By the end of 1925 Wilson and Herron no longer were among the living, but the seed they had sown (or helped to sow) was slowly maturing. The day was not too far—as Herron had foreseen—when the Germans and the Japanese at least thought they could join hands on the Volga River. The Nazi monster was already born at that time. Instrumental in its rise was Germany’s humiliation. This humiliation, however, did not derive from military defeat. The theory, so popular in the West before 1939, that the brown evil was due only to the fact that the Allies held no victory parade in Berlin in 1918 is blatant nonsense. (Such a parade, if anything, might have accelerated the rise of the Nazis.) The root of the trouble lay in the moralizing attitude of the West, especially of America, culminating in Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty which put all the guilt squarely on the shoulders of Germany.1 (The Treaty was signed on June 28, 1919, exactly five years after the double murder of Sarajevo, proving that crime does pay.) There is no better way to generate greater hatred than by forcing a person to sign a confession of guilt when he is sacredly convinced that the confession is untrue. This wanton humiliation, unprecedented up to that time in the annals of Christendom, created the thirst for revenge which the Nazis so cleverly exploited.
It has been argued that such an article had to be inserted in order to provide a moral basis for Germany’s reparation payments.2 It would have been not only simpler, but more honest and manly, to insist on reparations based upon the argument that in a complex war, whose origins historians were going to dispute during several decades, the loser obviously had to foot the bill—not the winner. If one compares the Congress of Vienna, which terminated twenty years of aggression, with the Paris Treaties, one sees all the difference. (France, as a matter of fact, emerged slightly enlarged in 1815 and thanks to Talleyrand’s diplomatic genius immediately joined the Holy Alliance.) True, the moral indignation game was played not only by official America but also by Britain—witness the “Hang the Kaiser” campaign of Mr. Lloyd George.3 After the defeat of a nation the situation is the same as after the physical defeat of a person. The victor has only one logical alternative: to cut his enemy’s throat or help him to his feet by offering him a peaceful hand. Democracies during a war, however, cultivate collective hatreds, work up a feeling of moral indignation against entire nations (not just against their governments, which sometimes might be perfectly warranted) and thus an equitable settlement becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible.
In the case of the outcome of World War I the most amazing decisions were made. Germany, not Austria-Hungary, was presented to the masses in the West as the real evildoer. (This was not always the conviction of responsible statesmen and we know of Clemenceau that his hatred was greater for Austria than for Germany.)4 Lloyd George is said to have declared a few times that for denominational reasons Austria-Hungary, not Germany, had to be carved up.5 Whatever the case may be, the fact remains that after 1919 Germany bordered only on one great power (France) whereas before 1914 her expansion had been hemmed in by three great powers—France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, powers with a grand total of 230 million inhabitants against Germany’s 62 million. Geopolitically Germany’s situation had now vastly improved and bright Germans were quite aware of this. Professor Ernst Kornemann, Rector of Breslau University, declared in his inaugural address on October 15, 1926, that in spite of all her losses, Germany must be glad that she survived the war as by far the strongest and ethnically most homogeneous political unit of Central Europe: “Let us take fully advantage of this situation, which our opponents have created by Balkanizing and atomizing Europe,” he exhorted his audience.”6
Poland, the only stronger state with a historic background bordering on Germany, had been handicapped from the beginning by the enmity of Lloyd George (and, later, of Winston Churchill). In the rest of the area to the south and east of Germany a political order which made an eventual catastrophe absolutely inevitable was established jointly by American leftist idealism, inane British cynicism, blind French chauvinism, and Italian neoimperialism, all intensively collaborating with the local forces of an antihistoric nationalism. The elements of criminality and insanity had achieved a perfect synthesis so that it was only a question of time until this area would fall under the sway of Berlin or Moscow or both. H. A. Macartney, one of the very few first-rate experts on Central Europe, said rightly, “For a very considerable proportion of the peoples of the [Danubian] Monarchy, then, the Monarchy, with all its faults, represented a degree of protection and of national security which was not lightly to be hazarded.”7 Yet as in the case of the decolonialization of our days, the leftists of the West combined with the nationalists of other countries in order to break up larger units, thus giving adjoining truly oppressive imperialist powers an unexpected chance to enslave these unviable fragments thoroughly and completely. And when Macartney says, “Of all the Danubian peoples only the Czechs have succeeded in creating anything like democracy. The rest either stuck to their old hierarchies or relapsed into despotism,”8 he is still somewhat charitable.
The Czechs only numbered 47 percent of the population of Czechoslovakia, but by “annexing” the Slovaks, very much against their expressed will, into a hyphenated “nation” which never had existed in the historic past,9 they suddenly formed a “majority.” As a matter of fact, there were more Germans (24.5 percent) in Czechoslovakia than Slovaks. By clever gerrymandering devices the Czechs could maintain a parliamentary majority and exercised an oppressive rule which drove the German minority (inexactly called “Sudeten Germans”) into the arms of a rebellious and disloyal nationalism evolving into National Socialism. Czechoslovakia foundered on the fact that while it actually represented a multinational state, it offered no place under the sun, it gave no chance for a “national fulfillment” to its ethnic minorities which together actually formed a majority. Like Yugoslavia it was a caricature of the defunct Austro-Hungarian monarchy. And with the dithyrambic praise bestowed by the Czech government upon Czechs behaving treasonably against the old monarchy, a real cult of disloyalty was created. The Czechs who had fought against Austria in the Czech Legion on the side of Russia from 1914 to 1917 were praised as national heroes. Why then should the “Sudeten Germans” not side “treasonably” with the neighboring Germans?
The trick of combining several nationalities into one was repeated by the Serbs who, copying the Czechs, promulgated the existence not of a “Serbocroatoslovene,” but of a “Yugoslav” nation, a historical, psychological, religious, and ethnic “non-sense.” Whether we peruse the official “Czechoslovak” or “Southslav” atlases,10 we encounter in either case a flat refusal to distinguish between the different “ruling” nationalities (of which one ruled while the others had to obey)11 and the same was true of the official statistics. (The Serbs also “annexed” the Bulgars of Macedonia and forbade the term “Macedonia” which had to be supplanted by “Southern Serbia.”) The West accepted all this without protest, but the reaction probably would have been different if the Germans had claimed the Dutch as “Germans” just because they spoke a language based on Low German. Up to the sixteenth century at least, the Dutch considered themselves to be Germans (inhabiting the lowlands—the Netherlands—of Germany), but subsequently they developed a national conscience entirely of their own which only certain Dutch Nazis dared to question. Yet the Slovaks never had been Czechs, the Croats and the Macedonians never were Serbs, the Slovenes had never been ruled by Belgrade.12
Before taking paper and pencil to make an inventory of what had become politically of the former Danubian monarchy, let us recall Disraeli’s words: “The maintenance of the Austrian Empire is necessary to the independence and, if necessary to the independence, necessary to the civilization and even to the liberties of Europe.” He feared the deep-seated antagonism of Britain’s moderate left toward Austria, of the Liberals already then influenced by radicalism, of men who measured foreign countries by their affinity to British institutions. “You looked on the English Constitution as a model form,” he said to the Liberals in the House of Commons. “You forced this constitution in every country. You laid it down as the great principle that you were not to consider the interests of England, or the interests of the country you were in connection with, but that you were to consider the great system of Liberalism, which has nothing to do with the interests of England, and was generally antagonistic with the interests of the country with which you were in connection.”13 How easily one could substitute “democracy” for “liberalism” and address these sentences to American no less than to British leftists who had served neither the real interest of their country nor of the countries whom they saddled with representative governments of a democratic character.
Winston Churchill, who during his life repeatedly crossed party lines and was by no means a “true conservative” (but, rather, a pragmatic Deist), held views similar to those of Disraeli. He had seen what not only the republican form of government in Germany, but also the destruction of Austria14 had brought to the world. “For centuries this surviving embodiment of the Holy Roman Empire had afforded a common life, with advantages in trade and security, to a large number of peoples,” he wrote, “none of whom in our time had the strength or vitality to stand by themselves in the face of pressure from a revivified Germany or Russia. All these races wished to break away from the federal or imperial structure, and to encourage their desires was deemed a liberal policy. The Balkanization of Southeastern Europe proceeded apace with the consequent relative aggrandizement of Prussia and the German Reich, which, though tired and war-scarred, was intact and locally overwhelming. There is not one of the peoples or provinces that constituted the empire of the Hapsburgs to whom gaining their independence had not brought the tortures which ancient poets and theologians had reserved for the damned.”15 Churchill repeated these views in a note to the Foreign Office on April 8, 1945: “This war should never have come unless, under American and modernizing pressure, we had driven the Hapsburgs out of Austria and Hungary and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer onto the vacant thrones. No doubt these views are very unfashionable.”16 No doubt they were in April 1945, because world leftism was already busy laying the foundations of World War III so that more young people, nay, people of all ages could again be plowed under for the sacred cause of progress, democracy, enlightenment, social justice, security, and so forth.
Taking the inventory of what has happened to Central Europe half a generation after the Treaties of Versailles, St. Germain-en-Laye, Neuilly, and Trianon, we will find that Germany in 1934 was ruled by a totalitarian dictatorship of the Nazis, that the Czechs of “Czechoslovakia” uneasily bossed the non-Czechs who were waiting for a day of revenge, that Poland and Austria were authoritarian states under Pilsudski and Dollfuss, that Hungary was ruled oligarchically with a very limited democracy, that the Iron Guard in Rumania was preparing for the conquest of the country, that in Yugoslavia ever since the murder of Radić the terror-regime of Belgrade ruled through assassination and execution, that parliamentarism prevailed neither in Bulgaria nor in Albania or Portugal. Lithuania and Estonia had become dictatorships. Latvia and Greece had two more years to wait for this transition. In Spain we saw the buildup for the civil war. In Japan parliamentary life had become as farcical as in Turkey, in Russia the Duma had disappeared a long time ago. In other words, the Holy Crusade to make Europe safe for democracy, with its billions spent and its millions killed, had ended in a total defeat of democracy and also, which was far worse, of the liberal principle of personal freedom. Where did personal freedom still exist? Where was it constitutionally protected? Certainly not in Czechoslovakia where Professor Tuka was jailed because on the tenth anniversary of the very spurious Pittsburgh Agreement he published an article entitled Vacuum Iuris in which he merely showed that the terms of the agreement had come to an end. Freedom outside of Switzerland and France existed only in the historic monarchies of Europe, of Northern Europe to be more precise. In this connection the text of the decision of the Conference of Ambassadors (of the Allies), issued in April 1921 when a similar resolution on a Hapsburg restoration had been passed in February 1920, makes interesting reading: “The Principal Allied Powers consider that the restoration of a dynasty which represented in the eyes of its subjects a system of oppression and domination over other races, in alliance with Germany, would be incompatible with the achievements of the war in liberating peoples hitherto enslaved, as well as with the principle for which the war was waged.”17
In view of the fact that now twenty-two million people in the area formerly ruled by the Hapsburgs were under the control of nations of other tongues, whereas before 1918 just about the same number were “controlled” by German-Austrians, Magyars, and Croats,18 one is truly amazed. Now the Hapsburgs figured as the villains in the eyes of the great worldwide left from Washington to Moscow (and, later, in the eyes of Brown Berlin!), while the Karagjorgjevićs of Serbia, who had come to rule by murder, governed through murder and had erected a monument in Sarajevo for the murdered Gravrilo Prinćip,19 were probably viewed as representatives of progressive, tolerant liberalism. To a Central European blessed with a modicum of education and common sense this declaration by the Conference of Ambassadors of the Principal Allied Powers must have appeared as the height of suicidal folly and hypocrisy. Quem Deus vult perdidi, prius dementat.
