The Peace of Amiens

by Nicholas Sumner

  ​Hitler’s attitude toward the United Kingdom was characterised by ambivalence and contempt. He believed that Britain and the Commonwealth were defeated foes and would be bound by the Treaty of Leamouth, which had a non-aggression clause. In this, he was guided by Rudolph Hess who, upon the cessation of hostilities, resumed his frequent trips to England and pursued his many friendships with members of the British aristocracy. Hitler often referred to the war of 1940 as ‘Der triumph der Ubermenshen’ and his view was reinforced by the inept British showing in that war.

  ​The British sent supplies to the Soviet Union from Barbarossa until its collapse. This fact was not lost on Hitler but the support was more moral than material. A small amount of weaponry reached the Soviet Union from the UK through the port of Murmansk and across the Iranian border. This included some aircraft and armoured fighting vehicles, but consisted mostly of humanitarian supplies and was seen by the Germans as insignificant. It is not unfair to say that the Labour Party in Britain was inclined to vocal backing of the Russian war effort to assuage its own conscience. Astonishing as it may seem today it is certainly true that many elements of Britain’s Labour movement – not only the most radical – held common cause with Stalin’s regime. The Liberals and Conservatives were appalled by the Soviet Union and saw it as essentially another kind of fascist state. However, after the German attack in June 1941 sent Soviet forces reeling, Britain began sending food and medicine to alleviate the suffering of the Soviet Union’s ordinary people as well as military and civilian observers to learn as much as possible about the situation there and the course of the war.

  ​Hitler’s attempts to export Nazism were not as successful as he hoped. The Finns for instance, though valuable allies in the war against the Soviet Union declined to join the Axis Pact. Italy too was a not entirely content member of the Pact. Il Duce’s appetite for conquest had been left un-sated by the Treaty of Leamouth. He had gained very little at the expense of the British and his ambitions in Egypt, the Red Sea, East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean were unsatisfied. Mussolini also made plans to offset the power of Germany and his erstwhile partner Adolf Hitler by creating an Italian leaning faction within the Axis. In Il Duce’s fancy this would consist of an alliance of nations under Italian guidance which would include Spain, Portugal, Romania, Hungary and even France. But from the tentative feelers put out through private channels Mussolini was quickly to discover that there was little appetite for any changes in the pecking order within the Pact.

  Spain eventually did become a member of the Axis after the disintegration of the USSR.[80] Franco, having resisted bringing Spain into full membership of the Pact, essentially succumbed to bribery. Though both the British and the Germans made extravagant promises to win his support, it was the proximity and success of The Third Reich that proved the deciding factor. That, and the tempting prospect of a return to the days of Spanish glory, at what seemed a low cost, held out by an alliance with Germany. Encouraged by his Foreign Minister Serrano Suňer, it is certain that Franco had little idea of the consequences of his actions, believing in 1943 that the peace would continue for at least a decade.

  From ‘The Nazi Religion’ Larry Ledbetter, writing in The Anglican, May 4th 1986

  The Nazi ideology was an amalgam of German ultra-nationalism and a neo-Germanic heathenism. From its earliest expression in the völkisch clubs and wandervogel groups and its development via eugenics and race-theory, it was permeated with an obsessive sense of national/racial superiority that inspired a revival of a romanticised Teutonic paganism. Hitler himself said:

  “Those who see in National Socialism as nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it...It is more even than a religion. It is the will to create mankind anew. The old beliefs will be brought back to honour again. The whole secret knowledge of nature, of the divine, the demonic. We will wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion peculiar to our race.”

  The Nazis favourite cultural expression – the operas of Wagner – fitted this idea well. The Ring Cycle can be seen as an idolisation of Teutonic paganism while Parsifal, with its mixture of magic, occultism and Christian symbolism is more ambiguous but fundamentally apostate in its outlook. [81] The Chief architect of this blasphemous usurpation of Christian imagery was Heinrich Himmler.

