A Perfidious Distortion of History

by Jurgen Tampke

  Thus the Versailles Peace Treaty is claimed to have presented the Weimar Republic with unsurmountable economic difficulties, leading to continuous political instability, which in turn undermined and discredited the fledging democratic system, until, finally, and faced with the further threat of Bolshevism, the Germans turned to Adolf Hitler, whose potential for evil no one at the time could have foreseen.

  Establishment of harmonious relations with Germany’s western neighbours soon brought rewards. The Bonn Republic was a success story virtually from its inception. Economically, the Federal Republic advanced in leaps and bounds during the 1950s and early 1960s. The need to rebuild the damage done by the war was already a powerful stimulus. The proverbial industriousness of the German people and an advanced vocational and scientific education program that fostered innovative approaches in all branches of industry added their share. Soon the term Wirschaftswunder (‘economic miracle’) was coined to describe the rapid rise in living standards of the whole population, and this assisted with the equally successful establishment of the democratic system. The cataclysmic end of the Third Reich, which had cleansed the nation of its last vestiges of militarism, was another factor. Prussia was finished: its last remnant, the former heartland of Brandenburg, had become part of the German Democratic Republic. Even the names Prussia and Brandenburg were excised, the latter to resurface after re-unification, but the former forever laid to rest. The electoral system worked well. The extreme political right never became a significant force in Germany again, nor did the extreme political left.

  But there was another and disturbing side to this success. Economic prosperity and political stability fostered a widespread sense among Germans that the nation had ‘come good’, and that harping on the past was pointless. In fact, many of the generation that grew up after the Second World War had little knowledge of some of the darker aspects of Germany’s recent history. Surveys of young people in the late 1970s and early 1980s revealed that more than half had no or little knowledge of Hitler.

  The extent of public ignorance about what had happened in the not-too-distant past could be gauged from the reception accorded to the American television miniseries Holocaust. Screened in Germany in early 1979 on the regional Third Program, which normally commanded only a small share of viewers — rarely more than 5 per cent — word of the tragic fate of the Weiss family spread rapidly. Two-thirds of the German television audience watched the final episodes. It was the first time that many had gained a more detailed knowledge of the Holocaust.

  Further evidence of widespread complacency about the country’s recent past lay in the German judiciary’s adherence to its inglorious tradition of dealing out rough justice. The judges’ record in punishing culprits of Nazi era crimes is woeful. If the few concentration-camp survivors and the millions of relatives of the murdered held any expectation that penal retribution was to be levied upon those responsible, they were to be disappointed. Given their involvement in the Nazi state, those judges kept in office after the collapse of the regime were disinclined to pull skeletons out of cupboards. 4 But subsequent generations of jurists, with the exception of Frankfurt attorney-general Fritz Bauer, who did manage to put a number of the culprits on trial in the mid-1960s, did little to improve the record. Of the 6,500 SS that had staffed the Auschwitz concentration camps (where over one million people had perished), only 29 received sentences in the Federal Republic. 5 In July 2015, in what was probably the last trial of Nazi criminals, SS Officer Oskar Gröning, then aged 94, was sentenced to four years’ jail for his part in the murder of 300,000 Jewish people. The sentence — which raised the number of Auschwitz staff put on trial to 0.48 per cent — was lauded by the international community, as was the judge’s condemnation of the German judicial system that had let so many off the hook. The reader keen to gain more knowledge of the trials of Auschwitz mass-murderers is advised to take strong tranquillisers. An SS foreman, for example, in charge of throwing 400 Hungarian children alive into a fire, was acquitted because one of the witnesses was not able to take the stand. ‘Those little ones trying to get out of the flames, the SS men kicked back with their boots into the fire … they were like little fireballs’, an eyewitness reported, ‘trying to escape the stake’. 6

  Little noticed by the broader public, too, was a spectacular confrontation among German historians that took place during the 1960s and 1970s.