An equal amount of stark madness also characterized French strategy in Central Europe. The American idea to destroy utterly the Western brake against Russian aggression and the Far Eastern obstacle to Chinese expansion, practiced in 1945, had its precedent in the French policies on the Danube.20 Austria-Hungary had been supported by Germany, therefore Austria-Hungary had to go. The successor states, however, now had to assume the role of effective dams against Germany and Russia. Austria had to be reduced to an area she roughly held in the thirteenth century; Hungary was deprived of 70 percent of her area and of two-thirds of her population. Austria was allowed to keep an army of 30,000, Hungary one of 35,000 men. (The Austrian army was not even permitted to use gasmasks.) Austria could not feed herself; one out of three Austrians was a Viennese, and she lost all major coal deposits.21 As a result the vast majority of Austrians thought of reunion with Germany and Nazidom flourished in Austria because the Nazis offered a speedy Anschluss.22 The Hungarians were automatically driven into the arms of those powers which promised a radical revision of the peace treaties—Italy and, later, Germany. The same was true of Bulgaria: One-third of the Bulgarians were living under a foreign flag.
Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia—countries whose names before 1850 could never have been found on a map, a dictionary or an encyclopedia23—formed the “Little Entente” and received an enormous amount of French military and financial aid. Billions of francs, extorted from unwilling French taxpayers, were poured into these countries designed to stem Germany’s Drang nach Osten. Two of them, Rumania and Yugoslavia, together with Greece and Turkey, also belonged to the Balkan League. The avowed purpose of this league was to oppose all territorial demands of Bulgaria (and Albania). The Little Entente and the Balkan League thus formed a huge “Z” stretching from the gates of Dresden to the borders of Iran. Yet, as any child could foresee, the French investments were hopelessly squandered. Greece and Turkey were not so much anti-German as merely anti-Bulgar, and the other three states were primarily interested in (a) preventing a Hapsburg restoration, and (b) thwarting Hungarian (or Austrian) revisionism. Their common interest was their common loot, their common fear, and their common bad conscience.
When the Nazis appeared on the scene as staunch enemies of the Hapsburg restoration, Prague, Belgrade, and Bucharest immediately collaborated with them and, in a way, betrayed their French protector. On top of all this it must have been evident to any intelligent person (and it was evident to any intelligent Frenchman not belonging to the leftist establishment) that the members of the Little Entente never would nor really could fight the Germans even if they wanted to. Their armies were the most heterogeneous units, their nucleus had been formed by small groups of traitors who had deserted from the old Imperial-Royal army and now were serving the new masters of Central Europe, many coming from the Balkans.24 We shall see later how these armies stood up to the grim realities of the years 1938-1941. Let us remember that Yugoslavia between 1918 and 1919 was officially called “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes,” Kraljevina Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca, abbreviated “S.H.S.” which was interpreted by those speaking German to mean Sie hassen sich, “they hate each other.” It is significant that to this day U.S. foreign language newspapers with a Central European background almost never call themselves “Czechoslovak” or “Yugoslav,” but Slovene, Croat, Serb, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Macedonian, etc. Not even under the tremendous pressure exercised by Communist dictatorships have these nationalities jelled into synthetic “nations.”
However important that seismic area, however tragic American intervention in that region, the fact remains that the American public at large was not really interested in that part of the globe—at least until the “Sudeten Crisis” in September 1938. This is less true of the American left, and here we come to the great sin of omission of the American right—or perhaps of the right of conservative circles almost anywhere in the West. When Hitler actively intervened on behalf of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia in 1938 and effectively blackmailed England, Neville Chamberlain referred to Czechoslovakia as a country “of which we know so little.” This, at least, was an honest and candid confession.
But let us not lose the thread of our investigation. To begin with, it is true that the study of foreign history and geography is a weak spot not only in American, but also in British schools. It has rightly been said that European history is often taught in American schools as “French history with frills.”25 (The usual frills are Philip II, the Reformation, Peter the Great, Bismarck, and Cavour.) Geography is the very stepchild of higher American education.26
To this calamity must be added another. Leftism in the United States was always international-minded whereas American conservatives tended to be nationalistic, introspective, and isolationist. There is, as we all know, a strong and durable connection between leftism (radical democracy, socialism, communism) and nationalism—a genuine ethnic nationalism or merely its clever exploitation. Yet, while leftism is trying to keep one eye on national realities and national susceptibilities, the other eye tries to encompass the globe. There can be little doubt that nationalism as well as anti-intellectualism in America grew at first on leftist soil. Jefferson in his remarks on foreign countries27 showed himself a fanatical nationalist and, as Professor Hofstadter has shown us so convincingly, anti-intellectualism in the United States went hand-in-hand with democracy. Intellectuality in America originally was considered to be an aristocratic vice.28 What could be more obvious than the antiegalitarian character of higher knowledge, training, or education? The American upper crust, the American aristocracy used to be great travellers; they enjoyed the value of foreign countries, whereas the early democratic element of the United States, the frontiersmen, had neither the disposition nor the time to scan foreign horizons. The China clippers, the rise of big banks with worldwide connections, the international relations of the leading universities interested the top layers of New England and the Middle Atlantic States. Thus the anti-intellectual and “localist” (isolationist) lower classes with subtly leftist views faced an international-minded and “brainy” upper class. F. J. Grund’s picture of the United States in the 1830s confirms this.29
It would be interesting to make a thorough study about the reasons why a change of attitudes actually has taken place. This evolution in America, however, has certain analogies and relations with shifts of emphasis in Europe. There, we should never forget, conservative thought (as opposed to mere traditionalist sentiments) developed more in those countries where the Reformation had triumphed than in the Catholic or even in the Greek-Orient ones. Maurras is not a conservative, de Maistre is more of a reactionary. What we get in Southern and Eastern Europe are rather emancipated thinkers who in the sovereignty of their outlook overcome the leftist myths—this, however, is not necessarily “conservatism.” The Reformers, Luther above all, as it cannot be stressed sufficiently often, were anti-intellectual and anti-rational. And since conservatism in Northern Europe leaned heavily on religion, this antirational and antirationalist attitude crept into conservative thinking. Professor Hofstadter is most emphatic about the influence of “Protestantism” on anti-intellectualism in America—especially so of the purely emotional sects with ecstatic undertones. Another factor was the international character of America’s socialism and the protectionist character of the American manufacturer. To make matters worse, it soon became evident that new ideologies were constantly imported into America by Continental immigrants and these new Weltanschauungen of a strongly political character, of an extremist and “radical” bias, were opposed to many facets of “Americanism” and a large part of the American folklore.30 Similar feelings prevailed in England. As a child I remember a comic strip in the London Daily Mirror which featured a black-haired, bearded anarchist who added the ending “ski” to every word he said, thus indicating his Slavic origin. And indeed it cannot be doubted that the Mediterranean and East European element played a very large role in the anarchist and Socialist movements in America until the 1930s. To be true, they also had an Irish admixture. It is obvious that Anglo-Saxons do not like to throw bombs or mount the barricades. Their civil wars, nowadays at least, if any, are waged in an orderly military fashion—and not in the Viet Cong way.
By the early twentieth century the internationally minded forces in America were the Marxist left, the anarchist left,31 the moderate, unorganized left composed of radical democrats, suffragettes, Single Taxers, the Catholic Church (with all sorts of mental reservations), and a great part of American Jewry. And the more these international-minded groups cast interested glances to Europe, Latin America, and Asia, the more the average solid “conservative” American stiffened in his retrospective parochialism. Obviously, there is a sane and even Godordained patriotism (remember Our Lord crying over the fate of Jerusalem), as there is also a patriotism which in the words of the conservative Dr. Johnson is a refuge of scoundrels. Equally there exists a reasonable, rational, and honorable Christian internationalism as well as a perverted and irrational form. Yet, whatever the case, the fact remains that internationalism no less than the crucially important field of international relations was “left to the left.” And so were intellectual and cultural affairs which, by default, became the monopoly of longhaired professors and short-haired ladies—a truly perverse situation, considering that intellectual and artistic creativeness is the only undisputed realm of male supremacy.32 (There always have been amazons, pétroleuses, and women of Herculean strength in the better circuses.)
Thus we should not be surprised to see American foreign policy following an ever-increasing leftist pattern. Originally the leftist pressures were exogen, came through the mass media, emanated from well-organized groups, from radio commentators and columnists. By 1938 the State Department was not yet the happy hunting ground of the leftists, but the leftist critique of it was increasing by leaps and bounds. As a result a leftist administration started its successive purges until the State Department assumed an increasingly leftist character. This was equally true of the diplomatic service which is largely under the control of the U.S. Department of State. (Ambassadors, however, need confirmation by the Senate, and fortunately, for one reason or the other, the right man might get into the right place, as in the case of Robert Murphy.) Under the crucial Democratic administrations from 1933 to 1953 many appointees were leftist professors a la William E. Dodd33 and leftist millionaires of the Joseph E. Davies type.34 Driven by their missionary zeal and their fatal vanity they often luckily left us their impressions, actions, and reactions in print, which gives us a marvelous opportunity to study the simple monumental leftist ignorance in its historic international relation.
This leftist monopoly on foreign affairs, however, is not only due to a conservative default, to a sour suspicious retreat in disappointment and offense. At the back of it lies something even more tragic: the imminent fear in the American noncommitted right that the left, so nicely rooted in American folklore, after all, is riding the Wave of the Future. How, otherwise, could one understand that temperamentally very conservative boards of trustees of colleges and universities have repeatedly hired professors notorious for their leftist ideas? How could one understand that archconservative American businessmen have sent their sons and especially their daughters to institutions of learning equally well known for their exorbitant rates and their extreme leftism, a leftism pertaining to politics, history, philosophy, economics—and morals? How often do well-paid Marxists in such places indirectly and even directly tell intellectually innocent maidens—at their hard-toiling fathers’ expense—that their procreators are real scoundrels and bloodsuckers? Yet the hard-toiling fathers know all this and both parents accept this state of affairs with a sigh: it is, after all, the “proper thing to do” to provide the dear little thing with a highbrow education in a college with high social rating and to acquaint her with all “advanced ideas.” They might hope that, once safely married to an equally hardworking stockbroker, the good girl would wake up from sweet leftist dreams and end up as secretary of the local Women’s Republican Club.
