Situating Austria and Romania Within the Context of Clerical Fascism

Few words in history or political science have had definitions as intensely debated as fascism. An enormous volume of ink has been spilled attempting to define the term since 1945, with a consensus remaining elusive beyond general agreement about ultranationalism and anti-Marxism. The controversy only increases when attempting to subcategorize the field: one such subcategory, clerical fascism, has been applied to cases as disparate as the Croatian Ustashi, on the one hand, and the German Christian movement in Nazi Germany, on the other. One of the states commonly identified with clerical fascism is Austria between 1934 and 1938, during which it adopted an authoritarian constitution modeled on Catholic corporatist ideology. However, when so-called Austrofascism is compared with Romania’s League of the Archangel Michael (LAM), which combined hypernationalist anti-Semitism, Orthodox Christian mysticism, and a totalitarian form of monarchism, little resemblance can be seen. Nevertheless, such a comparison might help to elucidate what both fascism and its clerical variant are.

According to John Pollard, the concept of clerical fascism dates to 1922, when Luigi Sturzo, an Italian priest and founder of the Italian People’s Party, used the term “clerico-fascism” to describe former members of his own party who left for Benito Mussolini’s fascists.[1] Much of the usage of the term, however, was applied to Austria under the rule first of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and then his successor Kurt Schuschnigg, as well as their political party, the Fatherland Front (VF). Discussion of the topic of fascism picked up in the 1960s, with extension of the term from Austria to Spain under Francisco Franco and Portugal under Antonio Salazar[2] and then to Slovakia under Josef Tiso.[3] The significant expansion of the study of fascism beginning in the 1990s found most major figures in the field at least commenting on clerical fascism, if not dedicating studies to the topic. Many of these scholars focused on Romania, including Stanley Payne, who famously wrote that “[t]he Legion was arguably the most unusual mass movement of interwar Europe.”[4] One current controversy regards whether clerical fascism is best understood as fascism with religious tendencies or as a fundamentally religious movement with fascist tendencies. In addition to Pollard’s study and a 2008 collection of essays,[5] recent work by Eliot Assoudeh has sought to fully taxonomize the term.[6]

If we choose to tentatively view clerical fascism as the infusion of fascism with religious qualities, we can begin by assessing the cases of Romania and Austria for their religious aspects. Austria was more than 90% Catholic in 1934, with the remainder of the country’s 6.75 million people in 1934 divided among Protestant and Orthodox Christians and 200,000 Jews concentrated in Vienna. With the Catholic faith so closely tied to Austrian national identity, it is unsurprising that political Catholicism lay at the heart of the ideology of the VF and the philosophy of the corporate state. In a speech in Vienna in September 1933, after the dissolution of the legislature but before the declaration of the new constitution, Dollfuss said, “We intend to take as the foundation of our constitutional life the corporative principle [...] as proclaimed in the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. It is our ambition to be the first country to give a practical response in political life to the appeal of this noble Encyclical.”[7] The aforementioned encyclical had been issued by Pius XI on the 40th anniversary of Leo XIII’s encyclical on the rights and duties of capital and labor, Rerum Novarum. Quadragesimo Anno explicitly counseled the creation of a corporative society to accomplish class collaboration.

Dollfuss’s pledge was honored when the constitution was promulgated the following spring. Beyond the addition of a Basmala-style incipit (“In the name of God the Almighty, from whom all right emanates, the Austrian people receives this constitution for its Christian, German federal state on a corporative basis” [8]), perhaps surprisingly, the constitution only explicitly mentions the Catholic Church twice: first, identifying it specifically along with the “other legally recognized churches and religious societies”[9]; and second, stipulating that religious organizations’ relationships with the state, while regulated by the state in all other cases, are to be “made in principle by agreement between the federation and the Holy See.”[10] This clause is significant in that it indicates the specific role to be played in the corporate state by the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, the government of Austria and the Catholic Church were to remain distinct. However, even within civil society, the role of the Vatican would remain limited. Instead, as Laura Gellott has detailed, the role of the Church was largely played by Catholic Action -- one of several similarly named lay organizations emerging in response to increased secularization in Europe. Having deemed the Christian Social Party (CSP) of the post-World War I years as deploying Catholicism overly politically, Catholic Action sought to place religious jurisdiction “squarely in the hands of the bishops, and one which would work on behalf of confessional, not partisan, interests.”[11] Thus, the Austrian corporate state sought to maintain a prominent role for the Catholic Church within society, albeit one separate from the state.

