Category Archives: religion

by Joel | 12 May 2024 · 5:54 am

Norman Conquest of Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 64-66:

The Normans were now effectively on its very doorstep; there was nothing to prevent their marching into the Holy City itself. Pope Leo IX resolved to move first. He raised an army, and led it in person against them. The two forces met on June 17, 1053, near Civitate, on the bank of the Fortore River, and the Pope was defeated. The Normans treated him with every courtesy and conducted him to Benevento, where they kept him for almost a year while a modus vivendi for the future was worked out. Its details need not concern us here; suffice it to say that just six years later, in the little town of Melfi, Pope Nicholas II invested Robert Guiscard with the dukedoms of Apulia, Calabria—and Sicily.

BY JUST WHAT TITLE the Pope so munificently bestowed on the Normans territories which had never before been claimed by him or his predecessors is open to doubt. Apulia and Calabria were questionable enough, but with regard to Sicily Nicholas was on still shakier ground, since the island had never been subject to papal control. It was unlikely, however, that such considerations bothered the Normans overmuch. By that third investiture, the Pope had issued Robert with an open invitation. Sicily, lying green and fertile little more than a stone’s throw from the mainland, was the obvious objective, the natural completion of that great southward sweep that had brought the Normans down the peninsula. It was also the lair of Saracen pirates, still a perennial menace to the Italian coastal towns of the south and west. While Sicily remained in the hands of the heathen, how could the Duke of Calabria and Apulia ever ensure the security of his newly legalized dominions?

To the local populations, the progeny of old Tancred de Hauteville must have seemed almost infinite. Already no fewer than seven of his sons had made their mark in Italy; and still this remarkable source showed no sign of exhaustion, for there now appeared on the scene an eighth brother, Roger. He was the youngest of the Hautevilles, at this time some twenty-six years old; but as a fighter he was a match for any, while as a statesman he was the greatest of them all. His brother Robert quickly recognized his qualities. As a recent arrival, Roger had not yet acquired any territorial responsibilities; he would clearly be the perfect second-in-command for the coming Sicilian expedition.

In the early spring of 1060 Robert and Roger together forced the surrender of the Byzantine garrison in Reggio, the Calabrian town that faces Sicily across the Strait of Messina. Now the only Italian city still in Greek hands was Bari, too far away on the Adriatic to cause any trouble; the way was clear. The Pope had given his blessing, the Western Empire was as powerless as the Eastern to intervene. Even in Sicily itself the situation seemed relatively favorable. In many areas the local population was still Christian—though of the Orthodox persuasion—and likely to welcome the invaders as liberators. As for the Muslims, they were certainly brave fighters, but they were now more than ever divided among themselves. It did not look as though the Norman conquest of Sicily would take very long.

In fact, from first to last it took thirty-one years—in notable contrast to the Norman conquest of England just six years later, which mopped up the Saxon opposition in a matter of months. This cannot all be attributed to the valor of the Saracen armies; it was due principally to the rebellious barons in Apulia, who divided Robert’s energies and resources at a time when he desperately needed all he had for Sicily. And yet, paradoxically, it was these Apulian preoccupations that made Sicily the brilliant and superbly organized kingdom that it later became. As Robert was obliged to spend more and more time on the mainland, so the campaign in Sicily fell increasingly under the control of his brother, until Roger could finally assume effective supremacy. This was to lead to the division of Robert’s domains and so allowed Roger, finally freed of Apulian responsibilities, to devote to the island the attention it deserved.

On January 10, 1072, the brothers made their formal entry into Palermo. Subjection of the island was still by no means complete. Independent emirates struggled on in Syracuse and Trapani, but henceforth final pacification could be only a matter of time. Robert Guiscard as Duke of Sicily claimed suzerainty over the island, but with his two mainland dukedoms to look after could never remain there long; Roger would be the effective ruler, with the title of Great Count. Sicily was to be effectively transformed. Since the first half of the ninth century it had been wholly or largely in Muslim hands, constituting a forward outpost of Islam from which raiders, pirates and the occasional expeditionary force had maintained an unremitting pressure against the southern bastions of Christendom. For some 250 years, separately and in combination, the two great empires had striven in vain to subdue them; Robert and Roger, with a handful of followers, had succeeded in barely a decade. Moreover, the Norman conquest of Sicily was, together with the contemporary beginnings of the Reconquista in Spain, the first step in the immense Christian reaction against the Muslim-held lands of the southern Mediterranean—that reaction which was shortly to develop into the colossal, if ultimately empty, epic of the Crusades.

