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This below is Chapter 3 Section 3:
World Politics 1935/1936
When Trotsky took over the Foreign Commissariat in 1917, he was therefore convinced that his main task was to “close the shop” because foreign policy in the traditional sense would no longer exist. Rather, the domestic policy of Soviet Russia, the overthrow of capitalism, would soon become the real content of world politics, in which the proletariat would annihilate capitalism throughout Europe and then in the world. Hitler’s views were opposed to those of Trotsky, but for him, too, there was no sharp distinction between domestic politics and world politics. Most Europeans saw in him and his regime above all the spearhead of German revisionism and thus a power that threatened peace; the more emphatically he emphasized his desire for peace or the more convincingly Rudolf Hess described the horrors of war, the greater the chances that the “liberation from the shackles of the Versailles dictate,” which was undoubtedly one of his main goals in world politics, could be achieved peacefully at a later date by the mere pressure of the Reich regaining its strength. But peace speeches and diplomatic declarations were not the only facts that mattered. Since Germany, as the great state in the center of Europe, was most closely connected with the rest of the world and was far from being able to carry out an almost complete closure of its borders on the model of the Soviet Union, everything that happened in its domestic policy had to have direct or indirect repercussions on world politics. Thus the parties that Hitler had banned or forced to dissolve continued to exist in one form or another in the rest of Europe, and it would have been strange if feelings of solidarity had not arisen. Some of the German parties even lived on as such, with the historically conditioned modifications, in parts of the German-speaking area: the Center in Austria and in the Saar region, the Social Democracy also in Czechoslovakia and, despite the government leadership by the National Socialists, even in Danzig. The Russian Mensheviks had contributed significantly to the anti-Bolshevik position of the European Social Democratic parties after 1918; how could the émigré party executive of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in Prague not have exerted a corresponding influence on the other parties of the Socialist Workers’ International? But feelings of solidarity and thus the repercussions on world politics in the churches and denominations were even stronger than in the parties.
Here, admittedly, an ambivalence was even more pronounced, which made itself felt in some of the parties, for the Austrian Christian Social Party, like the NSDAP, was an opponent of social democracy and as friendly with Mussolini as Hitler would have liked to be. For both the Catholic and the Protestant Church, National Socialism was on the one hand a threat and on the other hand a promise.
The Catholic Church had initially been more acutely aware of the threat contained in Article 24 of the party program, which tied the party’s “positive Christianity” to the “ethical life and moral sense of the Germanic race.” This called into question the absoluteness and universality of church teaching, and it was only logical that the church forbade its believers to become members of the NSDAP until 1933. On the other hand, however, there was good reason for the Church to sympathize with the national uprising, and the earlier bans were lifted in March 1933, though not without an unmistakable tone of concern. The Concordat of July 20, 1933 grew out of these contrasting sentiments: the Church abandoned political Catholicism in order to obtain a firm legal position for the defense of the spiritual core. For Hitler, in turn, recognition by the international power of the Vatican was a major global political success, which brought him more prestige than the extension of the German-Soviet neutrality treaty in May and the initialing of the Four-Power Pact in June. But as early as 1934 and 1935 strong tensions developed, which found expression to a large extent in the church’s struggle against Alfred Rosenberg’s “Myth of the 20th Century” and against “neo-paganism.” But the element of patriotic and anti-communist affinity was always maintained and proved to be effective not only in the Saar referendum in January 1935, but also in the countless sermons that denounced the Soviet concentration camps, although the German ones were always included.
Among the Protestants, both the affinity and the opposition were different. They were much more open than the Catholics about modern thought tendencies and thus also about nationalistic-volkish ideas, but on the other hand they had a much closer relationship to the Old Testament. Thus, tendencies towards renewal, which remained marginal in the Catholic Church, became a very strong force within the Protestant regional churches in the form of the “German Christians,” and they wanted to understand National Socialism as a “second reformation,” as a repetition of the deed of the “German man Luther.” The resistance they found was orthodox and, to a certain extent, reactionary, directed against the democratization and parliamentarization and the associated centralization that the “German Christians” were striving for. But the fight against the Aryan Paragraph and discrimination against Jewish Christians then came more and more to the fore on the part of the “Pfarrernotbund” (Emergency Covenant of Pastors) and the “Confessing Church,” and not a few of the German Christians approached the anti-Christian “German Faith Movement,” where turns like “the poisonous weed of Asian, Jewish-Marxist Christianity” were common. Nevertheless, hardly anyone could be more nationally minded than the former U-boat commander and Freikorps fighter Martin Niemöller, who soon became the world’s best-known figure of the church resistance.