The relationship of the LAM with the Romanian Orthodox Church was, in contrast, far more complicated. For the LAM itself, Orthodox Christianity was essential to Romanian national identity, and this principle was repeatedly enunciated by the LAM’s founder, C.Z. Codreanu. The very name of the organization aside, Codreanu’s biography often positions the Orthodox Church as under attack by non-Romanians, chiefly Jews. Recalling a meeting in September 1923 of the National Christian Defense League (LANC), from which Codreanu broke off the LAM in 1927, Codreanu recalls viewing the newly acquired territory of Bukovina, in which “all those mountains laden with first belonging to the Orthodox Church, which was now infused with politics” had fallen “under the Jewish axe.”[12] This passage is significant both for its positioning of Orthodoxy against Jewry but also because of the implication that the official Orthodox Church had been compromised by politics.

Years later, while visiting Bessarabia as leader of the LAM, Codreanu recalls hearing of trouble in yet another newly acquired territory, the Carpathian region of Maramures. The news is brought to Codreanu by two priests, one Greek Catholic and one Romanian Orthodox.[13] Notably when the Romanian Orthodox seek help in defending themselves against the Jewish enemy, they call on the LAM and not the official church, which is seen as wrapped up in political matters, if not already infiltrated by Jews.

The intertwining of Orthodox Christianity into Legionnaire ideology ran deeper than merely providing an alternative to government intervention where the Orthodox Church could not act, however. The foremost scholar of the LAM, Radu Ioanid, writes, “The Legionary movement willingly inserted strong elements of the Orthodox Christianity into its political doctrine. Thus the Legionary movement is one of the rare modern European political movements with a religious structure.”[14] According to Ioanid, the LAM syncretized Orthodox mysticism with Romanian peasant superstition[15]; in this way, the LAM deviated from the lower-case orthodoxy of the state church.

Nevertheless, many Orthodox priests joined the LAM and preached its philosophy of violence and anti-Semitic hatred. That there was already deep-seated hatred of Jews within the ranks of the Romanian Orthodox Church is attested at length in accounts of the Patriarch Miron Cristea, who led the church during the Legionary period. Despite Cristea being a man who “saw the Jews as a threat to the very existence of Romanian people, as parasites, as promoters of decadence, as invaders,”[16] he officially forbade clergy from joining the LAM in 1937, and the following year, when he was named prime minister by King Carol II, Cristea formed a government that specifically excluded Codreanu and the LAM.

Therefore, while the relationships of Austrofascism and the LAM with their respective churches were different, there is no denying that both movements were deeply infused with aspects of clericalism. Regarding whether both were fascist is more complex. Roger Griffin established four preconditions for fascism to emerge and take over a country. Regarding the first, native currents of ultranationalism or fascist role models,[17] Austria was largely lacking. Although some rabid nationalism could be found within pan-German circles, the majority of the political mainstream was nationalistic but not jingoistic or expansionist. Nor were the right-wing political leaders, favoring national conservatism, inspiring as fascist role models; only Hitler offered that type of inspiration after 1932. As a result, Austria lacked the “adequate political space”[18] of which Griffin speaks as a second precondition.

It is worth noting as well that Griffin’s “fascist minimum” of palingenetic ultranationalism, i.e., nationalism that seeks to recover a glorious past, is absent from Austria. Whereas Nazi Germany could evoke a Third Reich based on the First (Holy Roman Empire) and Second (Wilhelmine Empire), and Fascist Italy recalled the Roman Empire, Austrian interwar politics did not seek to reconstitute the imperial past. With the end of WWI and the dissolution of its empire via the Treaty of Saint Germain, Austria was a rump state that was highly ethnically homogenous, giving rise to an Austrian identity of German ethnicity and Catholic faith that would have been diluted by expansion.

Griffin’s third precondition of “an inadequate consensus on liberal values”[19] certainly obtained in interwar Austria as well as in most of Europe but seems insufficient alone to justify a fascist takeover. Finally, regarding the fourth precondition of “favorable contingency,”[20] Austria under Dollfuss instead presents a case where authoritarian rule was largely used to ward off fascist takeover (here by the Austrian Nazis). Whereas weak liberal democracies like Weimar Germany and Italy in the early 1920s were too weak to oppose the Nazis and Mussolini’s fascists, respectively, Dollfuss’s construction of an authoritarian corporate state was well equipped to ward off the attempted Nazi coup of July 1934.

Only when the geopolitical situation in Europe and the wages of the economic crisis -- not to mention Dollfuss’s assassination -- had eroded confidence in the corporate state could the Nazis successfully absorb Austria, reversing their fortunes from four years earlier. However, even here, the triumph of fascism in Austria meant its extinction as a separate state, rather than the abolition of Dollfuss’s corporative model in favor of fascist totalitarianism.