  ​One of the methods designed to help convert the German population (who generally thought of themselves as Christian) to the new Nazi religion, was to arrogate Christian concepts, beliefs and symbols and incorporate a twisted version of them into it. In the Nazi iconography, Hitler was a kind of Messiah, the thousand-year rule of the Third Reich a sick parody of the Messianic Era on earth mentioned in the book of Revelation. The Aryan race took the place of the Jews as the Chosen People and racial purity – blood purity – assumed the place of the Holy Blood of Christ as the means of salvation.

  ​Religion is often an expression of the desire of individual human beings to find peace, yet the leaders of the Nazi party, despite their success, found no peace at all. The deaths of Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels in the purge of 1943 meant that plans to displace Christianity with the new Aryan religion were slow to be implemented. Martin Bormann, the victor of the political infighting within the Nazi party, was certainly anti-Christian and the Kirchenkampf, his war on Christianity within The Third Reich, continued. It left a spiritual void in the hearts of the German people that can scarcely have been any better than the regressive heathenism the Nazis were intent to foist upon them.

  From ‘The Economy of the Third Reich’ by Wilhelm Offenbach, Macallister 1962

  Prior to 1939, the Nazis had made a series of decisions that reduced Germany’s engagement with the global economy. They preferred autarky and bilateral agreements to trade. German industry experienced difficulties in obtaining many raw materials that could only be sourced outside Europe, and in many ways could be considered as living hand-to-mouth. The situation was not helped by the Nazis habit of allowing manufacturers to pursue too many technically difficult projects simultaneously. A good example of this is the development of aircraft engines which was catastrophically mismanaged and failed to produce results as good as those of Britain. Albert Speer, the head of the Armaments ministry for much of 1942 wanted to cull the multifarious projects being undertaken by the engine manufacturers, but the success of German arms in the east meant that his colleagues were disinclined to interfere with what seemed a highly successful organization. [82]

  ​Within Germany itself however, money was plentiful, especially after the conquest of Switzerland and the appropriation of Swiss gold and foreign currency reserves. These amounted to the sum of 2.5 billion Reichsmarks but this enormous quantity of money paled into insignificance next to the Nazis spending plans.

  ​These included the reconstruction of the five ‘Fuhrer’ cities – Berlin, Munchen, Nuremberg, Linz and Hamburg. The plans for rebuilding Berlin alone were estimated at 5 billion Reichsmarks! The expansion of the Kreigsmarine was due to absorb almost as much. The fifth iteration of ‘Generalplan Ost’, the German plan for the subjugation of eastern Europe and its transformation into a settler area, was extraordinarily ambitious and was estimated at costing 67 billion Reichsmarks! The scheme included the construction of many new highways, large hydroelectric projects and a new train system, the Breitspurbahn. This was a broad-gauge railway which required the complete replacement of much of central Europe’s rail lines with a new 3-metre gauge track. In addition to this, the Germans were lending money to their allies – most notably Spain where it was used to fund Franco’s large programme of naval construction.

  ​Hitler, up to this time, showed a marked reluctance to place too heavy a tax burden on the German economy. This was not a product of any financial orthodoxy, but was due to his paranoid fear that the German people were ‘soft’ and unable to tolerate hardship. Only in 1942 was the task of matching the German economy to the demands of the war undertaken seriously, but with the peace, military spendin
g (particularly on the Army and Luftwaffe) was severely curtailed. So even this delayed expansion was not as far reaching or as successful as it might have been had the war continued into 1943.

  ​Due also to the entry of Swiss gold into the German economy inflation began to grow. Indeed, like Phillip II’s Spain, Nazi Germany found the economic adjustment necessitated by the influx of new wealth caused many difficulties. The Nazis response was price fixing by decree, but this caused shortages, sharp growth in the Black Market and sharp decline everywhere else. Corruption was rampant at every level of the Nazi administration and the Reichsmark began to devalue steadily against both the pound and the dollar.

