The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (121 page)

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In November 1936 Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which included a secret protocol committing each to non-intervention in the event that the other should become involved in a war with the Soviet Union. In November 1937 Mussolini removed his opposition to the Austrian
Anschluss
; the quid pro quo, which Hitler had long before envisaged, was the continuation of Italian sovereignty over the Germans of the South Tyrol. In February 1938 Germany recognized Manchukuo.

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The phrase, often attributed to Napoleon (who called the English
‘une nation de boutiquiers’
), in fact originated with Adam Smith in
The Wealth of Nations
: ‘To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.’

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The motion on February 9, 1933 was that ‘This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’. It was passed by 275 votes to 153. Churchill denounced it as an ‘abject, squalid, shameless avowal’; the
Sunday Times
as ‘unnecessary and in very poor taste’, but ‘in no way… representative of Oxford thought’. In fact the result reflected the influence of the Left in the Union at that time and is best understood as a vote against the government, not a vote for pacifism. When asked about the vote when he travelled through Germany less than a year later, Patrick Leigh Fermor ‘depicted the whole thing as merely another act of defiance against the older generation. The very phrasing of the motion – “Fight for King and Country” – was an obsolete cliche from an old recruiting poster: no one, not even the fiercest patriot, would use it now to describe a deeply-felt sentiment. My interlocutors asked: “Why not?” “
Für König und Vaterland
” sounded different in German ears: it was a bugle-call that had lost none of its resonance. What exactly did I mean? The motion was probably “
pour épater les bourgeois
,” I floundered. Here someone speaking a little French would try to help. “
Um die Börger zu erstaunen? Ach, so!
” A pause would follow. “A kind of joke, really,” I went on. “
Ein Scherz?
” they would ask. “
Ein Spass? Ein Witz?
” I was surrounded by glaring eyeballs and teeth… I could detect a kindling glint of scornful pity and triumph in the surrounding eyes which declared quite plainly their certainty that, were I right, England was too far gone in degeneracy and frivolity to present a problem.’

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Of all the leading Nazis, Ribbentrop was the one who most resembled a character out of a Heinrich Mann novel. Having tried to make his fortune in Montreal before the First World War, Ribbentrop had married into the Henkell Sekt family; got rich by importing champagne and Scotch; hobnobbed with Catholic politicians and Jewish businessmen; and acquired the prefix ‘von’by getting himself adopted by a suitably named old lady, who, in true Weimar fashion, had lost her money in the inflation and was grateful for the monthly pension he was offering. (Also in true Weimar fashion, Ribbentrop discontinued the payment some time later.) He met Goebbels in 1928; secured an introduction to Hitler via some old army friends; quietly joined the NSDAP in Bavaria in May 1932; and within months was acting as an intermediary between Hitler and Papen, whom he had known in the war. A number of the decisive meetings which led to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 took place in Ribbentrop’s Berlin-Dahlem villa. On October 1936 he was sent as ambassador to England, having convinced Hitler that he knew the ‘top people’ there. As Göring retorted: ‘The trouble is that they also know Ribbentrop.’

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Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, had cut his teeth in Lord Milner’s South African ‘Kindergarten’ of liberal-imperialist administrators. Though a scion of an old Catholic family, his friendship with Nancy Astor, the Conservative MP and wife of Viscount Astor, led him to join the Church of Christ Scientist as well as to visit Russia with George Bernard Shaw.

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Hilaire Belloc amused Duff Cooper with a poem that summed up Chamberlain’s policy nicely: ‘Dear Czechoslovakia / I don’t think they’ll attack yer / But I’m not going to back yer.’

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The ‘Uitlanders’ (Afrikaans for ‘foreigners’) were the British settlers who had been drawn to the Transvaal by the discovery of gold. They were treated by the Boers as aliens, furnishing the British government with a pretext for intervention in the region. Joseph Chamberlain, the arch-enemy of Home Rule for Ireland, demanded ‘Home Rule for the Rand’, meaning that the Uitlanders should be granted the vote after five years’ residence.

