Europe: A History (201 page)

Political scientists worry too much about the theoretical classification of Nazism. Some, after Arendt, accept that it was a member of the totalitarian family, others, after Nolte, think of it as one of the ‘three faces of Fascism’; others prefer to leave it as a movement
sui generis.
⁴⁷
It was one, none, or all of these things, according to the criteria one chooses. Less than fifty years after the last Nazi fell from grace, many analysts are still strongly swayed by personal rancour, by political bias, or by the victors’ syndrome. Suffice it to say, if personal views are permitted, that Nazism was the most repulsive movement of modern times. The ideals of its utopia were no less ugly than the realities of its Reich.

Europe, wracked by the Depression, was in poor shape to meet the challenge posed by Stalin and Hitler. The Western Powers were absorbed with their own affairs. The USA was absent. The states of East Central Europe were weak and divided. At the very time that the idea of collective security was mooted, Europe’s attention was diverted by the Civil War in Spain.

Britain at the end of the Great War had retreated into its island and imperial concerns. There were crises enough in Ireland, in India, and in Palestine. Despite the formation of two Labour governments, labour troubles multiplied at home. The General Strike of May 1926, the launching of the communist
Daily Worker
(1930), the Labour Party’s expulsion of its own leader, Ramsay MacDonald, for forming a National Government (1931), and the creation of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (1932), all took place to the background of unemployment rising to 3 million. The Conservative Government headed first by Stanley Baldwin and then by Neville Chamberlain was elected in 1935 on promises of stability and good management. Its principal headache prior to the Munich Crisis lay in the young King’s love affair with an American divorcee and his subsequent abdication. All the while, a remarkable series of social and technological advances were taking place: the initiation of the BBC (1922), of family planning (1922), of
full women’s suffrage (1928), and of paperback books (1935); the invention of television (1926), penicillin (1928), and the jet engine (1937). The British generation which came to maturity after the Great War felt that they had lived through enough stresses; the last thing they wanted to worry about was storm clouds on the Continent.

France could not withdraw from the Continent. In the 1920s French policy gave priority to building security, partly by the hard line towards Germany and partly through the ‘Little Entente’ in the East (see below). But then the emphasis shifted. The 1930s saw the heyday of French Algiers and French Saigon, whilst at home the Depression brought labour issues to the fore. édouard Daladier (1884–1970), a radical socialist, twice served as Premier, whilst shifting coalitions and the Stavisky scandal (1934) aroused widespread disillusionment. Political opinion polarized, with the Parti Communiste Francais and Action Française both vociferous. A whole stereotype of allegedly static French attitudes came to be associated with the name of Andre Maginot, Minister of War 1929–32 and constructor of a vast line of fortifications along the eastern frontier. This was not entirely fair. It is not true, as the British were later to charge, that the French army was unwilling to fight; but in the absence of any significant British force, it did not relish the task of fighting Germany single-handed; and it was locked into organizational plans that impeded early offensive action.

Scandinavia in the 1930s was fortunate in lying beyond the sphere of strategic tensions. Sweden was hard hit by recession in the iron trade, but responded under the Social Democrats by organizing the most comprehensive system of social welfare in the world, [
SOCIALIS
]

East Central Europe, in contrast, lay in the eye of the gathering storm. With Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other, its leaders had every right to be nervous. Security arrangements made by the French in the 1920s had several serious loopholes. The concept of the
cordon sanitaire
which began as a belt of states holding off Soviet Russia, was not pursued with any consistency. The ‘Little Entente’, which joined Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia in a cooperative system designed for the containment of a resurgent Hungary, did not include Poland—the largest country of the region—and from 1934 was matched by an independent Balkan Pact of Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey. The Western Powers had no high reputation for decisiveness. When Warsaw had been attacked by the Red Army in 1920, they sent a flurry of unsolicited military missions, but no military reinforcements. In 1934, when Marshal Pikudski took soundings in Paris about a preventative war against Nazi Germany, he elicited no response. The Western Powers never quite decided whether their policy in Eastern Europe was to be based on the new states, like Poland, or on the congenial post-Bolshevik Russia, which never materialized. From 1935, when their fear of Hitler outgrew their dislike of Stalin, they turned to a hyena to tame a wolf.

In East Central Europe, the international crisis of the 1930s inevitably affected internal affairs. The communist parties, usually illegal, had little popular support except in Czechoslovakia; but they acted as an important irritant, provoking
nationalist elements to react. Hitler, when he wasn’t inciting the German minorities in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, encouraged other nationalistic elements to emulate him. In the process dictatorships were strengthened, military budgets soared, the political role of the officer class increased; nationalism and ethnic conflicts of all sorts intensified.

