Category Archives: Germany

by | 19 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Eastern Europe Under Napoleon

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 81-83:

By 1794 France’s army numbered some 800,000, giving it a superiority of 2:1 in most engagements. After pushing intruders from French territory, French troops occupied the Low Countries and Germany west of the Rhine, areas they would hold until 1815. During these years, most of Europe fought France through seven coalitions, aimed first at the Revolution, and after 1799 at the France of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant military leader who by 1804 had created a “French Empire,” consisting of an enlarged France with vassal states in Eastern and Central Europe. These states included a new Germany (Rhine Confederation), a new Poland (Duchy of Warsaw), and for the first time ever a state of South Slavs (Illyria).

Austria was a major force in the coalitions but lost decisive battles in 1805 at Austerlitz and 1809 at Wagram and had to cede territory. Still, it never endured direct French occupation, and thus its fate differed sharply from western German areas that were ruled from Paris and saw their traditional legal and social systems revolutionized. For the first time, thanks to Napoleon, everyone in Hamburg, Bremen, and much of the Rhineland was equal before the law, peasants as well as townspeople, nobles, and churchmen, and Jews with Christians. All were free to do as they wished: to move about the map, marry, and buy or sell property. With feudal privileges abolished, for the first time these Germans, regardless of background, were citizens.

Napoleon also began revolutionizing the ancient Holy Roman Empire out of existence by compensating the moderately sized German states for territories lost to the new confederation west of the Rhine with ecclesiastical and free cities east of the Rhine. Within a few years, hundreds of tiny bishoprics, abbeys, and towns had been absorbed into Bavaria, Saxony, or Baden, a crucial step in the process of creating a simpler Germany, more susceptible to unification as a modern nation-state.

In the summer of 1804, responding to Napoleon’s self-coronation as French emperor a few months earlier, Francis proclaimed himself emperor of Austria. As a Habsburg, he remained “Roman Emperor,” but as the empire approached extinction, he wanted to ensure his status on the European stage against the Corsican upstart. The technical name for the Habsburg monarchy was now the “Austrian Empire,” but the point was not to pursue an aggressive, self-confident imperial project of the sort that animated France, Britain, or Russia. The move was instead about seeming not to stand beneath a certain standard of dynastic prestige.

The self-coronation occurred not a moment too soon, as in August 1806 Napoleon declared the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire defunct, and several princes of his Rhine Confederation seceded on August 1. Five days later a proclamation was read from the balcony of the baroque Kirche am Hof in Vienna that the empire no longer existed. In fact, the empire had long been an ineffectual league of tiny entities, unable to defend the German lands. One practical consequence was that Austria’s leadership in Germany came to an end, and indeed, Germany lost all definite political form. Though it had few effective powers of administration, the empire’s constitution had balanced rights of cities and territories and in popular understanding had come to embody the nation in ways not fully tangible.

Reports from the summer of 1806 tell us that people across the German lands were outraged that a willful foreign usurper had simply disbanded the empire. The reports reveal a previously hidden emotional attachment, reminiscent of the indignation that arose in Hungary after Joseph replaced Latin with German. Like that supposedly dead language, the Holy Roman Empire provided a basic coordinate of identity. Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s otherwise buoyant mother Katharina wrote of deep unease, as if an old friend had succumbed to terminal illness. She sensed bitterness among the people of her home city of Frankfurt. For the first time in their lives—indeed for the first time in many centuries—the empire was omitted from prayers said at church, and subtle protests broke out across the German lands. Was one now simply a Prussian or Bavarian? And if one was German, what did that mean?

Rhinelanders had welcomed Napoleon’s rule because his legal code enhanced their freedoms, yet soon sympathies began to erode. The more territory France’s emperor controlled, the less he was satisfied, and the more demands grew on his “allies” for money and soldiers. And west Germans felt humiliated by French victories over the large German states to the east. In 1806 Napoleon crushed the armies of Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt, then occupied Berlin. Two years later he forced Austria to join a continental blockade of England; and when Austria rose up the following year, he again smashed it down. The ill-fated Grand Armée that attacked Russia in 1812 was one-third German, and so were its casualties.

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Filed under Austria, Britain, democracy, France, Germany, language, military, nationalism, Poland, religion, Russia, Yugoslavia

by | 18 September 2024 · 6:15 am

Nationalist Fraternities in German Universities

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 85-87:

Universities were a target because of the new nationalist fraternities, the Burschenschaften, where students, some veterans of the fighting at Leipzig, committed themselves to the German nation, sang the poetry of Arndt, and immersed themselves in the cult of the lost empire, meeting yearly in torchlight at the Wartburg, the medieval castle above Eisenach where Martin Luther had translated the Bible. What is less known in this familiar story is that the participants of these events were not only German. Jena’s faculty included Protestant theologians who attracted students from across Europe, including dozens from the Slavic lands of the Habsburg Empire.

