BETWEEN THE WARS

The Aftermath of the World War

· Describe the problems affecting the countries of Europe in the aftermath of the First World War.

· Describe the efforts to preserve the peace after the war. Why did these eventually fail?

The First World War left Europe devastated. The sheer rate of death and maiming, as well as the frustration of nearly four years of virtual stalemate, had a devastating material and psychological impact on its people. The war that was to make the world “safe for democracy,” left only a legacy of physical damage, economic disruption, and uncertainty about all traditional institutions. Although present around the world, these factors were strongest on the continent of Europe.

When the war ended in 1919, nine million soldiers lay dead. From two to three million Russians died, and many more perished in the following civil war between Bolsheviks and their opponents. Among the other major participants, almost two million Germans, over one and a half million French, close to a million English, a half-million Italians, and over a million from Austria-Hungary died in battle. These figures do not count the wounded whose lives may have been shortened as a result of their injuries. The young paid the highest price; it is estimated that Germany and France lost over 15% of their young men. In addition to the serious demographic (population) devastation, large areas of the continent lay in ruins, especially in Belgium and northern France where the bulk of the fighting had taken place. Belgium, for example, lost over 300,000 houses and thousands of factories; 15,000 square miles of northeastern France was also in ruins.

In addition to the physical damage, every country faced the problems associated with the transition to a peacetime economy after five years of war. Returning servicemen had to be reintegrated into the job market at the very time that factories devoted to war production were closing or laying off workers. Inflation soared due to the scarcity of consumer goods and the higher wages that were paid during the wartime labor shortage. Estimates of the financial drain of the war range between $250 billion and $300 billion, figuring the dollar at its early 1920s level. Governments had been reluctant to raise money during the war from their own people in the form of higher taxes because they feared that this would diminish enthusiasm for the war effort. As a result, they borrowed the money through the sale of bonds to both their own citizens and foreign governments. The victorious Allies, mainly Britain and France, had borrowed heavily from the United States during the last three years of the war. Germany, in addition to its own debt, also faced the need to pay reparations to the Allies, which the British and French intended to use to payoff their loans to the United States. Governments further fed the inflation by printing enormous amounts of paper currency in hopes of paying off their debts.

Not all of the damage of the war was physical or financial. Soon returning veterans, often unemployed, began to feel that their sacrifices had been in vain. This fueled an intellectual cynicism (pessimism) and a distrust of all of the “traditional values” that had existed prior to the war. The war had lasted only five years, but its trauma had changed Europe more in that short period of time than during the previous five decades. Doubt and cynicism replaced the certainty and belief in progress that had helped fuel Europe’s dominance in the nineteenth century.

It was hard to identify any real “winners” in the war. Even Britain and France saw the joy of Germany’s defeat quickly evaporate as their economies crashed in 1919-1920. In addition to their other difficulties, the war had stimulated a desire by the indigenous (native) peoples of their colonies for the freedom that the Allies insisted they had fighting to defend during the war. British troops were dispatched to Ireland to fight a revolt that had begun with the Easter Rebellion of 1916, and Indian nationalists, led by Gandhi, would soon challenge British rule in her largest colony.

The map of Europe had been transformed as a result of the treaties following the war. The empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Ottomans had ceased to exist in their prewar forms. Many new countries emerged, principally Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. All of these countries had been envisioned as democracies; however, they had virtually no experience with either self-rule or democracy. In many countries, governments changed rapidly as no political party seemed capable of finding answers to the problems of the post-war era. Their small size also presented problems. Many of these new countries contained small pockets of minority ethnic groups who were disappointed that their national aspirations had not been met in the settlement of the war. Many ethnic Germans lived outside of the borders of the reduced Germany, especially in Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. In addition, the new boundaries often isolated traditional trading partners as the new countries often erected trade barriers that frustrated commerce (trade). Even long-established democratic governments would be severely tested during the next two decades, and the fragile new democracies would often crumble in the face of the challenges of the post-war world.

One common pervasive (all around) belief was revulsion at the human cost of the war. A number of half-hearted efforts at preventing future war through disarmament occurred the 1920s. At the Washington Naval Conference of 1922, Britain, the United States, France, Italy and Japan agreed to stop building large warships for ten years and to maintain an agreed upon ratio of ships in order to create a balance of naval power.[1] In the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, almost all of the world’s major powers (including Germany, Japan, and Italy) agreed to outlaw war as “an instrument of national policy.” This idealistic statement was tempered by the fact that countries retained the right to go to war in “self-defense.” As a Virginia Senator commented prior to voting on the treaty, “I intend to vote for the peace pact, but I am not willing that anyone in Virginia shall think that it is worth a postage stamp in the direction of accomplishing permanent peace.” These efforts were a well-meaning response to the horrors of the First World War, but they lacked any means of enforcement. During the 1930s, aggressive countries, primarily Germany, Italy, and Japan, would repeatedly break agreements that they themselves had signed without consequence due to the unwillingness of other countries to act in defense of the agreements.

Italy and Fascism

· Explain the factors that led to the Fascist takeover of Italy.

· Describe the methods that Mussolini used to gain power.

· Describe the fascist state constructed by Mussolini.

· Why was fascism viewed by some as an attractive alternative to communism?

After entering the war on the Allied side in 1915, Italy entered the peace negotiations with great expectations. The Italians had joined the war after the Allies had promised that they would gain large amounts of territory at the expense of Austria-Hungary. Although they gained some land, they were denied several important ports on the Adriatic Sea, which were awarded to Yugoslavia or administered by the new League of Nations. The Italians came away from Versailles with only minor gains, not nearly enough to justify the deaths of 700,000 of their youth.

Postwar Italy suffered social and economic damage similar to that of the other combatants. Due to inflation, the lira (the Italian unit of currency) fell to one-third of its prewar value, and disrupted trade patterns hampered recovery. There were not enough jobs for the returning soldiers, and unemployed veterans were ripe targets for growing extremist political parties. In some cities, residents refused to pay their rent in protest over poor living conditions. In the countryside, peasants took land from landlords. Everywhere food was in short supply.

In the four years after the armistice, five premiers (heads of government) came and went, either because of their own incompetence or because of the difficulty of the problems they faced. The situation favored the appearance of a political savior, “a man on a white horse.” Such a man was a blacksmith’s son, Benito Mussolini.[2] Mussolini grew up in and around left-wing political circles and became editor of the influential socialist newspaper Avanti (“Forward”) in 1912. While a majority of the Italian Socialist Party called for neutrality in World War I, Mussolini came out for intervention in the war. Party officials removed Avanti from his control and expelled him from the party. He then proceeded to put out his own paper, Il Popolo d’Italia (“The People of Italy”), in which he continued to call for Italian entry into the war on the Allied side.

To carry out his interventionist campaign, Mussolini organized formerly leftist groups into bands called fasci, a named derived from the Latin fasces, a symbol of authority in ancient Rome. When Italy entered the war, Mussolini volunteered for the army, saw active service at the front, and was wounded. When he returned to civilian life, he reorganized the fasci into a nationalist, right wing fascist movement to attract war veterans and try to gain control of Italy.

In the 1919 elections the Socialists capitalized on the mass unemployment and hardship to become the strongest party, although the party lacked effective leadership and failed to take advantage of its position. The extreme right-wing groups did not elect a single candidate to the Chamber of Deputies, but pursued power in other ways. Gabriele D’Annunzio, a fiery writer and nationalist leader, occupied the disputed city of Fiume (a city on the Adriatic Sea now known as Rijeka, Croatia) with a band of followers, in direct violation of the directives of the Treaty of Versailles. This open defiance of international authority strongly appealed to the fascist movement. D’Annunzio provided lessons for the observant Mussolini, who copied many of the writer’s methods and programs.

Mussolini’s Fascists soon gained the backing of wealthy landowning and industrial groups who feared the victory of Marxist socialism in Italy. Mussolini’s followers, known as the Black Shirts, beat up opponents, broke up strikes, and disrupted opposition meetings in 1919 and 1920 while the weak government did nothing to stop them. Despite these activities, extreme right-wing politicians still failed to dominate the 1921 elections. Only 35 fascists, Mussolini among them, gained seats in the Chamber of Deputies while the liberal and democratic parties gained a plurality (more than any other single party). Failing to succeed through the existing system, Mussolini established the National Fascist Party in November.

The centrist government elected in 1922 proved to be as ineffective as its predecessors, and the socialists continued to bicker among themselves. Meanwhile, Mussolini’s party attracted thousands of discontented middle-class people, cynical intellectuals, and industrial workers. Frustration with the central government’s incompetence and fear of the left was only part of the reason for the Fascist rise. One historian noted, “it was not on political ideas that fascism thrived, but on the yearning for action and the opportunities it provided for satisfying this yearning.”[3] While democratic groups responded to the post-war crisis with doubt and uncertainty, Mussolini confidently promised decisive action.

In October 1922, 50,000 Fascists threatened to march on Rome to display their strength. A frightened King Victor Emmanuel III, weary of inefficient government and fearful of a leftist takeover, invited Mussolini to form a new government. Thus, the famous “March on Rome” (which was completed only after Mussolini had already been assured of power) ushered in Mussolini’s twenty-year reign. In the following month Mussolini constructed a cabinet composed of his party members and other conservative nationalists, gaining dictatorial power. The Fascists were still a minority in Italy but by gaining control of the central government they could place their members and allies in positions of power. Soon they began to dominate every aspect of the nation.

Mussolini followed no strict ideology (set of political beliefs) as he consolidated his dictatorial rule. Called “Il Duce” (the leader), he threw out all the democratic procedures of the postwar years and dissolved rival political parties. He and his colleagues ruthlessly crushed freedom of speech and the press, often forcing castor oil down the throats of their opponents and banishing many of them to prison. When a Socialist deputy, Giacomo Matteotti, published a book criticizing Fascist corruption and violence, he was murdered. In his speeches, Mussolini referred constantly to the legacy and glory of the Roman Empire. He encouraged a high birth rate, but noted that individuals were significant only in so far as they were part of the state. Children were indoctrinated “to believe, to obey, and to fight,” and universal military service was required.

Mussolini controlled all real power through the Fascist Grand Council, whose members occupied the government’s ministerial posts. All this activity and centralization of power provided a striking contrast to the disorganization of the four years immediately after the war. Mussolini pursued the development of his political philosophy in a pragmatic (doing whatever will work regardless of ideology) manner. Activity, not consistency, marked his ideology.

Mussolini, a former atheist, began to tie the Roman Catholic Church into the structure of his new society. In 1929, he negotiated the Lateran Treaty with church representatives in order to settle the long-standing controversy between Rome and the Vatican. The new pact required compulsory religious instruction and recognized Catholicism as the state religion. Vatican City, a new state of 108 acres located within Rome itself, was declared to be fully sovereign and independent. With this treaty, Mussolini gained approval from devout Italians and the Vatican’s support for his government.

Similar to the accommodation with the Church, fascism did not threaten private property or the large industries. Mussolini’s economic system, known as state capitalism, aimed to achieve cooperation between labor and capital, by state force if necessary. Unlike socialists and communists, Mussolini believed that private enterprise was the most efficient method of production, intervening in economic production only as a last resort. The Fascists constructed a corporate state, in which the country was divided into syndicates, or corporations representing both management and labor. Under state supervision, these bodies were to deal with labor disputes, guarantee adequate wage scales, control prices, and supervise working conditions, very similar to the National Recovery Administration (NRA) that President Roosevelt would later attempt in the U.S.. Unlike the New Deal, however, fascism favored the interests of business over those of labor. After 1926, strikes by workers and lockouts by employers were prohibited.