  Historical controversies

  The explanation that the Great War was the product of an international rupture, for which all the major European powers shared responsibility, helped to provide an effective intellectual and cultural basis for the establishment of harmonious relations in Western Europe during the 1950s. This account, however, had one serious shortcoming: it was not compatible with the facts. That Lloyd George’s opportunistic ‘we all slid into the war’ had more to do with the political opportunism of that shifty British statesman 7 than with reality was laid bare in the 1960s, when Fritz Fischer, professor of history at Hamburg University, published a number of lengthy books in which he argued that the course of events leading to the outbreak of war, as presented at the time, was not compatible with the evidence.

  In his War of Illusions, Fischer contends that Imperial Germany’s attempt to join the ranks of the world powers had run into severe difficulties by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century — or, more correctly, that it was felt by the political, military, and economic establishment, and by a large section of the German populace, to have run into severe difficulties. A continuous series of diplomatic setbacks had led to the conviction that the virile German empire was being straightjacketed by its British, French, and Russian rivals. Plans for breaking out of this encirclement through war were being advanced by the powerful German military leadership as early as 1909. The civilian government, though more restrained, was also convinced that French revanchism, Pan-Slavism, and Handelsneid (British envy of Germany’s economic performance) could not forever stop the empire from becoming a world power.

  In Fischer’s view, the tendency to take an offensive approach to solving Germany’s perceived international isolation was manifested for the first time in early December 1912. The German government had supported the Dual Monarchy in the first Balkan War, and had threatened tsarist Russia with military action should St. Petersburg intervene. This brought an unfriendly response from British foreign minister Edward Grey and war minister Lord Haldane, who pointed out that in case of a German attack upon France, Britain would not remain neutral. As stated above, Wilhelm II was so outraged about the British stance that he called for a meeting of army and navy leaders, where the option of an immediate war against France and Russia was discussed but abandoned. 8

  Nevertheless, to Fischer, the ‘War Council’ meeting was an indication of how far the will to resort to warfare had taken hold of sections of the German elite. The most contentious part of Fischer’s thesis is his account of the crisis of July 1914, in which he blames Germany’s military leaders and its civilian government for using the Sarajevo assassination to force a showdown with the continental Entente powers. He argues that Kaiser Wilhelm’s ‘blank cheque’ was followed by a policy of pressuring the Vienna government into taking military action against the Kingdom of Serbia. Fischer furthermore contends that tsarist Russia would not have intervened on Serbia’s behalf if the Austro-Hungarians had refrained from a complete annihilation of Serbia. He points out that the tsarist foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, attempted to find a diplomatic solution to this new Balkan problem to the very end. Diplomacy failed, and with the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war upon Serbia on 28 July, and Russia’s partial mobilisation — and, a day later, its full mobilisation — the German government’s vital aim was achieved. A widespread media-fostered campaign of Russophobia, presenting that country as the bastion of evil and reaction, laid the blame on the tsarist government for starting the war — a vital prerequisite to securing the backing of the German labour movement. German troops invaded, wit
hout a declaration of war, the Grandy Duchy Luxembourg on 2 August and Belgium on 4 August, having already declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France on 3 August. Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s never-tiring attempts to keep Britain neutral, doomed from the beginning, finally failed at midnight on 4 April, after the United Kingdom, citing the violation of Belgium neutrality, declared war on the German empire.

  War of Illusions was the follow-up to Fischer’s first major monograph on World War I, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, published in its original version as Griff nach der Weltmacht (‘Grasp for World Power’). As its title implies, this presents an analysis of German war aims that, to Fischer, were bent on establishing German hegemony in Europe and world-power status. This book had already met with a very hostile response from the community of German historians commonly referred to as the Zunft, ‘the guild’. One particularly irate colleague claimed that the long list of Germany’s war aims presented by Fischer ‘was almost the monologue of a deranged person’. 9 War of Illusions did little to endear him to the outraged Zunft. They claimed that Fischer had completely overlooked the policies of Germany’s enemies, as well as the nation’s deep longing for peace. They insisted that the empire’s policies in July 1914 were of a defensive nature. They also maintained that Fischer’s stance had greatly harmed Germany’s reputation. The debate soon spread beyond Germany; indeed, with historians from around the world participating, the ‘Fischer controversy’ took on a global dimension.