But not even among the Jewish opponents and victims of National Socialist anti-Semitism was the element of affinity completely absent, so it is certainly not just Jews who felt threatened by this anti-Semitism. It too was a complex phenomenon and four main themes can be distinguished, each with different historical origins:
National Socialist anti-Semitism was a kind of narrow-gauge socialism that focused on the Jews all the accusations made by the socialists against capitalism: the accusations of exploitation, parasitism, alienation from the people. But many of the early socialists had fought Rothschild and the Jews first and foremost as “kings of the age;” it was not until Karl Marx had transferred the critique to the far broader subject of capitalism, although he too had declared the modern world to be “Jewish to its innermost heart.”
In addition to the social motive, National Socialist anti-Semitism also contained a national motive which showed an unmistakable agreement with its counterpart on the Jewish side, namely Zionism. While Zionism was in its turn essentially a reaction to anti-Semitism, particularly Russian and French anti-Semitism, it had an independent root in the emergence of national sentiment as manifested in the Italian liberation and unification movement, and the connection is evident in the fundamental book of Zionism, Moses Hess’s “Rome and Jerusalem” of 1862. Therefore, it was not only a defensive measure when the German Zionists, even before 1914, made the will to emigrate to Palestine a condition of membership.
The historical reason for National Socialist hostility to Jews was a version of the stab-in-the-back legend: during the World War, Jews had evaded service with arms and committed treason even before the collapse; however, the moving core of the motive was apparently not the questionable or false claims about percentages and bureaucracy of the war economy, but the memory of the role of Jews like Leviné, Levien, Eisner and Rosa Luxemburg in the German revolution; it was thus already a question of the motive of Jewish Bolshevism, which was directly opposed to the first two motives.
The climax of National Socialist anti-Semitism was represented by the ideological and at the same time mythologizing theory of causes, which derived all misfortune in world history from the workings of a demonic force, namely the Jew. Thus, in a public lecture on “The Schutzstaffel as an anti-Bolshevik combat organization” in 1935, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler saw “the relentless executioner’s sword of Cannstatt and Verden flashing in the course of time,” the pyres of the witch trials blazing, the Inquisition depopulating Spain and the reign of terror of the French Revolution slaughtering the best sons of the French people, and in all this, in his opinion, “our common eternal enemy, the Jew, had a hand in some cloak or through some of his organizations.” The same man, in the same lecture, at the same time, derived all the difficulties and catastrophes of German history in a comparatively rational way from the Germanic urge for freedom and individualism, thereby making it clear that the underlying experience was exclusively that of Bolshevism, and that he transformed Lenin’s “Who, whom?” into the thesis that in these race struggles there are no peace agreements, and to be defeated here for the people meant to be dead.
The first and most real motive showed the least impact and power. The boycott of April 1st, directed not least against the Jewish department stores, was quickly called off, and until 1938 the activity of Jews in the economy was relatively unhindered, not least because of the protection by the Reich Minister of Economics Schacht.
The second motive laid behind the “Nuremberg Laws” of September 15, 1935, which made the Jews mere “national subjects” and, however, went far beyond this aspect of constitutional law insofar as they introduced into legislation the concept of “blood” following the feudal and also, admittedly, the American model, and criminalized marriages and extramarital affairs between Jews and Germans. However, the Transfer (Haavara) Agreement, which was intended to facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine, was entirely Zionist.
The third motive remained an enduring but primarily propagandistic topos.
In its consequences, the fourth motive was the peak of the revolutionary character of National Socialism, and the question arises as to whether it did not represent a real declaration of war on “the Occident,” whose protectors, in contrast to Ernst Niekisch and other national revolutionaries, one expressly wanted to be.