In contrast, Romania had among the ripest environments in Europe for fascism to emerge, which is perhaps why so many fascist parties and movements proliferated there, among which the LAM was only the most historically important. First was the rabid ultranationalism within Romanian society, evoked in part by the country finding itself, with the end of WWI, vastly increased in both territory and numbers of ethnic minorities, most of whom were more economically prominent than the Romanians, who remained a largely peasant population. With ultranationalism, palingenesis appeared in the form of the identification of Romanians with the ancient Dacians. Dmitry Tartakovsky writes, “the established Romanian national mythology of the connection to the ancient Romans through the Dacians, became translated into new language based on blood superiority: only an inherently superior nation could survive for centuries of foreign domination as the Romanians had.”[21]

Beyond Griffin’s fascist minimum, Griffin’s preconditions were also present in interwar Romania. Specifically, A.C. Cuza, the firebrand anti-Semite who inspired Codreanu, offered a concrete example of a fascist role model. The weakness of the postwar Romanian state, which struggled to manage the country’s poor development compared to the remainder of Europe and its deep-seated ethnic tensions, provided a fertile ground on which extremism could flourish. The subsequent erosion of the liberal political system, with the regency of King Michael overthrown in 1930 by his uncle Carol II in the wake of the global financial crisis, and the failing consensus on liberalism were favorable contingencies that culminated in accession to power by the LAM in 1937.

Thus, the LAM seems more qualified as fascist, at least according to Griffin’s paradigm If we further consider the nature of fascism as a mass movement, we find further evidence of this contrast. In Austria, the VF emerged from the CSP from which Dollfuss emerged. According to the so-called Lager theory of Austrian politics, introduced in the 1950s by Adam Wandruszka, three parties dominated the political scene in Austria: the Social-democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ); the pan-German Greater German People’s Party (GDVP); and the CSP.[22] The Marxist roots of the SPÖ and its working-class base contributed to its emergence as a mass movement; the ethnic populism of the GDVP had the same mobilizing quality, and its co-optation by the Nazis upon their emergence in Austria capitalized on this quality.

In contrast, the CSP drew from an elite, religious, and conservative base. Thus, when it was created, the VF was not a mass movement; that it was created by Dollfuss and not “from below” by the people is proof. Even scholars categorizing the Austrian corporate state as fascist acknowledge this fact; e.g., Julie Thorpe, an opponent of the Lager theory, commenting on the lack of consensus on whether regimes other than those of Italy and Germany were fascist (including Austria), noted that these cases “lack the mass movement, charismatic leader and popular consent.”[23]

In addition, the CSP was the only major party, including the SPÖ, specifically opposed to union with Germany. As a result, it could not draw on feelings of ethnic solidarity, as the other parties, particularly the GDVP and the Nazis, could. Paradoxically, the CSP made repeated references to the German identity of the Austrian people. For her own part, Thorpe maintains that the CSP and subsequent corporate state were pan-German, but in a sense of civic nationalism rather than ethnic nationalism. She writes, “pan-German identity was a state-based nationalism that combined civic features (citizenship, state borders and assimilation of minorities to the state language) with ethnic features (language, religion and ancestry).”[24] This description stands in contrast to the racial nationalism of the Nazis.

If there was a national conservative mass movement in interwar Austria, it was the Heimwehr, which began in much the same manner as the Freikorps in post-WWI Germany. Beginning with the 1930 election, Heimwehr members participated with the CSP, as well as maintaining its own parliamentary bloc, the Heimatblock, which was brought into the government with the appointment of Dollfuss as chancellor. However, as the Heimwehr was brought into the political establishment, its status as a mass movement declined until its formal absorption by the VF in 1936 under Schuschnigg. With the formal suppression of the SPÖ in 1934, the Nazis remained the only mass movement in Austria.

In contrast, the LAM was conceived of and existed as a mass movement. Codreanu himself describes the LANC, the predecessor of the LAM, as a mass movement drawing specifically from the right-wing nationalist student movement emerging across Romania in the 1920s. Recounting in his autobiography the founding of the LANC, Codreanu describes Cuza as already characterizing the party as a mass movement, with the LANC chief saying, “We do not need to organize, our movement is based on a formidable mass current."[25] With the splitting off of the LAM, followed by the extension of the appeal of the movement from the students to the peasantry and Codreanu’s embrace of Orthodox mysticism, the base of the movement spread even further.

If we consider the characteristics of mass movements set out by Eric Hoffer in the 1950s, we can identify more of these traits in the LAM. Hoffer writes, for example, that “religious, revolutionary and nationalist movements are such generating plants of general enthusiasm”[26]; the LAM combines all three of the streams. Hoffer also identifies self-sacrifice as a key characteristic of mass movements. Much of his discussion of self-sacrifice addresses matters closely related to fascism, including the supremacy of the group over the individual, dissatisfaction with the present, glorification of the past, etc., but it is with Hoffer’s discussion of the “readiness to fight and to die”[27] that the LAM is more closely evoked.