Yet these young speakers of Slovak and Czech proved receptive to Herder’s ideas in a way that English or French intellectuals of that time were not. Indeed, Goethe had been shocked in the 1820s to learn that Herder’s thought was all but unknown in France. The reason was partly practical: French intellectuals did not need linguistic nationalism. French kings had established the boundaries of France generations earlier, and there was no doubt about where France lay, who its subjects or citizens were, or what language they should speak. The national struggle was instead about whether kings or people would rule French territory. In England, the logic of nationalism was similar.

But these Habsburg Slavs were even more insecure about their nations than were German intellectuals living in the shadow of France. Not only did they not live in national states, no names existed to describe their peoples. The thought of Herder proved more than irresistible: it was a compulsion. Aside from his message that nations truly lived through languages and not states, Herder had written of a great destiny for the Slavic peoples. His studies of history told him that the Slavic tribes that had settled Central and Eastern Europe centuries earlier had supposedly made territories fruitful that others had abandoned. Obedient and peaceful, Slavs disdained robbing and looting, but loved hosting strangers and spending time in merriment. Yet because of this openness, they had fallen victim to conquest by aggressive neighbors, in particular, Germans, who had committed “grave sins” against them. Because they were so numerous, inhabiting the vast area between Berlin and Kamchatka, he believed that history had not heard the last word from the Slavs.

At Jena, the young Slavic theologians had arrived at the center of Herder’s teaching. The patriotic historian Heinrich Luden, editor of Herder’s History of Humanity, gave lectures so popular that students listened from ladders at open windows. He said that history, properly understood, should awaken active love for the fatherland. He also held that non-German peoples had a right to national development and, astoundingly, denounced the suppression of the Czechs after the battle of White Mountain. Weimar, where Herder had lived and preached for decades and had many friends, was an easy afternoon’s walk away, and the young theologians gained access to the deceased philosopher’s personal circles.

Among their number, four became gifted poets, linguists, and historians, and they proved to be crucial for the history of East Central Europe: Ján Kollár, Ján Benedikti, Pavel Šafárik, and Juraj Palković. Kollár and Palković wrote poetry that is still read in Slovak schools, and Šafárik became one of the most influential geographers of the nineteenth century. All were of modest backgrounds: Palković and Kollár from farm families, Šafárik and Benedikti from the households of clergymen. Šafárik had upset his irascible father and was forced to live as beggar student, a “supplikant,” who spent holidays soliciting money from a list of donors supplied by school authorities. At first, none had a particular attachment to the national idea, and in keeping with the practices of the time, they enrolled in Jena according to the old sense of natio: they were “Hungarians.” Of the thirty or so students from Northern Hungary, Kollár later recalled, only he and Benedikti initially showed any interest in Czecho-Slovak literature. Later, most of the cohort Magyarized completely.

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Filed under Bohemia, democracy, Eastern Europe, education, England, France, Germany, Hungary, language, Slovakia

by | 15 September 2024 · 6:31 am

Boundaries of Eastern Europe

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 25-26:

This book ascribes no stereotypes to Eastern Europe beyond saying that it is an anti-imperial space of small peoples. In the corners of its political nightmares dwells this indistinct fear of being absorbed into larger powers. The anti-imperial struggle kept ethnic cultures alive, but it also promoted ideologies of exclusion that can become racist. The old empires, especially the Habsburg empire, inspire nostalgia, because they protected human rights and indeed nations and peoples better than did many nation-states that came later. This book uses “Eastern Europe” interchangeably with “East Central Europe” to cut down verbiage, but also because both terms are understood to refer to a band of countries that were Soviet satellites not in control of their own destinies. It denotes not so much a space on the map as shared experience, such that peoples from opposite ends of the region, despite all cultural or linguistic differences, employ a common narrative about the past. When he made his odd invocation of national survival, Viktor Orbán used words that would resonate not only in Hungary and Slovenia but also in Poland, the Czech Republic, or Serbia.

The former western republics of the Soviet Union—the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Belarus—are not included, because they formed a separate story throughout much of the period studied, subject to Sovietization that tested local cultures to a degree not seen in East Central Europe. For the same reason, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is included: this small country shared the destiny of being controlled by a superpower without being absorbed into it. But the GDR was also special. The East German regime eagerly took part in efforts to crush dissent in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980, home to small-time co-imperialists with enough hubris to tell the Motherland of socialism what socialism was really about.

The inclusion of the GDR underscores the fact that Germans cannot be thought to be outside East Central Europe, and not only because millions have lived in this space for centuries. The question of how Germany would form a nation-state after the Holy Roman Empire became defunct in 1806 has shaped the region’s fortunes and misfortunes. Bismarck’s supposed resolution of the question in the “second empire” of 1871 only exacerbated the German question by provoking a sense of abandonment among the Habsburg Germans, one in three of the total number. It was no coincidence that the original Nazi Party was founded in Bohemia in 1903. What happened when German nationalism entered Eastern European space in a time of imperial decline—first of the Holy Roman Empire, then of the Habsburg monarchy—was that it gradually moved from the old practice of absorbing Slavs into German culture to a new one of displacing them from a vast supposedly German space.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, economics, Germany, migration, nationalism, philosophy, USSR

by | 14 September 2024 · 6:41 am

East European Communist Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 17-19:

What Hitler, the “Bohemian corporal” (he was actually Austrian) achieved through his war was to make northern parts of Eastern Europe much simpler. With the aid of local collaborators, his regime segregated and then killed the overwhelming majority of East European Jews. But when the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht back to Vienna and Berlin in 1945, millions of Germans fled Eastern Europe as well, never to return. At the war’s conclusion, as a result of allied decisions, Polish and Czech authorities placed the remainder of Germans from Bohemia and eastern Germany in railway cars and deported them to a Germany that was much smaller than Bismarck’s Reich, let alone the Holy Roman Empire.

