Mattogno on Riga, Part Three: Hierarchies Are Hard

Having addressed Mattogno’s butchering of the Keine Liquidierung phone note and ignorance of points like basic meteorology, geography, and arithmetic, we move in this post to discussing how Mattogno addresses the aftermath of the shooting of a thousand Reich Jews in Riga on 30 November 1941. The “orthodox” history has it that, Lange having lodged a complaint about this shooting to RSHA and thus to Himmler, Himmler issued the orders the following day regarding the ongoing disposition of Reich Jews arriving in Riga and Minsk and summoned Jeckeln on 4 December to discuss events.

Mattogno’s first point of contention here regards why Jeckeln’s shooting of Reich Jews on 30 November should warrant the attention of Heydrich and Himmler, but the shooting of Reich Jews in Kaunas on 25 and 29 November by Karl Jäger’s Einsatzkommando would not; he writes (p. 217), “Therefore, as Himmler did with Jeckeln, the SS should also have summoned Jäger for a reprimand.” Again, on its face, this seems like a reasonable argument. However, there are a few key differences between the cases that Mattogno does not acknowledge.

First, there was no conflict of interest or “turf war” in Kaunas as there was in Riga. After all, Lange did not raise the issue of Reich Jews in Riga being shot because he was particularly concerned with their lives. Rather, he seems to have been motivated by the need to apportion some Jews to work detail and, perhaps as importantly, the fear that his prerogative to manage the arrival and treatment of Reich Jews in Riga, which he had been assigned as a member of the SD, would be taken over by Jeckeln. Also, it’s worth noting that it was Lange who had routed the Reich Jews shot in Kaunas to that city in the first place; therefore, if anyone would have raised an alarm, it would have been he.

Second, there is again the matter of geography – Riga is not Kaunas, and more importantly, the people stationed in each city were different. Jäger’s immediate superior, Stahlecker, was stationed in Riga; in contrast, Jeckeln, as an HSSPF, had Himmler as his immediate superior. Therefore, while Stahlecker, like Lange, could have taken issue with Jäger’s shooting of Reich Jews five days and one day earlier and some reprimand given, that they were in different cities made such a scenario less likely to have yet emerged, particularly while occurring in the context of the Jews of the Kaunas Ghetto being shot at the same time. Complicating matters is that, as I pointed out in my article on the Keine Liquidierung note, it seems fairly clear that Stahlecker wasn’t even in Riga on the dates in question. Otherwise, as Finnberg pointed out in his testimony, Lange would have brought his complaint directly to Stahlecker.

Mattogno pulls something similar in discussing the dispute that arose between Hinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar for Ostland, and the SS regarding the need to keep Jews alive for labor. Noting that Jeckeln claimed to have been ordered by Himmler to exterminate the Jews in the Riga Ghetto on 10 or 11 November, Mattogno points to a document dated 20 November from the Generalkommissar for Latvia, Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, commenting on labor assignments for ghetto Jews. Clearly, if the Jews of the ghetto were to be exterminated, Drechsler’s document makes no sense. Mattogno writes (p. 225), “Can one seriously believe that the Generalkommisar in Riga, who issued these orders, had never heard of Himmler’s alleged extermination order?”

Well, frankly, yes. Drechsler’s immediate superior was Lohse, who in turn reported directly to Alfred Rosenberg as Minister for the Eastern Territories – the civilian occupation regime. Jeckeln, as noted, reported directly to Himmler. Since the dispute between Lohse and the SS was ongoing, there is no reason to think Drechsler would not have begun planning to deploy the Riga Ghetto Jews for labor, particularly since, when he wrote the document in question, the Jews in the ghetto were still alive.    

A key thing to point out here is that there are two possibilities for what Mattogno has done in these cases. Either Mattogno doesn’t know or understand the differences in hierarchies between the SD, on the one hand, and the SS and Police Leaders, on the other, or between the SS hierarchy in the east and that of the civilian administration, or he’s deliberately obfuscating. The man has written several books on the topic of Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity, so the odds favor the latter, although I suppose the former is possible.

The next and last part of this series will offer some final observations on how Mattogno has treated this topic. Spoiler alert: He has done so badly.

Mattogno on Riga, Part Two: Phone Calls in Riga, Prague, and Berlin

Picking up where I left off in my last post, Carlo Mattogno’s treatment of the mass shooting of Latvian Jews, as well as a thousand newly arrived Reich Jews, on 30 November 1941 is riddled with errors and lapses in logic. After briefly remarking on the discrepancy between the actual date of the shooting and the date as reported in Stahlecker’s famous report of the following year (“in early December”), Mattogno writes (p. 216), “The exact date is important because the shooting of the Jewish transport early in the morning depended precisely on the large number of persons who were to be killed during the day. This has its logic, but if 45 minutes (from 8:15 to 9:00 AM) was time enough to kill 1,000 persons (according to the verdict in the Riga Trial), then why did it require more than seven hours to kill 4,000 people? At Riga, in fact, the sun only came up at 8:34 AM on 30 November, and it set at 3:50 PM.”

Mattogno on Riga, Part One: Keine Liquidierung Revisited

With my blogmates already having responded to parts of Carlo Mattogno’s magnum opus on the Einsatzgruppen, I decided to have a look at the ten pages Mattogno dedicates to the killings in the fall of 1941 in Riga – a topic I’ve had occasion to look at very closely over the last couple of years. I put together some of the theories about the famous Keine Liquidierung note a few years back; for his part, Mattogno seems to have stuck with some of the less compelling explanations.

The Slide to War: A European Civil War?

Outside of politics, did European society engage in civil wars?

With the exceptions of Ireland and Finland, I would have to say that, for the period between the end ofthe Russian Civil War and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, European society did not engage in civilwars. Given the presence of Ireland and Finland at peripheries of Europe, it's unsurprising that these wars are less often considered as impactful for the continent as those of Russian and Spain, although at least in the case of Finland, the issue of an emergent left lay at the root of the conflict. Thus, if we consider the period between the wars as one of reaction to Bolshevism specifically and the left generally, we should probably consider the period to be one primarily of coups rather than civil wars.

The other key question would seem to be whether Europe at large engaged in a civil war of left vs. Right over the entire interwar period. I'm sure many of us have "go-to" authors on particular topics; mine on civil war is Stathis Kalyvas, whose definition is "armed combat within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities."[1] Given this definition, it's hard to say that the idea of a Europe-wide 30 Years War truly obtains, at least in so far as such a war would be considered a civil war. Europe was not a recognized sovereign entity with a common authority in 1918. Nor do I think it's fair even to consider the lull in outright civil war between those in Russia and Spain to be a sort of left-right "cold war." The presence in the political center of some of the governments in Europe, particularly Germany, until the financial crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s attests to the opposite being true. And in those places where it was not, there was not, as noted, civil wars so much as coups.

Therefore, Dan Diner strikes me as being mistaken when he writes, "The front lines in an emerging universal civil war would thus have far-reaching consequences for the territorial makeup of the new nation-states in Central and East Central Europe."[2] However, this disagreement is one of definition, since the examples of violence that he marshals are legitimate examples of coups, ethnic cleansing, and/or revolution. As far as Donald Watt's observations are concerned, he seems closer to the mark in writing that the "'European civil war' came to embrace a very much larger section of what might loosely be stigmatised as 'European opinion'; and that the existence of this set of perceptions has been almost entirely neglected in the development of European historiography of the origins and course of the Second World War."[3] Definitions, after all, matter.

====

[1] Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2006), 17.
[2] Dan Diner, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe's Edge (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 65.
[3] Donald C. Watt, "The European Civil War," in The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement, edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Lothar Kettenacke (Crow's Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 5.

The Slide to War: Versailles and the Outbreak of War

Did the Treaty of Versailles lead directly to the outbreak of war in 1939?
I think it's safe to say that a direct line cannot be drawn from the Treaty of Versailles to the outbreak of war in 1939. Of course, the events are related, and it's unlikely that Hitler, largely embodying the proximate cause of war's outbreak in 1939, would have acceded to power if the Treaty of Versailles had not had its particularly punitive effects on Germany. However, it is also true that, had the international economies not crashed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it is less likely that democracy would have failed in Germany.

