Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (67 page)

The next morning André Chamson (head of the French delegation) announced that he and Julien Benda, author of
La Trahison des clercs
, must leave Madrid at once. For if by any chance either of them were killed, France could not choose but declare war on Franco, and this action would lead to world war. Chamson refused to accept the responsibility for such a catastrophe.
¹⁰⁰

Spender himself was already a veteran of the front where, at a machine-gun emplacement,

… the gunner in charge of it insisted that I should fire a few shots into the Moorish lines. I did this, positively praying that I might not by any chance hit an Arab. Suddenly the front seemed to me like a love relationship between the two sides, locked here in their opposite trenches … and for a visitor to intervene in their deathly orgasm seemed a terrible frivolity.
¹⁰¹

Meanwhile the terrible frivolity behind the Republican lines continued. As Orwell pointed out, each of the Left factions was obsessed by the need to be in a strong military position after Franco was beaten, and allowed this to affect their tactics and conduct of the war. To keep up numbers they avoided casualties, and the Communists often deliberately held up artillery or air support in order that
POUM
or other units which they wanted weakened should be broken.
¹⁰²
After the destruction of the
POUM
, Republican morale declined steadily. In these circumstances, Franco opted for a war of attrition throughout the appalling winter of 1937–8, and in April he cut Republican Spain in two. Thereafter it was really a matter of time only, with Franco taking no chances and insisting on overwhelming superiority. By the autumn Stalin had tired of the war, had extracted the last ounce of propaganda value out of it, had completed his purges and was already thinking of a new deal, either with the Western democracies or, more likely, with Hitler. He had also got all the Republic’s gold. So he cut off aid, and Franco was able to open his last Catalonian offensive, just before Christmas, confident that the end was near. Barcelona fell on 28 January 1939, and Madrid on 28 March. Franco had fought the war without passion, and when he heard it was over he did not even look up from his desk.
¹⁰³

The day Madrid surrendered, Hitler denounced Germany’s 1934 treaty with Poland, having occupied the whole of Czechoslovakia a week before. It was obvious that a European war was inevitable and imminent. Franco’s reaction was a brutal attempt to seal off Spain not only from the coming catastrophe but, as far as possible, from the whole of the twentieth century. Spain had a long tradition of crude social engineering and internal crusades. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it had expelled in turn vast numbers of Moors, Jews and Protestants. By such macro-persecution it had avoided the Reformation and the horrors of the Wars of Religion. The failure to
adopt similar methods of drastic extrusion had permitted the French Revolution to enter and thus crucified the country for fifteen years of civil war, as Goya’s drawings bore eloquent testimony. Now the invasion by post-Christian totalitarian culture had brought another three years of martyrdom. On the Nationalist side, 90,000 had been killed in action; 110,000 Republican soldiers were dead; there were a million cripples; 10,000 had died in air-raids, 25,000 from malnutrition, 130,000 murdered or shot behind the lines; now 500,000 were in exile, half never to return.
¹⁰⁴
The destruction of treasure had been immense, ranging from the famous library of Cuenca Cathedral to Goya’s earliest paintings in his birthplace, Fuentodos.

Franco determined to end the destructive process of corruption by amputating the agonized limb of Spanish collectivism. His feelings towards the Left anticipated those of the wartime Allies towards Nazism: he got unconditional surrender first, then de-Communized, but in a manner closer to the drumhead purges of liberated France than the systematic trials in Germany. It was not a Lenin-style totalitarian massacre by classes: the Law of Political Responsibilities of 9 February 1939 dealt with responsibility for crimes on an individual basis (the only exception was Freemasons of the eighteenth degree or higher). Strictly speaking, there was no death penalty for political offences as such.
¹⁰⁵
But there was a great rage in the conquerors – the Interior Minister, Suñer, wanted revenge for his brothers who had been shot in Republican prisons, and he was typical of thousands – and it was not difficult to pin capital crimes on Republican officials of all degrees. Mussolini’s son-in-law Ciano reported from Spain in July: ‘Trials going on every day at a speed which I would call summary …. There are still a great number of shootings. In Madrid alone between 200 and 250 a day, in Barcelona 150, in Seville 80.’
¹⁰⁶
Some tens of thousands thus died, but the figure of 193,000 sometimes given for the total is wrong, since many death-sentences passed by courts were commuted. Franco made it clear on 31 December 1939 that many long prison sentences (fifteen years was usual) would have to be served: it is necessary to liquidate the hatred and passions left us by our past war. But this liquidation must not be accomplished in the liberal manner, with enormous and disastrous amnesties, which are a deception rather than a gesture of forgiveness. It must be Christian, achieved by means of redemption through work accompanied by repentance and penitance.’
¹⁰⁷
In 1941 the gaol population was still 233,375; scores of thousands of those who had run the Republic died in prison or in exile. Others were banned from a huge range of public or private occupations by a decree of 25 August 1939, which put the objectives of the purge before government efficiency or the interests of the economy.
¹⁰⁸
Thus ancient and traditional Spain, led by a man who regretted every second
that had passed since the old world ended in 1914, sought to immunize herself from the present. The attempt did not succeed in the long run; but it gave Spain some protection from the pandemic which now overwhelmed Europe.