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by Joel | 10 May 2024 · 4:44 am

Arab Conquest of Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 58-59:

Sicily, like neighboring Calabria, became a haven for refugees from the iconoclast movement in the empire; but in the ninth it was shattered. The Arabs had waited long enough. They had by now occupied the entire length of the North African coast, and had already been harassing the island with sporadic raiding. Then in 827 they saw their chance of achieving permanent occupation. The local Byzantine Governor, Euphemius by name, had recently been dismissed from his post and recalled to Constantinople after an unseemly elopement with a local nun. His reply was to rise in revolt and proclaim himself Emperor, appealing to the Arabs for aid. They landed in strength, rapidly entrenched themselves, took little notice of Euphemius—who soon came to a violent end—and three years later stormed Palermo, making it their capital. Subsequent progress was slow. Messina fell in 843; Syracuse suffered a long and terrible siege, during which the defenders were finally reduced to cannibalism. The city surrendered only in 878. After this the Byzantines seem to have admitted defeat. A few isolated outposts in the eastern part of the island held out a little longer—the last, Rometta, even into the middle of the tenth century—but on that June day when the banner of the Prophet was raised over Syracuse, Sicily became, to all intents and purposes, a part of the Muslim world.

Once the wars of conquest were over and the country had settled again, life continued pleasantly enough for most of the Greek Christian communities. Although they had to endure a degree of discrimination as second-class citizens, they were normally allowed to keep their freedom, on payment of an annual tribute which many must have preferred to the heavy taxation and compulsory military service imposed by the Roman Empire. Meanwhile the Saracens displayed, as so often throughout their history, a degree of religious toleration which permitted the churches and monasteries and the long tradition of Hellenistic scholarship to flourish as much as ever they had done. In other ways too the island benefited from its conquerors. They brought with them a whole new system of agriculture, based on such innovations as terracing and siphon aqueducts for irrigation. They introduced cotton and papyrus, melon and pistachio, citrus and date palm and enough sugarcane to make possible, within a very few years, a substantial export trade. Under the Byzantines Sicily had never played an important part in European commerce, but with the Saracen conquest it soon became one of the major trading centers of the Mediterranean, with Christian, Muslim and Jewish merchants all thronging the bazaars of Palermo.

And yet, among the many blessings conferred upon Sicily by her Arab conquerors, that of stability was conspicuously absent. As the links of loyalty which bound the Emir of Palermo and his fellow chieftains to the North African caliphate grew ever more tenuous, the emirs themselves lost their cohesive force; they became increasingly divided against one another, and so the island found itself once again a battleground of warring factions. It was this steady political decline that was to bring the Greeks in strength back to Sicily—together with their Norman allies.

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by Joel | 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 Joel | 28 April 2024 · 1:12 pm

Weimar Elections of 1930

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 552-554:

Given the horrors that followed, it now seems impossible to understand why German people of their own free will could vote in such large numbers for a party pledged to destroy democracy. In Dresden, Victor Klemperer, an academic at Dresden University, wrote in his diary: ‘107 National Socialists. What a humiliation! How close are we to civil war!’ In contrast, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency there was no reason for despair over Hitler’s strong showing in the national elections because ‘it was only a symptom, not necessarily of anti-Jewish hatred, but was caused by unemployment and economic misery within the ranks of misguided youth’.

It seems 24 per cent of NSDAP voters were voting in an election for the first time, many of them young people and pensioners, 22 per cent of new NSDAP voters had previously voted for the DNVP, with 18 per cent moving from the middle-class liberal parties, and 14 per cent from the Social Democrats. In sum, the biggest movement of voters to the NSDAP came from the middle-class conservative and liberal parties, and the party received the least swing votes from the KPD and Zentrum. There was also a strong reluctance to vote NSDAP in the big cities with large working-class industrial workers.