In Poland, for example, the vicinity of Stalin and Hitler could be sensed on every hand. Marshal Pilsudski, who signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR in 1932 and another with Germany in 1934, sought an even-handed stance summed up in his ‘doctrine of two enemies’. The Polish Communist Party, which had opposed Poland’s independence in 1918–20, had adopted an internationalist and Trotskyite leaning. Its exiled leadership, largely Jewish, was liquidated
en masse
during Stalin’s purges. At the other extreme, the National Democratic movement spawned a fascistic offshoot, the
Falanga
, which was also banned. Militant nationalistic organizations sprang up in each of the national minorities. The Ukrainian OUN—a radical offshoot of the older UWO organisation— indulged in common terrorism and provoked brutal pacifications of the peasants. Zionism made rapid headway in the Jewish community, where ‘revisionist’ groups such as
Betar
spawned militants such as Menachem Begin or Yitzak Shamir, who would shine elsewhere. A Nazi Fifth Column was organized among the German minority. The activities of all these groups fuelled the fires of mutual hatred. After Pilsudski’s death in 1935, the so-called ‘Government of Colonels’ strove to check the centrifugal forces by forming a Camp of National Unity (OZON). But they found that the main opposition parties joined forces against them. General Sikorski joined Paderewski in Switzerland in the anti-government Morges Front. Priority was given to belated military reform and, in a state economic plan, to rearmament. The Foreign Minister, Colonel Józef Beck, trod an even-handed course which displeased the Western Powers, who wanted him to co-operate with Stalin. Towards his lesser neighbours, however, he thumped the nationalist drum. He set his eyes on the district of Zaolzie (Polish Cieszyn), which had been forcibly seized by the Czechs in 1919. And in early 1939 he sent a brusque ultimatum to Lithuania demanding an end to the state of undeclared war. Violent incidents were few; but the threat of violence was abroad.

Poland’s Jewish community—still the largest in Europe—lived out its last summers. In the late 1930s apprehension about the future was growing, especially when waves of Jewish refugees and expellees arrived from Germany. Various forms of petty harassment, in education, municipal laws, and employment, were on the rise, but there was nothing to compare with the rampages of the Nazis. For anyone who has seen the pictures and documents of those years, the image is one of a vibrant, variegated communal life. The Jewish
kahals
enjoyed full autonomy. Jewish parties of many hues were free to operate. There were Jewish film stars, Jewish boxing champions, Jewish women MPs, Jewish millionaires. To say, as is sometimes done, that Polish Jewry was ‘on the edge of destruction’ is true enough; but it is to read history backwards.
⁴⁸

Czechoslovakia had a reputation for democracy that was stronger abroad than
among the country’s own German, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, and Ruthenian minorities. Exceptionally for the region, it was highly industrialized, it had a genuine communist movement, and it looked to Russia for moral support. During the long presidency of the great T. G. Masaryk, who retired in 1935, it held together.

The ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes’ changed its name to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. It had no common history, language, or religion. It had come into being on the initiative of Slovenes and Croats from Austro-Hungary, who urged the Serbian establishment to admit them and then came to resent Serbian domination. The Serbian monarchy and army played the central role, particularly after the establishment of a unitary royal dictatorship in 1929. In Catholic Croatia, the national party of Stefan Radie* gained the upper hand in local affairs that had been impossible under Hungarian rule, only to find its voice blocked in Belgrade. Slovenia prospered quietly under its leader, Father Korosec, the original convenor of the Yugoslav National Council. Macedonia simmered. The climate of violence was heightened by the murder of Radió (1929) and then of King Alexander (1934). The democratic Serb opposition began to make common cause with the Croats. But time was short: ‘Yugoslavia is a necessity,’ wrote one observer, ‘not a predestined harmony.’
⁴⁹
(See Appendix III, p. 1319.) [
SARAJEVO
]

In the Mediterranean the main shock-waves were generated by Fascist Italy. Mussolini, who liked to talk in ancient Roman style of ‘Mare Nostro’ (Our Sea), was determined to become the regional power. Having eliminated the active opposition, who abandoned the parliament after the murder of a socialist deputy, he had a free hand. His designs were expedited by a pliant King and by the stage-managed organs of a streamlined ‘corporate state’. In the 1930s he looked further afield: Italian troops were sent to Abyssinia, to Spain, and, in March 1939, to Albania. The League of Nations recommended sanctions, the British and the French threatened reprisals, but nothing was actually done. Mussolini thrived by baiting Austria over South Tyrol. Prior to the ‘Pact of Steel’ of 22 May 1939, and the consequent Rome–Berlin Axis, he liked to flaunt his independence from Germany.

Civil strife had been festering in Spain for at least twenty years. The Spaniards met added misfortune by unleashing a civil war at a juncture when communist–fascist rivalry was moving to its peak throughout Europe. As a result, the military insurrection of 1936 attracted the attention of Hitler and Stalin. Spain was turned into a laboratory for Europe’s nastiest political practices. Three years of agony culminated in the resounding defeat of democracy. The roots of the conflict lay deep in Spain’s unstable history, in a polarized society, and in an intractable land problem. Over half of the land belonged to barely 1 per cent of the population. The mass of peasants lived on tiny holdings or on starvation wages. The small working class was badly hit by the Depression. The Roman Catholic Church, dominated by an ultra-reactionary hierarchy, was deeply involved in economic affairs as a major landowner and as the controller of many enterprises from the Banco Espíritu Santo to the Madrid tramways. An army whose ratio of
officers to men was unusually high was a bastion of ultramontane and monarchist sentiment. The result was a peculiarly obtuse and resistant social fortress composed of priest, squire, and officer, which habitually obstructed any reforms that touched their interests. Social protests were desperate, vicious, and anticlerical. Anarchists were prominent among both the rural labourers of the south and the workers’ unions of Barcelona. There were separatist provinces in Catalonia, in the Basque country, and, to some extent, in Galicia. In Morocco, where the long war against the Riffs ended in 1925, the army ruled supreme. In 1930–1 the latest lurch of the political seesaw brought the downfall of the military dictator, General Primo de Rivera, a lengthy interregnum, the
Dictablanca
, the abdication of King Alfonso, and finally the declaration of the Second Republic.