symbol of National Socialism was declared the
country’s only national flag. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and
German Honour banned marriages between Jews and citizens of German or
‘kindred’ blood. It also banned Jews from employing ‘Aryan’ female domestic
servants under the age of forty-five and from flying the swastika flag. The
Reich Citizenship Act defined the concept of citizenship and created the legal
category of ‘Reich citizen’ for all ‘Aryan’ Germans. Only ‘Reich citizens’ had full
political rights, including the right to vote. All other citizens were reduced to
the status of guests whose presence in Germany was merely tolerated.
Hitler was shown four drafts of the Citizenship Bill, and of these he chose
the ‘mildest’, while striking out the clause that limited the law to ‘full Jews’. As a
result it was left to the courts to decide who was a ‘full Jew’, who was a ‘half-
breed of the first and second degree’, who was ‘considered a Jew’ and who was
‘of German blood’. The courts also had to decide the consequences for those
who were not purely ‘German’. Hitler himself reserved the right to decide the
matter in those cases where there was still any doubt.
The Nuremberg Laws brought an end to Jewish emancipation and reduced
the question of German identity to one of biology. It was a clear declaration of
war on culture in general and it not infrequently encountered support in
Germany. Limiting Jewish influence by legal means found greater acceptance
among Germans than unofficial demonstrations and acts of violence. An
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 559

official report from Berlin stated that after years of conflict between Germans
and Jews, ‘clarity’ had ‘finally prevailed’, resulting everywhere in ‘great content-
ment and enthusiasm among the people’. In Koblenz there was ‘satisfaction’
because the new law would ‘lead to the desired isolation of Jews more than the
unedifying actions of individuals’. Those close to the Social Democrats,
conversely, claimed that these laws had been rejected by the workers and bour-
geoisie and ‘even in National Socialist circles’. According to this source, of
course, there was at least as much criticism of the replacement of the imperial
flag by the swastika as there was of the fact that the Jews had been stripped of
their rights. In official reports, too, it was this regulation concerning the flying
of flags that was the most unpopular of the Nuremberg Laws.66
Outwardly, the Nuremberg Laws brought a period of calm. The Olympic
Games were held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin in 1936 and the
National Socialist leadership was keen to present to the world a welcoming
picture of Germany. When the Jewish medical student David Frankfurter shot
the leading representative of the NSDAP in Switzerland, Wilhelm Gustloff, on
5 February, the regime banned all anti-Semitic demonstrations: the Winter
Olympics were due to start the very next day in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

Two months after the Saar referendum Hitler took a step that was to prove one
of the most significant stages on his road to the Second World War, when on
16 March 1935 he reintroduced general military conscription. The move was
in open violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which had limited
Germany to a professional army of 100,000 men. The new army was to have a
peacetime strength of thirty-six divisions and 550,000 men.
The victorious powers in Europe, including – initially – Italy, were content to
protest in writing. Great Britain had no qualms about signing a naval agreement
with Germany only three months later, on 18 June 1935, whereby Germany
undertook that its navy would not exceed a third of the tonnage of the Royal
Navy. Hitler now felt confident in striking a further and, in this case, fatal blow
against the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno, and on 7 March 1936 he declared
the Locarno Treaties null and void and, in a move designed to restore his coun-
try’s military sovereignty, occupied the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. If
France had resorted to arms in order to resist the invading German troops, the
Wehrmacht would have had to retreat, an unimaginable humiliation for Hitler.
But France was not ready for war, Great Britain even less so. Moreover, France
had refused only a short time earlier to impose harsh sanctions on Italy after it
launched its campaign in Abyssinia, thereby undermining the credibility of
the West in general. It was very much to Hitler’s advantage that in the early
months of 1936 international public opinion was more exercised by Italy than by
Germany, giving him a chance that he had no intention of ignoring.
The occupation of the Rhineland was backed up by propaganda: in a radio
address and a memorandum Hitler invited the signatories of the Locarno
560 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Treaties to undertake a comprehensive renegotiation of its terms. His aim was

to sign non-aggression pacts with France and Belgium that would last for
twenty-five years and be guaranteed by Great Britain and Italy. He also tried to
entice London with an air treaty, and if the West were to agree to his offer, he
even held out the possibility of Germany’s return to the League of Nations. The
Rhineland crisis ended just as Hitler had hoped: the League of Nations merely
condemned Germany for violating the Treaty of Versailles but imposed no
sanctions on the country; and France, Belgium and Great Britain guaranteed to
defend each other’s territories in the event of one or other of them being
attacked by Germany.
In Germany this surprise move gave a tremendous boost to Hitler’s popu-
larity, and the increase in his prestige offered him a welcome opportunity to
confirm his position by means of a plebiscite. In the hastily arranged elections
to the Reichstag on 29 March 1936, when Jews were not allowed to vote and,
where necessary, local election officials revised the results upwards, 98.9 per
cent of those who voted supported Hitler’s list, appearing to confirm the Führer
in his belief in his own infallibility, so much so, indeed, that as Ian Kershaw has
observed, he was now a ‘believer in his own cult’.67 In the most dangerous crisis
in the Third Reich’s foreign policy to date – the occupation of the Rhineland –
he had succeeded with his tactic of presenting the world with a fait accompli
and shown that western democracies and the League of Nations were incapable
of acting resolutely. Against this background, what could possibly go wrong for
him in the future? At the Party Rally of Honour in September 1936 he adopted
the role of a national redeemer and spoke of the mystic union between himself
and his nation: ‘That you have found me [. . .] among so many millions is the
miracle of our time! And that I have found you, that is Germany’s fortune!’68
The fall in German unemployment also contributed substantially to Hitler’s
popularity: between 1935 and 1936 the figure dropped from 2.1 million to 1.6
million, from 11.6 per cent to 8.3 per cent of the working population. (In the
United States the figure still stood at 16.9 per cent in 1936.) When the British
economist John Maynard Keynes put forward his General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money in 1936 and the book was translated into
German later that same year, he added a preface to the German edition, noting
that on the whole his general theory of production could be applied far more
readily to the conditions that existed in a totalitarian state than the classic
theory that was geared to a free market. In National Socialist Germany the state
had invested far more in the economy during the world economic crisis than
any other capitalist country, pursuing a policy of a ‘somewhat comprehensive
socialization of investment’ that Keynes recommended as a means of stimu-
lating the economy.69
But almost half – 47 per cent – of national economic growth between 1936
and 1938 was directly due to the increase in military spending. As Adam Tooze
has noted in this context:
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 561

If we add investment, of which a very large part was dictated either by the
priorities of autarchy or rearmament, the share rises to two-thirds (67 per
cent). Private consumption, by contrast, was responsible for only 25 per
cent of the growth over this same period, even though in 1935 it had
accounted for 70 per cent of total economic activity. If we consider only that
part of economic activity that was directly under the control of the state, the
dominance of military spending is even more dramatic. Of the goods and
services purchased by the Reich, the Wehrmacht accounted for 70 per cent
in 1935 and 80 per cent three years later.70

Keynes, who saw in his anti-cyclical economic policy a stratagem for peace,
justified his optimistic assumption by arguing that increased military expan-
sionism would not be necessary if full employment could be achieved by means
of domestic policies. To describe the economic policies of National Socialist
Germany as ‘Keynesian’, as has frequently been done, is to ignore the econo-
mist’s political message.
By September 1936 – the date of the Party Rally of Honour – Hitler had
already drawn up a secret timetable for preparations for war. Dating from
August 1936, his memorandum on a four-year plan was based on the same
geostrategic maxims as those that he had laid out in Mein Kampf:

Ever since the outbreak of the French Revolution, the world has been
drifting with increasing speed towards a new confrontation whose most
extreme solution is known as Bolshevism but whose ideas and goal amount
to no more than the removal and replacement by international Jewry of
what have until now been the leading social strata of humanity. No state will
be able to escape this historical confrontation or even to remain aloof from
it. Now that Marxism, with its victory in Russia, has created one of the largest
empires in the world as the starting point for its further operations, this ques-
tion has become one that represents a threat to us all. An ideologically divided
democratic world is now being brought face to face with a self-contained,
authoritarian and ideologically well-founded desire to attack. The military
means that underpin this desire to attack are growing from year to year.71

Germany remained the ‘focus of the western world against Bolshevik attacks’:

If Bolshevism were to triumph in Germany, such a victory would lead not to

another Treaty of Versailles but to the definitive annihilation, nay extirpation,
of the German people. [. . .] In view of the need to resist this danger, all other
considerations must necessarily pale into insignificance. [. . .] The scale and
speed of the military enhancement of our powers cannot be undertaken
quickly enough or on a large enough scale. [. . .] Unless we succeed in building
up the German Wehrmacht in the shortest possible time and unless we are
562 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

able to set up the formations, rearm and, above all, develop into the foremost
army in the world in terms of our intellectual education, then Germany will
be lost!72

Turning to the economic situation, Hitler concluded that Germany was over-
populated and not in a position to feed itself on the basis of its own resources.
The same was true of its need for raw materials. Although it was conceivable in
theory that the country could export more, this was unlikely in practical terms.
The main conclusion to be drawn from all this was that Germany should try, as
far as possible, to become self-sufficient. Petrol and rubber should be produced
synthetically without regard for the cost, while German steel and coal produc-
tion needed to be greatly increased. Industrial sabotage must be punishable by
death, and Jews in general must be held accountable for all the harm caused to
the German economy. But the ultimate solution could be only to ‘extend our
Lebensraum or, to put it another way, to increase our nation’s base of raw mate-
rials and food’, which meant war in the shorter, rather than the longer, term.
The two principal conclusions with which Hitler ended his memorandum were
as clear as they were succinct: ‘I. The German army must be ready for deploy-
ment within four years. II. The German economy must be capable of sustaining
a war within four years.’73
In order to meet the ambitious goal of achieving the greatest possible inde-
pendence within the shortest possible time, the regime created a large-scale
state-run economic sector under the leadership of Hermann Göring, who
added the present post to his existing portfolio of appointments that included
leader of the Reichstag, prime minister of Prussia, minister for aviation,
commander in chief of the air force, Reich forestry commissioner and Reich
master of the hunt. His agency thus came into direct opposition to the coun-
try’s Finance Ministry, with Göring himself on a collision course with Hjalmar
Schacht, who held the posts of president of the Reichsbank, minister for
economic affairs and, from May 1935, plenipotentiary-general for the wartime
economy.
The Four-Year Plan – the term itself was borrowed from the Soviet Union
– ushered in the transition to National Socialist state capitalism, whereby the
regime’s influence on the country’s economy acquired a whole new quality. In
July 1937 the Hermann Göring Public Limited Company for Ore Mining and
Ironworks was founded in Salzgitter as the nucleus of the Hermann Göring
Reichswerke that was summoned into life a year later and that by 1940 was
employing almost 600,000 people at every stage of the production process.
Schacht drew the obvious conclusion from his gradual loss of power and in
August 1937 asked Hitler to accept his resignation as minister for economic
affairs and plenipotentiary-general for the wartime economy. Hitler accepted
his request on 26 November 1937. Schacht retained the post of president of the
Reichsbank until January 1939.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 563

The decision to give absolute priority to the armaments industry inevitably

drove up the national debt to dizzying heights, especially when the government
decided against increasing taxes and, by extension, reducing mass consump-
tion. At no point did Hitler consider this alternative, for there was nothing that
frightened him more than discontent among the workforce. In a study
published in German in 1975 under the title Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft
(Working Class and Folk Community), the British Marxist historian Timothy
W. Mason discussed the altogether traumatic memory of November 1918 on
the part of Hitler and other leading National Socialists, an event which, like the
later legend of the ‘stab in the back’, was interpreted as one that had prevented
Germany from achieving ultimate victory by means of a revolution at home.74
The economic upturn since 1933 had improved the material conditions of
the majority of Germans: by 1937 average weekly wages were some 20.6 per
cent higher than at the height of the depression in 1932, although they were
still 28.8 per cent lower than in 1929. The cost of living index, conversely, had
risen by only 3.7 per cent between 1932 and 1937. Only now could many
Germans afford to buy a radio (‘folk receiver’), which was the most important
means for spreading National Socialist propaganda. Some 650,000 sets were
sold between August 1933 and August 1934, a further 854,000 by the end of
1935. By 1938 80 per cent of all German households in the country’s major
towns and cities had a radio. Only in the countryside was the ownership of a set
still relatively uncommon.
In 1933 only one household in thirty-seven owned a car. In 1934 Hitler
promised to build a popular model that would cost no more than 1,000
Reichsmarks, and in July 1936 he chose the Volkswagen, which was built by a
state-owned company run by the Strength Through Joy leisure organization, a
subdivision of the German Labour Front. Work began on the new car at the
purpose-built Volkswagen Works in the recently founded city of Wolfsburg on
the Mittellandkanal in May 1938. It was run by Ferdinand Porsche. By 1939
270,000 Germans had opened a savings account that would allow them to buy
a Volkswagen car once they had paid 750 Reichsmarks into the scheme. By the
end of the war the number of subscribers had risen to 340,000. Although not a
single civilian customer had received a Volkswagen by 1945 and the 275 million
marks netted by the German Labour Front were wiped out by post-war infla-
tion (the interest had been pocketed by the Reich), even the expectation that
Germans would be able to drive along the nation’s new motorways – the
‘Führer’s roads’ – in their own cars in the not-too-distant future was sufficient
to increase the popularity of the regime and also of Hitler personally.
In 1937 unemployment sank to 912,000, representing 4.6 per cent of the
working population, and by 1938 it had again been halved, dropping to 430,000,
or 2.1 per cent of the workforce. Germany was thus the first of the industrial-
ized nations to have been hit by the world economic crisis to return to full
employment. For the most part the boom was based on ‘creative’ accounting in
564 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the form of Mefo IOUs, a federal debt that could have been settled only by the
invasion of foreign territories and by the exploitation of their resources and
labour markets. Even if Hitler had not already long since planned the next war,
he would have had to have drawn up plans to that end by 1936 at the latest.
Otherwise it would not have been possible to avoid the consequences of huge
investment in unproductive projects and, with it, the collapse of the country’s
finances. In order not to have to defer the start of the war to some distant date
in the future, Hitler turned down the request for a comprehensive rearmament
programme demanded by Georg Thomas, the Wehrmacht’s chief economic
expert at the Ministry of War, as it became known in May 1935. Instead, he
insisted on a more broadly based rearmament programme that would not have
permitted a lengthy war but only a blitzkrieg. The spoils of these wars would
finance the next blitzkriegs. In this way Hitler planned to defray the incalcu-
lable cost of realizing his plan for a new Lebensraum for the Germans.
The more the unemployment figures fell, the more the market value of
labour rose. As Timothy W. Mason succinctly observed:

After 1936, the situation in the labour market made it possible for workers
to lay down certain conditions for their own political subjection. Since the
German Labour Front was responsible for stabilizing this subjugation, it
largely made its own the conditions of the working class, aiming at the very
least at a share in the country’s rising prosperity and necessarily leading to
a worsening of the conflict between the German Labour Front and those
authorities and interests that were bound to oppose all wage increases,
holiday pay and an extension to existing company-based welfare schemes.75

If the German Labour Front had supported the country’s employers, the civil
service and the military in limiting consumption, it would – as Mason aptly
notes – very quickly have become unusable as a mass organization:

Because of the continuing concern on the part of the powers that be that
they were not a legitimate form of government, the negative force of the
working class proved strong enough to make this road impracticable from
the outset. The regime had to sue for its favours through le plébiscite de tous
les jours.76

Between December 1935 and June 1939 the average hourly wage in industry
rose by 10.9 per cent – in the goods-producing sector, which included most of
the armaments industries, the figure was even higher at 11.3 per cent. As a
result of the longer working week, weekly wages went up even more, namely,
by 20.7 per cent. Here those areas of the economy dealing with consumer goods
fared better than the goods-producing industries. In 1939 a male worker
earned on average 5.80 Reichsmarks a week more than in 1936. (For women,
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 565

the increase was 2.50 Reichsmarks a week.) The purchasing power of the
working population rose in consequence by 85 million Reichsmarks. As a
result of the rising employment figures it rose by a further 115–120 million
Reichsmarks a week.
According to contemporary sources, the increase in income that was
recorded every year after 1935 was due in no small part to pressure exerted by
the workers. This pressure found expression in various ways whereby workers
simply withheld their labour – sick leave, careless work, absenteeism and sheer
unhelpfulness. In the summer of 1939, the owner of a tannery in Dresden
spoke – presumably without exaggeration – of a ‘strike in disguise’. Mason
described the increasing numbers of acts of insubordination as ‘a kind of
passive political opposition’ and a ‘primitive form of class warfare’.77 The second
phrase is presumably accurate, whereas the former may be an overinterpreta-
tion. In only the rarest cases does the reluctance to work appear to have been
politically motivated. Even so, it invariably resulted in the intervention of the
Gestapo: the regime’s routine response to every threat consisted in the use of
applied terror.
By the summer of 1939 it seemed impossible to increase armaments
production any further. By then the policies of the Third Reich had resulted in
a paradox: the gradual and continuing fall in unemployment and the rise in
incomes – both of these developments primarily a consequence of rearmament
– had led to an expansion of private consumerism that ultimately affected the
armaments industry, for any attempt to limit consumption now struck the
regime as politically dangerous, producing a dilemma for which the only long-
term solution seemed to be military expansionism. As we shall see, the war was
triggered on 1 September 1939 not by economic factors, and yet without
recourse to military force Germany would not have been able to pursue its
wartime economic policies for very much longer.

When, in August 1936, Hitler instructed the German armed forces to be ready
to be deployed within four years, he cited as his justification only the danger
from the east in the guise of Bolshevism. He may have struck a dismissive note
when referring to western democracies, but he did not describe them as future
enemies on the battlefield, and he did not express his desire to go to war with
them. In February 1935, at a time when in France arguments were raging over
the ratification of the mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union, Hitler
assured the French journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel that it was ‘nonsense’ to
speak of a traditional enmity between Germany and France. If he had expressed
a contradictory view in Mein Kampf, then such an opinion belonged to the
past. And he promised to correct it in ‘the great book of history’.78
And Hitler continued to court Great Britain as a future ally following the
naval treaty that he had signed with London on 18 June 1935. If at the same
time he struck a more belligerent note in his propaganda on colonial policy, it
566 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

was not because he regarded colonial expansionism as a significant goal in

German politics or even as an alternative to increasing Germany’s Lebensraum
by seizing lands to the east. Rather, the colonial question was for Hitler a means
by which to place pressure on London: Great Britain was to enter into an alli-
ance with him that would allow him a free hand in eastern Europe, while he
promised to recognize the Empire as a sphere of exclusively British interests.
With regard to western Europe and America, Hitler attached the greatest
importance to his country’s militant anti-Bolshevism. If western democracies
were finally to learn to regard Germany as the decisive bulwark against the
threat posed by the Soviet Union, they would – he believed – be reconciled to
his increasing violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The signing of
the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact in May 1935 and the formation of
popular front governments, first in Madrid in February 1936 and then in Paris
in June 1936, were setbacks in terms of Hitler’s foreign policy, while at the same
time containing within them an opportunity for propaganda, for Hitler had
every reason to hope that his anti-Communist slogans would find a greater
response with right-wing elements in France, Spain and even Great Britain
than had been the case until then.
On 13 September 1936, two months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil
War, Hitler addressed the Party Rally of Honour and presented himself to
Germany and to the world as the man who would save them from Bolshevism.
Striking a distinctly apocalyptic note, he claimed that the fighting in Spain was
‘symptomatic of an age that was descending into evil’:

For years we have been preaching about the great threat that the world faces
as it draws towards the end of the second millennium of Christian history,
and this is now becoming a terrible reality. Everywhere the Bolsheviks who
are pulling the strings are achieving increasing success with their subversive
activities. At a time when bourgeois statesmen speak only of non-
intervention, the international Jewish revolutionary central command in
Moscow is seeking to bring revolution to this continent of ours by means of
every radio station, by channelling money along a thousand different
conduits and by dint of a thousand different forms of political agitation.

The conclusion that Hitler drew from this state of affairs seemed compelling:
just as National Socialism had dealt with this ‘international persecution’ inter-
nally, so he would ‘ward off all external attacks with the most brutal resolve’.
Hence Germany’s determination to rearm.79
Rome proved more amenable than London when it came to winning allies
for an anti-Communist International. The war in Abyssinia had deepened the
divide between Fascist Italy and western democracies and inevitably led to a
rapprochement with Germany, on which Italy was in any case economically
dependent in no small way. Hitler had helped Mussolini with substantial
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 567

supplies of raw materials and in that way rendered largely ineffectual the sanc-
tions imposed by the League of Nations, prompting Mussolini to show his
gratitude by de-escalating the tensions over Austria and forcing the Austrian
chancellor to reach an agreement with Germany. The keenest critic of this
policy was the Austrian vice-chancellor and leader of the Fatherland Front,
Rüdiger Starhemberg, who had been removed from the government by
Schuschnigg following an unauthorized and highly undiplomatic telegram that
he had sent to Mussolini, congratulating him on the capture of Addis Ababa.
Schuschnigg himself took over the leadership of the Fatherland Front, an
umbrella organization for forces close to the government. As a result, Vienna
was now able to adopt a more pro-German line without any serious opposi-
tion, a policy which, with Hitler’s backing, Franz von Papen had done much to
promote since his appointment as German ambassador in August 1934.
A treaty between Germany and Austria was signed on 11 July 1936. In the
section of it that was made public, Germany acknowledged ‘the full sovereignty
of the federal state of Austria’ and abandoned the financial controls placed on
Germans travelling to Austria since May 1934. In return Austria professed itself
to be a ‘German state’. In the section of the treaty that remained secret, Vienna
committed itself to conduct its foreign policy ‘with regard for the peaceful aspi-
rations of the German government’ and in the case of questions that affected
both governments to engage in an exchange of views with Berlin. Austria also
promised to implement a wide-ranging political amnesty and to allow ‘the
so-called national opposition in Austria’ to share a role in government. By 11
July two new members of the government had been appointed with close links
to nationalist circles: Guido Schmidt as secretary of state at the Federal
Chancellery and Edmund Glaise-Horstenau as minister without portfolio. (The
following November Schmidt moved to Schuschnigg’s Foreign Office, while
Glaise-Horstenau took over the Home Office.) The various defence leagues
were disbanded in October 1936, and in June 1937 the National Socialist jurist
Arthur Seyß-Inquart was appointed to the State Council. From then on he
served as an intermediary both between Schuschnigg and Hitler and between
the chancellor and the ‘national opposition’. The Austrian NSDAP remained a
banned organization. After July 1936 Austria was a state with drastically reduced
sovereignty and, as such, little more than a satellite of the German Reich.
This consensual, but specious, solution to the Austrian question prepared
the way for a sustained and serious attempt to resolve relations between
Germany and Italy. On 23 October 1936 the two foreign ministers, Baron
Konstantin von Neurath and Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-
in-law, signed a secret cooperation and consultation agreement, laying the
foundations for the Berlin–Rome Axis that Mussolini announced on 1
November. Henceforth this axis could provide a focus for all those European
states that were ‘inspired by the will to work together and by the desire for
peace’.80 In fact, this declaration amounted to no more than a wilful justification
568 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of the cooperation between Germany and Italy in the Spanish Civil War, when
both powers had lent their assistance to Franco’s nationalists, officially recog-
nizing the dictator’s putsch-based regime on 18 November 1936.
A week later, on 25 November, Germany and Japan signed an anti-
Comintern pact. This agreement was drawn up by the German ambassador in
London and Hitler’s foreign policy adviser, Joachim von Ribbentrop, without
consulting the Foreign Office, which was on friendly terms with China. The
agreement provided for a joint propaganda campaign against the subversive
activities of the Third International and in the secret section of its provisions
expressly forbade the signatory states to undertake measures that might excul-
pate the Soviet Union in the event of its attacking one or other of the signato-
ries. Neither of the signatories, moreover, was permitted to conclude any treaties
with the Soviet Union that contravened the anti-Comintern pact.
In Japan the army had established itself as a force for order following the
suppression of a bloody military putsch that was undertaken by radical right-
wing officers in February 1936. Within the army, it was the employer-friendly
Tosei (Control Party) that set the tone. By August 1936 Tokyo had adopted the
‘Fundamental Principles of National Policy’, a compromise between the army,
which was seeking to expand Japanese rule into Eastern Asia, and the navy,
which sought, rather, to extend the country’s maritime might into the Pacific.
As a result, Japan needed to arm itself for confrontation with both the Soviet
Union and the Western Powers, especially the United States.
On 7 July 1937, only weeks after Prince Fumimaro Konoe, the head of a
well-respected family of aristocrats, had assumed control of the government,
shots were exchanged between members of the Chinese armed forces and
Japanese soldiers at the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing. Japan had had the right
to station soldiers in the city since the Peace of Beijing that had ended the
Boxer Rising in September 1901. The incident marked the start of the Sino-
Japanese War that was to culminate in the Second World War four years later.
Shortly afterwards the Chinese leadership under Chiang Kai-shek signed a
non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. In November 1937 the Japanese
government proposed peace terms aimed at turning China into a Japanese
satrapy. Germany, which since the time of the Weimar Republic had supported
the Chinese army through unofficial military advisers and which maintained
extensive trade links with Beijing, sought to mediate, but to no avail.
The Japanese took Nanking on 13 December 1937, leading to a bloodbath
among the local Chinese soldiers and civilian population that ended in the
deaths of up to 300,000 men, women and children and also involved mass
rapes and looting. By the end of 1938 the Japanese army had overrun large
areas of northern and central China, including the principal transport routes
and coastal regions, but it did not undertake any further major offensives. On
3 November 1938 Konoe’s government proclaimed a ‘New Order in East Asia’,
a peace zone that was to include Japan, China and Manchukuo. By this date
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 569

Germany had already withdrawn its military advisers and agreed to stop
supplying arms to Chiang Kai-shek and to curtail its trade with China. But
Tokyo’s hopes of forming an alliance with the Axis Powers remained unful-
filled. Berlin and Rome insisted on an alliance directed not only against the
Soviet Union but also against Great Britain and France, a desire rejected above
all by the Japanese navy, which did not yet feel strong enough to wage a major
naval war.
In the course of 1937 National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy moved
even closer together, and at the end of September Mussolini undertook a trium-
phal tour of Germany, the high point of which was an elaborately staged visit to
Berlin. On 28 September the Italian leader addressed a jubilant crowd on the
city’s Maifeld, explaining in German what he meant by the ‘ethics of Fascism’
and also by his ‘personal morality’: ‘to speak openly and candidly and if one has
a friend, to march together with him to the very end’.81 Barely six weeks later,
Italy joined the anti-Comintern pact on 6 November 1937. On 11 December
Mussolini took the same step that Hitler had taken four years earlier and
announced that his country was leaving the League of Nations.
By this date Hitler had already drawn up a detailed timetable for war, which
he expounded on 5 November 1937 at a secret meeting attended by the minister
for war, Werner von Blomberg, the foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath,
the commanders in chief of the three branches of the armed forces – Werner
von Fritsch for the army, Erich Raeder for the navy and Göring for the air force
– and, finally, Hitler’s military adjutant, Friedrich Hoßbach. According to a
record of the meeting drawn up by Hoßbach five days later, Germany’s land
shortage could be resolved only by force. The raw materials that Germany
needed for an empire which, encompassing the world, would be ruled by a
fixed racial nucleus, should be sought not overseas but in areas adjacent to the
Reich. It was Hitler’s ‘unshakeable resolve to solve the question of German
space by 1943–45 at the latest’.82 But, Hitler went on, it might be necessary to
act before this, if France were to degenerate into civil war or be drawn into a
war with a third party. If Germany’s military and political situation were to be
improved, its primary aim must be to defeat Czechoslovakia and Austria in
order to eliminate any threat to its flanks by any possible action in the west.
The military and strategic plans that Hitler presented to his assembled
ministers and representatives of the country’s armed forces were essentially a
summary of the programme already set forth in Mein Kampf. Indeed, he had
made it clear to Germany’s military leaders as long ago as 3 February 1933 that
as Germany’s chancellor he was determined to stick to these goals, and to that
extent his comments on 5 November 1937 can hardly have come as a surprise
to his audience. If Neurath, Blomberg and Fritsch were persuaded to oppose
his plans, then it was because of Hitler’s assumption not only that Great Britain
and France would stand idly by while Germany attacked Czechoslovakia but
that in the wake of the Spanish Civil War France and Great Britain would
570 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

declare war on Fascist Italy. Neurath’s misgivings seem to have been particu-
larly serious and indistinguishable from criticism of Hitler himself, so that
there is much to be said for the supposition that this was the occasion when
Neurath set in train the events that were to lead to his dismissal in early
February 1938.
On the other hand, there is no evidence that on 5 November 1937 Hitler
was already thinking of cutting himself adrift from either Blomberg or Fritsch.
If neither of them was still in office three months later, then this was the result,
rather, of two unrelated and unforeseen circumstances that gave Hitler an
opportunity to undertake a major reshuffle designed in the first instance to
cover up events that were deeply embarrassing to him. The first affair concerned
the second marriage of his minister of war. On 12 January Hitler and Göring
had been witnesses at the wedding of Blomberg and Margarete Gruhns. Nine
days later Hitler learnt that Gruhns had once modelled for pornographic
photographs and worked as a prostitute.
Possible successors to the compromised Blomberg included the commander
in chief of the army, Werner von Fritsch, but he was the subject of a police file
that Hitler had tried in vain to have destroyed in 1936. According to a statement
given by a professional criminal, Fritsch had been blackmailed for committing
an act of indecency with another man. In March 1938 a court established that
there were no grounds to the accusation, which was based on a case of mistaken
identity. For the present, however, the charge against Fritsch, which had been
unearthed by the Gestapo on Himmler’s instructions, seemed to incriminate the
commander in chief of the army, with the result that, like Blomberg, he lost his
post. In both cases the official reason given for their dismissal was failing health.
The post of minister of war was abolished on 4 February 1938, when the
duties of the minister in question were taken over by the newly created
Wehrmacht Supreme Command headed by Hitler himself. His immediate
subordinate was Wilhelm Keitel, an artillery general who was equal in rank to a
federal minister. Walther von Brauschitsch replaced Fritsch. And Göring, the
commander in chief of the air force, was appointed general field marshal,
making him the highest-ranking German soldier. In addition to numerous
other changes within the military that were officially designed to create a more
youthful image, there were also two new ministerial appointments, Joachim
von Ribbentrop replacing Neurath at the Foreign Office and Walther Fink,
hitherto secretary of state at the Ministry for Propaganda, replacing Hjalmar
Schacht at the Ministry of Economics. Both appointments were announced on
4 February 1938.
The Blomberg and Fritsch affairs had repercussions that proved extremely
welcome to Hitler. The Wehrmacht finally had a unified leadership. The
‘Prussian’ army lost its special status. And Hitler’s power increased. The influ-
ence of the old elite faded elsewhere as well, notably in the diplomatic service
and in business, thanks to changes at the head of the Foreign Office and the
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 571

Ministry of Economics. The shift in the balance of power that took place on 4
February 1938 produced an overall picture that persuaded contemporaries and
historians that this was all the result of long-term planning, whereas the events
of early February 1938 merely proved that Hitler was a genius at improvisation
with a masterly ability to take advantage of a situation that was as much a
surprise for him as it was for the rest of the world.

Early Signs of Appeasement: Britain 1933–8

Hitler’s partner of choice was Great Britain, which had viewed the change of
leadership in Germany on 30 January 1933 with remarkable sangfroid. The
conservative and liberal press interpreted the high level of continuity between
the cabinets of Schleicher and Hitler as a sign that for the present at least there
was no need to fear a dramatic change in German policy. In general, those
sections of the press that were close to the Labour Party expected the new
government to remain in office for only a brief space of time. The boycott of
Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933 triggered a more general outcry of indigna-
tion, but once the boycott had ended, the outrage quickly evaporated. The
British public remained divided. Right-wing tabloids such as the Daily Mail and
Daily Express found words of praise for the National Socialists’ militant anti-
Bolshevist stance, while conservative papers like The Times and the Daily
Telegraph adopted a similar, if more moderate, line. Liberal papers led by the
News Chronicle and Manchester Guardian took an increasingly critical view.
Only the Labour Party’s official newspaper, the Daily Herald, was emphatically
anti-Fascist and anti-National Socialist in its outlook.
By 1934 prominent journalists and politicians were keen to form a personal
impression of Hitler and of other well-known representatives of his regime. In
December of that year the Führer received a visit from the publisher of the
Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere, who was well disposed towards him. Rothermere
was followed in January 1935 by Lord Lothian, a leading member of the Liberal
Party. In the course of 1936 – the year of the Berlin Olympics – a whole series
of English visitors paid their respects to Hitler: the former Liberal prime
minister Lloyd George, who made no secret of his admiration for the German
leader; the press baron Lord Beaverbrook; Lord Rothermere again; and the
pacifist Labour politicians Lord Allen of Hurtwood and George Lansbury.
Hitler, Göring and Ribbentrop held several meetings with the Marquess of
Londonderry, the former secretary of state for air, who had stepped down in
May 1935, while Ribbentrop was twice the guest of Lord Londonderry on the
latter’s estates in Ulster, first in May 1936, then in November 1936. Hitler’s first
official visitors from Great Britain were the foreign secretary Sir John Simon
and his parliamentary secretary of state, Anthony Eden, who travelled to Berlin
in late March 1935 in order to take soundings about a possible agreement
between the two countries but returned to London empty-handed.
572 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Practically all of Hitler’s visitors took away the same message: his warnings
about the threat posed by Bolshevism, his insistence that Germany had the
same military rights as other countries and his interest in an Anglo-German
arrangement that would give the Reich a free hand in central and eastern
Europe and allow Germany to recognize the Empire as a British sphere of
interest. He also demanded the return of Germany’s colonies in Africa, a
demand that was tactical and therefore negotiable. Hitler had a chance of being
heard not only by his unofficial visitors from London but also by various
upper-class circles such as the Cliveden Set, a group of largely Conservative
figures who met at Cliveden, the home of Lord and Lady Astor, and who strove
for closer Anglo-German cooperation in their combined opposition to
Bolshevism. A similar goal was pursued by the Anglo-German Fellowship that
was formed in 1935 with backing from the German Embassy in London under
the chairmanship of a former army general, Ian Hamilton, who was also the
head of the Scottish branch of the British Legion. A predecessor of the Anglo-
German Fellowship, the Anglo-German Association had been founded in 1928
but was disbanded in April 1935 in order to avoid a discussion of the exclusion
of its Jewish members.
After 1933, for the majority of Neo-Tories – younger intellectuals on the
right wing of the Conservative Party – Mussolini enjoyed a far higher standing
than the ‘vulgar’ Hitler. Within their ranks, the most prominent supporters
of National Socialism were the historian Arthur Bryant and the journalist
Francis Yeats-Brown, while the Nationalist Socialists’ most radical followers
were Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, which he established
in October 1932. But any sympathy that the BUF may have enjoyed among
British Conservatives was forfeited, as we have already noted, in June 1934,
when left-wing hecklers were brutally attacked at a BUF rally at Olympia in
London.
In the eyes of Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government a greater threat
was posed at this time by the seditious propaganda of the Communist-led
National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, whose subversive activities were
meant to be curtailed by the hugely controversial Incitement to Disaffection
Act that came into force in November 1934. Parallel measures against the
extreme right were implemented only much later at the insistence of the Labour
Party and trade unions and in response to the increasingly militant anti-
Semitism of the BUF.
On 4 October 1936 a march by 1,900 uniformed Blackshirts led to violent
scuffles in Royal Mint Street in London’s East End between a far greater number
of anti-Fascist demonstrators and the police who were hoping to avoid a
confrontation between the left and the right. The home secretary then banned
a planned march through the rest of the working-class area and forced Mosley
to move his parade to the other side of the river. The legislative response to
these events was the Public Order Act of 1 January 1937 banning uniforms and
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 573

paramilitary associations and granting the government powers to deal more

effectively with public marches and demonstrations. The Act played a by no
means insignificant part in the country’s return to political normality.
Official relations between Great Britain and Germany entered a new phase
in 1935. Although the government in London was surprised when on 9 March
Göring officially admitted that Germany once again had an air force whose
existence had, of course, been an open secret in Britain for some considerable
time, and although the reintroduction of general conscription a week later
caused understandable disquiet, London contented itself with expressing polite
reproaches for this twofold violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles,
reproaches that Simon and Eden delivered in person during their visit to Berlin
on 25 and 26 March. Only three months later Britain agreed to Germany’s
proposal for a bilateral naval agreement that had been drawn up in November
1934. Signed on 18 June 1935, it allowed Germany to increase the size of its
navy up to a third of the tonnage of the British Royal Navy.
At this point, Japan seemed to pose a rather greater danger to Britain than
Germany. If London had not accepted Berlin’s offer, Germany might have
rearmed to a far greater extent. At the same time, the worsening of the situation
in Abyssinia demonstrated that the British-French-Italian Stresa Front of April
1935 was not worth the paper it was written on. France was furious at London’s
high-handed actions. But the British government had not been asked for its
agreement when France signed its mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union
in May, a pact that provoked serious misgivings in anti-Bolshevik Britain.
If the Marquess of Londonderry had had his way, there would not only have
been a naval treaty but also an agreement covering the relative sizes of the
British and German air forces. In his capacity as secretary of state for air,
Londonderry wanted to increase the strength of the Royal Air Force, which he
was able to do to only a limited extent in 1934, and at the same time come to
some arrangement with Germany in this regard. Unlike his cousin, Winston
Churchill, who even before 1933 had been warning of the danger of an increase
in Germany’s air power, Londonderry did not believe that Britain faced a
serious threat from Germany at least for the next few years. When at the end of
March 1935 Hitler informed Simon and Eden that the Luftwaffe had already
achieved parity with the Royal Air Force, Londonderry found himself under
massive pressure, and even the prime minister, who was temperamentally a
pacifist, expressed the belief in private that the Air Ministry had ‘slept through’
Germany’s rearmament programme.
Londonderry was obliged to defend his position in the upper house on 22
May 1935, when he spoke admiringly of Hitler’s ostensible willingness to limit
his country’s armaments programme and gave his backing to the possibility of
deploying bombs in areas bordering on the Empire even without concrete
justification for doing so. In making this claim, he incurred the wrath not only
of the political left but, worse, of many of his own Conservative Party friends.
574 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

An ailing MacDonald, who had previously supported him in public and parlia-
ment, was by now becoming increasingly weary of government and less and
less capable of carrying out his duties, with the result that he resigned on 27
June 1935 in favour of the leader of the Conservative Party, Stanley Baldwin,
who had previously been prime minister in 1923–4 and from 1924 to 1929.
Baldwin made Londonderry the lord privy seal and, hence, a minister without
portfolio. The new secretary of state for air was another Tory, the former colo-
nies’ minister, Philip Cunliffe-Lister. The National Liberal foreign secretary Sir
John Simon moved to the Home Office and was succeeded by Sir Samuel
Hoare, an old friend of Baldwin. Neville Chamberlain remained the chancellor
of the exchequer.
On 18 October 1935, two weeks after the start of the war in Abyssinia,
Baldwin asked King George V to dissolve parliament in the light of the wors-
ening international situation and to hold new elections, which would otherwise
have fallen due by October 1936 at the latest. The Labour Party accused the
prime minister of fomenting the fear of war in the British people, while pinning
its own colours to the mast of international disarmament and collective security
within the framework of the League of Nations, emphatically rejecting the idea
of an increase in British military spending. The Tories, for their part, described
rearmament as a condition for peace, in which context Baldwin gave his solemn
word that there would be ‘no great armaments’.83
The anti-war rhetoric of the Labour Party proved effective, and in the elec-
tions to the lower house on 14 November 1935 it increased its share of the vote
by 7.4 per cent when compared with the results in 1931, polling 38 per cent of
the total and returning 154 MPs to parliament, an increase of fifty-two. The
Conservatives’ share of the vote fell by 7.2 per cent, resulting in a total of 386
seats, eighty-three fewer than before. The Liberal Party won 6.7 per cent of the
vote, losing eleven of its thirty-two MPs, while the National Liberal Party that
had held power with the Tories won 3.7 per cent of the vote, returning thirty-
three MPs, two fewer than in 1931. MacDonald’s National Labour Party won 1.5
per cent of the vote, representing eight seats, five fewer than in 1931. Of the
remaining parties, none polled more than 0.7 per cent of the total. In the spirit
of the new united front, the Communists had withdrawn their candidates in all
but two constituencies, winning one of them at the expense of the incumbent
Labour candidate. Although the Tories had a comfortable majority in the lower
house, Baldwin again invited members of the National Liberal Party and
National Labour Party to help him form a cabinet that was still able to describe
itself as a National Government.
Within weeks of coming to power, Baldwin’s government was plunged into
its first serious crisis. On 7 and 8 December, his foreign secretary, Samuel
Hoare, stopped off in Paris on his way to Switzerland and met Pierre Laval,
France’s prime minister and foreign secretary, and discussed ways to settle the
conflict in Abyssinia, whereby large tracts of north-eastern and southern
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 575

Abyssinia would be handed over to Fascist Italy, while the rest of the country
would remain independent and be given access to the sea. Thanks to an indis-
cretion on the part of the Quai d’Orsay, details of the Hoare–Laval Pact became
public knowledge, leading to a storm of protest in the press. Baldwin tried to
defend his foreign secretary in the lower house but was unable even to win the
support of his own cabinet.
On 18 December the government decided to abandon the Anglo-French
proposal and Hoare was forced to resign. Anthony Eden, hitherto minister
without portfolio with special responsibility for the affairs of the League of
Nations, was named his successor on 22 December. Eden spent the following
weeks and months trying to persuade France and the United States to accept
the one sanction that Mussolini feared the most and over which he was threat-
ening to go to war: a ban on petroleum imports. But Eden failed to get his way.
In February 1936 Baldwin’s government fulfilled one of the promises on
which it had fought its election campaign and asked the lower house to agree
to spend £394 million over the next five years on increasing Britain’s defence
budget. A new minister for defence coordination was to oversee the United
Kingdom’s defence needs. A number of Conservative politicians wanted to see
a forceful figure like Churchill in this post. Baldwin thought initially of
appointing Hoare but then adopted a proposal from within his own party and
appointed the attorney general, Sir Thomas Inskip.
In terms of British foreign policy, the outstanding event of the spring of 1936
was Hitler’s most provocative action to date: his occupation of the demilitarized
Rhineland. Both Paris and London had reckoned on such a turn of events but
had failed to agree on any joint measures to prevent it. In the wake of Hitler’s
coup the Belgian prime minister, Paul Van Zeeland, and the French foreign
minister, Pierre-Étienne Flandin, urged Brussels, Paris and London to act in a
coordinated manner and invite the League of Nations to impose sanctions on
Germany for its treaty violation. The British response was negative. The major
newspapers had not regarded these recent events as a threat. The occupation of
the Rhineland was seen for the most part as an internal affair: according to Lord
Lothian, the Germans were ‘only going into their own back garden’.84 When
Flandin hurried to London to discuss the situation, Baldwin informed him that
sanctions required military backing, which Britain was unable to provide. In
cabinet he claimed that the Soviet Union would inevitably become embroiled in
any war and that Germany would end up becoming Communist.
As a result, Hitler’s treaty violation went unpunished, which in the circum-
stances could hardly be otherwise. But it was bound to encourage the Führer to
commit similar acts of provocation. Baldwin hoped that Hitler’s aggression
would be directed not against the West but – in the spirit of Mein Kampf –
against the East. In July 1936, the month in which the Spanish Civil War began,
the prime minister informed Churchill, ‘If there is any fighting in Europe to be
done, I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.’85
576 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The year 1936 has gone down in British history as the year of the abdication
crisis. George V died on 20 January at the age of seventy, having only recently
celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession in 1910. He was
succeeded by his son, the forty-one-year-old Edward VIII, who was still unmar-
ried but notorious for his numerous affairs with married women and for his
open sympathies with Germany. His undoing proved to be his relationship with
an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, with whom he took a Mediterranean
cruise on a hired yacht in the summer of 1936, a cruise widely reported by the
American, Canadian and Continental European press but comprehensively
ignored by British newspapers. By the autumn concerned voices were growing
increasingly strident at court, forcing Baldwin to intervene, but his conversa-
tion with the king on 14 October produced no results. The following day
Edward’s private secretary informed the prime minister that Wallis Simpson
was planning a divorce – her second. On 16 October, Edward summoned Lords
Beaverbrook and Rothermere to his summer residence at Balmoral and
persuaded them to say nothing about the affair for the time being.
While Edward continued to insist on his determination to marry Wallis
Simpson, the chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, was equally
adamant that he would resign if the king went ahead with his plan. The Anglican
Church likewise opposed the idea, and the governor general of Canada, Lord
Tweedsmuir, warned of the devastating consequences of such a move in a puri-
tanical country like Canada and also of the monarchy’s loss of prestige as the
centre of the whole Empire. Australia’s prime minister, Joseph Lyons, announced
that if Edward were to marry Wallis Simpson, the king would have to abdicate.
Baldwin felt obliged to increase the pressure on the king and inform him that if
he persisted in his plans, he would have no alternative but to abdicate. Churchill
was one of the few public figures to support the king. The vast majority of the
‘political class’ regarded the king’s marriage as incompatible with the dignity
of the monarch and, hence, of the United Kingdom. Most of the country’s
MPs believed that the majority of the British population thought the same.
On 10 December 1936, a week after Wallis Simpson had left for Paris, Edward
finally gave in to his prime minister’s entreaties and announced his abdication.
He was succeeded by his younger brother, George VI, Britain’s third king in
under a year.
Baldwin’s prestige had been badly affected by the brouhaha surrounding
the Hoare–Laval Pact, but his resolution of the abdication crisis helped him to
restore and enhance his standing, so that whenever he appeared in public from
then on he was greeted with loud applause. But Baldwin had turned sixty-nine
in August 1936 and was exhausted and weary of his work in office. He planned
to wait until the coronation on 12 May 1937 and then stand down. The king
accepted his offer and on 28 May appointed Neville Chamberlain the country’s
new prime minister. The son of Joseph Chamberlain, Neville was himself sixty-
eight, a businessman from Birmingham, where he had been lord mayor in
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 577

1915–16. Since 1922 he had headed several ministries, first as postmaster

general, then as minister for health and, since 1931, as chancellor of the
exchequer. In 1937 Chamberlain was replaced as chancellor by the home secre-
tary, Sir John Simon, who in return was replaced by Sir Samuel Hoare. For the
present no one expected any significant changes in government policy under
Chamberlain.
From an economic standpoint, the year 1937 was a relatively good one.
Unemployment fell to 10.8 per cent of the working population, its lowest since
1929, when it had stood at 10.4 per cent. As chancellor, Chamberlain had been
an orthodox champion of a sound economic policy, and under his successor
the Treasury adopted a middle course between taxation and borrowing as a
way of financing national expenditure. By 1938, unemployment was beginning
to rise again in the wake of a recession, peaking at 13.5 per cent and leading to
increased dependence on government borrowing. But even as late as 1938 the
Treasury was still resisting the idea of boosting the economy by increasing
defence spending.
As far as the armaments industry was concerned, Chamberlain consistently
maintained a policy of defence. Increased spending on the military was accom-
panied by the National Fitness Campaign of 1937–8 which, triggered by
German successes at the Berlin Olympic Games, took Germany as its model
and, as the left wing immediately pointed out, was demonstrably part of the
country’s defence policy. But whereas the Hitler Youth movement, the League
of German Girls and German national service all relied on force and coercion,
the National Fitness Council and the Board of Education were intended to
encourage young people’s physical fitness by appealing to reason. The indi-
viduals responsible for implementing these policies felt that it made sense to
adopt a number of German measures, but only a tiny minority on the political
right demanded that the British system pursue an authoritarian line.
In terms of British foreign policy, Chamberlain’s cabinet spent its first few
months in office wrestling with the same problem, continuing to adopt the line
first taken by Baldwin and refusing to intervene in the Spanish Civil War. By
the autumn of 1937, however, divisions were beginning to appear in the polit-
ical outlook of Chamberlain and his foreign secretary. Neither wanted a
confrontation with the dictatorships in Germany, Italy and Japan; and both
were keen to reach a peaceful settlement with their three international political
rivals, but whereas Chamberlain was inclined to adopt a more conciliatory
approach, Eden insisted on making clear what was non-negotiable, believing
that military strength was necessary to discourage Hitler and Mussolini from
going to war in pursuit of their expansionist goals. Chamberlain assumed that
Hitler wanted to establish a racially pure pan-Germany but that he was
unwilling to unleash a major war in order to achieve that aim.
In November 1937 a favourable opportunity seemed to present itself to
open high-level talks between the British government and the National Socialist
578 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

leadership when Lord Halifax, the former viceroy of India and briefly the
minister for war, who was now chairman of the Privy Council, a close adviser
to the prime minister and Master of the Middleton Hounds, received an invita-
tion to attend an international hunting exhibition in Berlin. He arrived in the
German capital on 17 November and held talks with Neurath, Göring,
Goebbels, Blomberg and Schacht, but his most important meeting was with
Hitler at Berchtesgaden on the 19th. Halifax praised the Führer for his attempts
to eradicate Communism, hailed the Reich as a western bulwark against
Bolshevism and informed Hitler that Britain had no qualms about a peaceful
resolution of the contentious issues of Danzig, Austria and Czechoslovakia, at
least to the extent that such a solution gave rise to no further problems. Hitler
spoke of his determination to destroy Bolshevism and asked Britain to give
him a free hand in central and eastern Europe. On reading Halifax’s report of
the meeting, Chamberlain felt that his own view of the situation was vindicated
and asked his cabinet to make concessions to Germany with regard to its colo-
nial policy in Africa, not least at the expense of Portugal, in order to achieve a
settlement with the Reich. Eden, on the other hand, remained sceptical.
In January 1938 a letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Chamberlain led to
an open disagreement between the latter and his foreign secretary: Roosevelt
had suggested an international conference to decide on basic rules for all deal-
ings between the different states, which Eden felt was a useful move that could
be used to test the credibility of both Hitler and Mussolini, whereas Chamberlain
found little of merit in the proposal, which he was convinced would provoke
only a negative reaction in Berlin and Rome. Without consulting Eden, he
wrote to Roosevelt, turning down the president’s proposal.
But it was Hitler who was the immediate cause of the rift between Chamberlain
and Eden. The Führer received the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg,
at his Alpine residence at Berchtesgaden on 12 February 1938, a meeting also
attended by a number of high-ranking generals, including Wilhelm Keitel, whose
presence was designed to be a deliberate demonstration of strength. In the course
of the meeting, Hitler demanded an amnesty for all Austrian National Socialists
who were currently in custody, freedom to operate for the NSDAP, the appoint-
ment of the National Socialist Arthur Seyß-Inquart as foreign secretary and
minister for homeland security and the first of a series of steps designed to incor-
porate Austria into Germany’s economic system. Hitler expected his terms to be
implemented by 15 February, on which day he was informed by Vienna that all
his conditions had indeed been met.
Three days later the Italian ambassador in London, Count Dino Grandi,
witnessed an embarrassing confrontation between Chamberlain and Eden.
Grandi had refused to explain Italy’s stance on the Austrian question but
announced that Mussolini was willing to enter into new negotiations with
London. Chamberlain was keen to accept, but Eden, who was profoundly
mistrustful of the Duce, believed that the offer was not serious and suspected
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 579

that Mussolini had already agreed to Austria’s annexation by Germany. In order

to sort out their differences, both men briefly withdrew from the room but not
before Grandi had seen Chamberlain criticize his foreign secretary for repeat-
edly missing opportunities: the situation could not be allowed to continue. In
cabinet all but two ministers backed Chamberlain, and on 20 February Eden
resigned. Five days later his portfolio was taken over by Lord Halifax.
It would be wrong to see Eden’s replacement by Halifax as marking the start
of Great Britain’s policy of appeasement. Rather, the change of leadership at the
Foreign Office reflected a shift from a more cautious and balanced form of
appeasement to one that was more thoughtless and all-embracing. By the early
months of 1938 appeasement was far from being a new line in British politics.
Strictly speaking, the country’s failure to respond to the reintroduction of
general conscription in Germany or to the occupation of the Rhineland as well
as its acceptance of the movement of Italian troops and weapons through the
Suez Canal during the Conquest of Abyssinia were also examples of appease-
ment. In Britain’s relations with Germany there had long been a critical attitude
to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, an attitude triggered in part by Keynes’s
1920 study on the economic consequences of that treaty. As a result, Germany
struck many Britons as a country that had been treated with undue harshness
and that it was in Britain’s best interests to approach with greater understanding,
not least in order to prevent France from growing immoderately powerful.
For the most part, this essentially benevolent attitude continued to dominate
Conservative circles after 1933. Indeed, a number of politicians and economists
even pointed out that Germany’s economic and financial problems were in part
a result of the protectionist stance that Britain had adopted in 1931. It made
sense, therefore, to expect a more liberal approach to foreign trade to have
a positive impact on Britain’s political relations with Germany. In short, the
country should pursue a policy of political and economic appeasement.
All the ‘appeasers’ were motivated by the thought of the British Empire: if
Britain were to be drawn into a conflict in Continental Europe, this would
strengthen the resolve of foreign groups eager to free themselves from every
kind of colonial rule and economic dependence. This in itself was enough to
persuade Britons to do everything in their power to avoid a confrontation with
the dictatorships in Italy and Germany. Moreover, these regimes were emphati-
cally anti-Communist and therefore possible allies in any attempt to resist the
spread of Bolshevism. The appeasers were not so naive as to believe that either
Hitler or Mussolini was unconditionally committed to peace. From their point
of view a certain degree of rearmament was necessary in order to discourage
both Italy and Germany from fomenting armed conflict in Europe or, at least,
in western Europe. Britain had started to rearm in 1936 but was still far from
having reached the point where we could speak of a deterrent. There was also
fundamental agreement among the appeasers that Great Britain had to work
more closely with the other great Anglo-Saxon power, the United States of
580 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

America. To them, dependence on America seemed to pose fewer risks than

dependence on an over-powerful Germany.
The only bone of contention among the appeasers was the extent to which an
attempt should be made to meet Hitler and Mussolini halfway. In this regard
pessimists like Eden were reluctant to go as far as optimists like Chamberlain and
Halifax. By the end of 1937 a sceptical Eden was drawing closer to an anti-appeaser
like Churchill, who had no illusions about Hitler’s desire for war and who had long
been demanding that far greater efforts be made to rearm the country. But the
biggest obstacle on the road to military parity with Germany – a goal that even
Baldwin had believed was no longer achievable – was not the lack of insight on the
part of Conservative politicians but the unwillingness on the part of the great mass
of the population to countenance another war. During the winter of 1934/5 the
League of Nations Union – the association of friends of the League of Nations –
had conducted a ‘peace ballot’, inviting 11.5 million Britons to express their views
on collective security. Ten million supported economic sanctions against an
aggressor, while only 6.8 million were in favour of military sanctions.
Traditionally, it was the Labour Party and the trade unions that were the
most outspoken champions of international disarmament and collective secu-
rity. Within the Labour Party the most radical pacifists, such as the party leader
from 1932 to 1935, George Lansbury, who rejected even the League of Nations
and the whole idea of national defence, represented only a tiny minority. Even
as late as 1937 Lansbury’s successor, Clement Attlee, was still refusing to give
his party’s backing to rearmament, although he had been in favour of supplying
arms to the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War and had supported
the idea of sending in volunteers from other countries. In 1937, at its annual
conference, the party agreed to abstain in the event of a vote on raising the
defence budget but not to vote against such a move. By 1938 Hitler’s aggressive
policies and the compliance of the British government persuaded the Labour
Party to review its policy and in September it spoke out forcefully against any
further appeasement, prompting Churchill to telephone Attlee and inform him
that the declaration of the workers’ party was a credit to the British nation.
The Labour Party remained consistently opposed to right- and left-wing
dictatorships, every party conference turning down Communist attempts to
form a united front. The Independent Labour Party, which had broken away
from the main party in 1932 and which by now was no more than a splinter
group, the Socialist League, Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club of 1935 and
London’s left-wing Bloomsbury Group continued to champion the idea of an
anti-Fascist bloc made up of all the left-wing parties, but from the standpoint
of the Labour Party leadership this amounted to a Communist attempt to
subvert the party and to rob it of any chance of ever again becoming the most
powerful political party in the country.
At the 1937 party conference the Socialist League’s organizational ‘affilia-
tion’ with the Labour Party was formally suspended and any thought of a
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 581

united front was rejected once and for all. Shortly afterwards Sir Stafford
Cripps disbanded the Socialist League that he had helped to form but continued
to advocate a left-wing united front and to speak out against all military
expenditure by the government until he was finally excluded from the party in
May 1939, when a number of his closest allies, including Sir Charles Trevelyan
and Aneurin Bevan, suffered a similar fate. The Labour Party was resolved not
to allow observers to entertain even the slightest doubts in its profession of
faith in a democratic form of socialism, with the result that it was as vehemently
opposed to Stalin as it was to Hitler.

Mobilization of the Right, Popular Front on the Left: France 1933–8

As in Great Britain, so in France very few observers regarded Hitler’s seizure of
power as marking a profound break in German politics. True, the socialists
and Communists were rather more alarmed at this development than the
bourgeois parties, but they still did not believe that European peace or French
security were in any immediate danger. On the parliamentary right, the alleg-
edly weak foreign policy of Aristide Briand was blamed for the rise of National
Socialism, while the moderate left in the guise of the socialists may have been
appalled at the domestic policies of Germany’s new rulers, but they continued
to place their hopes in international disarmament and in collective security
within the framework of the League of Nations. France’s Radical Socialist
prime minister, Édouard Daladier, who had come to power on 31 January
1933, only the day after Hitler had seized power, told a Senate army commis-
sion on 13 February that he did not see any worsening of his country’s interna-
tional situation as Hitler’s foreign policy was barely distinguishable from
Schleicher’s, just as Schleicher’s had been practically indistinguishable from
Brüning’s. France’s foreign minister, Joseph Paul-Boncour, who had been an
outspoken critic of the SFIO’s pacifist illusions, felt that the League of Nations
Disarmament Conference in Geneva was the best chance of preventing Hitler
from rearming.
The first unofficial contact between the heads of government in Paris and
Berlin was established by a personal friend of Daladier, Fernand de Brinon,
who was in touch with Ribbentrop, but a meeting with Hitler on 9 September
1933 produced no concrete results beyond the chancellor’s assurance that he
was bent only on peace. By the time that Brinon met Hitler again on 16
November, Germany had already announced that it was leaving the League of
Nations and would take no further part in the Disarmament Conference in
Geneva, while Daladier had taken over the War Office and been replaced as
prime minister by the Radical Socialist Albert Sarraut. With Hitler’s approval,
the outcome of the meeting was published in the form of an interview in Le
Matin on 22 November. Once again Hitler sought to allay French fears that he
was still trying to carry out his threat in Mein Kampf and settle old scores with
582 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

his country’s ancestral enemy. If the interview failed to achieve its intended
effect, this was due, not least, to the fact that only a few days earlier, Paul-
Boncour had sanctioned the publication of documents from Latin America
allegedly proving that Germany had far-reaching expansionist aspirations in
Europe and beyond.
At the end of December 1933 France had been buffeted by an incident that
shook the political system of the Third Republic to its very foundations, when
the Crédit Municipal in Bayonne collapsed in the wake of the fraudulent activi-
ties of the financier Alexandre Stavisky, who had had close links with journal-
ists and with Radical Socialist politicians. On 8 January 1934 he was discovered,
fatally injured, at his chalet near Chamonix – whether it was suicide or murder
remains unclear. Shortly afterwards two members of the cabinet of the Radical
Socialist Camille Chautemps, the colonial minister Albert Dalimier and the
justice minister Eugène Raynaldi, were forced to resign, the former for his
involvement in the Stavisky Affair, the latter for different reasons altogether. In
the eyes of the nationalist right and especially Action Française, these events
brought not only the Radical Socialists but the parliamentary system in general
into disrepute. Such was the vehemence of their campaign that Chautemps’s
government – France’s fourth cabinet since January 1933 – was forced to resign.
Chautemps was replaced by Daladier but the latter was fated to remain in
office for only a week: in order to win the support of the SFIO, he dismissed the
chief of police in Paris, Jean Chiappe, a self-declared enemy of the left and a
right-wing sympathizer, a move that was immediately met by the resignation of
the only two moderate right-wing ministers to have seats in his cabinet.
Daladier’s second cabinet was presented to the Chamber of Deputies on 6
February, when thousands of demonstrators gathered in the Place de la
Concorde not far from the Palais Bourbon, where the Chamber of Deputies
met. Summoned to take part in this show of solidarity, they were made up of
various right-wing groups, including Action Française, the Croix de Feu,
Jeunesses Patriotes and Solidarité Française. A second demonstration aimed
both at the government and at ‘Fascists’ was organized by the Communists. In
the course of the evening serious clashes broke out between demonstrators and
the police, resulting in fifteen fatalities, mostly among the demonstrators, and
over 1,500 injuries. Paris had not witnessed such bloody street battles since the
Commune in 1871.
The political right was presumably too fragmented and too disunited to be
able to aspire to more than merely toppling Daladier’s government on 6
February 1934. More ambitious goals such as abolishing the parliamentary
system and, with it, the Third Republic appear to have been beyond its reach.
But it achieved at least its immediate goal, even though the Chamber of
Deputies went ahead with its session and expressed its confidence in Daladier’s
government by 343 votes to 237. The very next day, however, the country’s
largest trade union, the CGT, called a general strike in an attempt to force the
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 583

government to act more decisively against the right-wing militias. Daladier

believed that it was crucial to form a more broadly based coalition and so,
ignoring the advice of the SFIO’s leader in parliament, Léon Blum, he resigned
on 7 February, marking an unprecedented triumph for the political right,
which through extreme extra-parliamentary pressure had brought down a
government that had just succeeded in gaining the backing of a majority of
deputies.
Appointed by the president of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, on 9 February,
the government of Gaston Doumergue, a centre-right Radical Socialist who
had been president from 1924 to 1931, was markedly more right-wing than any
of the six cabinets that had ruled France since the elections of May 1932. Apart
from himself, his cabinet included no fewer than five other former prime
ministers: Louis Barthou as foreign secretary, Albert Sarraut as home secretary,
Pierre Laval as minister for the colonies and Édouard Herriot and André
Tardieu as ministers without portfolio. The new minister of war was Marshal
Philippe Pétain, the army’s commander in chief in 1917–18, while the Ministry
of Public Works was taken over by a Neo-Socialist, Adrien Marquet. Louis
Marin, the leader of the conservative Union Républicaine Démocratique, took
over as minister of health. Apart from the Socialists and Communists, all the
parties – 402 deputies in all – expressed their confidence in Doumergue’s
government. Only 125 voted against it. Thanks to its large majority, the cabinet
was able to persuade the Chamber to grant it powers to deal with the economic
and financial crisis by means of emergency decrees, a procedure that reminded
the Socialists and others, too, of the politics pursued by Heinrich Brüning
during the final years of the Weimar Republic.
Even after 6 February it was a while before calm returned to the streets of
the capital. A Communist demonstration on 9 February led to further bloody
clashes with the police, resulting in several deaths. Three days later a general
strike began. Initially called by the SFIO, by the socialist CGT and by the Ligue
pour les Droits de l’Homme, it also received the backing of the Communists
and their own union, the CGTU, and had widespread support among the
workers. The Socialist Party and the Communist Party had originally organ-
ized separate demonstrations, but in response to pressure from the masses,
they pooled their resources. During the weeks that followed, it was above all
left-wing intellectuals who, having come together in early March under the
leadership of the Socialist anthropologist Paul Rivet to form a Comité de
Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes, urged the Socialists and Communists
to bridge the wide gulf between them.
At their party conference at Ivry in June 1934 the Communists finally
agreed to end their bitter rivalry with the Socialists and support an anti-Fascist
alliance, initially with the Socialists and then, from the autumn of 1934, with a
broad-based popular front that also included progressive Radicals. (The term
‘Front Populaire’ was first used on 9 October 1934 by the secretary general of
584 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the Communist Party, Maurice Thorez.) The alliance was due less to the polit-
ical involvement of the left-wing intelligentsia than to a change of direction by
the Communist International that stemmed in turn from a change in French
foreign policy in the form of the persistent efforts by the French foreign
minister, Louis Barthou, to work together with the Soviet Union in order to
create a bulwark against National Socialist Germany. The party secretary of the
SFIO, Paul Faure, and the party leader, Léon Blum, were initially mistrustful
of the Communists’ sudden volte-face but then, in mid-July, decided to seize
their chance and form an alliance against Fascism. The two parties reached an
agreement on 27 July 1934, committing themselves to putting an end to their
mutual sniping in order to oppose the nationalist right and all manifestations
of Fascism, in addition to countering the threatening danger of war.
By 6 February 1934 there was no longer any doubting the danger that the
political right posed for the Third Republic. This was the day on which all those
organizations that harboured right-wing elements demonstrated in favour of a
powerful state dominated not by the legislative but by the executive. Even so,
the term ‘Fascist’ can be applied to only a handful of defence leagues and other
right-wing associations. Although some of them may have fought their political
battles by violent means, nothing could have been more alien to their thinking
than a revolutionary ‘appel au peuple’ of a kind that was typical of Italian
Fascism and German National Socialism. The monarchist Action Française
and the Jeunesses Patriotes were elitist organizations in terms of their social
profile and makeup, while the followers of Casimir de La Roque’s Croix de Feu
turned out to be legalists when the situation took a more serious turn. They
were part of the older tradition of the counterrevolution or of Bonapartism and
were unwilling, therefore, to take their cue from non-French models.
According to the strikingly succinct definition offered by René Rémond,
Fascism is a ‘degenerate form of democracy’ that ‘derives its legitimacy from its
appeal to the sovereignty of the very people who transfer this sovereignty to
others’.86 By this definition, Marcel Bucard’s Francisme league, with its 10,000
members at most, was a Fascist grouping, and much the same could be said for
the even smaller Solidarité Française, which, like Francisme, was financed by
the industrialist François Coty. We could also apply the term to the far more
successful Parti Populaire Français, or PPF, which was formed in 1936 by the
former Communist Party official Jacques Doriot, who had been expelled from
his party in June 1934 when, as mayor of St-Denis, he had formed an anti-
Fascist popular front some months ahead of his party’s change of heart. But not
even the PPF was a major player in terms of mass demonstrations. The demo-
cratic traditions in the political culture of France were simply too powerful to
allow a ‘degenerate form of democracy’ to assert itself here along the same sort
of broad front as those found in both Italy and Germany.
Much against its will, it was the Doumergue government’s economic policy
that encouraged voters to migrate to the radical right and even, to a certain
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 585

extent, to the radical left. Previous cabinets had sought to implement defla-
tionary measures, but under Doumergue, whose government might best be
described as right- rather than left-wing, civil servants’ salaries and pensions
were slashed ever further, war widows lost their pensions if they remarried, and
the purchasing power of the masses was so drastically reduced that numerous
businesses were forced to close down. The number of registered unemployed,
which had stood at 243,000 in 1926, rose to over 453,000 in 1935 and to 864,000
in 1936, representing 8 per cent of the workforce. It was above all small traders
who turned to the anti-parliamentary right, while discontented civil servants
tended to drift to the left.
The only groups to benefit from the government’s higher defence spending
were a minority of employers and workers, but the additional costs exceeded
any savings to such an extent that the budget deficit, which the cabinet had
been trying to reduce, continued to increase. The government refused to
consider devaluing the franc, even though this would have helped exports and
raised tax revenues: the powers that be believed that retaining the gold standard
was a question of national honour.
Attempts to reform the constitution proved futile. Among Doumergue’s
advisers were André Tardieu and a commission whose members included the
conservative politician Paul Reynaud and René Coty, who was to be his coun-
try’s president from 1954 to 1959. Encouraged by their counsel, Doumergue
sought to strengthen the position of the prime minister, to limit parliament’s
right to approve expenditure, to grant the president the right to dissolve the
Chamber of Deputies without the approval of the Senate, to increase the powers
of the National Economic Council and to give greater independence to the
judiciary. His aims were by no means anti-parliamentary but were inspired by
the British model of a working, representative democracy. In spite of this, his
reforms were vigorously contested by the Socialists and Communists in oppo-
sition as well as by the majority of bourgeois Radical Socialists. All shades of
left-wing opinion regarded Doumergue’s reforms as no more than an attempt
to solve the country’s problems by authoritarian means.
Of all the cabinet members, it was the foreign minister, Louis Barthou,
whose achievement was the most impressive. Born in 1862, he was a member
of the conservative Alliance Démocratique and spoke fluent German, being
fond of German culture in general and of Wagner’s music dramas in particular.
But in the spirit of the old French tradition of drawing a distinction between
Germany’s intellectual and literary achievements on the one hand and its
propensity for power politics on the other, he was critical of Germany’s foreign
policy and in the wake of the First World War advocated the country’s breakup.
He was probably the only French politician to have read Mein Kampf in
the original German, with the result that he was correspondingly reluctant
to believe Hitler when the latter repeatedly insisted that his only goal was
peace.
586 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Barthou’s own overriding aim was to ensure Germany’s political isolation,

hence his attempts to achieve an ‘eastern pact’ with the Soviet Union that would
protect Poland and the states of the Little Entente – Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia
and Romania – from Germany’s expansionist aspirations. Germany, too, was
invited to join this new security arrangement, even though Barthou rightly
suspected that Berlin would reject the proposal out of hand. He also sought to
forge closer links with Fascist Italy and in that way to ensure that a power that
Hitler was currently courting could be aligned against the Reich.
Barthou’s attempts to bring his great plan to fruition involved a great deal of
travel: in April 1934 he visited Poland, where he encountered considerable
resistance on Pi5sudski’s part to an alliance with the Soviet Union, and in June
he travelled to Romania and Yugoslavia. In May, meanwhile, he had conferred
with the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, in Geneva, where he had laid
the foundations for the later Franco-Soviet mutual assistance treaty. In the
event he was not to witness the signing of the treaty on 2 May 1935, for he and
King Alexander I of Yugoslavia were assassinated by a Croat nationalist in
Marseilles on 9 October 1934. France’s most significant foreign minister of the
interwar years after Aristide Briand had been in office for only seven months.
If the French security services had been more effective, the assassination of
both the king and the foreign minister could have been averted, a situation for
which the minister of the interior, Albert Sarraut, paid with his job on 11
October. Two days later the justice minister, Henri Chéron, was forced to
resign on account of his involvement in the Stavisky scandal. Barthou was
replaced as foreign minister on 13 October by Pierre Laval, one of the finest
political minds that France has ever known. Unlike Barthou, he was from the
outset willing to make compromises with Germany, an attitude clear from his
refusal to indulge in any pro-French propaganda before the Saarland refer-
endum in January 1935. On 8 November, only a few weeks after Laval’s appoint-
ment, Édouard Herriot and the other Radical ministers resigned their cabinet
posts in protest at the constitutional plans of Doumergue and Tardieu, with the
result that Doumergue lost his parliamentary majority and was left with no
alternative but to resign.
Doumergue was succeeded on 9 November 1934 by Pierre-Étienne Flandin,
a politician from the ranks of the Alliance Démocratique, while Laval remained
foreign secretary. The new government attempted to deal with the country’s
economic crisis with the same deflationary measures as those adopted by
previous cabinets, and with the same lack of success. The drop in the birth rate
during the First World War had led to a fall in the number of recruits, with the
result that in the face of vehement protests from Socialists and Communists
alike the government decided on 15 March 1935 to extend military service
from one to two years. In turn Hitler used this as an excuse to reintroduce
general military conscription in Germany the very next day. A number of poli-
ticians such as Paul Reynaud had been impressed by the writings of the young
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 587

Charles de Gaulle, a military expert who also turned his hand to journalism
and whose highly regarded Vers l’armée de métier of 1934 advocated the forma-
tion of a professional army supported by major tank divisions and capable of
offensive warfare, but their demands foundered on the obdurate opposition of
the army generals under their new commander, Maurice Gamelin, and his
predecessor, Maxime Weygand, both of whom continued to pin their hopes on
a successful defence of the Maginot Line.
As far as France’s defence policy was concerned, a remarkable change
took place on the extreme political left in May 1935. Whereas the Socialists
continued to insist on international disarmament and collective security within
the framework of the League of Nations, the Communists now gave their clear
approval to national defence by way of their reaction to the Franco-Soviet
mutual assistance pact signed in Paris on 2 May 1935 by Laval and the Soviet
ambassador, Vladimir Petrovich Potemkin, and to a sensational communiqué
issued in the wake of Laval’s return visit to Moscow on 13 May. In this Stalin,
speaking on behalf of the Soviet Union as a whole, had declared his total
approval of the policy of national defence that France was pursuing with the
aim of keeping its armed forces at the level needed for the country’s security.
It was not long afterwards that Flandin’s seven-month period in office came
to a sudden end: on 30 May 1935 the Chamber of Deputies refused to grant the
cabinet the emergency powers that it had asked for. When Flandin resigned,
Lebrun replaced him with Laval, the latter’s third term as prime minister. Laval,
who retained the post of foreign secretary, was granted the powers that the
Chamber of Deputies had refused to give Flandin, and he used them without
delay to implement a number of decisive measures: the salaries and pensions of
civil servants were reduced by 10 per cent, while the tariffs for gas and elec-
tricity as well as rents were likewise cut by 10 per cent.
As the foreign secretary in Flandin’s government, Laval had travelled to
Rome in January 1935 in order to meet Mussolini, a man whom he much
admired and with whom he reached agreement on various matters relating to
their two nations’ foreign policy. Mussolini accepted a gradual reduction in the
privileges that Italians had enjoyed in Tunisia, while Laval offered the Italian
leader a number of territorial concessions in North Africa and in secret talks
guaranteed Mussolini a free hand in Abyssinia, a guarantee that he later claimed
was restricted to Italy’s economic impact on the Ethiopian Empire. Once the
war in Abyssinia had broken out in October 1935, Laval was prepared to go so
far towards siding with Mussolini that London suspected that he had been
bribed by the Italian leader. The pro-Italian agreement that Laval concluded
with the British foreign secretary, Samuel Hoare, in London on 8 December
foundered – as we have already observed – on the outraged reaction of the
British public.
In the Chamber of Deputies, too, Laval was sharply criticized at the end of
December, when his response to the war in Abyssinia was censured not only by
588 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Léon Blum but also by the Radical deputy Yvon Delbos and the conservative
Paul Reynaud. On 10 January 1936, the Chamber passed a law with the backing
of the right-wing parties that allowed the government the right to ban all
armed organizations of every political hue, while also increasing the severity of
the penalties for libel. When Laval hesitated to implement the relevant meas-
ures, the Radicals withdrew their support and nailed their colours to the mast
of the Popular Front that was founded on 14 July 1935 by left-wing parties,
trade unions and other left-wing organizations as well as by artists and intel-
lectuals such as Gide, Picasso, Irène Joliot-Curie and Julien Benda. On 22
January 1936, acting on the instructions of their party leadership, Herriot – an
outspoken critic of Laval’s pro-Italian and pro-German foreign policy – and
other Radical ministers announced their departure from the cabinet, which
lost its parliamentary majority and as a result was obliged to resign.
The new cabinet under the Radical Socialist Albert Saurrat was intended
from the outset as a caretaker government until the elections in May 1936. The
former prime minister, Pierre-Étienne Flandin, became foreign minister.
Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, the first secretary general of the Communist Party,
who had returned to the SFIO in 1924 only to part company with it again on
account of his increasingly right-wing views, was appointed labour minister,
while the aviation minister was the Neo-Socialist Marcel Déat. The resultant
shift to the left may have been slight, but it was sufficient to ensure the support
of the Socialists in the confidence vote, when the Communists abstained. It
was the first time that they had done so in a vote of this kind.
The Chamber of Deputies ratified the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact
on 27 February 1936, with the Senate following suit on 4 March. The pact
remained a contentious issue among right-wing groups and was used by Hitler
very soon afterwards to justify his occupation of the Rhineland. Unlike Laval,
Sarraut was vehement in his opposition to the extreme right and in February
ordered the disbandment of the Camelots du Roi, the paramilitary wing of
Action Française, a move he was able to justify following an attack on Léon
Blum by followers of Action Française on 13 February. The group’s founder
and principal ideologue, Charles Maurras, was accused of incitement to murder
after he had publicly demanded in April 1935 that Blum be ‘shot in the back’ as
a ‘naturalized German Jew’. He was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment,
which he served in 1937 – not that this prevented the Académie Française from
electing him one of its members in 1938.
The hate campaigns and violent attacks by the nationalist right played a
considerable role in strengthening opposition to them on the political left. By
January 1936 the Popular Front was being run by the Rassemblement Populaire.
The Front’s programme proposed the defence of civil liberties and peace, while
remaining content to promise to improve the conditions of the working classes,
to reduce the length of the working week, to provide public welfare for the
unemployed and to set up a state-run wheat board. Although the SFIO also
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 589

wanted the banking industry and a number of other industries to be national-

ized, this proposal was rejected by the Communists on tactical grounds and by
the Radicals for reasons of inner conviction. Only the idea of nationalizing the
armaments industry was supported by all the partners in the Popular Front.
The largest umbrella organizations of the French trade unions – the socialist
CGT and the Communist CGTU – met in Toulouse at the beginning of March
1936, when the CGT immediately made demands that the Popular Front was
unable to make on its own: public works to deal with unemployment, a forty-
hour week and a comprehensive programme of nationalization. If the
Communists had had their way, not only would the trade unions have united in
common cause, so too would the PCF and SFIO, but the socialists were
mistrustful of this sudden desire for peace and harmony and settled instead for
an electoral pact between all the parties that made up the Popular Front.
The Communists’ political volte-face included an ostentatious show of
support for the tricolour flag, for the Marseillaise and for the Jacobin tradition
of the French Revolution. Their electoral rhetoric, which was aimed at all social
groups and designed to achieve a state of national and social reconciliation,
culminated in a radio address by the party’s general secretary, Maurice Thorez,
on 17 April 1936 in which he declared that his party – a party of laymen – was
willing to hold out its hand to Catholics, blue- and white-collar workers and
farmers because they were their friends and beset by the same cares as they
themselves were. But Thorez went even further in soliciting the support of the
right: ‘We hold out our hand to you, the man who serves voluntarily, and to the
veteran who has become a member of the Croix de Feu, because you are a son
of our people and, like us, you suffer from disorder and corruption and, like us,
you want to prevent our country from descending into ruin and catastrophe.’87
The forthcoming elections for the Chamber of Deputies were one of the
reasons why France did not react more robustly to Germany’s occupation of
the demilitarized Rhineland on 7 March 1936. Although Sarraut had the
backing of the minister without portfolio, Joseph Paul-Boncour, in wanting to
take immediate military action to punish Berlin for its renewed breach of the
terms of the Treaty of Versailles, they were vigorously opposed by the minister
for war, Louis Maurin, by the chief of the general staff, Maurice Gamelin, and
by the minister for aviation, Marcel Déat. Not a single member of the govern-
ment was willing to support the idea of calling up all of the country’s reservists,
a move that even they themselves believed was necessary if France was to
provide a show of military strength. Such a step might well have sparked serious
riots and seemed to represent an incalculable risk only weeks before the
planned elections. As a result, a broad consensus that stretched from the
extreme right to the extreme left was quickly reached: France must do all in its
power to avoid the dangers of a European war.
The political left presented a far more united front than the centre ground
and the political right, and this was reflected in the election results, the Popular
590 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Front emerging as the clear winner from the two rounds of elections on 26
April and 3 May 1936. In the final runoff, the most successful candidate from
the left-wing parties – the SFIO, the PCF and the small Union Socialiste
Républicaine – was consistently supported by the followers of the other part-
ners in the electoral pact, so that the Front gained 369 seats compared with the
236 of the centre and right-wing parties. In all, 5.13 million voters backed the
left, while 4.3 million voted for the right in the widest sense of the term. But it
was the Communists who recorded the biggest gains, their new line in patri-
otism allowing them to break new ground and appeal to new groups of voters:
in comparison to 1932, they won almost 700,000 additional votes, polling
almost 1.5 million votes in all. The Socialists, conversely, lost ground, polling
37,000 fewer votes, while the Radicals suffered considerably more substantial
losses – 360,000 fewer votes than in 1932. The right-wing parties polled 84,000
fewer votes. For the first time in its history, the SFIO, with 146 seats, was the
biggest party, followed by the Radical Socialists with 115 and by the Communists
with seventy-two.
In the wake of the election results, only one party – the Socialists – could be
asked to lead the government, and only one politician – the leader of the SFIO,
Léon Blum – could be invited to become prime minister. From his point of
view, the victory of the Popular Front did not mean that the proletariat was
anywhere close to its goal of acquiring power, but it did at least provide the
conditions necessary for the proletariat’s exercise of power within the frame-
work of the capitalist system, an exercise du pouvoir that went beyond any mere
participation in a bourgeois-led coalition. Ever since the party conference in
Tours in December 1920, when he had effectively become the leader of the
SFIO in the Chamber of Deputies, Blum had repeatedly rejected the idea of
such a coalition, believing that it would lead to ideological ‘confusion’. An elec-
toral pact with the Radicals and parliamentary support for a left-wing bour-
geois government were a different matter, since they were not bound up with
the danger of any such ‘confusion’, which explains why the SFIO had reached
such agreements whenever it was possible to do so. But now that the SFIO was
the biggest party and the Socialists and Communists were together far stronger
than the Radicals, it seemed not only tenable to assume responsibility for
government, but politically expedient as well.
In keeping with the constitution, a new government could be formed only
after the new Chamber of Deputies had met for its constituent session, which
traditionally took place some four weeks after the elections. This period
between the elections and the formation of its first Popular Front government
was filled with the worst wave of strikes and unrest in France’s history. Within
a week of the elections the first riots broke out in Le Havre and Toulouse. Three
days later the strikes spread to Paris as well. Here it was the metal industry that
suffered the most. Walkouts were by no means the only problem, for factories
were occupied all over France, with the striking workers demanding higher
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 591

wages, shorter working hours and better conditions in the workplace, espe-
cially in the areas of hygiene and safety. René Rémond has compared the
‘cahiers de revendications’ in which the striking workers listed their grievances
with the ‘cahiers de doléances’ of 1789.88 But these grievances were not revolu-
tionary in character, for what the workers were demanding were the sort of
social reforms that had long been achieved in other countries, most notably
Scandinavia.
The demonstrations were for the most part spontaneous, having been
organized by neither the CGT nor the PCF. The only active role was played by
the few surviving anarchist-syndicalist trade unionists, Trotskyites and
members of the extreme left wing of the SFIO associated with Marceau Pivert,
the head of the Fédération de la Seine, who on 27 May announced ‘Tout est
possible’ in the pages of the Socialists’ official daily newspaper, Le Populaire de
Paris. Two days later L’Humanité felt it necessary to counter such revolutionary
exuberance: ‘Tout n’est pas possible’ ran the headline of the Communist Party
newspaper. In early June a second wave of strikes began, reaching their climax
later that month with 12,000 strikes involving some 1.8 million workers.
Large sections of the middle classes reacted to the events of May and June
1936 by fearing a Communist revolution and a repeat of the Paris Commune of
1871, resulting in a massive flight of capital out of the country: within a month
the Banque de France had lost 1,500 million francs. The historian Charles
Bloch has described as follows the mood among the bourgeoisie during these
weeks:

Parallels were drawn between the strike movement in France and the events
in Russia in 1917 and in Italy in 1919–20, when the revolutionary workers
and peasants had likewise occupied the factories and landed estates, or lati-
fundia, but the people who drew these parallels overlooked the fundamental
difference between the real revolutionary masses in Russia who were
striving to dispossess the major landowners and industrialists and the
French workers, whose peaceful occupation of factories was designed to
provide them with a lever guaranteeing the introduction of the reforms that
they were demanding, without – at least for the present – calling into ques-
tion the principle underpinning the capitalist economic system.

Bloch saw a link between the early summer of 1936 and the events of 1940: in
their search for a ‘saviour from the Communist danger’, sections of the French
bourgeoisie even turned to the Third Reich for help. ‘More than anything else,
the events of May and June 1936 created the mentality that was to lead in 1940
to the acceptance of the German occupation and of Marshal Pétain’s authori-
tarian regime.’89
The government which until 4 June 1936 was responsible for maintaining
law and order in the country was headed by Albert Sarraut. At the insistence of
592 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the Communists, it did everything in its power to avoid exacerbating an already

tense situation, with the result that the police made no attempt to interfere in
the strike action or to clear the occupied factories. But the Communists turned
down Blum’s invitation to join his cabinet, and on 14 May the PCF declared
that if they were loyally and unreservedly to support a Socialist-run govern-
ment, they could in that way serve the people better than by joining the cabinet
and ‘providing a pretext for campaigns by the enemies of the people designed
to induce panic and confusion among the population at large’.90
The Communists’ reasons for refusing to play an active part in government
were presumably no mere excuse. Rather, their decision was justified on the
grounds of the country’s current foreign policy, for Communist ministers
would inevitably have alarmed the bourgeoisie and thus made it more difficult
for France and the Soviet Union to work together more closely, as Moscow was
hoping would be the case. But another consideration would also have played a
role here: the Popular Front government could pursue a reformist agenda but
revolution was out of the question, with the result that not only was there no
need for the PCF to enter the cabinet, but such involvement would have been
counterproductive. As a party that merely kept the Popular Front in office, the
Communists found it easier not to have to accept direct responsibility for deci-
sions that they knew were bound to fall far short of the expectations of many,
if not most, of their supporters. The fact that the PCF’s tactics were respected
by large sections of the population is clear from its growth in membership,
which rose from 50,000 in 1933 to 280,000 by the end of 1936.
Not until the evening of 4 June 1936, only hours before the constituent
assembly of the Chamber of Deputies, was Blum finally able to present his
cabinet to the president of the Republic, Albert Lebrun. The foreign secretary
was the Radical Socialist Yvon Delbos, the home secretary the Socialist Roger
Salengro, who committed suicide only a few months later when falsely accused
by the far right of having been a deserter in 1915 and having defected to the
enemy. He was replaced in November 1936 by the Socialist Marx Dormoy. The
Radical Socialist Édouard Daladier took over at defence, while the Socialist
Vincent Auriol, who was to be the president of the French Republic from 1947
to 1954, became minister of finance. Another member of the SFIO, Charles
Spinasse, became the first Socialist minister of commerce in the Third Republic.
Since women did not have the vote in France, there was something distinctly
sensational about the appointment of three female undersecretaries of state:
the feminist Cécile Brunschvicg for education, the Socialist teacher Suzanne
Lacorre for the protection of children and adolescents, and the physicist
Irène Joliot-Curie for scientific research. Blum’s cabinet was also the first to
include undersecretaries of state for leisure and physical education as well as
for sport.
The first great challenge facing the Popular Front government was the need
to end the strikes and factory occupations that were paralysing the country. On
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 593

7 June Blum convened a meeting of the main bodies representing employers and
employees, the Confédération Nationale de la Production Française and the
Confédération Générale du Travail. It met at the Hôtel Matignon, which since
1935 had been the prime minister’s seat of office. By that same night the partners
to the negotiations had signed the ‘Accord Matignon’, the contents of which were
not dissimilar to those agreed to in Germany in November 1918 in the context
of the Central Cooperative Union of Employers’ and Employees’ Organizations
in Trade and Industry. Its key points were the immediate introduction of free
collective bargaining (this had existed in theory since 1919, but few employees
had benefited from it), the freedom to organize and join trade unions, the elec-
tion of workers’ delegates in factories and other places of employment and a
general increase in wages of between 7 per cent and 15 per cent, the average
being 12 per cent. Parliament was left to settle the questions of the forty-hour
week and paid leave. The workers were required to leave the occupied factories
and resume work, but there would be no sanctions against them.
The Accord Matignon did not end the strikes and factory sit-ins, for in spite
of all the appeals by Blum and the leader of the CGT, Léon Jouhaux, many
workers refused to abandon the sites that they had occupied as a way of
ensuring better conditions for themselves. The strikes began to crumble only
when Thorez, acting in the name of the Communists, called on the strikers to
suspend their actions on 11 June, although even by July there were still 1,688
strikes in progress, involving 176,947 striking workers.
The meeting at the Hôtel Matignon had restricted itself to points on which
employers and workers could agree, and it was left to parliament to enact the
socio-political changes that the Third Republic needed to implement if it was to
catch up with the rest of Europe. By June Blum had already proposed the first
basic laws, guaranteeing workers the right to two weeks’ paid leave, a reduction
of the working week from forty-eight to forty hours made up, as far as possible,
of five days of eight hours each, a legal basis to free collective bargaining and an
increase in the salaries and pensions of civil servants.
Later that summer further laws were passed banning child labour (except
for agricultural work), raising the school-leaving age to fourteen, nationalizing
the armaments industry, implementing a large-scale programme of job crea-
tion schemes in the public sector, extending the provision of family welfare
and disability pensions, and radically reorganizing the Banque de France,
which was now more closely tied to the executive and legislative power of the
state and renamed the Banque de la France in order to underline its character
as France’s national bank. In addition, a state-run wheat board was set up, the
Office National Interprofessional du Blé, to regulate the production, distribu-
tion and price of grain, with a monopoly on exports and imports. A further law
was passed in December 1936, providing for obligatory arbitration in wage
disputes. The main areas of social policy that still needed to be addressed were
unemployment benefit and retirement insurance.
594 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

It was not long before the country began to feel the economic consequences
of the reduction in the working week, including the new provisions for two
weeks’ paid leave and an increase in the level of wages and salaries. Employers
now had to pay their staff on average 25 per cent to 35 per cent more than previ-
ously; production fell, while prices rose; France’s international competitiveness
fell; the gold reserves of the Banque de la France sank to the legal minimum of
30,000 million marks since the government needed advance funds; and the
flight of capital continued. The free convertibility of the franc into gold was
suspended on 26 September 1936. The franc lost between 25 per cent and 35
per cent of its value in the wake of the transition to a flexible rate of exchange.
Since the franc had long been overvalued, a number of politicians, including
Paul Reynaud, had repeatedly demanded its devaluation, but hitherto without
success. The reforms that were undertaken during the summer of 1936 meant
that the devaluation of the franc turned out to be greater than would have been
the case in previous years. Production rose somewhat in the wake of the actions
of 26 September, but French industry remained uncompetitive on the interna-
tional market. Unemployment figures fell by only 20 per cent to 25 per cent, far
below the expectations of the Popular Front’s experts, who were influenced by
Roosevelt’s New Deal and by the doctrines of John Maynard Keynes. Wholesale
prices continued to rise, and since Blum’s government was reluctant to intro-
duce currency controls, capital continued to flow out of the country.
Blum’s government had been in office for only six weeks when Nationalist
officers staged a putsch in Spain on 17/18 July and triggered the Spanish Civil
War. The Popular Front was sympathetic to the Frente Popular that had ruled
in Madrid since 16 February 1936, and when the Spanish government secretly
asked Paris to help it with weapons, Blum’s first impulse was to comply, not
least on account of the existing trade agreement between the two countries. But
both the president of the Republic and the leaders of the Chamber of Deputies
and of the Senate warned him in no uncertain terms not to become involved in
the Spanish conflict, arguing that it could easily spill over into France and
perhaps even lead to war in Europe as a whole.
The leader of the Chamber of Deputies was Édouard Herriot, and he spoke
for most of the members of his party. Within the cabinet, too, the majority of
Radicals, including the foreign secretary Yvon Delbos, and the defence minister,
Édouard Daladier, were opposed to any such intervention. Only the aviation
minister, Pierre Cot, and the minister for national education, Jean Zay, supported
the idea. There was also opposition from leading officials at the foreign ministry.
The nationalist right fought a vigorous campaign against French intervention,
and their campaign presumably influenced many officers. The British refusal to
become involved also played a major role here: when Blum and Delbos visited
London in late July, Baldwin and his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, made it
clear that if France became embroiled in the Spanish Civil War, it could not
count on the support of the United Kingdom.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 595

Blum was convinced that any responsible French foreign policy must be
based on close cooperation with London. As a result, he had no choice but to
adopt the line taken by Britain and all the major European powers and not
become involved in the conflict. By the end of August 1936 twenty-seven
European states, including Italy and Germany, had signed the declaration
of non-intervention drawn up by Britain and France. In London, a non-
intervention committee was set up in the second week of September: its
members included representatives not only of France and Britain but also of
Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. Since neither Berlin nor Rome had any
intention of abiding by the principle of non-interference and since Moscow
had soon begun to play an active role in the conflict, Britain and France were in
the end the only major European powers to adopt the motto enshrined in the
treaty. And even here, Great Britain was far more consistent in its approach
than Paris.
Since his policy of non-intervention was evidently not working, Blum for a
time considered resigning as prime minister but was eventually persuaded to
stay by the president of the Second International, the Belgian socialist leader
Louis de Brouckère, and also by the Spanish ambassador. During the months
that followed – and in spite of the official ban on arms exports in place since 8
August 1936 – the Spanish Republic received aeroplanes from France, some of
which arrived via Mexico, while the writer André Malraux assumed command
of a French air force squadron called España, even though he himself was
unable to fly. The government in Paris also turned a blind eye to the recruit-
ment of volunteers for the International Brigades that fought on the side of the
Spanish Republic and that were made up for the most part of French recruits.
It also operated a very open policy towards its border with Spain. But the
Popular Front was too internally divided to be able to do any more than this.
The Communists, meanwhile, demanded far greater commitment from France
and finally distanced themselves from Blum’s government on 6 December 1936
by abstaining during a confidence vote following a major debate on foreign
policy in the Chamber of Deputies.
The French right saw in the Spanish Civil War a welcome opportunity to
increase its attacks on the Popular Front, complaining that Blum’s government
was pursuing an ideological policy that was threatening to plunge the country
into a European war. Domestically, too, the opposition found plenty of reasons
to lambast the political left. On 18 June, Blum was able to use the law of 10
January 1936 to disband the anti-parliamentarian right-wing leagues, including
de La Roque’s Croix de Feu, which had in the meantime spawned the Syndicats
Professionnels Français, associations organized along the lines of trade unions,
soon afterwards forming a political party, the Parti Social Français, or PSF, which
had members all over France, more than half of whom, however, lived in the
Paris region. By the beginning of 1937 it had more than one million members.
Although it was emphatically right-wing, anti-Marxist and anti-parliamentary
596 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

in its rhetoric, it remained to all intents and purposes within the framework of
the parliamentary system and existing legal provision.
In that respect it differed from another party that had been summoned into
existence in the summer of 1936, the aforementioned Parti Populaire Français,
or PPF, of Jacques Doriot, the mayor of St-Denis and former leader of the
Communists. With its demand for a corporative state, the PPF could be likened
to the Italian Fascist party, and the same was true of its deliberate targeting of
workers, its radical nationalism and its use of physical violence against its
sworn enemies. At no point, however, does it appear to have had more than
100,000 members, the vast majority of whom were workers and farmers.
No other right-wing party was as openly Fascist as Doriot’s, no other was as
massively supported by industry and finance, no other enjoyed such widespread
journalistic backing, including even the respected dailies Le Figaro and Le
Temps, and no other attracted so many prominent intellectuals such as the
writers Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Alfred Fabre-Luce and Bertrand de Jouvenel,
all of whom left the party in the autumn of 1938 after the Munich agreement to
reduce the size of Czechoslovakia. Contributors to Le Combat, the official news-
paper of the Jeune Droite, including Robert Brasillach, Georges Blond and
Thierry Maulnier, also wrote for Doriot’s paper, L’Émancipation Nationale, while
La Rochelle and de Jouvenel – both of them members of the Central Committee
of the PPF – also published in Le Combat. Among the party’s younger activists
were two who were later to become better known, the political scientist Maurice
Duverger and the bourgeois rebel Pierre Poujade.
Various right-wing journals such as Candide and, above all, Gringoire
conducted a vicious campaign against the Popular Front, Gringoire in partic-
ular unleashing a ferocious attack on the home secretary, Roger Salengro, and
reaching a wide readership with its print-run of 600,000 copies. Blum was the
preferred target of the anti-Semites in Action Française, who claimed that his
real name was Karfunkelstein, that he had been born in Bessarabia and that he
was following orders from Moscow. Writing in his own journal, Je Suis Partout,
on 13 June 1936, the historian Pierre Gaxotte felt that France was faced with
two alternatives: Bolshevism or national revolution. A year later an even more
radical anti-Semite, Robert Brasillach, took over as the paper’s senior editor,
while its prominent authors included the fanatical anti-Jewish writer Louis-
Ferdinand Céline, whose virulently anti-Semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un
massacre was published at the end of 1937.
In the autumn of 1936 the right wing of the leading industrial organization,
which had always been opposed to the Accord Matignon, staged a revolt against
the organization’s leadership and in an act of defiance changed its name from
the Confédération Nationale de la Production Française to the Confédération
Générale du Patronat Français (General Confederation of French Employers).
A new leader was appointed in October 1936 in the person of the spokesman
of the younger employers, Claude Grignoux, who taught jurisprudence and
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 597

admired all Fascist regimes, believing that liberalism was outdated. Specifically
he championed a corporative state based on the Italian model. Under his lead-
ership the CGPF adopted an outspokenly anti-Communist line directed against
the Popular Front.
On 31 October 1936 five French cardinals called on the country’s Catholics
to reject what they termed its ‘practical atheism’ and combat the ‘virus of revo-
lution’. Meanwhile, the military spawned La Cagoule, a group of conspirators
hostile to the Republic and responsible for the murders of the two Italian anti-
Fascists Carlo and Nello Rosselli in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne in July 1937. The stra-
tegic goal of La Cagoule was the violent overthrow of the present regime and
the establishment of a military dictatorship. The conspiracy was uncovered in
November 1937 and its leaders were arrested on the orders of the home secre-
tary, Marx Dormoy. At the end of 1936 the actions of the extreme right were
not yet a serious threat to the Republic, but within months of its coming to
power the Popular Front found itself dealing with a countermovement that
showed every sign of increasing in strength.
For all its ideological antagonism to National Socialism, the Popular Front
tried to maintain diplomatic relations with Germany, much as Germany sought
to remain on good terms with France. On 28 August 1936, four days after
Germany had introduced a compulsory two-year period of military service,
Blum received a visit from Hjalmar Schacht, the president of the Reichsbank
and finance minister, who was acting as Hitler’s envoy. Blum introduced
himself as ‘a Marxist and a Jew’ but stressed that in spite of German anti-
Communism and French anti-Fascism, the two countries could still come to
some ‘general agreement’. Schacht demanded the return of the German colo-
nies and the annulment of the Treaty of Versailles. If these conditions were met,
Germany would return to the League of Nations and would consider new
disarmament talks. Blum passed on Schacht’s colonial demands to the Foreign
Office in London, but the meeting had no practical consequences.
Nor was there any rapprochement with Fascist Italy. When Mussolini made
a conciliatory move in that direction in January 1937, he tied it to the condition
that France should leave Spain to Franco, prompting Blum to reject his demand
out of hand. Blum also declined to form a Franco-Soviet military alliance
proposed by the Russian defence commissar, Marshal Kliment Yefremovich
Voroshilov, during a visit to Moscow by the chief of the general staff, General
Victor-Henri Schweisguth. If Blum had responded positively to Russia’s initia-
tive – and Schweisguth’s reaction to it was entirely negative – relations with
Great Britain would have been compromised, a risk that Blum was unwilling to
contemplate.
Most of France’s allies reacted negatively to the change of government in
Paris in June 1936. Even before this date, Romania and Yugoslavia had already
begun to draw closer to Germany, and the formation of a Popular Front govern-
ment merely served to confirm their growing alienation from France. In the
598 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

case of Poland, which under Pi5sudski’s authoritarian rule was progressively

forming closer ties with Germany, there were also ideological reasons for the
country’s change of direction under its pro-German foreign minister, Józef
Beck. Belgium, which in October 1920 had formed a military alliance with
France, stressed its independence in the wake of Germany’s unopposed viola-
tion of the terms of the Treaties of Locarno, but opposition to the Popular Front
also persuaded King Leopold III of the Belgians to end the military alliance
with France on 14 October 1936, effectively signalling a return to his country’s
former neutrality. On 30 January 1937 Hitler declared Germany’s intention of
guaranteeing Belgian independence, and a treaty to that effect was signed on
13 October 1937. Six months earlier, on 24 April, the Western Powers had
already declared that they would support Belgium in the event of an attack.
If French politics lurched to the left at this time, there was still no need to
fear that fewer efforts would be made in the field of defence, a fear fomented by
the earlier anti-military rhetoric of the Socialists and Communists. Blum
supported Daladier’s call for an increase in military expenditure to 14,000
million francs for four years and in March 1937, with the broad agreement of
the Chamber of Deputies, he arranged for a large defence loan. On 14 October
1936 he received a visit from de Gaulle and was informed of the latter’s ideas for
a professional body of armoured troops and a French offensive strategy in the
event of Germany’s attacking Poland or Czechoslovakia. Blum was impressed,
but the same was not true of the chief of the general staff, Maurice Gamelin, or
of his still influential predecessor, Maxime Weygand, or, finally, of Philippe
Pétain. As a result, France’s armaments policy remained defensive in character,
while the army continued to be convinced that Germany was incapable of
breaching the Maginot Line.
By the beginning of 1937 Blum believed that France’s economy was so
precarious that on 13 February he ordered a suspension of all socio-political
reforms and an end to all further wage increases. There followed measures
designed to reassure private business, including a return to the free trade in
gold. The left wing of the SFIO was outraged, Marceau Pivert speaking of a
capitulation to militarism and to the world of banking and resigning in protest
from his various posts in the prime minister’s general secretariat. Anger among
the workers increased when the police, attempting to prevent a clash between
the left and de La Roque’s PSF at Clichy on 16 March, fired into the crowd,
killing five protesters and injuring around 200. Meanwhile, wild-cat strikes
were increasing in number, threatening to disrupt the 1937 Paris World Fair. By
the time the fair finally opened, more than three weeks late, on 24 May 1937, the
site was still covered in building rubble. Although the German and Soviet pavil-
ions were complete, those of France and many other nations were not. Foreign
visitors included Hjalmar Schacht, who used the occasion to confer with Blum
again, but the meeting was just as unproductive as their first encounter in
August 1936.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 599

By the middle of 1937, Blum and his government could no longer avoid the
conclusion that their attempts to combat the country’s worsening economic
situation had failed to produce any tangible results, and on 15 June Blum asked
parliament to grant him emergency powers intended to allow the government
to introduce a new tax on property and counter the flight of capital. The
Chamber of Deputies voted to accept this proposal by 346 votes to 247, but it
was thrown out by the Senate on 21 June by 168 votes to ninety-six. Most of the
Radical senators voted against the measure. The following day Blum announced
his resignation.
Blum’s departure threw a spotlight on the collapse of the Popular Front but
did not yet spell its definitive end. On 22 June the country’s president, Albert
Lebrun, invited the Radical politician Camille Chautemps to form a govern-
ment and to return to a post he had already held in 1930 and again in 1933–4.
Blum became deputy prime minister, while most of the ministers from his first
cabinet retained their posts. The Socialist minister of commerce was replaced
by Fernand Chapsal of the Radicals, while the Socialist finance minister,
Vincent Auriol, moved to the Ministry of Justice. The finance department was
taken over by Georges Bonnet from the right wing of the Radical Party, whose
members also included the minister for public works, Henri Queuille, and the
minister without portfolio, Albert Sarraut. The three female undersecretaries of
state were replaced. Whereas the Socialists had had a slight numerical advan-
tage in Blum’s cabinet, it was now the Radicals who held the upper hand. The
new government was clearly to the right of its predecessor.
Among the cabinet’s first measures was the definitive abandonment of the
gold standard on 1 July 1937, resulting in a further devaluation of the franc
amounting to around 25 per cent. With the agreement of the Communists, new
taxes were levied, and the French railways were placed under the state control
of the newly created Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer (SNCF). French
foreign policy also underwent a shift to the right, when Delbos urged the Czech
government to be more accommodating towards Germany on the question of
the Sudetenland. When Schacht paid a further visit to Paris in November 1937,
the foreign secretary, Georges Bonnet, spoke in support of closer cooperation
between Germany and Austria and of far-reaching autonomy for the Sudeten
region. Chautemps made no secret of his anti-Communism, a view shared by
large sections of the French public in the wake of the Moscow show trials. At the
same time the prime minister stressed his willingness to work with Berlin.
By the latter part of 1937 the country’s worsening economic situation
resulted in increasingly vocal calls for an abandonment of the forty-hour week.
At the same time, there was a new wave of strikes. In January, when the govern-
ment asked the Chamber of Deputies to grant it extraordinary powers to stabi-
lize the currency, the Communists made it known that they would no longer
abstain in any future votes, whereupon Chautemps declared his party’s pact
with the PCF at an end. The SFIO interpreted this to mean the end of the
600 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Popular Front alliance and withdrew its ministers from the cabinet. Chautemps
resigned on 15 June 1938.
Four days later he formed a new government that excluded Socialists and
included only Radicals and two members of the independent Union Socialiste
Républicaine. But on 21 January both the SFIO and PCF voted for the new
cabinet in order to avoid an even greater shift to the right. In the event, however,
Chautemps’s new government remained in office for only two months. By 10
March, when a vote of no confidence took place in the Chamber, the Austrian
crisis was coming to a head – Hitler marched into Austria two days later – and
Chautemps was replaced by his predecessor. Blum failed to form a government
of national unity embracing both Thorez and Reynaud and instead formed a
cabinet that resembled his first one in terms of its political makeup. Blum
himself took over the Finance Ministry in addition to the premiership, and
Paul-Boncour of the Union Socialiste Républicaine became foreign secretary. A
young left-wing Radical politician, Pierre Mendès-France, who was to be prime
minister in 1954–5, became undersecretary at the Treasury.
Although Blum’s second cabinet remained in office for only a short period
of time, it witnessed an important event in terms of France’s foreign policy. On
15 March, immediately after German troops had marched into Austria, Paul-
Boncour assured Prague that if Germany were to attack Czechoslovakia, France
would meet its obligations under the Franco-Czech Treaty of January 1924 and
come to its assistance. In early April Blum asked for extra powers to deal with
his country’s economic crisis, including the introduction of a capital gains tax
and foreign exchange controls, and won a majority in the Chamber of Deputies,
but at the insistence of the conservative Joseph Caillaux the Senate voted
against him on 7 April, prompting Blum to resign the very next day. If the left
wing of the SFIO associated with Pivert and the Fédération de la Seine had had
its way, then the prime minister would have opposed the decision of the first
chamber and appealed to the masses to resist the obstructive policies of the
Senate, by force if necessary. Although this would have involved no violation of
the constitution, it would in Blum’s view have amounted to a declaration of
war. He did not think that the conditions were yet ready for such a confronta-
tion in the spring of 1938 and as a result he sought to avoid a trial of strength
with the upper house.
The collapse of Blum’s second cabinet marked the end of the Popular Front,
a development that was the result not only of the massive pressure from the
right that all left-wing governments had had to confront since June 1936 but
also of the inexperience of the Socialists in dealing with questions of govern-
ment and administration. With the exception of the war years from 1914 to
1917, the SFIO had not been represented in cabinet, and so their ideas on the
exercise of power were correspondingly abstract, a shortcoming that found
expression in many laws, several of which were enacted with precipitate haste.
The doctrinaire ‘no’ to the mere idea of a ministerial role in government
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 601

propounded by Blum as a theoretical Marxist and a practising anti-revolutionary

demanded its price when he finally abandoned it in the early summer of 1936.
Even so, the work of the various Popular Front governments was by no
means futile, for they helped France to advance along the road to a modern
social state, while also aiding the extreme left in the form of the Communists
in their attempts to become more fully integrated into the political system of
the Third Republic and in that way keeping the extreme right in check. If
France avoided sliding into revolution and civil war in the wake of the serious
economic crisis of 1936, then this was thanks to those elements in the workers’
movement and on the left wing of the bourgeoisie that were able to learn from
the past. In a sense France spent the years between 1936 and 1938 catching up
with the ‘class compromise’ that had been brought to Germany by the revolu-
tion of 1918–19. Of course, this compromise was no more permanent in France
than it was in Germany, for in both cases the coalition that had been based on
social understanding soon foundered on inner contradictions and on the loss
of a parliamentary majority. In Germany this stage had already been reached
by June 1920, whereas in France it was not until the spring of 1938 that cracks
began to appear. Even so, the decisions that were taken at a time of increasingly
reformist politics continued to resonate on both sides of the Rhine, in many
cases retaining their impact right down to the present day.
Blum was succeeded on 10 April 1938 by the Radical Socialist Édouard
Daladier, who became head of the government for the third time in his career,
remaining in office until 20 March 1940 – an unusually long period by
the standards of the Third Republic. His cabinet was made up of Radical
Socialists, mostly from the right of the party, and of members of the Union
Socialiste Républicaine. The new foreign minister was the right-wing Georges
Bonnet, who was widely regarded as an advocate of appeasement towards
Germany. Both chambers granted Daladier the sort of sweeping powers that
the Senate had denied Blum. In order to avoid destabilizing the country any
further, both the SFIO and the PCF voted for Daladier in the confidence vote.
The extreme left wing of the Socialists – those associated with Pivert and his
Fédération de la Seine – objected to their party’s parliamentary support of the
government and were expelled from the SFIO at its annual conference in
Rouen in June 1938, a reminder to the remaining left-wing members to keep
in line.
As the summer ran its course, it became increasingly clear that Daladier
intended to use his powers not to further the reforms of the Popular Front but
in some cases to reverse them. When he announced on the radio on 21 August
that France needed to get back to work and that the length of the working week
in the armaments industry was to be increased, the Union Socialiste
Républicaine’s two cabinet ministers, Paul Ramadier at the Ministry of Labour,
and Ludovic-Oscar Frossard at the Ministry of Public Works, resigned, and
although their replacements came from the same party, they held rather more
602 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

moderate views than Ramadier and Frossard had done. From now on wild-cat
strikes were met with police brutality and factory sit-ins no longer tolerated.
The CGT protested and the SFIO and PCF demanded Daladier’s resignation,
but the government was able to continue to function thanks to the support of
the centre and right-wing parties.
Faced with the gravity of the international situation, the Socialists and
Communists were reluctant to mobilize the masses in an anti-parliamentary
revolt, with the result that France enjoyed a period of domestic stability, making
it easier for Daladier’s government to pursue policies towards Germany that
were aimed at peaceful understanding at practically any price.