The most impressive gains for the NSDAP were in Protestant rural areas, especially those of northern and eastern Germany stretching from Schleswig-Holstein to East Prussia. The party performed very well in large northern states such as Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Hanover, Brunswick and Oldenburg, and achieved comparable results in predominantly Protestant Franconia and Hesse-Nassau. Voting support in these areas came primarily from elements of the lower middle class: small shopkeepers, farmers, self-employed tradespeople such as builders, plumbers, electricians and joiners, but there was also an upswing of support from middle-class white-collar workers, lower civil servants, teachers and university students. It was these who would represent the party’s core voters during its rise to power, but the NSDAP was not simply a ‘middle-class protest party,’ as was once thought. It is now clear Hitler’s party was able to gain support from all sections of society in a way the other political parties could not.

It was not, as is often supposed, primarily economic misery that drove voters to the NSDAP. Hitler’s campaign had focused on the failure of the Weimar political system to solve Germany’s problems, and this issue seems to have struck a far stronger chord with voters than the state of the economy. There was a growing loss of confidence in the Weimar political system, which made the decision to vote for a party that was not tainted by involvement in that system much easier. An editorial in the Frankfurter Zeitung spoke of an ‘election of embitterment’ in which voters expressed deep disaffection with ‘the methods of governing or rather non-governing’ of parliamentary government.

Hitler’s dramatic election breakthrough had a devastating impact abroad. There was a large withdrawal of gold and foreign currency from the Reichsbank, and a sharp fall in German stocks on international markets. Even larger German banks were shaken by the wave of panic selling. Julius Curtius, the Foreign Minister, who was in Geneva while the League of Nations was in session, reported when he heard the results: ‘the mood was one of the greatest alarm’. The world now started taking much greater interest in Adolf Hitler.

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by Joel | 25 April 2024 · 1:32 pm

Catching an Interned Spy

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 257-258, 281-282:

WARSCHAUER HAD FIRST COME TO MI5’s attention in early 1940, after the chief constable of the Special Branch, Scotland Yard, received a letter from the former head of the German Jewish Aid Committee, the thirty-seven-year-old Hubert Pollack, who claimed to have helped [Ludwig] Warschauer obtain the immigration permits for Echen and her family. Pollack explained in his letter that, while he had known Warschauer to be an acquaintance of high-ranking Nazis, he had had no reason to suspect his loyalties at the time. In recent weeks, however, he had learned of Warschauer’s involvement with a sting operation in Berlin.

The ruse, Pollack claimed, went like this: Warschauer would invite a Jewish acquaintance whom the Gestapo wanted to arrest to lunch in a public restaurant. At some point an Aryan woman would join them at the table. Warschauer would excuse himself, and the moment he left the table, Gestapo personnel would enter and arrest the man for fraternizing outside of his race. Pollack felt compelled to alert the British to this information, adding that while Warschauer owed him money, this was not his motive for writing.

Sir Vernon Kell, then director of MI5, read the letter with keen interest. This was precisely the kind of suspicious activity—with “a Gestapo flavor”—that Kell had been looking for among refugees in Britain. MI5 duly opened a file that, thanks to the informants in Hutchinson [Internment Camp], had now grown to a weighty document.

Information had come from various sources. A private serving in the Pioneer Corps claimed that Warschauer had masterminded a profitable blackmail operation in Berlin. The soldier claimed that the engineer had an arrangement with a pretty barmaid. Warschauer would go out drinking with a target; then, once they were blind drunk, deliver the individual to a room at his accomplice’s bar. In the morning the man would awake to find the barmaid next to him in bed. Warschauer would then extort the target for money in exchange for discretion. Men now in Hutchinson may have been victims of the scheme.

…

The author and translator Claud W. Sykes, a senior figure at MI5 who concluded that “[Warschauer] would have been a Nazi but for his Jewish blood,” wrote a letter recommending that Warschauer be immediately transferred from Hutchinson camp, to separate him both from his cronies and the indulgent commandant.

“It seems to me too dangerous to leave him in a position where he is [Major] Daniel’s blue-eyed boy,” wrote Sykes.

In March 1942, five months after Peter left the camp and when only about 350 men remained in Hutchinson, Warschauer was transferred from the island to the London Oratory School on Stewart’s Grove, in the salubrious London Borough of Chelsea, also known as Internment Camp 001, which was used to house high-security internees.

