Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
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91 Compare with this attitude the telling fact that in Great Britain Ramsay MacDonald was never able to live down his “betrayal” of the Labor Party. In Germany the spirit of civil service asked of those in public office to be “above the parties.” Against this spirit of the old Prussian civil service the Nazis asserted the priority of the Party, because they wanted dictatorship. Goebbels demanded explicitly: “Each party member who becomes a state functionary has to remain a National Socialist first ...and to co-operate closely with the party administration” (quoted from Gottfried Neesse, Partei und Stoat, 1939, p. 28).
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92 Such as the Kolonialverein, the Centralverein fur Handelsgeographie, the Flottenverein, or even the Pan-German League, which however prior to the first World War had no connection whatsoever with big business. See Wertheimer, op. cit., p. 73. Typical of this “above parties” of the bourgeoisie were of course the Nationalliberalen; see note 74.
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93 Erich Ludendorff, Die überstaatlichen Mächte im letzten Jahre des Weltkrieges, Leipzig, 1927. See also Feldherrnworte, 1938, 2 vols.; I, 43, 55; II, 80.
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94 The main purpose of the corporate state was “that of correcting and neutralizing a condition brought about by the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century which dissociated capital and labor in industry, giving rise on the one hand to a capitalist class of employers of labor and on the other to a great propertyless class, the industrial proletariat. The juxtaposition of these classes inevitably led to the clash of their opposing interests” (The Fascist Era, published by the Fascist Confederation of Industrialists, Rome, 1939, Chapter iii).
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95 “If the State is truly to represent the nation, then the people composing the nation must be part of the State.
“How is this to be secured?
“The Fascist answer is by organizing the people in groups according to their respective activities, groups which through their leaders ...rise by stages as in a pyramid, at the base of which are the masses and at the apex the State.
“No group outside the State, no group against the State, all groups within the State ...which ...is the nation itself rendered articulate.” (Ibid.)
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96 For the relationship between party and state in totalitarian countries and especially the incorporation of the Fascist party into the state of Italy, see Franz Neumann, Behemoth, 1942, chapter 1.
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97 See the extremely interesting presentation of the relationship between party and movement in the “Dienstvorschrift für die Parteiorganisation der NSDAP,” 1932, p. II ff., and the presentation by Werner Best in Die deutsche Polizei, 1941, p. 107, which has the same orientation: “It is the task of the Party ...to hold the movement together and give it support and direction.”
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98 Mussolini, in his speech of November 14, 1933, defends his one-party rule with arguments current in all nation-states during a war: A single political party is needed so “that political discipline may exist ...and that the bond of a common fate may unite everyone above contrasting interests” (Benito Mussolini, Four Speeches on the Corporate State, Rome, 1935).
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99 The following anecdote recorded by Berdyaev is noteworthy: “A Soviet young man went to France...[and] was asked what impression France left upon him. He answered: ‘There is no freedom in this country.’...The young man expounded his idea of freedom:...The so-called [French] freedom was of the kind which leaves everything unchanged; every day was like its predecessors;...and so the young man who came from Russia was bored in France” (op. cit., pp. 182–183).
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100 The Austrian state hostility sometimes occurred also among German Pan-Germans, especially if these were Ausländsdeutsche, like Moeller van den Bruck.
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101 Hitler described the situation correctly when he said during the elections of 1932: “Against National Socialism there are only negative majorities in Germany” (quoted from Konrad Heiden, Der Führer, 1944, p. 564).
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102 At the outbreak of the second World War, at least 10 per cent of France’s population was foreign and not naturalized. Her mines in the north were chiefly worked by Poles and Belgians, her agriculture in the south by Spaniards and Italians. See Carr-Saunders, World Population, Oxford, 1936, pp. 145–158.
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103 “Since 1918 none of the [succession states] has produced ...a party which might embrace more than one race, one religion, one social class or one region. The only exception is the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia” (Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, loc. cit.).
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104 See Karl Marx, op. cit.
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105 Carl Schmitt, op. cit., p. 31.
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106 Vaclav Fiala, “Les Partis politiques polonais,” in Monde Slave, Février, 1935.
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107 See the careful analysis by Charles A. Micaud, The French Right and Nazi Germany. 1933–1939, 1943.
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108 The most famous instance was the split in the French socialist party in 1938 when Blum’s faction remained in a minority against Déat’s pro-Munich group during the party Congress of the Seine Department.
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109 The German socialist party underwent a typical change from the beginning of the century to 1933. Prior to the first World War only 10 per cent of its members did not belong to the working class whereas about 25 per cent of its votes came from the middle classes. In 1930, however, only 60 per cent of its members were workers and at least 40 per cent of its votes were middle-class votes. See Sigmund Neumann, op. cit., pp. 28 If.
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110 Schmitt, op. cit.
