Fascism Podcast With historic.ly

Here's an interview I did a few weeks ago on the historic.ly podcast, covering a lot of topics all either directly or indirectly related to fascism. Enjoy. Share. Etc.

Mattogno on Riga, Part Four: Polishing a Turd

I’m going to finish this series on Carlo Mattogno’s treatment of the murder on 30 November 1941 of thousands of Latvian Jews, plus a thousand Reich Jews who had just arrived in Riga, by making a few general observations.

Before that, however, a couple of confessions. First, I’m not an historian, although I do have an undergraduate history degree (summa cum laude) and 20 graduate credits in history (U.K. system). Also, I’ve never read a whole book by Mattogno. Readers of this blog will know that I am not a coauthor of the white paper published by most of the bloggers here several years ago, despite being one of the blog’s founders. Therefore, the extent to which I can claim any expertise on the topic at hand should be considered with those points in mind.

I spent the last week or so writing around 2,000 words on roughly ten pages of “history” written by Mattogno. While not an expert per se, I can state the following with confidence. Mattogno’s writing of history is terrible – just awful. If I submitted a paper for a grade with the kinds of errors he makes (or lies he tells), I’d get a failing grade. Were I a peer reviewer who received his work to be considered for publication in a scholarly journal (a job I have, in fact, done in a different field of the humanities), not only would I reject it outright, refusing to consider it further upon revision, but I would seriously doubt the field expertise and/or intellectual honesty of the writer.

In the ten pages on Riga alone, in a mere 2,000 words, I’ve managed to point out a number of serious methodological errors and instances of outright lying. This is not an historian – this is either an imbecile or an ideologue bent on falsifying the historical record. That Mattogno is routinely held up as the leading light of “revisionist scholarship” says a boatload about the quality of the scholarship we’re talking about. That he has managed to keep his hands relatively clean regarding overt anti-Semitism (a claim his coauthor Jurgen Graf cannot make) is a worthless distinction given the pitiful state of his “research."

“But look at all the footnotes!” Footnotes are worthless unless they’re deployed honestly. Yes, Mattogno cites a number of sources, but he doesn’t bother to present the material in those sources honestly or thoroughly.

“Thousands of pages can’t be wrong!” Yes, they can. Plus, did you ever notice how many of those pages are taken up by direct quotations? If he were a student, Mattogno would be cited for plagiarism despite acknowledging his sources because the sheer volume of quoted material is so great.

“He’s an expert in textual analysis!” Really? Who says? He doesn’t appear to have a degree in anything except (perhaps) classics and philosophy. I assume he learned some textual analysis as part of that process. That does not, however, make one an expert. Nor are the “readings” that he offers of many texts plausible or defensible.

Carlo Mattogno is a charlatan of the highest order. That he can reasonably present the veneer of respectability is beside the point. You can only polish that turd so much.

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.”

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.
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[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.

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."

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[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.

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.
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[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.

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.

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.

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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.

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[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).

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

Balancing Act: Bombing the Auschwitz Rail Lines

The inherent conflict between the strategic and humanitarian concerns of the Allies as the war drew to a close is perhaps best symbolized by certain aspects of the Holocaust. One of the major ethical debates that has arise out of the Holocaust is the decision by the Allied forces not to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz, the single deadliest of the Nazi extermination camps. While a consensus has arisen since the end of the war that bombing the rail lines was impractical and could actually have done more harm than good, a persistent minority of voices has insisted that the Allies should have done anything possible to prevent or delay the extermination process.