Mussolini’s fascism was a far milder form of totalitarianism (a government with total, unchecked power) than that seen later in the USSR or Nazi Germany. There was no overwhelming atmosphere of oppression or genocide (the mass murder of specific groups of people) in Italy. As in the case of the other dictatorships, Mussolini’s programs had some worthwhile features such as slum clearance, rural modernization, and campaigns against illiteracy and malaria. The trains did run on time, as Mussolini boasted, and the Mafia was temporarily weakened, with many of its more notable figures fleeing to the United States. Even when the depression hit Italy in the 1930s and unemployment reached one million, fascism remained an attractive model to many in the suffering democracies of the rest of Europe. Mussolini, much like FDR in the United States, was a dynamic leader who promised government action to remedy the problems of the time. Mussolini was praised for maintaining order and a proud national spirit, and his admirers often overlooked his ruthless suppression of civil liberties. Like communism, fascism was an alternative to the weakness of democratic government; however, unlike communism, it did not threaten private property, organized religion, or other elites (those who had privileged positions in society). In addition, it stressed a romantic vision of a return to a simpler, more pure, and glorious past. For these reasons, fascism or its imitators established itself as a powerful political force in all but the most stable European countries. Most importantly, it drew strong financial support from the wealthy who viewed it as a far more attractive alternative than government control by the left.

The Debt Problem and the Great Inflation

· Describe the Allied debt system that World War I created.

· How did Germany’s economic problems affect the Allied debt problem?

· Describe the problems that inflation caused in Europe following the war.

· What group was hurt the most by the Great Inflation? Why?

· What effect did the Great Inflation have on people’s attitudes toward their political systems?

A radical change had taken place during the war in Europe’s economic relationship with the United States. In 1914 the United States had been a debtor (one who owes money) nation, mostly to Europe, for the amount of $3.75 billion. The war totally reversed this situation. During the war, the United States lent billions of dollars and sold tons of supplies to the Allies, and by 1919 Europeans owed the United States more than $10 billion. This tremendous debt posed what economists call a transfer problem. These obligations could be paid only by the actual transfer of gold or by the sale of goods, neither of which Britain or France possessed in adequate quantity.

To complicate the picture, Allied powers in Europe had also lent each other funds, with the British acting as the chief banker, lending more than $1.7 billion. When their credit dried up during the war, they turned to the United States for financial help. Even though Britain owed huge sums to the U.S., it remained a net creditor of $4 billion because of loans it had made to other European countries. France, on the other hand, stood as a net debtor of $3.5 billion. In addition to war debts, the French government suffered greatly when the new communist government of Russia refused to acknowledge the validity of debts incurred by the former regime of the Tsar. This debt of some 12 billion francs, one quarter of France’s foreign holdings, remained unpaid.

Some of the Allies argued that all inter-Allied debts should be forgiven. The French especially argued that the contribution in the lives of their young men must be figured into the equation of inter-Allied debts. The United States, which had gone to Paris with a conciliatory spirit toward Germany in the treaty negotiations, changed its tune when dollars and cents were involved. This attitude was best expressed in a remark attributed to President Coolidge, who expected full repayment from America’s former allies, exclaiming: “They hired the money, didn’t they?” Beneath the extremes of these positions was the practical problem of paying such a huge debt. Germany’s debt problem was further complicated by the problem of reparations, owed primarily to Britain and France. To meet its huge obligations, Germany resorted to a radical inflation of its money supply. In the first three years after the war, the German government deliberately spent far more than its income. The printing of extremely large amounts of currency to finance government spending temporarily masked this policy.[4]

The debt situation became so serious in the summer of 1922 that Great Britain proposed that it collect no more from its debtors (Allied and German alike) than the United States collected from Britain itself. Britain saw that Germany would not be able to meet its reparations payments, and without them, the payments of the inter-Allied debts, especially debts owed to the United States, would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make. The U.S. refused Britain’s proposals but negotiations continued and new debt payment plans were eventually set up with thirteen countries. No reductions were made in principal (the amount of the loan), but interest rates were radically decreased and the time for repayment increased. Although this eased the debt problem somewhat, other factors continued to plague the economies of Europe.

All European nations suffered some degree of inflation as they attempted to recover from the war. Britain had minimal inflation and returned to prewar levels within two years after the signing of the Versailles treaty. On the continent, price and monetary stability came less easily. France did not stabilize its currency until 1926, when the franc was worth one tenth of its 1914 value. In Austria, prices rose to 14,000 times their prewar level until partial stability came in 1922. Hungary’s prices went to 23,000 times prewar level, and this increase was dwarfed by Poland (2.5 million times prewar level) and Russia (4 billion times prewar level). But it was Germany that served as the laboratory of the horrible impact of inflation on society. Germany’s prices went up a trillion times (a thousand billion) what they were in 1914! On the day of the Armistice in 1918, the German mark stood at 7 to the dollar. Five years later it took over four trillion (4,210,500,000,000) marks to equal a dollar.

The Great Inflation struck the middle classes hardest. Savings declined in value and government pensions became less valuable. Without property and hard assets (such as gold), which also appreciated for the wealthy, middle class workers were defenseless as prices rose and currency values declined. Where the middle classes and democratic traditions were strong, democracy could weather the storm. But in Central Europe, especially in Germany where the inflation was the worst, the cause of future totalitarianism received an immense boost, as the new democratic governments became associated with economic disaster.

Recovery and Disaster

· Describe the Dawes Plan. How did it attempt to solve the transfer problem?

· What other economic problems did European countries experience prior to the depression?

· Why did the Great Depression become an international problem?

After 1923, some calm returned to the European economies. In most countries production soon reached pre-war levels. Currencies began to stabilize by mid-decade, finally bringing an end to the scourge (plague) of the Great Inflation. Most significantly, in September 1924, a commission under the leadership of U.S. banker Charles Dawes formulated a new reparations plan in order to get the entire repayment cycle back into motion. The Dawes Plan reduced loan installments and extended them over a longer period. A loan of $200 million, mostly from the United States, was floated to aid German recovery. The Berlin government resumed payments to the Allies, and the Allies paid their debt installments to the United States—which in effect received its own money back again with interest.

Prosperity of a sort returned to Europe between 1923-1929. As long as the circular flow of cash from the United States to Germany to the Allies to the United States continued, the international monetary system functioned, but the moment the cycle broke down, the world economy headed for the rocks of depression. The system broke down in 1928 and 1929 as the U.S. and Britain began to experience a decline in the money supply. Extensions on loans, readily granted a year earlier, were refused. Even before the U.S. stock market crash on October 29, 1929, disaster was on the horizon. As countries rebuilt, they strove to protect their own economies by erecting high tariffs. These policies worked against international economic health by discouraging trade. The United States led the way toward higher tariffs, and other nations quickly retaliated. As American foreign trade seriously declined, the volume of world trade also fell.

There were other danger signals as well. Europe had suffered a huge population decline. There were 22 million fewer people in the 1920s in the western part of the continent than had been expected prior to the war. The decrease in internal consumers affected trade, as did the higher external tariffs. Around the globe, the agricultural sector suffered from declining prices during the 1920s. Many farmers went bankrupt, as they could not keep up with payments on their debts. Tariff barriers prevented foodstuffs from circulating to the countries where hunger existed. By the end of the decade, people in Asia were starving while wheat farmers in the western United States dumped their grain into rivers, and coffee growers in Brazil saw their product burned for fuel. As in the United States, the countryside preceded the cities into the economic tragedy, and people fled from the countryside to the already crowded cities as urbanization continued.

Because of America’s central position in the world economy, any development, positive or negative, on Wall Street reverberated across the globe. The United States, with roughly 3% of the world’s population, produced 46% of the globe’s industrial output. In the weeks following the stock market crash of 1929, the disaster spread worldwide as American interests demanded payment on foreign loans and the demand for imports decreased. The Kredit-Anstalt Bank of Vienna did not have enough money to fill demands for funds from French banks and failed in 1931. This set in motion a domino-like banking crisis throughout Europe. By 1932, the value of industrial shares had fallen close to 60% on both the New York and Berlin stock exchanges. Unemployment doubled in Germany, and 22% of the labor force was out of work in Britain. In country after country, industry declined, prices fell, banks collapsed, and economies stagnated. The depression fed on itself, growing steadily worse from 1929 to 1933. Even countries initially less hard hit, such as France and Italy, saw themselves drawn into the vortex (whirlpool) by 1931. The middle classes in Europe, which had suffered the most from the inflation during the 1920s, were once again devastated in the depression as jobs and savings were lost and families faced poverty and despair.

The debt problem that grew out of the war worsened during the depression. As the depression deepened, the debtors could not continue their payments. France refused outright in 1932, Germany after 1933 completely stopped paying reparations, Britain and four other nations made token payments for a time and then stopped entirely in 1934. Only Finland continued to meet its schedule of payments.

Political Effects of the Depression

· Describe the overall political effects of the depression.

· Explain why the Great Depression was especially devastating to Japan.

· Why did the depression produce tremendous political polarization in many countries?

From the major banks to the soup lines in villages, the Great Depression had a profound effect on politics and contributed even more to the feelings of uneasiness that had existed since 1918. In many countries the tendency to seek easily understood answers led people to embrace totalitarian solutions. Throughout the world people suffered from lowered standards of living, unemployment, hunger, and fear of the future, thus threatening representative government. Unemployed and starving masses were tempted to turn to dictators who promised jobs and bread. The hardships of economic instability, even in those countries where the democratic tradition was strongest, led to a massive increase in governmental participation in the economy (such as occurred in the U.S. with the New Deal).

The depression, though most remembered for its impact in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America, was a truly international collapse. Throughout the world the depression worsened an already bleak economic picture. Western markets could absorb fewer imports as production fell and incomes dwindled. The nations that produced foods and raw materials saw prices and earnings drop even more than before. Unemployment rose rapidly in the export sectors of the Latin American, African, and Asian economies, creating a major political challenge not unlike that faced by the Western leaders.

Japan, as a new industrial country still heavily dependent on export earnings for financing its imports of essential fuel and raw materials, was hit especially hard. The Japanese silk industry, a major source of exports, was already suffering from the advent of artificial silk-like fibers produced by Western chemical companies. Between 1929 and 1931, the value of Japanese exports plummeted by 50%. Workers’ real income dropped by almost one-third, and there were over three million unemployed. The depression was compounded by bad harvests in several regions, leading to rural begging and near-starvation. For Japan, the depression increased resentment of the economic dominance of western countries and helped promote new military expansionism designed to win more assured markets for Japanese products in Asia.

Similar to the Hoover administration in the U.S., most western governments responded to the onset of the catastrophe counterproductively. National tariffs were raised to keep out the goods of other countries, but this merely worsened the international economy and weakened sales for everyone. Most governments cut spending as their tax revenues went down. They were concerned about avoiding a repeat of the horrible inflation of the early Twenties, but their measures further reduced the money supply and pushed additional workers (such as government employees) out of jobs. As a result, confidence in the normal political process deteriorated. The depression greatly heightened political polarization (people supporting political extremist groups) in many countries. People sought solutions from radical parties or movements, both on the left and the right. Support for communist parties went up in many countries, and authoritarian movements on the radical right, imitating Mussolini’s fascism, gained increased strength throughout Europe. The fascist movement’s advocates, many of them former veterans, attacked the weakness of parliamentary democracy, corruption, class conflict, and most of all the breakdown of traditional values that had occurred during the Twenties. They proposed a strong state, ruled by a powerful leader who would revive their nation’s fortunes and pride. Fascists promised national unity and provided clear explanations (and usually scapegoats–persons to blame) for their nations’ problems. Their attacks on trade unions, socialists, and communists pleased many landlords, religious leaders, and business groups. Even in relatively stable countries, those without an overwhelming communist or fascist presence, battles between conservatives of the political right and labor movements of the left made effective national leadership difficult.

