The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  The temporal authorities were little better, despite the fact that the 1921 Constitution expressly ruled out discrimination on racial or religious grounds. In the 1920s Jews in the formerly Russian parts of the country had merely had to put up with the reluctance of the new regime to abolish what remained of the old Tsarist restrictions – many of which remained in force until as late as 1931 – and the inconvenience of the law banning work on Sundays. Worse was to come. The Camp of National Unity (OZN), founded in 1937 to mobilize popular support for Piłsudski’s successors, aimed to achieve the ‘Polonization’ of industry, commerce and the professions at the expense of Jews, who were declared to be ‘alien’ to Poland. There is no question that Jews were disproportionately successful, particularly in higher education and the professions. Though by 1931 fewer than 9 per cent of the Polish population were Jewish, the proportion rose above 20 per cent in Polish universities. Jews accounted for 56 per cent of all private doctors in Poland, 43 per cent of all private teachers, 34 per cent of lawyers and 22 per cent of journalists. Official boycotts of Jewish businesses led to dramatic declines in the number of Jewish-owned shops – in the Białystok region from 92 per cent of all shops in 1932 to just 50 per cent six years later. Jews were driven out of the meat trade by bans on ritual slaughter; Jewish students were segregated in university classrooms; they were excluded from the legal profession. By 1937–8 their share of university enrolments had fallen to 7.5 per cent. By the end of 1938 it was the government’s official policy to ‘solve the Jewish question’ by pressurizing Polish Jews into emigration. But that was scarcely an option for the many poor Jews in cities like Łódź, where over 70 per cent of Jewish families lived in a single room, often an attic or a cellar, and around a quarter were in receipt of charitable assistance.

  Anti-Semitism was also rife in Romania, thanks to the efforts of Alexandru Cuza and Octavian Goga’s National Christian Party and Corneliu Codreanu’s Legion of the Archangel Michael, with its green-shirted youth wing known as the Iron Guard. As capable as Hitler of equating Jews simultaneously with communism and capitalism, Codreanu had pledged to ‘destroy the Jews before they can destroy us’. He was not alone. In 1936 the president of the Totul pentru Tara Party, General Zizi Cantacuzino-Granicerul, had also called for the extermination of the Jews. To Goga, a poet by vocation, the Jews were like ‘leprosy’ or ‘eczema’. Even before 1937, Jews found themselves driven out of the Romanian legal profession, while Jewish students were subjected to harassment and intimidation. In 1934 Mihail Sebastian – born Iosif Hechter, but an apostate and a wholly assimilated Romanian – had written to Nae Ionescu, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, inviting him to write a preface to his new book. Ionescu’s preface contained the following dark admonition:

  Iosif Hechter, you are sick. You are sick to the core because all you can do is suffer… The Messiah has come, Iosif Hechter, and you have had no knowledge of him… Iosif Hechter, do you not feel that cold and darkness are enfolding you?… It is an assimilationist illusion, it is the illusion of so many Jews who sincerely believe that they are Romanian… Remember that you are Jewish!… Are you Iosif Hechter, a human being from Braila on the Danube? No, you are a Jew.

  With Goga briefly serving as Prime Minister after the far right made sweeping gains in the 1937 elections, Jewish newspapers and libraries were closed and Jews’ economic opportunities limited by the introduction of quotas for business and the professions. Although King Carol clamped down on the fascists when he dissolved parliament and established his own dictatorship in February 1938, the arrest and execution of Codreanu and twelve other Iron Guard leaders did not significantly improve the situation of the Romanian Jews. By September 1939 more than a quarter of a million had been deprived of their citizenship on the ground that they were illegal immigrants.

  What of other European states? Italian fascism had not at first been notably anti-Semitic. Yet in 1938 Mussolini introduced legislation closely modelled on the Nuremberg Laws. France was still a democracy, but one shot through with anti-Semitic prejudice. ‘Plutôt Hitler que Blum’ (‘Better Hitler than Blum’) was not only a jibe at the Jewish Socialist Léon Blum, the French premier from 1936 until 1937, but also a prophecy of sorts. In Hungary the mood was similar. A Jewish child risked being stoned if left alone in the streets of Szombathely.