  ​The deportation and murder of vast numbers of persons the Nazis considered undesirable caused shrinkage in the overall size of the German economy and, unlike the regime in the Soviet Union, which in economic terms the government of Germany began to resemble, the Nazis mounted direct and efficient attacks upon the German education system. In general, Communist regimes have tended to fund and encourage education whereas Fascist ones have tended to undermine it. In the German case the educational malaise was much deeper and more significant than the burning of books by the SA in the late 1930s. Germany underwent a severe brain drain prior to the war of 1940 and by 1942 graduates were emerging from German universities knowing much about eugenics, the mathematics of artillery and the Nazi version of history, but next to nothing of the skills that would be useful in building a modern diversified economy.

  ​Germany was able to continue economically for three reasons. Firstly, it had an enormous reserve of talent built up over many years because of its strong tradition in science and research. Although this tradition was being deliberately eroded by the Nazis in their search for a racially pure German science, it represented intellectual capital. A wasting asset certainly, but a considerable one nonetheless. Secondly, the enormous territories that Germany had conquered provided both economies of scale and primary resources that cushioned the impact of educational and economic decline. Thirdly, the widespread use of slavery which caused general economic shrinkage but gave the impression to those not enslaved that they were wealthier. The prospects for Germany’s economic future however were extremely bleak.

  From ‘The Madagascar Plan’ by Chanoch Cohen writing on jewhist.com [83]

  Initial Nazi plans to address what they so euphemistically called ‘The Jewish Question’, consisted of the establishment of a ‘Jewish reservation’ for all Jews from Poland and the other conquered territories. It was to be located in the Lublin district of Poland, and was one part of an extensive resettlement project that Hitler had selected Heinrich Himmler to oversee. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from eastern Europe to make way for German settlers, but the plans for an ‘ethnic new order’ in Poland were unworkable. In June 1940, they were supplanted by the ‘Madagascar Plan’ under which all Jews were to be deported to the French colony of Madagascar, a large arid island off the west coast of southern Africa.

  ​The idea of evacuating the Jews of Europe to Madagascar was not a concept that originated with the Nazis. The German scholar Paul de Lagarde put forward the idea in 1885, and in 1926 the Polish government investigated using Madagascar to settle its Jewish population. The commission set up to investigate the possibility, found that it would be feasible to settle 40,000 to 60,000 people in Madagascar, but Leon Alter, the director of the Jewish Immigration Association in Warsaw, believed the island could only handle 2,000.

  ​The idea was considered again in Germany in 1931 but it wasn’t until 3rd June 1940 that an ambitious bureaucrat named Franz Rademacher, head of the Judenreferat der Abteilung Deutschland: (Jewish Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) set the plan in motion with a memorandum to his superior Martin Luther. Rademacher advocated the separation of eastern and western Jews. The eastern Jews, he felt, were principally responsible for the “militant Jewish intelligentsia”, and should be kept in a specially constructed ghetto in Lublin to be “used as hostages to keep American Jews in check.” The western Jews, he went on, should be expelled from Europe entirely, “to Madagascar, for example.”

  ​On receiving this memorandum, Luther brought the subject up with the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. By 20th June 1940, Hitler spoke of the Plan with Grand Admiral Erich Raeder and had mentioned it to Mussolini on the 18th. The plan was turned over to the RSHA (Reich Central Security Office) and Adolf Eichmann (who was in charge of the Office of Jewish Evacuation within it) became involved. With the surrender of France on 21st June, one of the principal obstacles to the plan was removed. On 15th August, Eichmann released a draft titled Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt (Reich Security Main Office: Madagascar Project), which intended the forced resettlement of one million Jewish people per year over four years and relinquished the idea of retaining any Jews in Europe at all.

  Most of the Nazi hierarchy viewed the forced relocation of four million Jews to Madagascar as being better than the gradual extradition to Poland. As of 10th September, all deportations were cancelled and construction of the Warsaw ghetto was stopped.

