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Low Dishonest Decades

Myriad political and economic factors, together with muddled leadership, eroded democratic institutions and enfeebled governments across Europe between 1918 and 1939. No one today can say how the damage wrought by former US President Donald Trump and his populist acolytes in Europe will ramify in the years ahead.

WINCHESTER, UK – Although most of the world is grateful that Donald Trump’s presidency has ended, in its wake many still feel “uncertain and afraid,” as W.H. Auden put it in his immortal poem “September 1, 1939.” Auden, drinking alone in a New York bar, viewed the day when Nazi Germany invaded Poland to initiate World War II as marking the end of a “low dishonest decade” of squalid events and increasingly squalid moral compromises. Trump’s presidency may not have lasted a decade (it only seemed to), but lump together his four-year term with the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, and the world has arguably endured an era almost as compromised as the 1930s were.

Of course, Trump is neither Adolf Hitler nor Benito Mussolini. But, as four excellent recent books about the interwar years show, it wasn’t the fascists who started the rot that enabled their rise to power. Myriad political and economic factors, along with muddled leadership, eroded democratic institutions and enfeebled governments across Europe between 1918 and 1939, and no one today can say how the institutional damage wrought by Trump and his populist acolytes in Europe will ramify in the years ahead. Yet, one thing is abundantly clear: the rule of Trump, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orbán, Jarosław Kaczyński, and others also has been low and dishonest. The question that should most concern us is whether we can arrest the rot early enough.

The First Crisis of Democracy

The four books under review offer convincing accounts of some of the many upheavals of the 1920s and 1930s that provided a political opening for fascists and Nazis. The main thread running through all of them is the ideological conflict between communism and fascism during the interwar decades. Today, it is tempting to assume that this confrontation, which defined twentieth-century politics from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is history. Communism supposedly collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union, while fascism allegedly died with the death of Generalísimo Francisco Franco in 1975 and Spain’s embrace of democracy.

But the assumption that both fascism and communism have vanished is facile. Even though its practices have precious little to do with Marxism, the Communist Party of China has an authoritarian formula for economic progress (and COVID-19 elimination) that attracts new admirers.

As for fascism, its continued appeal as a form of government among the world’s motley array of populists and far-right ideologues can hardly be discounted. Giles Tremlett ends his meticulous, vibrant account of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War by pointing to the 1996 election victory of Spain’s right-wing People’s Party (PP), which, as its left-wing critics note, was founded by Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a prominent government minister during Franco’s dictatorship.

Tremlett could have gone even further. Vox, a far-right party that split from the PP in 2013, is now the third-largest political force in Spain. Meanwhile, Kaczyński’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland and Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary have shown that the political pendulum in some parts of Europe has swung much further to the right – toward the anti-Semitic nationalism that so marked the interwar period – than anyone might have expected just five years ago.

A Very German Revolution

The great question is why authoritarian nationalism, the dark heart of fascism, became so powerful across Europe in the aftermath of World War I. In November 1918: The German Revolution, Robert Gerwarth, a German historian at University College Dublin, argues that things could have turned out very differently if only the Weimar Republic had been allowed to succeed once Kaiser Wilhelm II finally accepted Germany’s defeat and his exile in the Netherlands.

November 1918

As Gerwarth’s subtitle indicates, there was widespread chaos in Germany as WWI ended. The military was in turmoil, and the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had inspired support for the radical left. But Gerwarth quotes the judgment of the novelist Thomas Mann: “The German Revolution is a very German one, even if it is a proper revolution. No French savagery, no Russian communist excesses.”

The result was a new constitution, signed on August 11, 1919, in the town of Weimar (famously home in the eighteenth century to Goethe and Schiller). As Gerwarth writes, “the Weimar Constitution was a remarkable document, written in the spirit of liberalism, which protected basic liberties like freedom of speech and the press, declared the equality of women and men, and established free and equal voting rights for all adult German citizens.” With its guarantees of paid maternity leave, female suffrage, and co-education for all, the German interior minister could confidently declare that Weimar Germany was now “the most democratic democracy in the world.”

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Many nowadays associate the Weimar Republic with hyperinflation and political ineptitude, but it achieved many remarkable successes. The republic’s form of welfare capitalism went far beyond what Otto von Bismarck had built decades earlier, and was perhaps the most inclusive and advanced in Europe at the time. German businesses and the country’s powerful labor unions agreed on a bold system of wage arbitration under which workers would be represented on company boards – something that remains a core element of Germany’s economic model today. So, this was no stillborn republic.

Weimar’s democratic order did not last – by 1933, Hitler was chancellor of Germany, consolidating a dictatorship that just six years later would engulf the world in war – but its demise was not preordained. As Gerwarth reflects sadly, “the Weimar Republic had by late 1923 managed to fend off some serious challenges from both the Left and the Right – far more serious challenges, in fact, than those faced by the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.” It is therefore wrong, he argues, to label the Weimar Republic a “weak democracy.”

