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.
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[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.

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.
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[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]

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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.

Gramsci, Riley, and Fascism

I'm on a bit of a hiatus from my coursework, having finished my first class with the University of Edinburgh about a month ago, the term paper for which is here. Now, I'm waiting to hear about admission to a different Master's program, which would save me a significant amount of money on tuition. I'm superstitious enough not to mention which school that is.

In the meantime, I'm reading a few things that are relevant to my research line and a couple that aren't. In the former category is Dylan Riley's The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe. Riley, who teaches political sociology at UC Berkeley, deploys an argument to counter the convention wisdom that a major contributor to the rise of fascism in interwar Europe was the lack of strong civil societies and related institutions. Actually, he maintains, the countries in which fascism emerged were characterized by strong civil societies with fairly lengthy histories. The cases he cites are Italy, Spain, and Romania; he then considers the cases of Hungary (which Riley identifies as authoritarian but not fascist) and Nazi Germany, showing that Germany shared aspects of his model, whereas Hungary did not.

At the core of Riley's work is a theory of societal conflict based on the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theoretician and political prisoner. Riley deploys Gramsci's concept of hegemony to explain the rise of fascism and its relationship to the existence and strength of civil society. The hegemonic project, particularly as regards social reform, requires that hegemony begin with the hegemonic group establishing intraclass hegemony with other groups within the same social class. E.g., the military might be the initial locus of power, and in the process of intra-class hegemony, it extends its power toward the church. The second stage involves the transfer of hegemony to other classes. Here, for instance, an example would be a national political party attracting voters from a workers' union. Finally, there is counterhegemony, where the class or social group that will arise to lead revolutionary change emerges in conflict against the hegemonic class or group.

Riley does a reasonably good job of making his case. He's well versed in most of the history of the countries he analyzes. I think where I part ways with him is in his characterization of fascism (or the lack thereof) in Spain and Romania. First, it's an open question regarding whether fascism was actually established to any significant extent in Spain. Certainly there were fascist strains within the Falange, and Riley is careful to note this point, but he seems overly eager to politicize Franco, who with the exceptions of being anti-democracy and anti-socialism, seems to have been relatively apolitical. The case of Romania is more complex and less well studied. He makes the argument that Codreanu's Iron Guard moved away from anti-Semitism and it acquired political power, which is a theory I'd not seen floated before.

Finally, I'm also not sure of how Riley uses the term "democracy." As part of his central thesis, he sees fascism as the result of failed hegemony in combination with a strong civil society presence. As a democratizing force, without strong political institutions, Riley theorizes, a society with failed hegemonic institutions will realize the democratic aspirations of civil society not through political democracy with elections (liberal democracy) but rather through the political expression of a more organic (ethnic?) sort of democracy. Where I think Riley might have been more accurate would have been to say that democratization with a lack of hegemonic political institutions gives rise to populism rather than to fascism. Whether populism is a core aspect of fascism is itself an open question, but I don't see a strong enough definition of fascism in Riley's book to bear out his model a hundred percent.

Anyway, I nevertheless enjoyed the book and found its ideas interesting. Whether it will play a significant role in my thinking about fascism as an historical movement remains to be seen. Next up, I'm reading Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which while not on the topic of 20th century history nevertheless engages another interest of mine -- textual criticism of ancient cultures and history of the Near East.

Austrian Coup of 1934

Conventional wisdom has tended to see the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938 as inevitable, given the strong historical, cultural, and political ties between Germany and Austria. Indeed, the Anschluss was welcomed by many Austrians, who had desired union with Germany since the end of World War I and who shared the Nazis' pan-German, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic beliefs. However, less than four years earlier, on July 25, 1934, an attempted National Socialist coup against the government of Austria was an abysmal failure. Why the so-called July Putsch failed can be understood as the result of Nazi Germany's inability to appreciate the complexities of Austria's authoritarian right wing and its resistance to key aspects of the Nazi Weltanschauung (world view). Examining the coup in its three stages demonstrates some of these complexities.

Background to the Coup

Almost from the moment that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, he indicated the desire to annex Austria.[1] However, several factors worked against this desire. Perhaps most importantly, Austria and Germany had been forbidden to unite politically under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In addition, loans extended to Austria from the League of Nations, which had been instrumental in keeping the country economically viable during the 1920s, had similarly stipulated that Anschluss would continue to be forbidden. Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss had reiterated the agreement not to unite with Germany under the terms of a second loan from the League, which he managed to push through the Austrian legislature by two votes in the summer of 1933.[2]

Nevertheless, not all of the forces were against Anschluss. Most importantly, as noted, a significant proportion of the Austrian population desired annexation by Germany and had since the end of World War I. On October 1, 1921, the National Assembly had voted for Anschluss, only to be rebuked by the League of Nations. Moreover, of the three major political parties in Austria at the time, two of them -- the left-wing Social-democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) and the right-wing German-nationalist Greater German People’s Party -- viewed union favorably, albeit the former with certain stipulations. In addition, the small but growing National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) was pro-Anschluss. Only the right-wing Christian Social Party of Chancellor Dollfuss opposed annexation by Germany.[3]

For the first three months of Hitler’s term in office, however, the matter did not reach a crucial level. The NSDAP in Austria had logged significant gains in regional elections in 1932, and the belief grew among the party in both Germany and Austria that power could be gained by the NSDAP in Austria through electoral means, in much the same manner as it had in Germany. Dollfuss, for a variety of reasons, wanted desperately to prevent such a turn of events. Therefore, when a constitutional opportunity to dissolve the legislature arose in May 1933, Dollfuss exploited it and, on May 4, expressed his intention to rule by decree. Over the course of the following year, Dollfuss would fashion an authoritarian state based largely on the model supplied by Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy.[4]

Hitler’s reaction to Dollfuss’s decision to suspend the legislature was to adopt a three-pronged attack on Austria, combining economic sanctions (principally a thousand-mark fee imposed on travel to Austria, which crippled Austria’s major tourism industry), broad use of pro-Nazi, anti-Dollfuss propaganda by radio, and terrorism committed by members of the NSDAP in Austria.[5] The country had already been facing political violence for years: Helmut Konrad of the University of Graz (Austria) has estimated that a political murder occurred in interwar Austria every two weeks.[6] With the Nazi terror campaign, the problem compounded significantly. Fearing for his country, Dollfuss banned the NSDAP in Austria and undertook a diplomatic campaign to support Austrian independence, finding that his most vehement supporter was Mussolini, who feared Nazi irredentist claims on the South Tyrol, the formerly Austrian territory that had been awarded to Italy at the Paris Peace Conference.[7]