The most avid ethnic cleansers among the East Europeans were Polish and Czech Communists, and indeed, Communists everywhere proved enthusiastic nationalists. This is astounding for two reasons. First, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had little concern for national identity: workers had no fatherland. Nationhood was not a lasting site of human subjectivity but something ephemeral, which diminished in importance as capitalism advanced. They had little but derision for East Europeans wanting to create their own nation-states. Engels called the small peoples to Germany’s east “relics.” Czechs were destined to be “absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations whose greater vitality enabled them to overcome greater obstacles.” Other “remnants of bygone Slavonian peoples” slotted for assimilation included Serbs, Croats, and Slovaks. In 1852, Engels blithely predicted that the next world war would cause entire reactionary peoples to “disappear from the face of the earth.”

Second, when the world divided into two camps, appearances suggested that there was little room for East European nationalism. By 1949, every state in the region seemed to be a miniature USSR, with the same sort of ruling Communist Party, five-year plan, economy based on heavy industry, collectivized agriculture, and socialist realism. Few Poles or Hungarians, even within the Party, doubted that the annual pageant in red of May Day reflected doctrines and practices whose nerve center was in Moscow. For the first time, millions of East Europeans learned Russian, and many became as proficient in copying Soviet reality as they could. Hundreds of thousands became “self-Sovietizers,” even holding their cigarettes the Russian way, or dressing in the militaristic style of the Bolshevik party. The Yugoslav Communists, with red stars on their caps, went so far that the Soviets tried to hold them back.

But these states were not Soviet replicas, nor were they (unlike Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Belorussia) actual parts of the Soviet Union. Beyond the façades of May Day processions in Warsaw in 1949, one saw banners in Polish, not Russian, and placards honoring Polish heroes. A few blocks from the parade route the Polish socialist state, governed by a Marxian party, was lovingly resurrecting old Warsaw, razed by the Nazis in 1944. This included rebuilding many of its churches, according to plans from the eighteenth century, with attention to the details of a saint’s halo. Bookstores across the state socialist world stocked romantic authors like Jan Kollár, but also the Polish, Hungarian, or Romanian national bards Adam Mickiewicz, Sándor Petofi, and Vasile Alecsandri; the philologists Ljudevit Gaj and Vuk Karadžić; and the ethnographer Pavel Šafárik, who had studied theology with Kollár in Jena. In Poland’s west, the state fostered the destruction of all signs of the German past, including cemeteries, and proclaimed the new territories Polish to the core, though they had been German for centuries.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, Germany, language, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, USSR, war

by | 9 July 2024 · 7:53 am

Japanese Navy in the Persian Gulf, 1990

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle p. 143:

Japan’s final contributions [to the 1990 war on Iraq] totaled $13 billion. Only three countries had spent more: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Japan had also frozen Iraqi assets and embargoed Iraqi oil. And its initial financial commitment in August of 1990 beat Germany’s announcement by ten days. Nonetheless, it was, as critics had charged, largely “checkbook diplomacy,” which incurred no substantial risk to the Japanese people.

The deployment of minesweepers, even after the hostilities were over, was a signal departure from the policies of the past. [Prime Minister] Kaifu was forced to deploy them without the aid of any legislation from the Diet, claiming that they were not going to a war zone but would be in international waters, merely clearing obstacles for international shipping. It would take some time for the Japanese public and the parliament to come around. The LDP leaders believed, however, that if the minesweeping mission was successful, the public would support a substantial change in defense policy and allow the SDF to be deployed on other missions.

Six ships and a crew of 511 made the trip to the Persian Gulf. The vessels were small but relatively modern. The largest of the six was a ship-tender of 8,000 tons. The mine warfare ships were just 510 tons and did indeed have wooden hulls. But then, recent minesweepers all had wooden hulls as a precaution against magnetic devices.

The minesweepers probably would not have been more useful had they been sent sooner. Before the UN deadline expired, little minesweeping was done because the allied commander did not want to risk touching off an early confrontation. After the deadline expired, minesweeping was mainly to give the appearance that the allies might make an amphibious assault on the Kuwaiti coast. Japan might have joined the allied minesweepers somewhat sooner but even its arrival in late May was useful. Iraq had dropped over a thousand mines in a long swath off the Kuwaiti coast. It took more than two dozen minesweepers and ten support ships from eight different countries over four months to clean up the mess.

According to a map in the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force Museum in Kure (near Hiroshima), Japan itself laid 55,347 mines to defend its perimeter: 15,474 along the Tokai and southwestern island chain, 14,927 in the northern Honshu and Shikoku regions, 10,012 along the coast of Kyushu, 7,640 along the south coast of Korea and across the Yellow Sea, and 7,294 around Taiwan.