  Most participants came out in support of Fischer, although sometimes with different arguments. Volker Berghahn, for example, who at the time of the controversy taught at Warwick University in the U.K., maintained that the German chancellor had attempted to seek a localised solution to the Serbian problem — that is, to create a fait accompli through a speedy defeat of the Serbs, followed by a peace offensive towards the Entente. According to Berghahn, the chancellor was aware, however, that the plan might misfire, leading to full-scale war. In the end, the bluff did indeed fail, mainly because it took too long for the Central Powers to get their act together. When the ultimatum was finally delivered on 23 July, the Entente partners realised that the Austro-Hungarian government was bent on a military solution, and they began to react accordingly. Now Bethmann-Hollweg was forced into the ranks of the hawks. 10

  Germany’s doyen of social history, Ulrich Wehler, accepts the German responsibility for the globalisation of the conflict without qualification, but sees in the motive a Flucht nach vorn — a ‘forward escape’. By pinning their hopes on a desperate gamble, the empire’s power elites attempted to maintain the traditional Prusso-German social and political system — and the privileged position their class held in that system — which they saw threatened by the growing influence of parliamentarism, and even more so by the massive rise of the German labour movement. A victorious war would greatly enhance Germany’s status and would take the wind out of the sails of the advocates of constitutional change once and for all. 11 However, as Fritz Fischer also considered the maintenance of the ruling social and political system in his accounts of the outbreak of the Great War, and as Wehler’s works also illustrate the growing economic performance of imperial Germany, the difference in their approaches is one of emphasis rather than substance.

  The accounts of these ‘revisionists’ of the outbreak of war in 1914 were supported by a mass of private and official papers from participants and observers in all of the belligerent countries, in neutral countries, and in smaller German states. The selection assembled by Fischer’s disciple Imanuel Geiss on the crisis of July 1914 alone amounted to 1,159 documents. 12 So overwhelming was this mass of evidence that attempts to counter it could garner little credibility. A number of traditionalist historians conceded the validity of the evidence that had undermined their original position, but claimed that the German empire had embarked upon a preventive war in August 1914. This, however, presupposed concrete plans on the part of tsarist Russia and France to stage an aggressive war against the Central Powers in 1914, or not much later. Such plans did not exist. 13

  By the mid-1970s, the debate had by and large petered out, at least in academic circles, and few historians kept advancing the ‘international crisis’ view. Whether the more accurate accounts have penetrated the public mind is difficult to gauge. The Fischer controversy certainly made no measurable impact on textbooks in German schools, which, to the present day, is the domain of the conservative wing of the German historical profession. As accounts there of the outbreak of war differ little from what was written in the 1950s, it follows that there has been no change in the presentation of the 1918–19 peacemaking process.

  Notwithstanding a good deal of acrimony and vilification, the debate brought about by Fischer, Wehler, and others remained within the bounds of academic discussion. Common courtesy was not altogether thrown out of the window. This was to change in the early 1980s with the next round of confrontation between West German historians, soon to become known as the Historikerstreit, or the ‘historians’ quarrel’.

  Over a generation had passed since the end of the Second World War, and in the main the Nazi past had been treated rather coyly in the Federal Republic. Of course, politicians, public figures, the media, and the churches had expressed their apologies and regrets for the Holocaust, although half of the respondents in a Der Spiegel survey had disapproved of chancellor Brandt’s kneeling on 7 December 1970 at a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. True, some compensation was paid out, but in general the preference seemed to be to let sleeping dogs lie, even as crimes such as the full extent of the extermination war against the Slavonic sub-humans and the inhuman use of slave labour through the whole of the German war industry were coming to light.

