The Failure of the Anti-Communist and Anti-Fascist Concepts in Great European Politics
Chapter 3 Section 7
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This below is Chapter 3 Section 7:
7. The Failure of the Anti-Communist and Anti-Fascist Concepts in Great European Politics
It seems that Hitler gave his speech, a sharp emphasis against the Western democracies, in Saarbrücken on October 8, 1938, because he was disappointed by the negative echo that the Munich agreements had produced in much of the English, French, and American press. After such a shift in power no reasonable man could expect unanimous enthusiasm in the states forced to yield, but Hitler was not satisfied with critical remarks; he allowed himself to be carried away into articulating now in their most general form the oldest of his causal explanations, namely anti-Semitism no longer merely as the apex of anti-Bolshevism, but as an indictment of fundamental tendencies in the western world, i.e. of liberalism. Thus, while he spoke respectfully of Chamberlain and Daladier, he sharply objected to the “internal construction” of their countries which made it possible for such men to be replaced at any time by figures like Duff Cooper and Winston Churchill, who spoke of their intention to start a new world war. Hitler did not go into the self-evident assumption of Churchill and Cooper—if Germany continued to pursue its policy of blackmail and aggression—but he continued with a turn of phrase that was not entirely clear: “We know further that still lurking menacingly in the background is the Jewish-international enemy which has found its state foundation and expression in Bolshevism. And furthermore we know the power of a certain international press that lives only on lies and slander.” This furthermore was hardly meant to express a mere addition, but presumably Hitler did not want the thesis of the essential affinity between Bolshevism and this international press to come to light quite bluntly. Instead of this, however, he also directly offended Chamberlain and Halifax when he forbade himself “governess-like tutelage” and recommended that the English concentrate on what was happening in Palestine.
So it was therefore not only the fortuitous event of the assassination of the Legation Secretary Ernst vom Rath by the 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan on November 7, 1938 in the Reich Embassy in Paris that explains the striking resurgence of anti-Semitism at the very moment when all the signs of a promising policy seemed to point to the sole emphasis of anti-communism. After the Nuremberg Laws, the German Jews had had a relatively quiet few years in which their emigration was encouraged and in which the large number of those who stayed behind were able to develop a community life of astonishing variety and vitality. In the economy, the Jewish positions seemed to have hardly been touched, and anyone who paid attention to the fact that economic-political laws often had several signatures of Jewish bankers next to Adolf Hitler’s signature did not even need to be an economist to believe that the real economic powers would easily assert themselves against the mere ideology of the party. This party ideology seemed to have retreated even to its most despicable hiding place, Julius Streicher’s pornographic diatribe newspaper Der Stürmer, which, however, was still posted even to the last backwater and in which the demand could be read again and again “to crush the head of the serpent of international Jewry.” But the third phase of National Socialist Jewish policy began in April 1938 with the “Ordinance Against Supporting the Camouflage of Jewish Businesses” and with the order to register Jewish businesses and to declare Jewish assets. To be sure, according to all assumptions, there was no exact planning, and no one can predict what the further course of events would have been like if it had not been for Grynszpan’s murder.
But it is just as little certain that the “Reichskristallnacht,” as the events were later trivially called, had to follow. Certainly there was spontaneous indignation, and not just among radical SA men. But when in 1936 the national leader of the Nazi foreign organization in Switzerland, Wilhelm Gustloff, was murdered by the young David Frankfurter with evidently demonstrative intentions, the state leadership had not allowed any riots to occur out of consideration for the upcoming Olympics, and this time there were more at stake than the undisturbed course of the Olympic Games. This time, however, the leadership displayed the opposite of restraint, and the seemingly spontaneous events clearly had their origins in the gathering of the “Old Guard” in Munich on the anniversary of the March to the Feldherrnhalle, and, in particular, in a whispered conversation between Hitler and Goebbels. Anti-Jewish actions were now taking place almost everywhere in Germany, led by the party and SA leaders, and not always as skillfully and inconspicuously as Goebbels had wished. For one night, Germany is, so to speak, Tsarist Russia: synagogues are set on fire, Jewish shops are stormed and looted, doctor’s offices are forcibly opened and medical instruments are thrown onto the streets, many Jews are beaten and tortured, thousands are transported to concentration camps, dozens of people are murdered, damage worth of hundreds of millions marks is done. Unmistakably, there is a moment of class struggle is when, for example, primarily wealthy Jews are arrested or when threats like these are uttered during the deportation: “We will see to it that your fat bellies disappear.” But much more significant than the events themselves, which, judging by the death toll, of course cannot remotely be compared with the great pogroms in Tsarist Russia and even less with the all-encompassing class