There were only a few cases of constructive political response to the depression. Scandinavian states such as Norway and Sweden, directed by moderate socialist governments, increased government spending and provided new levels of social insurance against illness and unemployment. In the United States, the New Deal used these same tactics to stimulate the economy. In these areas democratic government struggled for a time but eventually endured. But in countries with less of a democratic tradition, the political effects of the Great Depression were disastrous.

The Soviet Union

· What were the Five Year Plans?

· Why did the depression have little effect on the Soviet Union?

· What were the Great Purges?

After a bitter civil war, the Bolsheviks were able to consolidate their power in the Soviet Union after 1921. The death of Lenin in 1924 touched off a struggle for power, but by 1927 Joseph Stalin had emerged as the country’s undisputed leader. Stalin virtually abandoned Lenin’s goal of an international communist revolution in favor of his policy of “building socialism in one country.” In 1928 he began the first of the Five Year Plans, designed to transform the Soviet Union from a backward agricultural country into a modern industrial power.

During the early twenties the Soviet Union was treated as an international pariah (social outcast), but by the end of the decade most European countries had begrudgingly recognized the communist regime.[5] In busily building an industrial society, the USSR cut off almost all economic ties with other countries. The result placed great hardships on the Russian people, called to sustain rapid industrial development without outside investment, but the lack of trade and the massive governmental involvement in the economy prevented anything like a depression during the 1930s. Soviet leaders pointed with pride to the lack of serious unemployment and steadily rising production rates, in a telling contrast with the miseries that the capitalist countries were undergoing.

Instead of an economic depression, the 1930s saw great political turmoil as Stalin attempted to purge the Soviet Union of any force with the potential to oppose his dictatorial rule. Between 1934 and 1938, two-thirds of the members of the Communist Central Committee were executed. More than half of the top army leaders were imprisoned or executed, including the head of the army, Marshall Mikhail Tukhachevsky. These Great Purges were condemned throughout the world and created a great public relations obstacle for communist parties in other countries as the horror of the brutal Stalinist dictatorship became apparent throughout the world.

France

· Explain why France had so many changes of government between the wars.

· What was the Popular Front? Why did it fail?

In most cases the Great Depression led to one of two effects in Europe—a parliamentary system that became increasingly disabled, unable to come to grips with the new economic dilemma and too divided to take vigorous action even in areas such as foreign policy or the outright overturning of the parliamentary democracy itself.

France was a prime example of the first pattern. The depression struck France later than other countries, but in some ways the damage was greater. The French government responded sluggishly. Part of the problem was a lack of political unity. The French National Assembly was elected on the basis of proportional representation in which voters voted for political parties and then seats were apportioned based on the votes cast for each party.[6] This system encouraged the development of a large number of political parties. Since no party usually came close to commanding a majority in the National Assembly, governments had to be formed by diverse coalitions (political alliances) of individual parties. When one member of the coalition became dissatisfied and withdrew, the government collapsed. As a result, France underwent 34 changes of governments between 1919 and 1938.

French voters responded to the depression by moving toward the political extremes. On the left, socialist and communist parties expanded. Rightist movements calling for a strong leader and fervent nationalism also grew, often disrupting political meetings in order to discredit the parliamentary system. In response, the leftist parties (liberals, socialists, and communists) allied in a Popular Front in 1936. This coalition, under the leadership of Leon Blum, won a national election and set in motion a program to bring socialist reforms to France’s struggling economy. Blum’s government tried to reduce the domination of the traditional ruling elite over the finances of the country and block the growing fascist influences. The Popular Front government, however, was unable to take strong measures of social reform because of the ongoing strength of conservatives and the authoritarian right who opposed its every action. Many conservatives believed that: “Behind the Popular Front lurks the shadow of Moscow.”[7] The same paralysis crept into foreign policy, as Popular Front leaders, initially eager to support the new liberal regime in Spain that was attacked by fascist army leaders in the Spanish Civil War, found themselves forced to pull back in fear of a similar armed conservative revolt in France itself. In this atmosphere of social, economic, and international turmoil, Blum was unable to govern successfully. Further, an epidemic of sit-down strikes involving some 300,000 workers embarrassed the government. Gradually, laws introducing a forty-hour workweek, higher wages, collective bargaining, and paid vacations were enacted to satisfy many of labor’s demands. Blum attempted to introduce policies that favored the worker against big business, while avoiding the totalitarian extremes of fascism and communism. After only a year in office; however, the Popular Front’s political opponents forced Blum to resign. France swung back to the right with a National Union government that ended the forty-hour week and ruthlessly put down strikes.

The struggle between the Popular Front and right-wing forces illustrated the widening split between the upper and lower classes. The workers believed that the Popular Front’s reforms had been sabotaged and that a France ruled by a wealthy clique deserved little or no allegiance. On the other hand, some business owners and financiers were horrified at the prospect of communism and openly admired Mussolini and Hitler. Late in the decade, “Better Hitler than Blum” was not an uncommon statement among the French upper classes.[8] By 1940, France was so politically divided that the government was arresting its leftist critics even as German tanks were rolling toward Paris.

Britain

· Describe the political problems that Britain experienced during the Twenties.

· Why did the two Labour governments fall?

· What response did Britain make to the depression?

The two decades between the wars were not tranquil for Great Britain either. The country endured a number of social and political crises that were tied to the bitter labor disputes and unemployment that disrupted the nation. Neither of Britain’s two pre-war political parties, Liberals or Conservatives, could do much to alter the flow of events immediately after the war. From 1919 to 1923, a Liberal coalition ruled the country but it broke apart, leading to the division and decline of the party in favor of the more recently formed and openly socialist Labour Party.

Ramsay MacDonald formed the first Labour government in January 1924 and became Britain’s first socialist prime minister.[9] For ten months he and his party pursued a program to introduce socialism slowly within a democratic framework, but his move to recognize the communist government of the Soviet Union was bitterly opposed by Conservatives. When the London Times published the so-called Zinoviev Letter, a forged document which supposedly laid out the program for a communist revolution in Britain, Conservatives howled that the Labour Party was just a stepping stone to communism. Public backlash over this incident defeated the Labour government in the October 1924 elections.

For the next five years, the Conservatives, under Stanley Baldwin, held power. The government struggled through a coal strike and a general strike in which more than 2.5 million of the nation’s more than 6 million workers walked out. In May 1929, Labour, under MacDonald, won another victory. Once again the Labourites attempted their measured socialist program. The effects of the depression, however, condemned MacDonald and his government to failure. In two years trade declined 35% and close to 3 million unemployed people roamed the streets. When MacDonald’s government fell in 1931, it was replaced by a national coalition government, which was headed by MacDonald but dominated primarily by the Conservatives. The government initiated a recovery program and by 1933 signs of recovery were present as productivity increased by 23% over that of 1929. In contrast with the polarization caused by the Popular Front in France, Britain’s moderate coalition was able to make progress against the depression and avoid political extremism. In 1935, the coalition was reorganized and Baldwin again became prime minister.

To achieve an economic recovery, as with the New Deal, much of what remained of laissez-faire policy in Britain was discarded. The government regulated the currency, levied high tariffs, gave farmers subsidies, and imposed a heavy burden of taxation. The taxes went to expanded educational and health facilities, provide better accident and unemployment insurance, and more adequate pensions. The rich had a large portion of their income taxed away, and much of what might be left at death was then taken by inheritance taxes. As a result, the rich complained that they could hardly afford to live, much less to die. To many other people, unemployed and maintained on a small government allowance, the interwar period was aptly symbolized by a popular play of the time, Love on the Dole.[10]

British foreign policy was handicapped by the problems of managing their empire. In the early 1920s, British troops were sent to Ireland to crush a nationalist rebellion in the predominately Catholic country. Ultimately the southern part of Ireland achieved a measure of independence but the northern six counties, in which Protestants constituted a majority, remained part of Britain. Later, in the 1930s, a strong independence movement emerged in India under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi. In addition, Britain’s dual promises in the Middle East during the First World War put the country in the unenviable position of mediator in Palestine as British policy drew criticism from both Arabs and Jews. Although far less divided by extremes than France, Britain too faced the 1920s and 1930s with a myriad of problems and few easy solutions as Conservatives and the Labour Party exchanged government power without either group receiving a strong mandate from the people.

Eastern Europe

· Describe the problems that the new countries of Eastern Europe experienced.

· What was the most successful of the new countries? Why?

· What reforms did Kemal Atatürk accomplish in Turkey?

With the exception of Finland and Czechoslovakia, democratic governments fared poorly in Eastern Europe in the interwar period. By 1939, most of the states retained only the false front of democratic forms. Real power was exercised by varying types of dictatorships.

Most of these countries had unhappy histories of oppression by powerful neighbors, minority problems, economic weakness, and backward peasant societies. Poland, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Finland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia had not existed as states before 1918. Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Austria had been on the losing side in World War I and paid dearly in the treaties ending the war. Romania, which had been among the victors, gained large amounts of land from the war but also a large number of non-Romanian minorities.

For the first decade after the war, the small countries of Eastern Europe had the opportunity to develop without undue foreign interference. Paranoid nationalism, however, dominated each nation thwarting any possibility of regional cooperation. The peace treaties had settled few of the problems plaguing the area and instead constructed a series of artificial political boundaries that brought far more conflict than cooperation. The countries in the region all sought to erect huge protective tariff barriers, which only served to emphasize each country’s weaknesses.

Czechoslovakia possessed the greatest possibility among the Eastern European states for successful democratic government. The new state possessed a literate, well-trained citizenry and a solid economic base. It managed, for the most part, to avoid the roller coaster ride of inflation in the immediate postwar period and was an island of prosperity, boasting solid financial institutions, advanced industry, and a small farm-based agricultural sector. As in the other Eastern European states, there were serious minority problems; but of all the new states, Czechoslovakia extended the most liberal policies toward minorities. By the time of the depression, Czechoslovakia showed every indication of growing into a mature democratic country. The depression, however, heavily affected the country’s export trade and hit especially hard in the textile industry, which was centered in the mainly German-populated Sudetenland.

Aside from Czechoslovakia, Poland had the best chance of the new states to maintain democracy. The Poles, however, had to overcome several problems—a border conflict with the Soviet Union, the discontent of the sizable German population in the Polish Corridor and Danzig, and the fact that Poland had not existed as a country for over a century. When the country was reunited after the war, the Poles chose to imitate the constitutional system of France. The multiplicity of parties, a weak executive, and the resultant succession of governments led to a political paralysis until 1926 when Marshal Josef Pilsudski led a military revolt against the Warsaw government. For the next nine years, Pilsudski imposed his generally positive, benevolent (kindhearted) rule on the country. After his death in 1935, a group of colonels ruled Poland, permitting the formation of several anti-Semitic, semi-fascist organizations. Only in 1938 did the Poles turn back toward a more democratic government.

The rest of Eastern Europe was devoid (lacking) of democratic government by the middle of the 1930s. Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, like Poland, fell under the control of relatively benevolent dictators. In Romania, King Carol II took total power in 1930 in an attempt to deny power to the fascist Iron Guard movement. Admiral Horthy of Hungary and King Boris III of Bulgaria ruled in a similar manner. In addition to economic difficulties, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece were threatened by the ambitions of Italian imperialism. Disintegration seemed a real possibility for Yugoslavia as the new government attempted to hold together six major ethnic groups within its boundaries. King Alexander established himself as dictator in 1929 and ruled until 1934 when he was assassinated by Croatian separatists. The country then splintered between areas dominated by Croatia and Serbia. By the end of the 1930s, both Greece and Albania were also ruled by dictators.