BY EARLY 1942, THE INVESTIGATOR James Craufurd’s suspicion that Warschauer had been sent to England as a Gestapo agent had grown “nearly to a certainty.” The evidence collected during MI5’s raid on Warschauer’s office—in the home he shared with Echen—had provided a mountain of jigsaw pieces. Among the haul there were letters from Dr. Hans Sauer, the man who had ensured Warschauer’s smooth exit from Germany, as well as canisters of photographic film rigged to produce a blotted-out image unless developed in a specific way. MI5 spent weeks studying the letter Sauer had sent Warschauer for clues and code words, even employing an expert to analyze Sauer’s handwriting (“There is in the writing unusual intelligence, knowledge and mental ability, but a bad man,” the expert concluded banally).

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by Joel | 23 April 2024 · 8:39 am

Rushen Women’s Internment Camp

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 199-201:

The Rushen women’s internment camp had opened on the [Isle of Man’s] southern peninsula on May 29, incorporating two small seaside resorts: Port Erin and Port St. Mary. Despite the considerable number of women held there—close to four thousand, three hundred of whom were pregnant—security was laxer than at the men’s camps. A single barbed-wire perimeter encircled both resorts and, while the women had to apply for a permit before they could visit each other’s houses, they were free to walk between the two sites without hindrance.

At first the Hutchinson men whose wives were interned on the island had to send letters via the usual route to the backlogged censor’s office in Liverpool, where delays often meant their messages were long out-of-date by the time they arrived. From the moment the first internees arrived on the island, Bertha Bracey had pressured the government to establish a separate camp for married couples. Convincing the relevant departments to make such an expenditure was proving difficult.

In lieu of a married camp, Hutchinson’s intelligence officer, Captain Jurgensen, announced in late autumn the first monthly meeting between husbands and wives interned on the island. The rendezvous, he explained, would take place at the Port Erin branch of Collinson’s Café.

On the morning of the first meeting, a group of around fifty men, wearing their finest clothes and, in some cases, carrying bunches of flowers, gathered in readiness to leave the camp and be reunited, for a fleeting moment, with their imprisoned wives. A few hours later the men returned to Hutchinson. Many looked dejected. Werner Klein, one of Hinrichsen’s neighbors who had gone to meet his wife, explained to his friend that the psychological conditions in the women’s camp were even more strained than at Hutchinson. His wife had told him that Rushen was riddled with Nazi sympathizers, who had been whipped into a state of obstinate zeal by their self-appointed leader, Wanda Wehrhan, wife of a Lutheran pastor based in London and an energetic fascist. There had been no consideration of race or political allegiance when allocating women to Rushen’s houses. In some cases, Jewish women had been forced to share beds with fervent anti-Semites.

The Nazi women, like many of the male internees, believed that invasion was imminent. In some houses, Jewish women were banned by their Nazi housemates from the common room and forced to remain in their bedrooms. When one refugee entered the local Methodist church, one of the Nazis said, loudly: “Oh there is a bad smell, a Jewish smell, in this church.”

The women were permitted to leave the camp to shop twice a week. One of the landladies whose house had been requisitioned recalled overhearing a group of Nazi-supporting women discussing which of the local houses they would take for themselves when Germany won the war.

Rushen camp’s commandant, Dame Joanna Cruickshank, was seemingly ill-equipped to deal with these sensitivities and conflicts. Cruickshank, a former matron in chief of both Princess Mary’s RAF Nursing Service and the British Red Cross, had enjoyed a distinguished career in military nursing appointments. She had formidable powers of organization, but no understanding—or apparent willingness to understand—the situation of the women in her charge. She hired Nazi women to work on the camp staff, granted them access to camp records and, intent on preserving impartiality, ordered Jews and Nazis to collaborate on the production of the camp’s newspaper, of which only a single issue was produced.

Unaccustomed to being questioned by intelligent women from civilian life, Cruickshank became entrenched when challenged on her decision-making. When Klein’s wife, a non-Jew, had proposed to her camp commandant the separation of Jews and Nazis, Cruickshank said: “You are all enemy aliens, and that is the end of it.”

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by Joel | 13 April 2024 · 9:23 am

Quaker Roles in Kindertransport

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 40-44:

Shortly after Kristallnacht, Wilfrid Israel, a Jewish businessman and owner of Israel’s Department Store, one of the largest in Berlin, wrote to Bertha Bracey. Israel, a descendant of the first chief rabbi of Britain, Hermann Adler, was well connected—his friend Albert Einstein later said of Israel: “Never in my life have I come in contact with a being so noble, so strong and as selfless… a living work of art.”