The readings for this week demonstrate, more than perhaps any other point, the intricacies of diplomacy in the final years before the war. Donald Watt's essay begins with his observation that, "[i]n western Europe, the German Foreign Minister Stresemann's successors were being driven by unemployment and the rocketing growth of the Nazi party to abandon his policy of gradual revision of Versailles for a policy of adventurism from weakness."[1] Given the extent to which gradual vision had worked between 1924 and 1929, there is little reason to believe that this strategy would not have continued to work. That said, it is also true that the depth of the depression experienced by Germany was greater because of its inability to implement monetary policies that would alleviate recessionary pressures because of the shortage of foreign reserve currency. It's true that the desired customs union with Austria might have alleviated, if not reversed, the negative economic trends in Germany post-1929, but it is also true that the Versailles treaty cannot be directly blamed for the refusal of the League of Nations to authorize the customs union.

The other point to consider is whether any force at all could have prevented war from breaking out in 1939. Were we to concede that Versailles led to the rise of Hitler and that Hitler was bent on having a war, then the only question really is whether war could occurred before or after 1939, rather than prevented. Zara Steiner's treatment of the previous preventive action makes clear that members of Hitler's own cabinet were deeply unsure about Germany's ability to go to war over the Sudetenland: "All those Germans who opposed war in 1938, and they were a very disparate group, agreed that given the state of Germany’s armaments and its economic position, the country could not risk a major war with Britain and France, particularly if those countries were backed by the United States"[2]; this group included Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the finance minister -- who would also be Nazi Germany's last chancellor after Hitler's (and Goebbels's) suicide.

More aggressive action from Chamberlain and Daladier at Munich might therefore have resulted in Germany being defeated far earlier and at far smaller cost. This matter is speculative, of course, but interesting nonetheless.
======
[1] D.C. Watt, "Diplomatic History, 1930-1939," in The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. 12: The Shifting Balance of World Forces, 1898-1945, edited by C.L. Mowat (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1968), 684.
[2] Zara Steiner, "British Decisions for Peace and War 1938-1939: the Rise and Fall of Realism" in History and Neorealism, edited by Ernest R. May, Richard Rosencrance, and Zara Steiner (Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge UP, 2010), 134.

Defending Democracy: The Popular Fronts and Stalin

Were the popular fronts held hostage by Stalin?

I think the answer to whether the popular fronts were held hostage by Stalin depends on which front is being examined. If the most important popular fronts were those in France and Spain, then it seems clear that the former was not held hostage while the latter was. Whereas the Popular Front in France seems to have failed more as a matter of the ability of the competing ideological bloc to draw popular support, the Popular Front in Spain was brought down at least in part by an extension of Stalinist ideological purity tests to Spain.

Discussing the case of France, Tom Buchanan makes a compelling case that the "democracy had become fused since at least the 1870s with the Republican tradition,"[1] whereas the very idea of democracy in Spain was a "radical threat to the old elites."[2] As a result, the right was far more to engage with the left within the context to democracy in France, while in Spain, the forces of reaction, linked to the military, the church, and the monarchy, dominated the right wing. As to why the Popular Front failed in France, Helen Graham and Paul Preston contend that the opportunity was wasted by a failure of the Popular Front to use the momentum from the 1936 election to effect genuine change to the economic balance of power. The deepening of the economic crisis and Léon Blum's failure to respond to worker mobilization resulted in first his own and then the Front's fall from power.[3]

In the case of Spain, George Orwell perhaps made the most eloquent case for Stalinist intrigue being a major culprit in the failure of the Popular Front government to successfully withstand the coup of the generals, although to attribute Franco's victory entirely to Stalin would be to overlook other major factors, including the arms embargo, the intervention of Germany and Italy, and so on. On the point of Stalin's hostage taking of the Spanish Popular Front, Buchanan seems to hedge his bets, recounting Largo Caballero's correspondence with Stalin, with the latter giving him "guarded approval"[4] to a democratic implementation of socialism. However, the record of Soviet espionage in Spain is well established -- from the torture and assassination of POUM head Andreu Nin by agents of the NKVD to the actual recruitment of Trotsky's eventual assassin from Barcelona.

Orwell provides a wonderful summarization of the issue as faced in Spain: "Between the Communists and those who stand or claim to stand to the Left of them there is a real difference. The Communists hold that Fascism can be beaten by alliance with sections of the capitalist class (the Popular Front); their opponents hold that this manoeuvre simply gives Fascism new breeding-grounds. The question has got to be settled; to make the wrong decision may be to land ourselves in for centuries of semi-slavery. But so long as no argument is produced except a scream of 'Trotsky-Fascist!' the discussion cannot even begin."[5]

======

[1] Tom Buchanan, "Anti-Fascism and Democracy and Democracy in the 1930s," European History Quarterly, 32, no. 1 (2002): 44.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Helen Graham and Paul Preston, "The Popular Front and the Struggle against Fascism" in The Popular Front in Europe, edited by Helen Graham and Paul Preston (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), 11.
[4] Buchanan, ibid, 40.
[5] George Orwell, Homage to Calalonia (New York: Mariner Books, 1969), 247.

Constructing Utopia? The Third Reich

How important was anti-Semitism to the Nazi regime before 1939? Had the regime started on the 'twisted road to Auschwitz' before 1939?

Anti-Semitism was always vitally important to the Nazi regime, although that importance could be muted in public at times. Certainly it was a core philosophical underpinning of the Nazi movement, and while the Nazis would occasionally mute their presentation of the issue while attempting to campaign for votes, they did not hesitate to implement anti-Semitic legislation once in power. That said, it is also true that the state-sponsored anti-Semitism of 1939 was both qualitatively and quantitatively different from that in 1933.

For instance, while the regime implemented such measures as the one-day boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, and the systematic removal of Jews from the white-collar professions began almost immediately, the actual extraction process by which Jews would be removed from German life was quite slow. Several authors make it clear that the Nazis' primary objective during their first year in power was the establishment of single-party rule and Gleichschaltung; for instance, Jeremy Noakes details the suppression of the Bavarian People's Party, writing, "Although the BVP leaders were treated gently by comparison with Socialists and Communists and released after only a few days, this kind of cat-and-mouse tactic was clearly calculated to exercise the maximum psychological pressure on respectable middle-class people, for whom imprisonment would have a particularly traumatic effect."[1] Therefore, the anti-Semitic legislation of the first two years notwithstanding, the power of the state was principally against political enemies: the KPD and SPD, then other parties, and subsequently Nazi party rivals in the Knight of the Long Knives.

The period between the passage of the Nuremberg Law, which altered the citizenship status of German Jews, and Reichskristallnacht, which marked the first instance in which the full fury of Nazi Party functionaries was unleashed at large against the German-Jewish population, marked a section stage during which increased legal pressure was exerted upon the Jewish population while, perhaps counterintuitively, the Jewish population of the state increased by virtue of the annexations of Austria (particularly Vienna) and the Sudetenland (and Prague in March 1939). As hinted at in the prompt for this post, Karl Schleunes nevertheless points out in The Twisted Road to Auschwitz that, even as the noose tightened around the necks of German Jews and many sought to emigrate, the retail sector, which was heavily populated by Jewish family businesses, was exempted from much of the legislation because of the precarious state of the German economy, primarily the lack of foreign reserve currency. Remarking on the 1933 boycott, Schleunes writes, "economic considerations had forced the Nazis to protect several Jewish department stores"; this protection was followed by a government bailout for one of these stores.[2] Thus, despite Kristallnacht, the reason for Hermann Göring's anger with Joseph Goebbels at having unleashed the pogrom was that Germany was not yet prepared to lose this vital section of the economy, not to mention its physical capital.

Ultimately, as became the case even into the war with the implementation of the Final Solution, Nazi Jewish policy was clearly enunciated in philosophy but tended to limp along until a major event caused it to ratchet up significantly. The Nuremberg Laws were the first major elevation, Kristallnacht was the second, and with the war, the elevations became both greater in magnitude and more radical and deadly. This is the "twisted road" of which Schleunes's title speaks, and because the extermination camp at Birkenau was certainly not envisioned in 1933, the road that led there was necessarily contingent and thus "crooked."

=====
[1] Jeremy Noakes, "The Nazi Revolution," in Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe, edited by Moira Donald and Tim Rees (London: Palgrave, 2001), 107.
[2] Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-39 (Urbana-Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 93.

Irredentism and Minorities in the Interwar Period

Why did the Minorities Treaties fail to solve the minorities question? To what extent did they merely intensify hatreds and mistrust?

Although well intentioned, the Minorities Treaties ultimately failed to solve the minorities question because they underestimated the sheer complexity of the demographics in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, the enforcement mechanisms of the treaties were weak and therefore ineffectual in truly remediating the issues that arose between the wars. Finally, although it is not clear that these treaties made matters worse for minorities, they certainly did not make them any better.