Perhaps no country experienced more dramatic change between the wars than did Turkey. A German ally in the First World War, the Ottoman Empire disintegrated as British, French, Italian, and Greek troops occupied parts of the country. In the treaties following the war, the Turks had been forced to give up their claims to Libya, Egypt, the Sudan, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Arabia, as well as to recognize British possession of Cyprus. These terms and the foreign occupation encouraged the development of a nationalist movement known as the “Young Turks.” Led by Mustafa Kemal, a hero of the defense of Gallipoli in the World War, the Young Turks sought to expel the foreign invaders (“Turkey for the Turks”) and modernize the country to European standards.[11] The Young Turks strongly opposed the European powers that had dominated their country but greatly admired their accomplishments. Mustafa Kemal seized power from the sultan in 1921 and repelled a Greek invasion, which had advanced within forty miles of the capital of Ankara. In 1924, Mustafa Kemal expelled the sultan and proclaimed Turkey a republic with himself as president. Upon the suggestion of the national assembly, he adopted the name Atatürk or “Father of the Turks.” An atheist, Kemal Atatürk, blamed the Moslem faith for perpetuating backwardness, proclaiming: “Islam is a dead thing, not suitable for a civilized people.” In 1924 he expelled the caliph, who had been the head of Islam in Turkey, and stated: “The Republic must finally be a secular (non-religious) state.” Along with the attack on religion, Atatürk sought to modernize Turkey in other significant ways. Education and health vaccinations were made mandatory and the English and French languages were stressed in schools. By 1931, adult Turks were required to qualify for a certificate of literacy to enjoy the full rights of citizenship. The western Gregorian calendar was adopted along with the Roman alphabet and the metric system. Turks were also required to adopt family names and register them with the government. In 1925, the government outlawed the wearing of the traditional Turkish fez.[12] In addition, Atatürk ridiculed the Islamic custom of wearing the veil and promoted the equality of Turkish women by proclaiming, “a nation cannot progress without its women.” Despite his admiration for western practices, Turkey under Atatürk operated as a totalitarian state. In the early years of his rule, any hint of opposition was dealt with ruthlessly and the national assembly served merely as a rubber stamp. Atatürk believed that, “unity is essential, and there can be no rival theories, and no rival parties.” In 1930, the formation of an opposition party was permitted but when this led to increased criticism of the government and demonstrations, the opposition was dissolved. When Atatürk died in 1938, he left a mixed legacy. Turkey had made amazing progress in education, health care, and industrialization, but without any guarantees of civil liberties or democratic practices.

Germany

· Describe the system of government created by the Weimar Constitution.

· Describe the effects of the Great Inflation on Germany.

· Explain why the Weimar Republic was unable to win the support of many Germans.

In the first week of November 1918, revolutions broke out all over an exhausted Germany. Sailors stationed at Kiel rebelled and leftists in Munich revolted. The Kaiser fled to Holland after the authority of his government crumbled. On November 9, the chancellor transferred his power to Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the largest party in the German Reichstag, the Social Democrats, and the new leader announced the establishment of a republic. On the advice of Germany’s military leaders, the first act of the new German Republic was to ask the Allies for an armistice.

Violence quickly spread within the Republic after the signing of the armistice. German communists (known as Spartacists), led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, wanted a complete social and political revolution in imitation of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia the previous year. Ebert’s Social Democrats were moderate socialists who favored a democratic socialist system in which property rights would be maintained. At the beginning of 1919, communists and socialists clashed violently. Experiments in revolutionary government in Bavaria and Berlin horrified both traditionalists and Social Democrats. In the spring, a coalition of forces ranging from moderate socialists to right-wing paramilitary bands of unemployed veterans crushed the radical leftists and murdered Liebknecht and Luxemburg. In order to retain power in the face of the communist threat, Ebert made a deal with the remaining vestiges of Germany’s aristocracy and military leadership. Although inherently hostile to the Republic and favoring a return to monarchy, the traditional Prussian military leadership supported Ebert’s government in order to crush the communists. This alliance proved successful, and by the end of the year Germany had weathered the threat of a communist revolution. Meanwhile, the moderate parties triumphed in elections to select a constitutional convention, with the Social Democrats winning the most votes. The constitution they wrote in the town of Weimar, however, created many of the problems that would eventually destroy democracy in Germany.

The Weimar Constitution of 1919 provided for a democratic, parliamentary form of government with an elected national legislature, the Reichstag. . An elected president served as the head of state and commanded the armed forces. A chancellor was appointed by the president and could be dismissed by the legislature, similar to the British Prime Minister. The chancellor was the head of the government, appointing a cabinet to assist in running the government ministries. The constitution guaranteed the rights of organized labor, personal liberties, and compulsory education for everyone up to the age of eighteen. Only in an emergency could the president rule by decree (issuing orders that had the force of law), thus bypassing the Reichstag. Like the French National Assembly, the Reichstag was elected by proportional representation and therefore a plethora (large number) of political parties existed, ranging from the Communists to the far right. Although the Social Democrats in the middle usually remained the largest party, they seldom commanded a majority within the Reichstag. As a result, the country was usually governed by a coalition of moderate and right wing parties. In less than fifteen years there were seventeen different ruling coalitions. During times in which no majority coalition could be assembled, the president was forced to rule by decree.

The Weimar Republic faced overwhelming obstacles. First, the new republic had to live with the humiliation of having accepted the Versailles Treaty and its infamous war guilt clause. This defeatist image, combined with opposition from both right and left wing extremists, plagued Weimar moderates. Economically, Germany was also plagued by the same postwar problems as the rest of Europe. In addition, Germany faced the requirement to pay huge reparations as mandated by the Treaty of Versailles. When the Germans were unable to make their reparations payments to France in 1923, French troops marched into the industrialized Ruhr region and seized key factories as payment. German workers defied the French army and refused to work.[13] As a result, the French action accomplished little; however, this invasion of German territory was yet another deep humiliation that the Weimar government was powerless to prevent.

Inflation was a problem in most countries after the war, but in Germany the government deliberately chose to drastically inflate the money supply to meet its financial obligations. Between May and September 1921, the value of the German mark (the unit of currency) fell 80% in value. Conditions got appreciably worse in 1923 when the mark reached the exchange rate of 4.2 trillion to the dollar (as opposed to 7:1 at the end of the war). At its worst point in November 1923, the Reichsbank had 150 private firms using 2,000 presses running day and night printing banknotes. Mothers wheeled baby carriages full of banknotes to bakeries in order to buy a single loaf of bread. One historian described the situation:

Hyperinflation created social chaos on an extraordinary scale. As soon as one was paid, one rushed off to the shops and bought absolutely anything in exchange for paper about to become worthless. If a woman had the misfortune to have a husband working away from home and sending money through the post, the money was virtually without value by the time it arrived. Workers were paid once, then twice, then five times a week with an ever-depreciating currency.

By November 1923, real wages were down 25% compared with 1913, and envelopes were not big enough to accommodate all the stamps needed to mail them; the excess stamps were stuck to separate sheets affixed to the letter. Normal commerce became virtually impossible. One luckless author received a sizable advance on a work only to find that within a week it was just enough to pay the postage on the manuscript. By late 1923 it was not unusual to find 100,000 mark notes in the gutter, tossed there by contemptuous beggars at a time when $50 could buy a row of houses in Berlin’s most fashionable street. The currency became so worthless that some Germans even used it to paper their walls.[14]

The effect of the inflation was particularly devastating to the middle class as families watched their savings of a lifetime dwindle into nothing. The rich had property and valuables that rose in value with inflation, but the middle class had little except their bank accounts, which were soon worthless. Elderly pensioners were similarly affected, as their pensions became worthless overnight. The horrible inflation of 1920-1923 destroyed any confidence that the middle class may have had in democratic government. As a biographer of Hitler later wrote, “the result of the inflation was to undermine the foundations of German society in a way which neither the war nor the revolution of 1918, nor the Treaty of Versailles had ever done.”[15]

The currency crisis was ultimately solved by totally eliminating the old monetary system and instituting a new one.[16] After 1923, the economy began to improve, partly as a result of the skillful leadership of Gustav Stresemann, but mainly through the issuance of foreign loans and the alteration of the terms of the reparation payments. In 1925, Germany agreed to the Locarno Pact in which it promised to respect its existing borders and to keep the Rhineland demilitarized as required by the Treaty of Versailles. Largely as a result of this agreement, Germany was admitted as a member of the League of Nations, ending its diplomatic isolation.

From 1924-1929, Germany enjoyed political stability and economic prosperity. Germany rebuilt its industrial plant with the most up-to-date equipment and techniques available to become the second-ranking industrial nation in the world by 1929. Rebuilding, however, was financed largely with foreign loans, including some $800 million from the United States. In fact, the Germans borrowed almost twice as much money as they were forced to pay out in reparations.

In many ways the Germany of the late twenties resembled the United States of the same period. There was rapid economic growth as well as tremendous social tension. In the large cities, especially Berlin, democracy ushered in an era of tremendous artistic experimentation and changing moral values. Berlin became a Mecca for young visitors eager to sample the “cabaret lifestyle” of the city. A prominent German writer described Berlin as “the Babel of the world,” filled with depravity, avant-garde art, drunkenness, and prostitution.[17] Just as in the U.S., this rapid social change was greeted with mistrust by older, rural, conservative Germans who remained in the majority and often looked back nostalgically to the prewar days of order and tradition. The election of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, an elderly, conservative Prussian war hero, to the presidency in 1925 represented the conservative underpinnings of German society that felt itself under attack by the modern era.

Despite the economic improvement, the Weimar Republic was never able to undo the damage caused by the traumatic postwar years. As historian Peter Gay observed, the intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen who should have been the strength of Weimar “learned to live with the Republic ... but they never learned to love it and never believed in its future.”[18]

The worldwide depression thus proved to be fatal for German democracy. Desperate for capital, the United States called in its short-term loans and the German economy collapsed. By 1932 there were six million unemployed. To those who had experienced the Great Inflation of the previous decade, the Great Depression was a second economic disaster that could not be endured. After 1929, the insecurity and discontent of the middle classes crystallized around their children, who blamed their parents for the catastrophe of 1918 and the humiliations that followed. Young Germans, many of them unemployed after 1929, repudiated the Weimar Republic and sought a new savior for their country and themselves.

Adolf Hitler and the Rise of Nazism

· Describe Hitler’s early life.

· How did Hitler build the strength of the Nazi Party?

· What was the Beer Hall Putsch?

· Explain why the Nazi message appealed to many Germans.

· Describe the factors that allowed Hitler to come to power in 1933.

· Explain how Hitler quickly established a dictatorship after being appointed chancellor.

