Dark Continent, page 10
In the 1920s there had been fumbling alternative schemes of international cooperation such as the anti-communist White International, sponsored briefly by the Hungarians, or Count Coudenhove-Kalergi’s schemes for pan-European union. None of these amounted to very much. Under Hitler’s leadership, however, the Third Reich evolved a vision of a European order based on fundamentally different principles from those developed in Geneva. In the ideologically charged climate of inter-war Europe, a shift in the balance of power implied a profound political and moral challenge to the League system. The whole idea of liberal universalism came under attack.
AGAINST THE LIBERAL NEW ORDER
Hitler grew up steeped in the Pan-German nationalism—viciously anti-Slav and anti-Semitic—of the late Habsburg Empire. In 1923 during the Beerhall Putsch, he walked through the streets of Munich alongside the more famous Erich Ludendorff, who, together with Hindenburg, had been the architect of Germany’s wartime victories in the East. It is, therefore, tempting to interpret National Socialist foreign policy in terms of older German nationalist traditions. Undoubtedly, they were influential both on Hitler personally and on the movement he led. It would, however, be a great error to ignore the substantial differences between him and his predecessors. To imagine that Hitler was merely following in, say, Bismarck’s footsteps was profoundly to misunderstand the man and his view of the world. Bismarck thought in terms of great-power politics, Hitler of racial triumph.
Hitler did not object to the League of Nations simply because it defended the Versailles settlement. That would have implied a willingness to participate at Geneva if the settlement could have been revised. Many German nationalists, of course, did take this position, which was also the assumption underlying British appeasement policy. But in Mein Kampf, Hitler made it clear that restoring the frontiers of 1914 was certainly not his aim. He was after further Lebensraum for the German people. This imperial programme flowed naturally from his broader vision of politics as racial struggle. Such a struggle—seen in Darwinian terms as an existential battle—implied a hierarchical vision of international (or, better, interracial) relations.42
The League, after all, was an organization of states. But what was the state? According to Hitler’s biological view of politics, it was no less than “a living organism.” Reflecting the writing of German geopoliticians, he argued that boundaries could not be fixed; they were, rather, “momentary frontiers in the current political struggle of any period,” at the mercy of “the mighty forces of Nature in a process of continuous growth … to be transformed or destroyed tomorrow by greater forces.”43 Hitler’s own vision of global politics—unlike that of many geopoliticians—rested upon race: the state itself was merely the expression of the racial Volk. “Blood is stronger than a passport,” wrote a prominent pan-Germanist in 1937. The German minorities abroad were “racial comrades” of Reich Germans; the Third Reich had a duty to the whole of the German people, not merely those who happened to live within its current borders.44
The fundamental problem, therefore, with the League was not merely that it defended Versailles, but that—in Nazi eyes—it embodied a wholly mistaken philosophy of international affairs. There could be no equality among states, for some “are not worthy of existence”; there could therefore be no universal morality or law. Even the highly paternalistic liberalism which Geneva embodied reeked of humanitarian weakness to the Nazis. The stronger race must prevail over the weaker; it would thus win the right to impose its own wishes upon the loser. It followed that legal arrangements were purely matters of convenience, to be followed or repudiated as the interests of the Volk dictated.45
It is true that among German political theorists in the 1930s there were endless debates—for or against forms of European federalism, for German-led economic zones, for cooperation with Russia or an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Nevertheless, the logic of Hitler’s racial obsessions forced the discussion within narrow bounds and gave rise to a National Socialist doctrine of international law that attempted to define Germany’s new stance in the world. Equality in international relations was not taken as absolute; it was relative “to the concrete value of the race represented by the state,” in other words “their natural superiority or inferiority.” Thus was justified the “hegemony” of some races over others. Not surprisingly, German legal theorists argued that international law had only a very limited role to play in regulating relations between states, and they criticized the League for the way it had led to a “juridification” of international life. What masqueraded as a liberal philosophy of human rights was really—on this view—nothing other than a fig-leaf for the “1919 Versailles-Diktat,” and an expression of “the Jewish spirit” with its opposition to the life of the Volk and hatred of national specificity. Since there existed no “common rule of law,” there was little value in international institutions such as the League or the Permanent Court of International Justice.46
That the Nazi challenge to the League went far beyond mere territorial revisionism was clear enough at the time to those who wished to see. For C. A. Macartney, for instance, a leading British expert on central Europe, “Hitlerism was flatly incompatible with the League system and its philosophy.” One would have “to succumb to the other.” In a melancholy but fascinating article written in 1938, an émigré lawyer asked whether the collapse of belief in a universal international law did not reflect the “disintegration of European civilization.” There was no longer a cohesive value-system or an international society in the old sense; social and political divisions in Europe made it a “fiction” to talk about the “universal validity of all rules.”47
FASCIST EMPIRES
In an era when biological metaphors were widely applied to international relations, when fears of population decline were widespread, and nations themselves (in France, Hungary and Greece just as much as Germany) were seen as bodies—facing extinction, asphyxiation or decline if they could not “sustain life” within their borders—the need for “living space” was a common concern across the political spectrum. It was, for instance, not Hitler but Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne, who in 1928 opened a colonial exhibition entitled Space without People and People without Space. Anxious contemporaries saw no inconsistency in arguing simultaneously that their country had too small a population, and not enough land.48
For both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, empire was crucial to their claims to be great powers as well as to their very survival as dynamic nations. Empire was land, and land meant room for settlement, foodstuffs, raw materials and healthy colonists. Never mind the evidence that it was easier to win land than to direct people to it or that in the nineteenth century far more Europeans had preferred to settle in the Americas than in Africa: these were lessons fascist regimes would have to learn the hard way. Fascist empire-building marked the culmination of the process of European imperial expansion that began in the 1870s. Mussolini and Hitler accepted the basic geopolitical tenets of nineteenth-century imperialism, while jettisoning its liberalism.