Valentin Sandulescu’s treatment of a 1937 Legionnaire funeral is instructive in this regard. Like many other far-rightists during the Spanish Civil War, some LAM members volunteered to fight with Franco; two of these men, Ion Mota and Vasile Marin, were killed in action. When the bodies were returned to Romania (via Berlin, where they were honored by a Nazi color guard), the LAM staged a mass funeral, which included Legionnaires pronouncing the following oath: “I swear before God, before your holy sacrifice, for Christ and the Legion, to tear from me the earthly happiness, to render myself from humanly love and, for the resurrection of my People, to be ready for death at any time!”[28] The martyrdom of the fallen men, as well as of Codreanu by assassination a year later, contributed to the mass movement status that drove the LAM to become enshrined within the National Legionary State three years later -- until the LAM’s failed rebellion against Ion Antonescu in early 1941 and subsequent dissolution of the Legionary State.

In conclusion, while both Austria during Austrofascism and the LAM of interwar Romania have been cited as examples of clerical fascism, only Romania truly fits the moniker. Although Austria undoubtedly had strongly clerical aspects specifically contributed by the Catholic Church and its corporatist ideology, it lacked most of the basic requirements of a fascist government, and the VF was not a fascist movement. Conversely, the LAM had both an ideology deeply infused with Orthodox Christian faith and mysticism and a form of palingenetic ultranationalism characterized by anti-Semitism and totalitarianism. In some ways, the LAM is the quintessential example of clerical fascism, emerging sui generis in Romania before Spain’s Falange, Slovakia’s Hlinka Guard, and Croatia’s Ustasha. Austrofascism, in contrast, much more closely resembled the other authoritarian regimes of central and eastern Europe. It was clerical but not fascist.

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[1] John Pollard, “’Clerical Fascism’: Context, Overview and Conclusion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 2 (2007): 433.

[2] Paul Blanshard, Freedom and Catholic Power in Spain and Portugal: An American Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962.

[3] Yeshayahu Jelínek, “Slovakia's Internal Policy and the Third Reich, August 1940-February 1941,” Central European History 4, no. 3 (1971): 242-270.

[4] Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 279-280.

[5] Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe, edited by Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda with Tudor Georgescu (New York: Routledge, 2008).

[6] Eliot Assoudeh, “Between Political Religion and Politicized Religion: Interwar Fascism and Religion Revisited,” Religion Compass 9, no. 1 (2015): 13-33.

[7] Quoted in Johannes Messner, Dollfuss: An Austrian Patriot (Norfolk, Va.: Gates of Vienna Books, 2004), 107.

[8] Verfassung Des Bundesstaates Österreich Vom 24. April / 1. Mai 1934," Verfassungen der Welt, accessed December 5, 2010, http://www.verfassungen.at/at34-38/index34.htm, all translations mine.

[9] Ibid, Article 29.1.

[10] Ibid, Article 30.3.

[11] Laura Gellott, "Defending Catholic Interests in the Christian State: The Role of Catholic Action in Austria, 1933-1938." The Catholic History Review 74, no. 4 (1988): 575.

[12] Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaires [sic], translator unknown (Madrid: Editura “Libertatea,” 1976), 63.

[13] Ibid, 145.

[14] Radu Ioanid, "The Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5, no. 3 (2004): 435.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ion Popa, The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2017), 33.

[17] Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (Philadelphia: Routledge, 2013), 8.2.

[18] Ibid, 8.7.

[19] Ibid, 8.12.

[20] Ibid, 8.15.

[21] Dmitry Tartakovsky, “Parallel Ruptures: Jews of Bessarabia and Transnistria between Romanian Nationalism and Soviet Communism, 1918-1940," Ph.D. diss. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009), 72 footnote 120.

[22] K.R. Luther, “Dimensions of Party System Change: The Case of Austria” in Understanding Party System Change in Western Europe, edited by Peter Mair and Gordon Smith (New York: Routledge, 2013), 26 footnote 3.

[23] Julie Thorpe, "Population Politics in the Fascist Era: Austria's 1935 Population Index," Humanities Research 15, no. 1 (2009): 45.

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

[25] Codreanu, ibid, 43.

[26] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: HarperColllins, 2011), 16.

[27] Ibid, 79.

[28] Quoted in Valentin Sandulescu, "Sacralised Politics in Action: the February 1937 Burial of the Romanian Legionary Leaders Ion Mota and Vasile Marin," Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 2 (2007): 265.

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.”

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.