The man who was to “save the fatherland” came from outside its borders. Adolf Hitler was born in Austria, the son of a minor customs official. A mediocre student and outcast during his school days, he went to Vienna in 1908 hoping to become an architect or artist. When he failed to gain acceptance to the art institute, his hopes of pursuing a career in art came to an early end. In the cosmopolitan (sophisticated, diverse) capital of Austria-Hungary, surrounded by a rich diversity of nationalities and religions, Hitler formed his political philosophy. He avidly read pamphlets written by racists who advocated hatred of Austria-Hungary’s non-German population. Anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews) was a popular political platform, openly espoused (advocated) by the city’s mayor.[19] Hitler rapidly embraced this cause, using anti-Semitism to explain both his and society’s failures. A year before World War I, Hitler moved to the city of Munich in southern Germany where he earned a meager living by selling his drawings. When the war erupted in 1914, he joined a German regiment, was sent to France where he fought bravely, taking part in 48 engagements, and was awarded the Iron Cross. At the time of the armistice in 1918, he was in a hospital recovering from being blinded in a gas attack. He later said that news of Germany’s defeat caused him to turn his face to the wall and weep bitterly: “I hadn’t cried since I stood at the grave of my mother…. But now I could not help it. So it had all been in vain. All the sacrifices and privations…”[20]

Following his recovery, Hitler returned to Munich where he was hired by city authorities to act as an agent to investigate extremist political parties. In the line of duty he checked on a small organization called the German Workers’ Party. Hitler became attracted to the group’s fervently nationalistic doctrine and agreed with their anti-democratic, anti-communist, and anti-Semitic beliefs. He joined the party and soon became its leader or Fuhrer.

In 1920, the party took the name National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In German this was abbreviated as the NSDAP, and the words National Socialist (Nationalsozialistiche) became abbreviated to Nazi. That same year the party founded a newspaper to spread its views, and created a paramilitary organization from out-of-work veterans—the Storm Troopers (SA) or Brown Shirts. They also adopted the symbol of the swastika, which was set upon a red background. The swastika had been used by many cultures, including American Indians, to express the unending cycle of life. The red background symbolized the community of German blood.

More important than the party’s ideology or its symbol was Hitler himself. He quickly became widely known for his remarkable ability as a speaker. His power to arouse and move mass audiences drew large crowds in Munich. Even those who hated all that he stood for were fascinated by his performances. In the early days, Hitler would hire a number of beer halls for political rallies and speed from one to the next, delivering his emotion-filled message. He called for land reform, the nationalization of trusts, the abolition of all unearned incomes, expansion to include all German-speaking peoples in Europe, and the cancellation of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler told Germans that their miseries were not their own fault but rather the result of a “stab in the back” by corrupt politicians, communists, and Jews. The points of his argument were less important than the way he could package his concepts to fit whatever audience he addressed, and his popularity soared.

In November 1923, at the depth of Germany’s inflationary crisis, Hitler staged a revolt (in German, putsch) to overthrow the Bavarian government. It was known as the Beer Hall Putsch because it began in a famed Munich beer hall. Poorly planned and executed, the attempt failed. Hitler was arrested and was initially overshadowed by the putsch’s other main participants, World War I flying ace Herman Göring and General Erich Ludendorff. In a brief article describing the incident, Time magazine focused on Ludendorff rather than the unknown Hitler and predicted that, “it was clear that the career of a great German general is not over.... Perhaps, next putsch, he will not frolic with political opportunists such as Hitler.”[21]

Hitler used his trial as a platform to attack the unpopular Weimar Republic. Acting as his own attorney, Hitler told the court: “You may find us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smilingly tear up the motion of the state prosecutor and the judgment of the court; for it will exonerate us.” He received a mild sentence after his conviction for treason and more importantly became well known throughout the country. Time reported: “Hitler ... was sentenced to five years of confinement in a fortress and fined 200 gold marks. Since it was understood, however, that he will be obliged to serve only six months–and then receive a parole for good behavior, his followers received the verdict with loud approval….”[22] While in prison, Hitler dictated his statement of principles in a book entitled Mein Kampf (My Struggle). This work, often rambling and disjointed, was both an autobiography and statement of Nazi philosophy and objectives.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that history was fashioned by great races, of which the Aryan (Northern European) was the finest. The noblest Aryans, according to Hitler, were the Germans who should rule the world. He charged that the Jews were the arch-criminals of all time, that democracy was decadent, and communism criminal. He stated that expansion into the Soviet Ukraine and the destruction of France were the rightful course for Germany, and that the nation should use war and force, the proper instruments of the “strong,” to achieve its goals. Few took Hitler’s ranting seriously at the time, but it did appeal to a Germany devastated by the humiliation of Versailles. As the Nazis grew in strength, Mein Kampf began to be regarded as the Bible of the movement and its sales made Hitler wealthy.

The Great Depression finally brought on the collapse of the moderates’ position in the Weimar government. In the last elections prior to the collapse of the U.S. stock market (May 1928), the extremist parties had captured less than 15% of the vote (Communists 11% and Nazis 2%). In the 1930 elections, the Nazis increased their number of seats in the Reichstag from 12 to 107 and their popular vote from 810,000 to 6.4 million. With increasing unemployment and the fear that accompanied the declining economy, over 30% of the electorate now cast their votes for extremist parties of the far right or left. German conservatives soon began to view the Nazis as the perfect vehicle to smash the moderate-left parties that had ruled during Weimar. The Nazis’ intense nationalism, condemnation of communism, and support by the established churches made them increasingly acceptable to the middle class despite their violent tactics.[23]

By July 1932, the Nazis held 38% of the Reichstag seats, making them the country’s largest party. Communist strength grew also, but by far smaller margins (to 15% of the Reichstag). Together, the two opposing extremist parties now accounted for a majority. It became impossible for any other party to put together a majority coalition to rule and President Hindenburg was forced to rule through presidential decree.[24] As conditions grew worse, the hungry and frightened, as well as rich and powerful, turned to Hitler.[25] The latter groups feared the Communists and saw the Nazis as a useful shield against a Bolshevik revolution if conditions continued to worsen. As one historian has noted: “Nothing was new in Hitler’s message. What was new was the readiness of the audience to hear it. Thus the depression was described as “the last ingredient in a complicated witches’ brew” that led to Hitler’s takeover.[26]

Hitler’s first attempt to take advantage of economic disaster failed in 1923’s Beer Hall Putsch, but he would not fail the second time. After 1930, the Nazis took advantage of the desperate conditions resulting from the depression. Night after night, police and the military battled mobs of rioting Communists and Nazis:

At Nuremberg, Communists and Fascists (National Socialist Workers Party) met for a debate, which terminated in a free-for-all. Spectators amused themselves by pitching beer mugs and stones into the throng, injuring 70 contestants, among them three Fascist aldermen. Police charged and dispersed the rioters with truncheons and fire hose.

Thus violent already, the electioneering campaigns are expected to be increasingly vigorous as general election day (Sept. 14) draws nearer. Divided against themselves, German votes are now being sought by seven major parties, none of which can hope for a landslide in its direction. The parties: Social Democrats, Nationalists, Catholic Centrists, Communists, German People’s Party, the new Staatspartei, and the up-and-coming National Socialist Workers [Nazi] Party. Seeking the element which precipitated last week’s turbulence, observers unanimously pointed to the Fascists and their demagogue (a leader who appeals to the prejudice and emotions of the people)–oratorical, Jew-baiting, terrorist Adolf Hitler.[27]

In addition to posturing himself as the only alternative to communism, Hitler also promised to free Germany from the moral decadence of Weimar and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazi movement drew its support primarily from Germany’s conservative, religious, middle class, weary of social and economic disruption, and fearful of communism:

The churches welcomed the Nazis’ ascendancy to power, for they were deeply conservative institutions which, like most German conservative bodies and associations, expected the Nazis to deliver Germany from what they deemed to have been the spiritual and political mire that was the Weimar Republic, with its libertine culture, democratic “disorder,” its powerful Socialist and Communist parties which preached atheism and which threatened to rob the churches of their power and influence. The churches expected that the Nazis would establish an authoritarian regime that would reclaim the wrongly dishonored virtues of unquestioning obedience and submission to authority, restore the cultivation of traditional moral values, and enforce adherence to them.[28]

As the Nazi movement grew in popularity, Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, used every communications device available to convert the masses to Nazism. He staged huge spectacles all over Germany in which thousands of Nazi Party members all became supporting players to the “star” of the drama, Adolf Hitler. Such controlled hysteria was even more important than the message Hitler continued to repeat.

In the March 1932 presidential elections Hitler lost to von Hindenburg; however, after a strong showing by the Nazis in the July Reichstag elections, Hindenburg asked Hitler to join a coalition government. [29] Hitler refused, demanding instead the equivalent of dictatorial power. The stalemate led to the dissolution of the Reichstag in September until a second general election. These costly campaigns nearly emptied the Nazis’ treasury. It was also politically costly as they lost seats in the Reichstag, polling two million fewer votes than they had in the July election. As the Nazis declined, Communist support grew.

Some observers believed that the Nazis had passed the crest of their power by the end of 1932. At this critical point, however, a group of aristocratic nationalists and powerful industrialists, fearing a leftist revolution, convinced President von Hindenburg to offer Hitler the chancellorship. In January 1933, a mixed party cabinet was created with Hitler at the head. Conservatives, such as former chancellor Franz von Papen, convinced Hindenburg that making Hitler chancellor would force him to moderate his views and be responsible for government actions. “We have hired Hitler,” Papen said after the appointment. Although non-Nazi’s outnumbered Hitler’s supporters in the coalition cabinet, Nazis held the key positions of Minister of the Interior and State Minister of Interior for Prussia (Germany’s largest state). These positions, occupied by Wilhelm Frick and Hermann Goring, controlled the police and electoral process. Now the Nazis could act with full legal support. Many Germans enthusiastically greeted Hitler’s appointment as chancellor:

Outside the Palace, thousands of Hitlerites roared guttural victory cheers.

“Heil Hitler! Deutschland erwache! Juda verrecke!” they bellowed as he emerged waving his black felt hat. “Hail Hitler! Germany awake! Perish Juda!”

Berlin’s famed Der Tag (an independent newspaper) cried: “This historic day marks the birth of a new Germany!” Another newspaper predicted “Hitler the Chancellor will be a different man than Hitler the agitator.”[30]

Because he did not have a clear majority in the Reichstag, Hitler called another general election for March 5. Now in power, the Nazis used all the muscle at their disposal during this campaign. They monopolized radio broadcasts and the press; the SA bullied and beat the opposition. On the evening of February 27, a fire gutted the Reichstag building. A twenty-four-year-old Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, had set the blaze. Apparently acting alone, van de Lubbe gave the Nazis the issue they needed to mobilize their support. Goebbels’ propaganda machine went into action to blame the fire on the international communist movement (the propaganda minister so overplayed the story that most of the outside world came to believe that the Nazis themselves had set the fire).[31] Hitler may not have made much profit from the incident internationally but he did use it to win the election. The Nazis captured 45% of the Reichstag, which, with the 8% controlled by the right-wing Nationalist Party, gave them a bare majority. Quickly, the Nazis put through an Enabling Act that gave Hitler the right to rule by decree for the next four years. Immediately democracy and civil liberties crumbled:

To say that most German statesmen & politicians outside the Government’s charmed circle were scared to death last week, would be understatement. Panic made cowards of the bravest of brave German Socialists and Communists. Even Catholics trembled. It was accurately said that in less than two weeks Chancellor Hitler has reduced his opponents to a lower level of groveling fear than did Premier Mussolini in the two years after the March on Rome, Oct. 30, 1922.

In Germany last week–not two years but two weeks after the Republic “died” and before the new Reichstag met–nearly all Communist Deputies and many Socialist Deputies were in jail. The Hitler Government announced that no Communist Deputies (even should they break jail) would be admitted to the Reichstag. Most Socialist Deputies were expected to stay away, lest they be harmed. The bravest Socialist (by reputation), Dr. Otto Braun, Premier of Prussia, once famed as “The Lion of Social Democracy,” fled to Switzerland where he was still so terrified that he telegraphed to Berlin his resignation from the Prussian Diet and from the Socialist party.[32]

Before Berlin’s Kroll Opera House swarmed a crowd of young Nazis last week.