Fascist empire came first to Ethiopia, following the Italian invasion late in 1935. The fighting itself was conducted with unprecedented brutality by the Italians, who were desperate for a quick victory: gas and chemical warfare, as well as saturation bombing, killed enormous numbers, as did the detention and concentration camps that the Italians brought with them from the pacification campaigns of a few years earlier against the nomadic Senussi. Around 3,000 Italians died compared with tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians. Neither later nor at the time did this kind of bloodshed occasion much criticism; inside Italy, victory marked the high point of Mussolini’s reign, a “golden age” of “Fascist empire.”49
The peace that followed was equally enlightening. Following an assassination attempt on Viceroy Graziani, notorious for his brutality, Fascist squads went on the rampage in Addis Ababa, killing over a thousand people in cold blood. Others were executed in mass reprisals, including several hundred monks. All this offered a foretaste of what Europe—and Italy—would itself experience a few years later at the hands of the Germans. Meanwhile, Ciano addressed the General Assembly of the League of Nations, and referred to the “sacred mission of civilization” which Italy was heeding, declaring that his country would “consider it an honour to inform the League of the progress achieved in its work of civilizing Ethiopia.”50
Empire-building was closely connected with racial laws and decrees which were new to Italian Fascism. Considerations of racial “prestige” led the authorities to try to regulate sexual and other contacts between Italians and Ethiopians, in ways that they had not considered in Libya or on Rhodes. Just as the apartheid of the Nuremberg laws had been prefigured in pre-1914 German colonial policy, so Italian racism in Africa paved the way for the 1938 racial laws inside Italy itself. The infamous Manifesto of Racial Scientists, and the accompanying anti-Semitic laws, were thus not mere mimicry of National Socialism but an expression of Fascism’s attempts to create a fitting image for itself as an imperial power.51
Fascism’s admirers abroad took heart. Sixty-four French academics published a manifesto attacking “that false juridical universalism that equates superior and inferior, civilized and barbaric.” “Why continue to lie?” wrote a French journalist. “There are different levels among men; there is a human hierarchy. To deny it is absurd, and to disregard it a shameful confusion. Forget about Ethiopia, even two or three Ethiopias, if one is not enough … This is the absolute right of human civilization when the hour comes to impose itself upon barbarism.” Just a few years later, Marshal Pétain would publicly describe Vichy France as “a social hierarchy … rejecting the false idea of the natural equality of men.”52
Much Italian policy was, of course, reminiscent of Nazi views on race and empire. But between Hitler’s and Mussolini’s imperial projects there were two key differences. One was that Germans took racial exclusionism (and indeed the law generally) more seriously than Italians: the Nuremberg laws operated more efficiently than the 1938 race laws. The second was that while Fascism—like older imperialisms—saw its civilizing burden lying chiefly outside Europe, National Socialism did not: and just here, no doubt—by turning Europeans back into barbarians and slaves—lay the Nazis’ greatest offence against the sensibility of the continent.
Events in 1938–40 showed that the kind of leadership Nazi Germany desired in Europe could be obtained by a combination of conquest and “hegemony.” Military conquest led to either annexation—as with Austria—or occupation: the invasion of Bohemia-Moravia in the spring of 1939, for example, was interpreted as demonstrating the importance of “the phenomenon of leadership in the international community.”53 The second Vienna accord of August 1940—a deal brokered by Hitler to settle territorial disputes in central Europe—illustrated the possibilities of hegemony: Germany gained rights to Romanian oil exploitation, acted as regional arbiter between Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, and created “trustee rights” over the German minorities in those countries.
German commentators hailed this last step as a vast improvement on the old League system of minority protection: these “laws for the protection of the folk-group” gave the “mother country” the right to intervene in the event of disputes between the minority and the host government; they also turned the entire “folk-group” into a collective legal entity. But such legislation looked a lot better at the height of German power in the summer of 1940 than it did a mere four years later, for it made ethnic Germans hostage to the fortunes of Hitler’s war.54
In recent years, a “little Englander” school of revisionist historians has once again suggested that an Anglo-German war was avoidable. Was there perhaps more to appeasement than subsequent criticism allows, and less, perhaps, to Churchill’s insistence on confrontation? What if no British guarantee had been given Poland in 1939? Or if Hitler’s peace feelers had not been rebuffed in the summer of 1940? Might Whitehall not have done a deal with Germany which accepted Nazi control of eastern Europe in return for the continued existence of the British Empire? Did it not, perhaps, do something similar with Stalin a few years later?
