Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (14 page)

Much Italian policy was, of course, reminiscent of Nazi views on race and empire. But between Hitler’s and Mussolini’s imperial projects there were two key differences. One was that Germans took racial exclusionism (and indeed the law generally) more seriously than Italians: the Nuremberg laws operated more efficiently than the 1938 race laws. The second was that while Fascism—like older imperialisms—saw its civilizing burden lying chiefly outside Europe, National Socialism did not: and just here, no doubt—by turning Europeans back into barbarians and slaves—lay the Nazis’ greatest offence against the sensibility of the continent.

Events in 1938–40 showed that the kind of leadership Nazi Germany desired in Europe could be obtained by a combination of conquest and “hegemony.” Military conquest led to either annexation—as with Austria—or occupation: the invasion of Bohemia-Moravia in the spring of 1939, for example, was interpreted as demonstrating the importance of “the phenomenon of leadership in the international community.”
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The second Vienna accord of August 1940—a deal brokered by Hitler to settle territorial disputes in central Europe—illustrated the possibilities of hegemony: Germany gained rights to Romanian oil exploitation, acted as regional arbiter between Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, and created “trustee rights” over the German minorities in those countries.

German commentators hailed this last step as a vast improvement on the old League system of minority protection: these “laws for the protection of the folk-group” gave the “mother country” the right to intervene in the event of disputes between the minority and the host government; they also turned the entire “folk-group” into a collective
legal entity. But such legislation looked a lot better at the height of German power in the summer of 1940 than it did a mere four years later, for it made ethnic Germans hostage to the fortunes of Hitler’s war.
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In recent years, a “little Englander” school of revisionist historians has once again suggested that an Anglo-German war was avoidable. Was there perhaps more to appeasement than subsequent criticism allows, and less, perhaps, to Churchill’s insistence on confrontation? What if no British guarantee had been given Poland in 1939? Or if Hitler’s peace feelers had not been rebuffed in the summer of 1940? Might Whitehall not have done a deal with Germany which accepted Nazi control of eastern Europe in return for the continued existence of the British Empire? Did it not, perhaps, do something similar with Stalin a few years later?

If Hitler was, as A. J. P. Taylor once famously implied, just another politician, these arguments might have some force. But what weakens Taylor’s analysis of the origins of the war is his indifference to the role of ideology. The Second World War did not start because of diplomatic misunderstanding or confusion, nor even because of Hitler’s deceit or duplicity. Rather it started because—very late in the day—Hitler’s opponents realized they were faced with “a clash of two worlds.” Berlin and London were not playing the same game, though some on both sides wished they were.
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It is true that the British Empire was ruined by the cost of fighting Hitler. What, however, is doubtful is whether it could have been saved by joining him. Germany’s own colonial agenda troubled the British, who were reluctant to buy off Nazi demands in Europe with bits of Africa. The ideological gulf between the two powers was evident here too, and Nazi colonial planners harshly criticized the British for their excessively lax racial policies. Any alliance would therefore have involved the British abandoning their liberal imperialist creed (and belief in indirect rule) for hardline racialism. Such an alliance was actually envisaged by Alfred Rosenberg, a leading Nazi ideologue—Britain and Germany together defending the white race by land and sea. It implied, however, an impossible transformation in British values: these were liberal rather than authoritarian, while British
racism—which certainly existed—was based more upon culture than biology.
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The ideological gulf which existed between British and German society was revealed by the shocked British reaction to news of the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938. More than anything else up to that point, this event turned British opinion against appeasement.
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Over the next few months, the British and French governments were forced to reappraise their entire policy, even though after Munich the omens were poor. “The first part of Mr Hitler’s programme—integration of Germans into the Reich—is completed,” wrote Robert Coulondre, the new French ambassador in Berlin, in December 1938. “Now the time for
Lebensraum
has arrived.”
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Appeasement had been premised on the assumption that Nazi Germany was basically pursuing a revisionist agenda; the invasion of Bohemia-Moravia in March 1939 was the first sign that Hitler’s aims went beyond annexing the areas inhabited by ethnic Germans. It also indicated Hitler’s contemptuous attitude towards international agreements. In response, Britain and France belatedly sought to resuscitate the eastern security tier which they had created at Versailles by offering security guarantees to Poland and Romania. It was an unconvincing gesture.

Circumstances had changed greatly since 1919. Nazi control of the former Czechoslovakia now made strategic nonsense of an eastern alliance, while assuring Germany of the substantial resources in armaments and gold of the Czech state. There was no serious coordination of military plans between London and Paris, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Bucharest, on the other. Worse still, Russian power was restored, raising the spectre of a German-Soviet carve-up in the East. Blinkered by anti-communism—the same anti-communism which led Lord Halifax to welcome Germany as a “bastion against Bolshevism”—neither the British nor the French made a serious attempt to reach agreement with Stalin. This failure doomed the new independent states of eastern Europe, and turned the continent itself into an enormous laboratory in Nazi (and later communist) empire-building. The violence, which Europe had found it so easy to ignore when committed abroad in its name, proved harder to stomach at home.

THREE

Healthy Bodies, Sick Bodies

Ten Commandments for Choosing a Spouse:

1. Remember that you are German.

2. If of sound stock, do not remain unwed.

3. Keep your body pure.

4. Keep spirit and soul pure.

5. As a German, choose someone of German or Nordic blood for your partner.

6. When choosing your spouse, look into their lineage.

7. Health is a precondition of external beauty.

8. Marry only out of love.

9. Seek not a playmate but a partner in marriage.

10. Wish for as many children as possible.

—FROM THE
HAUSBUCH FÜR DIE DEUTSCHE FAMILIE
(BERLIN, N.D.)