One apparently has to leave “brains,” “ideas,” and “new vistas” to those budding leftist eggheads (even if they stand badly in need of a haircut). How, otherwise, can one explain the fact that newspaper owners, editors-in-chief, or radio station proprietors, who have safely overcome their adolescent flirtations with leftism, again and again employ wildly leftist reporters, columnists, and commentators? I have especially in mind a leading midwestern daily and its correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War. The paper was well-known for its strictly conservative attitude and the correspondent for his boundless sympathies for the mixtum compositum known as “Republican Loyalist Spain.” (Of course the Communists also were republicans and they were exceedingly loyal but not exactly to Spain.) That correspondent also was blessed with absolute and total ignorance of Spanish history, but leftists are always “forward-” and not “backward-” looking persons: They do not heed the maxim that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.35 Still, the attitude of that paper can be understood only in view of the repressed and well-hidden inferiority complex of the frequent American adherence to conservative principles without being intellectually able to defend them. Just because he also had a notion of “progress” practically in the leftist sense, he feels strongly that he is only fighting a rearguard delaying action. All he can usually look forward to is a certain Schadenfreude, a spiteful pleasure at the inevitable setbacks and failures of leftism. This attitude gives to a certain type of American conservative (far more so than to the Continental one) a petty, morose, and melancholy character. He stands in need of a rather lighthearted, humorous, and magnanimous aggressiveness, a will to win, coupled with the liberality of those who believe in diversity.
The American left in the 1920s was nevertheless building up its positions. They were strengthening their various camps intellectually, achieved an increasing control of education and the arts, and slowly gained a monopoly in fashioning public opinion on foreign issues. The rise of fascism in Italy was not overly noticed, however, and certain representatives even of the Democratic party were friendly toward Mussolini.36 Yet the Soviet Union was far more successful than Italy in winning the sympathies of the writers known to be “open-minded”—though only in one direction. And just as France had its Dreyfus case—a Jewish captain of the French Army was unjustly accused and convicted of having betrayed military secrets to the German military attaché37—the United States had its Sacco and Vanzetti case which drove a great many people into the leftist camp, some of them even right into the arms of communism or procommunism. (Among them was Eugene Lyons, a great idealist, who went as foreign correspondent to Moscow where he was cured of his leftism. But how many Americans had the advantages and the opportunity of such a splendid reeducation?)
There were many aspects to the Sacco and Vanzetti case, but to the outside world the least important of all was the question of the two men’s guilt or innocence. Whatever the answer might be, they themselves never admitted any guilt except their belief in political anarchism. Nontotalitarian Europe, however, was in modern times very lenient to political criminals and thus almost nobody cared whether these two men (and a third, a Portuguese, Celestino Madeiros) were assassins or not.38 By 1927 very few Continental countries had the death penalty. Sacco and Vanzetti had waited for death no less than seven years and this idea seemed intolerable to Europeans. Americans argue that justice in the United States is so meticulous that every appeal of a condemned man will be so carefully investigated that between the original trial and the actual execution years might elapse. Europeans would maintain that an agony lasting for several years is worse than a quick death. Therefore practically all of Europe protested. Rightists and leftists alike, monarchists and republicans, Fascists and Communists, Catholics and atheists. The Pope tried to intercede. Mussolini demanded pardon, the President of Portugal (then already a “Fascist dictatorship” under Salazar) also asked for grace. I mention all this in detail not only because the Sacco and Vanzetti case is of importance to American “ideological history,” but because it shows how little the Continental outlook is understood by Americans.39 The reaction among pious European Christians of the right is very simple: “Either these men are innocent, then their execution is a crime, or they are guilty, then they will hardly commit another murder. And as to a punishment, they will surely get it in after-life.”
In Fascist Italy the execution of these two anarchists was taken as a national insult. In 1928 Luigi Rusticucci published a book in Naples, Tragedia e supplizip di Sacco e Vanzetti, whose preface was written by Arnaldo Mussolini, brother of the Duce. Vanzetti’s earthly remains were brought back to Italy and buried. Around his grave (with the connivance of Fascist authorities) a local cult developed. The fact that these men were anarchists (and not Communists) was an aggravating circumstance in European feelings. “That’s what we all are,” was a not infrequent reaction, “but unfortunately, it is an irrealistic attitude and conviction.” This is also one of the reasons why the Rosenberg trial and the execution of the ill-fated couple did not create the same stir in Europe as the Sacco-Vanzetti case had. Against the background of millions dying in Red concentration camps and hundreds executed for “speculation,” the protest movement in Europe did not materially transcend the Communist camp.
The next stage in the unfolding drama of American-European relations came in 1929 through the Black Friday on the New York Stock Exchange and the powerful crescendo of the world economic crisis. This mighty blow, striking free enterprise without preparation, almost immediately engendered in America a wave of “anticapitalist” feelings, an increased interest and enthusiasm for Socialist ideas and notions, a new, benevolent attitude toward Russian communism. When I visited the Soviet Union for the first time in the summer of 1930 I was struck by the fact that 80 or 90 percent of the tourists came from the United States—and also that a very large sector of the Innospyetsy, the “Foreign Specialists” were Americans. America’s Red Decade (to use the title of one of Eugene Lyons’ books) was then already in full swing. Certain Americans were lapping up the books of Maurice Hindus and a great many salient features of the USSR recommended themselves to the American mind—the fostering of community feelings, the methodical warfare against “outworn traditions,” the emphasis on “progress,” industrialization, the demophile atmosphere of Russia (which had always existed), the welfare institutions, from kindergartens to hospitals, the experiments in the penal system,40 the efforts to create “something new.”41 Among the American tourists (the majority of them female), one frequently could discover an almost hysterical enthusiasm.42 For most of them communism filled a void caused by the loss of religious faith or faith in Wall Street. However, these tourists, visitors, and “students” had no means of measuring the achievements or failures of communisn. They had not known Imperial Russia, they did not speak Russian, they were completely in the hands of their guides, they had no contacts with the run-of-the-mill Russian population (contacts at that time were very difficult to establish), they knew nothing about Russian history, they were frequently so helpless that without “outside aid” they could not distinguish the door of a men’s room from that of a powder room. (Comment, “I find this sort of alphabet rather confusing!”) Had they ever been to an obshtshezhitye, “a common apartment,” seen a kitchen, or eaten in a stolovaya, a communal restaurant, they might have started thinking. But they had nothing to go on except their subconscious determination to be enthusiastic, and enthusiastic they usually became. He who knows human nature realizes to what extent a previous disposition can warp the human mind and destroy objectivity thoroughly and completely.
The economic crisis profoundly affected the patriotism of all these Americans who saw in their country not the mother who loves even when she is old, ugly, fragile, and “difficult,” but merely the provider, the “land of plenty”—quite in keeping with the immortal poetry of Edgar Guest.43 Mr. Hoover’s presidency was drawing to a close and Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the most dynamic gravediggers of the Western World, succeeded on a platform not dissimilar to that of his predecessor. Though Mr. Roosevelt belonged to the Democratic party, his social background made him not originally disposed to leftist policies at home and abroad. His wife (from another branch of the Roosevelt family) was more deeply inured with leftist ideas, the natural result of higher feminine education in the United States,44 be it public or private. Whereas Mr. Roosevelt in his politics was “playing by ear,” his wife, wielding a considerable influence, was (as we shall show) ideologically far more consistent. Mr. Roosevelt, moreover, had the scantiest of education for his task; he hardly knew Europe, his knowledge of foreign languages45 was as modest as his acquaintance with the mentality of other nations. Being largely ignorant himself, he really had no way of judging and evaluating expert opinion, or of coordinating conflicting expert views. He was profoundly anti-intellectual46 and his sense of objective truth was gravely impaired. His handicap was by no means predominantly of a physical nature. He certainly would have needed treatment from a competent psychiatrist.47
Hitler’s takeover in Germany and Mr. Roosevelt’s first inauguration speech were only a few weeks apart, and in the beginning there was a certain amount of Nazi admiration for President Roosevelt, his administration, and the New Deal which slowly crystallized, trying to solve the economic crisis with statist and planning measures. (The end of the economic crisis in the United States came, however, as it did in Germany, with rearmament.) The German traveler, writer, and lecturer, Colin Ross, who had decidedly Nazi views, was also an admirer of the “New United States.” Most Nazi authors writing about American history showed themselves favorably to the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian (populist and anti-Federalist) tradition,48 and Herr Johst, President of the Reichsschrifttumkammer, the Nazi Chamber of Literature, wrote a play about Tom Paine. The Roosevelt administration was hostile to big business and this was entirely in keeping with Nazi notions. (While the Nazis tolerated the manufacturers, they were especially hard on finance which they called “grasping but not creative capital,” raffendes aber nicht schaffendes Kapital.) The Nazis, moreover, were convinced that capital in the United States was largely in Jewish hands. They respected Henry Ford (the “history-is-bunk” man who had once written a book against the Jews) but they were dead certain that names like Mellon or Morgan were Jewish. Mr. Roosevelt’s highhanded dealings with the business world, with Congress, and the Supreme Court were greatly admired by the Nazis.
Nor was Mr. Roosevelt in the beginning too hostile toward Hitler or his henchmen. As a matter of fact, even the Anschluss was right away recognized by the United States, and the American Legation in Vienna swiftly transformed into a Consulate General. The Reichsmordwoche (“Reich Murder Week”), starting on June 30, 1934, during which the Nazis assassinated hundreds of opponents, “traitors,” and rivals within a few days, did not trouble American-German relations. American public opinion had neither been particularly upset by Japan’s grabbing Manchuria (aggression should have been stopped right there), nor by Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia—which even Mr. Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times “underwrote.” (Only a black pilot in Harlem volunteered for the Abyssinian air force—a mulatto in sympathy with Semitic Amharas under the flag of “Negro solidarity.”) Americans, however, were duly aroused by the Spanish Civil War which broke out in July 1936. To the American left this was the Crusade of Crusades, a far more sacred cause than either World War I or World War II.
What were the reasons for this enthusiasm which, in a certain way, still has not abated? It is obvious, as we have hinted before, that the (British manufactured) leyenda negra, the “Black Legend” about Spain, was still very much alive. Spain had been the pillar of the Counter Reformation and it was the last country to have been at war with the United States before World War I. Other reasons were Spain’s Catholic and allegedly aristocratic character.49 And Spain, on top of it all, received aid from Germany and Italy. Therefore, the reasoning went, the Nazis and the Fascists, envious of the wonderful democratic progress of Republican Spain, were scheming to destroy it. Franco was a “stooge” of Hitler and Mussolini; Franco “conspired” with Nazis and Fascists. (“Conspirationism” as a key to the understanding of history is by no means a privilege of unimaginative reactionaries, but also of the left.) It was Franco’s task to make Spain into a bastion of “racist fascism” and thus help to encircle democratic progressive France, which was run by a popular front government. It was therefore America’s duty to come to the aid of Loyalist Spain.