Mussolini, for his own part, assured Dollfuss at a meeting in Riccione, Italy, on August 19, 1933, that Italy would intervene on Austria’s behalf. In return, Mussolini asked that Dollfuss eliminate the political left in Austria. This opportunity presented itself on February 12 of the following year, when the SPÖ militia, the Republikaner Schutzbund, launched an armed uprising against Dollfuss’s rule. The uprising was brutally crushed, and the SPÖ was subsequently banned, leaving Dollfuss free to combat the NSDAP and consolidate his own authoritarian rule. A formal alliance with Italy and Hungary was entered in March. Hitler and Mussolini discussed the situation in Austria at their first meeting on June 14 but came to no agreements. Hitler admired Mussolini and wanted to avoid conflict with him. Plus, the German military was still weak.[8]

Consequently, Hitler opted to allow for an NSDAP coup in Austria. The coup leaders, seeing Dollfuss as weak and unpopular and believing strongly in growing support for their movement in the Austrian populace at large, elected to decapitate the government in Vienna and replace Dollfuss with one of their own. Any resistance, they imagined, would be easily crushed by armed Sturmabteilung (SA) units throughout the country, which had been arming despite being forced underground. Mussolini would accept the NSDAP coup once it was too late to roll it back, they believed.

Assault on the Chancellery

We know the intentions of the July Putsch in part because of the so-called Kollerschlag Document, which was found on an Austrian SA member attempting to cross the border back into Germany after the coup attempt failed. Although it was coded, the SA member was carrying the key as well, which was also found during the search. Although tactics on the first stage of the putsch are lacking, the strategy is clear: Dollfuss was to be deposed as Chancellor and the "period of inertia" that followed his resignation would be used for the SA to seize power.[9]

Ultimately, the tactic chosen to force Dollfuss's resignation was an armed attack on the Chancellery in Vienna. This attack was carried out by a special unit of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the SS-Standarte 89, which itself had been an Austrian SA unit until a couple of months earlier.[10] The coup leaders had believed that, in striking in the particular time and date chosen, they would seize not only the chancellor but also his entire cabinet, which was scheduled to meet at the time. In addition, it was known that the vice chancellor, Ernst Starhemberg, who was also a prominent figure in the Heimwehr independent right-wing militia, was in Italy on a state visit, so he would not be able to take over the government in his absence.[11]

While we will never know whether the coup against Dollfuss as planned would have been successful without the chancellor being killed, events did not unfold as intended. A large proportion of the responsibility for this failure in planning falls to Johann Dobler, a Vienna police inspector and member of the Austrian NSDAP, who developed pangs of conscience on the morning of July 25 and reached out to Emil Fey, the previous vice chancellor under Dollfuss and a current minister without portfolio, as well as a prominent Heimwehr leader. Although Dobler was not able to reach Fey, he met with Karl Wrabel, an aide to Fey, at a Vienna café later that morning and alerted him to the coup to take place that day. Wrabel subsequently made contact with Fey, who warned Dollfuss, who in turn dismissed the cabinet and tried to mobilize police to beat back the coming attack.[12]

When the assault team arrived at the Chancellery between noon and one in the afternoon, Dollfuss was shot twice almost immediately at close range and bled to death over the course of the next two hours. Angry at having been foiled in seizing the whole cabinet and specifically mad at Dollfuss, who refused to resign, the SS men with him refused to call a priest to administer the late rites of the church. As these events unfolded, elsewhere in the city, the President of the Republic, Wilhelm Miklas, named as chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, then serving as Foreign Minister, because Starhemberg was not in the country. At the same time, Fey mobilized the Heimwehr and police against the coup leaders, who surrendered before seven that evening.[13]

Dollfuss's assassination notwithstanding, the first stage of the coup -- the attempt to decapitate the government -- failed. Understanding why it failed offers some insight into how the Nazis had misjudged the nature of Austria's authoritarian right wing. Julie Thorpe of the University of Western Sydney (Australia) has offered a sort of taxonomy of the authoritarian right in interwar Austria. Opposing the traditional Lager (camp) theory of interwar Austrian politics, Thorpe instead characterizes the Dollfuss movement as explicitly fascist and pan-German, with the latter ideology distinguished among the Christian Socials as a Danubian pan-German imperialism based in Vienna, rather than a strictly völkisch (i.e., ethnic) pan-Germanism based in Berlin. Thorpe writes, "Austrian proponents of a pan-German identity claimed that the Austrian state was the fullest expression of German hegemony over non-German nationalities and of a German historical mission in Central Europe."[14] Consequently, while the Nazis might have seen the Christian Social electorate as sympathetic on the basis of its fascist authoritarianism and pan-Germanism, they misjudged the specifically Austrian-Viennese nature of this ideology.

Moreover, the loyalty of the Heimwehr, to whom Dobler as informant reached out, was emblematic of this erroneous assessment of the Nazis. Bruce Pauley of the University of Central Florida, in elucidating the history of Austrian National Socialism, has also treated the history of the Heimwehr at some length. In May 1930, the Heimwehr had publicly sworn the so-called Korneuburg Oath, which included explicitly fascist and pan-German expressions of ideology.[15] The following year, the Austrian Nazis and the Heimwehr organization in the federal state of Styria formed a Kampfgemeinschaft (fighting alliance).[16] Here, the Nazis seem to have misjudged the Heimwehr as a whole on the basis of the actions of its Styrian wing. Nazi ideology in Austria was always more popular in regions of Austria bordering non-German nations, including Styria, Burgenland, Carinthia, and parts of Tyrol. Believing that the sympathies of the Styrian Heimwehr existed in the Heimwehr in, e.g., Vienna or Salzburg was a fatal miscalculation.