  In 1982, when, after 13 years, the centre-left governments led by chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt were superseded by the centre-right government of chancellor Helmut Kohl, a number of West German historians decided to wake the dogs up. The Bonn Republic, approaching its twenty-fifth anniversary, could justifiably claim a successful history. Internationally, the FRG was working towards the widening and enlargement of the European Economic Community. Domestically the country’s democratic principles, laws, and institutions had been consolidated.

  It was time for a new approach towards Germany’s recent past. Kohl’s friend and advisor on matters historical, Michael Stürmer, lamented that Germany had lost its positive outlook towards its own past. It had to seek a new identity in order to make a full contribution to the global effort of stopping the communist threat that still emanated from Moscow. While 80 per cent of U.S. citizens were proud of being Americans, and 50 per cent of Britons were proud to be British, Stürmer regretted that opinion polls showed that in Germany only 20 per cent were proud to be Germans. 14 In his accounts of German history, Stürmer once again downplayed German responsibility for the outbreak of World War I, claiming that Versailles had been a fatal error on the part of the Allies that led to the downfall of the Weimar Republic. 15 As he also asserted that the Nuremberg trials were a communist plot (though the chief instigator of the trials was, in fact, the War Department of the United States), his analyses of the past need not be taken too seriously.

  Stürmer’s writings were mild compared to the outpourings of his fellow Bonn Republic historian Ernst Nolte. He claimed that Auschwitz, the Holocaust, and other crimes committed by Nazi Germany were essentially the fault of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks’ victory in the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent rise of Stalin and his methods, had forced Hitler’s hand and had led to the Final Solution. Auschwitz had its origin in the Gulag Archipelago. Nolte suggested that Hitler perpetrated an ‘Asiatic deed’ — an act of barbarism akin to the genocide committed by the Turks on the Armenians in 1915, or by Chinese Cheka units who, fighting on the side of the Reds in the Russian Civil War in 1920, are said to have tortured their opponents in rat-cages — because the Nazis thought themselves potential victims of Asiatic terror at the hands of the Bolsh
eviks. 16 His virtual suggestion ‘that the victims of Nazi genocide actually provoked the genocide, that the Jews in certain ways were responsible for their own fate,’ is the most appalling of the implications of Nolte’s ‘revision’. 17

  Almost as unfortunate were the arguments of Andreas Hillgruber, who regarded all efforts by the German leadership, including the continued operation of the death camps, as justified in stopping the advance of the barbarous Red Army into central and east-central Europe. That the Red Army was carrying death and destruction in its baggage was true, but it should have been pointed out that Operation Barbarossa and its aftermath destroyed over 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages, often along with their entire populations; that the Soviet Union lost thirteen million soldiers and seven million civilians; and that of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans, only 3.3 million survived. 18

  Hillgruber also ranked the expulsion of ethnic Germans from east-central, eastern, and south-eastern Europe, for which he blamed the British government in co-operation with Stalin, as a crime of the magnitude of the Holocaust. It is true that the expulsion was marked by acts of great inhumanity, but Hillgruber’s assertion overlooked the important fact that, in contrast to the Holocaust victims, the great majority of those expelled survived. Most, after enduring a period of austerity that was not confined to refugee populations, were able to live a meaningful — and for many even a prosperous — life.

  Nolte’s and Hillgruber’s arguments were received with incredulity, if not downright amazement, outside Germany, and they were also rebuffed by most German historians, but not by all. Renowned German scholars such as Joachim Fest, Karl Dietrich Bracher, and even Imanuel Geiss saw some merit in the work of Nolte, Hillgruber et al., and they were not alone. So bitter did the Historikerstreit become that professional academic historians refused to shake hands with each other. 19