The truth is different and, as always, complex. The Second Spanish Republic was just as much a failure as the first. Born in April 1931 as a result of communal elections which showed the left in strong ascendancy in certain key places, it went through a never-ending series of crises. As a constitutional monarchy nineteenth-century style, Spain clearly had not been viable. The dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in the 1920s brought stability as long as it lasted: It drew support from the army and the trade unions, but the latter finally went into opposition, whereupon Primo resigned, shortly to be replaced by General Berenguer. It would certainly have been the duty of King Alfonso XIII to establish a provisional royal dictatorship and to use force if necessary. Given the fanatically opposed, ideologically so thoroughly divided parties, from anarchists to Trotskyites to Carlist Traditionalists, a parliamentary regime along classic lines was and always will be bound to fail in Spain. Such a failure is all the more certain if the parties in question are grimly determined not to abide by the rules of the game and to revolt if circumstances permit. Modifying Clausewitz’ aphorism—war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means—one could say that in ideologically divided countries civil war is but the continuation of parliamentarism with other means. Miguel de Unamuno, a very independent-minded and original liberal who lived in exile during Primo’s dictatorship, had advocated civil war for years50—as a necessary means to purify the air and to rejuvenate the country. The politically inflammable material was getting larger and larger every year. At the last free elections in February 1936, no less than twenty-eight political parties competed and got a sufficient number of votes to send representatives to the Cortes. When I mentioned this to a Spanish friend he pounded the table and shouted, “This is a dirty lie! We have not twenty-eight but twenty-eight million different parties.” He clearly referred to the number of inhabitants of Spain.
The birth of the Republic was marred by endless acts of mob violence, by the burning of churches and monasteries (see p. 269), by endless strikes, by outbreaks of brigandage and a rapid decline of general security. To every unbiased observer it was evident that a democratic Spanish republic is a grotesque proposition. The democratic republic might work in the United States and in Switzerland, but since Spaniards are radically different from Genevans or Philadelphians, it was obvious that the experiment would fail—and fail only slightly less than it did in Russia.
The inner division of Spain was shattering. The elections of 1934 produced a right-of-center government. The result was a rising of the miners in the Austrias, most of them Anarcho-Syndicalists of the Federación de Anarquistas Ibéricos (F.A.I.). Delirious atrocities were committed already then, horrors worse than those depicted by Goya in his Desastres de la guerra.51 This savage outbreak could only be quelled with the aid of the Tercio, the Spanish Foreign Legion, a body of professional soldiers known for their courage and their brutality.52 Part of them stood under the command of a young general who had distinguished himself in the Riff War and who came from a notoriously Republican family. His younger brother Ramon, the first man to cross the South Atlantic by plane, had thrown leaflets from the air in 1931 asking the King to abdicate. The Prime Minister of the Spanish Republic in 1934, however, was Don José Maria Gil Robles, son of a well-known professor of political science and himself an outstanding Catholic lay leader. He tried to persuade the general in question to establish a military dictatorship because Spain had proved ungovernable by constitutional means. The general energetically rejected the proposal. His name is worth remembering: Don Francisco Franco y Bahamonde.
He certainly was not the most likely man in the Spanish Army to do what had been repeatedly done in Spanish America—establish military rule. General Sanjurjo was the man to do this. Sanjurjo failed, unfortunately, in a premature uprising and went to Portugal. After the elections in 1936, when matters went from bad to worse, Sanjurjo planned another uprising. Franco at that time had been sent to the Canary Islands by the leftist government; he had become suspect. At the same time the left also planned a takeover which was scheduled for late July.
Things came to a head when, in the Cortes, Rosa Ibarruri, La Pasionara, told the monarchist deputy José Maria Calvo Sotelo that he would speedily meet his end. On the same night he was arrested and murdered by the Assault Guards—a new police force created by the regime which did not trust the old Guardia Civil. It was now evident to everyone that Republican Spain had totally ceased to be an estado de derecho, a land of constitutionality, of law and order. Sanjurjo therefore proclaimed a military dictatorship and took a private plane to Spain to organize the takeover. Unfortunately the plane crashed. Sanjurjo was killed while the pilot barely survived the accident.53 Franco’s flight from the Canaries to Morocco, where he joined the Tercio, was better managed by Luis Bolin,54 and the transfer of the Tercio and of the Moorish regiments was partly financed by the Jewish quarter, the Mellah of Tetuan.55 The army rebellions in Barcelona, Valencia, and Madrid quickly collapsed, but the commander of Seville, the quixotic Queipo de Llano, who was not “in” the conspiracy, rose to everybody’s surprise. The initial stage of the revolution went so badly that General Mola was about to give up, when the Requestés, the military formations of Carlists, reorganized literally overnight and virtually forced him to fight. The fathers and grandfathers of these men had been defeated in the war against the liberal monarchy in 1872.56 Now they were again, miraculously, in on the plan. No doubt theirs was the lion’s share in the victory.57 Franco was just one of the generals in the junta that took over. The chairman of this committee was General Cabanellas, also a well-known republican. General Franco emerged as the undisputed leader only by the end of 1936.58
The situation at that time was this: The larger part of the army and a minor part of the navy had joined the military rising. The air force was almost wholly Loyalist. The richest parts of Spain were under the control of the Republicans, the poorest and most “backward” on the Franco side. Almost all the industrial areas were Loyalist, but the most historical provinces (Old Castile, Léon, Galicia, part of Aragón, and Navarre) were Nationalist. The term “Nationalist” is not entirely wrong in view of the fact that the Franco side stressed national values, and that the cry “Viva España!” was used among the nationalists, but was strictly taboo on the Loyalist side.
There can be no doubt that all the great lights, the great thinkers, the genius of Spain were traditionally rightist: Leftist Spain’s intellectual or artistic contribution was almost zero. True, there is Picasso, an artist of real genius and a Communist, but he leads an exceedingly “bourgeois” life and is repudiated by the Communists as an artist.59 Men such as Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, Federico García Lorca, Machado, Américo Castro, Salvador de Madariaga, Gregorio Marañón, and Menéndez Pidal were or are individualistic old liberals, but not Leftists.60 On the Loyalist side none of the great Spanish traditions was represented—except the anarchist bent embodied in the F.A.I. But in 1937 open warfare broke out between the Anarchists and the Communists, and the former were defeated in street battles, jailed, massacred en masse and murdered individually.61 The G.P.U. also brutally persecuted the P.O.U.M. (Partido Obrero de Unificatión Marxista), the Trotskyite group.62 Their leader, Andrés Nin, perished in one of the purges.63
As for population, the Loyalist area had about three times as many inhabitants as the Nationalist side, and, as we said before, its wealth was far more substantial. Republican Spain had almost all the industries, by far the best agricultural lands, and on top of it all the treasury, a big gold hoard which went largely to the Soviet Union and a smaller part to Mexico. The outlook was dim for the Nationalists, but they had the greater faith and by far the better leaders. Besides the Carlists, the toughest of the tough, they had the señorito on their side and most of the officers’ corps. This also prevented the fiendish massacres so prevalent in the Loyalist camp. It is true that in the confusion of the first weeks many people were shot, many innocents died. Georges Bernanos in Les grandes cimetières sous la lune64 has given a terrible account of the frivolous executions in Majorca, but I know of no case of slow tortures preceding death and of sheer bestiality which abounded in the leftist sector. Here the balance is entirely in favor of the Nationalists.65 The Loyalists have shown themselves faithful disciples of de Sade and the Bluecoats in the Vendée. The horrors of the Congo were anticipated in this war, and the great leftist delight, i.e., the defiling of cemeteries, was practiced as an exquisite art.
I had the chance to see the cemetery of Huesca, a city under siege, between September 1936 and April 1938. Only one road connected the city with Nationalist Spain and trucks could enter it only very early in the morning or late at night with the lights switched off and traveling at great speed. Life within the city went on normally, but the cemetery, to the east, was in Red hands all the time. And since the forces of progress, democracy, and enlightenment could not take Huesca, they vented their hatred on the dead.66 The vulgarities, the obscenities, the corpses torn out of their graves and assembled in obscene positions gave one a never to be forgotten impression of the fine spirit which received such enthusiastic support from the American and British left. I saw these horrors just a few days after the liberation of that cemetery and on the way back to Huesca, riding on an army jeep, we passed a stalled ambulance which bore the inscription, “Gift of the Friends of Spanish Democracy, Tampa, Florida Chapter.” My Spanish companion could not eschew the remark that we now had seen a splendid example of Western democracy. I protested—still, the “Revolution of the Eighteenth of July” as the Red counterrising was officially called,67 had indeed been an orgy of rape, sadism, torture, and unspeakable obscenities perpetrated by our dear friend, the Common Man, and which has its analogies wherever leftism lifted its ugly head. A detailed account of some of the horrors would hardly be fit to print. That they showed the need for a spiritual reeducation of vast sectors of the Spanish people is also not to be denied.68
As usual in ideological conflicts there was foreign intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The parties in question took help from whoever offered it. The Americans fighting against British rule accepted French aid and it is virtually certain that without the efforts of France, Spain, and the Netherlands (but, above all, those of France) independence would not have been achieved or only after a long time and at a terrible price. Yet the mere fact that the Founding Fathers were allies of Louis XVI and Charles III does not prove for a moment that they were imbued with Bourbon traditions or that the United States showed everlasting gratitude to the Bourbons of France and Spain.69 However, one radical difference exists between the two interventions. There was a Communist party in Spain which worked hand in glove with the Soviet interventionists, whereas there was no big Bourbonist organization in the nascent United States.70 To call the Falangists Fascists is far more erroneous than to call the Nazis Fascists (as the Soviets do, for very obvious reasons). The old Falangist doctrine, which is admittedly rather left than right, has certain totalitarian aspects and so had the J.O.N.S. (Juntas ofensivas nacional-sindicalistas), but the political theories of José Antonio Primo de Rivera and of Alfonso García Valdecasas, cofounder of the Falange, put the person first, not the state or society, a theory absolutely in keeping with the Spanish tradition.71
Whereas the Spanish Communists, the heroes of the “Revolution of July 18th,” collaborated with Moscow from the very beginning,72 the military men worked independently from the Nazis and the Germans, and German as well as Italian help was only forthcoming after the heavy aerial attacks by the Red air force.73 There were comparatively many civilian victims. Only German and Italian aid assured to the Nationalists superiority in the air which was probably not achieved before the summer of 1937. In the spring of 1938 I still witnessed Red air attacks.
German aid, outside of aviation, was merely technical (pioneers, materiel, signal corps) and after the conquest of the north Spanish industrial area (Basque provinces, Asturias) Nationalist Spain was financially quite independent. Italian military aid, for some time, had been substantial and the conquest of Málaga was carried out largely by Italian troops. But after the defeat of the Fascist units at Guadalajara the number of Fascist “volunteers” decreased and they were hardly visible during the spring offensive in 1938. As to mere manpower, the Loyalists had the edge over the Nationalists all the time and they were well provided with materiel, especially with tanks, by the Russians. The number of volunteers in the International Brigades—more genuinely convinced and certainly more fanatical than the Italian Fascist units—were considerable: Guesses vary from 40,000 to 60,000. A few volunteers, other than Germans or Italians, also fought on the Nationalist side. There were 600 to 700 Irish who withdrew relatively soon because they could not stand the Spanish food. There were some individual Portuguese and French volunteers (active Catholic monarchists). Actually, the only way to join was to enter the Spanish Foreign Legion—and to sign up for five years was a rather unattractive proposition.