Finally, there was a miscalculation on the Nazis' part with regard to their own organizations. As noted above, while the SA was the primary armed organization executing the coup nationwide, it was a former SA unit now subordinated to the SS that began the assault in Vienna. Importantly, less than one month before the July Putsch, the SA had been violently purged in Germany on the famous "Night of the Long Knives" of June 30, 1934. Anger about the purge spread to the SA in Austria, and as noted by prominent German historian Peter Longerich, "Although the Austrian SA had promised the plotters its support in principle, the Viennese SA failed to come to the assistance of their unpopular SS comrades."[17]

The Uprising in the Provinces

We know that the coup leaders in Vienna attempted and failed to seize a radio station in Vienna on July 25, from which they would have broadcast Dollfuss's removal from office as a signal for SA units throughout Austria to seize power on a local basis. On this point, the Kollerschlag document states, "On news of Dollfuss' resignation, the entire SA will immediately and without further instructions undertake 'unarmed propaganda marches' … for the purpose immediately occupying public offices and buildings in the provincial capitals and local administrative centres [sic] and of seizing power."[18] Elsewhere, it is stipulated, "Armed confrontation with the police or gendarmerie is preferably to be avoided for as long as possible. Where it proves necessary, however, it is to be carried out with the utmost vigour [sic] and maximum forces. Clashes with the Federal Army are to be avoided if at all possible."[19]

This stage of the coup failed as well. Part of this failure can be attributed to Nazi misjudgment of the sympathies of the Heimwehr, which was mobilized with the Austrian army nationwide against the Nazis. However, the reasons for the failure of the coup in the provinces ran deeper. Writing to the German foreign ministry on July 31, just one day after the coup was put down finally, Hans Steinacher, head of Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland, a Berlin-based government organization dedicated to engendering German unity outside of Germany's borders, laid out the reasons for the coup's failure. After indicating the mistakes of staging the coup while the vice chancellor was out of the country and of not preparing an option to abort the plan, Steinacher remarks, "The 'masses' are lacking. We are unable to prove that they exist and, at the moment when the matter was becoming really dangerous Italy intervened."[20] Clearly, there was no popular support for the Nazi coup beyond the Nazi party itself.

Here, the assassination of the chancellor itself seems have been a key mobilizing factor. As noted above, Dollfuss had been refused a priest for last rites by the SS. According to Philip Scheriau, in his Master's thesis written at the University of Vienna, this information was transmitted to the deeply Catholic Austrian population via newspapers both domestically and internationally before the coup attempt was even completed. The core of Scheriau's thesis states that "Dollfuss is represented in the [newspaper] coverage as a martyr in two primary ways. On the one hand, he is a hero who fell in the fight for his country, and on the other hand, he is represented as a hero and martyr in the Christian tradition."[21]

Beyond this, Dollfuss had enjoyed the support of the Austrian Catholic Church for his authoritarian policies. Not only was one of Dollfuss's most popular predecessors as chancellor, Ignaz Seipel, a Catholic priest, but Seipel had actually contributed to the creation of the Heimwehr that defended the Austrian state against the Nazis. Moreover, Dollfuss's funeral mass, held on July 28, before the coup was over, was said by the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, and was attended by half a million faithful. Those Austrians not already put off by the Nazis' anti-clericalism were surely disgusted by the reports of how Dollfuss had died, and if their sense of being Austrian was not offended, their Catholicism was.

Italian Intervention

As indicated in Steinacher's letter to the German foreign ministry, the final reason the July Putsch failed was the threat of Italian intervention.  Misjudgment of how Mussolini would react to the coup attempt was the final miscalculation of the Nazis in June 1934. Not only was Vice Chancellor Starhemberg in Italy at the time of the putsch, but likely unbeknownst to the coup leaders at the time, so were Dollfuss's wife and children. Mussolini's reaction to the putsch was deeply personal, and he mobilized Italian army troops to the Brenner Pass and Italy's border with Carinthia, in a clear threat of intervention if the Nazis did not stand down.[22] It was largely on the basis of this threat that Hitler withdrew support for the coup, and it collapsed.

However, it also seems that there was a miscalculation by the Nazis of the Austrian position on Italy as well. There was a not insignificant number of right-wing Austrians who resented Italy's annexation of South Tyrol at the end of World War I. Hitler, for his own part, had recognized Italy's claims to the territory as a way of appeasing Mussolini, for whom he had great respect. In June 1934, Hitler and Mussolini had met for the first time in person in Venice, and at this meeting, Mussolini had made clear his support for Dollfuss and for Austria's independence from Germany. That the coup went forward six weeks later would seem to be a grave error on Hitler's part.

The irredentist positions of the Austrian far right undoubtedly played a role in this error. Given the resentment about South Tyrol both in the Nazi Party and in the Heimwehr, it could have been believed that a Nazi seizure of power in Austria would create sufficient momentum for the reclamation of South Tyrol, or at least provide enough of a show of force at the Italian border that Mussolini would think twice before intervening. Here, the Nazis seem to have misjudged Dollfuss, himself initially an irredentist on South Tyrol, and his own willingness to compromise on the matter in exchange for Mussolini's support. As Gottfried-Karl Kindermann of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich notes, this guarantee of independence was stipulated in a secret attachment to the Rome Protocol of 1934, signed among Italy, Austria, and Hungary as a hedge against German aspirations of continental hegemony.[23] In essence, Dollfuss had conceded South Tyrol in exchange for Italian military protection. While this concession did not save his life, it did save Austria -- at least for the time being.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the complexity of the authoritarian right wing in Austria and the extent to which its ideals were different from those of Nazi Germany explains why the Nazis failed to seize control in Austria in July 1934. At the core of Dollfuss’s authoritarian lay Austrian nationalism that was deeply Catholic, and the loyalty of the people and state institutions to this ideology was fatally misjudged. It would require another four years and a vastly changed international landscape before Anschluss could be carried out successfully. The reasons why the Anschluss of 1938 succeeded, however, are beyond the scope of this paper.

---

[1] Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 2000), 522-23.

[2] Gottfried-Karl Kindermann, Hitler’s Defeat in Austria, 1933-1934, trans. Sonia Brough and David Taylor (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988), 32-33.

[3] Steve Beller, A Concise History of Austria (New York: Cambridge UP, 2007), 209-10.

[4] Kindermann, ibid, 78-79.