These tips for domestic harmony came near the beginning of the
Handbook for the German Family
, which the Nazi authorities routinely issued to every young couple. Its excellent collection of recipes was accompanied by advice on childcare, on looking after the home, diet and racial health. A special section summarized the Nuremberg laws and carried helpful charts to clarify family bloodlines and to investigate genealogies contaminated by marriage with Jews. Domestic health and happiness—readers were reminded—were no longer merely a matter for individual choice and satisfaction. Weimar’s self-centred
liberalism had been replaced by National Socialism’s concern for the community as a whole. Before the recipes came a useful saying of the Führer: “If one lacks the strength to struggle for one’s own health, one loses the right to life in this world of struggle.”

Such a book shows us values which had not only penetrated German life, but were also part of a much broader European discourse about national and family health in the inter-war years. The Third Reich might have taken this discourse to new extremes, and highlighted the role of race in a way unmatched elsewhere. But the idea that family health concerned society more generally, that the nation needed racially sound progeny, that the state should therefore intervene in private life to show people how to live—all this ran right across the political spectrum of inter-war Europe, reflecting the tensions and stresses of an insecure world in which nation-states existed in rivalry with one another, their populations decimated by one war and threatened by the prospect of another.

Fears for national strength were reinforced by the long-term decline in birth rates which had set in before the First World War. “The attention of many European governments has been called to the decreasing birth rate of the white races during the last decades,” noted an Italian journalist in 1937. “Most biologists, economists and politicians fully endorse the view that numbers are the strength of the Nation.” After 1918, the state tried to correct this trend by setting up Health Ministries and promoting family values. People were encouraged and exhorted to have more babies, while abortion and contraception were discouraged or criminalized. Living and housing conditions were improved, as were municipal amenities for the masses. Physical fitness was promoted through swimming in the new public lidos, rambling in the countryside or cycling during extended paid holidays.

But the development of social policy had a darker side as well: safeguarding the “quality” as well as the quantity of the nation’s human stock—as doctors, scientists and policy-makers recommended—implied reducing the dangers to public health. These were not only slums, poverty and malnutrition; they also encompassed the physically and mentally ill, who were shut away, sterilized or even in the extreme case killed for the greater good of society. Juvenile delinquents
or the sexually promiscuous were also seen as jeopardizing family stability and public order. And sometimes the threat to the nation was defined even more broadly in terms of an entire class—as in the so-called “social problem group,” which supposedly existed in inter-war Britain—or in terms of race. The Third Reich combined biological anti-Semitism with a highly efficient state apparatus to produce the most modern form of this kind of racial welfare state in Europe.

As we now know, Sweden, Switzerland and several other European countries continued to employ sterilization and other coercive measures in social policy until relatively recently. Such practices make Hitler’s Germany look less exceptional and closer to the mainstream of European thought than once seemed possible. Nevertheless, the similarities should not be exaggerated. The Nazi
Volksgemeinschaft
(or People’s Community) was promoted through what one social commentator called the “life-ensuring state,” but of course this “life-ensuring state” also believed it was necessary to take the life of others, expropriating their goods and redistributing them for the benefit of those inside the nation. Its emergence prompted both imitators (as in Italy) and critics—especially in Britain—who attacked the idea that racism had any basis in science, or more generally that social policy ought to be made on the basis of coercion. The Second World War became a struggle to define the relationship between the community as a whole, the individual citizen and social policy, paving the way for the very different forms of welfare state which would emerge after 1945. Fascist welfare states taught democrats the lesson that granting individual liberties was not enough to secure people’s loyalties in an era of mass politics. Hitler’s defeat would allow democracy to root itself once more in European life through a new sense of social solidarity and national cohesion.

WAR AND THE DESTRUCTION OF BODIES

Somewhere above eight million men lost their lives in the First World War—over 6,000 deaths each day of the conflict. With the casualties suffered as a result of the Russian Revolution, of flu, typhus and of the other conflicts that continued into the early 1920s, probably as many
as thirteen million Europeans died. France lost one in ten of its active male population, Serbia and Romania even more.

Most of the dead were young men, whose absence in post-war Europe had profound and devastating consequences for those who remained. Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneering researcher into human sexuality, described the war as the “greatest sexual catastrophe ever suffered by civilised Man.” During the fighting gender roles had already changed dramatically, as women and children fended for themselves without husbands or fathers. After 1918 the traditional family came under even greater strain: by then there were around 500,000 war widows in Germany alone, most of whom would never remarry.
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To millions of other women, the men who came home from the war carried the physical and mental scars of their experiences. They were “destroyed men” (in a contemporary phrase) and “wounded patriarchs.” Incapable of reintegration into civilian life, haunted by wartime memories, many committed suicide—rates rose fast at the end of the war—drank themselves into oblivion or tried to reassert their authority by beating their wives and children. While governments erected noble monuments to commemorate the dead, mutilated veterans begged at street corners or looked for work. Given this battering inflicted by total war upon Europe’s traditional patriarchal family, it is not surprising that there was much talk of “youth running wild” in a newly “fatherless community.” The crisis atmosphere of 1918/19 with insurrections, revolution and mutinies, increased the sense of a complete collapse of social order. “The revolution and its consequences have been particularly harmful for the psyche of many people, particularly of youth,” observed a Prussian civil servant. “The foundations have been shattered. State institutions have almost completely lost their authority, as has the Church. The educational influence of parents has often been reduced to nil.”
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