struggles of the Russian revolution, was the aftermath. The Reich Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels published an article in the Völkischer Beobachter on November 12, in which he wrote that the background to the murder was to be found in the agitation of the major Jewish world newspapers, and he came to the conclusion: “The Jew Grünspan was a representative of Judaism. The German vom Rath was a representative of the German people. Judaism, therefore, shot at the German people in Paris.” On the same day, Field Marshal Hermann Göring imposed a “fine” of one billion marks on German Jewry as a whole, and even confiscated the sums paid out by the insurance companies for the benefit of the Reich, so that the Jews had to pay for the damage done to them themselves. If the events as such were far behind the corresponding events in Russia, they were much more repulsive in character, because they were carried out by the over-strong against the weak and expressly approved by the state leadership. Although the collectivist attribution of guilt, which regards the deeds of individuals as mere outgrowths of a collective mentality or interest, was just as decided in the basic approach of the National Socialist racial theory as it was in the Marxist class theory and the class struggle practice of the Bolsheviks, it now came to light for the first time in widely visible deeds fully accessible to the world public, and the impression abroad was extraordinarily strong. Germany was now frequently no longer counted among the civilized states, and anyone who remembered that the same negation had affected Bolshevik Russia in 1918 and 1919 and, because of the Moscow trials, was often put forward again in 1937 and 1938, could easily conclude that the deviation from the simple norms of constitutional civilization on the basis of still relatively open conditions was something worse than the corresponding deviation in the midst of collapse, civil war and full-fledged total rule, even if the human sacrifices were far fewer.
Hitler, however, took such an obvious opinion as the symptom of a malicious conspiracy, and the anti-Semitic motive, which had always been among his most genuine motives, even if it was sometimes covered up by others, soon came to the fore in a way it had hitherto had never been the case in any public statement by the “Führer and Reich Chancellor.” In the Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939, what was symptomatic and salient was not so much the famous and later repeatedly quoted prediction of the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” (if international financial Jewry should once again plunge the peoples into a world war), the simultaneous statements make it likely that there was no talk here of physical annihilation. Another sentence was far more revealing, namely: “Over the Jewish slogan ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite’ a higher realization will triumph, namely: ‘Workers of all nations, recognize your common enemy.’” Hitler had never before made it so clear to the world that anti-Bolshevism, anti-Marxism and anti-Semitism formed a unity for him and his aims were by no means merely the revision of Versailles, the enforcement of the right of self-determination for the German people, or the East European living space of a “Germanic Reich,” but that he at the same time proclaiming a doctrine of the salvation of the world, which was addressed fundamentally to all people and which corresponded exactly to Marxist doctrine, although it was opposed to it in spirit.
It cannot be ruled out that Hitler also brought his anti-Semitism into play for tactical reasons, because he wanted to ally himself with the anti-Jewish streams in England and America. He overlooked the fact, however, that in England and America a natural dislike of the Jews was was widespread among the upper classes, Chamberlain and Halifax were not and could not be anti-Semites in the ideological sense. If he was now striving for an alliance on the international level in the name of anti-communism, then anti-Semitism would have to have a counterproductive effect, unlike in the case of Hugenberg and Papen in Germany.
But the quite a few listeners to two secret speeches that Hitler gave between Munich and Prague in those months could even have asked themselves whether Hitler’s anti-Semitism was really directed entirely or even primarily, against the Jews as a clearly definable group and whether his anti-Marxism was indeed as far removed from Marxism as its allies in the nationalist camp believed.
On November 10, 1938, Hitler spoke to about 400 representatives of the German press at an evening reception in the Führerbau in Munich. He boasted of the successes of the past year and praised the role played by propaganda and, consequently, the press. But the education in self-confidence was far from over, especially since the pacifist record he had to play up to now was no longer worth anything. What had already shaken this self-confidence during the World War was “the hysteria of our intellectual strata.” In the event of failure, these “chicken people” will certainly fail again and break the unity of the nation: “When I look at the intellectual strata here, unfortunately, they are needed; otherwise one day, I don't know, they could be exterminated or something like that.” Were the Jews, in the end, merely a particularly prominent part of the intellectuals for Hitler, and was the question did not arise as to whether the German intelligentsia under Hitler would ultimately suffer a fate similar to that of the Russian intelligentsia under Lenin, although the horror of the “extermination of the national intelligentsia” in Russia had been one of Hitler’s most original emotions? Was the fascination hidden in the fear and the role model in the horror?