The fact that Hitler, through the Church struggle and through discrimination against the Jews, created for himself opponents in many countries, especially in England, who would have been neutral in the face of mere German nationalism can be illustrated by the statement of an Englishwoman who said: “I thought that racial persecution belonged to another age.” On the other hand, even Nahum Goldman reports in his memoirs that although he had proclaimed “the Jewish boycott against Nazi Germany” at the World Jewish Congress, he had energetically supported the Transfer Agreement despite violent attacks.
Thus, everything seemed to indicate that a regime which had already created such powerful opponents for itself through its domestic policy would encounter the united resistance of all states as soon as it no merely advocated its revisionist claims merely through propaganda and diplomacy, backed them up with a strong rearmament. Europe was still the authoritative continent, however much its world dominance had been weakened by World War I and the rise of non-European powers such as the United States and Japan, and Germany was potentially the strongest but also the most feared power on the continent, and even the German culture had few friends and lovers since an anti-Semitic movement took over. Nothing was therefore more natural than for the war coalition to renew itself and for a policy of great resistance to be pursued. But the basic condition of this policy was that the Soviet Union should join it. Indeed, the Soviet Union was prepared to do so, feeling more threatened than any other country. But had she not once solemnly proclaimed through the mouths of her followers that she wanted to be “the gravedigger of bourgeois society”? Had she not championed a harsh revisionism for fifteen years? Had she not persecuted the Christian churches much earlier, harder and more effectively than the National Socialists did? Had she not taken away from Zionism all possibilities of movement and activity, while in Germany the Jewish communities led to a vigorous inner life and Zionism was even promoted? Briand was no longer alive, but Jean Herbette’s warnings about “evil” were hardly forgotten in the Foreign Ministry in Paris, and many Englishmen continued to think like “Augur.” When in September 1934 the question of the entry of the Soviet Union into the bodies of the League of Nations was discussed, the Swiss Federal Councilor Motta expressed the deepest distrust in which some of the experiences of the first post-war period had remained alive: “Our embassy in Petersburg was plundered in 1918, one of their officials was massacred. We never heard even the slightest apology. When in 1918 an attempt at a general strike threatened us with the horrors of civil war, we had to use military force to remove a Soviet mission which we had tolerated in Bern, because it was involved in the agitation…Communism means in every field…the most thorough negation of all ideas on which our being and our lives are based…The spread beyond political boundaries is its (communism’s) life spirit. If it renounces it, it denies itself. If it remains faithful to it, it becomes the enemy of all, because it threatens us all.”
Motta was not able to prevent the Soviet Union from being admitted to the League of Nations, but despite all of Litvinov’s speeches and efforts, the radical counter-possibility that communist theorists had for so long considered the most important, indeed unavoidable, did not completely disappear: the politics of the great agreement between the capitalist powers, i.e. the consent of the establishment of German domination in Eastern Europe after the annihilation of the communist regime. It evidently corresponded to Hitler’s real intentions and it appeared that it would imply the safeguarding of the colonial empires of England and France. It therefore met with sympathy in influential circles of the western powers. Although it failed to articulate itself much in public, it weakened the policy of the great resistance to a considerable extent, and although France’s Foreign Minister Pierre Laval concluded a defensive alliance with the Soviet Union in May 1935, his intentions were primarily domestic in getting Stalin to publicly praise France’s armaments efforts. In doing so, he dealt a severe blow to the violent anti-militarist agitation of the French communists and at the same time unwillingly prepared the Popular Front alliance which, over the course of the next twelve months, brought the communists together with the socialists and the left-bourgeois radical socialists under the banner of a new concept of “anti-fascism.” But he did nothing to bring the agreement to ratification in the House and Senate, for in fact he had already become a champion of small resistance.
The pivot of this policy was Mussolini’s fascist Italy. If it was possible to make Mussolini a reliable partner for the Western powers, then Hitler would be pinned down, forced to stand still, without the need to include the Soviet Union, which was unforeseeable in its consequences and feared especially by England. In April 1935, the Three Powers Conference in Stresa marked the culmination of this policy: a firm stand was taken against the violation of the Versailles Treaty of which Hitler was guilty when, on March 16, 1935, ostensibly in response to the extension of military service in France to two years, he proclaimed the introduction of general conscription and thus putting beyond all doubt the the fact of extensive German rearmament. But Mussolini felt he could exact a heavy price for his cooperation from the Western powers, namely, toleration of his intention to model Italy as a major colonial power and to conquer Ethiopia, which had been a member of the League of Nations since 1923 and therefore enjoyed the protection of collective security. Although he received no assurances, the Duce dared, on October 2, 1935, to summon millions of people to the squares of Italy and to appeal to “proletarian and fascist Italy” to finally acquire, through a campaign in East Africa, the “place in the sun” so long denied to her by thy the bourgeois nations of the West. In so doing he ruined the policy of small resistance in a short space of time, but its remnants proved to be strong enough to assure him eventual success.
