DEATH OF A NATION
DEATH OF A NATION
A New History of Germany
Stephen R A’Barrow
Book Guild Publishing
Sussex, England
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
The Book Guild Ltd
The Werks
45 Church Road
Hove, BN3 2BE
Copyright © Stephen R A’Barrow 2015
The right of Stephen R A’Barrow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Typesetting in Times by
YHT Ltd, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
A catalogue record for this book is available from
The British Library.
ISBN 978 1 910298 49 7
ePub ISBN 978 1 910508 81 7
Mobi ISBN 978 1 910508 82 4
This book is dedicated to the forgotten victims of war.
‘Some duties are to be observed, even towards those from
whom you have received injury. For vengeance and
punishment have their due bounds.’
Cicero.
Contents
Preface
Historiography
Maps
Introduction
Chapter 1 – The Early Germans: From Barbarians at the Gates of Rome to Holy Roman Emperors
Germania
The Great Migration of the Germanic Tribes
Chapter 2 – The Rise and Fall of the First Reich: The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation
The Legacy of Charlemagne’s 1,000-Year Reich
The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in an Era before the Nation State
What Kind of State was the Holy Roman Empire?
The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation: Hubris and Nemesis
The Break-up of the Empire and the Rise of Nations
The French Push on the Rhine and the Destruction of the Holy Roman Empire
Chapter 3 – The Rise and Fall of German Central Europe
Bohemia: The Heart of Europe
Bohemia’s Greatest Kings
Return of the Habsburgs
The Rise of Czech Nationalism
T.G. Masaryk’s Role in the Creation of the ‘Miracle of Czechoslovakia’
Hitler and ‘Heim ins Reich’ (Home to the Reich)
Edvard Beneš: Genocidal Bureaucrat
Feverish Ethnic Cleansing
A Desolate Kingdom
Chapter 4 – Prussia: From The ‘Sandpit of Europe’ To European Power Broker
Changing Perceptions of Prussia
The Crusader State
The Advance of the Teutonic Knights Along the Baltic Coast
The Coming of the Prussian State
Prussia: From Geographical Region to the Name for a State
Frederick the Great
Prussia’s High Water Mark
Napoleonic Tonic and German Whispers
Restoration Europe After the Era of Napoleon
Thinking about Germany
The 1848 Revolutions in Germany, Prussia and Austria
Bismarck (the Great) and a Prussian Germany
Bismarck Steers a Course for Germany
The End of the Concert
Chapter 5 – The Second Reich: In an Age of Global Imperialism
The Second Reich
Wilhelmian Germany: The German Victorian Era
European and American Imperialism Before the First World War
The Americas: Indian Wars in the Age of Imperialism
Russia: Ruler of the East
British Imperialism and the ‘White Man’s Burden’
German Imperialism and the Pursuit of ‘Weltmacht’ (World Power)
Kaiser Wilhelm and the Countdown to the First World War
Chapter 6 – From Empire to Republic: The First World War and Weimar
The Inevitability of War
The Motives of the Great Powers at the Outbreak of the First World War
The Blame Game
Escape Through War
The Sum Total of War
Shock and Revolution in 1918
The Cost of Versailles
The List
Punishment
Payment
Prevention
Legacy
Weimar and the Perfect Storm
The Three Phases of Weimar
Chapter 7 – The Third Reich: From Total War to War Without End
Hitlerism vs. Nazism
Foreign Policy: A Fool’s Errand?
Hitler’s War
Stalin’s War
Why Hitler Remains Front and Centre
Anti-Semitism: A History of Unremitting Persecution
Why?
Poland Reborn
Polish Pretensions Between the Wars
Hell Descends on Poland
Chapter 8 – The End is Nigh: Victory or Death
Victory or Death
The Precipice
Collapse
The Fate of the Fortresses
A Senseless Struggle
End Game
How Poland’s Modern Frontiers Came into Being
Now It’s Your Turn: Polish Administration of Former German Territories
Comparisons in Ethnic Cleansing
Postscript to How Poland’s Modern Frontiers Came into Being
Missing and Forgotten
Zero Hour
Chapter 9 – The Aftermath: A Nation Disappears
The Occupation
The Ten Thousand
A Freebooter’s Paradise
Economic Dismantlement
The Hunger Winters of 1945–48
Conclusions
Epilogue
Postscript:
A Personal Journey Through a Kingdom of Ghosts
East Prussia: A Rural Idyll Lost
Forgotten Silesia
Euro Regions: The Possibilities
Euro Regions: The Relative Successes
Europe and Hopes for the Future
Appendices
Notes on Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photographic Acknowledgements
Index
Author’s Note
Throughout this book I have used the German names of people and places unless there are very well known anglicised versions. For example, when describing Friedrich der Grosse I refer to him as Frederick the Great. However, I have not anglicised Kaiser Wilhelm as Kaiser William nor have I called Heinrich Himmler Henry Himmler. In terms of place names I have used the German form when they were part of one German constellation or another and put their modern Czech, French, Polish or Russian equivalents in brackets afterwards, wherever I felt this was appropriate.