Most importantly is the sheer ethnic heterogeneity of most of these states. Although we are commonly conditioned to see the minorities of Czechoslovakia as being Hungarians and Ruthenians, the most significant minority was the Slovaks. Therefore, part of the underestimation of the treaties was bound up in an incomplete understanding of the different ethnicities. For instance, Thomas Hammond writes, "Many of the Slovaks resented being dominated by the Czechs and insisted that their nationality was neither 'Czech' nor 'Czechoslovak.'"[1] Moreover, there was the problem of ethnic stratification cutting across class in ways not considered by the treaties. Using the example of Lithuania, whereas the landed gentry was German, the bureaucracy was largely Russian, and the urban middle class was largely Jewish, only the peasantry was Lithuanian on an ethnic basis, and as such, legal protection of minorities so empowered was not likely to mitigate class-based resentments. Moreover, each group also professed a different faith, respectively, Lutheran (at least a majority), Orthodox, Jewish, and Catholic, and as Ivan Behrend notes, "In an area of permanent foreign occupation that lacked independent statehood, religion played an important role in self-identification."[44]

Beyond misunderstanding the sheer complexity of the issues, the Minorities Treaties lacked sufficient enforcement mechanisms. Despite the obvious existence of severe ethnic conflict in some places, Carole Fink writes (specifically about the Polish treaty) that it "was dictated largely by great powers that had refused to accept, even theoretically, similar obligations; it was imposed on behalf of named and unnamed minorities that had not been consulted and would play no role in the enforcement process."[3] A knock-on effect was that countries with minorities outside its borders, principally Hungary and Germany, could use the enforcement process to protect its own ethnic groups while at the same time violating the treaty regarding its own minorities, particularly in the 1930s. According to Jennifer Jackson Preece, "minority grievances (both real and contrived) were deliberately exploited by revisionist Germany and Hungary throughout the 1920s and 1930s."[4]

The explosion of ethnic violence in Eastern Europe occasioned by the outbreak of World War II is sufficient proof that the Minorities Treaties did not help the condition of these minorities before the war. That said, I do not see evidence for the treaties making the situation worse. Rather, the lack of teeth in the treaties resulted in the problems occasioned by the creation of nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe remaining when the international system began to disintegrate in the 1930s.
=====
[1] Thomas T. Hammond, "Nationalism and National Minorities in Eastern Europe," Journal of International Affairs, 20, no. 1 (1966), 21.
[2] Ivan T. Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe Before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 44.
[3] Carole Fink, "Minority Rights as an International Question," Contemporary European History, 9, no. 3 (2000): 273
[4] Jennifer Jackson Preece, "Minority Rights in Europe: from Westphalia to Helsinki," Review of International Studies, 23, no. 1 (1997): 84.

The Interwar Crisis: Politics

The rise of the NSDAP to power is often seen as inexplicable, but placed in the context of interwar Europe as a whole, is the ascension to power of a radical, nationalist and anti-Semitic party more easily understood?

This is a topic I've been thinking a lot about lately, so I thought I'd write about it for this week's assignment as a way of aligning these new sources I've not read before with what I already had learned. To first answer briefly, I believe that it is not the context of interwar Europe as much as the specific circumstances in late Weimar Germany that make the ascension to power of the NSDAP more easily understood. This is not to say that the generally rightward, authoritarian drift of Europe was not a factor -- it certainly was. However, that the NSDAP came to power, rather than a military-style dictatorship à la Hungary, was quite specific to the personalities involved.

One of the most important things to bear in mind, in my opinion, despite it not often being said, is that Germany essentially stopped being a democracy once the government of Chancellor Hermann Müller collapsed in 1931. Thereafter, no chancellor had the support of the government and government by emergency decree, although, Harold James makes excellent points on how Heinrich Brüning maintained power, both because the SPD feared an even more reactionary government should it participate in a no confidence against him and because, by pursuing a policy of revising the reparations agreement, Brüning kept the animus of the population and political rivals outward, toward France, rather than inward: "Revision had become the principal way of uniting German politics in the face of the centrifugal pressures exerted by the unpleasant nature of economic choices during the depression."[1]

The terms in office of Chancellors Papen, Schleicher, and ultimately Hitler were backroom deals, with the mistaken impression on the part of Hindenburg's inner circle of advisers that Hitler could be reined in -- obviously an impression belied by the Reichstag Fire and subsequent events. In this regard, the situation of Hitler's party being propelled into power is unique. Whether the question is why a fascist, anti-Semitic political party could become the largest party in the country by July 1932 is a more difficult question but still one specific to Germany. The center had clearly collapsed, as witnessed by the massive losses suffered by the SPD and DVP, with their votes going largely to the KPD and Nazis, respectively. The drift of voters on the fence toward the right rather than the left was likely based on the relatively recent memory of Soviet-inspired revolution in Berlin and Munich.

All that said, Eric Hobsbawn offers a nicely concise overview of the context in which democracy had been thrown off increasingly over the 1920s and 1930s across Europe, and this context offers the remainder of the explanation for how the NSDAP ended up in power in January 1933 by explaining why both the power brokers in Germany and the electorate abandoned democracy. In detailing the three types of anti-democratic forces that were emergent in Europe between the wars, Hobsbawm writes, "All were against social revolution, and indeed a reaction against the subversion of the old social order in 1917-20 was at the root of all of them. All were authoritarian and hostile to liberal political institutions, though sometimes for pragmatic reasons rather than on principle."[2] While Germany took the third route of fascism, it could easily have gone one of the other two, had the army or monarchists acted decisively after the suspension of democracy following Müller's ouster.
=====
[1] Harold James, "Economic Reasons for the Collapse of the Weimar Republic," in Weimar: Why Did German Democracy Fail?, ed. Ian Kershaw (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990), 54.
[2] Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 114.

Diplomacy and Economics in Interwar Europe

In what ways were diplomacy and economics linked in this decade?

In my opinion, diplomacy and economics were linked in the 1920s in essentially two regards, i.e., with regard to French-German relations and to American-European relations. On the one hand, the economic situation in Germany had a direct impact on the extent to which it was able to meet its responsibilities to pay reparations to France, with immediate repercussions in most cases to the diplomatic relationship between the two countries. On the other hand, as the United States drifted into neutrality and non-interventionism, the extent to which this position was reflected in its economic relationship with Europe at large was also affected.

On the former point, the key example is likely the French occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, which came with a German default on coal payments per the Treaty of Versailles. Kathleen Burk describes the crisis thus: "[French Prime Minister] Poincaré finally decided that the only way Germany would pay reparations on the scale which had been agreed was if the United States loaned her the money, and France occupied the Ruhr essentially to force the Americans to do so."[1] The diplomatic and economic response was the Dawes Plan, which "tacitly assumed an immediate end to the economic occupation and reduction of the military occupation to a skeleton force."[2] The occupation of the Ruhr notwithstanding, the Dawes Plan was effective in forestalling complete collapse of the German economy and so can be considered a diplomatic victory.

On the latter point, Burk's review of Melvyn Leffler's The Elusive Quest praises Leffler's approach to American policy during the 1920s as properly considering both economic expansionism and political isolationism.[3] Pointing out the primary American goal of providing security for France and revitalizing Germany's economy, she notes that the U.S. policy on Europe was one that had abandoned the notion of European stability as "not of vital importance."[4] That the Coolidge administration nevertheless implemented the Dawes Plan indicates that the U.S. regarded the German economy as more important than French security. Thus, the U.S. had conceded the supremacy of economics over diplomacy, although the plan affected both economics and diplomacy positively in Europe, at least with regard to forestalling a war between France and Germany and/or German collapse.
======
[1] Kathleen Burk, "Economic Diplomacy Between the Wars," Historical Journal, 24, no. 3 (1981): 1005.
[2] Sally Marks, "The Myths of Reparations," Central European History, 11, no. 3 (1978): 246.
[3] Burk, ibid., 1011.
[4] Ibid.

Culture in Interwar Europe

Can we define a typology of modernism in Interwar Europe?

I think it's possible to define a typology of modernism in Interwar Europe that permeates the visual arts, music, and literature. Part of understanding the term "modernism" is seeing it as something other than a merely date-specific categorization. Rather, it's informative to situate culture within the larger historical context and to compare cultural output to that during the preceding period to identify the distinctive aspects of the typology of modernism.