[5] Ibid, 33-35.

[6] Helmut Konrad, “The Significance of February 1934 in Austria, in Both National and International Context,” in Routes Into the Abyss: Coping With Crises in the 1930s, ed. Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 22.

[7] Kindermann, ibid, 39.

[8] Ibid, 95,

[9] “The ‘Kollerschlag Document,’” in Hitler’s Defeat in Austria, 1933-34, ed. Gottfried-Karl Kindermann, trans. Sonia Brough and David Taylor (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988), 196.

[10] Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, trans. Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 177.

[11] “The ‘Kollerschlag Document,’” ibid, 196-98.

[12] Kindermann, ibid, 101-02.

[13] Ibid, 102-03.

[14] Julie Thorpe, "Revisiting the 'Authoritarian State' 40 Years on," Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 2 (April 2010): 319.

[15] Bruce F. Pauley, Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis: A History of Austrian National Socialism (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 74.

[16] Ibid, 76.

[17] Longerich, ibid, 178.

[18] “The ‘Kollerschlag Document,’” ibid, 196.

[19] Ibid, 197.

[20] Hans Steinacher, Head of the Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland to the Foreign Ministry, 31 July 1934, in Hitler's Defeat in Austria, 1933-1934, ed. Gottfried-Karl Kindermann, trans. by Sonia Brough and David Taylor (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988), 205-06.

[21] Philip Scheriau, "Mediale Reaktionen auf den Juliputsch 1934 in In- und Ausland" (Masterarbeit, University of Vienna, 2014), 71, translation mine.

[22] Kindermann, ibid, 116.

[23] Ibid, 43.

The Dissolution of Yugoslavia

In 1989, Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Montenegro. Today, the process of Yugoslavia's breakup is still not complete. Although all six former constituent republics are now independent sovereign states, it was not without serious conflict that Yugoslavia was broken up. In addition, a seventh republic, Kosovo, has been carved out of Serbia, but its future remains uncertain. Despite the tragic process of Yugoslavia's disintegration, however, some positive aspects of this process have emerged.

Like World War I, at the core of Yugoslavia's breakup was Serbian nationalism, which had been on the rise throughout the 1980s following the death of Yugoslavia's longtime communist dictator, Josip Broz Tito, who had been effective at maintaining Yugoslavia's cohesion and stifling nationalist tendencies. Following Tito's death, some Serbs increasingly began to feel that their supremacy within the federation, which had been a fact throughout Yugoslavia's existence, was being lost. Other ethnicities embraced nationalism in response. Complicating the problem was the fact that no single republic of Yugoslavia was ethnically homogeneous; rather, each republic had a mix of ethnicities, with one in sometimes only a slim majority. Serbs, in particular, existed in communities in all six republics, particularly Croatia and Bosnia. Frequent political crises and sporadic outbreaks of ethnic violence became commonplace.

The dismantling of the Soviet system and communism in Eastern Europe in general expedited Yugoslavia's dissolution. Free elections in most republics brought independence-minded parties to the fore. The first republic to break away was Slovenia, in early 1991, followed swiftly by Croatia. With Croatia's declaration of independence, Yugoslavia's army attacked. However, it was in Bosnia that the bloodiest battles were fought -- indeed, some of the bloodiest incidents in Europe since the end of World War II. When the dust settled in 1995, Bosnia was independent but itself had become a federation of a Bosnian state and a Serbian state within Bosnia, the Republika Srpska.

More complicated and extended has been the attempts of the Albanian province of Kosovo to secede from Yugoslavia and later the independent state of Serbia. First with an uprising in the 1990s that occasioned NATO intervention and UN administration and since 2008 with a declaration of independence, Kosovo has sought to separate itself from Serbia. However, unlike the constituent Yugoslav republics, Kosovo has not received universal recognition and has not been admitted to the UN, although some progress has been made toward normalizing relations with Serbia.

Sadly, ethnic tensions remain fairly high in these now six or seven independent states. However, one positive development is that the world community sought to punish war criminals who committed acts of genocide during the breakup of Yugoslavia, convening the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in 1993. The ICTY continues to prosecute war criminals and has successfully prosecuted several, including the former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. In the ICTY, the world community kept its promise in the UN Convention on Genocide to punish these crimes, which is one of the only positive results of a sad period of chaos in the Balkans.

Immigration to Europe

Immigration has played and continues to play an enormous role in European history since the end of World War II. In response to several factors, including decolonization of Africa and Africa, decimated populations as a result of the war and subsequent zero (or even negative) population growth, and later the Schengen Agreement all contributed to the changing demographic nature of native- and foreign-born Europeans. Examining the situations of immigration in several European countries can elucidate our understanding of the impacts of immigration on post-war Europe.

In the United Kingdom, decolonization of Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia resulted in an influx of immigrants from these countries, with a large uptick in the rates of immigration in the 1960s and 1970s. On the one hand, the policy toward immigrants in the U.K. of social integration has been successful. Second and third generations of British citizens of African and South Asian descent have arisen in the U.K., with such varied outcomes as the first Muslim mayor of London elected earlier this year, a proliferation of curry restaurants in the major metropolitan centers, people of Asian and African descent holding peerages, and so on. At the same time, politically there has been some reaction. The rise of the National Front and later the National Party in the U.K. was largely a reaction to non-white immigration. In addition, the U.K. population's electoral decision to leave the European Union was significantly motivated by a desire to stem immigration, including from elsewhere in Europe under the Schengen Agreement. Clearly, the U.K. continues to navigate the experience of immigration, but its overall experience seems to have been a net positive.

In France, immigrants came during the same period from North and West Africa and Southeast Asia. Here, the predominant policy practiced by French governments vis-à-vis immigrants has been one of multiculturalism, i.e., to encourage immigrants to maintain their customs to as great an extent as possible, while simultaneously becoming French citizens. As in the U.K., the rise of mass politics on the far right in the form of the Front National is one result of this increased immigration. However, it is clear that the overall experience of France with immigrants -- and equally important, of immigrants with France -- has been more problematic than that of the U.K. Multiple generations of people of African and Asian descent live in the banlieux of Paris, where they are subject to occupation-style policing and discrimination when they attempt to venture outside. At the same time, in opposition to France's centuries-long tradition of laïcité, both the discrimination and the government's encouragement of multiculturalism have contributed to increasing demands by communities of African and Asian descent to have their religious beliefs accommodated, which in turn has fueled ethnic and racial tensions even more. The spate of recent terrorist attacks in France, while not directly correlated to France's troubled experience with immigration, are nevertheless related.