  If the Jews could not feel safe in Europe, where else could they go? The English-speaking world was scarcely welcoming. The United States had been the first major country of European settlement to introduce immigration quotas in the 1920s, the culmination of a campaign for restriction dating back to the 1890s. As a result of new literacy requirements, quotas and other controls, the annual immigration rate fell from 11.6 per thousand in the 1900s to 0.4 per thousand in the 1940s. Others followed the American example as the Depression bit: South Africa introduced quotas in 1930, while Australia, New Zealand and Canada had all introduced other kinds of restriction by 1932. What the Jews of Europe needed was, of course, political asylum more than economic opportunity. But although large and influential Jewish communities existed in all these countries, there were countervailing tendencies at work. The restriction of immigration was never purely an economic matter, a question of unskilled native-born workers seeking to raise the drawbridge in the face of low-wage competitors. Racial prejudice also played a key role in identifying Jews (along with Southern Italians) as immigrants inferior to previous generations from the British Isles, Germany or Scandinavia. In the Anglophone world, anti-Semitism was a social if not a political phenomenon. Symptomatically, a Bill to admit 20,000 Jewish children to the United States was rejected by the Senate in 1939 and again in 1940.

  In any case, the United States could hardly claim to be a model of racial tolerance in the 1930s. As late as 1945, thirty states retained constitutional or legal bans on interracial marriage and many of these had recently extended or tightened their rules. In 1924, for example, the state of Virginia redefined the term ‘white person’ to mean a ‘person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian’ or ‘one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and… no other non-Caucasic blood’. Henceforth even a single ‘Negro’ great-grandparent made a person black. It was not only African-Americans and American Indians who were affected; some states also discriminated against Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, ‘Malays’ (Filipinos) and ‘Hindus’ (Indians). How profound were the differences between a case of ‘racial defilement’ in 1930s Hamburg and a case of miscegenation in 1930s Montgomery? Not very. Was it so very different to be in a mixed marriage in Dresden and to be in one in Dixie? Not really. Moreover, the influence of eugenics in the United States had added a new tier of discriminatory legislation which was not only similar to that introduced in Germany in the 1930s, but was also the inspiration for some Nazi legislation. No fewer than forty-one states used eugenic categories to restrict marriages of the mentally ill, while twenty-seven states passed laws mandating sterilization for certain categories of people. In 1933 alone California forcibly sterilized 1,278 people. The Third Reich, in short, was very far from the world’s only racial state in the 1930s. Hitler openly acknowledged his debt to US eugenicists.

  There was, of course, one particular part of the world to which Jews inspired by the ideology of Zionism had been migrating for decades: Palestine, where a Jewish ‘national home’ had been proclaimed by the British in 1917. Between 1930 and 1936, more than 80,000 Jews left Poland for Palestine, many of them young idealists determined to construct a new society with the communal kibbutz as its building block. As one young emigrant explained: ‘At home there were no prospects for the future. Business was bad. I did not see any prospects for a future after I had finished school. And even in this tragic situation, despite no prospects for the future, I wanted to finish school… If anyone asked me then what I would do after finishing school, I would not have known how to answer. In this terrible situation I took to Zionism like a drowning person to a board.’ Yet in 1936 the Bri
tish imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration into Palestine, fearing (not unreasonably) an Arab backlash. By 1938 it was taking eleven infantry battalions and a cavalry regiment to maintain anything resembling order as the mandate slid towards full-blown civil war.