The majority position on this question was well stated by Peter Novick, in his book The Holocaust in American Life. He points out that the precision of Allied bombers was such that perhaps as many as a third of the bombs dropped on the camp would have hit prisoners' barracks. Moreover, experience with the strategic bombing had indicated that bombing of rail lines was actually quite ineffective. Novick concludes, "the current received version -- a fruitful opportunity, fervently pressed and frivolously dismissed -- must contend with the strong possibility that this ambivalently presented suggestion was a well-intentioned but misbegotten idea that we can perhaps be grateful was turned down."[1]

The minority position is represented by David Wyman, in his book The Abandonment of the Jews. Wyman focuses much of his argument on the bombing of rail lines specifically to prevent the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and elsewhere in the summer and fall of 1944. He lays the blame at the feet of the Roosevelt administration and specifically the War Refugee Board. Conversely, he rejects arguments about the feasibility and efficacy of bombing the rail lines and the preference of the Operational Plans Division to bomb industrial targets. "In reality, Auschwitz was part of those target systems," Wyman writes. "OPD was either uninformed or untruthful."[2]

For my own part, I come down on the side of the majority position as expressed by Novick. In either case, the debate brings to the fore the matter of whether a balance can struck between strategic and humanitarian goals. I don't think that they can: strategic goals or concerns will always override humanitarian goals. In considering this question, I often think of the current situation in North Korea. On the one hand, North Korea is easily the most repressive state in the world today. Its leadership cares so little about its own people that the country has regularly experienced famine while the ruling elite lives in luxury. It is a situation that virtually calls out for humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, North Korea has nuclear weapons, and any attempt to intervene militarily in its affairs would almost certainly be answered with the deployment of these weapons. The strategic concerns must outweigh the humanitarian concerns.

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     [1] Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1999), 58.
     [2] David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 297.

The War in 1943: Allied Victories and Outproduction

While I am cautious to state that I do not believe that the whole of the Allied victory in World War II can be attributed to a handful of causes, I do nevertheless believe that two of the factors Richard Overy lists in his book were more decisive than the others: the Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk; and mass production on the Allied side. Whereas the Soviet victories early in 1943 provided much needed momentum for the Allied military cause, mass production allows the Allies -- particularly the Soviets -- to produce far more materiel than Germany, even if it was arguably inferior materiel.

While Germany's gains on Soviet territory in the first six months following the invasion in June 1941 were enormous, the Germans were stalled by winter, and the Soviets were able to mount a counteroffensive. However, the Wehrmacht still had sufficient strength to launch a second offensive in the spring of 1941, ultimately driving to Stalingrad. In contrast, the loss at Stalingrad, including the surrender of Friedrich Paulus's Sixth Army, was a crushing blow to German morale.[1] Perhaps more importantly, it forced the Nazis to fully mobilize their economy for the first time since the war began. The subsequent need to supplement domestic workers with slave laborers from Slavic countries belied the notion of Aryan racial supremacy.

If morale was badly damaged by the loss at Stalingrad, the loss at Kursk was a coup de grace. In addition to this effect, Kursk provided an object lesson in Overy's second important point -- i.e., that mass production by the Allies would ultimately result in victory for their side. In the battle, which involved more tanks than any battle before or since, sheer superiority of numbers was essential to the Soviet victory. Soviet mass production would continue apace, augmented by ongoing British and American war production, while the strategic bombing took a toll on Germany's only recently maximized production. In fact, the highest-quality German tanks had not yet rolled out from the factories.[2]

Kursk also drove home a point that all the counter-production of full mobilization in Germany could never counter -- superiority in numbers of people. Although the Wehrmacht had superior numbers of soldiers to the British, the American and Soviet militaries had far more. While the U.S. would need time to train its soldiers and the Red Army was somewhat crippled by the initial Barbarossa offensive, by early 1943, both these issues were no longer factors. Plus, Germany had lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and while the Soviets had lost even more, they had virtually endless population stocks from which to draw.[3]

In conclusion, the Allied victories at Kursk and Stalingrad and the ability of the Allied economies, particularly that of the USSR, were decisive factors in the Axis losing the war. Of course, other factors contributed significantly, but I feel that these issues at the very least knocked Germany out of the war, although defeating Japan required additional contributions.