Germany experienced a much larger population decline as a result of the war, not to mention partition, and its fast-growing economy during the 1960s and 1970s necessitated the influx of immigrants. In this particular case, the majority of the workers came from Turkey and were originally as guest workers, rather than as immigrants. When the economic need for these workers persisted, guest workers ultimately brought their families and became immigrants. A third generation of Germans of Turkish descent has now been born. Germany has largely chosen the strategy of the U.K. in seeking to integrate these immigrants, rather than encouraging multiculturalism. A newer, greater challenge is now being faced in Germany as the result of accepting more than a million refugees over the course of the past year, with the ultimate settlement status of these refugees undetermined. There have been the expected political reactions from the right, although laws in Germany generally keep the public discourse more civil than elsewhere. That said, much remains to be decided in Germany, and just in the past week, terrorist attacks have occurred there as well, although it is still unclear at this point the extent to which immigration and/or religion has played a role.

Ultimately, Europe to some extent is experiencing a struggle between, on the one hand, a commitment to human rights and acknowledging that there is a certain strength in diversity and, on the other hand, the long-term effects on the continent's demography of the immigration of non-Europeans with different cultures and beliefs. I do not personally see this as a crisis like some commenters do so much as a challenge. It took Europe hundreds of years to develop a political culture that was not only adopted in the United States but that has also become the model for much of the world. The ideologies of some immigrants might stand in diametrical opposition to this European ideal. The solution will be to encourage absorption policies that successfully integrate the immigrants into their new homes, rather than subject them to further alienation.

Effects of the Holocaust

For this week's assignment, I chose to write about a topic with which I'm very familiar, the Holocust. For years, I've conducted independent research on the topic and have published a fair amount of material. I think it's therefore safe to say that the Holocaust had extensive politics effects on Europe and the rest of the world. Although it is important to acknowledge that there were many innocent victims of the Nazis, not the least of whom were non-Jewish Polish citizens, Soviet POWs, and religious and political enemies, my focus here is on the largest victim group, i.e., the nearly six million European Jews killed during World War II.

Probably the most important political effect of the Holocaust was the creation within three years of the end of the war of the State of Israel. Although the Zionist movement had existed in its political form since the 1890s, it had had limited impact on the Jewish world at large. Because Orthodox Judaism rejected Zionism as heresy, while left-wing political organizations largely rejected it as bourgeois in its embrace of ethnic nationalism, Zionism in Europe was the province of eastern European, largely left-wing Jews, mainly in Poland, the Baltic States, and the Soviet Union. By the time the Holocaust happened, the political leadership of these Zionist groups was already in Palestine. The political effect of the Holocaust was a massive increase in support for Zionism, not only among the international community, which now agreed with the Zionism movement on the need for a Jewish state, but also among Jews themselves who had previously rejected Zionism but who now believed that continued Jewish survival in Europe was impossible. Although I believe that it is important to emphasize that the Holocaust did not "cause" Israel to exist -- the Zionist movement would ultimately have been successful in its goals; in fact, the Peel Commission under the U.K. Mandate for Palestine had voted for partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in 1937 -- it is undeniable, I believe, to state that the Holocaust expedited Israel's creation.

Obviously, given the long-term Arab-Israeli conflict that arose in connection to the creation of Israel, the Holocaust clearly had repercussions outside of Europe as well. Several important works on the topic have demonstrated an important role of Holocaust remembrance -- not to mention, unfortunately, some exploitation on one hand and denial on the other -- in post-World War II politics. In his book The Holocaust in American Life, the late historian Peter Novick argued that the Holocaust had a lasting impact on American culture and foreign policy over the course of the 20th century.[1] From the Israeli perspective, Tom Segev has argued quite convincingly that the Holocaust has been a frequent topic evoked by Israeli politicians, particularly when they find their own governments to be experiencing moments of crisis (e.g., a series of crises for David Ben-Gurion in the late 1950s culminated in Israel's capture, trial, and execution of Adolf Eichmann).[2] Finally, scholars of Holocaust denial have repeatedly noted a strong current of denial in the Arab world, particularly in the 21st century.[3]

Finally, recognition of the Holocaust, not to mention the Armenian Genocide of World War I, resulted in the U.N.'s adoption of its Convention on Genocide in 1948. Although the efficacy of this convention has been debated extensively, particularly given the failure of the United States to ratify it, it nevertheless was evoked when genocidal violence erupted in the former Yugoslavia beginning in the late 1980s, with the ultimate result being the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, which has tried and convicted several war criminals, not the least of whom was the former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Arguably, had the Holocaust not happened, the ability of the U.N. to enact the Convention on Genocide -- and perhaps even its inspiration to do so -- might well have been absent.

=====

     [1] Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Mariner Books, 2000).
     [2] Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (London: Picador, 2000).
     [3] See, e.g., Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2009).

Assessing Gorbachev

In my opinion, Mikhail Gorbachev deserves enormous credit for both the peaceful ending of the dictatorship and cold war and the decline and collapse of the Soviet state because I cannot imagine one happening without the other. Moreover, the see the decline and collapse of the USSR as having been an overwhelmingly positive thing, even if events since then for Russia and the other constituent republics have often been difficult. Gorbachev sought to dismantle the system more cautiously and slowly, so the chaos and anarchy that erupted in some places cannot, in my opinion, be blamed on him.

Regarding Gorbachev's most positive accomplishment, I believe that it was ending the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. With literally no end in sight for the Soviet troops fighting there, growing discontent over the war among the Soviet public – particularly among the USSR's Muslim ethnicities – and the monumental cost of the intervention with little or no gain, it is frankly amazing to me that Brezhnev persisted in the war for as long as he did, although the U.S. record in its own intervention in Vietnam left at least as much to be desired.