  To a thoroughly German-minded man like Klemperer, of course, emigration was precisely what the Nazis wanted, since it would by definition acknowledge that he was a Jew and not a German. Klemperer had no desire to start a new life in Palestine. As he put it: ‘If specifically Jewish states are now to be set up… that would be letting the Nazis throw us back thousands of years… The solution to the Jewish question can be found only in deliverance from those who have invented it. And the world – because now this really does concern the world – will be forced to act accordingly.’ The world’s response was not edifying. By the late 1930s the principle of resettlement of the Jews was scarcely challenged; the only question was where the Jews should go. Other colonial destinations were considered: British Guiana, for example. In 1937 the Polish government proposed shipping a million Jews either to South Africa (the British demurred) or to French Madagascar, but the Polish Jews who visited the latter concluded that no more than 500 families could realistically be settled there. The nadir of this tawdry process was the 1938 Evian conference, where delegates from thirty-two different countries gathered to offer their excuses for not admitting more Jewish refugees. Many Jews travelled to Bucharest, despite the anti-Semitism that was rife in Romania, in the hope of getting to Turkey or Palestine.

  For many – perhaps as many as 18,000 – Shanghai was the last resort, simply because the internationalized city required no visas for entry. There, it seemed to Ernest Heppner, a teenage refugee from Breslau, Jews ‘were just another group of nakonings, foreigners’. Yet Shanghai was to prove anything but a safe haven, for events in Asia were in advance of events in Europe. There, an authoritarian regime had already gone beyond the pursuit of national regeneration from within, and had turned its mind to territorial aggrandizement. The Western powers had proved incapable of enforcing the protection of minorities that had been written into the Paris peace treaties. That was perhaps not surprising, given that tradition of non-intervention in the internal affairs of states which dated back to the Treaty of Westphalia and which Woodrow Wilson could not overthrow. But when dictators challenged the borders that had been drawn up after 1918; when they invaded and occupied sovereign states – how then would the erstwhile peacemakers respond?

  The answer was by seeking a continuation of peace at almost any price, provided the price was not paid by themselves.

  8

  An Incidental Empire

  Bushidō… perhaps, fills the same position in the history of ethics that the English Constitution does in political history.

  Nitobe Inazō, Bushido, 1899

  Sixty-five million Japanese of pure blood all stand up as one man… Do you suppose that they all go mad?

  Matsuoka Yōsuke, speech to the League of Nations, 1932

  LIVING SPACE

  Camps were springing up everywhere in the 1930s. In Germany there were concentration camps for those whom the regime wished to ostracize and holiday camps for those whose loyalty it sought. In the Soviet Union there were labour camps for anyone whose loyalty Stalin and his henchmen doubted. In the United States the camps of the Depression years, called Hoovervilles, were not labour camps but the opposite: camps for the millions thrown out of work, named after the hapless president, Herbert Hoover, on whose watch the Depression had struck. The camps in Japan were different again. The inmates at a typical Japanese camp of the period were woken every morning at 5.30. They worked relentlessly all day, often enduring intense physical hardship, and scarcely resting until lights out at 10 p.m. They slept in unheated dormitories, their mail was censored, they were not allowed to drink alcohol or to smoke. But they were not prisoners. They were army cadets training to be officers. And the object of the harsh regime was not to punish them but to inculcate them with an almost superhuman military discipline. These military training camps were the camps of the future. By the end of the 1940s an astonishingly high proportion of able-bodied men born between around 1900 and 1930 would have passed through at least one.

  As we have seen, the Depression caused radical changes in economic policy in most countries, but radical changes in political and legal arrangements in only some. The sub-set of countries that also radically altered their foreign policies was smaller still. Most responded to the crisis as Britain and the United States did, by seeking as far as possible to avoid external conflicts. In his inaugural address in 1933, Roosevelt promised to base US foreign policy on the ‘good neighbor’ principle, winding up his predecessors’ interventions in Central America and the Caribbean and preparing the ground for the independence of the Philippines. This was as much out of parsimony as altruism; the assumption was that the cost of fighting unemployment at home ruled out further expenditures on small wars abroad. Even the majority of authoritarian regimes were quite content to persecute internal enemies and bicker with their neighbours over borders. Stalin had no strong interest in the acquisition of more territory; he already possessed a vast empire. Military dictators like Franco were more likely to wage civil war than inter-state war; as a conservative he understood that foreign wars ultimately helped domestic revolutionaries. Only three countries aspired to territorial expansion and war as a means to achieve it. They were Italy, Germany and Japan. Their dreams of empire were the proximate cause of the multiple wars we know as the Second World War. As we shall see, however, those dreams were far from being irrational responses to the Depression.