For instance, in the area of music, the debut of Igor Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps is instructive. For Modris Eksteins, the key aspect here is Freud's ability to shock fin-de-siècle Europe's sensibilities: "For modern art as for modern science shock and surprise had become by the early years of the twentieth century an integral part of the cultural landscape."[1] In this regard, Stravinsky's work did not disappoint, with audience members rioting at its premiere. More broadly, Stravinsky's music and even the more "radical" atonal work of Arnold Schoenberg were marked by the influence of neoclassicism, which could be seen as a reaction to the romanticism of the previous century.

In the visual arts, Eksteins notes the influence of new thinking about science and morality on cubism: "the geometric shapes that formed the basis of cubist composition-its critics derided it as decomposition - hinted at a fourth dimension beyond time, space, and matter related to the new ability to escape existing laws, be they gravitational, moral, or artistic."[2] Here, there is also again a reaction to the previous prevailing form, i.e., impressionism, with its realistic, if softly focused, emphasis on the subject matter. In this arena, Picasso is possibly the most famous artist and his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon embodying both a break with previous form and content -- the subject being prostitutes.

Finally, in literature, the subgenre of High Modernism was ascendant. With High Modernism, another sort of neoclassicism, which combined a return to mythic archetypes with radically new styles, was an important factor. A rallying cry was issued by the American expatriate (and future fascist) Ezra Pound, who exhorted his proteges to "make it new."[3] The literary figures thus influenced certainly include James Joyce, whose Ulysses retold Homer's Odyssey as a single day in 1901 Dublin, or the Anglo-American T.S. Eliot, whose poem "The Waste Land" juxtaposed passages wholly parachuted from ancient and medieval literature with lines such as "These fragments I have shored against my ruins,"[4] a direct reference to the fragmentation of High Modernist poetry (and prose).

In conclusion, the arts offered a typology of modernism in interwar Europe characterized by a radical break with past forms influenced in part by the rapidly evolving intellectual environment and by a desire to react directly against the previous mode. Although it does not make a particular point in this regard, I thought I'd end this post with this quotation from Paul Johnson's Modern Times, if only because it so nicely mashes together a bunch of figures from the arts into a single sentence: "They [Marcel Proust and James Joyce] in Paris on 18 May 1922 , after the first night of Stravinsky's Renard, at a party for Diaghilev and the cast, attended by the composer and his designer, Pablo Picasso. Proust, who had already insulted Stravinsky, unwisely gave Joyce a lift home in his taxi."[5]

=====

[1] Modris Ecksteins, "Culture," in Europe, 1900-1945, ed. Julian Jackson (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 178.
[2] Ibid, 175.
[3] Michael North, "The Making of 'Make It New,'" Guernica (August 15, 2013), https://www.guernicamag.com/the-making-of-making-it-new/
[4] T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land," https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land
[5] Paul Johnson, Modern Times: From the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 9-10.

The Triumph of Democracy?

Why was violence such a salient feature of politics in the immediate postwar period?

A phenomenon like increased public violence is not likely to be one with a simple explanation. It is more likely that a complex interrelationship of several factors, among them historic, sociological, and economic. Here, it seems the greatest contributors to this trend were; the demobilization of a rootless, recently defeated, often armed, group of young men (a population more often disposed to violence than others); increased ethnic heterogeneity with new or redrawn national borders; and the influence of certain romanticized notions of violence "from above."

On the first and second points, I think Gerwarth and Horne make several very persuasive arguments in their article on paramilitarism as a direct contributor to the increase in violence in the postwar period. Describing the large group of recently demobilized soldiers, they write, "Together they formed explosive subcultures of ultramilitant masculinity in which brutal violence was an acceptable, perhaps even desirable, form of political expression.[1] Here, the example of the Freikorps in revolutionary Berlin and Munich and these men's deployment against the revolutionaries is probably the most prominent. Gerwarth and Horne write later in their piece, "In other parts of Eastern Europe, however, the violence was less ideological, remaining more concerned with interethnic rivalries or the territorial borders of new nation-states."[2] Here, the authors' examples of violence during the dissolution of British rule over (most of) Ireland or the almost immediate ethnic violence emerging in the new Yugoslavia between Serbs and Croats are informative examples.

On the third point, a direct relationship is more difficult to draw, in part because evidence of the influence of philosophy on middle- and working-class men is difficult to track. Nevertheless, given his influence on prominent postwar leaders like Mussolini and his participation in Action Française, it is difficult to exclude the influence of Georges Sorel on this process. Charles Maier writes, "The task of Sorel's famous myth, with its incitement to class tension and creative violence, was to reinvigorate the elites as well as the proletarian challengers. Both Sorel and Pareto shared a new and still unusual bourgeois hostility to liberalism. Yet it was significant that in decrying a crisis of European culture, they summoned up the rhetoric of class confrontation. Social conflict had become preoccupying enough to call into question the entire legacy of Enlightenment rationality and humanism."[3]

The point here regards not only Sorel's appeal to the redemptive power of violence, which informed certain leaders' willingness to deploy it when unnecessary, but also the larger issue of a retreat from Enlightenment solutions to social problems that had been ensconced within the framework of liberal democracy as the Age of Reason's crowning achievement.

=======
[1] Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, "Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923," Journal of Modern History, 83, no. 3 (2011): 498.
[2] Ibid, 503.
[3] Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1975), 23.

Undermining the System: Revisionists and Counter-Revolutionaries

• How important was the relationship between fascism and nationalism?  
• What did fascists in Eastern Europe believe in?
• To what extent was fascism in Central Europe, in essence, a revolt against modernity?
• Did fascism represent a challenge to the established order in interwar Europe?  
• How far was fascism the exception rather than the rule in radical right-wing politics in Europe in this period?  
• Who constituted the elites - and what was the attitude of fascism to them?

Rather than note the specific questions I'm trying to answer here, I thought this week I'd instead write a more general post that touches upon most, if not all, of the questions regarding fascism. First, it's important to note that there is the concept within the study of fascism called the "fascist minimum," i.e., those qualities that, at the very least, can be said to be shared by all fascist movements. Roger Griffin defined it in 1991 as "palingenetic ultranationalism": nationalism that seizes on the idea of "the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it."[1] In this regard, the relationship between fascism and nationalism is absolutely essential -- there is no fascism without nationalism. Thus, we can conclude that the fascists in Eastern Europe believed in ultranationalism, but at least according to Griffin, to move beyond that minimum is inherently problematic, although it's fair to say that fascists were anti-communist, anti-democratic, and anti-liberal; however, notably, these positions are all negative, rather than positive. Finally, there is the pervasive violence of the fascist movement, which Gerwarth and Horne argue persuasively was a contribution of postwar paramilitarism and the "mobilizing power of defeat"[2] or, in the case of Italy, "mutilated victory."

The extent to which fascism was an exception to radical right-wing politics in Europe rather than the rule is a complex question. Stanley Payne's work on fascist history provides a useful taxonomy for understanding this question, I think. He classes the right generally into three categories: conservative right; reactionary right; and fascist. Thus, to use the example of Germany, while the conservative right could include broad swaths of the liberal and monarchist parties, the reactionary right was categorized by the nationalist parties, notably the DNVP, led by Alfred Hugenberg, which ended up being the Nazis' coalition partner. This latter group would include parties seeking to withdraw from democracy and reverse constitutional reforms, while the fascists are classed by Payne as revolutionary, seeking to smash the system entirely and construct something new. In this regard, we can consider the elites to encompass parts of the two non-fascist groups, either seeking to retain power by opposing fascists (conservative right) or to retain power by collaborating with (but, in theory, restraining) fascists (reactionary right). The extent to which both these strategies failed is self-evident.

The final question, of whether fascism represented a revolt against modernity, is best answered by Mazower, who writes, "there were dynamic non-democratic alternatives to meet the challenges of modernity."[4] Notably, however, Mazower includes Bolshevism and right-wing authoritarianism generally among these alternatives. It's also necessary to acknowledge that, while fascism was a reaction to modernity, the framing of the revolt itself could differ depending on the country under study. For instance, in Romania, which I am studying closely this term, there was a firm rejection of modernity for more traditional peasant values and specifically the Romanian Orthodox Church. For the Nazis, in contrast, the response was more revolutionary than reactionary, seeking to transform modern society not into a version of its past but rather something different and new. Moreover, the Nazis were willing to embrace modern means, e.g., mass media and propaganda, to accomplish this goal.

====

[1] Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, "Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923," Journal of Modern History, 83, no. 3 (2011): 491.
[2] Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1991), chapter 2, page 48/117.
[3] Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-45 (New York: Routledge, 1995), 15.
[4] Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1998), 4.