Regarding Gorbachev's worst miscalculation, I think his failure to assess his opponents within the Soviet government was the chief issue. While it certainly could not have been easy to manage criticism from his left from the entrenched interests of the military and security apparatuses and, at the same time, more right-wing pressure from the likes of Boris Yeltsin, a more savvy politician might have been able to insulate himself sufficiently from the sorts of threats that these groups posed and prevented the August 1991 coup and the rapid deterioration of his power that followed. More importantly, better management of the political terrain might have allowed Gorbachev to control the final collapse of the USSR more competently, thus perhaps averting some of the tragedy that has since ensued.

Finally, on a personal note, I lived through the collapse of the final year of the Soviet Union and remember the events very well. I recall Gorbachev returning to power when the August coup was crushed and the disappearance of the Soviet Union four months. I remember thinking then that Mikhail Gorbachev might have been the greatest leader of the 20th century for what he accomplished. Certainly he was the most significant, in the same way that Hitler was (in my opinion) for the first half. If everything about Europe mid-century was more or less a direct result of the catastrophic policies that Hitler pursued, then Gorbachev was ultimately the person who was responsible for that landscape having changed so enormously by the century's end.

Keine Liquidierung: Eine Neubeurteilung

Simul-blogged at Holocaust Controveries.

I. The Controversy Thus Far 

Among the controversies inspired by the publication in 1977 of David Irving's Hitler's War was the reproduction in that volume of a page of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's telephone log. In particular, the page cited by Irving, among other content, listed a series of notes taken by Himmler during or pursuant to a telephone conversation with RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich. At the time of the call, Heydrich was in his office in Prague, while Himmler was at FHQ Wolfsschanze in occupied Poland, where Hitler was then spending a majority of his time. 

The four lines in Himmler's telephone log pertaining to the conversation with Heydrich, at 1:30 p.m. on November 30, 1941, read thus:

Verhaftung Dr. Jekelius
Angebl Sohn Molotows.
Judentransport aus Berlin.
Keine Liquidierung.

Irving translated them as follows:

Arrest Dr. Jekelius
Alleged son of Molotov.
Jew-transport from Berlin.
No liquidation. 

On the basis of this telephone note, Irving presumed that Hitler had interceded in the planned liquidation of a particular transport of Jews from Berlin. This, Irving claimed, proved that the extermination of Jews in areas under Nazi control was a project about which Hitler was perhaps ignorant, and upon learning of plans for wholesale extermination, he interceded to stop it. 

Unsurprisingly, the response of historians to Irving's allegation has been uniformly negative. From initial responses from Martin Broszat and Gerald Fleming to later interpretations of the note from Christopher Browning, Richard Breitman, and others, the consensus has arisen, in contrast, that the note recorded a late attempt to prevent the shooting of a particular transport of Jews which, that day, was arriving in Riga, Latvia. On that same day in Riga, November 30, 1941, SS men and Latvian auxiliaries under the command of Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln were undertaking the extermination of roughly half of the Jews residing in the Riga Ghetto, with the other half to follow on December 8. The best available evidence suggests that the roughly one thousand Jews from Berlin arrived in Riga either immediately before the "Action" or as it was under way and were shot with the Latvian Jews that same day. 

Nevertheless, we are still left with several problems regarding this telephone note and its content and purpose. I.e., did the order originate, for whatever reason, from Hitler? Did it instead originate from Himmler or even from Heydrich? Regardless of the person from whom it originated, why was this order, presuming that it was a directive not to liquidate the Jewish transport from Berlin that had already arrived and been shot -- and I do think we must presume that (although perhaps, at a later date, I can address the alternate explanations) -- given in the first place? 

Several scholars have offered plausible explanations of the latter point, not the least of which include conflicts of interest between the HSSPF and RSHA in Riga, specifically regarding the apportioning of some percentage of able-bodied Jewish men for labor, and ongoing protests, mainly from the civilian authorities in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, over the treatment of Jews in the east, including sometimes the raising of objections specifically over the matter of German Jews. However, explanations of who gave the order on November 30 have been less clear. 

II. Enter Emil Finnberg 

As far as I've been yet able to determine, the role of SS-Hauptsturmführer Emil Finnberg was first suggested to be essential to understanding the November 30 phone note by Peter Klein, in his essay "Die Erlaubnis zum grenzenlosen Massenmord," which was published in the 1999 volume Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität, edited by Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann. Finnberg was in Riga in 1941 as a member of Einsatzgruppe A, specifically as adjutant to the head of Einsatzgruppe A Walter Stahlecker and then as chief investigator for BdS Riga. Later, Finnberg served in the SD office in Breslau. He survived the war and went on to give several depositions and undergo several interrogations. Perhaps most famously, he testified at the 1965 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. 

To explain the November 30 phone note, Klein cites two statements from Finnberg -- one from 1960 an the other from 1961 -- in which Finnberg tells virtually identical stories about a disagreement between Jeckeln, who directed the liquidation of the Jews of the Riga Ghetto on November 30, 1941, and SS-Standartenführer Rudolf Lange of Einsatzkommando 2, who was with the SD in Riga. 

The statement from 1960:

Im März 1942 hatte die damalige Oberführer Jeckeln in seiner Eigenschaft als [HSSPF] in Riga die Auflösung die Ghettos und die Beseitigung der Juden angeordnet. Dr. Lange, der damals Kommandeur der [Sipo] in Riga war, hat diesen Befehl abgelehnt. Daraufhin hat [Jeckeln] Judenschießungen durch die ihm unterstellten Polizeikräfte durchführen lassen. Ich weiß von dieser Angelegenheit, weil Dr. Lange eine entsprechende Unterstützung durch [Heydrich] haben wollte und über die Funkstation des BdS in Riga mit Berlin verkehrte. Da das Fernschreibnetz dem [HSSPF] unterstand konnte Dr. Lange ohne dessen Kenntnis keine Nachrichten nach Berlin durchgeben. Dr. Stahlecker war in diesem Zeitpunkt schon gefallen und ein Nachfolger nach nicht eingesetzt. (qtd. in Klein 933-34)

Translated:

In March 1942, the then Oberführer Jeckeln, in his capacity as HSSPF in Riga, ordered the dissolution of the ghetto and the elimination of the Jews. Dr. Lange, who was the then commander of the Security Police in Riga, rejected this order. Consequently, [Jeckeln] had the shootings of Jews carried out by his subordinate police forces. I know about this matter because Dr. Lange wanted appropriate support from [Heydrich] and communicated with Berlin via the radio station of the BdS in Riga. Since the telex network was under [Jeckeln], Dr. Lange could not get messages through to Berlin without his knowledge. Dr. Stahlecker had by this time already died, and a successor had not yet been appointed.

