Jews were seen as being disproportionately represented in both the ‘twin evils’ of consumerist capitalism and Godless communism. They were also portrayed as prominent in all forms of ‘degenerate’ art, music, literature and theatre, not least in the proliferation of ‘sexually obsessed pseudo sciences’, whether that be Magnus Hirschberg’s research into sexuality, or Freud’s psychoanalysis. Jews were intrinsically associated with the failing Weimar Republic and with the Marxist Social Democrats who had proclaimed it, as well as with the Communists who had attempted to overthrow it and turn Germany into a Soviet Republic in 1919. Conspiracy theories began to abound about the ambitions of world Zionism, which were based upon the fear of the prominent role Jews played in the media, publishing, mercantile trade, the legal system, and big business in general.ccxvii The fact that Jewish businessmen held prominent roles in the media in Great Britain, the United States, and France, and that their publications were not surprisingly highly critical of Nazi Germany, helped Hitler and leading Nazis in their propaganda to portray their reports as part of a wider conspiracy to draw the nations of the world into war with Germany. But above all, the economic and political meltdown in Germany led to a rise in the support of extremist groups such as the Communists and the Nazis. This was exacerbated as the extremists played on the basest of all human emotions — jealousy — reminding those hit hardest by the depression that, with less than 1 per cent of the population, Jewish families represented 31 per cent of the richest families in Germany as a whole.(44)
Anti-Semitism was on the rise everywhere during the era of the Great Depression of the 1930s and nothing bore witness to this more than the highly prejudicial and restrictive immigration policies of governments in countries to which East European and German Jews wanted to flee.(45) The United States’ refusal to lift its strict quota system doomed the Evian Conference, which had been convened to address the issue of the growing number of Jewish refugees fleeing Europe. At the conference, held in July 1938 in Switzerland, the British Foreign Office kept Palestine firmly off the agenda having effectively shelved the Balfour Declaration.ccxviii Britain also helped to block any denunciation of the Nazi government. Other British colonies and Commonwealth nations refused to consider large scale Jewish immigration. The Australian Minister of Trade and Customs explained that his country could do nothing for Jewish refugees, stating that Australia, ‘… only wanted British immigrants and had no desire to import a racial problem,’ and the Canadians cited economic and unemployment problems. Despite the blatant persecution of Europe’s Jews, the world showed itself indifferent to their suffering. Hitler duly noted the world’s ambivalence toward the fate of the Jews.(46)
Escape routes were now being barred one after the other and doors were closing on Jews desperate to get out of Europe. Only the wealthiest Jews were able to buy their way through the prejudicial bureaucracy and immigration restrictions that prevented so many others from escaping the horrors that were yet to come. Hitler and the Nazis used the darkest economic depression in history to manipulate people’s fears and play on their desperation, turning wild conspiracy theories into party doctrine. Without the consequences of the First World War and the devastating impact of the Great Depression on Germany, it is unthinkable that the Nazi Party would have risen so dramatically. In 1928, before the crash, the Nazis had polled a mere 2.8 per cent of the vote. Nevertheless, whilst anti-Semitic prejudice gained more traction during the economic upheavals during the Great Depression, it never became the cornerstone of the Nazis’ electoral success. Their promises to give people bread and work, restore order, break the chains of Versailles and prevent communist revolution were far bigger vote winners.
Professors Sir Richard Evans and Sir Ian Kershaw have argued that the key factor in understanding the rapid evolution of anti-Semitism in Germany is the pivotal role Hitler and his Weltanschauung (world view) played within the Nazi movement and how, through the absolute power he wielded, he was able to impose his apocalyptic will. Evans states:
… irrational and unstable though it was, the Third Reich was driven in the first place from above, by Hitler and his key henchmen… when Hitler was determined to slow down the implementation of a particular policy, for example in the case of anti-Semitism in the run up to the 1936 Olympic games, he had no difficulty in doing so… he was in the driving seat, determining the direction in which things moved.(47)
From 1938, Hitler again ratcheted up the Third Reich’s persecution of the Jews, by having their synagogues and businesses burnt down and ‘encouraging’ their mass emigration. After the invasion of Poland, Jews began being herded into ghettos, and after the invasion of the Soviet Union their wholesale extermination began, first by mass shooting and then through the use of Zyklon B gas at newly constructed industrial extermination centres at Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec and Chelmno.