The same map shows that the U.S. laid most of its 10,703 naval mines in the Inland Sea and along the Japan Sea coast (to destroy economic supply routes). When we visited the museum in 2015, a total of 297 American naval mines from World War Two remained unaccounted for. Mine disposal efforts continue to this day.

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Filed under economics, Germany, Iraq, Japan, Middle East, military, U.S., war

by | 7 July 2024 · 8:27 am

Japan vs. Germany in the Pacific

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 80-84:

The European war that began in August 1914 was more than European. Though it was the great European powers that immolated themselves in both victory and defeat, the war was fought around the globe and had immediate consequences for Asia and Japan.

The requirements of the European war were such that Britain, France, Germany, and Russia had to redeploy the troops maintaining their empires in Asia to the European theater of war. At the same time, they all wanted to defend those parts of their empires they could while depriving the enemy of his. Japan was Germany’s foe in this war and a very useful ally of Britain. The war was the final denouement of the tsarist regime in Russia and, when the Bolshevik Revolution had run its course, it would present Japan with a new, virulent, and formidable neighboring regime. Moreover, the successful Marxist revolution in Russia would embolden the nascent communist party in China just as the Bolshevik regime would aid and abet the Chinese revolutionaries who would one day make their own revolution and reshape Japan’s geopolitical reality. In the meanwhile, it was Japan that had an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the geopolitical contours of Asia.

Japan entered the war without hesitation on the side of Britain, sending an ultimatum to Germany on August 15 demanding that Germany withdraw all naval forces from Asian waters, disarm those not withdrawn, and turn over to Japan the whole of Germany’s Chinese territory. A week later, Japan blockaded the German-controlled port of Tsingtao and in early September Japan landed a force in order to assault the port from the rear. By November 7, 1914, Japan had taken the base at Tsingtao. At the same time, Japan also took over Germany’s other Pacific territories and bases, including the Marshall Islands, the Mariana Islands, Palau, and the Caroline Islands, prizes Japan kept as rewards for its participation in the war against Germany. The former German possessions gave Japan’s navy an orientation very different than it had before. Japan’s armed forces were arrayed across the Sea of Japan to China and the continent and, for the first time, had far-flung bases and possessions southward and eastward across the world’s largest ocean.

It is a common view of historians that Japan’s participation in the war was solely to further its territorial ambitions. A typical summary of the period opines that “the Japanese Empire was keen to make the most of the golden opportunity which Germany’s occupation with European events provided. . . . She proceeded to seize every Germany territory in the Pacific she could lay her hands on.” Doubtless this view comes from the Twenty-One Demands that Japan made on China—actually a series of memos that pressed the Chinese to give to Japan the same concessions they had given to Germany, plus several additional ones. The memos put Japan at odds with the United States, which was lamely arguing to restore China’s territorial integrity. In fact, the memoirs of Germany’s Kaiser, written after the war, support this view: “the rapid rise of Tsing-tao as a trading center aroused the envy of the Japanese. . . . Envy prompted England in 1914 to demand that Japan should take Tsing-tao. . . . Japan did this joyfully.”

Yet few history books note Japan’s contributions to the allied effort against Germany. All the great powers, most especially the United States, were apprehensive about Japan’s potential to become the dominant power not only in China but in the Pacific. Germany even briefly tried to pit the anxieties of the North American power against Japan in an effort to save Germany’s Pacific possessions. Britain too was ambivalent about Japan, first demanding that Japan enter the war immediately, then trying to limit the scope of Japan’s operations. But it must be said that Japan adhered to both the letter and spirit of the alliance it had made with Great Britain. In addition to joining the war immediately and taking Germany’s Asian bases, Japan served a number of other roles. First, Japan’s navy helped Britain drive German warships from the Pacific. The Japanese Imperial navy also allowed Britain, and later the United States, to minimize their forces in the Pacific, freeing those ships for duty in waters surrounding Europe. Further, Japan escorted convoys of troops and war materials from the British dominions in the Pacific to Europe—no small task in an era of mine and submarine warfare. Meanwhile, Japanese yards produced both ships of war and merchantmen for British allies. And beginning in 1917, Japan sent two flotillas of destroyers to the Mediterranean Sea to assist Britain in antisubmarine operations and escort troop transports. In the Mediterranean theater alone, the Imperial navy had thirty-two engagements with submarines and escorted a total of 788 allied ships.

One of the few who gave Japan its due was Winston Churchill, who served as Britain’s first lord of the admiralty and wrote a prodigious history of the war. To him Japan was “another island empire situated on the other side of the globe” and “a trustworthy friend.” Similarly, Lord Grey, who served as Britain’s foreign secretary, wrote that “Japan was for us for many, many years a fair, honorable, and loyal Ally.” Nonetheless, when the time came for postwar negotiations, Churchill and Grey were out of office and Britain had obligations to Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, who had all given Britain their firm support in the war.