=====

     [1] Jay W. Baird. "The Myth of Stalingrad," Journal of Contemporary History, 4 (1969): 201
     [2] Valeriy Zamulin, "Could Germany Have Won the Battle of Kursk if It Had Started in Late May or the Beginning of June 1943?" Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 27 (2014): 607
     [3] Mark Harrison, "The Economics of World War II: An Overview," in The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison, edited by Mark Harrison (New York: Cambridge UP, 1998), 14-15.

Perkonkrusts and the Final Solution in Latvia

Andrew Ezergailis, the author of what remains the standard work in English on the Final Solution in Latvia, gave his book the subtitle The Missing Center.[1] He chose this subtitle to represent what he felt was a noticeable absence in the discussion of collaboration by Latvians with Nazis. On the one hand, Ezergailis argued, some scholars tried to argue that the Latvians were rabid collaborators who couldn’t wait to lay their hands on their defenseless Jewish neighbors; on the other hand, other scholars depicted the Latvians as selfless rescuers who, with a very small number of exceptions, disagreed with Nazi Jewish policy and would have resisted more had the choice to do so not been deadly. The truth, Ezergailis wrote, lay somewhere in between.

Defenders of Latvian honor rightly pointed to a significant history of tolerance of Jews in Latvia, both during its period as a province of the Russian Empire and also during its brief period of independence between 1918 and 1940. Despite this relatively peaceful history in Latvia before the German invasion on June 22, 1941, the Jews of Latvia nevertheless suffered horribly during the Nazi occupation, with more than 75% of the almost 100,000 Latvian Jews murdered during the German occupation -- a percentage exceeded only in Lithuania and Poland.[2] The factors that contributed to this firestorm of extermination were multiple, but central was the role played by Latvian auxiliaries, who were drawn from a variety of sources, including the Perkonkrusts (Thunder Cross; PK) ultra-right-wing militia. PK was a conscious choice of the Nazis as a collaborator to assure the liquidation of the Jewish population, as shown by the pre-war contacts between the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) intelligence division of the SS and PK, the split in PK in the early days of the Nazi occupation roughly along predominantly anti-communist and anti-Jewish lines, and the percentage of the early death toll committed by members of the PK, notably the renowned Latvian airman Herberts Cukurs.

Latvia and Perkonkrusts Before June 1941

Perkonkrusts had emerged during the period in which Latvia was an independent state. January 1932 saw the rise of the Ugunskrusts (Fire Cross) organization founded by Gustavs Celmins,[3] a veteran of the Latvian War of Independence, ultra-nationalist member of the student fraternity Selonija, and sometime political attaché. The organization encountered opposition from the government and was banned in April 1933, after which point it morphed into PK and operated for another year. The organization, using the slogan "Latvia for Latvians," was virulently anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic, as well as anti-German, given the historical role of Baltic Germans in Latvia's ruling elites.[4]

With the seizure of power by Prime Minister Karlis Ulmanis in an authoritarian coup in May 1934, PK was also banned and many of its members arrested. Celmins fled abroad.[5] Latvia continued to be ruled by Ulmanis through the first year of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, but he was forced to resign in July 1940, one month following the occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union. For nearly the next year, the nation was subjected to severe repression under Soviet rule, the height of which occurred on June 13-14, 1941, just one week before the German invasion, when the NKVD ordered in a single night of terror the mass arrest and deportation of approximately 15,000 Latvian citizens.

Unsurprisingly, given this very recent experience with repression at the hand of the Soviets, a German military campaign to push out the Soviets was by and large quite welcome.[6] Moreover, its tolerant history notwithstanding, Latvia following the experience of Soviet rule had a not insignificant population who were now receptive to the anti-Semitic trope of Judeobolschewismus. While a thorough discussion of the history of this anti-Semitic archetype -- not to mention the history of Bolshevism itself in Latvia, which was not insignificant[7] -- is beyond the scope of this essay, it is nevertheless important to recognize that the year of Soviet rule that Latvians experienced contributed significantly to increased anti-Semitism in the country. While some found the Nazis’ use of the Judeo-Bolshevik threat to be a ridiculous throwback to the Nazi past, others -- particularly PK members who had long argued such a connection – believed the propaganda wholly.