Israel had already begun work to secure the release of Jews who had been arrested during the pogrom. He invited the commandant of Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp where Jewish men were being forced to accept the blame for Rath’s murder, to do his Christmas shopping at the store for free in exchange for the release of captives.

Now Israel wanted to organize the rescue of Jewish children up to the age of seventeen and find a way to send them to Britain. Israel knew that he needed the assistance of regional committees to quickly establish the machinery to realize such a plan, but British Jews were forbidden to visit Berlin. He had remained in contact with Bertha ever since they met in Nuremberg. Bertha was at her Euston office when she received the invitation from her old friend to visit him in Berlin.

The Quakers, a group that numbered just twenty-three thousand in Britain at the time, were permitted to travel freely to and from Nazi Germany. This generous attitude was the result of the group’s humanitarian work after the First World War, the so-called Quakerspeisung—Quaker feeding—a program that provided five million German children with food in the aftermath of the war and recession.

Many children who benefited from this philanthropic work grew up to become senior Nazi officers; the memory of the group’s benevolence remained clear across the nation and political divides. In 1936 a Nazi dictionary for children provided just three entries for church denominations: Protestanten, Katholische, and Quäker. The definition for Quäker identified the group as having “sacrificially cared for destitute children in Germany after the Great War.” As a result, the Nazi regime allowed the Quakers to continue their philanthropic work relatively unimpeded.

In the days after Kristallnacht, Bertha traveled to Berlin with a delegation of five colleagues to confer with Wilfrid Israel as to how they might, with the utmost urgency, evacuate children to Britain. When she arrived, Bertha attempted to keep her presence in the city secret, fearing that German Quakers living in the city might experience reprisals were the group’s plans exposed. These plans, first suggested by the German Jewish social worker and refugee activist Solomon Adler-Rudel and devised in collaboration with the Jewish Refugees Committee, were a masterpiece of collaboration and international organization.

Vulnerable German children up to the age of seventeen would take a train from Germany to the Netherlands, which, the day after Kristallnacht, had agreed to allow temporary residence to an unlimited number of German and Austrian children. From Holland, they would take the ferry to Britain, to be accepted into the home of a willing family. There would be unimaginable pain as children were parted from their parents, not knowing when or if they would again meet, but the plan seemed preferable to any alternative. As she returned to Britain, Bertha knew that without the backing of the British government—which would need to issue the immigration permits—it would come to naught.

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was torn on how his government should respond to current events. As news from Germany spread, the prevailing tide of public opinion had shifted; national anxieties about asylum seekers were, it seemed, matched and even surpassed by the urge to demonstrate compassion on the international stage. Outrage had finally grown to the monstrous proportions necessary for action.

Chamberlain told the House of Commons that his government would consider “any possible way by which we can help these people.” An “open doors” policy was out of the question, however, not least because of fears that refugees might compete for jobs at a time of high unemployment. Even prominent Jewish representatives appeared to oppose the large-scale admission of Jews, seemingly afraid of agitating anti-Semitism in Britain.

Four days after the attacks, a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Foreign Policy discussed possible responses. The home secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, who was from a Quaker family, suggested that part of the British annual quota of sixty thousand immigrants—of which only about a quarter had currently been used—might be earmarked for German Jews suffering from Nazi oppression. The previous September, Winston Churchill had written an open letter in the Evening Standard imploring Hitler to cease his persecution of Jews; now he suggested settling refugees in a colony such as British Guiana. The discussion ended without resolution.

On the morning of November 21, eleven days after the violence of Kristallnacht, Bertha Bracey met the home secretary, accompanied by five other humanitarian representatives. Among them was Ben Greene, who had returned from a trip to Germany only that morning. The members of this interfaith group, called the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, outlined a plan that, Hoare soon realized, might represent precisely the kind of grand gesture that the British public required.

At first, Hoare expressed some doubt that any parents would willingly send their child alone to a foreign country, to live with strangers. Greene explained that, while he was in Berlin, he had put the same question to Jewish families in person.

“They were,” Greene told the politician, “almost unanimously in favor of parting with their children.” Better to assume the risks of their children going to a foreign country, most parents had told him, than keep them to face the capricious dangers at home.

Moved by Bertha’s tragic descriptions of Berlin, challenged by her display of Quaker faith in action, and no doubt inspired by what seemed like a public relations coup, Hoare at last committed to a course of action. Provided they had a guarantor to offer food, shelter, and the cost of a ticket home, “transmigrant” children, as they were to be known, would be welcome in Britain. Visas and alien cards would be waived in place of a new permit bearing the child’s name and those of his or her parents.