Battlefield of Extremes: The Spanish Civil War 1936–9

On the afternoon of 17 July 1936 a military putsch in Melilla – an enclave
belonging to the Spanish protectorate of Morocco – marked the start of the
Spanish Civil War, which began a few hours earlier than planned. The action was
triggered unintentionally by security forces loyal to the Republic, when their
attempt to arrest the conspirators was thwarted by the defection of a unit of the
Spanish Foreign Legion which, called upon to help, decided to support the
putsch instead. Within hours the rebel officers had taken control of the coastal
fortress of Melilla. The Nationalist centre of the pronunciamiento associated with
General Emilio Mola thereupon gave the signal for other mutinies in mainland
Spain. After Melilla, the next town to fall into Nationalist hands was Tetuán, the
headquarters of the high commissioner for Spanish Morocco, followed in turn
by Ceuta. The British Neo-Tory Douglas Jerrold had earlier sent a light aircraft
to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, ensuring that one of the conspirators who
had been exiled to Tenerife, General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, who was
to assume command of the African army, was able to reach Tetuán on 18 July.
While still in Las Palmas, Franco had issued a radio appeal calling on divisional
commanders and navy chiefs to support the uprising.
On the Spanish mainland many garrisons joined the insurrectionists after
18 July. General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano y de Serra was entrusted with the
task of reducing Andalusia to Nationalist control, an aim he achieved in Seville,
Córdoba and Cádiz after often violent fighting with troops loyal to the Republic
as well as with striking workers. In Granada, where the commanding general,
Miguel Campins, hesitated for two days before submitting to Queipo, artillery
was used against the working-class quarter of Albaicín. Among the victims on
the Republican side was the poet Federico García Lorca, the author of Blood
Wedding, who was shot on the morning of 18 August. Campins paid for his
vacillation with his death: on Queipo’s orders he was court-martialled,
sentenced to death and executed in the face of Franco’s wishes.
The uprising on the part of Nationalist elements in the armed forces was
successful not only in Morocco and parts of Andalusia but also in Galicia,
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 603

Navarra, León, the island of Majorca, the predominantly agricultural areas of

what had once been the kingdom of Castile around Burgos and Valladolid and
also in Oviedo and Saragossa. The whole of eastern Spain, including Catalonia,
Valencia and Murcia, remained republican, as did much of the north of the
country, including the Basque region, Santander and Asturias, and, in the south
of the country, Extremadura and parts of Andalusia. In short, the Republic
retained control of the larger towns and cities and of those regions that were
economically the most developed, namely, Catalonia and the Basque region,
together with Madrid, totalling around two-thirds of the country’s territory. Of
the seventeen highest-ranking generals only four took part in the mutiny, while
only a single head of a military region – Saragossa – was involved. On the other
hand, only 3,500 out of 15,000 officers remained loyal to the Republic. In the
navy, it was the officer class that tended to side with the rebels, while ordinary
seamen and NCOs supported the Republic. In total the Republicans had
112,000 troops at their disposal, the Nationalists 98,500. Among the population
at large it was initially only in Navarra and in the conservative parts of Castile
that the rebels enjoyed their most powerful support.
Apart from the members of the military who had staged the putsch, the
rebel camp also included the Carlist or monarchist traditionalists who were on
good terms with General Mola, and the supporters of José Antonio Primo de
Rivera, the charismatic leader of the Falange Española de las JONS (Juntas de
Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista), which of all the political organizations in Spain
was the one that was closest to the Italian Fascists and to the German National
Socialists. With the exception of the Basque region, the Catholic Church every-
where sided with the rebels. The only bishop who refused to do so was the
bishop of Vitoria, whose diocese included the Basque country. But even in
‘Nationalist’ Spain there were members of the clergy and monastic orders who
objected to the arbitrary executions of the military’s real or imagined enemies.
Following the murder of the monarchist politician José Calvo Sotelo on the
night of 12/13 July, the leader of the Catholic-conservative opposition party,
the Confederación Española des Derechos Autónomas (CEDA), José Maria
Gil-Robles y Quiñones, had fled to northern Spain, thence to France and, in the
wake of his deportation by Blum’s government, to Portugal, from where he
supported the Nationalists and transferred his party’s funds to General Mola.
Following the elections on 16 February 1936, the Republic’s government was
made up of members of the Popular Front headed by the left-wing Republican
Santiago Casares Quiroga, who succeeded Manuel Azaña after the latter was
named president on 16 May. Even during the election campaign, the largest
party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), under its leader Francisco
Largo Caballero, had already announced that it would not put forward the names
of any ministers and it duly kept its word. On the evening of 18 July, following the
military putsch, José Giral of the Izquierda Republicana formed a new cabinet. It
too was purely bourgeois in its makeup and immediately decided to arm the
604 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

people. Early the next morning the two biggest trade unions, the Socialist Unión
General de Trabajadores (UGT) and the anarchist or, rather, anarchist-syndicalist
Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores (CNT), were provided with weapons
by the Ministry of War. Immediately the cry went up in the working-class
districts of Madrid and many other towns and cities ‘No pasarán!’, a call broad-
cast late the previous evening on Spanish radio by the best-known female
Communist politician, Dolores Ibárruri (‘La Pasionaria’). By 19 July power
no longer lay with the government in Madrid but with the trade unions and
ultimately with the people in the streets.
On the night of 19/20 July some fifty churches were torched in Madrid. On
the 20th fierce fighting broke out around the Real Alcázar and on the Punta del
Sol, ending in victory for the champions of the Republic. Following the capture
of the fortress, numerous rebels were killed. Of the officers who had fought on
the Punta del Sol, many escaped to Toledo and Guadalajara, where the rebel-
lion had been successful. In Barcelona, Lluis Companys, the president of the
regional government – the Generalitat – of Catalonia, had refused to arm the
people, whereupon the CNT stormed several arsenals and assumed command
of the Republican forces. Exceptionally, the Guardia Civil sided with them. By
the evening of 20 July the insurrection had been put down in Barcelona as well
as in Madrid.
It is unclear how many men and women lost their lives in mass executions
and massacres during this early phase of the rebellion. On principle, Franco
granted pardons only after the individual in question had been executed, the
only exceptions being left-wing foreign journalists who sympathized with the
Republican cause: Arthur Koestler, for example, witnessed at first hand the
capture of Malaga in early February 1937 and reported on it to the liberal News
Chronicle. He was sentenced to death without a proper trial and spent three
months in a Nationalist prison. The total number of victims of politically moti-
vated murders in Nationalist Spain between 1936 and 1939 is unknown,
although recent research puts the figure at 90,194.
In Republican Spain recent estimates put the number of people executed or
massacred between 1936 and 1939 at around 50,000. This left-wing reign of
terror included the precautionary shooting of 2,000 prisoners near Madrid in
November and December 1936, allegedly on the orders of Santiago Carillo
Solares, who was responsible for public safety on the Madrid Defence Junta and
who later became secretary general of the Spanish Communists. The Catholic
clergy suffered particularly harshly at the hands of Republican extremists, who
murdered thirteen bishops and more than 6,800 priests, monks, nuns and
novices, most of them during the first six weeks of the Civil War and mostly in
Catalonia, which was a stronghold of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism.
Here hatred of the Catholic Church was particularly deeply rooted.
In those parts of Spain like Andalusia that were largely made up of vast
landed estates, militant anti-clericalism was part and parcel of a radical agrarian
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 605

revolution: in the wake of the putsch and the arming of the people, day
labourers and farmworkers felt that the time had come to wreak vengeance on
the landowners who they felt were exploiting them, together with the bour-
geoisie and the Church which they regarded as the landowners’ closest allies.
And they proceeded to exact vengeance in the most primitive and brutal
manner by burning down monasteries and churches and by abducting and
murdering particularly hated representatives of the old regime. The American
writer Ernest Hemingway, who was working in Spain as a reporter, noted in his
novel For Whom the Bell Tolls how in a small Andalusian pueblo all the middle-
class men were driven together with flails and then thrown over a cliff. His
account was modelled on events in the town of Ronda, where 512 men and
women were killed during the first four weeks of the Civil War.
The CNT and the socialist agricultural workers’ trade union, the Federación
Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT), set themselves the task of
organizing the revolutionary movement from below, occupying warehouses
and silos, distributing food supplies and cereals to the rural population, dispos-
sessing the majority of the larger landowners, including those who had not
supported the putsch, and introducing a process of collectivization. During the
winter of 1936/7 there were 1,500 legalized agricultural collectives in Republican
Spain. By August 1938 this number had risen to over 2,200.
In Catalonia it was the anarchist-syndicalist CNT that was the driving force
behind the collectivization programme and for a time the only ruling body.
In the matter of Catalonian autonomy it was in agreement with the regional
government, which remained in office and which was left increasingly to run
the region’s finances. By the end of September the CNT was even being repre-
sented on the regional council.
In the Basque region, too, regionalism was the common denominator
among the most varied social and political forces. Once the Cortes in Madrid
had granted the region autonomous status in October 1936 and the leader of
the conservative Partido Nacional Vasco (PNV), José Antonio Aguirre, had
been elected the first president of the region, his party declared its unequivocal
support for the Republic, and although Aguirre’s attempts to force through the
region’s independence led repeatedly to conflict with central government, it
also contributed to the fact that the Basque clergy tended on the whole to
remain loyal to the Republic.
It was Burgos that became the political centre of the Nationalists and here
that a Junta de Defensa Nacional was established under General Miguel
Cabanellas on 24 July 1936. And it was in Burgos that General Franco, who on
30 September had had himself proclaimed ‘Generalissimo’ and commander
in chief of all the Nationalist troops, was named head of state on 1 October.
On the Republican side, the Socialist Party leader and trade union leader
Francisco Largo Caballero replaced the former prime minister, José Giral
Pereira, on 4 September. The new Popular Front cabinet was made up of
606 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Liberals, Republicans, Socialists and Communists, who on 4 November,

following the Nationalists’ march on Madrid, were joined by the anarchists of
the CNT under the central control of the Federación Anarquista Iberica (FAI).
A former terrorist, Juan García Oliver, became justice minister: only shortly
before his appointment he had been defending the murder of clerics and other
class enemies as examples of the justice of the people.
Surprising though it may seem at first sight, it was the Communists who
together with the bourgeois parties formed the conservative wing of the
government. It was entirely in the spirit of Stalin and the Comintern that as
far as the Partido Comunista de España, or PCE, was concerned, defence of the
Republic against a Fascist attack was infinitely more important than any prole-
tarian revolution and, indeed, more important than any redistribution of
wealth. In a letter that they addressed to Largo Caballero on 21 December,
Stalin, Voroshilov and Molotov advised the Spanish government to implement
measures that would help the peasants, win over the petty bourgeoisie and the
bourgeoisie in the towns and cities, guarantee free trade and proscribe all forms
of confiscation and dispossession. The Soviet leaders even stressed that for
Spain the parliamentary route could be a more effective way of bringing revo-
lution to the country than had been the case in Russia.
The Socialist prime minister replied on 12 January 1937, thanking Moscow
for its advice, but adding that not even among simple Republicans was it possible
to find any ‘enthusiastic champions of parliamentary institutions’.91 Within the
cabinet, Largo Caballero was one of the most outspoken advocates of far-
reaching social change, and much the same was true of the anarchist ministers.
But the CNT and FAI found themselves in a dilemma from which there seemed
to be no way out. By playing a role in government and by helping to disband the
soviet-like committees and local militias of rival workers’ organizations that had
sprung up everywhere in the summer of 1936, they had become complicit in a
process aimed at the centralization and militarization of power, making their
goal of a society free from domination seem even more remote a prospect and
alienating large sections of their supporters to whom this particular brand of
Realpolitik had nothing whatever to offer.
By the time that the new government was installed in Madrid, it was clear
that neither Britain nor France would side with the Republic in the Spanish Civil
War, whereas Franco’s Nationalists already enjoyed the support of two other
major powers, Italy and Germany. Unlike Berlin, Rome was largely conversant
with Franco’s plans for revolution, although Mussolini initially hesitated before
agreeing to help the rebels on 30 July 1936 by sending twelve aeroplanes from
Sardinia to Tetuán. His aim was clear: a Spain ruled by Fascist sympathizers and
owing a debt of gratitude to Italy would be a valuable ally in his battle to win
strategic control over the Mediterranean and its transformation into a ‘mare
nostro’. Particularly important in this context was the establishment of an Italian
base on the Balearics and perhaps even the islands’ annexation.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 607

Franco made contact with Hitler through two members of the NSDAP’s
overseas organization, who had a chance to meet the Führer on the evening of
25 July in Bayreuth, where he was attending that summer’s festival. That very
night Hitler agreed to send twenty unarmed Junkers Ju 52 transport machines,
with six fighter planes, to Tetuán, an offer that he made without consulting the
Foreign Office but after taking soundings with Göring and Blomberg, who
were also in Bayreuth. It was these aircraft that helped Franco to transport his
army of 35,000 men – mostly Moroccan Muslims – from Spanish Morocco to
Spain.
There has been much speculation over Hitler’s reasons for helping Franco in
late July 1936. One thing is certain: with the establishment of a Popular Front
government not only in Paris but in Madrid as well, the Führer felt that his
endless warnings about the spread of Communism had been confirmed. If
Germany supported Nationalist Spain and if the Nationalists defeated the coun-
try’s Communists, then Germany had a good chance of gaining an ally in its
planned restructuring of Europe. At least as important in Hitler’s view was the
opportunity to work with Italy in Spain and in that way to drive a wedge between
Rome and London. Economic and military considerations were evidently
secondary. For Göring as the head of the Luftwaffe, it was important to provide
German airmen with an ideal training ground in Spain in case the situation
grew more critical in Europe as a whole. Since Göring was also responsible for
the current four-year plan, he was bound to be keen to ensure that raw mate-
rials such as iron ore and iron pyrites that were crucial to the war effort could
be imported from Spain. But on 25 July 1936 these considerations appear not to
have played a major role. In order to avoid foreign policy complications, Hitler
sought throughout the Spanish Civil War to maintain the appearance of non-
intervention and certainly had no wish to compete with Mussolini over which
of them would offer Nationalist Spain the greater support.
Starting at the end of 1936, Italy sent between 70,000 and 80,000 soldiers to
Spain, while Germany sent around 10,000 pilots, technicians and instructors. It
also seems likely that the number of tanks supplied by Italy exceeded the 200
provided by Germany. It was the German Luftwaffe unit of the Condor Legion
that launched the three-hour attack on the town of Guernica on 26 April 1937,
a town that had quasi-religious associations for the Basque population. The
attack resulted in 1,654 deaths, all of them civilians, and 889 injuries. Germany
immediately denied any involvement in the atrocity. The Nationalists’ military
command in Salamanca, which had played a part in planning the attack,
claimed that the Basques themselves had set fire to the town in order to blame
the Nationalists, but the general public in western democracies refused to be
taken in: shrapnel from German bombs revealed the true perpetrators.
Posterity has come to associate Guernica with Picasso’s famous painting which
was exhibited only a few weeks later in the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the
Paris World Fair.
608 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Stalin took longer than Mussolini and Hitler to decide to support what was
effectively his own side in the Spanish Civil War. In the shorter term he was not
interested in seeing the Communists come to power in Madrid but was
concerned, rather, to turn Spain into part of an anti-Fascist front that would also
include France and, following what he hoped would be the victory of the Labour
Party, Great Britain, too. In the longer term, however, Stalin was evidently
following a rather different plan: the better the Spanish Communist Party played
the part that was allotted to it, the better the prospects for the sort of Communist
revolution that had initially not been on the Soviet leader’s agenda.
While it is unclear at what point Moscow decided on covert intervention
in Spain, it was at the end of September 1936 that a ship laden with weapons left
the Crimea for that country. The Soviet Union demanded a high price for its
help, for Largo Caballero’s government moved much of Spain’s remaining gold
reserves to Moscow. (The other part of the reserves had already been used to
buy weapons from France.) Some 510 tons of gold valued at 1,500 million gold
pesetas were handed over to Soviet officials at Cartagena in the second half of
October 1936 and turned into hard currency during the fourteen months from
early February 1937 to late March 1938, allowing the Spanish government to
buy the weapons that it urgently needed.
At least as important as the supply of weapons from the Soviet Union were
the International Brigades provided by the Communist International: units of
volunteers from Europe and America who were willing to fight on the side of
the Spanish Republic. The first units arrived in Spain in early November 1936:
some came by sea, others by crossing the Pyrenees. Although Communists
ran these units, it was by no means only members of Communist parties who
flocked to join these units but left-wing fighters in the broadest sense, ranging
from Social Democrats to bourgeois liberals wanting to contribute to the fight
against international Fascism. Some independent left-wing writers such as
George Orwell and W. H. Auden from Britain and Simone Weil from France
preferred to have nothing to do with the International Brigades: Orwell joined
a left-wing Communist militia group in Catalonia, while Auden drove ambu-
lances for a Republican unit and Weil fought with an anarchist militia group.
According to one anti-Fascist source, the International Brigades active in
Spain in June 1937 included 25,000 fighters from France, 5,000 from Poland,
5,000 from Great Britain and the United States, 5,000 from Germany and Italy,
3,000 from Belgium, 2,000 from the Balkans and 1,000 from Latin America,
making 46,000 in total. More cautious estimates speak of 25,000 brigade
members. It was almost exclusively Communists who held the leading political
and military positions in the International Brigades. They included the French
Communist André Marty, who was a member of the Comintern’s executive
committee and who assumed the role of supreme political controller and
instructor; the Italian Luigi Longo; the Hungarian László Rajk; and the Germans
Franz Dahlem, Wilhelm Zaisser and Hans Beimler, who was killed in action in
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 609

December 1936 while fighting close to Madrid. Among other Communists

were the German writers Ludwig Renn, a former frontline officer whose real
name was Arnold Vieth von Golssenau, and Gustav Regler, whose experiences
in the Spanish Civil War persuaded him to break with Communism. For a short
time their number also included the English writer Stephen Spender. Among
leading socialists in the International Brigades were Pietro Nenni from Italy
and Julius Deutsch, a former leader of the Austrian defence association. Another
Austrian was General Emilio Kléber, a man who was already a legend in his
own lifetime and whose real name was Lazarus Stern. During the First World
War he had been a prisoner in Russia and had converted to Bolshevism, later
working in the German Communist Party’s illegal military apparatus and, later
still, taking on the role of military adviser to the Comintern in China, where he
commanded troops in the fighting against the Japanese, before winning mili-
tary glory in Spain while defending Madrid.
By the time that the first International Brigades arrived in Spain in early
November 1936, the Republic’s position had deteriorated markedly. The Burgos
Junta was formally recognized by Germany and Italy on 7 November. By the
end of the year the Spanish Nationalist forces included not only the Spanish
Foreign Legion, or Tercio, but also almost 50,000 Moroccans. The officers who
had been marked by their experiences in the colonial war with the Rif and who
shared the Church’s view that the Civil War was a crusade against Communism
and a new Reconquista tried to convince the North African mercenaries that
they were fighting atheists – the enemies of every religion, including Islam. The
Moroccans were also joined by the German pilots of the Condor Legion, by
soldiers from Antonio Salazar’s authoritarian Portugal, and, increasingly from
early 1937 onwards, by soldiers from Mussolini’s Italy and by volunteers from
the ranks of Eoin O’Duffy’s Irish Blueshirts.
The Nationalist troops were by now far more numerous than the ejército
popular and were certainly better equipped and better disciplined: by November
1936 they had overrun almost half of the country. On 27 September, a symbol
of Nationalist resistance, the Alcázar of Toledo, which had been under siege
since July, was liberated by Franco’s troops. By now large areas of central Spain
and Andalusia were under Nationalist control. By the middle of October the
front had moved so close to Madrid that the capital seemed about to fall. When
Mola gave a press conference in Avila, where he had established his headquar-
ters, and was asked by foreign journalists which of his four columns would
overrun the capital, his reply, which was later to become proverbial, was ‘The
fifth column’, by which he meant the Nationalist sympathizers in the city. On
6 November, Largo Caballero’s government, expecting the worst, moved its
seat of operations to Valencia.
Immediately afterwards the Communists and their Soviet military advisers
seized control of the capital. It was the old Bolshevist Jan Karlovich Berzin who
was given the task of defending the city. He had advised on preparations for the
610 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

‘German October’ in 1923 and became known in Spain as ‘General Grishin’. The
Communists worked closely with General José Miajá Menant, the regional
commander and the government representative on the Junta for the Organization
and Supervision of the Defence of the Capital that had been in place since
6 November. They mobilized most of the proletarian population, including the
women, who formed a battalion of their own and who soon saw action on the
Segovia Bridge.
The battle for Madrid began on 7 November. The Nationalists fired artillery
rounds on the city, while planes dropped incendiary bombs almost without
interruption in a deliberate attempt to spread panic among the civilian popula-
tion. Firefighters were gunned down by machine-gun fire from fighter planes.
On the Republican side, the well-disciplined Fifth Regiment distinguished
itself in combat: trained by Soviet military instructors and dominated by
Communists, it was commanded by the Communist Enrique Líster, a former
quarry worker who had been trained in Moscow and who figures as ‘Manuel’
in André Malraux’s novel L’Espoir. The first International Brigades joined the
fighting on 8 November. Emilio Kléber assumed command of all the Republican
troops in the Ciudad Universitaria and the Casa de Campo.
On 12 November, 3,000 armed anarchists under Buonaventura Durruti
arrived in Madrid. Durruti was a ‘social bandit’ with a turbulent terrorist past.
He was killed on 21 November, allegedly by a stray bullet fired from the Ciudad
Universitaria that was by then under Nationalist control, though it is also
possible that he was shot by an anarchist disgruntled at his commanding officer
who expected his troops to display an unusual degree of discipline and an
exceptional willingness to take risks. By early January 1937 the front had stalled
around Madrid – a major triumph for the defenders who thanks to their courage
had succeeded in preventing the Nationalists from taking the capital.
The next great success for the Republican forces came in March 1937, when
they reported a significant victory over Italian forces who on Mussolini’s orders
had marched on Sigüenza to the north-east of Madrid, from where they pushed
forward to Guadalajara and the capital. They were met by units of the
International Brigades, including the Italian Garibaldi Battalion under the
Republican Randolfo Pacciardi, and by Spanish militiamen under Enrique
Líster and Valentín González, also known as ‘El Campesino’. The soldiers
defending the Spanish Republic fought Franco’s allies not only with weapons
but also with extremely cleverly and effectively worded leaflets appealing
to their comrades’ proletarian sympathies and to feelings of international soli-
darity. By 18 March the International Brigades had achieved their objective:
out of a total of 50,000 men, around 2,000 Italians had been killed and
4,000 wounded. Most of their surviving compatriots turned tail and ran, aban-
doning war material, weapons and munitions. Several hundred – according
to some estimates, more than 1,000 – were taken prisoner and politically
‘re-educated’.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 611

The French historians Pierre Broué and Émile Témime have described the
Battle of Guadalajara in March 1937 not only as a military victory but also as a
political triumph that allowed the victors to win over a number of enemy soldiers:

The victory appeared to be a triumph of international ‘anti-Fascism’ and

was hailed as such by Mikhail Koltsov in his reports for Pravda. But ‘anti-
Fascism’ celebrated its final victory here, for the war devoured not only the
revolution but also one particular manifestation of it: revolutionary war.
War had become an end in itself and now turned on the revolutionary
instincts that had lent it the lambent flame of intellectual significance and
humanity.92

Militarily speaking, the fighting around Guadalajara, although seen by

Hemingway – a Republican sympathizer – as among the most decisive battles in
world history, did not mark a turning point in the Spanish Civil War. The
Nationalists, who had overrun Malaga on 8 February, followed up their setback
at Guadalajara by advancing along several fronts. In the north Franco’s troops
took Bilbao in June 1937 and, in the months that followed, Santander and finally
Asturias, with the result that the whole of northern Spain and, with it, several of
the country’s most important industrial regions, were now under the control of
the rebels. Teruel, which the Republicans had won back in December 1937, fell
to the Nationalists in February 1938. They launched their offensive in Aragon in
March and by August had advanced as far as Vinaroz on the Mediterranean
coast, in that way cutting off Catalonia from the rest of Republican Spain. The
Battle of the Ebro began in July 1938 and lasted until the end of October, bringing
the Republicans their last major territorial gain, and even then it was only of
short duration, for by November 1938 their units had been forced to withdraw
from the Ebro. A month later the Nationalists took up the fight for Catalonia.
From the autumn of 1938 the Republicans were reduced to a defensive position
from which they were never able to recover.
Politically speaking, the left began to fall apart in the spring of 1937, while
the right grew increasingly unified. In April the Falangists, who had lost their
charismatic leader through the execution of José Antonio Primo de Rivera in
prison in Alicante on 20 November 1936, joined forces with the Carlists, a union
which, far from being voluntary, was foisted upon them by force of circum-
stances. The combined party was known as the Falange Española Tradicionalista
y de las JONS and was led by Franco, its programme dominated by traditionalist
and clericalist features, making it authoritarian but not totalitarian. The Falange
had never really been a mass movement. The head of the new party, the Caudillo
or Generalissimo, was a man from the military and from the old power elites,
not a Fascist Führer. Under Franco the reformed Falange undertook important
social and propagandist tasks but it had no influence on the country’s politics
either during the Civil War or afterwards.
612 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

When the Civil War began in summer 1936, it was not Fascists and
Communists who were the driving forces but anarchists and members of the
military. On the political right nothing subsequently changed in this regard,
whereas the changes on the left were far-reaching. The political influence of the
Partido Comunista de España became much stronger after it joined Largo
Caballero’s government in September 1936, and the same was true in Catalonia
of the newly formed left-wing unity party, the Communist-dominated Partit
Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC), which soon afterwards was invited to
join the Council of the Generalitat. The line taken by the PCE and PSUC was
mutually agreed with Moscow and aimed entirely at the defence of the Republic,
making both parties important factors in guaranteeing law and order in the
country and, as such, attractive to the petty bourgeoisie. Within central govern-
ment the Communists presented themselves as the champions of total freedom
of religion and of the restoration of the right to attend church services, a right
that had been abolished only in practice, not by law. In this, however, they
encountered stiff and successful resistance from the prime minister and the
minister of justice, the anarchist Juan García Oliver.
For Largo Caballero the support of the Communists and of their Soviet
military advisers was a source of considerable concern, and on 23 April 1937
he dissolved the Madrid Junta, which had been a bastion of authority in the
PCE. Soon afterwards he limited the powers of the political army commis-
sioners, all of whom were Communists and whose number included several
who were to achieve prominence in the party: Josip Broz Tito, Klement
Gottwald, Palmiro Togliatti and, for a time, Walter Ulbricht. In some cases he
simply dismissed them from office. The Communists regarded this as a delib-
erate provocation and responded with a violent campaign against the head of
government. One development that made this situation additionally dangerous
for the prime minister was the rapprochement between the reformist right
wing of his own party, the PSOE, under the navy and aviation minister Indalecio
Prieto and the finance minister Juan Negrín, and the PCE. Both of them shared
the Communists’ view that serious steps in the direction of a socialist society
would have to wait until the Fascists were defeated. Largo Caballero and the
anarchists, by contrast, wanted to achieve both of these goals simultaneously.
The major clash between the Communists and the forces of social revolution
came in May 1937 – not, however, in Madrid, but in Barcelona. In September
1936 the Council of the Generalitat had been joined not only by the PSUC and
CNT but also by the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), whose
secretary general, Andrés Nin, became the justice minister. The POUM was a
small left-wing Communist party that had emerged from the Izquierda
Comunista, whose keen criticisms of Stalinism had initially been inspired by
Trotsky only for it to break with him in 1934, after he demanded that it join
the Socialist Party and form its left wing. Instead, the Izquierda Comunista
joined forces in 1935 with the Catalonian Marxist Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 613

to form the POUM. In Stalin’s eyes the POUM remained a Trotskyite party and,
in keeping with the latest Soviet linguistic usage, a melting pot for the agents of
Fascism. On 16 December 1936, Nin, responding to intense pressure from the
Communists, left the Catalonian regional government, prompting Pravda to
refer the next day to a ‘purge of Trotskyites and anarchists’ that had been imple-
mented just as energetically in Spain as in the Soviet Union.93
On 3 May 1937, members of the Civil Guard acting on the orders of a PSUC
politician who was in charge of law and order in the region entered the
Barcelona Telephone Exchange that had been occupied by the CNT since July
of the previous year. The occupiers fired on them with machine guns from the
upper floors. Immediately afterwards workers in the Catalan capital began a
general strike not sanctioned by the CNT, surrounding strategically important
sites, building barricades and in that way reducing large sections of the city to
their control. While the CNT tried to reach an agreement with the Generalitat,
the members of a new organization of extreme anarchists, the Amigos de
Durruti, called on the anarchist youth movement Juventud Libertaria and the
POUM to take up arms against the enemy within. It is unclear if agents provo-
cateurs from the Franco regime had a hand in this development, although such
claims were being voiced even at the time.
The fighting in Barcelona lasted for five days: members of the Civil Guard
and Communists fired at the anarchists, and the anarchists fired back.
Contemporary estimates speak of between 400 and 500 fatalities and 1,000
injuries. The central government in Valencia sent police reinforcements and
three warships to Barcelona on 6 May, and their presence helped to encourage
both sides to respond to the CNT’s urgent appeals to end the fighting, with the
result that something approaching a state of order was restored on 8 May.
As far as the armed workers were concerned, this regional civil war within
the wider context of the Spanish Civil War was the expression of a spontaneous
protest on the part of the anarchist masses at the national policies of the workers’
organizations, including – up to a point – the CNT. The POUM did what it
could to avoid an open break with the CNT and after 6 May sought to adopt a
conciliatory stance by limiting itself to calling on the workers not to leave the
barricades. But the PSUC, which was no longer represented in the reconstituted
Generalitat, and the PCE finally felt that the time had come to deal with the
‘Trotskyites’. The Communist press spoke of the members of the POUM as
‘crypto-Fascists’ and as ‘Franco’s fifth column’.
On 15 May two Communist members of the central government, the
education minister Jesús Hernández and the agriculture minister Uribe
Galdeano, demanded a ban on the POUM. Although Largo Caballero refused
to meet their demands, only the anarchists backed him up. Most of the
Socialists, including Indalecio Prieto and Juan Negrín Lopez, and the bour-
geois Republicans sided with the Communists and then flounced out of the
debate, precipitating a government crisis that ended with Largo Caballero’s
614 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

resignation on 17 May and with the appointment of the finance minister, Juan
Negrín Lopez, as his replacement. A pragmatist who held a chair in physiology,
Negrín was a Socialist who was also the Communists’ preferred candidate: they
all felt that victory over the ‘Fascists’ should be given absolute priority over all
other objectives. The anarchists refused to join the new cabinet. Since a right-
wing Socialist took over as minister of war – a post formerly held by Largo
Caballero in addition to the premiership – and since Negrín had no intention
of allowing himself to be used by the Communists and the Soviet Union, it is
difficult to describe the PCE as the winner in this crisis.
But Negrín was either unable or unwilling to prevent the suppression of the
POUM. The party newspaper, La Batalla, was banned at the end of May, and in
the middle of June the members of the party’s executive committee, including
Nin, were arrested. The indictment of 11 June referred specifically to the party’s
attempt to engineer the violent overthrow of the Republic and its democratic
government and to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in its place. The
influence of the Spanish Communists’ Soviet contacts was particularly evident
in the claim that in the context of the Moscow show trials, the POUM had
attacked the Soviet justice system and maintained links with international
Trotskyite organizations whose actions ‘on the soil of a friendly power’ proved
beyond doubt that they were in the pay of the Fascists.94
The police were now largely under the control of the PCE and in the course
of their enquiries produced counterfeit documents to show that Nin was a
Fascist agent, although by the time that the case came to court in October 1938,
these charges had already been dropped. But he remained accused of attempting
to overthrow the existing order. Five leading officials of the POUM were
sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from eleven to fifteen years, and
the POUM and its youth organization, the Juventud Comunista Ibérica, were
banned. Although the case did not produce the sort of Muscovite show trial
that the Communists had hoped for, it none the less allowed the PCE to achieve
its principal aim.
Nin did not live to see the trial. His name was no longer included in the list
of the POUM’s indicted officials drawn up by the Ministry of Justice on 29 June
1937. Immediately after his arrest he had been taken to a ‘private’ prison run by
the Communist Cheka, a branch of the Soviet NKVD. On 4 August the govern-
ment was forced to admit that he had been taken to a special prison from where
he had ‘disappeared’. The episode caused a furore that extended far beyond
Spain’s borders and triggered international protests. By early August the New
York Times was reporting that Nin’s body had been found on the outskirts of
the capital. He had been abducted by agents of the Soviet NKVD, who were a
ubiquitous presence in Republican Spain, after which he was interrogated and
tortured, but he had steadfastly refused to confess to his alleged crimes. He had
to pay a high price for maintaining his position. German members of the
International Brigades claimed it was the Gestapo that had sprung him from
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 615

prison at Alcalá, whereupon he was thrown into a locked car and murdered.
He was only one of the NKVD’s many victims, albeit the most famous.
Nothing undermined the sympathy of left-wing and liberal Europeans for
the Spanish Republic as much as the countless murders committed by agents of
the Soviet secret services against alleged Trotskyites in the POUM. (It was only
later that it became clear that Communist leaders such as Emilio Kléber, who
had been ordered back to the Soviet Union in 1937, were also victims of Stalin’s
reign of terror.) The POUM maintained close links with a number of left-wing
socialist parties in Europe, including the Independent Labour Party in Great
Britain and the German Socialist Workers’ Party, which was formed in early
October following a rift with the German Social Democrats. Among the
former’s sympathizers was George Orwell, who has left a vivid account of the
bloody fighting in Barcelona in May 1937 in his book Homage to Catalonia,
which was first published in London the following April.
At the beginning of March 1937 the German Socialist Workers’ Party sent
Willy Brandt to Barcelona. Brandt had been born Herbert Frahm in Lübeck in
1913 and since April 1933 had been working for his party in Norway. In his
reports he criticized the POUM’s policies as ultra-left and sectarian, hence
largely flawed, but he reproached the Spanish Communist Party for under-
mining morale in the war on Fascism by slandering its proletarian opponents:

The Communist Party is currently the most decisive political force in anti-
Fascist Spain. It may not run the government, but it still controls most of the
state apparatus. The country’s army officers are for the most part organized
within it, and the police are largely in its hands. Spain is in the process of
turning into a Communist Party dictatorship. We are on the way, if not to a
Communist Spain, then at least to a Communist Party Spain.95

This weakening of the position of the political left was exploited by the
right. When, in May 1937, the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, adopted
an initiative put forward by the Spanish president, Manuel Azaña y Diaz,
and proposed a truce between the various parties involved in the Civil War,
allowing first all foreign ‘volunteers’ to withdraw and then for negotiations
for a peace treaty to take place, he received the support of the Vatican but
was flatly turned down by Franco, who insisted on the unconditional surrender
of all the Republican forces. By the summer of 1937 Franco’s position in the
Nationalist camp was stronger than ever. A possible rival, General Mola, had
been killed in a plane crash on 3 June, while the Generalissimo’s regime was
strengthened nationally and internationally by the fact that on 31 July 1937 the
country’s Catholic bishops, writing to bishops all around the world, described
as just and necessary the struggle to topple the Republican government. On 28
August the Vatican recognized the authorities in Burgos as Spain’s official
government.
616 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Beginning in August 1937, Germany and Italy increased their naval patrols
in an attempt to prevent the Soviet Union from helping the Republic, but their
efforts were undermined by the French, who from October 1937 turned a blind
eye to arms smuggling across the Pyrenees, which had been closed as a border
since August 1936. In March 1938 Léon Blum’s second cabinet even opened up
the border to arms traffic, only for Daladier’s government to bow to pressure
from London and reverse this measure in July 1938. Since Germany and Italy
continued to increase their aid, the Nationalists’ military advantage went on
growing in consequence. Franco formed his first government on 1 February
1938 and included in it five military figures as well as civilian ministers. His
brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Suñer, who had united the Falangists and the
traditionalists on the Caudillo’s instructions and created a new party of unity,
took over the portfolios of minister of the interior and minister for propaganda
and the press. The government’s main challenge was to lay the foundations for
the authoritarian system that was to characterize the whole of Spain following
the right-wing victory in the country’s civil war.
The Republican government had moved its seat of power from Valencia to
Barcelona on 31 October 1937, believing that it was safer there. On 5 April
1938, ten days before Franco’s troops reached the Mediterranean at Vinaroz,
the minister of war, Indalecio Prieto, who regarded victory as an increasingly
unlikely prospect, was dismissed from the cabinet at the urging of the
Communists. Negrín, who refused to share his pessimism, took over his former
colleague’s portfolio. Since the central government was cut off from the bulk
of Republican Spain in the centre and south-east of the country, it became
more dependent than ever on the military, and in the southern zone had no
choice but to abandon its political and military powers to General José Miajá
Menant. Even so, Negrín banked on the survival of the Republic, believing
that Germany’s aggression towards Czechoslovakia would lead to a full-scale
European war and ultimately save the Spanish Republic.
The Anglo-French policy of appeasement that culminated in the Munich
Agreement of 30 September 1938 destroyed these calculations, but it also had
repercussions for the Republic’s principal ally, the Soviet Union: from that
point onwards, Stalin felt that an alliance with Great Britain and France against
Hitler was scarcely achievable any longer, although it is unclear whether he had
already decided at this stage that he would try to work together with his arch-
enemy in Berlin. Whatever the answer, there is no doubt that he was keen to
reduce as far as possible his increasingly risky commitment to Spain. From his
point of view, the International Brigades had completed their task, for in most
of them Spaniards far outnumbered foreigners; there were now sufficient well-
trained airmen; and the withdrawal of foreign volunteers would be relatively
easy to accept, a position shared by Negrín. On 1 October, at the suggestion of
the Spanish Republic, the League of Nations assumed the task of overseeing the
withdrawal of all volunteers from Spain. The International Brigades held a
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 617

final march-past in Barcelona on 15 November, and the following day the

Battle of the Ebro came to an end with the retreat of the Republicans to the left
bank of the river.
The final phase of the Spanish Civil War began in December 1938, when
the Nationalists invaded Catalonia. By 26 January 1939 Barcelona had fallen,
practically without a struggle. On 7 February President Azaña fled to France,
together with Negrín’s government. Within two days all resistance had ended
in Catalonia. Negrín returned to Spain on 10 February and on the 24th trav-
elled to Madrid. Four days later Azaña announced that he was standing down
as president after Britain and France had recognized Franco’s government on
the 27th.
Negrín’s insistence on continuing a war that was now completely hopeless
triggered a putsch, and on 5 March a junta headed by General Sigismondo
Casado, who had previously been loyal to the Republic, and by the moderate
Socialist Julián Besteiro, the country’s former ambassador in London, assumed
the business of government and extended an offer of peace to Franco’s govern-
ment in Burgos. A Communist divisional commander began to march on
Madrid, but the other army commanders refused to lend him their support.
The very next day Negrín again fled the country, this time for good. He was
accompanied by leading Communists and by members of his own govern-
ment. A four-day civil war – a war within a war – began in Madrid on 7 March,
when a Communist army commander turned on Casado and called for resist-
ance to the junta. Casado was able to maintain his position, but the negotia-
tions with Franco’s government that were conducted by representatives of the
Caudillo’s ‘Fifth Column’ in Madrid produced no results acceptable to the
junta. Meanwhile the Nationalist troops had continued to advance, and on
28 March, the day after the government in Burgos had announced that it was
joining the anti-Comintern pact, they occupied Madrid. Alicante, which had
previously transferred its allegiance to Casado, fell on 31 March. The Spanish
Civil War was over by 1 April 1939.
Writers cannot agree on the number of people killed during the fighting as
a result of the atrocities committed by both sides in the conflict, estimates
ranging from 270,000 to 500,000, while the number of soldiers who fell in
battle is put at between 100,000 and 300,000. Nor was the end of the Civil War
the end of the reign of terror. In 1939 Gonzalo de Aguilera, Franco’s press
officer, told Charles Foltz, the correspondent of the Associated Press, that ‘it’s
our program, you understand, to exterminate a third of the male population of
Spain. That will clean up the country.’96
Aguilera’s remark had deep historical roots in the ideal of the limpieza de
sangre, the purity of blood, which had motivated the persecutors of the Jews who
had converted to Christianity in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Men
like Aguilera believed that it was their historical task to purge Spanish society of
those whose thinking was ‘wrong’, by which they invariably meant left-wing.
618 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The project was never fully realized, but the mass executions that took place
wherever the Nationalists drove out the Republicans were almost unprece-
dented in scale. According to British estimates, there were at least 10,000
executions in the first five months after the end of the war. Mere membership
of a left-wing organization was often enough for the individual in question to
be denounced, charged, sentenced and executed. Recent research suggests that
the total number of victims of Nationalist terror between 1936 and 1950 is in
the order of 150,000, a number that would undoubtedly have been much higher
if 441,000 Spaniards had not succeeded in crossing the Spanish border by April
1939 and escaping to France across the Pyrenees. Since many of them returned
to Spain as a result of the catastrophic conditions in the first improvised recep-
tion centres, the number of those who emigrated for good was much lower and
is believed to have been between 160,000 and 300,000.
Of the refugees who settled abroad – mostly in France but also in Mexico
– many fought for the Allies during the Second World War or were active in the
French Resistance. Some 15,000 were taken to German concentration camps
following the occupation of France, and only half of them survived. Largo
Caballero was one of them. He died in Paris in 1946, a year after he was
liberated. Other Spanish politicians who had once been prominent and who
included Lluis Companys, the former president of the Catalan Generalitat
and Julián Zugazagoitia, the Socialist minister of the interior, were extradited
to Spain, where they were executed. Negrín was granted asylum in Great
Britain.
Of the Communist fighters from eastern central Europe and the Soviet
Union, many were victims of Stalin’s purges. Kléber probably died in 1939,
whereas others were killed in the wake of the Budapest show trial of László
Rajk in 1949, a trial that ended with his execution. Others who were liquidated
include Marcel Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador during Largo Caballero’s
years in power, General Jan Bersin, who coordinated the defence of Madrid,
and Mikhail Koltsov, Pravda’s Spanish correspondent, who was also active as a
political adviser and military organizer. The leader of the Spanish militia,
Valentín González (‘El Campesino’), was twice able to escape from the Soviet
Union, on the second occasion from the Gulag camp at Vorkuta. Among those
who survived their years in exile were La Pasionaria, Enrique Líster and
Santiago Carillo, who played an important role as secretary general of the
Spanish Communists after Franco’s death in 1975 and was one of the founders
of Eurocommunism.
Many of the leading Spanish artists and intellectuals remained in exile: they
include the painter Pablo Picasso, who had of course been living in Paris since
1906; the film director Luis Buñuel; and the historian Salvador de Madariaga.
The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset left Spain in 1936 and did not return
until 1946. The poet Antonio Machado died shortly after emigrating in July
1939 to the French commune of Collioure close to the border with Spain.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 619

Of the supporters of the Republic who were unable or unwilling to leave

Spain, around 270,000 were sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment,
while well over 100,000 were sent to labour camps or ‘labour battalions’, osten-
sibly with the aim of re-educating them. They were forced to work on recon-
struction projects, including road-building, or else they were sent to work in
the mercury mines at Almadín, where the conditions were particularly
inhuman and unhealthy. Their release from custody or from labour camps did
not mean a return to normality, however, but usually ended in exile or in their
having to report to the police on a daily basis. Republicans were effectively
excluded from public office. According to a decree of August 1939, 80 per cent
of all vacant positions had to be offered to those who had fought on the side of
the Nationalists or who had been persecuted by Popular Front governments.
Many Republican supporters were fined or dispossessed; and ‘Red’ parents
were often denied the right to raise their own children: in 1942, for example,
some 9,000 children were being raised by the state.
The social changes introduced by the Republicans failed to survive the
Nationalists’ victory, and this was as true of agricultural and industrial collec-
tives as it was of the secularization of schools, the full legal equality of women,
the provisions granting greater autonomy to Catalonia and the Basque region
and, of course, the changes in the political complexion of those working in
administration and in the judiciary, the police and the military. The Fuero del
Trabajo (Basic Labour Law) that was enacted by the Burgos government in
March 1938 and that came into force throughout Spain in April 1939 went
well beyond its model, the Italian Carta del Lavoro of 1927, and created state-
controlled, uniform, hierarchical syndicates of employers and employees. The
main positions within these national syndicates had been taken by Falangists –
members of the only party that was acknowledged to exist.
Not until July 1942, three years after the end of the Civil War, was a law
enacted that dealt with the formation of the Cortes, which was to be made up
of elected members and professional deputies, including ministers, high-
ranking officials from the Falange’s national councils and from the national
syndicate and individuals deemed particularly worthy by the head of state. For
the present the question as to the form of state that Spain would be was left
unresolved. Not even the charter of July 1945 shed any light on the matter, for
all that it resembled a constitution of sorts. In July 1947, following a refer-
endum, Spain was declared a monarchy, although this was to have practical
consequences only once the head of state had completed his term of office. It
was the prerogative of the Caudillo of Spain and of the Crusade, and of the
Generalissimo of the Spanish Armed Forces, Don Francisco Franco
Bahamonde, to propose to the Cortes the name of the person he wanted to
succeed him, a suggestion he could put forward at whatever point he liked.
By the end of the Civil War, Spain lay in economic ruin. Most of
the production plants had been destroyed, and by 1940 the national income
620 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

had fallen to its 1914 level. Between 1935 and 1939 industrial production fell
by 31 per cent, agricultural production by around 21 per cent, and the average
per capita income by 28.3 per cent. Since the victors were determined to savour
their triumph to the full, the country remained deeply divided. The regime that
had total control of the country after April 1939 was authoritarian, reactionary
and tainted by clericalism, a military dictatorship and a police state. But it was
neither totalitarian nor Fascist. For that, it lacked the ideological and social
dynamism that characterized the regimes of both Hitler and Mussolini.
No other contemporary observer has left such a succinct and compelling
analysis of the specific features of Spain in the 1930s as Franz Borkenau, who
was born in Vienna in 1900 and left Germany in 1933. A former Communist,
he visited Spain in the summer of 1936 and again in the spring of 1937 and
published an account of his experiences in his book The Spanish Cockpit, which
was published in London in 1937. According to Borkenau, the Spanish right
was far too dependent on the Church and army to be able to achieve the sort of
modernization that the Fascist dictatorships of the time had done in terms of
greater coordination and efficiency. But nor was the Spanish left a force for
modernization:

The history of the Spanish civil war, as far as the Left camp is concerned, is
the history of the spontaneous resistance of the masses against two things:
on the one hand against the revolt of clergy and army, and on the other
hand against the necessity to beat down this revolt with modern means of
warfare and organization. The masses wanted to fight and did fight heroi-
cally, but they wanted it to be a fight in the old guerilla [sic] manner of 1707
and 1808, a rising from village to village, from town to town, against the
threat of tyranny. That it could not be.97

In Borkenau’s view both the Spanish workers’ movement and the Spanish left
in general ‘had been able to fight’ but were ‘not able to organize an efficient
fight’.98 By analogy, this also applied to the right-wing camp.

Had the Spanish revolution met Franco only, it would probably have evolved
a superiority over him of the same type as that evolved by the revolution-
aries in France and Britain. But here the revolution met, not its own reac-
tionary adversaries, but the strongest military powers in the world.99

As a result, the Republic was left at the mercy of the very power that had offered
to help it: the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was no revolutionary force in
Spain, for it was convinced that a revolution could not be allowed to take place in
the Iberian peninsula. ‘On the battle-field of central Spain, to-day, the Comintern
and the Faschintern are meeting in their first military battle; the course of history
has involved the Spaniards, but the Spaniards are only auxiliaries.’100
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 621

Two years before the end of the Spanish Civil War, Borkenau came to the
conclusion that

whatever the final result of the armed fight may be, Spain will not emerge
out of it as a genuinely Europeanized country, be it in the fascist, the liberal-
democratic or the communist sense. It will remain what it was, a country
whose evolution has been arrested at the end of the seventeenth century,
which has since displayed an enormous amount of resistance to foreign
intrusion, but no capacity for rejuvenation. There may be, in the end, a
régime claiming to be liberal-democratic or claiming to be fascist; in reality,
it will be something profoundly different from what these names designate
in Europe.101

It is a judgement that pointedly sums up the Spanish dilemma.

A Model for Germany: The Anti-Semitic Policies of Fascist Italy

For one country, active involvement in the Spanish Civil War resulted in an
economic and financial burden that was to prove almost intolerable: Italy. In
1936–7 public spending was nearly twice as high as it had been in 1934–5: 40.9
million lire compared with 20.9 million. Over the same period the national
budgetary deficit had risen almost eightfold, from 2.1 million lire to 16.2 million.
The cost of living rose by 20 per cent in 1937 in the wake of a marked devalua-
tion of the lira the previous year.
Mussolini’s support for Franco led to his increasing dependence on Hitler.
Germany had long been Italy’s principal trading partner, while trade with
Britain and France continued to fall. By the end of the 1930s even the United
States had to settle for second place after Germany as the main recipient of
Italian exports, and the same was true of Italian imports. By 1935 Italy was
already importing more than half its coal from Germany, and by 1940 Germany
had a virtual monopoly in this field.
Economic dependence went hand in hand with an ideological rapproche-
ment, a rapprochement that was only to be expected, given the many points of
contact between Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. Only the
countries’ differences in the area of foreign policy had made such a develop-
ment difficult at least up to the outbreak of the war in Abyssinia. The Spanish
Civil War brought Berlin and Rome closer together than ever. This was the
period when the two countries gradually came to hold very similar views
in a field in which Italian Fascists and German National Socialists had
previously been clearly differentiated, namely, racist ideology and especially
anti-Semitism. It was not that Germany needed to force Italy to emulate it,
for all of Fascist Italy’s anti-Jewish measures were undertaken on its own
initiative.
622 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Within the Fascist Party there was a radically anti-Semitic faction associated
with Roberto Farinacci, who was the party’s secretary general in 1925–6. Even
at this time the party was already stirring up hatred of the Jews. The fact that
Jews were active in anti-Fascist organizations abroad and in the anti-Fascist
Resistance – they included the brothers Nello and Carlo Rosselli, who were
murdered in France in 1937 – led to the first official anti-Semitic campaign in
1934. Mussolini was never entirely free from anti-Jewish prejudices but nor did
he have any misgivings about promoting Jews in the Fascist movement and
entrusting them with government appointments. Not until the end of the 1920s
did his attitude start to harden. Thereafter he suspected Jews of being behind
every setback to his regime, especially when those setbacks came from western
democracies and from the League of Nations.
It was hard to whip up mass hysteria against the Jews in Italy not least
because in the 1920s there were no more than 48,000 Jews in the country as a
whole, a number that included 8,500 Jews who were not from Italy at all. By
1931 the total number was around 50,000. In short, Jews made up only 1.1 per
cent of the Italian population. The largest Jewish communities were in Rome,
Milan and Trieste. Their situation deteriorated in the wake of the Lateran
Treaties of 1920, for although they remained Italian citizens, the promotion of
Catholicism as the state religion meant that from then on Jews were seen as
members of those religious communities that were merely tolerated by the
state, adding to the pressure on Jewish students to attend classes in Roman
Catholicism.
But it was the war in Abyssinia that caused the country to lurch much
further in the direction of open racism. The tendency to think in terms of a
racial superiorità was traditionally directed in the main at Slavs and Africans
and received much support from the colonial war in North Africa, involving,
as it did, discrimination not only against individuals with a darker skin colour
but, more generally, against those who were Italian only in a legal sense but
who did not belong to the razza italiana. First and foremost, these people were
Jewish. As the historian Hans Woller has written,

The rabid racism that had its most powerful roots in the colonies was
combined with a declaration of war on the lurking bourgeois spirit that
everywhere had an inhibiting influence, with the Jews inevitably coming to
the centre of attention here: they were regarded as the embodiment of the
complacently bourgeois mentality that was now under permanent attack
and were said to destroy the picture of national and racial homogeneity that
was so dear to Mussolini’s heart. If the Jews were bullied and deprived of
their rights, it was reckoned that the bourgeoisie, the monarchy and the
Vatican could all be threatened with a similar fate if they opposed the
Fascists’ plans for the country’s reorganization.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 623

The progressive exclusion of the Jews was part of an ongoing process of radi-
calization that Woller rightly sees as one of the basic tenets of Fascism:

Every form of moderation meant a threat, and every period of stasis could
lead to the loss of popular support in society, support that could be guaran-
teed only by constant mobilization and agitation and by a kind of permanent
state of emergency. The fact that Mussolini had to obey this fundamental law
just as surely as did Hitler and the leaders of smaller Fascist movements that
would never have come to power on their own merits alone will not have
troubled him any further. Nothing was further from his purpose than to
stand still and rest on the laurels of his Fascist revolution, for that revolution
was, much to his own dismay, far from having been completed.102

It was no accident, therefore, that the systematic discrimination against the

Jews that began in the autumn of 1938 on the model of Germany’s Nuremberg
Laws coincided with a violent campaign against the bourgeoisie that was
organized by the party secretary Achille Starace. From now on the bourgeoisie
stood accused of placing private profit above the national cause. Mussolini’s
first call for greater vigilance vis-à-vis the Jews dates from February 1938 and
demanded that at universities, in administration, in the free economy and in
the cultural life of the nation the part played by Jews should be reduced to the
point where it reflected their actual percentage within the population as a
whole. A Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti published in July and signed by the
Duce categorically excluded Jews from the razza italiana.
There followed a whole series of measures that had a radical impact on the
daily lives of Italian Jews. Jewish pupils and teachers had to leave Italian schools.
Foreign Jews living in Italy were no longer recognized as Italian citizens and
had to leave the country within six months. In October 1938 the Gran Consiglio
del Fascismo issued a Declaration on Race in which Jews were defined as
persons who had a Jewish father and a Jewish mother: religion played no part
in this, becoming important only in the case of the children of a mixed
marriage. If the child was baptized, he or she was deemed Italian but was other-
wise classified as Jewish. Unlike in Germany, there were no half-, quarter- and
eighth-Jews according to this taxonomy.
Provisions designed to protect the Italian race – Provvedimenti per la
Difesa della Razza Italiana – were passed on 17 November 1938, a week after
the great Crystal Night pogrom in Germany. They brought together all existing
anti-Jewish legislation and added a number of new discriminatory measures of
their own. From now on Jews were allowed to marry only Jews; existing mixed
marriages had to be annulled; Jews were prevented from working in the armed
forces or for the civil service; and they could not be members of the Partito
Nazionale Fascista. There were also drastic limits placed on their economic
624 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

activities: Jews were no longer allowed to run larger firms and could no longer
own estates covering an area of more than fifty hectares.
There were exceptions for those Jews who had served Italy and Fascism,
and yet even these ‘privileged’ individuals were barred from holding public
office, from becoming members of the armed forces and from joining the
Fascist Party. Many Jews left the country. One of the most famous of them was
the physicist Enrico Fermi, who settled in the United States and played a signif-
icant role in the research that led to the production of the first atom bomb. The
anti-Jewish measures undertaken by the state were far from popular, but nor
was there a broadly based protest movement. The Catholic Church merely
signalled its solidarity with those Jews who had converted to Catholicism.
In the matter of racism, Fascist Italy had drawn closer to National Socialist
Germany entirely on its own initiative and in certain respects, including the
question of the annulment of mixed marriages, it had even outdone the Germans.
It seemed as if Hitler could be satisfied with his tractable Axis partner who had
once been his inspiration. On 9 May 1938 he paid a state visit to Rome and was
acclaimed alongside Mussolini. Both men seized the opportunity to announce
their desire to continue aligning their countries’ domestic and foreign policies.
In April 1939, barely a year later, Italian troops overran Albania, an attempt
on Mussolini’s part to emulate Hitler, who the previous month had invaded
Resttschechei – literally, the ‘remainder of Czechia’, namely, those parts of
Czechoslovakia annexed on 15/16 March as the Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia. In both cases, the other partner in the Axis learnt of the operations
only once they were already under way. By the spring of 1939 the Berlin–Rome
Axis was best described as a ‘brutal friendship’ – the term was first used by the
British historian F. W. Deakin in his book about the wartime alliance between
National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy, Brutal Friendship (1962).

Neighbours at Risk: Czechoslovakia, Poland and the

Third Reich 1935–8
Relations between Germany and Czechoslovakia had been tense since 1935,
and by the spring of 1938 they were also casting a shadow over Spain. In May
1935 Prague signed a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union that was
intended to complement the treaties it had already signed with Romania and
Yugoslavia in 1920–21 within the framework of the Little Entente and the
friendship and alliance treaty with France in 1924. The pact also tied Soviet
help to simultaneous support from France. Although it was directed against
Germany, it did not stop Hitler from putting out feelers in November 1936 to
see if Edvard Beneg, who had replaced Tomág Masaryk on 18 December 1935
as the Czech president, might be interested in signing a non-aggression pact
with Germany. In the event, this initiative was not pursued by Berlin, in spite
of Beneg’s positive reaction to it.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 625

In a secret discussion on 5 November 1937 that was minuted by Friedrich

Hoßbach, Hitler was already talking about ‘acting against Czechoslovakia’: the
time for such action would come when the internal weakness of France and of
the French army made this move possible or France became involved in a war
with some other power. Hitler calculated that by incorporating Czechoslovakia
and Austria into the German Reich, he would be able to provide food for an
additional five or six million people and ease the burden on Germany both
militarily and politically. On 5 November 1937 there was no more than a
passing reference to ‘German values in Czechoslovakia’, Hitler being concerned
not with the Sudeten Germans’ right of self-determination but with expanding
the Lebensraum of the Germans.103
In the elections to the Czech parliament in May 1935 Konrad Henlein’s
Sudeten German Party, or SdP, received two-thirds of all the German votes,
winning 15.2 per cent of the total and becoming the biggest party in the
country, bigger even than the Agrarians on 14.3 per cent, followed by the Social
Democrats on 12.6 per cent and the Communists on 10.3 per cent. At this date
in its history the SdP was still a moderate party. Henlein had distanced himself
from the National Socialists in the autumn of 1934 and refused to redraw the
country’s borders. Only after its election successes did the SdP forge any closer
links with Berlin. Both before and after the elections the party’s public demands
were aimed at greater autonomy, not the secession of the region. In a lecture
that he delivered at Chatham House in London in December 1935, Henlein
attacked both pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism, declaring the formation of
national states in the eastern corner of central Europe to be impossible.
By 19 November 1937 Henlein had changed his tack completely, arguing in
his Report to the Führer and Reich Chancellor on Current Questions of German
Policy in the Czechoslovak Republic that the SdP must ‘disguise its profession of
faith in National Socialism and present it as a philosophy and as a political prin-
ciple’. As a political party operating within the democratic and parliamentary
system that was currently in force in Czechoslovakia, it must use democratic
language and democratic and parliamentary methods. But it had now become
‘senseless in terms of Realpolitik to support the idea of autonomy in the Sudeten
region because this region has been turned into a concrete wall and enceinte of
the Czechoslovak state’.104 In the course of further lecture tours of England that
Henlein undertook in July 1936, October 1937 and May 1938, his hosts, including
Winston Churchill, were assured that the exact opposite was the case. On each
occasion he gave his word as a gentleman that he had received no instructions
from Berlin and that he was striving to achieve a solution in Czechoslovakia that
would give the Sudeten Germans greater autonomy. His assurance was welcomed
by the majority of British Conservatives, but not by Churchill himself.
The government in Prague, which had been led by the Slovak Agrarian
politician Milan Hod:a since November 1935, included members of the
German ‘activist’ parties, namely, the Social Democrats and the Agrarian
626 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

League. In July 1936 they were joined by the Christian Socialists. On 18

February 1937 Hod:a signed an agreement with all three parties in which he
held out the promise of decentralization in the sense of economic and admin-
istrative regionalism but explicitly ruled out the whole notion of political
autonomy. He also promised the activist parties – who represented only a third
of Sudeten Germans – more government jobs for Germans and higher state
subsidies for crisis-hit areas of the country. In reality little changed in
Czechoslovak politics. For Beneg and most leading politicians in Prague the
Czechoslovak Republic remained the ‘National State of the Czechoslovak
Nation’ that had been created at the end of 1918. Ethnic minorities enjoyed
greater political freedom and political influence in Czechoslovakia than in any
of the other states in eastern central and south-east Europe that had been
formed or reconstituted in 1918. But in the country’s own view of itself, there
was no room for nationalists other than those of the ‘Czechoslovak nation’.
Among the active opponents of this state ideology were not only the
Sudeten German Party but also the Slovak People’s Party associated with Father
Andrej Hlinka, with whom Henlein developed a closer working relationship in
February 1938. A conversation between Henlein and Hod:a in September
1937, at which the former had demanded the immediate introduction of self-
rule for the German-speaking areas, produced no results. On 14 November
1937 serious clashes broke out in Teplitz (Teplice) between Henlein’s supporters
and the police, leading to the arrest of an SdP deputy who had delivered a
particularly incendiary speech and resulting in a further worsening of relations
between the government in Prague and the majority of Sudeten Germans, a
development observed with marked satisfaction in Berlin.
The Czechoslovak Republic’s fourth-largest party, the Czech Communist
Party, had always been bitterly opposed to the government. Insofar as every
cabinet since 1929 had included the emphatically reformist Social Democrats,
there was never any likelihood that a popular front would be formed in
Czechoslovakia. But the Czech-Soviet mutual assistance pact of 1935 and the
Comintern’s new general policy forced Stalin’s followers in Prague to undertake
certain tactical manoeuvres of their own under their leader Klement Gottwald
and to support the government’s official foreign policy at least to the extent that
this policy affected the terms of the pact with the Soviet Union.
There was a further need for this policy shift in that Stalin was by the mid-
1930s attaching extraordinarily high importance to Czechoslovakia’s strategic
significance in view of its geographical position and its alliance with France.
But the Czech Communist Party’s new line could also accommodate the most
violent threats to the government. Speaking in the lower house on 22 April
1936, the Communist deputy Bohumír 4meral declared that if the bourgeoisie
was incapable of retaining the present conception of an alliance with the Soviet
Union, then it was in the interest of all nationalities within the state ‘to bring
about a change in the political balance within this country of ours’.105
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 627

Czechoslovakia was not only the one state in east central Europe whose
democratic system survived the world economic crisis; it was also the most
highly developed industrial state in this part of the Continent. With the excep-
tion of 1932, its trade balance was invariably in the black, as was its balance of
payments, the only exceptions here being the three years 1932, 1933 and 1936.
The consumer goods industries that for the most part produced for the export
market suffered badly as a result of the depression in the agricultural countries
in east central and south-east Europe. (This had a particularly serious impact
on the German-speaking regions, where unemployment was substantially
higher than the national average.) The economic historian Alice Teichova has
described as follows the repercussions of the great crisis for Czechoslovakia:

In comparison to 1929 the Czechoslovak economy had a distinctly more

autarkic character. Its foreign trade remained below the level reached in
1929, whereas its industrial production came close to returning to its earlier
level. At a time when it was facing a great military threat, this necessarily
exacerbated the country’s situation in terms of the world economy and
contributed to its political weakness.106

Poland was even more badly hit by the world economic crisis than
Czechoslovakia. There had been a brief period of economic growth in the late
1920s, which the colonels’ regime interpreted as the successful outcome of the
policy of sanacja (cleansing) introduced in the wake of Pi5sudski’s military
putsch in May 1926, but this came to an end in 1930. If we take 1929 as the base
year, then the index of industrial production fell, dropping from 100 to 69 in
1931 and to 54 in 1932. By 1932 shares on the Warsaw stock exchange were
trading at only 20 per cent of their 1928 value. During the same period agricul-
tural prices fell by around two-thirds. Even as late as 1935 a farmer was receiving
on average only a third of what he had earned in 1928. According to the histo-
rian W5odzimierz Borodziej, ‘Whereas the great crisis in the towns and cities
recalled conditions in Germany and America, in the country it assumed the
proportions of a catastrophe affecting every aspect of civilization.’107
Politically, too, the years of the world economic crisis were a turbulent time
for Poland. In 1929 a group of radical Ukrainian nationalists formed the
Organizacija Ukrajinskih Nacjonalista (OUN) that had no scruples about
resorting to armed terror. On 15 June 1934 they murdered the minister of the
interior, Bronis5aw Pieracki, in the very heart of Warsaw. That same year a
concentration camp was built at Bareza Kartuska on the orders of the country’s
president, Ignacy Mo0cicki. Anyone suspected of criminal activities by the
local authorities could be sent there without trial for up to six months. The first
prisoners were right-wing extremists from the Obóz Naradowo-Radikalny
(ONR) who were falsely accused of murdering Pieracki. On 14 September
1934 the country’s foreign minister, Józef Beck, informed the League of Nations
628 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

that he was terminating the treaty protecting minorities on the grounds that
there was no equivalent law that applied to Europe as a whole.
Ever since Pi5sudski’s military putsch of 1926, Poland’s government had
been a provisional one. Legally speaking, the parliamentary and democratic
constitution of March 1921 which had been modelled on that of the Third
French Republic remained in force, but it had in fact been largely overtaken
by events. After Pi5sudski resigned as prime minister for a second time at the
end of November 1930, the government was run almost entirely by army
officers: seven of the country’s eight prime ministers between 1931 and 1939,
together with fifteen ministers and fifteen regional voivodes, hailed from the
army, many of them holding the rank of colonel. Pi5sudski, the regime’s ‘strong
man’, remained the minister of war and the general inspector of the armed
forces.
Starting in March 1931, a special committee of the Sejm worked on drawing
up a new authoritarian constitution intended to provide the dictatorship with a
solid legal framework. The result was the ‘April Constitution’ of 1935, which
was geared entirely to installing Pi5sudski as the future head of state, on whom
would devolve the task of assuming ‘responsibility for the fate of the state in the
face of God and history’. Embodying within his own person the ‘unified and
indivisible power of the state’, he could choose his country’s prime minister as
he deemed fit and could also designate his own successor as president, in addi-
tion to being the ‘supreme commander of the armed forces’ and empowered to
appoint one-third of the members of the Senate. The other organs of state were
all under his control: the government, the Sejm, the Senate, the armed forces,
the courts and a Court of Auditors. The president was elected by an electoral
body whose members were for the most part made up of the ‘worthiest citizens’
who in turn were elected by the Sejm and the Senate in the ratio of two to one.
Under the terms of a specially enacted decree, candidates for the Sejm were
chosen not by the political parties but by local electoral bodies, ensuring that
the state apparatus had extensive influence over their appointment. The voting
age was raised from twenty-one to twenty-four.
The ‘April Constitution’ would have guaranteed Pi5sudski almost unlimited
powers, but he did not live to see his election as state president, for he died after
a long illness on 12 May 1935. The office of head of state remained in the hands
of his loyal supporter, the professor of chemistry, Ignacy Mo0cicki, who had
held the position since May 1926. Pi5sudski was buried amid great pomp at the
Royal Castle in Wawel in a ceremony attended by Hermann Göring and Pierre
Laval, who used the occasion to discuss Franco-German relations in some
depth. Even more than during his lifetime, the dead Pi5sudski became a myth-
ical figure in Polish history, memories of the authoritarian ruler of the later
years gradually being supplanted in the collective consciousness by his merits
as an army commander and statesman who in 1926 had saved his country from
economic, financial and political ruin.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 629

The first elections to take place under the new constitution were held in
September 1935 but resulted in a low turnout of only 46.5 per cent, a figure
influenced in no small part by left-wing calls for a boycott. The government bloc
known as the BBWR – a non-party alliance that had been formed in 1928 and
was prepared to work closely with the government of Marshal Pi5sudski –
received a three-quarters majority, only for it to disband itself a short time after-
wards. It was replaced in March 1937 by a more rigorously organized Camp of
National Union, or OZN, led by Colonel Adam Koc and bearing a certain simi-
larity to the official party of Fascist Italy, while never achieving the latter’s dyna-
mism. As inspector general of the armed forces Pi5sudski was replaced by
Edward Rydz-?mig5y, who was acclaimed as ‘leader of the nation’ but never
came close to achieving his predecessor’s authority or popularity. In May 1938
the OZN demanded that the country’s Jews be driven from public life, but the
hope of triggering a popular movement in favour of the government failed to
materialize, and the OZN remained an association of worthy notables.
The shift to the right on the part of the colonels inevitably provoked a
response from the political left. Poland’s Socialist Party, the PPS, had become
increasingly radicalized in the years since 1929 and in 1935 it demanded land
reform without compensation and a dictatorship of the proletariat rather than
a restoration of parliamentary democracy, but with the exception of a brief
episode in 1935/6 it refused to countenance a popular front alliance with the
country’s illegal Communist Party. Far more damaging to the Polish Communist
Party were Stalin’s purges. Those of its leaders who were living in the Soviet
Union and who were suspected of Trotskyism were almost all deported or
liquidated between 1933 and 1937. Of its 3,800 officials, only 100 survived the
Stalinist Terror. The ‘Polish operation’ aimed collectively at all Poles living in
the Soviet Union began in 1937. The Polish Communist Party was officially
disbanded in May 1938, a move justified the following year by the claim that
the party had been infiltrated by the agents of Polish Fascism.
In the spring of 1936 major strikes broke out in the country’s industrial
regions, followed by violent clashes that ended in eight deaths in Kraków and
fourteen in L’viv. A year later, in April 1937, the country was shaken by bloody
strikes among the peasants, strikes that had been called by the Peasant Party
demanding not only economic and political reforms but also a return to a
parliamentary democracy. The clashes resulted in forty demonstrators being
shot by the police and around 100 policemen being injured. Five thousand
farmers were arrested and around 1,000 brought before the courts. By now,
control over the state’s apparatus of power was working so well that the colo-
nels’ regime was able to survive even this crisis, its worst to date.
But there was also powerful opposition on the political right. Roman
Dmowski’s National Democrats had grown more radical under Pi5sudski and
become more virulently anti-Semitic. By January 1937 the National Democrats
were even demanding the deportation of all Jews, a demand taken up in May
630 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

and June 1937 by the OZN. An extreme right-wing rival of the National
Democrats was the aforementioned ONR, which had been formed in 1934 and
whose political programme centred on Poland for Poles alone and on a totali-
tarian Fascist ‘Catholic state of the Polish nation’. Among the population at
large there was much support for its anti-Semitic rhetoric. In the mid-1930s
there were repeated pogrom-like excesses, generally at weekly street markets,
that resulted in the deaths of twenty individuals, fourteen of whom were Jews.
The Catholic clergy played a key role in fomenting anti-Jewish sentiment.
In March 1936 the Synod of Catholic Bishops demanded that non-Jewish chil-
dren be segregated from their Jewish classmates at school. On 29 February
1936 the primate of the Catholic Church, Cardinal August Hlond, had written
a pastoral letter arguing that the Jewish problem would last as long as the Jews
remained Jews. Although universal hatred of the Jews was to be rejected,

it is a fact that Jews are waging war against the Catholic church, that they are
steeped in free-thinking, and constitute the vanguard of atheism, the
Bolshevik movement, and revolutionary activity. It is a fact that Jews have a
corruptive influence on morals and that their publishing houses are
spreading pornography. It is true that Jews are perpetrating fraud, prac-
ticing usury, and dealing in prostitution. [. . .] One should stay away from
the harmful moral influence of Jews, keep away from their anti-Christian
culture, and especially boycott the Jewish press and demoralizing Jewish
publications.108

The prime minister from 1936 to 1939, Felizian S5awoj-Sk5adkowski, rejected

the use of physical force against the Jews but declared that an economic boycott
was legitimate. During this period there were internationally coordinated plans
in government circles to force the country’s Jews to resettle in Madagascar.
This was an alternative to the idea of resettlement in Palestine that was
demanded by Polish Zionists but on which Great Britain was currently placing
ever greater restrictions. For a time this alternative project was pursued with
Léon Blum’s Popular Front government in Paris, for all that it ultimately came
to nothing. The enforced expulsion of Polish Jews to Madagascar was primarily
intended to solve a socio-political problem: that of rural overpopulation. The
vast numbers of Polish peasants could move to the towns and cities only once
the middle classes who were already living there and who were made up of
Jewish tradesmen, merchants and other artisans had been forcibly removed.
Easier to implement were internal political measures such as the introduc-
tion of a limit on the number of Jewish students at colleges and universities. In
this way the government was able to reduce the number of Jewish students
from over 20 per cent of the total in 1928/9 to 10 per cent in 1937/8, a reduc-
tion that represented the percentage of Jews in the population as a whole. This
official anti-Jewish policy was backed up by a demand made by anti-Semitic
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 631

students and implemented by university vice-chancellors, whereby Jews had to

sit in special rows of seats when attending lectures at Polish universities. An
‘Aryan paragraph’ was also introduced by many professional organizations
with the aim of driving Jews from all freelance professions.
In terms of its political economy, Poland had subscribed to orthodox
maxims until 1935, maintaining the stability of the zloty and ensuring a
balanced budget and a positive trade balance. By the mid-1930s the govern-
ment was beginning to change tack and adopt an anti-cyclical economic policy
in the spirit of Keynes, with state investment being used above all for the arma-
ments industry. In the wake of a four-year programme agreed in 1936, some
100,000 new jobs were to be created, chiefly in southern central Poland, and
the yawning gulf between the industrialized and the agricultural regions was to
be reduced.
Poland’s economic development profited from the new policy, even if the
benefits were modest. Not until 1938 were Polish factories producing more
than they had done in 1913. If we take the year 1913 as the base, then produc-
tion output rose to 86 per cent of its pre-war level in 1929, dropping to 52 per
cent in 1932 and rising to 105 per cent only in 1938. On the other hand, the
social structure of the country changed little during the interwar period. If we
take 1921 as the index year, the proportion of peasants in gainful employment
had dropped only slightly to 94 per cent, while the proportion of workers rose
to 106 per cent, that of the petite bourgeoisie to 107 per cent and that of the
intelligentsia to 112 per cent. On the strength of these statistics, W5odzimierz
Borodziej has drawn the sobering conclusion that Poland was one of those
states that ‘could in general report no economic growth during the whole of the
interwar period’.109
In terms of its foreign policy, Poland could feel satisfied with its signing
non-aggression treaties with two of its potentially most dangerous neighbours:
with the Soviet Union in July 1932 and with Germany in January 1934. In
March 1934 Pi5sudski spoke privately of an unprecedented situation in Polish
history. But he was clear-sighted enough to predict that his country’s improved
relations with Berlin would last no more than four years, in spite of the fact that
the treaty with Germany was due to run for a ten-year period.
The foreign minister Józef Beck, who had been a member of every Polish
cabinet since November 1932 and was felt to represent a markedly pro-German
outlook, honoured the treaty with Berlin by issuing only the mildest of rebukes
for Germany’s occupation of the Rhineland in March 1936 while approving
of it in practice. He refused, however, to join the anti-Comintern pact, as
Hitler had wanted, since he did not want to be forced into a position where
Poland was directly opposed to the Soviet Union (and indirectly opposed
to the Popular Front in France), a position that in turn would have made
Poland dependent on Germany. In November 1937 Beck signed a bilateral
treaty with Germany designed to safeguard their countries’ minorities, and this
632 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

led to a further thawing of relations between Berlin and Warsaw, while the
worsening of relations between Germany and Czechoslovakia was welcomed
by Beck with unalloyed enthusiasm. Poland and Czechoslovakia were still
arguing over Teschen (Cieszyn), which had been divided up by a conference of
Allied ambassadors in July 1920 in a way that Poland felt was unacceptable. If
Czechoslovakia were to crumble beneath German pressure, Poland might have
a chance of resolving the Teschen question in its favour.
Beck pulled off a spectacular coup on 17 March 1938, when, in the wake of
Germany’s annexation of Austria, he delivered an ultimatum to Lithuania,
demanding that his eastern neighbour finally establish diplomatic and economic
relations with Poland and recognize the existing border, including the loss of
the area around Vilnius. Given Poland’s military superiority, the government in
Kaunas felt that it had no choice but to comply with these demands.
Beck seemed to have come much closer to achieving his goal of a ‘Third
Europe’ in the form of a bloc of eastern central European states under Polish
leadership, but he would be able to realize his ambitions only if relations
between Germany and Poland remained as good as they seemed to be in the
spring and summer of 1938. Whether Hitler was interested in such an aim was
unclear, but the autumn of 1938 was to bring clarity to the situation, albeit not
in the way that Warsaw wanted.

Roosevelt’s Realpolitik: The United States from 1936 to 1938

Attempts to appease the dictators in Berlin and Rome were by no means limited
to Europe, for the United States of America was also a party to this process.
When the Abyssinian conflict came to a head in the summer of 1935, Roosevelt
asked for special powers that would allow him to impose sanctions on the
aggressor, but the largely isolationist Congress declined to grant his request.
A Neutrality Act passed by the secretary of state Cordell Hull in August 1935
against Roosevelt’s wishes merely banned American ships from supplying war
materials to countries involved in the war. Neither oil nor steel was covered by
the American embargo or by the sanctions of the League of Nations, a loophole
exploited not only by Fascist Italy but also by the relevant branches of industry
within the United States itself.
In the wake of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 the
government in Washington supported the British line of non-intervention.
Roosevelt asked Congress for a law banning the supply of war materials to
countries involved in the Civil War, and the Senate and House of Representatives
agreed to his request in January 1937. The embargo hit the Spanish Republic
far harder than the rebels, who were well supplied with arms from Germany
and Italy, but for domestic reasons Roosevelt was by no means displeased with
this outcome. In conversation with his secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes,
the president observed that lifting the embargo would cost the Democrats
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 633

many Catholic votes in the mid-term elections in 1938. The White House
never lost sight of the fact that the majority of American Catholics were on
Franco’s side. Equally important were the interests of major industries such
as Texaco and General Motors, which supplied the Spanish Nationalists with
huge quantities of oil and trucks throughout the Civil War.
Public opinion in America was divided over the events in Spain. A powerful
minority supported Franco, while a much smaller minority backed the Republic.
From the ranks of the latter, between 2,000 and 3,000 volunteers were recruited
who fought in the Abraham Lincoln and George Washington Battalions as part
of the International Brigades that were on the side of the Republic. But the vast
majority of Americans were neutral and would undoubtedly have backed a
law passed by Congress in May 1937 which, entirely in the isolationist spirit,
imposed a universal weapons embargo, thereby coming close to the goal of all
the isolationists: permanent neutrality. But here too the interests of big business
were taken into account, a ‘cash-and-carry’ clause allowing states engaged in
the war to buy American goods for cash and export them on their own ships,
the only exception being war materials. An avowed isolationist like Senator
William Borah from Idaho denounced this compromise, dismissing it with the
phrase ‘the whole sordid cowardly cash and carry proposition’,110 but convinced
internationalists such as Cordell Hull regarded the act as a blatant attempt to
gag American foreign policy.
The president was more of an internationalist by nature, but as a proponent
of Realpolitik he shied away from open conflict with the isolationists as he
needed their votes for his internal policies. On 5 October 1937, less than a year
after his triumphant re-election, he gave a speech in Chicago – a traditional
stronghold of the isolationists – and, responding to Japan’s recent invasion of
China, appeared to signal a change in American policy in favour of greater
interventionism. The address has become known as his ‘Quarantine Speech’:

The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to

those violations of treaties and those ignorings of human instincts which
today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from
which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality. [. . .] When
an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves
and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the
community against the spread of the disease. [. . .] War is a contagion,
whether it be declared or undeclared. [. . .] The will for peace on the part of
peace-loving nations must express itself to the end that nations that may be
tempted to violate their agreements and the rights of others will desist from
such a course. There must be positive endeavors to preserve peace.111

In fact Roosevelt’s speech did not mark a turning point in American foreign
policy, for ‘quarantine’, the president believed, was a milder expression than
634 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

‘sanctions’. He had wanted to make his country’s moral position clear to his
audiences at home and abroad, but he was unwilling to make any commitments.
On 12 December 1937, when Japanese aircraft dropped bombs on a flagged
American gunboat, the Panay, that was lying at anchor in the Yangtze River
outside Nanking, and fired on it with machine guns, killing two crew members
and an Italian journalist, the USA declined to retaliate after Tokyo issued an
apology. Not for a moment did Washington consider declaring war on Japan.
Conversely, the United States did feel that the realignment in Germany’s trade
policies implied by Schacht’s ‘New Plan’ posed a serious threat to the western
world in general. This realignment involved the opening up of Latin America to
German exports and increasing the amount of raw materials imported to
Germany from that corner of the world, without Germany demanding any
foreign currency in return. Whereas German exports fell in total by 2.73 per cent
between the first quarter of 1934 and the equivalent period in 1935, German
imports from Latin America rose by 17.5 per cent. Total exports dropped by
11.62 per cent, while exports to Latin America rose by 18.32 per cent. Between
1932 and 1936 Germany’s share of all the imports to Latin America almost
doubled, rising from 7.3 per cent to 14 per cent. During this same period the
United States was able to increase its share by only 0.6 per cent from 28.8 per cent
to 29.4 per cent.
The United States did what it could to oppose this development and
succeeded in maintaining its lead as Latin America’s largest trading partner,
the only exceptions being Argentina, Brazil and Chile, the subcontinent’s three
biggest economies. Washington exerted particular pressure on Brazil, which
Getúlio Vargas had been running as an authoritarian regime since 1930 and,
since his coup d’état in November 1937, as a dictatorship modelled on Antonio
de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo in Portugal, finally persuading Vargas to
decline to sign a new trade agreement with Germany – the earlier contract had
been signed in 1931 and had ended in July 1936. But Washington’s success was
merely apparent, for Brazil continued to exchange goods with Germany on a
currency-free basis until the start of the Second World War.
Under Roosevelt there were no more violent incursions in Latin America,
for these no longer harmonized with the ‘good neighborhood’ policy that he
had announced in his inaugural address in March 1933. But the new policy of
non-intervention also meant accepting and supporting dictatorships like those
of Fulgencio Batista, the American-backed victor in the 1933 civil war in Cuba,
and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Yet America also tolerated not
only the left-wing nationalist regime of Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, a regime
which, bent on social reform, was profoundly anti-clergy, but also the popular
front coalition of Radicals, Socialists and Communists that came to power in
Chile in 1938 and remained in office until 1946.
Three Pan-American conferences were held between 1933 and 1938: in
Montevideo in December 1933, in Buenos Aires in November 1936 and in
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 635

Lima in December 1938. At each of them Roosevelt attempted to persuade the

states of Latin America to adopt the foreign policy maxims of the United
States. But Argentina, which had been a covert military regime since 1930,
succeeded in resisting American attempts to force the subcontinent’s republics
to commit themselves to resisting any external threat. The result was a promise
of mutual consultation tied to a ban on intervention that effectively amounted
to a formal obligation to act on the part of the United States. Not until July
1940, almost a year after the outbreak of war in Europe, did an inter-American
conference in Havana comply with Washington’s wishes and regard any foreign
attack on a signatory state as an attack on all of the treaty’s signatories.

On the domestic front, the first twelve months of Roosevelt’s second term in
office were overshadowed by three major crises. The first resulted from his
aforementioned plan to break the conservative majority of the Supreme Court
by insisting on the appointment of an additional judge for each one who had
reached the age of seventy. Not only the Republicans but many liberal
Democrats regarded this ‘court-packing’ as an attack on the American consti-
tution. In the event the problem that important New Deal laws might be
obstructed by the Supreme Court resolved itself when a relatively conservative
judge moved over to the liberal camp at the end of March 1937, helping the
advocates of reform to gain a majority. Shortly afterwards several conservative
judges stepped down and were replaced by progressive judges, encouraging
commentators to refer to a ‘Roosevelt Court’. But the sense of bitterness gener-
ated by the president’s attempt to manipulate the balance of power within the
Supreme Court lasted beyond the actual struggle, which ended officially in
August 1937. Even after that date Roosevelt could no longer rely on the loyal
support of his own party in Congress to the extent that he had done
previously.
A second crisis was social in character. At the end of December 1936 the
workforce at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, had begun a series of sit-ins
that for many observers recalled the early years of the Popular Front in France.
The company leaders capitulated in February 1937 and met all the demands of
the United Automobile Workers, the UAW, a union whose key positions were
held by socialists, Communists and Trotskyites. The fact that the old umbrella
organization, the American Federation of Labor, or AFL, excluded the UAW in
1937 did not harm the latter in the slightest. Quite the opposite: its member-
ship shot up from 35,000 to 400,000 and it quickly became one of the most
powerful pillars in a new and more radical umbrella organization, the Congress
of Industrial Organizations (CIO). There were further sit-ins in other large
industries in the course of 1937, including United Steel, Firestone Tire and
Rubber, and American Woolen. The employers and the conservatives were
particularly incensed at the attitude of the Democratic governors and of the
president, for the former refused to end the occupations by sending in the
636 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

National Guard, while the president thwarted an attempt by the Democrat

senator James F. Byrnes to persuade the Senate to condemn the sit-ins.
The third crisis was one that affected the American economy in general. In
June 1937 Roosevelt had reacted to positive economic figures by drastically
reducing public expenditure. His cuts were aimed in the main at the Works
Progress Administration, or WPA, while the activities of the Public Works
Administration, or PWA, were completely stopped. Two months later industrial
production recorded its biggest drop in American history. Within three months
the full capacity of the steel industry had fallen from 80 per cent to 19 per cent,
and in the second half of the year the stock market index of the New York Times,
which in the spring of that year had for the first time returned to its pre-1929
level (= 100), fell to 85 points, wiping out all the gains that had been made since
1935. Between August and October the Dow Jones Index fell from 190 to 115
points. Additional difficulties were caused by falling agricultural prices, forcing
Congress to take extensive measures in February 1938, including quotas on
wheat, cotton and tobacco production.
Within the cabinet it was the secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau,
Jr, who was the most outspoken advocate of a balanced budget and a reduction
in the national debt. He ascribed the drop in production solely to lack of invest-
ment. In his view, higher state expenditure would lead only to inflation and
higher taxes. His two most determined opponents were Harold Ickes and the
governor of the Federal Reserve Board, Marriner Eccles, whose arguments
were Keynesian, even though he had never read any of the British economist’s
writings: during a period of deflation the government needed to offset the lack
of investment by higher expenditure financed by loans, whereas at times of
economic growth the government should build up its reserves. During the
early months of what was to become known as the ‘Roosevelt Depression’, the
president adopted the position of Morgenthau and his orthodox advisers.
But Roosevelt could not ignore the worsening plight of the men and women
on welfare and the first deaths from starvation. Nor could he turn his back on
the growing number of unemployed. Between 1937 and 1938 the number of
unemployed grew from 14.3 per cent of the workforce to 19 per cent, which in
absolute figures meant a rise from 7.7 million to 10.4 million. In 1939, ten years
after the great stock exchange crash of 1929, the number of unemployed again
rose above ten million. Another sharp fall in prices on the New York Stock
Exchange on 25 March 1938 played a major part in persuading Roosevelt to
align himself with the supporters of deficit spending, and on 14 April he asked
Congress to help finance a major aid programme funded by loans: the PWA
was to receive almost 100,000 million dollars, the resurrected WPA more than
140,000 million. Further funds were channelled into building cheap housing,
into agricultural credits and into work schemes for unemployed young people.
At the end of April 1938 Roosevelt asked Congress to set up a commission
of inquiry to address the problem of the way in which power was concentrated
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 637

in the American economy, but it produced few concrete results. In June

Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act that Roosevelt had asked for, but
in a form that admitted of so many exceptions that it was barely possible to
speak of any improvement to the situation of wage earners. It was the last of the
New Deal reform laws and came at a time when there were already signs of an
economic recovery.

Mid-term elections were held in 1938, when the whole of the House of
Representatives and one-third of all senators came up for re-election. The
Democrats were able to hold on to their majority in the House of Representatives,
albeit with the slenderest of leads: 48.6 per cent for the Democrats and 47 per
cent for the Republicans, reflecting an increase of 7.4 percentage points for the
‘Grand Old Party’ when compared with 1936. In the Senate the Republicans
won an additional six seats, but the Democrats maintained their two-thirds’
majority with sixty-nine seats against twenty-three. The elections of November
1938 were not a plebiscite on the New Deal, although they left the New Dealers
weakened. They had already suffered a serious defeat in April 1938 when the
Reorganization Bill that was intended to grant the president powers to restruc-
ture government agencies in order to improve efficiency was thrown out by the
House of Representatives by 204 votes to 196. After 1939 the funds available for
the New Deal were reduced, and some of them, including the popular Federal
Theatre Project, were abandoned altogether in June 1939.
Unlike the crisis of the early 1930s, the ‘Roosevelt Depression’ did not give
rise to a new wave of radicalization. On the political right there were extreme
anti-Semites who denounced the New Deal as a ‘Jew Deal’ and who included
groups such as William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts, Father Coughlin’s
Christian Front, the German-American Bund that was funded by the NSDAP
and the Black Legion, a terrorist organization active in the Midwest. All of
them remained splinter groups. On the political left, the Communists gained
new supporters by forming a broad anti-Fascist alliance and passing them-
selves off as the true heirs of the American Revolution. They were especially
successful with the CIO, which welcomed their organizational skills. And
yet the Communists were never a mass movement even during the second
half of the 1930s.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities that was established by
the House of Representatives in May 1938 under the chairmanship of the
Democrat Martin Dies from Texas devoted itself almost without exception to
the alleged machinations of the Communists, largely ignoring the American
supporters of Fascism and National Socialism and turning a blind eye to the
activities of the Ku Klux Klan. It believed that Communists had infiltrated
the Public Works Administration, especially the Federal Theatre Project and
the Federal Writers’ Project, and identified 640 organizations, 483 newspapers
and 280 trade unions as Communist-infiltrated or Communist-led. During the
638 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

election campaign of the autumn of 1938, liberal candidates were denounced

as Communist pawns. They included the governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy,
who owed his stigmatization to the good relations that he maintained with
Communist officials in the CIO but whose denunciation earned him the
demonstrative backing of the president, Roosevelt reproaching Dies’s
committee for allowing itself to be used for the un-American aim of influ-
encing the election. When Murphy lost the election, Roosevelt appointed him
attorney general in February 1939.
The setbacks that Roosevelt suffered at home after 1937 raised doubt all
over the world about whether the western democracies would be able to assert
themselves in the face of right- and left-wing dictatorships. The malicious
comments made by National Socialist Germany and highlighting the contrast
between Germany’s successes in its attempts to deal with its own economic
crisis and the failures of the Roosevelt administration were noted on the other
side of the Atlantic. But Roosevelt refused to be discouraged by his opponents
at home and abroad and, as we have already observed, he proposed to the
British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in January 1938 that they should
convene an international conference to consider the question of fundamental
norms in international relations, only for his proposal to fall on deaf ears in
London. In September 1938 the crisis in the Sudetenland prompted him to
appeal twice to Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier and Beneg to do everything in
their power to maintain peace. In his second message on 28 September he
proposed an international conference on neutral soil and invited Mussolini to
work towards this end.
Roosevelt initially regarded the Munich Agreement of 30 September as a
step in the direction of international détente and even as a successful outcome
of his own endeavours, but it was not long before he realized his error, and on
11 October, responding to Hitler’s new armaments programme, he announced
that America would spend $300 million on arms. On 2 November 1938 he
signed an Anglo-American trade agreement whose anti-German thrust was
plain for all to see. The pogroms of 9 and 10 November were a point of no
return in the president’s dealings with Germany. At the end of the year he
threw his weight behind France’s attempts to sell up to 1,000 fighter planes to
the United States, by which date there was no longer any doubt that Washington
had abandoned its former policy of strict neutrality.
Even now, however, the American public was far from prepared to counter
National Socialist aggression in Europe with military force. A Gallup poll in
mid-September 1938 in which Americans were asked if their country could
avoid being dragged into the conflict if Britain and France declared war on
Germany revealed that 57 per cent of those questioned believed that it could;
68 per cent demanded that a national referendum be held before America
declared war, the only exception being if the country was invaded directly. If
the day was to come when Roosevelt would conclude that the United States
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 639

could no longer avoid providing military support for western European

democracies, then he still had a lot to do to persuade Americans that this was
the case.

Reaching Out Across Borders: From the Austrian Anschluss to the

Munich Agreement
On 9 March 1938, three weeks after he had accepted Hitler’s ultimatum and
complied with the Führer’s humiliating demands, the Austrian chancellor Kurt
von Schuschnigg ordered a referendum, hoping in the process to secure his
country’s last remaining vestiges of independence. In a radio address he invited
his fellow Austrians to vote on 13 March for a ‘free and German, independent
and social, Christian and united Austria’.112 Hitler saw in this a violation of the
agreements that he had reached with Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden on 12
February, and on 11 March he demanded that the referendum be abandoned.
When Vienna agreed to do so, he pressed home his advantage and insisted on
Schuschnigg’s resignation and on the appointment of the National Socialist
Arthur Seyß-Inquart as his successor. By the time that the country’s president,
Wilhelm Miklas, reluctantly agreed to these demands, Austria’s National
Socialists were already in positions of power in many areas of the country’s
public life. At dawn the next day the Wehrmacht marched into Austria. By now
it was clear to Hitler that Mussolini would on this occasion do nothing to
oppose him, in marked contrast to what had happened in July 1934.
Hitler accompanied the German troops as far as Linz. The acclaim with
which he was everywhere greeted played a significant role in his decision to
sign the law decreeing the reunification of Austria and the German Reich, to
which he put his name in Linz on 13 March. Two days later he addressed a vast
cheering crowd in Vienna, informing his audience that ‘as Führer and chan-
cellor of the German Nation and Reich, I report before history the entry of my
homeland into the German Reich’.113
In his first cross-border offensive, Hitler once again rode roughshod over
international law – in this case the Treaties of Versailles and St-Germain – but
he had no need to worry about serious opposition from western democracies:
in neither France nor Great Britain was the population ready to go to war for a
victor’s right that until then had prevented the Germans and Austrians from
practising their right of self-determination. Moreover, France was in a political
vacuum at the time that Germany marched into Austria, Camille Chautemps
having resigned on 10 March. Not until three days later was he replaced by
Léon Blum. And although Chamberlain condemned Germany’s actions, he
accepted events as a fait accompli.
In Germany itself there was an overwhelmingly positive response to the
Anschluss and to the announcement of a plebiscite on 10 April. Even the exiled
leaders of the Social Democrats in Prague concluded on the basis of reports
640 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

that they received from their followers in Germany that ‘the national euphoria
[. . .] is genuine and that only a more far-seeing minority remains staunch in its
criticism and refuses to have anything to do with it’.114 In Austria the Catholic
bishops and even a prominent Social Democrat, the former chancellor Karl
Renner, campaigned for a yes vote in the referendum, and on 10 April over 99
per cent of those Austrians who voted supported ‘reunification’ and ‘the list of
our Führer Adolf Hitler’ – the only list in the election for the new pan-German
Reichstag. The figures were identical to those in Germany.
There could no longer be any talk of a ‘secret ballot’ in April 1938. In many
places spoilt ballot papers were counted as yes votes, while no votes were
declared invalid. And yet there could be no doubt about the popularity of the
Anschluss or of the man who had brought it about. In the eyes of many who
had hitherto mistrusted him, Hitler was now regarded as a statesman who had
completed Bismarck’s task by overcoming the gulf that had opened up in 1866
and creating a bridge between modern Germany and the old Holy Roman
Empire that had ceased to exist in 1806. By 1938 there were few Germans or
Austrians who believed in a ‘lesser’ Germany: the age of the Protestant National
Liberals had ended long ago, and the view – first proposed in Frankfurt in
1848–9 – that a German national state could not be formed with Austria had
become outdated following the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy.
It was really only the experts who spoke of the economic and strategic advan-
tages of the pan-German solution that had now been achieved. The fact that as
the man responsible for the Four-Year Plan Göring had been particularly
insistent in urging the Anschluss was only logical since Austria enlarged the
German volume of industry by some 8 per cent. Most valuable of all were the
rich iron ore deposits in the Erzberg in Styria, which until then had been mined
by the Austro-Alpine Coal and Steel Company but which now passed into the
hands of Göring’s Reich Works. The 400,000 or so Austrians who were unem-
ployed – more than a fifth of all employees – formed an additional workforce
that the German armaments industry could certainly use. The gold and foreign
currency reserves amounting to at least 782 million Reichsmarks allowed the
Reich to avoid any reductions in imports, reductions that would otherwise have
been necessary now that the world economy was again showing signs of
collapsing in the wake of the problems in America. Materially speaking, however,
the most important aspect of the Anschluss was the consolidation of Germany’s
position vis-à-vis those countries in eastern central and south-eastern Europe
that were Germany’s preferred foreign trading partners following the imple-
mentation of the New Plan.
There was, of course, one of Austria’s neighbours that had every reason to
be worried by the events of March 1938: Czechoslovakia, which was now
hemmed in on three sides – north, west and south – by the pan-German Reich.
Politicians in Prague were in no doubt that Hitler’s expansionist ambitions had
not been satisfied by the annexation of Austria. On 20 February, in a speech
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 641

to the Reichstag, the Führer had referred to the Reich’s obligation to protect
those ‘ten million Germans’ living in ‘two of the states lying on our borders’,
nations which ‘until 1866 had been united with the whole of the German
people in a constitutional bond’.115 One of those states, Austria, was now a part
of Germany. The other, Czechoslovakia, had formed alliances with two major
powers, France and the Soviet Union. As a result, any threats issued against
Prague would have serious international ramifications.
Hitler’s ‘fifth column’ in Czechoslovakia was Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten
German Party, which had polled two-thirds of all the German votes in the elec-
tions to the Czech parliament in May 1935. (In the local elections in May and
June it even managed to increase its share of the vote to 85 per cent.) For the
present, Henlein was prevented from demanding the annexation of the
Sudetenland into the German Reich, for to have done so would have spelt his
party’s immediate demise. But he could do what Hitler asked of him at a meeting
on 28 March 1938 and make impossible demands of the government in Prague.
From then on this was the official line of the Sudeten German Party.
By now the threat to Czechoslovakia was so obvious that the Soviet foreign
minister, Maxim Litvinov, addressing foreign correspondents in Moscow on 17
March, spoke of the need for collective action to safeguard peace and shortly
afterwards suggested that the governments in Prague, Paris, London and
Washington should convene an international conference to this end. The
British government’s attitude to the Soviet Union had been adversely affected
by its experience during the Spanish Civil War and so London turned down the
request. Chamberlain even informed the lower house on 24 March that such a
conference would merely exacerbate international tensions. Equally negative
was the response from Washington, while the French government – Blum’s
second cabinet – found that its own hands were tied after London had signalled
its disapproval. Litvinov continued to insist that the Soviet Union would meet
its obligations towards Czechoslovakia if France were to do the same and if
Poland and Romania allowed the Red Army to pass through their territories.
On 28 and 29 April, during an official visit to London, Blum’s successor,
Édouard Daladier, and his foreign minister, Georges Bonnet, were informed by
Chamberlain and Lord Halifax that if Germany attacked Czechoslovakia, the
United Kingdom would not feel under any obligation to side with France. The
news can hardly have come as a surprise as Chamberlain had already made a
similar point in a note dated 22 March. If the Sudetenland problem was to be
solved, then Chamberlain advised the Czech government to make far-reaching
concessions and to negotiate directly with Berlin. Daladier and Bonnet, too,
felt that such an attitude was both appropriate and necessary.
Tensions between Berlin and Prague grew dramatically worse in the second
half of May. On 20 May, reacting to false reports of an imminent German attack
(the reports were almost certainly inspired by the Russian secret service),
Czechoslovakia mobilized part of its armed forces. The British government
642 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

informed Hitler that if France went to the assistance of its Czech ally, London
would have no choice but to stand by France, while at the same time informing
the Quai d’Orsay that the British would not resort to armed conflict. On 30
May Hitler told the Wehrmacht of his ‘unshakeable resolve to crush
Czechoslovakia by military force in the near future’.116 He set 1 October 1938 as
the date by which the Wehrmacht was to be ready to march into Czechoslovakia
and take possession of Bohemia and Moravia.
Faced with the danger of a major European war that might even spill over
into the rest of the world, in the summer of 1938 leading military figures, diplo-
mats and well-known conservatives spoke out for the first time against Hitler.
Relying on his own memoranda relating to the current military situation, the
army’s chief of the general staff, Ludwig Beck, asked the army’s commander in
chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, to signal the army’s collective refusal to obey
orders. When Brauchitsch declined to do so, Beck resigned on 18 August. His
successor, Franz Halder, for a time supported plans for a coup that would have
involved the Berlin regional commander, General Erwin von Witzleben; the
chief of the defence staff, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and Theodor Kordt, a
member of the embassy staff in London. Among the other conspirators was
Leipzig’s former mayor, Carl Goerdeler, who no doubt to avoid police prosecu-
tion spent the months between August and mid-October in Switzerland.
Brauchitsch was not initiated into the plan. If he refused to do as he was
asked, the conspiracy could not succeed. Another precondition for striking
while the iron was hot was the unyielding attitude of the British: only if London
stood up to Hitler did the conservative resistance movement believe that it had
a chance of toppling him and reinstating the monarchy under one of Crown
Prince Wilhelm’s sons, a solution that struck many of the conspirators as the
most popular alternative.
Beck and the other conservatives did not rule out war as a way of extending
German influence in central Europe. And they too felt that Czechoslovakia
posed an intolerable threat to Germany. But they were convinced that Germany
must have a realistic chance of winning the war, which meant limiting its aims,
keeping the number of the country’s enemies to an absolute minimum and
finding the right time to start hostilities. Above all, they were keen to avoid a
military conflict with Great Britain and France. On this point they were in total
agreement not only with Ernst von Weizsäcker, the secretary of state at the
Foreign Office, and with the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, but
also with Göring. The conservative faction wanted to pursue an expansionist
policy in the spirit of Wilhelmine Germany, but without resorting to its anti-
English excesses. They refused to jeopardize Germany’s future by adopting
Hitler’s dangerous all-or-nothing policies.
In August 1938 the former conservative politician Ewald von Kleist-
Schmenzin visited London on Beck’s behalf but was able to see only Conservative
critics of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, among them Churchill and the
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 643

undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office, Lord Vansittart, who had been
chief adviser to the former foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. Although
Chamberlain was aware that the Conservative faction was urging a resolute
response, he regarded Kleist-Schmenzin’s warnings about Hitler’s belligerent
intentions as exaggerated. The conservative politicians in Berlin reminded the
prime minister of the ‘Jacobins at the French court at the time of King William’,
in other words, the exiled supporters of James II, who in the wake of the
Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 had worked to restore the Stuarts to the throne.
Kordt’s experience was much the same. He was received by Lord Halifax in
his capacity as foreign secretary on 7 September and with Weizsäcker’s approval
asked his host to make it plain to Hitler that Great Britain was ready to go to
war. Like Chamberlain, however, Halifax saw no advantage in a pact with
Prussian politicians and military figures whose foreign policy aims, including
their demand for more German colonies, struck them as potentially even more
dangerous than the aims of Hitler himself. The ruling Tories were grateful to
Hitler for turning Germany into a bulwark of anti-Bolshevism, an achievement
which from their point of view lay in the best interests of both Britain and
Europe and which should not be jeopardized by an openly reactionary regime.
By the time Kordt met Halifax on 7 September, Britain had already opened
a new chapter in the tale of its policy of appeasement. Acting on Chamberlain’s
behalf, the former trade minister Lord Runciman – a National Liberal politician
and shipping magnate – had arrived in Prague on 4 August 1938 with the aim
of mediating between the Czechoslovak government and the Sudeten Germans.
He was sympathetic to the cause of the German minority. Although the Czech
government was now willing to grant a considerable degree of autonomy to the
Sudeten Germans, thereby meeting practically all of the demands of the Sudeten
German Party and belatedly distancing itself from the idea of a national state of
the entire Czechoslovak nation on which the country had based its own exist-
ence, this was no longer enough for Henlein and his party, who at Hitler’s
bidding now demanded the right of self-determination, including the right to
secede from Czechoslovakia and join the German Reich.
As a result, Runciman’s mission failed. On his return to London, he laid the
blame firmly at the door of the government in Prague and insisted on the right
of the Sudeten Germans to secede. The Times expressed a similar sentiment in
its editorial on 7 September – the day on which Halifax and Kordt met in
London. This was immediately interpreted all round the world as the ‘official’
British view, an interpretation that the Foreign Office was immediately obliged
to deny.
The Greater Germany party conference began in Nuremberg on
6 September. In his closing speech on the 12th Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia
in no uncertain terms, chastising the leadership in Prague for ‘terrorist black-
mail’ and for pursuing ‘criminal ends’, while stressing Germany’s tremendous
military efforts, assuring his listeners that his sole concern was the right of
644 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

self-determination of four and a half million Germans in Czechoslovakia and

threatening that

If the democracies were to convince themselves that they must do every-

thing in their power to ensure the repression of the Germans, then there
will be serious consequences! [. . .] The Germans in Czechoslovakia are
neither defenceless nor have they been abandoned. Let this be taken into
account.117

Towards the end of his speech, Hitler sought to invest his policy with a greater
historical dimension by drawing a parallel between Germany under his own
leadership and Italy under Mussolini, while appealing to the special status of
the ‘old German Reich’ to which Bohemia and Moravia had once belonged.
Within this context the return of the imperial insignia, including the crown,
orb, sceptre and sword that Hitler had arranged to be transferred from Vienna
– the city of the Habsburg emperors – to the scene of the Nuremberg party
rallies, acquired a topical significance:

When we consider the incredible provocation that even a small state has
seen fit to offer Germany in recent months, then we may find an explana-
tion for this in the unwillingness to regard the German Reich as a state that
is more than a peace-loving parvenu. [. . .] The Roman empire is beginning
to breathe again. But Germany, although historically infinitely younger, is
no new-born infant on the international stage. I have had the insignia of the
old German Reich brought to Nuremberg in order to remind not only our
own German people but the whole world that more than five hundred years
before the discovery of the New World, there was already a mighty
Germanic-German Reich. [. . .] The German people has now been wakened
and has presented itself as the wearer of its thousand-year-old crown. [. . .]
The new Italian-Roman empire and the Germanic-German Reich are, in
truth, ancient phenomena. One does not have to love them. But no power
in the world will ever be able to remove them.118

The party rally was barely finished when German newspapers fell over one
another reporting alleged atrocities committed by Czechoslovaks in the areas
inhabited by Germans. After several incidents the government in Prague imposed
military law on thirteen districts on 13 September. Editions of the Völkischer
Beobachter on 18 and 20 September included banner headlines such as ‘Terrible
Atrocities by Czech Thugs’, ‘Murderers Without Masks’, ‘Witnesses of the Czech
Bloody Terror’, ‘23,000 Refugees’, ‘Commune and Hussites Hand in Hand’,
‘German Blood Demands Atonement’ and ‘Murder By Every Means’.119 The
reports were fabricated at the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda
and were based on facts and figures made up by the ‘experts’ seconded to the task.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 645

While the crisis in the Sudetenland was coming to a head, the British prime
minister took the sensational step on 14 September of announcing that he was
visiting Hitler. Chamberlain knew that he had the backing not only of his own
government but also of most of the Dominions: the prime ministers of Canada
and Australia, William Mackenzie King and Joseph Lyons, had both encouraged
him in recent weeks to continue his efforts to ensure European and, hence,
international peace, while the prime minister of the Union of South Africa,
James Hertzog, a staunch advocate of racial segregation, was all in favour of a
pro-German policy, a position shared by Ireland’s Eamon de Valera. Only the
New Zealand prime minister, Michael Joseph Savage, who had headed his coun-
try’s Labour government since 1935, was an outspoken enemy of appeasement.
Conversely, France was unequivocal in its support for Chamberlain: reacting to
a pessimistic assessment of the situation on the part of his own military, espe-
cially the head of the French air force, Joseph Vuillemin, Daladier urged his
British counterpart to find an honourable way out of the Sudetenland crisis.
Within hours of the announcement of Chamberlain’s visit, the British prime
minister met Hitler at the latter’s mountain retreat on the Obersalzberg near
Berchtesgaden on 15 September. Hitler tried to intimidate Chamberlain in the
same way that he had done in his negotiations with Schuschnigg seven months
previously. But the head of a power that Hitler had always wanted to see as his
maritime partner reacted differently and responded to Hitler’s threats of war
by asking why he had invited him, Chamberlain, to visit him if he was already
resolved on a show of strength. In the circumstances, Chamberlain concluded,
it was probably best if he returned home.
Hitler relented. If Chamberlain would accept the basic principle of the
Sudeten Germans’ right of self-determination, the two men could then discuss
the implementation of that agreement. Chamberlain agreed to confer with his
cabinet colleagues on the right of self-determination and even the secession of
those areas where the population was more than 50 per cent German. In return
he made Hitler promise that in the meantime he would not use force against
Czechoslovakia.
Chamberlain had the backing of his own cabinet, just as Daladier had the
support of his government, which at that date was still being kept in power by
the French Socialists. In response to massive pressure and an ultimatum from
London and Paris, the Prague leadership under President Beneg and Prime
Minister Hod:a bowed to the inevitable and on 21 September agreed to the
British proposal to cede their country’s purely German territories to Germany
and to hold referendums under international supervision in the contested areas.
Chamberlain and Hitler met for a second time on 22 September, this time
at Bad Godesberg. But their talks were less productive than the prime minister
had hoped. Hitler insisted that his Wehrmacht be allowed to march into
Czechoslovakia immediately and that the territorial claims of Hungary and
Poland that he himself had encouraged be met. Chamberlain could not agree
646 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

to Hitler’s demands without exposing himself to the reproach that he had

surrendered to blackmail. The two men were still locked in negotiations when,
late in the evening of 23 September, news came that Czechoslovakia had mobi-
lized its armed forces. Despite the dramatic worsening of the situation,
Chamberlain declared his willingness to communicate the German ultimatum
– euphemistically described as a ‘memorandum’ – to the government in Prague.
Hitler set the time and date of 14:00 on 28 September for the unconditional
acceptance of his demands.
When Hitler received news on 26 September that the Czechoslovak govern-
ment had rejected his demands, the world seemed to be on the brink of another
major war. The previous day Great Britain had mobilized its fleet and France
had called up its reservists. And on the 26th Chamberlain announced that in
the event of military action against Czechoslovakia, Britain would support
France. That same evening Hitler delivered a speech in the Sportpalast in Berlin
that was broadcast by every German radio station, inviting Beneg to choose
between war and peace and assuring the world that the Sudetenland would be
his final territorial demand in Europe: ‘We don’t want any Czechs.’120 His fanat-
ical speech was greeted by frenzied applause. But the mood in the Sportpalast
was not shared by the Germans in general, for according to official reports there
was practically no stomach for war in the country. Peace was uppermost in the
thoughts of all Germans at this time.
The very next day, 27 September, Hitler ordered forces to be prepared for an
initial assault and for nineteen divisions to be mobilized. Hitler’s enemies at
home were bound to assume that the order for attack would come the very next
day, but no such order was given. On 28 September, before Hitler’s ultimatum
to Czechoslovakia expired, Mussolini responded to a request from Chamberlain
and Roosevelt and offered to mediate, even if only by asking Hitler to delay
mobilization by twenty-four hours.
Hitler had agreed to the Berlin–Rome Axis in October 1936 and could not
turn down Mussolini’s request without appearing to be warmongering in the
eyes of the world, including his own people in Germany, and within hours he
had given orders to delay mobilization and agreed to Chamberlain’s suggestion
of an international conference to settle the argument over the Sudetenland,
albeit with one important change: he invited Chamberlain, Daladier and
Mussolini to meet him the next morning in Munich but refused to include
Beneg, who Chamberlain had wanted to be present as well.
The four leaders met in the Bavarian capital on 29 September, and the result
of their talks came close to meeting the demands that Hitler had made at Bad
Godesberg: Czechoslovakia was to begin clearing its purely German territories
on 1 October, a move that had to be completed by the 10th. During this ten-day
period the Wehrmacht could progressively occupy the area that had been
cleared. A referendum was agreed for the ethnically mixed regions, although
this was later abandoned, while Germans and Czechs living outside the new
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 647

border should be given the right to choose. Great Britain and France guaran-
teed the safety of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in the event of an unpro-
voked attack. Germany and Italy were willing to provide this guarantee only
once the question of the Polish and Hungarian minorities had been settled, but
in the event they did not keep their word.
Hitler was both the winner and the loser of the Munich conference. Germany
had been enlarged by the addition of a further region settled by Germans and
once again he had achieved this aim without a single blow having been struck
– further grist to the propaganda mills as proof of his genius as a statesman. But
he had wanted far more than the annexation of the Sudetenland: according to
his original plan, the Wehrmacht would have advanced as far as Prague,
Czechoslovakia would have been destroyed as a state and Bohemia and Moravia
would have been overrun. Thanks to Mussolini’s mediation, he had failed to
achieve these objectives. Indeed, he would have been unable to do so without
declaring war and presumably becoming embroiled in a war of European, if not
global, dimensions. But the Germans were not ready for such a development in
the autumn of 1938. ‘I cannot yet wage a war with the help of this people,’ he was
forced to admit to himself when, on the afternoon of 26 September, he stood at
the window of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and saw how indifferent and
dejected the Berliners looked as they watched a march-past that he himself had
ordered.121 Conversely, the applause that Chamberlain and Daladier received
from the people of Munich was a potent reminder of the German population’s
love of peace. In the circumstances the Munich Agreement was a highly respect-
able interim result for Hitler.
On their return from Munich the leaders of the western democracies were
showered with flowers and cheered. Most British and French newspapers
reported on the outcome of the meeting with Hitler in positively euphoric
terms. Chamberlain famously declared that the document he and Hitler had
signed, announcing their countries’ determination never to go to war with
each other again but to resolve all contentious issues by means of negotiations,
as a guarantee of ‘peace for our time’.122
In the lower house, conversely, Chamberlain was criticized not only by the
Labour Party but also by his Conservative Party colleagues, Anthony Eden,
Alfred Duff Cooper and Winston Churchill. Cooper even resigned as first lord
of the Admiralty in protest at the Munich Agreement, while Churchill, speaking
in the house on 5 October, declared the outcome of the conference to be the
result of an act of unprecedented blackmail on Hitler’s part. The British people
must know that

we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilib-
rium of Europe has been deranged, and [. . .] the terrible words have for the
time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: ‘Thou art
weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ And do not suppose that this is
648 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first
sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by
year until by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we
arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.123

After a debate lasting four days, the house voted on 6 October, when 366 MPs
voted for the position that the prime minister had adopted in Munich, with 144
rejecting it. The latter group included the Labour Party and the Liberals. Some
eighty Tories, among them Churchill, Eden, Cooper and Harold Macmillan,
who was to be his country’s prime minister from 1957 to 1963, abstained. For
Chamberlain the Munich conference had an agreeable side-effect, for on 16
April Britain and Italy signed a treaty in which the two powers agreed to main-
tain the status quo in the Mediterranean, although the treaty was due to come
into effect only after Italy had withdrawn its troops from Spain. In Munich
Mussolini assured Chamberlain that he would withdraw 10,000 soldiers from
Spain, an offer designed to create a favourable atmosphere for the eventual
implementation of the Anglo-Italian pact. Chamberlain shared this view, not
least because Italian attacks on British ships in Republican ports were to cease
on Franco’s instructions. At this date some 12,000 hand-picked Italian soldiers
were still fighting on the Nationalist side in Spain, but by the time the treaty
finally came into force on 16 November 1938 the Republicans were fighting
their final rear-guard action on the Ebro.
In France it was really only the Communists who objected in the press and in
parliament to the terms of the Munich Agreement and to the abandonment of a
country that had been a loyal ally of France, whereas the extreme right applauded
the move. In a vote on Daladier’s foreign policy on 4 October 1938, 535 deputies,
including – with a single exception – all of Blum’s Socialists, voted for the govern-
ment, only seventy-five against it. Three parliamentarians abstained. The no
votes were those of the seventy-three Communists, the Socialist Jean Bouhey
and the right-wing deputy Henri de Kerillis. The foreign minister, Georges
Bonnet, who even more than Daladier was an advocate of appeasement, felt it
appropriate to write to his Czech counterpart Kamil Krofta on 2 October and
assure him of the ‘profound sympathy’ with which ‘hour by hour’ he had ‘followed
your noble and courageous personal activities at a time when your nation is
being so painfully tested’.124 A poll revealed that not all Frenchmen and women
approved of the attitude taken by the government and by the majority of members
of the Chamber of Deputies. Only 57 per cent supported it, while 37 per cent
disapproved. When asked whether France and Great Britain should in future
oppose Hitler’s demands, 70 per cent said yes, only 17 per cent disagreed.
One immediate consequence of the Munich Agreement was the definitive
breakup of the Popular Front. At Daladier’s urging, the Radicals refused to
work with the Communists after the latter had voted no in the Chamber of
Deputies. Shortly afterwards the Socialists, too, joined the opposition, in their
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 649

case by way of a reaction to the rigorous financial policies of the new finance
minister, Paul Reynaud, who was appointed on 1 November and who was an
outspoken critic of the forty-hour week. (On 4 October, in the vote on the
enabling act on which Reynaud’s measures were based, the SFIO had abstained.)
A general strike called by the CGT for 30 November 1938 was by no means a
failure, but nor could it be declared an outright success, for less than half of all
workers took part in it.
By the end of the year arguments over the Munich Agreement had driven a
wedge between the secretary general of the SFIO, Paul Faure, and the party
leader, Léon Blum: Faure was in favour of continuing the policy of appeasement
towards Germany, whereas Blum, regardless of his commitment to interna-
tional disarmament, demanded resistance to aggression, bringing him closer to
the bellicose attitude of the left wing of his party and the figure of Jean Zyromski.
Blum’s position gained a small majority at a special conference of the Socialists
in the Paris suburb of Montrouge in December 1938. The CGT, too, was divided,
critics of the Munich Agreement, including the organization’s leader Léon
Jouhaux, winning a two-thirds majority at the union’s congress in Nantes in the
middle of November. Daladier’s government was strengthened by the failure of
the general strike and by the divided opposition, allowing it to continue unhin-
dered its policy of appeasement towards Germany. On 6 December the French
and German foreign ministers – Bonnet and Ribbentrop – signed a non-
aggression pact in Paris, with Germany expressly agreeing to respect France’s
existing borders. The agreement was, of course, just as worthless as the written
protestation of a mutual desire for peace that Chamberlain had persuaded
Hitler to sign in Munich on 1 October 1938.
For Czechoslovakia – the country most affected by the Munich Agreement –
the treaty was a disaster. It had been forced to capitulate to Hitler by the Western
Powers. Only after the negotiations had been concluded were the Czech repre-
sentatives who had travelled to Munich officially informed of the decisions that
had been taken. Nor was the loss of the areas of their country largely settled by
Germans the only loss that the Czechs had to endure, for shortly before midnight
on 30 September a Polish ultimatum arrived in Prague demanding the secession
of the region around Cieszyn by noon the next day. The Czech government
agreed to the demand, and on 2 October the disputed region was occupied by
Polish troops. The coup, which had been coordinated with Germany, proved so
popular in Poland that in the elections in November the OZN won practically all
the seats in the Senate that were being contested in addition to 161 of the 208
seats in the Sejm. The turnout was 67.4 per cent.
President Beneg resigned on 5 October, three days after Polish troops had
marched into Cieszyn. On 2 November the country was forced to accept the first
judgment handed down by the court that had been convened in Vienna by
Germany and Italy and cede to Hungary a large part of southern Slovakia, with
its predominantly Hungarian population. On 19 November Prague created the
650 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

legal framework for the autonomy of the rest of Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine,
an autonomy that had already existed de facto for some time previously.
The Soviet Union, which was the most important ally of Czechoslovakia
after France, was not invited to the Munich conference. It drew its own conclu-
sions from the crisis that beset Europe in the autumn of 1938 and decided that
the capitalist powers could all too easily overcome the political differences
between democracy and Fascism in order to make common cause against
Communist Russia, which felt, therefore, that it had no choice but to come to
some arrangement with Germany, a point underscored by the deputy Soviet
foreign minister, Vladimir Potemkin, at his meeting with the French ambas-
sador, Robert Coulondre, on 4 October. Opposition to the revolutionary power
in the east was certainly a factor that united the nations that took part in the
Munich conference, but the anti-Bolshevism of London and Paris was in fact
defensive rather than offensive, in which respect it differed from the policies
pursued by three other major powers: National Socialist Germany, Japan,
which had signed the anti-Comintern pact in November 1936, and Italy, which
joined the pact the following year.
Stalin had every reason, therefore, to feel threatened. But the Soviet Union,
too, was not above issuing threats. If Germany were to attack Czechoslovakia,
then it would respond by attacking Poland, since it was assumed in Moscow
that Poland would not allow the Red Army to march through its territories.
Operating through the Comintern, Moscow supported the aim of the Czech
Communists, which was to turn a national defensive war into a central
European civil war that would eventually lead to the victory of the proletarian
masses. Hitler’s ability to generate sympathy for his anti-Bolshevik policies
among the western democracies was also a response to Stalin’s policies at home:
to the great purges in the Soviet Union, to the civil war propaganda and to the
revolutionary activities of the Communist International in the West.
The western democracies, including the government in Prague, never lost
sight of the fact that the Soviet Union might emerge even stronger from a
European war, whereas most British Conservatives and the bourgeois parties
that once again were setting the tone in France preferred to close their eyes to
the danger posed by National Socialist Germany. Worse, the vast majority of
people in both Britain and France simply refused to take the threat seriously.
And yet it must remain an open question whether in the autumn of 1938
even confrontational realists like Churchill could have commanded enough of a
majority to persuade their fellow Britons to adopt a policy that must necessarily
have led to military confrontation with Hitler. It is equally unclear whether a
government bent on war would have had the support of the Dominions. It is
conceivable that the increasingly illusionary policy of appeasement needed to be
seen to have failed before contemporaries were convinced that the democracies
of western Europe must do more than merely arm themselves but must make
the most extreme efforts to assert themselves in the face of the most dangerous
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 651

of all aggressors. The fact that even as late as September 1938 only a minority of
individuals had come to this conclusion resulted in a policy that led inexorably
to the Munich debacle, whereby the only state in eastern central Europe that had
remained a democracy was sacrificed by the western democracies, in the name
of Realpolitik.