The occupation of Latvia by Germany, beginning in June 1941 as part of the larger Operation Barbarossa, had included anti-Semitism within its larger context. In preparation for a coming clash of ideologies, the Nazis sought to cultivate the cooperation of anti-Soviet activists in the areas to be occupied long before the invasion began, and Latvia was no exception. There was no shortage of populations from which collaborators could be drawn. In addition to several leading figures of the independent Latvian military, who had fled to Germany in the previous one to two years, there was also a large Baltic German population that had only recently be relocated to Reich territory under the Heim ins Reich population transfer program of the SS. Finally, and most relevant because of the pre-existence anti-Semitism of PK, Gustavs Celmins himself had relocated to Germany in 1940 and was joined there by several high-ranking PK members.[8]

Perkonkrusts as a Pre- and Post-Invasion Collaborator

To determine whether PK was a conscious choice of the Nazis for collaborations requires first demonstrating pre-invasion communication between the parties. The assumption of substantial pre-invasion collaboration had always been assumed on the basis of Celmins's arrival in the country one week after the invasion with the Wehrmacht as a Sonderführer.[9] However, despite widespread claims of such collaboration in the secondary literature, documentation of bona fide pre-invasion collaboration has been extraordinarily scarce. Moreover, with PK having been banned by the Nazi occupation authorities in August 1941, less than two months into the occupation, the window of opportunity for collaboration seems to have been quite short.

One important piece of evidence is that the Nazi party was aware of the existence of PK in Latvia in its earlier heyday, as shown by mention of the group in a two-part article published in late 1933 in the party newspaper Ostland, the organ of the Bund Deutscher Osten in Berlin. In these articles, PK is referred to as a possible ally of the Nazis, although its anti-German attitude is criticized and attributed to “a mistaken perception of National Socialism as a danger to the Latvian state.”[10] Nevertheless, it is also presciently noted that, given French cooperation with the Soviets, Latvia and PK would soon have to come to terms with Germany.[11] With PK having been pushed underground the following year, how the organization re-emerged has been difficult to determine.

            Important clarification was offered by Freds Launags, who joined PK at the beginning of the Nazi occupation and collaborated with the SD before eventually joining the anti-Nazi underground, spearheading resistance to the returning Soviets. Launags ultimately emerged in Stockholm after the war, where he volunteered for anti-Soviet intelligence work. He emigrated to the United States and was ultimately cultivated as an operative for the CIA. At a debriefing in the 1950s, Launags clarified the extent of pre-invasion collaboration.[12]

            Launags recounted how, while living under Soviet occupation in 1940, he helped to form a secret anti-Soviet resistance group, posing as a communist in hopes of infiltrating the government to moderate its policies. He went underground when the NKVD cracked down on resistance in early 1941. He claimed to have been recruited for more formal anti-Soviet espionage by a PK member named Feliks Rikards in April 1941, after which point PK contacts with Germany began to arm the underground with smuggled German arms. When the war with Germany broke out, Launags began moving toward Riga, offering assistance in routing out communists along the way. He arrived in Riga on July 4, at which point PK had already been reconstituted and had established an operating office. Gustavs Celmins was at that time in Berlin requesting the formation of a Latvian SS unit.[13]

            Launags’s testimony, while valuable, must be approached with caution. Certainly, were he directly responsible for war crimes, he would have denied any involvement; situating himself within a political, rather than armed, wing of the movement would have sufficiently exculpated him from participating in the extermination of Latvia’s Jews. Nevertheless, his testimony about the creation of subgroups within PK corroborates quite closely and independently several other sources on the topic, none of whom cite Launags.