But meanwhile Great Britain had taken serious steps into the realm of the second small possibility of world politics, the politics of small consensus. Shortly after the introduction of general conscription in Germany, the British cabinet had asked Hitler whether the visit by Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon and Lord Privy Seal Anthony Eden, which had been planned for some time, was still welcome. Hitler, understandably, did not say no, and at the talks of March 25 and 26 he apparently made a very good impression on the English guests, who had thought they were meeting a demagogue and who now came to believe that a statesman was sitting opposite of them. Although Simon and Eden traveled on to Moscow of all places, they took up a suggestion from Hitler on their return, and in rapid negotiations conducted by the special ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, a naval agreement was prepared, which was presented to the surprised world public on June 18. The total strength of the German naval fleet was set at 35% of that of the British, and parity was even granted for U-Boats. Although Great Britain thereby achieved her goal of binding Hitler with new treaties after the Versailles provisions had become obsolete, she also retrospectively sanctioned earlier breaches of the treaties and gave Hitler the impression that he could not expect any decisive resistance, even if he did threw off the last and most important fetters that had been placed on Germany after the defeat.
Mussolini created the conditions for this. He encountered unexpectedly fierce resistance when he deployed his troops against Ethiopia, and within weeks sanctions were imposed on Italy by 50 countries. But the Duce displayed great nerve, and the League of Nations did not carry their measures to the point where they would have become dangerous to the regime. As late as March 2, 1936, the new French Foreign Minister Flandin, by means of a “last appeal,” obtained a further postponement to delay the decision on an oil embargo again.
Meanwhile the French government, whose attention was always primarily focused on Germany, had forwarded the pact with the Soviet Union to the legislature, thereby reverting to the policy of great resistance. But domestic opposition from the right and sections of the center was extremely fierce, and Hitler was convinced with a sure psychological instinct that the French, especially on the eve of crucial parliamentary elections which the “Popular Front” hoped to win, would not be inclined to make any serious decisions. Moreover, he was also probably right in thinking that the Franco-Russian pact, despite its reference to the League of Nations statute, represented a novel fact which had not been foreseen when Stresemann had agreed in Locarno in 1925 to agree to the “demilitarization” of the Rhineland, i.e. to accept an extraordinary loss of sovereignty for an indefinite future in order to appease France. Thus, shortly after the ratification of the pact by the French chamber on March 7, 1936, Hitler allowed German troops to move into the Rhineland, thereby committing by far the most serious of his breaches of the treaty to date. That he was exceedingly nervous during the first 48 hours is well documented, and the troops were instructed to withdraw if necessary. It is an open question whether the National Socialist regime would have survived the occupation of Mainz and Cologne.
But it was now evident that the French military was no less frightened than the Germans. Without mobilization measures, they did not believe they could be responsible for an action, and the politicians did not want to agree to this, so that they were content with an appeal to the League of Nations. In England, according to the report of the German military attaché, the opinion of the little man on the street was that they were not crazy after all and would not go back to the Somme and Passchendaele again because the Germans were occupying their own country. Thus Hitler once again retained the upper hand and achieved a real triumph in the quickly announced Reichstag elections on March 28, with a turnout of over 99%, 98.8% of those entitled to vote voted for the National Socialist ticket.