The Australians and New Zealanders, chips off the Anglo block, were alarmed by Japan’s reach in the Pacific at the war’s end in 1918, and equally aware of Britain’s diminished naval strength. They insisted Japan give up any of the former German holdings south of the equator. Likewise, the United States apprehended Japan, its navy, and its extensive Pacific outposts as a maritime rival and a potential threat to free trade in Asia. As a result, Japan, the United States, Britain, and its oceanic dominions now found themselves in a peculiar geographical and political puzzle.

Japan was Britain’s ally, had built a formidable navy, and had acquired far-flung Pacific bases. Australia and New Zealand were dependable British dominions but strongly preferred to have their security guaranteed by the motherland rather than by Japan. The United States never had a peacetime alliance with Britain, but Britain valued U.S. friendship, and the two democratic, commercial, naval powers sat astride the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, Japanese and American interests and possessions in the Pacific were not separated by any discernible boundary and the two powers viewed each other as rivals. The Americans also insisted on an “Open Door” trading policy in China but Japan clearly had gained the upper hand over the Europeans in that chaotic country.

The Americans had some reason to be concerned about Japan’s new position in the northwest Pacific. Japan had been consolidating its control in southern Manchuria and Korea, had taken over Shantung, and had won most of its twenty-one demands from China. The Open Door policy, the idea that outside powers would compete on equal terms in China and respect its sovereignty, was seriously threatened by Japan’s increasingly advantageous position. Government in China was becoming ever more fragmented and corrupt.

The American government also had domestic pressures to deal with in regard to Asian policy. Navalists saw British power fading and Japanese power expanding. The trend seemed to be toward Japanese dominance in the Pacific. Likewise, American traders wanted the government to take a more aggressive stance that would give them some advantage—or at least, not put them at such a disadvantage in Asia in general and in China in particular. Christian missionaries were also keen to set to work on the vast populations now accessible to their gospel. But worst of all, and most outspoken, the racist Anti-Immigration League in California made barring Japanese immigrants from schools, jobs, and property the sine qua non of their agenda and, consequently, of California politics. The Californians now found allies in various anti-immigration societies in the eastern United States as well as in worker unions and even in recent European immigrants who feared the Asians would not only drive down wages but take their jobs. Thus, the nascent Japanese-American rivalry found expression even at the level of local politics.

Complicating matters further, the Western allies, including Japan, still had troops in Siberia. Their intervention there was a confused, fruitless, and embarrassing attempt to stave the Bolshevik Revolution, or rescue the Czech freedom fighters, or prop up an alternative government, or prevent the massive resources of Siberia from falling into somebody else’s hands, or something similar. Everyone, except perhaps the Japanese, was ready to leave Siberia but not so willing to leave first and allow Japan a free hand. Consequently, the peace conference at the palace Versailles was an infamous mess.

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Filed under Australia, Britain, China, Germany, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, New Zealand, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 8 June 2024 · 9:35 am

U.S. Enlists Mafia to Invade Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 316-317:

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Mussolini declared his support for Hitler, with whom he had concluded the so-called Pact of Steel four months before. He did not immediately declare war—the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, having warned him that Italy simply did not have enough tanks, armored cars and aircraft. To get involved in the European conflict at this point would, said Badoglio, be tantamount to suicide. Nine months later, however, the situation had changed dramatically. Norway, Belgium and Holland had been invaded; France was falling. On June 10 Italy declared war. Mussolini had hoped to help himself to Savoy, Nice, Corsica, Tunisia and Algeria from the French, but to his disgust Germany signed an armistice establishing the collaborationist government under Marshal Pétain at Vichy, which retained control over southern France and all its colonies.

So far as North Africa was concerned, only Egypt was left; and in September 1940 the Duce sent a large Italian force across the Libyan border. The British troops stationed in Egypt were at first hopelessly outnumbered; their counterattack, however, proved far more successful than expected and resulted in massive numbers of prisoners. So decisive was the Italian defeat that Hitler was obliged to send out his Afrikakorps, under the command of General Erwin Rommel. Only then did the British lose the initiative, ultimately to regain it at the Battle of El Alamein in October–November 1942.

The story of the Desert War is not ours, but it exemplifies the several successive humiliations suffered by Italy between 1940 and 1943. Mussolini’s invasion of Greece in October 1940 once again forced Hitler to send troops to his rescue; and by the beginning of 1943 disaster threatened him from every side. Half the Italian troops serving in Russia had been annihilated; both his North African and his Balkan adventures had been dismal failures. The Italians had had enough. Then, in July 1943, the Allies launched an operation which, as well as giving them a foothold in Europe, promised to remove Mussolini from the scene for good. They invaded Sicily.

For Sicily, hitherto, the war had been disastrous. As an island, it had suffered even more acutely than the rest of Italy. The ferryboats to the mainland were disrupted; the export market largely disappeared, while imports became irregular and uncertain; sometimes the Sicilians had found themselves with virtually nothing to eat but their own oranges. The rationing system was a bad joke; the black market reigned supreme. For the Mafia, on the other hand, conditions could hardly have been better. With a good deal of help from its branches in New York and Chicago, in the last years of peace it had already begun a swift recovery from the Mori reign of terror; and by 1943, whatever Mussolini might have said or believed, it was flourishing.