Preface
Death of a nation? Germany?? A strange proposition for a nation with the largest economy in Europe, the paymaster of the European Union and the country that appears to control not only the purse strings but also the terms of all Eurozone ‘bailouts’. The nation which in 2014 won the football World Cup for the fourth time is very much alive, isn’t it!?
One German academic was flabbergasted at the title, asking me ‘How can you give this title to your book?’ To which I answered, ‘Is
Prussia still very much alive? How about Silesia? How about German Bohemia? How many Germans know that Prague was twice the de facto capital of the First Reich? And what about the Austrians’ relationship with their shared past? Beyond that there was no Germany from 1945–1949 when the Allies comprehensively dismantled the Reich that Bismarck established. And if we want to get on to the question of whether the Germans still possess a tangible sense of national identity at all then I think even you’d have to admit that any notion of a German national identity is exceptionally fractured, at best.’ My colleague paused and said, ‘Those names are ghosts from our past, most of which are best left forgotten.’ An incomprehensible answer from a German historian but it underscores some of the points I will go on to make in this book. Beyond that, saddled with the interminable guilt and shame of being German foisted upon them from all quarters for the ‘collective responsibility’ for two world wars and the holocaust, the Germans, it appears, have decided to demographically fade away, as though the weight of this afflicted consciousness has simply become too much to bear. Whereas the UK, France and USA have seen their post-war populations increase significantly, Germany’s has been in sharp decline and is set to decrease further from 81 to 68 million by 2050.
For most of us in Western Europe, we can enjoy looking back through our family histories and tracing our origins back to places whose names, historical markers and populations have remained largely unchanged for centuries. For many in Central and Eastern Europe, following wholesale population replacements during and after the Second World War, this has become all but impossible. Tens of millions of people in a zone between the 12–39th lines of longitude from the Bohemian borderlands to the Karelian lakes lost their homelands and in most cases the states that annexed them have been busy writing their former owners out of the official histories and obliterating their memory brick-by-brick. The murderous destruction of Jewish communities across Europe by the Nazis is well documented. The destruction of communities and cultures of Finns in Karelia, Germans in Prussia, Hungarians in Transylvania, Italians in Istria, Poles in Lviv and Vilnius to name but a few are far less well known and have received far less attention.
In Death of a Nation I have set out to put into a much broader historical context the enormous human and cultural cost to Germany and German Austria of losing two world wars and the damage this has done to their sense of national identity. To gain a sense of just how cataclysmic the changes were, you only need to look at a map of Europe in 1914 and compare it to one of Europe today to see the sheer scale of a wholesale reordering of the Continent. What isn’t immediately comprehensible to most however is the way in which this reshaping of Europe’s borders, along much more ethnically homogenous lines, was undertaken.
In the case of German-speaking Europe, it took the First World War to hugely diminish German Austria and the Second to emasculate Germany by expunging Prussia from the map of Europe altogether. By means of an overview prior to the break-up of Austria Hungary, 25 per cent of the old empire’s population had been German Austrians. Once the borders had been redrawn they received just 12 per cent of the old empire’s territory with half of them ending up on the wrong side of newly drawn borders in neighbouring and now mostly hostile nations. As for Germany, before the First World War she consisted of 540,740 square kilometres, the third largest nation in Europe after Russia and Austria Hungary. Today a reunited Germany holds sway over 357,668 square kilometres, making her Europe’s seventh largest nation in terms of area after Russia, Ukraine, France, Spain, Sweden and Norway! German Austria and Germany’s territorial losses, including only their German-speaking populations, amounted to an area greater than that of the entire United Kingdom. And it was not just the borders that moved; the people left stranded on the wrong side of all too often arbitrarily-drawn borders also ‘had to be expelled’.