In the meantime, Mussolini was also on the road to victory. On May 5, 1936, the Italians, under the leadership of the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Badoglio, entered Addis Ababa, and it was no longer of any use when the Ethiopian delegate, in an impassioned speech to the League of Nations on May 11, denounced the “crime” by which the Italians “with the most cruel means of modern civilization” robbed the Ethiopians of their freedom and “exterminated” considerable parts of the population. It was not long before the sanctions were lifted, and the western powers indicated that they would try to revive the policy of small resistance, despite the Franco-Soviet pact. But Hitler had made possible Mussolini’s triumph possible, and Mussolini had made Hitler’s success possible. It was no wonder that the two were now moving more and more towards one another, since Hitler’s admiration for Mussolini and fascism had always been evident, and since Mussolini, for his part, even in times of sharp power-political tensions between the two states, showed the ideological affinity and often emphasized the structural similarity of the regimes. A tip from Mussolini gave Hitler the opportunity to conclude an agreement with Austria on July 11, 1936, which confirmed state independence and nevertheless forced Dollfuss’s successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, to agree to a kind of Gleichschaltung. Hitler was no longer isolated, for the three main realistic options for the policy to be pursued towards him had shown so many interferences that none could be consistently implemented.
But what about the fourth and oldest basic possibility, that of great agreement? There is little positive evidence of this kind to be found in official statements by Western statesmen, but Laval at least seems to have given serious thought to whether it might not be best to direct German momentum eastward, and there were various hints in leading circles in Western states and talks that went in this direction, which in turn filled the American ambassador in Berlin, William Dodd, with great indignation. The counter-tendencies were certainly much stronger, although they were often represented in public by writers who were sympathetic to the great social experiment in the Soviet Union. In France, the Popular Front was victorious in the May 3 general election, and in England, too, anti-fascism gained ground despite the Conservatives enjoying a secure parliamentary majority. The diplomacy of Foreign Commissar Litvinov corresponded perfectly with these tendencies. It was so different in character and intonation from the pronouncements of the 1920s that something extraordinary must have happened to bring about this change. However, it is highly questionable whether Stalin expressed his real fears when, at the 17th Party Congress, he distinguished between an “old” and a “new” line of German policy, which would have been in contention even before Hitler came to power, namely the Rapallo policy on the one hand, and the tendency to resume the policy of the former German Emperor on the other, “who for a time occupied the Ukraine, undertook a campaign against Leningrad and turned the Baltic countries into a staging area for such a campaign.” It was all too understandable that he announced to the representatives of this new policy, using a drastic metaphor, that the new industrial and military strength of the Soviet Union would prevent them from “sticking their pig snout into our Soviet garden.” But was his real fear not that the Western powers would take his new line, the Litvinov policy, for a mere stratagem and would eventually switch to the policy of the grand agreement after all? But then, in the future, the campaign of the German ruler and the intervention of the Allies would no longer be directed against each other as in 1918, but would be coordinated. Germany, then, had to be the center of his concerns, and two hopes presented themselves: Germany’s return to the Rapallo policy on the one hand, and the paradoxical separation of capitalist Germany, pronounced in its fascism, from the less active capitalist states. In any case, he had to press ahead with armaments, and he had already laid the foundation for this in 1928 with the first five-year plan. In May 1935, he was able to give the most convincing interpretation of collectivization, even for Western ears, when he said in a speech to Red Army graduates that the task had been to free a technically backward and almost destitute country with a semi-illiterate population “from the tracks of the Middle Ages and ignorance onto the tracks of modern industry and mechanized agriculture.” This had been accomplished, he said, and now the Soviet Union had a powerful and first-class industry and an organized and technically superbly equipped Red Army. Shortly before, the Deputy War Commissar Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky had announced more precisely at the Seventh Congress of Councils in January 1935: the expenditure of the People’s Commissariat for Defense in 1934 had amounted to about five billion rubles and for 1935 6.5 billion rubles had been estimated. The effective strength of the Red Army at the present time is 960,000 men and the goal was “that there shall be no other army equal to it in the world.”
If Germany was the center of attention for Stalin, the Soviet Union in turn must have been the main object of Hitler’s focus, even if he was primarily concerned with Italy and France, with England and Poland. Although Stalin’s claim that the Soviet Union’s rearmament was a reaction to Hitler’s seizure of power, its origins go back much further, and in any case it was so far ahead of the German one that any government in Berlin would have been extremely alarmed. In 1934 Hitler by no means spent more than 3 billion marks on armaments, 5 billion rubles was at least four times as much, and the statistics of a planned economy do not reveal the indirect armaments expenditure.