American intelligence officers, somewhat better informed than the Duce, understood that for the projected invasion to be successful it was vitally important to have the Mafia firmly on the Allied side. They therefore made careful approaches to the dominant boss of gangland crime in the United States, a Sicilian named Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano. He had in fact been in prison since 1936 on compulsory prostitution charges, but was still very much in command. In late 1942, after long discussions, the two sides struck a deal. Luciano would have his sentence commuted; in return, he made two promises. The first was that his friend Albert Anastasia, who ran the notorious Murder Inc. and who also controlled the American docks, would protect the waterfront and prevent dockworker strikes for the duration of hostilities. The second was that he, Luciano, would contact other friends in Sicily, who would in turn ensure that the invasion would run as smoothly as possible.

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Filed under Africa, Germany, Italy, Mediterranean, migration, nationalism, U.S., war

by | 1 June 2024 · 5:14 pm

Bismarck Unites Italy

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 297-298:

In 1866 the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck found Austria to be a serious obstacle to the realization of his dream of uniting all the German states into a single empire. He therefore forged an alliance with the new kingdom of Italy: the two would attack Austria simultaneously on two fronts. In the event of victory, Italy’s reward would be Venice and the Veneto. A single battle was enough. It was fought on July 3 at Sadowa—also known by its German name of Königgrätz—some sixty-five miles northeast of Prague, and it engaged the greatest number of troops—some 330,000—ever assembled on a European battlefield. The Prussian victory was total. It bankrupted the military resources of the Emperor Franz Josef and opened the way to Vienna. The ensuing armistice duly resulted in the cession of the promised territory. Venice was no longer the independent republic that she had once been, but she was at least an Italian city rather than an Austrian one; and Italy could boast a new and economically invaluable port on the northern Adriatic.

The unity of Italy, however, could not be achieved without Rome; and Rome too was acquired by courtesy of Bismarck, who had cunningly drawn France into a war by his threat to place a prince of the ruling Prussian House of Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain—a proposal clearly unacceptable to the French, who would have then found themselves completely surrounded by Germany. War was therefore declared—by France, not Prussia—on July 15, 1870. It was to prove a bitter struggle; Napoleon III was going to need every soldier he had for the fighting that lay ahead. Thus, by the end of August, not one French soldier remained in Rome. Pope Pius IX was left defenseless. Napoleon’s defeat at Sedan on September 1 spelled the end of the Second Empire; and on September 20 the Italian army entered the Holy City. The Pope withdrew inside the walls of the Vatican, where he remained for the last eight years of his life. The plebiscite that was held shortly afterward registered 133,681 votes in favor of the incorporation of Rome into the new kingdom and 1,507 against. Rome was now part of Italy, not by right of conquest but by the will of its people; and the kingdom of Italy, under its sovereign King Victor Emmanuel II, finally took its place among the nations of Europe.

As the voting figures showed, the Sicilians were as happy as their new compatriots. They were, after all, a good deal more Italian than Spanish, and even though their King was a Piedmontese—a man of the mountains rather than of the sea, and hailing from as far from Sicily as it was possible to go while remaining an Italian—there seemed a fair chance that they would be allowed to play a larger part in their own affairs than they had in the past. They hoped so, anyway.

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Filed under Austria, France, Germany, Italy, military, nationalism, religion, Spain, war

by | 5 May 2024 · 6:20 am

Who Killed Weimar Democracy?

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 673-678:

Given all the cumulative problems it faced, it is surprising Weimar democracy lasted as long as it did, but we need to remember that it endured longer than Hitler’s Third Reich. The period from 1918 to 1923 was politically and economically turbulent, but democracy survived. Between 1924 and 1929, the economy stabilised, Germany regained international respectability, and democratic rule was never threatened. Even in the period of deep political and economic crisis between 1930 and 1933, during the time of authoritarian ‘presidential rule’, there was no attempt to overthrow the Republic.

The commonly held view is that the ‘Great Depression’ led to the collapse of Weimar democracy, and brought Hitler to power, is not credible. The USA and Britain suffered economic problems often as difficult as those of Germany, but democracy did not collapse in either of those countries. This suggests there was something specific about the nature of the political and economic crisis that was peculiar to Germany at this time.

The two decisive ingredients in the period from 1930 to 1933 were the supreme indifference of President Hindenburg, and his inner circle, to sustain democratic government, and the dramatic rise in electoral support for Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP. It was a toxic mixture of these two factors, operating at a time of deep economic depression, which ensured Germany’s experiment with democracy failed.

Yet the seeds of the Weimar’s democratic tragedy were planted by the type of democratic system established after the November Revolution of 1918, and embedded into the Weimar Constitution of 1919. The November Revolution was a very strange one indeed, which left Germany’s judicial, bureaucratic, and military elite largely intact. Weimar judges punished those on the Left with harsh sentences, while treating radicals on the Right very leniently, and the Reichswehr remained a law unto itself, being more preoccupied with shaking off the military restrictions placed upon it by the Treaty of Versailles than defending democracy.