Forging a New World? Peacemaking at Paris

Was peace doomed from the beginning? Or did the ‘economic consequences’ of the peace undermine the achievements of the peacemakers? How valid are the criticisms of Keynes?

After reading the materials for this week, I remain convinced that the key failure of the Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles was economic, i.e., that the terms imposed upon Germany were onerous to the point of nearly guaranteeing its future economic instability and, thus, political instability. However, although far more has made said about the reparations payments Germany was required to make being the core reason why the treaty ultimately failed, it seems more important was the extraction of such a large proportion of Germany's resources, rendering it unable to make these payments. Had it retained more of its resources or had access to them on the market or had it lost its resources but not been subjected to reparations, Germany might have become sufficiently economically and politically stable.

In this regard, I really do find Keynes's arguments persuasive. For one thing, he does not suggest that any type of monetary punishment of Germany would be too onerous. Oh the matter of coal, for example, he writes, "This [annual delivery of coal to France for 10 years] is a reasonable provision if it stood by itself, and one which Germany should be able to fulfil if she were left her other resources to do it with."[1] Elsewhere, he is even more blunt: "There is no question but that Germany lost lose these ore-fields. The only question is how far she is to be allowed facilities for purchasing their produce."[2] He makes his case perhaps no more clear than when he writes, "Yet if these feelings [of victors' justice] and these rights are allowed to prevail, beyond what wisdom would recommend, the reactions on the social and economic life of Central Europe will be far too strong to be confined within their original limits."[3]

Among the cases made against Keynes, Zara Steiner's is perhaps the most vociferous, but I don't find it particularly compelling. First, she claims that Keynes found the reparations clauses "morally unjustified and financially unworkable,"[4] but she cites no source on this point, nor does she stipulate why he saw the terms as unworkable. In directly addressing Keynes's argument, which she considers "pernicious but brilliant,"[5] she does little more than argue that the terms of Versailles were not so bad because the terms Germany dictated to the Soviets at Brest-Litovsk were worse. Her most direct statement, i.e., "Even in the short term, the Versailles treaty did not leave Germany prostrate; on the contrary, Germany industry revived, and some historians believe that stabilization might have come earlier had the political structure been less fractured,"[6] i.e., is also unsourced.

Moreover, it seems to put the cart before the horse to some extent, in placing the fractured political structure of Germany because the cause of the treaty's failure, rather than considering that the cause and effect might have been reversed. In fact, with a broad social democratic government including liberal parties, it is hard to argue that Germany was badly political divided in 1919. The Kapp Putsch was a year off and based at least in part on the ultimate imposition of Versailles. Thus, I don't find Steiner's criticisms valid.

====

[1] John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Row, 1920), 86.
[2] Ibid, 98.
[3] Ibid, 94.
[4] Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1918-1933 (New York: Oxford UP, 2005), 64.
[5] Ibid, 67.
[6] Ibid, 67-68.

The Revolutionary Background

Here's my first discussion post for the term:

Was there a danger that the Bolshevik Revolution would spread from Russia in the period 1917-1920?

Stipulating up front that hindsight always provides 20/20 vision, I have to conclude that there was virtually no danger that the Bolshevik Revolution would spread beyond Russia in the aftermath of World War I. Part of drawing this conclusion of course is dependent on how comparatively easy revolutions in Berlin, Munich, Budapest, and Bratislava were put down, but the other part of the issue regards how well entrenched the ruling elites were in these countries (and others), as well as how badly the Bolsheviks, in attempting to export revolution, misjudged the power of nationalism and the forces of reaction.

On the first point, Charles Maier argues compellingly that Marxist revolution was contained in concerted efforts by the bourgeoisie to prevent the loss of status and power. Of the three countries on which Maier focuses his argument, Germany is the most important since it experienced two Marxist uprising with temporary success. Part of the success of counter-revolution in Germany was how well entrenched traditional bases of power, i.e., the military and aristocratic landowners, still were when the war ended. Maier writes, "The constitutional system of the Reich and the three-class Prussian voting system, as well as the continuing dominance of the army and bureaucracy, preserved the power of the Junkers until 1918 and even beyond."[1] These power bases, as well the important Catholic constituency and the ascendant industrial bourgeoisie within the liberal parties, were effective controls on the power of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) before the war. With the collapse of the monarchy, these interests were willing to support the SPD against the revolutionary left, and this dependence was reciprocated in the SPD's inability to government without the center.

On the topic of nationalism, Ivan Berend's analysis is instructive. Beyond the obvious example of fascism emerging in certain places as an effective immunization against Marxism, Berend's treatment of postwar ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia provides an important context in which to read Boris Starkov's account of Soviet intrigue in the Balkans in the 1920s. Berend writes, "The long dreamt-of brotherhood of the newly founded states was very quickly found to have snags."[2] Recounting early separatist movements among, e.g., Slovaks and Croats, it is unsurprising that the necessary unity through class to render a Marxist uprising successful was lacking since unity in nationality was so contentious. Finally, it is worth noting that Kun's revolution in Hungary was put down by many of the same forces that attempted (but failed) to overthrow the Bolsheviks. Here, the key differences seem to be the comparative lack of popularity of Kun's regime and the more favorable territorial advantage held by the Bolsheviks in the Civil War.

[1] Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1975), 34.

[2] Iván T. Berend, "Alternatives to Class Revolution: Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War," in Pat Thane, Geoffrey Crossick and Roderick Floud, eds., The Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (New York: Cambridge, UP, 1984), 263.

Back to School with the Bund

Turns out I'm returning to coursework in a few weeks, thanks to a scholarship that came through at the last minute and that will pay for my next course, entitled "Shadow of Versailles (1919-1939)." I'm currently planning on writing on the topic of the Jewish Bund in Romania after WWI.

This topic is a pretty unexplored one, at least in English. While there's a ton of material out there on the Bund in Russia before and during the Russian Revolutions of 1917, the trail of them runs a bit cold after the Bolsheviks take over. It's generally agreed that the Bund split into roughly left (pro-Bolshevik) and right (anti-Bolshevik) wings and that the former was absorbed into the party, while the latter was driven underground. What happens to the Bund's right wing is a mystery after then. The greatest volume of material that's available is on the Bund in Poland, where it continues as a major political force through the entire interwar period and forms a large part of the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. The losses are enormous of course, and the Bund is absorbed by the Polish communists after the war.

Romania and the Baltic States are the missing link. In the Baltics, particularly Latvia and Lithuania, the Bund continues as a potent political force in the interwar period. The history of Lithuania's Bund is parallel to that in Poland, particularly given the disputed status of Vilnius between the wars, where the Bund had its stronghold. In Latvia, the Bund holds political power, including legistative offices, until the authoritarian takeover. After that, it isn't really clear what becomes of it, including whether it contributes to Jewish resistance in Riga and environs.

In Romania, the Bund is limited to the border regions annexed to Romania at the end of WWI -- Bukovina (from Austria-Hungry) and Bessarabia (from Russian). I've been reading Dmitry Tartakovsky's excellent dissertation on Jews in Bessarabia and Transnistria (UIUC, 2010) and I've laid my hands on some French sources, which in turn references the five-volume Bund history in Yiddish edited by Hertz et al. So I have a lot of work ahead of me, none of which is likely to be in English.

In the meantime, near the end of September, I'll be posting my discussion posts here as per usual. More later.

Book Review: Mayer's "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?"

I'm starting a new job next week, so I don't know when I'll have time to blog again soon. With hope, I'll be in a new course in September and will blog regularly then; in the meantime, I'm offering the below.

The first course I took when I went back to school in 2015 was a hisoriography course, for which the below was one of my assignments, i.e., a review of one of the books I would be including in my term paper for the course, which I posted earlier. Figured I'd post this now, since my academic studies have taken a bit of a pause.

=====

Mayer, Arno J. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History. New

York: Pantheon, 1988.

This book[1] makes a curious, albeit mostly baffling, contribution to the intentionalist-functionalist debate. Mayer, who is currently professor emeritus of history at Princeton and holder of an endowed chair, began his academic career specializing in World War I and its aftermath, writing his dissertation at Yale on the relationship between the war and the Russian Revolutions of 1917. He went on to publish a book on the Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles and volumes on European revolution and counter-revolution before trying his hand at the Final Solution. The result commits the dual errors of advancing a thesis even too radical for most functionalists and of failing to substantiate his argument with sufficient primary and secondary sources and documentation. The result is a text that ultimately has greater worth as a curiosity than as an addition to either the history or the historiographical debate.