The ninth of November 1938: The History and Consequences

of the Jewish Pogroms in Germany
No group of people was as adversely affected by Germany’s cross-border inva-
sions as the Jews. The annexation of Austria alone delivered 190,000 Jews into
the hands of the National Socialists. As Saul Friedländer has noted, the perse-
cution of the Jews in Austria and especially in Vienna, a stronghold of Austrian
anti-Semitism, went beyond anything previously known in Germany:

Public humiliation was more blatant and sadistic; expropriation better organ-
ized; forced emigration more rapid. The Austrians [. . .] seemed more avid for
anti-Jewish action than the citizens of what now became the Old Reich
(Altreich). Violence had already started before the Wehrmacht crossed the
border; despite official efforts to curb its most chaotic and moblike aspects, it
lasted for several weeks. The populace relished the public shows of degrada-
tion; countless crooks from all walks of life, either wearing party uniforms or
merely displaying improvised swastika armbands, applied threats and extor-
tion on the grandest scale: Money, jewelry, furniture, cars, apartments, and
businesses were grabbed from their terrified Jewish owners.125

Officially, around 5,000 Jews were deported to Czechoslovakia, Hungary and

Switzerland between March and November 1938. Meanwhile, other Jews left
legally, the emigration of poorer Jews being financed by compulsory levies on
Jewish communities. Among those allowed to leave the country was the eighty-
two-year-old Sigmund Freud, who travelled to England in June 1938, having
previously been forced to sign a declaration that he had not been mistreated –
he added a sarcastic comment to the document: ‘I, Prof. Freud, hereby confirm
that after the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich I have been treated by
the German authorities and particularly by the Gestapo with all the respect and
consideration due to my scientific reputation.’126 By May 1939 some 100,000
Jews had fled Austria – more than half of all the Jews who had been living in
Austria at the time of the Anschluss. Forced emigration went hand in hand
with the ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish property, a process that was more systemati-
cally and promptly expedited in Austria than had been the case in Germany,
although here, too, the pace quickened after 1936.
The deportation and emigration of Jews added an international dimension
to the problem of Jewish refugees. On Roosevelt’s initiative a conference was
652 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

convened at Evian on the French side of Lake Geneva in July 1938 to deal with
the question of Jewish refugees. It was attended by representatives from
thirty-two different countries. But, as Saul Friedländer has observed, its objec-
tive was made clear from the outset in the wording of the invitation: no country
was expected to accept more émigrés than its laws would allow. This also
applied to the United States and its restrictive immigration laws that had been
in place since 1924. In spite of many humanitarian appeals from outside, the
conference produced no concrete results, the only exception being the appoint-
ment of an international committee for refugees under the American lawyer
George Rublee. The National Socialists were able to capitalize on the failure of
the conference. Since no country was willing to alter its immigration policy in
favour of the Jews, the Völkischer Beobachter was able to strike a triumphalist
note: ‘No One Wants Them.’ On 12 September Hitler informed the Nuremberg
party rally that the large and thinly populated western democracies were
willing to offer the Jews ‘only moral support’, but no real help.
Even before the Anschluss, there were already signs of more radical anti-
Semitism in Germany. At the beginning of 1938 all Jews were required to hand
in their passports, and new passports were issued only to those planning to
leave the country. In April Jews were ordered to report their wealth. In June a
decree under the Reich Citizen Act of 1935 defined the circumstances in which
a business was to be regarded as ‘Jewish’. Another law of 6 June 1938 listed
commercial services that Jews were in future banned from providing, including
the job of estate agent. A decree drawn up on 17 August 1938 by Hans Globke
at the Ministry of the Interior – he later ran Konrad Adenauer’s Federal
Chancellery – ordered Jews who did not have a specifically Jewish first name to
add ‘Israel’ or ‘Sara’ to their list of first names. The decree came into force on 1
January 1939. After 30 September Jewish doctors could no longer be regis-
tered. Meanwhile Goebbels in his capacity as Gauleiter of Berlin implemented
various measures designed to drive the Jews from the capital: party members
dressed in civilian clothes painted the word ‘Jew’ and a Star of David on the
shop windows of Jewish businesses. By the autumn of 1938 the number of anti-
Semitic disturbances was increasing in many parts of the country: in Munich
and Nuremberg synagogues were set on fire.
Other countries, too, adopted discriminatory policies towards Jews. After
Poland but before Fascist Italy, Hungary passed its first anti-Semitic law in May
1938. Nor was it only authoritarian or totalitarian regimes that introduced anti-
Jewish measures. Germany’s policy of forcing Jews to emigrate meant that
Switzerland felt particularly threatened and on 28 May 1938, two weeks after
the Anschluss, the Bundesrat in Berne decided to demand that all holders of
Austrian passports be in possession of a Swiss visa when entering Switzerland.
Once Austrian passports had been replaced by German passports, the measure
was extended to the holders of all German travel documents. The inevitable
consequence was that Swiss citizens now needed a German visa when entering
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 653

Germany. In order to offset the problems raised by this requirement, Switzerland

proposed that the security police in Berlin who were responsible for issuing
travel documents and who were the forerunners of the later Reich Main Security
Office should mark Jewish passports in some distinctive way. The result was the
large ‘J’ with which the German authorities stamped all Jewish passports from
then on. According to an official Berne report, the new ruling, which came into
force on 4 October 1938, made it possible to check on the border to see ‘if the
owner of a German passport is an Aryan or a non-Aryan’.127
When German troops marched into the Sudetenland, the Jews who were
living there were ordered to move to the remaining part of Czechoslovakia,
prompting the authorities in Prague to deport the individuals in question.
Since Hungary refused to take them, several thousand Jews ended up in a
no-man’s-land along the Danube between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where
they were forced to live in intolerable conditions in insanitary makeshift camps.
The fate of the Jews driven from the Sudetenland was a prelude to the one
later faced by a much larger group of Jews: the 56,000 or so Polish Jews who were
living in Germany at the time of the 1933 census. Warsaw banned their deporta-
tion to Poland by passing a law on 31 January 1938 that allowed the authorities
to deny Polish citizenship to citizens living abroad. Generally the law was applied
only to Jews. In October the regulations were made stricter when the passports
of Poles living abroad were declared invalid unless their holders were able to
produce a special entry permit by the end of the month. Those who did not
receive such a permit became stateless with effect from 1 November 1938.
The Germans decided to react to this move without delay, and on the orders
of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and of the German Police, all male
Polish Jews living in Germany were given until 29 October to leave for Poland.
(It was assumed that their wives and children would follow them.) Since the
Polish border police refused entry to the deported Jews, the latter were left
wandering around in no-man’s-land for several days without food. Most of
them were finally sent to the Polish concentration camp at Zbaszyn, although
the remainder were allowed to return to Germany.
Among the 16,000 Polish Jews who were deported from Germany and who
ended up at Zbaszyn was the Grynszpan family from Hanover. One member of
the family, the seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, was currently staying
illegally in Paris. Alerted by his sister to his family’s fate, he decided to protest
in a way that ensured the attention of the entire world: he bought a gun and on
7 November went to the German Embassy in Paris, where he shot the first
secretary, Ernst vom Rath, who was so seriously wounded that he died of his
injuries on the afternoon of 9 November.
The assassination in Paris was used by the National Socialists as the pretext
for the biggest wave of pogroms that Germany had witnessed since the Jewish
massacres of 1348 to 1350, when Jews had been held responsible for the Black
Death. Within hours of Ernst vom Rath’s death being made public, synagogues
654 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

all over Germany were torched: 267 were burnt down, and some 7,500 Jewish
businesses were destroyed. At least ninety-one Jews were killed, while hundreds
committed suicide or died in concentration camps as a result of the ill-
treatment that they received there. Tens of thousands of wealthy Jews were
taken to these camps in order to force them to emigrate.
The signal for the pogroms – popularly known as ‘Reich Crystal Night’ –
was given by Goebbels after consulting with Hitler, who was staying in Munich
as part of the events surrounding the annual celebration of his Feldherrnhalle
March in 1923. The atrocities were carried out by the SA, SS and countless
party members as the organized advance guard of German anti-Semitism. The
population at large was barely involved and evinced little sympathy for the acts
of vandalism ostensibly perpetrated in its name. ‘Rarely did their faces betray
what their owners were thinking,’ a report from Munich read. ‘Here and there,
there was gloating but occasionally also expressions of revulsion.’ In the town
of Hellbrunn near Bad Tölz some observers ‘expressed their approval of the
actions against the Jews, others looked on passively, and still others showed
sympathy even if they haven’t expressed it publicly.’ The exiled leaders of the
Social Democrats, who had in the meantime moved their headquarters to
Prague, were informed by their colleagues in Germany that ‘the excesses’ were
‘much criticized by the vast majority of the German people’.128
The democratic press, notably British and American newspapers, reported
in detail on the events that took place in Germany on 9/10 November 1938,
generally expressing a note of revulsion, but only one country reacted with more
than words, when Roosevelt ordered the American ambassador to Germany,
Hugh R. Wilson, to report on the situation, shortly afterwards recalling him to
Washington and leaving his post unfilled, a situation that remained unchanged
until the embassy was closed following Germany’s declaration of war on the
United States in December 1941. At a press conference that he gave on 15
November – the day on which Wilson paid his final visit to Ribbentrop –
Roosevelt expressed his incredulity ‘that such things could occur in a twentieth-
century civilization’.129 In a nationwide radio broadcast, former President
Herbert Hoover, the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, and spokesmen of
various religious groups all expressed their outrage at the new wave of Jewish
persecution in Germany. From then on Berlin regarded the United States as the
main centre of international Jewry.
Goebbels ordered the pogrom to end on 10 November. According to an
announcement by the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,
Germany’s Jews would be given their final answer by legislative means. The
first decrees were issued two days later. German Jews had to pay an ‘atonement
fee’ of 1,000 million marks and must foot the bill for reopening their busi-
nesses. They were also banned from making any legal claims against the Reich.
The order prohibiting Jews from playing any part in the economic life of the
nation prevented them from running individual retail outlets, mail-order firms
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 655

and freelance trades. Jews had until 1 January 1939 to sell their property, their
businesses, their stocks and shares, their jewels and their works of art. The
money that they received in return was so little that this process of Aryanization
amounted to an act of expropriation. In practice it resulted in a vast redistribu-
tion of Jewish property in favour of non-Jewish rivals, a redistribution that
continues to be felt to this day.
This Aryanization process was accompanied by measures designed to bully
the Jews. They were no longer able to visit swimming baths, cinemas, theatres,
concert halls and museums, and they were prevented from travelling in train
compartments already occupied by ‘Aryans’. They were no longer allowed to
own gold, silver, precious stones and radio sets, their telephones were cut off
and their driver’s licences were withdrawn. New laws allowed Jews to be herded
together in ‘Jewish houses’ and to be made to do forced labour. German schools
were henceforth closed to Jews, as was the universal welfare system.
By the winter of 1938/9 the social isolation of the Jews was practically
complete, but as yet no decision had been taken as to what to do with the
214,000 Jews who according to the census of May 1939 were still living in
‘Greater Germany’. The Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration established
in February 1939 under Reinhard Heydrich succeeded in reducing the number
by 30,000, but since no other country was willing to take in a large number of
poor German Jews and since Great Britain had effectively blocked all further
Jewish emigration to Palestine as a result of the increasingly pro-Axis mood in
the Arab world, forced immigration could not be expected to provide a quick
and comprehensive solution to the German ‘Jewish question’.
Even so, there was no doubt that the National Socialist leadership was
determined to get rid of the Jews. At Berchtesgaden on 5 January 1939 Hitler
himself informed the Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, that he was resolved
‘to get the Jews out of Germany. They will still be allowed to take part of their
possessions with them, [. . .] but the more they hesitate, the less they will be
able to take with them.’130 On 30 January 1939 – the sixth anniversary of the day
on which he had seized power – Hitler informed the Reichstag that as so often
in his life he was once again speaking as a prophet:

If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe were to succeed in

plunging the nations of the world into another world war, then the result
will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and, with it, the victory of Jewry,
but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.131

An Alliance of Opposites: The Second World War is Unleashed

The future course of German politics was outlined in two secret speeches at the
end of 1938. On 8 November Himmler informed the leaders of the SS that their
Führer would ‘create a Greater German Reich, [. . .] the greatest empire ever
656 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

established by humanity and ever seen on earth’. For Himmler the choice was
between ‘the great Germanic Reich or nothing’. Two days later Hitler confided
in a number of handpicked representatives of the German press that the
regime’s ‘peace propaganda’ that it had been forced to promote for reasons of
foreign policy but which had its ‘questionable side’ was no longer relevant. It
was now necessary to ‘change the German people’s whole psychological outlook
and gradually make it clear that there are things which, if they cannot be
brought about by peaceful means, must be achieved by force’.132
It was not only Hitler’s ‘peace propaganda’ that later proved, in part, to have
been ‘questionable’. Re-educating the Germans and preparing them for war also
had to take account of the fact that, in spite of the Hitler Youth, labour service
and general conscription, everyday life in Germany in the later 1930s was domi-
nated by the regime’s civilian achievements, including increased security in the
workplace, a whole series of social improvements, primarily for women and
families, and the leisure activities of the Strength Through Joy movement, which
was the most popular of the German Labour Front’s programmes. The expecta-
tions of countless millions of Germans had nothing to do with wartime conquests
but with Strength Through Joy cruises to Norway and the Mediterranean or even
the acquisition of a new Volkswagen.
By 1938 the number of unemployed men and women in Germany was 0.4
million or 1.9 per cent of the workforce. We can only speculate on the extent to
which falling unemployment could be credited to the armaments industry,
how much higher personal income would have been without the vast sums of
money being spent on rearming Germany and what the Reichsmark was actu-
ally worth – always assuming that it could have been converted to other curren-
cies and that prices, wages and rents had obeyed the law of supply and demand
rather than state controls. What mattered was that the country’s achievements
should not be put at risk. At the end of 1938, of course, few Germans believed
that their Führer was bent on war. According to official reports on the mood in
the country, the overwhelming majority of party comrades regarded the
Munich Agreement as yet further proof of Hitler’s ability to deal with even the
most serious international crisis in a statesmanlike manner without recourse
to war.
By the time that Himmler and Hitler gave their secret speeches in November
1938, the next stages of Germany’s massive expansion programme had already
been set out. Hitler gave orders on 21 October to ‘deal with the remainder of
Czechia’ and to occupy the Memel Territory (Klaipeda region), which had
been annexed by Lithuania in 1923 and had been an autonomous region since
1924. On 24 November he gave additional instructions to prepare to overrun
the Free City of Danzig (Gda-sk), which in accordance with the Treaty of
Versailles had been under the protection of the League of Nations since 1920.
The question of Gda-sk brought Poland into the sights of Germany’s
expansionist policies, and on 24 October Germany’s foreign secretary, Joachim
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 657

von Ribbentrop, proposed an arrangement with the Polish ambassador, Józef

Lipski, under which Gda-sk would be returned to Germany, there would be
transport links between East Prussia and the rest of the Reich, Poland would
have a free trade port in the Gda-sk region with transport links to Germany,
the non-aggression pact between the two countries would be extended by
twenty-five years and Poland would join the anti-Comintern pact. If Poland
had agreed to Germany’s proposals, it would at best have been the junior party
in any future war with the Soviet Union, a prospect indistinguishable from
total loss of the country’s identity.
When Hitler tried to interest the Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, in a
slightly modified version of these ideas at their meeting in Berchtesgaden on 5
January 1939, Beck did not turn them down outright but he made it clear that
the Polish people could not be expected to accept the disappearance of the Free
State of Gda-sk without demur. The proposals were finally rejected three
weeks later during a visit that Ribbentrop made to Warsaw between 25 and
27 January. The compensation that the German foreign minister proposed to
pay in the form of Soviet Ukraine, which the two countries were to overrun
together, was not sufficient to persuade the Polish leadership under Mo0cicki,
Rydz-?migly and Beck to change their position. ‘We’re not Czechs,’ Beck
informed his German colleage.133
On 10 February 1939 Hitler explained to a group of senior commanders
what had persuaded him to bank on war and war alone. The successes of 1938,
he explained, were merely way-stations on the road to a much more ambitious
goal:

When the collapse came in 1918, the numerically strongest people in Europe
lost its position of political influence and, with it, the means by which to assert
its most important and most natural interests in life with all the resources at
its command and in all conceivable circumstances. We are talking about the
most powerful nation not just in Europe but effectively in the world. [. . .] [We
must] represent the interests of our people as if the fate of our race in the
coming centuries had been placed exclusively in our hands today. [. . .] We can
acquit ourselves of the obligation to act as if our actions today will shape the
entire future of Germany. [. . .] We must make good the omissions of the last
three centuries. [. . .] Ever since the Peace of Westphalia our people has been
travelling a path that has led us increasingly away from the position of a world
power into a state of destitution and political impotence.

Germany’s rebirth, which had begun in 1933, did not represent the end of
its journey, but only the beginning. And Hitler was convinced that ‘The next
war will be an ideological war, that is, a consciously ethnic and racial war.’134
Hitler’s speech of 10 February 1939 made it clear what separated his own
agenda from that of the old Wilhelmine elite: whereas they wanted to return
658 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

to a Germany that had flourished before the First World War, he wanted to
return to the period before the Thirty Years War. They thought that they were
representing German interests, whereas he knew that he was fired by a uniquely
true, National Socialist ideology. When Hitler spoke of a ‘world power’, he used
an expression familiar to his listeners. But for a man at the head of ostensibly
the greatest nation in the world, it was not enough to lead one world power
among many. The German Reich had to become the most powerful empire in
the world, and that in turn meant world dominion, hence Hitler’s orders at the
end of January 1939 to build a vast underwater fleet and his decision in March
to begin preparatory work on a new Colonial Office.
On 12 February 1939, two days after the speech in which he laid out his
basic principles, Hitler received the Slovak politician Vojt@ch Tuka, who in
1929 had been sentenced to a lengthy term of imprisonment for high treason.
Hitler told him of his sympathy for the Slovak independence movement. He
had evidently decided to settle the problem of ‘the remainder of Czechia’ as
soon as he possibly could. With the help of Slovak separatists, he was able to
ensure that by 14 March Slovakia had declared its independence.
By the evening of 14 March Hitler had already summoned Emil Hácha,
Edvard Beneg’s successor as president of the Czechoslovak Republic, to Berlin
and forced him to agree to the unconditional surrender of his country. Early the
next morning Hácha and his foreign minister, Frantigek ChvalkovskF, signed an
‘agreement’ declaring that ‘in order to achieve lasting peace’ the Czech president
was ‘confidently placing the fate of the Czech nation and country in the hands
of the leader of the German Reich’.135 Immediately afterwards the German
Wehrmacht marched into the ‘remainder of Czechia’, and by 16 March Hitler
was able to proclaim the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
from Prague’s Hrad/any Castle. On the 18th Germany’s former foreign minister,
Konstantin von Neurath, was appointed the Reich protector with effectively
unlimited powers, while Hácha henceforth required the trust of the Führer and
German chancellor. Germany and Slovakia signed a defensive alliance treaty on
18 March, imposing tight controls on the new state, notably in terms of its
foreign policy but also militarily, economically and financially.
Given its industrial capacity, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
represented a considerable gain for Germany’s arms-based economy. The
National Socialists showed considerable skill in involving sections of the Czech
bourgeoisie in the Aryanization of Jewish property, a process which here too
was carried out with systematic rigour. In this way the bourgeoisie was made
compliant with National Socialist demands. The immediate military advantage
of destroying ‘the remainder of Czechia’ lay in the fact that what German prop-
aganda called the ‘mother airship’ of the Soviet Union in central Europe was
now sidelined. Since the start of 1939 Germany had a wholly oppressive stra-
tegic weight that seemed to guarantee it permanent hegemony in eastern
central and south-east Europe.
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 659

Prague was a watershed in more than one respect. In his third foray into
a foreign country, Hitler had crossed a border that was bound up with the
whole concept of a German national state and, with it, the idea of belonging to
the German nation. By annexing the Czech part of Czechoslovakia as the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Germany had ceased to be a national
state like any other, for the term ‘Reich’ now acquired a new dimension that
at the same time implied a much older quality. According to the Austrian
legal historian Karl Gottfried Hugelmann, an outspoken pan-German who
from 1935 taught at the University of Münster in Westphalia, ‘the essential
hallmarks’ of the Reich in the Middle Ages had been ‘greatness, power and
dignity’, whereas by 1940 this dignity was based ‘on the consciousness of a
mission’. The ‘incorporation’ of the Czech people into the German Reich was
justified and meaningful in terms of the concept of the Reich, and people must
see that ‘with the incorporation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
into the Greater German Reich, the latter’s character as an empire emerges
even more clearly’.136
On 1 April 1939 the German constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt delivered a
lecture at the University of Kiel that was published later that same year in
expanded form. Here he drew attention to German linguistic usage whereby ‘the
great historically important polities – the empires of the Persians, the Macedonians
and the Romans, the empires of the Germanic peoples as well as those of their
adversaries – were always called Reich in a very specific sense.’ Located at the
heart of Europe, the German Reich lay ‘between the universalism of the powers
of the liberal-democratic West, with their tendency to assimilate nations, and the
universalism of the Bolshevist, world-revolutionary East’, and was ‘forced to
defend on both fronts the sanctity of a non-universalist, Volk-orientated way of
life that respects the concept of nationhood’. According to international law, the
concept of ‘empire’ was one of

a large-scale territorial order dominated by specific ideological beliefs and

principles, precluding the intervention of foreign powers and having as its
guarantor and guardian a people that has proved itself equal to that task.
[. . .] It is our concept of the Reich as an ethnically orientated, large-scale
territorial order sustained by a single Volk that is the new concept of order
under a new kind of international law.137

National Socialist jurists in Himmler’s inner circle lost no time in criticizing

Schmitt for attempting to propose a German counterpart to the Monroe
Doctrine of 1823, an attempt they dismissed as both half-hearted and
ideologically unsound. Werner Best, who was the security services’ head of
personnel, argued in August 1939 that according to the popular understanding
of the term, international law could not even be considered a proper form
of law:
660 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The only purpose of every nation is self-preservation and self-development,

and the standards according to which it acts are entirely conditioned by this
aim. In its dealings with other nations, no nation can allow itself to be
bound by rules that claim to be valid but which disregard its own existential
aims.138

In short, Hitler’s Reich could not only lay claim to a higher law than other states
and nations within its own territories, but it was the quintessential Reich, and
there was no law that any other states or nations could assert in the face of it.
For western Europe’s two biggest democracies, the ideas of March 1939
marked a turning point. In France indignation at the brutal violation of the
Munich Agreement was arguably even greater than in Britain, almost the whole
of the press and most politicians, including Daladier, demanding a stricter line
against Hitler. France’s foreign minister, Georges Bonnet, continued to shy away
from direct confrontation with Germany but in this he found himself isolated
within Daladier’s cabinet. Speaking to Conservative Party supporters in
Birmingham on 17 March – the eve of his seventieth birthday – Neville
Chamberlain described the breakup of Czechoslovakia as an instance of total
disregard for the obligations that the German government had agreed to in
Munich and asked a series of rhetorical questions that left his listeners in no
doubt about his fears for the future:

Is this the end of an old adventure, or is it the beginning of a new? Is this the
last attack upon a small State, or is it to be followed by others? Is this, in fact,
a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?139

Britain drew its first practical consequence from Hitler’s act of aggression on 21
March, when it proposed a consultation pact with Poland, a pact that France and
the Soviet Union were also to join. That same day Ribbentrop issued an ulti-
matum to Poland, demanding that it return Gda-sk to the Reich and agree to a
transport link between East Prussia and the rest of Germany. Two days later
German troops marched into the Memel Territory with the coerced consent of
Lithuania, annexing Klaipeda too. That same day – 23 March 1939 – Germany
signed an extraordinarily advantageous trade agreement with Romania, which
had been exposed to tremendous pressure by Berlin from the start of their nego-
tiations a month earlier.
Also on 23 March 1939 Poland began to react to the extortionate demands
that Germans had been making of Slovakia, Lithuania and Poland itself in the
course of recent days. Warsaw introduced partial mobilization and moved
three divisions and a cavalry brigade to a position close to the country’s western
border. Two days later Poland comprehensively rejected Germany’s demands
of 21 March. On 31 March Chamberlain told the lower house that Britain guar-
anteed the national independence of Poland, if not its borders and its integrity,
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 661

a declaration repeated almost immediately by France. The Polish foreign

minister, Józef Beck, visited London on 6 April and succeeded in turning
Britain’s unilateral guarantee into a provisional Anglo-Polish mutual assistance
pact. But Beck refused to contemplate a similar agreement with Soviet Russia.
Nor did he consider it opportune to enter into a three-way pact with France, a
country with which Poland had been allied since 1924. Beck gave a famous
speech in the Sejm on 5 May, setting forth his country’s priorities in a program-
matical way:

Peace is a precious and desirable commodity. Our own generation, which

has been baptised by the blood of war, undoubtedly deserves a period of
peace. But, like almost everything in this world, peace has a high and yet
calculable price. We Poles do not acknowledge the concept of peace at any
price. In the lives of the nations and states of this world there is only one
commodity that has no price: honour.140

Italian troops marched into Albania on Good Friday, 7 April 1939, the day after
the provisional Anglo-Polish pact was signed. King Zog fled to Greece, and on
12 April an ad hoc ‘national assembly’ offered the Albanian crown to King
Victor Emanuel III, who gratefully accepted it four days later. A viceroy was
then installed and a new constitution announced, followed by the formation of
a Fascist Party and of a Supreme Fascist Council modelled on its Italian coun-
terpart. Mussolini clearly wanted to show the whole world that Hitler was not
the only leader capable of imposing his will on another country with the help
of the military. A few days earlier, on 3 April, Hitler had given instructions for
Germany to make military preparations for an attack on Poland and for the
armed forces to be ready to act at any given moment after 1 September 1939.
On 13 April Great Britain and France countered the aggressive actions of
the Axis Powers by declaring their readiness to come to the assistance of
Romania, Greece and Turkey. The Netherlands, Switzerland and Denmark
were offered similar guarantees, but in every case they declined to accept them
lest they provoke Germany. The following day Chamberlain asked the Soviet
Union to assist its western neighbour in the event of an unprovoked attack, but
Moscow turned down the invitation and instead proposed a triple alliance
involving Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Five weeks earlier, in his
famous speech to the Eighteenth Party Conference of the Soviet Communist
Party on 10 March, Stalin had declared that it was his party’s task ‘to be cautious
and not allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are
accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them’.141 This
could only be interpreted to mean that Great Britain and France, which six
months earlier had signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler without first
consulting the Soviet Union, could not count on Soviet help in any confronta-
tion with National Socialist Germany.
662 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

On 17 April, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Alexei Fyodorovich Merekalov,

informed the secretary of state at the Foreign Office, Ernst von Weizsäcker, that
his government was interested in improving relations with Germany. On 4 May
an even clearer signal came from Moscow, when Stalin replaced his foreign
minister, Maxim Litvinov, who had always been regarded as western-orientated
and a supporter of the League of Nations but who was always ridiculed in the
National Socialist press as ‘the Jew Finkelstein’, with the chairman of the Council
of People’s Commissars, Vyacheslav Molotov. This was the first time that a
member of the Politburo had run the Foreign Ministry. Stalin now had more
effective control of Soviet foreign policy and could keep open his conflicting
options – namely, an arrangement with the West or, alternatively, an agreement
with his Fascist archenemy in Berlin.
Hitler addressed the Reichstag on 28 April, spelling out his reaction to the
diplomatic activities of the Western Powers and Poland by announcing the end
of both the Anglo-German naval agreement of 1935 and the German-Polish
non-aggression pact of 1934. For long stretches, the speech was a rhetorically
skilful rebuttal of a move by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who on 14 April had sought
assurances from Hitler and Mussolini that they would not attack thirty-one
named countries in the course of the next twenty-five years. If Germany and
Hitler were to demand something similar of the United States, Hitler retorted,
then Roosevelt would undoubtedly appeal to the Monroe Doctrine, according
to which the European powers were not allowed to interfere in the affairs of
North, Central and Latin America. ‘This is exactly the kind of doctrine we
Germans are now claiming for Europe, certainly for the territory and the affairs
of the Greater German Reich.’142 Hitler had already postulated the idea of a
‘German Monroe Doctrine’ in the sense of a ‘Germany for the Germans’ in an
interview with an American news agency in October 1930. It was presumably
Carl Schmitt who encouraged him to expand this postulate and apply it to the
whole of Europe after he, Schmitt, had referred to the American model in his
speech in Kiel. The concept had no doubt come to Hitler’s attention via high-
ranking National Socialist jurists. From then on he regarded it as his own.
On 22 May 1939, three and a half weeks after his Reichstag speech, Hitler
concluded the so-called ‘Steel Pact’ with Mussolini, committing each country to
come to the other’s assistance if it were to wage war with a third party. It mattered
not a whit if it was an offensive or a defensive war. Both powers were interested
only in Lebensraum. In a diary entry, Italy’s foreign minister, Gian Galeazzo
Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, commented wryly: ‘I’ve never read a treaty like it
– it’s pure dynamite.’143
Mussolini had agreed to Hitler’s proposal because he accepted the Führer’s
assurance that the forthcoming great war would not take place for several
years. In 1939 Italy was far from being in a position to play the role that Hitler
had planned for it. Meanwhile the camp of Germany’s ‘allies’ in the wider sense
had continued to grow. After Japan and Italy, the Japanese satellite state of
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 663

Manchukuo and Hungary both joined the anti-Comintern pact on 24 February

1939, with Franco’s Spain following suit on 27 March. It remained completely
unclear what these countries would do for the Reich if the situation were ever
to become serious – especially if Hitler were to take the unprecedented step of
forming an alliance with Stalin.
Until August 1939 it was possible only to speculate on the direction that the
Soviet Union’s foreign policy might take. On 24 May the British cabinet had
agreed to enter into negotiations with Moscow on a military alliance, a move
accepted by Chamberlain only with reluctance but actively encouraged by
Daladier. Public opinion in Great Britain favoured such a pact: in a poll taken in
June 1939, 84 per cent of those asked said that they supported the idea of a mili-
tary alliance between Britain, France and the Soviet Union. But it was only on 24
July that an agreement was reached that would come into force after a military
convention. Under its terms the signatories would come to each other’s assist-
ance in the event of a direct or indirect attack not only on one of them but also
on Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Belgium, Romania, Greece and Turkey.
Stalin himself had insisted on extending the terms to cover indirect aggression,
however difficult it was to define such attacks. He also demanded the inclusion
of the Baltic States and Finland, even though the countries in question had no
wish to receive Soviet assistance.
The military negotiations began on 12 August, a delay caused by the fact
that the western experts had to travel to Leningrad by sea. The sticking point
turned out to be a Soviet demand that the government in Warsaw was not
prepared to consider, namely, the right of the Red Army to march through
Polish territory on its way to the West. The French representative was instructed
by his superiors in Paris to agree to the terms of the treaty in the form desired
by the Soviet delegation. The British representative was merely empowered to
state that in the event of war Poland should accept Soviet support, an outcome
with which the Soviet negotiators could declare themselves satisfied.
By the summer of 1939 Chamberlain’s mistrust of Stalin was at least as
profound as Stalin’s mistrust of the Western Powers and especially of the Tory
government in London. In spite of his outrage at Hitler’s treaty violation of 15
March 1939, Chamberlain had not yet abandoned his belief in appeasement.
And he was not alone in this. The Federation of British Industry, which had
long been an advocate of economic appeasement, began negotiations with its
German counterpart on the very day that the Wehrmacht marched into the
‘remainder of Czechia’. Two days later, on 17 March 1939, both organizations
signed an agreement expressing a desire for Anglo-German negotiations that
would put an end to the destructive rivalry between their two countries and
allow the maximum cooperation. In June and July 1939 several face-to-face
discussions were held between Chamberlain’s principal diplomatic adviser, Sir
Horace Wilson, and Helmuth Wohlthat of Göring’s Four-Year-Plan Authority,
during which Wilson stressed Britain’s desire for economic cooperation, for
664 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

greater access to British markets for German producers and for concessions on
the matter of Germany’s colonial policy – on condition, of course, that the
Reich took steps to restore international stability.
Even at the height of appeasement, Great Britain had not lost sight of the
need to rearm. In October 1938, shortly after the Munich conference, the lower
house raised the military budget from £1.5 million to £2.1 million, much of the
increase earmarked for the Royal Air Force. On 29 May 1939 the lower house
voted to reintroduce general conscription in the face of opposition from the
Labour Party. (The policy had been abandoned in 1920.) France, which econom-
ically speaking had been recovering swiftly thanks to its use of special powers,
likewise began to force the pace of rearmament under the impression left by
Germany’s aggressive actions in March 1939. When Marcel Déat, a former
Socialist and now the leader of the radical right-wing Rassemblement National
Populaire, famously answered the question ‘Mourir pour Dantzig?’ with a reso-
lute ‘no’ in the newspaper L’Œuvre on 4 May 1939, he was not speaking for the
majority of his fellow countrymen and women. In a poll asking if France should
respond to Hitler with force in the event of his trying to take the Free City of
Gda-sk, 76 per cent said yes, 17 per cent said no and 7 per cent had no opinion
at all.
The military efforts of the two biggest democracies in western Europe
suffered a setback on 11 July 1939, when, by twelve votes to eleven, the Foreign
Policy Committee of the American Senate frustrated Roosevelt’s attempts to
loosen the 1937 Neutrality Act so that in the event of war Great Britain and
France could buy military material from the United States and transport it
back home on their own ships using the cash-and-carry policy to which we
have already referred. The House of Representatives had already agreed to this
motion on 30 June by a narrow majority of 200 votes to 188. But the isolation-
ists had the upper hand in the Senate. In the summer and autumn of 1939 there
was no question of any active American support for Great Britain and France
in the event of a war with Germany. With Japan, conversely, America chose to
be openly confrontational, and on 26 July 1939, acting at the bidding of the
Senate, the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, announced that the United States
would not be renewing the trade treaty of 1911.
During the period between the political and, in the narrower sense, mili-
tary negotiations that Great Britain and France conducted with the Soviet
Union in the summer of 1939, a meeting took place in a Berlin wine bar on 26
July between two Soviet diplomats, the Berlin chargé d’affaires, Georgi
Astakhov, and the deputy head of the Soviet Trade Mission in Berlin, Yevgeny
Babarin, and Julius Schnurre, an adviser at the Foreign Office, in the course of
which Schnurre openly asked for greater German-Soviet understanding and,
more specifically, for a non-aggression pact and an agreement on their mutual
interests in eastern central Europe. His main argument was that Great Britain
could offer the Soviet Union only involvement in a European war and enmity
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 665

with Germany, whereas an agreement with Germany would mean neutrality

and, hence, non-involvement in any European conflict.
This meeting marked the start of more intensive contacts between Germany
and Soviet Russia. In early August Ribbentrop told the Soviet chargé d’affaires
directly that there was no problem that Germany and the Soviet Union could
not agree upon, whether it affected the Baltic or the Black Sea. On 14 August
Ribbentrop pointed out that both Germany and the Soviet Union shared a
common foe in ‘capitalist Western democracies’ and once again offered
Moscow the opportunity to define its sphere of interest between the Baltic and
the Black Sea. Two days later Molotov hinted that a visit from the German
foreign minister would not be unwelcome in Moscow, and on the 19th Berlin
and Moscow agreed to the framework for a credit and trade treaty. On the 20th
Hitler sent a telegram to Stalin, inviting him to receive Ribbentrop in Moscow,
the German foreign minister being equipped with comprehensive authority to
sign a non-aggression treaty. On the 21st Berlin received word that Ribbentrop
was expected in the Soviet capital on 23 August.
Shortly before midnight on 24 August 1939 a bemused and in many cases
shocked world learnt that after three hours of talks Ribbentrop and Molotov
had signed a German-Soviet non-aggression pact. It was dated the previous
day. Both states would refrain from undertaking any aggressive acts for a ten-
year period. They would not assist a third party in the event of a war with their
co-signatory. Nor would they play any part in coalitions aimed directly or indi-
rectly against the other party.
What the rest of the world did not know was that the two countries had also
signed a secret addendum to the treaty, which provided for the partition of
Poland and the Baltic States, including Finland, into German and Soviet spheres
of influence separated by the northern border of Lithuania and by a line marked
by the courses of the Narew, Vistula and San rivers. As for south-east Europe,
Germany recognized the Soviet interest in Bessarabia, which belonged to
Romania. Unresolved was the question of ‘whether the interests of both sides
make the preservation of an independent Polish state seem desirable, and how
this state should be demarcated’.144 As the treaty pointedly stated, this question
could be resolved only in the course of subsequent political developments.
The pact positively invited Hitler to attack Poland, a prospect that Stalin did
not find in the least intimidating. Not only did the Soviet leader gain a large area
of land that the Western Powers had been unable to offer him, he also gained the
time that he needed to continue arming his country and preparing for the even-
tuality that Hitler might at some point revert to his earlier plan of extending
Germany’s Lebensraum at the expense of Soviet Russia. In the meantime he
could see the extent to which the capitalist powers were tearing each other apart.
Speaking to a small group of party members that included Georgi Dimitrov,
the secretary general of the Communist International, Stalin admitted on
7 September 1939 that it would ‘not be bad’ if Germany and the capitalist
666 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

countries were weakened. ‘Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is

shaking and undermining the capitalist system.’145 It was he, Stalin, who was
playing off the capitalist powers against one another, the Soviet leader concluded.
Ideologically speaking, the pact between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s
Germany was an alliance of opposites and hard to fathom. In December 1933
Dimitrov had defined ‘Fascism in power’ as ‘the open terrorist dictatorship of
the most reactionary, chauvinistic, and imperial elements of finance capital’,146
a definition officially adopted at the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern
in August 1935. To form any kind of an alliance with such a system presup-
posed the abandonment of principles that had been held in high esteem until
then, and this was certainly the criticism that – initially at least – was levelled
at the Hitler–Stalin Pact by many western Communists. But observers who set
out from the premise that there could not possibly be a contradiction between
the international working class and the Soviet Union would certainly be able to
justify the German-Soviet agreements of 23 August and see them as benefiting
the world’s proletariat and furthering world revolution. All that was needed
was the right way of seeing things, namely, a dialectical perspective.
After a brief period of uncertainty, this was the interpretation placed on the
situation by the Communist parties of western Europe, foremost among them
the French Communist Party, which insisted that the ‘land of socialism’ had
broken through the ‘front of the imperialist states’ and secured not only its
own future but also peace in Europe. In short, it was entirely the ‘imperialist’
Western Powers that were to blame for the failure of the Soviet Union, Great
Britain and France to reach an agreement. They had supported Germany’s
‘eastern thrust’ in Munich and refused to sign up to a policy of collective secu-
rity. At the same time the French and British Communists and the German
Communists in exile in Moscow asserted their determination to continue their
struggle to defeat the warmongering Fascists.
The most remarkable assessment of the Hitler–Stalin Pact came from Mao
Zedong, the secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party, who following
the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 had formed a new, albeit
precarious, united front alliance with the nationalist Kuomintang of Chiang
Kai-shek. In an interview with the New China Daily, Mao claimed that the
Moscow agreement had thwarted the attempt on the part of ‘the reactionary
international bourgeoisie represented by Chamberlain and Daladier’ to provoke
a war between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Germany and

broken the encirclement of the Soviet Union by the German-Italian-

Japanese anti-Communist bloc. In the East it deals a blow to Japan and
helps China; it strengthens the position of China’s forces of resistance to
Japan and deals a blow to the capitulators. [. . .] Badly hit by the Soviet-
German treaty, Japanese imperialism is facing a future beset with still
greater difficulties.147
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 667

The treaty of 23 August 1939 certainly came as an unpleasant surprise to

Tokyo. On 11 May 1939, in the course of the Sino-Japanese War, there had been
serious clashes with the Soviet Union on the border with Manchukuo and
the Mongolian People’s Republic, which had been founded in 1924 and was
completely independent of Moscow. The episode was known as the Nomonhan
Incident and lasted from May to September 1939. The German–Soviet agree-
ment not only violated the anti-Comintern pact but also gave the impression in
Japan that the country had been abandoned by National Socialist Germany.
Hiranuma’s compromised cabinet was toppled. When war broke out in Europe
on 1 September, Japan remained neutral but was also isolated in the Far East.
The Nomonhan Incident ended on 15 September with a truce that was tanta-
mount to a complete defeat for the Japanese Empire, triggering a sense of
profound demoralization within the Japanese army.
With his dramatic volte-face Hitler managed not only to wrong-foot his Far
Eastern partner in the anti-Comintern pact, he also confused many of his loyal
supporters at home. It was no easier for him to justify the treaty of 23 August
1939 than it was for Stalin, for the Führer had repeatedly portrayed National
Socialist Germany as the power that was destined to act as a bulwark against
evil in the form of Bolshevism. At the Nuremberg party rally in September
1934 he had delved far into the past in order to back up his belief in Germany’s
mission, claiming that

Just as the waves of peoples and races from the east were once fragmented
by their impact on Germany, so our people have once again become the
breakwater in a flood that would have buried Europe, together with its
welfare and its culture.148

The following year he told the American journalist Hugh Baillie, who was head
of United Press, that ‘Germany is the bulwark of the West against Bolshevism
and will fight propaganda with propaganda, terror with terror, and force with
force in order to fend it off ’.149 And at the 1937 Party Day of Labour he described
‘international Jewish Bolshevism’ as ‘an absolutely foreign body in the commu-
nity of European cultural nations’, while ‘the claim of an uncivilized, Jewish-
Bolshevist international guild of criminals to rule over the old European
cultural country of Germany from Moscow’ was no more than a ‘shameless
provocation’.150
Now, barely two years later, Hitler was signing a pact with ‘Satan’ in order to
drive out the ‘devil’, as he described the new situation on 28 August 1939.
Litvinov’s dismissal (and, retrospectively, the fall of Trotsky and other Jewish
Bolsheviks) struck Hitler as proof that under Stalin the Soviet Union was
willing to break with its former policy of internationalism and interventionism
and to evolve in the direction of a kind of National Socialism. It was no longer
permissible to speak of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and of the struggle to combat it.
668 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Countless propaganda texts promoting the old message were consigned to the
waste-paper basket overnight, and anti-Bolshevik propaganda films were taken
out of circulation.
Once the German-Soviet non-aggression pact had been signed, Hitler felt
that Germany’s position was so strong that he seriously considered accepting
the offer that he received on 25 August from the British ambassador Sir Nevile
Henderson: Germany would use its influence to secure the continuing exist-
ence of the British Empire if London did nothing to prevent Germany from
solving its problem with Poland. He then decided to begin hostilities at 4:30 the
following day. But on 25 August he was informed that Mussolini, who had not
discovered that Hitler was planning to invade Poland until 12 August, was
unable to fight alongside Germany because of resistance to the idea on the part
of King Victor Emanuel III, the Italian foreign minister, Gian Galeazzo Ciano,
and leading members of the country’s military. He also learnt that the Anglo-
Polish mutual assistance pact was on the point of being signed. The result was
the threat of a situation that he was still unwilling to contemplate: a war on two
fronts, as in 1914. On the evening of 25 August, acting on advice received from
Walther von Brauchitsch, Hitler countermanded his orders to the army.
The secretary of state at the Foreign Office, Ernst von Weizsäcker, and the
career diplomat at the German Embassy in London, Theodor Kordt, used the
breathing space to make frantic attempts to avert war, as did Hermann Göring,
who sought the help of a Swedish mediator, the businessman Birger Dahlerus.
But neither Brauchitsch nor the army’s chief of the general staff, Franz Halder,
had any intention of opposing war with Poland. Hitler himself was resolved on
going to war. He still hoped that he could prevent Great Britain and France
from becoming involved, although it was no longer anything more than a hope.
Britain could not accept Hitler’s proposals without violating its commit-
ments to Poland, while the proposals that Hitler put to Warsaw in the form of
an ultimatum on 29 August were designed only to serve as an alibi in the face
of the tribunal of history. There was also something unreal about Mussolini’s
idea, put forward on 31 August, that the British government might agree to the
return of Gda-sk to Germany and in that way prepare the ground for a confer-
ence involving all the major powers. At 12:40 that same day Hitler gave orders
for hostilities to begin against Poland: they would start at 04:45 on 1 September
1939. In order to provide some semblance of legitimacy the SS had to ensure
that there were suitable ‘incidents’ on the border between Germany and Poland,
one of which was a feigned attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz
in Upper Silesia by SS men wearing Polish uniforms late on the evening of
31 August.
Hitler was under no economic constraints when he unleashed the Second
World War on 1 September 1939. True, he could not have continued his war
economy policies for much longer without the need to encroach on foreign terri-
tory, but the annexation of Austria and of the Sudetenland and the establishment
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 669

of a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia had lifted some of the economic

burden from Germany’s shoulders. He was determined that war would begin at
the earliest available opportunity. To have waited would have meant allowing
Great Britain and France more time to rearm, threatening Germany’s lead in this
area. The non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union freed Hitler from the
danger of a major war on two different fronts. In the summer of 1939 American
isolationism was still powerful enough to make it unlikely that the United States
would enter the war alongside Britain and France at least in the foreseeable
future. In the circumstances it made sense to attack Poland as soon as possible,
especially since Hitler was not yet convinced that London and Paris would
honour their commitment to come to Warsaw’s assistance.
In marked contrast to the situation a quarter of a century earlier, there was
no enthusiasm for war in Germany in September 1939. At the end of June, the
regional council of Ebermannstadt in Upper Franconia had noted that

the desire for peace is greater than the desire for war. As a result, the vast
majority of the population would be willing to support a solution to the
Danzig question only if it were to be as swift and as bloodless as other
annexations in the east. [. . .] We cannot reckon on the same degree of
enthusiasm today as there was in 1914.

A month later the same civil servant summed up the mood among the popula-
tion as follows: ‘Among the public at large the answer to the question as to
how to solve the problem of Danzig and the corridor remains the same as
before. Annexation to the Reich? Yes. By war? No.’ On 31 August – the last day
of peace – the writer echoed the reports from other parts of the Reich: ‘It is
likely that public confidence in the Führer will now be subjected to its sternest
test to date. The overwhelming majority of party comrades expect him to
prevent war from breaking out, even if this means abandoning Danzig and the
corridor.’151
In the speech that he delivered to the Reichstag on 1 September 1939, only
hours after the start of the war, Hitler appealed to Frederick the Great, the
historical figure whom he admired the most and whom he invoked as a witness
to the fact that, if necessary, Germany could defy even a major coalition:

There is one word that I have never learnt, and that word is ‘capitulation’.
But if anyone thinks that we may be facing a difficult time ahead, I would
ask them to remember that a king of Prussia once stood up to one of the
greatest coalitions in history with a ridiculously small army and that he
emerged successful after three battles because he had a faithful and a strong
heart of a kind that we too need at a time like this. But I should like to assure
the rest of the world that there will never be another November 1918 in the
history of the German Reich.152
670 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The German invasion of Poland was followed within hours by British and French
demands to cease all hostilities forthwith and to withdraw German troops from
Polish territory. On 2 September London followed up its note from the previous
day by issuing an ultimatum and insisting on compliance by 11:00 the following
day. Since no German answer was forthcoming, Britain was now at war with
Germany. The French ultimatum was handed to Ribbentrop at 12:20 on the 2nd
and expired at 17:00 that same day, after which France, too, was on a war footing
with the Reich. Two other members of the Commonwealth, Australia and New
Zealand, together with British India, also declared war that day, followed on the
6th by the Union of South Africa, whose prime minister, James Hertzog, had
championed his country’s neutrality, only to be overruled by the majority of
members of his government and of parliament, all of whom favoured interven-
tion. Canada followed suit on the 10th. In short, Hitler’s war had from the outset
not merely a European but a global dimension.
In Britain the lower house gave Chamberlain its full support on 3 September.
Two days earlier the Labour Party had published its own war manifesto with an
appeal to Britons to resist Hitler’s latest act of aggression by force of arms. In
spite of the failure of his earlier policy towards Germany, Chamberlain declined
to resign but consolidated his position within his party by giving three
Conservative ‘anti-appeasers’ cabinet seats on 3 and 4 September: Winston
Churchill as first lord of the Admiralty, Anthony Eden as minister for the
Dominions and Harold Macmillan as head of the newly established Ministry of
Information.
The French government, too, could count on parliament’s backing when it
declared war: on 2 September both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate by
a show of hands unanimously empowered Daladier’s government to raise new
loans which, even if the prime minister avoided the term, were war loans. In
both chambers the Communists, too, voted for the government bill. Three
and a half weeks later, on 26 September, the Communist Party was declared
an illegal organization after it had begun to turn the army against the ‘imperi-
alist war’ and to describe the invasion of eastern Poland by the Red Army as
an act of liberation. In both cases it was responding to a directive from the
Comintern.
Hitler was surprised by the speed with which western democracies reacted
to his invasion of Poland and decided that attack was the best form of defence.
By 3 September he once again had a clear bogeyman in his sights: Jewry. Now,
however, it was no longer Jewry in its ‘Bolshevik’ manifestation, but its ‘demo-
cratic’, ‘plutocratic’ and ‘capitalist’ form. As a dialectician, Hitler was now
second only to Stalin, and in this capacity he blamed the Jews for the war that
he himself had just unleashed. According to an appeal that he made to the
German people on 3 September and which he had written before France had
entered the war, it was not Great Britain that should be held responsible for
hostilities but
 DEMOCRACIES AND DICTATORSHIPS 671

that Jewish-plutocratic and democratic ruling class that wishes to see only
subservient slaves in all the nations of the world and which hates our new
Reich because it sees in it a model for the sort of social enterprise that it
fears will infect its own country, too.153

Addressing the ‘men and women of the NSDAP’ on 3 September, Hitler insisted
that it was ‘our Jewish-democratic international enemy’ that had ‘succeeded in
harrying the English people into war with Germany. The reasons are just as
mendacious and threadbare like [sic] they were in 1914.’ And all members of
the party were exhorted to prepare for a fight to the death:

Within a matter of weeks the National Socialist readiness for war must be
transformed into a spirit of unity ready to stick together through thick or
thin. Then the capitalist warmongers in England and its satellites will very
soon discover what it means to attack the largest people’s state in Europe
without good reason.154

Hitler’s language on 3 September 1939 was powerfully reminiscent of a

particular variant of his rhetoric associated with the ‘ideas of 1914’ in which
he had drawn a distinction between social and, indeed, socialist Germany
and capitalist, not to say plutocratic, England. The ‘international Jewish
conspiracy’ seemed to have moved its headquarters overnight from the Kremlin
in Moscow to the City of London. Hitler’s anti-capitalist rhetoric presumably
found an echo in the workforce because Germany was currently enjoying full
employment, with an extensively developed welfare state and a range of popular
leisure activities offered by the German Labour Front. And Hitler needed to be
able to rely on the backing of the workforce if he wanted to avoid a new
‘November 1918’. One novel aspect of the present situation, when compared
with the one that had obtained in Wilhelmine Germany, was the fact that the
appeal to anti-Jewish sentiment came not from any particular social or political
groups but from ‘above’, lending it an official character. But whatever the
response to these slogans, anti-Semitism had been the dominant force in
Germany since 1933, which was one of the principal differences between the
events of 1914 and those of 1939 and also between the wars that began to
unfold at that time.
Another difference was signalled by Hitler with a decree that he signed in
October 1939, backdating it to 1 September, the day the war had begun. It read:

Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler and Dr Karl Brandt MD are hereby given

responsibility for extending the authority of specified doctors so that, after
a critical assessment of their condition, mercy killing may be used on those
patients who, at least as far as is humanly possible, have been deemed to be
incurably ill. Adolf Hitler.155
672 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

In this way the Führer was now master of life and death. His war was to give
him the opportunity of taking to its ultimate conclusion his social Darwinian
view of the world and helping a new, racially pure and healthy Aryan type of
human being to gain ascendancy. While the attention of the German people
was focused on the war on its various fronts, it was easier than it had been
previously to take the necessary step from ‘preventing the birth of children
suffering from hereditary diseases’, which was allowed under a law passed on
14 July 1933, to the ‘destruction of life that is unworthy of living’, and to do so,
moreover, without attracting attention. It was a move from eugenics to the
euthanasia championed by Karl Binding, an expert in criminal law, and by
the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, who, as we have already observed, had demanded
the ‘destruction of life unworthy of life’ – thus the title of the book they had
co-authored in 1920. But in large sections of society and especially among
members of the Christian Churches, ‘mercy killing’ for the mentally ill was still
regarded as murder. Once the war was under way, Hitler hoped to be able to
put his world-changing plan into practice. It was entirely within the logic of the
totalitarian state that he himself had created that it would be possible to ignore
and invalidate, where necessary, any inconvenient norms associated with the
bourgeois tradition of the rule of law. In National Socialist Germany this logic
could find consummate expression only once the country was at war.
 4

Fault Lines in Western Civilization:

The Second World War and the Holocaust
War as Annihilation: The Fifth Partition of Poland

O 8(G &8ā G&ĕ87G had deliberately set out to unleash a war in 1939 while
knowing that it was not in its power to ensure that it remained a localized
conflict. That country was National Socialist Germany. It must remain an open
question whether Hitler would have invaded Poland in the autumn of that year
if Stalin had not come to his assistance with the Moscow non-aggression pact of
23 August 1939, but it is scarcely conceivable that Germany would have turned
down the chance to go to war, given the extent to which it had rearmed itself
and the level of rearmament that could be found among the other powers at that
time. The German-Soviet non-aggression pact, which was in fact an invitation
to attack, reduced the risks associated with Hitler’s dangerous game inasmuch
as it made the Soviet Union the co-aggressor and, as such, dependent on the
policies of the principal aggressor for the foreseeable future.
Addressing a group of high-ranking generals on the Obersalzberg on
22 August, Hitler gave as his reason for declaring war on his eastern neighbour
the ‘annihilation of Poland, the aim being to remove living forces, not to attain
a particular line’. According to another version of his remarks which, although
contested, is entirely credible, Hitler added that ‘for the present’ he had deployed
his ‘Death’s Head Divisions only in the east’ with orders ‘to send all Polish-
speaking men, women and children ruthlessly and mercilessly to their deaths,
because only in this way can we acquire the Lebensraum that we need. Who
nowadays still speaks of the extermination of the Armenians?’1
Hitler was able to rely on the broad support of the army leadership in his
decision to turn on Poland. During the Sudeten crisis of the spring and summer
of the previous year, there had been military opposition to his plans. Among
those opposed to his plans had been Franz Halder, who later became chief of
the general staff. By the time that Hitler had changed the direction of his attack
and set his sights on Poland in the spring of 1939, there was no longer any trace
of opposition in his country’s army. The Sudetenland had not been a part of the

673
674 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

German Reich in 1871, but this was not true of large sections of Poland, and for
that very reason it was regarded by the political right in Germany as a ‘robber
state’ and a ‘seasonal state’ – both terms were expressions of contempt for those
countries that had been created in 1918 only to vanish again in the wake of
Germany’s expansionist ambitions. Halder described the termination of the
German-Polish non-aggression pact on 28 April 1939 as ‘a weight off his mind’.
The Wehrmacht would be able to deal with Poland within a matter of two to
three weeks, Halder announced in a confidential speech in late April or early
May. Following the Polish ‘Cannae’, he concluded, it would, if necessary, be
possible for the Wehrmacht to strike a blow against the Western Powers.2
From the very outset the war with Poland was a racist war of extermination,
no longer a European war in the ‘normal’ sense of the term but the first völkisch
conflict in Europe and, like the ensuing occupation, a foretaste of what lay in
store for the Slav countries to the east. Even during the First World War, the
Slav nations – unlike their Germanic and Latin counterparts – had not been
numbered among the leading civilized nations by the German elite but had
been the target of ethnic resentment and negative clichés such as ‘filthy’ and
‘backward’. This was even truer of the Jews who made up some 10 per cent of
the Polish population. Ideas on what needed to be done in Poland were corre-
spondingly radical. Writing in 2006, the German historian Jochen Böhler
noted that

even in the summer of 1939 German plans to expand eastwards already

included the extermination of large sections of the population that was
living there and the oppression of the survivors. The Wehrmacht was fully
informed about this programme at the start of the war and it played an
active role in its implementation.3

Poland knew about the German plans to invade its territory thanks to the news
service of its general staff, with the result that it had been progressively mobi-
lizing its armed forces since the middle of August, ordering a general mobiliza-
tion on the 30th. In turn this meant that the units close to the border when war
broke out early on 1 September with airborne attacks and shots fired from the
Schleswig-Holstein battleship on the Westerplatte near Gda-sk were already on
high alert. Within hours the Polish air force had been completely destroyed even
before it had taken to the air. For its part, the army fought doggedly and tena-
ciously but had no real chance of defeating the vastly superior forces of the
Wehrmacht. By 11 September the Third German Army was able to cross the Bug
River to the east of Wyszków.
From the outset the German troops were fed reports that had no basis in
fact, namely, that they had to deal with attacks by Polish guerrillas. The only
truth was that the Polish troops who had withdrawn into the country’s interior
preferred to avoid open conflict but to fight, instead, from the cover of woods,
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 675

hedges, farmsteads and hamlets, which the invading army interpreted as a sign
of Slav treachery. They reacted by setting fire to villages and small towns and by
shooting captured Polish soldiers and civilians, including old men, women and
children. The total number of Polish soldiers killed while not fighting was more
than 3,000. Between early September and late October there were 714 mass
executions resulting in the deaths of 16,000 civilians. Jews in particular were
suspected of being responsible for ambushing German soldiers. It is unclear
how many of them were killed, although there were numerous instances of
German soldiers cutting off or singeing the beards of Jewish men in public
places or of their beating them. Looting of Jewish properties was often accom-
panied by the rape of Jewish women.
Throughout the Polish campaign, the distinction between the Wehrmacht
and the SS was not always clear. In August 1939 the SS Dispositional Troops and
the SS Death’s Head Units had been granted the status of a ‘standing armed
force’. The Fourteenth Army consisted of the SS’s Germania Combat Regiment,
while the SS Death’s Head Brandenburg Combat Regiment was another separate
unit that was responsible for the burning down of several synagogues. Hitler’s
Personal Body Guard fought with the Eighth Army, while the SS Deutschland
Artillery Regiment saw active service as a subdivision of the Kempf Panzer
Division. Like the SS Reconnaissance Detachment, it took part in the defeat and
subjugation of Poland. Members of the Kempf Panzer Division carried out a
pogrom at Goworowo near Ró,an on 6 September, when the town’s Jews were
herded together into the synagogue, where the bodies of murdered Jews already
lay. The building was then set on fire. Only the last-minute intervention of a
Wehrmacht officer prevented a mass murder from taking place.
In addition to the 1.5 million Wehrmacht and SS soldiers, five units of the
Reich Main Security Office that had been created in 1939 were also active in
Poland, with initially some 2,000 men. According to the minutes of a discussion
of the Office’s heads, its task was ‘to render as harmless as possible the leading
stratum of the Polish population’. Or, as the Office’s director, Reinhard Heydrich,
put it the following day: ‘We plan to spare ordinary people, but we have to kill
the aristocracy, the priests and the Jews.’4 It is not known how many Jews were
killed by the units deployed in Poland in September and early October 1939,
although we do know that between 500 and 600 Jews were murdered in the
biggest massacre, which took place between 16 and 19 September in Przemy0l
and the surrounding area under Udo von Woyrsch. In total it is thought that
7,000 Jews were killed in Poland between September and the end of the year.
The activities of the Wehrmacht, SS and special units were aided and abetted by
death squadrons of the paramilitary German Ethnic Self-Defence Force, which
during the initial months of the occupation killed between 20,000 and 30,000
Polish citizens.
On the Polish side there were also a number of excesses committed against
the German minority during the month of September, resulting in the deaths
676 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of around 2,000 Germans, some 400 of whom perished on 3 September in

Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), where paramilitary organizations from both sides were
active. A tipping point in Polish history came on 17 September, when the coun-
try’s president, Ignacy Mo0cicki, and the army’s commander in chief, Edward
Rydz-?mig5y, fled to Romania, taking Felizian S5awoj-Sk5adkowski’s govern-
ment with them, leaving the Red Army to march into eastern Poland along a
broad front – officially to protect the Ukrainians and the White Russians who
were living there. Three days later the Poznan and Pomerelia armies capitu-
lated on the Bzura, and Warsaw fell on 27 September 1939.
The following day Ribbentrop and Molotov signed a German-Soviet border
and friendship treaty in Moscow. In a secret addendum to it, the border was
moved from the Vistula to the Bug further east, while by way of compensation
the whole of Lithuania, with the exception of a tip of land in the country’s
south-west corner, became a part of the Soviet sphere of influence. As a result
of this agreement, Germany now occupied 48 per cent of Polish territory, or 63
per cent of its population, with the Soviet Union occupying 51 per cent, or
37 per cent of the population. Eastern Poland, under the control of the Red
Army, was the part of the country where Poles and Jews were in a minority
compared with the Ukrainians and White Russians.
The final Polish units capitulated on 5 October. In the course of the fighting,
the Polish army lost 66,300 men, the German army 10,572, the Red Army 737.
Almost 700,000 Polish soldiers were taken prisoner by the Germans, more than
200,000 by the Soviet army. Some 110,000 officers and soldiers were able to leave
Poland via Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary and Romania. By the time the cannons fell
silent, there was already a Polish government in exile under General W5adys5aw
Sikorski, which was formed in Paris on 30 September after Ignacy Mo0cicki, by
that date living in exile in Romania, had stepped down as president two days
earlier. Its strongest support came from the Polish army in exile, which recruited
its members from those officers and soldiers who had left Poland in 1939 and
travelled to France and Great Britain via Hungary and Romania. In total, it
numbered around 84,000 men. Additionally, there were experienced secret
service officers who were to provide valuable service to the Allies during the war.
The German population had been markedly unenthusiastic about the war
when it broke out on 1 September, but the rapid victory of the country’s troops
in Poland was greeted with relief and even enthusiasm. Public opinion in the
Reich was not concerned with the fate and welfare of the Polish people.
Germany’s victory was followed by the fifth partition of Poland, after those
that had taken place in 1772, 1793, 1795 and 1815. Germany now annexed a
large part of the country in the west and north, while the Soviet Union did the
same in the east. The rest of the country – the ‘General Government’ that also
included Warsaw – now formed a kind of annexe to the Reich.
On Hitler’s instructions, the military administration of Poland ended on
25 October 1939. But the conditions did not exist for a civilian administration
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 677

to take its place, with the result that until the spring of 1940 – to quote the
German historian Martin Broszat – the Führer’s decision left ‘an often
completely unresolved situation in which the state, the police and the NSDAP
were all jointly responsible for running the country, opening up an anarchical
legal vacuum and almost certainly not unintentionally providing the basis for
large-scale retaliatory measures against both Poles and Jews that were more or
less entirely lacking in the due process of law and that lasted for several weeks’.5
On 6 October Hitler informed the Reichstag that the most important chal-
lenge facing Germany’s future policy towards Poland was ‘achieving a new
ethnographic order, in other words, resettling nationalities in such a way that
once this development is over there will be clearer lines of demarcation than is
the case today’.6 The implementation of this programme devolved for the most
part on the NSDAP, the SS, the SD and the special units, which initially devoted
themselves to the mass execution of Jews and members of the Polish intelli-
gentsia, including university teachers, clergymen, schoolteachers, lawyers,
doctors and landowners. The usual form of execution was by firing squad.
Among the worst of these atrocities was the ‘Extraordinary Pacification Action’
in the spring of 1940, when several thousand intellectuals, artists and politicians,
including the former leader of the Sejm, Maciej Rataj, were shot. Some 88,000
Poles, Jews and Roma were deported to the General Government between
September and December 1939 in order to resettle ethnic Germans – mainly
Balts from Estonia and Courland, Volhynian Germans from the Ukraine and
Bessarabian Germans from Romania – in the new regions of the Reich, namely,
the Wartheland Reichsgau (OkrHg Warcki), the Danzig-West Prussian Reichsgau
(Gda-sk-Prusy Zachodnie), the new administrative district of Zichenau
(Ciechanów) in East Prussia, the area around Suwalki that was annexed to East
Prussia and the enlarged region of Upper Silesia. Hitler was resolved that in
future only Germans would live on German soil, an aim whose implementation
was entrusted to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who on 7 October 1939
was appointed Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Ethnic Stock.
In May 1940 Himmler drafted a memorandum spelling out the conse-
quences of this policy for Poles living in the General Government. The memo-
randum, headed ‘Treatment of Ethnic Aliens in the East’, had Hitler’s explicit
approval. All Poles who were not ‘of good blood’ and, hence, capable of being
‘Germanized’ would never rise above the status of serfs. For the non-German
peoples of the east, no education would be permitted beyond that provided for
in a four-year elementary school: ‘The aim of this elementary schooling will be
limited to simple sums up to 500, writing one’s name and the lesson that
obeying the Germans, together with honesty, hard work and decency, are
divine commandments. I do not consider reading to be necessary.’ The parents
of children ‘of good blood’ should either go to Germany and become loyal citi-
zens there or hand over their children. ‘They will then probably have no more
children, thus removing the danger that this subhuman race in the east could
678 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

ever be ruled by these people of good blood, who might form a dangerous
ruling elite that would be our equals.’ The great majority of Poles could not be
‘turned into Germans’, and for them there was only one prospect: they were to
‘become available as a leaderless nation of labourers, providing Germany with
migrant labour every year and constituting a workforce that can be used for
special assignments such as roads, quarries and construction work’.7
This policy was duly implemented. All those men and women who were
German or who were regarded as capable of being turned into Germans were
placed in one of four different groups in the German People’s List extending
from self-professed members of what had until then been the German minority
to men and women of German stock who had not behaved as ethnic Germans
(Volksdeutsch), and from those men and women of German stock who had
become assimilated into the Polish way of life but who could still be turned into
Germans to Volksdeutsch ‘renegades’ who could none the less be saved. But the
vast majority of Poles had no prospect of becoming members of the master
race. German rule in Poland was that of a colonial power that regarded the
subjugated nation as its racial inferior. Unlike colonial rule during the
Wilhelmine era, however, the real power was placed not in the hands of officers
and civil servants but of two irregular bodies: the NSDAP, which appointed
Hans Frank as governor general with his headquarters at Wawel Castle in
Kraków, and the SS, which executed Hitler’s racist policies. This disempower-
ment of the traditional bureaucracy was deliberate. The kind of thinking that
operated in the tried and tested categories of norms, regulations and accepted
areas of competence and that characterized the higher bureaucracy was not to
be given the opportunity to impede the dynamics of the NSDAP’s racist
revolution.
The Sovietization of eastern Poland may have assumed different forms but
it proceeded along lines similar to those adopted by the Germans in subju-
gating ‘their’ part of the country. In order to give their domination at least the
semblance of democratic legitimacy, the Soviet authorities ordered the ‘elec-
tion’ of popular assemblies in October 1939, assemblies that immediately asked
to be accepted into the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Republics, leading to
the systematic loss of Polish identity in the annexed territories, to the nationali-
zation of industry and, soon afterwards, to the collectivization of agriculture.
The social changes were accompanied by shootings, arrests, prison sentences
and, from February 1940, deportations to the east and south of Russia. By June
1941 between 760,000 and 1.25 million individuals had been forcibly removed
from eastern Poland. Many, especially small children, died of the cold on the
journey. Initially at least, those who were deported were members of the upper
classes and the previous state apparatus or members of the intelligentsia. In
June 1940 Jews – generally refugees from the German-administered part of the
country – made up the bulk of those who were driven out of the country. In
June 1941 it was Ukrainian and White Russian ‘nationalists’.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 679

Of all the atrocities committed by the Soviet regime in eastern Poland

between 1939 and 1941 it is the murder of thousands of Polish officers in the
spring of 1940 that has seared itself most deeply in the collective conscious-
ness. On 5 March 1940 the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party under the
chairmanship of Stalin himself decided to shoot 25,700 ‘officers, civil servants,
landowners, police officers, gendarmes and prison guards’ who were currently
in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps and in Ukrainian and White Russian prisons.
In total, 21,300 individuals were executed. Of the officers, 4,000 were killed at
Kharkiv, 6,300 at Mednoye in the Kalininsky District of Tver Oblast and 4,000
at Katyn. There were other mass shootings of Poles, notably at Bykivnia near
Kiev, where the bodies of the Poles were buried alongside the victims of the
great terror of 1937–8, but it is impossible to put a number on them.
The bodies buried at Katyn were discovered in the spring of 1943 by
retreating German troops and presented to the world as a blatant example
of the criminal character of Bolshevism, a claim – ironically enough – made
in the very same year as that in which the systematic murder of European Jews
at the hands of National Socialist Germany had sunk to new and terrible depths.
The world was denied all knowledge of this particular genocide, just as it failed
to hear about the extent to which the Polish upper classes had been liquidated
in those parts of Poland that were subject to Germany’s tyrannical rule.

From ‘Drôle de guerre’ to the Battle for Norway

Of the Western Powers, France and Britain gave Poland practically no military
assistance. Although Paris had promised that it would launch a large-scale
offensive fifteen days after the start of the war with the aim of relieving the
pressure on the Polish forces, it merely sent a handful of units to the territory
in front of the Siegfried Line, the German equivalent of the Maginot Line that
had been built in 1938. There were a few skirmishes, which according to figures
released by the Wehrmacht resulted in 196 German deaths up to and including
19 October. The first two British divisions did not land in France until early
October, followed by two more divisions during the third week of October.
A more effective measure was Britain’s naval blockade, which was imposed
at once and which – as in the First World War – was designed to cut Germany
off from international trade. In the ensuing naval warfare, both the Germans
and the British chalked up victories: in September German submarines
destroyed the aircraft carrier Courageous in the Bristol Channel and in October
they sank the battleship Royal Oak in Scapa Flow, while in December British
warships damaged the German armoured ship Admiral Graf Spee so badly that
the commander saw himself obliged to scuttle his vessel off the estuary of the
River Plate. The most important gesture of solidarity with Poland consisted in
the two western democracies rejecting the ‘peace offer’ that Hitler proposed in
his Reichstag speech on 6 October. In general the first seven months of the war
680 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

in the west became known as ‘the phoney war’ in the Anglo-Saxon world and
‘drôle de guerre’ in France.
In the autumn of 1939 Hitler was minded to force a decisive battle by
launching an offensive in the west but finally abandoned the plan because of
the weather, postponing it until the following spring. In this way he robbed his
conservative opponents, who for a time included the fickle chief of the general
staff, Franz Halder, of the whole raison d’être for their plot to overthrow Hitler.
One plot that did come to fruition was an attack by the Württemberg carpenter
Georg Elser on the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich on the evening of 8 November.
But by the time that Elser launched his assault, Hitler had already left the scene
of his annual speech marking the anniversary of his 1923 putsch. The Führer
immediately suspected that the British secret service lay behind the attempt on
his life, but Elser was acting on his own. London was aware of the conservative
conspirators’ plans to topple Hitler, but Chamberlain’s government had no
intention of offering a truce or a strategic cessation of hostilities to the Prussian
factionists even in the event of a change of regime in Berlin.
Conversely, there was political and military activity in the east. At the end of
September the Soviet Union forced Estonia to sign mutual assistance and trade
agreements, imposing similar treaties on Latvia and Lithuania in early October.
In every case the counties in question were required to provide Russia with mili-
tary bases. In return Lithuania was granted the area around Vilnius that had
fallen into Soviet hands as a result of the fifth partition of Poland only a short
time earlier. Only Finland refused to bow to Soviet pressure. On 10 October
reservists were called up, which effectively amounted to mobilization. On 13
November the negotiations between the Finnish and Soviet governments were
broken off, and on 30 November the Winter War began with an attack by the Red
Army. The following day Moscow established a ‘People’s Government of the
Democratic Republic of Finland’ in the border town of Terijoki under the
Finnish-born old Bolshevik Otto Wilhelm Kuusinen, signing a friendship and
mutual assistance treaty with the puppet government on 2 December. In Helsinki
Risto Ryti of the Progressive Party became prime minister, while the Social
Democrat Väinö Tanner was appointed foreign secretary. Field Marshal Carl
Gustav Mannerheim remained chairman of the Defence Council and assumed
overall command of the country’s armed forces.
In those parts of Europe that had retained their democratic governments,
the Finnish struggle against Soviet aggression found many sympathizers. A
Swedish solidarity committee provided the watchword ‘Finland’s cause is our
own’ and some 8,000 Swedes signed up as volunteers, although only two
enlarged battalions were actually deployed on the front. Otherwise Per Albin
Hansson’s Social Democrat government in Stockholm remained strictly
neutral, so much so that Rickard Sandler, an advocate of intervention, was
obliged to resign in the middle of December, when he was replaced as foreign
secretary by Christian Günther, who shared his prime minister’s views on
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 681

Swedish foreign policy. Support from the League of Nations remained purely
symbolic, although Helsinki appealed to the organization for help in early
December, and on 14 December the Soviet Union was excluded from its list of
members as the aggressor in the conflict. The Scandinavian and Baltic members
of the Council of the League of Nations did not take part in the vote, which was
to be the League’s final sign of life.
The neutrality of the Scandinavian states proved to be a decisive obstacle in
providing the French and British help that Paris and London had promised
Helsinki at the start of the war. In both countries the public mood was unequiv-
ocally pro-Finnish. But, as the Finnish historian Seppo Hentilä has observed,
the real reason for agreeing to provide help was rather different:

The Western Powers were chiefly interested in the ore deposits in northern
Sweden and were afraid that these might fall into the hands of Germany or,
following the conquest of Finland, of the Soviet Union. It was therefore in
France’s and Britain’s best interests to draw out the Winter War. Sweden’s
situation was complicated as it was threatened by occupation on three
sides. Even though the Western Powers were a more tolerable alternative
to Sweden than Germany or the Soviet Union, it remained steadfast in
its opposition to the transit of aid across its territory throughout this
period.8

The Finnish armed forces initially put up stiff resistance and withstood the
vastly superior forces of the Red Army, even succeeding in preventing the
aggressor from breaking through their lines at Summa (now Soldatskoye) on
the Karelian Isthmus, but an attempt to surround the enemy forces there cost
so many Finnish lives that it had to be abandoned on 23 December. After that
the fighting on the Karelian Isthmus descended into positional warfare. To the
north of Lake Ladoga, conversely, the Finnish strategy was successful, and here
two Soviet divisions were encircled. In early January 1940 Finnish troops
destroyed the Red Army’s motorized Forty-Fourth Division and encircled
other divisions.
Not until early February were Soviet units under the defence commissar
Marshal Kliment Voroshilov able to achieve a breakthrough on the Karelian
Isthmus. On 23 February the Soviet leadership sent word via Stockholm,
informing the Finnish government of its peace terms. Finland was to lease the
Hanko Peninsula to Russia for thirty years and cede the whole of the Karelian
Isthmus to the Soviet Union, including the town of Vyborg and the western
and northern shores of Lake Ladoga. The Finnish government was reluctant to
agree to these terms and again asked the Western Powers for their help, which
on this occasion consisted of the promise to send an expeditionary force of
over 10,000 men by April. Once again, however, Stockholm refused to allow
British and French troops to march through Sweden. Since Mannerheim
682 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

believed that it was pointless to continue fighting, the government decided to

begin peace talks on 29 February. Paris and London reacted with a renewed
offer of help, which the Finns examined only to dismiss it as inadequate. After
a series of further successes by the Red Army, the Finns were finally prepared
to agree to additional demands by Soviet Russia to annex parts of Kuusamo
and Salla. The peace treaty was signed in Moscow on 13 March and came into
force the next day. The Finnish casualties were numbered at around 24,000,
while those of the Red Army – by its own estimates – amounted to 49,000.
Finland had suffered serious territorial losses, but it had at least achieved its
principal aim of maintaining its independence. The experience served to forge
a closer bond among Finns, and the result was tantamount to a rebirth of the
Finnish nation. But the Winter War had far-reaching consequences not only in
Finland itself. The Soviet Union drew the lesson that its aim of conquering
Finland and turning it into a Soviet republic was for the present beyond its
means, while Hitler’s Germany concluded from the events of 1939–40 that, if
the situation were ever to arise, it would be relatively easy for the Wehrmacht
to inflict a comprehensive military defeat on the Red Army.
In France, Finland’s ultimate capitulation triggered a major government
crisis, when, at a secret session of both chambers of the National Assembly,
Daladier’s government was reproached for not providing Finland with effective
support. In a vote of no confidence in the Chamber of Deputies on 20 March,
239 deputies voted for the government and one against, but 300 abstained.
Daladier drew the obvious conclusion from his political defeat and resigned
after almost two years in the post. The following day, 21 May, his finance
minister, Paul Reynaud, took over as both prime minister and foreign secretary.
Reynaud had always been an outspoken critic of the policy of appeasement
towards National Socialist Germany. Daladier remained the defence minister
and in that way was able to prevent Charles de Gaulle – a military reformer who
had played a major role in formulating Reynaud’s declaration of his govern-
ment’s belligerent aims – from being appointed secretary to the Military
Cabinet. In the confidence vote in the Chamber of Deputies on 22 March
Reynaud received only one more vote than an absolute majority: 268 yes votes,
156 no votes and 111 abstentions. The vote was an accurate reflection of the
inner divisions and tensions that existed in France in the spring of 1940.
On London, too, the Winter War left its mark. As first lord of the Admiralty,
Winston Churchill had repeatedly urged his cabinet colleagues to ignore
Norway’s neutrality and mine its coastal waters – not just to pre-empt a German
attack and cause lasting harm to the Reich by cutting off its supply of ore from
northern Sweden but also to draw Norway and, if possible, the whole of
Scandinavia into the British sphere of interest. This violation of international
law seemed to Churchill to be justified by the higher good, namely, securing
the freedom of the free peoples of Europe, first and foremost the British. The
Soviet attack on Finland in late November 1939 confirmed the Admiralty and
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 683

its first lord in their conviction that Scandinavia was strategically important.
From now on there were demands not only that Norway’s coastal waters be
mined but that Bergen and above all Narvik, where Swedish ore was loaded on
to German ships, be occupied.
Churchill had already convinced his prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, of
the strategic necessity of an offensive in the North Sea, when France’s new prime
minister arrived in London on 28 March 1940 for the fourth meeting of the
Anglo-French Supreme War Council. Both countries agreed not to conclude a
separate peace and, once the war was over, to work together to secure peace. But
the main item on the agenda was Swedish ore exports to Germany. At Reynaud’s
urging, Sweden was asked to suspend these supplies. The two allies also agreed to
mine Norway’s coastal waters and to send an expeditionary force to Scandinavia,
where it would occupy first Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger and then
the area where Swedish ore deposits were to be found, including the port at Luleå
on the Bay of Bothnia. The details were settled during Churchill’s visit to Paris on
5 April.
Early on 8 April – even before the government in Oslo had been informed –
Norway’s coastal waters were mined. An Anglo-French expeditionary force was
due to occupy Narvik on 10 April and advance as far as the border with Sweden,
but on 9 April, before the plan could be put into action, the Wehrmacht invaded
Denmark. After offering only brief resistance, Denmark bowed to the inevitable,
leaving the Wehrmacht to march into Norway. The commander in chief of the
German navy, Admiral Erich Raeder, had already proposed this idea in October
1939, and at his suggestion, Hitler received Vidkun Quisling on 14 December.
Quisling, who was the former minister of war and the leader of the radical right-
wing Nasjonal Samling, alerted Hitler to the fact that Norway’s neutrality was
being threatened by Britain. That same day Hitler gave orders to prepare a study
on military action in Scandinavia, resulting in the ‘Weser Exercise’, the precise
timetable for which was set by Hitler on 2 April.
In Norway the German occupation encountered far greater resistance than
in Denmark. Although German troops were able to occupy the country’s
leading ports on 9 April, the battleship Blücher that was due to land the occu-
pying forces’ general staff and Gestapo officials was sunk by the Norwegian
military as it passed through the narrows near Oscarsborg, giving the royal
family, together with the government and countless civil servants and members
of parliament, time to flee the capital and escape to Elverum. The state bank’s
gold reserves were also salvaged at this time. On 9 April King Haakon VII
turned down a German demand that his country capitulate with a single ‘Nei’,
a refusal to surrender in which he was supported by the government of the
Social Democrat prime minister Johan Nygaardsvold. They also rejected the
German request that they recognize the legitimacy of the ‘government’ formed
by Quisling. That same day the Storting granted Nygaardsvold’s government
the extraordinary powers that it needed to continue the military struggle.
684 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

British, French and exiled Polish units landed on the Norwegian coast
between 14 and 18 April, but in most places the German advance meant that
they had little choice but to put to sea again. Only in the vicinity of Narvik was
there fierce and protracted fighting, which ended when the city fell into Allied
hands on 28 May. By 8 June, however, the troops were ordered to withdraw, the
king and his government having left Tromsö and fled to England the previous
day. The Norwegian units that had inflicted heavy losses on the German navy,
especially in the Oslofjord and in the north of the country, laid down their
arms on 10 June.
Hitler’s puppet, Vidkun Quisling, had appointed himself ‘minister of state’ on 9
April and was placed at the head of an Administrative Council by the occupying
power. The council owed its existence to an initiative on the part of judges from the
Supreme Court but failed to gain any legitimacy and was disbanded at the end of
September. The actual business of government was conducted by Josef Terboven,
the former Gauleiter in Essen, who was named Reich commissar for Norway on 24
May 1940. He was assisted by a twelve-man state council that he himself appointed.
With the exception of Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling, all political parties were
banned. In February 1942 Terboven appointed Quisling prime minister, even
though he enjoyed practically no support among the wider population.
In Denmark, conversely, King Christian X remained on the throne and the
government continued in office. Supreme power lay in the hands of Hitler’s
plenipotentiary – until October 1942 the diplomat Cécil von Renthe-Fink,
thereafter SS group leader Werner Best. The Social Democrat prime minister
Thorvald Stauning, who headed the government until his death in May 1942,
enlarged his cabinet by including liberal and conservative politicians as well as
non-party civil servants in order to form a government of national unity.
Denmark also aligned itself with Germany by joining the anti-Comintern pact
in November 1940 and by taking steps to deal with Communists at home. By
making concessions of this kind the Danish government was able to retain a
considerable degree of autonomy until the summer of 1943, enjoying a greater
level of independence than any other country occupied by German troops.
The loser in the race to control Scandinavia was Great Britain, at least in the
shorter term. As Ian Kershaw has pointed out, the main responsibility lay with
Churchill,

but it was Chamberlain who paid the political price. The knives were now
sharpened for the Prime Minister who had tried to appease Hitler. Churchill,
whose warnings from the wilderness now appeared so prophetic, had
gained in stature. By early May much of Chamberlain’s own party had lost
confidence in him as the leader Britain needed in war. The opposition
parties were adamant that they would not work with him in a war cabinet.
On 10 May, after faring badly in a vote of confidence in the House of
Commons, he resigned.9
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 685

The foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, was regarded by many as Chamberlain’s

most likely successor, but in order to take up a seat in the Commons, he would
first have had to resign his seat in the Lords, which in turn would have trig-
gered a by-election, quite apart from the fact that he doubted his ability to lead
the country in time of war, and so he decided that same day to renounce an
appointment that would have marked the high point of his political career.
The way thus lay open for the then sixty-five-year-old Churchill in spite of
his reputation for political inconstancy – he had twice switched his allegiance in
the past, from the Conservatives to the Liberals in 1904 and from the Liberals
back to the Tories in 1924. As chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1928 he
had been a minister without a fortune. And as an imperialist diehard, he had
doggedly resisted every step on the road to Indian independence, incurring the
wrath of the moderate Conservatives, the Liberals and the Labour Party. But his
determined opposition to the policy of appeasement, together with his dyna-
mism and energy and his brilliance both as a public speaker and as a writer,
ensured that he was at least well respected by his numerous enemies. When, on
10 May, he offered the Labour Party a share in government in order to place his
war cabinet on a broad political basis, Clement Attlee accepted his invitation.
Attlee became Churchill’s deputy as lord privy seal, and the Labour politician
Hugh Dalton took over as minister for economic warfare. Dalton’s party
colleague Herbert Morrison became minister of supply at least until October
1940, when he was promoted to home secretary. Halifax remained foreign
secretary until December 1940, while his predecessor in the post, Anthony
Eden, became war minister. The press baron Lord Beaverbrook became minister
of aircraft production. Churchill himself retained overall control of defence.
When George VI appointed Churchill his new prime minister on the
evening of 10 May 1940, the Wehrmacht’s expected western offensive had just
begun, ushering in a new phase in the Second World War. Hitler sought a reso-
lution in his war with the Western Powers at the very moment that an adver-
sary emerged who was determined to resist him at all costs and force Germany
to its knees. In his first speech to the lower house on 13 May, Churchill told
MPs and the British people that he had nothing to offer them but ‘blood, toil,
tears and sweat’ and that war must be waged by land, sea and air against the
most monstrous tyranny in history: ‘for without victory, there is no survival
[. . .] for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood
for’.10 The challenge facing Great Britain eight months after the war had been
unleashed could hardly have been couched in more dramatic or more apposite
terms.

France’s Collapse: The Campaign in the West

The German attack in the west began early on 10 May, when the Wehrmacht,
ignoring the neutrality of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, thrust
686 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

westwards along a front stretching from the North Sea coast to Luxembourg in
the south. The first country to abandon any pretence of resistance was the
Netherlands. Even while the negotiations for the country’s capitulation were
still in progress, Rotterdam was being bombarded, resulting in the loss of some
900 lives. On 13 May Queen Wilhelmina and her government went into exile
in London. Two days later the military capitulation was complete, and by the
18th the former leader of the Austrian National Socialists, Arthur Seyß-
Inquart, had been installed as Reich commissar for the occupied territories and
had begun to put in place a German civilian administration.
Belgium took a little longer to subdue, but by 16 May the fortresses at Liège
and Namur and on the Dyle Line had all been taken. By the 17th Brussels had
been occupied, Antwerp by the 18th, allowing the Wehrmacht to cut off the
Belgian troops to the north of this line from the British and French units that
had in the meantime advanced from France into Belgium. The Belgian govern-
ment fled first to France and then to England. King Leopold III remained in
the country, where he officially surrendered on 28 May, after which he returned
to his royal palace at Laeken, effectively a German prisoner of war. General
Alexander von Falkenhausen assumed the role of military governor of Belgium,
while Eggert Reeder, an SS group leader who was regional president of Cologne
and Düsseldorf, became head of the governor’s administrative staff.
Once Grand-Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg and her government had
gone into exile in London, the country was to all intents and purposes annexed,
thereafter becoming a part of the Gau of Mosel-Trier, which was renamed the
Moselland Gau in early 1941. The entire population was subjected to a radical
programme designed to impose German culture and the German language on it,
while all men old enough to do military service were drafted into the Wehrmacht.
Around 100,000 Francophile men, women and children from Alsace-Lorraine
were forced to leave the region, which had likewise been effectively annexed.
They were all sent to Vichy France. A general strike intended to protest at this
last-named measure at the end of August 1942 had no effect but served, rather,
to encourage the principality’s new masters to adopt even harsher measures
against ‘national comrades’ who had no desire to be any such thing.
The German army marched into France not along the Maginot Line, which
had been massively fortified during the interwar period, but further north,
across the Ardennes, a natural barrier that the French military had considered
impregnable. In the space of just three days seven German Panzer divisions
from Army Group A under General Gert von Rundstedt were able to deal an
annihilating blow to the Ninth French Army under General André Georges
Corap. Sedan fell into German hands on 15 May, a bridgehead that allowed
General Heinz Guderian and his armoured division to advance towards the
coast on his own initiative, prompting the French commander in chief, Maurice
Gamelin, to report to the prime minister that the army could no longer guar-
antee the safety of the capital. In northern and eastern France the civilian
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 687

population began to flee in vast numbers, with the result that many roads
became gridlocked. By June some eight million French men, women and chil-
dren were fleeing from the invading Germans.
Informed by Reynaud as to the gravity of the situation, Churchill travelled
to Paris on 16 May, where he found a state of near panic. In the event the
expected fall of Paris was delayed because the Germans first wanted to advance
to the Channel coast. Reynaud restructured his government on the 19th, taking
over the Ministry of Defence while retaining the premiership. Daladier, who
had previously been the minister of the interior, became foreign secretary, while
the energetic minister for the colonies, Georges Mandel, assumed Daladier’s old
post. The ‘victor of Verdun’, the eighty-four-year-old war hero Philippe Pétain,
became deputy prime minister, while Gamelin, whom Reynaud held respon-
sible for the present military debacle, was replaced as commander in chief by
the former chief of the general staff, Maxime Weygand, a supporter of the
extreme right and, like Pétain, constitutionally opposed to the parliamentary
democracy of the Third Republic.
On the same day that this major reshuffle took place in Paris, German
Panzer units under Ewald von Kleist reached Abbeville on the Somme estuary,
completing the ‘sickle cut’ – as Churchill was later to describe it – and isolating
the British and French troops that were north of the Somme and preventing
them from rejoining the rest of the Allied forces. Five days later, on 24 May,
when the German troops were only ten to fifteen miles from Dunkirk, the
German advance was suddenly interrupted, when Hitler, in agreement with
Rundstedt but in disagreement with his other generals, including Brauchitsch
and Halder, decided to spare the Panzer corps and to leave Göring’s air force to
complete the encirclement of Dunkirk from the sea.
This unexpected break in the Panzer war was used by the British general,
Lord Gort, to evacuate the British Expeditionary Force and withdraw to
Dunkirk in order to form a bridgehead there, a move undertaken on his own
initiative and in defiance of all the promises given to the French, for all that it
gained the later approval of Eden in his capacity as minister of war. The troops
began to set sail for Great Britain on 27 May. The German Luftwaffe disrupted
Operation Dynamo – as the British called it – by pounding the beaches and
port but was unable to prevent the evacuation and suffered serious losses
itself at the hands of the Royal Air Force. By 4 June some 224,301 British
soldiers and 111,172 French and Belgian troops had been evacuated across the
Channel, although they had to leave their weapons and other military equip-
ment on the Continent, in which regard they differed from the Canadian
troops who had landed in France and sailed from there to Britain. The ‘Dunkirk
miracle’ meant nothing less than the temporary salvation of Great Britain, for
without the evacuation of the bulk of the Expeditionary Force, the United
Kingdom would almost certainly have been unable to continue its war with
Germany.
688 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

During the second half of May the British and French governments both
pinned their hopes on Roosevelt. Churchill wrote to the American president
on 15 and 18 May, urging him to support Great Britain by arguing that his
country would be placed in the direst of predicaments if France was defeated.
Roosevelt replied on the 24th, a letter which, however friendly in tone, struck
an evasive note dictated by the powerful isolationist lobby in the United States.
All that the president was prepared to promise was to attempt to influence
Mussolini and persuade the latter to keep Italy out of the war.
When Paul Reynaud arrived in London on 26 May for talks with the British
government, he too urged Roosevelt to offer his diplomatic assistance, resulting
in an Anglo-French request that Roosevelt received the next day and to which
he reacted at once by informing Mussolini that he – Roosevelt – was willing to
assume the role of a mediator and, if necessary, to pass on to the Allies any
claims that Italy might care to entertain in the Mediterranean. He also assured
Mussolini that when the war was over, Italy would be allowed to take part in
any peace conference as an equal partner. The approach proved unsuccessful,
Mussolini turning down the offer on 28 May.
If Reynaud and Lord Halifax had had their way, Britain and France would
then have appealed to Italy directly, but on 27 May, after a certain amount of
vacillation, Churchill finally decided against such a step. The concessions
approved by the French prime minister included not only a generous compro-
mise on colonial policy in Africa but also the demilitarization of Malta and the
neutrality of the Suez Canal and Gibraltar, concessions that struck Churchill as
incompatible with the vital interests of the British Empire. While a number of
British and French politicians could envisage the idea of Mussolini as a medi-
ator in any dealings with Hitler, this seemed to Churchill to amount to a request
for a ceasefire, which the British prime minister was bound to oppose. Great
Britain’s position was clear: it would remain unyielding.
By the time that Operation Dynamo was completed on 4 June and Dunkirk
had fallen into German hands, 1.2 million soldiers from France, Britain,
Belgium and the Netherlands were German prisoners of war. The real battle
for France began the following morning, ushering in the second phase in
Germany’s campaign in the west. More than one hundred German divisions
faced fewer than fifty French divisions, while Germany’s superiority in the air
was overwhelming. The same was true of the German Panzer corps. The result
was that there were no longer any major battles. The Wehrmacht moved south
behind the rear of the Maginot Line, overrunning Alsace and Normandy and
taking Rouen on 9 June. The following day Italy, determined not to lose out on
the expected spoils, declared war on France and Britain, although the country
was in no position to claim military glory for itself as it was simply unprepared
to conduct an operational conflict.
On 5 June, the final day of the latest German offensive, Reynaud again
reshuffled his cabinet, taking over the Foreign Office from his old adversary
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 689

Édouard Daladier and, in his capacity as defence minister, appointing an advo-

cate of unconditional resistance, Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, as his
undersecretary of state. De Gaulle’s counterpart at the Foreign Office was Paul
Baudouin, who sought to influence Reynaud by pulling him in the opposite –
defeatist – direction, an influence that was soon to prove more effective than de
Gaulle’s.
On 10 June, the day on which Italy entered the war, Reynaud and his govern-
ment decided to leave Paris. In the course of the next three days, two meetings
of the Allies’ Supreme War Council met, first near Orléans, then near Tours. In
both cases the meetings were attended by Churchill, who was obliged to turn
down the French request for the deployment of the Royal Air Force as he needed
the planes to defend Great Britain. On 13 June Churchill and Reynaud addressed
a joint appeal to Roosevelt. The very next day German troops occupied Paris,
which immediately beforehand had been declared an ‘Open City’. Reynaud’s
government moved to Bordeaux, coincidentally the very city where another
French government had established its temporary headquarters in the face of
the country’s imminent defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.
The fall of Paris proved hugely demoralizing not only for the population at
large but also for its political and military leaders. Pétain and Weygand had
only recently declared that further resistance was futile, whereupon Weygand
had insisted that not the army but the state as a whole should capitulate, a move
intended to point the finger of blame at the country’s politicians. Roosevelt’s
answer was debated in the Council of Ministers on 16 June and did nothing to
improve the atmosphere, for although the president promised to supply more
arms, he was unable to hold out the prospect of the United States entering
the war at least in the foreseeable future.
Reynaud’s cabinet saw only two alternatives: it could either continue the
struggle from a base in North Africa or it could invite the Germans to state the
conditions for a ceasefire. A British offer to create a ‘union’ of the two states
with shared nationality, a common government and a common army, found
favour with Reynaud but encountered only incredulity and rejection elsewhere.
Reynaud was inclined to continue fighting alongside Britain but had the impres-
sion that he no longer enjoyed the support of the majority of his ministers and
in response to a request from the president of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, he
announced his resignation. On 16 June Lebrun named as his successor the most
popular Frenchman of the time, Philippe Pétain, who formed a cabinet in which
the defeatists held sway: Weygand became defence minister, Baudouin foreign
minister and Admiral François Darlan, who had switched his allegiance to the
peace camp, was appointed the minister for the navy. The deputy prime minister
Camille Chautemps, who had played a major role in Reynaud’s resignation,
retained his post.
The Council of Ministers’ request that Germany should state its conditions for
a ceasefire was agreed towards midnight and handed to the Spanish ambassador
690 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

in France to be conveyed to Hitler. In a radio address the following day Pétain

informed his fellow countrymen and women that France must suspend hostili-
ties. The speech was effectively an order to the French not to offer any more
resistance to the Germans, and most of the country’s troops immediately laid
down their weapons, leaving the Wehrmacht to take cities such as Cherbourg,
St-Étienne and Lyons without a struggle. Coming from Verdun, Guderian’s
Panzer corps advanced as far as the Swiss border. On 18 June Hitler met Mussolini
in Munich to agree on the terms for the ceasefire with France. Mussolini’s far-
reaching demands for Nice, Corsica, large parts of North Africa, including
Tunisia and French Somaliland, and the surrender of the French fleet and air
force to Italy, were rejected by Hitler, who was determined to prevent the French
fleet from continuing to fight the war not only in Europe but also in the colonies
and who was no less resolved to turn Pétain’s France into a puppet state loyal to
the German Reich.
When the octogenarian marshal asked Germany to discuss the terms for a
ceasefire and consciously refused to make his acceptance of Germany’s terms
dependent on Britain’s approval, as he had been asked to do by the Allies’
Supreme War Council on 28 March 1940, he presumably had the majority of
his compatriots behind him. The country’s defeat was a given with a long
prehistory that could not be corrected overnight. France had relied on the
protection that the fortifications along the Maginot Line appeared to provide.
In spite of de Gaulle’s repeated warnings, the country had not built up an effec-
tive armoured division capable of fighting an offensive war, while its air force,
too, had suffered from years of neglect. For far too long the nation had deluded
itself into thinking only of peace, a shortcoming shared by the political right
and left. Socially and politically, the country was deeply divided.
Although only a small minority had applauded the extreme right-wing slogan
‘Rather Hitler than Blum’ at the time of the Popular Front, the spirit of defeatist
conformity to the demands of the Third Reich continued to thrive under
Daladier and Reynaud. Among its most prominent representatives were the neo-
socialist mayor of Bordeaux, Adrien Marquet, who became minister of the inte-
rior in Pétain’s government on 29 June, and two leaders of radical right-wing
parties, the ex-Socialist Marcel Déat and the former Communist Jacques Doriot.
None of the defeatist politicians was as consistently and ruthlessly opportunistic,
however, as the former prime minister, Pierre Laval. On 2 September 1939 he
had tried in vain to speak in the Senate against the government’s decision to go
to war with Germany. By the summer of 1940 he was unconditional in his
support for Pétain, and on 22 June he was appointed deputy prime minister.
But the universally revered Pétain did not speak for the whole of France
when he addressed the nation on 17 June 1940. By the following day he had
received a response from Charles de Gaulle, who as undersecretary at the
Defence Ministry had travelled to London four days earlier at Reynaud’s request
to help coordinate the Allies’ war effort. De Gaulle used the British airwaves to
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 691

appeal to all French officers, soldiers, engineers and specialized workers in the
armaments industry who were then living in exile in Great Britain or who were
planning to move there to get in touch with him. France’s defeat, he told them,
was not definitive and their country was not lost for they had a great Empire
behind them – the British Empire – and could make use of the vast industrial
resources of the United States: ‘This war is not over as a result of the Battle of
France. This war is a worldwide war. [. . .] Whatever happens, the flame of the
French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ The
sentence from the speech that was most widely quoted – ‘France has lost a battle
but France has not lost the war’ – was added only later to the published version
of the text.11
The speech had a tremendous impact and became the basic manifesto of
French resistance to the German occupation. Ten days after making the speech
de Gaulle founded France Libre in London, the command centre of the French
Resistance. The British government recognized the general as leader of a free
France on 28 June, and in the French colonies several other generals and gover-
nors, including the governors of Chad, Cameroon, French Equatorial Africa
and the French Congo, came over to his side. In France itself Pétain’s govern-
ment sought to prevent the dissemination of de Gaulle’s speech, in which it was
helped by strict censorship laws introduced in the autumn of 1939, but it was
unable to suppress it completely. The dissident general was stripped of his
French citizenship, and a war tribunal sentenced him to a term of four years in
prison on 4 July 1940 and then, on 2 August, to death. The French men and
women who agreed with de Gaulle were not impressed by these measures.
On 21 June the French ceasefire delegation under General Charles Huntziger
was taken to Compiègne and to the same railway carriage as that in which
Marshal Foch had spelt out the Allies’ conditions for an armistice to the German
negotiators on 11 November 1918. Here, in the presence of Hitler and a number
of high-ranking generals, General Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the head of
the Wehrmacht’s Supreme Command, informed the French delegation of
Germany’s terms for surrender. Most of northern France, including Paris and
the area as far south as the Loire, together with the whole of the Atlantic coast,
was to be occupied by German troops, while the German military commander
in Brussels was to administer the belt along the border with Belgium consisting
of the départements of Nord and Pas-de-Calais. All sovereign authority lay in
the hands of the occupying power, and only local government remained in local
hands, albeit under the supervision of the occupying authority, with which they
were obliged to ‘collaborate’.
The French army was reduced in strength to 100,000 men at home – the
figure was the same as that imposed on the German army in 1919 under
the terms of the Treaty of Versailles – while in Algeria and the French colonies
the number was set at 279,000. Artillery, tanks, aircraft and heavy military
equipment were to be handed over to Germany, and the French fleet was to be
692 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

decommissioned and confined to port under German supervision in order to

prevent the vessels from falling into British hands, a stipulation that did not
apply, however, to those ships that were needed to defend the country’s overseas
territories. In response to a request from Weygand and Darlan, Germany prom-
ised not to appropriate the French fleet either during the war or afterwards. For
its part France agreed to prevent all its citizens from resuming the fight against
Germany, or in other words, from joining de Gaulle. France also released all its
German prisoners of war but had to accept that 1.95 million French soldiers
remained in German prisoner-of-war camps. German citizens – that is, émigrés
– had to be returned to the Reich if so requested. Germany would be compen-
sated for the cost of the country’s occupation, which was initially calculated at
400 million francs or 20 million marks, a day and was also entitled to make
continuing demands on France’s economic resources.
The terms of the armistice contained no specific mention of Alsace and
that part of Lorraine that had belonged to Germany between 1871 and 1918. The
regions in question – the départements of Moselle, Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin –
were de facto incorporated into Germany, although their legal annexation had to
wait. Alsace henceforth formed a part of the Gau of Baden that in future was to be
known as the Gau of the Upper Rhine, while Lorraine became a part of the Gau of
Saarpfalz that was renamed the Westmark. Both regions were placed under the
civilian control of their respective Gauleiters. French place names were replaced
by German ones. Steps were taken to prevent the use of the French language, and
all men eligible for military service were drafted into the Wehrmacht.
The French delegation signed the armistice agreement on 22 June after the
German side had rejected almost all of its counterproposals and issued an ulti-
matum. It would come into force after a similar agreement had been reached
with Italy. Although Pétain had asked Italy for a ceasefire on 20 June, Mussolini
launched an offensive in the Alps on the 21st, albeit one that resulted in few
territorial gains. In the course of their negotiations with the French delegation
in Rome, the Duce’s representatives demanded that the newly conquered areas
be ceded to Italy, that all of the French Alpine army’s military equipment be
handed over, that the Franco-Italian border in Europe and Africa be demilita-
rized and that Italy be allowed to use a whole series of military ports and certain
French ports and railways in Africa for military purposes. The agreement was
signed on 24 June, and the ceasefire came into force at 1:35 the next morning.
By the end of the western campaign France could mourn 85,000 war dead and
15,000 soldiers missing in action, while the equivalent figures for Germany
were 27,000 dead and 18,000 missing.
It was not long before Britain protested at the breach of the agreement of 28
March 1940, when both countries had committed themselves not to sign a
separate peace treaty. After de Gaulle was acknowledged as leader of the Free
French on 28 June, most of the French fleet was destroyed by the Royal Navy
on 3 July as it lay at anchor in the harbour at Mers el-Kébir in what was then
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 693

French Algeria. Around 1,300 French officers and sailors lost their lives in the
attack. Churchill had been keen to prevent the ships from falling into enemy
hands and at the same time wanted to show the United States that he was deter-
mined to continue to resist Germany even without his Continental allies.
Pétain responded to this unprecedented challenge by breaking off diplomatic
relations with Britain on 5 July and by bombing Gibraltar, while Germany
reacted by suspending its operation to decommission the French fleet.
Since 1 July Pétain’s government had been meeting at Vichy on the northern
edge of the Massif Central. Unlike Paris and Bordeaux, the once-fashionable
and popular spa town lay in unoccupied France. Here, on 10 July, the National
Assembly – a joint session of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies convened at
the request of the deputy prime minister, Pierre Laval – granted Pétain the
special powers needed to draw up a new constitution. The move was approved
by 569 parliamentarians from every party, while eighty, including thirty-seven
of Léon Blum’s Socialists, opposed it. The only preconditions for the new consti-
tution were that it must guarantee the rights of labour, the family and the
country, that it be ratified by the people and that it be enforced by the relevant
legislative bodies.
By the end of July Pétain had issued five constitutional decrees that largely
invalidated the constitutional laws of 1875. Under the decree dated 11 July, the
new head of state was Philippe Pétain, marshal of France, in whom were
invested far-reaching dictatorial powers, including the whole of the legislative
power until such time as new chambers were in place. He was the commander
in chief of all the armed forces; the ministers whom he appointed were respon-
sible to him alone; and it was he who negotiated and ratified all international
treaties. Only when declaring war did he need the agreement of parliament.
The Senate and Chamber of Deputies that had been elected in 1936 were
prorogued until further notice.
The Third Republic was over. In its place was an authoritarian presidential
dictatorship that marked the start of what Vichy’s propagandists called the
révolution nationale. Laval and other opponents of parliamentary democracy
had won an important victory, for France now had the framework of an order
that in the longer term was intended to help the country mitigate the severity
of the terms of the armistice, to keep out of the Second World War, to restore
its sovereignty through a peace treaty and to assume a suitable position in
Hitler’s new vision of Europe.
The rapid defeat of France was immediately hailed as proof of the Führer’s
inspired strategy of a blitzkrieg, and yet it had been planned as no such thing.
Rather, two factors had turned the campaign into a blitzkrieg: on the one hand,
there were the failings of the French and British military, on the other the impro-
vised breakthrough of Guderian’s German Panzer corps from Sedan to the
Atlantic coast in the middle of May 1940. According to the German military
historian and retired colonel Karl-Heinz Frieser, ‘the blitzkrieg mentality evolved
694 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

only after the campaign in the west’. In short, the Blitzkrieg was ‘not the cause but
the consequence of victory. What had been achieved to universal surprise in May
1940 was to serve from now on as the “secret of victory” in realizing Hitler’s desire
for conquest’. Only then could the ‘folly of the “world blitzkrieg” ’ arise that was to
have such catastrophic consequences for world history. In Frieser’s pointed
phrase, ‘The campaign in the west was not planned as a blitzkrieg, successful
though it proved, whereas the 1941 campaign in the east was planned as a blitz-
krieg, but it was one that proved unsuccessful.’12
Although Hitler had not been responsible for the rapid victory in the west
and had in fact placed that victory at risk by vacillating while his forces were
advancing on Dunkirk, the subjugation of France led to a massive increase in
his popularity at home. Two decades after the Treaty of Versailles had come
into force, the German Reich seemed finally to have won the First World War.
‘The superhuman greatness of the Führer and of his work is recognized today
by all right-thinking national comrades and recognized, moreover, uncondi-
tionally, joyfully and gratefully,’ reported the chairman of the Regional Council
of Swabia on 9 July, while the district leader of the NSDAP in the city of
Augsburg noted the following day that ‘it can be said in all confidence that the
entire nation is now filled with such trust in the Führer as has arguably never
been the case before’. German academia was just as enthusiastic as the many
nameless ‘national comrades’: in a letter that he wrote to another German
historian, Siegfried A. Kaehler, on 4 July 1940, the liberal conservative histo-
rian Friedrich Meinecke, who otherwise had grave misgivings about Hitler and
National Socialism, admitted that

for me, too, joy, enthusiasm and pride in this army must be the dominant
emotions, at least for the present. And to have regained Strasbourg! How
could a man’s heart not beat a little faster at this? After all, building up an
army of millions in the space of only four years and rendering it capable of
such achievements has been an astonishing and arguably the greatest and
the most positive accomplishment of the Third Reich.13

When, in the spring of 1940, the National Socialist regime launched its campaign
to win European support for a leading role for the Reich and for Italy, it could
rely on the backing of many and, indeed, most German historians. Writing in
Goebbels’s weekly Das Reich, which first appeared at the end of May 1940, Peter
Richard Rohden contributed an article that was published on 21 July 1940 and
declared that the two countries shared a special mission:

Within the Germanic and Romance world, only Germany and Italy repre-
sent a genuine imperial idea of order that aims not at suppression and
exploitation but at justice and peace – Italy as the heir of the pax Romana,
Germany as that of the Sacrum Imperium.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 695

The following year Karl Richard Ganzer published The Reich as a Force for
European Order, the principal message of which was contained in the following
highlighted passage:

Thanks to its higher political potency, the German nucleus organizes

around itself as its determinative centre a group of spaces which, different
in kind, may be racially autonomous but which form a political community,
within which German leadership and the autonomy of these other races are
balanced in an organic hierarchy.14

In 1941 Ganzer became the temporary director of the Reich Institute for the
History of the New Germany.
For Hitler, of course, ‘the autonomy of other races’ was not something
that would ever dictate his actions even in western Europe. As early as May 1937
he had dreamt of the ‘future annulment of the Peace of Westphalia’. And on
7 November 1939, following a conversation with Hitler, Goebbels noted in his
diary: ‘It will not be long now before we aim a blow at the Western Powers.
Perhaps the Führer will succeed in annulling the Peace of Westphalia sooner
than we all think. This would be his life’s crowning achievement.’ Ten days later
Hitler returned to the subject: ‘The Führer talks about our war aims,’ Goebbels
noted on 17 November.