“Give us the Enabling Act!” they chanted, “give us the Enabling Act or there will be another fire!”

The Reichstag was meeting in the Opera House because the central hall of the Reichstag building had been gutted by incendiary fire, a fire that despite popular murmurings the Nazis have persistently blamed on Communists. Because of the fire every Communist deputy was in jail. So the young Nazis’ cry was easily answered: The Reichstag passed the Enabling Act 441-94, Adolf Hitler became Dictator of Germany for four years to come.[33]

Every aspect of the Weimar government was quickly overturned. The Nazis crushed all opposition parties and put aside the Weimar constitution. Concentration camps such as Dachau, outside of Munich, were quickly established for Communists, Socialists, and other opponents of the regime. By July 1933, all other political parties had been outlawed. When President von Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler became both chancellor and president, combining both offices under the title of Fuhrer. Hitler proclaimed his regime to be Germany’s Third Reich, succeeding the Holy Roman Empire (962-1806) and Bismarck’s Second Reich (1871-1918).

The Long History of Anti-Semitism

· Identify the significant early events in Judaism prior to 132.

· What factors tended to increase anti-Semitism in Europe? In what ways did the Christian churches contribute to anti-Semitism?

· What factors led to the assimilation of Western European Jews during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

· What factors led to the development of Zionism? Why did most European Jews reject this idea?

An essential part of the Nazi ideology was an absolute hatred of the Jews. Hitler’s anti-Semitism ran deep; he blamed Jews for various personal misfortunes and also for movements such as socialism and excessive capitalism that in his view had weakened the German spirit. As early as 1920, he had talked of a “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem:”

In the discussion that ensued with members of a speech entitled “Why We Are Anti-Semites,” Hitler revealed that he had contemplated the question of how the “Jewish Problem” is to be solved. He resolved to be thoroughgoing. “We have, however, decided that we shall not come with ifs, ands, or buts, but when the matter comes to a solution, it will be done thoroughly.” In the speech proper, Hitler spelled out, with candid explicitness that he prudently would not repeat in public after he had achieved national prominence, what he meant by the phrase “it will be done thoroughly.” It meant that putting the entire Jewish nation to death–or, as Hitler himself had stated publicly a few months earlier in another speech, “to seize the Evil [the Jews] by the roots and to exterminate it root and branch”–would be the most just and effective punishment, the only enduring “solution.”[34]

Later in Mein Kampf, Hitler had written:

…if at the beginning of the War [World War I] and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters [Jews] of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans…[35]

It is important to understand that Hitler and the Nazis did not invent anti-Semitism, they merely exploited a hatred that had existed in Europe for centuries. Anti-Semitism provided Hitler with a convenient scapegoat on whom Germans could project blame for all of their misfortunes. Its effectiveness as a political tool was due to the fact that Hitler’s racist rhetoric fell on ears eager to hear, and believe, his message. To understand the willingness of Germans (and to an extent many other Europeans) to follow the path of hatred requires a historical look at Judaism and European attitudes toward the Jewish people.[36]

Judaism began between 1800-1500 BCE when the shepherd Abraham made an agreement or covenant with God in which God promised to bless him and his descendants if they renounced all other gods and remained faithful to him (this explains why Jews are sometimes referred to as the “Chosen People”). The Jewish belief in monotheism (one god) contrasted sharply with the prevalent belief in polytheism (many gods) that was later adopted by the Greeks and Romans. The fact that this covenant was formed in the town of Hebron led to Abraham’s followers being called Hebrews.

Abraham, his son Isaac, and Grandson Jacob settled in the land of Canaan, which later became known as Israel. During the first centuries of their history, Jews were organized into groups that traced their ancestry to the descendants of Jacob’s twelve sons. These groups were called the “Twelve Tribes of Israel.” One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, was sold into slavery in Egypt and, through his wisdom and honesty, eventually became a top advisor to the pharaoh. After being driven from Canaan by a plague, the Jews were invited to live in Egypt until eventually a new pharaoh decided to enslave them. This condition of slavery endured until Moses led the Jews out of Egypt around 1200 BCE. This exodus is celebrated in the holiday of Passover. Jewish tradition maintains that God directed his laws to Moses in what is known as the Torah. These form what Christians call the first five books of the Bible. Along with the Talmud, which is a collection of commentary on the Torah as well as legal, ritual, historical, and ethical writings, these Hebrew Scriptures are the written foundation of Judaism.

Two hundred years after leaving Egypt, the Jews were able to establish their own kingdom under King David and his successor, King Solomon. During this time, Jerusalem was established as the capital of the Jewish state of Israel and the Great Temple was built as a place of worship. After the death of Solomon in 928 BCE, the kingdom split into two with the northern area retaining the name of Israel while the south became known as Judah. This is the origin of the term “Jews.” During this time many of the basic principles and teachings of Judaism were developed. In 721 BCE, the northern kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians and the people were exiled and scattered. They disappeared as a distinct culture and are referred to as the “Lost Tribes of Israel.”

In 586 BCE, the Babylonians conquered Judah, destroying the Great Temple, and enslaving many Jews who were taken in what became known as the Babylonian Captivity. These Jews, inspired by the prophet Ezekiel, refused to assimilate (blend in with other cultures) for fear that they would totally lose their cultural identity. Fifty years later, the Jews were allowed to return to Judah where the Great Temple was rebuilt and the kingdom was re-established until the Greeks under Alexander the Great in 331 BCE once again conquered it. Until 167 BCE, the Jews were allowed to maintain their religion but then King Antiochus of Syria tried to totally eliminate the practice of Judaism. The Jewish revolt against Antiochus was led by Judah Maccabee and is celebrated in the holiday of Hanukkah.

In 63 BCE, the Romans conquered Judea. It was during their rule that a Jew named Jesus was born. Some Jews believed that he was the long-awaited messiah and followed him as their leader, but most Jews retained their traditional beliefs. There were periodic Jewish revolts against Roman rule, and in 70 CE the Roman General Titus conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Great Temple, except for parts of its western wall which is today often called the Wailing Wall.[37] Some Jews, called Zealots, refused to submit to Roman rule and 960 men, women, and children retreated to the hillside fortress of Masada where they were able to hold out for three years until they committed suicide rather than surrender. After the last rebellion was crushed in 132, the Jews were forced to leave Jerusalem and its surroundings and were scattered in lands either ruled by the Romans or the Moslems. This scattering of the seeds of Judaism is referred to as the Diaspora. In both cases Jews faced some forms of discrimination because of their different beliefs and practices, but were generally allowed to practice their faith. In most areas, Jews were treated considerably better than another religious minority, the Christians.

This relative freedom ended in the fourth century when the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. This began a new era of persecution, as Christians became infuriated that the Jews refused to convert and join the “New People of God” as the pagan Romans had. Under the rule of the Roman Catholic Church, Jews were legally declared inferior peoples. Christians were subject to the death penalty if they converted to Judaism and intermarriage between Christians and Jews was prohibited. Jews were excluded from most social contacts with Christians and, most importantly, from the guilds thereby denying them the right to practice a skilled craft. As a result, many Jews became merchants. The Romans also developed and perpetuated the myth that the Jews had been responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. This view conveniently explained the problem that Jesus had been killed by the Romans and was not officially abandoned by the Catholic Church until the 1960s.

Beginning in the eleventh century, conditions for European Jews became even worse as Christians fought for two centuries to expel the Moslems from the Holy Lands of the Middle East. This struggle, known as the Crusades, created great hostility toward any non-Christians in Europe, as evidenced by the slogan “Baptism or Death.” The failure of the Crusades only served to heighten anti-Jewish feelings, and in 1290 the Jews were expelled from Britain and from France in 1360. During this time the “Blood Libel” was developed as Jews were accused of using the blood of Christian children in their Passover ritual. In general, Jews became scapegoats for all of the major ills of society such as the Black Plague in the mid-fourteenth century that devastated Europe. In 1215, the Catholic Church required that Jews wear a distinctive mark, in many areas a yellow badge. Prohibited from most professions and forbidden from owning land, some Jews became moneylenders because this practice was forbidden to Christians. This only added to the unpopularity of Jews, especially in times of economic hardship. After their expulsion from Northwestern Europe, many Jews settled in Eastern Europe or in Spain where Jewish culture flourished, but by the fifteenth century resentment against the Jews intensified in Spain and many Jews began to convert to Christianity to avoid persecution under the dreaded Spanish Inquisition.[38] After their complete expulsion from Spain in 1492, most of Europe's Jews settled in Central or Eastern Europe.

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century ushered in yet another period of extreme difficulty for European Jews. As Protestants formed new Christian churches in their split from Roman Catholicism, they were initially hopeful that the Jews would convert to the new beliefs. The Protestant leaders soon became incensed when Jews refused. Jews suffered from both sides in this era of religious warfare between Catholics and Protestants. The Protestant leader Martin Luther was especially vehement (impassioned) in his condemnation of the Jews. In 1542 he wrote a pamphlet entitled Against the Jews and Their Lies:

What then shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? …

First their synagogues should be set on fire and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever see a cinder or stone of it….

Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed…. They ought to be put under one roof or in a stable, like gypsies, in order that we may realize that they are not masters in our land, as they boast, but miserable captives.

Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer books and Talmuds…

Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more.

Fifthly, passport and traveling privileges should be absolutely forbidden to the Jews….

Sixthly, they ought to be stopped from usury (money-lending). All their cash and valuables of silver and gold ought to be taken from them….

Seventhly, let the young and strong Jews and Jewesses be given the flail, the ax, the hoe, the spade, the distaff, and spindle, and let them earn their bread by the sweat of their noses…[39]

In 1555, the Pope ordered that Jews be segregated from Christians, not allowed to be outside at night, and be forced to wear a yellow hat as a mark of identification. The term ghetto comes from an area of Venice, Italy where the city’s Jews were forced to live. For Jews who had been persecuted for years because they had refused to assimilate, it was ironic that law was now enforcing this separation. Even the writings of William Shakespeare perpetuated anti-Jewish stereotypes such as his character of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, in the Merchant of Venice. Only in Eastern Europe and in the country of Holland could Jews practice their religion with any semblance of freedom. A few Jews emigrated to the United States, establishing the first synagogue in the colony of Rhode Island in 1763.

The Jewish communities of Eastern Europe contained 75% of the world’s Jews by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Most Jewish life in Eastern Europe was self-contained, as Jews lived in isolated communities called shtetls and spoke a dialect called Yiddish. Life was periodically disturbed by pogroms, government-sponsored riots against the Jewish population. These were usually used as diversions during times of economic hardship or after military defeats. These hardships inspired many Eastern Europeans Jews to emigrate to America during the late nineteenth century.