The problems with Heavens begin with Mayer’s nomenclature and compound from there. First, Mayer elects to eschew the two most common terms to refer to the extermination of Europe’s Jews during World War II, Holocaust and Final Solution, in favor of “Judeocide,” a term unused by historians before Mayer and largely ignored since. While his complaint about the term “Holocaust,” i.e., that it has religious connotations and that its emphasis on survivor memory incurs fundamental problems with critical analysis,[2] is well-worn ground, but his rejection of the term “Final Solution,” particularly given the predominant use of the term among functionalists emphasizing the Nazi government’s agency over the victims’ perspectives, seems poorly founded. In addition, Mayer proposes and applies a three-fold paradigm of anti-Semitism, with “Judeophobia” connoting personal prejudice, “anti-Semitism” connoting institutionalized prejudice against Jews, and “anti-Judaism” connoting hostility toward the Jewish faith.[3] That he relegates his explanation to a footnote rather than offering a more incorporated explanation of his terminology for his reader seems frankly hostile.

Moreover, on a macro scale, Mayer chooses to present the “Judeocide” within the broad context of what he calls the “Second Thirty Years War,” covering both world wars and the interwar period. In a lengthy prologue that strays far from the central subject matter, Mayer draws broad analogies between the period from 1914 to 1945 and that from 1618 to 1648, the “First Thirty Years War.” Sharing in common the explosion of widespread violence in central Europe in the context of a general social and economic crisis, Mayer clearly sees strong similarities between the periods, but his discussion of the Thirty Years War – not to mention his discussion in the same prologue of the first Crusades – seems more like a justification for an historian specializing outside the Nazi period to write about the Final Solution than an ideological framework, which it ultimately is not. That the three periods – the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, and the first half of the twentieth century – involved the commission of grave acts of violence by German-speaking people against civilian Jewish populations is not in dispute; rather, the relevance of the similarities feels strained, particularly when this framework is not sustained throughout the work, except for in the repetition of particular contrived terms.

The result of this decision to use non-standard terminology adds a level of density to an already challenging read. Mayer frequently uses German terms without translating them, and although his vocabulary in English (which is not his first or second language, it bears noting) is extraordinary, both of these points communicate a certain hostility toward the non-specialist. These choices by the author are particularly stunning given Mayer’s highly controversial choice to eschew the use of footnotes entirely, even in cases of direct quotations. According to historian Richard Breitman, when challenged during a symposium on his non-use of standard citation methods, Mayer defended himself by claiming that he had no need to “prove his manhood.”[4] With three words, Mayer somehow managed to offend women, conscientious historians, and, it must be pondered, tenured professors, given Mayer’s presence at Princeton for 27 years by the time this book appeared.

Beyond the problems of nomenclature and shoddy scholarship, Heavens has the additional problem of some statements that Mayer makes that simply cannot be justified in the context of the available scholarship. In perhaps the best-known of these statements, Mayer writes about the Nazi concentration/extermination camp Auschwitz in southwestern Poland, where one million people were murdered, the majority of them Jews, “[F]rom 1942 to 1945, certainly from Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural’ causes than ‘un-natural’ ones.”[5] Given the established fact that the majority of Jews killed by the Final Solution were dead by the end of 1942, this statement seems particularly ludicrous. Similarly inane is Mayer’s contention that the Einsatzgruppen – the mobile killing squads deployed against political operatives and civilians in the wake of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – “killed few Jews in the buffer zone, and even once they penetrated Russia’s [sic] pre-1939 borders, they initiated their infamous butchery only upon reaching towns and cities captured after heavy fighting.”[6] In fact, the Jewish casualties in the areas abutting the 1939 border were enormous, particularly in Latvia and Lithuania, where the Nazis faced virtually no resistance from the Soviet Red Army, which had fled in the face of the invasion.

All of these significant shortcomings of Heavens relate in some fashion to Mayer’s highly controversial thesis, which is that the “Judeocide” of World War II was not ultimately so much an expression of anti-Semitism (or “Judeophobia”) as the result of the conflation by Hitler and the Nazis of Jewish identity with Bolshevism, i.e., Judeobolschewismus. In short, had the Nazis’ not primarily targeted the Soviet Union among their war aims and had they not primarily done so because of their intractable hatred of Soviet communism, then Jewish casualties would have been significantly fewer. It should be stipulated that the latter part of this proposition – that the Nazis turning toward extermination as a policy toward Europe’s Jews was intimately linked to the fortunes of the military campaign against the USSR – is a fundamental assumption of functionalism. That the Nazis’ anticommunism outweighed their hatred of Jews is not.

While it is not unusual, particularly in the functionalist camp, for a thesis greatly at odds with the prevailing scholarship to be introduced, for it to be introduced in the absence of justification among the pre-existing literature is unheard of. In this sense, the errors of Mayer’s technique and the outlandishness of his central thesis are fundamentally connected. For example, less than twenty pages after making his statement about natural vs unnatural causes of Jewish deaths, Mayer writes, “Seemingly discontinuous with the intrinsic social amalgam and tactical ambiguity of the Nazi project, as well as uninformed by precedent, the extermination sites [the Aktion Reinhard camps and Chelmno] defy explanation.”[7] Yitzhak Arad’s seminal study of the Aktion Reinhard camps – Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka – was published in English in 1987,[8] and it was incumbent upon Mayer as a responsible historian to be aware of the major scholarship in the field and to revise his own writing accordingly. That Mayer failed to acknowledge the very explanation of the Reinhard camps that Arad provided is almost criminally negligent.

These very large negative aspects of Heavens notwithstanding, Mayer, as a self-described Marxist, is an able historian of European anticommunism and anti-Sovietism, and while these passages of the book are similarly unsourced, they are nevertheless not at odds with the established scholarship. Moreover, the framing device of the Second Thirty Years War is potentially enlightening, but as noted above, Mayer does not sustain this framework sufficiently to qualify his book as an essential reading on those particular grounds. Readers in search of a radically functionalist point of view have a rich literature to consult that can both communicate the functionalist thesis and serve as bases for further research. Heavens sadly does neither.

---

[1] Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

[2] Ibid, 16.

[3] Ibid, 5, footnote.

[4] Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991), 26.

[5] Mayer, 365.

[6] Ibid, 270.

[7] Ibid, 377, emphasis mine.

[8] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

Unz, Roberts, and Irving

Simul-blogged at Holocaust Controversies

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration Treasury official, was dancing tantalizingly close to flat-out Holocaust denial. He's back again, now defending the choice of libertarian activist and one-time California gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz to publish David Irving's Hitler's War on his website, Unz.com, which publishes a variety of libertarian materials, as well as "race realism," anti-Zionist polemics, and other generally far-right materials.

For his own part, Unz is a bit of a cipher. For instance, he is Jewish himself, although we have seen in the cases of Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen, and others that being Jewish isn't always a guarantee against anti-Semitism. For a while now, Unz has drawn suspicion for his willingness to publish blatantly anti-Semitic material, although he has generally been able to defend his editorial judgment on the basis of his libertarian leanings. This orientation has generally led to the comments threads at Unz.com being something of a free for all, as I'd noted in the past. Sergey Romanov has also commented here on Unz's activites in this regard.

The publication of Hitler's War, however, seems to indicate a kind of Rubicon. Along with the book in HTML form, Unz has also published an accompanying essay entitled "The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving." In that essay, Unz muses on his own relative ignorance of WWII historiography before encountering Irving's work and asks, "All his material is massively footnoted, referencing copious documents in numerous official archives, but how could I possibly muster the time or energy to verify them?" He continues, "Rather ironically, an extremely unfortunate turn of events seems to have fully resolved that crucial question."

From here, Unz launches into a short history (as he understands it) of the Lipstadt case as emblematic of, as he calls it, the work of "zealous ethnic-activists" (read: Jews). As he describes the events culminating in the London lawsuit, "This development [i.e., Lipstadt labeling Irving a Holocaust denier] eventually sparked a rancorous lawsuit in 1998, which resulted in a celebrated 2000 libel trial held in British Court." The next paragraph is worth quoting in full:

That legal battle was certainly a David-and-Goliath affair, with wealthy Jewish movie producers and corporate executives providing a huge war-chest of $13 million to Lipstadt’s side, allowing her to fund a veritable army of 40 researchers and legal experts, captained by one of Britain’s most successful Jewish divorce lawyers. By contrast, Irving, being an impecunious historian, was forced to defend himself without benefit of legal counsel.