Perkonkrusts Splits Into Factions 

Launags recounted that PK was being divided into subgroups when he arrived in Riga. One of the groups was Sondergruppe R (for Rikards), to which Launags was attached and for which his chief job was interrogating communists. Sondergruppe R eventually became known as the Latvian Card Index, and it operated throughout the war as an intelligence-gathering arm of the SD targeted against communists. The other, more famous, subgroup was Sondergruppe A, commonly referred to the Arajs Kommando (AK) and named for the Latvian policeman Viktors Arajs, which was deployed against Latvia’s Jews.[14]

Thus, already by Launags’s arrival in Riga, PK was being divided into wings targeting, respectively, communists and Jews – both of which were traditional PK enemies. Although PK would be banned outright in six weeks, the recruitment process for the AK would indicate how important PK was to the persecution of the Jews. Arajs himself seems to have appearance unsummoned at the police headquarters in Riga on July 1, where he met Walter Stahlecker, head of Einsatzgruppe A, which had been attached to Heeresgruppe Nord with the invasion on June 22 to execute political opposition, including male Jews between 15 and 50 years old. Stahlecker authorized Arajs to form a commando, and three days later, the following call was published in Tevija, a nationalist newspaper: “All nationally-thinking Latvians -- members of Pērkonkrusts, students, officers, Home Guards [“Aizsargi”], and others, who wish to take an active part in the cleansing of our country from harmful elements, can register themselves at the Headquarters of the Security Kommando at Valdemars Street 19, from 9-11 and from 17-19.”[15]

Several mysteries surround the appearance of Arajs, as well as his specific mention of PK in his call to arms when it had been banned seven years earlier; in contrast, the Aizsargi had only been banned with the Soviet occupation a year earlier. One possible explanation is offered by Ezergailis, who notes (albeit in a footnote) that a document exists showing that Arajs himself had been a PK member. Ezergailis writes, “Under Ulmanis [Arajs] had to deny this association to keep his position as a policeman […] At the same time, however, we can not [sic] completely eliminate the possibility that the Germans knew of Arajs' early association with the Perkonkrusts and that he therefore was preselected for the job.”[16] It is also possible that, upon the Germans occupying Riga, Arajs simply reported to the police station to determine the situation and volunteered for duty with the Einsatzgruppe. Significantly, Roberts Stiglics, whom Stahlecker appointed police chief in Riga, had like Celmins returned to Latvia with the Germans. It is not outside the realm of possibility that Stiglics and Arajs were acquainted via police work and that the former called upon the latter.[17]

Conversely, Richards Plavnieks protests that Arajs could not have been a PK member. He notes that, while the initial 1975 indictment against Arajs from his trial in West Germany included the charge that Arajs was a PK member, the charge was removed in the indictment’s final form.[18] Moreover, Plavnieks asserts that the mistaken identification of Arajs with PK is largely the result of mistaken testimony from Jewish eyewitnesses, who, while well able to identify their persecutors on a personal level, would have been less able to determine the specific taxonomy of the Latvian far right.[19] However, Plavnieks does not engage the document that Ezergailis uses to substantiate the possibility of Arajs’s membership. As a result, Plavnieks’s claim that, “[b]ecause he belonged to the police force during the Kārlis Ulmanis dictatorship under which Pērkonkrusts was a banned organization, Viktors Arājs incontrovertibly could not have been a member, at least not as of 1934”[20] seems naïve, if not almost quaint.