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1 By S. Lawford Childs, “Refugees—a Permanent Problem in International Organization” in War is not Inevitable. Problems of Peace. 13th Series, London, 1938, published by the International Labor Office.
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2 The early persecution of German Jews by the Nazis must be considered as an attempt to spread antisemitism among “those peoples who are friendlily disposed to Jews, above all the Western democracies” rather than as an effort to get rid of the Jews. A circular letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to all German authorities abroad shortly after the November pogroms of 1938, stated: “The emigration movement of only about 100,000 Jews has already sufficed to awaken the interest of many countries in the Jewish danger.... Germany is very interested in maintaining the dispersal of Jewry ...the influx of Jews in all parts of the world invokes the opposition of the native population and thereby forms the best propaganda for the German Jewish policy.... The poorer and therefore more burdensome the immigrating Jew is to the country absorbing him, the stronger the country will react.” See Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Washington, 1946, published by the U. S. Gov ernment, VI, 87 ff.
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3 Kurt Tramples, “Völkerbund und Völkerfreiheit,” in Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 26. Jahrgang, Juli 1929.
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4 The struggle of the Slovaks against the “Czech” government in Prague ended with the Hitler-supported independence of Slovakia; the Yugoslav constitution of 1921 was “accepted” in Parliament against the votes of all Croat and Slovene representatives. For a good summary of Yugoslav history between the two wars, see Propyläen Weltgeschichte. Das Zeitalter des Imperialismus, 1933, Band 10, 471 ff.
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5 Mussolini was quite right when he wrote after the Munich crisis: “If Czechoslovakia finds herself today in what might be called a ‘delicate situation,’ it is because she was not just Czechoslovakia, but Czech-Germano-Polono-Magyaro-Rutheno-Rumano-Slovakia....” (Quoted from Hubert Ripka, Munich: Before and After, London, 1939, p. 117.)
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6 This term was first coined by Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die österreichische Sozialdemokratie, Vienna, 1907.
Historical consciousness played a great role in the formation of national consciousness. The emancipation of nations from dynastic rule and the overlordship of an international aristocracy was accompanied by the emancipation of literature from the “international” language of the learned (Latin first and later French) and the growth of national languages out of the popular vernacular. It seemed that peoples whose language was fit for literature had reached national maturity per definitionem. The liberation movements of Eastern European nationalities, therefore, started with a kind of philological revival (the results were sometimes grotesque and sometimes very fruitful) whose political function it was to prove that the people who possessed a literature and a history of their own, had the right to national sovereignty.
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7 Of course this was not always a clear-cut alternative. So far nobody has bothered to find out the characteristic similarities between colonial and minority exploitation. Only Jacob Robinson, “Staatsbürgerliche und wirtschaftliche Gleichberechtigung” in Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 26: Jahrgang, July, 1929, remarks in passing: “A peculiar economic protectionism appeared, not directed against other countries but against certain groups of the population. Surprisingly, certain methods of colonial exploitation could be observed in Central Europe.”
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8 It has been estimated that prior to 1914 there were about 100 million people whose national aspirations had not been fulfilled. (See Charles Kingsley Webster, “Minorities: History,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 1929.) The population of minorities was estimated approximately between 25 and 30 millions. (P. de Azcarate, “Minorities: League of Nations,” ibid.). The actual situation in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia was much worse. In the former, the Czech “state people” constituted, with 7,200,000, about 50 per cent of the population, and in the latter 5,000,000 Serbs formed only 42 per cent of the total. See W. Winkler, Statistisches Handbuch der europäischen Nationalitäten, Vienna, 1931; Otto Junghann, National Minorities in Europe, 1932. Slightly different figures are given by Tramples, op. cit.
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9 P. de Azcarate, op. cit.: “The Treaties contain no stipulations regarding the ‘duties’ of minorities towards the States of which they are a part. The Third Ordinary Assembly of the League, however, in 1922,...adopted ...resolutions regarding the ‘duties of minorities.’....”
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10 The French and the British delegates were most outspoken in this respect. Said Briand: “The process at which we should aim is not the disappearance of the minorities, but a kind of assimilation....” And Sir Austen Chamberlain, British representative, even claimed that “the object of the Minority Treaties [is] ...to secure ...that measure of protection and justice which would gradually prepare them to be merged in the national community to which they belonged” (C. A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities, London, 1934, pp. 276, 277).
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11 It is true that some Czech statesmen, the most liberal and democratic of the leaders of national movements, once dreamed of making the Czechoslovak republic a kind of Switzerland. The reason why even Bene? never serious attempted to effectuate such a solution to his harassing nationality problems was that Switzerland was not a model that could be imitated, but rather a particularly fortunate exception that proved an otherwise established rule. The newly established states did not feel secure enough to abandon a centralized state apparatus and could not create overnight those small self-administrative bodies of communes and cantons upon whose very extensive powers the Swiss system of federation is based.