There was not too much unity among the Nationalists, except that they were determined to have Spain’s fate settled by Spaniards and that Spanish traditions and a Spanish way of life should be maintained. Unlike the Republicans, they not only wanted bullfights to continue, but they insisted that a man should be able to go to church without being clubbed to death or a woman join a religious order without being undressed publicly, raped, slaughtered, and exhibited on a butcher’s hook.74 Franco, however, had the greatest difficulties in bringing the various supporters of his side under one hat: He forced the Falange, the J.O.N.S. and the Carlists to join in a common organization (which, by American standards, would be like amalgamating the Birchers with A.D.A.) and this led to many a local explosion.75 The Falangist leader Hedilla had been three times en capilla, “in chapel” prior to execution for insubordination and revolt, but he was pardoned again and again.76 On the Aragon front I met with a Carlist captain who loudly regretted that they fought only Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists, but not the Nazis, enemigos de Nuestro Señor Jesús Cristo. Liberal monarchists, (Alfonsinos) and many moderate Republicans (Lerroux, etc.) were on Franco’s side. The vast majority of moderate Republicans and Liberals, who had fled Spain altogether because they opposed both warring sides, either returned during the Civil War, during World War II, or soon thereafter.77 Naturally, the devout Catholic element had no choice; Loyalist Spain persecuted the Church with far greater savagery than even the Russian Communists did, so it had to side with Franco.78 The situation was different only in the Basque Provinces.79
The Loyalist or Republican side, without hesitation, could be called “Red” because the Communists and, to a lesser extent, the Socialists were the only well coordinated international bodies within Spain. As to worldwide connections, the precision of their ideology, their fanaticism, and energy, the forces of “liberal democracy” could not compare with the Second (Socialist) and Third International. The Communists fully cooperated with the Socialists—after all it was the time of the Popular Front flirtation and Largo Caballero, the Socialist leader, was called the “Spanish Lenin” by Stalin himself—but gunned after the F.A.I, and the Fourth International, the Trotskyites. Even Freemasonry, officially persecuted in Nationalist Spain, was fairly divided because it was, after all, a “bourgeois” movement and would have faced an even worse fate in Red than in Nationalist Spain. (There was the example of the USSR.)80 The non-Socialist democratic element in Red Spain merely served as an alibi: It was powerless. A man such as President Azaña probably did not like the murders and the executions,81 but he did not have the power to stave them off. Over 6,000 priests, friars, and nuns were massacred under his eyes, but what could he have done? He was not master in his own house. And in this connection it is interesting to note that the Communist party was not at all numerically strong in the last elections (something equally true of the Falange). This fact is usually adduced by naive minds to prove that a Communist danger did not exist in Spain, and that the Communist plans for a takeover were merely a phantom evoked by the right.82 Yet a small determined minority can always conquer a disorganized state and a deeply divided society: The Russian Revolution of November 1917 proved it. And the takeover of the Spanish Communist party in the Loyalist section of the country proved it again.
The pro-Loyalist hysteria, however, existed mainly in Britain and in the United States. (It was, for me, an interesting sociological experience to talk to the prisoners from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in their provisional encampment near Zaragoza. As one could expect, a very large segment came from the West Coast between San Diego and Vancouver.) Still, the majority of Americans sympathized with the “Republic” and merely Catholics had largely another orientation. A small sector of Catholics, however, changed sides under the influence of Jacques Maritain83 and tried to assume a “neutralist” position. It is not easy to see how they could do this, knowing all the facts (or most of the facts), but, of course, they could not grasp the happenings as they did not know the Spanish character—and the day-to-day reporting did not offer a coherent picture. They were horrified by the excesses of the Nationalists in the first weeks and these cannot be denied. They were shocked by the Nazi and Fascist aid. Yet if—to quote an example—a man discovers that his country, fighting a war for a just cause, has immoral allies and that his own army has committed atrocities, he certainly has the moral duty to protest loudly against this state of affairs. But should he therefore “call it quits” and consider himself a “neutral,” refusing to take sides? There is nothing more dangerous than perfectionism. Inevitably the words of Gonzague de Reynold come to one’s mind, “Often behind a false moderation quite simply a real cowardice is hiding.”
American Catholics did not know all the facts; neither did the non-Catholics. In a country as wealthy as the United States there is usually no dearth of information. Information costs money and it can be bought—correct information as well as wrong information. To get all the right information and to reject the false, the deceitful, the fabricated one, a special gift is necessary, the ability to weigh evidence. Living in the United States during World War II, I found it always possible to find the truth and to get excellent information, but I had to go out of my way and I had to read everything with a critical eye. Believe it or not, it could be done, partly because I knew Europe well and had been brought up in Central Europe where the printed word is looked upon with greatest suspicion. “Er lügt wie gedruckt—he lies like print,” is a standard phrase. (It might legitimately be questioned whether bibliolatry is not a specific gift of the Reformation.) Especially the “editing”84 done by newspapers, slants, distorts, and colors the news. While in Spain I met the correspondent of the New York Times on the Nationalist side. He told me grimly that only a small fraction of his reports ever got printed whereas the cables of Mr. Herbert L. Matthews, stationed on the Loyalist side, received a far better treatment. Finally the New York Times sent one more correspondent to the Red side, Mr. Lawrence Fernsworth, featured as a “liberal Catholic,” a man who later wrote for the pro-Communist publication The Protestant.85 From him we could hear the glad news that religious tolerance was on the increase in Republican Spain: Why, only a few days before he had been able to attend Mass in a private home.86
Neither the Nazis nor the Italians were able to cash in on their “investments” in Spain. Franco saw Hitler only once and, as an old specialist on criminals from his days in the Tercio, he immediately sized up his partner. There never has been an Axis Madrid-Berlin; The Rome-Berlin Axis, on the other hand, had been largely the work of Western leftist ineptitude. Fascism and Nazism, as we have pointed out, were never sufficiently close to agree on a common foreign policy. Masters are often furious if their disciples go their own ways or achieve greater fame. The crucial point in Hitler’s expansionist plans was Austria—not because it was his (despised) land of birth, but because the geopolitical edifice of Central Europe as constructed by the Paris Treaties was such that the elimination of only one brick was enough to bring it down; with the Anschluss perfected, the most important part of Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia) was totally encircled and could be strangled by merely closing the borders. When Czechoslovakia was incorporated into the Reich, Poland was similarly encircled, and so forth.
It was in Italy’s self-interest to preserve Austria’s independence and in the crisis of the summer 1934, after the murder of Dollfuss and the pitched battles fought in Central and Southern Austria between the Heimwehr and the illegal Nazi formations, Mussolini mobilized against Germany. Several divisions stood at the border of the North Tyrol and of Carinthia. The Italian army, for better or for worse, was then the guarantor of Austria’s survival.
In the eyes of the left, Austria was hardly worth saving because it was a “Fascist” state. It had started as a democratic republic in 1918, but ideological differences tore the country asunder. Already in 1927 a demonstration in Vienna had degenerated into a revolt, the Palace of Justice was burned down by a mixed Socialist-Communist mob, and there were over a hundred casualties. The non-Socialist element started to counterorganize and thus the Heimwehr, the “Home Defense League,” was born. But the Socialists too put up a private army, the “Republican Defense League” (Republikanischer Schutzbund), and although either formation hardly ever appeared with arms in public, it was obvious that they possessed weapons illegally. The Socialist bailiwick, naturally, was the city of Vienna which, for years, had engaged in big housing programs: Enormous fortresslike buildings were erected in a belt around Vienna and created the impression that, in a civil war, the Red city was ready to defend itself against the rest of the country whose predominantly non-Socialist convictions were only too well known.
In the meantime the Nazi peril arose. The Nazis also organized along military lines, also established para-military formations and prepared for the “Day X.” All through 1933 and in early 1934 the Nazis engaged in a terror campaign, similar to that of the Viet Cong. They threw bombs, committed arson, destroyed bridges, etc.
The government in the meantime consisted only of members of the Christian Social Party and the Heimwehr. The parliament had ceased to function due to a technicality, i.e., the absolute equality of mandates of government and opposition. The constitution stated that the largest party was to provide the Speaker, but since the government had eighty-one mandates, the opposition eighty (Socialists, Communists, and pro-Nazi Pan-Germans), and the Speaker was not permitted to participate in the voting, a complete stalemate had ensued. With the aid of a wartime emergency law the cabinet continued to be in power without consulting the parliament. No elections were decreed since a number of Nazis would have been voted into parliament, creating a situation not quite as bad but similar to that of Germany in 1932. There was no possibility for democratic government—and the government, relatively unmolested by the Socialists, desperately fought the terroristic Nazis.
The situation unexpectedly came to a head when the police received information about a large deposit of arms in Linz, which probably belonged to the Republican Defense League. Policemen who came to search the premises were fired at and they counterattacked. The trade unions replied with a general strike which was tantamount to stabbing the government in the back, a government engaged in a life and death struggle with the Nazis. In other words, the trade unions and the Socialist (Social Democratic)87 party had virtually become allies of the Nazis. The communal apartment houses in Vienna were now transformed into fortresses and the army, combined with the police and the Heimwehr, attacked this fortified belt successfully. The Socialist rebellion also spread to other parts of Austria but was suppressed in a few days. Significantly enough, the railroadmen and the postal employees, knowing more about the outside world and the general state of affairs, refused to sabotage the means of communication. At times the fighting was bitter, many of the Marxist leaders fled to Czechoslovakia (among them Otto Bauer) and some of them transferred to Russia. One local Socialist leader (Koloman Wallisch) and eight more organizers, unfortunately, were executed. Jail sentences were imposed upon others. The moderate Socialists had been opposed to the rising against the government, some members of the Christian Social party were against the quelling of the rebellion and would have preferred negotiations.88 The result was an increased isolation of the government.
Among leftist circles between San Francisco and Moscow the indignation against “Austro-Fascism” and “Clerico-Fascism” was boundless. The crackdown on the Social Democrats (often represented as kind democrats with social leanings) was construed as an action of the Dollfuss regime in obedience to Mussolini’s orders, which was by no means the case. Mussolini was interested only in having a buffer between Italy and Germany. A right-of-center government suited him well. Yet the fact remained that in this outbreak the Socialists had in fact acted as Nazi collaborators—as certain Buddhists in South Vietnam acted in fact as Viet Cong collaborators—and that the Nazis had received orders from Berlin to stay put. The Socialists were ideologically nearer to the Nazis than the Heimwehr, the Monarchists, the Catholic Church, or all true right-wingers. True, there was an entente between Dollfuss and Mussolini (the only effective protector of Austrian independence!), but the Nazis loathed Austria’s cooperation with the Latin-Catholic world. Therefore they planned to murder Dollfuss before his forthcoming meeting with Mussolini, which was scheduled for the last days of July 1934.