            Because PK had been divided into Sondergruppen R and A, the ban on the organization in August 1941 had less of an effect than might otherwise be thought. Sondergruppe R, per Launags’s testimony, was subsumed into the SD as the Latvian Card Index, and this information is broadly corroborated by multiple sources. Sondergruppe A, or the AK, would go on to participate broadly in crimes against humanity, targeting mainly the Jews of Riga and the countryside of Latvia. Matthew Kott notes that the Latvian Card Index itself split into wings led by Rikards, who formed the clandestine resistance to the Nazis and subsequently to the Soviets, and Celmins, who was ultimately arrested by the Nazis in 1944 and sent to a concentration camp.[21]

Members of Perkonkrusts Commit Mass Murder

Regardless of whether he was a PK member or not, Arajs nevertheless recruited among PK members, and while the testimony of Jewish survivors might be inaccurate for the reasons noted, other sources substantiate their number among the AK. For instance, Kott notes that PK members “exerted a disproportionate influence on the course of the Holocaust in Latvia,”[22] although he concedes that several sources have likely exaggerated the number. In addition, Katrin Reichelt, while stating that it is “very difficult if not impossible”[23] to prove the number of PK members among participants in the Final Solution, refers to the Operational and Situational Report of Einsatzgruppe A of August 1, 1941, in which Stahlecker favorably describes the organization, calling them “a moral elite, whose attitude is ready for battle thoroughly.”[24]

Among the most prominent PK members who served in the AK was Herberts Cukurs, who distinguished himself in the eyes of several survivors for his cruelty in the ghetto-clearing operation of November 30, 1941 – the first of two dates on which the majority of Jews in the Riga ghetto were shot at Rumbula. Although Cukurs’s PK membership before the war has been a matter of some dispute, several sources attest to his becoming a member in the days following the Nazi occupation. In addition, although there has been some disagreement with regard to Cukurs’s involvement in atrocities, it is unlikely that eyewitnesses would misidentify someone as well known among Latvians as Cukurs. Moreover, even Ezergailis, who has tended to defend Cukurs as condemned on the basis of very little evidence, is forced to concede that, “Although Arajs’ men were not the only ones on the ghetto end of this operation [Rumbula], to the degree that they participated in the atrocities there the chief responsibility rests on Herberts Cukurs’ shoulders.”[25] Finally, the mere association of Cukurs, Arajs, and AK in the two Aktionen at Rumbula demonstrates the participation of PK in the mass murder of Latvia’s Jews.

Conclusion

            In conclusion, PK was a conscious choice of the Nazi leadership generally and the SD particularly in perpetrating the Final Solution in Latvia. Not only can mutual and contacts between the Nazis and PK be substantiated from long before the German invasion of Latvia, but the division of PK under the Nazi occupation along anti-Soviet and anti-Jewish lines, a decision unlikely to have been taken without German approval, indicates an attempt to channel anti-Semitic energies toward a genocidal goal. Finally, although the focus on Herberts Cukurs here due to issues of space precludes a more thorough discussion of PK collaboration, the actions of the airman and his commander Viktors Arajs provide concrete evidence of participation in genocide. Although Ezergailis considered PK to be part of the “missing center” of his book’s title, the benefit of additional sources now indicates just how much of that center PK occupied.

---

[1] Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941-1944: The Missing Center (Riga, Latvia: Historical Institute of Latvia, 1996)

[2] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country,” https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005161, accessed November 15, 2016; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Teaneck, N.J.: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 1220; Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Bantam, 1986), 403.

[3] Please note that all diacritical markings of Latvian names and words have been removed.

[4] Matthew Kott, “Latvia's Perkonkrusts: Anti-German National Socialism in a Fascistogenic Milieu,” Fascism: Journal of Contemporary Fascist Studies, 4 (2015), 180-81.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Richards Plavnieks, "Nazi Collaborators on Trial During the Cold War: The Cases Against Viktors Arajs and the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 2013), 31-32.

[7] Among other factors, the Latvian Rifles, a unit of the Red Army, played a decisive role in the Bolshevik seizure of power, and Latvians were the single most over-represented minority among the peoples of the Russian Empire in the Bolshevik Party, ahead of both Jews and Ukrainians. See, e.g., Ezergailis, The Latvian Impact on the Bolshevik Revolution: The First Phase: September 1917 to April 1918 (New York: East European Monographs, 1974).