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12 Wilson notably, who had been a fervent advocate of granting “racial, religious, and linguistic rights to the minorities,” “feared that ‘national rights’ would prove harmful inasmuch as minority groups thus marked as separate corporate bodies would be rendered thereby ‘liable to jealousy and attack’” (Oscar J. Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights, New York, 1933, p. 351). Macartney, op. cit., p. 4, describes the situation and the “prudent work of the Joint Foreign Committee” that labored to avoid the term “national.”
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13 The term is Macartney’s, op. cit., passim.
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14 “The result of the Peace settlement was that every State in the belt of mixed population ...now looked upon itself as a national state. But the facts were against them.... Not one of these states was in fact uni-national, just as there was not, on the other hand, one nation all of whose members lived in a single state” (Macartney, op. cit., p. 210).
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15 In 1933 the chairman of the Congress expressly emphasized: “One thing is certain: we do not meet in our congresses merely as members of abstract minorities; each of us belongs body and soul to a specific people, his own, and feels himself tied to the fate of that people for better or worse. Consequently, each of us stands here, if I may say so, as a full-blooded German or full-blooded Jew, as a full-blooded Hungarian or full-blooded Ukrainian.” See Sitzungsbericht ties /Congresses der organisierten nationalen Gruppen in den Staaten Europas, 1933, p. 8.
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16 The first minorities arose when the Protestant principle of freedom of conscience accomplished the suppression of the principle cuius regio eius religio. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 had already taken steps to secure certain rights to the Polish populations in Russia, Prussia, and Austria, rights that certainly were not merely “religious”; it is, however, characteristic that all later treaties—the protocol guaranteeing the independence of Greece in 1830, the one guaranteeing the independence of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1856, and the Congress of Berlin in 1878 concerned with Rumania—speak of “religious,” and not “national” minorities, which were granted “civil” but not “political” rights.
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17 De Mello Franco, representative of Brazil on the Council of the League of Nations, put the problem very clearly: “It seems to me obvious that those who conceived this system of protection did not dream of creating within certain States a group of inhabitants who would regard themselves as permanently foreign to the general organization of the country” (Macartney, op. cit., p. 277).
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18 “The regime for the protection of minorities was designed to provide a remedy in cases where a territorial settlement was inevitably imperfect from the point of view of nationality” (Joseph Roucek, The Minority Principle as a Problem of Political Science, Prague, 1928, p. 29). The trouble was that imperfection of territorial settlement was the fault not only in the minority settlements but in the establishment of the succession states themselves, since there was no territory in this region to which several nationalities could not lay claim.
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19 An almost symbolic evidence of this change of mind can be found in statements of President Eduard BeneS of Czechoslovakia, the only country that after the first World War had submitted with good grace to the obligations of the Minority Treaties. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II BeneS began to lend his support to the principle of transfer of populations, which finally led to the expulsion of the German minority and the addition of another category to the growing mass of Displaced Persons. For BeneŜ’ stand, see Osc
ar I. Janowsky, Nationalities and National Minorities, New York, 1945, pp. 136 ff.
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20 “The problem of statelessness became prominent after the Great War. Before the war, provisions existed in some countries, notably in the United States, under which naturalization could be revoked in those cases in which the naturalized person ceased to maintain a genuine attachment to his adopted country. A person so denaturalized became stateless. During the war, the principal European States found it necessary to amend their laws of nationality so as to take power to cancel naturalization” (John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem, Institute of International Affairs, Oxford, 1939, p. 231). The class of stateless persons created through revocation of naturalization was very small; they established, however, an easy precedent so that, in the interwar period, naturalized citizens were as a rule the first section of a population that became stateless. Mass cancellation of naturalizations, such as the one introduced by Nazi Germany in 1933 against all naturalized Germans of Jewish origin, usually preceded denationalization of citizens by birth in similar categories, and the introduction of laws that made denaturalization possible through simple decree, like the ones in Belgium and other Western democracies in the thirties, usually preceded actual mass denaturalization; a good instance is the practice of the Greek government with respect to the Armenian refugees: of 45,000 Armenian refugees 1,000 were naturalized between 1923 and 1928. After 1928, a law which would have naturalized all refugees under twenty-two years of age was suspended, and in 1936, all naturalizations were canceled by the government. (See Simpson, op. cit., p. 41.)
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21 Twenty-five years after the Soviet regime had disowned one and a half million Russians, it was estimated that at least 350,000 to 450,000 were still stateless—which is a tremendous percentage if one considers that a whole generation had passed since the initial flight, that a considerable portion had gone overseas, and that another large part had acquired citizenship in different countries through marriage. (See Simpson, op. cit., p. 559; Eugene M. Kulischer, The Displacement of Population in Europe, Montreal, 1943; Winifred N. Hadsel, “Can Europe’s Refugees Find New Homes?” in Foreign Policy Reports, August, 1943, Vol. X, no. 10.)