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

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

Mattogno on Riga, Part One: Keine Liquidierung Revisited

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

The Slide to War: A European Civil War?

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

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

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

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

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

The Slide to War: Versailles and the Outbreak of War

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

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

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

More aggressive action from Chamberlain and Daladier at Munich might therefore have resulted in Germany being defeated far earlier and at far smaller cost. This matter is speculative, of course, but interesting nonetheless.
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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.

Defending Democracy: The Popular Fronts and Stalin

Were the popular fronts held hostage by Stalin?

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

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

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

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

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

Constructing Utopia? The Third Reich

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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.