The larger part of the British and American press was anti-Nazi, but also anti-Dollfuss. Mr. Stephen Spender wrote his ringing poetry about the Vienna troubles, and Mr. W. H. Auden, then firmly in the leftist camp, put his pen at the service of the same cause. United Press published the news about 10,000 dead in the streets of Austria’s capital (there were less than 300 in Austria all told, more than 100 of them on the government side) and this piece of information came from their correspondent, Mr. Robert Best. His case is psychologically interesting. He hailed from Georgia, had the usual scanty education of American foreign correspondents who start their careers reporting about fires and suicides in love-nests, but one nice day are jerked out of their cosy surroundings and land in far-away countries—such as Austria. Usually not familiar with the language spoken there, these (in their majority) political middle-of-the-roaders almost regularly associate with the left. They do not come from “radical” families but, up to the gills in the myths of their local folklore, they are neither overly friendly toward the “Catholic hierarchy,” nor toward “titled aristocrats,” and they lack the proficiency to talk with peasant leaders—nor would they ever really understand their minds. The only ideological language they possibly can understand is that of the Marxist and non-Marxist left which uses the vocabulary of the French Revolution mixed with expressions one remembers from the economics courses in college.89 Mr. Best, obviously, could not understand the talk about the Reichsidee, the Ständestaat, organischer Staat, Ganzheitsphilosophie, Volkstumswerdung, Heimatverbundenheit, or Ordnungsbild—concepts that cannot be translated with precision into English. He could understand the Socialists, though. So he sided with the International Socialists and when they disappeared from the political surface and went underground, he quite naturally transferred his enthusiasm to the National Socialists. This transition must have come to him quite easily: Racial prejudices, after all, were something he had always been familiar with; as a matter of fact, he had them himself. So he stayed on even after the Anschluss, made no move to quit Vienna after Germany’s Declaration of War, became a radio speaker for the Nazis, and agitated against his land of birth. Why be surprised? The Nazis were progressive, built superhighways, provided the people with cheap cars and cheap radio sets, and were riding the wave of the future. They were in his mind the fulfillment of the American dream. His kind of evolution was frequent, has numerous analogies, and is perfectly natural.90
The murder of Dollfuss was organized in Germany and “Millimetternich’s” successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, could not possibly stave off the final disaster. The amity between Vienna and Rome was heavily mortgaged by the South Tyrol which the Fascists brutally tried to Italianize by all conceivable means. Nazi propaganda in Austria (which in sentiment was strongly anti-Italian) portrayed the Austrian government as a handful of traitors because they kept silent about Mussolini’s policies in the South Tyrol. (Not even the Austrian Nazis could foresee that Hitler in 1939 would agree with Mussolini to resettle the South Tyroleans in “Greater Germany.”) Yet Italy remained the only power to protect Austrian independence.91
This also was fully understood in London and Paris and led to the Stresa Conference which resulted in a London-Paris-Rome Axis for the preservation of Austrian freedom. A public declaration of a guarantee by these three powers followed. Schuschnigg himself tried to strengthen anti-Nazism in Austria and to achieve a greater understanding between the Successor States of the Old Monarchy. He knew that the Ständestaat (“Corporate State”) designed to overcome class antagonisms and party strife, was not enough. Man does not live by bread alone. He therefore wanted to restore the monarchy in Austria in the long run and this idea had many supporters: practically all members of the Christian Social party, of the Heimwehr, and even a few moderate Socialists. Only the Nazis, the radical Socialists and the Communists opposed such a solution with violence and fury. The greatest difficulty, however, was made by Prague and Belgrade. These two governments collaborated closely with Hitler in the “Austrian Question.” Beneš declared in conversations that he would rather see the Nazis in Prague than the Hapsburgs in Vienna.92 Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were deadly afraid that their countries would melt away the moment the Hapsburgs appeared on the horizon. They melted away a few years later, and Beneš, in his exile, acknowledged freely that the countries of Central Europe had not had the opportunity to solidify and to acquire an inner cohesion.93 In fact, as faithful minions of Hitler, they declared restoration to be a casus belli, which in itself shows the brittleness of the house of cards built by leftist endeavor at the Paris Peace Conference.94 The hatred of the “United Left” for the Hapsburgs lasts to this very day95 and is typified by the Austrian Socialists who in so many ways continue the Nazi traditions, especially in the field of legislation.
Ideological reasons in the West, however, were responsible for Mussolini’s withdrawal of his support for Austrian independence and with the ensuing inevitable fall of Austria,96 with the Anschluss, the stage was set for World War II, the Third War of Austrian Succession. And with the outcome of World War II the chance for new, bigger, and more terrible calamities was given. The ideological reasons for this entire development—from 1917 over 1935 and 1938 to our days—are of a distinctly leftist character.
At the Stresa Conference Mussolini informed Sir Samuel Hoare, the British Foreign Minister, and Monsieur Laval, that he intended to attack Abyssinia, a country with whom the Italians (as now the Somalis) had border difficulties. He made it clear that he would use the opportunity to take revenge for the defeat of Adowa in 1896 and would conquer all of Abyssinia. In the beginning his declaration made little impression and since he met with no protest he proceeded to prepare this war—no doubt a war of aggression against the spirit and the letter of the League of Nations Charter. To make matters worse, it was Italy who had introduced Abyssinia into the League of Nations, an entry opposed by Britain because Abyssinia was suspected of tolerating slavery and practicing barbaric punishments (mutilations, etc.).
With the buildup of Mussolini’s overseas forces British public opinion became increasingly restive and leftist circles, which also had a hold on a certain sector of the Conservative party, demanded that Britain adhere strictly to the League of Nations Charter and that military-economic sanctions should be imposed on Italy for breaking the rules. Of the great powers only the Soviet Union, Germany, the United States, and Japan did not belong to the League.
From a higher moral point of view the situation was singularly complex. There can be no doubt about Italy’s infringing upon the stipulations of the Charter. It was also certain that Italy could and would introduce a more civilized, a more humane life in a colonized Abyssinia97 and that from the point of view of the Common Good of the Abyssinians, Italy’s rule would have been preferable to that of the local autocracy. People with such diverging political views as Mr. Evelyn Waugh and Herbert L. Matthews have been with the Italian army in this struggle and have seen the Italian administration afterwards.98 They both (for rather different and yet so similar reasons) favored the Italian side. There was, moreover, the case of the tribes and “nationalities” subjected by the real Abyssinians, the Amharas, after their victory in 1896. The arms they collected from the defeated Italians enabled them to subject vast tracts of land, especially to the east, southeast, and south of the provinces of Amhara, Tigre, and Shoa, i.e., the regions inhabited by the Dankalis, Gallas, and Somalis. Conquered by the Italians, they were merely to pass from one alien rule to another, and probably from a harsher to a more lenient one.
British public opinion was worked up to a high degree while Sir Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval racked their brains about what to do in order to save the “Stresa Front” (Austria!), to let the League of Nations keep its face, and to reach a compromise preserving order in Europe. The war had already started, Italian troops advanced in the North, when Hoare and Laval secretly drew up their famous plan to avert the worst. The idea was that the harassed Abyssinians cede their conquests to Italy which thus would have obtained a direct connection between Erythrea and Somalia: The Italian colonial empire in Africa would have been consolidated in this way. Mussolini showed himself not too difficult99 but the Hoare-Laval Plan was actually torpedoed by the indiscretion of two leftist journalists and, above all, by the well-organized “Peace Ballot.” (Who does not want peace?) Due to this wave of moral indignation Britain adopted a rigid policy in the best tradition of League of Nations orthodoxy and Sir Samuel Hoare was made to resign, to be replaced by Mr. Anthony Eden, until then Minister without portfolio for League of Nations affairs.100 The sanctions were ineffective, Soviet oil reached Italy, and Abyssinia was defeated in 1936. Haile Selassie, the hapless Emperor, took up residence in London, but the “Committee for the Defense of Abyssinian Democracy” refused to terminate its propaganda actions. Whether Abyssinia was then or is now (or even has the capacity to be) a “democracy” is quite another question.
The tragic results of the sanctions soon made themselves felt. The Nazis in Austria greeted each other with a knowing smile saying “Haile Selassieh!” instead of “Heil Hitler!” They knew that the West’s stand in the Abyssinian case was the beginning of the end of Austria’s independence. And so it was. England could not possibly assume moral leadership in a general action to prevent Italy from acquiring colonies: Being the archcolonialist herself she could not really turn to Italy saying, “Colonial conquests were possible until 1919, but now that we have the League, now that we all believe in peace, democracy, equality, progress, universal brotherhood and other niceties, you have to stay where you are.” In Italian (and not only in Fascist) eyes England behaved like a millionaire organizing other rich men to prevent a shiftless proletarian from becoming a skilled worker. (Of course, Italy would not have greatly benefited from Abyssinia, but that’s not the point. Colonies meant prestige, and only in exceptional cases eventual riches!)
Mr. Anthony Eden (today the Earl of Avon) thus is the creator of the Axis. He embodied the policy that drove Italy into the arms of Germany. Mussolini, being not a gentleman but a common man personally hurt by all and any criticism, burst into obscene rantings against England. American public opinion under leftist leadership sided with Britain and the League. Germany, however, derived a great profit—material and political—from this development. Isolated Italy was her prey.
Without effective Italian protection Austria’s enslavement was only a question of time. Britain had lost all interest in Austria, and no longer Hitler but Mussolini now appeared to be the main villain to British public opinion. It can be said without danger of refutation that London wanted to avert Hitler from the West and therefore gave him practically a free hand in the East. In 1940 the advancing Germans found in La Charité a deposit of documents from the Quai d’Orsay among them a note of Lord Halifax to the French Foreign Office exhorting the latter not to make the slightest gesture which Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, might interpret as an encouragement to resistance.101 An enormous amount of ink has been spilled about Schuschnigg’s tactics and his “missed opportunities,” but the fact remains that as soon as Italy was Germany’s partner, not even the greatest political genius could have saved Austria. It had been written off by the West, by the pro-Nazis as well as by the anti-Nazis—even if for very different reasons. And, indeed, not too much could be expected from the resistance of the Austrian people because it had lost the center around which its loyalty could rally: the Hapsburgs. Besides, the Austrians in their majority felt German102—though not necessarily Nazi. As a matter of fact, a great deal of Austrian resistance against the Anschluss had the character of the struggle between the “other Germany,” “Christian Germany,” and “Brown Greater Prussia.”103 It is too easily (and often too conveniently) forgotten that the first Austrian Constitution, promulgated under Social Democratic leadership in 1918, declared Deutschösterreich, “German Austria,” to be part of the Reich.104 The driving motor against the Anschluss were the Monarchists and after the calamity happened, they really got it in the neck. (This went so far that the members of the Austrian nobility, being a race of traitors against Germandom, were forbidden by Hitler to use their titles.)105
Americans and Britishers knew very little about these subtleties of a tragic struggle. Only in Jewish circles in the English-speaking world could a greater restlessness be observed. Ambassador Dieckhoff, who spoke to the American Secretary of State Cordell Hull106 on March 12, 1938, the day after the Anschluss, informed the Reich’s Foreign Office that Mr. Hull had no words of disapproval of Austria’s annexation and even two days later he was still courteous. (Only Mr. Sumner Welles seemed bitter.)107 Knowing Mr. Hull’s mental horizon one can hardly be surprised.