Once started, we need to settle the outstanding questions. He’s thinking of

the total liquidation of the Peace of Westphalia, which was concluded in
Münster and which he wants to do away with in Münster. That’s our great
goal. Once it has been achieved, we can calmly close our eyes and rest.15

To pretend that the Peace of Münster and Osnabrück had never happened was
tantamount to wanting to redraw the map of Europe and ensure that Germany
gained permanent supremacy over the rest of the Continent. Within this
context, the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire’s old western border, as it
had existed before the Thirty Years War, would probably have been only the
first step in a far more ambitious project, and even by the autumn of 1939
Hitler was already going much further than this: according to Goebbels, when
he began to divide up the French provinces on 3 November, he considered
setting aside Burgundy as a resettlement area for the South Tyroleans who, in
keeping with an agreement made between Germany and Italy on 23 June 1939,
had until the end of the year to decide whether they wanted to emigrate to
Germany or remain in Italy as Italian citizens enjoying no special rights.
Following Hitler’s victory over France, Germany took its first steps in the
direction of implementing this plan. Himmler left for a tour of inspection of
Burgundy on 10 July 1940, the aim of his visit being to test whether the region
could be Germanized by the resettlement of German peasant families. By the
696 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

end of December 1940 a report had been drawn up: one million Germans
would be required to resettle nine French départements.
The Germanization of Burgundy was a part of the Greater German policy
announced by Hitler in the spring of 1940. On 9 April – the day on which
Germany invaded Denmark and Norway – he explained to its closest associates:
‘Just as Bismarck’s empire came into being in 1866 [i.e. in the wake of Prussia’s
victory over Austria], so the Greater German Reich will come into being today.’16
Before the war, Hitler had used the word ‘Germanization’ to describe the
conquest of Lebensraum to the east, in the rolling expanses of Russia, but ever
since the signing of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact on 23 August 1939,
Russia had ceased to play a part in his vision of Germany’s future. The Greater
German Reich was now to include Germanic nationalities such as the Danes,
the Norwegians, the Dutch and the Flemish, who would be united under
German leadership and form an entity distinguished by its racial purity but no
longer a nation state.
In this way Hitler was resurrecting the old pre-nationalist idea of Germania
magna that had been invoked by the German Humanists around 1500 and
again in the early nineteenth century by Ernst Moritz Arndt. By 1940, however,
it had come to seem ‘post-nationalist’ in character. Apart from the Greater
Germanic Reich, only Italy and – had it been able to reach an agreement with
Germany – Great Britain could have asserted their right to be regarded as
European powers of any stature at this time. These, then, were the outlines of
Hitler’s new European order to the west of the Russian border at the point of
his greatest military triumphs to date.

Tokyo, Washington, Berlin: A Change in International Politics 1940–41

Germany’s triumph in its campaign in the west had implications for the Far East
as well. Japan had remained neutral when war had been unleashed in Europe in
September 1939 but it changed its policy in response to the defeat of the
Netherlands and then of France: the chance to conquer the Dutch East Indies
and French Indochina suddenly seemed tantalizingly close. Even British
Malaysia and Singapore seemed to lie within Tokyo’s grasp. In 1940 the army
forced the resignation of Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai’s government after he had
seemed to them to be unduly cautious, allowing the return to power of the prime
minister from 1937–8, Prince Konoe Fumimaro. Apart from Konoe, the army’s
other political favourites were the army minister Tojo Hideki and the foreign
minister Matsuoka Yosuke.
The new government was keener than its predecessor to renew the coun-
try’s ties with Germany, ties that Japan had severed by signing its non-aggression
pact with the Soviet Union. Under the propagandist slogan of a ‘Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ Japan now sought to dominate the whole of East
and south-east Asia. The Japanese navy had long been urging expansion in a
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 697

southerly direction, and by the summer of 1940 the army, too, had adopted a
similar line, even though it had traditionally set its sights on Russia. From now
on the country’s motto was ‘Northern Defence and Southern Advance’.
Hitler initially remained cautious in the face of signals from Tokyo, and it was
not until August 1940, when he realized that massive American support meant
that a quick victory over Britain could no longer be expected, that he agreed to take
soundings, the aim of which was a military alliance against the United States as
the price for Germany’s willingness to recognize that east and south-east Asia
belonged to Japan’s sphere of interests. The Japanese navy was reluctant to agree to
this new policy as it did not feel that it was sufficiently prepared for a war with
the United States, but it finally bowed to pressure from the army when the latter
demanded that a treaty be concluded with the Axis Powers of Germany and Italy.
Japan’s foreign minister signed a Tripartite Pact in Berlin on 27 September 1940: it
was a defence alliance that would come into effect in the event of an American
attack during the next ten years. Germany promised to help Japan in its attempts
to reach a settlement with the Soviet Union and was even willing to leave Iran and
India to Moscow in the event of the latter’s joining the Tripartite Pact.
This renewed rapprochement between Japan and the Axis Powers was
accompanied by a realignment in terms of Japan’s domestic policies. Shortly
after the Tripartite Pact had been signed, all the political parties in Japan were
disbanded and replaced by the Taisei yokusankei, or Imperial Rule Assistance
Association, which was founded on 12 October 1940, its aim being to fulfil the
functions of a single party and form an umbrella organization for all the coun-
try’s professional and cultural organizations. Its chairman was the country’s
prime minister. But its political and military leaders held such divergent views
on its aims that the Association never achieved the dynamism of Hitler’s
NSDAP or Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista. Parliament continued to be
made up as before, and although the regime grew markedly more authori-
tarian, the Japanese Empire never became a totalitarian dictatorship of the
German or Italian kind.
It was highly questionable whether in signing the Tripartite Pact Tokyo
would be able to intimidate the United States – potentially its most dangerous
adversary. On 26 September 1940, a day before the pact was signed, the United
States had placed a total embargo on steel and scrap metal that caused Japan
considerable harm. This was America’s answer to an aggressive act by Tokyo
that was approved by Berlin and – against its will – by Vichy, namely, the occu-
pation of French Indochina, which allowed Japan to cut off important supplies
from the China of Chiang Kai-shek. Regardless of the new alignment of forces
between Berlin, Rome and Tokyo, the American embargo was rigorously main-
tained throughout the subsequent period, while Washington provided China
with an increased amount of help.
The Soviet Union, too, reacted to the Tripartite Pact in ways that Tokyo had
not anticipated and made no attempt to join the treaty. All that Matsuoka was
698 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

able to achieve in Moscow in April 1941 at the end of an extended tour of

Europe was a neutrality treaty, not the non-aggression pact that he had been
hoping for. The Japanese government had no idea that Germany had in the
meantime radically revised its attitude to the Soviet Union. At the same time
the United States successfully increased its pressure on Japan. While the coun-
try’s outspokenly anti-American foreign minister was travelling in Europe,
Konoe’s cabinet went behind his back and took soundings with Washington in
order to explore the possibility of a settlement between the two powers.

The United States had declared its neutrality at the start of the war in Europe,
but by 4 November 1939 Washington had changed its position in favour of the
Allies, when a new Neutrality Act allowed countries involved in the hostilities
to buy goods of every kind, including weapons and munitions, from the United
States under the terms of the cash-and-carry clause of 1937 and to export them
on their own vessels.
On 16 May 1940, six days after Germany launched its campaign in the west,
Roosevelt asked Congress to agree to authorize $1,000 million to mechanize
and motorize the army and build 50,000 military and naval planes. Both the
Senate and the House of Representatives agreed to his request. At the same
time Congress raised the upper limit of the national debt to $4,900 million.
Three months later, on 19 July 1940, Roosevelt signed the Two-Ocean Navy
Act providing for the construction of a much-enlarged fleet that could operate
in both the Atlantic and the Pacific and that would be ready by 1945.
At this date in the country’s history public opinion as to how to react to the
aggressive policies of the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in Berlin,
Rome and Tokyo was still deeply divided. In May 1940 committed internation-
alists associated with the journalist William Allen White responded to
Germany’s campaign in the west by forming a Committee to Defend America
by Aiding the Allies. As its name implied, it sought to offer massive support to
European democracies, especially Great Britain, in order to make it unneces-
sary for the United States to enter the war. Among its supporters were first and
foremost east coast intellectuals, including ‘Yankees’ who felt committed to
England, and Americans of Jewish extraction.
An isolationist countermovement that was formed in July created far more
of a stir. This was the America First Committee summoned into existence by
the industrialist Robert Wood. Among its star speakers was Charles A.
Lindbergh, the internationally celebrated aviator who had been the first man to
make a nonstop solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. Most of its
sponsors and supporters were businessmen from the Midwest, especially from
Chicago and the surrounding area, and Americans of Irish and German extrac-
tion. All were for the most part Republicans. But the Grand Old Party, too,
included internationalists and even interventionists, to two of whom Roosevelt
gave cabinet posts in June 1940 in a demonstrative show of support for their
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 699

cause: Henry L. Stimson, who had been the secretary of war under Taft and
Hoover and who now returned to his former post, and William Franklin
(‘Frank’) Knox as secretary of the navy.
During the summer of 1940 the American people became increasingly
aware of the dangers threatening their country from abroad. In May 40 per
cent of a representative cross-section of Americans emphatically rejected any
military involvement, but by July 66 per cent believed that Germany repre-
sented a direct threat to their country. That same month, at a conference of
Pan-American foreign ministers in Havana, the administration was confronted
by the fact that Hitler’s attempt to intimidate the countries of Latin America
was beginning to pay off: out of regard for their trade with Germany, Argentina,
Brazil and Chile were only three of the countries in the region that refused to
send their ministers to Cuba. In spite of this, the State Department had
succeeded by the end of the year in signing defence agreements with every
Latin American republic with the exception of Argentina.
In September 1940, supported by an ambitious campaign by the Committee
to Defend America spearheaded by the First World War hero General John
Joseph Pershing, Roosevelt took a decisive step that went some way beyond his
previous offers of help for Great Britain. Circumventing the ‘cash-and-carry’
provision of the 1937 treaty and in response to an urgent appeal from Churchill,
he handed over to Britain fifty older destroyers, mostly from the First World
War, and sent a number of planes back to their factories, so that Britain could
buy them from there. In return London gave Washington permission to estab-
lish military bases on Newfoundland, Bermuda and the British islands in the
Caribbean. The deal was an early expression of what was later to become
known as the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and Great Britain.
Of scarcely less value to Britain than ships and aircraft was a law that came into
force on 16 September: the Selective Service Act ordered the registration of all
men aged between twenty-one and thirty-five, allowing recruits to be called up
in peacetime for the first time in American history.
Presidential elections were due to take place in November 1940. Even as late
as the summer of that year it had still been uncertain whether Roosevelt would
allow his name to be put forward as the Democratic Party candidate. Although
the constitution did not rule out a third term in office, there was an unwritten
law that an incumbent who had already been re-elected once would not contest
the presidency again. It was probably in late May 1940 that in view of the
extremely tense international situation Roosevelt decided that he would be the
first president to break with tradition and stand for re-election, but not until
immediately before the Democratic Convention in Chicago in July did he
reveal that he would accept his party’s nomination. As was expected, he was
nominated by a huge majority. Roosevelt was also able to persuade the dele-
gates to accept his secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, an avowed inter-
nationalist, as his vice-presidential running mate. The Republicans’ candidate
700 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

was a dark horse, Wendell Willkie, a former Democrat and a largely unknown
industrial manager from New York. A liberal internationalist whose slogan was
‘One World’, he used his gifts as an orator and his influential positions to win
the support of large and well-respected newspapers like the New York Times
and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, giving him a good chance of winning over
voters from the political middle ground.
In the course of the election campaign, both candidates assured potential
voters that they would keep America out of any war, with Willkie finally going
so far as to question Roosevelt’s desire for peace and persuading the president
to promise all American fathers and mothers that their sons would never be
sent to any foreign wars. Three days before the elections, he even assured voters
that ‘Your President says this country is not going to war’.17 Roosevelt’s attempt
to defeat his political challenger was helped not only by his political experience
but also by the clear upturn in the country’s economic fortunes, an upturn due
above all to the forced pace of rearming America and to the exports to Britain
that were a direct result of the war in Europe. What the New Deal had failed to
achieve was now accomplished by the war even before the United States had
officially entered the conflict: a new economic boom was in the offing.
Although Roosevelt’s victory was not as emphatic as it had been in 1932 and
1936, he still won far more votes than Willkie: 27 million against 22 million,
resulting in 449 votes for the incumbent and eighty-two for his Republican
challenger in the Electoral College. Roosevelt proved most popular with
working-class and lower middle-class voters as well as with those of Jewish and
Polish extraction and, finally, with black Americans. It was the isolationists
who were most disappointed by the outcome of the election since their choice
had been between two internationalists. On 19 January 1941 one of the most
influential speakers of isolationist America, the Republican senator Gerald P.
Nye from North Dakota, told a meeting of the America First Committee in
Kansas City that ‘I shall be surprised if history does not show that beginning at
the Republican convention in Philadelphia a conspiracy was carried to deny
the American people a chance to express themselves’.18
One of the first foreign policy decisions that Roosevelt took after he had
been re-elected was to provide weapons and military equipment to Great
Britain, which by now was on the verge of bankruptcy and which was not
required to pay for the help offered. Roosevelt explained his actions at a press
conference on 17 December 1940, offering a vivid analogy:

Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden

hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and
connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what
do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose
cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes
on? I don’t want $15 – I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.19
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 701

Two days later, in one of his widely acclaimed ‘fireside chats’ on the radio,
Roosevelt justified the principle of the intended ‘lend-lease’ by arguing that
America must be the ‘arsenal of democracy’. On 11 March 1941 Congress passed
the Lend-Lease Act that merely required foreign governments to return to the
United States any American ships, tanks and aircraft that they had been ‘lent’ in
the course of the war. By now there could no longer be any question of America’s
‘neutrality’. Economically speaking, the United States was already at war with the
Axis Powers by the spring of 1940, and an important element of American poli-
tics was economic in nature: it was keen to secure the long-term future of Europe
as a market for American goods and as a place to invest American capital.
Roosevelt offered a principled explanation of his country’s new and openly
interventionist policy in his State of the Union Address to Congress on 6
January 1941. In view of the offensive on the part of the ‘aggressor nations’ the
future of all American republics was under serious threat, the president
explained. He promised to provide all democracies with economic and mili-
tary help to defend their freedom. The world that America wanted to secure
must be based on four freedoms: the freedom of speech and expression, ‘the
freedom of every person to worship God in his own way’, the freedom from
want and the freedom from fear:

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of

world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the
very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators
seek to create with the crash of a bomb. [. . .] Freedom means the supremacy
of human rights everywhere. [. . .] To that high concept there can be no end
save victory.20

With regard to Japan, the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, propounded four
principles in April 1941 that Tokyo was required to acknowledge before the
United States could begin the negotiations desired by Konoe’s government:
Japan must safeguard the sovereignty and territorial integrity of every state; it
must not interfere in the affairs of other states; it must acknowledge the equality
of all nations, especially in respect of their trade opportunities; and it must not
use force to alter the status quo in the Pacific. In June a fifth demand was added,
albeit in the form of a qualifying clause, whereby the Tripartite Pact must be
regarded as dead. It scarcely needs adding that Japan was unwilling to agree to
such a radical rejection of its expansionist ambitions. As a result, the United
States moved perceptibly closer to the possibility of a war on two fronts – in
Europe and in the Pacific – in the first half of 1941.

The European power that Roosevelt was determined to support with every
means ‘short of war’ certainly felt encouraged by America’s help, and as long as
Churchill remained at the head of the British government, Hitler was unable to
702 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

count on London’s willingness to sue for peace, as he had briefly hoped in the
wake of his victorious ‘blitzkrieg’ against France.
On 19 July 1940, barely two weeks after he had returned in triumph to
Berlin from his temporary headquarters at Freudenstadt in the northern part
of the Black Forest, Hitler addressed the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera House
and again appealed to Britain to ‘show reason’:

Mr. Churchill ought, perhaps, for once, to believe me when I prophesy that
a great Empire will be destroyed – an Empire which it was never my inten-
tion to destroy or even to harm. I do, however, realize that this struggle, if it
continues, can end only with the complete annihilation of one or the other
of the two adversaries. Mr. Churchill may believe that this will be Germany.
I know that it will be England.21

Hitler was alluding here to a prophecy by the Oracle at Delphi transmitted

by Herodotus, according to which King Croesus of Lydia would destroy a
great empire if he waged war on the Persians. The war ended with his defeat
by King Cyrus the Great of Persia in 546 ăG, when Croesus lost his entire
empire.
The truth of the matter is that by this date Hitler no longer believed in a
peaceful resolution to his conflict with Great Britain. On 16 July 1940, three
days before he addressed the Reichstag, he had given instructions for Operation
Sealion, a land invasion of England that was to be launched after the Royal Air
Force had as far as possible been rendered ineffectual. Air attacks on Great
Britain – the Battle of Britain – increased in intensity on 13 August: among the
targets were radar stations, airports, aircraft factories, ports and railway lines in
southern England. After the first British bombing raids on Berlin the Luftwaffe
systematically extended its attacks to London and other large cities in early
September. Many German pilots also deliberately targeted groups of civilians.
The Battle of Britain reached its climax on 15 September, when fifty-six
German and twenty-six British aircraft were shot down. During the aerial
battle for England 43,000 civilians were killed between the start of the war and
June 1941. On one night alone, 14/15 November 1940, 600 civilians were killed
in Coventry during a raid by the Luftwaffe designed to spread terror.
This was the largest deployment of Göring’s Luftwaffe to date, and it proved
to be a debacle. The planned destruction of radar stations and anti-aircraft
defence installations had failed to produce the desired results, removing an
important precondition for a successful land invasion. Even the most modern
German aircraft could not linger in British air space for more than half an hour
if they were to have enough fuel to return home, whereas the pilots of the Royal
Air Force and of the Commonwealth and Polish-exile armed forces did not
have this problem. And they had an important ally in the bad weather, which
also played a part in thwarting Germany’s subsequent planning, when on
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 703

17 September autumn storms forced Hitler to postpone indefinitely Operation

Sealion, which was due to begin only four days later.
Even before the start of the Battle of Britain, Hitler had already expressed
doubts as to whether it would really be possible to defeat Great Britain within
the foreseeable future, and on 21 July, addressing the commanders in chief of
the three branches of the Wehrmacht, he broached the possibility of turning his
attention to the Soviet Union, the first time he had done so since the German-
Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939. He explained his decision by insisting that
Britain was still pinning its hopes on America and Russia. Ten days later, on 31
July, Hitler expressed himself more clearly in a discussion on the Obersalzberg,
pointing out that ‘England’s hope’ was ‘Russia and America’, but that if Russia
was removed from the equation, America, too, would cease to be a problem,
which in turn would mean that Japan would gain in importance. Russia, he
declared, was ‘England’s and America’s Far Eastern rapier against Japan’:

With Russia smashed, England’s last hope would be shattered. Germany then
will be the master of Europe and the Balkans. Decision: Russia’s destruction
must therefore be made a part of this struggle. Spring 1941. The sooner Russia
is crushed the better. Attack achieves its purpose only if Russian state can be
shattered to its roots with one blow. Holding part of the country alone will
not do. Standing still for the following winter would be perilous. [. . .] If we
start in May, we would have five months to finish the job.22

Clearly, Hitler could think only in terms of a blitzkrieg from the summer of
1940 onwards.
According to the German historian Andreas Hillgruber, it was Britain’s
resistance, in which it received substantial support from the United States,
which was responsible for Hitler’s change of heart:

It was the defeat of France and the hoped-for ‘settlement’ with Great Britain
that had been intended to free up Hitler’s back and create a strategic basis
on which to launch an attack on the east when he deemed that the moment
was right. Now, what until then had been his main goal – the conquest of
the east – became the means by which to deal with the Anglo-Saxon mari-
time powers, which, far from accepting his rule over central and western
parts of Continental Europe, were determined to challenge that hegemony.23

This is the point that Hitler’s plans had reached by the end of July 1940, but, as
was to become clear, his timetable was by no means set in stone.
The Soviet Union had been able to put to good use the time during which
Germany was completing its triumphant campaign in the west. On 15 June,
following an ultimatum, the Red Army marched into Lithuania, including the
south-western tip of land that had been claimed by Germany on 28 September
704 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

1939. Two days later, it occupied Latvia and Estonia. All three countries were
declared Soviet republics and hence a part of the Soviet Union on 6 August. By
June 1941 almost 170,000 real or alleged anti-Communists had been deported
from the Baltic States to the Russian interior, mostly to Siberia: 34,250 from
Latvia, 60,000 from Estonia and 75,000 from Lithuania. Stalin’s next blow fell
on Romania, which on 26 June was instructed to cede Bessarabia and North
Bukovina to the Soviet Union. Two days later both regions were overrun by the
Red Army.
In the case of Bessarabia, Soviet intervention was limited to dividing the
region into south-east and eastern central European spheres of interest as
enshrined in the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of 23 August 1939. When
King Carol II of Romania asked Germany on 2 July 1940 to guarantee its
borders and to send a military mission, the request was more than welcome to
Hitler. Under the terms of the Second Vienna Award of 30 August Germany
and Italy forced Romania to cede Northern Transylvania and the Székely Land
to Hungary. On 4 September Carol II appointed the pro-German general Ion
Antonescu prime minster and the country’s leader. Two days later, under pres-
sure from Antonescu, Carol abdicated in favour of his son, Michael. On the 7th
Romania was obliged to cede southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria. The remaining
borders were recognized by the Axis Powers without any attempt on Germany’s
part to consult with the Soviet Union, which had vital interests in Romania. On
2 September Hitler decided to send a military mission to Romania in response
to Carol’s request. Germany was now a step closer to one of its strategic goals:
control over Romania’s oilfields.
Germany’s policy towards Romania represented a challenge to the Soviet
Union but by no means spelt an end to relations between Berlin and Moscow.
The supplies of petroleum, earth metals and grain from the Soviet Union that
formed part of the German-Soviet trade agreement of 11 February 1940 and of
an earlier agreement of 19 August 1939 continued as before, largely making up
for those lost as a result of the British naval blockade. In the middle of September
Hitler briefly toyed with the idea of pursuing Ribbentrop’s contentious alterna-
tive to war with Russia, an anti-British ‘Continental Bloc’ from ‘Yokohama to
Spain’ that would also include the Soviet Union. Hitler met Mussolini on the
Brenner on 4 October to discuss ways in which their interests in Franco’s Spain
and Vichy France might be reconciled. In Berlin’s view both of these countries
should also be included in the proposed Continental Bloc.
On 23 October – barely three weeks later – Hitler and Franco met at the
railway station at Hendaye on the border between France and Spain. It turned
out to be a disappointing encounter for both parties. Although Hitler was willing
to agree to Franco’s conquest of Gibraltar, the Generalissimo remained reserved,
Hitler’s desire that Spain enter the war foundering above all on Madrid’s demand
that Germany relinquish areas of land in North Africa, a demand that Hitler
refused to consider at Hendaye. By the time that Hitler had expressed his
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 705

willingness to agree to it in November, Spain’s economic situation was so dire

that the country’s divided political leaders could not agree to his demand. Later,
depending on the military situation, Franco declared that Spain was either not
one of the belligerents or that it was neutral. In December 1940 Spain decided to
form a group of volunteers that was largely made up of Falangists, the ‘Blue
Division’ that was later deployed on the German side on the eastern front, until
Franco ordered its withdrawal in December 1943.
Hitler’s meetings with Laval and Pétain in Montoire-sur-le-Loir near Tours
likewise produced few concrete results, for although Pétain persuaded Hitler to
declare France the protecting power in the case of French prisoners of war in
Germany, he received no assurance that Berlin was ready to negotiate a peace
treaty in the foreseeable future. Conversely, Pétain refused to enter the war and
fight alongside Germany against Britain. The policy of collaboration to which
the French chef d’état publicly agreed only on 30 October ran into an almost
immediate problem when Pétain, without consulting Germany, dismissed Laval
– hitherto the policy’s principal advocate – on 13 December 1940 and replaced
him as foreign secretary with the Anglophile Pierre-Étienne Flandin. In turn,
Flandin left the government in February 1941 in response to pressure from
Germany. His successor, Admiral François Darlan, who took over the portfolios
of foreign minister, home secretary, minister of information and minister of the
navy in addition to the deputy chairmanship of the Council of Ministers, staked
everything on forging closer ties with Germany and making France an active
member of any future Continental Bloc.
But the most momentous event of October 1940 was not Hitler’s discussions
in Hendaye and Montoire but the start of the Italian assault on Greece on the
early morning of 28 October – the eighteenth anniversary of Mussolini’s March
on Rome. The driving force behind this move was Italy’s foreign secretary, Count
Ciano, who thought that it was time for his country to emerge from the shadow
of the ever-expanding German Reich. Mussolini was annoyed with Hitler for
repeatedly acting on his own, and he deliberately failed to consult with Berlin,
so that when Hitler arrived at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence for a meeting with
the Duce later that same day, he found himself facing a fait accompli. For the
Italian troops, the undertaking turned out to be a debacle, and in early November
Greek units launched a counteroffensive and conquered around a third of
Albania, which Italy had occupied in April 1939. British troops landed on the
island of Crete on 29 October and reached Athens by early November. Hitler was
afraid that the Royal Air Force would bomb the Romanian oilfields at Ploiesti
and by the end of 1940 he was planning a German relief operation in Greece.
The Greek adventure proved to have unfortunate consequences for the Axis
Powers in Africa. In mid-September 1940 Italy had used its base in Libya to
launch an offensive against Egypt only to find itself stalled shortly behind the
border. In December the British Nile Army began a counteroffensive that proved
hugely successful: the Italian forces were thrown out of Egypt and 38,000 men
706 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

taken prisoner. A further British offensive began in Eritrea in the second half of
January, and by the 21st they had captured Tobruk in the eastern part of Italian
Libya, followed by Benghazi, the capital of Cyrenaica, in early February, when
they took some 140,000 prisoners. Shortly afterwards, British troops in Kenya
launched an attack on Italian Somaliland in the course of which Mogadishu was
captured. If Italy had concentrated its troops on the various theatres of war in
Africa and especially on the strategically important kingdom of Egypt, instead
of sending most of its soldiers to Greece, the British would never have achieved
such rapid successes in North Africa.
When the German and Italian leaders met at the Berghof near Berchtesgaden
in January 1941, Hitler was left with no choice but to force Mussolini to abandon
his ‘parallel war’ and place himself at the service of Germany’s strategic goals. In
February the first units of Rommel’s German Afrika Korps arrived in Tripoli,
where they quickly launched a counteroffensive. By March practically the whole
of Cyrenaica had fallen into German hands and the fortress at Tobruk was
surrounded. In Greece, meanwhile, the British were continuing to advance and
by the end of April they had already landed more than 58,000 men.
As yet, it was still unclear what effect the Italian campaign in the south of the
Balkan peninsula might have on Hitler’s strategic planning with regard to Russia.
Although Ribbentrop’s idea of turning the Tripartite Pact into the nucleus of a
major Continental Bloc had not been completely unsuccessful (Hungary, Romania
and Slovakia joined the alliance in November 1940, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in
March 1941), the Soviet Union made no attempt to join the anti-British grouping.
Stalin had rejected Churchill’s invitation to break with Germany on 1 August, but
the Soviet leader had no intention of seeing his country as a partner in a European
alliance headed by Germany.
On 12 November the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov arrived in
Berlin for two days of talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop. As the result of a British
air raid on the capital, part of the talks had to be held in a government bunker
and proved difficult, with no tangible outcome. Hitler tried to persuade the
Soviet Union to accept German rule in Europe and German claims to a colo-
nial empire in Africa in return for Soviet expansion in the direction of the
Indian Ocean that would have harmed British interests in the region. For his
part, Molotov was more interested in Finland and south-east Europe: Germany
was to end its use of Finnish territory for the transport of German troops to
Norway, which the two countries had agreed to in September. It was also to
withdraw the military mission that it had sent to Finland at that time and it
was to acknowledge the Soviet Union’s right to annex Finland. Moreover,
Germany was to agree to the border guarantee given to Romania in return for
a Soviet guarantee for Bulgaria. And it was to grant Moscow the right to free
use of the Baltic ports and the construction of military bases in the Bosporus
and the Dardanelles. Molotov also asked for a note to be taken of Soviet Russia’s
interest in the future fate of Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Greece.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 707

The deliberations with the Soviet foreign minister did not mean an unequiv-
ocal end to the idea of a Continental Bloc. Indeed, Molotov even wrote a letter
on 26 November expressing his willingness to turn the Tripartite Pact into a
Four-Power Pact at least as long as the governments in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo
were willing to agree to Moscow’s conditions, which he once again put forward
in detail, even adding to his earlier demands. But Hitler had no intention of
meeting the Soviet Union halfway. For him, it had been clear since the Berlin
talks on 12 and 13 November that there could never be any question of an
agreement with Stalin and that war was therefore inevitable. Hitler regarded
Molotov’s letter as an attempt at blackmail and did not deem it worthy of a reply.
On 18 December he issued instructions for Operation Barbarossa: ‘Even before
the end of the war with England, the German Wehrmacht must be prepared to
crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign.’24 Preparations had to begin at once and
must be completed by 15 May 1941 at the latest.
Hitler’s timetable for his war with the Soviet Union could easily have been
disrupted by two events in the Balkans: Italy’s impending defeat in Greece and
the coup d’état in Yugoslavia on 27 March 1941. The coup in Belgrade was insti-
gated by the commander in chief of the Yugoslav air force, General Dugan
Simovi1, and by the air force general Borivoje Markovi1, both of whom opposed
their country’s membership of the Tripartite Pact, a contentious decision that
the prime minister, Dragiga Cvetkovi1, sealed with his signature on 25 March,
two days before his overthrow. The organizers of the putsch declared the seven-
year-old King Peter II to be of age and made him head of state. In turn, Peter
appointed Simovi1 his new prime minister. While Prince Regent Paul went to
Greece, violent demonstrations against the Axis Powers broke out in Belgrade.
Although the new government did not formally terminate the agreement
of 25 March and although it assured Germany of its good intentions, Hitler
regarded the coup as directed against the Reich, which was true to the extent
that the British secret services had had a hand in the putsch. By 27 March Hitler
had given orders for Yugoslavia to be invaded and persuaded the Bulgarian and
Hungarian leadership to join forces with him with the aim of crushing the
country. The Hungarian prime minister, Count Pál Teleki, who was at pains to
maintain good relations with both Berlin and London and who had signed a
friendship treaty with Belgrade in December 1940, declined to violate the treaty
but was unable to assert himself in the face of opposition from the Reich
governor, Miklós Horthy, and the army leaders. He took his own life on 7 April.
On 6 April, a day after the new Yugoslav government had signed a friendship
and non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union, Hitler launched his Balkan
campaign without prior warning. Yugoslavia and Greece were attacked, Belgrade
suffering a particularly heavy aerial bombardment, while the German tank
units that entered the country from Austria and Bulgaria encountered only
token resistance. By 12 April German troops had taken Belgrade. Five days later
the Yugoslav supreme command capitulated. King Peter and his government
708 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

were able to escape to Greece in British planes and shortly afterwards formed a
government in exile in London.
Troops from Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy and the Italian satellite state of Albania
were all involved in the occupation of the country. Germany and Italy jointly
announced the end of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 8 July. Germany annexed
a major part of Slovenia, together with Lower Styria and parts of Carniola,
while Italy took control of the remainder of Slovenia, including its capital
Ljubljana, as well as most of Dalmatia and the majority of the islands in the
Adriatic. Hungary annexed the former Hungarian parts of Serbia, while
Bulgaria annexed the bulk of Macedonia. Albania, which was dependent on
Italy, incorporated Kosovo and neighbouring parts of Macedonia.
Croatia, which was occupied in part by German troops and in part by
Italian forces, acquired the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was ruled by
Ante Paveli1, a member of the fiercely Catholic Fascist Ustaga movement who
had been responsible for the assassination of King Alexander I in Marseilles in
October 1934 and who returned from exile in Italy to head a nominally inde-
pendent state. As its Poglavnik (‘leader’), he enjoyed the backing of only a small
minority of his compatriots, and even this support he soon forfeited as a result
of extensive corruption, arbitrary decisions and extreme forms of terror.
Montenegro was declared an Italian protectorate, while in Serbia power was
vested in the hands of a German military administration assisted by a Serbian
regional authority that it itself installed and that was run by the former defence
minister and Catholic conservative, Milan Nedi1. Behind him were more than
500 dignitaries, including Orthodox bishops, teachers at the University of
Belgrade, industrialists and former ministers. His government’s authority was
called into question by the nationalist Ietnici associated with Colonel Dra:a
Mihajlovi1 and, after July 1941, by the rapidly growing partisan movement of
Josip Broz Tito, the secretary general of the Yugoslav Communist Party.
In Greece, too, German troops made rapid advances after invading the
country from Bulgaria on 6 April 1941. By the 9th Salonica had fallen, and by
the 21st the Epirus Army had capitulated. Six days later Athens was occupied.
The British forces withdrew from the mainland and sought refuge on the island
of Crete, which was taken by German parachute troops on 1 June after twelve
days of heavy fighting involving considerable loss of life. In Athens a Greek
government under General Georgios Tsolakoglou had in the meantime been
formed under the watchful eye of the occupying power. At the end of May King
George II went into exile in Egypt, taking his government and sections of the
military with him. Since Hitler needed the German troops for his campaign in
the east, he left most of the country to the Italians as the occupying power,
though units of the Wehrmacht remained in Athens, Salonica, on Crete and
elsewhere. Bulgarian troops moved into eastern Macedonia and western Thrace.
While the Wehrmacht was enjoying its military triumphs in the Balkans,
the war with Britain had ground to a standstill in the west. The last major air
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 709

raid on London took place on 10 and 11 May 1941, in the course of which more
than 1,200 Londoners were killed. At the end of May, the German battleship
Bismarck, which had destroyed the largest British battlecruiser, HMS Hood,
three days earlier, was sunk by the British, largely ending the submarine warfare
in the Atlantic. The submarine war continued elsewhere but in spite of substan-
tial British losses it failed to bring about the change in Germany’s fortunes
hoped for by the country’s naval command. In North Africa there were no
significant battles between the middle of June and the middle of November
1941, whereas in East Africa the British inflicted heavy losses on the Italians,
taking Addis Ababa in April. The bulk of the Italian forces deployed in Ethiopia
capitulated in May on Amba Alagi. In Iraq the British succeeded in over-
throwing the pro-Axis regime of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani that had been brought
to power by a putsch on 1 April: units of the British army captured Baghdad on
30 May, whereupon the anti-British rulers went into exile.
A week later British and Gaullist forces invaded Syria from Palestine and
Iraq. In July the troops under General Henri-Fernand Dentz that had been
stationed there by the Vichy regime were forced to abandon their resistance
and agree to a ceasefire. In short, Britain had now asserted itself along a broad
front in the Middle East. Hitler could, however, draw some comfort from the
fact that Turkey, which had responded to Italy’s invasion of Albania by
exchanging mutual assistance declarations with Britain and France and agreed
to mutual neutrality with the Soviet Union in the event of a war, signed a
friendship treaty with Germany on 18 June 1941. The country’s president,
Mustafa Ismet Inönö, who had succeeded the state’s founder, Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk, on the latter’s death in November 1938, saw no conflict of interest here
since he believed that these agreements merely reflected Turkey’s determina-
tion to maintain its neutrality, no matter what the circumstances might be.
For Turkey’s treaty partner, Hitler, the rapid victories in the two blitzkriegs in
the Balkans meant that he had no need to alter his timetable for attacking the
Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa could go ahead as planned. But the middle
of May 1941 – the earliest date at which Hitler felt able to launch his invasion –
proved to be impossible on account of the late thaw, the floodwaters in the major
Russian rivers that his forces would have to cross and organizational problems
with the army, all of which persuaded him to delay the invasion until 22 June
1941, a date that must have given Hitler – a man with a profound awareness of
European history – pause for thought, since this was the day on which another
conqueror, Napoleon I, had begun his invasion of Russia in 1812, a war that
famously ended in military disaster for him and his forces.
On 3 March 1941, just sixteen weeks before the war actually began, Hitler
directed the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, to undertake ‘special assignments
preparatory to the political administration’ of the regions in question, assign-
ments ‘that stem from the final confrontation between two diametrically opposed
political systems’. Speaking to some 200 high-ranking officers on 30 March, Hitler
710 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

went on to explain – according to notes made by Franz Halder, the chief of his
general staff – that Bolshevism was ‘asocial and criminal’ and that Communism
posed an ‘enormous threat’:

We must move away from the idea of soldierly camaraderie. Communism

is no comrade of ours: it never was and it never will be. We are talking about
a war of extermination [. . .], war on Russia: the destruction of the Bolshevik
commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia. We must wage war on the
poison of decay. This is not a matter for military tribunals. [. . .] This battle
will differ greatly from the one in the west. In the east harshness means
mildness in the future.

The following day, 31 March 1941, the notorious ‘Commissar Order’ was first
drafted, receiving its final form on 12 May. Its key sentence reads, ‘Political
functionaries and commissars are to be removed.’25
Hitler’s language in the spring of 1941 recalled that of the ‘years of struggle’
before 1933. For him, the war on the Soviet Union was from the outset an ideo-
logical, all-or-nothing ‘civil war’. The time when he could have fought only the
democratic or plutocratic version of ‘international Jewry’ was fast disappearing.
With the start of his offensive against the Soviet Union, the struggle to combat
‘Jewish Bolshevism’ was once again paramount, a struggle that he seemed to
have pushed to the back of his mind when signing the German-Soviet non-
aggression pact, just as he appeared to have forgotten his belief that German
Lebensraum could be acquired in the east only by destroying the Soviet Union.
He could surely feel that he was understood by the majority of the officers whom
he addressed on 30 March 1941 and whom he informed of the new situation and
of the methods appropriate to that situation. At all events, there was no vocal
dissent. And although Halder’s account of the occasion suggests that Hitler did
not expressly attack the Jews, all of those present must have known who and
what was intended.
General Erich Hoepner – an officer who belonged to the military opposi-
tion and who was expelled from the army in January 1942 for disobeying
orders – drew the conclusions that Hitler wished to be drawn: ‘The war with
Russia is the inevitable consequence of the struggle for existence that has been
forced upon us and in particular of the struggle for the economic self-
sufficiency of Greater Germany and of the European territory that it controls,’
reads Hoepner’s deployment order of 2 May 1941:

It is the old struggle of the Germanic peoples against the Slav world, the
desire to prevent European culture from being swamped by ideas from
Moscow and Asia, and the rejection of Jewish Bolshevism. This struggle
must have as its goal the destruction of present-day Russia, which is why it
must be waged with unprecedented rigour. In its conception and execution,
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 711

every military action must be guided by the iron will to wipe out the enemy
ruthlessly and completely. In particular, this means no quarter should be
given to the representatives of the present Russian Bolshevik system.26

It was not only Hitler’s war that began at four in the morning on 22 June 1941
with Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. It was also the war of the
Wehrmacht that unquestioningly accepted the Führer’s orders.

From ‘Barbarossa’ to Pearl Harbor: The Globalization of the War

Neither Stalin nor Hitler had ever believed that the German-Soviet non-
aggression pact of 1939 meant more than a temporary breathing space in the
ongoing struggle between their two powers. A confrontation with the Soviet
leader’s ideological opposite in Berlin was inevitable because Hitler had never
renounced the programme set forth in Mein Kampf, where he had announced
his intention of conquering Lebensraum in the east and destroying ‘Jewish
Bolshevism’. The Soviet dictator was in no doubt on this point. On the other
hand, Stalin was also convinced that Hitler would never attack the Soviet Union
before he had completed his victory over Great Britain. This period was to be
devoted to pushing ahead with his country’s rearmament programme and
avoiding anything that might provoke Germany into launching a premature
attack. This explains why Russia, unlike Germany, respected the economic obli-
gations to which it had committed itself in 1939–40. Between January and June
1941 Moscow supplied the Reich with 1.5 million tonnes of grain, 100,000
tonnes of cotton, 2 million tonnes of petroleum products, 1.5 million tonnes of
wood, 140,000 tonnes of manganese and 20,000 tonnes of chromium.
As far as the country’s armaments were concerned, the Soviet Union had
more planes, more tanks and far more pieces of artillery than the German
Reich in 1941: in the case of the latter, the respective figures were 42,300 and
7,000. The Red Army maintained an army of 2.5 million men in the west of the
Soviet Union and 2.2 million in the Far East. The Wehrmacht, conversely, had
at its disposal 152 divisions made up of three million men, in total around
three-quarters of the army in the field.
But whatever advantages the Soviet army may seem to have had in the
summer of 1941, these had to be offset by serious shortcomings in terms of its
technical equipment and operational training but above all by the fatal conse-
quences of the great purge that had taken place in the Red Army. Stalin had
effectively removed its head when in 1937–8 he had dismissed more than
34,000 officers from their posts. Of these, some 22,000 were murdered, among
them eighty of the country’s top military leaders. Of the survivors, some 10,000
of the arrested officers were welcomed back into the army’s ranks in 1940. But
the Red Army certainly did not feel that it was ready for action in 1941. Stalin
reckoned that it would not reach its full fighting strength until the end of 1942.
712 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Strategically speaking, the Soviet Union had banked on being able to move
swiftly from defence to attack since the days of Mikhail Tukhachevsky.
Underlying the army’s strategy was the assumption that any war would begin
with a declaration of hostilities and a general mobilization. This assessment did
not change when the defence commissar, Kliment Voroshilov, was dismissed in
May 1940 following the failure of the Finno-Soviet Winter War and was replaced
by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko. If Germany were to attack, then such an
assault, they believed, would come from south of Brest-Litovsk and from the
Balkans and be directed at the Ukraine.
There was certainly no lack of warnings of an imminent German attack in
the first five months of 1941. On 21 April, for example, Churchill sent word to
Stalin via the British ambassador in Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, a left-wing
independent socialist, that the British secret service was expecting such a
move, but the Soviet leader suspected that this was a trap – an attempt on
London’s part to drive Moscow into a war with Berlin. Not even the Soviet
secret service’s own views on the matter were taken seriously by Stalin, and this
remained the case even when trustworthy German informants such as Harro
Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack, two members of the legendary ‘Red
Orchestra’, and the Tokyo master spy Richard Sorge reported on Hitler’s plans.
On 5 May Stalin took a step that he intended to be interpreted as a powerful
demonstration of his wish to raise morale: he took over Molotov’s seat on the
Council of People’s Commissars so that the party and the government were
now being run by one and the same person. That same day he addressed gradu-
ates from the Military Academy as well as army leaders and the leading members
of his government, describing the Red Army as an assault army equipped with
modern weapons, but he continued to resist the idea of a preventive war
against Germany, which both Timoshenko and the chief of the general staff,
Georgi Zhukov, were advising him to consider in a revised plan of operation
that they suggested he should adopt at a later stage. His suspicions towards
democratic Britain continued to be no less real than those that he entertained
towards National Socialist Germany, and when Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Heß,
on his own initiative flew to Britain on 10 May, where he was immediately
arrested after landing by parachute, Stalin’s first response was to see in Heß’s
action an attempt on Hitler’s part to reach an agreement with Britain on an end
to the war in the west before unleashing an attack on Russia. But neither in
Berlin nor in London was there any support for this amateurish demarche by
the Führer’s deputy.
By the beginning of June news agencies were reporting in increasing
numbers on an imminent German attack, and so Stalin was unable to avoid
ordering troop reinforcements on Russia’s western border and the forward
placement of the army’s command centres. On 19 June the Red Army began to
camouflage aerodromes and send aircraft to airports closer to the border. But
it was necessary to do everything possible to avoid anything that might have
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 713

provoked the German side, a directive that continued to apply even when, in
the middle of June, it became increasingly clear in Moscow that the date for the
attack was set for 22 June. The people’s commissar for internal security, Lavrentiy
Beria, wrote to Stalin on the 21st and demanded the recall of the Soviet ambas-
sador in Berlin, Vladimir Dekanozov, who he alleged was providing Moscow
with false information and had just announced that Germany would attack the
Soviet Union the very next day. Beria was determined not to be misled. Like all
other Soviet leaders he trusted Stalin’s superior judgement, and Stalin continued
to be convinced that Hitler would not risk waging a war on two different fronts
simultaneously.
Once the unthinkable had happened, orders were sent to the Red Army
early on the morning of 22 June 1941 to repel and destroy the enemy wherever
he had violated the Soviet border. But the Wehrmacht seemed unstoppable. By
28 June Minsk had fallen into German hands, and within a week German
troops were already 350 miles inside Russia. On 29 June the Central Committee
of the Soviet Communist Party declared the war with the Fascist aggressor the
‘Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union’. Stalin, who since 1 July was also the
chairman of the Defence Committee of the Soviet Union, appealed to the popu-
lation on the 3rd to wage a partisan war behind the front line. This was the day
on which the German chief of the general staff, Franz Halder, predicted that
Germany could win the war with Soviet Russia within two weeks at the most.

In a radio address on 22 June 1941 Hitler sought to present the attack on the
Soviet Union as an act of self-defence. Among the extortionist and aggressive
actions on the part of the Soviet Union that had forced him to take this step he
mentioned not only the Belgrade putsch of 27 March but also the attempted
overthrow of the Romanian Conducator, Ion Antonescu, by the Fascist ‘Iron
Guard’, which until then had been actively encouraged by Germany, at the end
of January 1941. But the main reason for his intervention, Hitler explained, was
the coalition between London and Moscow that the two countries had recently
agreed to. After repeated border violations by the Soviet Union, ‘the time has
now come when it is necessary to counter this plot by Jewish-Anglo-Saxon
warmongers and by the no less Jewish powers that be in the Bolsheviks’ head-
quarters in Moscow’.27
To the extent that they were not dyed-in-the-wool National Socialists, most
Germans reacted with dismay to this new development but quickly allowed
themselves to be won over by the Wehrmacht’s military successes. Among the
first to applaud the invasion of the Soviet Union were Evangelical and Catholic
churchmen. The Spiritual Liaison Council of the German Evangelical Church
whose chairman was the bishop of Hanover, August Marahrens, wrote to Hitler
on 30 June to thank him for having called on ‘our people and on the peoples of
Europe to take up arms so decisively against the mortal enemy of all order and
of all western Christian culture’. The Catholic bishops merely invited their
714 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

flock to ‘perform their duties faithfully, to endure bravely and to show self-
sacrifice in working and fighting in the service of our people’, but a number of
princes of the Church went even further during the months that followed, the
bishop of Eichstätt, Michael Rackl, for example, hailing the Russian campaign
as a ‘crusade, a holy war for home and nation, for faith and Church, for Christ
and His most holy Cross’. The bishop of Münster, Count Clemens August von
Galen, likewise proclaimed the campaign a just war against the godless
Bolsheviks, announcing in a pastoral letter of 14 September 1941 that ‘the
declaration on the part of our Führer and Reich chancellor’ that the ‘Russian
pact’ had run its course had ‘liberated us from a serious concern and provided
a release from extreme pressure’. It was with approval that he cited Hitler’s
reference to the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik powers that be in Moscow’. In the same
letter, however, the bishop was severely critical of National Socialism – and not
for the first time. Galen described as ‘horrendous’

adherence to a teaching that claims that it is permissible to take the lives of

‘unproductive people’, of those poor, innocent people who are mentally ill.
It is a doctrine that essentially opens the door to the violent killing of all
people who are declared to be ‘unproductive’, of those who are incurably
sick, war invalids and the disabled and those who are old and weak.28

Galen’s personal standing and the furore caused by his public protests at
the euthanasia programme – euphemistically called the ‘euthanasia action’ –
ensured that he was not immediately arrested and sent to a concentration camp.
Hitler’s decree of 1 September 1939 had resulted in the deaths of more than 70,000
men, women and children by the summer of 1941. They were initially killed by
lethal injection, then, from January 1940, by being gassed by carbon monoxide.
The programme was interrupted on 24 August 1941, disquiet among the popula-
tion at large having reached the point where Hitler felt that it was politically
dangerous to ignore the outcry, but the interruption did not mean an end to the
‘destruction of life not worth living’, for Hitler’s instructions applied only to those
centres of mass killings in the old Reich that had come to public attention, namely,
Grafeneck in Württemberg, Hadamar near Limburg and Brandenburg an der
Havel. The murders continued in a decentralized form and using other means,
including deliberate starvation (a method already employed during the First
World War), mass shootings by the SS in the new Gau of Danzig-West Prussia and
even the use of dynamite. One group of patients who were invariably killed without
even an examination of the individual case were Jews who were mentally ill.
Meanwhile Germany was continuing to conduct its campaign in the east
with the help of other European nations. Romania and Italy signed up to the
action on 22 June, the former by offering the bulk of its armed forces, the latter
with only an expeditionary force, followed by Slovakia on the 23rd. When
Finland took a similar step on the 25th, it stressed the fact that it was supporting
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 715

the Reich not as a federal ally but as ‘co-belligerent’. From a Finnish standpoint
this was merely a question of pursuing a war that had been in progress for some
time and of regaining land that the country had had to cede to the Soviet Union
under the terms of the Peace of Moscow of 12 March 1940. On 27 June, a day
after Finland declared war on the Soviet Union, Hungary did the same, citing
alleged Soviet air raids as its reason for doing so. Three Hungarian divisions
were involved in the occupation of the Ukraine, but the country’s military
engagement remained largely symbolic, at least until the spring of 1942.
Even before the war with the Soviet Union had actually started, the German
leadership had decided that from 1942 the Wehrmacht should satisfy its need
for food within Russia itself. According to the minutes of a meeting of secre-
taries of state on 2 May 1941, this meant accepting as many as forty million
deaths from starvation inside the Soviet Union. The comprehensive directives
for the Germanization of the new Lebensraum in the east were contained in
the General Plan for the East, the initial version of which was submitted by
Himmler on 15 July 1941. It had been drawn up with the help of agricultural
scientists from the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and proposed that
within thirty years eastern Poland, the Baltic States, Belorussia and parts of the
Ukraine would all be settled by Germans, which presupposed that thirty-one
million local inhabitants would be moved to western Siberia, while fourteen
million ‘of good race’ could remain where they were. Included in this mass
deportation project were not only Russians, White Russians and Ukrainians
but also Poles and Czechs. Between 80 per cent and 85 per cent of all Poles
would be deported, the highest quotient of all the nationalities in question,
followed by White Russians, or ‘White Ruthenians’ (75 per cent), and
Ukrainians (65 per cent).
The following day, 16 July 1941, Hitler laid out his plans for the occupied
areas in the east. Among those present on this occasion were Hermann Göring
and Alfred Rosenberg, who was to be appointed Reich minister for the occupied
regions on the 17th. The European part of the Soviet Union was to be divided
into four commissariats, namely, the Ukraine, the Eastern Region (Ostland)
with the Baltic States and Belorussia, Muscovy and the Caucasus. This ‘enor-
mous cake’ had to be ‘sliced up in a handy way so that we can, first, control it,
second, administer it and, third, exploit it’. But the world must not find out that
this was a long-term plan:

All necessary measures – shooting, resettlement and so on – we shall under-

take in spite of this, and we can undertake them in spite of this. [. . .] The
formation of a military power to the west of the Urals must never again be
raised even if we have to wage war for a hundred years. [. . .] It must always
be our inviolable principle that no one else must be allowed to bear arms
except Germans. [. . .] The soldier must always ensure that the regime is
secure.29
716 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

In the course of a conversation in his headquarters three months later, on 17

October 1941, Hitler summed up his ambitions for the east in a single sentence:
‘There’s only one duty: to Germanise this country by the immigration of
Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.’30
The campaign in the east was planned by Hitler and his army leaders as a
blitzkrieg. But military developments on the eastern front during the summer
of 1941 did not always live up to the expectations of the more optimistic of
the generals. The German troops continued their advance in the Baltic States
and in the Ukraine, but after the fall of Smolensk they were brought to a stand-
still further south. The military wanted to press ahead to Moscow, but Hitler
refused, not least for economic reasons, the capture of Kiev and of the Donets
Basin striking him as far more important than the fall of the capital. At the
end of August the Soviet Union was able to profit for the first time from the
agreement on mutual assistance – and against a separate peace – that it had
signed with the United Kingdom on 12 July: Soviet and British troops marched
into neutral Iran, defeating its forces and obliging the Axis-friendly shah, Reza
Shah Pahlavi, to abdicate. The country was divided into three zones, a Soviet
zone in the north, a British zone in the south and a neutral zone in the middle.
From then on Great Britain and, at a later date, the United States were able to
provide the Soviet Union with military equipment, which reached Russia
via Iran.
Along the northern section of the eastern front the Wehrmacht, working
together with Finnish units, was able to complete the almost total encirclement of
Leningrad by early September 1941. Hitler was resolved to subjugate the city by
starving its million or so inhabitants, although Lake Ladoga allowed minimal
supplies to get through to them. Kiev fell on 17 September, when 665,000
members of the Red Army were taken prisoner. In early October the Army Group
Centre began to advance on Moscow between Smolensk and Orel. Stalin
proclaimed a state of siege in the capital on 19 October after the government
apparatus and diplomatic corps had already fled from the city.
In the extreme south-east, Rostov, which had only recently been taken,
was lost on 21 November. By now Moscow was almost within sight of the
German troops but was saved by a period of muddy weather and then by the
early onset of a particularly harsh Russian winter. Leningrad, too, remained
undefeated. Already exhausted, the Wehrmacht was ill-equipped to face a
winter war. Although 3.3 million Russian soldiers had been taken prisoner, the
Soviet Union was nowhere near the point of collapse, and by early December it
had begun a counteroffensive along several sections of the front. The strategic
objective of Operation Barbarossa – the defeat of the Soviet Union by means
of a blitzkrieg – had failed. Several generals were relieved of their posts, and
the commander in chief of the army, Walther von Brauchitsch, was likewise
dismissed. On 19 December 1941 Hitler himself assumed control of the
army.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 717

Hitler had not consulted with his Far Eastern partner in the Tripartite Pact
when launching Operation Barbarossa. Tokyo’s hope that a coalition with
Berlin, Rome and Moscow would deter the Anglo-Saxon powers from seeking
to counter Japanese expansion in the Pacific had therefore proved misplaced.
When the Japanese foreign minister, Matsuoka Yosuke, who in April 1941 had
signed the neutrality treaty with Moscow, tried to persuade his government to
enter the war, he encountered considerable opposition on the part of both his
navy and, to a lesser extent, his army. Both of them rejected the ‘northern
option’ and insisted on the superiority of its ‘southern’ alternative. Matsuoka
was forced to resign on 15 July in the wake of a cabinet reshuffle. He was
replaced as foreign minister by Admiral Teijiro Toyoda, one of whose tasks was
to explore the possibility of peace talks with the United States.
In practice, however, Tokyo’s policies ran counter to this aim. On 24 July a
40,000-strong Japanese army marched into the southern part of French
Indochina, an action undertaken in the face of American warnings but with the
reluctant backing of the Vichy government, its aim being to cut off the Burma
Road, which was the most important of Chiang Kai-shek’s supply routes, and
provide free access to the oil wells in the Dutch East Indies. The United States
reacted on 26 July by freezing all of the Japanese assets that it controlled and
extending the existing economic embargo to crude oil. Three days later Great
Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the Dutch East Indies followed suit, the last-
named country through the Dutch government in exile in London. Japanese oil
reserves were enough for three years at the most, and so it became a matter of
urgency to seize the resources of the Dutch East Indies. On 3 September a
liaison conference including representatives of the government and the military
resolved to prepare for war against the United States, Great Britain and the
Netherlands but at the same time to continue informal talks with America on
condition that a decision was reached by 10 October at the latest. The army and
navy were to be ready for action five days after that. On 6 September an impe-
rial conference attended by the vacillating Emperor Hirohito, who was gener-
ally reluctant to go to war, confirmed the Principles for the Implementation of
Imperial Policies that had been passed three days earlier.
For a time it seemed as if it might still be possible to avoid a conflict with the
United States. Roosevelt was not averse to agreeing to a meeting proposed by
Konoe, but he insisted on the stringent conditions that his secretary of state,
Cordell Hull, had laid down in his Four Points in April 1941, including the with-
drawal of Japanese troops from China. He also demanded preparatory talks. On
13 September a liaison conference in Tokyo agreed the basic conditions for
peace between Japan and China, under which the Japanese military would with-
draw from China only after the government of Chiang Kai-shek in Chungking
had merged with the Japanese puppet regime under Wang Jingwei in Nanking,
which in the circumstances was never likely to happen. China was also expected
to recognize the Japanese satellite state of Manchukuo. On 2 October Hull
718 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

informed the Japanese ambassador, Kichisaburo Nomura, that America rejected

these proposals.
Konoe himself was willing to ignore the ‘China incident’ – as the Sino-
Japanese War that had started in 1937 was routinely described in Tokyo – and
in that way to meet America’s demands more than halfway, but he was unable
to obtain a majority in cabinet. His most outspoken opponent was General Tojo
Hideki, the minister of the army, who considered any retreat in the face of
American demands to be incompatible with Japanese honour. On 16 October
the prime minister bowed to the inevitable and asked the emperor to dismiss
him. Konoe took the opportunity to repeat remarks that he had already made
to Tojo: he could take responsibility for a major war only if the conflict with
China had first been resolved. Tojo succeeded him on 18 October, retaining the
post of army minister and also taking over the Home Office. Hirohito rescinded
the decree of the imperial conference on 6 September and asked his govern-
ment to continue its secret talks with the United States, a task that fell to the
foreign minister, Togo Shigenori, who had previously been his country’s ambas-
sador in Berlin and Moscow.
The die was cast at a liaison conference between the government and the
military on 1 November. The ‘hawks’ finally got their way after a seven-hour
debate, arguing that it was better to wage war now rather than later, when
America would be even stronger. At 01:30 on the morning of 2 November the
assembled members voted to go to war with the United States, Great Britain
and the Netherlands in early December if by midnight on the 1st the talks with
Washington had failed to reach a satisfactory outcome. An imperial conference
confirmed this decision on 5 November. The decisive factor was the conviction
that only in this way could Japan prevent itself from running out of fuel for
military purposes within the next two years. In November 1941 the country’s
leaders did indeed believe that they had their backs to the wall. But it was their
own policies that had driven them into this impasse, policies which had begun
in September 1931, when the country had marched into Manchuria and which
it had continued in July 1937 when it had embarked on its war with China.

When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, the dyed-in-the-wool anti-Communist

Winston Churchill lost no time in greeting the Soviet Union as a companion in
misfortune and fellow combatant. By the evening of 22 June 1941 he had
announced in a radio address heard by millions of Americans in addition to his
listeners at home that ‘the Russian danger is our danger, and the danger of the
United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home
is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe’.31
Two days later Roosevelt, addressing a group of journalists, declared that it
went without saying that the United States would offer Russia all the help that it
could. In a subsequent declaration on 26 June he made it clear that he would not
place the Soviet Union at a disadvantage by appealing to the Neutrality Act.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 719

Ever since the German victory over France in June 1940 Roosevelt had been
clear about three things: first, the United States would have to enter the war
sooner rather than later (he had first referred to it as the ‘Second World War’ in
March 1941); second, the greatest threat to his country was the one posed by
the most aggressive dictator, Adolf Hitler; and, third, there remained practically
no prospect of his gaining a majority in Congress for any declaration of war.
Knowing this, Roosevelt proceeded to create what as far as possible was a
fait accompli. He had declared a state of national emergency as early as May
1941, a declaration that allowed him to take exceptional measures. In early July,
with the agreement of the government in Reykjavík, he sent 4,400 marines to
Iceland to replace the British and Canadian troops that had occupied the North
Atlantic island in May 1940 but which Churchill felt were needed in the thea-
tres of war in Europe and North Africa. Iceland had tremendous strategic
significance for any naval war and could not be allowed to fall into German
hands, a point on which Roosevelt was in full agreement with leading military
figures in the United States.
In the case of an amendment to the Selective Service Act of September
1940, conversely, Roosevelt needed the approval of Congress, which had not
been the case with his occupation of Iceland. The aim of the measure was to
extend the period of military service for all conscripts for the duration of the
national emergency, to make it possible to deploy them outside the western
hemisphere and to raise the upper limit of 900,000 army personnel. In the
Senate the draft amendment received a clear majority of forty-five votes to
thirty, albeit after a heated debate, while in the House of Representatives, the
majority was a single vote: 203 in favour of the motion, 202 against it. If the
isolationists had had their way, the United States would have forfeited its mili-
tary defences at the very time that it was facing its severest threat to date.
At the end of July, even before Roosevelt had won this trial of strength in
Congress, his closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, who was also head of the coun-
try’s Lend-Lease Program, travelled to Moscow from Great Britain via the
polar route. With the support of the president and the State Department, he
wanted to establish what exactly Stalin envisaged by way of American help. For
the Soviet leader, the country’s most pressing needs were anti-aircraft guns,
machine guns and rifles, but Stalin also took up Hopkins’s suggestion of an
American-British-Soviet conference in Moscow. Roosevelt was urged to enter
the war at the first available opportunity: without American help the Soviet
Union and Great Britain would hardly be able to destroy Germany’s military
might. That Roosevelt shared this assessment was clear from a message he sent
and that Hopkins passed on to Stalin.
It was not until 9 August that Hopkins saw Roosevelt again, when, together
with Churchill, he arrived at Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland on
board the Prince of Wales. This was the first time that Roosevelt, who travelled
to the meeting on the cruiser Augusta, had met the British prime minister in
720 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

person. They discussed the international situation, including not only what the
two Anglo-Saxon powers might do to deal with the aggressors in Berlin, Rome
and Tokyo but also the outlines of a post-war order. Their support of the Soviet
Union was one of the subjects to be discussed, as was the military protection of
British ships in the Atlantic and, one of their most pressing concerns, the threat
posed by Japan in the Pacific. For Churchill, the most important outcome of
the meeting was Roosevelt’s belated promise to provide a military escort not
just for American and Icelandic ships but for those from other nations on their
voyage between the United States and Iceland. On the other hand, Roosevelt
was unable to hold out the promise of America’s entry into the war as desired
by the British prime minister, who had to make do with the president’s
announcement that he would keep his eyes open for a suitable ‘incident’ that
might be used to justify the declaration of hostilities. For the present he would
continue to fight the war without officially declaring that that was what he was
already doing.
The Atlantic Charter on which Roosevelt and Churchill agreed on 12 August
and which they made known two days later was intended for public consump-
tion, not least the general public in America. In it, its two signatories assured
the world that they were seeking ‘no aggrandizement, territorial or other’ and
would make no territorial changes that did not accord with the freely expressed
wishes of the peoples concerned. They went on to insist that they respected
the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they
wanted to live and proclaimed their desire to restore the sovereign rights and
self-government of all those peoples who had been forcibly deprived of them.
They would endeavour, ‘with due respect for their existing obligations’, to
‘further the enjoyment by all States [. . .] of access, on equal terms, to the trade
and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic pros-
perity’. They went on to assert their desire to bring about the fullest collabora-
tion between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing
improved labour standards, economic advancement and social security. After
the ‘final destruction of the Nazi tyranny’ they hoped to establish a peace that
would ‘afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety’ so that ‘men in all
lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want’. Such a peace, they
went on, should ‘enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without
hindrance’. Finally, all nations should ‘abandon the use of force’, so that all
nations that threatened others must be disarmed. And they vowed to undertake
‘all practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the
crushing burden of armaments’.32
In its tone and content the Atlantic Charter recalled Woodrow Wilson’s
Fourteen Points of January 1918. Both documents sought to present them-
selves as blueprints for a better world order, although the text of the later
charter necessarily represented a balancing act, contradictions between theory
and practice being obscured as far as possible. Independence fighters in India,
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 721

Burma and Ceylon immediately appealed to the right of national sovereignty

and self-government enshrined in the Atlantic Charter, forcing Churchill to
explain to the lower house that such ‘sovereign rights’ applied only to the
downtrodden nations of Europe. This, he went on, was a problem that had to
be separated from the development of organs of self-government within the
British Empire. Britain’s determination to abide by the ‘imperial preference’
enjoyed by members of the Commonwealth – the reciprocally enacted tariffs
and free trade agreements between the Dominions and colonies of the British
Empire – was amply covered by the reference to ‘existing obligations’.
The third member of the triumvirate, Stalin, was absent from the meetings
off the coast of Newfoundland, but Roosevelt and Churchill sent him their
cordial greetings on 12 August. Whatever the two western leaders may have
thought of the Soviet dictator’s love of peace, their immediate concern was to
appeal to the idealism of all Americans and to force the isolationists on to the
moral defensive. In the longer term, however, the Atlantic Charter was nothing
less than a new, if abbreviated, version of the normative project of the West, a
project by which the nations of the West, foremost among which were the
United States and the United Kingdom, must be judged if they wanted to retain
their credibility in the post-war world. By 1945 a further forty-three nations
that had declared war on Germany had signed up to the principles of the
charter, at least on paper. They included the Soviet Union and China. It was
these forty-three nations that Roosevelt presciently called the ‘United Nations’
at the Anglo-American Arcadia Conference in Washington on 1 January 1942.
There was no lack of ‘incidents’ in the autumn of 1941 that were well calcu-
lated to lead to a worsening in German-American relations. On 5 September
Roosevelt announced that the previous day an American destroyer, the Greer,
had been attacked by a German submarine. U 652 had in fact been pursued for
several hours by the Greer with the support of British war planes and a British
destroyer in the seas to the south of Iceland before firing torpedoes at the
American vessel, none of which hit its target. Even so, Roosevelt used the
encounter as the excuse for a shoot-on-sight order on 11 September: from then
on the fleet should fire on submarines belonging to the Axis Powers as soon as
they appeared in waters important for the defence of the United States.
A second incident on 16 October proved more serious: an American destroyer,
the Kearney, was attacked by a German U-boat in waters near Iceland, resulting in
the deaths of eleven sailors. The following day the House of Representatives agreed
to a government request to arm American freighters on their way to Great Britain,
thereby weakening the Neutrality Act of November 1939. A further amendment
to the act, ending the exclusion of American vessels from declared battle zones,
was adopted by a narrow majority in early November. This vote had been preceded
on 31 October by the most serious incident to date between the United States and
Germany, when the destroyer Reuben James was sunk by a German submarine
600 nautical miles to the west of Ireland, with the loss of 115 lives.
722 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

By now the press and public opinion in America were markedly less isola-
tionist than they had been at the start of the war in Europe. According to an
opinion poll in early October 50 per cent of those questioned felt that the defeat
of National Socialist Germany was more important than American neutrality
and, regardless of the anti-Communist mood in the country, there was growing
sympathy for lending support to the Soviet Union, under the terms of the
Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, by sending in supplies, not least because many
Americans believed that this way it would be possible to prevent their own
country being drawn into a war, or anyway delay such a development. The
principal threat was deemed to be Hitler’s Germany, not the Japanese Empire.
After American experts had succeeded in decoding the encrypted radio traffic
between Tokyo and the Japanese Embassy in Washington (the name of the
machine used was ‘Magic’), the American military felt that the country was
relatively safe from surprise Japanese attacks.
America’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, informed the Japanese ambas-
sador of his country’s terms for a peaceful settlement of the conflict between
their two countries. Central to the conditions were the withdrawal of Japanese
troops from China and Indochina, the renunciation of all of Japan’s exterritorial
rights in China, recognition of the government of Chiang Kai-shek as China’s
only legitimate representative and the repeal of the Tripartite Pact. Tokyo
regarded this catalogue of demands not only as a rejection of its own proposals
for a modus vivendi but also as an American ultimatum, and on 1 December an
imperial conference decided that the only response was war.
Washington, too, was anticipating a Japanese attack by this time, but the
American military assumed that it would be directed at Malaya, Thailand or
the Philippines, which since 1935 had been a Commonwealth enjoying internal
political autonomy but under American control in terms of its defence and
foreign policy. United States territory was not considered a possibility. There
were certainly pointers to an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii,
where most of the Pacific fleet lay at anchor. These pointers included a report
from the American Embassy in Peru, but all of them were either lost in the vast
numbers of other reports that were received or they were simply not taken seri-
ously. In fact Pearl Harbor had for some time been at the top of Japan’s list of
targets. An expeditionary fleet left the Kuril Islands on 26 November, heading
for Hawaii. It included six aircraft carriers.
The first Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor at 07:55 local time –
14:25 in Washington, DC – on 7 December 1941, with a second wave of attacks
following an hour later. Three cruisers, eight battleships and four other vessels
were sunk or badly damaged, 188 aircraft were destroyed and a further 159
were rendered unfit for service. More than 2,400 members of the American
armed forces lost their lives and almost 1,200 were wounded. Aircraft carriers
were not hit since they were at sea. Also spared were the bunkers sheltering the
American submarines. At the same time Japan launched a coordinated attack
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 723

on the Malayan Peninsula, Singapore and, shortly afterwards, the Philippines

and Hong Kong. The American island of Guam was captured on 10 December.
Pearl Harbor was the ‘incident’ that sparked America’s entry into the Second
World War, even if Roosevelt had expected that such an occurrence would take
place in the Atlantic, rather than the Pacific. The suggestion that he knew about
the time and place of the attack but deliberately did nothing to prevent it
belongs in the realm of conspiracy theories for which there is not a shred of
evidence. The bodies responsible for military security had lamentably failed in
their duty, but once the Japanese attack had taken place, Roosevelt no longer
ran the risk of rejection when he asked Congress on 8 December to agree to his
declaring war on Japan. The Senate gave its unanimous backing, while there
was only a single dissenting voice in the House of Representatives.
It was by no means inevitable that the United States would declare war on
Germany, but Hitler was keen on such an outcome since only in this way could
he bind Japan firmly to him and conflate the Anglo-Saxon war with the Asiatic
war, thereby turning two separate conflicts into a world war. On 11 December
Hitler informed the Greater German Reichstag that an agreement had just been
reached between Germany, Italy and Japan and that all three powers would
wage ‘the war that has just been forced on them by the United States of America
and England’ with all the means at their disposal, ensuring a victorious outcome
and vowing not to agree to an armistice or to peace with either the United States
or Great Britain without the full consent of all the other parties.33
In fact it may not have been merely military and strategic considerations that
persuaded Hitler to declare war on America and turn the war into a global
conflict. Ever since 1 September he had repeatedly threatened to destroy European
Jewry in the event of ‘international finance Jewry’ succeeding in plunging the
nations of the globe into another world war. Now a world war was a fact, and
Hitler could start to do what he had long been wanting to do but had not yet
ordered: the systematic extermination of Jewry throughout Europe.

Genesis of Genocide: The ‘Final Solution’ (I)

Until the summer of 1941 the National Socialist leadership in Germany had
been unclear as to what it should do with those Jews who were living in the
regions that had been overrun by the Wehrmacht. Following the occupation
and partition of Poland, Berlin was initially inclined to consider a ‘territorial’
solution within the country itself, especially in Lublin, in the eastern part
of the General Government. Here Hitler and Himmler envisaged the creation
of a special Jewish ghetto, but the first deportations between October and
December 1939, involving almost 90,000 men, women and children, proved so
chaotic that the governor, Hans Frank, protested vehemently against the plan
to establish a kind of Jewish reservation to the east of the Vistula, with the river
providing a natural barrier. His protests initially proved successful.
724 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Frank was helped by the fact that in the early summer of 1940 an alternative
solution to the ‘Jewish question’ found Himmler’s approval, this time abroad. In
early June 1940, shortly before Germany’s victory over France, the head of the
Foreign Office’s ‘Jewish Desk’, Franz Rademacher, took up an idea which, first
proposed in 1885 by the German anti-Semite Paul de Lagarde, had been revived
in the second half of the 1930s by the Polish colonels’ regime. All Jews – or, in
Rademacher’s taxonomy, all ‘Western Jews’ – were to be deported to Madagascar,
which at this date was still part of France’s colonial empire. Once Hitler had
approved this idea, the Reich Main Security Office submitted a plan in August
1940 under which the East African island would be turned into a monumental
ghetto under Germany’s overall control.
Of course, the climatic conditions and the lack of any infrastructure on the
island meant that the ‘Jewish question’ would have been solved in a very phys-
ical way within a short space of time in the form of mass deaths. But this was
not the only reason why the Madagascar plan was no real alternative to killing
the Jews, millions of whom were to have been transported to the island on
French and British ships. Without a peace treaty with Great Britain, this plan
could never have been realized. And since this basic precondition could not be
achieved, the plan played practically no further part in German deliberations
after the end of 1940.
While the National Socialist leadership was considering first the Lublin
solution, then the Madagascar alternative, the Jews were herded together in
ghettos in the Warthegau and in the General Government and in that way kept
apart from the rest of the population. The conditions in these ghettos were so
intolerable that the people living there soon began to die in large numbers –
according to the calculations of the Austrian-born American historian Raul
Hilberg, more than half a million Jews perished in this manner. The ghettos
had been planned as temporary arrangements – as transit camps where Jews
would be housed on their way to more permanent settlements, whether in the
east of the General Government or on the island of Madagascar, but when the
Lublin and Madagascar projects turned out to be chimerical, the German
authorities in a number of places, including Lodz, tried to ensure that the Jews
who were living in their ghettos could at least survive by giving them work in
the armaments industry. But other German authorities, including those in the
Warsaw ghetto, preferred to leave the Jews who were under their supervision
simply to starve to death. In April 1941 the advocates of ‘productivity’ prevailed
over those who supported starvation, albeit only briefly, for with the invasion
of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 a new chapter began in National Socialism’s
policy towards the Jews. With hindsight we can probably say that the fate of the
Jews in those parts of Europe under German control was sealed the moment
that Hitler decided to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ in Russia.
Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union in December 1940. It was about
this time that he announced his desire to ‘find a definitive solution to the Jewish
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 725

question in those parts of Europe dominated or controlled by Germany’, a solu-

tion that would be taken in hand ‘after the war’.34 According to a report filed by
Theodor Dannecker, the Gestapo’s ‘Jewish Expert’ in Paris, it was Himmler and
Göring who passed on the Führer’s request to come up with the blueprint for a
‘final solution’ to Reinhard Heydrich in his capacity as head of the Reich Main
Security Office. When Dannecker drew up his report on 21 January 1941, the
project already lay before Hitler and Göring ‘in all its essential outlines’.
Subsequent planning was to ‘extend both to the work needed to ensure the
deportation of every single Jew and the detailed planning of a resettlement
campaign in territory that is yet to be determined’.35
By March 1941 at the latest Heydrich’s thoughts had been focused on the
Soviet Union, especially on a remote and particularly inhospitable region:
the coast of the Arctic Ocean. On 23 September 1941 he told Goebbels that the
Jews should be taken to the camps that had been built there by the Bolsheviks
and where they had no chance of surviving. That many Jews would die on their
way there was also a part of Heydrich and his associates’ calculations. It seems
likely that by the spring of 1941 the Reich Main Security Office was also
working on plans to exterminate most of the Jews who were capable of working
by forcing them to build roads and drain areas of marshland.
Most of the murders of Soviet Jews were carried out from the very first day
of the campaign in the east by the four newly formed special units of the SS.
Each was assigned an area corresponding to one of the three main army divi-
sions, Army Group North, Centre and South. (Special Units C and D shared the
area covered by Army Group South.) Hitler’s conflation of Jews with Bolshevik
party members and partisans initially meant the death of most of the adult male
Jews within the special units’ areas of operation, but by the end of July the SS
and special units were increasingly bent on shooting women and children as
well, an extension of their remit that stemmed from a new regulation: on 16/17
July Hitler had conferred on Himmler in his capacity as the Reichsführer of the
SS and chief of the German police responsibility for ‘the security of the newly
occupied eastern areas’, in that way leaving the police to solve the ‘Jewish ques-
tion’. On 14/15 August 1941 Himmler met Otto Bradfisch, the leader of Special
Unit 8, in Minsk and informed him of ‘the Führer’s orders relating to the
shooting of all Jews’.36 And Hitler’s orders were duly implemented: in one region
alone – the area covered by Special Unit A, namely, the Baltic States and parts
of northern Russia – some 125,000 Jews and 5,000 non-Jews were killed between
22 June and 15 October 1941. In one of the worst massacres of the war, 33,700
Jews were shot in the gorge at Babi Yar near Kiev on 29 September 1941. The
total number of Jews killed during the first five months of the eastern campaign
was around half a million. The genocide had begun.
Not only did the Wehrmacht place no obstacles in the way of the special
units but in many places helped with the executions. No doubt the discovery of
the bodies of tens of thousands of murdered prisoners held by the NKVD in
726 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the areas that had been overrun in eastern Poland and western Ukraine helped
the soldiers in question to overcome any moral scruples they may have had.
Two German field marshals explicitly told their troops in the autumn of 1941
to regard the war with the Soviet Union not as a traditional conflict but as an
ideological and racial war. On 10 October, Walther von Reichenau spoke for
Hitler when he declared that the ‘soldiers in the east’ were the ‘agents of an
implacable ethnic idea’ who needed to have ‘complete understanding of the neces-
sity of harsh but just retribution against Jewish sub-humanity’. Erich von Manstein
used almost identical language when he declared in November 1941 that

the Jewish-Bolshevik system must be eradicated once and for all. Never
again should this system be allowed to interfere in our European
Lebensraum. Every soldier must understand the need to exact harsh retri-
bution on Jewry, the spiritual agents of the Bolshevik terror.37

Even officers like Henning von Tresckow, the chief operations officer of Army
Group Centre, and Colonel Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff of the general
staff, both of whom were to play prominent roles in German opposition to
Hitler, initially agreed with the way in which east European Jews were equated
with Bolshevik partisans, initialling reports on completed executions and
passing on orders to others in keeping with the instructions that they received.
It was only after the murder of the Jews – including women and children – in
Borisov (Barysaw) on 20 and 21 October 1941, by which date there was no
longer any doubt about the genocidal nature of the National Socialists’ hostility
towards the Jews, that Tresckow and his friends decided to draw the ultimate
conclusion from their opposition and murder the tyrant responsible for the
genocide.
Local forces were also involved in the mass shootings of Jews in the Baltic
States, eastern Galicia and the Ukraine, their hatred being directed not just at
the Jews who had sided with the Soviet Union in 1939–40 but at Jews in
general, a state of affairs for which a mixture of religious, economic and polit-
ical motives was to blame. In the small Polish town of Jedwabne in the district
of Bialystok, the Jews were murdered by Poles from their own community by
being either beaten to death or burnt alive in local barns. The Catholic clergy
made no attempt to condemn these and other atrocities. The authors of a
report which, originating within the Polish Church itself and covering the
period from 1 June to 15 July 1941, was submitted to the government in exile
in London argued that

as far as the Jewish Question is concerned, it must be seen as a singular

dispensation of Divine Providence that the Germans have already made a
good start, quite irrespective of all the wrongs they have done and continue
to do to our country. They have shown that the liberation of Polish society
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 727

from the Jewish plague is possible. [. . .] Clearly, one can see the hand of
God in the contribution to the solution of this urgent question being made
by the occupiers.38

The example set by the Germans encouraged likeminded regimes in south-east

and eastern central Europe to emulate them. On Ion Antonescu’s orders, the
Romanian army and gendarmerie murdered between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews
in Romania itself and on Russian soil in 1941–2, while the Croatian Ustage,
acting on orders from Ante Paveli1, conducted a crusade against the country’s
2.2 million Orthodox Serbs and around 45,000 Jews during which unspeakable
atrocities were committed against Serbian women in particular. By the spring of
1942 between 300,000 and 400,000 Serbs and most of the region’s Jews had been
killed without any attempt on the part of Pope Pius XII or the Catholic clergy to
put a stop to the Catholic Ustage. In August 1941 the Hungarian police handed
over around 18,000 foreign Jews to the SS, all of whom were killed in western
Ukraine, together with some 5,600 Ukrainian Jews. In the autumn of 1941
Catholic Slovenia took over a large number of anti-Jewish measures from
National Socialist Germany, including the yellow star that all Jews had to wear
in public and that was introduced into the Reich on 1 September 1941. Excluded
from the Slovak Jewish Statute of 1 November 1941 were those Jews who had
converted to Catholicism. Slovakia was the first European country to begin
deporting its Jews to the east – to the Auschwitz concentration camp – in March
1942.
It was Alfred Rosenberg who, as head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied
Eastern Territories from 17 July 1941, was nominally responsible for the imple-
mentation of German rule over those parts of the Soviet Union that had been
overrun by the Reich. In fact, the task devolved on two high-ranking officials
of the NSDAP: Hinrich Lohse, who was the Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein
and Reich commissar for the ‘Ostland’, which was made up of the three Baltic
States and Belorussia; and Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reich
commissar for a reduced Ukraine, who was also placed in charge of the eastern
Polish district of Bialystok. Koch regarded the Ukraine as an area ripe for
exploitation and saw the Ukrainians as a nation of slaves who were required to
work for their German masters. Rosenberg himself thought that this policy
was flawed since it made it impossible for him to work with anti-Bolshevik
forces in the Ukraine, but his objections were futile since Martin Bormann, the
powerful head of the party’s Chancellery, invariably sided with Koch, in which
regard he could, where necessary, rely on Hitler’s support.
But Rosenberg, too, thought merely in terms of expediency where the Jews
were concerned. When, in October 1941, the general commissar for White
Ruthenia, the former Brandenburg Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube, protested at the
mass killing of Jews, including many skilled manual workers, and wrote to
Rosenberg to ask if all Jews were to be liquidated ‘without regard for age and
728 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

sex and economic interests (for instance, the Wehrmacht’s need of specialists in
armament plants)?’, Rosenberg assured him that ‘in principle economic consid-
erations must be overlooked in the solution of the problem. In general, any
question which may arise is to be solved on the spot, together with the Higher
SS and Police Leader.’39
The extermination of the Jews had begun in the summer of 1941, but there
was much that still remained unresolved. For now, the mass killings were
confined to sections of the Jewish population in eastern Europe, where the
preferred form of killing was shooting. But it was impossible, of course, to kill
many millions in this way in a short space of time, quite apart from the ‘moral’
cost to those actively involved and the impossibility of concealing such killings
from the German public and from the world at large. What was still required,
therefore, was the ‘Comprehensive Plan for Implementing the Proposed Final
Solution to the Jewish Question’ that Göring, as coordinator for all non-military
activities in the eastern campaign, demanded from Heydrich on 31 July 1941.
With regard to his thoughts on a definitive solution to the Jewish question,
Hitler continued to divide Jews into eastern European and western European
Jews at least until the autumn of 1941. On 30 January 1941 he had reminded
the Reichstag of his ‘instructions’ of 30 January 1939, which he had in fact
backdated to 1 September 1939, the day when war broke out, and insisted that
‘if the other world is plunged into a general war by Jewry, then the whole of
European Jewry will have finished playing its role’.40 Hitler evidently regarded
German and western European Jews as hostages that the United States had to
take into consideration in all its dealings with Germany. In his eyes America was
the protecting power and the political arm of international ‘finance Jewry’. If the
United States were to side with Germany’s enemies, foremost among which was
the Soviet Union, then the ‘Jewish-capitalist-Bolshevik world conspiracy’ to
which he referred in his New Year’s Day address on 1 January 1942 was an ines-
capable reality.41 Hitler would no longer need to pay any heed to the Jews living
in the Reich and in western Europe – and this would be even truer once he had
won the war. Whatever the outcome, the Jews had no chance of surviving in a
world that was ruled by Germany.
On 14 August 1941, however, Hitler’s strategic and political planning was
thrown into disarray by the official announcement of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s
Atlantic Charter. Hitler could no longer assume that Great Britain would capit-
ulate and reach a settlement with him in the wake of a German victory in the
east. One consequence of this new situation was his decision to turn his back
on the strategy of a blitzkrieg that would have involved taking Moscow as
quickly as possible. Instead, he now decided that his plan must be to capture
material resources in the south of the Soviet Union and in that way provide
Germany with the means to conduct a much longer war.
The other consequence concerned the Jews, for Hitler now expected the
United States to enter the war sooner rather than later and to spearhead
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 729

an Allied invasion along the Atlantic coast, and so he began to plan to destroy
all European Jews while the war was still in progress. The eradication of
European Jewry was a response to the way in which a war in Europe had been
turned into a global conflict: Hitler operated in terms of the categories in which
he thought.
On 18 August 1941 Hitler agreed to a proposal put forward by his minister
of propaganda whereby every Jew in Germany was required to wear ‘a large,
visible Jewish symbol’, namely, the aforementioned yellow star, the wearing of
which was imposed by the courts on 1 September 1941. In the course of the
same conversation with Goebbels, Hitler addressed the ‘Jewish problem’ in
more general terms, making it clear that he was now thinking of dealing with
the ‘Jewish question’ by physical liquidation on a European scale while the war
was still in progress:

The Führer is convinced that his earlier prophecy in the Reichstag – namely,
if Jewry succeeded in provoking another world war, it would end with the
destruction of the Jews – is now being borne out. It has proved to be true in
recent weeks and months with an almost uncanny certainty. In the east the
Jews must pay the price; in Germany they have already paid the price, at
least in part, and they will have to pay even more in the future. North
America remains their final refuge; and even there they will one day have to
pay the price, be it sooner or later.42

Writing in the weekly Das Reich on 16 November 1941, the minister of public
enlightenment and propaganda informed the German public that Hitler’s
prophecy of 30 January 1939 had been deadly serious:

We are currently witnessing the fulfilment of this prophecy, and although

the fate that Jewry is now undergoing may be harsh, it is more than deserved.
Pity is completely inappropriate, regret even more so. In fomenting this war,
world Jewry has completely misjudged the resources available to it and it is
now experiencing a gradual process of annihilation that it had previously
planned for us and that it would have carried out without a second thought
if it had had the power to do so. It is now being destroyed according to its
own law of ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’.

Goebbels’s message – that Hitler’s prophecy concerning the destruction of the

Jewish race in Europe was already coming true – could not have been clearer,
not least because the print run of Das Reich in the autumn of 1941 was over a
million. Anyone reading or hearing about the minister of propaganda’s article,
with its screaming headline, ‘The Jews Are To Blame!’, will have discovered in
this way that the Jews in eastern Europe were being murdered in their thou-
sands and that the regime was resolved to complete this process by taking it to
730 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

its bitter end. ‘In this historical confrontation’, Goebbels explained to his
readers on 16 November 1941, ‘every Jew is our enemy, no matter whether he
is vegetating in a Polish ghetto or eking out his parasitic existence in Berlin or
Hamburg or blowing the trumpet of war in New York or Washington. [. . .] The
Jews are our enemy’s emissaries among us. Whoever sides with them is joining
the enemy in time of war.’
Goebbels’s article was first and foremost a warning to all those Germans
who sympathized with the Jews that they were threatened with the harshest
reprisals: ‘Anyone wearing a Jewish Star is marked out as an enemy of the people.
Anyone who continues to have private dealings with him belongs to him and
must be evaluated and treated like a Jew.’43 It is unclear whether Goebbels also
intended his article to be read as a kind of final warning to those American Jews
whom he accused of attempting to drive the United States into war with
Germany. But this seems possible. After all, there was as yet no ‘world war’ in
November 1941, even though Hitler had assumed in the middle of August that
such a global conflict was imminent.
Reports in the New York Times meant that American readers were fully
informed about events in Germany and knew that by the middle of October
1941 Jews were being deported to regions to the east of the Reich. These depor-
tations were Hitler’s response to Roosevelt’s orders to the American fleet to fire
‘on sight’ on German and Italian submarines in American waters, an order that
he had issued on 11 September 1941 in the wake of the Greer incident. But
Hitler was unwilling to liquidate German Jews as long as Germany and the
United States were still at peace. On 30 November, when around 5,000 Jews had
been shot near Kaunas without his authorization, Hitler used the occasion to
send a message via Himmler to Heydrich: ‘Transport of Jews from Berlin! No
liquidation.’44 The orders were delayed and reached Riga only after 1,000
German Jews had been shot there, but they were implemented in the case of
other deportations from the Reich. While Goebbels spoke of ‘world Jewry’s’
responsibility for the war in his article on 16 November and threatened all Jews
with liquidation, Hitler seemed willing to wait before issuing orders to annihi-
late German and western European Jews until the war in Europe acquired an
obvious and unambiguous global dimension.
The Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December
1941 brought to an end the phase in the war where Hitler had observed a
tactical restraint in terms of the ‘Jewish question’. It must have been immedi-
ately after Pearl Harbor that Hitler decided to kill all Jews within the German
sphere of influence even while the war was still being fought. ‘We know the
power that stands behind Roosevelt,’ Hitler told the Reichstag on 11 December.
‘It is the Wandering Jew, who thinks that the time has come for him to do to us
what we were all forced to observe in horror in Soviet Russia.’ The following
day he addressed a meeting of national and local leaders, prompting Goebbels
to note in his diary:
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 731

As for the Jewish question the Führer is resolved to settle the matter once
and for all. He has predicted that if the Jews were to cause another world
war, they would witness their own destruction. This is no empty phrase.
The world war is now upon us, and the destruction of the Jews must be the
necessary consequence of this.45

One of the regional leaders who attended the meeting on 12 December 1941
was Hans Frank, who four days later told a session of the General Government
administration that the Jews would no longer be deported to the ‘Ostland’ or to
the Ukraine but would be killed in the General Government itself:

We were told in Berlin: why are you making all this trouble? We can’t do
anything with them in the Ostland or in the Reich. Liquidate them your-
selves! [. . .] For us, too, the Jews are exceptionally harmful, devouring all
our food like animals. [. . .] We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t
poison them, but we can take steps that one way or another will lead to their
successful eradication, which will be done in the context of measures that
must be discussed by the Reich as a whole.46

Two days later, on 18 December, Himmler spoke to Hitler and later noted:
‘Jewish question. / to be exterminated as partisans.’47 The meaning of this
laconic remark is not hard to decipher: now that the Reich was at war with the
United States, all the Jews that Germany could round up were to be liquidated,
just as hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed in the Soviet
Union.
The discussions mentioned by Hans Frank took place in the villa at 56–58
Am Großen Wannsee on 20 January 1942 under the chairmanship of Reinhard
Heydrich. The meeting had initially been planned for 9 December 1941 but was
then postponed on account of the new international situation. Among those
who attended what has become known as the ‘Wannsee Conference’ were
representatives of the SS, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry
for the Eastern Territories, the Office for the Four-Year Plan, the General
Government and the Reich Chancellery, including four secretaries of state, one
undersecretary of state and one permanent secretary. Its aim was to discuss the
‘final solution of the Jewish question’. The minutes were kept by Adolf Eichmann,
who was the head of the Jewish Desk at the Reich Main Security Office and who
recorded Heydrich’s coded explanation of what he understood by the ‘evacua-
tion of the Jews to the east’:

In the course of the final solution and under the appropriate leadership, the
Jews are to be put to work in a suitable way in the east. Jews capable of
working will be dispatched to these region in large columns and segregated
by sex, building roads as they go, during which process a large number will
732 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

undoubtedly be lost to natural attrition. Any that are left over will have to
be dealt with appropriately since they will undoubtedly represent the most
resistant strain and form a natural elite which, if allowed to go free, would
constitute the nucleus of a new Jewish stock. (Witness the experience of
history.) In the course of the practical implementation of the final solution,
Europe will be thoroughly combed from west to east.48

The Wannsee Conference marked the start of a large-scale operation designed

to make those parts of Europe that were occupied or controlled by Germans
‘free from Jews’. In practice, road building no longer played a significant role in
liquidating Jews since the military situation in the east precluded this kind of
colonization. The ‘final solution’ in the sense of mass killings on an industrial
scale was to take place for the most part on Polish territory. From the autumn
of 1941 experts from Operation T-4 – named after 4 Tiergartenstraße in Berlin,
the main centre for murdering the mentally ill – helped with the technical
preparations for the mass murders that were being planned. They already had
experience in the use of poison gas for killing the mentally ill using mobile ‘gas
vans’.
By October 1941 the SS had begun building the first camp to be used purely
for the purposes of extermination at Belzec near Lublin. Permanent gas cham-
bers were installed there the following month, a clear sign that the decision to
begin the systematic liquidation of at least all eastern European Jews had
already been taken by this date. Belzec was followed by Sobibór and Treblinka.
The existing camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek, conversely, were not pure
extermination camps but concentration camps that were a part of larger
economic organizations. Polish Jews and gypsies unable to work were gassed at
Chelmno for the first time on 8 December 1941. As the Dutch historian L. J.
Hartog has noted, Chelmno – also known under its German name of Kulmhof
im Warthegau – was ‘the first murder factory in the history of humankind’.49
At the time of the Wannsee Conference, the machinery of mass murder was
still in its infancy, but it grew in efficiency in the course of 1942. The gas vans
were replaced by gas chambers in Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka and
Majdanek. Zyklon B, a hydrocyanic acid gas, replaced the carbon monoxide
that had been used previously. At Auschwitz-Birkenau the inmates continued
to be worked to death right up to the end, not least at the hands of a subsidiary
of IG Farben, although many Jews, together with gypsies and Soviet prisoners
of war, were gassed as soon as they arrived at the camp.
Hitler never issued any written instructions for the liquidation of the Jews,
reactions to his instructions to kill the mentally ill effectively precluding this
kind of order. But he expressed his wishes concerning the ‘solution to the
Jewish question’ in such a way that his underlings, from the head of the SS to
the Higher SS and police leaders right down to the heads of the special action
groups and special action commandos, were left in no doubt that the most
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 733

radical interpretation of his instructions was the one that corresponded most
closely to his wishes. This is one of the reasons for the increasing radicalization
of the process in question.
Another reason may be sought in the results of previous measures that had
been taken without regard for their consequences. The resettlement of ethnic
Germans in the Warthegau as well as the deportation of Jews from the Reich
and from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to the General Government
created a problem that could not be solved by deporting Jews to what had
formerly been Soviet territory. The neighbouring territories were already
covered by the ‘General Plan East’, and the Arctic coast that had been earmarked
for camps was inaccessible to Germany. As a result, there could no longer be
any possibility of a ‘territorial solution to the Jewish question’ to the east of
Poland. Although such a solution would ultimately have led to the physical
annihilation of the Jews, this would have taken a relatively long time. Once this
option had been ruled out, the only alternative was the ‘final solution’. The
practical constraints that made mass murder seem inevitable – above all the
food situation, which became increasingly critical from the end of 1941 – were
the result of decisions for which Hitler was ultimately responsible. The long-
debated question as to whether the extermination of the Jews was ‘intentional’
or ‘functional’ – in other words, whether it reflected Hitler’s intentions or
whether it stemmed from the inner logic of the National Socialists’ policies on
war and race – cannot be answered as a simple either/or, for both aspects came
together here.
On 30 January 1942 – ten days after the Wannsee Conference and nine
years to the day since he had seized power in 1933 – Hitler gave a speech in the
Sportpalast in Berlin in which he again reminded his listeners of his prophecy
concerning the eradication of the Jews:

We are clear in our own minds that the war can end in only one of two ways.
Either the Aryan peoples will be exterminated, or Jewry will vanish from
Europe. [. . .] For the first time the authentically ancient Jewish law will be
applied: ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ And the more wide-
spread these struggles become, the more widespread anti-Semitism will be
– and world Jewry should take this to heart. This anti-Semitism will find
nourishment in every prison camp and in every family that understands
why it ultimately had to make this sacrifice. And the time will come when
the most evil enemy ever to have been seen in the world will be played out
for at least a millennium.50

In the thousand years between victory over the Antichrist and the Last
Judgement, the devil would have no more power over human beings. Without
actually mentioning his Biblical source, Hitler was referring to Chapter Twenty
of the Book of Revelation in his attempt to convince his German audience of
734 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the importance of their historical, not to say soteriological, mission. And not
just the Germans: no less than Goebbels, Hitler was convinced that Europe
and, indeed, the ‘Aryan’ race in general had every reason to be grateful to
Germany for saving the world from the international threat posed by Jewry.
Although the idea that anti-Jewish sentiment could be used as a means of
enlisting European support for National Socialist Germany may seem absurd,
this development could have been predicted, for the National Socialists’ anti-
Semitic slogans had found a positive response in all those parts of Europe that
were under German influence. After Italy and Hungary, the Vichy government
in France enacted its own anti-Jewish laws, which it did soon after the armi-
stice and without any prompting by Germany. At the end of July a law was
passed requiring all naturalization papers that had been issued since 1927 to be
checked, with the result that some 8,000 Jews lost their French citizenship. The
month of August saw the repeal of a law passed only the previous April and
intended to forbid incitement on racial or religious grounds. And on 3 October
1940, just a week after the first anti-Jewish decree had been passed by the
German military commander, the Pétain regime issued a Statut des Juifs that
defined a Jew as any person descending from at least three grandparents of the
‘Jewish race’ or if the person in question was married to a Jew, two such grand-
parents. It also banned Jews from holding public office and all positions of
ownership or responsibility in the press, theatre and film industries. As a result
of the Statut des Juifs, 140 lecturers and four professors were dismissed from
their posts at the Collège de France.
A further law of 4 October 1940 allowed individual départements to intern
Jews from abroad, although it was not until the May of the following year that
the first mass arrests were made. In June, following the introduction of a new
and harsher Statut des Juifs, a limit was placed on the number of Jews who
could work in several freelance professions, including medicine and the law.
Measures were also undertaken to ‘Aryanize’ the French economy. Some 47,000
Jewish businesses – largely branches of the textile industry as well as depart-
ment stores and banks – were wound up or taken over by non-Jewish concerns.
This blow hit Paris’s Jewish population particularly badly.
Among early victims of the État français’s policy on Jews and émigrés were
two German Social Democrats: the leading Marxist theorist and former
German finance minister Rudolf Hilferding, who was Jewish, and the former
leader of the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, Rudolf Breitscheid, who was
not a Jew. The Vichy police arrested them both at the Hôtel du Forum in Arles
in southern France on 9 February 1941 and handed them over to the secret
services in Vichy, which in turn sent them to the Gestapo’s prison in Paris, La
Santé, where Hilferding took his own life on 12 February 1941. Breitscheid was
deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, where he was murdered in
August 1944, ostensibly in an air raid. The most prominent Jewish Socialist in
France to be handed over to the Germans by the Vichy regime was Léon Blum,
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who survived his years in the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau
and returned to head the French government in 1946–7.
Only in one western European country then under German influence
were there protests at the increasing disfranchisement and persecution of the
Jews, and that was in the Netherlands. In November 1940 teachers and students
at the Universities of Leiden and Delft objected to the dismissal of a number of
Jewish members of staff, and on 25 February 1941 the Communists in
Amsterdam successfully called a general strike designed first and foremost as a
protest at a particularly brutal police operation in the Jewish quarter of the city.
But in all the other countries occupied by German troops the National
Socialists’ anti-Semitic policies encountered a mixture of apathy and muted
approval summed up by Saul Friedländer: ‘The anti-Jewish measures were
accepted, even approved, by the populations and the spiritual and intellectual
elites, most blatantly so by the Christian churches.’51
In Germany it became clear in the course of the war that the regime’s unre-
lenting anti-Semitic propaganda had had an effect – this is the only possible
explanation for the extraordinarily deep contempt for the Jews that found
expression in countless letters written not only by officers but also by ordinary
soldiers, especially those deployed to Poland. In spite of this, the National
Socialist leadership knew that the aim of murdering European Jews would
never have been accepted by the population at large. Notwithstanding pointed
references to the ‘disappearance’, ‘annihilation’ and ‘extermination’ of the Jewish
race, it was necessary, therefore, to conceal the process as such and, hence, the
manner in which the murders were carried out.
It must remain an open question whether Hitler’s closest associates shared
his apocalyptic vision of a final struggle between the Aryan and the Jewish
races. Indeed, it was unnecessary for them to do so to be fanatical anti-Semites.
And it was probably not even necessary to hate the Jews to carry out Hitler’s
orders to eradicate them. It was enough to regard the charismatic Führer as
politically infallible in order to rule out the possibility that what Hitler was
demanding in the name of Germany could ever be wrong. Certainly, it does
not seem to have been necessary to obey orders concerning the extermination
of the Jews: nothing that we know about the German policemen in the east
who refused to shoot unarmed Jewish men, women and children suggests that
any were punished for declining to do so. For the majority – and regardless of
what they personally may have felt about the Jews – it seems to have been a case
of ‘orders are orders’. The social pressure of camaraderie was as a rule more
powerful than the individual conscience.
But a dislike of the Jews was by no means negligible, for both in Germany
and elsewhere it had long been a part of conservative thinking and, for an even
longer period, of the Christian tradition in general. Even if hatred of the Jews
grew into a murderous delight in only a minority of cases, this made it easier to
look away when Hitler set about carrying out his profession of faith. Both of
736 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the country’s Christian Churches had protested at the killing of the mentally ill,
but few members of the clergy objected to the murder of Jews, about which far
more was known than Germany’s leaders wanted. One of the protesters was the
Catholic dean Bernhard Lichtenberg, who paid for his courage with his arrest
and his life. The regime adopted a rather more lenient approach to the Lutheran
bishop of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, who, although an avowed anti-
Semite in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Berlin court chaplain Adolf
Stoecker, repeatedly used his sermons and letters to inveigh against the treat-
ment of Jews. He even wrote to Hitler and Goebbels on the subject, until he was
banned from speaking and writing in March 1944.
Murdering millions of Jews required not only an army of helpers willing to
carry out orders, it also presupposed the complicity of the country’s various
elites: the military, whose successes on the battlefield had made it possible to
build the extermination camps in the first place; the industrialists who profited
from the policy of working their employees to death; the banks who turned the
wedding rings and gold fillings of murdered Jews into currency for the Reich
and provided loans to build the camps; the scientists and technicians who set
up the machinery for mass murder; the doctors who undertook inhuman
experiments on Jewish and other prisoners; the lawyers who gave a semblance
of legitimacy to the disfranchisement and persecution of the Jews; and the
historians and economists who laid the foundations for the ‘solution of
the Jewish question’ by placing their knowledge at the service of the regime.
The murder of the Jews was not a secret project that German history was
designed from the outset to complete, but German history can explain why
there was so little resistance to it when the man in whom the majority of
Germans still believed set about the realization of a project involving the most
extreme form of anti-Semitism that the world has ever witnessed.