That evening Hoare made good on his promise. In a debate in the House of Commons he pledged that, while the refugee issue was “an international problem” that “no single country can hope to solve,” Britain was “prepared to play [its] full part. “I believe that we could find homes in this country for a very large number [of children] without any harm to our own population,” he continued. We shall, Hoare promised, “put no obstacle in the way of children coming here.”

There was much to be done. In addition to the logistical challenges involved in bringing unaccompanied minors across Europe, there was the issue of locating and vetting British families who could provide safe lodging. Ideally these individuals would be equipped to ease the children’s psychological turmoil at having been separated from their parents. Regional committees needed to be set up to enlist foster parents and organize accommodations.

Then there was the question of how—considering that the need vastly outstripped the provision—places would be allocated. Priority would be given to middle-class candidates, perceived to be likely to adapt most quickly to a new country, and—in a grim paralleling of the Nazi preference for Aryan-looking children—blond girls were favored, as potential British foster parents and guarantors were more inclined to choose them from photographs.

Dennis Cohen, chair of the Jewish Refugees Committee’s emigration department, and his wife left for Berlin on November 28, 1938, to finalize arrangements with the German government and consult with the welfare organizations responsible for making selections—the Reichsvertretung in Germany, and the Kultusgemeinde in Austria—from more than six hundred applications that had already arrived.

The children were to be brought out of Germany by various means, mainly train, but also by plane in some cases. The proposal was dubbed by the German Railway Authority as simply Kindertransport—the Children’s Transport.

The Nazis cooperated with the plan: so long as no money or valuables were removed from Germany, and the emigration was handled discreetly and with no cost to the state, the party voiced no objection to sending Jewish children to Britain. The SS organized extra carriages for the refugees to be attached to regular trains. The refugees would be accompanied by a minimum number of adult supervisors, around one adult per twenty-five children in the first instance. The British act of benevolence was also conditional: all young people accepted into the country were expected to have left Britain for a new country of asylum within two years, preferably one.

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by Joel | 22 March 2024 · 5:43 am

Aftermath of the 1920 Kapp Putsch

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 168-170:

The Kapp Putsch may have been a bungled fiasco, but it made possible a victory of immense importance for right-wing counterrevolutionary elements in Bavaria. On the night of 13–14 March, General Alfred von Möhl, the commander of the armed forces in the Munich area, after hearing news of Kapp’s coup in Berlin, decided to launch one of his own, supported by a local paramilitary self-defence militia, known as the Home Guard (Einwohnerwehr). Möhl informed Johannes Hoffmann (SPD), the Prime Minister of Bavaria, that he could not guarantee the safety of his government unless it transferred power to the Army. Hoffmann hurriedly assembled his cabinet in the early hours of 14 March, urging the rejection of the general’s ultimatum. Most of his ministers shrank from such a course of action. Instead, they supported a proposal by Ernst Müller-Meiningen, the DDP leader, who suggested the right-wing nationalist Dr Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the government president of Upper Bavaria and a member of the pro-monarchist BVP, should take over.

Deprived of political or military support, Hoffmann was unceremoniously driven from office. On 16 March, Kahr was elected as the Prime Minister of Bavaria in a vote in the Bavarian Assembly. The Social Democrats refused to participate in Kahr’s right-wing conservative government, and would never again hold power in Bavaria during the Weimar years. Under Kahr, Bavaria became a conspiratorial, anti-Republican ‘cell of order’ (Ordnungszelle). Kahr immediately issued a decree to curtail the immigration of ‘Eastern Jews’ to Bavaria, and he actively encouraged antisemitism. Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, whose naval brigade had played a key role in the Kapp Putsch, immediately found a safe haven in Munich, where he established a new secret society called Organisation Consul (OC), whose main purpose was to murder leading supporters and politicians in the Weimar Republic.

Adolf Hitler was now in the perfect place to establish a new anti-democratic, nationalistic, antisemitic party. On 20 February, the German Workers’ Party (DAP), led by Anton Drexler, changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). Members of the party, contrary to widespread belief, did not initially call themselves Nazis but rather National Socialists (Nationalsozialisten), but their opponents used the term, and the name stuck.