One of the essential ingredients for the successful transition from an authoritarian to a democratic form of government is the existence of a strong, resilient party of the moderate Right, committed to the ideals of democracy. In Britain, the Conservative Party fulfilled this role, evolving from the late 19th century into a mainstay of the British party system. In Germany, no such party was able to take on that stabilising role. The leading conservative party in Germany was the DNVP. Between 1919 and 1930, its voter support reached a high point of 20.5 per cent and 103 seats in the December 1924 election, but then fell to a low point of 7 per cent at the September 1930 election, when it gained just 41 seats. During the Weimar era, the DNVP was a bitter opponent of Weimar democracy, with a leader in Alfred Hugenberg who moved the party to the extreme Right.

Germany’s military defeat in the Great War also cast a giant shadow over the Weimar Republic. The ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth, which held that Germany was not defeated on the battlefield, but betrayed by Liberals, Jews and Socialists on the home front, remained a powerful one. Some of these negative feelings fed into the general hatred of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The inclusion of Article 231, known as the ‘war-guilt clause’, seemed particularly vindictive. Add in the bill for reparations and you have a perfect recipe for deeply held animosity towards democracy. Any government forced to sign such a treaty would have been unpopular, but the fact this task fell to the SPD-led coalition government was deeply damaging for the stability of democracy. The tag ‘November Criminals’ was hung around the necks of those politicians who had instigated the fall of the Kaiser and were responsible for the establishment of democracy.

There were also two aspects of the Weimar Constitution which undoubtedly contributed to the failure of democracy. The first was the voting system, based on proportional representation, which gave Reichstag seats in exact proportion to the votes cast in elections. In Germany, this system did not work. In July 1932, 27 different political parties contested the election, ranging across the political spectrum, with each representing one class or interest group. These differing parties reflected the bitter divisions in German society and made the task of creating stable coalition governments extremely difficult, and eventually impossible. Some coalitions took weeks to form, but could fall apart in days. The last functioning Weimar coalitions were those led by SPD Chancellor Herman Müller between 1928 and 1930, involving the SPD, Zentrum, the DDP, the DVP, but they finally broke apart over the increasing payments of unemployment benefits.

The Weimar Republic also lacked the one key factor that made democracy stable in the USA and Britain – that is, a two-party system, with one left-wing liberal democratic and one conservative party, alternating in periods of power, with each loyal to the democratic system. If there had been a first-past-the-post electoral constituency system, as operated in Britain, then probably a small number of parties would have ruled, and there would have been a better chance of stable government, although given the deep differences between the Weimar political parties that is by no means certain.

Those who drafted the Weimar Constitution were unwittingly culpable in offering a means of destroying democracy. This was the special powers the Weimar Constitution invested in the role of the President. No one realised when drafting the Constitution how an anti-democratic holder of the post could subvert the power of the President. Article 48 gave the German President extensive subsidiary powers in a ‘state of emergency’ to appoint and dismiss Chancellors and cabinets, to dissolve the Reichstag, call elections and suspend civil rights. The two German presidents of the Weimar years were quite different. Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert was an enthusiastic supporter of Weimar democracy. He used Article 48 on 136 occasions during the period 1918 to 1925, but always with the intention of sustaining the Republic by preventing coup attempts, not with the aim of undermining or threatening its existence. Paul von Hindenburg, elected in 1925, was a great contrast. He was a right-wing figure, who had led Germany’s militaristic armed forces during the Great War of 1914–1918. Up until March 1930, Hindenburg never used Article 48 at all. Henceforth, influenced by a small inner circle of advisers, all militaristic and authoritarian in outlook, he appointed Chancellors of his own choosing, who remained in power using emergency powers granted under Article 48.

It was President Hindenburg, therefore, who mortally damaged the infant democratic structure in Germany more than anyone else. It was not the Constitution or the voting system that was the fundamental problem, but the culpable actions of Hindenburg, who chose to deliberately subvert the power it had invested in him. Hindenburg appointed three Chancellors between 1930 and 1933: Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen, and Kurt von Schleicher, all of whom governed using emergency decrees granted by the President.

The political crisis after 1930 was deliberately manufactured by Hindenburg, who refused to involve Social Democrats in government, who were the strongest supporters of democracy. It must not be forgotten, however, that from 1930 onwards Adolf Hitler was the single most dynamic and popular politician in Germany. He united the voters on the Right of German politics in a way no other politician had been able to do so since the beginning of the Weimar years. The NSDAP managed to be anti-elitist and anti-capitalist while at the same time being patriotic and nationalist. The spectacular voting rise of the NSDAP from 2.63 per cent of voters in national elections in 1928, to 18.3 per cent in 1930, then to a high point of 37.3 in July 1932, was on a scale never seen in a democratic election before.

It was not by elections that Hitler finally came to power, however, but he would not have even been considered as a potential German Chancellor without his huge electoral support. A total of 13.74 million people voted for Hitler of their own free will in July 1932. Solid middle-class groups, usually the cement that holds together democratic governments, decided to support a party openly promising to destroy democracy. This mass electoral support was the decisive factor that propelled Hitler to a position where he could be offered power. Hitler’s party grew because millions of Germans felt democratic government had been a monumental failed experiment. To these voters, Hitler offered the utopian vision of creating an authoritarian ‘national community’ that would sweep away the seeming chaos and instability of democratic government, and provide strong leadership.