A Change of Direction: The Axis Powers go on the Defensive

For Germany, the year 1942 began with bad news from the eastern front: the
Red Army had succeeded in advancing from the Valdai Heights to an area
north of Smolensk, in that way driving a wedge between the Army Group
Centre and the Army Group North. And by 18 January Soviet troops had
broken through the positions of Army Group South to the south of Kharkiv.
It was here, in May, that the German counterattack began on Hitler’s orders. In
the course of the operation almost 239,000 Red Army soldiers fell into German
hands. The German summer offensive brought the Wehrmacht substantial
gains in the south-east: by July Voronezh and Rostov had been taken and
shortly afterwards the army reached the Don. The Red Army retreated to
the Stalingrad front, which was then systematically fortified. Units of the
NKVD used extreme brutality to prevent the Soviet troops from retreating any
further.
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By this date the Wehrmacht was running perilously short of fuel, so that
Hitler’s principal strategic goal, at least in the shorter term, was to capture the oil
wells in the Caucasus, especially at Baku. On 21 August mountain troops hoisted
the German flag on Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in the Caucasus, but the
assault on the naval port at Sukhumi proved a disaster. Although the Germans
managed to persuade sections of the non-Russian population to collaborate
with them and formed battalions of Cossacks, Georgians and Kalmucks, the
regrouped Army Group A lacked the ability to capture Grozny and Baku. The
result was a violent argument between Hitler and the army’s chief of the general
staff, leading to Halder’s resignation on 24 September and to his replacement by
General Kurt Zeitzler of the infantry. Seven weeks earlier, on 19 August 1942,
the Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus had begun its assault on
Stalingrad, encircling the city within a matter of days. On 25 August Stalin
declared a state of siege in the industrial capital that bore his name. For Hitler,
the capture of Stalingrad had more than merely strategic importance for, like
Leningrad and Moscow, the city on the Volga was the embodiment of ‘Jewish
Bolshevism’, which was the archenemy that he needed to destroy.
In its war on Great Britain, Germany was able to exploit the fact that in
early 1942 much of the British Mediterranean fleet had been moved to the
Indian Ocean to discourage Japanese aggression. In early February the German
Afrika Korps under Rommel marched on Tobruk, capturing the town on 21
June. Rommel was promoted to field marshal the following day. Both Hitler
and Mussolini had wanted Malta to be captured next, but instead Rommel
turned his attention on Egypt, reaching El Alamein, around sixty miles west of
Alexandria, on 30 June. But the Afrika Korps did not have the reserves to
continue its advance on Cairo, and at the end of October Montgomery began a
large-scale offensive aimed at recapturing El Alamein, which was held by
German and Italian troops. Exiled Polish units fought alongside the British.
From that point onwards, the Axis Powers remained almost permanently on
the defensive in North Africa, and at the end of November, Rommel’s troops
withdrew to Marsa al-Brega, explicitly flouting Hitler’s orders.
The legendary ‘Torch Landings’ had taken place two weeks earlier, on 8/9
November 1942, when American and British troops under Dwight D.
Eisenhower had landed in Morocco and Algeria. The French navy initially
fought back in Casablanca, Oran and Algiers, but on 10 November Admiral
François Darlan, who had been replaced as prime minister by Pierre Laval in
April 1942 and who, now in charge of the Vichy government’s armed forces,
happened to be in Algiers in early November, agreed to a truce in north-west
Africa and was immediately recognized by the Allies as the head of the French
civilian authorities in North Africa. Darlan’s actions were presumably taken on
his own initiative, rather than in secret agreement with Pétain. The leader of
France Libre, Charles de Gaulle, who had not been informed about the Allied
invasion of Morocco and Algeria, lodged a formal protest with Churchill. Darlan
738 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

ignored his dismissal by Pétain on 16 November. On 24 December he was

murdered in Algiers by one of de Gaulle’s supporters and was replaced as the
Allies’ partner in the region by the commander of the French troops in North
Africa, General Henri Giraud, who had escaped from a German prisoner-of-war
camp in April 1942 and was regarded as empathically anti-German.
In Tunisia, conversely, an invasion by German and Italian troops that began
by air on 12 November initially encountered no resistance from the French. In
February 1943 Rommel inflicted a severe defeat on the Americans at the
Kasserine Pass in the south of Tunisia, although this failed to prevent the Allies
from advancing further inland. On 9 March Rommel was replaced as commander
in chief of the German-Italian Afrika Korps by General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim,
who capitulated on 13 April 1943, when 175,000 German and Italian soldiers
were taken prisoner, bringing an end to the war in North Africa.
In Europe, too, the first American troops landed in Northern Ireland on 21
January 1942. Between March and May the first carpet bombing of German
towns and cities was carried out by the Royal Air Force, resulting in hundreds of
deaths during each sortie. Lübeck, Rostock and Cologne were the places
targeted. For its part, the Luftwaffe attacked Bath, Exeter and Canterbury but
failed to achieve its objective of ending British air raids on Germany. The first
– experimental – attempt to land Canadian and British troops in Continental
Europe was undertaken at Dieppe on 19 August but ended in heavy casualties.
The German submarine war in the North Atlantic climaxed in the summer of
1942 with coordinated attacks on American convoys on their way to Great
Britain, but the ‘pack tactics’ employed by the German U-boats ceased to be
effective when the British built a replica of the German Enigma machine and
were able to decode the radio traffic between German vessels. In this the British
experts were helped by information gleaned by the Polish secret service.
The landing of British and American troops in North Africa on 8/9
November 1942 prompted Hitler to launch an operation that he had long been
planning for this precise eventuality: the occupation of those parts of France
that had not yet been overrun by German troops. The move began on 11
November, the same day that Italy, after consulting with Germany, began to
occupy Provence as far as the Rhône. The following day Italian forces invaded
Corsica. When Hitler informed Pétain on 11 November that the operation
was already under way, the marshal protested at Germany’s violation of the
ceasefire agreement of 22 June 1940 but did not call on his fellow countrymen
and women to resist. When the Germans occupied Toulon on 27 November
with the aim of preventing the French home fleet that lay at anchor there from
defecting to the Allies, the commander ordered that the ships be scuttled. Only
three submarines were able to escape to Algeria.
The fact that the Western Allies launched their large-scale invasion in
November 1942 not in Europe – as the Soviet Union and, initially, the United
States had hoped – but in North Africa was due to British insistence: the United
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Kingdom felt that it was in a relatively strong position in the southern

Mediterranean – a region that had always been strategically important for the
Empire – whereas the Axis Powers were comparatively weak in that area.
The failure of the attempt to land troops at Dieppe in August 1942 confirmed
the government in London in its decision to adopt this set of priorities. An
Allied landing on the French Atlantic coast would have required far more prep-
aration and presumably have cost more lives than an invasion of North Africa.
Roosevelt and Churchill did, however, agree that victory over Germany should
take precedence over the defeat of Japan, a sequence of events that in
Washington’s eyes also made economic sense. In the Pacific, conversely, the
United States and Great Britain were for the present inclined to remain on the
defensive in keeping with an agreement that the two leaders had reached at the
Arcadia Conference in Washington during the winter of 1941/2.
Japan adopted the opposite expedient. On 22 December 1941 its troops
landed on Mindanao, the most southerly of the Philippines. Five days later they
took Hong Kong and marched into Manila on 2 January 1942. That same
month Japanese troops invaded islands that belonged to the Dutch East Indies,
including the oil-rich Tarakan and Celebes. From Thailand they also launched
an offensive against British Burma and landed on New Guinea, leading to a
full-scale mobilization in Australia. After an eight-day siege, the British crown
colony of Singapore capitulated on 17 February, when 70,000 British soldiers
under General Arthur Percival were taken prisoner by the Japanese – from a
British standpoint one of the worst disasters in the history of the Empire. Three
weeks later the Burmese capital Rangoon was taken. On 8 March the Dutch
forces on Java surrendered. By now the whole of the Dutch East Indies was in
Japanese hands. The conquest of the Philippines was completed by 6 May.
Four weeks later, on 3 June, the battle began for the American Midway
Islands, which the Japanese were keen to capture above all because they prom-
ised to provide effective protection from American air raids such as those that
had been launched against Tokyo and other cities in April 1942. But the
Japanese aggressors suffered such serious losses, including four of their finest
aircraft carriers, that after four days of fighting they were obliged to call off the
operation. Their defeat proved to be a turning point in the war in the Pacific,
and the planned assault on Hawaii was called off. For Japan, the period of
major military successes and territorial gains came to an end in June 1942.
Japan had also wanted to use the increasingly militant Indian independence
movement for its own ends, but for the present this aim, too, proved unrealiz-
able, and in the early autumn of 1942 the British colonial power succeeded in
restoring order after rioting had broken out following the arrest of the entire
leadership of the Indian National Congress in August. Among those arrested
were Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, who had tabled the Quit India
Resolution at the All India Congress, calling on the British to leave India at
once. In the shorter term the Indian nationalists could no longer expect any
740 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

support from Japan. Nor could they prevent India from continuing to export
foodstuffs, textiles and other goods to Great Britain and its Allies and from
sending 2.5 million soldiers to fight on the various fronts where the Allies were
engaged in hostilities with the Axis Powers. In the wake of its Midway Islands
defeat, Japan concentrated its efforts on consolidating its rule in the areas that
it had already captured and on fending off American and British attacks.
Just as Japan was suffering its first serious defeat, Germany was making
unprecedented territorial gains, its sphere of influence extending from the
North Cape to El Alamein and from the Channel Islands to the Caucasus. But
within months a dramatic change had taken place not only in North Africa but
also in eastern Europe. On 19 November 1942 the Red Army, currently to the
west of Stalingrad, set out on a major offensive from its bridgeheads on the Don.
Acting on the orders of Stalin himself and of Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevsky,
the army first broke through the positions of the Third and Fourth Romanian
Army and then encircled the German Sixth Army under Friedrich Paulus.
Hitler categorically refused to allow Paulus to break free from his position
near Stalingrad but promised to provide an effective airlift, only for this to prove
just as much a failure as a relief attack by the newly formed Army Group Don.
Between the middle of December 1942 and the middle of January 1943 the
Soviet troops succeeded in crushing the Italian and Hungarian troops who were
fighting alongside the Germans on the Don. Shortly afterwards the Red Army
pushed forward along the south of the eastern front, driving Army Group A
from the Caucasus and also from the bridgehead on the Kuban Peninsula that
had been receiving supplies from the Crimea. A few days later, on 18 January
1943, Soviet troops in the north captured Schlüsselburg on Lake Ladoga, in that
way creating a land link to Leningrad, which had been besieged and starved
since September 1941. The supplies provided by the United States under the
terms of the land-lease agreement and including ships, bombers, aircraft, tanks,
jeeps, lorries, locomotives and freight cars had clearly had an impact. Equally
clear was the fighting spirit of the Red Army as the Soviet Union displayed a
military might that taught the Germans the meaning of fear.
Hitler had given strict orders on 23 January 1943 that the Sixth Army was
not to capitulate even though its situation was now completely hopeless. On 31
January Paulus – now general field marshal – surrendered, together with the
southern half of his Sixth Army. The northern half raised the white flag two
days later. Of the original 250,000 men, between 30,000 and 40,000, generally
the wounded, had in the meantime managed to break out. At least 120,000
men had fallen, while a further 90,000 ended up as Russian prisoners of war.
Stalingrad was the worst defeat that Germany had suffered since 1939, a defeat
from which the country would never recover and that dealt an initial blow –
not yet fatal – to the myth of the invincible Führer.
In the course of the weeks that followed, the Red Army took Rostov, Kharkiv
and Kursk, while the Wehrmacht was driven back across the Don. For a time
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 741

the front was mired in mud, but in early July Hitler launched one final large-
scale offensive, Operation Citadel, a major tank battle that began at Orel and
the recently recaptured Kharkiv and inflicted serious losses on the Red Army
but which was then called off on Hitler’s instructions in the middle of July after
a Soviet breakthrough in the central section of the front and the fall of Orel.
This was followed by further Soviet offensives, forcing the German army to
retreat ever further westwards. Kiev fell in early November, and by the middle
of January 1944 the front extended from Leningrad across the Pinsk Marshes
to the Crimea. It was no longer possible for Germany to reinforce the eastern
front since a second front had opened up in Sicily, where American and British
troops under Eisenhower’s overall command had landed on 10 July.
Ever since the Japanese defeat on the Midway Islands and the German
defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad Hitler’s prospects of successfully engaging
with the British Empire on a global scale had progressively diminished. On 28
November 1941 he had received a visit from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj
Mohammed Amin el-Husseini, and promised to support him in the Arabs’
struggle with the Jews in Palestine and with the latter’s British protectors. But
following British military successes in the Middle East and North Africa
el-Husseini could no longer be of any use to the Reich. And much the same was
true of the former Iraqi prime minister, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, who, a declared
friend of the Axis Powers, had likewise fled to Germany and who met Hitler on
15 July 1942.
Hitler had slightly more success with another political refugee, the former
president of the Indian National Congress, Subhas Chandra Bose, with whom
he held discussions on 28 May 1942. In June 1943 Bose was able to escape to
Japan on board a German U-boat. Once in Japan, he convened and headed a
provisional Indian national government, while also forming an Indian national
army numbering between 40,000 and 45,000 Indian prisoners of war in Malaya
and Singapore that fought alongside Japanese troops under Japanese command.
In February 1944 this joint task force attacked the East Indies from Burma only
to be driven back by the British in the April of that year.
Even before the German Sixth Army had capitulated at Stalingrad,
Roosevelt, Churchill and their chiefs of staff had met at Casablanca between 14
and 26 January 1943 in order to agree on their subsequent course of action.
The meeting’s most important outcome was Roosevelt’s insistence on the Axis
Powers’ ‘unconditional surrender’, a phrase that the president recalled had
been used by the commander of the Union forces, General Ulysses Grant, at
the end of the American Civil War in April 1865.
It was a demand intended to counter Stalin’s fear that the Western Powers
might come to some arrangement with Hitler: a special peace with Germany
was now out of the question even if there were a change of government in
Berlin. Germany, Italy and Japan had to capitulate not only militarily but also
on a governmental level. The next stage in the campaign was to be the conquest
742 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of Tunisia and a landing on the island of Sicily. Churchill was particularly keen
to implement this plan because he felt that in 1943 it was still too soon to
attempt an invasion of France, as Stalin was insisting: British losses along
Germany’s Atlantic Wall would be reduced if the Allies had already inflicted
heavy defeats on the Wehrmacht elsewhere. The Western Allies accepted that
the demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ would strengthen resistance in
Germany and Japan, their principal concern being to ensure that both states
should be deprived of their ability to launch any further attacks in the future.

Home Fronts: Nations at War

On 1 September 1939 – the first day of the war – Hitler had assured the Reichstag
that there would never be a repeat of November 1918, and there is no doubt that
on this point, at least, he proved to have prophetic powers. The Second World
War witnessed no strikes in Germany, no mutinies and certainly no revolution.
This was by no means the result of the omnipresence of terror but was due
above all to the ruthless exploitation of the occupied areas that protected
Germany from the sort of famine that it had known during the First World War.
And it was also due to the equally ruthless exploitation of millions of foreign
civilian workers, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates who consti-
tuted a new sub-proletariat subjected to a racist hierarchy: ‘workers from the
east’ were treated far less well than those from the west, the latter group
containing far more ‘volunteers’ than the former. The most inhuman treatment
of all was that meted out to Jewish slave labourers, for whom forced labour was
intended as no more than a staging post on their journey to death.
Forced labour and slave labour by foreigners also ensured that for the
Germans war was not as ‘total’ as might have been supposed on the evidence of
Goebbels’s notorious Sportpalast speech on 18 February 1943. Speaking only
weeks after the catastrophe of Stalingrad, the minister for public enlighten-
ment and propaganda had asked the rhetorical question: ‘Do you want total
war?’ and elicited a frenetic ‘Yes’ from his fanatical crowd of listeners. Universal
conscription for women was never introduced because it would have flown in
the face of Hitler’s petty-bourgeois image of the middle-class German house-
wife. The German people was to remain loyal to its Führer, a goal that imposed
limits on the extent to which the German workforce and especially working
women could be exploited, limits that Hitler personally ensured were never
violated.
Even so, the growth in the armaments industry meant that the proportion
of women who were economically active in the German civilian workforce was
very high at 37.3 per cent – 10.9 per cent higher than in Great Britain. By 1943
women accounted for 48.8 per cent of the workforce in Germany, compared
with 36.4 per cent in Great Britain. As in all wartime economies, far more
women were occupied in professions in Germany that had largely been the
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 743

preserve of men in the years leading up to the war: they were now found as
postal workers, railway employees and bus and tram drivers. And as in all other
countries involved in the war, the German armaments industry was favoured
at the expense of all other branches of industry. In the course of several system-
atic purges, skilled manual workers, tradesmen and women and all those
workers active in areas of the economy that had been producing goods for
civilian needs were forced to take jobs in the armaments industry, a situation
that led to the closure of countless firms, just as was the case with conscription.
Between 1939 and 1944, 48.3 per cent of skilled manual workers were lost to
their industry, while comparable figures for trade and agriculture were 42.7 per
cent and 22.6 per cent respectively.
There was no question of the Germans leading ‘affluent’ lives during the
Second World War, least of all in the final years when air raids were a constant
threat. Even before 1939 the standard of living of the civilian population had
been kept artificially low as a result of the primacy accorded to the need to
rearm the country. The British historian Richard J. Overy has pointed out that
after the war began, German policy consisted

not in maintaining a high standard of living or preserving peacetime condi-

tions but in maintaining a basic minimum beneath which living standards
were not allowed to fall. Whatever happened, there could be no repeat of
the ‘turnip winter’ of the First World War. Hitler’s true priority was equal
distribution not higher consumption. It was a question of ensuring that no
section of the German population had to suffer more than any other and
that the sacrifices that had to be made were equally distributed.52

The exploitation of foreign regions and of foreign labour was by no means the
only resource on which the German economy drew in financing the war. The
principal material burden was borne by the Germans – not so much through
higher taxes and contributions as in a way that they initially did not even
notice: through their savings. The vast increase in the national debt between
1939 and 1945 was possible only because all the institutions where Germans
kept their savings, from post offices to building societies and from banks to
insurance companies, were forced to place their investments at the govern-
ment’s disposal by buying the Reich’s long-term debenture bonds and Treasury
bills. This debt could have been passed on to others only if Germany had won
the war.
The country’s defeat meant that after the war the Germans were presented
with a huge bill in the form of the disappearance of almost all their savings and
the radical loss of the Reichsmark’s purchasing power, a loss that only now
became fully apparent. Savings had continued to grow during the war since strict
economic controls on all goods intended for daily use resulted in a huge surplus
of consumer spending power. Each time that food shortages led to discontent in
744 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the population, the regime sought to react in as flexible a way as possible: when
the workers’ displeasure at small meat rations found expression in the summer of
1942, for example, the rations were immediately made bigger, only to be reduced
again in May 1943 in the face of renewed shortages.
The more the Wehrmacht had to retreat from east to west during 1943 and
later, the worse the food supplies became, especially after the winter of 1943/4.
Few foodstuffs were available, and the emphasis shifted away from meat to vege-
table products. In this way an average urban working-class family was more or
less able to meet its need for calories, but even in those families of labourers who
enjoyed larger rations, the reduction in the consumption of animal protein and
edible fat led to a fall in the usual dietary standards. As the German economic
historian Christoph Buchheim has noted, the mass of consumers had to cut
back, childless households being required to make far greater sacrifices than
families with small children.53 Food parcels sent by soldiers on the eastern and
western fronts may occasionally have helped their families to deal with the
consequences of a failing economy, but the only people to profit from this traffic
on a grand scale were those in political, military or economic power, who
received these ‘care packages’ from neutral countries like Switzerland, usually in
return for a generous payment. Behind the façade of the ‘national community’
there still lay social differences between the upper and lower classes, differences
that grew more extreme in the course of the war.
The Third Reich’s own ambitious plans were also undermined by the
haphazard way in which the German economy was refocused after 1939 to
meet the needs of the war. Not until March 1940 was a Ministry for Ammunitions
and Weapons established under the general inspector for roads, Fritz Todt, who
was given the task of planning and guiding the arms industry. Following his
death in a plane crash on 8 February 1942, Todt was replaced by Albert Speer,
Hitler’s favourite architect, who had organized the Nuremberg Party Rallies and
designed the New Chancellery in Berlin. Under his guidance, German industry
was more rigorously geared to the demands of a wartime economy. Speer also
supervised the army of foreign labourers made up of civilians, concentration
camp prisoners, Soviet and other prisoners of war and ‘working Jews’ who were
ruthlessly deployed in boosting German armaments production, often being
exploited to the point where they were physically destroyed by the work. In this
Speer had the not always trouble-free support of the Thuringian Gauleiter Fritz
Sauckel, the general plenipotentiary for labour mobilization.
By the end of November 1942 some 4.67 million foreign workers were
employed in industry, skilled manual work, agriculture and private households in
Germany, the majority of them Soviet prisoners of war and civilian labourers, who
made up 1.6 million of the total, followed by 1.3 million Poles and 931,000 French
prisoners of war. By the end of 1944 the number of foreign civilian workers and
prisoners of war had risen to at least 8.2 million, a number that does not include
700,000 concentration camp prisoners. The total number of German workers in
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 745

the summer of 1944 was 23.3 million. Civilian workers had the greatest chance of
surviving (94 per cent), followed by prisoners of war (70 per cent), ‘working Jews’
(53 per cent) and, finally, concentration camp prisoners (31 per cent).
If German workers continued to enjoy the social benefits of the pre-war
period, including health and safety standards and especially legal protection for
expectant and nursing mothers, then this was because it was in the regime’s best
interests to ensure the loyalty of the workforce. In the autumn of 1940 the German
Labour Front announced plans for a large-scale programme of ‘Social Services
for the German People’ for the post-war period, a programme designed to provide
a positive picture of the future and in that way to make the present privations
appear more palatable. It included comprehensive provisions for old age, health
care with provisions for leisure and recreation, a national wage, professional
training and social housing. The right to work was also to be enshrined in law
alongside the obligation to work. In a memorandum of September 1940 the
German Labour Front described the provisions for social housing as ‘a bulwark
against old age, against subversion by foreigners and against social misery’.54
Hitler underscored the political significance of this programme by appointing the
leader of the German Labour Front, Robert Ley, to the post of commissar for
social housing on 15 November 1940.
The repressive counterpart to these social benefits, whether already granted
or merely promised, was the increased terror inflicted on all those whose
comments or actions were deemed to undermine the Führer and his ‘final
victory’. As the German historian Rolf-Dieter Müller has observed, the means
used to impose internal discipline on the ‘national community’ extended ‘from
warnings to deportation to a concentration camp and, finally, to execution’.55
The People’s Court that was established as a temporary expedient in April 1934
before being made permanent on the basis of a law passed in April 1936
assumed the functions of the Supreme Court in all matters relating to treason
and other political crimes. Under the chairmanship of Roland Freisler, it
evolved after 1942 into a forum for show trials, dispensing a form of justice that
pursued with particular rigour every violation of newly created and ever
stricter criminal laws. The number of death sentences rose dramatically after
the Germans had begun to lose faith in a ‘final victory’ in 1943. On 26 April
1943, at its final session, the Reichstag conferred comprehensive powers on
Hitler as ‘supreme court judge’, an action that amounted to the removal of
the last remaining vestiges of legality and judicial independence in Germany.
According to the reports of official observers, Hitler’s address to the
Reichstag on 26 April 1942 encountered a largely critical response among
the population at large, a reaction due not only to his attacks on the courts but
also to his hints that the war would not be over even by the coming winter.
Since the last blitzkrieg victories in the summer of 1940, the myth of the Führer
had lost at least a little of its glamour, a process accelerated by the army’s
capitulation at Stalingrad. As Ian Kershaw has noted in The ‘Hitler Myth’,
746 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

It was not the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad, as often presumed, which

saw the turning-point in Hitler’s popularity. [. . .] The contribution of the
massive shock unleashed by ‘Stalingrad’, and the enormous loss of prestige
accruing to Hitler as a result, was to open the flood gates to the criticism
which was already present just below the surface and which – despite the
obvious risks involved – now openly allotted blame to the Führer himself.56

Reports of the loss of the Sixth Army triggered shock, dismay and despond-
ency, but in spite of increasing criticism of him personally, Hitler continued to
be viewed with substantially greater benevolence than his henchmen Goebbels
and Göring, to say nothing of the NSDAP’s regional and local officials. If any
representative of the Third Reich still hoped to command the support of the
broad mass of the population, then it was the man at the top. The pact that they
had signed with him in 1933 and that they had later renewed at times of
national triumph was still upheld by the majority of Germans even at a time of
serious defeats and setbacks. Indeed, they were positively afraid of ending it
even when the fear of air raid sirens and bombing raids became a nightly
reality.

In 1942, just as Hitler’s ‘European fortress’ was reaching its greatest size, so the
Führer’s adversary in London was undergoing the most difficult period of his
wartime premiership: among broad swaths of the population, Churchill was
seen as unlucky, both politically and militarily, while the brilliant left-wing
independent socialist Sir Richard Stafford Cripps, who had been ejected from
the Labour Party in May 1943 and who was currently the lord privy seal, was
deemed a suitable successor. It was not until Montgomery’s successful break-
through at El Alamein in late October 1942 that Churchill’s position was once
more consolidated, whereas his rival’s prestige was damaged by his failure
during an official visit to India in the spring to persuade the National Congress
to come to the Allies’ defence in return for the promise of future independence.
By the end of November Churchill felt strong enough to remove Cripps from
his war cabinet and demote him to the post of minister of aircraft production.
On 1 December 1942, a month after the victory at El Alamein, Sir William
Beveridge, an eminent economist and liberal social reformer, submitted a
report to the lower house headed ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’, a report
that he had drawn up at the request of Ernest Bevin, the labour minister and a
prominent Labour Party politician. It was a forward-looking manifesto for
social change that in many respects resembled the German Labour Front’s
programme of September 1940.
Beveridge proposed a picture of post-war society in Britain in which there
would no longer be any material need, no unemployment, no illness without
appropriate medical care and no ignorance caused by a lack of education.
Central to his report was the idea of national standard insurance based on weekly
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 747

contributions from all workers with a regular income and designed to provide a
basic existence for the sick, for widows, for the unemployed and for pensioners,
while medical care would be provided by state-run public health departments
similar to those introduced by the Labour government in New Zealand in 1938.
What made the Beveridge Report a bestseller was not the original nature of
its proposals, but the plausible focus of many different plans all aimed at
overcoming the class-based character of British society.
The British press greeted the recommendations of the Beveridge Report as
revolutionary in the extreme, The Times insisting that its proposals must be
made the basis of government action: ‘The Government has been presented
with an opportunity for marking this decisive epoch with a great social measure
which will go far towards restoring the faith of ordinary men and women
throughout the world in the power of democracy.’ The Economist called the
report ‘one of the most remarkable state documents ever drafted’:

The true test of the Beveridge Plan is whether or not it will inspire, regard-
less of vested interests, a nation-wide determination to set right what is so
plainly wrong and a series of prompt decisions by the Government to ensure
that whatever else this war may bring, social security and economic progress
shall march together.57

The different political parties were by no means single-minded in their response

to Beveridge’s proposals, Churchill and most Tories fearing that his demands
for reform would distract from the country’s primary concern, the war effort,
while the Labour Party, conversely, felt reinforced in its political aims but was
immediately riven by internal dissent: on the one hand there were those
members of the government who viewed the plan as the basis for domestic poli-
cies once the war was over but as impracticable in the shorter term, and the
majority of members of the lower house, who wanted the cabinet to agree to
Beveridge’s recommendations and to begin to implement them without delay.
A bill to this effect was moved in the House of Commons in February 1943 but
was rejected by 335 votes to 119, with ninety-seven Labour MPs voting against
the government and only twenty-three for it. Among the latter were all the MPs
who belonged to Churchill’s cabinet in one function or another, with only a
single exception.
Since 1940 Churchill had repeatedly described the conflict as the ‘people’s
war’, and there was certainly no lack of impressive examples of national soli-
darity and of practical support for the weakest members of society. In the case
of air raids, for example, better-off families living in the countryside took in
children from poorer families from London’s East End and from the slum
districts of other British cities. But there were also crass examples of Britons
clinging to their privileges and of snobbery and egoism: golf clubs, for instance,
refused to turn their greens and fairways into farmland, while hotels declined
748 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

to accommodate impoverished victims of the air raids. Members of the lower

classes used the opportunities afforded by the air raids to loot shops: in 1941,
4,585 such cases were reported.
The rhetoric of a ‘people’s war’ was also impossible to reconcile with the
racial prejudice to which blacks were still subjected in Great Britain at this
time. In spite of the lack of soldiers and especially pilots, they were initially
unable to serve in the Royal Air Force, and even the Home Guard, which was
made up of civilians intended to be activated in the event of a German inva-
sion, was for a time barred to them. White soldiers from the United States who
were stationed in Great Britain managed to have blacks banned from dance
halls and restaurants at least until such time as the Colonial Office successfully
intervened and reversed the ban. White soldiers continued to have their own
hospitals, cinemas and officers’ messes.
As we have already observed, the number of women in gainful employment
rose markedly during the war. But women who had to look after children under
the age of fourteen or to perform domestic tasks such as preparing midday
meals for their menfolk were excluded from the universal conscription that was
introduced in 1941. For those married women employed in industry and
responsible for looking after small children, the government set up kindergar-
tens. The extension of women’s work met with sustained resistance on the part
of trade unions afraid that their members would be disadvantaged. The offi-
cially acknowledged principle of ‘Equal pay for equal work’ was largely ignored
by employers, with the result that even if women did the same, often highly
qualified work as men, they generally earned only half as much.
In general, economic mobilization in Great Britain was less ‘total’ than in
Germany, a point well illustrated by the fact that the average level of consumption
was cut less radically in the United Kingdom than in Germany: the index of real
per capita consumption fell from 100 in 1938 to seventy in 1944, whereas the
equivalent figure for Great Britain was a drop of only 12 per cent. In both coun-
tries state planning gained in importance during the war. Keynes, who in July
1940 was appointed special adviser to the Treasury, introduced a new kind of
budgetary plan that included not only the state’s income and expenditure but also
national accounts data – periodic accounting using macroeconomic flows ascer-
tained from national product statistics with an account for each aggregate relating
to society as a whole, in other words, businesses, private households, the state,
foreign countries and changes in assets on which all transactions appeared with
the usual aggregates as in any double-entry bookkeeping system. The welfare state
that was being planned for the post-war period was already taking shape in the
form of Keynes’s budgetary reform and the report of the Beveridge Commission.
The repressive side of British wartime politics was felt by foreigners who
were members of the Axis Powers. All Germans and Austrians living in Great
Britain were divided into three categories in September 1939, although only
those placed in the first category – manifest sympathizers of the Third
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 749

Reich – were interned at this stage. In May 1940, following the evacuation of
British troops from France and Belgium, most of the refugees who had left
Germany on racial or political grounds were also interned – by preference, on
the Isle of Man, at least as long as the island could accommodate them all. In
addition to the 25,000 émigrés who were forced to find temporary refuge in the
United Kingdom, there were also around 9,000 who were deported to Canada
and Australia. The manifest injustice caused in this way to Hitler’s opponents,
many of whom were Jewish, helped to convince Churchill to end the ‘general
roundup’ of German and, following Mussolini’s entry into the war, Italian
émigrés in the summer of 1940 and to release the first group of internees. It was
not until two years later, however, that the final internees were released. By
then, many younger Jewish volunteers from Germany and Austria were already
fighting alongside British volunteers in the war on German National Socialism
and Italian Fascism.
The British Dominions went their own way where ‘enemy aliens’ were
concerned, with New Zealand – ruled by the Labour Party since 1935 – adopting
the most liberal approach. Here only those Germans were interned who were
known to be supporters of National Socialism. Australia was harsher in its
treatment of all émigrés from the countries that made up the Axis Powers. Here
all ‘enemy aliens’ had restrictions placed on their movements and were moni-
tored by the police. But even here internment was used only as a last resort
against declared followers of Hitler and Mussolini. After 1940 interned
Europeans were able to object to these measures, although the same was not
true of Japanese internees. Under its Liberal prime minister William Lyon
Mackenzie King, Canada, too, pursued a policy of discrimination towards
potential ‘enemy aliens’. Whereas German and Italian immigrants were interned
in only the rarest cases, Canadians of Japanese extraction were indiscriminately
interned following the start of the war in the Pacific, a case of applied racist
prejudice that Canada shared with its larger neighbour to the south.

In 1940 127,000 men, women and children of Japanese stock were living in the
United States. Of these, one-third were first-generation immigrants, while two-
thirds had been born in the United States or were naturalized Americans.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, both groups were without exception
suspected of being spies and agents working for their country of origin. At the
urging of politicians and of members of the military on America’s West Coast
where most Japanese Americans lived, but also at the bidding of the Department
of War, Roosevelt ordered the internment of all ethnic Japanese on 9 February
1942. Some 110,000 were locked up in isolation in prison-like camps, often in
desert-like conditions. Not until 1944 did internees have a chance to leave the
camps by declaring their loyalty to the government and either joining the army
or taking a job in the country’s interior. The racist character of their collective
loss of freedom was underlined by the fact that there were no similarly summary
750 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

measures against Americans of German or Italian stock. Even so, the Supreme
Court declared the president’s order to be constitutional in a judgment handed
down in December 1944.
‘Japanese Americans’ were not the only Americans who experienced racial
prejudice in the war, for American blacks suffered a similar fate. The wartime
economy led many of them to leave the rural south and move to the industrial
centres in the north-east and Midwest, especially Detroit, where race riots in
June 1943 resulted in thirty-four deaths, including twenty-five blacks. The
previous year black trade union leaders and civil rights activists had formed
the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, which opposed all forms of racial
discrimination, especially in theatres and restaurants, devising new forms of
protest such as sit-ins.
It was thanks to the insistence of one particular black trade union leader, A.
Philip Randolph, who was the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, that Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 on 25 June 1941 banning
discrimination in the defence industry and federal administration on the basis
of race, religion, skin colour and nationality, but his Fair Employment Practices
did not have the force of law, and post-war attempts to give the order legal status
foundered on the opposition of conservative Democrats from the southern
states.
In the military, too, the 700,000 African Americans who served as soldiers
continued to be discriminated against in many ways. The marine corps and the
army’s flying corps were completely barred to them. In the training camps
blacks and whites were segregated, and although more advanced training was
sometimes integrated, few blacks went on to this stage of the programme, while
even in the integrated camps blacks could not be certain that their white
instructors would not subject them to racial discrimination. Some of these
incidents triggered protests and even unrest.
Women, too, were disadvantaged. In the course of the war they were
intended to fill gaps in factories and more especially in the service industries
that had opened up when their menfolk enlisted. Others filled newly created
posts in the government apparatus, which grew considerably in size after 1942.
Professional women were invariably paid less well than men. Working mothers
whose husbands were on active military service had to leave their children
unattended at home or in parked cars since there were no kindergartens to
speak of. In this regard the New Deal had produced few benefits, and the war
meant that building on its achievements was no longer a priority. Instead, the
focus was on doing away with institutions that seemed no longer to be needed
in the face of imminent full employment. Two of the organizations disbanded
at this time were the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress
Administration.
Even before the United States had entered the war, the hostilities had already
led to a substantial increase in state spending and in the national debt. On the
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 751

West Coast, which was nearest to Japan, government contracts in the aircraft
industry and, in their wake, technological research and many highly special-
ized supply industries gave a boost to the whole of the regional economy, as did
investment in infrastructure. The ever-increasing need for workers brought
numerous Mexicans to the south-west, especially to California and Los Angeles,
where violent clashes lasting several days broke out between local and immi-
grant workers in June 1943.
It was the trade unions who benefited most from the boom, their member-
ship rising from 10.5 million in 1941 to thirteen million four years later. Of
course, not all workers and not even individual trade unions felt bound by the
promise given by the country’s two biggest unions, the AFL and the CIO, not to
strike for the duration of the war: between the end of 1941 and 1945 there were
15,000 work stoppages. A strike by the United Mine Workers persuaded
Congress to pass the War Labor Disputes Act (also known as the Smith–Connally
Act) in May 1943, when the Senate and House of Representatives gained the
required two-thirds majority needed to ignore the president’s veto. From then
on the unions had to observe a cooling-off period of thirty days before holding
a strike in any branch of industry that was vital to the war effort. The same law
empowered the president to send in troops to occupy companies involved in the
armaments industry. Calls for a strike in any such industry were banned.
At no point in its history did the United States benefit so much from the
emigration of highly qualified Jewish scholars from Germany as in the years
between 1939 and 1945. Academics driven from Germany by Hitler advised
the American government on questions of psychological warfare and post-war
planning. Their colleagues from the natural sciences helped to ensure that the
United States won the race with Germany to build the first atomic bomb.
American and British experts succeeded in developing rocket technology to
the point where the Allies had a decisive advantage in defending themselves
from enemy submarines, aircraft and missiles. Added to this was the increas-
ingly rapid decryption of German and Japanese codes, the Poles and the British
proving themselves to be pioneers in the case of German codes. America’s
resources seemed limitless, but none was more important than the country’s
mental resilience. After Pearl Harbor, Americans were unanimously behind
whatever their president demanded to ensure that their country and its ideals
triumphed over the dictators in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo.

In the wake of Germany’s invasion of his country on 22 June 1941, the dictator
in Moscow required several days to recover his composure. Among the first
measures that he then took were the evacuation of all industrial plants that were
important for the war effort and, as far as possible, the relocation of the work-
force in all those regions that were close to the front. All were moved to areas
that were believed to be safe from the German army and Luftwaffe, namely, the
Volga, the Urals, western Siberia and central Asia. Weapons factories, motor
752 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

and tractor factories, all branches of the aeronautics industry and steel and
automobile works were relocated from Leningrad, Moscow, the Ukraine and,
shortly afterwards, from the Donets Basin: between July and November 1941 a
total of 1,523 industrial concerns were moved. In his book Russia at War,
Alexander Werth, the Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times throughout
the Second World War and later, describes this ‘transplantation of industry’ as
‘among the most stupendous organisational and human achievements of the
Soviet Union during the war’, while stressing that by no means all industrial
sites were evacuated in time. Nor could they be destroyed in keeping with
Stalin’s ‘scorched-earth’ policy of 3 July 1941.58
From the start of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Russian
workforce was placed under immense pressure. A seven-day week and a longer
working day were introduced on 22 June, and at the end of 1941 all employees in
the weapons industry were declared ‘mobilized’ persons, meaning that they
could no longer change their place of work. Compulsory service was introduced
for the entire urban population in February 1942: this applied to men aged
between sixteen and fifty-five and to women between sixteen and forty. The
rural population was subjected to this same ruling shortly afterwards.
The further east the Wehrmacht advanced, the worse the supply of food
became, until it finally reached catastrophic proportions: the areas occupied by
the German troops by November 1941 were responsible for 38 per cent of
cereal production and for 84 per cent of sugar production in the Soviet Union
as well as producing 38 per cent of the country’s cattle and 60 per cent of its
pigs. As a result, new areas had to be found for farming in the Volga region, the
Urals, western Siberia and Kazakhstan and new crops sown. During the war
agricultural work was carried out almost exclusively by women and children,
who were helped during the harvest by any members of the urban population
who were available.
The psychological mobilization undertaken in the name of the ‘Great
Patriotic War of the Soviet Union’ included targeted appeals to Russian national
pride, with Stalin promoting the cult of leading poets and composers such as
Tolstoy and Chekhov, Glinka and Tchaikovsky, as well as war heroes from the
days of Tsarist Russia such as Field Marshals Suvorov and Kutuzov and even
Ivan the Terrible, the subject of Sergei Eisenstein’s famous epic film of 1944. Also
related to the new spirit of Soviet patriotism was the disbandment of the
Communist International in May 1943, a move motivated exclusively by foreign
policy considerations. And much the same was true of the regime’s no less
demonstrative rapprochement with the Orthodox Church, with which Stalin
signed a kind of concordat in September 1943, allowing the Church to elect its
own patriarchs, to re-establish the Holy Synod as its governing council, to resur-
rect Moscow’s patriarchal newspaper which had been banned in 1936, and to
reopen a number of theological seminaries and academies. The Church enjoyed
a resurgence of its popularity, with growing numbers of worshippers, especially
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 753

soldiers, and responded to the Communists’ concessions by proclaiming its

loyalty and patriotism in cloyingly bombastic terms.
While recalling pre-revolutionary traditions and institutions, the regime
also sought to foment hatred of the country’s German invaders. Among Soviet
soldiers, no writer was as widely read as Ilya Ehrenburg, whose articles were
regularly published in the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). On 23
August 1942, as the Germans were already advancing on Stalingrad, he wrote
that the Russians could endure privation, famine and death but not the
Germans: ‘Today there is only one thought: Kill the Germans. Kill them all and
dig them into the earth. [. . .] We shall kill them all. But we must do it quickly;
or they will desecrate the whole of Russia and torture to death millions more
people.’ And on another occasion: ‘If you have killed one German, kill another.
There is nothing jollier than German corpses.’59
Hatred of the Germans was fuelled by more than merely the acts of barba-
rism inflicted on peoples whom they regarded as their racial inferiors.
Particularly galling to many Soviets was the way in which the Germans were
initially greeted as liberators in the Baltic States, the Ukraine and the Caucasus.
In this way entire nationalities were collectively suspected of sympathizing with
the enemy. The first to be affected by this hostility were Soviet citizens of German
extraction, foremost among whom were the Volga Germans. As early as August
1941, the government in Moscow ordered half a million Volga Germans to be
uprooted from their traditional homeland, where many of them had been living
since the days of Catherine the Great, and deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
The Volga German Autonomous Republic was formally abolished. In total, 80
per cent of all ethnic Germans were affected by these measures. A similar fate
befell all those nationalities that were accused of collaborating with the aggres-
sors, including Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, Meskhetians and Crimean
Tartars. Around 45 per cent of Crimean Tartars died as a result of deportation
and resettlement. In the areas that they had once inhabited, all memory of them
and of their culture was systematically destroyed.
Wherever it was directly involved in the fighting, the Soviet civilian popula-
tion suffered appallingly, but nowhere more so than in Leningrad. In the course
of the siege, which lasted almost 900 days, from September 1941 to January 1944,
between 600,000 and 800,000 men, women and children died out of a total
population of three million. The Germans’ systematic attempt to starve the
inhabitants into submission led to many cases of stealing, looting and even
cannibalism. Even when the culprits were guilty of stealing only bread, the
NKVD frequently reacted by shooting them. No breaks were allowed during the
working week, and those workers who left their posts during that time were
dragged before the courts and accused of desertion. Imprisonment was the
punishment for ‘idling’. If the Red Army had not succeeded in providing minimal
supplies for the encircled city during the winter months, Russia’s ‘Gateway to the
West’ would have become a ghost town by 1944.
754 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The terror suffered by Leningrad at the hands of the NKVD was by no

means exceptional, for wherever the Wehrmacht made advances, the troops of
the Soviet Ministry of the Interior liquidated or deported anyone who was
guilty – or thought to be guilty – of opposing the regime. The bloodiest opera-
tions took place in eastern Poland, the western Ukraine, the former Polish part
of Belorussia and in the Baltic States. In L’viv on 24 June 1941, members of the
Cheka killed around 3,500 of their prisoners on the express orders of the head
of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria, having previously tortured them in particularly
barbaric ways. According to reliable estimates, between 20,000 and 30,000 men,
women and children were killed by the Cheka in eastern Poland alone. They
died as a result of mass shootings, beatings, torture and rape or else they were
forced to march until they literally dropped dead from exhaustion. In October
1941, when panic among Communist Party officials was at its height, Stalin
ordered the NKVD to deport to Kuibyshev all remaining relatives of ‘enemies of
the people’ who were still in Moscow and execute them there. In Stalino, shortly
before the city was taken by the Germans, the Cheka forced all their prisoners
to dig their own graves before shooting them. In the Donets Basin workers were
shot for simply criticizing the regime or the supply situation.
But the terror meted out to the civilian population pales into insignificance
when compared to that inflicted on a daily basis on the members of the Red
Army. Among its earliest victims were the supreme commander on the western
front, General Dimitri Pavlov, and three of the generals under him. All were
arrested following the fall of Minsk on 4 July 1941, accused of an ‘anti-Soviet
military conspiracy’, sentenced to death and shot on 22 July. On 16 August 1941
Stalin issued Order 00270, according to which troops who had been surrounded
were to continue fighting until the last possible moment or regain their own regi-
ment. Those who ‘allowed’ themselves to be taken prisoner were to be destroyed
by whatever means were necessary. The families of members of the Red Army
who surrendered were to receive no state support or financial assistance.
By this date 1.5 million members of the Red Army were already prisoners
of war in Germany, and that number continued to rise, reaching 3.8 million by
the end of 1941. According to later figures, 994,000 men and women were
sentenced by military courts and 157,000 of them were shot for desertion or
other alleged crimes. A further 400,000 soldiers were sent to punishment
battalions for having broken out of an encircled area or having escaped from a
prisoner-of-war camp. These battalions also included many prisoners of war
who had been liberated by the Red Army. The 1.5 million members of these
punishment battalions were sent to the most dangerous sections of the front,
where most of them were soon killed by enemy fire.
Stalin’s own son, Yakov, also fell victim to the dictator’s implacable rigour,
when the boy was captured by the Germans in July 1941 and Stalin repudiated
him as a coward and a traitor, refusing a German offer to exchange him for a
number of German generals. Yakov Dzhugashvili died in the concentration
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 755

camp at Sachsenhausen in April 1943, probably by his own hand. ‘The Red
Army had no means of retreating,’ writes Jörg Baberowski. ‘Its soldiers had the
choice of being shot or taken prisoner by the Germans or being killed by
NKVD commandos. As a result they generally decided to continue their attack,
which gave them a greater chance of surviving than a retreat.’60

Occupation, Collaboration, Resistance (I): Eastern Central

Europe, South-east and North-west Europe
Opponents of Communism who were willing to work with the Germans could
certainly be found in those parts of the western Soviet Union that had been
overrun by the Wehrmacht, especially among non-Russian nationalities. But it
was hard for these groups to collaborate with their ostensible ‘liberators’ not
only because of the National Socialists’ belief in their own racial superiority but
also because the German leadership was determined to use the war in the east
to further its territorial ambitions and win more Lebensraum for the Germans.
This quest for Lebensraum meant that the Slav population had to make way
for the German peasants and artisans who, protected by German weaponry,
were to colonize the conquered regions in order for those areas to be used by
the Reich. The peoples of the east could hope to survive only if they submitted
unconditionally to their new masters and agreed to work for them as their
slaves. ‘Extra mouths’, as they were called, were left to starve to death, a fate also
suffered by many of the five million Soviet prisoners of war, only around a
million of whom survived the war. The land that had previously been farmed
by the native population was now intended to feed the German invaders, while
its mineral resources now belonged to the Germans and to no one else.
Himmler summed up the ‘philosophy’ underpinning the quest for Lebensraum
when he spoke in Kiev in August 1942 and argued that ‘the social question can
be solved only by killing others so that you can get their fields’.61
The practical implementation of these plans was the responsibility of the
two Reich commissars whom Hitler had entrusted with the task of adminis-
tering the newly conquered areas to the east: the Gauleiter of Schleswig-
Holstein, Hinrich Lohse, who was placed in charge of the Baltic States and
White Russia (‘White Ruthenia’) that were lumped together as the Reich
Commissariat of the Ostland; and the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich
Koch, who was responsible for the Reich Commissariat of the Ukraine. The
Ukraine was particularly rich in grain and raw materials, persuading Koch to
see it as a region that could meet 80 per cent of the Greater German Reich’s
needs and also provide a workforce. The leading Ukrainian nationalists
in the OUN, associated with the name of Stepan Bandera, proclaimed a
sovereign state on 30 June 1941 but were arrested only a few days later and
sent to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Alfred Rosenberg, who
came from a German Baltic family and who from June 1941 headed the
756 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Reich Commissariat for the occupied countries to the east, felt that Koch was
committing a serious mistake in so brusquely rejecting the demands of the
nationalist and anti-Bolshevik forces, which had many supporters especially in
the Ukraine, but, as we have already noted, he was powerless to persuade Hitler
to accept his counterproposals. As a result, Rosenberg was unable to hold out
the promise of national independence for those Baltic peoples who were a part
of the western culture group.
Hitler was equally dismissive when the Soviet general Andrei Vlasov, who
had been taken prisoner by the Germans in July 1942, declared his willingness
to form an army of Russian prisoners of war and deserters that would fight
alongside the Wehrmacht and free Russia from Stalin’s tyrannical rule. But in
December 1942 Vlasov was able to convene the Smolensk Committee that
gathered the names of volunteers prepared to oppose the Soviet armed forces
from within German military units. At least half a million former members of
the Red Army heeded this appeal – many of them were no doubt motivated less
by anti-Bolshevik sentiment than by the fear that they would otherwise starve
to death in German prisoner-of-war camps or be shot by the NKVD.
Not until September 1944, when the Red Army was already perilously close
to the German border, did Hitler agree to the formation of a ‘Russian Liberation
Army’, known for short as the ‘Vlasov Army’. It was made up of prisoners of war,
forced labourers and émigrés and for a time numbered 100,000 men. Towards
the end of the war it saw active service on the eastern front in Bohemia and
Moravia. (The Americans to whom Vlasov surrendered handed him over to the
Soviet Union together with his army. He and nine of his generals were executed
in August 1946, while his soldiers were sent to labour camps or, where there were
deemed to be extenuating circumstances, they were sentenced to six years’ exile.)
Among Vlasov’s German supporters after early 1944 was Heinrich Himmler,
who was always happy to set aside his ideas on racial purity when the ‘final
victory’ made it expedient for him to do so. The Waffen-SS, which in the end
comprised thirty-eight divisions, included not only Danish, Norwegian, Dutch
and Flemish soldiers – in other words, ‘Germanic’ units – but also, towards the
end of the war, Latvian, Estonian, White Russian, Russian, Polish, Bosnian,
Cossack, Uzbek, Indian and Arab units. The Russian units formed in the early
months of 1944 also included the Fifteenth Cossack Cavalry Corps, which was
assimilated into the Russian Liberation Army in early 1945. It had proved
impossible to establish the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation
using Germanic forces alone, but by 1943 the Germanic slogans had in any
case outlived their usefulness. By then Germany’s leaders hoped to enlist
support for their cause only by promising to save the whole of Europe and,
hence, the world from the threat of Bolshevism.

What was true of the Ukrainians was even truer of the Poles, who could not
hope to be treated more leniently by the Germans even if they offered to help
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 757

the Reich in its war with the Soviet Union. Although there were a few supporters
of the Russian Communists in Poland, there were even fewer who championed
the cause of the German National Socialists. Very soon after Poland’s defeat at
the hands of the Wehrmacht, the first pockets of resistance had been formed in
the General Government, including the ZwiJzek Walki Zbrojnej, or ZWZ,
which was formed during the winter of 1939/40 and which had the support of
General Sikorski’s exiled government in London. Renamed the Armia Krajowa
(Home Army) in 1942, it was guilty of summarily executing many deserters
and informers, while also attacking particularly hated representatives of the
occupying regime and destroying rail links, prisons, police stations and pris-
oner transports. By the winter of 1943/4 the Home Army is said to have had
between 300,000 and 350,000 members, although only around 20,000 of them
fought as armed partisans. In comparison, the much smaller Communist
People’s Army, or Armia Ludowa, that was formed in January 1944 as the
military arm of the Polish Workers’ Party created by representatives of
the Comintern in early 1942, was never much more than a marginalized
faction.
But armed Poles fought against Germans not only in their native Poland,
they were also active on several fronts elsewhere. In 1944 80,000 Polish soldiers
were fighting with the Western Allies and a similar number with the Red Army.
Between March and August 1942 a small army of 70,000 former prisoners of
war and interned Poles under General W5adys5aw Anders – the ‘Anders Army’
– had been ‘evacuated’ on Stalin’s orders via central Asia to Iran, from where it
was deployed under British command in Iraq and Palestine, then in North
Africa and Italy, a move made at Churchill’s behest. But this did little to improve
the tense relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government in
exile as Moscow refused to divulge any details concerning the whereabouts of
more than 10,000 missing Polish officers. When the Wehrmacht discovered
the buried bodies of the victims of the Katyn Massacre in the spring of 1943,
the government in exile asked the International Red Cross to investigate the
matter, a step to which Molotov reacted by breaking off diplomatic relations
with Sikorski’s government on 25 April.
The armed struggle was only one part of the Polish resistance movement. In
spite of the occupying power’s omnipresent reign of terror, Polish intellectuals,
harking back to a tradition that had grown up in Russian Congress Poland in
the nineteenth century, established an underground university and under-
ground grammar schools as part of an ‘underground state’ supported by
civilian society and financed by money smuggled in from Great Britain. All
were coordinated by a Delegatura structured into twelve departments. If
the resistance movement had not been planned in advance and if it had not
been well organized practically throughout the General Government, an elite
section of its activists would never have been able to strike the blow that we
shall discuss in greater detail in due course: the Warsaw Uprising that began on
758 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

1 August 1944 and lasted nine weeks – longer than even its organizers had
initially believed to be possible.
A sizeable proportion of Poland’s 1.3 million civilian population experi-
enced German occupation not in Poland itself but in the Old Reich. As early as
October 1939 the governor general, Hans Frank, had introduced the require-
ment to work for all Poles living in his area of jurisdiction and aged between
fourteen and sixty. In 1940 Poles started to be employed in Germany, and it was
not long before the number of workers recruited by force had outnumbered
those who applied through the usual channels. There was a particular need for
workers in the agricultural sector, where, in spite of all official orders and
prohibitions, Polish and other foreign workers were generally better treated
than in industry. On the strength of special ‘Polish decrees’, Poles working in
the Reich were not only prevented from using public transport but were even
banned from keeping bicycles and from attending German church services and
going to the cinema or the theatre. They also received substantially smaller
food rations than workers from the west. And if they engaged in sexual rela-
tions with Germans, they were punished by being publicly hanged in the pres-
ence of their assembled compatriots, although after the middle of 1943 this
punishment was generally commuted to deportation to a concentration camp,
a penalty also meted out to German women who ‘gave themselves’ to Poles.
There were no similar provisions for German men who had sexual relations
with Polish women.

In comparison to the Poles, the Czech inhabitants of the Protectorate of

Bohemia and Moravia were treated relatively leniently. Politically speaking, the
native population was stripped of all its rights, and a unity party, the Národní
shromá:d@ní, replaced all the previous political parties. The occupying power
was responsible for deciding all questions of foreign policy and defence, and all
the authorities that were responsible for implementing the country’s domestic
policies were overseen by the German administration. Communists, ‘left-wing’
bourgeois intellectuals and German émigrés who had fled to Czechoslovakia
and been unable to escape before the German occupation began were deported
to concentration camps. After the autumn of 1941 the country’s Jews were sent
either straight to the camps in the east or to Theresienstadt (Terezín), which
was opened in the Protectorate in June 1940. After 1942 they were sent from
Theresienstadt to the extermination camps in Poland.
Strikes and demonstrations held to mark Independence Day on 28 October
1943 were brutally suppressed by the occupying power: one worker was
shot and a student so badly injured that he died soon afterwards. Hitler
used the demonstrations as an excuse to close all Czech colleges and universi-
ties for a three-year period. With the exception of medics, all the country’s
teachers were left in limbo, while students were set to work. In September
1941 the Czech prime minister, Alois Eliág, was accused of holding secret
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 759

negotiations with Edvard Beneg’s government in exile in London, a charge that

led to his arrest. A show trial ended in a death sentence, and he was shot in June
1942.
In general, those who worked with the Germans had nothing to fear. Czech
industry was incorporated into Germany’s wartime economy and to all intents
and purposes run by German businesses. Numerous smaller, medium-sized
and larger employers profited from the ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish property, and
the workforce took advantage of the full employment brought about by the
war. The first protector of the Reich, Germany’s former foreign secretary,
Konstantin von Neurath, was given leave of absence in September, ostensibly
for health reasons, but he was effectively stripped of his powers and replaced by
his newly appointed deputy, the head of the Reich Main Security Office,
Reinhard Heydrich, whose treatment of the local population was marked by
incomparably greater brutality.
A turning point in the history of the Protectorate came on 27 May 1942,
when volunteer parachutists, acting on behalf of the Czech government in
exile, attempted to assassinate Heydrich, who died of his injuries on 4 June
1942. In the course of the reign of terror that his death provoked, some 10,000
Czechs were arrested and over 1,000 shot without trial. The massacres at Lidice
and Le:áky on 10 and 24 June 1942 were intended above all to intimidate the
local population: the villages were destroyed, all the adult males were shot, and
the women and children were sent to concentration camps. Heydrich’s place
was taken by the colonel-general of the Order Police, Kurt Daluege. In August
1943 the role of protector was assumed by Wilhelm Frick, the German home
secretary, who was replaced in that capacity by Himmler. Between then and
1945 there were few major acts of sabotage or other attacks, the reign of terror
exercised by the SS and the police ensuring that the Protectorate of Bohemia
and Moravia henceforth operated along strictly National Socialist lines.

Collaboration and resistance were also features of occupied Serbia. At least on

the surface, one of the collaborators was the head of the Belgrade government
installed by the occupying power, General Milan Nedi1. At the same time,
however, Nedi1 worked undercover with the Chetniks, the nationalist wing of the
Serbian resistance movement, which, motivated by its militant Pan-Slav ideals,
evinced the utmost brutality in its dealings with the Croatian Ustage, as well as
with the separatists of Montenegro and Albania and with the Bosnian Muslims,
while adopting a defensive stance towards the German occupying power and
even receiving occasional support from the Italians. In his dealings with King
Peter II and the Yugoslav government in exile in London, Nedi1 even stressed
that he saw himself only as their custodian. Also secretly allied to the
conservative resistance movement associated with Colonel Dra:a Mihajlovi1
was the 18,000-strong armed gendarmerie – the Serbian State Guard – that had
been created by Nedi1 and which was tolerated by the Germans, whereas the
760 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

smaller 3,600-strong Serbian Volunteer Corps under Dimitrije Ljoti1, the

founder of the Christian nationalist Zbor movement, manifestly belonged in
the camp of the collaborators.
The Communist partisans under Josip Broz Tito, who was a native Croat,
gained much support throughout Yugoslavia after the Comintern issued an
appeal in July 1941, asking for help with freeing the country from its German
oppressors. By the early autumn they already had 15,000 followers, and the
number of acts of sabotage and attacks on members of the Wehrmacht and its
installations as well as on the Serbian gendarmerie grew from ninety-seven in
July to 892 in September 1941. The Germans reacted with extreme reprisals in
keeping with the motto of the commanding general Franz Böhme, according
to which 100 Serbian hostages were to be shot for every German soldier who
was killed. Between April 1941 and February 1942 more than 20,000 civilians,
including thousands of Jews, were rounded up and executed. Among them
were 2,300 inhabitants of the town of Kragujevac, including pupils and teachers
from the local grammar school and Jews, all of whom were executed by the
Wehrmacht – rather than by the SS – on 21 October 1941.
The reign of terror inflicted by the Germans and by the Croat Ustaga helped
to boost the membership of the Communist partisan movement, encouraging
even non-Communists disillusioned by the Chetniks’ wait-and-see policy to
join the movement. Tito’s fighting units were obliged to withdraw from Serbia
in November 1941, when their stronghold – the western Serbian town of U:ice
that they had declared an independent republic – was captured by the Germans.
As a result they were forced to concentrate their activities on the Italian protec-
torate of Montenegro, on western Bosnia and on Herzegovina, all of which
regions belonged to the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ under Italian occupation
and influence. Attempts on the part of Tito and Mihajlovi1 to reach an agree-
ment foundered on the irreconcilability of their respective positions, and by
November 1941 there had been the first bloody clashes between the Chetniks
and the Communist partisans, with the two sides rivalling one another in
terms of the horror of the atrocities that they committed.
From Hitler’s standpoint, both of these partisan camps posed a threat, more
especially since the fall of El Alamein in October 1942, which increased the
risk of an Allied invasion of the Balkans. In January 1943 German, Italian and
Croat units succeeded in destroying most of Tito’s National Liberation Army in
south Croatia and western Bosnia, but the Communist forces were still
powerful enough to inflict a serious defeat on the Chetniks in the Battle of
Neretva in February 1943. Three months later they suffered heavy losses when
surrounded by German and Italian troops at the Battle of Sutjeska, but shortly
afterwards enjoyed the spectacle of seeing most of the Chetniks units disarmed
by the Axis Powers.
In November 1943 Tito convened the Second Congress of the Anti-Fascist
Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia in the Bosnian town of Jajce.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 761

It resolved that in future Yugoslavia would be a federation, installed a provi-

sional government under Tito’s presidency, banned King Peter II from returning
to the country and contested the right of the government in exile in London to
speak for Yugoslavia. Stalin, who until then had been Tito’s only supporter
in the Allies’ camp, regarded the installation of a provisional government
as a threat to the broad-based east–west anti-Hitler alliance and reacted
with commensurate indignation, whereas Churchill, who until that point had
supported Mihajlovi1, was enough of a realist to realign his position, from then
on banking on Tito and supplying the latter’s partisan movement with large
quantities of munitions and weapons.
Tito was also helped by Italy’s capitulation in September 1943, an event that
we shall be examining in greater detail in due course. It was an unexpected turn
of events that allowed the Communist partisan movement to consolidate its
position in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to regain a foothold in Montenegro,
from where it had had to withdraw following the Battle of Sutjeska. In turn this
allowed the movement to emerge as victor from the Yugoslav civil war and war
of liberation and to take its place in history as the most successful resistance
movement of the Second World War. Meanwhile the Chetniks’ star sank even
lower, a situation not even helped when their leader was appointed minister of
war, commander in chief of the Yugoslav Army at home and divisional general
by the exiled monarch. When, at Churchill’s instigation, Peter II issued an appeal
on 12 September 1944, urging all Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to join Tito’s
National Liberation Army, the die was cast: if Yugoslavia were to be reborn
following the expulsion of the Germans, the country would be led by Communists
and in that way would be radically different from the former Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes.

As in the former Yugoslavia, so in Greece, resistance to the Italian and German

occupying forces was divided into a Communist-led and an anti-Communist
camp. The National Liberation Front, or EAM, was a popular front with a mili-
tary arm, the National Liberation Army, or ELAS. Ranged against them was the
much smaller National Republican Greek League, or EDES, a more middle-
class, democratic organization. Only in response to massive pressure from the
British did the rival movements join forces in November 1941 and blow up
the railway viaduct over the Gorgopotamos, an important supply route for the
German Afrika Korps. After that, further large sums of British money were
necessary to persuade the ELAS to cooperate on a regular basis with the EDES,
an association that began in July 1943 but which proved extremely short-lived:
following the capitulation of Italy two months later, the ELAS disarmed the
Italian Pinerolo Division and, using the weapons that it had seized, immedi-
ately began an armed struggle against the EDES units that were operating in
Epirus. The clashes between the two groups were nothing less than a prelude to
the Greek Civil War that broke out in 1946 and lasted until October 1949.
762 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

From the autumn of 1943, the struggle to liberate Greece was directed at
one occupying power alone, Germany, and at the Greek government that it had
installed in Athens. The Germans focused their efforts increasingly on
defending the major cities and principal transport links. Among the hallmarks
of their rule were the brutal reprisals against the civilian population each time
that the partisans’ activities offered them an excuse to act. Between December
1943 and July 1944 the inhabitants of entire villages were executed, notably in
Kalavrita on 13 October 1943, in Distono on 16 July 1944 and in Klissura on 29
July 1944. Between March 1943 and October 1944 some 21,255 Greek men and
women were killed by the occupying powers and a further 20,000 thrown into
prison.
It was with brutal resolve and total consistency that the Germans set about
removing all Jewish elements from the occupied country: in the face of inef-
fectual protests from the prime minister, Konstantinos Logothetopoulos,
between 45,000 and 50,000 Jews were deported from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz
and Treblinka in the early months of 1943. Most were gassed on arrival. There
followed the arrest and deportation of Jews from Athens and the Aegean. Of
the 70,000 or so Jews who had been living in Greece in 1940, only a little over
10,000 remained in the country after the Germans withdrew in August 1944.
Only a handful managed to escape to the countries of the Middle East. Of those
who had been deported, around 2,000 survived the Shoah.
In February 1944 the EAM and ELAS on the one hand and the EDES on
the other agreed to a ceasefire on the basis of the status quo. By now the
Communist-led partisan movement was so powerful that the left-wing liberal,
Georgios Papandreou, who had headed the Cairo-based government in exile
since April 1944, offered the EAM six ministerial posts in his coalition cabinet.
Only at the urging of a Soviet military mission and after King George II had
promised to accept the findings of a plebiscite did the Communist leadership
agree to enter government in August 1944. On 24 September all the partisan
groups, headed by the ELAS and EDES, signed the Caserta Agreement and in
doing so accepted the government in exile, which in turn transferred command
of the combat units in Greece to the commander in chief of the British armed
forces in the country. At about this time the Germans began to withdraw their
troops from the Aegean and from Greece, allowing the ELAS to extend its rule
over large sections of the country. British and Greek troops then marched into
Athens and a number of other large cities. On 27 October, five days after the
withdrawal of the Wehrmacht, Papandreou’s government moved its headquar-
ters to Athens.
Five weeks later, on 1 December 1944, the EAM announced that it was
leaving the government. Shortly afterwards a Communist uprising broke out
in Athens, triggered by shots fired by the police at largely unarmed demonstra-
tors. It did not end until the middle of January 1945, when the EAM agreed to
a ceasefire with the British, subsequently signing a form of peace treaty with
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 763

the government on 12 February. Although this development seemed for a

time to avert the possibility of a civil war, it merely represented a lull in the
fighting.

As in Greece, so in Belgium, Germany’s presence in the country until 1944 was

predominantly military. The German military commander was General
Alexander von Falkenhausen, who received administrative support from
Eggert Reeder, whose entire period in office was marked by his attempts to
prevent the SS from gaining control of the military apparatus. Falkenhausen,
who was closely associated with the military and conservative opposition to
Hitler, was relieved of his post on 13 July 1944 and arrested on the 29th, nine
days after the failed attack on the Führer. The military administration was
replaced by a civilian one under the Cologne Gauleiter Josef Grohé. Since
Grohé not only retained Reeder as his administrative head but also appointed
him his deputy and since Reeder opposed Himmler’s attempts to impose
German values on Flanders, relations with the SS remained fraught.
Both the radical right-wing Flemish nationalists of the Vlaamsch Nationaal
Verbond that absorbed the Verbond van Dietsche Nationaal-Solidaristen in
1941 and the Walloon Rexists associated with Léon Dégrelle had some sympathy
for the idea of working more closely with the Germans – both groups provided
volunteers for the Flemish and Walloon legions of the Waffen-SS. And, much to
the surprise of the Germans, there was also a willingness to collaborate on the
part of the Belgian Socialists associated with the internationally renowned
social psychologist Hendrik de Man, who had headed the Parti Ouvrier Belge
since 1939. A self-confessed advocate of a planned economy, de Man regarded
Belgium’s capitulation as a defeat for parliamentary democracy and plutocratic
capitalism, which he believed should be exploited for his own Socialist ends. He
disbanded the Socialist Party in the summer of 1940 and founded an umbrella
trade union modelled on the German Labour Front, the Unie van Hand- en
Geestesarbeiders (also known as the Union des Travailleurs Manuels et
Intellectuels) that worked closely with the Germans but gained few supporters,
with the result that the German side soon lost interest in the new organization.
Among the collaborators in the wider sense was King Leopold III, who
unlike the government of Hubert Pierlot did not go into exile but remained in
Belgium, where he was held under house arrest at Laeken after having signed
the capitulation agreement with Germany. His fondness for an authoritarian
form of government cost him the sympathies of many Belgians, as did his
attempt to form a government of his own and his willingness to meet Hitler in
November 1940. In the end he was obliged to abdicate in favour of his son,
Baudouin, in 1950.
After the war some half a million Belgians were accused of collaborating
with the Germans. Their number included many civil servants who had
continued to hold their posts under the direct supervision of the Germans, as
764 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

well as a number of employers who profited from Germany’s wartime rule.

Some 345,000 individuals were placed on trial and 60,000 of them were
sentenced. The tally of Belgians engaged in active resistance has been reckoned
to be around 70,000. Among their acts of resistance was the help that they
offered Jews by offering them a place to hide and thereby preventing them
from being deported to extermination camps. Others helped in this way were
Allied airmen shot down over Belgium. There were also numerous acts of
sabotage, more especially after 1943, including the spectacular blowing up of a
bridge in the Ardennes in December 1944, when hundreds of German soldiers
lost their lives. But the vast majority of Belgians tolerated foreign rule without
collaborating with the Germans or actively resisting them.

Unlike Belgium, there was a German civilian administration in the Netherlands,

with the Austrian National Socialist Arthur Seyß-Inquart as commissar. As a
result, the NSDAP had far more influence on German policies in the occupied
Netherlands than was the case with its southern neighbour. Since the Dutch are
a Germanic nation and were regarded by the National Socialists as racially
related to them, Germany’s long-term policy towards the Netherlands was
aimed at integrating the country into the planned Greater Germanic Reich. In
the business community and among civil servants there was a widespread will-
ingness to work closely with the occupying power but no desire to see their
country swallowed up by Germany either then or in the future.
With its 80,000 or so members, the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging asso-
ciated with Anton Adriaan Mussert never commanded much support among
the population at large and initially received little encouragement from the
occupying authorities, who were more interested in working as smoothly as
possible with the established elites in both the state and in industry. In 1941
Mussert founded the Netherlands SS Volunteers Legion, which fought alongside
German troops in the war on Russia. A unity party that was formed by conserv-
ative elements in July 1940 and that was willing to work with the Germans was
the Nederlandsche Unie which won around ten times as many members as
Mussert’s party but proved insufficiently tractable, with the result that it was
banned by the German civilian administration in December 1941, a fate that it
shared with other parties like it. Parliament was prevented from meeting after
June 1940, and the country was ‘ruled’ by Dutch general secretaries in the minis-
tries, all of them directly supervised by Germans. Together with Queen
Wilhelmina, the country’s ministers had gone into exile in London on 13 May
1940, three days after the German invasion. The conservative prime minister,
Dirk Jan de Geer, returned to the Netherlands on his own initiative in February
1941 and, encouraged by the Germans, sought a compromise peace that
acknowledged the new realities. But he remained little more than a curiosity.
As we have already noted, the Netherlands was the only country occupied
by German troops where there were public protests against the persecution of
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 765

the Jews. Such protests began at the Universities of Leiden and Delft in
November 1940, before assuming the form of a general strike in Amsterdam in
February 1941. This was not the last strike in the occupied Netherlands, for in
1942 the country’s doctors refused to work. And in late April 1943, when Dutch
soldiers released from German prisoner-of-war camps were obliged to under-
take work in Germany, workers throughout the Netherlands downed tools in
protest. In September 1944, as the Allies drew closer, bringing with them the
promise of liberation, it was the turn of the railway workers to go on strike.
But such actions were unable to prevent Dutch workers from being forcibly
recruited. Under the terms of the laws enacted by the occupying power, all
Dutch males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five were obliged to
respond to calls to work in Germany. In 1944 passenger trains were rerouted to
Germany in order for suitable passengers to be chosen to work in the Reich. By
November 1942 the number of Dutch men and women employed in Germany
was 153,000, while the equivalent number for Belgian citizens was 130,000.
The occupying power reacted to every strike with the utmost severity:
when the railway workers went on strike in September 1944, for example, the
authorities responded with a blockade of the country’s inland waterways that
lasted several weeks, preventing foodstuffs from reaching the major towns and
cities. Violence committed by the Dutch resistance and including acts of sabo-
tage and attacks on well-known collaborators, on members of the civilian
administration and on soldiers and institutions associated with the Wehrmacht
met with wildly excessive reprisals on the part of the German authorities: in
February 1943, fifty hostages were shot in reprisal for the murder of a former
Dutch general who was known to be working for the Germans. And during the
final months of the war hundreds of hostages were executed in response to
each attack by resistance groups.
The authorities could do relatively little in the face of less spectacular forms
of resistance. When employment offices and public health offices thwarted
attempts to send workers to Germany, their actions could often not be proven,
and, unless the population at large denounced them, Jews who had gone to
ground, those who refused to work in Germany and members of the resistance
movement who were concealed by their compatriots were hard to track down.
During the war more than 50,000 Dutch citizens were sent to concentration
camps. After the war 150,000 collaborators spent longer or shorter periods of
time in concentration camps built by the Germans on Dutch soil, atoning for
the crimes committed during the years of occupation. A total of 66,000 were
sentenced in this way to lengthy terms of imprisonment, including life sentences,
while 900 of them received the death penalty. Among those who were sentenced
to death was Anton Mussert, who was executed in The Hague on 7 May 1946.

Like the Netherlands, occupied Norway was also governed by a civilian German
administration. The only local forces on which Hitler’s commissar, the Essen
766 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Gauleiter Josef Terboven, could rely were the 50,000 or so members of the only
authorized party, Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling, together with the 4,000
Norwegian volunteers of the Waffen-SS whom Quisling helped to recruit.
Since Terboven doubted Quisling’s political abilities, the latter was obliged to
appeal to his two patrons in Berlin – the head of the NSDAP’s Foreign Policy
Office, Alfred Rosenberg, and the supreme commander of the navy, Erich
Raeder – to support him. Quisling enjoyed a partial success when the ‘tempo-
rary state councillors’ appointed by Terboven from the ranks of the Nasjonal
Samling were allowed to bear the title ‘minister’ from the end of September
1941. Quisling himself was finally appointed prime minister on 1 February
1942, but this too was no more than an honorary title. Hitler had no intention
of meeting Quisling’s desire to turn Norway into a ‘free, indivisible and inde-
pendent Reich’ that was a part of the Greater German Reich. For the present at
least all the real power in Norway continued to be vested in Terboven.
Nor did Quisling’s appointment help to win more support for German rule
among the Norwegian population. Indeed, he launched his period in office in
February 1942 with a series of measures designed to bring the Church and the
educational system into line with NSDAP policies, inevitably triggering a
conflict that left Norway more deeply divided than before. Some 60 per cent of
all schoolteachers signed a declaration stating their inability to contribute to
the education of the young people of Norway according to the guidelines of the
Nasjonal Samling’s ‘youth programme’. They refused, therefore, to join the
newly founded Norwegian Teaching Union. The government responded by
arresting around 1,000 teachers and deporting them to the north of the country,
where they were subjected to a harsh regimen of forced labour.
Equally uncooperative were the bishops and other members of the clergy
who were faced with the demand that they should publicly proclaim their alle-
giance to the ‘new state’. On 24 February 1942 Norway’s bishops resigned from
all their positions within the country’s Lutheran Church, while declaring their
readiness to go on performing their pastoral duties. Quisling responded by
suspending the bishops and replacing them with others loyal to his discredited
regime. When the clergy declared their solidarity with the bishops and likewise
resigned all their official functions, five leading members of the Christian
Council for Joint Deliberation, including the bishop of Oslo and primate of the
Norwegian Church, Eivind Berggraf, were arrested. Those members of the
clergy who even after an ultimatum from the Ministry for the Church and
Education still refused to return to their former positions no longer received a
stipend, but they were able to continue with their pastoral work and were paid
out of sizeable donations collected by the newly created Church leadership.
Quisling’s plan in September 1942 to create an umbrella organization – the
Riksting – similar to the German Labour Front also proved to be a fiasco, when
the trade unions and other associations reacted by asking their members to
resign from all their existing organizations. Terboven was able to stem the tide
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 767

of resignations only by forcing Quisling to abandon his plan for a Riksting: it

was a triumph of civil disobedience.
By this time the actual running of Norway lay in the hands of the resistance
working closely with the government in exile in London. For a while the occu-
pying power was unaware of the boats commuting between Norway and the
Shetland Isles, taking refugees to Britain and ferrying volunteers, weapons and
other material to Norway for use in the underground movement. Norwegian
resistance fighters from the growing ranks of the Milorg helped in British
attacks on German warships such as the Bismarck and the Tirpitz, while also
destroying German vessels and disrupting not only supply routes but also
industrial complexes vital to the armaments industry and, finally, carrying out
assassinations of representatives of the occupying power. The most spectacular
act of sabotage was the attack on the heavy water reactor at Vermork, which
was crucial to the German nuclear research programme. Carried out in
February 1943, it was the work of a Norwegian commando trained by the
British Special Operations Executive.
The Germans responded to every act of resistance with drastic retaliatory
measures, generally involving the execution of men and women who had not
been directly involved. In one such retaliatory act in April 1942 the fishing
village of Televåg was razed to the ground. It was here that two resistance fighters
had hidden after returning to Norway from the Shetland Isles and killing two
Gestapo agents. The men of the village were deported to the concentration camp
at Sachsenhausen, where thirty-one of them died, while the women and chil-
dren were sent to camps in the Norwegian interior. In the autumn of 1943 the
German authorities closed the University of Oslo, having previously arrested
1,200 students and thirty members of the teaching staff. By the end of the war
some 40,000 Norwegians were interned in camps that the Germans had built in
the country. Among them were numerous policemen and army officers who
had refused to declare their allegiance to the new state. Since April 1940 some
50,000 Norwegians had fled to neighbouring Sweden, including 900 Jews –
more than half the number of Jews who had been living in Norway in 1940. Of
the 700 Jews who remained in Norway, few survived the Second World War.
The Norwegians who succeeded in fleeing their native country and in
reaching either Sweden or Great Britain formed the nucleus of an army of
volunteers that was recruited by the Norwegian government in exile under the
Social Democrat Johan Nygaardsvold. Comprising land troops, an air force
and a navy, it numbered around 2,500 men by the winter of 1942/3 and took
part in numerous Allied operations. When the German forces abandoned
Norway without a struggle in May 1945, Terboven took his own life. King
Haakon VII and his government returned to Oslo on 31 May, and Quisling
handed himself over the Norwegian Home Guard. He was tried and sentenced
to death, an execution carried out on 15 October 1945. Twenty-five Norwegian
collaborators suffered a similar fate.
768 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Denmark – the most southerly of the Scandinavian states – represented a

special case in terms of Germany’s occupation of foreign states. Here King
Christian X remained in the country throughout the occupation, and the
cabinet, which had been enlarged in 1940 to become what was effectively an
all-party government under the Social Democrat prime minister, Thorvald
Stauning, worked closely with the German authorities, a situation that continued
under Stauning’s successor, Vilhelm Buhl, after Stauning’s death on 3 May 1942.
German interests were represented by the Gestapo’s former legal adviser and
now SS group leader Werner Best, who replaced the diplomat Cécil von Renthe-
Fink on 5 November 1942. As long as the Danish government accepted its
political dependence on the German Reich and was able to dissuade the Danish
people from engaging in any major acts of resistance, the occupying power
respected the democratic system of government in Denmark, including the
leading role of the Social Democrats.
For Werner Best – one of the SS’s intellectuals – Germanic Denmark was one
day destined to become a part of the Greater German Reich, which is why he felt
the need to treat the country as considerately as possible. The kingdom was also
of great strategic and economic significance for Germany, inasmuch as it
provided a bridge to Norway and to a part of the Continental coastline that faced
England. It also provided Germany with a sizeable proportion of its food needs
– between 10 per cent and 15 per cent in 1941, representing 75 per cent of all
Danish agricultural exports. In terms of its foreign policy, Denmark made impor-
tant concessions to Germany by leaving the League of Nations in July 1940 and
joining the anti-Comintern pact in November 1941. Moreover, the Danish
government placed no obstacles in the way of a recruitment drive for volunteers
for the Waffen-SS and, among the German minority in North Schleswig, for the
Wehrmacht. The country’s leaders in Copenhagen hoped that in this way they
could avoid becoming directly involved in the war and maintain their autonomy.
Given the government’s aims, it was inconceivable that the small Danish
National Socialist Party would be interested in a place in government. Still less
was it possible to install a government under the leadership of Frits Clausen,
Denmark’s leading National Socialist, which was the solution demanded by
Hitler in the autumn of 1941. Soon after taking up his new appointment, Best
was able to persuade Clausen to renounce all thought of his party’s joining the
government, thereby opening up the way for a constitutional solution that
involved the appointment of the non-party foreign minister, Erik Scavenius, to
lead a cabinet that continued to be made up of all the principal parties from the
Social Democrats to the conservatives. In keeping with Hitler’s demand, the
Reichstag even passed an enabling act that granted the Danish government
extensive powers in the field of legislation. But the way in which these powers
were implemented continued to be decided by the parties that made up the
cabinet. Scavenius’s cabinet was more dependent on Germany than its Social
Democrat predecessors, but it was still far from being a puppet government.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 769

By the beginning of 1943 Best believed that the situation in Denmark was
sufficiently stable for him to agree to the country’s participation in the Reichstag
elections that were due to take place by 3 April at the latest. In the event, the
elections were held on 23 March, when the Social Democrats emerged as the
largest party with 44 per cent of the votes cast. Together, the four coalition
parties won 92 per cent of the vote. The Danish National Socialists polled only
2 per cent and remained a mere splinter group. Scavenius’s government was
rightly able to interpret the result as a plebiscite for its policy of folkestyre, or
Danish self-determination.
The coalition government’s domestic triumph was followed only a few
months later by its worst crisis to date. The military defeats inflicted on
Germany since the end of 1942 and the propaganda broadcast by the BBC on
the basis of reports received from Danish politicians in exile in London led to
growing unrest among the Danish population in the course of 1943 and even
to the fear that Denmark might be regarded as a partner of the Axis Powers
by the likely victors and punished accordingly. In the spring of 1943 the
Special Operations Executive began to increase the number of its contacts with
Danish resistance groups and to provide weapons and explosives for the agents
who arrived in Jutland by sea or by air. The number of acts of sabotage grew
from twenty-four in January to eighty in April 1943, and there was also a series
of strikes and clashes between Danish civilians and soldiers from the
Wehrmacht.
The German military commander in Denmark, General Hermann von
Hanneken, was all in favour of punishing every act of sabotage and resistance
with draconian severity, but Best preferred to continue to adopt his former,
more tolerant approach, and it was his policy that prevailed until the summer
of 1943. But then the situation changed. The fall of Mussolini and the devas-
tating air raids on Hamburg by the Royal Air Force in July left many Danes
believing that the war would soon end with Germany’s defeat, and the gulf
between the government parties and the population widened, while the Social
Democrats and trade unions lost much of their influence on the workers. In
early August unrest broke out in many parts of the country: in Esbjerg, for
example, a wild-cat strike began on 6 August and lasted six days. On 21 August,
Best was able to persuade the government parties to issue a further joint appeal
against strikes and acts of sabotage, but it had no effect. Instead, there was an
increase in the number of bombings, especially of transport links. Particularly
unsettling for the occupying power was the spread of strikes to North Jutland,
where an Allied invasion was currently expected.
On 24/5 August, Best met Hitler at the latter’s headquarters in the
Wolfsschanze near Rastenburg in East Prussia and reported on the tense situa-
tion in Denmark. He discovered that the Führer had already decided to adopt
a much harsher policy towards the Danes: the days of the ‘model protectorate’
were over, and Best himself felt that his own days were numbered in spite of the
770 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

backing of Himmler, Ribbentrop and the minister of food, Herbert Backe.

Against his better judgement, Best was obliged to issue an ultimatum and
impose conditions on Scavenius’s government that it could not possibly meet,
including the use of force against striking workers. Since the Social Democrats
rejected the ultimatum outright, the government had no choice but to do so as
well. The Germans reacted by declaring a state of emergency and replacing
Scavenius’s government with Hanneken on 29 August 1943. Hanneken was
invested with executive powers. Although King Christian X refused to accept
his ministers’ resignation, their powers were now merely nominal and they
were unable to perform their official duties.
The confrontational policies long demanded by Hitler and implemented by
Hanneken were successful to the extent that the strikes and demonstrations
ended very quickly, but there could no longer be any question of the two sides
working together in any productive manner. Best was therefore able to persuade
the authorities in Berlin to end the state of emergency as quickly as possible
and to appoint an ‘apolitical’ cabinet or an administrative committee to run the
country. But Best also felt that the state of emergency should be used to create
a powerful German police force that would prosecute all attacks on German
interests. The Danish negotiators accepted that as things stood it was no longer
possible to form a constitutional government but only an administration made
up of ministerial secretaries of state that would operate under strict German
supervision.
In the meantime the occupying power had issued a series of draconian
decrees against strikes and acts of sabotage. It was on this basis that a Danish
resistance fighter was sentenced to death on 8 September. The small Danish
army was disbanded, although the navy pre-empted the move by scuttling its
own ships. On 8 September, Best sent a telegram to the Foreign Office demanding
that the question of the country’s Jews and Freemasons be resolved while the
emergency legislation was still in force, since there would inevitably be unrest
and possibly even a general strike if the Germans waited until the state of emer-
gency had expired before acting against the 8,000 or so Jews living in Denmark.
As Best’s German biographer, Ulrich Herbert, has rightly noted, Best’s concern
– in spite of his later testimony – was not to solve the Jewish question by giving
this order. Rather, he had always been eager to remove the Jews from the sphere
of German influence in Europe, a position that had no practical consequences
in Denmark only because in the present circumstances radical action would
have run counter to the overriding German considerations, not least of which
was the uninterrupted flow of Danish foodstuffs to the Reich.62
But the expectation that the state of emergency would allow the authorities
to act swiftly without causing a stir proved mistaken. Once Hitler had approved
the deportation of Danish Jews, Best instructed the Danish police to impound
the Jewish community’s list of members on 17 December, a move which,
combined with the arrival of an additional German police presence from
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 771

Norway, spread alarm not only among Denmark’s Jews but also among the
public at large. From now on Best was forced to confront the fact that the step
that he himself had demanded would result in violent opposition, a view that
was shared by Hanneken. But it was Georg F. Duckwitz, the shipping expert at
the German Embassy, who took the decisive step. When he was informed on
11 September – presumably by Best – that the raid would be carried out on 1/2
October, he informed two Social Democrat politicians of his acquaintance,
Hans Hedtoft and Hans Christian Hansen, who in turn alerted representatives
of the Danish Jewish community to the German plan.
This timely warning meant that the majority of the Jews in Denmark could
make good their escape. The government in neutral Sweden was informed of
developments by its ambassador in Copenhagen and passed word to the German
government that it was prepared to accept the Danish Jews, an offer also broad-
cast on the radio in order to apprise the individuals concerned of what was
happening and allow them to seek refuge with Danish friends and neighbours.
The German navy had made no preparations to prevent the Jews from escaping
via the Öresund, and so some 7,000 Jews, together with several hundred of their
non-Jewish partners, were able to reach Sweden in Danish fishing boats and
small ships. Back in Denmark, the German police were able to arrest a further
481 Jews on 2 October and in the days that followed. At Best’s urging, they were
sent not to any of Germany’s extermination camps but to the concentration
camp at Theresienstadt, where most of them survived the war. In his capacity as
Hitler’s plenipotentiary in Denmark, Best let it be known that in spite of the
failure of the attempt to arrest the country’s Jews, he had achieved his principal
aim of ridding Denmark of its Jewish population.
The state of emergency came to an end on 6 October 1943, and after that
date Best was required to confer on all policy matters with the secretary of state
at the Foreign Office, Nils Svenningsen, who spoke on behalf of all the secre-
taries of state. Meanwhile the various Danish resistance movements had joined
forces as a ‘Freedom Council’ that maintained close links with the British
government and enjoyed growing support among the Danish population. It
was the Freedom Council that carried out most of the acts of sabotage that
were committed in increasingly large numbers after October 1943, including
the murder of Danish spies who had been working for the Germans. Several
saboteurs whom the German secret police had been able to arrest were tried by
a German war tribunal and a number of them were sentenced to death. But in
his attempt to avoid an escalation of the situation, Best refused to shoot
hostages, which was one of the reprisals demanded by Hitler. He was equally
steadfast in his refusal to liquidate members of the resistance as a response to
assassinations and acts of sabotage.
Best was able to get his way in the case of the shooting of hostages, but the same
was not true of what can only be described as the reign of ‘counter-terror’. On 4
January 1944, the playwright and Lutheran pastor Kaj Munk was assassinated by
772 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

German secret agents in reprisal for the killing of a spy from the ranks of the
Danish National Socialists. This was followed by many more acts of ‘counter-
terror’ in a ratio of two to one – two Danes were killed for every dead German.
Hitler had initially demanded a ratio of five to one.
The Danish resistance movement culminated in a ‘people’s strike’ in
Copenhagen at the end of June 1944, an action triggered by the partial destruc-
tion of the Tivoli amusement park and by a night curfew that represented
Germany’s response to an act of sabotage on a munitions factory. The strike by
the city’s workers was so successful that Best was left with no choice but to lift
the curfew on 28 June. The following day eleven demonstrators were shot by the
police and it was announced that eight resistance fighters had been executed.
The strikes continued to spread until Best declared a state of siege in Copenhagen
and shut down the service industries. Military patrols were also instructed to
shoot on sight, and fighter aircraft were equipped with incendiary bombs. This
last-named measure proved so intimidating that the strikes began to crumble
after 1 July, and two days later the insurrection was over.
Hitler was furious at the events in Copenhagen, which he interpreted as a
total failure of the tactics adopted by Best. On 5 July the latter received a severe
reprimand from the Führer at the Berghof near Berchtesgaden, and the limited
powers that he had enjoyed until then were without exception removed when
Hitler’s new decree of 30 July 1944 abolished the legal prosecution of resistance
fighters and permitted only ‘counter-terror’. Denmark’s special status was over,
and the Scandinavian kingdom was finally one more occupied country among
many others.

Occupation, Collaboration, Resistance (II): France

At first sight Vichy France bore a striking similarity to occupied Denmark,
initially enjoying a considerable degree of autonomy in terms of the country’s
domestic policies and politics. On a deeper level, however, it differed funda-
mentally from Denmark, for whereas the Social Democrat-led government in
Copenhagen met the Third Reich halfway in all matters relating to foreign
policy in order to be able to retain its democratic system, the Pétain regime in
Vichy used the country’s military defeat and exploited German rule to do away
with the Third Republic’s parliamentary democracy. The ‘national revolution’
proclaimed by the elderly marshal in his capacity as head of state was not aimed
at establishing a Fascist dictatorship, however, but at creating an authoritarian
regime that most clearly resembled the estado novo of Salazar’s Portugal.
The état français drew on various traditions of the French right, traditions
extending from the ideologues of the counterrevolution such as Louis de
Bonald and Joseph de Maistre to Bonapartism and Boulangism and including
present-day representatives such as the Croix de Feu and Action Française. The
last-named of these groups benefited from the fact that in July 1939, shortly
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 773

after his election as pope, Pius XII had lifted the order of excommunication
placed by his predecessor, Pius XI, in 1926 on all those French men and women
who read the group’s newspaper, Action Française. One of the organization’s
most prominent representatives in Vichy France was Raphaël Alibert, the first
minister of justice and author of the constitutional decrees of July 1940 to
which we have already referred. The motto of the état français – ‘Labour, family,
fatherland’ – had been coined in 1934 by Colonel Casimir de la Rocque, the
leader of the Croix de Feu. It was young right-wing groups who in the interwar
years had drawn up the ideas on a planned economy that Darlan’s government
now adopted, although it was Italian Fascism that provided the model in terms
of professional groupings, the wearing of uniforms by members of paramilitary
organizations close to the government, the use of propaganda and the stigma-
tization of real or imagined enemies of the state such as Communists,
Freemasons, foreigners and Jews. National Socialist Germany’s Reich Labour
Front inspired the creation of youth work camps (‘chantiers de jeunesse’), while
the systematic glorification of Pétain as the ‘hero of Verdun’ recalled the lioni-
zation of Marshal Pi5sudski in Poland, Admiral Horthy in Hungary, Marshal
Antonescu in Romania and Generalissimo Franco in Spain. In every one of
these countries it was the best-known military leader who was called upon to
embody the unity of the nation and to symbolize the new order.
When Pétain dismissed Laval in December 1940, he was far from aban-
doning the idea of collaboration with Germany, an idea that he had publicly
endorsed on 30 October 1940, barely a week after his meeting with Hitler in
Montoire. If Laval had to go, it was because Pétain did not trust him or
his closest advisers. François Darlan, who as vice-president of the Council of
Ministers and foreign minister, home secretary, minister of information and
minister of the navy all rolled into one had become the government’s new
strong man, issued a series of protocols in May 1941 that were designed to
reduce by a quarter the cost of the country’s occupation as well as agreeing to
the release of 100,000 prisoners of war and offering the Germans tacit support
in their war with Great Britain in Iraq, Syria and North Africa. But the proto-
cols encountered such stiff resistance on the part of the German and French
governments that in the end they remained unsigned. On 18 April 1942, Pétain,
bowing to tremendous pressure from Germany, reappointed Laval as the head
of his government, while also investing him with extraordinary powers. On 22
June 1942 – the first anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union
– Laval addressed the nation. His speech contained a sentence which in the eyes
and ears of most of his radio listeners defined him as a mere agent of the occu-
pying power: ‘I wish a German victory, because, without it, bolshevism
to-morrow would settle everywhere.’63
Vichy France revealed many romantic and backward-looking features.
Among them was the exclusion of women from public service, the emphasis
placed on the father as the head of the family, the subsidized ‘return to the soil’
774 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

that was meant to stop the mass exodus from the countryside and the attempt to
combat Freemasonry and the ideas of the Enlightenment, an attitude that in
many cases went hand in hand with a demonstrative clericalism. The regime
pandered to the political right by forcing farmers and many freelance profes-
sionals such as doctors, chemists and architects to form their own organizations,
and the same was true of the disbandment of trade unions and of the employers’
umbrella organization in favour of purely professional unions. The Italian Carta
del Lavoro of 1926 found its counterpart – and namesake – in the Charte du
Travail of 4 October 1941, which created a legal framework for relations within
business and industry and consolidated the power of the head of each firm
behind the façade of good working relations between unions and management.
Vichy revealed its reactionary and repressive aspect particularly clearly in
the aforementioned Jewish decrees of October 1940 and June 1941 but also by
purging the civil service and judiciary of supporters of the Third Republic. The
law preventing the removal of judges was repealed, and with it went the inde-
pendence of the judiciary. There followed the creation of a whole series of
special courts, including ones set up to prosecute those French men and women
‘responsible for the country’s defeat’ as well as to suppress Communists and
combat the black market. But the Supreme Court trial in Riom of those blamed
for the defeat of 1940, including Léon Blum and Édouard Daladier, turned into
a complete debacle, and the proceedings were adjourned on 11 April 1942 after
Hitler had publicly complained that the trial was not about responsibility for
the war but merely about the inadequate preparations for war.
In addition to its constraints, its repression and its reactionary policies,
however, the état français also contained within it a number of modernizing
tendencies. René Rémond has argued that it harboured a handful of economic
and financial theorists aware of France’s financial backwardness and deter-
mined to transform the country into a powerful industrial nation:

These technocrats, who were relatively indifferent to the political situation,

were the heirs of the pre-war generation of technicians [. . .] and at the same
time the precursors of the future generation of high-ranking officials who
were successful in modernizing France after 1945, a process that would not
have been so swift if Vichy had not laid the foundations for it.64

Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union proved to be a turning point in France

just as it was elsewhere. In the wake of the Hitler–Stalin Pact, the outlawed
French Communist Party had sought to reach an agreement with the occu-
pying power and even to revive L’Humanité and other party newspapers, a
request that was immediately turned down. But after 22 June 1941 the situation
changed completely, and the Communists began a campaign of active resist-
ance designed to oust the Germans and their French lackeys. On 21 August the
Communist Party member Pierre Georges, who was later to play a leading role
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 775

in the French Resistance as Colonel Fabien, shot a random member of the

Wehrmacht, the naval adjutant Alfons Moser, at the Barbès-Rochechouart
underground station. The Germans reacted to this and similar acts with
unprecedented severity, and at the end of October ninety-eight French hostages
were shot. In the autumn of 1944 the Vichy government’s home secretary,
Pierre Pucheu, gave orders for around 100 prisoners to be executed.
The murder of Alfons Moser came at a time when Pétain, addressing the
nation in a radio broadcast on 12 August, claimed that an ‘ill wind’ was
sweeping through the country. He and his prime minister, Édouard Daladier,
were unsettled less by the increasing impact of the BBC’s French-language
broadcasts that could be heard all over France and that included the propa-
ganda put out by de Gaulle’s France Libre than by strikes such as the miners’
walkout in the département of Pas-de-Calais in May 1941, an action designed
to protest at the closeness of the relationship between the pits’ managers and
the occupying power.
The Vichy government responded to the unrest by banning all political
gatherings and undertaking a new wave of purges aimed chiefly at the coun-
try’s Freemasons. They also doubled the strength of the police force and actively
encouraged the Légion Française des Combattants, which in November 1941
became the Légion Française des Combattants et des Volontaires de la Révolution
Nationale. Its final nucleus was formed in January 1943 by the uniformed
Service d’Ordre Légionnaire, or SOL, which under its leader, the philo-Fascist
Joseph Darnand, waged a bitter war on Gaullists, Bolsheviks, Freemasons and,
last but not least, the country’s Jews.
When the état français was created in July 1940, there were some 330,000
Jews living in France, excluding Algeria. Of these, 200,000 were French citizens.
The remainder were foreigners made up of 90,000 Poles, Russians, Germans,
Austrians and Romanians and 40,000 refugees from the Netherlands, Belgium
and Luxembourg. They were joined in October 1940 by almost 7,000 Jews from
Baden and the Saarland Palatinate who had been deported to unoccupied
France by the Reich Main Security Office without any attempt at prior consulta-
tion with the government in Vichy.
France had already started to intern foreign Jews and other undesirable
aliens in improvised camps in the autumn of 1939. Conditions in camps such as
those at Gurs, Les Milles and Rivesaltes were so appalling that many inmates
died of illness, hunger and exhaustion. The writer Arthur Koestler was interned
at Gurs during the winter of 1939/40 and claimed that it was worse than a ‘Nazi
concentration camp in terms of its food, amenities and hygiene’.65 By 1942 the
number of camp inmates in the German-occupied parts of France was 15,000
and in the unoccupied parts as many as 50,000. They included not only Jews and
non-Jewish immigrants but also Sinti and Roma who had no French passports.
In late March 1942 the occupying power deported 1,000 Jews, mostly French
citizens, from Le Bourget to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Starting on
776 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

7 June 1942, all Jews in the occupied regions of France were required to wear
the Jewish Star. For the present the Jews in the rest of the country were spared
this measure because the government – once again headed by Pierre Laval since
18 August – was afraid of negative reactions on the part of the population at
large. The new director general of the French police, René Bousquet, whom
Laval himself had personally appointed, assured his German colleagues that the
police under his command would take part in any anti-Jewish measures in
return for the promise that it would be foreign Jews who would be the first to be
affected.
It was Laval who proposed that children under the age of sixteen could also
be deported, even though the Germans had made no such demand: he did not
want his government to be responsible for the welfare of the underage Jews who
would otherwise have been left behind, thereby placing a further burden on the
state. The biggest raid was organized by the French police in the middle of July
1942, when 12,800 foreign Jews were held for several days in the Vélodrome
d’Hiver – the capital’s winter cycling track – until they could be deported. Here
they were herded together in extremely cramped conditions, even though the
authorities had made no plans to accommodate and feed so many people. By
October 10,500 foreign Jews had been transported from internment camps in
unoccupied France to Drancy, from where they were taken by train to occupied
Poland. By the end of 1942 the number of Jews deported from France totalled
42,000, more than half of all the Jews arrested in France who were victims of
National Socialist genocide.
The raids that took place in several French cities during the summer of 1942
could not be kept secret and gave rise to nationwide protests: prefects reported
anger among the population at large; and several Catholic bishops took issue
with the injustice done to the Jews, expressing their outrage in pastoral letters
read out in church – on 23 August the archbishop of Toulouse, Jules Saliège,
described Jews as people whom Christians should treat as their brothers. Until
then the Vichy regime had been able to rely on the support of the Catholic
clergy. It now responded by quoting anti-Jewish remarks by popes and scholas-
tics and by speaking of political agitation fomented by enemies of the ‘national
revolution’. In early September, using the official news service, the government
called on all Catholics to direct their feelings of sympathy to the 1.2 million
French prisoners of war who at least were ‘genuine sons of France’.66
French prisoners of war also played a role in the Vichy government’s
attempts to meet German demands for a great commitment on France’s part to
Germany’s wartime economy. When Hitler’s general plenipotentiary for labour
deployment, Fritz Sauckel, demanded that 350,000 French workers be made
available for the second half of 1942, Laval managed to lower that figure to
150,000 and arranged for three workers to be exchanged for every one prisoner
of war, an exchange known as the relève. But by the end of July 1942 only 40,000
workers had volunteered for the programme in response to Laval’s appeal of
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 777

22 June, with the result that the Reich forced most of its 1.2 million prisoners
of war to undertake the work against their will.
In September 1942 the government passed a law allowing all men between
eighteen and thirty-five to be mobilized for tasks deemed to be in the national
interest. Under its terms a further 240,000 French workers were sent to Germany
between then and the end of 1942. Sauckel’s demand for an extra 250,000
foreign workers from France led to the introduction of further legislation
whereby all men born between 1920 and 1922 were forced to work in Germany
for a two-year period – the Service de Travail Obligatoire, or STO. All those
affected by this measure, together with their families and the Church, reacted
with outrage, and many young men joined the French Resistance in order to
avoid having to undertake forced labour in the Reich. Within the administra-
tion and in the police force and gendarmerie, there were many who, in spite of
the threat of severe penalties, showed no interest in making the STO work.
In November 1942, between the law mobilizing large sections of the French
workforce and the introduction of the STO, came two major events in the
history of the Vichy regime, when Allied troops landed in North Africa and
Germany occupied the rest of France. Until then the government had had a
certain political leeway, but it now became a satellite state entirely dependent
on the will of the Reich, a state of affairs that Laval repeatedly tried to deny. On
30 January 1943 – the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany
– Laval replaced the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire with the Milice Française and
appointed the former organization’s head, Joseph Darnand, its successor’s
secretary general. The paramilitary militia was made up of volunteers whose
task was to maintain order and to track down and hand over to the police all
who refused to work or opposed the regime and all Jews who had gone into
hiding. The militia was intended to strengthen Laval’s personal power over his
political rivals in Vichy and Paris and also over the German occupiers. But this
last-mentioned task proved increasingly impossible for Darnand to perform
when he began to pursue his own policies, formed alliances with Pétain’s
enemies and forged ties with the German secret service and police.
Like Pétain, Laval was a collaborator in the sense of a collaboration d’état,
but he was not a collaborationniste. French historians define collaboration d’état
as collaboration between the Vichy government and the occupying power
undertaken in the interests of the state but not necessarily based on any ideo-
logical ties with the Third Reich, being aimed in the main at progressively
increasing France’s scope for action and restoring its sovereignty at the
first available opportunity. Collaborationnistes, conversely, were those politi-
cians and intellectuals who openly admitted their support of Fascism and
regarded National Socialists as kindred spirits and Hitler’s Germany as the
only power capable of preserving Europe from both ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and
the overwhelming influence of Anglo-Saxon democracies, foremost among
which was the United States of America. Since collaborateurs were mostly
778 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

ardent anti-Communists and anti-Semites, there were not only differences

between them and the collaborationnistes but also important points that the
two groups had in common.
Two of the most prominent collaborationnistes were the former Socialist
politician Marcel Déat and the erstwhile leader of the Communists, Jacques
Doriot. By July 1940 Déat, who in May 1939 had coined the defeatist slogan
‘Mourir pour Dantzig?’, was already championing the idea of a single great
unity party led by Pétain and modelled on the parties of the Italian Fascists and
German National Socialists, but he was unable to persuade Pétain to accept this
suggestion. He then approached the German occupying power and in February
1941 formed his own movement, the Rassemblement National Populaire, or
RNP, whose party newspaper, L’Œuvre, attacked the Vichy regime as nation-
alist, capitalist and reactionary. In the summer of 1941 he joined forces with
Doriot and Eugène Deloncle, the leader of the pro-Fascist Mouvement Social
Révolutionnaire, and founded the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le
Bolshévisme, which in 1943 was to provide the nucleus of the French unit of the
Waffen-SS, later to become known as the SS Division Charlemagne.
Unlike the intellectual Déat, the people’s tribune Doriot, who was the leader
of the radical right-wing Parti Populaire Français (PPF) of 1936, took his anti-
Communism to such extreme lengths that for a time he saw active service in the
war against the Soviet Union, fighting as a French legionary and wearing a
Wehrmacht uniform. While the Foreign Office in Berlin and the German ambas-
sador in Paris, Otto Abetz, banked on Déat, the more radical Doriot enjoyed the
backing of the SS, but neither man was able to command mass support. As a
collaborationniste, Doriot lost most of the followers that he had had before the
war, although his party continued to have more members than Déat’s. Together
with other Fascist organizations, including Deloncle’s, the RNP and PPF are
believed to have had a little over 14,000 members in fifty-two départements
between 1942 and 1944. The total number of members of all Fascist and pro-
German organizations during the second half of 1943 has been estimated as
being 50,000 at the very most.
Among the intellectual collaborationnistes were the journalist Alfred Fabre-
Luce and the writers Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu
la Rochelle and Henry de Montherlant, all of whom were eloquent advocates of
a struggle spearheaded by National Socialist Germany and designed to save
Europe from Bolshevism. The spokesmen for the collaborationnistes were
based in Paris, but they also had influential allies in Vichy, including the former
Communist Paul Marion, who became minister of information and propa-
ganda in February 1941; Jacques Bénoist-Méchin, the secretary of state to the
vice-president of the Council of Ministers; and Joseph Darnand, the head of
the Milice Française, who, with the active support of his closest colleague
Philippe Henriot, came to embody the Vichy regime’s increasingly rapid slide
into Fascism after 1943.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 779

The year 1943 marked the high point of the French Resistance. With the
introduction of forced labour in January 1943, the number of fighters grew, as
did the number of their armed attacks on policemen associated with the Vichy
regime as well as on militia members, well-known collaborators and members
of the occupying power. The occupiers responded with mass deportations to
German concentration camps: of the 87,000 French men and women affected by
this measure, two-thirds belonged to the resistance movement. The remainder
were made up for the most part of hostages, prisoners and homosexuals.
The various resistance groups were originally divided both regionally and
politically, but under the impact of the regime’s increasingly repressive meas-
ures they forged closer links among themselves, and in January 1943 de
Gaulle’s personal representative in France, Jean Moulin, who was the former
prefect of the département of Eure-et-Loire, succeeded in bringing together the
leading left-wing resistance groups in the east of the country, namely, ‘Combat’,
‘Libération-Sud’ and ‘Franc-Tireur’. On 27 May he formed the Conseil National
de la Résistance (CNR) in Paris. It included not only the outlawed fighting
units of the moderate left and right and the Republican parties but also the
largest and most active of all the resistance organizations, the Communist-led
Front National. Four and a half weeks later Jean Moulin was arrested by the
Gestapo. Brutally tortured by the head of the Gestapo in Lyons, Klaus Barbie,
he died of heart failure two and a half weeks later, on 8 July. It was a serious
blow for the French resistance movement but no more than a temporary
setback, for the maquisards – named after the maquis, or scrubland, in the
Massif Central and other regions suitable for guerrilla fighting – continued to
attack the occupying Germans and their French supporters with unrelenting
resolve.
The amalgamation of the different resistance groups in France lent new
impetus to attempts to bring together the anti-Vichy forces outside France. In
the spring of 1943, General Henri Giraud, the civilian and military high
commissioner in North Africa, responding to pressure from his close adviser
Jean Monnet, formally broke with Pétain’s government, prompting de Gaulle to
give in to British demands and form an alliance with Giraud. On 3 June 1943
the two generals met in Algiers and founded the Comité Français de Libération
Française, or CFLN. But the dual presidency of Giraud and de Gaulle proved to
be short-lived, and under pressure from those members of the French
Resistance in Algeria who set the tone in the Advisory Assembly that met in
September, Giraud was forced to stand down in early October, leaving de
Gaulle as sole leader of the CFLN and at the same time the representative of
French power in Algeria. Since the Allies had already recognized the CFLN as
representing French interests in July, the leader of France Libre was from now
on able to rely on the support of a power which until 8 November 1942 had
maintained diplomatic relations with Vichy and banked on Giraud in North
Africa: the country in question was the United States of America.
780 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

With Giraud gone, the rift between the members of the French military
active outside France came to an end. It was a rift that had already cost many
lives: those lost during de Gaulle’s attempt to land his troops, with British help,
in Dakar in September 1940; those lost in the fighting in Syria in the summer
of 1941 between the forces of Vichy and those of Britain and France Libre;
and, later, those lost in the battle for North Africa on the occasion of the Allied
landings there in November 1942. Within France, too, de Gaulle’s authority
increased. Following his arrest, Moulin was replaced by another of the general’s
confidants, Georges Bidault. Meanwhile the resistance movement continued
to attract new members thanks not only to the increasingly harsh repressive
measures adopted by the Vichy regime and the occupying power but also to a
factor over which the French had little influence, no matter what their political
affiliations: the military successes of the Allies, who were already inflicting
heavy defeats on the Germans on every front. As a result, the belief in an ulti-
mate victory by the Reich and its allies began to fade in France just as it did
elsewhere.
Within the Vichy regime, there was renewed friction between Pétain and
Laval in the summer of 1943, when the former refused to accept a German
proposal to strip of their French citizenship all Jews who had become French
nationals since 1927, thereby making it easier for the Germans to arrest them.
Laval, who had already agreed to the German plan, had to back down, a step
that delayed, while not preventing, the deportation of Jews holding French
passports. A few months later a serious crisis blew up between the occupying
power and the French state, when Pétain, eager to prevent Laval from stripping
away even more of his powers, took a step that has been described by the histo-
rian Marc-Olivier Baruch as a ‘constitutional coup d’état’: on 11 November the
marshal signed a constitutional act by which the two chambers of the National
Assembly that had been suspended in July 1940 were reconvened. Their task
was to work out the new constitution and appoint Pétain’s successor. The occu-
pying power intervened at once and prevented Pétain from addressing the
nation by radio. Pétain protested but was forced to give in and henceforth
accept his permanent supervision by the German diplomat Cécil von Renthe-
Fink, the Reich’s former plenipotentiary in Denmark. It was Laval who emerged
victorious from this power struggle in France’s domestic politics.
At the beginning of 1944 the Germans insisted on the dismissal of a number
of Pétain’s closest advisers as well as numerous prefects and sub-prefects, some
of whom were deported to Germany. At the same time the occupying power
was able to ensure the appointment of dyed-in-the-wool collaborationnistes to
government posts: on 1 January 1944 Joseph Darnand, the secretary general of
the Milice Française, became the secretary general responsible for maintaining
law and order and, hence, effectively chief of police, while his colleague Philippe
Henriot, who like Darnand was a fanatical anti-Semite, became minister for
information and propaganda five days later. With the appointment of Marcel
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 781

Déat as minister of labour on 17 March, three declared Fascists were now in

key positions in the French government. All, moreover, could rely on the Milice
Française, which had long been the principal instrument in the struggle with
the French Resistance. Darnand appointed its members prefects, police chiefs,
prison wardens and leading officials in the secret service. The new courts set
up by Darnand in January 1944 were given the task of sentencing resistance
fighters who had prepared or carried out assassinations. Since appeals were not
allowed, a guilty verdict was followed by the accused’s immediate execution.
As the Milice Française gained in power, so the police grew more ineffec-
tual and at the same time drifted away from the état français, leading to
increased support for the resistance movement both from disenchanted
members of the police force and from the ranks of the civil service. In turn this
meant that for a time the dividing line between collaboration and resistance
became blurred. There were particularly violent clashes between the Résistance
and the Milice in early 1944 in the scrubland around Glières in the départe-
ment of Haute-Savoie. Here the forces loyal to the Vichy regime were able to
prevail only with German help. In the wake of these clashes many resistance
fighters were executed without trial. In the population at large Laval was held
responsible for the Milice’s reign of terror, Pétain escaping relatively lightly
thanks to his considerable personal standing. On 26 April, on his only visit to
Paris since the ceasefire, Pétain was greeted with an ovation, a reception
repeated in other French towns and cities through which he passed in the
spring of 1944. And yet there was no longer any broad support of the kind that
the état français had initially enjoyed: most French men and women were by
now waiting impatiently for their country’s liberation from foreign rule, a state
that came perceptibly closer with the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944.
It was shortly after this that the occupying power and the Milice Française
committed some of the worst atrocities of the whole of the Vichy era. On 7 June
German troops recaptured Tulle from the Franc-Tireurs et Partisans resistance
group and on the 8th hanged ninety-nine of the town’s inhabitants from the
balconies of local buildings. Two days later an SS division known as ‘Das Reich’
wiped out an entire village, Oradour-sur-Glane: 642 men, women and children
were herded into a barn and into the village church and either shot or burnt
alive. On 20 June members of France-Garde, the billeted militia, abducted the
former Radical Socialist minister Jean Zay from his prison cell at Riom. His
body was not found until 1946. On 7 July members of the Milice Française
murdered another Radical Socialist politician, Georges Mandel. His death was
intended as retribution for the murder of the minister of propaganda, Philippe
Henriot, who had been killed by resistance fighters on 28 June.
On 20 August, by which date the Germans had already begun to retreat
from France, Pétain was taken against his will from Vichy to Belfort and from
there to Sigmaringen in Swabia. He was followed by Laval and his ministers,
also against their will. The new government in exile, which included Darnand
782 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

and Déat, was headed by Fernand de Brinon, the Vichy government’s former
representative with the German High Command in Paris and later secretary of
state. His appointment had Pétain’s approval. The Sigmaringen cabinet no
longer had any real power; this now lay in the hands of the French Resistance
movement. On 25 August, three days after the last Jews had left for Auschwitz,
troops from France Libre under General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc liberated
Paris with the help of fighters from the French Resistance. Within hours de
Gaulle had entered the capital and addressed the waiting crowds from the Hôtel
de Ville. The following day, to tempestuous acclaim, he marched at the head of
his loyal supporters along the Champs-Élysées to the Place de la Concorde.
As long as the Germans had the final word in France, it had remained
unclear what would become of the country in the event of a German victory.
All that was certain was that Alsace-Lorraine would remain in German hands.
Since 1941 there had no longer been any talk of Burgundy becoming German,
although this had occupied the thoughts of Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels
both before and after the campaign in the west. But Hitler had never envisaged
the rest of France as part of a Greater German Reich. Presumably a territorially
reduced France would have had a role to play as a vassal state of a victorious
Germany. The fact that Hitler felt a certain respect for French culture and that
the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, and many German officers held
France in even higher esteem meant that the French were not treated as a helot
race and thus avoided the fate suffered by the White Russians, Ukrainians and
Poles.
On the other hand, many of the French artists and intellectuals courted by
Abetz simply came to terms with the realities of the situation, if they did not
actively collaborate with the enemy. Between 1940 and 1944 a number of
important plays were premièred in Paris, including Sartre’s Les Mouches and
Claudel’s Le Soulier de satin. With German approval books continued to be
published, including works by Camus, Duhamel and even François Mauriac,
who was a member of the Résistance and who also wrote for an underground
publishing house, Éditions de Minuit. Painters and sculptors remained unmo-
lested as long as they did not attack the occupying power. Describing the
cultural life of Paris between 1940 and 1944, Marc-Olivier Baruch has even
spoken in this context of a ‘period of efflorescence’.67
With the liberation of France came the mythical transfiguration of the
French Resistance. In his speech to the crowd outside Paris’s Hôtel de Ville on
25 August 1944 de Gaulle declared that France had been liberated by its own
people with the help of its armies and the support of ‘fighting France, in other
words, the only true and eternal France’.68 In making this claim, de Gaulle
turned the achievements of a small minority of a million or so French men and
women into the exploits of an entire nation, while collaboration was ascribed
to a finite number of individuals whom it was now a question of ruthlessly
calling to account. Both in the weeks before the Allied invasion and in the
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 783

months that followed it, some 10,000 men and women fell victim to this process
of épuration. None was ever tried in a court of law. Their number included
politicians, members of the Milice Française and gendarmes. Women who had
had intimate relations with German soldiers were indiscriminately accused of
collaboration, just as they were in other occupied countries. All were ostra-
cized and in many cases their hair was shaved off. Children who were the
offspring of such liaisons were never allowed to forget their origins.
Informal retribution was followed by its formal counterpart. Of the Vichy
regime’s ministers and secretaries of state, twenty-two were sentenced to varying
terms of imprisonment or forced labour in 1945, while eighteen were sentenced
to death – ten of them in their absence. Among those who received the death
sentence was Pétain, although in view of his age the sentence was not carried
out: instead, he was banished to the island of Yeu off the Vendée, where he died
on 23 July 1951. Laval, Brinon and Darnand were executed. Doriot was killed in
an air raid on Germany in February 1945, while Déat managed to escape to Italy,
where he hid in a monastery and died in 1955. Of the senior figures in the Milice
and other high-ranking officials of the Vichy regime, some 1,500 were sentenced
to death and executed; 38,000 served terms of imprisonment.
Not a few collaborators were helped by the fact that they had maintained
links with the resistance movement. Among them was René Bousquet, who
until the end of 1943 had been secretary general of the French police and, as
such, had been at the very top of his country’s repressive regime. He had even
played a substantial role in the deportation of Jews living in France, all of whom
were taken to the extermination camps to the east. His sentence was limited to
a five-year ban on holding public office. Only when new incriminating evidence
came to light much later, including his complicity in the deportation of 194
Jewish children, was he tried again in 1991, but the trial was repeatedly post-
poned thanks to Bousquet’s friendship with François Mitterrand, who was
president of France from 1981 to 1995. Bouquet was shot on 8 June 1993 by an
assailant who was said to have been of unsound mind.