  ​Rademacher proposed the setting up of a special bank tasked with overseeing the liquidation of all Jewish assets in Europe to pay for the Plan. This bank would then play the role of financial intermediary between Madagascar and the rest of the world. Jewish people would not be permitted to have monetary transactions with anyone outside the island and they would only be allowed to take their money out of Germany in the form of German goods. The desired perception of the outside world would be that Germany had given ‘autonomy’ to the Jewish settlement in Madagascar. However, Eichmann made it clear in his draft, that the SS would manage and regulate every Jewish organization that was created to govern the island. With some modifications the plan was approved by Hitler in October 1940 but was not put into operation until February of the following year.

  ​The first deportation, ‘transportation’ as the Nazis described it, took place in March 1941. A group of 7000 Moravian Jews who had been deported to Lublin were forced to board trains bound for Danzig where they were herded onto a 12,600 ton German steamer the Sonderburg which then set sail for Madagascar. Conditions on board were indescribable. The Sonderburg had been launched in 1899 as the Potsdam, a passenger liner for the Holland-America Line but had been operating as a Norwegian whaling ship when taken as a prize in 1940. She had been designed to carry 2500 passengers and the overcrowding on the ship was appalling. Little provision had been made to feed the ship’s ‘cargo’ and none of them were allowed on deck during the 26-day voyage. One of the survivors, Mordechai Bronfman estimates that 65% of the people who boarded the Sonderburg died on the journey from a combination of malnutrition, disease and general abuse. The bodies of the dead were simply tossed overboard.

  ​The Sonderburg made five voyages to Madagascar in the following year, inevitably the cruelty and barbarism that attended these ‘voyages of death’ became known throughout the world and sparked international outrage. In February 1942 the Sonderburg was intercepted in the South Atlantic by the American cruiser USS Wichita and the disposal of bodies, was observed by her crew. Her captain contemplated sending a boarding party to the Sonderburg but she was flying the yellow quarantine flag and he was reluctant to cause an international incident.

  ​Once the survivors of the Sonderburg’s voyages disembarked in Madagascar, life was scarcely any better than it had been on the ship. Housed in camps, without money or resources, the Jews were expected to grow or procure their own food, but they were given no tools, no seeds, no livestock and no assistance of any kind. Furthermore the goods that they were supposed to receive in exchange for their money were usually pilfered by the SS before they ever left Germany.

  ​The plan was suspended in April 1942 by directive of Adolf Eichmann, not for any reasons of human decency, but simply that the Nazis decided that there were simpler and less expensive ways to kill Jewish people. The Madagascar Plan was deliberately under r
esourced, haphazardly implemented and showed unequivocally that the Nazi ‘territorial solutions to the Jewish Problem’, were not only conceived to bring about the end of the Jewish presence in Europe, but to kill as many Jews as possible in the process. The failure of the Madagascar Plan and the logistical problems of deportation in general, would ultimately lead to the conception of the Holocaust as the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question.’

  From ‘The Night of the Lance’ Gunter Schmidt, writing in Die Nachrichten, June 1951

  It was perhaps inevitable, given the predatory character of the regime, that once victory had been achieved and a kind of peace once more held sway in Europe, that the Nazis would begin to turn on one another. In the early spring of 1943, shortly after the collapse of the last organised Soviet resistance, Himmler began pressing for the founding of the new state of Burgundy which conformed roughly to the outline of the medieval kingdom of the same name. It was to be carved out of parts of France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland. The capital city was to be either Ghent or Dijon and its chancellor was to be Léon Degrelle, the Belgian Fascist leader.

  ​Although Himmler was certainly blindly loyal to Hitler, by 1943 the SS was beginning to resemble a private army with eight motorized divisions and more forming including several Panzer divisions. Himmler wanted the status of the SS within the German Reich to become that of a kind of new nobility, ruling it as a military-religious order, like the Teutonic Knights who had their own fiefdom in Prussia. The State of Burgundy was to be governed by a Reichsverweser (Regent), who would also be the Reichsfuehrer SS (Himmler’s position). He was supported in this aim by Joseph Goebbels, but both men were aware that to achieve this goal they would have to weaken the influence of the party bureaucracy, which bought them into direct conflict with Martin Bormann. In fact, the main reason for Goebbels’ support of Himmler was to marginalise Bormann.