TEN
The End of Old Europe

The age of aggression was bound to end in a world war. Nevertheless, it is vital to understand precisely how and why this climax came about, for what happened in the 1930s determined the contours of our age in the 1980s. On 5 April 1940, four days before the Nazi invasion of Norway began the European phase of the war in earnest, Goebbels gave a secret briefing to selected German journalists, one of whom made a transcript. The key passage is as follows:

Up to now we have succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark concerning Germany’s real goals, just as before 1932 our domestic foes never saw where we were going or that our oath of legality was just a trick. We wanted to come to power legally, but we did not want to use power legally …. They could have suppressed us. They could have arrested a couple of us in 1925 and that would have been that, the end. No, they let us through the danger zone. That’s exactly how it was in foreign policy too …. In 1933 a French premier ought to have said (and if I had been the French premier I would have said it): ‘The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote
Mein Kampf
, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!’ But they didn’t do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs.
And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!’
¹

This remarkable statement is, on the whole, an accurate summary of what happened in the 1930s. It was adumbrated by Hitler’s secret briefing of his Service chiefs on 3 February 1933, his first meeting with them after his assumption of supreme power. He told them he was going to overthrow the Versailles settlement and make Germany the greatest power in Europe, and he emphasized: ‘The most dangerous period is that of rearmament. Then we shall see
whether France has statesmen. If she does, she will not grant us time but will jump on us.’
²

Everyone knew Hitler’s aims were ambitious. The German masses believed they could and would be attained without war, by assertive diplomacy, backed by armed strength. The generals were told that war would almost certainly be necessary, but that it would be limited and short. In fact Hitler’s real programme was far more extensive than the generals, let alone the masses, realized and necessarily involved not merely war but a series of wars. Hitler meant what he said when he wrote in
Mein Kampf:
‘Germany must either be a world power or there will be no Germany.’ When he used the term ‘world power’ he meant something greater than Wilhelmine Germany, merely the dominant power in central Europe: he meant ‘world’ in the full sense. The lesson he had learnt from the First World War and from Ludendorff’s analysis of it was that it was essential for Germany to effect a break-out from its Central European base, which could always be encircled.
³
In Hitler’s view, Ludendorff had just begun to attain this, at Brest-Litovsk, when the ‘stab in the back’ by the Home Front wrecked everything. Hence his real plans began where Brest-Litovsk ended: the clock was to be put back to spring 1918, but with Germany solid, united, fresh and, above all, ‘cleansed’.

Hitler’s aims can be reconstructed not merely from
Mein Kampf
itself, with its stress on the ‘East Policy’, but from his early speeches and the so-called ‘Second’ or
Secret Book
of 1928.
⁴
This material makes it clear that the ‘cleansing’ process – the elimination of the Jews – was essential to the whole long-term strategy. Being a race-socialist as opposed to a class-socialist, Hitler believed the dynamic of history was race. The dynamic was interrupted when race-poisoning took place. The poison came, above all, from the Jews. He admired Jews as ‘negative supermen’. In his
Table-Talk
he said that if 5,000 Jews emigrated to Sweden, in no time at all they would occupy all the key positions: this was because ‘blood purity’, as he put it in
Mein Kampf
, ‘is a thing the Jew preserves better than any other people on earth’. The Germans, on the other hand, had been ‘poisoned’. That was why they lost the First World War. Even he was poisoned: that was why he occasionally made mistakes – ‘all of us suffer from the sickness of mixed, corrupt blood’.
⁵
Race-poisoning was a comparatively common obsession in the time of Hitler’s youth, rather as ecological poisoning became an obsession of many in the 1970s and 1980s. The notion of ubiquitous poisoning appealed strongly to the same type of person who accepted conspiracy theories as the machinery of public events. As with the later ecologists, they thought the race-poison was spreading fast, that total
disaster was imminent, and that it would take a long time to reverse even if the right policies were adopted promptly. Hitler calculated it would need a hundred years for his regime to eliminate racial poisoning in Germany: on the other hand, if Germany became the first nation-race to do so successfully, it would inevitably become ‘lord of the Earth’
(Mein Kampf).

What distinguished Hitlerian race-theory was, first, this rooted belief that ‘cleansing’ could make Germany the first true superpower, and ultimately the first paramount power in the world; and, secondly, his absolute conviction that ‘Jewish race-poison’ and Bolshevism were one and the same phenomenon. In 1928, when he wrote his Second Book, he did not appreciate that old-style ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism had ceased to exist and that Stalin’s Russia was in essentials as anti-Semitic as Tsardom had been. On the contrary, he believed that the Soviet Union was a Jewish cultural phenomenon. Hence the object of his policy was to combat ‘an inundation of diseased bacilli which at the moment have their breeding-ground in Russia’.
⁶
Thus the ‘cleansing’ fitted in perfectly with the resumption of traditional German East policy, but on a far more ambitious scale.

Hitler’s full programme, therefore, was as follows. First, gain control of Germany itself, and begin the cleansing process at home. Second, destroy the Versailles settlement and establish Germany as the dominant power in Central Europe. All this could be achieved without war. Third, on this power basis, destroy the Soviet Union (by war) to rid the ‘breeding-ground’ of the ‘bacillus’ and, by colonization, create a solid economic and strategic power-base from which to establish a continental empire, in which France and Italy would be mere satellites. In the fourth stage Germany would acquire a large colonial empire in Africa, plus a big ocean navy, to make her one of the four superpowers, in addition to Britain, Japan and the United States. Finally, in the generation after his death, Hitler envisaged a decisive struggle between Germany and the United States for world domination.
⁷