Few, if any, who voted for the Nazis in the last free election in 1932 could have imagined that the Führer’s anti-Semitic rhetoric would result in the Jews becoming victims of industrialised extermination, of their hair being used to make socks for U-Boat crews, or their skin being used to make lampshades. The unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust were still to come. However, there would be no hiding the fact that the Nazis’ intentions toward the Jews were becoming ever more murderous for those who witnessed the Reichskristalnacht of November 1938. The stories of Jews being sent east for ‘relocation’ may have been believed by the naïve, or by those who chose not to believe what that euphemism might really mean, but hundreds of thousands of ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers saw the transports and witnessed the executions by SS death squads, and their accounts began to spread through the population. Even if the full and horrible truth did not become known or acknowledged during the war, the deportations had taken place in public view; complicity extended far beyond a small group of Nazi criminals. Suspicions would certainly have grown as the war went on, but many would simply not have wanted to believe the full horror of what was taking place, and few were brave, or suicidal enough, to risk their lives and those of their families by defying the regime, no matter how unspeakable its crimes.
Resistance in Nazi Germany meant death. Nearly 4 million Germans were interned in concentration camps and resistance from any and all quarters was brutally suppressed. Hans and Sophie Scholl and their compatriots of the White Rose Student Group in Munich were beheaded for handing out leaflets criticising the war and the regime. The Protestant pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was hanged for opposing the regime. Military personnel who attempted to overthrow the regime were similarly court-martialled and shot, and political leaders of the July 1944 coup were strung up on piano wire or hung from meat hooks to prolong their agonising death. In all, nearly 100,000 Germans met their death for daring to oppose the regime. All the while, the Allies gave the German anti-Nazi resistance no support, let alone hope. Perhaps more people should have risked their lives for their beliefs, but mere mortals are all too often found wanting in the face of the brutality of such a barbarous regime.
The renowned Israeli historian, Robert Wistrich, in drawing together the underlying causes of the Holocaust, summarises the horrors and casts them in a broader historical context. He describes the Holocaust as a ‘pan-European event’ in view of how much collaboration the Nazis received from occupied territories, in identifying, persecuting and ultimately assisting in the extermination of the overwhelming majority of the Jews who were killed during the Holocaust.ccxix Arguing that it could not have happened without the deep-rooted age-old anti-Judaism that existed at the heart of Western civilisation, Wistrich states, ‘The Holocaust cannot be divorced from the dominant religious tradition of Western civilisation… as a modern version of a Christian holy war… Hitler masquerading as the Germanic warrior ‘Christ’ bringing this millenarian tradition to a gruesome end in the death camps… (on) the “sacred altars” of the new political religion called National Socialism.’ Ultimately the Nazis dictated that there could not be two chosen people. The Nazis�
�� new secular credo, which sought to untie the moral conventions of Judeo-Christianity and replace them with their own New World View, simply took the next step into the abyss of a millennial evolution of anti-Semitism. Thus Wistrich concludes, ‘The missionaries of Christianity had said, in effect: you have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: you have no right to live among us. The German Nazis had decreed: you have no right to live at all.’(48)
POLAND REBORN
Poland’s greatest misfortune was to lie between more powerful neighbours who were always ready to take advantage of her. She has sometimes been referred to as the doormat of Europe, an epithet no less appropriate to Germany; both countries have long served as battle grounds for foreign armies ever-willing to take advantage of their territory as spoils of war. The two ancient adversaries could benefit by gaining a better understanding of each other’s history, in which they will find many shared, mostly tragic, experiences; ultimately, both have been pawns of more powerful neighbours and alliances.