Next, the 1961 statement:

Zur Person Langes möchte ich noch nachtragen, daß ich einmal erlebt habe, wie er sich Jeckeln widersetzte. Stahlecker muß wohl gerade gefallen gewesen sein. Lange lehnte es ab, die von Jeckeln befohlene Liquidation des Ghettos durchzuführen. Ich habe davon erfahren, weil er nämlich zu unserer Funkstelle kam, um unter Umgehung von Jeckeln den Entscheid von Heydrich und Himmler herbeizuführen. Diese untersagten die Exekutionen, Jeckeln ließ sie trotzdem durch seine Kräfte durchführen. Danach war das Verhältnis zwischen Lange und Jeckeln äußerst gespannt, worunter die gesamte [Sipo] litt. (ibid)

Translated:

On the person of Lange, I would like to add that I experienced once how he resisted Jeckeln. Stahlecker must surely just have died. Lange refused to carry out the liquidation of the ghetto that Jeckeln ordered. I know about this namely because he came to our radio station to bypass Jeckeln by obtaining a decision from Heydrich and Himmler. This prevented the executions; Jeckeln still had his forces carry them out. Thereafter, the relationship between Lange and Jeckeln was extremely strained, under which the whole Security Police suffered.

Presumably, Lange took issue with the Berlin Jews being taken to Rumbula, so he went to Finnberg's office to use the radio and to contact Berlin and appeal to Heydrich and/or Himmler. By the time Himmler, who had left Berlin on the morning of November 30, arrived at Wolfsschanze, it was too late to intercede. The strong reprimand about acting outside of orders with regard to Reich Jews being settled in RKO issued by Himmler the following day, Lange's promotion to KdS two days later, and Jeckeln being summoned to meet Himmler in person on December 4 all indicate the fundamental interpretation of a disagreement between the RSHA and HSSPF being at the heart of the matter; Finnberg's testimony indicates the source of the complaint itself in Riga as Lange.

III. The Problems With Finnberg

Finnberg's account, however, is not without its problems. For one, the Rumbula Action was long over by March 1942, so at the very least, the matter of the date must be worked out. Moreover, Stahlecker was, in fact, not dead in November or December 1941, although he was by the end of March 1942, which requires that Stahlecker's absence at the time of the incident between Lange and Jeckeln be explained. On the face of Finnberg's statement, all that we can be certain of is that there was a massacre of Jews going on; Lange, Jeckeln, and Finnberg were all currently serving in Riga; Stahlecker was not there (perhaps dead); and his replacement, Heinz Jost, had not yet arrived.

Jeckeln arrived in Riga sometime after November 12, 1941. We know that he met with Himmler in Berlin on that date. Andrew Ezergailis, in The Holocaust in Latvia, puts Jeckeln's arrival in Riga on "November 14 at the earliest" (p. 241). By August 1942, he is reported in Belarus, heading up the anti-partisan Operation Malaria.

Lange would have arrived in Riga with Einsatzkommando 2 in late June 1941. He is in Riga until moved to Reichsgau Wartheland in January 1945, where he presumably dies.

Stahlecker headed Einsatzgruppe A, which was headquartered at Riga in September 1941 but had moved onto Krasnogvardeysk by the first week of October. Stahlecker would have returned to Riga more or less permanently when named BdS Ostland on November 8. Beginning the first week of December, he concerned himself mainly with KZ Jungfernhof. Sometime between the last trainload arriving at Jungferhof on December 10 and his death, on March 23 of the following year, Stahlecker went to the front, but it is unclear exactly when, and it is also unclear whether he returned to Riga during this period or how often. Ezergailis places him at Rumbula on November 30 (p. 254), but he seems to be alone in doing so.

Finnberg was attached to Stahlecker as adjutant and moved with him until Finnberg himself was promoted to the position of chief investigator in October 1941. By 1943, however, he is stationed in Breslau, as noted above, although the time of his transfer is similarly unclear.

We can consider November 14 to be the earliest possible date on which the events that Finnberg describes took place. Continuing, if we take at face value Finnberg's statement that Stahlecker was not there and his replacement had not yet arrived, then we can determine the latest possible date on the basis of Jost's taking of Stahlecker's post.

When Jost was interrogated in May 1947, he recalled receiving the command in April, but corrected his account on prodding from the interrogator to March 24 (the day after Stahlecker's death) and then to March 27. The interrogation definitely places Jost at the head of Einsatzgruppe A by April 7 (p. 4). Therefore, the events described by Finnberg would fall between November 14, 1941, and April 7, 1942.

However, in a later interrogation, in March 1948, Jost also provides important information about Jeckeln's whereabouts:

JECKELN ist sehr spät in das Baltikum gekommen, ich schätze dass es im Winter gewesen ist, so um den November herum, da war er zuerst in Riga bis er den Auftrag bekam diese Kampftruppen zu bilden. Ich glaube es war im January oder Februar. Und dadurch ist der den militärischen Dienststellen bekannt geworden. Vorher als er in Riga war, war er den Dienststelle nicht bekannt, weil Riga zivilverwaltetes Gebiet war und mit der Heeresgruppe Nord nichts zu tun hatte (pp. 6-7).

Translated:

JECKELN was very late coming to the Baltics, I guess that it was in the winter, so around November, because he was first in Riga until he got the job to form this battle group. I think it was in January or February. And thus, he became known to the authorities. Before, when he was in Riga, he was unknown to the department because Riga was governed by the civil authorities and had nothing to do with Army Group North.

Here our problems compound. Finnberg says the disagreement between Lange and Jeckeln occurred in March 1942, when Stahlecker was dead and not yet replaced -- which would limit the possible time to about a week. However, Jost, who is that very replacement, states that Jeckeln had left Riga by March and was now attached to Army Group North. Clearly one of them is wrong, but Jost seems in a better position to know the whereabouts of someone who, like him, was attached to the army, as Finnberg was not. It seems reasonable to conclude that Finnberg has the date wrong.