Yet Hindenburg needed a great deal of persuading before he finally made Hitler the Chancellor of a ‘national coalition’. It was former Chancellor Franz von Papen who played the most decisive role in convincing Hindenburg that Hitler could be ‘tamed’ by being invited to lead a cabinet of conservatives. By then, the only alternative to Hitler taking on the role was for Hindenburg to grant Schleicher, the current Chancellor, the power to declare a ‘state of emergency’, ban the Communists and National Socialists, suspend the Reichstag indefinitely and rule with the support of the Reichswehr. Behind-the-scenes intrigues and the personal rivalry between Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher were also factors that played a crucial role in bringing Hitler to power. But it was Hindenburg’s decision in March 1930 to create a presidential authoritarian right-wing regime that was the most decisive step that opened a path towards this solution.

The real problem Hindenburg faced was that the three previous Chancellors, Brüning, Papen and Schleicher, had no popular legitimacy, and no parliamentary support. Hindenburg’s presidential rule had taken Germany down a blind alley. The only politician who could add popularity to Hindenburg’s faltering presidential regime was Adolf Hitler. It was the decision to appoint the NSDAP leader as Chancellor which put the final nail in the coffin of Weimar democracy, and opened the path to catastrophe for Germany and the world. Hindenburg had been the gravedigger and the undertaker.

The history of the Weimar Years is therefore a warning sign of how a democracy under poor leadership can drift towards a form of authoritarian rule that ultimately destroys it, under the pressure of economic crisis and unrelenting political instability. This is a question that continues to engage us today.

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by | 1 May 2024 · 2:23 pm

Political Violence in Germany, 1932

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 597-599:

Out on the streets, there was an alarming increase in violence between the National Socialists and the Communists. Yet the idea Germany was nearing civil war after 1929 has been greatly exaggerated. On 12 October, the Liberal-left newspaper Die Welt am Montag (The World on Monday) published statistics, based on official sources and newspaper reports, on those killed and injured during political clashes since the beginning of 1923 to July 1931. These revealed that 457 people had been killed, and 1,154 had been injured in the period. However, just over half of those fatalities (236), and one-third of those injured (462), had occurred in 1923 alone. Between 1924 and 1928, the period of economic stability, there had been 66 fatalities and 266 injured. From 1929 to July 1931, the number of deaths increased to 155, with 426 injured. Violence was certainly on the rise after 1930, but it never reached the levels of the 1919 to 1923 period. A closer look at the post-1929 statistics reveals which side suffered more victims. The Communists and Left radicals suffered 108 deaths since 1929, while in the same period, right-wing organisations, including the National Socialists, suffered 31 dead. There were only eight fatalities among pro-republican groups such as the SPD-led Reichsbanner. There were also 10 police officers killed. Most violent clashes resulting in death involved the National Socialists and Communists.

This picture can be confirmed in greater detail with the help of statistical surveys, and police reports in the German state of Saxony. In 1929, there were 51 recorded Communist–NSDAP clashes, in 1929, this jumped to 172, and then hit 229 in 1931. The most violent clashes happened during indoor meetings. There was, however, a noticeable difference in how the police dealt with these violent confrontations. The police acted against Communist ‘troublemakers’ far more often than against National Socialists. In 1929, the ratio of police interventions was 30 KPD to 11 NSDAP; in 1930, it was 121 KPD to 32 NSDAP, and, in 1931, it was 140 KPD to 63 NSDAP. It was only during 1932 that political violence really escalated, with the Prussian Ministry of the Interior recording 155 deaths; of these 55 belonged to the NSDAP and 54 to the KPD.

The information on weapons seized by police during NSDAP– KPD clashes shows that in 1929 the police confiscated only two guns and eight knives, a figure that rose to 17 guns and 181 other weapons in 1930, but in 1931 this fell to 5 guns and 78 other weapons. This is in stark contrast to the earlier Weimar era, from 1918 to 1923, when firearms featured heavily in clashes between Left and Right. As bad as violence was after 1929, it would be totally misleading to suggest the police could not contain it or that Germany was nearing civil war. In rural areas, there were hardly any violent clashes which resulted in fatalities at all.

The front line of Left–Right violent confrontations after 1929 was primarily in the big cities. Communists felt they ruled the working-class urban streets. Any place that was home to large numbers of industrial workers was prepared to violently resist the advance of the National Socialists on the streets. Communists rarely took action to break up Social Democratic political meetings, except for a few large-scale events, mainly organised by the Reichsbanner. In contrast, Communists adopted a proactive approach whenever the National Socialists held rallies and meetings in the big cities. Most of these violent confrontations occurred during and after indoor meetings. Communists initiated most of them, keen to emphasise National Socialists were not welcome in working-class areas. Well-organised Communist gangs arrived in force at NSDAP meetings, hell bent on violence. The police authorities, however, had a broad spectrum of special powers to break up or ban demonstrations.

As violence escalated, a culture of political martyrdom emerged, with those killed on both sides receiving elaborate funerals attended by thousands of activists.

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