Well, most importantly here, Irving was not "defending himself"; he had brought the suit himself, against one of the world's largest publishing houses. He had also been stupid enough to do so in the U.K., where the law required him to pay the costs of the defense should he lose. Instead, the way Unz presents it, Big Bad Deborah Lipstadt victimized poor old David Irving, dragging him into a court with her millions of dollars, and bullied him into bankruptcy. Whether Unz knows this is the exactly opposite of what actually happened in Irving v. Lipstadt or is merely ignorant, I can't say, but the necessary conclusions we must draw are, respectively, that Unz is lying for devious purposes or he was so careless as to not familiarize himself with the merest details of the case.

This lying by omission or frankly catastrophic ignorance carries over to his treatment of the findings in the case. Unz writes, "[T]he worst they discovered after reading every page of the many linear meters of Irving’s personal diaries was that he had once composed a short 'racially insensitive' ditty for his infant daughter, a trivial item which they naturally then trumpeted as proof that he was a 'racist.'" He draws this conclusion, it seems, on reading (perhaps) Lipstadt's own version of events in her book History on Trial, rather than the book distilled from the expert testimony of Richard Evans (Lying About Hitler), who was the primary historian-witness at the Lipstadt trial refuting both Irving's version of historical events and his historical methods. Evans's book details how Irving systematically misrepresented primary sources or ignored them altogether as part of an overall project to exculpate Hitler for crimes, misdeeds, and mistakes.

Finally, Unz tells us that, adding insult to injury, Irving was jailed in Austria after being convicted of denying the Holocaust there on a trip in 2005. I commented on this turn of events at the time, and I remain convinced of the opinion I expressed then. That point notwithstanding, it's clear that Unz has published Hitler's War at least in part in admiration for Irving's free speech battles -- as he understands them. The conclusions we must draw are clear: Unz is either actively shilling for Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism now or is a useful idiot contributing to their cause.

What about Roberts? His defense of Unz is both more amusing in its blunders and more consistent with his previous pieces. Here is Roberts's version of events:

Zionists destroyed David Irving’s livelihood with slander and libel, because he made public a letter from the former chancellor of Germany, Hitler’s predecessor, to Winston Churchill, a letter that Irving found in the American publisher’s file of Winston Churchill’s history of the war, and which the publisher prevented Churchill from publishing in his history. The former chancellor of Germany, who escaped the Nazis and lived in England, wrote to Churchill that two of Hitler’s financiers were Jews who managed two of the largest banks in Germany. One was a Zionist leader. The letter exists, and there is no reason to doubt its honesty. However, for making an important historical document public, Irving was labeled by a vicious propaganda campaign an “anti-semite” and “holocaust denier.”

Putting aside the fact that the charge of libel was disproved in court, the story of the former German chancellor (here he refers to Heinrich Brüning, the second-to-last chancellor before Hitler) is one I hadn't heard before. The lack of dates provided by Roberts makes it difficult to discern the particulars of the story of Irving being destroyed for daring to publish this letter, although it is possible, I suppose, that Irving was first to locate this information. I do, however, also note that Irving has published the letter in question at his site, and he makes no mention in doing so that he suffered any consequences regarding the letter. I know enough about David Irving to know that no opportunity to bemoan his own persecution would go unexploited.

Roberts continues

Another Irving honesty, the one that destroyed him, was that after 10 years of research he could not find one document that provided evidence for the claim that Hitler personally conducted the holocaust or that he even knew about it. Irving did find and report documents that he made available in which Hitler issues orders prohibiting extermination of Jews.

I've already written extensively on one of these pieces of evidence. Roberts as least has the sense (or lacks knowledge) to avoid referring explicitly to the Lipstadt case. He also, like Unz, does not state his own particular set of beliefs about these matters. Both men are apparently still too attached to whatever support, monetary or otherwise, that they receive from people who disdain Holocaust denial to plainly state what they seem to be strongly suggesting is their point of view.

Therefore, I invite Messrs. Unz and Roberts to clearly state their own points of view. They live in a country where they cannot be punished for doing so. Rather than coy dancing around the point, let them be the brave defenders of history and truth as they apparently see them. Then, let them defend those points of view in discussion and debate.

Talking Nazis With the Dissident Peasant

Yesterday, I did a show with leftie podcaster Dissident Peasant (whom you should support -- really). Unlike my last interview, this one is priced affordably (it's free). Click and enjoy.

Actual Brownshirts With ThamesDarwin https://t.co/821ADBvxUf via @JeffHisDudeness

— Thames Darwin (@thamesdarwin) May 31, 2018

Stefan Molyneux Is Holocaust Denier-Adjacent

Simul-blogged at Holocaust Controversies

You probably missed, but there was a bit of a dust-up a couple of days ago on Twitter. What happened was that, about a month ago, New Atheist Sam Harris hosted Christian Picciolini on his podcast. Picciolini is a former leader of the Hammerskins skinhead group who reformed several years ago and now does the lecture circuit talking about how to prevent/undo the damage done by such groups. During the Q&A section of podcast, Picciolini stated his belief that Stefan Molyneux, the very popular Irish-Canadian YouTube (on who much more here). Now, weeks later, Harris announced that he had expunged all mention of Molyneux from his podcast, apparently because Molyneux lodged a complaint with Harris. For his own part, Picciolini took to Twitter to complain and offered some evidence.

So what's the deal here? Is Stefan Molyneux a Holocaust denier?

No, but he is Holocaust denier-adjacent.

This is a blog about Holocaust denial, so I won't bore you here by providing you with some definition of denial and showing you that Molyneux doesn’t exactly fit the bill. But what is this adjacency of which I speak? It boils down to a few key points.

1) Molyneux frequently engages in anti-Semitic rhetoric that, at the very least, seeks to "explain" anti-Semitism by identifying Jews behaving badly. For instance, while I certainly have issues with some of the content from its editor, this video provides some good examples. Among other topics, Molyneux details how communism generally and Bolshevism specifically were really Jewish movements. To be clear, it's true that the number of Jews among the Bolsheviks was larger than their proportion in the general population. It's also true that, by WWII, most of them were gone -- Kaganovich and Livtnov* being the notable exceptions. It's moreover true that other political parties in revolutionary Russia and had far higher proportions of Jewish members: specifically the Mensheviks, the General Jewish Workers' Association (the Bund), and the Zionist parties. The latter two were, in fact, entirely Jewish. Why so many Jews in left-wing parties? The answer is a pretty simple one. Left-wing politics seek to disturb pre-existing hierarchies. Jews were near the bottom of the Tsarist hierarchy. Do the math.

2) Molyneux has hosted Holocaust deniers on his show. In particular, Molyneux has hosted Chuck Johnson (discussed by our own Sergey Romanov here) and "Styxhexenhammer666," on whom see this RationalWiki article. Maybe Molyneux hosted these guys before they became deniers? One of Sergey's archived links is from January 2017; Molyneux last hosted Johnson one month earlier. But Molyneux also tweeted out a statement supportive of Johnson six months after that. With Styxhexenhammer, Molyneux has hosted him more than once since his denial statements.

3) He seems to buy every other Jewish conspiracy theory. OK, not the really dumb ones like blood libels, but he's constantly bleating about "cultural Marxism," and there's a good case to be made that this is really just an anti-Semitic dog whistle. Is it possible that Molyneux doesn't realize that it is? Sure, it's possible -- it's just not likely.

All of that makes him denier-adjacent, in my opinion. Others might call aspects of Molyneux's shtick "soft denial." That works too.

But is he a racist? Oh, you betcha.

======
* Litvinov gets an asterisk in this case due to his removal from office by Stalin, purportedly because he was Jewish and therefore an inappropriate representative of the Soviet foreign ministry and signing a non-aggression pact with the Nazis. He eventually returned to the foreign ministry. Yes, Lenin was apparently one-quarter Jewish by ancestry; no, he did not identify as Jewish, nor was he raised Jewish. No, Stalin was not Jewish. Nor was Beria.

Paul Craig Roberts Crosses the Line

Simulblogged at Holocaust Controversies

If you've never heard of Paul Craig Roberts, don't feel bad. As a public figure, he seems to have hit his high water mark during the Reagan Adminstration as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, where he stridently defended supply-side economic policy. Since 2001, he has been a rather loud voice among the 9/11 truth movement, which dovetails nicely with his Buchanan-esque paleoconservative views of Israel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his writings over the last decade or so have walked a very fine line between perhaps overly vehement but otherwise justifiable attacks on Israel's role in American foreign policy to overtly anti-Semitic rhetoric. I want to be clear before continuing that I don't know whether Roberts is an anti-Semite and am not saying that he is. But with his latest column, he has crossed over a divide -- whether he knows it or not -- into plain Holocaust denial. And for this, he needs to answer.