If Hitler was, as A. J. P. Taylor once famously implied, just another politician, these arguments might have some force. But what weakens Taylor’s analysis of the origins of the war is his indifference to the role of ideology. The Second World War did not start because of diplomatic misunderstanding or confusion, nor even because of Hitler’s deceit or duplicity. Rather it started because—very late in the day—Hitler’s opponents realized they were faced with “a clash of two worlds.” Berlin and London were not playing the same game, though some on both sides wished they were.55
It is true that the British Empire was ruined by the cost of fighting Hitler. What, however, is doubtful is whether it could have been saved by joining him. Germany’s own colonial agenda troubled the British, who were reluctant to buy off Nazi demands in Europe with bits of Africa. The ideological gulf between the two powers was evident here too, and Nazi colonial planners harshly criticized the British for their excessively lax racial policies. Any alliance would therefore have involved the British abandoning their liberal imperialist creed (and belief in indirect rule) for hardline racialism. Such an alliance was actually envisaged by Alfred Rosenberg, a leading Nazi ideologue—Britain and Germany together defending the white race by land and sea. It implied, however, an impossible transformation in British values: these were liberal rather than authoritarian, while British racism—which certainly existed—was based more upon culture than biology.56
The ideological gulf which existed between British and German society was revealed by the shocked British reaction to news of the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938. More than anything else up to that point, this event turned British opinion against appeasement.57 Over the next few months, the British and French governments were forced to reappraise their entire policy, even though after Munich the omens were poor. “The first part of Mr Hitler’s programme—integration of Germans into the Reich—is completed,” wrote Robert Coulondre, the new French ambassador in Berlin, in December 1938. “Now the time for Lebensraum has arrived.”58
Appeasement had been premised on the assumption that Nazi Germany was basically pursuing a revisionist agenda; the invasion of Bohemia-Moravia in March 1939 was the first sign that Hitler’s aims went beyond annexing the areas inhabited by ethnic Germans. It also indicated Hitler’s contemptuous attitude towards international agreements. In response, Britain and France belatedly sought to resuscitate the eastern security tier which they had created at Versailles by offering security guarantees to Poland and Romania. It was an unconvincing gesture.
Circumstances had changed greatly since 1919. Nazi control of the former Czechoslovakia now made strategic nonsense of an eastern alliance, while assuring Germany of the substantial resources in armaments and gold of the Czech state. There was no serious coordination of military plans between London and Paris, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Bucharest, on the other. Worse still, Russian power was restored, raising the spectre of a German-Soviet carve-up in the East. Blinkered by anti-communism—the same anti-communism which led Lord Halifax to welcome Germany as a “bastion against Bolshevism”—neither the British nor the French made a serious attempt to reach agreement with Stalin. This failure doomed the new independent states of eastern Europe, and turned the continent itself into an enormous laboratory in Nazi (and later communist) empire-building. The violence, which Europe had found it so easy to ignore when committed abroad in its name, proved harder to stomach at home.
THREE
Healthy Bodies, Sick Bodies
Ten Commandments for Choosing a Spouse:
1. Remember that you are German.
2. If of sound stock, do not remain unwed.
3. Keep your body pure.
4. Keep spirit and soul pure.
5. As a German, choose someone of German or Nordic blood for your partner.
6. When choosing your spouse, look into their lineage.
7. Health is a precondition of external beauty.
8. Marry only out of love.
9. Seek not a playmate but a partner in marriage.
10. Wish for as many children as possible.
—FROM THE HAUSBUCH FÜR DIE DEUTSCHE FAMILIE (BERLIN, N.D.)
These tips for domestic harmony came near the beginning of the Handbook for the German Family, which the Nazi authorities routinely issued to every young couple. Its excellent collection of recipes was accompanied by advice on childcare, on looking after the home, diet and racial health. A special section summarized the Nuremberg laws and carried helpful charts to clarify family bloodlines and to investigate genealogies contaminated by marriage with Jews. Domestic health and happiness—readers were reminded—were no longer merely a matter for individual choice and satisfaction. Weimar’s self-centred liberalism had been replaced by National Socialism’s concern for the community as a whole. Before the recipes came a useful saying of the Führer: “If one lacks the strength to struggle for one’s own health, one loses the right to life in this world of struggle.”
Such a book shows us values which had not only penetrated German life, but were also part of a much broader European discourse about national and family health in the inter-war years. The Third Reich might have taken this discourse to new extremes, and highlighted the role of race in a way unmatched elsewhere. But the idea that family health concerned society more generally, that the nation needed racially sound progeny, that the state should therefore intervene in private life to show people how to live—all this ran right across the political spectrum of inter-war Europe, reflecting the tensions and stresses of an insecure world in which nation-states existed in rivalry with one another, their populations decimated by one war and threatened by the prospect of another.