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It is interesting to note that Henlein was himself the product of a mixed marriage; his mother was Czech.

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They were Oliver Stanley (President of the Board of Trade), Walter Elliot (Minister for Health), Earl Winterton (Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) and Earl de la Warr (Lord Privy Seal).

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Ivone Kirkpatrick, from the British embassy, who accompanied Wilson, was mesmerized: ‘At intervals he rose from his chair and drifted towards the door as if resolved to leavethe room. I gazed at him in fascination. During oneofhis many tirades I was unable to take my eyes off him and my pencil remained poised above the paper… At times, particularly when Wilson spoke about the Prime Minister’s desire for a peaceful solution, Hitler pushed back his chair and smote his thigh in a gesture of frustrated rage.’

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Fuller had been the mastermind behind the British tank offensive at Cambrai in 1917. His frustration with the British Establishment led him to support Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

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Like Guderian, Rommel had also thought deeply about tank warfare. His two pre-war books,
Infantry Attacks
and
Tank Attacks
, brought him to Hitler’s attention, leading to his appointment ashead of Hitler Youth training and later commander of Hitler’s personal security battalion, which accompanied the Führer when he visited occupied Czechoslovakia.

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At the outbreak of war, the British had seven aircraft carriers, the Germans none; fifteen battleships to the Germans’ five; forty-nine cruisers to the Germans’ six; 192 destroyers to the Germans’ twenty-one.

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Two striking examples: Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (Celine) and Georges Rémi (Hergé). The former wasa confirmed anti-Semite well before the war and was imprisoned after the war for his role in the Vichy period. The latter (who was Belgian rather than French) had somewhat weaker prejudices against Jews and Americans, was strongly anti-Japanese and less than pro-German, but was certainly quite firmly anti-Communist. Some of the best of his Tintin stories were in fact produced during the German occupation:
he Crabe aux pinces d’or, Le Secret de la licorne, he Trésor de Rackham le rouge
and
Les Sept Boules de crystal
, all published in
Le Soir
between 1940 and 1944. After the war, Hergé was arrested for collaboration, but responded that he had merely answered King Leopold’s appeal not to abandon his country.

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Significantly, 15 out of 25 leadersof the
Einsatzgruppen
had doctorates. These were more extraordinary than ordinary men – members of the German academic elite. The number of groups was later increased from five to seven, with an additional
Einsatzkommando
from Danzig.

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It should be remembered that most of these territories had been ceded by Germany only under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Technically, they now became two new
Reichsgaue
: Danzig-West Prussia (including Danzig, Bromberg and Marien-werder) and Wartheland (including Posen and Littmannstadt, as Łódź was renamed). These were administratively part of the Reich but with the exception of Danzig treated as foreign territory for the purposes of travel. It was significant that they were defined as
Gaue
, the regional unit of party rather than state organization in Germany. Here the party would be able to act without the constraints of pre-1933 administrative institutions.

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It was Johst who wrote the famous line, usually misattributed to Göring: ‘
Wenn ich Kultur höre… entsichere ich meinen Browning
’ (When I hear the word culture… I take the safety catch off my Browning). The line comes from the opening scene of Johst’s best-known play,
Schlageter
(1933), a tribute to the Nazi ‘martyr’ Albert Leo Schlageter. He described his visit to Poland with Himmler in the book
Ruf des Reiches – Echo des Volkes! Eine Ostfahrt
(1940).

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The introduction of the star in Germany reopened the debate about the status of mixed marriages. It was decreed that the star would not be mandatory for ‘(a) a Jewish husband living in a mixed marriage if there are children born of this marriage who are not considered Jews. This also applies if the marriage is dissolved or if the only son was killed in the present war [and] (b) a Jewish wife in a childless mixed marriage for the duration of the marriage’.

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The scale of the Quit India revolt, which was condoned by the supposedly non-violent Gandhi (‘I will prefer anarchy to the present system of administration’), is often forgotten. In all, more than 60,000 people were arrested. According to official statistics 1,028 people were killed and 3,125 seriously injured, though the total number shot dead may have been as high as 2,500. More than 300 railway stations were destroyed or severely damaged.