‘To cause this nation to vanish from the face of the earth’:
The ‘Final Solution’ (II)
The first country to report that all of its Jews had been exterminated was Serbia.
Thousands of Jewish men were shot in the wake of the ‘atonement measures’
undertaken in the summer and autumn of 1941. These deaths were followed
between March and May 1942 by the murders of some 8,000 Jewish women and
children in the concentration camp at Sajmigte and afterwards by the killing of
patients and staff at the Jewish Hospital in Belgrade and of Jews from the nearby
camp, all of whom perished in a gas van sent from Berlin. A similar fate was
suffered by Sinti and Roma, who both here and in others parts of Europe occu-
pied by the Germans were regarded as racially and socially inferior and as
784 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

unnecessary mouths to be fed. In August 1942, the head of the civilian admin-
istration in Belgrade, SS group leader Harald Turner, reported on the comple-
tion of his murderous actions, striking a note of pride in his telegram: ‘Serbia is
the only country in Europe where the Jewish problem has been solved.’69
On the strength of the experiences gleaned during the murder of the
mentally ill, gas vans were also used to exterminate Jews in the Baltic States,
White Russia, the Ukraine and in the camp at Chelmno (Kulmhof). Not until
November 1941 were Jews murdered in large numbers in gas chambers in
Belzec in the General Government of Poland. Along with Sobibór, Treblinka
and, after July 1942, Majdanek, Belzec was one of the extermination camps
supervised by the Lublin district SS group leader, Odilo Globocnik. ‘Action
Reinhard’ was presumably so called in memory of Reinhard Heydrich. By the
end of 1942 some 434,000 Jews had been murdered at Belzec, while the figure
for Sobibór for March to June 1942 – the first three months during which it was
operational – was between 90,000 and 100,000, most of them from Lublin,
Austria, the Old Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Systematic
killings in the gas chambers at Treblinka began in July 1942. Majdanek was
originally intended for Soviet prisoners of war but soon became both a concen-
tration camp used for slave labour and an extermination camp. The same was
true of Auschwitz. Here the Economic and Administrative Main Office ensured
that inmates were killed through overwork, while direct physical annihilation
by gassing was carried out by the Reich Main Security Office.
The extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau opened in September 1941
with the killing of some 600 Russian prisoners of war and 200 other inmates
who were either ill or unable to work. All were murdered using Zyklon B gas.
By the middle of February 1942 the mass killings in gas chambers had started.
Early victims included Jews from the labour camps in Upper Silesia who were
declared unfit for work. In 1943 a separate camp was built at Birkenau for
women, families and gypsies and a ‘family camp’ for Jews from the concentra-
tion camp at Theresienstadt. Jews who were to be killed had to strip naked
before being gassed. Death was by suffocation and was painful. The bodies
were then processed: gold teeth were removed, the women’s hair was cut off,
artificial limbs were removed and items of value such as wedding rings and
spectacles were collected in piles. This task was performed by Jewish
Sonderkommandos, or special commandos. Initially the bodies were buried,
but from 1943 onwards they were burned in large ovens produced by the Erfurt
firm of Topf & Sons. The bones were crushed in special machines. In Saul
Friedländer’s words, ‘the ashes were used as fertilizer in the nearby fields,
dumped in local forests, or tossed into the river, nearby. As for the members of
the Sonderkommandos, they were periodically killed and replaced by a new
batch’.70 The number of men, women and children murdered at Auschwitz has
been put at 1.3 million, a figure made up of 1.1 million Jews, 140,000 Poles,
some 20,000 Sinti and Roma and 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 785

Those who were murdered in this way came from every part of Europe that
was either occupied or controlled by Germany. The Jews were rarely offered
assistance by the local population. Nowhere was that help as successful and as
comprehensive as it was in Denmark. In the Netherlands, by contrast, the
displays of solidarity in Delft, Leiden and Amsterdam in 1940–41 were soon
replaced by cooperation between the police and civil servants on the one hand
and the occupying power on the other whenever it was a question of deporting
Jews to the extermination camps to the east. The same was true of Belgium,
where, unlike its neighbour to the north, the overwhelming majority of the Jews
who were living in the country were of foreign extraction. In France, collabora-
tion encountered resistance when it was a question of deporting Jews who had
long been established in the country. Of the Jews who were deported from
France, 68 per cent were of foreign extraction. Of the foreign Jews who had been
living in France, 39 per cent fell victim to the Holocaust, whereas the figure for
French Jews was small by comparison: 12 per cent. In France 23 per cent of the
country’s Jewish population were deported or killed, whereas the proportion in
Belgium was around 50 per cent, in the Netherlands as high as 75 per cent.
The first 10,000 Jews to be transported from Belgium to the extermination
camps in the east left in August 1942. They were Poles, Czechoslovaks, Russians
and other foreign Jews, but as yet their number did not include any Belgian
nationals. In a report that he sent to Berlin on 9 July, Werner von Bargen, the
Foreign Ministry representative with the German military high command in
Belgium, attributed this situation to the fact ‘that the understanding of the
Jewish question is not yet very widespread here [in Belgium]’, while ‘the Jews
here are integrated into economic life, so that one could be worried about diffi-
culties in the labor market’.71 Those Belgian and foreign Jews who survived the
Holocaust owed their survival to spontaneous help from the local population
and to the support of resistance groups. The last train to take Jews from the
collection camp at Mechelen left for Auschwitz on 31 July 1944 and included
the artist Felix Nußbaum, whom the National Socialists deemed a representa-
tive of ‘degenerate art’. He was gassed at Auschwitz, probably on 2 August 1944.
In the Netherlands the leaders of all the country’s Christian Churches
protested at the deportation of Jews in July 1942. When the Reich commissar,
Arthur Seyß-Inquart, agreed to exclude baptized Jews who had converted to
Christianity before the German occupation, the Protestant bishops backed
down, but the Catholic bishops continued to voice their objections and to
inform their congregations of their anger. The authorities responded by arresting
the majority of Catholic Jews in the Netherlands and deporting ninety-two of
them to Auschwitz, where they were immediately gassed. One of the victims was
the Carmelite nun and philosopher Edith Stein, a native of Breslau who had
converted to Catholicism in 1922.
Among the German Jews who fled to the Netherlands and did not
convert to Christianity was Anne Frank, who had been born in Frankfurt in
786 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

June 1929. For two years from 6 July 1942 to 4 August 1944, she and her family
were able to hide in a building at the rear of a house in Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht
thanks to the help of a number of Dutch neighbours. She described this period
in the pages of her now famous diary. She and the other Jews who were hiding
in the secret annexe were denounced and arrested on 4 August 1944. Only her
father, Otto, who was deported to Auschwitz, survived the war. Anne herself
and her sister Margot were taken to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen,
where they both died of typhoid fever in March 1945, shortly before the camp
was liberated.
Jews living in countries occupied by the Germans could survive only by
escaping – which became almost impossible in southern France, too, after that
part of the country had been overrun in November 1942 – or by going under-
ground, a move that presupposed the active assistance of non-Jews. In all the
occupied countries and even in Germany itself there were individuals willing
to risk life and limb by protecting Jews from their persecutors. But nowhere
were there as many such individuals as in Poland, a country that had tradition-
ally been anti-Semitic. Money and extortion also played a role here, and there
is no doubt that there were many more Poles who sympathized with the exter-
mination of the Jews and who denounced Jews who had gone into hiding than
ones who helped assimilated Jews to conceal their identity, and still fewer who
offered Jews somewhere to hide. Of the 3.3 million Jews who had been living in
Poland in 1939, some 300,000 survived the war. Of these, 40,000 at most had
remained in Poland itself.

Most of the countries that were allied to National Socialist Germany adopted
an inconsistent and contradictory attitude to the extermination of the Jews,
and this is even true of Fascist Italy. In the occupied parts of Greece, Croatia
and southern France, Italian diplomats and army officers saved thousands of
Jews from certain death by preventing them from being deported to extermi-
nation camps. In Croatia, this put them at odds not only with the Germans but
also with the radically anti-Semitic Ustage, who had already exterminated most
of the Jews in those areas that were under German control or influence. On 21
August 1942 Mussolini informed his military and civilian subordinates that he
supported Germany’s claim to the Jews living in those parts of Croatia that
were under Italian occupation. Italy’s Foreign Ministry had been told shortly
beforehand about the purpose of the deportation demanded by the Germans
in a letter sent by the second-in-command at the German Embassy in Rome,
the envoy Otto von Bismarck, who was a grandson of the founder of the Reich
and whose language was unusually candid: that aim was ‘the dispersal and total
elimination’ of all the Jews whom Germany wanted to see deported.72
If leading Italian military figures on the other side of the Adriatic under
General Mario Roatta, the commander in chief of the Second Army in Slovenia,
Dalmatia and Croatia, were unwilling to bow to Rome’s directive, their
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 787

reluctance was due less to humanitarian considerations than to their concern for
political reality: for all their horror of the murderous racism of their German
allies, they were also worried that if Germany were to be defeated, they would be
regarded by the victorious powers as complicit in an appalling crime. But in
spite of Roatta’s objections, Mussolini ordered all Jews living in the Italian-
occupied part of Croatia to be interned in the middle of October and then to be
handed over to Croats and Germans. But although they were interned in a camp
on the island of Rab, they were not handed over, Roatta having prevailed on the
Duce to issue further instructions and defer any decision on the fate of the
camp’s inmates until the spring of 1943. Only after the fall of Mussolini in July
1943 and the signing of an armistice between Italy and the Western Allies on 8
September were the Germans able to seize at least some of the Jews living in
those parts of Croatia that had been under Italian occupation and deport them
to Auschwitz – another group had in the meantime joined Tito’s partisans.
Until the summer of 1942 it looked as if another of Hitler’s loyal allies, the
Romanian leader Ion Antonescu, would support Germany in its quest for a
‘final solution to the Jewish question’, just as he had supported the Reich in its
war on the Soviet Union. During the first twelve months of the war in the east,
Romania’s army and gendarmerie murdered between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews
in the recaptured regions of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. And in October
1941 Romanian troops killed between 45,000 and 50,000 Jews in Odessa after
marching into the city. But in the autumn of 1942, Antonescu, presumably
reacting to the military defeats sustained by the Axis Powers, began to rethink
his policy, and in October he postponed to the following spring the deportation
of the remaining 300,000 Romanian Jews to which he had already agreed,
informing one of Himmler’s representatives in November that Romania disap-
proved of Germany’s attitude to the Jews. It is clear that the pressure exerted by
Berlin on Bucharest had the opposite effect to the one intended. In the light of
the military situation on the eastern front, Hitler was unable to use military
force against the recalcitrant conducator and as a result he was obliged to accept
Romania’s refusal to continue with its programme of extermination.
Under Miklós Horthy, Hungary was scarcely less anti-Semitic than the
Romania of Ion Antonescu. The anti-Jewish racist legislation of May 1939 was
followed in the spring of 1942 by the nationalization of land under Jewish
ownership. Jews were sent to the eastern front as part of a forced labour
programme, resulting in countless deaths. But this period also witnessed a
significant shift in Horthy’s foreign policy. In March 1942, convinced that in the
end the Third Reich would be defeated by the Allies, he replaced his unequivo-
cally pro-German prime minister, László Bárdossy, by a landowner, Miklós
Kállay. Regarded as an outspoken foe of both Hungarian National Socialism in
the form of Ferenc Szálasi’s Arrow Cross Fascists and of German National
Socialism, Kállay sought closer ties with the Western Powers in keeping with
Horthy’s wishes.
788 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Kállay initially refused to bow to Germany’s demands that the Jewish Star be
introduced into Hungary, too, and that he begin to deport the country’s 800,000
or so Jews. Hitler met Horthy at Schloß Kleßheim near Salzburg in April 1943,
but their meeting resulted in no closer agreement between the two sides. The
following month Kállay insisted in an official speech that all European Jews
should without exception be deported from the Continent but at the same time
conceded that the most important precondition for such a policy did not exist
and would not exist until a solution had been found to the problem of where the
Jews should be resettled. Moreover, Kállay also professed his faith in an ideal
that could hardly have been further removed from National Socialist ideology:
‘Hungary will never deviate from those precepts of humanity, which, in the
course of history, it has always maintained in racial and religious questions.’73
Barely a year later, Hitler decided to act. In order to pre-empt Hungary’s
switch of allegiance to the Allied camp, he gave Horthy an ultimatum when the
two men met again at Schloß Kleßheim on 18 March 1944: threatening to use
military force against Hungary, he compelled Horthy to agree to his country’s
occupation, to install a pro-German government and to make available 100,000
Jews whom he claimed were needed to work in Germany. The very next day
Hungary was occupied by German troops. The former ambassador in Berlin,
Döme Sztójay, was placed in charge of the government, and a number of Horthy’s
closest colleagues were arrested and sent to German concentration camps.
Adolf Eichmann, the head of the department responsible for Jewish affairs
at the Reich Main Security Office, arrived in Budapest on 20 March and opened
the final chapter in the Third Reich’s attempts to deal with Hungary’s Jews as
part of the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. The first arrests were made in
the Hungarian provinces on 7 April, a move undertaken with the active support
of the gendarmerie and with the enthusiastic acclaim of sections of the local
population. The first deportations to Auschwitz took place in May, with between
12,000 and 14,000 Jews setting out for the extermination camp on a daily basis.
Slovakia was already involved in this development and had been since late
March 1942, when the first train left for Auschwitz carrying 999 young women.
The deportation took place not in response to German demands but according
to the wishes of the government under its prime minister, the fiercely
anti-Semitic Vojt@ch Tuka: in the wake of the large-scale ‘Aryanization’ of
Jewish property, the government had no desire to be saddled with the welfare
of impoverished Jews. Slovakia had already sent 20,000 Jews to Germany
at the beginning of 1942 to work on forced labour projects – in the event
they all helped to build the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. By the end of June
1942 some 52,000 Jews had been deported to Auschwitz and other extermina-
tion camps. At this juncture the country’s president, Josef Tiso, a Catholic
prelate, responding to warnings from the Vatican, raised doubts about
the policy with the result that the deportations were briefly suspended, leading
in turn to a muted protest from Ernst von Weizsäcker, the secretary of state at
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 789

the Foreign Office. By September 1943, however, three transports again left for
Auschwitz in response to German demands.
By March 1943 only around 20,000 Jews were still living in Slovakia, most
of them baptized. When Tuka raised the possibility of their being deported to
Germany, too, the Catholic clergy protested, as did the population at large,
persuading the prime minister, Vojt@ch Tuka, to abandon the idea. When Tiso
met Hitler on 22 April 1943, he showed no inclination to deport the converted
Jews, a position he was able to maintain largely because, given the relatively
small number of Jews still living in Slovakia, Berlin had little reason to exert
pressure and force the country to act.
Like Slovakia, Bulgaria was initially willing to cooperate with Germany by
deporting the region’s Jews, and in June 1942 parliament empowered the govern-
ment of Bogdan Filov to deal with the problem. With the agreement of Tsar Boris
III, the 1,100 or so Jews living in the two areas that Bulgaria had been able to
annex in April 1941 on the strength of its involvement in the two German
campaigns in the Balkans – the former Greek Thrace and the hitherto Yugoslav
Macedonia – were handed over to the Germans in the spring of 1943 and deported
to the extermination camp at Treblinka. Those Bulgarian Jews who, unlike the
ones from Thrace and Macedonia, were not regarded as foreigners were to be
deported soon afterwards in keeping with an agreement made between Tsar
Boris and representatives of the SS, but in the wake of protests on the part of
parliament and of the Orthodox Church, Boris went back on his word, with the
result that Bulgaria’s remaining 25,000 Jews were left in the country and in that
way survived the Holocaust.
Even in Finland, where only 150 to 200 Jews of foreign extraction were
living, Germany demanded a contribution to the ‘final solution’. In July 1942
Himmler visited Helsinki and insisted on this demand, whereupon the coun-
try’s secret police began to compile lists of names and addresses of all the indi-
viduals who were to be handed over. But the affair could not be kept quiet and
there were protests both in parliament and from the public at large, with the
result that of the thirty-five foreign Jews originally believed to have been on the
secret police’s list, just eight remained there and were deported to German-
occupied Estonia in November. Only one of them survived the end of the war.

Even those European countries that remained neutral were indirectly affected
by the persecution and extermination of the Continent’s Jews. Although tens of
thousands of Spanish volunteers from the ‘Blue Division’ fought on the eastern
front until December 1943, Spain tried to keep its distance from the conflict
and not compromise its neutrality by consorting with the dictators in Berlin
and Rome or with the Anglo-Saxon democracies. As part of this balancing act,
Madrid replaced its Axis-friendly foreign minister Ramón Serrano Suñer with
the Anglophile Count Francisco Gómez-Jordana in September 1942, while at
the same time allowing Jews who hoped to reach the West from those parts of
790 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

France that were still unoccupied to pass through Spain and Portugal. Although
Portugal’s dictator, Antonio Oliveira Salazar, insisted that transit visas be issued
on only the most restrictive basis, many Portuguese consuls ignored Lisbon’s
instructions, allowing as many as 50,000 Jews to escape in this way.
Among those who sought their freedom by crossing the Pyrenees was the
literary scholar and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who had emigrated to
France in 1933. He was granted a visa by the American consulate in Marseilles
and had also obtained transit visas for Spain and Portugal, but when he and
other Jewish refugees were on the point of crossing the border at Port Bou on
26 September 1946, the Spanish border police refused to recognize the visa
provided for him in Marseilles. In his despair, Benjamin abandoned his
attempts to cross into Spain and took his own life that same day.
Unlike Spain and Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden remained democratic
countries. In response to Swiss demands in November 1938, Germany had
stamped all Jewish passports with an indelible red J, a move that Sweden
adopted a little later. After this date it was practically impossible, therefore, for
Jews to enter Switzerland legally. Border controls were greatly increased in
1942, and in the August of that year the cantonal authorities were instructed to
send back all foreign Jews to the country’s borders on the grounds that they
were not political refugees: directly or indirectly such Jews would in this way
fall into German hands. Until the end of 1943 this directive was more or less
rigorously upheld. After that date, occasional, if rare, exceptions were made.
Until the end of 1942, Sweden adopted a similarly restrictive approach to
Jewish refugees, but the country changed its policy when it became clear from
news reports that Jews were being systematically exterminated in vast numbers.
In response Sweden opened up its borders to Norwegian and Danish Jews.
Sweden also veered from its policy of neutrality by supporting the Norwegian
resistance movement, providing equipment and training its members in camps
that lay close to the border. At the same time, however, the Social Democrat
government helped Germany’s wartime economy by means of ore and ball
bearings exports. Here too there were parallels with Switzerland, which allowed
Germany to transport material over the Alps to Italy, while its industry worked
for the Axis Powers. On the other hand, Switzerland was dependent on coal
imports from Germany. Neither Sweden nor Switzerland would have been able
to maintain its independence without making concessions to Germany. But
their cooperation not only helped – albeit unwittingly – to prolong the war, it
also contributed indirectly to that aspect of National Socialist policy that was
taken in hand only once the war had started: the final solution to the Jewish
question.

Neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland were aware from an early date
that Germany was systematically murdering the Continent’s Jews. In the
summer of 1942, Kurt Gerstein, a devout Protestant who was a disinfection
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 791

expert in the hygiene service of the Waffen-SS in Berlin and who had presum-
ably had a subversive agenda when joining the organization, was ordered by the
Reich Main Security Office to obtain around 220 pounds of Zyklon B (prussic
acid) and deliver it to Lublin. In Belzec he witnessed the mass gassing of Jews
and on the train journey from Warsaw to Berlin he spoke about what he had
seen to an attaché at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin, Göran von Otter. He also
informed the Evangelical bishop in Berlin, Otto Dibelius. Shortly afterwards,
another Swedish diplomat, Karl Ingve Vendel, who was the Swedish consul in
Stettin, was told about the mass killing of Jews. His informant was almost
certainly Henning von Tresckow, the chief operations officer of Army Group
Centre and a leading member of the military resistance to Hitler. Both of these
Swedish diplomats informed the government in Stockholm about what they
had learnt, but Stockholm failed to pass on their reports to the Western Allies.
Similar news reached Switzerland in the summer of 1942. The German
industrialist Eduard Schulte was well connected to high-ranking figures in the
National Socialist regime and in the course of a visit to Zurich told a Jewish busi-
ness friend that Germany was planning to wipe out all the Jews in Europe. The
business friend informed the director of the Geneva office of the World Jewish
Congress, Gerhart Riegner, who in turn sent a cable to the World Jewish
Congress headquarters in New York and London via the American and British
legations in Berne, while at the same time questioning the reliability of the infor-
mation contained in the report. In this way not only the World Jewish Congress
but also the foreign ministries in London and Washington learnt about the ‘final
solution’. The American undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles, agreed with the
president of the World Jewish Congress that they would not publish the report
until they had received independent confirmation. The International Red Cross
and the Swiss government reacted with similar reserve.
News of the ‘final solution’ became more widely known in Great Britain at
the end of June 1942. In the United States the State Department saw itself
compelled in November to confirm to the World Jewish Congress that Riegner’s
telegram was based on fact. On 10 December the British government received
a detailed report from the foreign minister of the Polish government in exile,
Count Edward Raczy-ski, spelling out all that was happening in the extermi-
nation camps. A week later the Allied governments and the National Committee
of France Libre issued a declaration informing the world that the Jews of
Europe were being systematically exterminated and that those responsible for
these crimes would not escape retribution.
In October 1942, a Polish underground militant, Jan Karski, who had previ-
ously been able to visit the Warsaw ghetto with Jewish help, disguised himself
as a Ukrainian guard and witnessed a mass execution of Jews in one of the
outposts of the extermination camp at Belzec. Shortly afterwards Karski
managed to escape via Germany, Vichy France, Spain and Gibraltar to London,
where the Polish government in exile had summoned him to appear. His
792 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

reports were initially greeted with scepticism not only in Polish and British
circles but even among the Jews to whom he spoke. In July 1943 he travelled to
Washington as the courier of the Polish government in exile and met Catholic
archbishops, leaders of local Jewish organizations, the associate justice of the
United States Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter, and even President Roosevelt,
informing them all about the situation in Poland and about the extermination
of the Jews, but his first-hand reports had no practical consequences. The
representatives of America’s Jews were emphatic in their support for the war on
National Socialist Germany but had no wish to place the president under any
additional pressure where their own particular cause was concerned.
By the end of April 1944 the Allies were fully apprised of the activities of the
largest of the extermination camps thanks to the Auschwitz Protocols of Rudolf
Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, two Jewish inmates who had escaped to Slovakia and
whose reports reached Great Britain and America via Switzerland. But all
attempts by individual Jews to persuade American leaders to bomb the gas
chambers at Auschwitz or to destroy the railway line leading to the camp found-
ered on the lack of interest evinced by the State Department and on the resist-
ance of the War Department. The standard argument of the opponents of the
plan was that in this way resources would be diverted from areas where they
were more urgently needed. In August 1944 the assistant secretary of war, John
J. McCloy, offered a further objection, arguing that such an action would merely
serve to encourage the Germans to commit even greater atrocities.
British reactions were equally negative. On both sides of the Atlantic,
leading military figures and politicians were afraid that any increase in their
commitment to the Jews would lead to greater anti-Semitic resentment at
home. In certain cases anti-Jewish prejudice on the part of individual politi-
cians may also have played a role here. At no time were there any military
actions on the part of the Allies specifically designed to save the Jews.
Technically speaking, it would have been possible to bomb the railway lines
leading to Auschwitz: after all, industrial plants only a few miles away from the
gas chambers and ovens were repeatedly attacked by Allied bombers between
July and November 1944.
The Vatican, too, was well aware of what the Germans were doing to the
Jews, having received reports of the mass executions in the Baltic States in early
1942 and, shortly afterwards, learning about the events in Poland and the
Ukraine. But Pope Pius XII was unwilling to criticize the Third Reich publicly
since he feared reprisals against Catholics in Germany and in other German-
controlled parts of Europe. Like so many others, he also regarded Bolshevism
as a greater danger than National Socialism. In his 1942 Christmas message he
expressed his sympathy for those who had been condemned to death on
national or racial grounds and for those others who had been ‘consigned to a
slow decline’ but he reduced the impact of his criticism by referring in the same
breath to the victims of air raids.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 793

Pius passed no comment on the deportation of Rome’s Jews in October

1943, and when the bishop of Berlin, Count Konrad von Preysing, wrote to
him in March 1943 and asked him to speak out against the deportation of Jews
elsewhere and pointed out that there were many Catholics among those who
were being deported, the pope contented himself with thanking Berlin’s
Catholics for the love that they had shown ‘so-called non-Aryans’ in their time
of need.74 Throughout the war the pope behaved exactly like a diplomat for
whom the interests of the Catholic Church – at least as he himself interpreted
those interests – took precedence over all humanitarian considerations that
others might have derived from the Christian message. The extermination of
European Jews could thus proceed without any public protest from the Vatican.

In late July 1942, at more or less the same time that news of the mass gassing
of Jews was reaching the West, a Jewish resistance group – the Kydowska
Organizacja Bojowa, or KOB – was being established in the Warsaw ghetto. Its
200 or so activists obtained pistols and hand grenades from the Communist
underground movement. Its activities were initially aimed at Jewish collabora-
tors on the Jewish Council but it made little progress, and in August and
September its leading members were arrested by the Germans. In spite of this
setback, the organization had not been crushed, and in January 1943 its members
attacked an SS escort, whereupon between 5,000 and 6,000 Jews were arrested.
The KOB reacted by killing Jews who had been working for the Germans,
including the assistant head of the Jewish ghetto police. The KOB’s work with
the Polish home guard was made more difficult by the fact that the latter had
little time for the Communist tendencies of some of the Jewish resistance fighters
and their links with the Communist underground. In spite of this, weapons
continued to reach the ghetto.
Himmler had given orders for the Warsaw ghetto to be destroyed, starting
on 19 April 1943. Its inhabitants were to be deported to the extermination
camps. The KOB and its military arm, the Kydowski ZwiJzek Wojskowy, or
ZZW, were prepared for this operation and began an armed struggle against
the SS. The fighting lasted for nine days, initially in the streets, then from
underground bunkers. A handful of activists avoided death by tunnelling
through into the non-Jewish part of the capital. The SS used flamethrowers,
machine guns, hand grenades, dynamite and tear gas. It was with some pride
that SS brigade leader Jürgen Stroop was able to report on the results of his
actions on 16 May 1943: ‘The Jewish quarter in Warsaw exists no more.’75 The
SS claimed to have killed as many as 60,000 Jews.
The uprising in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw was not the only act of
self-defence on the part of the Jews, for armed clashes also took place in the
ghettos in Bialystok and Vilnius when attempts were made to clear them. There
was even a riot in the camp at Treblinka in August 1943. This was preceded by
the exhumation and burning of bodies – a clear sign that the Germans were
794 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

keen to remove all trace of their crimes and that the camp was being closed
down in advance of the Red Army’s expected arrival. Of the 850 ‘working Jews’
who were still living in Treblinka at this time, all were killed during or soon
after the uprising, the only survivors being the 100 or so who had been able to
escape.
The Jews in the camp at Sobibór rose up in mid-October 1943. This camp,
too, was scheduled for closure. The inmates succeeded in killing the SS guards
and some 300 Jews escaped across the River Bug and sought refuge in the
nearby woods, where they joined the local partisans. The SS struck before
similar uprisings could take place at Majdanek and in the camps at Trawniki
and Poniatowa. As part of Operation Harvest Festival some 42,400 Jews were
executed in early November 1943. In order to drown out the sounds of shooting
and the cries of the dying prisoners, deafening music was played over the
camps’ loudspeakers.
The extermination of the Sinti and Roma was relatively unsystematic when
compared to that of the Jews. Although they came originally from north-west
India and were therefore ‘Aryan’, the Sinti and Roma were still regarded as
‘subhuman’ by the National Socialists. Gypsies living in Germany were sent to
concentration camps from as early as 1936. Within two years they were being
used as forced labourers. The first mass shootings took place in 1941. By the
following year gypsies were being gassed at Chelmno. In Vichy France some
30,000 Sinti and Roma were interned before being handed over to the Germans.
In Poland, the Soviet Union and Serbia thousands of gypsies were murdered
during the German occupation. The Ustage regime in Croatia and Antonescu’s
government in Romania likewise murdered tens of thousands of gypsies. Of
the 22,600 men, women and children interned in the gypsy camp at Auschwitz,
19,300 perished. Of the gypsies and ‘gypsy half-castes’ living in the Old Reich,
around 15,000 were killed, while the figures for Austria and Czechoslovakia are
8,000 and 35,000 respectively. Estimates of the total number of gypsies
murdered under German rule range from 220,000 to 500,000.
At the end of 1942 the SS decided to distinguish between the Sinti, who they
argued could be traced back to their Aryan roots and who were therefore
‘racially pure’, and the Roma, who were said to be racially impure. As a result,
the SS stopped deporting both groups to extermination camps with the imme-
diate aim of murdering them. In 1944 as many as 2,500 half-gypsies who were
described as ‘non-conformist’ were sterilized in Germany. The National
Socialists’ policy towards gypsies was riven by contradictions, motivated, as it
was, by a mixture of biological racism and socio-political utilitarianism. If the
desire to exterminate gypsies was less intense and less all-encompassing than
was the case with the Jews, then this was due to the fact that while they were
regarded as less deserving members of society, they were not held responsible
for an international conspiracy. The Jews alone fell into this last-named
category.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 795

On 4 October 1943, the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, addressed SS

group leaders in Poznan and spoke more openly than ever before about the
extermination of the Jews:

‘The Jewish people is being exterminated,’ says every party comrade, ‘that’s
clear, it’s in our party’s programme, eliminating the Jews, exterminating
them, that’s what we’re doing.’ And then they all turn up, the eighty million
good Germans, and each of them knows at least one decent Jew. It’s clear
that the others are bastards, but this one is a first-rate Jew. Of all who talk
like this, not one has looked on, not one has survived it. Most of you will
know what it means when one hundred corpses lie side by side, when five
hundred are lying there and when one thousand are lying there. To have
endured this and at the same time – always excepting the odd case of human
weakness – to have remained decent: it is this that has made us strong. This
is a glorious chapter in our history that has never been written and that can
never be written.76

Two days later Himmler addressed a meeting of NSDAP Gauleiters in the city.
Once again he addressed the subject of the extermination of European Jewry:

The question has been asked of us, how it is with the women and children?
I have taken the decision to achieve a clear solution also in this matter. I did
not consider that I had the right to eliminate the men – that is to kill them
or have them killed – and let their children grow up to become the avengers
against our own sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken
to have this people disappear from the face of the earth.77

Goebbels, too, attended the meeting of Gauleiters in Poznan and afterwards

noted in his diary that Himmler had provided ‘a very unvarnished and frank
account’ of the problem:

He is convinced that we can solve the Jewish question throughout Europe

by the end of this year. He proposes the harshest and most radical solution:
to exterminate the Jews root and branch. It is certainly a logical solution,
even if it is a brutal one. We have to take the responsibility of completely
solving this issue in our time. Later generations will certainly not handle
this problem with the courage and the ardor that are ours.78

Of the two great goals of National Socialism, one of them – creating more
Lebensraum in the east – seemed no longer to be attainable by the autumn of
1943. Hitler had been forced to abandon Operation Citadel in the Kursk salient
in the middle of July, after which the Red Army continued its western advance
more or less unchecked. In August and September 1943 the Germans had to
796 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

abandon the Donets Basin and the Kuban bridgehead, and in November the
Dnieper Line was lost. But it still seemed as if the other great aim – the final
solution of the Jewish question – might yet be achieved. That being so, the
National Socialist leadership addressed this question with all the greater deter-
mination. Its ultimate aim was not the physical eradication of all Jews: after all,
Hitler was convinced that Jewry had left its mark on early Christianity in such a
way that the spirit of Judaism lived on in Christianity and was therefore ulti-
mately to blame for the fact that the Aryan nations’ desire to assert themselves
had been fatally impaired, with the result that the struggle to defeat the Jewish
spirit could be won only if Christianity was defeated first.
In his monologues in his headquarters, Hitler repeatedly returned to the
idea that Jesus was an Aryan or at least a half-Aryan and that it was Paul who
as a Jew had set early Christianity on a course that had led it irrevocably in the
direction of Bolshevism, as Hitler explained on 21 October 1941:

If the Jew has succeeded in destroying the Roman Empire, that’s because St.
Paul transformed a local movement of Aryan opposition to Jewry into a
supra-temporal religion, which postulates the equality of all men amongst
themselves, and their obedience to an only god. This is what caused the
death of the Roman Empire. [. . .] Rome was Bolshevised, and Bolshevism
produced exactly the same results in Rome as later in Russia. [. . .] Saul has
changed into St. Paul, and Mardochai [the birth name of Karl Marx’s grand-
father] into Karl Marx. By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a
service of which our soldiers can have no idea.79

Three years later, on 30 November 1944, Hitler expressed his views on the
Jewish character of Christianity in the following terms:

Jesus fought against the materialism of His age, and, therefore, against the
Jews. [. . .] Paul [. . .] realised that the judicious exploitation of this idea
among non-Jews would give him far greater power in the world than the
promise of material profit to the Jews themselves. It was then that the future
St. Paul distorted with diabolical cunning the Christian idea. Out of this
idea, which was a declaration of war on the golden calf, on the egotism and
the materialism of the Jews, he created a rallying point for slaves of all kinds
against the élite, the masters and those in dominant authority. The religion
fabricated by Paul of Tarsus, which was later called Christianity, is nothing
but the Communism of to-day.80

Hitler’s hatred of the Jews was not simply an expression of racism. The ‘Negroes’,
whom he despised most of all, were not to be wiped out but only reduced to the
status of slaves. Gypsies, whom he defined as ‘foreign to the species’, were perse-
cuted and murdered because they were ‘asocial’. But he felt increasing respect
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 797

for the ‘non-Aryan’ Japanese and Chinese. The racist Hitler was aware that
strictly speaking the Jews were not a race. On 3 February 1945 he dictated the
following statement to Martin Bormann, the director of the party chancellery;
the authenticity of the remark has been questioned:

Spiritual race is of a tougher and more enduring kind than natural race. The
Jew remains a Jew wherever he goes. He is by nature a creature who cannot
be assimilated. And it is this quality of non-assimilability that determines
his race and that is bound to offer us sad proof of the superiority of the
‘spirit’ over the ‘flesh’!81

But the physical annihilation of the Jews did not mean that the Jewish ‘spirit’
had been defeated once and for all. Since this spirit had been taken over into
Christianity, the ‘Nordic race’ would still face a difficult fight even after the
‘Jewish question’ had been solved. As a result, the ‘final military victory’ would
have to be followed in Hitler’s view by an unprecedented cultural revolution
whose aim was to rectify a historical mistake that had been committed almost
2,000 years earlier, when the Jewish spirit in Christian form had set about
conquering Europe and breaking the back of the Aryan nations by robbing
them of their true nature as a master race and shackling them to the alien
Jewish commandment of ‘Thou shalt not kill’.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, German anti-Semites like Paul
de Lagarde had commented on St Paul’s alleged falsification of Jesus’s teach-
ings. Hitler took up their ideas and thought them through to their logical
conclusion: the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ was the necessary precon-
dition for the removal of the influence that the Jews and Jewish Christianity
continued to exert on European and world history. Only then would the true
Aryan nature, no longer inhibited by the morality of compassion, be able to
develop to its full extent and enable Aryan man to assert himself permanently
in the struggle for existence. To achieve this goal, or at least to come as close to
achieving it as possible, was the mission of the man who saw himself merely as
the agent of the will of history.

Collapse of a Dictatorship: Italy 1943–4

Mussolini’s Italy could not hold a candle to National Socialist Germany in
terms of the intensity of its hatred of the Jews, but in terms of their domination
as an occupying power the Italian Fascists did all they could to compete with
their most ruthless ally. In Abyssinia Italian troops managed to kill 75,000
guerrillas before having to surrender to the British in May 1941, while the
number of individuals summarily shot has been estimated at 24,000, those who
died in concentration camps at a further 35,000. The Swiss historian Aram
Mattioli has described the regime established by the Italians in Abyssinia
798 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

between 1936 and 1941 as a ‘reign of terror for which there were few prece-
dents in the colonial history of either Africa or Asia’.82
The Italians were so ill prepared for their occupation of Greece that some
5 per cent of the civilian population died from starvation during the winter of
1941/2. In Croatia and Montenegro the Italian forces reacted to attacks by Tito’s
partisans with methods all too reminiscent of those used by the SS: torture, the
shooting of hostages, the burning down of entire villages and mass deportations
to concentration camps were the norm. Whenever hostages were executed, the
general rule was to shoot ten of them for every officer killed or injured. In total,
100,000 Slovenians and Croats were deported in order to ‘Italianize’ the annexed
areas as quickly and as comprehensively as possible. In this regard a particularly
radical solution was found by the commander in chief of the Second Royal
Army, General Mario Roatta, the same man who, as we have already observed,
successfully opposed the handing over of Jews to the German authorities in the
autumn of 1942.
For ideological and economic reasons as well as on the grounds of prestige,
Mussolini insisted on Italy’s taking part in the Germans’ campaign against the
Soviet Union, but the 200,000 men from the Armata Italiana in Russia (ARMIR)
were ill prepared for their deployment in the east. Above all, they lacked winter
clothing and heavy weapons. By the time that the Red Army recaptured
Stalingrad in early February 1943, the Italians had lost 95,000 men, almost 70
per cent of their vehicles and practically all of their artillery. The number of
wounded Italian soldiers ran into the tens of thousands. The Italian retreat
from the eastern front in the spring of 1943 was chaotic in the extreme, and
only around 10,000 of the ARMIR’s soldiers ever saw their homeland again.
The fall of Stalingrad was preceded in November 1942 by the lost Battle of
El Alamein. For the Italians the Axis Powers’ worst defeat to date in North
Africa had a similar significance to the Germans’ defeat at Stalingrad and
marked the beginning of the end. German and Italian forces in North Africa
were obliged to capitulate in May 1943. On 10 July British and American troops
under the command of General Eisenhower landed in south-east Sicily and, as
the historian Jens Petersen has noted, destroyed at a stroke the National Socialist
‘myth of the impregnability of Europe as a fortress’.83 Augusta and Syracuse were
left with no choice but to capitulate. Only in the north-eastern corner of the
island, opposite the Strait of Messina, were German troops able to resist, at least
for a time. The Allies’ advance on Sicily was the main reason why Hitler aban-
doned Operation Citadel on 13 July and moved his Second SS Panzer Division
from Russia to Italy.
Even before the Allies had invaded Sicily, Italian discontent and war-
weariness had found expression in hunger strikes and, in March 1943, in major
strikes that started in the Fiat Works in Turin and quickly spread to other parts
of northern Italy. These were the first strikes for almost twenty years and
involved up to 300,000 workers. Their primary aim was higher wages and
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 799

increased food rations, but there were also calls for an immediate end to the
fighting. The employers entered into negotiations with the strikers and as far as
it was in their power to do so they met their demands. The state apparatus, the
Fascist Party and the official corporations, conversely, remained conspicuous
by their absence. The stato corporativo proved to be no more than a façade – a
clear sign that the Fascist system was already losing its authority.
The social unrest lent moral and political support to the forces of opposi-
tion that had begun to regroup by the winter of 1942/3. The agents of the
regime noted an increase in support for the Communists, but by the summer
of 1943 it was a group of politicians from parties to the right of the Communists
who were gaining in importance and whose figurehead was the former Reform
Socialist Ivanoe Bonomi, who had been prime minister in 1921–2. Bonomi
was in contact with the group of supporters associated with the daughter-
in-law of the king, Princess Marie José of Piedmont, a daughter of the late king
of the Belgians, Albert I. By the summer of 1942 this group was already plan-
ning a coup d’état against Mussolini, the aim being to topple the Duce and lock
him up, after which a general would head a temporary military regime prior to
the formation of a cabinet made up of older politicians whose task it would be
to negotiate with the Allies in the hope of extricating Italy from the war.
By now there was also opposition to Mussolini in the Fascist Party itself. The
leader of the conspirators was the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Count
Dino Grandi, who was convinced that the Axis Powers were facing defeat and
who also bore a personal grudge against the Duce following his dismissal as
minister of justice in early February 1943. Grandi’s closest allies were the former
leader of the Senate, Luigi Federzoni, the corporation minister Giuseppe Bottai
and Mussolini’s son-in-law, the former foreign minister, Gian Galeazzo Ciano,
who had been dismissed in February 1943. All three men were united by the
fact that they had opposed Italy’s entry into the war in 1940. In the summer of
1943 Grandi sought a reconstitutionalization of the Fascist regime under the
terms of which the monarch, Senate and Chamber would be restored to their
constitutional roles. A new government would be re-established on this basis
and begin peace talks with the Western Allies. From 1932 to 1939 Grandi had
been the Italian ambassador in London, where he had built up a good personal
relationship with Churchill. By 1943 he evidently felt that he was ready to
shoulder a greater challenge and, like his political friends, he was convinced
that his plans could be achieved not with Mussolini but only with the Duce’s
removal from power.
Within the military it was the chief of the army’s general staff, Vittorio
Ambrosio, who was the driving force behind a faction that had grown increas-
ingly sceptical about the Duce’s leadership. From Ambrosio’s standpoint,
Mussolini could remain the head of the government only if he were able to
persuade Hitler to accept a fundamental shift in his strategic priorities and, by
ending the war in the east, concentrate the Axis Powers’ military strength on the
800 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

struggle with the Western Allies, especially in the Mediterranean. Alternatively,

Mussolini would have to agree to Italy’s complete withdrawal from the war. If
Mussolini were unwilling to do this or if his approach to Hitler were unsuc-
cessful, the Duce would have to be removed from the equation. And for this, the
king’s involvement would be required.
As for Victor Emanuel III, he too had good reason to distance himself from
Mussolini, for if Italy was defeated, the monarchy would almost certainly be
toppled. And so he needed to break off all relations with the man who had led
his country into war. It seems to have been in early July 1943 that Victor Emanuel
declared his willingness to have Mussolini removed by the army and the carab-
inieri and to replace him with a provisional government under Pietro Badoglio,
the former chief of the general staff whom Mussolini had dismissed in December
1940. The more support such a move enjoyed on the part of the Fascist Party, the
greater its chance of succeeding without bloodshed or a civil war. But Victor
Emanuel was keen to await the outcome of a meeting between Hitler and
Mussolini that was due to take place in Feltre in northern Italy on 19 July. In
delaying his decision, the king still hoped that Italy’s withdrawal from the war
might be achieved by diplomatic means and with Germany’s agreement.
The meeting between the Führer and the Duce that took place in Feltre
consisted for the most part of an interminable monologue on the part of Hitler,
who expatiated for hours on the importance of the Ukraine and the Balkans to
Germany’s wartime economy. Mussolini, who was in particularly poor health by
this date, demanded increased military support from Germany but otherwise
was essentially content to listen, in which regard he disappointed the hopes of
the army’s leaders, notably Ambrosio himself, who had travelled to Feltre with
Mussolini and who urged the latter to draw attention to Italy’s desperate plight
and to the need to end the war in the shortest possible time. While the two
dictators were conferring in Feltre, the Allies were bombing Rome. Although it
was only one of many air raids that helped to depress the mood and morale of
the Italian people in the course of 1943, it was the first attack on the Italian
capital and, as such, it had a particular political and symbolic significance.
That same day the conspiracy against the Duce assumed a more concrete
form when the king agreed to Mussolini’s dismissal. Grandi drew up various
documents spelling out his ideas on Italy’s return to constitutional rule and the
abolition of the Duce’s dictatorship. He submitted his plans to Mussolini on 21
July, plans proposed not only by Grandi and his allies but also by more moderate
Fascists, including those well disposed to the monarchy. Mussolini was in fact
already aware of them thanks to Roberto Farinacci, the Fascist Party’s radical
leader in Cremona. Mussolini agreed to Farinacci’s suggestion that his enemies
be called to account at a meeting of the Gran Consiglio del Fascismo, the party’s
supreme committee, which had not been convened for many years. Mussolini
proposed the time and place of the meeting: late in the evening of 24 July at his
own official headquarters, the Palazzo Venezia.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 801

Mussolini committed a serious error at the meeting, for although the Gran
Consiglio was merely an advisory body with no decision-making powers, he
ordered a vote on Grandi’s proposal. Twenty-eight members voted for it, nine-
teen against, amounting to a vote of no confidence in the dictator. Mussolini
still hoped for the support of the king and the military, with the result that he
attributed little importance to his defeat. But Victor Emanuel III was resolved
to seize his chance. The vote in the Gran Consiglio made it unlikely that the
Fascist Party and its supporters would oppose the dismissal of the prime
minister. But he needed to act swiftly.
When Mussolini turned up for an audience with the king at the Villa Savoia
on the afternoon of 25 July, he planned merely to hand back to the king his
supreme military control of the war, which had been conferred on him on 10
June 1940 without any urging on his part. But the king asked Mussolini simply
for his resignation and informed him that to all intents and purposes Badoglio
had already taken over the reins of government. On leaving the Villa Savoia,
Mussolini was arrested by carabinieri. After being held briefly against his will
on the islands of Ponza and La Maddalena off Sardinia, the disempowered
Duce was taken to a hotel on the Gran Sasso in the Abruzzi mountains on 28
August.
The bloodless coup on 24/5 July 1943 was possible only because Fascist
Italy was less totalitarian than the regime claimed to be. There was a legitimate
force alongside and above Mussolini, namely, the monarchy, and the crisis that
overtook Italy in the summer of 1943 demonstrated that the representative of
the crown, not least as a result of the support that he enjoyed among army
leaders, still had the ability to assume the role of a counterforce. And there was
another way in which Fascist Italy was less of a Führer state than National
Socialist Germany: the Third Reich had no committee comparable to the Gran
Consiglio, which could be used by the country’s internal opposition to subvert
the man at the top. Ultimately, control over the country’s population was far
less tight and far less comprehensive than was the case with Italy’s ally to the
north of the Alps. Had it been otherwise, the strikes in the industrial areas of
Turin, Milan and Genoa could not have taken place in the spring of 1943 and
the Duce’s dictatorship could not have imploded so unresistingly only a few
months later.
Badoglio’s government was no alternative Fascist regime as Grandi and his
friends had envisaged, but was essentially a military cabinet that filled a handful
of posts with civilian commissioners, including past and present prefects. One
such portfolio was that of the minister of the interior. Until his dismissal as the
chief of the general staff in 1940, Badoglio had been a loyal follower of Mussolini
and had committed a number of serious war crimes in Libya and elsewhere.
The jubilation that greeted the change of government and that found expres-
sion in the streets of several Italian cities on 25 July was aimed not at Badoglio
but at the assumption that a peace treaty would soon be signed with the Allies.
802 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Whenever the authorities felt that the demonstrations and strikes had gone
too far, those uprisings were brutally suppressed by the police, most notably in
Reggio Emilia and Bari. In the course of the clashes that took place between the
state and the population all over Italy between 25 July and 8 September 1943,
there were 105 fatalities, 572 injuries and 2,455 arrests. The new government
made no attempt to repeal or alter the Fascists’ anti-Semitic legislation but
contented itself with disbanding the Fascist Party, the Gran Consiglio and the
politically inspired Special Court and with incorporating the militia into the
army. On 25 July Badoglio tried to reassure his country’s German allies by
publicly declaring that the war would continue and that Italy would keep its
word.
Hitler refused to believe such assurances, which were in any case at odds with
the true facts of the matter, for while Badoglio was officially seeking to persuade
the Germans to allow Italy to withdraw from the war by common consent, he
had secretly made contact with the Western Allies in Lisbon. In responding to
Badoglio’s approach the Allies were in fact flouting an agreement of 1 January
1942 in which all the Western Powers involved in the war had promised not to
sign a special peace deal with any of the Axis Powers. The Americans and British
insisted on Italy’s unconditional surrender in keeping with the agreement
reached in Casablanca in January 1943, but this was a demand that Badoglio and
his government resisted for several weeks. A secret armistice was finally signed
in Cassibile on the island of Sicily on 3 September. Not even Italy’s own troops
were informed about this treaty. That same day two British divisions landed in
Calabria, and on 8 September Eisenhower in his capacity as commander in chief
of the Allies announced the truce to the world. The following day American
troops landed at Taranto and Salerno.
At the time of the coup, German troops were stationed not only in Sicily,
where they were engaged in fighting the Allies, but also in Calabria and
Sardinia, where they were supposed to establish a second front. Other German
soldiers were stationed in central Italy with the aim of defending the Gulf of
Genoa. When Mussolini was ousted from power, Hitler massively increased
the Reich’s military presence in Italy. The king and his government no longer
felt safe in the capital and fled via Pescara to Brindisi on 9 September, the day
after the armistice came into force. Once in Brindisi, they sought refuge with
the Allies who had landed there. The Germans spoke of ‘treachery’ and occu-
pied Rome on 10 September, the capital having been declared an ‘open city’ on
31 July.
On 12 September a unit of German paratroopers managed to free Mussolini
from prison on the Gran Sasso. That same day he was flown to Vienna on
Hitler’s orders and on the 13th he met the Führer at the latter’s headquarters at
Rastenburg. Hitler informed him of his future role: he was to head the ‘Fascist
National Government’ that had been formed by a number of Radical Fascists,
including Roberto Farinacci, at the Germans’ bidding during the night of 8/9
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 803

September. By now Mussolini regarded the term ‘Fascist’ as so ineffectual that

he rejected it when choosing a new name for the state, the Repubblica Sociale
Italiana, or RSI. The new government established its headquarters in the small
town of Salò on Lake Garda, with the result that Italy’s second Fascist regime
has gone down in history as the ‘Repubblica di Salò’.
Following the armistice, all Italian troops, no matter where they were based
in Europe, were regarded as traitors and as enemy combatants by the Germans
and disarmed, so that around half a million Italian soldiers now had to under-
take forced labour for the Reich as prisoners of war either in Germany itself or
in the occupied areas to the east. In the Balkans and especially in Greece armed
conflict broke out between the Italians and their former allies in consequence
of the brutal behaviour of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. Some 25,000 Italian
soldiers died in these clashes or perished while being transported to German-
held areas. A similar number of military internees died in German camps. On
the Greek island of Cephalonia 5,000 soldiers of the Divisione Acqui were shot
after being taken prisoner, an unprecedented war crime committed against
members of a state that until very recently had been the Reich’s closest ally. In
Italy itself not a few soldiers were able to avoid being disarmed and transported
to Germany by going into hiding among the civilian population.
In the Balkan peninsula it was the local partisans who were the principal
beneficiaries of Italy’s capitulation. In Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia they
captured large quantities of weapons and ammunition and in many cases were
able to establish a base in those regions that had been vacated by the Italians. In
Croatia the Second Italian Army surrendered to Tito’s partisans. The war mate-
rials that fell into the latter’s hands helped them in their struggle with their
remaining enemies, the Germans, the Chetniks and the Ustage. The Ustage like-
wise benefited from Italy’s withdrawal from the Axis alliance, for the Ustage state
was able to rid itself of a troublesome protector and annex the coastal region
along the Adriatic that the Italians had overrun in 1940.
By the autumn of 1943 Italy was no longer under a single rule. The royalist
government under Badoglio set up its headquarters in Salerno but enjoyed
limited authority only in those areas in the south of Italy that were occupied by
the Allies. To the north of the Gulf of Gaeta, where the Allied offensive became
bogged down for some time, Mussolini’s Repubblica Sociale Italiana was in
theoretical control but in practical terms, central Italy, with the exception of
Rome, was largely administered by the German military under General Field
Marshal Albert Kesselring. In the north two operational zones were created as
separate entities cut off from the rest of Italy, namely, the foothills of the Alps
and the Adriatic coast, which were administered by the Gauleiters of the Tyrol
and Carinthia respectively. In consequence the Salò government was effec-
tively left with only the areas to the north and south of the Po, including
Romagna, which it administered under the watchful eye of the plenipotentiary
of the Greater German Reich, the diplomat Rudolf Rahn.
804 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Mussolini’s RSI presented a socialist image to the world and announced

comprehensive plans for nationalization that seemed to reflect the Duce’s
desire to return to his roots. At the same time, however, the Partito Fascista
Repubblicano that was reconstituted in November 1943 pinned its colours to
the mast of a radical anti-Semitism in its ‘Verona Manifesto’: the Jews were
excluded from the Italian nation and stripped of their last remaining rights, the
others having already been removed under the race laws of 1938. Some 7,000
Jews were handed over to the Germans by Mussolini’s regime and deported to
extermination camps, mostly to Auschwitz. Of them, only 830 lived to see the
end of the war. In Rome the Germans ensured that the 1,030 Jews living in the
city were rounded up in the middle of October 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. Of
them, only fifteen survived the genocide. In total, around a fifth of the 43,000
Jews who were still living in Italy in 1942 fell victim to the Holocaust.
The Salò regime held its first show trial against five defendants in Verona in
early 1944. All were accused of betraying the Fascist ideal. The most prominent
of the ‘traitors’ who came before the court was the country’s foreign minister of
many years’ standing, Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law. Like
the other defendants, he was sentenced to death and executed on 11 January
1944. The Republican National Guard and the Black Brigades that were
summoned into existence in the summer of 1944, and that all party members
aged between sixteen and sixty were required to join, conducted a reign of terror
against all who held divergent views. Mention should also be made in this context
of the Decima Mas under Prince Valerio Borghese, which was a former elite divi-
sion from the marines and specialized in fighting against the partisans.
The Germans were reluctant to accept the formation of a regular army by
the RSI. In the end around 43,000 men served in the Republican armed forces,
while a further 70,000 fought as volunteers in the Waffen-SS or in units under
the direct orders of the German High Command. Among those who remained
loyal to Mussolini to the very end were not only old Fascists for whom the
coup of July 1943 was an expression of opportunism, cowardice and treachery
but also many younger Italians for whom the fight against Bolshevism was in
itself a good enough reason to side with the Duce and, hence, with the Germans.
Of course, the Salò regime was incapable of winning over the masses with
its socialist rhetoric and anti-Bolshevist propaganda. The attitude of the work-
force emerged in November 1943 from a new strike at the Fiat works in Turin
that on this occasion was called by the Communists and involved 50,000
workers. The proposed programme of nationalization was frustrated from the
outset by the Germans, its failure contributing in no small measure to the
contempt felt by the proletarian masses for the satellite regime in Salò that was
entirely dependent on the Reich.
The alternative Italian government – that of Marshal Badoglio in Salerno
– was in its own way no less dependent on foreign rule: formed by the Western
Allies, his military regime was obliged to work with those anti-Fascist parties
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 805

and groups who had merged to form the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale in
late January 1944. Among the members of this heterogeneous alliance were
Communists, Socialists, left-wing Liberals and Catholics. All were initially
fiercely opposed to the king and to the prime minister he had appointed, but in
the spring of 1944 the leader of the Communists, Palmiro Togliatti, who had
only recently returned from exile in Moscow, brought about a change of direc-
tion that reflected Stalin’s orders: to free Italy from ‘Nazifascismo’ was to take
precedence over all other goals, with the result that internal disputes now had
to wait to be resolved. Joining forces with the left-wing Socialist Pietro Nenni,
Togliatti aimed to bring the political left to power by democratic means and on
15 April 1944 even entered Badoglio’s cabinet as a minister without portfolio.
Two other eminent figures who took the same step at this time were the philos-
opher Benedetto Croce and Count Carlo Sforza, who had held the post of
minister of the interior under Giovanni Giolitti in 1920–21 and who returned
from exile in America to resume his political career.
Italy’s Communist Party, the PCI, had undergone a period of reorganization
during its exile in France and since 1942 had been active in the Italian under-
ground movement. Its members were behind not only a number of strikes,
including the one in Turin in November 1943, but also countless attacks on
Fascist officials and collaborators as well as on landowners and employers. The
PCI was by far the most powerful group within the Resistenza, which by 1943/4
had developed into a military force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, the
Socialists who were active as a guerrilla group came together in Rome in
the autumn of 1943, forming the Partito Socialista di Unità Proletaria under the
leadership of Pietro Nenni, Giuseppe Saragat and Lelio Basso. On the bourgeois
side, the most active group in the Resistenza was the Partito d’Azione under
Ferruccio Parri. The Liberals formed the Partito Liberale Italiano in July 1942,
while the Freemasons, whom the Fascists had tried to suppress, were behind
the Partito della Democrazia del Lavoro. The Democrazia Cristiana rose from
the ashes of the Catholic Partito Popolare Italiano and the Azione Cattolica in
October 1942. After 1945 the Democrazia Cristiana was to become the prin-
cipal government party under the leadership of Alcide de Gasperi.
The Resistenza was fighting two enemies: the German occupiers and the
Italian Fascists. It has been calculated that in the summer of 1944 there were
80,000 armed resistance fighters and that that number rose to more than
200,000 at the height of the movement’s activities in the spring of 1945. Most of
these partigiani were former members of the Royal Army who had been able to
avoid being disarmed by the Germans in September 1943. Between 30,000 and
40,000 partisans are believed to have been killed in action, while around 12,000
Fascists and collaborators fell victim to the anti-Fascist vendetta. The Germans
retaliated with their usual brutality whenever members of the Wehrmacht,
Waffen-SS and German military police were attacked. On 24 March 1944, for
example, 335 hostages were shot by an SS unit under Herbert Kappler in the
806 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Fosse Ardeatine near Rome. Among those murdered on this occasion were
leaders of the Jewish community in Rome and members of the anti-Fascist
parties. And on 29 September 1944, at the village of Marzabotto to the south of
Bologna, 770 civilians were executed by the SS and Wehrmacht on the orders
of Major Walter Reder. A total of 9,200 men, women and children were killed
by the Germans in their attempts to combat the partisans and to intimidate
them by shooting hostages.
The Kingdom of Italy had already declared war on Germany on 13 October
1943. Units of the Royal Army that had been restored to combat strength were
deployed by the Allies as Badoglio Divisions. But the main burden of the
fighting fell on the shoulders of the Americans and of British Commonwealth
troops. By the middle of August the Wehrmacht had already retreated from
Sicily and, following the Allies’ landing at Salerno, they withdrew to the Gustav
Line at Monte Cassino and Ortona, a line they were able to defend until early
1944. At the end of January an American corps established a bridgehead at
Anzio and Nettuno to the south of Rome. Finally, on 18 May, troops from New
Zealand, India and Poland succeeded in taking the fortress at Monte Cassino.
During the weeks that followed, the Germans were forced to retreat not only
from southern Italy but from central Italy as well.
The Allies entered Rome on 4 June and once again declared it an ‘open city’.
Five days later, in an attempt to salvage the monarchy, Victor Emanuel III
appointed his son Umberto the ‘general governor of the kingdom’. Badoglio’s
cabinet stepped aside in order to make way for a coalition government made
up of anti-Fascist parties and once again including Togliatti. Although the
struggle to liberate Italy was still far from over, there could no longer be any
serious doubts about its outcome in the early summer of 1944.

The Allies Advance: Eastern Asia and Europe 1943–4

The year 1943 was a decisive one not only for Germany but also for the Reich’s
Axis ally in the Far East, for in January the Chinese government that had been
installed by the occupying power in Nanking in March 1940, as an alternative
to the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek in Chungking, declared war
on the United States and Great Britain. Yet this did little to improve Japan’s
strategic position vis-à-vis the Anglo-Saxon powers. In the spring of 1943 the
new foreign minister in Tojo Hideki’s government, Shigemitsu Mamoru, began
what was from the outset an illusory attempt to use his relations with the Soviet
Union to bring about a special peace between Germany and Russia in order
to be able to concentrate all of his country’s forces on its conflict with the
Western Allies. Not quite so hopeless was the attempt to change Japan’s policy
in the countries it was currently occupying in south-east Asia and to shift the
emphasis from the brutal exploitation of the occupied regions to the deliberate
encouragement of anti-colonial movements, especially in Burma and the
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 807

Philippines. In both cases this policy led to unilateral declarations of independ-

ence: in Burma on 1 August and in the Philippines on 14 October.
A week later, on 21 October, the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose,
who, as we have already noted, had escaped to Singapore on board a German
submarine in June 1943 and made his way from there to Tokyo, placed himself at
the head of a Free India government in the Japanese capital. On 30 October a
friendship treaty was signed with the Nanking government in which Japan relin-
quished the special rights that it had enjoyed under the terms of the Boxer
Protocol of 1901. A Greater East Asia Conference was held in Tokyo on 5 and 6
November 1943, its participants including not only Japan itself but also
Manchukuo, Nanking China, Thailand (an ally of Japan), the Philippines, Burma
and Bose’s Free India. The results remained largely rhetorical, the participants
merely agreeing to work together more closely in order to develop a common
sphere of affluence in eastern Asia and to respect each other’s sovereignty. Japan’s
new commitment to its allies and to those states that were dependent on it was a
reaction not only to Italy’s departure from the Axis camp but also to the defeats
that it had suffered in its war with the Western Powers: in late June American
forces had landed on New Guinea and on the Solomon Islands, marking the
launch of a major Allied offensive in the South Pacific. On 30 September Japan
moved its main line of defence back to the Mariana and Western Caroline
Islands.
Tokyo’s hopes that its new slogans would win massive support for Japan as
a major power in the occupied countries foundered not least on the fact that its
repressive policies remained largely unchanged. Forced labourers continued to
be deported to Japan from China, Taiwan, Korea and most of the regions that
it subsequently overran, while women were forced into prostitution within the
armed forces. According to reliable estimates, one million men, women and
children died from overwork in the occupied regions. A further 540,000 pris-
oners of war succumbed to starvation, poor hygiene and lack of medical care.
In addition, 3.6 million Chinese and one million Filipinos were massacred by
Japanese soldiers. 550,000 were killed by carpet bombing and by chemical and
biological weapons, 250,000 by artificially induced famine. The total number
of civilians killed by the Japanese in the context of their belligerent Lebensraum
policy has been estimated at six million.
The harshness of Japan’s colonial policy led to the formation of resistance
movements in almost all of the countries that it occupied after the end of 1941.
A people’s army, or Hukbalahap, was created in the Philippines in 1943. Made
up for the most part of impoverished peasants, it directed its activities both at
the Japanese and at the upper stratum of society that was guilty of collaborating
with the country’s invaders. In the Malay Peninsula, it was above all ethnic
Chinese who joined the anti-Japanese people’s army. In French Indochina, the
League for the Independence of Vietnam – the Vietminh that was formed by
the Communist Party under Ho Chi Minh – resisted the foreign rule of both
808 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Japan and France, which with Tokyo’s consent maintained its administrative
grip on the country until March 1945. In Burma, the Burma National Army
under General Aung San, which had initially sided with Japan against the
British, began its armed struggle against the occupying power in March 1945.
The Anti-Fascist Freedom League that was created in August 1944 also
included Communists. In the Dutch East Indies, by contrast, the independence
movement under Ahmed Sukarno continued to the end to work with the
Japanese, believing, as it did, that its aim of an independent Indonesia would be
achieved only when the Japanese imperial armies had defeated the European
colonial powers.
Between 22 and 26 November 1943 – only weeks after the Greater East Asia
Conference had ended – Churchill, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek met in
Cairo, where they agreed on a campaign to recapture Burma, to restore Korean
independence and to hand back Taiwan, the Pescadores Islands and Manchuria
to the Chinese. Japan was to lose the German islands in the Pacific that it had
captured after 1914, and the war with both Japan and with National Socialist
Germany was to end with their unconditional surrender. Chiang Kai-shek
could be satisfied with this outcome, for in Cairo the Anglo-Saxon powers had
effectively acknowledged him not only as China’s main representative but as
the leader of a major international power.
At more or less the same time that the Cairo Conference was taking place,
American troops under Chester Nimitz were landing on the Gilbert Islands, a
move that triggered the legendary strategy known as ‘island-hopping’ or ‘leap-
frogging’. In December British Indian forces began their attempt to regain
control of Burma, an objective in which they were soon joined by American and
Chinese troops. The month of January 1944 saw the American invasion of the
Marshall Islands, followed in the summer by the Mariana Islands, starting with
the capture of Guam. The fall of one of the Mariana Islands, Saipan, triggered a
political earthquake in Japan, forcing Tojo Hideki’s government to step down on
18 July. It was replaced by a cabinet under the retired general Koiso Kuniaki,
whose first action in office was to lower the age of conscription to seventeen.
The capture of the Mariana Islands also had a major strategic significance,
for American bombers could now reach Japan from their new base there.
Carpet bombing raids began in November 1944 and culminated on the night
of 9/10 March 1945, when more than 85,000 men, women and children were
killed in a single night in Tokyo, more than in any other air raid during the
whole of the Second World War. American troops under General Douglas
MacArthur landed on the Philippine island of Leyte in October 1944, prompting
Japan to deploy most of its fleet and turning the fighting there into the biggest
naval battle of the Second World War. Not even the first kamikaze attacks by
Japanese pilots who packed their planes with explosives and crashed them on
to the enemy warships proved effective in the longer term, for the Americans
emerged victorious, albeit after suffering heavy losses.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 809

The Philippine capital, Manila, fell to American forces in February 1945,

but only after the Japanese had massacred members of the civilian population.
That same month United States troops captured their first Japanese island,
Iwojima, again only after sustaining many casualties. At least 7,000 American
servicemen fell, while the equivalent number for the Japanese was over 20,000.
The battle for Okinawa began on 1 April, when thousands of kamikaze
pilots were deployed. Four days later the Soviet Union unilaterally ended its
neutrality agreement of 13 April 1941 and in doing so came closer to fulfilling
a promise that it had given to the Western Allies in Yalta in early February,
when it had agreed to enter the war on Japan within two or three months of
Germany’s capitulation. At this date there were still Japanese forces in
Manchuria, Korea, large parts of China, the Dutch East Indies and Indochina.
The Japanese leadership still had at its disposal some three million soldiers who
had yet to see active service. Everything seemed to indicate that Japan would
draw on these untapped resources in the hope of averting a military defeat.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, the Red Army succeeded in driving the Germans
out of the Ukraine in March 1944 and by April had crossed the Dniester and
entered Romania. The Crimea was in Soviet hands by the middle of May. In
early June an offensive was launched against Finland on the Karelian Isthmus,
ending with the Finns’ defensive victory in the middle of July. On 31 July the
Finnish prime minister, Risto Ryti, was forced to resign after he had assured
Ribbentrop the previous month that he would not sign a separate peace treaty
with the Soviet Union. The Finnish president, Field Marshal Carl Gustav
Mannerheim, took over the running of the country and on 2 September met
one of the Soviet Union’s principal demands by breaking off all contact with
Germany. Two days later the fighting ended. Under the terms of the truce
signed in Moscow on 17 September, Finland renounced all claims to those
parts of Western Karelia that it had had to cede to the Soviet Union in 1940. It
also renounced the Petsamo region. The Soviet Union acquired a military base
in Porkalla and received reparations amounting to $300 million, a sum that
had to be paid within the space of six years.
In south-east Europe, too, the Germans lost two former allies at this time.
On 20 August the Red Army advanced as far as the Romanian heartlands.
Three days later King Michael dismissed his prime minister, Ion Antonescu,
who was immediately arrested. And he gave orders for the fighting to stop. A
German air raid on Bucharest prompted Romania to declare war on Germany
on 25 April. At the end of August the Red Army occupied Bucharest and the
oilfields at PloieLti. An armistice was signed in Moscow on 12 September.
Romania’s southern neighbour, Bulgaria, tried to appease the Soviet Union by
announcing that it was leaving the anti-Comintern pact on 2 September, an
announcement precipitated by the fact that the Red Army had reached the
Danube at Giurgiu. But this was insufficient to prevent the Soviet Union from
810 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

declaring war on Sofia on 5 September. On 8/9 September a coup brought to

power a pro-Soviet, Communist-dominated government under Kimon
Georgiev. Shortly afterwards Bulgaria was overrun by the Red Army. On 11
October Sofia formally renounced those parts of Greece and Macedonia that it
had captured in 1940. An armistice was signed in Moscow on 28 October
between Bulgaria on the one hand and the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the
United States on the other.
The Red Army’s advance was everywhere accompanied by the ruthless perse-
cution of political enemies and by a comprehensive resettlement programme. In
the run-up to the summer offensive of 1944 some 300,000 Poles pre-empted the
Soviet advance by fleeing from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia to the Polish heart-
lands. Between 1944 and 1946 a total of 800,000 Poles were relocated from the
Ukraine to Poland, while 500,000 Ukrainians were moved from Poland to the
Ukraine. Even before the return of the Red Army, the virulently nationalist and
anti-Semitic Ukrai-ska Povstanska Armija – the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or
UPA – had been committing acts of terror against Polish settlers: some 80,000
Poles, including women and children, were murdered by them. The counter-
terror of the Polish Home Army, or Armia Krajowa, is believed to have cost the
lives of around 20,000 Ukrainians.
The Red Army launched Operation Bagration on 22 June 1944, the third
anniversary of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Named after a tsarist
general at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, this major offensive was aimed at
Army Group Centre, which was currently occupying the front line between
Vitebsk and Bobruisk. Within days the Wehrmacht had sustained losses far in
excess of those incurred during the Stalingrad debacle. Soviet troops took the
White Russian capital Minsk on 3 July. Since the start of the offensive twenty-
eight German divisions had been crushed and around 350,000 men killed.
Shortly afterwards a second major Soviet offensive was launched in Galicia,
allowing the Red Army to continue its western advance. Soviet troops crossed
the River Bug on 20 July, and by the end of the month their leading tank divi-
sions had reached the eastern suburbs of Warsaw.
During their summit meeting in Teheran between 28 November and 1
December 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had already agreed in principle
to move Poland further to the west. The country’s eastern border was essentially
to be the one proposed by Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, in 1912,
while the area around Bialystok was to fall to Poland, the northern section of
East Prussia, including Königsberg, to the Soviet Union. The modified Curzon
Line secured for the Soviet Union nine-tenths of the spoils of war that it had
already received under the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. As
for Poland’s western border, Stalin and Churchill agreed in Teheran that it should
be the River Oder. In order not to antagonize Polish voters at home, Roosevelt
preferred not to be so specific. But the Allies were in no doubt that any territorial
losses to the Soviet Union in the east of Poland should be counterbalanced
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 811

by gains in the west at the expense of Germany. On 22 February 1944 Churchill

told the House of Commons that this agreement was the best solution possible
to the Polish question.
The Polish government in exile in London was now headed by Stanis5aw
Miko5ajczyk, the successor of W5adis5aw Sikorski who had been killed in a
plane crash at Gibraltar on 4 July 1943. He agreed to his country’s western
expansion but in spite of the accord reached in Teheran he was keen to retain
the eastern border laid down by the Peace of Riga that had been signed in March
1921. This placed the frontier some 150 miles to the east of the Curzon Line.
Diplomatic relations between Moscow and the government in exile had been
broken off in April 1943 in the wake of the murder of thousands of Polish
officers by the GPU at Katyn. On 1 January 1944 a National Council was estab-
lished in Warsaw under the leadership of the Communist Bo5es5aw Bierut and
immediately formed an Armia Ludowa (People’s Army) to counteract the
Armia Krajowa. On 22 July Moscow Radio announced the formation of a Polish
Committee for National Liberation – also known as the Lublin Committee –
under the Socialist Edward Osóbka-Morawski. It was nothing less than a
Communist-run alternative to the government in exile in London.
The Armia Krajowa, which had played a part in the liberation of Vilnius in
July 1944, was offered an alternative by the Red Army: either it should join the
Polish Army in exile under Zygmunt Berling that was now fighting on the
Soviet side or it should disarm. Officers from the underground army who
rejected both options were taken prisoner and either deported to the east or
shot. Many of those who were able to escape from Soviet clutches later joined
the Communist underground.
For the Polish Home Army, the Red Army’s military successes in Poland
were arguably the main reason why its members finally felt able to launch a
long-planned operation in Warsaw on 1 August 1944 and rise up against the
German occupiers. The capital was to be liberated by Poles before the Soviet
troops arrived. The Armia Krajowa’s decision was also motivated by Claus
Schenk von Stauffenberg’s failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944,
an event that was widely seen as a harbinger of the imminent collapse of
National Socialist Germany. The Home Army had received weapons and
munitions by air from the Western Allies, albeit on a much smaller scale than
had been the case with the French Resistance. It is reckoned that 40,000 armed
fighters took part in the Warsaw Uprising. They were led by the commander of
the Home Army, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski.
Two days after the uprising began, the prime minister, Stanis5aw
Miko5ajczyk, responding to an invitation from Stalin and at the urging of
the British, opened talks with representatives of the Lublin Committee in
Moscow, but by the time the negotiations ended on 10 August, the two sides
were no closer together. Meanwhile the rebels, cheered on by the local popula-
tion, had liberated large sections of the capital. By 4 August, however, the
812 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Germans had launched a counterattack. Both Hitler and Himmler were keen
to see Warsaw razed to the ground as the home of the Polish intelligentsia and
of the national resistance movement. The rebels were to be shot on sight, no
matter whether they were engaged in fighting or not. And the non-combatant
population, too, was to be gunned down. The German counteroffensive was
placed in the hands of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, an SS group leader. The
street fighting was accompanied by artillery fire and flamethrowers, while the
Luftwaffe rained down bombs on the city. One of the worst atrocities, involving
the murder of 40,000 men, women and children, including wounded fighters
and the doctors and nurses caring for them, was committed on 5 and 6 August
by the Dirlewanger Brigade that had previously massacred large numbers of
civilians in White Russia. Members of another special unit raped thousands of
Polish women.
By the time the Warsaw Uprising ended on 2 October with the capitulation
of the Home Army, the number of Polish victims was somewhere between
150,000 and 180,000, nine-tenths of whom were civilians. Those of the city’s
inhabitants who had survived were driven out of Warsaw, after which the
Germans began systematically to destroy the capital and its cultural treasures.
The mass murders committed in Warsaw between August and October 1944
were perpetrated not only by Germans and by their hired thugs, including Red
Army deserters from Azerbaijan, but also by ‘a passive accomplice in the form of
the Soviet Union’, to quote the Polish historian W5odzimierz Borodziej.84 Soviet
troops lay to the east of the city but did nothing to help the rebels. Stalin also
refused to allow the Western Allies to intervene. Until 10 February American
aircraft were prevented from using Soviet airports. A single aid flight to the
Polish capital was the only concession that Russia was willing to make.
If the rebels had triumphed, then from Stalin’s point of view the ‘wrong’
Poles would have won – not his own Poles, but those who sympathized with the
Western Allies. In turn this meant leaving the Germans to deal with the most
active section of the Polish population, a section that Stalin fully expected
would become his enemies in the future. Once Hitler’s Germany was defeated,
the ‘right’ Poland – that of the Lublin Committee – would be in a far better posi-
tion than it had been before the Warsaw Uprising. Stalin was perfectly willing
to accept that the Western Allies would regard his country’s attitude to the
Polish uprising as a deliberate slap in the face.
On 9 October, just under a week after the Warsaw Uprising had been
suppressed, an Anglo-Soviet conference opened in Moscow. It was attended by
Churchill and Stalin and, as an observer, the American ambassador Averell
Harriman. In his capacity as head of the Polish government in exile, Stanis5aw
Miko5ajczyk was asked to attend in an advisory capacity but he continued to
refuse to recognize the Curzon Line as Poland’s eastern border or to concede
that the Lublin Committee, which was also represented at the conference and
which had in the meantime assumed an executive function in the area between
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 813

the Bug and the Vistula, should provide the majority of ministerial posts in a
post-war cabinet. When Churchill repeated the Soviet demands regarding
Poland’s borders and Roosevelt, following his re-election on 7 November 1944,
refused to guarantee the borders of an independent Poland, Miko5ajczyk and
his cabinet in exile resigned on 24 November. The new prime minister was the
staunchly anti-Communist Socialist Tomasz Arciszewski. The last Polish
government in exile no longer had a role to play on the international stage. In
terms of Poland’s domestic policies, the main beneficiaries of the Allied stance
were the Lublin Committee and the National Council that was equally loyal to
Moscow and that had already appointed its leader, the Communist Bo5es5aw
Bierut, as the new president of Poland.
During the initial part of the Warsaw Uprising, the Red Army had been held
up by a German counterattack near the Polish capital, as well as being detained
further north, close to the border with East Prussia. A new Soviet counterof-
fensive began on the German-Romanian front on 20 August. A few days later
there was an uprising against the Germans in Slovakia, where the Red Army
had in the meantime reached the Dukla Pass in the Carpathian Mountains, but
by early October the Germans had succeeded in putting it down in spite of
support from Soviet paratroopers. On 13 October the German Army Group
North was driven from Riga and forced to retreat to Courland, where it was
surrounded and continued to resist until May 1945. On 16 October Soviet
troops attacked East Prussia, and although the Wehrmacht was able to recap-
ture most of the towns taken by the Red Army, including Goldap, by early
November, the eastern front had shifted, with a section of it now lying in the
territory of the Old Reich.

Militarily speaking, the main event of 1944 was the formation of a second front
in France, which Stalin had been demanding since 1942 but which the British
and the Americans had repeatedly postponed. The Western Allies finally landed
in Normandy on 6 June. Hitler and the leaders of the Wehrmacht had long been
reckoning on such an offensive by the Americans and British, albeit further
north than was actually the case: they had assumed that the Allies would land
their troops in the Pas-de-Calais at the narrowest point of the English Channel.
As a result, the Germans believed that they were relatively secure with their
Atlantic Wall which they had systematically constructed along the Belgian and
French coastline and which included almost 15,000 bunkers and nearly 2,700
gun emplacements. Hitler, at least, refused to believe in the possibility that the
Western Powers could launch a successful invasion of France.
The Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff had been set up in early
1942 and had planned Operation Overlord for 1943, then, following an agree-
ment reached by Roosevelt and Churchill in Quebec in August 1943, set D-Day
– the D stands for ‘disembarkation’ – as 1 May 1944 but finally delayed it until
June because of bad weather. The landings were preceded by the systematic
814 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

bombing of the enemy’s transport links and of the missile launch sites that were
currently being built in northern France.
Under Eisenhower’s overall command were twenty-three infantry divisions,
ten tank divisions and four air landing divisions, making a total of three million
soldiers from America, Britain and the Commonwealth as well as Gaullist,
Polish, Czech and Dutch volunteers. The German forces comprised 1.87 million
soldiers under the supreme command of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt.
Three Allied air landing divisions were dropped behind the German lines on
the morning of 6 June before the landing itself began. This move resulted in
serious losses for the Allies. And yet even on the first day of the operation,
Allied forces were able to break through the German lines at three points,
allowing them to establish bridgeheads in France and in the course of the
following days to create a larger area of operations.
The First American Army under General Omar Bradley succeeded in
crossing the Cotentin Peninsula on 18 June. The previous day the commander
of Army Group B, Field Marshal Rommel, in whom the Germans had placed
their greatest hopes, was badly injured in a low-flying aircraft attack. By the end
of July some 116,000 men had fallen on both sides. The Seventh German Army
and parts of the Fifth Army – a total of 125,000 men – were surrounded at
Falaise on 19 August, and only a fraction of them managed to escape, with
45,000 being taken prisoner. With that the Allies had effectively won. The road
to Paris was now open and the actual battle for France could begin. Six months
were to pass before it reached its successful conclusion.
By the end of August the Germans had lost around 250,000 men. In the course
of the weeks that followed, they were able to delay the Allies’ advance in several
places but they could not prevent troops from the United States and France Libre
from landing on the Mediterranean coast between Toulon and Cannes on 15
August. Nor could they stop de Gaulle from entering Paris on 25 August. The first
German city to fall into American hands was Aachen on 21 October, and by the
end of November American troops had taken Metz and Strasbourg. But then the
Allied advance ground to a standstill. Since Roosevelt felt no reason to mistrust
Stalin, he did not insist on his own troops entering Berlin before the Red Army.
Had he done so, the post-war era would have taken a different turn.
In general the Western Allies banked on their aerial supremacy. Starting
in the summer of 1943, they had increased the frequency of their air raids
on German towns and cities. In late July 1943, 35,000 men, women and
children in Hamburg were killed as part of Operation Gomorrah. A further
2,700 died in Berlin in November and December. In August the air raids
on Peenemünde, where Germany’s V-2 rockets were made, had particularly
serious repercussions for the country’s war effort, but even more devastating
were the raids on the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt in October 1943. In
May 1944 the Allies’ combined air forces concentrated their efforts on
destroying factories in the Reich and in the Protectorate of Bohemia and
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 815

Moravia where Germany was producing synthetic fuel. In July 1944 large
parts of Stuttgart were bombed, and at the end of August the inner town of
Königsberg was destroyed.
The Germans responded with renewed air raids on London between
January and April 1944, but they were unable to break the fighting spirit of the
British any more than the unmanned V-1 and V-2 missiles that were used to
attack the capital from June 1944 onwards. But nor did the Allies’ nightly
bombing raids on larger and medium-sized German towns and cities have the
desired effect, for the Germans showed no sign of rebelling against their
leaders. While the majority of Germans no longer believed in an ‘ultimate
victory’ following the military disasters at El Alamein and Stalingrad and in
the wake of the landings in Sicily and of the collapse of Fascism in Italy, they
had acclaimed their Führer for far too long to break with him now that the
Reich’s future was looking increasingly bleak. The Allies’ watchword of ‘uncon-
ditional surrender’ had generated a sense of fatalism along a broad front: by
1943, most Germans, with the exception of only the most fanatical National
Socialists, must have reckoned that their country was heading for defeat and
yet they still preferred that prospect to a terror without end.

The twentieth of July 1944: German Resistance to Hitler

Between committed National Socialists and those ‘party comrades’ who vacil-
lated between the cult of Hitler and a feeling of fatalism, there was a third group
of Germans: those who were emphatically opposed to the Führer. To the extent
that their opposition turned to active resistance, they differed from the resist-
ance movements of other countries in that they were fighting not a foreign
government or a regime installed by a foreign power but their own government:
to attempt to overthrow their own leaders during the war was tantamount to
breaking with traditional ideas of national loyalty, and this was a notion that
gave rise to a serious crisis of conscience on the part of many Germans, espe-
cially those of a conservative frame of mind.
If organized resistance to Hitler and to his regime was to be effective, then
it presupposed that those who carried it out were close to power, a paradox that
became true once the National Socialists could rely on solid support among the
population at large, namely, after the summer of 1933 at the latest. Among
Hitler’s earliest opponents were members of the country’s labour movement,
but they were too divided and not close enough to him to be effective in this
regard. Closer to power and yet not synonymous with the innermost circle of
power, conversely, were those members of the officer corps and high-ranking
bureaucrats who had maintained a certain distance from National Socialist
ideology or who had even turned their backs on it. Among the first group were
older conservatives (in the widest sense of the term), while the second group
included some of Hitler’s younger opponents.
816 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Among those who had access to the means of power were others who exer-
cised particular authority or who had specialist knowledge. They included the
former chief of the general staff, Ludwig Beck, and the former mayor of Leipzig,
Carl Goerdeler; theologians of both the major denominations such as the
Evangelical pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and, on the Catholic side, the Jesuit
priest Alfred Delp; former Social Democrat politicians such as Julius Leber,
Carlo Mierendorff and Theodor Haubach; and former trade union leaders such
as Wilhelm Leuschner and Jakob Kaiser. (Leuschner had been a member of the
free trade unions, Kaiser of their Christian counterpart.) The active officers,
diplomats and civil servants who were resolved to bring down Hitler needed
the assistance of experts and links to the most important groups in society. And
if they were to achieve anything, the advisers and planners were dependent on
the cooperation of oppositional forces in the military and civilian apparatus of
state.
Politically speaking, the alliance of convenience that was forged by Hitler’s
enemies was a coalition extending from the Social Democrats to the German
nationalists. On its right wing were convinced monarchists and the supporters
of an authoritarian system, while on the left were those who advocated a single
trade union and the nationalization of key industries. What united them was
their conviction that tyranny must be replaced by a state under the rule of law.
But the notion that bound them together could not be a return to a state like the
Weimar Republic. Those Germans, including conservatives, who had opposed
the first German democracy to have existed in their own lifetimes were no
more likely to hanker after it after 1933 than they had welcomed it prior to that
date. But even those who had once defended the Weimar Republic no longer
felt that it was responsible of them to reintroduce a system that had ultimately
foundered on the shortcomings inherent in its very constitution.
The aim of the Kreisau Circle associated with the lawyer Helmuth James
von Moltke was to create a synthesis out of all these opposing traditions. Both
on Moltke’s Silesian estate at Kreisau and in the Berlin apartment of his friend
Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, a government adviser with the Economic
Staff East of the Wehrmacht’s supreme command, conservatives and socialists
pondered the question of a post-war Germany in which the opposition between
‘left’ and ‘right’ would be abolished and replaced by an order based more on
smaller communities such as family, parish, homeland, profession and busi-
ness than on parties and other large organizations, while self-government and
federalism would provide a counterbalance to the Reich as the principal
guiding force. Right up to district level, the Germans were to be allowed to vote
for their representatives directly, the head of each household receiving an addi-
tional vote for every child who was not entitled to vote. Above the district level,
the voting would be indirect, so that the regional assemblies would emerge
from the parish and district councils, the Reichstag from the regional assem-
blies. In terms of their foreign policy, the members of the Kreisau Circle
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 817

opposed traditional nationalism and championed a united Europe, not that

this prevented their principal spokesman, Adam von Trott zu Solz, an adviser
in the Information Department at the Foreign Office, from arguing for a time
that parts of West Prussia and the whole of the Sudetenland should remain in
German hands.
The older conservatives such as Carl Goerdeler, who was regarded as a
future chancellor; the former ambassador in Rome, Ulrich von Hassell, who
was seen as a prospective foreign secretary; and the Prussian finance minister
Johannes Popitz were all major politicians in the Wilhelmine mould, in which
regard they differed markedly from the members of the Kreisau Circle. The
lands that Hitler had conquered up to 1940 were to remain German, the only
exceptions being the General Government and the Protectorate of Bohemia
and Moravia. Like the academics who supported National Socialism, Goerdeler,
Popitz and Hassell regarded the Reich as an instrument of law and order in
Europe. They rejected the methods with which Hitler planned to subjugate the
lands to the east of Germany but at least until the winter of 1941/2 they felt that
the war on the Soviet Union had a positive aspect to it, since the overthrow of
Bolshevism and the consolidation of German hegemony could in their view be
fully reconciled with their ideas on a new order in Europe.
With regard to their domestic policies, the older conservatives differed
markedly from the members of the Kreisau Circle in that they were far more
emphatic in their rejection of western democracy. Popitz, for example, envis-
aged a rigorously centralized state. In his draft version of a provisional
Grundgesetz that he drew up in January 1940 Popitz granted the country’s head
of state an altogether dictatorial range of powers. Only in the definitive consti-
tution was the nation to be offered the chance to exert any influence on politics
through professional representation.
Goerdeler, too, sought a largely independent executive with no effective
parliamentary control. The government could at any time issue decrees that
would take the place of laws. To abolish them or to topple the government
would require a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag. A simple majority would
be sufficient if the Reichstag and the Reichsständehaus – the first chamber
made up of representatives of professional organizations, the Churches and the
universities – were jointly to demand that the existing government be prorogued.
Half of the members of the Reichstag would be elected by the Gau councils, the
other half directly by the people. Heads of households with at least three legiti-
mate children would receive an additional vote. Laws would come into force
only with the assent of the first chamber. As head of state, Goerdeler proposed
a governor general, who might later step down in favour of a hereditary
monarch.
Goerdeler’s objections to the whole idea of the people’s right of self-
determination had always been a part of the conservative tradition, but this
was by no means their only rationale. It was not necessary to be a conservative
818 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

to conclude from the experience of Weimar that the majority could be wrong
and that the majority principle should not be allowed free rein. Although Hitler
did not owe his position as chancellor to free elections, his political rise was
certainly the result of a choice on the part of voters who had made his party by
far the largest in Germany. His abiding popularity justified mistrust in the
masses’ powers of judgement, a view held not only by conservatives but also
by many Social Democrats. But an authoritarian system like the ones proposed
by Popitz or, in a milder form, by Goerdeler could have been maintained only
with the help of the military. Hitler’s conservative enemies were deluding
themselves if they believed that the people would settle for far fewer political
rights than they had enjoyed before 1933.
In short, those conservatives who were hoping to topple Hitler from power
did not need to be committed opponents of anti-Semitism since misgivings
about the Jews had long been a part of the conservative tradition in Germany.
Both before and after 1933 it was a part of the conservative credo that the influ-
ence of the Jews on the country’s economy and culture needed to be reduced,
with the result that the Nuremberg Laws struck many conservatives as an
essentially valid attempt to deal with Jewish presumption. In a memorandum
that he drafted in early 1941, Goerdeler, for example, expressed his desire to
repeal a whole series of discriminatory measures against the Jews and to make
ghetto conditions in countries occupied by Germany ‘more humane’, but he
also thought that if the international community were to be successful in estab-
lishing a Jewish state ‘in parts of either Canada or Latin America under condi-
tions that would make life worth living’, then Germany’s Jews should be
automatically relocated there. The only exceptions would be those Jews who
had fought in the First World War, who could prove that their families had been
naturalized before 1871 or who could show that they had been baptized. Other
exceptions were the Christian descendants of ‘mixed marriages’ that predated
1933. Goerdeler was scarcely exaggerating when he claimed that these new
measures would completely invalidate the Nuremberg Laws. Nor did his
comment that it was a ‘truism’ that ‘the Jewish people belong to another race’
represent a departure from conservative thinking.85
Goerdeler’s memorandum was written before the country embarked on its
systematic destruction of the Jews. The members of the resistance movement
spoke as one in condemning this crime. In another memorandum dating from
1944, Goerdeler wrote of the ‘monstrous nature of the systematically planned
and bestially executed elimination of the Jews’.86 A young officer from the
legendary Ninth Potsdam Infantry Regiment, Axel von dem Bussche, witnessed
a mass execution of Jews in the Ukraine in the autumn of 1942 and decided to
offer to assassinate the man responsible for ordering this atrocity. After
speaking to like-minded members of the military, including Claus Schenk von
Stauffenberg of the general staff, he planned to blow up both Hitler and himself
during a presentation of a new army uniform, but before he could do so, he was
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 819

seriously injured on the front and unable to play an active role in the conspiracy.
An attempt by another young officer, Ewald Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin,
to kill Hitler in a similar way in February 1944 was thwarted when the planned
presentation was cancelled at very short notice.
Bussche and Kleist were not the only officers willing to blow themselves up
with Hitler. Another member of the general staff, Colonel Rudolf-Christoph
von Gersdorff, who hailed from an old Prussian family of aristocrats, began
planning a similar attack in the summer of 1942 and by 21 March 1943 was
ready to put it into action when showing Hitler captured enemy war material in
the course of celebrations marking Heroes’ Memorial Day in the Arsenal in
Berlin. His plan was to explode two English limpet mines, but Hitler rushed
through the exhibition so quickly that the attack could not take place. Gersdorff
had already lit one of the mines but managed to prevent it from exploding. The
‘Providence’ so often invoked by Hitler seemed to be on his side once again.
Gersdorff had planned this attack at the urging of Colonel Henning von
Tresckow, the first general staff officer of Army Group Centre and a key figure
in the military resistance movement. He knew exactly what atrocities had been
committed by the SS in the east since he received and signed orders to destroy
alleged or real partisans, both Jewish and non-Jewish, together with members
of their families, including women and children. He evidently regarded extreme
measures as an unavoidable military necessity in combating partisans, and
initially at least the war on Bolshevism was also his war. Not until the autumn
of 1941 did he decide to resist the regime that was fighting this war: by then he
was no longer in any doubt about the genocidal intentions of the National
Socialists towards the Jews and, hence, about the fundamentally criminal char-
acter of the Third Reich. From then on it was clear to Tresckow that only the
removal of Hitler could put an end to the murders.
The man who planned to kill Hitler in the Wolfsschanze – the Führer’s
headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia – on 20 July 1944 came from a
family of Catholic aristocrats in Swabia. Like his brother Berthold, Colonel
Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg had been one of the disciples of the poet Stefan
George and shared the latter’s dream of an aristocracy of the mind as well as of
a ‘new Reich’ and of a Germany that was more inward-looking. Both brothers
initially regarded National Socialism as an opportunity to create a national
community that overcame all divisions, and even racism seemed to them to be
a healthy phenomenon, although both of them regarded the racial policies of
National Socialism as a dangerous exaggeration of a basically sound idea.
When Helmuth von Moltke put out feelers in 1941 or early 1942 to see if
Stauffenberg was willing to join the resistance movement, Stauffenberg’s initial
answer was no: Germany first had to win the war, for not until after the war on
Bolshevism was it possible to deal with the ‘Nazi plague’. Only during 1942 did
Stauffenberg change his mind and realize that Hitler must be removed from
power while the war was still in progress. By now he was convinced that
820 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Germany could no longer win the war but that a defeat in the east could still
perhaps be averted. In October 1943 he was appointed chief of staff to the
commander of the Replacement Army that was charged with training soldiers
to reinforce first-line divisions at the front, a position that had considerable
strategic significance for the conspiracy and that granted him access to Hitler.
Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded only after he had left Hitler’s headquarters at
Rastenburg and was already on his way back to Berlin. The actions carried out
by the conspirators from the Wehrmacht’s high command on 20 July 1944 in
their attempt to topple the National Socialist regime were doomed in advance
to failure since their basic assumption was flawed: Hitler was not dead but had
survived the attack with only minor injuries.
That same evening Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators – Friedrich
Olbricht, Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim and Werner von Haeften – were shot
in the courtyard of the Wehrmacht’s high command on the orders of General
Friedrich Fromm, the commander of the Replacement Army. Ludwig Beck,
who was to have become head of state if the coup had succeeded, was already
dead at this point. At Fromm’s insistence he had tried to shoot himself but,
having failed, was then shot dead by a sergeant. The following day Henning von
Tresckow took his own life on the eastern front at Ostrów in Poland, where he
faked an enemy grenade attack, a move dictated by the fear that he would be
tortured into revealing the names of his fellow conspirators.
Hitler wrought terrible revenge on all who were directly or indirectly impli-
cated in the plot, but he was unable to prevent one defendant after another from
admitting to his guilt at the People’s Court in Berlin and openly defying the
tyrannical court president, Roland Freisler. Ulrich Wilhelm Schwerin von
Schwanenfeld, who worked in the quartermaster general’s office, gave ‘the many
murders in Poland’ as his reason for acting as he did. Count Peter Yorck declared
that ‘what matters is what links all these questions together, the state’s totali-
tarian claims on the citizen to the exclusion of his religious obligation to God’.
Hans-Bernd von Haeften, an adviser to the Foreign Office and the elder brother
of Werner von Haeften, was also speaking for his friends when he said that ‘my
view of the Führer’s role in world history is that he is a great agent of evil’.87
Of those whom Freisler sentenced to death, the first eight, including Field
Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, General Erich Hoepner and Yorck, were hanged
at Plötzensee Prison immediately after the sentence was handed down on
8 August. The others had to wait. Julius Leber, whom the Gestapo had arrested
on 5 July on the strength of his contacts with the illegal German Communist
Party, was sentenced to death on 20 October and executed on 5 January 1945.
Goerdeler was sentenced on 8 September, though it was not until 2 February
1945 that he was executed. Moltke was sentenced and executed in January
1945. The same fate befell Father Alfred Delp on 2 February. Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, who had been arrested in early 1943, was sent to the Flossenbürg
concentration camp in February 1945 and after a summary trial was executed
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 821

on 9 April. The total number of executions related to the events of 20 July 1944
was around 200.
But even if Hitler had been killed in the assassination attempt, this would
not have meant that the conspirators would have won, for they had little
support in the population at large. According to official reports, most Germans
were outraged by the attack, and there was much joy at the news that Hitler had
suffered only minor injuries. The president of the Nuremberg Court of Appeal
observed that the attempted assassination was

repudiated even by those who are not outspoken National Socialists, not
only because of their repugnance at the crime itself but also because they
are convinced that the Führer alone can control the situation and that his
death would result in chaos and civil war.88

This was by no means an unrealistic assessment of the situation, for a power

struggle among leading National Socialists in the wake of Hitler’s death was
entirely predictable. Through his contacts with Popitz even Himmler was impli-
cated in the conspiracy, although there was no evidence that the Wehrmacht as
a whole would side with the conspirators. Stauffenberg and his friends were
convinced that they would have been accused of stabbing the troops in the back.
The National Socialists’ claim that the conspiracy was the work of a small and
reactionary minority fell on fertile ground. Although the ‘Hitler myth’ may now
have been fatally undermined, it had still not been definitively scotched. Indeed,
the failed attempt to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944 even led to a brief revival of the
myth, with many Germans believing that Hitler was really in league with
‘Providence’ and that only through him could Germany still be saved.
Those who had been involved in the events of 20 July 1944 could not be in
any doubt that Hitler was more popular than they were. It was also highly
unlikely that they would ever have been able to convince the German people of
the need for an act of tyrannicide by subsequently exposing the crimes of the
National Socialists. And once Churchill and Roosevelt had demanded the
Germans’ unconditional surrender at their conference in Casablanca in January
1943, the conspirators could not even be certain that the Allies would impose
more lenient terms on Hitler’s enemies than they would on a Germany led by
the National Socialists. But for the core group of the resistance, the success of
their action in the summer of 1944 was not what mattered. What mattered to
them above all was that the world and coming generations of Germans should
know that Hitler was not Germany but that there was another, better Germany.
For all those who thought along these lines it was a question of honour to
act in the way that the conspirators of 20 July had done. Most of them had
become active members of the resistance movement only at a relatively late
date. Their outlook was ‘nationalist’ and so there was much about National
Socialism that was not at all alien to their thinking. For them, the war was by no
822 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

means only Hitler’s but also their own, its aim being not only to assert Germany’s
leading role in the world but also, after the summer of 1941, to combat an
aggressive and criminal system in the form of Bolshevism. The realization that
they themselves were serving an aggressive and criminal system finally came to
them all, in some cases sooner than others. Whether they were willing to admit
it or not, all of them were guilty to varying degrees. To risk their lives in rebel-
ling against Hitler was a way of atoning for that guilt.
A different Germany was arraigned before Roland Freisler’s court, for its
finest representatives had been acting according to a tradition that was marked
by Christian, humanitarian, Kantian and Prussian ideals. This was a tradition
that acknowledged an authority higher than the state and the man in charge of
that state, namely, the individual conscience. Inasmuch as the conspirators had
been following the dictates of their conscience, 20 July 1944 was a great day in
recent German history. Two other dates that have gone down in the annals of
the German resistance to Hitler have an equally high moral status: 8 November
1939, the day on which the Württemberg carpenter Johannes Georg Elser tried
to kill Hitler with a homemade bomb during the Führer’s anniversary visit to
the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich; and 18 February 1943, when Hans and Sophie
Scholl, the founders of the White Rose student organization, responded to the
defeat at Stalingrad by distributing hundreds of leaflets in the courtyard
at Munich University, protesting in that way at Hitler’s unconscionable
leadership.
Elser, who was a simple man acting alone, and Hans Scholl and his sister,
together with their fellow students Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell and
Willi Graf and their academic mentor Kurt Huber, all suffered the same fate as
the conspirators of 20 July 1944: they were all executed. If they and others had
not risen up against Hitler, the Germans would have had little to look back on
after the end of the National Socialists’ rule that could have given them cause
for hope as they contemplated the events of the years from 1933 to 1945.