And could not a similar question be asked with regard to the German bourgeoisie, which had mostly allied themselves with Hitler precisely in order to finally be free from the threats of communism? In any case, many a citizen would have called Marxist the conclusion that Hitler drew from the experience he told young officers about in the Reich Chancellery on January 25, 1939: “How often, especially in the bad times, did I drive past road construction crews and and there were tar workers standing there, sooty and dirty, and then the cars had to stop there, ten, twelve automobiles. In the cars sat wealthy citizens, merchants, bankers or people like that were sitting in the cars, and on the street stood these proles, and when I compared the heads, there was an eye shining out from under the soot and dirt of so many of these road workers that I had to say to myself: Actually you should put him in the car and order the other one here to work on the roads.” Was Marxism right in the end in its main thesis of the irresolvable opposition between the dying bourgeoisie and the rising proletariat, and was Hitler about to put this main thesis into practice? Presumably Hitler would have answered such a question that he had individual proletarians in mind and not the proletariat, and that he was not striving for a stateless society of general equality, but on the contrary for the formation of a “new social elite” capable of exercising rule over Europe. But was Lenin, with his talk of the “grain” of the all-transforming party and of Russia as the “strongest state in the world,” so so far removed from this? In any case, it must be clear to all listeners and basically all readers of his books and speeches that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was no mere hostility to the Jews and that his anti-Marxism was closer to the real Marxism of the Soviet Union than the doctrinaire Marxists themselves would have admitted.
Now the journalists and writers of England and the United States were certainly not among the listeners to these speeches, and very few of them had read Mein Kampf. Nevertheless, the assertion cannot be called into question that in England and America and especially in France, great concern would have spread as a result of the public speeches and actions of the period between October 1938 and March 1939 even if there had not been a single one there Jewish journalists and not a single Jewish financier there. Even the most staunch anti-Communists could not have been able to escape this concern.
But it was Hitler’s destruction of what was left of Czechia that created a new quality of criticism and resistance and meant the death blow to the anti-communist concept of great agreement, although it continued to exist in weak remnants. What caused Hitler to switch from the motive of "self-determination" to the motive of “living space” before he had even seriously raised the issue of the oldest desideratum of German self-determination, that of Danzig and the Germans in Poland, has still not been convincingly clarified to this day. Certainly the connection to the Central European conception of Friedrich Naumann and others as well as to the former Austrian reality was obvious, but the new government in Prague was fully aware that it had to cooperate unconditionally with the Greater German Reich, and the Slovak problem seemed to be solved to general satisfaction when a Slovak Diet elected the priest Josef Tiso as prime minister of an autonomous federal state. But there were Slovak radicals for whom this solution was not enough, and as early as mid-October 1938 Göring gave them his opinion that an “airport base in Slovakia was very important for the Luftwaffe in operations to the east.” However, what was decisive in the narrowest sense of the word was a personal moment that had no equivalent on Stalin’s side: Hitler’s feeling that he didn’t have long to live and that he would therefore have to make the “big decisions” soon. Presumably, the much more banal taste for impressive successes and triumphant entrances also played a role. In any case, by means of barely veiled threats, he pushed the Slovak radicals along the path of separatism, which the central government in Prague opposed only because it did not receive any information about the wishes of the Reich government. The dismissal of Tiso by the new President Hacha on March 10, 1939 was the opportunity Hitler desired and brought about. On March 12, he had the Wehrmacht draw up the “demands for an ultimatum.” The German minority took to the streets in Brno, Iglau and Pressburg and tried to provoke the Czechs, everywhere with relatively little success. Hitler promised the Hungarians Carpatho-Ukraine, which he had refused them in the Vienna arbitration of November 2, 1938, and in Bratislava the radicals of Rodobrana took over the leadership of independent Slovakia. On the night of March 15, Hacha and Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky were received by Hitler in the Reich Chancellery. Hacha appears very weak and humble, but the most severe threats are necessary to get him to sign the “treaty” that annexes the Czech Republic as a “protectorate” to the German Reich. This did not merely reverse the state emancipation of 1918, but introduced a new kind of status of inferior rights, which had hitherto been unknown in Europe and which, as a result of the anti-colonial movements, was also in decline in the rest of the world. And the occupation of the Czech Republic was presented by the German press as a campaign of conquest: “Swastika banners are waving over Prague” was one of the headlines, and Hitler took possession of the Hradcany as if he had moved into the enemy’s capital after a victorious war. But this time the advancing troops were not greeted with cheers and flowers and kisses: fists clenched, tears flowed, and women spat in the faces of German soldiers.