On 24 February, the first large meeting of the newly named NSDAP took place in the first-floor hall of the Hofbräuhaus, before a crowd of 2,000 people. This day was commemorated by the party as Founding Day, and became the location of an annual speech by Adolf Hitler. At the meeting, Hitler was given the task by Drexler of reading out the 25 points of the NSDAP party programme, which he declared ‘unalterable’. The main authors of the programme were Hitler and Drexler, with some economic ideas from Gottfried Feder added. They were remarkably like those being advanced by many other nationalist right-wing parties at the time. The party’s most notable gimmick was to combine nationalist and antisemitic ideas with anti-capitalist and so-called ‘socialist’ measures. This novel combination allowed the NSDAP a banner under which workers could shelter along with conservative middle- and upper-class groups, thereby acting as a bulwark against communist revolution at home and offering the possibility of restoring German military power abroad.

The ‘national’ elements of the party programme included promises to revise the Treaty of Versailles, to unite German-speakers into an expanded Greater German Reich, which would exclude Jews from German citizenship rights, treat them as foreigners and halt future Jewish immigration. The ‘socialist’ parts of the party platform included pledges to nationalise trusts, abolish land rents, restrict interest on loans, introduce profit-sharing in industry, promised the nationalisation of big business, to open large department stores to small traders, confiscate profits made by industry during the war, and create a People’s Army. The anti-capitalist elements of the party programme appeared to spell the end of interest-bearing loans and clearly threatened the existence of banks.

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by Joel | 6 February 2024 · 7:02 am

Rooting Out Nazis in 1946 Germany

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 236-238:

The Spruchkammer tribunals were mocked for a good reason. They served mainly to whitewash suspect characters who needed certificates of good character, notoriously labelled Persilschein – after the washing powder Persil – to show they were ‘whiter than white, with all brown [Nazi] stains removed.’ The initial problem was to find anyone in the legal profession who was not themselves compromised – 90 per cent of German lawyers had been Nazi Party members. In Hamburg at the end of the war, every judge was a member of either the Party or an affiliated organisation. It was a dilemma that would never be resolved. So Nazi judges tried cases of Nazi crimes – including those jurists who had sent people to the gallows for ‘crimes’ that, until Hitler came to power, had not been offences, such as sexual relations between Jews and Christians. In the American zone not a single judge was removed from the bench after the war.

The majority of the police were Nazis, too, which ought to have prevented their involvement in such cases, but did not. Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the SDP, had been assigned a five-man police guard by the British Occupation forces, who had assured him that the police force had been ‘cleared of Nazis’. But on 15 May 1946 he angrily wrote to British officials to say that, after overhearing his bodyguards chatting, he found that four out of the five had been in the SS. He was also profoundly shocked to learn that the British had just appointed a notorious SS man, Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Shult, as head of the police in the British zone. An Allied Control Commission report to the British Foreign Office explained: ‘It is fairly clear that if the denazification of the police is carried to extremes there would be no police force left. With conditions…[in Germany] as they are it would perhaps seem that the essential thing is to have a reliable police force and this cannot be achieved without some sense of security…The need is…[to] terminate the process of denazification at some stage for these reasons…We will surely still need the police as an instrument of military government.’ In an apparently seamless transition, many senior officers kept their jobs, among them Wilhelm Hauser, Chief of Police in the Rhineland-Palatinate, who, when he was an SS officer in Byelorussia, had been responsible for countless wartime atrocities.

No German institution was entirely ‘cleansed’. Brown stains remained everywhere. More than three-quarters of university professors had been Party members, and even those who briefly lost their jobs were reinstated. Dr Hans Preuss, Dean of the Theology Department at one of Germany’s foremost universities, Erlangen, in Nuremberg, was a fervent Nazi who, in the 1930s had organised the burning of books in the university’s library written by Jews or Marxists. Preuss was sacked in the summer of 1945 but got his job back the following year. Around two-thirds of Germany’s teachers had been Nazis, and at the gymnasia, the best secondary schools, the figure was higher. Thousands had been fired in the three or four months after the end of the war. In 1946, 90 per cent of them were reinstated. The British poet Stephen Spender, then a civil servant, who had been despatched early in the year to report on education in the British Occupation zone, could see why. Visiting a school in Hamburg, he asked the children what they were studying. ‘Latin and biology,’ they said. ‘Nothing else?’ I asked. ‘No, sir. You see the history, geography, English and mathematics teachers have all been fired.’