The symbol of the Holy Roman Empire was the twin-headed eagle, looking both east and west; this could have made a more suitable heraldic symbol for Poland. Poland’s early glory days lay in her Piast nobility, the dynasty that fought the Teutonic Knights and saw itself as very much at the heart of Central Europe. However, she was soon being squeezed from all sides; first there was the ever-increasing pressure of German settlement pushing further east, then there was the rise of powerful neighbours in Saxony to the west, Austrians to the south, and later the Prussians to the north. Consequently, Poland turned east and allied herself to Lithuania under one of her greatest kings, Casimir the Great. After ceding territories such as Silesia to the Holy Roman Empire as early as 1335, Poland looked to the vast expanses of the East to forge a new empire; this was another historical ‘destiny’ the country would share with Germany. By looking eastwards, the Jagiellon dynasty established one of Europe’s largest empires for Poland-Lithuania and attained the territorial high point of any Polish state, before or since. Poles who continued to view Poland as part of the Western civilisation — not least due to their deep-rooted Roman Catholicism — became known as Piasts, and those who sought further expansion of the Polish Empire in the East were termed Jagiellons.
Standing between East and West, Poland was destined to come into conflict with her neighbours. An old Polish saying states that, ‘Poles kill Germans as a matter of duty and Russians for sport,’ which is not a statement likely to endear them to either of their powerful neighbours. Many Poles proudly recall that it was a Polish general, General Sobieski, who ‘saved Europe from the Ottoman hordes’. It is true that Sobieski successfully led a great pan-European army in 1683, one that not only halted the Turks at the Battle of Vienna, but also helped turn the tide against the Ottoman Empire. However, in doing so, he freed Austria’s hand. With her southern frontier much less encumbered, Austria was able to spread her power and influence further, through Central and Eastern Europe, and at Poland’s expense.
Poland’s feuding nobility assisted in her unprecedented decline in the eighteenth century. After three partitions, Poland was partitioned out of existence by her three gluttonous neighbours by 1795; her ancient capital of Krakow and southern territories fell to Austria; Poznan and her western territories fell to Prussia; Warsaw and the remaining bulk of her population and territory fell to Russia.
Poles had to choose whether to live in Austrian, Prussian or Russian-administered Poland. No one immigrated to Russian Poland out of choice, and the largest migration was to those areas under Prussian rule. The Poles were the largest minority in an otherwise relatively homogeneous Prussian, and later German, state. At the time of German unification, Poles numbered 2.25 million and were concentrated in West (former Royal) Prussia and in the hinterland around the city and region of Posen. There were other communities living in Prussia with more distant links to the Piast Poland of the Middle Ages. In Upper Silesia there were Poles who spoke an ancient almost unintelligible Wasserpolnisch. There were the Masurians in southern East Prussia and the Kashubians in the Danzig hinterland, who all spoke their own Slavic dialects alongside German, and who had lived cheek-by-jowl between German and Polish settlers since the thirteenth century.(1) Prussian, and later German, policy towards the areas of the Polish Commonwealth it had annexed, and its Polish minority, swung between bouts of liberalism and outright colonisation. Yet it can still be said that Prussia was a much better arbiter of her Polish minority than Germany became.
By and large, Prussian policy was not to Germanise the Poles, but to encourage them to become loyal Prussian subjects, much as the German East Prussians had been loyal subjects under the Polish crown for two centuries. To that extent, Polish remained the official language of instruction in elementary and secondary schools. Only in the final years of Gymnasium (secondary school with a strong academic focus — not unlike grammar schools) was German introduced to help those students who wanted to study at German universities. The 1830 Polish uprising, which predominantly took place in Russian-occupied Poland, created a groundswell of sympathy for the Poles in Prussia, but also the fear that the insurrection would infect relatively stable Prussian Poland. The Grand Duchy, with its special administrative status centred on Posen (Poznan) was replaced and became just another Prussian province, more Germans were briefly encouraged to settle in the former Polish provinces of West Prussia and Posen, and the use of German in schools was briefly extended — which predictably created greater resentments.