The anti-communist conception of the grand agreement had thus collapsed before it could fully emerge, for even those in the West who had been most inclined to think along these lines had assumed tacitly that Hitler would not use violence and would not seek further expansion, i.e. the subsequent recognition of the national right to self-determination was the furthest step that they intended to be take. If the governments of England and France had had a purely anti-communist, i.e. anti-Bolshevik attitude, they would certainly have viewed the incorporation of Czechia into the German Reich as a further development of the positions required for the forthcoming decisive struggle, and they indeed have had to act that way if they presented themselves as representatives of capitalism. But were they allowed to be sure that Hitler was a pure anti-communist? Wasn’t anti-communism for him in the end just as much an instrument in the service of other purposes as the right to self-determination obviously was? But even if Chamberlain and Halifax had trusted Hitler, the public opinion of their countries would not have given them a free hand, for that public opinion was now predominantly anti-fascist, however unmistakable the countercurrents still existing. Very characteristic was the report of the Polish ambassador in Washington, Jerzy Potocki, who, with a clear undertone of dislike and criticism, told his foreign minister as early as March 7 that President Roosevelt and the press were manipulating the American public with the intention of “encouraging hatred of everything that smacks of fascism.” In this, he said, the USSR was counted among the camp of democratic states, just as the Loyalists were seen as defenders of democratic ideas during the Spanish Civil War. Similar views were held in England by the Labour Party in paradoxical agreement with the conservative oppositionists around Churchill, and in France the parties of the “Popular Front” were still powerful enough to move in the direction of a renewed transition to the policy of great resistance under the banner of anti-fascism. With the occupation of Prague, this tendency was bound to receive a tremendous impetus everywhere throughout the West.
Chamberlain had spoken with striking caution at first, but then, on March 17 in Birmingham, he was forced to express his fears at the prospect of an attempt “to rule the world by force,” and he closed his speech with the sentence: “…no greater mistake (could) be committed than that of believing that our nation, because it considers war to be a senseless and cruel thing,…has lost its marrow so much that it cannot exhaust its force to meet a daring challenge, should it ever come.” A little later, in even shorter and more evocative words, Halifax told the German Ambassador von Dirksen that he could understand Hitler’s taste for bloodless victories, but that next time he would be forced to shed blood. It didn’t really matter what the next time would be; if one calls the will to resist war will, then from the occupation of Prague onwards England was undoubtedly determined to go to war, provided that Hitler made further territorial demands and attempted to enforce them by force. But this was at the same time a return to simple state policy; the profound change that this state policy had undergone through the existence of the ideological states was left out without disappearing completely. In any case, events did not make Chamberlain and Halifax anti-fascists any more than did Daladier and Bonnet, if only because they did not want to offend Italy.
The peculiar thing was that Hitler had in fact already made new demands, but that they were initially made in a thoroughly friendly, emphatically anti-communist spirit and, strictly speaking, were not territorial demands, but on the contrary implied renunciations that Stresemann would never have made under any circumstances. After all, nothing was more painful and unbearable for the Germans of the Weimar Republic than the existence of the Polish “corridor” that separated East Prussia from the Reich, and with it the independent existence of the “Free City of Danzig.” Nowhere could the Germans complain with greater justification about discrimination, even disenfranchisement and persecution of their compatriots. Hitler had radically reversed the course of the Weimar Republic in January 1934, and no one but him could have done it. His motive was evidently anti-communist sympathy with the regime of Marshal Pilsudski, who, after all, might have crushed the Bolsheviks in 1920 had he agreed to support the last Belorusian army. When at the end of October 1938, Hitler had Ribbentrop suggest to the Polish Ambassador Lipski that he agree to Danzig’s return to the Reich and to accept an extraterritorial motorway and a corresponding railway line through the corridor, he had in mind a “general settlement” of all existing frictions, which would be “the culmination of the work initiated by Marshal Pilsudski and the Führer.” The background was quite unmistakably the prospect of a joint fight against the Soviet Union, and in the further talks that Hitler and Ribbentrop had in the following months with Lipski and Foreign Minister Beck, there was often meaningful talk of the Ukraine, and a rejection on the part of the party the Pole was not apparent. But on the other hand, Lipski pointed out from the beginning that Danzig had a special and symbolic meaning for Poland and that an extraterritorial highway represented a serious loss of sovereignty. In fact, for the sake of his higher aims, Hitler had brought about a general settlement with Italy by solemnly renouncing South Tyrol. Here, however, he demanded something, although in the main merely the abandonment of a legal relationship, namely the inclusion of the free city of Danzig in the Polish customs area. Hitler did not consider that a radical fascist state can pursue a policy of renunciation against the backdrop of its much broader ultimate goals, but that fascist-like nationalism was least capable of doing so. Thus the friendly atmosphere of the discussions was lost more and more, the mood of the Polish public deteriorated visibly; there was outrage that Germany had prevented a common border between Poland and Hungary in the Vienna arbitration award, and they took a rather sharp action against the German minority.