[8] Kott 188.

[9] I.e., a “special leader”; Ezergailis, ibid, 121-22.

[10] “Das Parteiwesen in Lettland,” Ostland: Wochenschrift für den gesamten Osten 14, no. 44 (October 27, 1933): 471, translation mine.

[11] “Das Parteiwesen in Lettland,” Ostland: Wochenschrift für den gesamten Osten 14, no. 46 (November 10, 1933): 495.

[12] "Biographic Debriefing of Clevland [sic] O. Hahn" (Hahn Debriefing), LAUNAGS, FREDS, Volume 1 (LAUNAGS, vol. 1), Second Release of Name Files Under the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Acts, ca. 1981 - ca. 2002 (Second Release of Name Files), Record Group 263: Records of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1894 - 2002 (RG 263), National Archives at College Park, MD (NACP), pp. 24-281.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Quoted in Plavnieks, ibid, 35, translation his.

[16] Ezergailis 196.

[17] Ibid, 156.

[18] Plavnieks, ibid, 159.

[19] Ibid, 157-58.

                [20] Ibid.

[21] Kott, ibid, 190-91.

[22] Ibid, 189.

                [23] Katrin Reichelt, “Between Collaboration and Resistance: The Role of the Organization Perkonkrusts in the Holocaust in Latvia,” in The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia, edited by Andris Caune, Aivars Stranga, and Margers Vestermanis (Riga, Latvia: Latvijas Vestures Instituta Apgads, 2003), 285

[24] Quoted in ibid, 286, translation hers.

[25] Ezergailis, ibid, 192.

Radar vs. Signals Intelligence in British Successes

I feel that the intelligence work at Bletchley Park was more important to the U.K. success during 1940 than radar was. Essentially, I feel this way because radar, while certainly helpful, could only provide so much of an advantage. For instance, although Murray and Millett indicate an advantage for the U.K., at least in submarine warfare, owing to radar, writing that German U-boats did not yet have radar in 1942.[1] Therefore, radar-equipped British naval vessels were in a better position to communicate with each other. However, the down side to that advantage is that U-boats were also more difficult to detect in 1940 because they did not have radar in 1940, thus the comparative superiority of the Ultra program.

Given the need of the British navy to avoid U-boat packs lurking along convoy routes, Murray and Millett indicate clearly that signals intelligence would make a key difference.[2] In explaining how the Enigma code was first broken by Poland, which then presented its own findings to British intelligence,[3] the authors introduce the idea of the evolving nature of Enigma and its ability to work against itself. For instance, they write, "the British learned that the Germans were operating a weather ship off the coast of Iceland. In early May the Royal Navy mounted a well-planned cutting-out operation that captured the ship along with the Enigma keys for June. Two days later the Royal Navy […] captured U-110 […] and stripped the boat of all Enigma materials, including the keys for the highly secret 'officers only' traffic.[4] The Ultra program was no successful that even two investigations by Germany over lost campaigns failed because the Germans still believed that Enigma was unbreakable.[5]

Radar is not accorded that type of attention by Murray and Millett. Further, the Germans were ultimately able to get around British radar,[6] although this was long after 1940 and thus not a factor during the "standing alone" period. The authors do point out that the Germans' failure to comprehend the U.K.'s use of radar in 1940 was a key reason that Operation Sea Lion was abandoned.[7] However, this was clearly a matter of a failure on Germany's part, rather than an innovation on Britain's. Thus, the combination of Ultra's self-perpetuating nature (more intelligence yielding more intelligence) and its decisive role in the naval war demonstrate the superiority of codebreaking over radar as military innovations.

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     [1] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, 1937-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2001), 255.
     [2] Ibid, 243.
     [3] Ibid, 244.
     [4] Ibid, 245.
     [5] Ibid, 246.
     [6] Ibid, 256.
     [7] Ibid, 87.