The disturbing lack of quality in the Foreign Service under the Roosevelt administration made the American government as uninformed as the American public was through leftist reporters and news commentators. The American Ambassador in Germany prior to the Anschluss was Professor William E. Dodd108 whose Diary was published by his son William E., Jr. and his daughter Martha.109 According to an unconfirmed rumor President Roosevelt wanted to appoint another Professor Dodd to head the American Embassy in Berlin (probably Walter F. Dodd), but thanks to a clerical error (or to some leftist intrigue?) it was the Chicago history professor who got the plum.
The reading of Ambassador Dodd’s Diary is almost as rewarding as the study of the far more voluminous Herron Papers, because in sheer backwood, parochial leftism these two men vied with each other. There are, of course, passages of historical value such as Dieckhoff’s admission that he would have liked to see Hitler overthrown,110 or the Polish Ambassador’s belief (as early as 1934!) that Hitler was secretly negotiating with Russia. Bullitt’s avowal that Lord Lothian and Lloyd George wanted to give a free hand to the Germans is as interesting as the Czech Minister’s claim that neither Czechoslovakia nor Yugoslavia would permit a return of the Hapsburgs to Vienna111—the old collaboration of Beneš and Belgrade with the Nazis! The funnier part of this Diary concerns Ambassador Dodd’s aristophobia and democratism. He is scandalized that his German butler packs his suitcase, is shocked by Sumner Welles who has fifteen servants, is critical of American diplomats with a Harvard accent, and his description of a requiem for Pilsudski (which poor Dodd had to attend) is priceless. (“Candles were burning and priests were chanting in Latin which no one understood, and occasionally falling upon their knees and scattering incense, which I think Jesus never used. It was the medieval ceremony from the beginning to end . . . to me it was all half-absurd.”) A hillbilly from the Shenandoah Valley lost in the neon jungle of Broadway could not have felt more bewildered. However, the most terrifying aspect of his diary was Dodd’s total ignorance of history, a proof of the tragic specialization to which learning in America so frequently is subjected. He had published (in German!) books on Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, but the not inconsiderable rest of history remained to him a book with seven seals.
We want to present our readers with only a few specimens of the Ambassador’s reactions to impressions and events. It is interesting to note that everything he thought odd or obsolete was immediately styled “medieval,” a habit he shared with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It also was perhaps a hangover from reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. Goring, naturally, had a “medieval hunter’s uniform.” Savagery and barbarism, Dodd thought, were a “curious quality of the Nazi mass mind which passed away in England with the Stuart kings in 1688.”112 Himmler, in Professor Dodd’s eyes, was probably another James II. University professors who confessed to him their despair drew the following comment: “They do not know the real cause of Germany’s reign of terror: the failure of the 1848 movement to resolve itself into a democratic parliamentary system.” As if a democratic parliamentary system had not been installed by the victorious Allies in 1918—but with what results! The following reflection, jotted down on March 11, 1935, is delightful: “The Pope is in a tight place. He must help Lutherans and Lutheran universities to save Catholicism in Germany. At the same time he must support Nazi philosophy in the hope of defeating communism in Russia and checking the advance of socialism in France and Spain.” One wonders where these “Lutheran universities” are and what effect Nazi philosophy might have had on the Front Populaire in France or on the C.G.T. in Spain. Professor Dodd informed Franz von Papen that “Father Coughlin is always breaking loose” and then found out to his surprise that “Von Papen is a Catholic, but he showed no sympathy with Coughlin.” Should every Catholic be enchanted by every priest? One is totally perplexed by sentences like these: “It is an unprecedented move to abolish such historic states as Bavaria or Saxony dating back to the time of the Caesars. Hitler, as much as he hates France, is imitating Napoleon I who abolished all French States.”113 Was Dodd raving mad? And such a man not only represented the United States in the worst trouble spot of the world, but taught history—history!!—at the University of Chicago.114 After such pronouncements one should not be surprised to hear that it was Germany’s “thousand-year aim to annex or at least subordinate all the Balkan countries.”115 Of course it is difficult to know whether such ignorance is of a historic or rather geographic nature. Sir Robert Vansittart, GCB, GCMG, MVO, Chief Diplomatic Advisor of the Foreign Office, published a book in 1940 replete with such historic nonsense that he would have flunked out of every secondary school on the Continent,116 but he played a significant role before and during World War II. The New York Times, priding itself on its high standards, not only put Hungary on the Balkan Peninsula, but even Czechoslovakia.117 Mr. Raymond Moley, another professor and former “braintruster” to President Roosevelt, wrote in his column in Newsweek in 1943 a piece of pro-Soviet propaganda about the Baltic States which contained a record number of historic, geographic, and political errors. Facts are sacred? After a storm of protest had broken loose, Dr. Moley sent a stenciled reply “To my critics” which ended in the sentence, “My critics are entitled to their opinions and I to mine.” If there are no absolutes, there are no facts—there are only opinions. All this is partly the psychological-practical result of our age which demands that everybody should have an opinion on almost anything and that everybody should be able to “think on his feet.” But it can’t be done.
The end of Austria created very little commotion in the West.118 Kurt von Schuschnigg was the only head of government who did not flee abroad but stayed on and “faced the music,” making the rounds of jails and concentration camps. This did not much impress the American left, because he was a “Fascist” and when he came to the United States in 1947 demonstrations were organized against him by native leftists and by what the French called la résistance de la Cinquième Avenue. But now that Austria had been crushed, Hitler turned against his willing collaborators, the men and the governments that had been “kept” by the French, had taken their money but, as Jacques Bainville had clearly foreseen,119 failed their employer. Paris now started to see the light, recognized the folly of having destroyed Austria-Hungary (as they had seen in the eighteenth century the folly of having built up Prussia), but now it is too late.120 Beneš, to prevent a restoration of the Hapsburgs in Vienna, had secretly negotiated with the Nazis121 and had encouraged Mussolini in his anti-Hapsburg stand. He had even been opposed to any type, any kind of Danubian Federation to stem the Nazi tide, though he openly admitted that his antagonism rested on sentimental and psychological, rather than on political or economic reasons. He intimated that the Little Entente would “always be opposed with intransigence and under all circumstances” even to a union between Austria and Hungary—after all, two sovereign states.122 He also served notice on France that all these or similar solutions of the Central European problem were “inacceptable to Paris because, above all, they were condemned by the Little Entente.” Naturally, it was difficult for this little man with the narrowest of political horizons to forget the ideological stand of his party, the National Socialist party, or his wartime activities, his ceaseless endeavors to prevent an early peace that would have ended the senseless slaughter. “Any compromise with Vienna in the summer of 1917 would have been unmitigated disaster for us,” he shamelessly confessed later on.123
Why did this spiteful, drab, and puritanical man, who had helped to build an impossibly synthetic country and had waged such a suicidal policy based on resentment that led to sovietization of Czechoslovakia, gain such prestige in certain Western circles? For this there are a variety of reasons: One was his anti-Catholic attitude, and “anti-Catholicism,” as Peter Viereck has pointed out, is the “anti-Semitism” of the moderate left. Another reason for his posing as liberator of “Czechoslovakia” from the yoke of the Hapsburgs, the “Viennese bureaucracy,” an “alien aristocracy,”124 “big landowners,” and “Pan-Germanism,” all arguments one can beautifully present to those prejudiced in ignorance. Sometimes one wonders to what extent he was ready to “modify” them. Discussing the possibility that the Western Allies might not energetically support Czechoslovakia against German pressure, he told Count Sforza, “If we should remain without support against the German menace, we will surprise the world with a limitless subservience to Berlin.”125 At the bottom of his heart this man always despised the West and longed for Russian cooperation. His contempt was greater for Britain than for France. In England he saw a future colony of the United States and “there is no greater impertinence than the American one.”126 A perusal of the articles he wrote for the antireligious periodical Volná myšlenka (“Free Thought”) and Beseda before World War I is most revealing in this respect.
The most fatal aspect of his role, however, lay in his absolute determination to prevent a Hapsburg restoration even if the alternative was the Anschluss—and with the Anschluss the encirclement and the end of Czechoslovakia.127 Better the Nazi flag over the Hradčany in Prague than Otto in Vienna’s Hofburg! Yet is it conceivable that the man was so stupid128 that he thought Hitler might reward him for his anti-Hapsburg stand? An American journalist of renown who saw Beneš immediately after the Anschluss found that he “pooh-poohs the idea that Hitler might succeed in any way in interfering with the affairs of the Czechoslovakian Republic.” It is obvious, on the other hand, that Beneš never regretted the course he took130—except perhaps in 1948 when it was too late. He always had a sneaking and at times a very open admiration not only for perennial Russia, but also for the Soviet Union. In 1938 he must have expected aid from Moscow, and this all the more so as the Third Soviet Army Air Corps was inofficially stationed in Czechoslovakia. He was sure that “communism in its philosophy and morality has certain similarities with democracy. It is also humanitarian, universalist, intellectualist, and rationalist. It is also pacifist, internationalist, and for the League of Nations policy.”131 This, after all, was typical for the way “moderate leftists” in the United States liked to look at communism. Beneš was dead certain that the Soviet Union would evolve to a freer form, but, as soon as he returned to Czechoslovakia under Russian auspices, this leader of the Czech National Socialist party proved to be one of the most docile pupils Hitler and Stalin ever had. Personal freedom no longer seemed to interest him. True, while still in exile he had claimed that Hitler should serve as an example in many ways. In January 1942 Foreign Affairs (New York) published an article by Beneš in which he said openly that Hitler was to be imitated as a “forerunner of minority settlements.”132 He repeated this thesis again in March 1944 when he spoke about the “grim necessity” of the transfer of populations,133 which meant in practical terms the total expropriation and deportation of fully one-third of the population of the historic countries belonging to the Crown of St. Wenceslas (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia). Dr. Beneš, being a “good democrat,” believed in majority rule. But since all the German inhabitants of this area would vote, he could hardly expect a solid majority for radically leftist experiments. The logical conclusion was quite simple: the German-speaking population had to be expelled. The Soviets agreed with him because they knew that in the old elections the Sudeten Germans produced only a tiny Communist vote. Beneš might have argued that these German-speaking Bohemians and Moravians would not only vote the “wrong ticket,” but also had been “disloyal.”