The Partition of Europe (I): The Allies’ Post-war Plans

Right until the very end a number of Hitler’s principal enemies, most notably
Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, still hoped that the overthrow of the National Socialist
regime would place Germany in a position to conclude a peace treaty with the
Allies that would be based on mutual understanding. But once Churchill and
Roosevelt had referred to the Axis Powers’ ‘unconditional surrender’ in
Casablanca, this was no longer a realistic expectation. The Normandy landings in
June 1944 merely served to stiffen London’s and Washington’s resolve. Churchill,
who was fully informed about the aims of the conspirators in Berlin, while at the
same time feeling a profound distrust of all things Prussian, believed that he
needed to speak dismissively of the group of individuals associated with the
events of 20 July when he addressed the House of Commons on 2 August 1944:
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 823

the attack on Hitler, he insisted, was no more than an example of infighting

among the leading figures in the Reich.
Central to Allied plans for a post-war Germany was the ‘dismemberment’
of the Reich. One of the first leaders to propose this idea was Stalin in talks
with the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden in December 1941, when the
Soviet leader had suggested that the Rhineland be taken out of Prussian hands
and that East Prussia be ceded to Poland, while Bavaria was to become an inde-
pendent state. In October 1943 the foreign ministers of the United States, Great
Britain and the Soviet Union – Cordell Hull, Eden and Vyacheslav Molotov –
met in Moscow and agreed that the borders of an independent Austria should
return to what they had been in 1938 and that East Prussia should be ceded to
Poland. Details were to be drawn up by the European Advisory Commission,
which had its headquarters in London.
As we have already noted, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met in Teheran
between 28 November and 1 December 1943 and agreed that Poland should be
moved further west and that the northern part of East Prussia should pass into
Soviet hands. They also agreed, in principle at least, that Germany should be
dismembered. At the final session of the talks, Churchill demanded that Prussia
be isolated and treated more harshly than the rest of Germany, which was to
form a separate state. He also proposed the formation of something like a
Danube Federation comprising Bavaria, Austria and possibly also Hungary.
Roosevelt was in favour of five autonomous German states: first, Prussia;
second, Hanover and north-west Germany; third, Saxony; fourth, Hessen; and,
fifth, Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg. The Ruhr and the Saarland should no
longer be under German sovereignty but governed by the United Nations.
Although Stalin was more inclined to side with Roosevelt than with Churchill,
no binding decisions were taken in Teheran, and the three leaders left it to the
European Advisory Commission to discuss all remaining aspects of Germany’s
partition.
In terms of Germany’s treatment in the future, opinions differed greatly
even within the American government. Cordell Hull advocated a voluntary
fragmentation of Germany, a view based on his belief that there were powerful
separatist movements in the west and south of the country. The assistant secre-
tary of state, Sumner Welles, on the other hand, was emphatically in favour of
force to implement Germany’s dismemberment. The treasury secretary Henry
Morgenthau went even further: he wanted the southern part of East Prussia
and the whole of Silesia to pass to Poland, while France was handed the
Saarland and all the territories to the west of the Rhine and Mosel. He also
wanted the Ruhr to be placed under international control and the rest of
Germany to be divided into two autonomous states: a northern half and a
southern half. In order that Germany would never again pose a threat to the
rest of the world, the country was to be radically de-industrialized and turned
back into an agrarian economy.
824 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

When they met in Quebec in September 1944, Roosevelt and Churchill

expressed their support for Morgenthau’s plan. But by 22 September Roosevelt
had withdrawn his imprimatur, a move influenced by the objections of Hull as
secretary of state, of Stimson as secretary of war and of Stimson’s assistant, John
McCloy, all of whom had persuaded him that Morgenthau’s ideas for a
re-agrarianized Germany were the product of backward-looking wishful
thinking and would be fatal for Europe’s economic revival. Shortly afterwards
Churchill, too, distanced himself from the Morgenthau Plan.
Of course, the Allies’ agenda continued to include the partition of Germany.
On 27 October 1944 Churchill cabled Roosevelt, informing him about his talks
with Stalin in Moscow and noting that the Soviet leader had given his approval
to the idea of separating the Ruhr and the Saarland from Prussia and of creating
an independent Rhineland and a southern German state that would include
Austria and have its capital in Vienna. Yet another set of ideas was proposed by
the new provisional government of the French Republic that had been formed
under de Gaulle on 10 September 1944 and that the Allies recognized on
23 October: the left bank of the Rhine was to be removed from German control,
while the Rhine as far as a point to the north of Cologne was to become the
new permanent French border; the Ruhr was to become international and the
Saarland would be annexed by France; there would also be a French-occupied
zone in south-west Germany. Germany would henceforth be a collection of
states that would at best be loosely held together. During a visit to Moscow in
December 1944, when a twenty-year pact of alliance was signed between
France and the Soviet Union, de Gaulle expressed his agreement with the
proposed relocation of the German-Polish border along the Oder–Neiße Line,
but Stalin declined to agree to French demands that the Rhine should become
the new border between Germany and France.
The American presidential elections on 7 November 1944 provided
Roosevelt with a domestic distraction between Churchill’s visit to Moscow in
October 1944 and the planned summit of the three leaders in early 1945.
The Republican candidate was the governor of New York, Thomas E.
Dewey, one of the most active politicians of the younger generation, while the
Democrat candidate was Roosevelt, hoping to enter the White House for
the fourth time in his career. As Roosevelt’s running mate the party passed over
the present incumbent as vice-president, the New Dealer Henry Wallace,
and instead chose the Missouri senator, Harry S. Truman, who was regarded
as relatively conservative. Although Roosevelt was by now in poor health,
not least as a result of progressive arteriosclerosis, his campaign proved effec-
tive and he again triumphed at the polls, winning 53.5 per cent of the vote,
while his rival won 46 per cent. In the Senate the Democrats lost one seat but
won twenty more seats in the House of Representatives, with the result that
the president’s party was able to maintain its majority in both houses of
Congress.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 825

On 4 February 1945, three months after the presidential elections, Roosevelt,

Churchill and Stalin met at Yalta in the Crimea, whither they were accompa-
nied by their foreign ministers, leading members of their armed forces and
their principal political advisers. The conference took place at a time when the
American military was reckoning on having to fight a lengthy war in the Far
East, possibly lasting until 1946 and involving the loss of a further one million
American soldiers. It seemed to Roosevelt to be all the more important, there-
fore, to persuade the Soviet Union to build up a second front against Japan.
Stalin was willing in principle not only to end the neutrality agreement that
he had signed with Tokyo in April 1941 and which was due to last five years but
also to enter the war against Japan within three months of Germany’s surrender.
However, he attached rigorous conditions to this second step: Russia was to be
handed back both the Kuril Islands that the tsarist empire had ceded to Japan
in 1875 and southern Sakhalin, which Russia had lost to Japan in 1904/5.
Russia’s old rights to railways and ports in Manchuria were also to be restored.
Roosevelt agreed to these demands on condition that he also had the backing
of Chiang Kai-shek and in this way he made it possible for Moscow to end the
Soviet-Japanese neutrality agreement, which was done on 5 April 1945, albeit
initially purely as a symbolic gesture.
The desire to end the war in East Asia and in the Pacific as quickly as
possible with Soviet help was not the only reason why Roosevelt was far more
willing than Churchill to accommodate Stalin’s wishes in Yalta. Ever since the
summit in Teheran, Roosevelt had regarded the United States and the Soviet
Union as the two world powers on whose close cooperation the preservation of
world peace would primarily depend in the future. Such a joint agreement
presupposed mutual trust, and Roosevelt was willing to place that trust in
Stalin if the Soviet leader was prepared to do the same.
When, in Yalta, the Soviet dictator repeated his demand that Germany be
dismembered, Roosevelt did not contradict him. But Churchill and above all
Eden now had misgivings about such a policy, since they believed that the
Soviet Union would derive the principal benefit from it. The outcome of their
discussions was a compromise: although Germany’s dismemberment was
formally agreed, a new committee was set up with the aim of advising on the
matter. In this way a decision was deferred.
All three leaders agreed that absolute power over Germany should be placed
in the hands of the Allies, who committed themselves only to ‘take such steps,
including the complete disarmament, demilitarization and dismemberment of
Germany, as they deem requisite for future peace and security’.89 In keeping
with a promise that Stalin had given to Churchill in October 1944 France was
to have a seat on the Allied Control Council and was to be given an occupied
zone in south-west Germany, which would be created at the expense of the
American and British zones. But France did not have a seat on the Committee
on Dismemberment of Germany.
826 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

In every other respect the division into zones reflected the one agreed to by
the European Advisory Commission between September and November 1944:
the south of Germany, including Hessen, was to be a part of the American
zone, to which Bremen and Bremerhaven were added as an enclave in early
1947; the British zone comprised north-west Germany; and the Soviet zone
was made up of eastern and central Germany, its border running to the west of
Lübeck and along the Elbe to the north of Wittenberge, after which it followed
the western borders of the Prussian province of Saxony and of the Länder of
Thuringia and Saxony, ending at the western border of Czechoslovakia. Berlin
was to be divided into four sectors. Similar provisions were made for Vienna
and Austria. The question of reparations remained unresolved. Like the
problem of Germany’s dismemberment, it was passed on to a special commis-
sion that would examine the matter more closely and that would be set up in
Moscow.
Germany’s future was only one of the subjects that exercised the Big Three
during their week-long summit in Yalta. The modified Curzon Line was recog-
nized as Poland’s eastern border. Neither Britain nor America wanted to extend
the country as far as the River Oder. Churchill turned down Stalin’s demand that
the Oder–Neiße Line should be its western border, famously commenting that
‘It would be a great pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it
died of indigestion.’90 In view of these differences of opinion the three leaders
merely promised to ensure that Poland would receive a considerable increase in
its territory in the north and west but without committing themselves to solving
the question of where its border should lie.
All the participants were well aware that if Poland were to be moved further
west, this would involve the enforced resettlement of millions of men, women
and children. Churchill had already told the House of Commons on 15
December 1944 that ‘a clean sweep’ was necessary and that the ‘expulsion’ of the
Germans living in the eastern parts of the Reich was ‘the most satisfactory and
lasting’ way of achieving that goal. He refused to accept that there was no room
in Germany for the population of those areas that were to be ceded to Poland
(and in the case of the northern part of East Prussia, to the Soviet Union): ‘After
all, 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 Germans have been killed already in this frightful
war. [. . .] Moreover, we must expect that many more Germans will be killed in
the fighting which will occupy the spring and summer.’91
The leaders of the Western Powers showed rather more qualms when it
came to Stalin’s demand that they all recognize the Polish provisional govern-
ment, the former Lublin Committee that had been installed by the Communists
on Soviet instructions. Churchill pointed out that the sovereign independence
and freedom of Poland were a question of honour for Great Britain, although
he was willing to compromise in this regard. Both Churchill and Roosevelt
agreed that the provisional government should be expanded by the inclusion of
‘democratic leaders’ currently living in exile and in Poland itself, after which it
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 827

would gain general acceptance. But in fact both leaders had by this point
already withdrawn their support for the government in exile in London, whose
prime minister, the Socialist Tomasz Arciszewski, was unwilling to make any
compromises. Instead, they accepted Stalin’s promise that free elections would
be held in Poland, perhaps within a month, and in that way – without being
conscious of what they were doing – they sealed the fate of the country for
whose sake Great Britain had declared war on Germany in September 1939.
Churchill’s willingness to abandon Poland was part of a wider strategy that
involved the division of south-east and eastern central Europe into zones of
interest. In May 1944 Great Britain had proposed to the Soviet Union that
Romania be treated as a Soviet zone of operation, Greece as a British zone. In
the course of the ensuing talks the operational zones of both powers were
extended, so that Britain’s came to include Yugoslavia and Russia’s Bulgaria.
Roosevelt agreed to this arrangement on 12 June. These spheres of influence
appeared to be more clearly defined at the talks between Stalin and Churchill
that were held in Moscow in October 1944 and that were also attended by
the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, as an
observer. According to this definition, Soviet influence in Romania was to be
90 per cent and in Bulgaria 80 per cent, while Britain ensured that it had 90 per
cent control over Greece, a country it viewed as strategically very important. In
the case of Hungary and Yugoslavia, they agreed on a ratio of 50:50, although
in the case of Hungary this was soon altered to 80:20 in favour of the Soviet
Union.
By the time the Big Three met in Yalta, there was no longer any talk of this
kind of division along percentage lines. By now the Red Army had overrun
Romania and Bulgaria and driven the Germans from Poland, Belgrade had
been taken on 20 October 1944, and while the Allies were meeting in the
Crimea, Budapest was about to fall. The Big Three welcomed the agreement
between the exiled Yugoslav prime minister, Ivan 4ubagi1, and the leader of
the Anti-Fascist Council, Marshal Tito, on forming a coalition government,
although when it was constituted on 17 March 1945, the actual power lay with
the Communists. In a ‘Declaration on Liberated Europe’, Stalin, Roosevelt and
Churchill specifically referred to the Atlantic Charter when assuring all nations
of the right to ‘form interim governmental authorities broadly representative of
all democratic elements in the population and pledged to the earliest possible
establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of
the people’.92
This final promise was not worth the paper it was written on, for the
Western Powers handed over large tracts of south-east and eastern central
Europe to the Soviet Union, a power that already had a military say in those
areas following the advance of its armies and that could no longer be expelled
from its new area of influence, the former anti-Bolshevik cordon sanitaire of
the interwar period – or at least it could not be removed without unleashing
828 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

another war. Poland was just one of the countries that had to adapt to the
dictates of the new political reality.
Three formerly independent states – the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania – had not been discussed at all in either Teheran or Yalta. Stalin
managed to persuade the Western Powers to agree to these countries’ remaining
a part of the Soviet Union, which was itself one of the outcomes of German-
Soviet cooperation from 1939 to 1941. Even as early as March 1942 Churchill
had demonstrated his willingness to allow the Soviet Union to retain its borders
of June 1941. In August 1942 the embassies of the three Baltic States in London
were removed from its list of diplomatic representatives. And although the
United States continued to accept the de jure existence of the Baltic States, it
accepted their de facto annexation by Soviet Russia, just as it accepted one of
the consequences of the Sovietization of the Baltic region: the deportation to
Siberia of large sections of the bourgeois elites and of hundreds of thousands of
peasants who had opposed the enforced collectivization of agriculture. Getting
into bed with Stalin demanded a high moral price in the form of a disavowal of
the principles of the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, to which the Soviet
Union, too, officially subscribed since signing the United Nations Charter on 1
January 1942.
At this date in its history the term ‘United Nations’ referred to the twenty-six
states that had already declared war on Germany. But for Roosevelt the phrase
meant much more, standing, as it did, for his vision of a just order of world
peace or a global ‘New Deal’, a vision very similar to that of Woodrow Wilson
in 1917/18 but one that now had a good chance of not being undermined by his
enemies at home. The president hoped that the League of Nations, which had
had no real significance since 1939, would be replaced by a new organization
based on universal principles, responsibly led by the great powers and capable
of acting in the interests of collective security: the United Nations Organization,
or UNO.
Since the United States had no desire to be outvoted, it needed to have an
extensive right of veto in the United Nations’ most important committee, the
Security Council, a right that it would share with all the other major powers. It
also needed to reach a fundamental agreement with the other major power, the
Soviet Union, that would guarantee lasting peace in the world. The League of
Nations had been created in 1919 with the aim of safeguarding the status quo
that had emerged at the end of the First World War. As envisaged by Roosevelt,
the United Nations was in an even more difficult situation in 1945. As the
historian and political scientist Waldemar Besson has aptly noted, it ‘repre-
sented a world government designed to preserve a status quo that had not yet
been established’.93
Stalin had initially been sceptical and even dismissive about the American
project but had begun to shift his ground in 1943. At the conference of foreign
ministers in Moscow in the October of that year, Molotov agreed to the
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 829

proposal that once the Axis Powers had been defeated, an international organi-
zation should be set up with the aim of maintaining peace. At the talks that
were held by inter-Allied experts in Dumbarton Oaks, DC, between 21 August
and 7 October 1944 the structure and function of the United Nations were
discussed, including a future International Court. The two Anglo-Saxon
powers negotiated first with the Soviet Union, and then with the China of
Chiang Kai-shek, which enjoyed the backing of the United States as the fourth
major power.
The result of these discussions provided the basis for the United Nations’
future charter. The Security Council could be convened at any time, in which
regard it differed from the Council of the League of Nations; France was offered
a permanent seat on the Council; and the major powers would all have the right
of veto. No less important to the United States was the fact that in the event of
an attack all member states should have the ‘inherent right’ to defend them-
selves individually and collectively until the Security Council had taken what-
ever steps were deemed necessary. No agreement was reached on the particular
form that the right of veto should take or on the Soviet demand that all sixteen
Soviet republics should have a seat and a vote in the general assembly by analogy
with the Dominions of the British Commonwealth. Discussion of both of these
contentious issues was deferred, with the result that both of them were again on
the agenda at Yalta.
At Yalta, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill agreed that two of the Soviet
Union’s republics, the Ukraine and White Russia, should be accepted into the
United Nations alongside the Soviet Union itself. The right of veto was accepted
in the absolute form on which Stalin had insisted: a major power could make
use of this right even when it was itself involved in a dispute. All of those states
that had been at war with Germany or that had declared war on their common
enemy before 1 March 1945 were to be allowed to become members of the
United Nations. This second possibility was used not only by a number of Latin
American republics but also by Egypt, Syria, the Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, as
well as by a country that had remained neutral throughout the Second World
War and broken off diplomatic relations with Germany on 2 August 1944 only
in response to massive pressure from the Allies: Turkey had declared war on
Germany on 23 February 1945, almost the last possible moment that it could
have done so and still qualified as a member of the United Nations.
Just eight weeks later, on 25 April 1945, the inaugural conference of the
United Nations met in San Francisco at the invitation of the five major powers:
the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, China and France. The
representatives of fifty-one nations signed the UNO Charter at their first
plenary session on 26 June, the same day as that on which the statute of the
International Court was passed. Once the five major powers and the majority
of the other signatory states had left the ratification documents with the
American government, the charter could come into force on 24 October 1945.
830 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Among the organization’s primary aims were the preservation of international

peace and security by means of effective collective measures; the development
of friendly relations between states based on the principle of equality and the
right of self-determination; international cooperation designed to solve inter-
national problems of an economic, social, cultural and humanitarian kind; and
respect for human rights and basic freedoms for all without regard for race,
gender, language or religion.
The dominance of the five great powers may well have instilled in the other
members of the United Nations the feeling that they were second-class states,
but their privileged status was essential if the new organization was to operate
efficiently, for only if they backed a Security Council resolution could that reso-
lution be implemented. It was the colonies that had far more reason to complain,
for the mandated regions of the League of Nations were placed under the super-
vision of the UN’s Trusteeship Council and as a result had neither a seat nor a
vote in the general assembly. For their subsequent fate they could hope for the
support of the two remaining major powers, the United States and the Soviet
Union, both of which regarded themselves as anti-colonial. But in the imme-
diate wake of the Second World War neither Washington nor Moscow could
think of creating a new world order without their most important ally, Great
Britain, which itself stressed the fact that it was not the only colonial power
among the major powers. This also explains why Britain was so keen to see
France return to the group of major powers.
The United Nations was only one of two projects with which the United
States sought to place its seal on the post-war world. The other was discussed at
Bretton Woods in New Hampshire between 1 and 22 July 1944. This conference
was attended by members of forty-four governments in the anti-Hitler coalition
and addressed questions of currency, payments and trade in the post-war
period. The result bore the imprint of the American financial expert Harry
Dexter White rather than that of the chief British delegate, John Maynard
Keynes, and established the Bretton Woods system, which initially had two
pillars to it: the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, and the World Bank. (The
third pillar was to be introduced in 1947 in the form of the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT.) In order to ensure the free convertibility of their
currencies, the member states of the IMF agreed on fixed gold and dollar pari-
ties: the dollar standard, which was initially set at $35 per ounce of gold.
The American Central Bank was required to redeem dollars for gold when-
ever it was asked to do so. The other members of the Bretton Woods system
were tied to the dollar by fixed exchange rates. Revaluations and devaluations
within a margin of up to 20 per cent were possible only in the case of lasting
imbalances and only within the context of international agreements. As a
result, only the United States was genuinely independent in terms of its mone-
tary and currency policy. The mixed gold–dollar standard was less rigid than
the previous pure gold standard or the gold currency standard that had existed
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 831

between 1925 and 1931: the possibility of altering the parity of all currencies in
relation to gold provided a considerable degree of flexibility, as did the possi-
bility of a limited revaluation or devaluation of individual currencies. But the
Bretton Woods system could function only as long as the United States had no
sizeable foreign trade deficit and pursued a policy of controlling the money
supply, two preconditions that obtained only until the early 1960s.
The principal aims of the International Monetary Fund, which was a special
organization of the United Nations, were international cooperation in the field
of currency policy; facilitating international trade; safeguarding currency rela-
tions; creating a multilateral payment system; removing exchange controls; and
making it easier to achieve a balance of payments by granting credit to member
states. The task of the bank – originally called the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development – was to foster the economic development of
member states by means of loans to governments and private business.
From an American perspective, the Bretton Woods initiative finally allowed
the United States to take on the leading economic role that it had effectively
inherited at the end of the First World War but from which it had subsequently
withdrawn with catastrophic consequences for the world economy. The archi-
tects of the new currency agreement saw the United States as the new global
stabilizer, a world power which in a spirit of self-interest had drawn the right
conclusions from the economic and financial crises of the interwar years and
placed its material resources in the service of a world economy geared to
lasting, uninterrupted growth, in that way making a decisive contribution to
ensuring world peace in the guise of a kind of global New Deal.
Stalin’s perspective was very different: for the Soviet dictator, making the
dollar the world reserve currency was clear proof of the United States’ imperi-
alist intentions, with the result that neither Soviet Russia nor the countries
dependent on it signed the Bretton Woods agreement in 1945. In turn, this
meant that only ‘capitalist’ countries were able to draw on the IMF in the case of
problems with their balance of payments and to intervene in the case of major
fluctuations in the value of the dollar. Tied as they were to the dollar and to
gold, international exchange rates brought these nations substantial advantages
over a long period of time, while the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc that began
to emerge at that time cut itself off from everything that might serve to consoli-
date the United States in its hegemonic role. The outlines of the East–West
confrontation of the post-war period were already clearly visible in the field of
international currency even as early as 1945.
The man who had played a leading role in overcoming American isolationism
did not live to see the end of the war and the foundation of the United Nations.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of heart failure on 12 April 1945 at the age of
sixty-three. It had taken him a long time to realize that his country could have a
future as a world power only if it spearheaded the fight against Hitler. His attitude
to Stalin and to the latter’s long-term goals was marked by extraordinary naivety.
832 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

When he announced in Yalta that the United States planned to leave its troops in
Europe for no more than two years after the end of the war, he unwittingly risked
everything for which the American armed forces had been fighting and for
which they would continue to fight.
But it was above all his charisma and his strength of will that helped America
to overcome the deep depression of the 1930s and brought his country to the
point at which it stood in the spring of 1945. His successor, Harry S. Truman,
was a failed shopkeeper but a highly successful senator for his home state of
Missouri. He lacked much of what had made FDR one of the great presidents
of the United States and he had no experience in the field of foreign policy. But
he was willing to learn and, as was soon to become clear, he had enough intel-
ligence and instinct to deal with the challenges that he faced on becoming the
thirty-third president of the United States on 12 April 1945.

Completion of a Mission: The ‘Final Solution’ (III)

While the Allies were preparing for the new world order that they wanted to see
established in the wake of the Second World War, National Socialist Germany
was attempting to complete what it saw as its historic mission of rooting out
and destroying European Jewry. The few German Jews who had not yet been
deported by the winter of 1944/5 were either living in what were described as
‘privileged mixed marriages’ with an ‘Aryan’ partner or, more rarely, they had
managed to conceal their Jewish origins or were living in hiding among non-
Jewish Germans. The Jewish partners in a ‘mixed marriage’ were stripped of all
their rights. They had to wear the Jewish Star, to live with their spouses in
special ‘Jewish houses’ and to face the constant threat of being sucked into the
maelstrom of the extermination process.
Many ‘mixed breeds’ also felt threatened, especially those ‘of the first degree’,
namely, ‘half-Jews’, even if they were not officially numbered among
Geltungsjuden, i.e. those persons who were legally considered to be Jews in
National Socialist Germany and who were ‘mixed breeds’ with two Jewish
grandparents or were married to a Jew or were members of the Jewish faith.
‘Half-Jews’ and ‘quarter-Jews’ were subjected to discrimination and harass-
ment – after 1941 they were dismissed from the armed services, pensioned off
as civil servants and banned from pursuing certain professions. After March
1944 ‘half-Jews’ were obliged to undertake forced labour in the Todt
Organization’s special units. In December 1942 the Ministry of Education
decreed that ‘mixed breeds of the second degree’ could study medicine,
dentistry and pharmacy, but not veterinary medicine. Behind this decree lay
the assumption that ‘Aryan’ Germans might be willing to allow themselves to
be treated by a ‘quarter-Jew’ but that they would not permit their pets to receive
treatment in this way. Questions relating to the special treatment of ‘mixed
breeds’ were to be settled by the party chancellery, which ultimately meant
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 833

Hitler himself. For its part, the Reich Main Security Office was keen to see as
many ‘mixed breeds’ exterminated as possible.
Among the concentration camps built outside Germany itself, one of them
had special status: Theresienstadt lay in the Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia. It was in part a concentration camp and in part a transit station on the
way to one of the death camps. Saul Friedländer has described this ‘dual face’ as
follows: ‘On the one hand, transports were departing to Auschwitz and
Treblinka, on the other, the Germans set up a “Potemkin village” meant to fool
the world.’94 Among the camp’s ‘amenities’ were a coffee house, concerts,
performances of plays, a reading room and a bank. It was to Theresienstadt
that Leo Baeck was deported in January 1943, together with other leading
members of the Reich’s Association of Jews in Germany. The following October
saw the arrival in the camp of the few Danish Jews whom the Gestapo had been
able to arrest. In June 1943 a commission from the International Committee of
the Red Cross was allowed to visit the camp. In case the commission asked to
see where the Jews deported from Theresienstadt would ultimately be taken,
Adolf Eichmann in his capacity as head of the Jewish Department at the Reich
Main Security Office ordered a ‘family camp’ to be built at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
For the time being, its inmates were not exterminated, but as soon as it became
clear that the Red Cross commission would not ask to see Auschwitz, all of the
inmates in the ‘family camp’ were immediately sent to the gas chambers.
In the autumn of 1944 a propaganda film was made in Theresienstadt. Its
official title was Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement
Area, though the prisoners referred to it under the ironical title of The Führer
Gives a Town to the Jews. It presented Theresienstadt as an almost luxurious
resort with schools, parks, swimming pools, football competitions and endless
cultural activities. Its director was the well-known Jewish actor Kurt Gerron,
one of the most prominent of the camp’s inmates. Shortly after the film was
completed, he was taken to Auschwitz on the last transport and murdered
there on 8 October 1944.
The film was never shown in public. Its only audience was a second commis-
sion from the International Committee of the Red Cross which visited the
camp in April 1945 and reported back to Geneva with an account of the ‘small
Jewish state’ that they had seen. Since November 1941 more than 140,000 Jews
and ‘mixed breeds’ were transported to Theresienstadt. Some 33,000 died
there, while a further 88,000 were deported to the extermination camps. By the
time they were liberated by the Red Army on 8 May 1945, only 17,000 Jews
were still living in the camp. Among them was the former head of the Reich’s
Association of Jews in Germany, Leo Baeck.

The ‘final solution’ took a particularly dramatic turn in Hungary, which was
overrun by German troops in March 1944. By 9 July Adolf Eichmann and his
colleagues had managed to deport 438,000 Hungarian Jews from the Hungarian
834 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

provinces to Auschwitz, starting in the Carpathian Ukraine and northern

Transylvania. Around 394,000 were gassed on their arrival in the camp. By this
date there were still some 200,000 Jews living in the Hungarian capital. Since
the spring of 1944 the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee had been trying to
buy the lives of Jews who had not yet been deported. Acting on Himmler’s
orders, Eichmann agreed to this deal, and in April 1944 the lives of one million
Jews were exchanged for 10,000 winterized trucks that were made available by
the Western Allies for use on the eastern front. The exchange was negotiated by
the Jewish dealer Joel Brand.
Hitler was presumably hoping to drive a wedge between the Western Allies
and the Soviets and, if possible, to persuade the Anglo-Saxon powers to enter
into separate peace negotiations prior to a joint assault on the Soviet Union. In
order to achieve this objective, the head of the SS would presumably even have
been willing to delay the extermination of European Jewry or at least to accept
a reduction in the numbers murdered. But the Western Allies had no intention
of agreeing to such a realignment of their allegiances, quite apart from the fact
that Himmler did not have the power to implement it without Hitler’s approval.
The Jewish middlemen travelled from Vienna to Istanbul, from where they
were taken to Cairo, where they were interrogated and interned by the British
authorities. As a result, Eichmann’s proposed deal did not take place.
Another deal proved more successful, when another of the leaders of the
Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee, Rudolf Kastner, obtained permission for
1,684 Jews to travel from Budapest to Switzerland, their journey taking them
– unexpectedly – via Bergen-Belsen. The price paid was $1,000 for each of the
Jews who were saved in this way. Switzerland was willing to accept this group
of Hungarian Jews and, indeed, had little choice in the matter if its interna-
tional reputation was not to suffer. By now the whole world knew what was
happening in the extermination camps, and by the time the two transports
from Bergen-Belsen arrived in Switzerland in the autumn of 1944, images of
the gas chambers at Treblinka had been circulated all round the world. The
camp had been liberated by the Red Army at the end of July before the Germans
had been able to destroy all trace of their crimes there.
For the Hungarian regent, Miklós Horthy, there was no longer any doubt
about the outcome of the war by the summer of 1944, and on 6 July he ordered
an end to the deportation of Jews, dismissing his prime minister, Döme Sztójay,
who had been markedly loyal to the Reich, and replacing him on 25 August
with Géza Lakatos, an army general colonel who enjoyed his confidence and
who immediately ordered the reopening of all the Jewish shops and businesses
that had been closed in April, at least to the extent that their owners or managers
were not Jewish. When the Red Army entered Hungary from Romania in early
October, Horthy began secret talks in Moscow with the aim of reaching an
agreement with the Soviet Union, and on 11 October a provisional armistice
was signed in the Soviet capital. Four days later, in a radio address, Horthy
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 835

ordered his troops to lay down their weapons. By now, however, the radically
anti-Semitic Arrow Cross under Ferenc Szálasi had so comprehensively infil-
trated the army that Horthy’s orders were ignored. The SS arrested Horthy and
threatened to shoot his son if he did not appoint Szálasi his prime minister and
resign as his country’s regent. He was then interned in Germany.
During the weeks that followed, around 50,000 Hungarian Jews, both men
and women, were forced to make the journey to Austria on foot. Many of them
died on the way. Of the survivors, thousands perished building fortifications
around Vienna, while 35,000 were used for a similar project near Budapest. By
December Soviet troops were drawing ever closer, making it inevitable that the
Hungarian army would retreat to the capital, whereupon ‘Nyilas’ – thugs affili-
ated to the Arrow Cross Party – butchered large numbers of Jewish workers,
causing terrible carnage on the banks of the Danube and on the bridges span-
ning the river. The bodies were dumped in the river.
There were two ghettos in Budapest at this time, the first and smaller of
which was ‘international’ and under the protection of neutral countries such as
Switzerland and Sweden. After the Hungarian government had bowed to
foreign pressure and agreed to let 8,800 Jews emigrate to Palestine, the Jewish
Relief and Rescue Committee succeeded in turning the individual exit permits
into family permits. Carl Lutz, the head of the ‘Foreign Interests’ section at the
Swiss Embassy, provided ‘protection papers’ for 40,000 Jews. Almost 35,000 of
these papers were recognized by Szálasi’s government, but the plans to allow
some 40,000 Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Palestine were thwarted in the end
by the SS. At that point Lutz joined forces with the first secretary at the Swedish
Embassy, Raoul Wallenberg, and with the German diplomat Gerhart Feine,
who was critical of the regime, and rented around thirty large apartment
blocks, where 30,000 of Budapest’s Jews found a safe haven between then and
the end of the war. In addition to Lutz and Wallenberg, the papal nuncio and a
number of diplomats from Spain and Portugal were also involved in saving
thousands of Hungarian Jews. The best-known of them, Raoul Wallenberg,
was taken to the Soviet Union by the NKVD in 1945. All trace of him disap-
pears after 1947.
The Nyilas continued their brutal killings even while the diplomats were
saving lives. Their last great massacre took place on the banks of the Danube in
the middle of January 1945, when the majority of their victims were Jewish,
including women and children. Between 10,000 and 20,000 Jews were murdered
by anti-Semitic gangs during the winter of 1944/5, before the Red Army
took the city on 13 February. Barely half of the capital’s 200,000 Jews survived
the war.

It was also during the winter of 1944/5 that Himmler redoubled his efforts to
reach out to the Western Allies by making concessions on the Jewish question,
authorizing contacts between his inferiors and the representatives of Jewish
836 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

organizations in Switzerland and also forging links with possible mediators in

both Sweden and Switzerland. Among his personal acquaintances was the
Swiss politician Jean-Marie Musy, and it was to Musy that he proposed the
release of 10,000 Jews in order to lay the foundations for his negotiations with
Britain and America. In January 1945 a train bringing 1,200 Jews from
Theresienstadt did indeed reach Switzerland. The following month the vice-
president of the Swiss Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, travelled to Berlin
to confer with Himmler on the release of Scandinavian internees from the
concentration camp at Neuengamme and of Jews at both Theresienstadt and
Bergen-Belsen. Himmler proved highly cooperative, and on 21 April he even
received a representative of the World Jewish Congress, Norbert Masur, who
travelled to Berlin from Sweden. But the outcome of the talks was only modest:
Himmler agreed to the release of 1,000 Jewish women and a number of promi-
nent foreigners among the Jewish inmates at Ravensbrück, all of whom were
allowed to travel to Sweden.
But there could be no talk of a radical change of policy with regard to the
implementation of the ‘final solution’, for the killings continued until the final
weeks of the war. In November 1944, under the impact of the advancing Soviet
troops, Himmler ordered an end to the gassings at Auschwitz. All the gas
chambers and crematoria were to be blown up in order to destroy all trace of
the genocide. As far as possible, the SS had already adopted a similar approach
to the extermination camps further to the east. Here the bodies were dug up
from the mass graves and burnt. As we have already noted, attempts to cover
up the crimes that had been committed at Treblinka were thwarted by the
arrival of the Red Army in July 1944.
Even before the camp at Auschwitz had been closed, the SS had responded
to a request from Albert Speer and sent able-bodied Jews to work in the arma-
ments industry in Germany. Some were dispatched to Dachau, others to the
Dora-Mittelbau tunnels in the Harz, where they were employed under barbaric
conditions in the manufacture of V-2 rockets, a scheme operated by the Todt
Organization. In January 1945 all the camps in the east were evacuated on
Himmler’s orders, and between 700,000 and 800,000 prisoners, most of them
Jews, were forced to march westwards. At least a quarter of a million of them
died of exhaustion or cold or were shot or burnt alive. In many places civilians,
including members of the Hitler Youth movement, joined in the killings.
Elsewhere, over 5,000 Jewish prisoners from outposts of the Stutthof
concentration camp were shot near Palmnicken in the second half of January
on the orders of the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, after their progress
had been stalled in the course of their march along the Baltic coast. A similar
fate befell the majority of the 3,000 prisoners from Buchenwald, whom the SS
dispatched on foot to Theresienstadt in April 1945. Of the 45,000 inmates at
Buchenwald around one-third did not live to see the end of the war. Prisoners
who were too ill to travel were left behind. At Auschwitz 200 sick women were
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 837

killed by the SS before they left. The Red Army captured the largest German
extermination camp on 27 January 1945 and freed the 7,000 or so survivors.
The total number of men, women and children murdered there has been put at
1.3 million. The total number of victims of the Holocaust has been estimated
to be between five and six million.
It was not only Germans who took part in the murder of European Jews. So,
too, did anti-Semites and willing helpers of the SS in every part of Europe
under German rule. But it was National Socialist Germany that planned and
put into operation this unprecedented act of genocide. Without their determi-
nation to exterminate the Jews, without the discipline of the officials entrusted
with its implementation and without the capacity of Germany as a highly
developed industrialized nation, the project could never have been realized.
Even by the spring of 1945 many Germans must have suspected that they
would be called to account by the Allies for this crime against humanity, but it
was only much later that they became aware of a far more radical consequence
of their elimination of European Jewry, for in the wake of what they had done
to the Jews, they would never again be able to see themselves in the same way
as they had before the greatest turning point in German history: Hitler’s seizure
of power in 1933.

The End of the War (I): The Fall of the Third Reich
By the end of 1944 Hitler’s final major advance on the western front – the
Ardennes Offensive – had to all intents and purposes failed. The Allies lost
over 70,000 men, the Germans more than 80,000. All that Hitler had achieved
was to delay by six weeks the British and American invasion of Germany. After
heavy fighting, the still undamaged bridge over the Rhine at Remagen fell into
American hands on 7 March 1945. Here American forces established their first
bridgehead on the right bank of the Rhine and now had a position from which
to launch their attacks on the Bergisches Land and the Ruhr.
The last large-scale offensive by the Red Army began on 12 January 1945
along a front running from the Memel to the Carpathians. To the east, German
troops were still surrounded in Courland, an area that Hitler obstinately
refused to leave. Since the Ardennes Offensive in the west meant that the
Wehrmacht no longer had any reserves that it could call up, the Soviet troops
were able to advance westwards within a matter of days. At the end of January
1945 they overran the industrial region of Upper Silesia that had escaped any
wartime destruction. The implications of this move prompted Speer, in his
capacity as minister of armaments, to draft a memorandum to Hitler, culmi-
nating in the observation that the Reich’s ability to fight the war and to produce
any further weapons was practically over. On 31 January Marshal Georgi
Zhukov established a bridgehead at Küstrin an der Oder (now Kostrzyn nad
OdrJ). That same day Königsberg (Kaliningrad) was surrounded, albeit only
838 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

temporarily. And on 4 March the Red Army pushed forward to the Baltic and
cut off East Prussia from the rest of the Reich.
The area’s Gauleiter, Erich Koch, had repeatedly prevented the local popula-
tion from evacuating the region in good time, with the result that the precipitate
flight of tens of thousands of East Prussians proved little short of disastrous.
Many convoys of people were crushed by Soviet tanks or shot at by Soviet fighter
planes, while horse-drawn vehicles fell through the ice on the Vistula Lagoon.
Not even those who found a boat in the small port at Pillau (Baltiysk) were safe,
for several of the vessels sent to East Prussia by the navy were sunk by enemy fire,
including the former Kraft durch Freude steamer Wilhelm Gustloff. At least
25,000 men, women and children were killed while fleeing across the Baltic to
Schleswig-Holstein or Denmark. No less terrible was the fate of those East
Prussians who were unable to escape from the advancing Soviet troops. Countless
women and girls were raped, and men and women who were capable of working
were abducted to the Soviet Union. Men and women of all ages were indiscrimi-
nately killed. The number of German civilians who were killed because old age
or illness prevented them from fleeing has been put at over 100,000.
Tens of thousands of refugees travelling westwards stopped in and around
Dresden in the middle of February, a state of affairs which, although well
known to the Allies, did not prevent them from transforming a city famous not
only as ‘Florence on the Elbe’ but also as an industrial centre into a burning
inferno on the night of 13/14 February. Two waves of attacks by British Bomber
Command involving more than 7,000 aircraft were followed at midday on the
14th by an American bombardment. In all, between 20,000 and 25,000 people
lost their lives.
Apart from Hamburg, where 35,000 people had died in Operation
Gomorrah in July 1943, Dresden has been seared into the German conscious-
ness with particular intensity as a result of its destruction in Allied air raids.
The carpet bombing of German towns and cities was an integral part of the
Allies’ campaign, having been specifically sanctioned at the conference in
Casablanca in January 1943. Among the targets chosen were not only centres
of German industry and of arms production but also important traffic hubs
and ports that were regarded as strategically vital. These raids were also
designed to undermine the morale of the civilian population and were
described by the Royal Air Force as ‘moral bombing’ in contradistinction to
‘strategic bombing’.
This aim of destroying morale was not achieved, for, far from persuading
‘national comrades’ to rise up and overthrow Hitler and his regime, the enemy
air raids merely served to encourage the feeling that the Germans belonged to
a community fated to suffer a single destiny that involved holding out against
all the odds. There was nothing ‘moral’ about the bombs that were used to
terrorize women, children and the elderly. Rather, the carpet bombing was a
sign that the inhumanity of the aggressor can also change the person who gets
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 839

in his way to the point of denying the very humanity of those who are fighting
a defensive war. It was this insight that persuaded the bishop of Chichester,
George Bell, to protest at ‘moral bombing’ from 1941 onwards. This and other
objections were finally heard, and in the wake of the destruction of Dresden,
even Churchill came to the conclusion that to continue this kind of carpet
bombing was harming Britain’s war aims more than it was helping them and
that it could not be justified in the longer term.

At the same time as the Red Army was overrunning the eastern half of Germany,
there were still German troops in Norway, Denmark, the northern part of the
Netherlands, Courland, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, northern
Croatia, Slovenia and northern Italy. A major Allied offensive began in Emilia-
Romagna on 9 April, leading to the liberation of Bologna twelve days later. The
Americans took Genoa on 27 April, the same day that Communist partisans
captured Mussolini near Dorio on Lake Como. He had been trying to escape
disguised as a Wehrmacht soldier. The following day he and his mistress, Clara
Petacci, were shot, after which they were hung upside down from the roof of a
filling station on the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, where their bodies were
displayed with those of twenty of Mussolini’s followers, including the former
party secretary, Achille Starace. The last stage of Fascist rule in Italy, the
Repubblica di Salò, was definitely over. In its place came a wave of bloody anti-
Fascist purges that culminated in the early summer of 1945.
On 29 April, a day after Mussolini had been shot, the German forces in Italy
surrendered unconditionally at a ceremony in the Allies’ headquarters at
Caserta in the presence of a group of Soviet officers. The armistice came into
force at two o’clock on the afternoon of 2 May. It had been preceded by secret
talks that the German military governor in northern Italy, SS group leader Karl
Wolff, had entered into on his own initiative with Allen Dulles, the head of
America’s Office of Strategic Services, in Zurich. These talks were continued in
Ascona on 19 March in the presence of two high-ranking American generals.
For Stalin, these contacts between their common foe and the Western Allies
were a source of deep mistrust, and in a telegram that he sent to Roosevelt on
3 April he voiced his suspicion that with German agreement the British and
Americans were planning to advance into the very heart of Germany while
Soviet troops would continue fighting the Wehrmacht, a claim that Roosevelt
emphatically rejected two days later. There was no such intention in the Allied
camp. After all, both Roosevelt and Churchill knew very well that they owed
their imminent victory to the military efforts of the Soviet Union, and so they
repeatedly stressed that there was complete agreement between the three Allies
in terms of Germany’s unconditional surrender.
In fact, there could no longer be any talk of an agreement between the Allies
with regard to the fate of eastern central and south-east Europe at this time. On
6 March the Soviet Union forced Romania to install a government that may
840 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

have appeared on the surface to be a multi-party cabinet but which was in fact
effectively dominated by Communists. Even more unsettling in the view of
both Roosevelt and Churchill were the developments currently taking place in
Poland, where the Soviet Union, aided and abetted by the Provisional
Government, was in the process of building a Communist satellite regime and
preventing the Americans and British from sending representatives into the
country that had been ‘liberated’ by the Red Army.
‘An impenetrable veil has been drawn across the scene,’ Churchill wrote to
Roosevelt on 16 March 1945. Eleven days later he drew the president’s atten-
tion to the fact that ‘Eastern Europe will be shown to be excluded from the
terms of the Declaration on Eastern Europe, and you and we will be excluded
from any jot of influence in that area.’ And yet the agreements reached at Yalta
allowed precisely the outcome with which Churchill now saw himself
confronted: the ‘Russian form of democracy’ would be imposed on Poland and
other states in eastern and south-east Europe.95
During the weeks that followed, Churchill’s concerns regarding Poland
continued to increase. In April he persuaded the former head of the Polish
government in exile, Stanis5aw Miko5ajczyk, who had stepped down in
November 1944, to acknowledge his friendship with the Soviet Union, to
recognize the modified Curzon Line as Poland’s eastern border and to with-
draw all claims to Lemberg (L’viv). In spite of this, non-Communist forces in
Poland continued to be driven back. At the end of March sixteen leading repre-
sentatives of the non-Communist underground movement were invited to
Moscow, ostensibly to take part in talks on the formation of a Polish govern-
ment of national unity, only to be arrested on their arrival and held in deten-
tion. When Churchill protested to Stalin on 29 April, the Soviet dictator replied
by claiming that the accused had planned and carried out acts of sedition
behind the back of the Red Army. In a show trial that began on 18 June, thir-
teen of the accused were sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from
four months to ten years. Three of them were acquitted.
On 4 May 1945 Churchill drew up a paper in which he sketched out the
situation on which the Western Powers needed to take a stand. If Germany
were to be divided into zones, as the Allies had agreed, and if Poland were
occupied by the Russians, then

Poland would be completely engulfed and buried deep in Russian-occupied

lands. What would in fact be the Russian frontier would run from the North
Cape to Norway, along the Finnish-Swedish frontier, across the Baltic to a
point just east of Lübeck, along the at present agreed line of occupation and
along the frontier between Bavaria and Czechoslovakia to the frontiers of
Austria, which is nominally to be in quadruple occupation, and half-way
across that country to the Isonzo river, behind which Tito and Russia will
claim everything to the east. Thus the territories under Russian control
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 841

would include the Baltic provinces, all of Germany to the occupational line,
all Czechoslovakia, a large part of Austria, the whole of Yugoslavia, Hungary,
Roumania, Bulgaria, until Greece in her present tottering position is reached.
It would include all the great capitals of Middle Europe, including Berlin,
Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia. The position of Turkey
and Constantinople will certainly come immediately into discussion.

In Churchill’s view, this was ‘an event in the history of Europe to which there
has been no parallel, and which has not been faced by the Allies in their long
and hazardous struggle’. Even Soviet demands on Germany for reparations

will be such as to enable her to prolong the occupation almost indefinitely,

or at any rate for many years, during which time Poland will sink with many
other States into the vast zone of Russian-controlled Europe, not necessarily
economically Sovietised, but police-governed.

The conclusions were obvious:

We have several powerful bargaining counters on our side, the use of which
might make for a peaceful agreement. First, the Allies ought not to retreat
from their present positions to the occupational line until we are satisfied
about Poland, and also about the temporary character of the Russian occupa-
tion of Germany, and the conditions to be established in the Russianised or
Russian-controlled countries in the Danube valley, particularly Austria and
Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans. Secondly, we may be able to please them
about the exits from the Black Sea and the Baltic as part of a general state-
ment. All that matters can only be settled before the United States armies in
Europe are weakened. If they are not settled before the United States armies
withdraw from Europe and the Western World folds up its war machines
there are no prospects of a satisfactory solution and very little of preventing
a third World War. It is to this early and speedy showdown and settlement
with Russia that we must now turn our hopes. Meanwhile I am against
weakening our claim against Russia on behalf of Poland in any way.96

Churchill noted his concerns and demands at a time when the new president
of the United States, Harry S. Truman, had yet to give any firm commitment or
sense of direction to his country’s policies. As far as ending the war in Europe
was concerned, the actual running of the country seemed for a time to lie in the
hands of Dwight D. Eisenhower as the supreme commander of the American
and Western Allied troops in Europe. Unlike Churchill, Eisenhower appeared
to have no interest in ensuring that the Western Allies reached Berlin as quickly
as possible in order to prevent the capital from falling into the hands of the Red
Army. Eisenhower regarded even his advance on Prague as less urgent than
842 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Churchill believed to be necessary. The American general’s prime concern was

to occupy southern Germany as far as the Czechoslovak border of 1937, a
concern guided by the fear that the Americans would encounter massive resist-
ance from German troops holed up in what he regarded as the ‘fortress’ of the
Alps. Churchill tried to persuade Eisenhower to change his priorities but was
unsuccessful, not least because Truman backed his commander in chief. The
overall interests of the western world to which Churchill referred in his memo-
randum of 4 May had only a single clear-sighted and eloquent advocate in the
final weeks of the Second World War, and that was Churchill himself.
Of course, he, too, was partly to blame for the situation in which he found
himself, even though he was by no means as trusting of Stalin as Roosevelt had
been. Great Britain and the United States had left the Soviet Union to shoulder
much of the burden of the Allies’ military confrontation with National Socialist
Germany and repeatedly delayed opening up a second front in France, as Stalin
had demanded. There had invariably been compelling military reasons for
such a delay. And in this way the two great Western Powers managed to ensure
that the losses sustained by their armies remained within reasonable bounds,
an attitude that they hoped would be shared by their countries’ voters. An addi-
tional factor was Great Britain’s imperial interest in the Mediterranean and in
the survival of the Commonwealth. It was these interests that meant that the
Western Powers invaded North Africa before they attempted to land their
troops on the European mainland.
But the price of this policy was the western democracies’ abandonment of a
large part of Germany to the Soviet Union and effectively a willingness to hand
over the whole of eastern central and south-east Europe without a struggle.
The promises that Roosevelt and Churchill had made to Stalin in Teheran and
Yalta could no longer be taken back. Moreover, the end of the war in Europe
was by no means the end of the Second World War, and both Washington and
London believed that they needed Soviet help to defeat Japan. In the circum-
stances there could be no talk of a major confrontation with Stalin in the spring
of 1945.

While Churchill’s warnings about the danger in the east grew ever more urgent,
the Red Army continued its advance westwards, an advance accompanied by
hundreds of thousands of rapes and instances of looting, to say nothing of the
murder of countless civilians. Danzig (Gda-sk) fell on 30 March, Königsberg
(Kaliningrad) on 9 April, the day on which Hungary capitulated to the Soviets.
By 13 April the Red Army had moved into Vienna. Three days later the major
Soviet offensive against Berlin was launched from the Oder-Neiße Line.
Meanwhile, the British and Americans were advancing through Germany
from the west. On 18 April American troops took Magdeburg and the following
day they captured Leipzig. Bremen fell into British hands on 26 April, and four
days later the American Seventh Army occupied Munich, the former ‘capital of
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 843

the movement’. In the course of April the Western Allies not only overran
German towns and cities, they also liberated three German concentration
camps: Buchenwald on the 11th, Bergen-Belsen on the 15th and Dachau on the
29th. The photographs and film recordings of the starving inmates and moun-
tainous piles of bodies were circulated all round the world and left an indelible
mark on the minds and memories of shocked contemporaries.
By the final weeks of the war only a tiny minority of fanatical National
Socialists still believed in a ‘final victory’ by the Third Reich. ‘The nation has
completely lost its nerve and is terribly agitated and afraid,’ we read in an offi-
cial report of the mood in Bad Aibling in Bavaria in March 1945. According to
a report filed by the secret service on 7 March and relating to Berchtesgaden,

the broad mass couldn’t care less what a future Europe looks like. It can be
gathered from every conversation that the people’s comrades from all walks
of life want a return to the living standard of the pre-war era as soon as
possible, and don’t lay the slightest value on going down in history.

One local inhabitant was quoted as saying: ‘If we’d have imagined in 1933 how
things would turn out, we’d never have voted for Hitler.’ According to another
report, the following opinion was also being expressed at around this time:
‘The Führer was sent to us from God, though not in order to save Germany, but
to ruin it. Providence has determined the destruction of the German people,
and Hitler is the executor of this will.’97
Hitler was determined to drag down Germany and the German people and
take them with him into the abyss if the war was to end with the Reich’s defeat.
On 19 March he issued instructions that whenever a region had to be surren-
dered to the enemy, all military installations were to be destroyed, as were all
transport links, newspaper offices, industrial plants and public utilities. (Not
until five weeks later did he learn from Albert Speer that not only were his orders
not being carried out but that every effort was being made to prevent them from
being implemented.) Until April Hitler continued to hope that the alliance
between the western democracies and Bolshevik Russia would fall apart. When
he received the news that Roosevelt was dead, he thought that the alliance would
collapse within weeks, if not days, an assessment in which he was confirmed by
Goebbels. And when this expectation failed to be met, he expressed the confident
hope that the decisive battle would be fought in Berlin and that he would win.
Soviet tanks reached the eastern suburbs of the capital on 20 April, Hitler’s
fifty-sixth birthday, and began to shell the city. This was the day on which most
of the Third Reich’s dignitaries saw the Führer for the last time. Shortly after
coming to his bunker and lining up to congratulate him on his birthday,
Göring, Himmler and most of the country’s ministers left Berlin. (Speer also
left the city, but in his case it was not for good.) Two days later Goebbels
announced that Hitler had decided to remain in the capital.
844 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Many of the Führer’s vassals interpreted this decision as a gesture of resig-

nation and were convinced that he would resign as chancellor. On 23 April,
Göring, who since 1941 had been Hitler’s designated successor, sent a telegram
from the Obersalzburg near Berchtesgaden, announcing that if he received no
word from Berlin by ten o’clock that evening, he would take Hitler’s place at the
head of the Reich. In Berlin there was no doubt about Göring’s aim, which was
to start talks with the Western Powers and negotiate the terms for Germany’s
surrender. Hitler forced Göring to resign from all his positions and ordered
him to be placed under house arrest.
Hitler’s reaction was far less muted when he discovered on the 28th that five
days earlier Himmler had met the vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross,
Count Folke Bernadotte, in Lübeck and through him offered to surrender to the
Western Allies. Hitler spoke of ‘the most shameless betrayal in human history’98
and ordered Himmler’s immediate arrest and liquidation, but to no effect.
By this time Soviet troops were already fighting their way through to the
Potsdamer Platz in the immediate vicinity of the Chancellery and of the Führer’s
bunker. The city’s defence lay in the hands of regular soldiers, members of the
Hitler Youth movement and older members of the Volkssturm, or People’s
Militia. They did not have the slightest chance of defeating the Red Army. In the
course of the ‘Battle for Berlin’, which was by now drawing to a close, the Soviets
lost a further 100,000 soldiers – almost as many as the Americans lost in the
whole of the European theatre of war.
It was during the night of 28/9 April 1945 that Hitler took the decision to
draw from Germany’s defeat the conclusion that he had repeatedly announced
would be taken in this case and one to which all his policies had been geared,
even if he himself was only subconsciously aware of that fact: he would take his
own life. He dictated his political testament early on the morning of 29 April,
blaming international Jewry for the war and ‘charging the leadership of the
nation and their subjects with the meticulous observation of the race-laws and
the merciless resistance to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international
Jewry’.99 He named Karl Dönitz the new head of state and the new commander
in chief of the country’s armed forces – until then Dönitz had been the
commander in chief of the navy and had established his headquarters at Plön
in Holstein. Goebbels was appointed the new chancellor.
Hitler killed himself at around four o’clock on the afternoon of 30 April
with a single gunshot to his right temple. His companion of many years’
standing, Eva Braun, whom he had married the previous day, took poison. The
news of Hitler’s death was broadcast on the radio the following evening at
22:26: he had, it was claimed, died that afternoon ‘in combat at his post in the
Reich Chancellery, while fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism’.100 His
successor as chancellor was already dead, Goebbels having committed suicide
several hours earlier, together with his wife, after the two of them had first
killed their six children by administering prussic acid. Like those of Hitler and
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 845

Eva Braun, the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels were soaked in petrol
and burned in the Chancellery gardens in keeping with the instructions that
they had left. There they were discovered on 2 May by the first Soviet troops to
reach the former power centre of the German Reich after the soldiers defending
the city had surrendered to the Red Army earlier that same day.
Few mourned Hitler’s passing. Most Germans received the news with a
mixture of apathy and relief. With the approach of the Allied troops, the former
‘people’s comrades’ did everything they could to hide symbols of the Third Reich,
such as photographs of the Führer, swastika flags, National Socialist uniforms
and party badges.
It was his compatriots’ faith in the charisma of their Führer that had allowed
Hitler to remain in power for twelve years, and it was only the belated realiza-
tion that his rule had turned out to be a disaster for Germany that finally broke
the spell that he had cast on the majority of his fellow Germans. This spell had
been the precondition for the role that Hitler had played in the history of the
world since 1933. No other individual has influenced the course of twentieth-
century history as much as he did, and few of the major events that have taken
place in the world since 1945 have not been connected, directly or indirectly,
with his rule.
Hitler has gone down in history as the man who, more than any other,
destroyed traditions and values that until then had been regarded as self-evident
in the whole of the western world, including Germany itself. To the extent that
anti-colonial freedom movements were fuelled by the world war that he himself
fomented, then this was a collateral benefit of his impact. Posterity’s memory of
him rests for the most part on the millions of people, mainly Jews, whose lives
were sacrificed to his obsessions. When his empire finally crashed to the
ground, most Germans were left feeling numb, so much so that in 1945 few of
his compatriots were willing to accept the idea that their former enthusiasm for
their leader had made it possible for their country to commit the crimes with
which the victorious Allies were now about to confront them.

The new government that Hitler’s successor, Karl Dönitz, formed on 2 May
transferred its seat of power to Flensburg. Its main goal was to ensure that as
many German troops as possible surrendered to the Allies before they could be
taken prisoner by the Soviets. The first regional surrender took place in Italy
and, subsequently approved by Dönitz, came into force on 2 May. It was
followed by a second surrender on the evening of the 2nd at Ludwigslust Castle
in Mecklenburg. On the 3rd a further surrender was signed at Stendal to the
west of the Elbe. Both of these last two treaties were made with the Americans.
On 4 May Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeburg, acting on Dönitz’s
instructions, signed a regional partial surrender of all German troops in the
Netherlands, north-west Germany and Denmark. It was concluded in
Montgomery’s headquarters on the Lüneburg Heath. In return, Montgomery
846 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

gave his verbal assurance that German soldiers still fighting the Red Army
would be allowed to serve time as British prisoners of war. Around 1.85 million
German soldiers were able to escape from Soviet detention and surrender
to the British and to the Americans during the first week of May, their
flight more or less disorganized and individually undertaken. Between 2 and
8 May hundreds of thousands of refugees reached those parts of Germany
where they were safe from rape and harassment at the hands of members of the
Red Army.
At the same time, the fighting continued in many other places, notably
northern Yugoslavia and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Czech
resistance movement organized an uprising in Prague on 5 May that was put
down by units of the SS and, initially at least, by a division of the Vlasov Army
that shortly afterwards defected to the Czechs. The American troops under
Patton had in the meantime occupied the western part of Czechoslovakia as far
as the agreed demarcation line running from Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) to Pilsen
(Plze3) and Budweis (Ieské Bud@jovice) and played no part in the fighting.
Not until 9 May did the Red Army march into Prague and bring an end to
German rule in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Four days earlier General Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had completed
the surrender of German troops in southern Germany and western Austria in
Munich. That same day Dönitz’s representative, Admiral Hans Georg von
Friedeburg, arrived at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims. His attempts to
ensure that German troops fighting in Yugoslavia and Bohemia had time to
make their way into American captivity proved futile, Eisenhower insisting on
unconditional surrender on all fronts during the night of 8/9 May. Dönitz had
no choice but to accept this condition. With his agreement and on his orders
Alfred Jodl, the chief of the operations staff of the Wehrmacht’s High Command,
signed the surrender in Reims early on the morning of 7 May.
On Stalin’s insistence the act of surrender was repeated in the Soviet head-
quarters in Berlin shortly after midnight on 9 May. The German signatories were
representatives of all three branches of the armed forces: the chief of the
Wehrmacht’s Supreme High Command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, for the
army; Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeburg for the navy; and Colonel General
Hans-Jürgen Stumpff for the air force. The armistice had come into force shortly
beforehand at 00:01, marking the end of the Second World War in Europe.
Dönitz’s government in Flensburg survived for another two weeks, but on
23 May Eisenhower, responding to pressure from the Russians and from the
French, ordered the arrest of all of its members, whose shadowy existence had
been tolerated only by the British. The German Reich that had been estab-
lished in 1871 was finally at an end.
That same day Heinrich Himmler, the man primarily responsible for the
genocide of European Jewry, took his own life by swallowing a capsule of
poison hidden in his mouth: he had gone underground using a false name, but
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 847

had been captured by the British military on 21 May. The highest-ranking of

Hitler’s followers who was still alive at this time was Hermann Göring, who
was arrested by members of the American armed forces at Berchtesgaden on
9 May. He too managed to evade responsibility for his crimes, for although he
was one of the twelve accused in the trial of the principal war criminals at the
International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg who on 30 September and 1
October 1946 were sentenced to be hanged, he killed himself by swallowing
poison on the evening of 15 October, the day before his planned execution.

The Partition of Europe (II): Radical Changes and Deportations

Churchill addressed the British nation in a radio broadcast on 13 May, praising
the Allies’ victory in Europe and thanking the soldiers of Great Britain and the
Commonwealth as well as their American allies for defeating Hitler’s and
Mussolini’s military might. Towards the end of his broadcast he reminded his
listeners not only that Japan had not yet been defeated but also that the ideals
of the Western Allies were still under threat in Europe:

On the continent of Europe we have yet to make sure that the simple and
honourable purposes for which we entered the war are not brushed aside or
overlooked in the months following our success, and that the words ‘freedom’,
‘democracy’, and ‘liberation’ are not distorted from their true meaning as we
have understood them. There would be little use in punishing the Hitlerites
for their crimes if law and justice did not rule, and if totalitarian or police
Governments were to take the place of the German invaders.101

In a telegram sent to Truman the previous day, Churchill had expressed himself
even more clearly. For the first time he referred to what he called an ‘iron
curtain’ that was being ‘drawn down upon their front’:

There seems little doubt that the whole of the regions east of the line
Lübeck–Trieste–Corfu will soon be completely in their [i.e. Soviet] hands.
To this must be added the further enormous area conquered by the
American armies between Eisenach and the Elbe, which will, I suppose, in
a few weeks be occupied, when the Americans retreat, by the Russian power.
[. . .] Meanwhile the attention of our peoples will be occupied in inflicting
severities upon Germany, which is ruined and prostrate, and it would be
open to the Russians in a very short time to advance if they chose to the
waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic.

It was vitally important, therefore, ‘to come to an understanding with Russia,

or see where we are with her, before we weaken our armies mortally or retire to
the zones of occupation’.102
848 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Churchill knew what he was talking about, for he was describing a process
made possible by his own and Roosevelt’s concessions to Stalin with regard to
south-east and eastern central Europe. In Bulgaria a putsch by the newly
formed Patriotic Front on 9 September 1944 had brought to power a pro-Soviet
government under the former prime minister Kimon Georgiev in which
Communists held key positions, including the ministries of the interior and of
justice. In the winter of 1944/5 the new regime began a rigorous policy of
persecuting former members of the government. The trial of 162 men accused
of high treason ended with death sentences on ninety-six of them in early
February 1945. Those sentenced to death, including all of the members of the
new government council that functioned as the head of state on behalf of
Simeon II, (who had mounted the throne of his father, Boris III, in August 1943,
when he was only six) were executed immediately afterwards. In Romania,
meanwhile, the pro-Soviet Communist government that was installed on 6
March under Petru Groza began to reduce the influence of the non-Communist
forces headed by King Michael. As in Sofia, so in Bucharest, the posts of
minister of the interior and of justice were filled by Communists.
In Hungary, by contrast, the Soviet Union proceeded more cautiously.
Here, in December 1944, a number of Communists, returning from their
self-imposed exile in Moscow, had formed a National Independence Front in
Szeged, which had recently been recaptured by the Red Army. A provisional
national government whose members were elected by acclamation was formed
in Debrecen on 21 December 1944. The following day it appointed Colonel
General Béla Miklós Dálnoki its prime minister following his defection to the
Red Army. Communists held four ministerial appointments in his government,
including the Ministry of the Interior, granting them control of the police.
Under Soviet supervision National Committees were set up in every town and
city with the power to pass laws, annul court decisions and order arrests. In
March 1945 the Communist Party forced through a series of agricultural
reforms designed to do away with larger and medium-sized estates and to create
a new class of peasants that was scarcely viable in economic terms but which the
Communists hoped would later agree to promote agricultural cooperatives: in
other words, collectivization.
As Czechoslovakia returned to life in the final months of the war, the Soviet
government took advantage of the fact that Edvard Beneg’s government in exile
had drawn closer to Moscow after 1943 and signed a friendship and mutual
assistance treaty with the Soviet Union in the December of that year. Even though
the Soviet Union annexed Carpatho-Ukraine – a part of the former Czecho-
slovakia – in December 1944, Beneg continued on his chosen course, not devi-
ating from it for a moment. At the end of January 1945 his government broke off
all relations with the Polish government in exile in London and recognized the
pro-Soviet Lublin Committee as Poland’s provisional government. No other
country had proved as accommodating towards Stalin with regard to Poland.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 849

In March 1945 the various Czech groups living in exile agreed on a joint
programme with the Communists in Moscow. This was the basis of the
National Front government of Czechs and Slovaks that was formed in Kogice
in Slovakia on 5 April under the leadership of the Social Democrat Zdenek
Fierlinger. It included the Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald as one of
the deputy prime ministers and the Communist sympathizer General Ludvík
Svoboda as minister of the interior. Beneg once again took over the post of state
president. It agreed to nationalize heavy industry, mining and banking and to
undertake extensive land reforms. Slovakia was granted a considerable degree
of autonomy. Germans and Hungarians who had not actively fought against
the separatist forces were stripped of their citizenship. The Munich Agreement
of September 1938 that had obliged Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to
Germany had already been annulled by the British war cabinet in July 1942
following representations from Beneg. At the same time London had declared
its willingness to agree to the resettlement of the region’s German minority.
The Beneg Decrees – presidential orders from the period between May and
October 1945 and retrospectively approved by the Provisional National
Assembly on 28 March 1946 – provided the quasi-legal basis for denying citi-
zenship to the majority of Germans and Magyars, who were dispossessed with
no recourse to compensation. Their savings were confiscated, and they were
forced to work on repairing the damage caused by the war. National Socialist
criminals were punished, as were traitors and their accomplices. During the
weeks between these unauthorized deportations and the practical implementa-
tion of the decrees of the Potsdam Three-Power Conference at the end of
January 1946, some 800,000 Germans were expelled from the country, their
deportation accompanied by the most terrible atrocities committed by the
troops who were returning from exile, including revolutionary guards and in
some cases civilians, too. Between May and July 1945 massacres took place in
Landskron (Landskroun), Postelberg (Postoloprty), Saaz (Zatec) and Aussig
(Ústí nad Labem). Hundreds of Germans died while being deported from Brno
to the Austrian border, most of them from illness and lack of the most basic
medical care. Countless Sudeten Germans took their own lives in work camps
and internment camps, where they were held prior to their actual removal.
Cautious estimates of the number of Germans who died during these unof-
ficial expulsions from Czechoslovakia amount to between 13,000 and 30,000.
A law passed by the Provisional National Assembly on 8 May 1946 provided
for the retroactive immunity from prosecution of those who had infringed any
rules in the wake of this odsun, or deportation. The government adopted a far
more lenient approach to Magyars than to Germans, a situation due in the
main to the fact that the government in Budapest was opposed to these depor-
tations. On the strength of the resettlement treaty of February 1946, 68,000
ethnic Hungarians from the Slovak region of the country were exchanged for
77,000 Slovaks living in Hungary. The majority of the country’s half a million
850 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Magyars remained where they were. Out of a total of more than 2.8 million
Sudeten Germans, only around 200,000 were still living in Czechoslovakia by
1950.
After all that the Germans had done to the Czechs in the Protectorate of
Bohemia and Moravia during the war, there can have been very few Czechs
who in 1945 thought it possible or even desirable to live together in peace and
harmony with the Germans in the new Czechoslovak state. Moreover, the vast
majority of Sudeten Germans had opposed Czechoslovakia through their
support for Konrad Henlein’s party and actively agreed to the country’s dismem-
berment in 1938/9. The backing of the Allies gave the whole idea of odsun an
international legitimacy even if this policy was incompatible with the principles
of the Atlantic Charter and of the United Nations Charter. But the violence that
had accompanied the unofficial deportations made it clear yet again that the
dehumanization of politics and warmongering under Hitler had set in train a
disastrous series of events that acquired its own momentum: in their attempt to
combat National Socialist aggression, even Hitler’s democratic enemies resorted
to methods that were profoundly inhumane.
In Poland the Communists already wielded far more power at the end of the
war than they did in Czechoslovakia. General Leopold Okulicki disbanded his
Home Army on 19 January 1945, even though he was under no illusions that
German foreign rule would not be replaced by its Soviet equivalent. His soldiers
were freed from their oath of allegiance. Okulicki’s final command to his
followers was to begin to rebuild their country, no matter how difficult the
circumstances, and most of his soldiers responded to his orders, but by no
means all of them. More than 10,000 went underground, from where they
organized resistance to the Sovietization of Poland.
The Communist-dominated provisional government of the Socialist
Edward Osóbka-Morawski transferred its seat of power from Lublin to Warsaw
on 1 February. In spite of the many arrests and deportations of the opponents
of the Communists, the former head of the Polish government in exile,
Stanis5aw Miko5ajczyk, who had resigned in November 1944, responding to
pressure from Churchill, declared his willingness in June 1945 to travel to
Moscow and discuss with two Polish Communists, Bo5es5aw Bierut and
W5adis5aw Gomu5ka, the formation of a Polish government of national unity.
Since the Western Powers did not recognize Osóbka-Morawski’s government
and since the Soviet Union did not recognize Tomasz Arciszewski’s govern-
ment in exile in London, Poland was prevented from attending the first confer-
ence of the United Nations in San Francisco and from signing the UNO Charter
on 26 June. The enlarged cabinet of national unity was finally formed two days
later, on 28 June. Miko5ajczyk – formerly the secretary general of the Peasants’
Party – was appointed deputy prime minister and minister of agriculture, while
the Socialist Jan Sta-czyk took over as labour minister and minister of
welfare. The important Ministry of Public Safety remained in the hands of the
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 851

Communist Stanis5aw Radkiewicz. This largely symbolic cabinet reshuffle was

followed between 29 June and 5 July by the official recognition of the Provisional
Government of National Unity by France, Great Britain and the United States.
Poland signed the United Nations Charter on 15 October and in that way was
finally accepted as one of the organization’s founder members.
By the date in question, the largest of the country’s political parties, the
Communist Polish Workers’ Party, had some 190,000 members, while the two
parties that were dependent on it, the Socialists and the new Peasants’ Party, had
124,000 and 150,000 members respectively. The former right-wing parties – the
National Democrats and the Sanacja parties associated with Józef Pi5sudski – were
regarded as ‘Fascist’ and, as such, were excluded from political life. The privileged
position of the Communists rested on the fact that they had come to occupy all of
the country’s key posts within a short space of time, and their protector, the Soviet
Union, still controlled many military bases even after the Red Army had left in the
summer of 1945. Moreover, the NKVD continued to maintain powerful regi-
ments of special troops that were able to help the government in its ruthless
attempts to suppress the anti-Communist underground movement.
The outcome of the Second World War left Poland radically transformed.
Around six million Poles had lost their lives as a direct result of the conflict. Of
these, between 80 per cent and 90 per cent were Jews, while 12 per cent were
ethnic Poles. The material losses have been estimated to be $49,000 million at
1939 prices. In eastern Poland the country lost 47 per cent of its pre-war terri-
tory and 23 per cent of its 1939 population. Vilnius and L’viv, both of which had
played a major role in the history of Poland, were now a part of the Soviet
Union. Gda-sk and Wroc5aw, two cities with powerful links with Germany,
now belonged to Poland.
Describing the events of 1944 to 1947, the Polish historian W5odzimierz
Borodziej has spoken of ‘the greatest migration of peoples’ ever witnessed by
Poland:

The newly drawn border in the east left the vast majority of Belorussians
and Ukrainians in the Soviet Union. From the autumn of 1944 an exchange
of populations began to take place along the new eastern border, an
exchange designed to bring national identity into line with state identity.
Partly under constraint, around half a million Ukrainians and 36,000
Belorussians were resettled in the Soviet Union. According to official esti-
mates at least 1.1 million crossed the eastern border from former Polish
regions to the east and from camps and settlement areas. Of these, 250,000
were Jews. Whereas those who were deported in 1940/41 travelled volun-
tarily to the west, those who were ‘evacuated’ from the former areas in the
east of the country left their own homeland out of fear of the new occupying
regime. The great majority of eastern Poles and Jews settled in the new
regions in the west and north of the country.103
852 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The four to five million German citizens who in May 1945 were still living to
the east of Poland’s future western border were largely expelled from the region
before the border was defined at the Potsdam Conference in July and August
1945. In many cases violence was used to resettle them, although the brutality
was nowhere as extreme as it was in the case of Czechoslovakia. Conditions in
the work camps and internment camps, including former concentration camps,
where the Germans had to wait before leaving the region, were so appalling
that according to later Polish estimates the death rate among the inmates was
between 20 per cent and 50 per cent. Germans were allowed to remain in
Poland if it was thought that they could be won back to the Polish cause or if
they might consider converting to it. This was the case chiefly with Germans
from Upper Silesia, Kashubia and Masuria.
Ethnically speaking, the new Poland was far more homogeneous than the
older one had been and in consequence it was far more of a nation state than
its predecessor. And, as Borodziej has noted, it was incomparably more ‘prole-
tarian’ than pre-war Poland. As a result of the war and of German and Soviet
occupation, it had lost 57 per cent of its lawyers, 39 per cent of its doctors, 27
per cent of its Catholic clergy and 29 per cent of its university teachers. Many
of those who had emigrated and who included intellectuals, artists, politicians,
civil servants and army officers never returned. Post-war Communist-led
Poland was far from being the same country as the one for which these men
and women had fought since 1939 by means of either weapons or words.

The Red Army’s presence in a country was by no means the only way to bring
a Communist party to power or to ensure that it played a decisive role in
government. In Yugoslavia, for example, it was not Soviet troops who liberated
the country from German rule but Tito’s partisans, who were able to achieve
their objective not least as a result of massive support from the Western Allies.
In no other country was the Second World War a civil war to the extent that it
was here, and it was far from over when Germany capitulated on 8/9 May 1945.
During the weeks that followed, Tito’s Communist partisans delivered their
final devastating blows against their internal Yugoslav foes, who included the
followers of Milan Nedi1’s Serbian satellite regime that was swept from power
in the autumn of 1944, to say nothing of its collaborators, the Greater Serbian
Chetniks under Dra:a Mihajlovi1 and the Fascist Ustage in Ante Paveli1’s
Croatia.
Tito’s partisan army marched into Zagreb on 8 May 1945. The task of
meting out retribution to the Ustage and the Slovenian anti-Communists in
those parts of the country that had been annexed by the German Reich was
made simpler by the fact that the British troops that were by now stationed in
Carinthia and Styria handed over more than 100,000 Croat soldiers and
members of the Ustage militia, as well as around 20,000 Slovenes, to Tito’s
units, leading to mass executions beginning with the one in Maribor (Marburg)
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 853

on the Drau in May 1945, when thousands of Tito’s political enemies were
killed. In Slovenia tens of thousands of men, women and children were shot or
clubbed to death, their bodies burnt in pits, mineshafts and karst caves. Half a
century later, following the breakup of Yugoslavia, the dead were registered by
Slovenia’s post-Communist government in around 600 mass graves and found
to include tens of thousands of Croats, Slovenes, German soldiers and members
of the German minority as well as numerous Serbs, Montenegrins, Italians and
Hungarians.
Of the anti-Communist leaders, Milan Nedi1, who had been arrested in
Austria, was able to avoid a trial by taking his own life in February 1946.
Mihajlovi1 hid for a whole year in Bosnia before being captured in March 1946.
Together with other leaders of the Chetniks, he was subjected to a show trial
that ended in guilty verdicts and the execution of the accused. A similar fate
was suffered in June 1947 by the Croat marshal Slavko Kvaternik, who had
been his country’s head of state in 1941–2 before being stripped of all his
powers by Paveli1 in October 1942. With the help of the Church authorities,
Paveli1 escaped from Croatia to Italy in 1945, finally reaching Buenos Aires in
late 1948 as the guest of the Argentine dictator Juan Peron. When Peron was
deposed in 1955, Paveli1 fled to Spain, dying in Madrid’s German Hospital in
December 1959.
The murder of members of the German minority was part of a plan to put
an end once and for all to the peaceful coexistence of Croats and Danubian
Swabians who had been living in this region for centuries. Most of the ethnic
Germans were housed in camps where tens of thousands of them died as a
result of mistreatment, illness and lack of medical care. The survivors were able
to leave only gradually following the foundation of the German Federal
Republic in 1949. But Tito’s state not only wanted to get rid of the Germans
living in Yugoslavia but also to annex the largely German-speaking areas of
Austria and provide troops that would be used to occupy Austria, a demand
that the Allies rejected. In the middle of May 1945 partisans who had marched
into southern Carinthia occupied Klagenfurt but by the end of the month they
were forced to leave. For the present Yugoslavia continued to lay claim to parts
of Carinthia and Styria, where there was a powerful Slovenian minority.
A far more serious international problem arose from Yugoslavia’s attempts
to revise the border laid down in the Treaties of St-Germain and Rapallo in
1919–20 and to do so, moreover, at the expense of Italy. Even before the arrival
of the Western Allies at the end of April 1945, Yugoslav units had occupied the
whole of Istria before moving on to Trieste, Fiume (Rijeka) and Gorizia (Görz)
in early May, forming ‘National Liberation Committees’ and organizing a
popular movement for the annexation of these regions by Yugoslavia. The
occupation of Trieste and Gorizia by British and American units in May
marked the start of a conflict that soon became focused on the future of Trieste.
On 9 June the military administration of Istria was entrusted to Yugoslavia by
854 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

a three-power agreement, but Tito’s troops were required to leave Trieste, Pola
(Pula) and the Isonzo Valley. A line of demarcation was agreed upon in Duino
eleven days later: Pola, Trieste and the Isonzo Valley remained under the provi-
sional military rule of the Allies, while Yugoslavia was offered the prospect of
acquiring Fiume, Zara (Zadar), the greater part of Istria and the islands along
the Dalmatian coast that had until then belonged to Italy, in other words,
regions with largely Slovene and Croat populations.
The question of who held the reins of power in Yugoslavia in 1945 was very
quickly settled. The Red Army left the country in the May of that year, and by
August, in response to an Allied recommendation, the Anti-Fascist Council for
the National Liberation of Yugoslavia had been enlarged to include a further
121 politically active individuals, including thirty-nine former parliamentar-
ians, ensuring that the Communists and their allies had a two-thirds majority.
This enlarged Council declared itself the provisional parliament of a demo-
cratic and federal Yugoslavia and passed an electoral law preventing ‘collabora-
tors’ from voting and lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen.
Even during the electoral campaign the former prime minister in exile, Ivan
4ubagic, who had been the foreign minister in Tito’s coalition cabinet, resigned
from the government in October, so disillusioned was he at the ruthlessness of
the Communists. The elections to the two chambers of the Constituent
Assembly on 11 November 1945 resulted in a majority of more than 90 per cent
for the Communist People’s Front in the Federal Council and 89 per cent in the
Council of Nationalities. Among its first decrees, the Constituent Assembly
proclaimed Yugoslavia a republic and declared that all the laws passed by the
Anti-Fascist Council were legally binding. On 31 January 1946 a constitution
came into force based on the Soviet constitution of 1936 and making Yugoslavia
a Federal People’s Republic comprising six regions: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia.
In Albania the Communists were able to seize power even more swiftly
than in Yugoslavia. The small Communist Party that Tito had founded in 1941
established an apparently all-party Anti-Fascist Council for National Liberation
with his active support in May 1944. Like its Yugoslav counterpart, it received
material and military support from the Western Allies, especially Great Britain.
The chairman of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, the grammar
school teacher Enver Hoxha, had himself elected leader of the Council’s execu-
tive organ, the National Liberation Committee. The National Front – a rival
organization active in the south of Albania – had fought the Italian troops
occupying the region and opposed the satellite regime installed by the Italians
in Tirana, but it also collaborated with the Germans who marched into Albania
following the Italian surrender in September 1943 and nominally re-established
the region’s independence.
The Communist-led National Liberation Army took up the fight against
the Germans and enjoyed considerable success, its actions helping to speed up
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 855

the withdrawal of the Wehrmacht from central and northern Albania in the
autumn of 1944. On 22 October, even before Tirana had been captured, the
National Liberation Committee had itself declared Albania’s democratic
government by an ad hoc assembly in the form of the Second Anti-Fascist
Congress for National Liberation. As a result, the Communists were now the
country’s de facto rulers. By rigging the elections on 2 December 1945, Hoxha’s
Democratic Unity List gave itself a semblance of parliamentary legitimacy. The
newly elected National Assembly proclaimed the Albanian People’s Republic
on 11 January 1946, allowing the Communist revolution to proceed in a
pseudo-legalistic form.

There were good reasons why Stalin, unlike Tito and Hoxha, took his time in
establishing Communist regimes in the countries of eastern central and south-
east Europe that were under the direct influence of the Soviet Union. In 1945
the secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party was keen to ensure that a
democratic façade was maintained in those countries occupied by the Red
Army and, where possible, to set up coalition governments in which the
Communists were not obviously in the ascendant. If he adopted this course, it
was not simply to take the sting out of any potential criticism of these
burgeoning ‘people’s democracies’ on the part of the Western Powers, he also
did so in the interests of the Communist Parties that were involved in govern-
ment in four countries in western Europe: France, Italy, Belgium and Denmark.
In France the Communists had joined the National Liberation Committee
in April 1944 at the repeated request of de Gaulle. Communists held the posts
of minister of health and of aviation in de Gaulle’s provisional government that
was formed on 10 September 1944. In Italy the Communist leader Palmiro
Togliatti was deputy prime minister under Ivanoe Bonomi, a post he retained
until 8 June 1945, when he became minister of justice under Ferruccio Parri.
The finance ministers in both Bonomi’s and Parri’s cabinet were also party
members. In Belgium, too, the Communists were active in government, sitting
in cabinet alongside Christian Democrats and Liberals in the coalition govern-
ment of the Socialist Achille van Acker. In Denmark the transport minister in
the Liberation Ministry under the Social Democrat Vilhelm Buhl was also a
Communist. In all four countries the Communist ministers remained loyal
and did nothing that might be construed as preparations for a violent over-
throw of the existing regime.
In 1945 Stalin had no ambitions in this regard: his principal interest was to
consolidate and build up Soviet influence wherever the Red Army had the
means by which to steer governments and political life in whatever direction it
wanted. And nowhere were these conditions as well defined as in the Soviet-
occupied part of Germany. In Stalin’s eyes, this region was not only the jewel in
the Soviet crown following the defeat of National Socialist Germany, it was also
the guarantee of a further increase in Soviet power in Europe. As long as the
856 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

United States maintained a powerful military presence in Europe, Stalin was

keen not to provoke America unnecessarily. But once the United States had
withdrawn its troops, the balance of power in Europe would shift, a prospect
that the Soviet Union found gratifying in the extreme.

New Beginnings and Traditions: Germany after Capitulation

Even before Germany surrendered, the Soviet Union had already begun to
implement political changes in the part of the country that it occupied. On 2
May 1945 – the day on which the troops defending Berlin laid down their
weapons – a group of émigré German Communists under the leadership of
Walter Ulbricht, a former member of the Saxon Reichstag and of the Communist
Party’s Politburo since 1927, arrived in the capital. Their task was to provide
systematic support for the Soviet Union in its attempts to reform the region in
the spirit of Communism. On 17 May the Soviet commander of Berlin, General
Nikolai Bersarin, established a municipal authority for Greater Berlin under a
non-party mayor, placing all of the key positions in the hands of Communists.
A similar policy was adopted by the Soviet occupying powers in the other
towns and cities that were a part of the Soviet zone.
The victory speech that Stalin delivered in Moscow on 9 May left the world
in no doubt about his aims with regard to Germany: the Soviet Union was
celebrating victory, he declared, but it had no intention of either dismembering
or destroying Germany. This was a clear rejection of the plans for Germany’s
dismemberment that he had proposed in Teheran and Yalta. In the meantime
he had evidently convinced himself that, having gained the northern part of
East Prussia and pushed Poland westwards at Germany’s expense, the Soviet
Union could best safeguard its own interests by using its zone of occupation to
influence the whole of Germany. In order to do this, it was important to ensure
that what remained of the Reich was not broken down into independent states.
On 5 June the four victorious powers drew the logical consequence from
Germany’s unconditional surrender and assumed overall control of the areas
they occupied. The Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the
Assumption of Supreme Authority in Germany was issued in Berlin in the joint
names of the four commanders in chief of the Allied forces: Dwight D.
Eisenhower for the United States; Georgi Zhukov for the Soviet Union; Bernard
Montgomery for the United Kingdom; and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny for
France. It included the general terms of Germany’s surrender as enshrined in
its military capitulation of 8/9 May, its preamble specifically stating that ‘there
is no central Government or authority in Germany capable of accepting
responsibility for the maintenance of order, the administration of the country
and compliance with the requirements of the victorious Powers’. The assump-
tion of supreme authority by the four Allies included ‘all the powers possessed
by the German Government, the High Command and any state, municipal, or
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 857

local government authority’. Specifically excluded from this declaration was

any mention of ‘the annexation of Germany’.104
Supreme authority was exercised by the commanders in chief in the occu-
pied zones under their control and by the Allied Control Council in all matters
affecting Germany as a whole. The same was true of Berlin, which was divided
into four sectors. Here all matters pertaining to the city as a whole were the
responsibility of Allied Command. Between 1 and 4 July Soviet troops occu-
pied the western parts of Saxony, Thuringia and Mecklenburg that had recently
been vacated by the Americans and British. At the same time the Americans,
British and French moved into their allocated sectors in Berlin. As agreed in
Yalta, the French-occupied zone in the south-west of Germany was taken from
what had been planned as the American and British zones.
The Allies adopted a similar procedure in Austria, except that in Vienna,
unlike Berlin, the inner city was administered jointly by the four Allies, and,
unlike Germany, Austria already had its own government by the summer of
1945. The Soviet Union had installed a provisional coalition government under
the former chancellor Karl Renner on 27 April. It included not only Renner’s
Socialists but also Christian Socialists and Communists and reintroduced the
1929 version of the 1920 constitution on 1 May and a week later permitted the
formation of regional governments in the restored regions. The provisional
government in Vienna was formally recognized by the Western Powers on 20
October.
The first signs of a new political beginning in Germany were already making
themselves felt in what would later be the British zone even before the country’s
military surrender. Here the driving force was a former Social Democrat
member of the Reichstag, Kurt Schumacher, who had been released from
Dachau in March 1943 after a ten-year martyrdom. On 19 April – nine days
after the Americans had captured Hanover – he convened a meeting in the city
intended to re-establish the Social Democrats as a political party. The first local
association was formed in Hanover on 6 May, becoming the provisional party
headquarters – the Schumacher Bureau – in the British and American zone.
The first party to regroup after the collapse of Germany was the Communist
Party, which was re-founded in Berlin on 11 June, the day after the Soviet
Military Administration had allowed the formation not only of ‘anti-Fascist
and democratic’ parties but also of trade unions. In calling for new members,
the party struck an emphatically nationalist and reformist note, professing its
belief in free trade and private initiatives in business on the basis of private
property. It also expressed the view that it would be wrong ‘to impose the Soviet
system on Germany’, since such a course of action did not take account of the
present conditions in the country. Rather, the decisive interests of the German
people suggested an alternative course in the form of the establishment of ‘an
anti-fascist, democratic regime in a parliamentary-democratic republic with
all democratic rights and liberties for the people’.105
858 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

It was by no means clear in the summer of 1945 how relations would develop
between the Communists and the Social Democrats. In both parties there were
many who thought that Hitler would never have come to power if there had not
been a deep split within the ‘Marxist’ workers’ movement and that it was there-
fore imperative that they overcome their historical differences. Acting in
complete agreement with Stalin, the ‘Ulbricht Group’ gave absolute priority to
rebuilding the Communist Party: once the party was effectively organized, it
could – and must – make the unity of the working class one of its principal
objectives. Schumacher was emphatically opposed to all plans to unite the
workers’ movement, and in August 1945, in his ‘Political Guidelines for the
Social Democrats in their Relations to Other Political Factors’, he made his
views clear in no uncertain terms: ‘The Communist Party is indissolubly tied to
one, and only one, of the victorious powers, to nationalist and imperialist Russia
and to its foreign policy aims.’106 As Schumacher was increasingly able to
consolidate his position within the Social Democrat movement in the western-
occupied zones, then this position also became that of the Social Democrats in
the western parts of Germany.
The first ‘bourgeois’ party to be formed after the war was the Christian
Democratic Union, or CDU, which represented an attempt to overcome the
denominational divide in Germany and bring together Catholics and
Protestants in a people’s party that could appeal to every social class. Branches
were founded in Cologne, Berlin and Frankfurt, and it was here that the first
meetings were held in June 1945. Konrad Adenauer, whom the Americans
restored to his former post as mayor of Cologne on 4 May 1945 and who went
on to become federal chancellor, was not one of the CDU’s founding members,
for he spent the early months after the end of the war vacillating over whether
to revive the Catholic Centre Party or to join the new interdenominational
party. Not until the end of August did he join the CDU. German liberals also
began to regroup in July 1945. Although they may have adopted a variety of
names, their common goal was to avoid the old split between a left- and a
right-wing liberal party.
The Americans initially kept their distance from these new political group-
ings. Directive 1067 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Truman ratified on 10 May
stated that American policy was aimed not at the liberation of Germany as a
defeated enemy state but at its occupation. It also included a ban on all political
activity. In practice, of course, this ban could no more be maintained than the
slogan ‘No fraternization’ that was a part of the same directive. If Americans
wanted to re-educate the Germans and turn followers of National Socialism
into democrats, then the latter had to be given the chance to act in politically
responsible ways. Since this was impossible on a higher level in 1945, it was
necessary to make a start on a lower level among the country’s parishes and
communes. The Americans placed far too much trust in ‘grass-roots democ-
racy’ for them to be able to ignore this insight in the longer term.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 859

In parishes and towns in the American zone, especially those in Bavaria, it

was often local Catholic priests and, later, former trade union leaders whose
opinions were sought by the officials representing the occupying power and
whom they consulted whenever they wanted to know which Germans could be
trusted with administrative tasks. Equally important were the expertise and
personal experience of German émigrés, some of whom had been smuggled
back into Germany in May 1945 with the agreement of the Social Democrats’
executive committee in London and with the help of the American Office of
Strategic Services. On their return to Germany a number of them played an
active role in forming anti-Fascist workers’ initiatives. German émigrés also
featured in the ‘White Lists’ of Germans who, politically speaking, had not been
compromised or who were known to have opposed Hitler. The support that the
Soviet occupying power offered to Germans eager to found their own parties
also helped to undermine the ban on political activities as early as the summer
of 1945. If the democratic principles espoused by the Western Powers were to
prosper in Germany, then it was necessary to rely on the people and institutions
that had helped to sustain the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic.
And there was another German tradition, older than the country’s demo-
cratic legacy, that the Western Allies sought to use for their own ends. This was
the federalist tradition, which seemed well suited to preventing the resurgence
of a powerful central force. In the light of their experience of the totalitarian
single-party state that the Third Reich had been, many Germans might be
expected to feel a certain sympathy for a federalist system. And even the Soviet
occupying power struck a federalist note by dividing its zone into five regions
on 9 July: Thuringia, Saxony, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and Saxe-Anhalt.
Even so, these regional governments had only limited powers when compared
with the eleven central authorities under the Soviet Military Administration
which, largely Communist-controlled, had been established only a short time
earlier.
In the western zones, it took much longer to establish regional administra-
tions. This was a process that began on 28 May 1945, when the Americans
installed a new government in Bavaria under the former leader of the Bavarian
People’s Party, Fritz Schäffer, and that ended on 1 November 1946 with the
formation of the region of Lower Saxony that was ordered by the British
authorities. The Saarland enjoyed special status, for although the Allies had all
agreed that it would be a part of the French zone, it was in fact annexed by
France as a separate economic region cut off from the rest of Germany.
The occupying powers agreed in principle that the danger that had been
posed by National Socialism and by German militarism needed to be removed
once and for all. The Berlin Declaration of 5 June ordered the arrest of leading
Nazis and of all ‘the war criminals and all persons who have participated in
planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or
war crimes’.107
860 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

But from the very outset there were clear differences between the Allies in
terms of the thrust and methods that should be used in combating the legacy of
National Socialism – or, as the Soviet and German Communists called it, ‘Fascism’.
The western democracies were keen above all to punish all guilty individuals,
while the Soviet Union additionally wanted to remove the ‘class distinctions’ that
in the Marxist-Leninist view of history had produced ‘Fascism’ in the first place,
hence the Russian desire to destroy the basis on which the Junker class and the
capitalist bourgeoisie had built up their power. In Soviet eyes, the principal aim of
‘anti-Fascism’ was to secure the hegemony of the Communists. On 14 July 1945
– the twelfth anniversary of Germany’s ban on all political parties with the excep-
tion of the NSDAP – the United Front of Anti-Fascist and Democratic Parties
(Antifa) was founded in the Soviet-occupied zone. It comprised the German
Communist Party, the German Social Democrats, the Christian Democratic
Union and the German Liberal Democrat Party. The Communists’ leading role
was not spelt out in detail but was already guaranteed even at this early date.
The country in which the four occupying powers were to exercise supreme
authority for the most part lay in ruins. The largest cities and many of the larger
towns had been turned into a wasteland by the Allies’ bombing campaign. Many
transport links, including nine-tenths of the railway network, were destroyed or
disrupted. And millions of men, women and children, including those whose
homes had been bombed, refugees from the east, survivors of the Holocaust and
displaced persons from eastern, eastern central and south-east Europe, were
either housed in the most primitive conditions or had nowhere at all to live. The
Reichsmark had lost most of its value; German savings had been largely
destroyed by the National Socialists’ method of financing the war; food was in
such short supply that many people, especially those living in the towns and
cities, were suffering from hunger; and with the approach of winter the lack of
fuel was a cause for serious concern. Many of the ‘middle-class’ ideas on morality
that had been accepted until then had been radically undermined, especially
respect for the property of others, be it in private or public hands.
On paper at least, JCS 1067, the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive that was inspired
by the Morgenthau Plan and that had been issued in May 1945, was still in force in
early July: under its terms no measures could be undertaken that might be
‘designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy’.108 But if the United
States had stuck to this maxim, Germany would have been engulfed in an unim-
aginable catastrophe that would not only have affected the occupying troops but
caused the men and women living in western democracies, notably the American
people, to rise up against their leaders. The United States could not afford to
contemplate such a conflict with its own people and with its own values, with
the result that when the three victorious powers – the United States, the Soviet
Union and Great Britain – met in Potsdam between 17 July and 2 August
July 1945, there was every likelihood that Truman would use the opportunity to
call for a change of heart.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 861

Potsdam: The Decision of the Three Great Powers

In the wake of Germany’s surrender the question of a further summit between
the three main powers was left hanging in the air. In both Teheran and Yalta the
leading statesmen of the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain had
agreed on certain basic principles concerning the post-war world order. Now
that National Socialist Germany had been defeated by their troops, they needed
to work out in detail how to proceed in Germany and central Europe. There was
no thought of including a fourth power in their deliberations, for although
France had once again been recognized as a major power and been given a zone
to occupy in both Germany and Austria, Stalin had no interest in negotiating
with three, rather than two, other western powers, and neither Truman nor
Churchill saw any reason to give the headstrong General de Gaulle a chance to
make agreement among the Allies even harder to achieve than it already prom-
ised to be. After all, de Gaulle had provoked Britain and America in the spring
of 1945 by occupying the Aosta Valley in Italy and by sending troops to the
Lebanon and Syria. In both cases the Anglo-Saxon powers had been driven to
the brink of military conflict as a result of his high-handed actions.
It was Churchill who was the first to insist on a further meeting with Truman
and Stalin, a conference he proposed to Roosevelt as early as 11 May, so afraid
was he that Stalin was planning to extend Soviet influence in Europe. In
Churchill’s view only a powerful Anglo-Saxon West whose members acted
together had any chance of placating the ‘imperialistic demands of Soviet
Communist Russia’,109 which is why at the end of May he roundly condemned
the plan put forward by Truman’s pro-Soviet special envoy, Joseph E. Davies,
that any summit attended by all three world leaders should be held only after a
meeting between the American president and the Soviet party leader. Such
conditions, he explained, were demeaning for Great Britain and the
Commonwealth, and the British government would not attend an Allied confer-
ence that was held in these circumstances. Britain, Churchill insisted, must be
treated as an equal partner from the very outset.
In a memorandum that he handed to the American diplomat at the end of
May, Churchill raised his objections to the idea of an American-Soviet summit
to the level of a point of principle:

It must be remembered that Britain and the United States are united at this
time upon the same ideologies, namely, freedom, and the principles set out
in the American Constitution and humbly reproduced with modern varia-
tions in the Atlantic Charter. The Soviet Government have [sic] a different
philosophy, namely, Communism, and use to the full the methods of police
government, which they are applying in every State which has fallen a
victim to their liberating arms. The Prime Minister cannot readily bring
himself to accept the idea that the position of the United States is that
862 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Britain and Soviet Russia are just two foreign Powers, six of one and half a
dozen of the other, with whom the troubles of the late war have to be
adjusted. [. . .] The great causes and principles for which Britain and the
United States have suffered and triumphed are not mere matters of the
balance of power. They in fact involve the salvation of the world.110

Although Truman immediately denied that he had been planning a preliminary

conference involving only America and the Soviet Union, he was unable to allay
Churchill’s fears that the new president was intending to pursue a policy of
appeasement towards the Soviet Union. During the initial months of his presi-
dency, Truman was influenced by his country’s foreign minister, James F.
Byrnes, as well as by Joseph Davies and by Harry Hopkins, who had been
Roosevelt’s closest adviser, with the result that he tended to regard Stalin as a
pragmatic leader whose lust for power was already sated, while he was convinced
that Churchill was guilty of seriously exaggerating the Russian dictator’s expan-
sionist ambitions to the point of becoming a hysterical anti-Communist. It
was during the negotiations that took place in Moscow in late May and early
June 1945 between Hopkins and Stalin that the die was cast with regard to
Poland’s future fate, when Hopkins agreed to the enlargement of the Communist-
dominated Warsaw cabinet through the inclusion of a number of former exiles
and ‘bourgeois’ politicians, a move which, purely symbolic in character,
persuaded both Washington and London to recognize Osóbka-Morawski’s
government in early July. At this juncture Truman was keen above all to
persuade the Soviet Union to enter the war with Japan as soon as possible and
to maintain Soviet-American cooperation beyond the end of the war.
Soviet policies were not the only reason why Churchill was keen to convene
a three-nation summit as quickly as possible. By the time he drafted his memo-
randum to Davies at the end of May, he was no longer the head of a national
government but only of a purely Conservative cabinet. At its party conference
in Blackpool, the Labour Party had decided to leave what had effectively been
an all-party government, prompting Churchill to ask King George VI to accept
his resignation on 23 May and to form a new government. One of his first offi-
cial acts on being reappointed prime minister was to dissolve the House of
Commons that had been elected in November 1935 and whose term in office
had twice been extended on account of the war, most recently in December
1944. New elections were set for 5 July, an early date thought to favour the
Tories, who hoped that Churchill’s popularity as wartime prime minister would
benefit them so soon after their country’s victory over Germany. Since most
British soldiers could vote only while they were still abroad and it would need
time to bring their ballot boxes back to England, the lower house decided to
seal these boxes for a period of three weeks. Until then the outcome of the elec-
tions remained uncertain. Insofar as it was in Churchill’s power to influence
matters, the planned summit had to take place before the election results were
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 863

known, in other words, at a time when no one could doubt whether or not he
was still the British prime minister.
At the end of May Truman, Churchill and Stalin agreed to hold their summit
in Berlin on 15 July. In fact the conference began two days later than planned
and not in the ruins of the former capital, but in Potsdam, which had suffered
slightly less badly. The main topic on the agenda during the first eight days of the
conference was Poland’s western border. Appealing to the wishes of the Polish
government, Stalin demanded that the border be the Oder–Neiße Line, while
Churchill and – far less forcefully – Roosevelt had insisted that it be further to
the east. Churchill’s main argument was that the population between the Lausitz
Neiße and the Glatz Neiße was purely German and that Germany already had
enough problems trying to house and care for millions of refugees from the east.
The food and fuel available within the 1937 borders had to be available to all
Germans, regardless of the zone in which they were living. On this point
Churchill refused to be moved even by the Polish delegation under Bo5es5aw
Bierut that was able to explain its position to the three powers on 24 July.
The following day Churchill flew back to London in order to be present
when the elections results were announced on 26 July. To the surprise of most
observers, the overwhelming victor was the Labour Party, which returned 393
members to the lower house, while the Conservatives held on to only 197 seats.
(The Labour Party won 49.7 per cent of the vote, the Conservatives 36.2 per
cent and the Liberals 9 per cent, resulting in twelve seats.) The brief campaign
had concentrated on the economy and on social policy rather than the merits
of the wartime premier and his party. The majority of the British population
wanted to see the implementation of the reforms that had been promised to
them by the Beveridge Report of 1942 but which had yet to be put into opera-
tion. (The one exception was the Education Act of August 1944, which raised
the school-leaving age to fifteen and introduced free lessons at secondary as
well as primary schools.) The Labour Party’s slogan – ‘Let us face the future’ –
had proved more attractive than the Tories’ patriotic appeal to keep Churchill
in office as a tried and tested statesman. Churchill could comfort himself with
the knowledge that even those of his compatriots who had voted for the Labour
Party recognized his historic achievement: no other western leader had
contributed as much to the Allies’ victory over National Socialist Germany and
to the preservation of free democracy as the now seventy-year-old Churchill.
His successor as prime minister was Clement Attlee, the country’s former
deputy prime minister and until then the leader of the opposition in the House
of Commons. At Churchill’s insistence he had been a member of the British dele-
gation at the Potsdam Conference, but he and his new foreign secretary, Ernest
Bevin, who had replaced Anthony Eden, were far less familiar than their prede-
cessors with the problems that needed to be resolved in Potsdam. In the case of
Poland’s disputed western border with Germany, neither of them felt bound to
Churchill’s implacable rejection of the Oder–Neiße Line that was demanded by
864 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Poland and the Soviet Union. After 26 July the political weight that Great Britain
could add to the scales at the Potsdam Conference was reduced, while that of the
Americans increased. This was the first example of the way in which the change
of government in London was to affect British foreign policy.
Truman’s opposition to the more westerly border was less resolute than
Churchill’s even during the first few days of the conference. After 26 July the
Americans and especially their secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, came to hold
the view that they could reasonably go more than halfway in meeting Soviet
demands with regard to Poland’s western border if Stalin were to agree to a
compromise on another controversial matter, the question of reparations. Here
the parties additionally felt pressed for time, for Truman wanted to return to
the United States as quickly as possible in order to devote himself fully to a
victorious conclusion to the war with Japan. In turn this meant that he was
eager to withdraw most of his American troops from Europe and deploy them
in the Far East.
The agreement on Poland’s western border that was reached in Potsdam
was only apparently a compromise. The border was to begin in the north at a
point just to the west of Swinemünde (?winouj0cie), so that Stettin (Szczecin)
became a part of Poland. After that it followed the Oder and the western Neiße
as far south as the Czechoslovak border. With the exception of the northern
part of East Prussia, the German regions in the east were to be administered by
Poland. A definitive ruling on the border was left to a peace treaty to resolve.
Northern East Prussia, including Königsberg (Kaliningrad), was placed under
Soviet control, the Western Powers agreeing to support the Soviet Union’s
claims to this region in any peace treaty that was still to be negotiated.
Polish administration in the German regions in the east did not mean that
Poland became a fifth occupying power with a representative on the Allied
Control Council. In terms of international law the administrative authority in
these territories was merely provisional, but in practice Poland exercised sover-
eign control over its new regions in the west. In this regard the United States
and Great Britain had been faced with a fait accompli: in the light of the Red
Army’s conquest of the areas in question and in view of the continuing depor-
tation of Germans from these eastern regions, everything suggested that the
provisional nature of the governance of these areas to the east of the Oder–
Neiße Line, which represented a quarter of the land mass of the German Reich
before 1937, would prove to be worth no more than the paper on which it was
written. Germany as defined by its 1937 borders, which was the starting point
of the Potsdam Conference and, as such, agreed to by Stalin, became a legal
fiction thanks to this very same conference. In reality, Germany consisted of
the area occupied by the four Allies and governed by the Allied Control
Council. This was the Germany that emerged from the Second World War, a
Germany that no longer included East Prussia, Farther Pomerania, East
Brandenburg and Silesia.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 865

On the question of reparations, too, the Allies sought to accommodate

Stalin’s wishes, even if they were reluctant to go as far as they did with regard to
Poland’s western border. Although the Soviet Union failed to achieve partial
control over the Ruhr, as it had hoped to do, it did receive assurances that its
claims to reparations payments from the three occupied zones in the west would
be met. The three major powers agreed in principle that over the next two years
reparations could come both from the dismantling of German industrial plants
– a move designed to destroy Germany’s potential for waging another war – and
from Germany’s foreign assets. The Potsdam Agreement did not include any
provisions for reparations payments from current production of a kind that the
Soviet Union had already implemented in its own occupied zone.
In keeping with a recommendation from the Allied Reparations Committee
that had been set up at Yalta, the Soviet Union, which had suffered the most
from the war that Hitler had unleashed, received 56 per cent of the reparations
from all the occupied zones as well as 10 per cent from the industrial plants
that were to be dismantled in the western zones. In addition, Moscow received
a further 15 per cent from these plants in return for Soviet supplies of food-
stuffs, coal, potash, zinc, timber, clay and petroleum products from its own
occupied zone. Poland’s claims were to be met from the Soviet quotient. In
response to American demands, Austria was spared any reparations payments
on the grounds that it had been Hitler’s first victim. With regard to German
assets abroad, Britain and the United States agreed not to make any claims on
Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Upper Austria and Finland if, for its part, the
Soviet Union forfeited the right to any claims on German assets to the west of
the aforementioned regions or to the gold that the Western Powers had taken
from those parts of the Soviet-occupied region that had been temporarily
under their control.
The Potsdam reparations ruling was a provisional measure riven by contra-
dictions and conflict. In response to British demands, there was no attempt to
set an upper limit of $20,000 million on the total cost of reparations, a figure
that the Soviet Union had asked for. Since every occupying power could collect
reparations from its own zone, everything depended on the Allies’ ability to
work together. But it soon became clear that in spite of the agreements reached
in Potsdam the Soviet Union was continuing to draw the bulk of its reparations
from current production, not only jeopardizing the welfare of the German
population in its own occupied zone but also flying in the face of its promise to
provide food and other goods to the western zones by way of exchange. In the
circumstances it was impossible to achieve the declared aim of Truman, Attlee
and Stalin to treat Germany as a single economic entity within its 1945 borders.
But the practical implementation of this maxim was thwarted by one of the
western occupying powers, too, when France, which had not attended the
Potsdam Conference, announced in no uncertain terms on 7 August 1945 that
it was vetoing the establishment of German central administrative units that the
866 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Allies were supposed to support in order to maintain Germany’s economic

unity. France retained the right to decide as it thought fit with regard to the
Potsdam reparations agreement even though it was a member of the Allied
Reparations Commission. In general Paris regarded as binding only those deci-
sions to which it subsequently gave its explicit approval.
Truman, Churchill and Stalin had evidently not thought through to their
logical conclusion the possible consequences of excluding France from the
Potsdam Conference. Quite apart from the dilatory character of the repara-
tions compromise, the French objections to central administrative offices in
Germany played a significant part in ensuring that Germany’s economic unity
remained a mere postulate. Although the three major powers had shelved the
idea of ‘dismembering’ Germany that had been raised at their conferences in
Teheran and Yalta, they had not completely ruled out a partition of the country.
In the summer of 1945, therefore, it was impossible to predict whether or not
Germany would ever constitute a single economic and national entity.
The question of Poland’s western border and the problem of reparations
remained intractable, but most of the other issues relating to Germany were rela-
tively uncontroversial. According to its opening statement, the Potsdam
Declaration’s principal aim was to ensure that ‘German militarism and nazism will
be extirpated and the Allies will take in agreement together, now and in the future,
the other measures necessary to assure that Germany never again will threaten
her neighbors or the peace of the world’. At the same time, the Allies offered an
assurance that it was not their intention ‘to destroy or enslave the German people’.
Rather, they wanted to give the German people the opportunity

to prepare for the eventual reconstruction of their life on a democratic and

peaceful basis. If their own efforts are steadily directed to this end, it will be
possible for them in due course to take their place among the free and
peaceful peoples of the world.

The occupation of Germany was to be guided by the following aims: ‘The

complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany and the elimination
or control of all German industry that could be used for military production’.
The NSDAP was to be destroyed, as were subsidiary organizations such as the
SS, SA, secret service and Gestapo, together with the country’s land forces, its
navy and its air force, including its general staff. All National Socialist laws that
discriminated against people on the basis of their race, religion or political
beliefs were to be repealed. War criminals and their agents were to be detained
and brought to trial, and all National Socialist party leaders were to be arrested
and interned, as were all those persons deemed to pose a threat to the Allied
occupation and its aims. An initial list of the principal war criminals was to be
published on 1 September. The three great powers wanted to decide as soon as
possible on the best way of proceeding against this group of war criminals.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 867

‘To prepare for the eventual reconstruction of German political life on a

democratic basis and for eventual peaceful cooperation in international life
by Germany’, it was necessary to reorganize the country’s educational and
legal systems as well as its administration, beginning on a local level. All demo-
cratic political parties were to be permitted and encouraged. All of them
were to have the right to call meetings and hold public discussions. Elected
assemblies were to be set up as soon as possible on a local, provincial and
regional level. As far as the need for military security allowed it, there should
be freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. Religious
institutions must be respected, and free trade unions should be established. But
before the Allies could make good their promises, the German people must
accept that

they have suffered a total military defeat and [. . .] they cannot escape
responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves, since their own
ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance have destroyed [the]
German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable.

Under the heading ‘Economic Principles’ Germany was given the task of
destroying its potential for fomenting a new war and of introducing a rigorous
policy of decentralization, the aim of which was to be achieved by ‘eliminating
the present excessive concentration of economic power as exemplified in
particular by cartels, syndicates, trusts and other monopolistic arrangements’.
In reorganizing the economic life of the nation particular emphasis was to be
placed on the development of agriculture and ‘peaceful domestic industries’.
Allied controls were to be imposed on Germany ‘only to the extent necessary’.
Reparations should leave the German people with sufficient means to subsist
without the need to rely on external assistance. The proceeds of exports from
current production and from existing supplies were to be available in the first
instance to pay for imports for which the necessary means were to be made
available when drawing up a budgetary plan. In this context German adminis-
trative centres were required to play a significant role, except that the French
veto prevented such an apparatus from ever being established.
There was no argument among the Allies concerning the vast movement of
peoples that resulted from the redrawing of the map of Europe. Throughout
the war, Churchill had repeatedly drawn attention to the example of the Greek-
Turkish population transfer that had been carried out under the terms of the
Treaty of Lausanne of 1923. On the basis of this agreement 1.2 million Greeks
had been deported to Greece from Asia Minor, from the Pontus region and
from Eastern Thrace, while 400,000 Turks from Macedonia, Thessaly and the
Epirus were resettled in Turkey. A similar population exchange between Turkey
and Bulgaria had been envisaged in November 1919 under the terms of the
Treaty of Neuilly. In the light of these precedents, neither Britain nor America
868 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

felt any misgivings that might have militated against forced resettlements as
long as these were regulated under international law.
In the specific case that was to be decided in Potsdam, the experience of
German policies of the last decade suggested a population transfer. After all
that the Germans had done to their neighbours, no one could think that Poles,
Czechs and Germans would live together harmoniously in the territories that
lay beyond the new border with Germany. If the three great powers had left
millions of Germans to live in these parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia, then
from an Allied point of view this could merely encourage an aggressive German
irredentism and hence pose a further threat to peace in Europe.
In response to demands from Soviet Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia, the
Allies recognized, therefore, that ‘the transfer to Germany of German popula-
tions, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary,
will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should
be effected in an orderly and humane manner.’111 This humanitarian provision
was not legally enforceable, but it was included in an attempt to reassure the
general public in all the western democracies: they had all been fully aware of
the atrocities committed during the unofficial deportations during the war. But
the notion of dividing the refugees among the different occupied zones in a way
envisaged by the Potsdam Declaration proved to be illusory, for in August 1945
France refused to open up its borders to refugees and displaced persons.
By the time the Potsdam Conference ended on 2 August 1945, there was a
further committee on which the three major powers had agreed, at least on
paper: the Council of Foreign Ministers. Its members were representatives of
the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain in addition to France and
China. Its most important function was to draw up peace treaties for Italy,
Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and France and then submit these to the United
Nations. (France and China were to advise on these treaties to the extent that
they had signed armistice agreements with the states in question.) The Council
was also to work towards a peaceful settlement in Germany so that the docu-
ment in question could be accepted by a German government suitable for this
purpose, once such a government had been formed.
Some of the agreements made by the Three Powers were initially not
intended for publication, although they were not officially secret. They included
agreements to begin the withdrawal of British and Soviet troops from Iran by
withdrawing Allied troops from Teheran with immediate effect and to revise
the Black Sea Straits Agreement signed in Montreux in 1936, which restored to
Turkey full sovereignty over the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara and the
Bosporus. This last-named point amounted to western support for the Soviet
demand to be allowed to control the straits in question, a demand to which
Turkey would of course have had to agree – which it did not in fact do.
None of the countries that attended the Potsdam Conference had pursued
the aim of dividing Germany. Unlike France, all three were keen – albeit for
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 869

different reasons – to treat the occupied country as an economic and, as far as

possible, a future political unit. For the United States and Great Britain this was
their only way of exerting influence on the Soviet zone and of receiving a share
of the supplies to their own zones that the Soviets had agreed in Potsdam to
provide. For their part, the Soviets banked on being able to influence the
western-occupied zones and hoped to have the Ruhr – Germany’s industrial
heartland – placed under the control of all four powers, a suggestion that had
not been rejected out of hand in Potsdam. If no agreement could be reached on
these contentious issues, then there was no mistaking the geographical line
along which the occupied area would be divided in two: it was the border that
ran between the British and American zone on the one hand and the Soviet
zone on the other.
At first blush, it was Stalin who emerged the victor from the Potsdam
Conference. He had managed to have Poland moved further west, just as he had
wanted, and on the question of reparations his demands had been met with the
exception of an upper limit of $20,000 million and the internationalization of
the Ruhr. If he had succeeded in asserting his demands with regard to the
industrial region on the Rhine and in the Ruhr, the Soviet Union would have
acquired decisive influence in the western half of Germany and also substan-
tially strengthened its position in western Europe. But this triumph was denied
to Stalin. His claims on the Ruhr encountered stiff resistance not only from the
British in whose zone the industrial region lay but also from the United States,
which was unquestionably the leading power in the West. Truman drew a far-
reaching conclusion from the course of the Potsdam negotiations: even if the
Soviet Union were to enter the war in the Far East, he had no desire to accord it
the right to play a part in the occupation of Japan. Haggling with Stalin over the
German question and the closely related Polish question had been unavoidable,
but he was not willing to conduct similar negotiations with the Soviet leader
following what he hoped would be the Allies’ victory over Japan.
For Germany the results of the Three Powers’ summit in Potsdam were
mixed. The Potsdam Declaration was not a peace treaty but was intended to
replace one for the foreseeable future. In terms of the territorial losses that it
enshrined, to say nothing of the economic burdens that it imposed and the
political obligations that it placed on Germany, it was far harsher than the
Treaty of Versailles. But Potsdam also represented the United States’ definitive
abandonment of the spirit of the Morgenthau Plan. By now Morgenthau was
no longer a member of the American government, Truman having accepted
his treasury secretary’s verbal resignation without further ado on 5 July –
Morgenthau had resigned in response to Truman’s refusal to allow him to
attend the Potsdam Conference. The Declaration’s demands on dismantling
German industry may have been hard to meet but they were far from being a
programme designed to deindustrialize the country or return it to an agrarian
economy.
870 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Politically, too, the outcome of the conference gave the Germans modest
cause for hope. They received the assurance of individual rights and demo-
cratic participation in any decision-making process, marking a repudiation of
JCS 1067 that had remained in force until then. Only in the western-occupied
zones and in the western sectors of Berlin, of course, were there any real
grounds for political optimism on the part of the Germans, for Stalin’s inter-
pretation of the word ‘democracy’ differed fundamentally from that of the
Americans, the British and the French, a point he had proved not only in the
Soviet Union but in all of those countries where with Soviet help Communists
had gained key positions in 1944 and 1945.
Everything that the Western Powers noted on this subject in Potsdam
confirmed Stalin in his conviction that they had finally come to accept as a fait
accompli the events that had unfolded in south-east and eastern central Europe.
Although the German question might still be unresolved, there was no longer
any doubt that Europe was now divided into an eastern and a western sphere of
influence and that it would remain so divided for the foreseeable future. By the
time the Potsdam Conference ended, Churchill’s reference to an ‘iron curtain’
summed up the reality of the old Continent even more aptly than it had
before.