But it was March 15 that finally hardened the situation. Now the Polish public was convinced that Poland would be the next state to “take its turn”; and the German protection of Slovakia undoubtedly meant an extraordinary deterioration in the strategic position of Poland, if it considered itself an opponent and not an ally of the German Reich. Nevertheless, Beck did not agree with the most obvious of all proposals now put forward by the British government: that Poland, together with England, France and the Soviet Union, should issue a declaration expressing a willingness to resist any threat to the political independence of any European state. Even a policy of great resistance was bound to be dangerous for Poland’s victorious war against Soviet Russia in 1920, and the Polish regime of colonels was even less able to accept the unmistakable tendency towards ideological anti-fascism than the Conservative Party government in England. Thus Beck pleaded for a bilateral agreement, and on March 31st Chamberlain made a statement in the House of Commons that the British Government would give the Polish Government all support it could in the event of action “which clearly threatens Polish independence and goes against which the Polish government would accordingly regard resistance with its national armed forces as indispensable.” The wording was not entirely clear, and Hitler’s proposals did not necessarily threaten Poland’s independence. But this declaration could be seen as a unilateral—and utterly unprecedented in English history—guarantee obliging the British government to intervene in arms, even if only the Danzig government declared annexation to the Reich and Poland opposed it by force of arms. The decision about war and peace was thus placed in the hands of the Poles, although Beck had concealed essential facts in London and although Henderson called the German cause “by no means unjustified or immoral,” but the Poles “heroic, but also fools.” There were serious concerns even among leading Poles, and the Polish ambassador in Paris, Juliusz Lukasiewicz, spoke very negatively about Chamberlain’s domestic motives, which he said amounted to an “ideological struggle against Hitlerism” and aimed to provoking an overthrow in Germany.
Beck, in turn, derived from Hitler’s anti-communism the conviction that he was utterly incapable of even contemplating an anti-Polish agreement with the Soviet Union.
Thus, the negotiations about a mutual assistance pact, which were conducted during the summer months between the Western powers and the Soviet Union, would not have been very promising even if they had actually been able to agree on a common line of struggle against Hitlerite fascism. First of all, Poland was at stake, and Poland could only expect help against Germany if it allowed the Soviet troops to invade. But that, according to Beck and Marshal Rydz-Smigly, would entail the loss of those eastern territories taken from the Russians in the Peace of Riga, and almost no one was in Poland was willing to hand over Brest-Litovsk and Lemberg to the Soviet Beelzebub in order to be able to defend Danzig against the German devil. Moreover, since the Soviet Union was also raising the question of the security of the Baltic border states, the negotiations were more than likely filled with the deepest mutual distrust, for the Russians feared that the Western powers wanted to exhaust the Soviet Union and Germany on the Polish battlefields, and in the British Foreign Office the opposite and older suspicion was still very much alive, that the Soviet Union wanted to involve the Western powers in a war with Germany in order to be able to dominate the whole of Europe later and subject it to the Soviet system. Thus, negotiations conducted in July and August by a Anglo-French military mission in Moscow with Marshal Voroshilov made slow progress. Then, like a bolt of lightning from a moderately overcast sky, came the news that Reich Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop would be arriving in Moscow on August 23 to conclude a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. The anti-fascist conception, which had never been more than a tendency within the politics of the great resistance, had now also failed. The fifth main possibility of world politics, apparently impossible for ideological reasons and neglected for a long time, had prevailed: an understanding between the enemies, which seemed to be a resumption of the Rapallo policy. This averted the threat of world war, but also broke the more probable imprisonment of Hitler: the starting signal for the partial European war was given, if the Western powers persisted in fulfilling their obligations to Poland.
Very nice work. Excellent attention to detail.
You may appreciate this - more of the grand sweep of history, played out as US control over International Affairs and the breakdown of their Rules Based International (Dis-) Order . . .
https://les7eb.substack.com/