In Western Europe, the French Revolution, with its emphasis on liberty and equality, inspired more liberal attitudes toward Jews. In 1791, the Jews of France were afforded complete legal equality. The conquests of Napoleon spread these ideals throughout Europe. In Germany, Jews took advantage of this new opportunity by using their tradition of study to excel in the professions such as medicine, law, and the sciences. Some western Jews, like Moses Mendelssohn of Berlin, began to argue that Jews should attempt to blend in with secular (non-religious) society. By the dawn of the twentieth century, most German Jews considered themselves Germans first and Jews second. German Jews, who accounted for only .1% of the total population, won 25% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to Germans, and many other assimilated Jews rose to positions of influence. This soon produced feelings of resentment and jealousy. The belief that Jews were dominating the professions resulted in quotas being assigned to limit the number of Jews in major universities. In the socially prominent German army, Kaiser Wilhelm II proclaimed in 1913 that only Christians could be good officers.[40]

An interest in eugenics, or the application of scientific principles to the study of race, led to the development of anti-Semitism, a term first used in 1879 by German author Wilhelm Marr in his pamphlet “The Victory of Jewry over Germandom.” The ideas of Charles Darwin were perverted to advocate that some races were superior to others and that inferior races should be eliminated in a perverse form of “survival of the fittest.” A Frenchman, Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, wrote “An Essay on the Inequality of the Races” and coined the term Aryan to describe the people of Northern Europe whom he believed to be superior to other races. Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s book on the racial superiority of Germans was also widely read.

With this interest in racism, anti-Jewish attitudes again seemed to be on the increase in Western Europe, although most Jews led assimilated lives that placed their nationality ahead of their Jewish identity. The trial of Colonel Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer, reminded Jews that many others would never view them as valued members of secular society. In 1894 Dreyfus, a Jew, was convicted of selling military secrets to Germany. The military and conservative forces in France covered up his obvious innocence for years before he was finally retried and found innocent in 1906. The feeling that the progress that Jews had made prior to the end of the nineteenth century was being lost in Western Europe and the increase of pogroms in Eastern Europe led a Viennese journalist, Theodor Herzl, to argue that Jews would only be free if they had their own country. This belief that the Jewish people should return to the Middle East and recreate the ancient kingdom of Israel was called Zionism. This idea was not embraced by a majority of Europe’s Jews, unwilling to give up their European lifestyles to become pioneers in the desert, but small, dedicated groups began to settle in what was then called Palestine. During the First World War Britain supported Zionism by promising the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the Balfour Declaration. The greatest obstacles toward this goal were the opposition of the Arabs of Palestine and the indifference of most European Jews.

The Nazi War on the Jews

Describe the early actions that the Nazis took against the Jews.

What were the Nuremberg Laws?

What was Kristallnacht?

Why were many Jews unable to flee from Nazi Germany?

Many believed that Hitler had exaggerated his anti-Semitism in order to aid his rise to power and hoped that, after attaining power, the Nazi attacks on the Jews would cease. Tragically, this proved to be wishful thinking. After crushing all political opposition, Hitler swiftly began to destroy the Jews. When he took power, Hitler ruled over 500,000 Jews and 66 million Germans. Since 1880, the number of Jews in the population had been declining due to assimilation (primarily through intermarriage). In addition, few German Jews saw their primary identity as being Jewish, and only 20% regularly practiced Jewish religious rituals..[41] Despite the relatively small role that Jews played in German life, Hitler proclaimed that Jews were everywhere and pledged to destroy what he described as a Jewish plot to gain control of the world.

When the Nazis seized control of the government in 1933, most Jewish officials in the government quickly lost their jobs; Jews were forbidden to pursue many business and industrial activities, and Jewish businesses were boycotted. “On every Jewish shop,” wrote the wife of the British Ambassador in Berlin, “was plastered a large notice warning people not to buy in Jewish shops.” Non-Jews snatched up at bargain prices valuable properties formerly owned by Jews. Non-Jewish doctors and lawyers profited when Jewish professionals were forced from their practices. Thus, Hitler gained solid supporters among the business and professional classes as he pursued his racist policies. Many Germans willingly believed that the Jews deserved their fate.[42] Half-hearted international protests failed to limit the anti-Semitic policies as improvements in the German economy gained Hitler many more fervent supporters both inside and outside Germany.

The Nazis built concentration camps as early as 1933, but most of the Jews who were initially incarcerated were arrested for their political activities rather than simply for their race. In the meantime, the immediate pressures of government policies pushed many Jews and political opponents into committing suicide. It has been estimated that in 1933 alone, 19,000 Germans killed themselves and 16,000 more died from unexplained causes.

In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws came into force. Aryans and non-Aryans were forbidden to marry. Jews (defined as any person of one-fourth or more Jewish blood) lost their citizenship, and anti-Semitic signs were posted in all public places. In 1937, a series of decrees “Aryanized” all businesses, and Jews were forced to sell at extremely low prices. In 1938 the Nazis began to deport all Jews who lacked German passports, most of Polish origin. 15,000 were stripped of their possessions, expelled from Germany, and dumped at the Polish border. In November, a young German Jew, whose parents had been among the expelled, entered the German embassy in Paris and shot a German diplomat. This provided a ready excuse for a well-organized, all-out attack on Germany’s Jewish population:

Synagogues were everywhere fired or dynamited. Numberless Jews of both sexes were beaten by mobs ….

The complicity of the German Government was proved by the fact that in most cases police made no effort to restrain these so-called “mobs.” These consisted mostly of young Germans who drove up in cars. Heavy boots of the sort worn by party members when in uniform gave a good clue to the identity of the window smashers and firebugs.

The synthetic “mobs” were in some cases joined by genuine mobs but these were mostly Germans who simply grabbed what they could after Jewish shop fronts had been smashed by the “mobs.” Some mobsters tossed Jewish goods out of smashed windows to passersby with guffaws and cries of: “Here are some cheap Christmas presents. Get yours early!” Not all German Aryans countenanced this depravity. Said an Aryan Berlin housewife despondently as she watched Aryan children making off with the contents of a Jewish shop: “So that is how they teach our children to steal!”

The harsh explosive epithets in which the German language is rich, were heaped, together with obscenities, upon Jewish men, women and children in every part of the Reich. They were spat upon, cuffed, nose-jerked, kicked and given black eyes.[43]

On Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, 300 synagogues were burned, 7,000 shops looted, 91 Jews killed and 30,000 more arrested and sent to concentration camps. In addition, the government levied a fine of one million Reichmarks ($400 million) on the Jewish people for the damage done.

Prior to Kristallnacht, many German Jews hoped to outlast the Nazi regime but now there was a mass effort to emigrate. As of the end of 1937, a total of 129,000 Jews had left the Reich, but another 371,000, or three-fourths of the 1933 community, had stayed behind.[44] After Kristallnacht, a vast majority of German Jews (and the 185,000 Jews of the former Austria) sought to leave. In the next ten months, between 100,000 and 150,000 German Jews departed, roughly as many as had left the Reich during the first six years of Nazi rule. Although they stripped the emigrants of almost all their wealth, the Nazis otherwise encouraged Jews to leave. The great problem was that there was nowhere to go. Anti-Semitism had never been confined to Germany, and most countries, still recovering from the depression, were not eager to open their doors to Jewish refugees. According to polls taken between 1938 and 1939, 95% of the American people disapproved of the Nazi regime, yet fewer than 9% supported relaxing immigration restrictions to admit more German refugees. Several thousand Jews fled to Poland, only to be met with anti-Semitism and brutal pogroms there as well. Many German Jews sought to emigrate to Palestine which now had a Zionist community of 200,000. Fearful of Arab objections, the British began restricting Jewish immigration just as the measures against German Jews intensified. Between 1938 and 1941, 18,000 Jews were able to emigrate to Palestine (many of them illegally), but this was a small fraction of those who wanted to leave. [45] Some prominent Jews such as Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein were able to escape, but the vast majority who wanted to leave became trapped in German territory once the Second World War began.

The Nazi State

· Describe the methods that the Nazis used to stamp out any dissent.

· What was the “Night of the Long Knives”?

· What was the SS?

· What groups did the Nazis persecute other than the Jews?

· Why did most Germans enthusiastically support Hitler by 1938?

By 1934, virtually no opposition to the Nazi government remained. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry controlled all of the media, seeking to instill a single pattern of thought in literature, the press, broadcasting, drama, music, art, and the cinema. Opposing political parties had been eliminated and all political opponents were either in exile or in the concentration camps. Books written by authors that the Nazis disapproved of were burned before cheering crowds of students and teachers:

Undampered by a chilly drizzle, some 40,000 Germans jammed the square between Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University and the Opera House looking at a black mass of crisscrossed logs, insulated from the pavement by sand. A thumping band blared out old military marches. Toward midnight a procession entered the square, headed by officers of the University’s student dueling corps in their dress uniforms…. Behind them came other students and a line of motor trucks piled high with books. More students clung to the trucks, waving flaring torches that they hurled through the air at the log pile. Blue flames of gasoline shot up, the pyre blazed. One squad of students formed a chain from the pyre to the trucks. Then came the books, passed from hand to hand while a leather-lunged student roared out the names of the authors:

“Erich Maria Remarque (wild cheering)–for degrading the German language and the highest patriotic ideal!”

“Sigmund Freud–for falsifying our history and degrading its great figures...”

On he went, calling out the names of practically every modern German author with whom the outside world is familiar: Karl Marx, Jakob Wasserman, Albert Einstein, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Walther Rathenau… [46]

Even the Nazi Party itself was not immune from these purges. On the night of June 30, 1934, Hitler struck at those in the party whom he suspected of being less than 100% loyal to him. The main target was the leadership of the SA, the Brown-shirted storm troopers that had assisted his rise to power. The SA, and its leader Ernst Roehm, were seen as economic radicals who desired a more socialist emphasis to the Nazi revolution. In addition, the elimination of the undisciplined Brown Shirts was crucial to Hitler’s efforts to win the loyalty of conservative army leaders. Among those executed during the “Night of the Long Knives” were Roehm, former Chancellor Schleicher, and Gregor Strasser (one of the founding members of the Nazi Party). To carry out this “blood purge,” Hitler used his own elite guard–the black-shirted SS (Schutzstaffel). The SS, under the command of Heinrich Himmler, along with the secret police or Gestapo, became the primary instruments of Nazi terror.

The state used mass popular education, integrated with the German Youth Movement, to drill and regiment boys and girls to be good Nazis. Boys in the Hitler Youth learned above all else to be ready to fight and die for their Fuhrer. Girls were prepared for their ultimate task, bearing and rearing the many babies to be needed by the Third Reich. German universities, once renowned for their academic freedom, became agencies for propagating the racial myths of Nazism. Only loyal Nazis could go to universities, and professors who did not cooperate with the regime were fired.

Religion also became entrapped in the totalitarian mechanism. Since Nazism elevated the state above all else, a movement was started to subordinate religion to the Hitler regime. The organized churches originally backed the Nazis warmly until it became apparent that their traditions and beliefs would also have to be subservient to those of the Nazis. Both Protestant and Catholic churches suffered under the Nazi attempt to make them an arm of the state, and several dissident church leaders, such as Martin Niemöller, were imprisoned.[47] It was Niemöller who perhaps best described the way in which the Nazis were able to establish their state of terror:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the trade-unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.[48]

The terror was not just reserved for Jews and political opponents. The Nazi moved swiftly to crush other groups that they considered outside of their definition of “Good Germans.” As early as 1934 the Nazis took steps to deal with “defective human beings:”

A New Year’s present for Mother Nature was packaged last week by Bachelor Adolf Hitler who has said that “Nature is unable to cope with modern life.”

German surgeons will do the coping. Under decrees issued last week and effective Jan. 1, the Nazi State, according to Chancellor Hitler’s spokesman, will set out to deprive 400,000 “defective” German men & women of their reproductive powers in the next two years.