Roberts's column posted on May 3, entitled "Morality, Truth, Facts Have Exited From The Dying West," begins by addressing remarks made Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a speech to the Palestinian National Council on April 30 -- or more correctly addressing the response by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who called Abbas's remarks Holocaust denial. To be clear, I don’t know what Abbas actually said, but if the reporting is correct, then his remarks were at the very least insensitive and overly general regarding the causes of European anti-Semitism and its relationship with Zionism. That Abbas has a history of overt Holocaust denial (having written a doctoral dissertation several decades ago that minimized the death toll) didn't help Abbas's case here. For what it's worth, he has since apologized.

Roberts first expresses agreement with Abbas's remark that European anti-Semitism was not Christian in origin but rather an outgrowth of Jewish control over money lending (again, a bit of an overgeneralization), but in the fourth paragraph, he really hits his stride:

What was the Holocaust? According to zionists, the Holocaust was National Socialist Germany’s elimination of 6 million Jews by first gassing them and then cremating the bodies. It is unclear how Germany managed this feat when all of its limited and dwindling resources were employed, unsuccessfully as it turns out, on the Russian front.

The first problem, obviously, is that the definition he provides is not one limited to only "zionists" [sic]. More importantly, as noted in numerous blog posts here, no responsible historian claims that the Nazis gassed six million Jews. Fewer than three million deaths of Jews during the war can be attributed conclusively to gassing; at least an equal number were shot by Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, were starved or died from disease in ghettos or non-death camps, or were murdered by Axis allies.

His third point is also a bit of a groaner, although if we could extend the benefit of the doubt to him regarding good faith, we might say it's a decent question. Enough ink has been spilled on the topic of the changing nature of Nazi Jewish policy during the Barbarossa campaign, so I won't reinvent that wheel here except to note that Roberts seems woefully under-read on this topic. Anyone with more than a miniseries-level knowledge of the Holocaust would consider the whole paragraph an exercise in either total ignorance of historical facts or evidence of bad faith.

Roberts continues:

Photos demonstrating the Holocaust include dead skeletal-like bodies. But these are not people gassed and cremated. These are deaths from typhus and starvation. The disintegrating German state had no food or medicines for Germans and often not for its own soldiers. Concentration camp inmates were on the bottom of the totem pole.

True enough, the bodies in German camps found by American and British liberators were of Jews who died of disease and starvation. To his credit, Roberts does not try to claim that these dead Jews are not the responsibility of the German state. But that's a less interesting point than feeling the need to point this fact out at all. Where have I seen this before? Oh yes! That Roberts deploys an opening gambit of virtually every Holocaust denier I've encountered over the last 20 years is probably not a vote in his favor here

The next few paragraphs is really where the rubber meets the road, so I want to drill down on these a bit. He begins, "We know very little about the Holocaust, because no one is allowed to study it."

Actually, we know a tremendous amount about the Holocaust and what we know about it we know because people have routinely been able to study it. This might seem axiomatic, but apparently it isn't, since it's another commonly used opening gambit used by deniers. More on this below.

Roberts continues, "Anyone in Europe who studies it and makes the slightest correction to the zionist narrative is arrested and imprisoned as a Holocaust denier."

Putting aside the point addressed above about a "zionist narrative," Roberts is simply wrong. Assuming by "zionist narrative," he means that European Jews were deliberately murdered in numbers of approximately six million by the Nazis, using methods including poison gas, then perhaps he isn't aware that this account is routinely modified on the basis of newly available evidence. Interestingly, one of the things that has happened is that the death toll estimated by historians has tended to go up, not down. Gerald Reitlinger (a European) estimated the number of deaths as falling in range of 4.3 million to 4.7 million in 1953; Raul Hilberg (another European, albeit eventually a naturalized American) estimated the number at 5.1 million in 1961. These numbers, by the way, were already at odds with numbers estimated by, e.g., the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry tasked with estimating this number. Reitlinger wasn't prosecuted for estimating a number fully 1.5 million smaller than the "official" estimate.

Roberts again: "There is no doubt that many Jews were killed, but there are different views about the various means employed and the extent to which the process was organized or haphazard. Before differences could be resolved and sorted out, the subject was put off limits."

Compare Mark Weber's writing from "The Holocaust: Let's Hear Both Sides": "They ["revisionists"] do not dispute the fact that large numbers of Jews were deported to concentration camps and ghettos, or that many Jews died or were killed during the Second World War."

Regarding the means employed, to be clear, there are not different views, at least among anyone who has taken the time to explore the issue. Regarding whether the process was organized or haphazard, thereby hangs a tale -- one told here and elsewhere repeatedly, despite Roberts's assurance that such a discussion is "off limits."

Two points bear mention here. The first is the intentionalist-functionalist debate, which I wrote about here. If it interests you, you can read about it further, but suffice it to say that it was perhaps the major point of dispute among historians for a couple of decades, and nobody went to prison.

The second point is the Historikerstreit, or "historians' fight" of the 1980s and 1990s, during which conservative German scholars openly questioned the extent to which the Holocaust might have been a natural reaction on the part of the Nazis to Bolshevist terror, which was believed by many people, not just Nazis, to be specifically Jewish in origin (owing to the Jewish backgrounds of many early Bolsheviks). None of these historians were punished either. Many of them wrote canonical works in the historiography of the Third Reich (e.g., Ernst Nolte) that remain important.

Not to put too fine a point on this issue, but I've spent the last two years researching fairly intensively the Holocaust in the Baltic States and eastern Poland. Trust me when I tell you that no small amount of the work in this area has examined the extent to which Jews living in these regions might have provoked the anger of the populations by embracing the Soviets when the Red Army occupied these regions between September 1939 and June 1941. This point is examined because it's an important one -- if one of the goals of history is to assure that, by understanding history, we can avoid it being repeated in its worst aspects, then understanding the motivations of the murderers of Europe's Jews is an important part of the process.

None of the historians who have examined this question -- difficult as it is to examine -- have been prosecuted, much less imprisoned. Where "historians" have been imprisoned is when they have publicly stated their conviction that the Holocaust was essentially a hoax -- that the number of victims have been irresponsibly inflated and especially that no gassings were committed. As wrongheaded and counterproductive as I might think these laws are, it's worth noting that these are the people who have been prosecuted -- not radical functionalists like Götz Aly, not conservative revisionists seeking to draw an equivalence between the Holocaust and Stalinist mass killing like Nolte, and not nationalist historians like Mark Paul, whose work seeks to contextualize the mass killing of Jews within the behavior of certain sectors of the Jewish population. Also worth noting is that the people who are prosecuted are often not prosecuted for denying the Holocaust per se but for inciting racial hatred -- which is a crime in more countries than it is not. Given that the Venn diagram for Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites is pretty much a perfect circle, this fact ought not surprise us.

Roberts writes the following next:

For example, suppose a scholar in Germany discovers a previously unknown document that proves that National Socialist Germany exterminated 3 million Jews. This discovery of proof of the Holocaust would be rewarded with the arrest and imprisonment of the scholar for reporting the document, because it conflicts with the official zionist declaration of 6 million. The document would be branded a falsification and discarded. The scholar’s career would be ruined.

I hope the examples of Reitlinger and Hilberg above have disproved this point. But I do believe that, were a document found smeared with Hitler's DNA and reading, "Kill the Jews, use gas chambers, and stop when you hit six million," some people would find issue with its veracity. It's fair to question the motives of people willing to seize on the smallest bit of exculpatory evidence and ignore the mountain of evidence proving the Holocaust.

The last paragraph from Roberts worth addressing is this:

The Holocaust is not a subject that can be studied or investigated. It is an occurrence handed down by zionists that cannot be examined or modified and certainly not questioned. We must take it on faith alone. If a scholar does not, he is a Holocaust denier and, if European or captured in Europe, he is imprisoned.

Well, by now, he's basically repeating himself, but a final point does emerge here in referring to "scholars" as the people being imprisoned for denying the Holocaust. With the exception of David Irving, whose early work on World War II could be considered genuinely valuable, if biased, none of the people prosecuted for doing so have been scholars -- not even close. The number of Holocaust deniers with advanced history degrees numbers zero -- the ones who did have them are either dead (Harry Elmer Barnes) or no longer deniers (Mark Weber), and they were always the minority. There's a reason for that fact.

The rest of Roberts's essay is par for his particular course, and I won't address it here. In the interest of fairness, I intend to draw Roberts's attention to this piece; should he respond, I'll note it here.