Yet since Mr. Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George, and M. Clemenceau had handed over these areas inhabited by a people of German extraction against their wishes to the artificial state of Czechoslovakia, why should they have been loyal to the nationalist government of the Czechs? The Slovaks, the Hungarians, the Poles, the Ruthenians who had to join this curious state without being asked, had not been loyal either.134 In 1918-1919 the “Sudeten Germans” proclaimed their loyalty to Austria, but a self-determination was denied to them by the Great Western Democracies.135 Their efforts to unite with Austria were put down by force of arms.136 By the fall of 1938 Austria no longer existed and the Germans of the Third Reich figured as the only conationals of the Sudeten Germans. Now, if these Germans of Bohemia-Moravia, appealing to the principle of determination to deny them the fulfillment of this then it was highly undemocratic to deny them the fulfillment of this wish. Or, if after 1945 they wanted to remain under the rule of Prague, then why deport them? Of course, Dr. Edvard Beneš was a democrat and not a liberal. This comes out clearly in his tirade against the freedom of the press in July 1945. “Unbridled freedom to publish newspapers must not be reestablished,” he declared. “We all say that liberalism has been discarded. This is a fact, and we must realize that one of the factors in public life that is, above all, subject to today’s socializing trends, is journalism. How to harmonize this fact with freedom of speech is another matter. But here, too, the principle that the freedom of the individual has to be subordinated to the freedom of the whole, holds good.”137 Liberalism goes out, socialism comes in. Why not? Dr. Beneš headed a National Socialist, not a National Liberal party! And when Jan Masaryk was thrown out of the window this was probably one of the finest acts of subordination of the individual to the “whole,” i.e., the interests of the Czech Communist party.
So much about Dr. Beneš, one of the gravediggers of Europe, a man so highly esteemed by the leftist press, a man who was destined to die in ignominy, isolation, and despair.138 When Hitler shrewdly whipped up the passions of the Sudeten Germans, who had very genuine grievances against the Czechs and asked more energetically than ever for self-determination, the Western powers were put into a far more awkward position than the average leftist journalist surmised. Could Great Britain—just to quote one instance—-fight in good conscience against the realization of the principle of self-determination? Czechoslovakia had not only the three-and-a-half-million Sudeten Germans (as many people as there were Americans in 1776) but also a million Hungarians and Poles who wanted to break away—not to mention the Slovaks who, at the very least, demanded autonomy. The whole edifice of contradictions, built in 1918-1919, was coming down with a crash. And what should a democrat say if people, invoking the democratic principle, demanded for themselves an undemocratic order? As a matter of fact, Hitler, without even threatening invasion and war, could have coldly strangled Czechoslovakia. Even without treason or terror, simply by being compelled to arm excessively, the Czech Republic (already suffering badly from a grave economic crisis) could have been driven into total bankruptcy. Actually, the foolish experiment of the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye was drawing to a close. And when “Czechoslovakia” rose again in 1945, it had changed from a German protectorate to a Soviet satellite. This to all practical purposes entailed one not inconsiderable difference: The Czechs had never been forced to accept the Nazi philosophy or to deny their religion. Now they were required to embrace Marxist-Leninism, i.e., the ideology of a Prussian Jew and of a half-German Kalmyk.
The abuse heaped upon the head of Mr. Neville Chamberlain for his surrender in Munich was almost entirely unjustified. First of all it must be realized that Mr. Chamberlain inherited a totally unarmed country from his predecessor, Mr. Stanley Baldwin, one of the most insular political leaders England ever produced. Baldwin not only knew little about the outside world, he actually hated it.139 The pacifist Labour Government preceding Mr. Baldwin’s premiership had been working very hard to disarm Britain, and when the Nazi danger loomed around the corner, the Labourites engaged in the highly amusing pastime of calling for disarmament while insulting the Tories for not standing up to the Nazi menace. The Liberals did even worse: Lloyd George admired Hitler and declared after his visit to the Obersalzberg, “I have never seen a happier people than the Germans. Hitler is one of the greatest of the many great men I have ever met.”140 Democracy means rule by public opinion numerically arrived at. British public opinion was as little prepared to fight over Czechoslovakia as over Austria, and though certain leftist circles were highly enthusiastic about Czechoslovakia, they were not sufficiently organized to sway the masses. Czechoslovakia was indeed a country about which the British (in the words of Mr. Neville Chamberlain) “knew so little,” and whoever wanted to look it up in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica could not find it—nor its people.141
To declare war against Germany in September 1938 would have been a suicidal gesture for Britain. Even if it is untrue that there were less than a dozen modern antiaircraft guns in Britain at that time, the armament was exceedingly poor and there was no conscription.142 The French left was torn between pacifism and interventionism. The Soviet Union had a military pact with Czechoslovakia dating back to 1935, but no common border. The argument that a war at that moment would have given the edge to the Allies is so silly that it hardly needs refutation. The army of Czechoslovakia would not have resisted for forty-eight hours. The Czech officers would have been killed by their own soldiers and the Czech population after defeat would have been treated like the Poles. As it happened, the Czechs were not called to military service, there was full employment all through the war, the people received the same rations as the Germans, the birthrate rose, and in spite of isolated cases of atrocities (Lidice), civil casualties were very small, the losses through aerial warfare almost zero.
In other words, Chamberlain, abused and ridiculed as the “umbrella man” (which Englishman does not sport an umbrella?) had almost no choice—in fact, none at all, unless he accepted the word of the conspirators in the German General Staff. The conspirators of the Haider-Beck combine were powerless against Hitler who was well supported by the masses.143 There, after all, was the man who had licked unemployment, the man who had wiped out peacefully the results of a truly iniquitous treaty, the man who showed himself able to enlarge the Reich without firing a single shot. Intellectual liberty was down to almost nothing, but the masses have few ideas they want to express: Bread and games are more important to them than the freedom of the press or academic freedom. The generals, however, not only despised Hitler as an upstart (Hindenburg called him the “Bohemian private first class”);144 they fully understood the lowness of his character which had become evident in the Fritsch case145 and, above all, they were afraid that he might bring about the ruin of Germany in a fatal two-front war. Generals, on the average, are far less bellicose than journalists or patriotic housewives: They know the horrors of a war and they dislike any break in the routine.
The conspirators were determined to arrest Hitler in case a war broke out. Only then a very large sector of all males would be mobilized and under military orders, thus no longer able to follow party directives.146 The masses would also be impressed by the fact that Hitler, who promised their country territorial aggrandizement without spilling a drop of blood, had brought them the agonies of a war after all—in other words, that he had broken his pact with the German nation. The conspirators even stationed a division in Thuringia between Munich and Berlin in order to paralyze Nazi party formations in case of an emergency—especially Hitler’s bodyguard (Leibstandarte) stationed in Munich. (Hitler’s arrest was planned to take place in Berlin.)
Theodor Kordt, a German diplomat in London and brother of one of the conspirators, went to 10 Downing Street where he informed the Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax on the evening of September 5, 1938, about the conspiracy, insisting that Britain should not deal with Hitler, that the Prime Minister should not negotiate with him but should allow war to break out—the conspirators’ only chance to strike against the idol of the common man. By that time, however, Chamberlain had already consented to meet Hitler, but the conspirators were not told this. The German officers risked their lives, but they were not considered worthy of confidence.147
The Beck-Haider group was desperate when Chamberlain went to Godesberg,148 though they became more hopeful when the crisis approached a new climax. The date for Hitler’s arrest was set for September 29, but then, prompted by Chamberlain, Mussolini intervened and the conspirators gave up. Hitler had gained another “moral” victory.
Why did Neville Chamberlain not collaborate with the conspirators? No ideological reasons were involved, only the curious inability of the Britishers and Americans to project themselves into the minds and temperaments of other nations. I can almost visualize the faces of the men in Downing Street after Theodor Kordt’s departure. They must have looked at each other with a mixture of embarrassment, suspicion, surprise, disdain, uneasiness, and discomfort—until one of them exclaimed, “Damn it, this is a preposterous E. Phillips Oppenheim story! Can any one of you chaps imagine a bloody general arresting His Majesty’s Prime Minister?” Indeed, no one could visualize a British general handcuffing Mr. Churchill or Mr. Attlee. Here, however, we are up against an old Anglo-Saxon limitation and an insoluble dilemma. The dilemma arises in the minds of the British or the Americans when their belief in radical human differences, if not in racial superiority, suddenly and mysteriously collapses giving way to the very opposite conviction, i.e., that human beings everywhere are “basically the same,” that they are “more alike than unlike.” Here is a source of endless miscalculations, misinterpretations, and catastrophic errors.
Thus only God knows whether one can make Mr. Chamberlain’s Englishness a major point of accusation. This limitation certainly is not of a moral but only of a psychological order. No doubt the man was an English gentleman in the best sense of the word, honorable, without guile, perhaps somewhat simple-minded, but future historians will surely judge him with infinitely greater fairness than the hysterical newspapers of his days. Was the United States perhaps ready to fight for Czechoslovakia or merely egging on England to go out on a limb? True, the United States had no military alliance with that brand-new country, but it was its brainchild, the joint creation of Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Masaryk, and American citizens of Czech149 and in some cases of Slovak origin.150 Still, President Roosevelt himself admitted that he was “not a bit upset” about the results of the Munich Agreement.151
The vilification of Neville Chamberlain is usually accompanied by the statement that Winston Churchill always had seen the light, that he had always known exactly what a scoundrel Hitler really was and that Chamberlain’s naive exclamation upon his arrival from Munich about “peace in our time” would never have been made by the Old Bulldog. Certain Conservatives would fully subscribe to this myth, firmly believing that Churchill, a “typical Conservative of the old school” is, in this respect at least, beyond reproach. Churchill, however, never was a genuine conservative, but rather an old-fashioned eighteenth-century Liberal and Deist. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, belonged to the “left-most” wing of the Tories and, after a short flirtation with the Conservative party, young Winston became an ardent British Liberal of the leftish, of the Lloyd George dispensation. He was considered a “Radical,” supported Lloyd George after the war when the Welsh politician disliked the strong stand Churchill adopted towards bolshevism. Lloyd George’s pro-Russian and anti-Polish attitude was partly due to his loathing for Poles (which Churchill inherited), partly to his desire not to lose the indirect support of the Trade Unions who wanted to cripple Poland’s resistance in her life-and-death struggle against the Red army.152
After the break with Lloyd George Mr. Churchill worked his way back into the Conservative party where the old diehards (who always valued character more than brains) never quite forgave him his switches.153 But when, upon his return from Yalta, he told the House of Commons (February 27, 1945) that he did not know any government that kept its obligations, even to its disadvantage, as faithfully as the Soviets did and that he was thoroughly opposed to debating Russia’s loyalty to pacts and treaties—what did he really think? If he believed his own words he was a great deal more naive than Chamberlain with his “peace in our time.”154 And his famous perspicacity about Hitler? In November 1935—well over a year after the June 1934 massacre —Churchill called the Führer a “highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner” and added that “the world lives on hopes that the worst is over and that we may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age.”155 As late as 1937 our great Epimetheus wrote about Hitler, “If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”156 Churchill’s conversion did not take place until sometime in 1938.