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During his pre-war Marxist phase, Cripps had been expelled from the Labour Party for proposing a ‘Popular Front’ with the British Communists. This recommended him to Churchill as a potentially effective ambassador in Moscow.

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Out of the 153 divisions, there were 19 panzer divisions and just 15 of motorized infantry.

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For this sensationalist hypothesis, see Viktor Suvorov,
Icebreaker
(1990) and Con-stantine Pleshakov,
Stalin’s Folly
(2005). Suvorov’s (wholly circumstantial) evidence was the destruction of defensive assets along the Soviet western frontier in 1940 and early 1941. The documents cited by Pleshakov – several drafts ‘on the principles of the USSR’s armed forces deployment’ from 1940 and 1941 – show only that Stalin was contemplating a pre-emptive strike. They are mere sketches, without any of the sort of detailed operational planning the Germans had been working on since July 1940.

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Hess appears to have acted on his own initiative in the hope of brokering a separate peace with Britain on the eve of Barbarossa. He flew to Scotland apparently in the erroneous belief that the Duke of Hamilton – whom he had met at the 1936 Olympics – might be open to such an initiative. Hess parachuted from his Me 110, landing at Floors Farm near Eaglesham, on the bleak moors south-west of Glasgow. On hearing the news of Hess’s capture, Churchill declared: ‘Hess or no Hess, I am going to see the Marx Brothers.’

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Russians remain reluctant to acknowledge Stalin’s gross negligence in 1941. In a poll conducted on the 50th anniversary of his death, the Russian Centre for Public Opinion found that 53 per cent of Russians still regard him as a ‘great’ leader. He was, a Russian pensioner told the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, ‘the father of the family, the person who took care of us’.

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Goebbels noted in his diary for March 16, 1942: ‘Nationalistic currents are increasingly observable in all former Baltic states. The populations there apparently imagined that the German Wehrmacht would shed its blood to set up new governments in these midget states… This is a childish, naïve bit of imagination which makes no impression on us… National Socialism is much more cold-blooded and much more realistic in all these questions. It does only what is useful for its own people, and in this instance the interest of our people undoubtedly lies in the rigorous establishment of a German order within this area without paying any attention to the claims… of the small nationalities living there.’ Hitler, as we have seen, wanted Ukrainians to be like Indians in his imagined British Empire: docile, uneducated consumers of brightly coloured textiles made in Germany.

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Significantly, the guidelines issued by the Reich Security Main Office for the ‘treatment of the Jewish question in the occupied territories of the USSR’ introduced a new and wider definition than had hitherto been used in the Reich: ‘A Jew is anyone who is or has been a member of the Jewish religion or otherwise declares himself to be a Jew or has done so or whose membership of the Jewish race is apparent from other circumstances. Anyone who has one parent who is a Jew within the meaning of the previous sentence is regarded as a Jew.’

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Einsatzgruppe
A massacred Jews in Kovno, Riga and Vilna, to name just three locations.
Einsatzgruppe
B operated in Byelorussia and the area west of Smolensk, killing Jews in Grodno, Minsk, Brest, Slonim, Gomel and Mogilev.
Einsatzgruppe
C ranged from eastern Poland into the Ukraine, carrying out mass murders in Lwów, Tarnopol, Kharkov and Kiev.
Einsatzgruppe
D was active in the southern Ukraine and the Crimea, especially in Nikolaiev, Kherson, Simferopol and Sebastopol. It will be seen that the role of the
Einsatzgruppe
was essentially to obliterate the historic Pale of Jewish Settlement.

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One estimate puts the total towards the end of the war at around 647,000, of whom around a third were from the Ukraine, 17 per cent apiece from the Caucasus and Turkestan and 12 per cent from the Baltic states. Some 11 per cent were Cossacks, 5 per cent were Tatars, 2 per cent Kalmyks and 2 per cent Byelorussians.

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The most precise figures for the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War are asfollows: total population in 1939 – 9,415,840; lowest estimate of losses – 5,596,029; highest estimate – 5,860,129.