The pendulum swung back in Prussia under Friedrich Wilhelm IV. He was a self-confessed Polonophile, and when he came to power in 1840 he issued a general amnesty for all Poles who had taken part in the 1830 uprisings. The policy of German settlement was abandoned and an increase in Polish and Jewish immigration was facilitated, especially from Russian Poland. This was accompanied by a new school ordinance that met all the basic demands of the Polish community with regard to the use of their language. Prussian liberals had long been pro-Polish and, by April 1848, were even in favour of some form of reconstituted Polish entity, so as to give Prussia a buffer against Russia.
In May 1848, the liberal-left majority elected to the first Prussian National Parliament demonstrated pro-Polish sympathies, arguing for more special concessions. However, these discussions came to nothing; this was partly because the nationalist fervour emanating from the French Revolution of 1848 created violent nationalist uprisings again, in and around Posen, but also because on the wider foreign policy agenda, Prussia was committed to not provoking Russia. An autonomous, let alone an independent, Polish region in Prussia that would have encouraged the rebellious Poles in the Russian Empire to become even more vociferous in their struggle for independence, would have set Prussia and Russia at loggerheads against one another.
It was under Otto von Bismarck that Prussian, and then German policy made a long-term departure from the more benevolent policies of the Prussian past. In 1863, to underscore Prussia’s alliance with Russia, Bismarck signed the Alvensleben Convention, under which Russia and Prussia offered to assist one another in the event of another Polish uprising. The Prussian constitution, however, continued to protect Polish civil liberties no matter what the international temperature was, and Polish deputies kept being returned to the Prussian parliament to represent their interests. The Prussian judiciary also defended the use of Polish in the internal administration of the former Grand Duchy and the use of Polish in its schools.(2) The climate changed dramatically during the course of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when Poles clearly sided with France. Bismarck was forced to station reserve regiments, which might have been required at the front, in Posen and throughout the province, to keep a lid on an expected uprising. After German unification, Bismarck poured oil on the fire of German-Polish relations with his Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. He regarded Catholic Poles as doubly dubious in their loyalties to Germany. This was followed by the expulsion of 32,000 non-naturalised Poles
and Jews back to Russian Poland, reversing a long-standing policy of allowing Poles from other areas to settle in Prussia, and signalling a new course from Berlin.
In 1886, the German government established the Royal Prussian Colonisation Commission in Posen with the aim of buying failing Polish estates and dividing these up among German farmers. From 1891 the Pan-German League and other ultra-nationalist groups increased pressure for greater Germanisation of the province. The year 1908 was the low point in German policy towards Poland before the First World War with the establishment of the Anti-Polish Expropriation Law, which allowed, with compensation, for the forcible removal of Polish landowners in favour of Germans.(3)
During the First World War, General Józef Piłsudski’s Polish legions were pressed to serve alongside the Central Powers. Piłsudski, who later became leader of a reborn state of Poland, had a life-long conviction that the greatest threat to Polish interests came from Russia. Imperial Germany was the first nation to sponsor the restoration of the kingdom of Poland, setting up an autonomous Polish government and administration in 1916, as a reward for the Polish legion’s service against Russia; a gesture which is largely ignored in modern day histories of Poland. This German-sponsored Poland may have been intended to serve as a satellite of a victorious post-war Imperial Germany, giving its oath of allegiance to the Kaiser, but Germany nevertheless helped pave the way for the independent republic of Poland that emerged in 1918.(4) When Imperial Germany collapsed in late 1918, Germany’s good intentions were quickly forgotten, and the Poles seized their opportunity for independence. The uprising centred on Posen (Poznan was incidentally the birth place of Field Marshal/President Hindenburg) and a bitter guerrilla war ensued between the German military and Polish irregular forces. Before long, the Poles were fighting both the Germans and the Russians in an attempt to seize as much territory as possible for the new Polish state. It is perhaps more than a little ironic that Russia, which had occupied the largest part of Poland containing the majority of her population and which had mistreated its Poles to a far greater degree than had Austria or Prussia, should have imposed a settlement that ended up with Poland being reconstituted yet again after the Second World War, but this time with two-thirds of her territory having been taken from Germany.
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