We tend to forget that from 8th May 1945 to 23rd May 1949 there was no Germany. In the intervening period there was no German state or state institutions and Germans were at the mercy of their occupiers. The Germany that Bismarck had fashioned was comprehensively dismembered, divided into occupation zones or simply annexed. The euphemism used for the annexation of Germany’s former eastern territories by Poland was that they were being put under Polish ‘administration’. For four long and horrific years, Stalin and his stooges in Poland, Czechoslovakia and beyond busied themselves with the ethnic reordering of Central Europe. By the time the German Federal Republic was proclaimed on 23rd May 1949, Prussia, which had been Germany’s largest and most powerful state and whose origins reached back to the early thirteenth century, had been wiped from the map of Europe by an Allied ‘proclamation’ on 25th February 1947, the first and only time a European state has been ‘legislated’ out of existence. And Bohemia and Moravia, which had been home to the likes of Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud and Oskar Schindler, as well as 60 per cent of Austria’s industrial base, had an entirely new identity grafted upon it and an absolute break was made with its millennial connection to German-speaking Europe.
The fact that most modern historians have either chosen to completely ignore or simply gloss over the largest demographic, geographic and cultural ‘realignment’ in both German and modern European history makes their accounts all the more suspect. My favourite history teacher at school, who inspired my interest in the subject, who had fought the Germans in the deserts of North Africa and through Italy uttered the most fundamental truth about historians when he stated, ‘To understand any historian’s true prejudices, look not for what they have written about but for what they have failed to include!’
It always helps to know a little about an author’s background and their inner motivations for writing a book. It’s also important for an author to confess any formative experiences that might have influenced his or her outlook. All students of history are taught to look for evidence of such influence and I think it is fundamentally misleading to try and conceal these. If you have something to say, and a reason for saying it, then that should be made clear to the reader at the outset.
By means of an example, I cite a recently published popular work by Tony Judt, entitled Post War: A History of Europe Since 1945. The book was peppered with negative references about Germans and Germany, from the beginning of the book right through to the epilogue, where I discovered the following statement: ‘To ask each new generation of Germans to live forever in Hitler’s shadow, to require that they take on responsibility for the memory of Germany’s unique guilt and make it the very measure of their national identity, was the least that could be demanded.’(1) (my italics). The second edition paperback, printed in 2007, did not contain any references to the sources used. Nor did it give any inkling as to the reasons for the author’s apparent prejudice in the short biography that was placed on the rear inside cover. My curiosity remained unsatisfied, so I typed the author’s details into an Internet search engine only to discover that Judt was born in London in 1948, whereas his mother’s parents had immigrated to Britain from Russia, and his Belgian father was descended from a line of Lithuanian Rabbis — a family history that would not dispose you well toward Germans or Germany on either side.
It is a sad reflection on the human condition to observe that there is no such thing as an objective history, and there is certainly no such thing as an objective history of Germany. The horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust are still too visceral and emotive to allow for that. All too many books continue to conclude their histories of Germany on 8th May 1945. If they do continue the history beyond that date, they either totally ignore or casually skirt the horrors of the immediate post-war period during the Allied occupation.
Post-modernist theorists question the value of history. They would be on stronger ground if they were to simply question its ability to ever be truly objective. In the pantheon of the good and the great, Macaulay never attempted to conceal his Whig bias, Christopher Hill wrote a book on Lenin which failed to even mention Trotsky, and E.H. Carr’s sympathy for
the Soviet Union was hardly a secret. Indeed, Carr’s views on the nature of history and historicism would go so far as to state that we should only study history from the perspective of the victors, the losers having failed the test of history — an interesting viewpoint, but such a one-sided perspective doesn’t help anyone gain a more rounded understanding of events past; to gain that you have to read history from a variety of perspectives.
Death Of A Nation has been a work in progress for twenty years, and one that has taken me ten years of solid research and writing to complete. It has been a personal journey based upon having lived, worked, and studied in Germany, on and off for the past four decades. I have travelled extensively throughout the country and through the areas that used to be part of Germany, both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I have talked to family and friends and interviewed those with a longer perspective on history than either just the twelve years of the Third Reich, or Germany from the ‘Year Zero’ of 1945.
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