  Why did only these three authoritarian regimes adopt and act upon aggressive foreign policies? A conventional answer might be that they were in thrall to anachronistic notions of imperial glory. All certainly harked back to stylized histories of their countries, Mussolini invoking the memory of the Romans to justify his African adventures, Hitler laying claim to the ‘lost territories’ of the Teutonic knights, the Japanese imagining their ‘Yamato race’ as if it were more than a mere offshoot of Chinese civilization. Yet there was nothing anachronistic about the idea of empire in the 1930s. In a world without free trade, empires offered all kinds of advantages to those who had them. It was undoubtedly advantageous to Britain to be at the centre of a vast sterling bloc with a common currency and common tariffs. And what would Stalin’s Soviet Union have been if it had been confined within the historic frontiers of Muscovy, without the vast territories and resources of the Caucasus, Siberia and Central Asia?

  The importance of empire became especially obvious to the self-styled ‘have not’ powers when they adopted rearmament as a tool of economic recovery. For rearmament in the 1930s, if one wished to possess the most up-to-date weaponry, demanded copious supplies of a variety of crucial raw materials (see below). Neither Italy, Germany nor Japan had these commodities within their own borders other than in trivial quantities. By contrast, the lion’s share of the world’s accessible supplies lay within the borders of one of four rival powers: the British Empire, the French Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States. Thus, no country could aspire to military parity with these powers without substantial imports of commodities whose supply they all but monopolized. For three reasons, it was not possible for the ‘have nots’ to rely on free trade to acquire them. First, free trade had been significantly reduced by the mid-1930s, thanks to the imposition of protectionist tariffs. Second, Italy, Germany and Japan lacked adequate international reserves to pay for the imports they required. Third, even if their central banks’ reserves had been overflowing with gold, there was a risk that imports might be interdicted by rival powers before rearmament was complete. There was therefore a compelling logic behind territorial expansion, as Hitler made clear in his memorandum of August–September 1936, which outlined a new Four-Year Plan for the German economy.

  This important document, drafted by Hitler himself, begins by restating his long-run aim of a confronta
tion with ‘Bolshevism, the essence and goal of which is the elimination and the displacement of the hitherto leading social classes of humanity by Jewry, spread throughout the world’. Strikingly, Hitler singles out as a particular cause for concern the fact that ‘Marxism – through its victory in Russia – has established one of the greatest empires as a base of operations for its future moves.’ The existence of the Soviet Union, he argues, has enabled a dramatic growth in the military resources available to Bolshevism. Because of the decadence of the Western democracies and the relative weakness of most European dictatorships, who need all their military resources merely to remain in power, only three countries ‘can be regarded as being firm against Bolshevism’: Germany, Italy and Japan. The paramount objective of the German government must therefore be ‘developing the German Army, within the shortest period, to be the first army in the world in respect to training, mobilization of units [and] equipment’. Yet Hitler then goes on to enumerate the difficulties of achieving this within Germany’s existing borders. First, an ‘overpopulated’ Germany cannot feed itself because ‘the yield of our agricultural production can no longer be substantially increased’. Second, and crucially, ‘it is impossible for us to produce artificially certain raw materials which we do not have in Germany, or to find other substitutes for them’. Hitler specifically mentions oil, rubber, copper, lead and iron ore. Hence: ‘The final solution lies in an extension of our living space, and/or the sources of the raw materials and food supplies of our nation. It is the task of the political leadership to solve this question one day in the future.’ Yet Germany is not yet in a military position to win living space through conquest. Rearmament will therefore only be possible through a combination of increased production of domestically available materials (for example low-grade German iron ore), further restriction of non-essential imports such as coffee and tea, and substitution of essential imports with synthetic alternatives (for example ersatz fuel, rubber and fats).