The new decree makes it the duty of every German doctor to denounce to the State any German who seems to be “defective…. Millions of Germans scanned anxiously the State’s list of grounds for sterilization: 1) hereditary deafness; 2) hereditary alcoholism; 3) hereditary blindness; 4) St. Vitus’ dance (a disorder of the nervous system); 5) epilepsy; 6) manic-depressive insanity; 7) congenital idiocy; 8) schizophrenia (split personality); and 9) severe physical deformity.[49]

Two hundred “Hereditary Health Courts” were set up. Two doctors and one judge had the power to order ‘defectives” to be sterilized. In 1940, a euthanasia program known as Operation T4 began to kill the mentally ill or physically handicapped. Patients were taken out of institutions to locations such as Hartheim Castle and the Hadamar Institute to be gassed in specially constructed chambers disguised as showers.[50] Between January 1940 and August 1941 over 70,000 people were killed in the euthanasia program. The program was halted in 1941 when prominent German Protestant and Catholic church leaders protested to the government, although the handicapped and mentally ill continued to be killed under less formalized procedures.

Homosexuals were declared to be “socially aberrant’ and the Nazis moved swiftly in 1933 to outlaw all homosexual organizations. In 1935, homosexual acts among German men were made subject to punishment by ten years of imprisonment. Later, homosexuals were deported to concentration camps. Of the approximately 1.2 million homosexuals living in Germany at the time of the Nazi takeover, an estimate of between 10,000 and 15,000 perished in the camps.[51]

Jehovah’s Witnesses were a small religious minority that infuriated the Nazis by refusing to serve in the army or utter the “Heil Hitler” salute. Ten thousand Witnesses were sent to concentration camps and between 2,500 and 5,000 died. Permitted to leave if they renounced their beliefs, most refused. In addition, Freemasons and Gypsies were also actively persecuted. Of the estimated 950,000 Gypsies who fell under Nazi control between 1933-1945, between 220,000 and 500,000 were murdered.

As in Italy, the Nazis retained capitalism and private property. The state, however, rigidly controlled both business and labor. Labor unions were dissolved, and workers and employers were formed into a new organization, the Labor Front. As in Mussolini’s corporate state, strikes were forbidden. The Nazis took compulsory dues from workers’ wages to support Nazi organizations. The state also set up the “Strength Through Joy” movement which provided sports events, musical festivals, plays, movies, and vacations at low cost.

The government tried to solve the nation’s very serious economic problems by confiscating valuable Jewish property and increasing the national debt by a third to provide work for the unemployed. To create jobs, the first four-year plan was established in 1933, undertaking an extensive program of public works and rearmament. The unemployed were put to work on public projects (especially the system of superhighways, the Autobahnen), in munitions factories, and in the army. Overlapping the first program, the second four-year plan was initiated in 1936. The objective of this plan was to set up a self-sufficient economic state. The gross national product had increased by 68% between 1933 and 1938, and unemployment had dropped from a high of six million to virtually nothing.

In naming Adolf Hitler its Man of the Year for 1938, an award given to “the person who for better or for worse, had most influenced events in the preceding year,” Time made this assessment of Nazi rule:

What Adolf Hitler & Co. did to Germany in less than six years was applauded wildly and ecstatically by most Germans. He lifted the nation from post-war defeatism. Under the swastika Germany was unified. His was no ordinary dictatorship, but rather one of great energy and magnificent planning. The “socialist” part of National Socialism might be scoffed at by hard-&-fast Marxists, but the Nazi movement nevertheless had a mass basis. The 1,500 miles of magnificent highways built, schemes for cheap cars and simple workers’ benefits, grandiose plans for rebuilding German cities made Germans burst with pride. Germans might eat many substitute foods or wear ersatz (an artificial substitute) clothes but they did eat.

What Adolf Hitler & Co. did to the German people in that time left civilized men and women aghast. Civil rights and liberties have disappeared. Opposition to the Nazi regime has become tantamount to suicide or worse. Free speech and free assembly are anachronisms (out of order). The reputations of the once-vaunted German centers of learning have vanished. Education has been reduced to a National Socialist catechism (set of beliefs).

Germany’s 700,000 Jews have been tortured physically, robbed of homes and properties, denied a chance to earn a living, chased off the streets. Now they are being held for “ransom,” a gangster trick through the ages. But not only Jews have suffered. Out of Germany has come a steady, ever-swelling stream of refugees, Jews and Gentiles, liberals and conservatives, Catholics as well as Protestants, who could stand Nazism no longer....

Meanwhile, Germany has become a nation of uniforms, goose-stepping to Hitler’s tune, where boys of ten are taught to throw hand grenades, where women are regarded as breeding machines. Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany’s bourgeois (middle class) economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled.... [52]

The overall popularity of the Nazi regime in Germany could not be disputed. Admirers mobbed Hitler whenever he appeared in public. The Nazis had come to power in 1933 as a minority party, which many observers were convinced could not last. By 1937, their grasp on power was unchallenged. As a result, the need for coercion declined. The number of concentration camp prisoners dropped from almost 27,000 in the fall of 1933 to approximately 10,000 in 1937.

Hitler’s rise to power had been an unfortunate, yet logical effect of the humiliations Germany had suffered since 1918. The nation, stunned by military defeat, humbled at Versailles, ravaged by the Great Inflation, and finally devastated by the Great Depression, had turned to a man with the easy answers. Hitler could both explain away Germany’s failures and provide hope of future greatness. Part of this promise of greatness would, however, soon plunge the world into a Second World War.

Jeffrey T. Stroebel, The Sycamore School, 1996. Revised 2003.

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[1] The United States and Britain maintained parity between their navies. Japan, an emerging power in Asia was to have three capital ships for every five of the two main powers. France and Italy were limited to a ratio of 1.67:5. This agreement collapsed in 1935 when Japan no longer agreed to accept a position inferior to the U.S. and Britain.

[2]“Benito” was in honor of the Mexican revolutionary hero Benito Juarez.

[3] Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism: 1870-1925, (London: Methuen & Co., 1967), p. 518.

[4] This condition had been accurately predicted by John Maynard Keynes in his critique of the Treaty of Versailles, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).

[5] The United States was one of the last major powers to extend diplomatic recognition to the U.S.S.R. in 1933.

[6] This is similar to the system used in Israel today.

[7] Right-wing political pamphlet quoted in Richard Overy and Andrew Wheatcroft, The Road to War (London: MacMillan, 1989), p. 126.

[8] Overy and Wheatcroft, The Road to War, p. 126.

[9] As a sign of the dramatic change from the Conservative and Liberal governments, only years before MacDonald had been described as a dangerous radical in a police file.

[10] The term “dole” is British slang for welfare or unemployment payments.

[11] Mustafa Kemal, like most Moslem Turks, was given only one name at birth (Mustafa). The second name of Kemal was bestowed upon him in school to distinguish him from another Mustafa. Kemal means “perfection” and was given in recognition of his abilities as a student.

[12] The fez permitted devout Moslems to both protect their head against the hot sun and touch the ground with their forehead in prayer.

[13] After six months of occupation the tonnage of coal delivered to France as reparations was barely more than what the Ruhr had produced in the eleven days prior to the French occupation. 132 Germans died and 150,000 were expelled from their homes as a result of anti-French activities during the first nine months of the occupation.

[14] The information on inflation is taken from Alex de Jonge, The Weimar Chronicle, Prelude to Hitler (New York: New American Library, 1978).

[15] Alan Bullock, Hitler, A Study in Tyranny (New York: Torchbooks, 1964), p. 91.

[16] 1,000 billion of the old marks could be exchanged for one mark of the new currency.

[17] Comments of Stefan Zweig, quoted in Peter Gay, Weimar Culture, (New York: Harper, 1970), p. 129.

[18] Gay, Weimar Culture, p. 24.

[19] Although Jews accounted for less than 9% of the city’s population in 1910.

[20] John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977), pp. 79-97.

[21] Time 19 November 1923.

[22] Time 7 April 1924. Hitler’s lenient sentence was typical of Weimar justice as violent acts of the left were severely punished, while those of the right received lenient or no punishment. Of the 22 murders that could be traced to left-wing elements between 1918 and 1922, 17 were rigorously punished, 10 with the death sentence. Of the 354 murders traced to right-wing elements, only one was punished with a lengthy prison term. The right-wing murders of Matthias Erzberger, a figure hated by the right for his role in the armistice and Treaty of Versailles, went totally unpunished. Gay, Weimar Culture, pp. 20-21.

[23] See, for example, William Sheridan Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984), pp. 139-142. Allen’s work chronicles the experience of a single German town (Northeim in Hanover) during the Nazi rise to power. Allen notes that Lutheran ministers had “been among the most popular and effective Nazi speakers in the town. In fact, a large measure of Northeim’s support for the NSDAP (Nazi Party) had come because the Nazis posed as a devoutly religious party (p. 284).”

[24] In the turbulent early days of the Weimar Republic, President Ebert had issued 136 decrees, but as greater stability ensued between 1925 and 1930, no presidential decrees were needed. Between April and December 1931, 40 emergency decrees were issued and no laws were passed by the Reichstag. In 1932 there were 59 decrees and 5 Reichstag laws. See Eugene Davidson, The Making of Adolf Hitler (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1977), p. 284.

[25] German unemployment reached 33% by the end of 1932. The worst U.S. unemployment rate was 25%, Britain’s 20%.

[26] Davidson, The Making of Adolf Hitler, p. 294. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 39.

[27] Time 25 August 1930.

[28] Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 435.

[29] Hindenburg won 53% in the run-off, Hitler 37%, and Ernst Thälmann, the Communist candidate, 10%.

[30] Time 6 February 1933.

[31] Toland, Adolf Hitler, p. 406.

[32] Time 27 March 1933.

[33] Time 3 April 1933.

[34] Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 425.

[35] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manhiem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), p. 679.

[36] Judaism is the oldest of the three major religions. It is 2,000 years older than Christianity and 2,600 years older than Islam. Today there are about fifteen million Jews in the world, six million in the United States and four million in Israel.

[37] The Western Wall in Jerusalem, also known as the Wailing Wall, is all that remains of the Second Temple, which was destroyed in AD 70. Today, the wall remains a sacred place for Jews. Many take pilgrimages to the wall to pray and hold religious ceremonies.

[38] There is some inconclusive evidence that the family of Christopher Columbus was among these “New Christians.”

[39] Abba Eban, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews (New York: Summit, 1984), pp. 199-200.

[40] Despite this attitude, Jews did serve as non-commissioned officers and officers in the reserve.

[41] Gershom Scholem, “On the Social Psychology of the Jews in Germany, 1900-1933,” in David Bronson, ed. Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933: The Problematic Symbiosis (Heidelburg: C. Winter, 1979), 12.

[42] Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, pp. 416-417.

[43] Time 21 November 1938.

[44] John V. H. Dippel, Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 208.

[45] Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), p. 49.

[46] Time 22 May 1933.

[47] Niemöller was a highly decorated U-boat officer in the First World War.

[48] Berenbaum, The World Must Know, p. 41.

[49] Time 1 January 1934. Sterilization of the mentally handicapped was not, however, limited to Germany. Between 1907 and 1939, 30,000 such operations were performed in the U.S., half of these in California.

[50] These gassings predated the use of the same techniques to kill Jews and other concentration camp victims later in the war. Several veterans of the T4 program took their “expertise” to the extermination camps of Poland. Included among these were Christian Wirth the future commandant of the Treblinka death camp and Franz Stangl commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka.

[51] Persecution of lesbians was much more infrequent. Male homosexuals deported to concentration camps were identified by a pink triangle in the camps. When the war ended, many of the homosexuals who were incarcerated under the 1935 law were required to complete their sentences under the Allied occupation of Germany. The 1935 measures were not repealed until 1969. In 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states were entitled to outlaw homosexual acts in a manner similar to the Nazi prohibitions.

[52] Time 3 January 1939.