Many of the clergy, regardless of denomination, had also been Party members. After the sacking of numerous German civil servants, the Lutheran Bishop of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, preached that they had suffered too much and were the victims ‘of extremely skilful propaganda…[most] had joined the Party thinking of the public welfare. They did not identify themselves with the regime.’ He was perhaps also thinking of himself. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1933, arguing that he had done so ‘in good faith…believing it could produce a religious revival,’ though he later began to oppose the regime and was removed from his bishopric. The American Religious Affairs Division of the Occupation reported to Clay that it knew of 351 active clergy in the American sector. Of these, only three were defrocked. In the summer of 1946 the Catholic Archbishop of Freiburg, Conrad Gröber, nicknamed ‘Brown Conrad’ because of his fervent support for the Nazis, issued a pastoral letter to his flock in which he blamed the rise of Hitler on ‘secularism’, neatly absolving the Church and the people from responsibility for what had happened over the last dozen years.

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by Joel | 19 January 2024 · 7:10 am

Dalrymple on the Mahabharata

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 321-323:

While its equivalents in the west – the Odyssey, Beowulf or the Nibelungenlied — have died out and are only remembered now by the most bookish of scholars, the story of the Mahabharata is still the common property of every Hindu in the subcontinent, from the highly educated Brahmin scientist down to the untouchable roadside shoe-black. Recently, when a 93-episode adaptation was shown on Indian television, viewing figures never sank beneath 75 per cent and rose to a peak of 95 per cent, an audience of some 600 million people. In villages across India, simple Hindu peasants prostrated themselves in front of their village television screens for two hours every Sunday morning. In the towns the streets were deserted; even the beggars seemed to disappear. In Delhi, government meetings had to be rescheduled after one memorable Sunday morning when almost the entire cabinet failed to turn up to an urgent briefing.

The Mahabharata is more than worthy of its fame. Even in translation it retains the narrative and moral power of a Shakespearian tragedy, but with the action grafted on to the Indian equivalent of the world of Homer. The epic occupies roughly the same place in the Indian national myth as that held in Britain by tales of King Arthur, but for Hindus the Mahabharata also retains the religious significance of the New Testament: included within it is the Bhagavad Gita, the most subtle, wise and sacred of all Hindu religious texts.

The Mahabharata opens in a hermitage on the edge of the Naimisa Forest. There a group of rishis [sages] are preparing for the night when the bard Ugrasravas arrives on the threshold. The sadhus [ascetics] invite the bard to join them on the condition that he amuses them with tales of his travels. Ugrasravas tells them that he has just returned from the great battlefield of Kurukshetra and agrees to tell the story of the apocalyptic war which reached its climax on those plains. He introduces the epic by emphasizing its sacred power.

‘A Brahmin who knows all the four Vedas [the Hindu Old Testament] but does not know this epic, has no learning at all,’ he says. ‘Once one has heard this story no other composition will ever again seem pleasing: it will sound as harsh as the crow sounds to one who has heard the song of the cuckoo. From this supreme epic comes the inspiration of all poets: no story is found on earth that does not rest on this base. If a man learns the Bharata as it is recited, as it once fell from the lips of Vyasa — what need has that man of ablutions in the sacred waters of Pushkar?’

In sheer length, the epic is still unrivalled. It consists of some 100,000 Sanskrit slokas (stanzas), eight times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey put together, four times the length of the Bible; quite simply it is the longest composition in the world. Yet miraculously, even a generation ago, it was common to find wandering storytellers who knew the whole vast epic by heart: they would sit in the coffee houses or on the steps of the Delhi Jama Masjid and recite the entire poem without a break over the course of seven days and seven nights.

Even today, when the wandering bard has followed the Indian lion into near-extinction – killed off, in the case of the epic, by Hindi movies and national television – it is just possible, in very remote places, to find men who still know the epic. A friend of mine, an anthropologist, met one such wandering story-teller in a little village of Andhra Pradesh. My friend asked him how he could remember so huge a poem. The bard replied that in his mind each stanza was written on a pebble. The pile of pebbles lay before him always; all he had to do was to remember the order in which they were arranged and to read the text from one pebble after another.

In the form in which it survives today, the Mahabharata is a colossal miscellany of Hindu religious discourses, folk tales and legends. But all these diversions are built up around a central story of almost minimalist simplicity.