Klein answers some of these questions for us. He notes, e.g., that if it were March, as Finnberg stated, there could not have been the total liquidation of the ghetto happening at the same time because, by then, a policy had already been established to assign Jews to forced labor for one of several agencies or for the Wehrmacht. Further, Klein notes that the Dünamünde Actions occurred in spring, but this wasn't the event to which Finnberg referred because Lange himself had organized that action, and it wasn't a liquidation but a culling of Jews unable to work. Finally, Klein suggests that Finnberg likely mixed up the date because Stahlecker's absence was memorable; otherwise, the Einsatzgruppe leader would likely have intervened (pp. 934-35)

Therefore, the dispute between Lange and Jeckeln must have taken place between November 14 (Jeckeln's arrival in Riga) and February 28 (to put the date as late as possible according to Jost's interrogation). The events of mass shootings committed by the Nazis in Riga during this period were the following:

• November 30: Rumbula I
• December 8: Rumbula II
• December 9: Riga Ghetto, 500 Jews who had hidden during the previous actions are killed
• January 19: A transport of Czech Jews arriving via Theresienstadt is shot upon arrival.
• February 5: A group of Jews is taken from the Riga ghetto and shot.

The next mass killings did not occur until March (Dünamünde). As noted, it is possible, perhaps even likely, that Finnberg conflated the date of Dünamünde with that of Riga and moreover conflated Stahlecker's mere absence with his death.

IV. The Final Piece of the Puzzle

The final matter to determine is which of the five above dates -- November 30, December 8, December 9, January 19, and February 9 -- is the date on which Finnberg's reported dispute between Jeckeln and Lange arose. The only plausible date among the five is the first because the latter dates either did not involve Lange or involved his participation without incident.

Taking the second point first, the December 9 incident did not involve the Security Police and thus did not involve Lange and his men; it was carried out entirely by the Schutzpolizei under the aegis of the Ordnungspolizei, which had been subordinated to the HSSPF before the invasion of the USSR.

Regarding the December 8 action, while these murders did involve Lange and his men, we know from testimony, particularly that of Viktor Arajs, one of the chief Latvian collaborators and leader of the so-called Arajs Kommando, that his own participation on that day was authorized by Lange, who was Arajs's primary contact with the Nazi occupying forces. Moreover, Andrej Angrick and Klein, in The "Final Solution" in Riga, report that Security Police were specifically deployed on December 8 to clear the ghetto and move people to Rumbula to be shot -- "probably a direct consequence of Himmler's criticism of Jeckeln" over the previous week (p. 154).

The January 19 incident, pointed out to me by HC blogmate Jonathan Harrison, as far as I've been able to tell, is attested only by Angrick and Klein, who cite no specific source regarding the incident (p. 261ff). Ezergailis does not report it at all; his list of transports to Riga, taken in turn from Riga survivor and historian Gertrude Schneider, reports that the transport arrived and was sent to the ghetto and to Salaspils. There is also limited evidence, primarily from SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinz Trühe, who served with the Sipo and SD in RKO, that the transport was killed using gas vans. In any case, the Czech/Theresienstadt transport was an RSHA transport, so there is little chance that Lange was not directly involved in how it was treated.

The February 5 incident was brought up to me by blogmate Jason Willis Myers, who pointed me to the relevant pages in Browning's Origins of the Final Solution (p. 397ff). Browning also cites Schneider here, and Schneider, for her part, places responsibility for the "action" firmly on SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Maywald, who worked directly under Lange and apparently also organized the Dünamünde actions. Therefore, we can consider the February 5 incident as having Lange's approval.

This leaves only November 30 as a possible date for the dispute to have arisen between Jeckeln and Lange.

V. Back to Wolfsschanze

Having established that Finnberg's testimony refers to events of November 30, 1941, we can consider some points in closing. Perhaps the most significant of these issues is why Lange would have been irked enough by Jeckeln's decision to shoot 1,000 Jews from Berlin alongside perhaps ten times that many from Riga to contact Heydrich on the matter.

After all, as my blogmate Nick Terry has pointed out to me, we know from the Stahlecker Report that men from Lange's Einsatzkommando 2 participated in the Rumbula shootings, so the question does arise regarding the basis upon which Lange would raise an objection. The explanation of a mere conflict between capacities is logical but seems a tad insufficient.

Lange was, in late November and early December 1941, concerned primarily with establishing the Salaspils concentration camp to receive Reich Jews. That Salaspils was not ready earlier was the primary reason that transports of Reich Jews originally planned to be sent to Riga were re-routed to Kaunas (where they were shot by Karl Jäger's Einsatzkommando on November 25 and 29). 

The final answer for why Lange took such issue with Jeckeln's decision only days later might be that offered by Richard Breitman in his book Official Secrets. He writes about the November 30 transport:

This transport included a number of decorated World War 1 veterans, who according to prior SS decisions, should have been sent to special camp at Theresienstadt for prominent or decorated early Jews. When Himmler found out about their presence on the train, he tried to cancel the killing, calling on Heydrich to intervene; but the action had already taken place. Himmler was furious at this breach of instructions and political insensitivity. (p. 83)

Breitman's version is bolstered by two key supporting pieces of evidence. First, as noted by multiple authors, the Kaunas transports shot by Jäger had also included decorated veterans; the well-attested complaint from Minsk of Wilhelm Kube, Generalkommissar for Belarus, that same week also noted this point. Finally, Christian Gerlach, in his landmark essay on Wannsee (pp.  770-71), notes that only then days earlier, Adolf Eichmann had issued a memo urging caution in deporting decorated war veterans; Gerlach notes further that, given consistent complaints to the RSHA on this point, this exemption continued into the subsequent year.

Were Lange aware that decorated veterans were among the thousand Jews that Jeckeln intended to have shot on Nov. 30, it is likely, given Eichmann's guideline, that Lange would take the matter to the RSHA. Assuming he was able to reach Heydrich and communicate his concerns, the latter could in turn inform Himmler, and the RFSS could issue his own directive: Judentransport aus Berlin / Keine Liquidierung. Finnberg provides the missing link between Lange and Heydrich.