The End of the War (II): The Atom Bomb and Japan’s Capitulation
Early on 16 July 1945 – the day before the start of the Potsdam Conference – a
team of American and British nuclear physicists at Alamogordo in the New
Mexico desert conducted an experiment that was to change the world, when
they successfully exploded the first atom bomb. The experiment was the result
of years of research that had been massively funded by the United States
government in the form of what had become known as the Manhattan Project.
American efforts were driven in particular by the fear that thanks to the
research of three German nuclear physicists, Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg
and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Hitler’s Germany might be able to produce
and use the new means of mass destruction even before the United States. The
fear proved to be unfounded, for Hitler was interested solely in ‘miracle
weapons’ that could be used only in the shorter term and gave no thought to
investing huge resources in a technology that might never even be used for
military purposes. In consequence, German nuclear research lagged far behind
its Anglo-Saxon counterpart and by 1944 had still only reached the stage
at which Roosevelt’s Uranium Committee had begun its work in July 1941.
Although nuclear experiments were conducted in Germany – on the island of
Rügen in October 1944 and at Ohrdruf, an outpost of the Buchenwald concen-
tration camp, in early March 1945, the latter supervised by the SS – Germany
was nowhere near having the capability of deploying atomic weapons by the
end of the war.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 871

The destructive force of ‘Trinity’ – the code name for the bomb exploded in
New Mexico – far exceeded the expectations of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the
man in charge of the team at Los Alamos. The science editor of the New York
Times, William L. Laurence, was able to observe the clandestine event from a
distance of some twenty miles and reported seeing

a burst of flame such as had never before been seen on this planet, illumi-
nating earth and sky, for a brief span that seemed eternal, with the might of
many super-suns. [. . .] Then out of the great silence came a mighty thunder.
For a brief interval the phenomena we had seen as light repeated themselves
in terms of sound. It was the blast from thousands of blockbusters going off
simultaneously at one spot. [. . .] The ground trembled under our feet as in
an earthquake.112

Truman had arrived in Potsdam on 15 July and immediately after the experi-
ment had taken place, he was told that it had been a success. Even before that,
he had resolved that if there was no prospect of a rapid end to the war in the
Far East, he would deploy the new weapon as soon as it had been tested. On
18 June, his chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, had reckoned that based on
the experiences of the Battle of Okinawa between April and June 1945, an inva-
sion of the principal islands of Japan would cost the lives of some 268,000
American soldiers – approximately as many as had already lost their lives on
every front in the Second World War. Together with his secretary of war, Henry
Lewis Stimson, and his secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, Truman believed
that if the war were to continue using conventional weapons, it would be
several months – possibly as late as the autumn of 1946 – before Japan surren-
dered. Since the atom bomb offered a chance to save the lives of hundreds of
thousands of GIs, it would have to be dropped on a Japanese city. Not only
Truman and his closest advisers were in agreement on this point, so, too, was
Churchill. Truman and Byrnes – he, too, a former senator – were essentially
domestic politicians in the summer of 1945, and both thought invariably of
home voters, who would not forgive their own leaders if they continued a
bloody and costly war even though they had the technical means to bring it to
an early end.
After he had been informed of the results of the experiment in the New
Mexico desert, Truman spoke to Stalin on the margins of the eighth plenary
session of the Potsdam Conference on 24 July and mentioned in passing that
the United States now had at its disposal a new and unusually destructive
weapon. Stalin reacted calmly and said only that he hoped that the United
States would use it to good effect against Japan. In fact Stalin had long known
about the experiment at Alamogordo thanks to a Soviet spy, the nuclear physi-
cist Klaus Fuchs, who had emigrated to Britain from Germany in 1933 and
had worked on the Manhattan Project.
872 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

At this stage no decision had been taken to drop a nuclear bomb on Japan.
Before such a step was taken, Japan was to be given a chance to end the war. In
an ultimatum dated 26 July, Truman, Churchill and the president of the
National Government of the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek, who was not
in fact present in Potsdam, demanded that Japan lay down its arms by 3 August
at the latest and in that way avoid the total destruction of its armed forces and
devastation of the country’s islands.
The Allies’ conditions were non-negotiable. All of those deemed involved in
the country’s ‘irresponsible militarism’ and policy of aggressive expansionism
must be removed from power and Japanese war criminals called to account. As
set forth in the Cairo Declaration of November 1943, the territories and sover-
eignty of Japan were to be limited to the areas that it held before it embarked on
its expansionist policy. And Japan would be occupied until such time as a new,
democratic and peaceful order had been established. The Potsdam Declaration
said nothing about the Tenno (emperor), demanding neither his abdication and
condemnation nor the transition from a monarchy to a republic. Nor did the
Declaration indicate the Allies’ willingness to leave Emperor Hirohito on the
throne. Finally, there was no direct threat to use the atom bomb.
Since 7 April 1945 the Japanese government had been headed by Admiral
Suzuki Kantaro, who, now in his late seventies, enjoyed the emperor’s trust. He
owed his appointment to forces eager for peace. At the urging of the Japanese
foreign minister, Togo Shigenori, the former prime minister Konoe Fumimaro
began talks in Moscow in July in the hope of persuading the neutral Soviet
Union to intervene with the Western Powers, but the Soviet negotiators reacted
with extreme reserve and prevaricated. Konoe’s actions were discussed in
Potsdam and were not without result, for the Potsdam Declaration demanded
only the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces, not of the
country as a whole, as had been the case with Germany, leaving the Japanese
the right of political self-determination and holding out the prospect of access
to raw materials and participation in world trade relations. All of these points
were intended as a signal to those forces in Tokyo that were keen to see a rapid
return to peace.
But the Japanese leadership was deeply divided. The moderate forces asso-
ciated with the foreign minister saw positive points in the Potsdam Declaration
but felt that they needed to clarify the question as to the Allies’ future attitude
to Emperor Hirohito, whereas the radical militarists associated with the
minister of the army, Anami Korechika, and with the chief of the army’s general
staff, General Umezu Yoshijiro, regarded the acceptance of an ultimatum as
incompatible with Japanese honour. On 28 July, at the end of lengthy discus-
sions within the Supreme War Council, Togo recommended that they wait for
the Soviet response to Konoe’s mission. In a subsequent press conference, the
prime minister explained that they had decided on a policy of mokusatsu,
which, although difficult to translate, amounted to a refusal to acknowledge
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 873

the situation and to treat it with silent contempt, prompting the minister for
the army to coin the phrase that dominated the headlines of the nationalist
press the following day: ‘Rejection Through Ignorance.’ From an American
perspective this was an unambiguous no and, as such, a signal that the United
States should begin preparations to drop the first atom bomb.
As the city chosen to be bombed, the planners opted for an industrial and
military centre, the port of Hiroshima. At 08:15 on the morning of 6 August
1945, acting on the orders of President Truman, the crew of the Enola Gay
bomber dropped the first atom bomb to be used as a military weapon from a
height of approximately 2,000 feet. The bomb bore the name ‘Little Boy’. Some
80,000 of the city’s 355,000 inhabitants were killed outright, and a further
60,000 were dead by the end of 1945. Over the coming months and years a
further 60,000 died from radioactive poisoning. Four-fifths of the city’s build-
ings were destroyed or severely damaged on 6 August 1945.
On 8 August, two days after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Soviet Union
declared war on Japan. At this date the Americans had still not received a formal
offer of surrender from Japan even though Truman had threatened only the
previous day that he would order further air raids if Japan did not sue for peace
forthwith. The reason for Tokyo’s silence was the continuing divisions among
the country’s leaders: the Supreme War Council could take only unanimous
decisions, and these were impossible to achieve because of the differences
between the moderates and the radicals. And so Truman ordered a second
atom bomb to be dropped, the last of the three produced within the framework
of the Manhattan Project. ‘Fatman’ was dropped on the port of Nagasaki at
11:00 on the morning of 9 August, landing on an armaments factory operated
by Mitsubishi. Of the city’s 270,000 inhabitants, 39,000 died as a direct result of
the attack, and a further 31,000 had perished by the end of the year. Some 40 per
cent of the city’s buildings were destroyed.
Even after the second bomb had been dropped, those advocating a hard line
in Tokyo were still unwilling to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.
But just before midnight on the evening of 9 August Emperor Hirohito himself
intervened in the Council’s deliberations. His prime minister asked him to
decide between the positions of the moderates and the radicals, whereupon
Hirohito sided with his foreign minister, who advised acceptance of the ulti-
matum. Shortly afterwards the Foreign Ministry sent word via the Japanese
Embassy in Berne that Japan was ready to surrender as long as the victorious
powers made no demands that would jeopardize the rights of the emperor as
the country’s supreme ruler.
After consulting with Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union, the United
States government agreed to this demand but only to the extent that it promised
to leave the decision about the country’s ultimate form of state to the free will of
the Japanese people and to occupy Japan only until such time as the aims of the
Potsdam Declaration had been met. The note signed by Byrnes in his capacity
874 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

as secretary of state arrived in Tokyo early on the morning of 12 August. Two

days later, the Supreme War Council accepted it at the emperor’s insistence.
That same evening an attempt to mount a coup by a number of rebellious army
units was quickly put down. A handful of radical nationalists among the mili-
tary and political leaders committed hara-kiri.
On 15 August Hirohito addressed the nation and informed his listeners that
Japan had accepted the American note. At no point did he use the words ‘defeat’,
‘surrender’ or ‘capitulation’. He condemned the bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki but also declared in unambiguous terms that to have continued the
war would have meant the collapse and extinction of the Japanese nation.
The following day he ordered a ceasefire on every front. Shortly after 09:00 on
the morning of 2 September 1945 the unconditional surrender of the Japanese
armed forces was accepted by the commander in chief of the American troops,
General Douglas MacArthur, on board the battleship Missouri that was anchored
in the Bay of Tokyo. The agreement was signed in the presence of representa-
tives of the Soviet Union, China, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada
and France. The Japanese signatories were the new foreign minister, Shigemitsu
Mamoru, and the chief of the general staff, General Umezu Yoshijiro. With that
the war in Asia was over.

Truman was returning home by sea from the Potsdam Conference when he
heard that Hiroshima had been bombed. His reaction was one of relief and
even delight. He had had no moral scruples about deploying the weapon. From
his point of view, it was a legitimate and even necessary means by which to end
a terrible war at the earliest available opportunity with the least possible
number of American casualties. Washington was happy to accept that this
action would result in the deaths of an incalculable number of Japanese civil-
ians, including women and children. Hundreds and thousands of civilians had
already been killed in conventional bombing raids – in Tokyo alone more than
85,000 had died on the night of 9/10 March 1945. Every western democracy
was by now so inured to the mass killing of civilians that any moral inhibitions
on the part of those responsible for such actions were already beginning to
fade. The atom bomb permitted a tremendous increase in the capacity for
destruction, and it was this that made it strategically useful. The long-term
consequences of radiation poisoning were barely taken into account.
There is no evidence to support the view that Truman and his closest
advisers were guided by widespread racist prejudice against the ‘Japs’ when
they decided to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The new weapon of mass
destruction would presumably have been used in the war on Germany, too,
if it had been available in time. Nor is there any indication that Truman
was influenced by the consideration that it was necessary to have made prac-
tical use of the atom bomb on at least a single occasion in order to show the
world once and for all that in the future war could no longer be the recourse of
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 875

politicians. This idea was, however, represented by two leading scientific

advisers to the American government, the presidents of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and of Harvard University, Karl T. Compton and James
B. Conant. Compton wrote to the secretary of war, Henry Lewis Stimson, on 11
June 1945 to state that if the weapon was not used in the present conflict, ‘the
world would have no adequate warning as to what was to be expected if war
should break out again’.113 This was a consideration that was exceptionally far-
reaching in its implications, which perhaps helps to explain that it was beyond
the remit of those whose task it was in the summer of 1945 to decide on whether
or not to deploy the atom bomb at all.
The keenest scientific criticism of the decision to drop the first atom bombs
was voiced in 1965 by the historian Gar Alperovitz, the spokesman of a ‘revi-
sionist’ school of thought in American historiography. His central thesis was
that by the summer of 1945 Japan was on the point of military collapse and it
was unnecessary to use atomic weapons to shorten the war. Alperovitz believed
that Truman and his advisers had been following a very different agenda, which
was to intimidate the Soviet Union. The American leadership was convinced
that a display of nuclear strength in the Far East would have a positive effect on
Soviet policies in Europe, and once he knew that the experiment at Alamogordo
had been a success, Truman had adopted a far less accommodating stance
towards Stalin even at the Potsdam Conference.
In point of fact, the Japanese leadership was far from accepting the inevita-
bility of surrender before 6 August 1945. If the bombs had not been dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war would have lasted very much longer:
Truman and his closest advisers were entirely right on this point. As for the
Soviet Union, Byrnes had come to the conclusion by 21 July – the day on which
he and Truman were informed in detail about the nuclear explosion at
Alamogordo – that Russia no longer needed to enter the war with Japan.
Byrnes, too, initially hoped that the United States’ new military strength might
have a positive influence on Soviet policy in Europe, but he was the only
member of the American delegation in Potsdam to hold this view. After 21 July
Truman no longer attached any importance to the Soviet Union’s declaration of
war on Japan but at the same time he did nothing to prevent Russia from taking
that step. We may also infer a further political effect of the events in the New
Mexico desert: the atomic bomb will have confirmed Truman in his intention
of refusing to allow the Soviet Union to assist in occupying Japan and in that
way of preventing the country from causing him the same sort of difficulties as
those he had already had to endure in the case of Germany.
As far as Europe was concerned, the United States was able to avoid an anti-
Soviet volte-face in the summer of 1945. Even the planned cooperation on
arms control that was advocated above all by Stimson survived this strain on
their relations. In short, there could be no talk of a hardening of Washington’s
position towards Moscow at the Potsdam Conference after 21 July. Rather, the
876 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

United States continued to count on working together with the Soviet Union
and accepted as a fait accompli the existence of a Soviet sphere of influence in
south-east and eastern central Europe. The nuclear bomb represented a mili-
tary and technological revolution that shifted the balance of political power
between Soviet Russia and the United States in favour of America. But in 1945
the United States did not pursue a policy of ‘atomic diplomacy’ in the sense
understood by Alperovitz. The Cold War began only later.

In declaring war on Japan on 8 August, the Soviet Union may have entered the
conflict only at the very last moment, but it was far more than merely a symbolic
act. As soon as war was declared, the Red Army advanced into Manchuria and
sent troops to the northern part of Korea as well as to the Kuril Islands and to
Sakhalin, both of which were annexed by Soviet Russia. (In the case of the four
southernmost Kuril Islands that had not been among the group of islands
ceded by Russia to Japan in 1875, this meant the annexation of territory inhab-
ited by Japanese nationals, which in turn resulted in the deportation of the
islands’ population.) In Korea the fighting lasted until 26 August. In keeping
with an agreement made with the United States, the Japanese troops surren-
dered to the Soviets north of the thirty-eighth parallel, while to the south it was
the Americans who accepted the Japanese surrender, marking the birth of a
line of demarcation that was very soon to prove extremely contentious.
In China the Japanese troops surrendered to Chiang Kai-shek on 9 September.
The Soviet Union and Chiang had signed a friendship and alliance treaty only
eight weeks earlier, on 14 August, when Soviet Russia had confirmed various
rights agreed to by the Western Powers in Yalta and including Manchuria, a
naval base in Port Arthur (Lüshunkou) and additional privileges on the Liaotung
Peninsula. The National Chinese government also recognized the independence
of Outer Mongolia. In terms of China’s domestic policies, the treaty resulted in a
strengthening of the position of Chiang’s party, the Kuomintang, in its struggle
with the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong, who inevitably interpreted
such a move as a serious affront.
Throughout the previous period Mao had waged a tenacious guerrilla war
on the Japanese in northern China, and in August 1945 he and his troops took
part in the Soviet invasion of the region. At Soviet insistence and through the
intermediary of the Americans Mao began talks with Chiang Kai-shek in
Chungking, the provisional headquarters of the Chinese National government.
Starting in late August, they ended on 10 October with a joint declaration in
which both sides recorded their readiness to work together in peaceful coexist-
ence. The communiqué was to be worth no more than the paper on which it
was written and produced no real agreement between the two opposing camps.
No more successful was a subsequent agreement more or less imposed by the
Americans on 25 February 1946 and relating to troop numbers and troop
distribution. Violent fighting broke out between the Nationalists and the
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 877

Communists in April, and by the spring of 1947 there was open civil war, a
conflict that ended only two years later with the victory of the Communists
and the expulsion of the Kuomintang from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan.
Following Japan’s surrender, many of the colonies of the European powers
that had been occupied by Japan attempted to prevent a return to the status
quo. In Java, which was part of the Dutch East Indies, two leaders of the inde-
pendence movement, Ahmed Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, proclaimed the
Republic of Indonesia on 17 August 1945. The armed forces of Sukarno and
Hatta were able to bring under their control not only Java itself but also Sumatra
and the island of Madura to the south of Sumatra and would probably have
continued their triumphal advance if Anglo-Indian troops, supported by units
of Japanese soldiers who had been released from prisoner-of-war camps for
this very purpose, had not offered them stout resistance. Dutch troops replaced
the British soldiers in October 1946. Attempts by the colonial power to reach
an agreement with the new republic proved unsuccessful in the longer term,
and after several bloody interventions by the police between 1947 and 1949 the
government in The Hague was finally forced to bow to international pressure,
more especially from the United States, and offer Indonesia its independence
in December 1949.
Among the French colonies occupied by the Japanese, Vietnam was the one
where news of the Japanese surrender triggered the biggest pro-independence
demonstrations. Installed by the Japanese in March 1945, Emperor Bao Dai
abdicated on 25 August 1945, and on 2 September the Communist leader Ho
Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi. In the
north of the country the Japanese were replaced by a National Chinese army,
while the south was occupied by Anglo-Indian troops who, as in the Dutch
East Indies, were able to rely on the support of units of former Japanese pris-
oners of war. The month of September witnessed the first clashes between the
forces of Ho Chi Minh – the Viet Minh – and French soldiers whom the British
had rescued from Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. General Jacques-Philippe
Leclerc – the liberator of Paris – leading 35,000 French colonial troops arrived
in the south of Vietnam in October. Some twelve months later, following the
failure of all attempts by Ho Chi Minh to reach a settlement with France, the
First Indochina War broke out.
Like the Dutch and the French, the British, too, found themselves facing
independence movements in many of their south-east Asian colonies in the
wake of Japan’s capitulation. There were powerful anti-colonial forces in
Singapore, Malaya and above all Burma, where the attempt to restore colonial
rule provoked determined resistance. As in other occupied countries, Japanese
rule had strengthened the resolve of those who opposed every form of colonial
control. If there was a positive side to Japanese imperialism, then this was it.
It was easiest for the United States to adapt to the new situation, for as long
ago as 1935 it had already promised its quasi-colony, the Commonwealth of
878 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the Philippines, national independence in 1945. As a result of the war, it was

not until July 1946 that America belatedly kept its word, while at the same time
ensuring that it maintained a number of trading privileges and several military
bases in the Philippines. The European colonial powers needed more time to
realize that the Second World War had permanently undermined the founda-
tions of their rule in Asia. The longer it took them to reach this understanding,
the harder it would be for them to abandon their illusions, a process that would
turn out to be as costly as it was bloody.

Guilt and Atonement: The Caesura of 1945 (I)

The number of people who perished directly or indirectly as a result of the
Second World War has been put at sixty million. More civilians than soldiers
died, although estimates of the number of civilian deaths vary wildly. Among
the civilian deaths were the Jews, Poles, Russians, White Russians, Ukrainians,
Sinti and Roma murdered by the National Socialists; the civilian victims of the
civil wars in Yugoslavia and Greece; and the murdered hostages, the refugees,
the victims of air raids and the millions who died of starvation and who are not
even included in many sets of statistics.
The number of soldiers who fell in combat or who died in prisoner-of-war
camps was at least twenty-seven million and as such was more than three times
higher than the equivalent figure for the First World War, when an estimated
8.5 million soldiers perished. The greatest losses were sustained by the Soviet
Union and China, with twenty-seven million and 13.5 million fatalities respec-
tively. Next came Germany with 6.35 million, India with more than three
million and Japan with more than two million deaths. In every case the number
includes both fallen soldiers and dead civilians.
With the exception of those conflicts that were purely civil wars, there had
been no European war since the Thirty Years War in which the distinction
between combatants and civilians was as blurred as it was in the Second World
War. Even though it was not a total war that involved every corner of the world,
it was certainly far more ‘total’ than the First World War had been. The Hague
Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907) had
stipulated that only military targets should be attacked and that the civilian
population should as far as possible be spared. These regulations were ignored
not only by the dictator-ruled aggressor nations but increasingly by western
democracies. By their own admission, the Allies’ ‘moral bombing’ was intended
to break the will of the civilian population and in that way to rob the aggressor
states of their mass support.
But the carpet bombing of German and Japanese cities was not the only
way in which the democratic Western Powers came closer to the brutal
fighting methods of their enemies. The mass expulsions sanctioned by the
Western Powers in 1945 would not have happened if Germany had not already
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 879

undertaken extensive ethnic cleansing operations in those parts of Europe that

it controlled. In the words of the historians Jörg Baberowski and Anselm
Doering-Manteuffel: ‘The extermination of the German armies and the expul-
sion of the German population from the regions to the east of the Oder-Neiße
Line as well as from Bohemia were the consequence of the German conquest
and occupation of those areas.’114
According to the understanding of the time, neither carpet bombing nor
mass deportations were war crimes. In the case of the Allied bombings, those
responsible saw their actions as an appropriate response to German and Japanese
aggression, and in the case of forced migration, the Western Powers were able to
point to contractually agreed precedents from the period after the First World
War, especially the Greek-Turkish population exchange that was made on the
basis of the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923.
It may be added that war crimes were not a new feature of the Second World
War. Nor were they committed only by the dictatorial regimes that had
unleashed the war and that were responsible for most of the atrocities. The list
of Soviet war crimes was equally long, and it did not begin with the murder of
thousands of Polish officers at Katyn in the spring of 1940. The Western Allies
felt more firmly committed to international law than their Communist allies,
but even they were guilty of actions that come under the heading of war crimes.
In the spring of 1945 the first wave of occupation in the western part of Germany
brought with it lootings, rapes and violent excesses on the part of Allied troops.
Among Allied war crimes was the inhuman treatment meted out to several
hundred thousand German prisoners of war in some twenty ‘camps’ in fields on
the left bank of the Rhine, where the ‘accommodation’ consisted of holes in the
ground dug by the inmates themselves and where at least 8,000 prisoners died.
In 1945 the term ‘war crime’ struck many legal scholars and politicians in
western democracies as too weak adequately to describe what National Socialist
Germany and its allies had done to humankind. Three decades earlier, on 24
May 1915, Great Britain, France and Tsarist Russia had jointly signed a note
protesting at the massacre of Armenians and accusing the Ottoman Empire of
a ‘crime against humanity and against civilization’. The victorious powers
returned to this expression at the end of the Second World War and on 8 August
1945 the representatives of the three major powers and France, in keeping with
an agreement reached at the Potsdam Conference, accepted the London accord
whereby the legal authority of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg
that was still to be set up should be extended to crimes against peace in the
sense of planning, preparing, unleashing or carrying out a war of aggression as
well as committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The law on whose basis sentences were passed in Nuremberg and shortly
afterwards in Tokyo, too, was a newly created international law. Experts
on international law in the western democracies did not feel bound to the prin-
ciple of ‘nulla poena sine lege’ (no punishment without a law) that banned all
880 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

retroactive penal legislation and that had been constitutive for all states under
the rule of law, their response being based on a consideration that they felt
could be justified only under natural law. The National Socialists’ crimes were
punishable simply because they were fundamentally at odds with the legal
principles universally recognized by civilized peoples. The reprehensibility of
the crimes that were detailed in Nuremberg was so great that contemporaries’
sense of justice would have been violated in a far more flagrant manner if these
crimes had not found a condign punishment. For this reason the Western
Powers were willing to accept a further shortcoming: one of the victorious
powers that was sitting in judgement had itself committed war crimes and
crimes against humanity on a vast scale and was now ensuring that these actions
were not discussed in Nuremberg.
After a trial lasting almost eleven months, the first sentences were handed
down on the principal defendants on 1 October 1946. Twelve of the highest-
ranking officials of the Third Reich, including Göring, Ribbentrop, Frick,
Rosenberg, Keitel and Jodl, were sentenced to death by hanging; others, such as
Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Heß and his armaments minister Albert Speer, received
lengthy prison sentences. As we have already noted, Göring was able to avoid
execution on 16 October by taking his own life. The country’s former vice-
chancellor, Franz von Papen, and the president of the Reichsbank and minister
of finance, Hjalmar Schacht, who had smoothed Hitler’s path to the Chancellery
but who had committed no crimes in the sense of the indictments made at the
Nuremberg War Trials, were both acquitted.
The trial of the principal war criminals was followed by proceedings against
doctors, lawyers, prominent industrialists and businesses, including Flick,
Krupp and IG Farben, members of the Foreign Office, the Wehrmacht high
command and individual military figures and SS leaders. (The SS had previ-
ously been declared a ‘criminal organization’ together with the leaders of the
NSDAP, the Gestapo and the secret service.) These trials ended in a further
thirty-six death sentences. The total number of individuals sentenced by their
former enemies for war crimes and crimes against humanity has been reck-
oned to be between 50,000 and 60,000. Of those who were sentenced in the
Soviet zone, around one-third were deported and made to take part in forced
labour programmes inside the Soviet Union. In the western zones, 806 death
sentences were handed down and 486 of these were carried out. (This figure
includes the defendants in the Nuremberg Trials.) It is not known how many
death sentences were handed down and carried out in the Soviet zone.
The ‘denazification’ of the millions of members of National Socialist organi-
zations was a random, more or less mechanical, process that varied from zone to
zone, but the procedures adopted by the Soviet Union were by far the most
rigorous and arbitrary. Those National Socialists who were not deported to the
Soviet Union were sent to ‘special camps’, as were unpopular bourgeois demo-
crats and Social Democrats and even Communists who opposed the new regime.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 881

Of the 120,000 or so prisoners in these camps, which remained in existence until

1950, 42,000 are said to have perished. One of them was the former concentra-
tion camp at Buchenwald. When Thomas Mann delivered a lecture in the
National Theatre in Weimar on 1 August 1949, marking the bicentenary of
Goethe’s birth, he declined to comment on the continuing nature of the terror, a
silence that left many of his admirers feeling disappointed.
The counterpart to repression was privilege. The administration, police and
schools were thoroughly purged, and, wherever possible, reliable Communists
were smuggled into leading positions. ‘People’s judges’ and ‘new teachers’ who
had received only the most rudimentary training replaced their politically
compromised predecessors. Criteria such as professionalism and efficiency
played no part in these appointments: denazification and politics pursued by
men and women chosen for their Communist sympathies fitted together entirely
seamlessly.
The mirror image of the Soviet zone was the French-occupied zone, where
France adopted a relatively generous attitude to former National Socialist offi-
cials, whose past transgressions as party comrades were used from the outset to
exert pressure and compel loyalty to the new regime. Here, too, of course, there
were dismissals, arrests and internments. In all four zones these formed the
first phase of the denazification process that lasted until well into 1946. The
second phase began in the American zone in March 1946 and in the British
and French zones six months later and involved court-like appearances before
tribunals that divided into five groups those Germans who on the basis of
questionnaires were arraigned before them: major offenders, offenders, lesser
offenders, followers and, finally, those who were acquitted. The Americans
were the most rigorous, acquitting only a small minority and initially banning
all of those who were classed as ‘followers’ from pursuing their professional
careers. The British dispensed with this expedient and declared more than half
of those whom they examined to have been ‘exonerated’.
The more clear-cut the contrast between east and west became in the course
of 1947, the more tolerant the Americans grew towards former National
Socialists. For years Hitler had been a national hero, his party a mass move-
ment. To have pursued with ruthless rigour all of his former followers risked
creating a reservoir of social discontent and political radicalism. Better results
were expected from leniency and re-education in the form of the rapid accept-
ance of democracy and resistance to extremist slogans from both right and left.
All in all, denazification proved to be a mistake. In the western half of Germany,
those who were not guilty of a criminal offence could return to their former
professional lives after 1949. After a few years had gone by, not only ‘followers’
and ‘lesser offenders’ could hope to escape their political past, so, too, could
‘offenders’.
The Soviet Union proceeded in much the same way against lesser National
Socialists, who were expected to undergo a process of re-education and learn to
882 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

be honest ‘anti-Fascists’. From the standpoint of the Soviet Military

Administration, the most important part of the denazification process was not
individual sanctions but structural changes, including breaking the power of
those classes which according to Marxist and Leninist thinking had helped the
Fascists come to power in the first place. This approach also found expression in
the land reforms of September 1945 that were designed to do away once and for
all with the Junker class to the east of the Elbe. Some 7,000 landowners were
dispossessed without recourse to compensation, their lands passing into peasant
hands. Of the half a million individuals who received lands in this way, 83,000
had been driven from their former homes in the regions to the east.
Dispossession affected not only former supporters of National Socialism
but even those who had opposed it. Even so, it is impossible to describe this
radical policy as specifically Communist. Middle-class agrarian reformers had
for decades been demanding a change to the way property was distributed in
the area to the east of the Elbe, but what they had had in mind was certainly not
expropriation without compensation. And yet this did nothing to detract from
the popularity of ‘land reform’, many members of the middle classes welcoming
the redistribution of these landed estates as justified and, indeed, long overdue.
The same cannot be said of the industrial reforms that were ushered
in shortly afterwards, in October 1945. These affected not only war criminals
and National Socialists but big business in general. By the spring of 1948
almost 10,000 businesses had been taken over by the state without any
compensation. As a result, 40 per cent of industrial production was in the
public sector by this date. To these businesses may be added the Soviet corpo-
rations in heavy industry that the occupying power ran under its initiative.
Banks and building societies had been nationalized even earlier, in July 1945.
By the autumn there could no longer be any doubt about the Soviets’ goal: the
capitalist social order was to be systematically dismantled and replaced by a
socialist order.
In the western zones the social changes undertaken by the occupying
powers remained relatively limited. Although there were tentative moves in the
direction of land reform, these failed to produce any results. In industry,
conversely, a number of major companies and banks whose role under National
Socialism had been particularly incriminating and that included IG Farben,
the iron and steel industry in the British zone, the Commerzbank, the Dresdner
Bank and the Deutsche Bank were seized and placed in trusteeship. The twelve
largest coal and steel companies were turned into twenty-eight independent
companies by the British occupying power after it had seized control of them
in December 1945. No compensation was paid. Although the Labour Party
introduced a policy of nationalization of major industries following its election
victory in July 1945, this failed to meet the approval of the American military
governor, General Lucius D. Clay, whose own policy prevailed, and the ques-
tion of nationalization was postponed on the grounds that it was too important
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 883

to be decided in one particular region or a single occupied zone but must be

left to a later German legislator to resolve.
The scissure in German social history represented by the year 1945 can be
best appreciated by a comparison with the situation in Germany at the end of
the First World War, when the German government – in the form of the Council
of People’s Deputies – enjoyed a legitimacy that was not questioned by the Allies.
The Reich was not occupied, and none of the old power elites was forced to step
down. Although the landowners on the right bank of the Elbe temporarily lost
some of their political influence, they were able to hold on to the social bases of
their power. And heavy industry was able to defy the nationalization movement.
The civil service was not substantially shaken by the revolution of 1918/19,
while the judiciary remained entirely untouched by it. The military was obliged
to respect the limits placed on it by the Treaty of Versailles, but throughout the
years of the Weimar Republic it remained exactly what it had been in the old
Reich: a state within a state. It was also a factor in the country’s internal politics
and in the case of a national emergency it could assume an executive function.
In keeping with the terms of the Potsdam Declaration there was initially no
German state and no German military after the Second World War. After the
‘land reforms’ had been completed, there were no longer any landed estates to
the east of the Elbe. Under Decree 46, the state of Prussia that had been domi-
nated by these estates was disbanded by the Allied Control Council on 25 April
1947 with the blanket justification that Prussia had ‘always been the upholder
of militarism and reaction in Germany’ and that it had therefore ceased to
exist.115 Heavy industry was expropriated in the east, while in the west it was
broken up by the occupying powers and later, after the foundation of the
Federal Republic, handed over to the workers according to a system of equal
representation. As a result, none of the power elites that had resisted demo-
cratic change in the years before 1933 was able to play a similar role after 1945.
As far as the western zones were concerned, there was a far greater sense of
continuity in the public services. American and British attempts to do away with
the German civil service and replace it with an English-style system proved inef-
fectual. No judge who had been complicit in the sentencing crimes of the Third
Reich was himself sentenced on that score. A number of university teachers
such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt who had compromised their reputa-
tions in particularly flagrant ways between 1933 and 1945 lost their positions,
but many who with hindsight appear to have been scarcely less culpable were
able – after an involuntary break – to resume their careers at the point they had
reached in 1945. Political checks on civil servants served to keep them in line,
much as the experience of the country’s ‘collapse’ had had a sobering effect.
Open hostility to democracy was now discredited, and this was as true of civil
servants as it was of the judiciary.
Following the fall of the Third Reich, there was no new beginning, and yet
the term often used by the Germans in this context – ‘die Stunde Null’, or ‘Zero
884 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Hour’ – is an accurate reflection of contemporaries’ perceptions. Never had the

future been so hard to predict in Germany, never had chaos been so omni-
present as it was in the spring and early summer of 1945. There was no longer
any sense of security, and this feeling left its mark on memories of this period,
albeit in different ways – it was far more brutal in the Soviet zone, for example,
than it was elsewhere. In all four zones, society lay in ruins and proved to be
extremely mobile. Hungry city dwellers undertook foraging expeditions into
the countryside, where they were able to barter goods and obtain the food they
needed, while many of those who had been better off but who now had no
salaries or pensions or other regular income had for a time to take on primitive
jobs. The women who scoured bombsites, removing rubble and salvaging
building bricks and other valuable kinds of building material, came to embody
the radical change that had taken place in society, with women now performing
the roles traditionally taken by men.
During the years of National Socialist domination the claims of the tradi-
tional upper class to greater social prestige had been systematically opposed in
the spirit of a ‘national community’, and yet the actual structure of German
society had not been revolutionized. Only in the wake of the air raids,
the deportations and social breakdown did German society undergo a change
far more radical than anything it had known during the first ten years of the
Third Reich. Even so, few of the changes that took place in 1945 proved long-
lasting. This was an exceptional period, and one that gave rise to no new order
but only to a profound desire to return to some kind of normality as quickly as
possible.
The shock sustained by the Germans was moral rather than social and, in
spite of all their attempts to apologize for the war, it was to leave a lasting
impression. After 1918, the myth that the Germans were innocent and that
they had been stabbed in the back met with the approval of the country’s elites
and also of the broad mass of the population, but this was no longer the case
after 1945, for it was all too obvious that the man at the top had unleashed the
Second World War and that he bore most of the responsibility for what had
happened. The ruined cities, the plight of those whose homes had been bombed
and who had been evacuated, the misery of the refugees and of the displaced
and, finally, the increasing awareness of the concentration camps and of the
murder of the Jews: all of these factors were an indictment of Hitler and an
argument against any reversion to National Socialism. Even so, there was for a
long time the popularly held view that the party leaders and the SS were solely
to blame for the crimes that had been committed, while the Wehrmacht and
the mass of Germans were routinely said to have remained ‘decent’. It was one
thing for the Germans to distance themselves from their Führer and his fanat-
ical helpers but another to acknowledge the German traditions that National
Socialism had tapped into and accept responsibility for all that had happened
in and through Germany since 1933.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 885

The philosopher Karl Jaspers, whose writings were banned by the National
Socialists in 1937/8, triggered a wave of positive and negative reactions with his
essay The Question of German Guilt when it appeared in print in 1946. (It was
based on a lecture that he had given at Heidelberg University during the winter
of 1945/6.) Jaspers spoke of a ‘collective’ and ‘moral guilt’ in the sense that the
Germans were responsible for political conditions between 1933 and 1945.
‘That the spiritual conditions of German life provided an opportunity for such
a régime is a fact for which all of us are co-responsible.’ The term ‘collective
guilt’ was enough for many to criticize Jaspers for adopting an arbitrary
approach to the Allies. The fact that Jaspers disputed that the Germans were
solely to blame for National Socialism and that he claimed that the rest of the
world was complicit in Hitler’s success, and that, quoting from a recent study,
The German Question, by the émigré economist Wilhelm Röpke, he referred to
the Germans as Hitler’s ‘first victims’ and even argued that ‘German anti-
Semitism was not at any time a popular movement’ did little to reduce the
anger felt by those who reacted unfavourably to Jaspers’s views.116
No less divisive was the response to a manifesto that sought to break with
the nationalist legacy of German Protestantism: the ‘Stuttgart Admission of
Guilt’ by the Provisional Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany was
published in October 1945 and written mainly at the instigation of the bishop
of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, and of the former concentration camp victim
Martin Niemöller, who had been president of the Church of Hessen-Nassau. It
spoke of a ‘solidarity of guilt’ between Church and nation and encountered
considerable opposition within the Church itself. Particular offence was caused
by the sentence: ‘Through us endless suffering has been caused to many nations
and countries.’ The phrase was thought to reflect the Allied view that the
Germans bore collective responsibility for the war. For conservative Protestants,
there was something excessive about the self-reproach that ‘we did not profess
our faith more courageously, that we did not pray more ardently, did not believe
more joyfully and did not love more fervently’.117 But it was also these words
that seared themselves into the collective memory of German Protestants and
played a decisive role in providing Protestant churches outside Germany with a
starting point for their attempts to deal in a spirit of reconciliation with the
country that had given rise to the Reformation.
The Stuttgart statement did not refer specifically to the greatest and most
terrible of the crimes committed by National Socialism: the murder of European
Jewry. And decades were to pass before the Germans acknowledged the central
significance of the Holocaust in their country’s history. This act of genocide
was described by the historian Dan Diner as a ‘break in civilization’:

As an event, Auschwitz touches on every level of civilizatory certainty that

is a part of the basic conditions of the way we behave towards one another.
This bureaucratically organized and industrially enforced mass destruction
886 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

represents something amounting to a denial of a civilization whose thoughts

and actions obey a rationality that presupposes a minimum of anticipatory
trust, a trust marked by utilitarianism that precludes groundless mass
killing, especially in the form of rational organization, and precludes it,
moreover, on the grounds of calculated interest and self-preservation on the
part of the perpetrators. A socially developed trust in social rules that deter-
mine life and survival was turned into its opposite: the mass killing became
the rule, while survival was owed to mere chance.118

The murder of European Jewry was the quintessential breach in civilization

that the National Socialists pursued most systematically and most rigorously of
all. It began with mass shootings and ended with mass gassings. In parallel with
the Holocaust other mass murders were committed by the Germans and these
too can be described as ‘breaches in civilization’, assuming that we do not stress
the element of ‘industrial’ killing as much as Diner does. In addition to the
murder of the mentally ill that Hitler himself ordered, there was also the exter-
mination of a large section of the Polish elites and the de facto condemnation
to death by starvation of millions of White Russians, Ukrainians, Russians and
members of other nations that made up the Soviet Union. The number of
victims among Russia’s civilian population has been reckoned to be fifteen
million. According to the calculations of the American historian Timothy
Snyder, one Soviet citizen in twenty-five was killed by German hands, while
the figures for the Ukraine and Poland were one in ten, that for White Russia
one in five.119 At the same time the National Socialists murdered hundreds and
thousands of Sinti and Roma, an act of genocide that may not have been carried
out with the same systematic ruthlessness as that of the Jews, but which was no
less industrial in its scale.
Breaches in civilization before 1939 include the Turkish massacre of
Armenians in the First World War and Stalin’s collective murders, including
those of the Kulaks and, during the great famine of 1932–3, the peasants in the
Ukraine. Others that fall under this heading are Stalin’s condemnation of large
sections of the non-Russian population of the Soviet Union during the Second
World War, all of whom were regarded as unreliable from a nationalist point of
view. Common to all these actions – whether or not they count as genocide in
the sense defined by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 – is that they reflect a ‘utopia of
unambiguity’. The phrase is that of Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-
Manteuffel citing the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and describes the belief in
a racist, ethnic, national or class-based homogeneity in whose name all those
elements must be liquidated that fly in the face of this notion. Bauman himself
draws attention to a further characteristic bound up with the postulate of
‘unambiguity’ and useful in distinguishing the ‘modern’ mass murders prac-
tised by totalitarian regimes from the older type of atrocity: ‘Contemporary
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 887

mass murder is distinguished by a virtual absence of all spontaneity on the one

hand, and the prominence of rational, carefully calculated design on the
other.’120
But if the Germans’ attempts to exterminate European Jewry differed from
other acts of genocide, then the difference lay not in bureaucratic routine or the
technical perfection with which the victims – men and women, the elderly and
the very young – were swept away and mechanically killed at Belzec, Sobibór,
Treblinka and Auschwitz, for there were also a number of other distinguishing
features that deserve to be mentioned here. The Jews were not a ‘nation’ as such
but were the citizens of many other states, and in many countries they regarded
themselves as fully integrated members of the nation in question. In the eyes of
their enemies, conversely, the Jews were to be found everywhere in the world
and, as a result, there was nowhere where they could be said to be at home. For
radical anti-Semites – unlike those who advocated the older kind of religious
anti-Judaism – it mattered little whether the Jews continued to hold their tradi-
tional religious beliefs or whether they had forsworn the religion of their fore-
fathers. If Jews were the Germans’ mortal enemy, this was because Jewry strove
for world dominion, whether in a capitalist and plutocratic form or in a Marxist,
Bolshevist guise. On their way to achieving this goal, the Jews would allegedly
stop at nothing in order to subvert the ‘Aryan’ race from the inside and turn its
members against one another.
This belief was shared by minorities in many European countries, but only
in Germany had extreme anti-Semitism come to power on its own terms. Only
here was the country headed by a man who believed that he was called upon by
Providence not only to destroy Jewry but the Jewish spirit, too, a spirit that had
permeated Christianity and in that way infiltrated the ‘Aryan’ nations as well.
Culturally speaking, Germany was a western country and had taken part in the
great processes of European emancipation that had swept across the Continent
since the Middle Ages and in the case of the Reformation had even set that
movement in train. Germany had contributed to the European Enlightenment
and in the nineteenth century had produced a state under the rule of law that
reflected western standards. As a social state, it had been a model for others,
and by the beginning of the twentieth century it was a highly developed indus-
trial country and one of the world’s leading scientific nations. This helps to
explain why the extermination of European Jewry gave rise to such incompre-
hension and horror in western democracies. ‘There is no doubt’, Churchill
wrote to Anthony Eden on 11 July 1944, that the persecution of the Jews in
Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory

is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the
whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by
nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading
races of Europe.121
888 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

The Holocaust was a crime against humanity committed by a country in the old
West whose traditional elites were none the less different from those of the
nations of the transatlantic West, for at least until 1918 Germany had only
partially assimilated the ‘normative project of the West’ in the form of the ideas
of 1776 and 1789. Inalienable human rights and the principles of national
sovereignty and of representative democracy were not part of the political
culture of the Kaiserreich. In the minds of the German bourgeoisie, obeying a
state which, as a state under the rule of law, could by definition do no wrong
was more important than the idea of political responsibility for the community.
During the First World War Germany’s war ideologues contrasted the ideas of
1789 with those of 1914 and in that way presented the German state – a powerful
cultural and authoritarian entity – as a superior answer to the universal values
associated with all of the western democracies.
Following the defeat of 1918, Weimar’s parliamentary democracy seemed
to many members of the various elite groups who shaped public opinion to be
a form of state that had been imposed on them by their victors and, hence, as
‘un-German’ – an interpretation shared by Hitler, among others. National
Socialism was the most extreme expression of the Germans’ anti-western
resentment. All of those features of the Third Reich that were ‘modern’ were a
reflection of normative deficiencies in the process of German modernization.
Without the support of the pre- and anti-democratic traditions on which he
was able to draw, Hitler would never have been able to subject Germany to his
tyranny in 1933, and only because he held the reins of state was he able to
implement a radical solution to the Jewish question, which was a central
element in the National Socialist project. The Holocaust had a prehistory that
went beyond the history of anti-Semitism and racism and that cannot be sepa-
rated from German history in general, the history of a largely western country
whose traditional elites had until 1945 obstinately refused to open themselves
up to the political culture of the West and which now had to suffer the conse-
quences of this catastrophic policy.

By the time the sentences were passed on the principal defendants in Nuremberg
in October 1946, Italy had long since ceased to be an occupied country. The
Anglo-American military government had remained in office until 31 December
1945, during which time it had had the final say on all legislative matters. No law
came into force without its agreement, and no changes to the law could be made.
The Western Allies exerted a decisive influence on the purging of the civil
service, on restructuring the press and on shaping cultural politics.
Attempts to wreak vengeance on Italy’s Fascists had begun as early as 1943
in those parts of the country that were not occupied by German troops – most
brutally in the form of the unofficial purges that cost the lives of some 1,200
Fascists between 1943 and 1946. In parallel to this, an official political purge –
epurazione – was conducted by committees installed by the Allied military
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 889

government as well as by liberation committees and state commissions. Most

of the mayors who had served under Mussolini were dismissed from their
posts, and the same was true of those who had held leading positions in the
country’s administrative apparatus. In northern Italy commissions set up by
the Communists to purge the country of Fascists went much further and in
many factories not only dismissed former Fascists but also removed all of those
individuals whom they regarded as hostile to the workers.
In Italy, unlike Germany, it was left to the country’s judiciary to deal with the
legal fallout from the years of Mussolini’s dictatorship. In those cases where the
existing penal code of 1931 proved inadequate, the newly created Alta Corte di
Giustizia and the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg fell back on
universally recognized legal principles and in doing so consciously departed
from the principle of nulla poena sine lege, and the same was true of the special
courts that tried between 20,000 and 30,000 politically compromised Fascists
and their collaborators between 1945 and 1947, passing around 1,000 death
sentences and handing down a large number of lengthy terms of imprisonment.
According to the historian Hans Woller, ‘In no European country – with the
possible exception of France – did the courts proceed so quickly and so brutally
against discredited Fascists. Nowhere else did so many representatives of the
old regime have to atone for their shameful acts in 1945 as they did in Italy.’122
At the end of 1945 the Italian governments were under massive pressure from
the Allies to rid the country of all Fascist elements, but once the occupying troops
had left, this was no longer a factor. The Christian Democrats who since 4
December 1945 were part of an all-party government under Alcide de Gasperi
were markedly less interested in continuing these purges than their left-wing
coalition partners, namely, the Socialists under the deputy prime minister Pietro
Nenni and the Communists under the justice minister, Palmiro Togliatti. In June
1946 Togliatti underwent a change of heart with regard to the country’s Fascist
past, a volte-face that provoked dissent even among his party colleagues. He
proposed an amnesty that weakened or abolished many of the sanctions that had
been imposed prior to that date and that came into force on 22 June. Three weeks
earlier the first post-war parliament had been elected on 2 June. The left-wing
parties polled far fewer votes than expected – the Communists won 18.9 per cent
of the total, the Socialists 20.7 per cent – while the Christian Democrats won 35.2
per cent, registering a victory that was felt to be little short of sensational.
On the same day as the elections, a plebiscite was held to decide the future
type of state that Italy would be. Some 54.3 per cent voted for a republic, 45.2
per cent for the retention of the monarchy. Victor Emanuel III, who had
appointed Mussolini his prime minister in October 1922 and who had dismissed
him in October 1943, was no longer on the throne by this date in the country’s
history, having abdicated in favour of his son, Umberto II, on 9 May 1946 and
gone into exile in Egypt. A few days after the referendum, Umberto, too, left the
country, choosing Portugal as his new home.
890 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Apart from the king, the military, too, had provided reliable support for the
Duce and his Fascist regime, at least until 1943. Its leaders felt that the country
owed them a debt of gratitude for their role in the dictator’s overthrow and as
the Western Powers’ ally and in this they enjoyed the support of the Christian
Democrats and the latter’s governments, which consistently refused to heed a
United Nations demand and hand over some 1,700 members of the Italian
armed forces who were accused of serious war crimes.
Since Italy, for its part, was demanding the extradition of German war
criminals, it was obliged to give at least the impression that it took seriously its
announcement that it would deal with its own war criminals. The military
prosecutor’s office did indeed initiate more than 2,000 preliminary proceed-
ings affecting not only Germans but also Italian collaborators and members of
the armed forces. But the determination not to indict any Italian war criminals
meant that practically no charges were ever brought before the courts. The vast
majority of Italians saw nothing untoward in this development: their own
officers and simple soldiers continued to be regarded as ‘decent people’ who,
unlike the Germans, were incapable of carrying out atrocities. As a result, the
war crimes that Italians had committed most notably in Ethiopia, Greece and
Yugoslavia for the most part went unpunished.
The suppression of the wrongs that Italy had inflicted on other countries
under Fascist rule went hand in hand with the tendency to draw such a clear
distinction between Italian Fascism and German National Socialism that it
became almost impossible to see any similarities between the two regimes. At
the same time the Italian left promoted the myth that there had been wide-
spread resistance to Fascism – it was a myth that allowed the Communists to
appeal to the common legacy of all anti-Fascist forces after they became the
party of opposition in 1947.
According to Wolfgang Schieder, this process allowed the ‘ritualized history
of the “Resistenza” ’ to be ‘raised to the level of a masterly narrative in Italian
politics’, deliberately reducing the story of Fascism to a tale of anti-Fascism.
Whereas the political left was reluctant to be reminded of its impotence and
defeat before and under Fascism, the political right had no interest in reminding
the world of the part that it had played in the rise of the Fascist dictatorship and
the support that it had given Mussolini’s regime. In Schieder’s estimation, the
result was two decades of ‘shared uninterest in Fascism’ after 1945.123
During the early post-war period, a further point in common was the
attempt to negotiate a peace treaty that kept the country’s borders more or less
unchanged and that left Italy as materially unencumbered as possible. There
were no peace talks in the narrower sense of the term: the Italians were merely
able to state their position in Washington, Moscow, London and Paris. In every
case the central argument was that Mussolini had forced Italy into war on the
side of Germany, that it had fought a decent war and that it had broken free
from the Duce’s tyranny in 1943 of its own accord, before making an important
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 891

contribution to the Allies’ victory over Germany. As Woller has noted, the
Italian representatives portrayed Italy as ‘the principal victim of Fascism’, an
interpretation of the true facts of the matter so wayward that it failed to find
acceptance in any of the four capitals where it was proposed.124
The conditions imposed on Italy under the terms of the Paris Peace Treaty
of 10 February 1947 were entirely acceptable. The former Axis Power was
required to cede the Dodecanese to Greece (it had captured the islands in
1912), to return Istria to Yugoslavia and to renounce all claims to its colonies,
although this did not prevent it from receiving a mandate from the United
Nations in November 1949, offering it trusteeship over its former colony of
Somalia in order for the region to prepare for independence. Trieste initially
became a free state but reverted to Italy in 1954. South Tyrol remained Italian
and in January 1948 received its first autonomous statute. The reparations that
Italy was required to pay were modest: Yugoslavia was promised $125 million,
Greece $105 million, the Soviet Union $100 million, Ethiopia $25 million and
Albania $5 million. The Italian armed forces had to accept reductions in their
manpower and equipment. The bulk of the Italian navy was acquired by France,
Greece, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
The peace treaty proved hugely controversial at home: not only the extreme
right in the guise of the neo-Fascists and the monarchists but also the liberals
made common cause against what they viewed as a brutal imposition. The
truth of the matter is that Italy emerged practically unscathed from the Paris
talks. In Ethiopia it had waged a racist war under Mussolini’s leadership and
used methods of mass execution for which there were few parallels in European
colonial history. It had fought alongside the Germans in North Africa, in the
Balkans and in the Soviet Union and increased its territory at the expense of
other European nations. And it had contributed to the persecution and exter-
mination of European Jewry. In 1947 the majority of Italians refused to
acknowledge any of this. For them, it was reassuring to think that everything
for which Fascist Italy might be reproached was overshadowed by the far
greater and more terrible crimes committed by its former ally, National Socialist
Germany.

In Japan, conversely, the monarchy may have been retained, but its character
changed irrevocably. On 1 January 1946 Emperor Hirohito expressly rejected
the idea that he was a god in human form. Ten months later, on 3 November
1946, he announced a new constitution, which had been produced by a commis-
sion set up by the American occupying power and which had been approved by
an overwhelming majority by the newly elected parliament in October 1946. It
came into force six months later, on 3 May 1947. The emperor was no longer the
sovereign ruler of the nation but the symbol of the state and of the unity of the
nation. The aristocracy was abolished. Japan was henceforth a parliamentary
democracy with an independent authority to administer justice. The state and
892 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

religion were separate entities and Shinto no longer the privileged religion. The
constitution guaranteed the classical basic rights, including freedom of religion,
and acknowledged that men and women enjoyed equal rights. Under Article 9
Japan renounced the right to maintain a military force and to wage war, a radical
innovation whose origins remain unclear: whether it stemmed from a Japanese
initiative or whether it was due to pressure exerted by the occupying power is a
question that has never been fully resolved.
Unlike Germany, Japan continued to have its own government even after it
had surrendered. The commander in chief of the Allied troops, General Douglas
MacArthur, headed what was effectively the only occupying power. Within hours
of Japan’s surrender he had ensured that all state control was placed in the hands
of the occupying power, but in the light of Japanese protests and a directive from
the State Department, he was very soon obliged to revise this arrangement: from
then on, MacArthur issued his orders through the Japanese government, which
in this way became the executive organ of the occupying power.
MacArthur’s orders were all aimed at the systematic westernization of
Japan. He repealed the country’s repressive security laws and ordered the
release of political prisoners and the arrest of others who were suspected of war
crimes. He allowed the creation of free trade unions and the right to strike,
banned child labour, legislated for equality between the sexes, broke up major
businesses (zaibatsu), introduced land reform and liberalized education. As a
result, many of the changes enshrined in the new constitution of 1947 merely
enacted innovations that had already been ordered by the occupying power.
One of the United States’ principal aims was to punish war criminals, but
this was made more difficult by the fact that in the brief period between the
country’s surrender and the American occupation much of the incriminating
material was destroyed by the Japanese authorities. Not until May 1946 could a
Nuremberg-style International Military Tribunal begin its work in Tokyo.
Some of those accused, including the former prime minister, Konoe Fumimaro,
and the former army minister and chief of the general staff, Sugiyama Gen,
committed suicide and in that way avoided arrest. The wartime prime minister,
General Tojo Hideki, who was another of the principal war criminals, survived
an attempt to take his own life that left him seriously injured.
Tojo was one of seven defendants sentenced to death at the International
Military Tribunal in November 1948. Six of them were members of the mili-
tary. The only civilian was the former prime minister and foreign minister,
Hirota Koki. In sixteen cases the judges passed life sentences, in two cases long
terms of imprisonment, although all of those who were still alive were released
in 1956. As in Germany, the trials of the principal war criminals were followed
by others against individuals accused of war crimes. There were also trials of
Japanese war criminals in the Philippines, China and the Soviet Union.
The United States also wanted to see a process of political purges similar to
the denazification trials that had taken place in Germany, but this demand was
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 893

thwarted by resistance on the part of Japanese civil servants. Of the structural

changes ushered in by the occupying power, land reform was probably the
most successful. Some five million smallholders profited from the fact that
between 1946 and 1949 the state bought up land from the larger landowners
and then redistributed it. After that, no one was allowed to own more than
three hectares of land or to farm it as a tenant farmer. Only on the barren island
of Hokkaido were larger farms of up to twenty hectares allowed.
Reform of the educational system also had a lasting impact. Pupils were
now required to attend school for nine, rather than six, years, with the intro-
duction of a three-year period of secondary education similar to that provided
by American colleges. The teaching staff was ‘re-educated’ and the syllabus
demilitarized. The Americans were less successful in their attempts to break up
the country’s larger businesses, for although the requisite laws were passed,
they did not prevent new mergers from being formed and new amalgamations
from coming into existence. In the view of the historian Gerhard Krebs, the
American reformers ultimately achieved the opposite of what they had set out
to do: thanks to the modernization of its industrial and financial institutions,
Japan became a more powerful rival to the United States than it had been
before the Second World War.125
In post-war Japan there was no debate on the subject of war guilt similar to
the one conducted in Germany, where it was no accident that the discussion was
prompted by Protestant figures: humanity’s guilt as a result of our inherent
sinfulness has always been a central topic of all Christian religions, especially
Lutheranism. In the Shinto religion, conversely, there is no such tradition and as
a result there was no ‘guilty conscience’ with regard to Tokyo’s aggressive policies
during the 1930s and 1940s or to the terrible suffering that the Japanese military
and especially the military police – the Kempeitai – had inflicted on the civilian
population and, above all, on the 100,000 women and girls forced into prostitu-
tion in China, Manchuria, Korea and many of the other regions overrun by
Japan. Any admission of guilt was seen as incompatible with the Japanese sense
of ‘honour’ in large sections of the population, an attitude as true today as it was
in 1945. A deeply rooted feeling of shame means that any admission of guilt is
seen as a loss of face, and this is something that has to be avoided at all costs.
From the standpoint of Japan’s political right, the war criminals who were
executed continue to be seen as patriots and martyrs. They are still commem-
orated at the Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto sanctuary established by Emperor Meiji
in 1869. Between 1975 and 2009 prominent members of the Liberal Democratic
Party regularly took part in the nationalist ceremonies that were held here every
year on 15 August, the official anniversary of Japan’s surrender. The atomic
bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki confirmed the Japanese
in their belief that they had been victims, rather than perpetrators, in the Second
World War, a view that continues to affect the country’s relations with its neigh-
bours and that sets it apart from western democracies of the post-war era.
894 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

On 8 September 1951, four and a half years after Italy, Japan finally signed
a peace treaty in San Francisco. Notable absentees among its other signatories
were Communist China and the Soviet Union. In it Japan declared its willing-
ness to abandon all territories that it had gained or conquered after 1895. The
United States gained limited administrative authority over a number of smaller
but strategically important islands and signed a security treaty with Japan that
allowed the country to form ‘self-defence units’, effectively allowing it to rearm.
In return for America’s concession, Japan reluctantly agreed to sign a peace
treaty with the Kuomintang government in Taiwan, recognizing it as the only
legitimate Chinese government.
Japan’s extreme militarism now belonged to the country’s past. But many of
those who had been partially responsible for the policies pursued by Japan
during the war again had a political future once the occupying troops had left
in 1951. The former foreign minister, Shigemitsu Mamoru, who had in the
meantime served a term of imprisonment, returned to his old post in 1954, and
three years later the outspokenly anti-Communist Kishi Nobusuke, who had
been a member of Tojo’s war cabinet, returned to lead the government. In Japan
this was regarded as a sign of normalization, and not even the United States
was shocked by such a development any longer.

Japan, Italy and Germany: the period between 1943 and 1945 was a time of cata-
strophic failure by three countries attempting to create an empire in the twentieth
century. The regimes in Tokyo, Rome and Berlin hoped to achieve what older
powers had managed to do in previous centuries and expand their rule to foreign
countries that they preferred to be less well developed. It was not imperialism as
such that produced these aggressive regimes during the interwar period. Rather,
these systems emerged in countries that felt they had come off badly when the
world had been divided up at an earlier date. If there is a common origin for
the global catastrophe of the first half of the 1940s, then it is to be found in the
compulsively compensatory attempt on the part of three powers that believed
themselves disadvantaged by destiny and that were determined to change the
international and political status quo in their favour, in that way securing for
themselves the place in the world to which they believed they were entitled.

West, East, Third World: The Caesura of 1945 (II)

The three major powers had met in Potsdam in July and August 1945, and yet
even at this early date many Britons were already beginning to ask themselves
whether they were really members of the ‘Big Three’ any longer. Almost five
million Commonwealth soldiers had fought alongside United Kingdom troops
in the course of the Second World War: 2.5 million from India, more than one
million from Australia and New Zealand, 725,000 from Canada, almost
500,000 from the colonies in East and West Africa and 200,000 from South
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 895

Africa. For their mother country this military help was just as important as the
loans that Great Britain received from India and from the old Dominions of
Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Added to these were the generous supplies
of American materials made available under the Lend-Lease Program. Without
this support the United Kingdom would not have been able to fight the Axis
Powers or to emerge victorious from the conflict. Materially speaking, this
historic victory was based on tick.
Once the war was over, bills would be presented: the government in London
was in no doubt on this score. Supplies from the United States ended abruptly
on 2 September 1945. In the course of lengthy negotiations in which John
Maynard Keynes again played a leading role, the British managed to obtain a
considerable amount of debt relief: the United States reduced its demands
under the Lend-Lease Program from $22,000 million to $650 million, just 3
per cent of the sum that Britain owed. The Commonwealth countries that had
helped Britain with loans ultimately demanded only 1 per cent of the amount
that was due to them, meaning that they voluntarily wrote off £38,000 million,
or $152,000 million.
This counteroffer came as a huge relief to London, but it was not enough to
restore the United Kingdom’s ability to act in a financially responsible way. The
Second World War had destroyed around 28 per cent of the national wealth at
home and abroad. Financial ruin threatened if Britain could not borrow from
abroad. Difficult talks were again necessary before the required loans could be
obtained: $125,000 million from Canada and three times that amount –
£375,000 million – from the United States.
There was fierce opposition to the requested loan in Congress, but the
Senate finally agreed to the proposal in May 1946 by forty-six votes to thirty-
four, the House of Representatives in July by 219 votes to 155, allowing Truman
to sign the new law on 15 July 1946. The agreement of the two houses was ulti-
mately the result of their realization that Great Britain was an important and,
indeed, their most important ally in their attempts to prevent the Soviet Union
from extending its influence yet further in Europe. Now the leader of the oppo-
sition, Winston Churchill had delivered a historic speech in Truman’s presence
in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, when he had spoken for the first time in
public of the ‘Iron Curtain’ that had descended on Europe from Stettin in the
north to Trieste in the south. Against this sombre background he had invoked
the ‘special relationship’ between the two great English-speaking democracies,
the United States and Great Britain. Churchill’s words served as a wakeup call.
The widespread misgivings provoked in both of the biggest American
parties by the British request for a loan were due in no small part to the United
Kingdom’s policy towards Palestine. In a White Paper published in May 1939,
the government in London had explicitly stated that the Balfour Declaration of
November 1917, promising a national home for the Jews in Palestine, had
never been intended to imply the foundation of a Jewish state against the will
896 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

of the Arab population. Palestine was to be given its independence within ten
years, when Arabs would continue to be in the majority in the new state. For
the next five years – from 1940 to 1944 – the White Paper established a limit of
75,000 Jewish immigrants – a regular yearly quota of 10,000 and a flexible
supplementary quota of 25,000. For Zionists, this ruling represented the worst
setback in their history.
Immediately after the end of the war Jewish and Arab interests clashed in
the mandated region. For the Jews, Palestine had become their primary place
of refuge in the wake of the National Socialists’ policy of persecution and exter-
mination, while the resident Arabs were emphatically opposed not only to any
further Jewish immigration but also to any partition of Mandated Palestine
into a Jewish and an Arab sector, a solution advocated by Chaim Weizmann as
head of the Jewish Agency and president of the World Zionist Organization.
The Mandate’s British administration was also opposed to any further influx of
Jews from Europe but was unable to prevent illegal immigration: by the begin-
ning of 1946 the number of illegal immigrants was exceeding 1,000 every
month and the number of Jews living in Palestine already amounted to 608,000,
making up two-fifths of the region’s overall population.
In the United States – which itself had no intention of taking in any more
Jews from Europe – the British attitude was harshly criticized. Washington
demanded that Mandated Palestine should immediately open up its borders to
100,000 Holocaust survivors, a demand that the British resisted. In order to
end the arrival of ‘illegal’ immigrants, London imposed a naval blockade and
interned a total of 26,000 refugees in camps on the island of Cyprus. A ship
with 4,500 Jewish displaced persons, the Exodus 1947, was sent back to Europe
in the late summer of 1947. In Palestine itself, the mandated power found itself
fighting an increasingly bitter war against Zionist underground groups such as
the right-wing Irgun under the later prime minister Menachem Begin and the
Stern Group under Avraham Stern. Starting on Black Sabbath, 29 June 1946,
both groups carried out multiple attacks on British institutions. The Zionist
reign of terror culminated on 22 July 1946 in a bomb attack by Irgun on the
King David Hotel in Jerusalem that was used by the British Mandate adminis-
tration. Ninety-one people lost their lives in the attack.
The radicalization of the Jewish protest contributed in no small way to the
fact that in Great Britain public opinion was turned against the country’s
existing policy on Palestine, with the result that in February 1947 the Labour
government under Clement Attlee was persuaded to leave the United Nations
to solve the Palestine problem – the United Nations was the successor of the
League of Nations that had entrusted Great Britain with the Mandate in 1922.
But Britain refused to play any part in the division of Palestine that a plenary
session of the United Nations Organization resolved to implement by a two-
thirds majority on 29 November 1947, even declining to allow the United
Nations’ Palestine Commission to travel to the mandated region.
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 897

By the winter of 1947/8 the fighting between Arabs and Jews had escalated
to the point of open civil war. On 14 May 1948 – the day before Great Britain
unilaterally ended its mandate – the prime minister of the provisional Israeli
government, David Ben-Gurion, proclaimed the state of Israel. The following
day troops from Arab neighbour states marched into Palestine. The war ended
in July 1949 with the victory of the Israeli army and a sizeable increase in the
size of the state of Israel.
By this date a historic decision with regard to India had already been taken
in London, for on 20 February 1946 Attlee’s government had announced its
firm intention of taking all the necessary steps to ensure that by June 1947
power would have been transferred to a responsible Indian government. But
London’s desire to turn India into a loose federation ran into difficulties both
with the centralist Congress Party under Jawaharlal Nehru and with the
Muslim League under Muhammed Ali Jinnah, an outspoken advocate of a
partition of British India. In August 1946 bloody fighting broke out in Calcutta
and the Punjab between Hindus and Muslims, leading to the deaths of more
than 4,000 members of the two communities. The last viceroy of India, Lord
Mountbatten, and Attlee’s cabinet finally realized that there was only one viable
solution to the chaos that threatened, and on 3 June 1947 the government in
London announced a plan to divide the subcontinent into a largely Hindu and
a predominantly Muslim state. The relevant law was passed by parliament on
18 July and came into force on 15 August. British rule in India was over.
Churchill and other Conservative diehards had repeatedly warned that
Britain’s withdrawal from India would mark the beginning of the end of the
Empire, but the Labour government refused to be deterred from taking a step
that it regarded as unavoidable and one that the United States expected not
only of Britain but also, in principle, of all the other European colonial powers:
their willingness to give up colonies that wanted their independence. In the
case of India there had in the meantime been a shift in the material balance
between the colonial power and its colony, for Britain was now the debtor,
India the creditor. Its credit balance in London amounted to £1,300 million,
while British exports to India, which in 1914 had made up two-thirds of Indian
imports, had sunk to a mere 8 per cent of the total by 1940.
As the German historian Peter Wende has written in his book on the British
Empire, it was by now clear that

Britons no longer had sufficient resources to be able to hold on to power by

force if a crisis were to arise in the future. In the light of experiences gleaned
during the war, the British government no longer regarded the Indian Army
as a reliable tool with which to suppress a possible uprising. Moreover, the
growing participation of Indians in the administration of their country
reduced the chances of Britons making a career for themselves in the
Colonial Office. For a long time the Indian Civil Service had been the
898 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

preserve of graduates from English universities, but by 1947 it numbered

among its ranks 510 officials of Indian origin alongside 429 of British stock.
[. . .] It was no spectacular military defeat but a progressive erosion of power
that made the withdrawal of the British from India a political necessity.126

Great Britain was so weakened by the Second World War that it could no
longer afford to wage a series of lengthy and costly colonial wars, quite apart
from the lack of desire on the part of the population at large to support such
conflicts. At the beginning of 1948 the emergence of the new states of India and
Pakistan from fighting of particular ferocity was followed by the independence
of two other colonies in Asia: Burma and, far less fraught with conflict, Ceylon.
Like India and Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) became a member of the
Commonwealth, whereas Burma eschewed that honour. But this did not mean
the end of British rule in Asia, for Malaya, Singapore and North Borneo
remained British colonies, at least in the shorter term: Malaya gained its inde-
pendence in 1957, Singapore in 1963 and Brunei in 1984. The crown colony of
Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997 at the end of a ninety-nine-year
lease signed in 1898. In Africa there was a bloody uprising against British rule
in Kenya in the 1950s. By the 1960s one British colony after another was gaining
its independence in Africa. Only in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) were
white settlers able to delay this step until 1980.
The United Kingdom was undoubtedly one of the victorious powers in the
Second World War, which is why it was easier for it to bid farewell to its colo-
nies than was the case with France. The Fourth Republic did everything in its
power to retain its overseas possessions, which it had inherited from the Third
Republic and, in the case of Algeria, from the restored Bourbon monarchy of
1814–15 and the July Monarchy of 1830. There was a marked sense in which
these possessions represented a form of compensation for France: the colonies,
protectorates and Algeria, which had been incorporated into Metropolitan
France in 1848, seemed to provide something of the gloire that France felt
it needed after the dramatic defeat of 1940 and the German occupation. It was
an expensive illusion that cost many human lives but one that a whole series of
post-war governments continued to harbour in France. Ironically, it required
the return to power of the national war hero Charles de Gaulle in 1958 to
reconcile France to the fact that it had no other future except that of a purely
European nation. When Algeria was granted its full independence in 1962,
French colonial rule finally came to an end in Africa.
The Belgian Congo gained its independence in 1960, the same year as most
of the French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. This move marked the beginning
of one of the most terrible chapters in Africa’s post-colonial history. Portugal,
which had remained neutral in the Second World War, proved to be the most
unwilling European country to bid farewell to its past greatness. Its armed
forces finally ended the bloody colonial wars in its African possessions of
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 899

Angola and Mozambique. In 1975, a year after its Lisbon putsch – the Carnation
Revolution of 25 April 1974 – the army drew a line under Portugal’s colonial
history in Africa. In 1999, two years later than Hong Kong, Portugal’s last
colony in Asia, Macao, was handed back to the People’s Republic of China.

During the Second World War the colonial question had been a bone of conten-
tion between the United States and Great Britain, for, unlike Wilson, Roosevelt
was an outspoken anti-colonialist. He was also keen to interpret the concept of
self-determination as the right of Asian and African colonies to enjoy their
independence: the promises enshrined in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941
were to apply to them as well. In this regard nothing changed under Truman.
But, unlike Roosevelt, Truman had no need to exert any pressure on London
on this point, for Attlee’s Labour cabinet granted India – a particularly pressing
case – its independence even more quickly than Washington had expected.
The Netherlands, by contrast, needed considerable persuasion to end their
colonial rule in Indonesia.
During the Cairo Conference in November 1943 Roosevelt had offered
control of French Indochina to the National Chinese government of Chiang
Kai-shek, which sent troops into North Vietnam in the summer of 1945. But
the United States had no thoughts of supporting the Communist Viet Minh,
and following the Communist victory in China Washington reined in its anti-
colonial policies in south-east Asia, too. Where necessary, they preferred to
support French colonial power rather than an independence movement whose
successes were threatening to shift the political balance in favour of the Soviet
Union. In Africa the problem of colonialism was not yet an immediate cause
for concern in American eyes in the 1940s: not until the following decade did
the Black Continent command Washington’s attention to any greater extent.
In 1945 the United States was by far the most powerful country in the world
from an economic, financial, military and political point of view, and it clearly
relished the significance of this state of affairs in its dealings with its closest ally,
Great Britain. The United Kingdom was so financially dependent on the good-
will of the United States that it felt the need to toe Washington’s line in terms of
British foreign policy. Conversely, the United States set store by according
Great Britain a privileged place in the post-war order and in that way compen-
sating it for the loss of its standing in the world. On 15 November 1945,
responding to an American initiative on Truman’s part, Attlee and the Canadian
prime minister, William Mackenzie King, visited Washington to sign a joint
declaration on closer cooperation in the field of the peaceful use of nuclear
energy. Other countries were invited to sign as soon as there were reliable guar-
antees that they would not use fissionable material for military purposes. The
signatories also expressed their support for an international ban on atomic
weapons and on all other weapons of mass destruction. The United States had
no intention, of course, of relinquishing its monopoly on nuclear weapons.
900 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

By the autumn of 1945 there were already signs that relations between the
Western Powers and the Soviet Union were beginning to deteriorate. At the
meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers set up in Potsdam and held
between 10 September and 2 October 1945, Vyacheslav Molotov responded to
the refusal of Byrnes and Bevin to recognize the Communist-dominated
government of Romania by agreeing to accept the Anglo-American proposal
that France and China be allowed to take part in the preparatory peace talks
only if they had first signed armistice agreements with the country in question.
(This applied in the case of Romania.)
The Western Powers were far more troubled by the clear violation of an
agreement reached in Potsdam, namely, the reinforcement of Soviet troops
stationed in northern Iran and the separatist movement led by the Communist
Tudeh Party in those Iranian parts of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan where autono-
mous republics had been proclaimed in December 1945. Only when, with the
backing of the United States and of Great Britain, Iran complained to the
Security Council of the United Nations about Soviet aggression in March 1946
did Moscow promise to withdraw its troops within six weeks. But at the same
time the Soviet Union increased its pressure on Turkey, demanding that Ankara
not only grant it joint control over the Bosporus but also that it return the
southern Caucasian areas around Kars, Ardahan and Artvin that it had ceded
in 1921. In March 1946 it also announced that it was ending the Soviet-Turkish
non-aggression and neutrality pact that it had signed in 1925. In order to lend
military weight to his demands Stalin ordered massive troop concentrations on
the border with Turkey.
In the summer of 1946 the tensions between the Soviet Union and Turkey
led to a fundamental rethinking of American policy towards Soviet Russia and
played a significant part in the outbreak of the Cold War. But in the early months
of 1946 there could as yet be no talk of a definitive breach between East and
West. The United States did not question Soviet dominance in eastern central
and south-east Europe. In February 1946, after hesitating for a long time,
Washington recognized the government in Romania that had been installed by
the Soviet Union. By this date Communists loyal to Moscow had long since
taken up key positions in government and in the state apparatus in Sofia,
Bucharest and Warsaw, while they were also actively involved in the govern-
ments in Budapest and Prague. In the Soviet zone in Germany the Communist
Party and the Social Democratic Party had merged to form the Socialist Unity
Party of Germany in April 1946, albeit only after massive pressure was exerted
on them by the occupying power. In this way the foundations were laid for the
hegemony of the Communists and for the alignment of all the other parties.
Churchill was not exaggerating when in the speech that he delivered in Fulton
in March 1946 he referred to an ‘Iron Curtain’ dividing Europe in two.
But the line of demarcation that had been drawn in Yalta did not simply
divide the Continent into ‘East’ and ‘West’, for it ran right through the heart of
 FAULT LINES IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 901

the old West. The new East encompassed not only two countries marked by
Byzantine Orthodoxy, Bulgaria and Romania, but also countries whose reli-
gious thinking was influenced by the western Christian Church, including the
Baltic, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Soviet-occupied part of
Germany. And the new transatlantic West included not only countries of the
Occident but also – following the defeat of the Communists in the civil war that
ended in 1949 – Orthodox Greece and Islamic Turkey. During the Cold War,
the historic concepts of the ‘West’ and of the ‘East’ were so overlaid by the new
opposition between East and West that the older reality and its semantic asso-
ciations were increasingly lost from sight.
After 1945 there were no longer any purely European world powers. By
then the two world powers were the United States and the Soviet Union, both
of them key players in the anti-Hitler coalition. And both acquired a position
of hegemony within their respective spheres of influence. Initially, at least, the
‘bipolarity’ that began to emerge in 1945 was asymmetrical, for as long as only
one of them could produce nuclear weapons, it continued to enjoy a decisive
advantage over its international rival. Economically and financially, too, the
United States was superior to the Soviet Union. It was the new world banker,
with the dollar as the leading global currency. During the immediate post-war
era there could be no talk of any equality or balance of power between the
United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
After 1945 most European countries fell under the influence of one or other
of the two remaining world powers. With the exception of the Korean peninsula,
the United States and the Soviet Union were nowhere in such immediate prox-
imity to one another as they were in the old Continent of Europe. But Europe was
only a small part of the world, and countries that the European powers had
subjected to their rule in other continents were no longer guaranteed to remain
theirs after 1945. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, there was
not yet a ‘Third World’, but two of the states that had been reborn between 1945
and 1949 – India and Indonesia – were so large that they were clearly predestined
to assume a leading role when the countries outside the sphere of influence of the
two superpowers finally became aware of their own common interests.
The Soviet Union had always seen itself as an anti-imperialist power – not
that this prevented it from pursuing a policy towards China in Manchuria that
was little more than a continuation of the policies of the imperialist Russia of
the tsars. After 1945 Moscow could count increasingly on being able to recruit
fighters from national liberation movements who would commit themselves to
the global class war and hence to the world revolution. The United States,
which owed its existence to an anti-colonial revolution, was obliged to distance
itself from colonialism in order not to expose itself to criticism on the part of
the Soviet Union.
The Second World War advanced the cause of emancipation for all the
colonial nations – not because this was the intention of the man who had
902 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

unleashed the war, but because the war left all of the old colonial powers
permanently weakened. By the end of the hostilities the days of the British
Empire that Hitler had always admired were numbered, as were those of the
French colonial empire. Paradoxically, the post-war world order whose outlines
could already be dimly discerned in 1945 continued to bear a German stamp
in both Europe and Asia, for this order was largely the result of the second
attempt of the German Reich to turn itself into a world power and, indeed, into
the foremost world power. It was an attempt that had ended in catastrophic
failure.
 From World War to World War:
Retrospective of an Exceptional Period

O 8 MN OāP7āQăāŚ MRSM, General de Gaulle spoke to the French nation in

his capacity as the head of France Libre and sought to place contempo-
rary events within a broader historical context. ‘The war on Germany began in
1914,’ he declared:

The Treaty of Versailles certainly did not end that war but merely signalled
an armistice in the course of which the enemy rebuilt his forces of aggres-
sion. German aggression began again in March 1936, initially with the occu-
pation of the Rhineland, then against Austria and Czechoslovakia, followed
by preparations for the campaigns against Poland, Belgium and France,
which for their part were merely a prelude to the invasion of Russia and to
the present concentration of the war effort on the Anglo-Saxon nations. In
reality, therefore, the world is fighting a thirty years war either for or against
the universal domination of Germany.1

Two and a half years later Winston Churchill took this interpretation of history
as his own, writing to Stalin on 27 February 1944 to say that he regarded ‘this
war against German aggression as all one and as a thirty years’ war from 1914
onwards’.2
This reference to a second Thirty Years War may have been an example of
psychological warfare but it was not without historical substance. Germany was
not solely to blame for unleashing the First World War, but it was a major power
that bore the greatest responsibility for the escalation of the July crisis and,
hence, for ensuring that the Austro-Serbian conflict developed into a major
European war. After 1918 Germany was unable to come to terms with its defeat,
and if the country was in agreement on any single point, it was what it regarded
as the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles, which it insisted required revising.
Hitler was resolved from the outset on belligerent expansionism, but unlike the
majority of the revisionists, he never had any intention of accepting the borders
of the pre-war period. Even so, there was a sense of continuity in terms of

903
904 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

Germany’s questioning the status quo, and once Hitler had come to power, this
aspiration became the single most unsettling factor in European politics. With
hindsight, it became tempting, therefore, to regard the interwar period as no
more than a fragile peace and to accuse German politics since 1918 of a single-
mindedness that made the Second World War seem inevitable.
If we extend our field of vision beyond Europe to Asia, we shall find further
reasons to question the view that the two decades after 1918 were a time of
untroubled peace. Japan, which was later to become an Axis partner of National
Socialist Germany, had begun to expand its own power base as early as 1931,
when it had established the protectorate of Manchukuo. By July 1937 it had
triggered the Sino-Japanese War with an incident on the Marco Polo Bridge in
Beijing, a conflict which by the end of 1941 had become a part of the Second
World War. Germany’s other Axis partner, Italy, had invaded Ethiopia in 1935
and begun a war that was more than the traditional colonial conflict but, rather,
a racially motivated war of extermination and to that extent a harbinger of
what the world was to experience on a far larger scale after 1939, initially in
eastern central Europe, thereafter in eastern Europe. The Spanish Civil War,
too, bore all the hallmarks of a prelude to the Second World War, with the Axis
powers of Germany and Italy fighting on one side, while the Soviet Union was
actively involved on the other. This was the first time that ‘Fascism’ and
‘Bolshevism’ had clashed militarily, two ideological opposites that were to
cooperate with each other only a short time afterwards as part of the Hitler–
Stalin Pact, only for them to become embroiled in a life and death struggle
following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.
After 1945 references to a second Thirty Years War are also found in the
writings of historians, most vividly and most emphatically in a 1988 study by
the American historian Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The
‘Final Solution’ in History, where the author describes the Second World War as
a German crusade against Jewish Bolshevism. In Mayer’s view, there were
several significant parallels between the Thirty Years War of 1618–48 and the
‘thirty years war’ of 1914–45:

In terms of the international system, the issue in both cases was the bid of a
major power for continental hegemony, a bid which was opposed by ideo-
logically inconsistent military coalitions. As champions of the balance of
power, Richelieu and Gustavus Adolphus were as incongruous a pair as
Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. In one case central Europe was in the
eye of a hurricane; in the other case eastern Europe was. Both times the
bloodletting was enormous and there were more civilian than military
casualties. [. . .] In 1648 the checkmate of the Habsburgs’ hegemonic and
centralizing pretensions was translated into the continuance of Germany as
a collection of over two hundred virtually autonomous territorial states
whose rulers wielded authority on the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio.
 FROM WORLD WAR TO WORLD WAR 905

In 1945 the defeat of the drive for European mastery by a belatedly united
Germany resulted in its being divided in two halves, each of which had its
own inviolable civil religion.

According to Mayer, in both cases

the traditional foundations of Europe were shaken by a general crisis in civil

and political society which was at once cause and effect of total and
monstrous war. The first half of the seventeenth century had the dubious
distinction of being the bloodiest and most destructive half century on
record, until it was surpassed by the first half of the twentieth. [. . .] Whereas
the General Crisis and Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century marked
the last phase of the ideological struggle between Catholicism and
Protestantism, the General Crisis and Thirty Years War of the twentieth
century marked the climacteric of the ideological struggle between fascism
and bolshevism. [. . .] In the seventeenth century Europe simultaneously
reordered and enlarged its imperial reach; in the twentieth century it lost its
world primacy and overseas empire.3

The comparison between the first half of the seventeenth century and the first
half of the twentieth century, both of which could be described as exceptional
periods, is illuminating. Like the Thirty Years War, the First and Second World
Wars were not just conflicts between states but were also waged on the level of
ideological confrontations and for a time assumed the form of a civil war. Like
1648, 1945 signified a profound break in the state system and in the internal
order of the states involved in the conflict. If the Thirty Years War ended in the
victory of the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, then the outcome of the
Second World War could be encapsulated in the phrase coined by the German
international lawyer Hans Peter Ipsen, ‘cuius occupatio, eius constitutio’ (the
occupier chooses the constitution). The ‘Westphalian System’ was based on the
maxim that all states should determine their own internal order and that other
states had no right to intervene in their sovereign affairs. The system proposed
at Yalta and Potsdam transferred this maxim to the sphere of influence of the
major powers: what happened within the gradually emerging blocs did not
justify any violent intervention by the other side, not even if the hegemonic
power threatened the sovereignty of a state within its own sphere of influence.
Conflicts might break out between the leading powers if the spheres of influ-
ence intersected, as was the case with the treatment of Germany as a single
economic entity, or if the formally agreed demarcation line was ignored and
crossed by one side, as was the case with Korea in 1950.
But alongside the parallels there are also fundamental differences between
the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In spite of its different phases and
shifting coalitions, the Thirty Years War struck contemporaries as a single war,
906 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

whereas the majority of Europeans and North Americans did not feel that they
were at war during the two decades that separated the First and Second World
Wars. The peace that was produced by the treaties signed in Versailles and in
the other Paris suburbs would presumably have lasted much longer if the
Weimar Republic had not been fatally buffeted by the storms of the world
economic crisis and if it had not been replaced by Hitler’s Führer state. The
term ‘second Thirty Years War’ suggests an inevitability to the way in which
events unfolded between 1914 and 1945 and turns the years of peace into an
optical illusion, a teleological and deterministic view of history that no longer
allows us to distinguish between the situation that might have developed at the
end of the First World War and the one that actually emerged under the impact
of a global economic catastrophe.

For the French and the British, the First World War continues to be the ‘Grande
Guerre’ and the ‘Great War’. And war remains ‘the father of all and king of all’
in the sense defined by Heraclitus of Ephesus. Writing in 1925, the German
economist Moritz Julius Bonn noted that ‘The Great War meant the triumph of
the theory of violence’:

The Great War differed from other wars in one respect: it was not a mere
professional war. Most wars in days gone by have been fought by people
whose business it was to deal with the enemy in accordance with approved
military rules. The Great War was a war of nations. The activities deciding
it were not restricted to the front. Its consequences, not only its direct
consequences, were daily felt in every home. In this respect it must be
compared with organized civil war, which is bound to shake the relations of
society wherever it is raging. [. . .] War denies the principles on which our
civilization is really based; it denies the sacredness of human life; it denies
the inviolability of private property; it tears up treaties. [. . .] Now this spirit
of violence developed by a four years’ uninterrupted practice cannot
suddenly be transformed into one of gentleness when the word ‘disband’ is
spoken.4

After 1918 paramilitary violence became a feature of the internal politics of

many states, especially those that had been defeated. Russia was the first country
to see war turn into civil war. As early as November 1914 Lenin had spoken of
‘the conversion of the present imperialist war into a civil war’ as being ‘the only
correct proletarian slogan’.5 After the October Revolution of 1917 Lenin had
had a chance to put his theory into practice, at the same time hoping that the
Russian example would spark a revolution in Europe as a whole.
In fact the Communist revolution was confined to Russia, but as a threat it was
soon a constant presence in Europe thanks to the Communist International and
its affiliated parties. The civil wars of the immediate post-war period remained
 FROM WORLD WAR TO WORLD WAR 907

restricted to the regions where they broke out and failed to merge as a single great
civil war in the way that the Bolsheviks had hoped. But the whole of Europe was
gripped by the fear of civil war and of Red revolution, and nowhere more so than
in the country without whose active help Lenin and the Bolsheviks would never
have come to power: Germany. The deeper reason for this state of affairs was a
national trauma: the experience of the breakdown of the old order and the expo-
sure to chaos, blind violence and the rampages of foreign soldiers in the Thirty
Years War of 1618–48. This was the quintessential negative experience of the
earlier period of German history, the German seminal catastrophe.
Like Bolshevist Russia, the United States of America first became actively
involved in European politics in 1917. Woodrow Wilson, who was instru-
mental in taking his country into the war, spoke of a nation’s right of self-
determination and in doing so created a slogan more powerful than Lenin’s call
for world revolution. The states that succeeded the Russian and Habsburg
Empires in eastern central and south-east Europe became the beneficiaries of
two archetypal western principles, national sovereignty and democratic
majority decisions, both of which were inextricably linked to the American
Revolution of 1776 and to the French Revolution of 1789.
But the application of these principles to regions of mixed nationality natu-
rally led from the outset to conflicts with other western traditions, namely,
respect for the human and civic rights of all citizens and, hence, tolerance of
minorities. The new states felt that they were nation states, although none was
a nation state in the strict sense of that term: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and
Poland, in particular, were all states made up of multiple nationalities. The
agreements designed to protect minorities and foisted on these countries by
the League of Nations rarely proved satisfactory, and with the exception of
Finland and Estonia, none of the new states could be held up as an example of
a successful relationship between the titular nation and its ethnic minorities.
The problems associated with these nationalities made it more difficult to
form stable political majorities and in that way contributed to the fact that
western democracy failed to put down any permanent roots in most of these
young states. Other typical burdens on democracy were the peasants’ lack of
land, widespread illiteracy, the distrust of the clergy, of the military and of the
privileged classes, especially the major landowners, vis-à-vis the parliamentary
system, and the radical protest of peasants, members of the petty bourgeoisie
and workers at existing conditions. Those in power generally responded to the
signs of an internal crisis with a forced nationalism that often included anti-
Semitism. And they also fell back on repressive measures. In the end the self-
determination of the leading nation invariably triumphed over the democratic
self-government of its citizens. It was a development that took to its most
absurd extreme Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to equate these two principles.
The first new state to turn itself into one based on an authoritarian system
was Hungary in 1919–20. Hungary was one of the nations that had lost out in
908 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the war and now mourned for the frontiers that it had forfeited under the terms
of the Treaty of Trianon. It was also the only country in central Europe to
witness a Communist revolution in 1919. A decade after the end of the First
World War there were few new states that could be described as democracies,
and by the middle of the 1930s all but two were governed by more or less
authoritarian regimes. The exceptions were Czechoslovakia, the most heavily
industrialized and secularized country to emerge from the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, where the majority of the population was middle-class, and Finland,
which numbered itself among the Scandinavian democracies and was power-
fully influenced by their political culture. Finland’s southern neighbour, Estonia,
occupied an intermediate position with its ‘state-run democracy’.
Not only most of the new states in eastern central and south-east Europe
were ruled by dictators by the first half of the 1930s, so, too, were many of the
older European states. In the Balkans and on the Iberian peninsula there were
no longer any democracies by 1938. By then western democracy had retreated
to Scandinavia, Great Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg,
France and Switzerland. Czechoslovakia remained a part of this group of states
only until it was destroyed by National Socialist Germany in March 1939.
Any attempt to identify a common factor that would explain the gradual
disappearance of democratic governments during the interwar period will find
that in almost every case it was the social and mental backwardness of the
countries in question. Authoritarian right-wing dictatorships gained a foot-
hold in countries that were still predominantly agrarian in character, countries
in which, with the obvious exceptions of the Baltic States and Austria, large
sections of the population were unable to read and write, and the Orthodox
Church formed a powerful cartel with the country’s traditional upper class.
But in two cases the term ‘backwardness’ is inadequate to explain the situa-
tion, namely, in Italy and even more so in Germany. Both countries had much in
common. Both had achieved national unity only relatively recently, in the second
half of the nineteenth century, and both had become colonial powers only at an
even later date. In both countries, moreover, there were striking differences in
the way in which their regions had developed: in Italy, there was a north–south
divide, whereas in Germany the divide was between the west and east of the
country. Before 1914 both countries had been only partially democratized. And
although Italy was a parliamentary monarchy, it had adopted something close to
universal franchise only in 1912. Moreover, the electoral boycott imposed by the
Vatican in 1870 in response to the abolition of the Papal States was still in force.
In Germany there had been universal male suffrage since 1871, but the country
became a parliamentary monarchy only in October 1918, when the prospect of
its imminent military defeat could no longer be ignored.
This lack of synchronicity in Germany’s democratization process – the
early democratization of the right to vote and the belated introduction of a
parliamentary system of government – continued to affect the country in the
 FROM WORLD WAR TO WORLD WAR 909

wake of the First World War, when the revolution of 1918/19 could involve
only more democracy in the form of the introduction of women’s suffrage, the
democratization of the right to vote in the individual states and the full imple-
mentation of the parliamentary system of government. Attempts on the part of
the extreme left to establish a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ on the Soviet
model had the backing of only a minority of the proletariat and were brutally
suppressed in 1919–20. Italy witnessed no revolution after 1918, although it
did experience revolutionary unrest in the form of the biennio rosso of 1919–
20, when the parliamentary system of government was subjected to a stern test.
In the Germany of the Weimar Republic western democracy struck large
sections of the middle classes as a form of government imposed on them by the
victorious nations and, hence, as an ‘un-German’ product of their defeat. In
Italy the West fell into disrepute because the political right blamed it for the
country’s ostensible vittoria mutilata, when it had been robbed of the fruits of
its heroic struggle. In this way anti-western resentment marked the beginning
of each country’s rebellion against democracy as an institution.
Fascism came to power in Italy in October 1922 with the active help of the
monarchy and the willing indulgence of the liberals who set the political tone at
this time. It created a system hitherto unknown in Europe, a system that relied
for its support on paramilitary forces that had previously acted with extreme
violence against the divided left and that had received financial backing from
the country’s major landowners. When Mussolini came to power, this was far
from spelling the end of the reign of terror. Instead, it gave state approval to that
terror.
Italian Fascism was the most radical response to Bolshevism that had been
witnessed up to that time, while in certain respects modelling itself on the
Russian movement. In terms of their intolerance of political and ideological
opponents, Fascists and Communists were practically indistinguishable. Both
regimes appealed to the whole man and promised that the future would give
rise to a ‘new man’ shaped by their own ideas. The comprehensive nature of
this claim set the new dictatorships in Italy and the Soviet Union apart from
traditional authoritarian regimes such as earlier military dictatorships. Italy
was the first country in which the new type of regime was described as ‘totali-
tarian’ by its liberal and socialist critics. It was a term that was taken over by
Mussolini and later applied by academic writers to characterize the features
that Fascism, National Socialism and Bolshevism all had in common: the
monopoly on power and on propaganda that was enjoyed by a single party,
the rigorous elimination of each and every form of division of power, the
suppression of all forms of opposition, the omnipresence of the secret police
and of terror, the disfranchisement of the individual, the mobilization of the
masses and the cult of the country’s leader.
In 1922 Italy had only partly been industrialized and was still largely a
rural economy. In many parts of the Mezzogiorno, including Calabria, the
910 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

population was still largely illiterate in the early 1920s. (The national average in
1921 was 27 per cent.) If backwardness in Italy was one of the reasons for the
failure of democracy and for the emergence of a right-wing dictatorship, then
it was also one of the reasons why a similar development was relatively unlikely
in Germany. Germany was a highly developed industrial country where all
children had long been required to attend school. Those regions that were
regarded as ‘backward’ included the countryside to the east of the Elbe that
was dominated by major landowners and, more especially, East Prussia, which
was cut off from the rest of Germany and able to survive only with generous
financial help from Prussia and the Reich. But unlike Italy there was no part of
Germany where the level of education was strikingly lower than elsewhere.
The fact that a single movement, modelled on the Italian Fascists, could
become the most powerful party in Germany after 1930 was due in no small part
to the lack of synchronicity within the process of democratization in the country.
Once the parliamentary system had foundered on the lack of any willingness to
compromise on the part of the moderate parties, Hitler’s National Socialists were
presented with a unique chance that allowed them to appeal not only to the wide-
spread resentment at western democracy but also to the nation’s claims to have a
share in power in the form of universal suffrage, a claim documented since
Bismarck’s day and one that was largely robbed of its political impact by the semi-
authoritarian presidential cabinets that ruled the country from 1930 onwards.
It was a pseudo-democratic appeal to the people that distinguished Hitler’s
radical rejection of Weimar from that of the traditional right. Until then
the political right had for the most part sought an authoritarian solution to
the crisis that threatened to plunge the country into a bloody civil war. By the
winter of 1932/3 a number of conservatives had come to believe that in a
country with a long tradition of democratic suffrage the planned change of
regime needed broad support among the masses. Since Hitler, as the leader of
the largest ‘nationalist’ party, seemed a suitable candidate to guarantee this
support and since he was willing to share power with the conservatives, the
right-wing establishment, headed by Hindenburg as the country’s president,
was instrumental in helping him to win the chancellorship on 30 January 1933.
Italian Fascism and German National Socialism had many points in
common. Both movements subscribed to an extreme nationalism. Both were
radically anti-Marxist and anti-liberal. Both of them inflicted unprecedented
brutality on their political opponents, and both of them idolized their leaders
and glorified their nation’s youth as well as admiring virility and military
virtues. Once they had come to power, they systematically eliminated all of the
forces and institutions that stood in their way and by dint of a mixture of prop-
aganda and terror created an acclamatory pseudo-public that brooked no
opposition and offered the regime the semblance of legitimacy.
As far as the gradual suppression of the country’s traditional elites was
concerned, the National Socialists were far more ruthless and successful than
 FROM WORLD WAR TO WORLD WAR 911

the Italian Fascists, who were obliged right up until the end to reach an agree-
ment with both the monarchy and the military. In spite of the constant internal
power struggles associated with the country’s leader, National Socialism was
far more totalitarian and far closer to enjoying a monopoly of absolute power
than Italian Fascism. Another difference was the fanatical anti-Semitism that
was integral to Hitler’s movement. Not until the end of 1938 did Mussolini’s
regime adopt anti-Jewish policies inspired by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 but
never implemented with the same degree of bureaucratic ruthlessness as was
the case in Germany. Of course, Italian Fascism, too, was racist, a point abun-
dantly clear from the country’s colonial wars in Libya and, later, in Ethiopia. In
Africa the Duce revealed just how ruthlessly aggressive towards the outside
world his regime was capable of being. But in spite of his repeated claims to be
anti-Bolshevist, he never considered waging war on the Soviet Union, a reluc-
tance due in the main to his realization that Italy lacked the material resources
for such a conflict. If, in 1941, he took part in the German campaign in the east
– a late colonial land grab that was also an ideological war of extermination –
then this was because Fascist Italy had no wish to come away empty-handed
from the expected new world order.
The similarities between Italian Fascism and German National Socialism
were so self-evident that even contemporaries bundled them together under the
catch-all term ‘Fascist’. National Socialism was indeed the German expression of
Fascism, while at the same time diverging from its Italian model on so many
essential points that it would be wrong to see in it merely a form of ‘German
Fascism’. There were many Fascist movements in Europe during the interwar
years, including the Spanish Falangist movement, the Croatian Ustaga, the
Romanian Iron Guard and the Hungarian Arrow Cross. But only in Italy and
Germany did Fascist parties come to power without outside help, and only in
these two countries did autonomous Fascist regimes come into existence.
Attempts to turn European Fascist movements into international organiza-
tions were doomed from the outset to failure, for their exclusive nationalism
made it impossible for Fascist regimes to create a sense of international soli-
darity comparable to that enjoyed by the Communist International. Thanks to
its anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, the Third Reich succeeded in
persuading a handful of intellectuals, politicians, parties and groupings to
collaborate with it in the countries that it occupied, but it was never able to
mobilize the masses. Fascist or National Socialist internationalism would have
been a contradiction in terms.
The most extreme opponents of the far right were the Russian Bolsheviks,
who had always seen themselves as the vanguard of a new, classless society, with
the result that following their seizure of power they immediately set about elim-
inating the ruling classes and, where possible, destroying them root and branch.
The Italian Fascists and the German National Socialists had no desire to destroy
their countries’ economic, military, bureaucratic and intellectual elites but
912 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

wanted to make them compliant to their own particular needs, an aim in which
they succeeded to varying degrees. For Stalin, it was crucial to his rule to deal
with Russia’s backwardness once and for all, and thanks to the brutal means that
he employed he came closer to this goal than any politician before him.
Conversely, it is only with considerable reservations that we can speak of a
modernization of Italian society by Fascism. Only in the case of the attempt to
do away with illiteracy can we speak of any real success, and yet even here
Mussolini was merely pursuing a policy already introduced by Giolitti. In
National Socialist Germany industrialization proceeded apace in spite of the
agrarian romanticism of the party’s ideological outlook. And yet this, too, was
not because Hitler wanted to modernize Germany but because he would not
have been able to pursue his war aims if he had not forced the pace of growth in
the country’s arms industry. National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy were
not dictatorships bent on modernization but an expression of a modernization
crisis in two nations that had achieved national unity only at a very late date,
that were unable to solve their social problems by democratic means and that
were profoundly dissatisfied with their place in the new post-war world order.
The crisis in European democracy during the interwar years was not
confined to those countries that had been turned into authoritarian or Fascist
dictatorships, for it also affected most of the countries that could look back on
older democratic traditions. The First World War had dealt a severe blow to
contemporaries’ faith in reason and fuelled nationalist passions that continued
to burn even after the weapons had fallen silent. But the war had also produced
a feeling of hatred directed at all who were held responsible for the killings,
including those who had justified the millions of deaths or who had profited
from them. After 1918 a return to normality was difficult even in those coun-
tries where there was a long tradition of solving political conflicts on the parlia-
mentary stage through a peaceful exchange of ideas. The propertied classes
were everywhere afraid of the increased power of the workers’ movement and
of its trade unions and affiliated parties. After 1918 it seemed more likely that
the bourgeoisie would be outvoted by the political left than had been the case
before 1914.
At the same time, parliamentary democracy foundered only in those coun-
tries where it had not been introduced until 1918 and 1919 or where it did not
enjoy broad support within society at large. In older democracies, Fascist
movements were unable to establish the sort of mass base for their activities
that they enjoyed in Germany and in Italy. Even in a country like France, where
the Communists managed to unite a large section of the working class, they
were still not in a position to force the Socialists into second place. Even in
France and Great Britain there was right-wing criticism of the parliamentary
system and of democracy, and there was also a responsive audience willing to
listen to such concerns. But in contrast to the Conservative Revolution in
Germany, young right-wing intellectuals in neither France nor Great Britain
 FROM WORLD WAR TO WORLD WAR 913

ever succeeded in defining public opinion but merely represented one line of
thinking among many.
The world economic crisis that saw Germany abandon its parliamentary
system and embrace a right-wing totalitarian dictatorship left Great Britain
and the United States scarcely less badly affected than the Reich, but in both of
these Anglo-Saxon countries democracy survived, economic and social
reforms allowing it to reconstitute itself on a new and more solid basis. During
the Great Depression all of the old expressions of freedom demonstrated their
resilience. Wherever the normative project of the West had put down roots and
left its mark on the political thinking of the rulers and of the ruled, it proved its
worth in the great crisis that affected the world from 1929 onwards, a crisis that
represented the most serious challenge the West had faced until then.

If there was anything about Adolf Hitler’s Reich that earned the sympathy of
conservative circles in the West after 1933, it was its militant anti-Bolshevism.
Britain’s policy of appeasement during the second half of the 1930s rested in no
small part on the assumption that this hostility was unshakeable and that it
could therefore serve as the basis for limited cooperation between London and
Berlin. The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939 revealed
this estimation to be no more than an example of wishful thinking. On the
other hand, it was not hard to predict that the arrangement between Hitler and
Stalin would not last, and the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 July
1941 gave Great Britain the chance to continue its war on National Socialist
Germany with a powerful ally at its side. The fact that the Conservative
Churchill was an outspoken opponent of revolutionary Bolshevism was of no
importance in this context. As long as the future of Great Britain and of the
British Empire was at stake, any ideological differences were bound to fade into
insignificance next to the common interest in defeating the German aggressor
as swiftly and as comprehensively as possible.
Roosevelt seems to have had no ideological scruples about working with
Stalin to overthrow Hitler and for a time he regarded the Soviet Union as a
calculable entity whose anti-colonialism was very much after his own heart
and, as such, in welcome contrast to Churchill’s imperialism. Hitler was the
enemy tout court: there was nothing about him or his regime or his view of the
world that offered a point of contact for American policy-makers. With Stalin,
conversely, it was possible to act in concert and, indeed, there seemed every
likelihood that this spirit of cooperation would extend beyond the war. The
United States and the Soviet Union would emerge from the Second World War
as the two most powerful nations of the post-war era, and in Roosevelt’s eyes
the ability to maintain world peace would depend in future on their ability to
agree and to work together.
The sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius has described Communism and
Fascism as ‘the two great twentieth-century movements against parliamentary
914 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

democracy and against the project of civil society’.6 In fact it was not only
Italian Fascism and German National Socialism but also Russian Bolshevism
that represented a radical negation of the normative project of the West that
had emerged from the Atlantic revolutions of the late eighteenth century. But
there was something distinctly asymmetrical about the stance that these two
ideological opposites adopted towards this project. The Fascists rejected every
aspect of the legacy of 1789 and to that extent were part of a tradition linking
them to the Catholic and romantic counterrevolution of the early nineteenth
century, whereas the Bolsheviks saw themselves as the heirs of the extreme left
wing of the French Revolution, the ‘conspiracy of equals’ associated with
François-Noël (‘Gracchus’) Babeuf, who was the first to demand the complete
abolition of private property and the creation of a Communist society. Within
this tradition of revolutionary thinking, there was no room for individual
freedom.
For four years, from 1941 and 1945, it proved possible to neutralize the ideo-
logical conflict between western democracies and the totalitarian Soviet system,
but only because of their shared opposition to another totalitarian regime, that
of National Socialist Germany. Throughout this period the Anglo-Saxon powers
were obliged to abandon positions that they had solemnly championed in the
Atlantic Charter of 14 August 1941. Even without being conscious of what they
were doing, they sacrificed the right of self-determination of the peoples of
eastern central and south-east Europe on the altar of a partnership forced upon
them by Hitler. When Churchill became aware of the fatal consequences of this
policy during the final weeks of the war, he protested at what had happened but
was unable to effect any changes. The fault lines in the post-war world were
clearly identifiable in the spring of 1945, Europe being divided into one part that
was able to keep the promises enshrined in the Atlantic Charter and another
part that was denied this opportunity.
With their joint victory over National Socialist Germany, there was no
longer any need for the western democracies to work together with the Soviet
Union, and it was only a question of time before the ideological conflict
between these two different worlds flared up anew. The historian Dan Diner
has seen in the clash between ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ the central key to our
understanding of the twentieth century, whereby ‘equality’, according to the
Soviet understanding of that term, has nothing to do with the liberal equality
before the law or with the socio-democratic belief in equal opportunities but
presupposes absolute equality in the sense of the radical elimination of the
inequalities that are due to the class system.
To express this antithesis, Diner draws on the metaphor of a ‘universal
civil war’:

On a vertical plane, the confrontation cut through previous state and

national loyalties, corresponding in this way to the nineteenth-century
 FROM WORLD WAR TO WORLD WAR 915

antinomies of freedom and equality, bourgeoisie and proletariat, revolution

and counterrevolution. Decolonization also appropriated the political
terminology of 1789: in the second half of the twentieth century, entire
continents were raised to the status of revolutionary subjects, with commen-
tators now beginning to speak of a tiers monde in analogy to the tiers état.7

As a metaphor, the term ‘universal civil war’ encapsulates the basic ideological
conflict that was to leave its mark on the twentieth century up to the end of the
Communist regime in Europe between 1989 and 1991. This conflict had begun
with the Russian Revolution of October 1917. There were three reasons why
this conflict failed to break out fully during the interwar years. First, a whole
series of setbacks in terms of its efforts to export its own particular brand of
revolution meant that the Soviet Union was forced to postpone the ‘world revo-
lution’ and to concentrate instead on Stalin’s slogan about ‘building socialism in
one country’. Second, the democratic messianism of the United States was
thwarted by American isolationism, which prevented any lasting transatlantic
or global commitment on the part of what was potentially the leading western
power. And, third, a third force emerged with the Fascists and, more especially,
with the National Socialists and their seizure of power that made it impossible
for East and West to confront one another as part of a conflict between ‘freedom’
and ‘equality’ or between ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’.
The victory of the anti-Hitler coalition led to a radical simplification of the
international situation, for now there were only two world powers, the United
States and the Soviet Union. And the United States was by far the more powerful
of the two as a result of its superior technological know-how and its monopoly
on atomic weapons. If we define a major power by whether it has a permanent
seat on the Security Council of the United Nations, then China was paralysed
by its internal power struggle between the Kuomintang and the Communists,
and Great Britain and France, the two greatest colonial powers in Europe, had
been so weakened by the war that it was questionable if they would ever be able
to recover from it.
By now the United Kingdom was so materially dependent on its former
colony, the United States, that we may agree with Dan Diner when he speaks of
the transfer of the ‘imperial baton’ from Great Britain to the United States and
of a ‘translatio imperii of our time’.8 For the present it remained unclear what
would become of the two former world powers, Germany and Japan. At least in
Europe the age of the classic, sovereign nation states was drawing to a close, a
realization that naturally needed time to sink in. The fate of the old Continent
no longer lay in its own hands but in those of the two world powers that
between them had decided the outcome of the Second World War.
The year 1945 marked the end of one particular type of totalitarian dicta-
torship but not the end of totalitarian rule as such. Germany’s surrender drew
a line not only under the twelve-year history of the Third Reich but also under
916 THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

the seventy-four-year history of the German Reich. The year brought an end to
Germany’s revolt against the normative project of the West, an act of rebellion
that had started long before 1933. By unleashing the Second World War,
Germany destroyed the foundations of all that had retained its universal
validity in Europe in the wake of the First World War. The Holocaust made it
clear to the world what ideological blindness could accomplish when harnessed
to modern technology and when a country like Germany abandoned the rule
of law, as it did in 1933. If the murder of European Jewry has left deeper scars
on the collective conscience of the West than the millions of murders carried
out by Stalin, then this is not only because the Shoah was unique in its chilling
and mechanical efficiency but for another reason, too: this crime against
humanity was committed by a nation that was a part of western culture and
that was judged, therefore, by western standards. This was at the heart of the
‘German catastrophe’ of which the historian Friedrich Meinecke spoke in the
title of a widely read book that was first published in Germany in 1946.9
In Europe western values survived the Second World War because the new
West in the guise of America and the British Dominions came to the aid of the
libertarian forces in the old Continent. But the cause of freedom continued to
be threatened. The ability of the West to maintain a coherent and cohesive
stance on both sides of the North Atlantic depended on whether the ideas of
1776 and 1789 would continue to shine as a beacon of light in the post-war
world.