There can be no doubt that the Soviet Union and Bolshevism also occupied the emotional center of Hitler’s thinking in 1935-36. Speaking to Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden, according to interpreter Paul Schmidt, “his nostrils trembled slightly with excitement as he described the dangers of Bolshevism to Europe.” With “passionate excitement” he emphasized that hundreds of his party comrades had been murdered by the Bolsheviks and that many German soldiers and civilians had lost their lives fighting Bolshevik uprisings. According to Schmidt, his “favorite topic, the Soviet Union,” took up a lot of time during the conversation, and Hitler, full of anger, called Czechoslovakia, which was just negotiating a mutual assistance pact with Moscow, the “advanced arm of Russia."
All of this was not mere tactics, but a thinly veiled plea for Hitler’s real foreign policy conception, the conception of a policy of great agreement that corresponded exactly to his domestic policy: the alliance with Papen and Hugenberg for the purpose of defeating the common enemy. This alliance, too, was more than mere tactics for Hitler; it corresponded to some of his deepest convictions.
Therefore, the major confrontation with the Soviet Union and Bolshevism, which Hitler undertook in the Reichstag speech of May 21, 1935, should not only be seen in the context of short-term foreign policy goals. Hardly anywhere else has he presented himself and his movement so unequivocally as a response to Bolshevism.
As a doctrine, National Socialism refers exclusively to the German people, while Bolshevism emphasizes its international mission; it was a National Socialist conviction that Europe’s happiness and achievements were inseparably linked to the existence of a system of independent, free national states, but Bolshevism preached the establishment of a world empire and knew only sections of a central International; Bolshevism is pursuing the international world revolution with the weapons of terror and violence, National Socialism is fighting for the consistent balancing of life contradictions and for the bringing together of all to achieve common achievements; Bolshevism sacrifices millions of people and immeasurable values of traditional culture for the sake of a theory and yet achieves only a very low standard of living, while National Socialist Germany is happy to belong to a European cultural community which has stamped its spirit on the contemporary world to such a great extent; National Socialism sees in private property a “higher development of human economic development,” but Bolshevism not only destroys private property, but also private initiative and the the joy of responsibility.
These were certainly to a large extent commonplaces in contemporary thought in Europe and America. But nothing to say against the fact that they also represented Hitler’s sincere convictions. Without genuine common ground, a policy of consensus could not be pursued. The German answer had to be, for the most part, the answer of both Europe and the United States. But its peculiarity had already become tangible for everyone at the beginning of 1934 in another Reichstag speech by Hitler, namely the peculiarity that this answer was at the same time at least a rudimentary copy: “When Herr Stalin expressed his fear in his last big speech that anti-Soviet forces might be active in Germany, I have to correct this opinion to the effect that just as little as in Russia a German National Socialist tendency would be tolerated, so little will Germany tolerate a Communist tendency or even propaganda.” Did not the freedom of the European cultural community consist precisely in the fact that it tolerated hostile propaganda and even activity, because it gave space to all opinions and activities and had hitherto been strong enough to draw profit from it for its development? Was there not the danger that all free activity and every private expression of opinion would have to be suppressed if this demand for exact correspondence was carried to further consequences? Should not the fate of Papen and Hugenberg be a lesson and a warning for Simon and Eden? Did not Hitler himself stand in the way of the policy he most strove for? Was not Bertrand Russell right when he said, albeit with a defeatist undertone, “In trying to stop them, we shall become like them”? Not only did the old anti-German sentiments come into play, but also the anti-totalitarian beliefs deeply rooted in Western culture. The obstacles piling up before the policy of great agreement were at least as great as those before the policy of great resistance.
In any case, by the middle of 1936 it had become an indisputable fact that the two defeated sides of the World War were once again great military powers and that they had good reason to feel threatened by one another. It had not yet been definitively decided which of the four major world policy options that emerged after Hitler came to power would be realized. The fifth main possibility, to which Stalin had alluded with nostalgia in his speech, no longer seemed to exist: the possibility of Germany and the Soviet Union finding one another along the lines of the Rapallo Treaty. On the contrary, both powers let weapons do the talking, albeit outside their sovereign territories, as they intervened on opposite fronts in the Spanish Civil War after the revolt of General Franco.