Maybe so, though I find it hard to believe that radical left-wing terrorism or Warsaw Pact hostility ever posed a mortal threat to modern Germany. But historians can at least agree on the reasons for the Nazi ascendancy, starting with the punitive peace settlement imposed on Germany by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The 1929 US stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression ravaged Germany too soon after it had emerged from the hyperinflation of the early 1920s. And much of the German officer class remained convinced that their forces had not actually been defeated militarily in WWI, but had instead been betrayed by the country’s politicians.

War by Other Means

Paul Jankowski, a history professor at Brandeis University, notes in his book All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War how little the Great War actually resolved. “All, victors and vanquished alike, believed they had fought defensively, for their survival or for their ideals,” he writes, and “[a]ll believed themselves somehow wronged by the peace that followed. No war had left so abiding a sense of national insult among all who had waged it.” Even “[t]he victors resented each other.”

All Against All

Jankowski glides elegantly around the world in his quest to grasp the origins of WWII in the events of the early 1930s. Japan invaded China and established the puppet state of Manchukuo; the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt left the gold standard; and Mussolini waged wars in Libya and Ethiopia in pursuit of an African empire. The 1932-34 World Disarmament Conference in Geneva and the 1933 London Economic Conference revealed the participants’ mutual distrust. Self-interested nationalism, rather than any sense of the collective good, permeated both meetings – not least, of course, in the case of Hitler’s Germany, which was intent on rearming and securing Lebensraum (“living space”) for the German people through eastward territorial expansion.

Jankowski argues that the early 1930s delivered a series of hammer blows to the post-WWI order. But not all of those blows were launched by warmongers and imperialists. The Roosevelt administration, for example, was very much “America First” in its instincts, and shunned any international commitment or promise that stood in the way of US economic recovery. Thus, FDR abruptly abandoned the gold standard and undermined the London Economic Conference, which had been called to forge a unified response to the Great Depression by the world’s leading democracies. FDR would not act out of concern for the world beyond America until well after the Nazis and fascists were on the move in Europe.

Historians still debate the relative importance of all these factors in contributing to WWII’s outbreak, as well as to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Clearly, almost every country responded to the Great Depression by turning inward. In Germany, this shift toward national self-sufficiency was intensified by the feeling across the political spectrum that the Versailles terms had gravely wronged the country, making a mockery of Germans’ trust in the “Fourteen Points” for peace (oddly not spelled out by Gerwarth) that US President Woodrow Wilson had announced to Congress in January 1918. After all, Wilson had said that “there shall be […] no punitive damages,” and that self-determination “is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.”

The Pain in Spain

So much for good intentions. By July 1936, the divisions emerging across Europe had ignited a civil war in Spain, as right-wing military officers began their revolt against the Second Spanish Republic’s left-wing government.

Tremlett, whose The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War combines journalistic flair with scholarly precision, is no starry-eyed propagandist for the International Brigades, long the romantic heroes of Spain’s agony. Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls left an indelibly sympathetic impression of the foreign idealists (35,000 by Tremlett’s count, from well over 50 countries) who crossed the Spanish border to fight for the Republic. But while Tremlett acknowledges the Brigaders’ idealism and extraordinary courage, he also emphasizes their military naiveté and internecine obsessions with ideological purity.

The International Brigades

The foreign volunteers were united by a determination to defeat the fascism that the world had already seen in Mussolini’s Italy and now in Hitler’s Germany. But their unity was weak from the start. The communist commissars who directed the Brigades loathed the anarchists, for example. In what was supposed to be the Brigaders’ “popular front” against fascism, ideological tensions between Trotskyists, Stalinists, and socialists bred mistrust and paranoia.

Tremlett notes the overwhelming influence of the advisers sent from the Soviet Union. They were coyly termed “Mexicans” to avoid openly flouting the non-intervention pact signed by 27 countries, including the Soviet Union. One such “Mexican,” under the nom de guerre General Walter, was Karol Świerczewski, a Pole who had been a military instructor in Moscow. He was “probably the harshest commander the Brigaders would have,” Tremlett writes, “a man of considerable personal courage, but one who showed no mercy when it came to shooting prisoners or those deemed cowardly in battle.”

Such executions by Walter and others became “an established part” of the war. So did the battlefield atrocities committed by Francoist forces, especially the Moroccans who had enlisted in Spain’s North African army.

But arguably the worst barbarities of the war, captured by Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, were the aerial bombing and strafing of civilians and Republican troops alike. The Soviet-supplied Republican aircraft proved no match for the bombers and fighter planes supplied to Franco – along with their pilots – by Hitler and Mussolini. As long as Franco enjoyed air supremacy, his eventual victory was likely; without it, he might well have been defeated.

A similar question mark hovers over the refusal of the United Kingdom, France, and the US to intervene on behalf of Spain’s legitimate government. French Prime Minister Léon Blum, who led a popular-front government, had initially wanted to help the Madrid government, but settled for a non-intervention pact after it became clear that Britain was not prepared to fight another war in Europe. Hitler and Mussolini, paying only lip service to the pact, had other ideas. As one US diplomat observed, the Non-Intervention Committee set up by Britain and France was “the most cynical and lamentably dishonest group that history has known.”

That may be true, but where was the electoral support for war? As Jankowski notes, in 1933, students at the Oxford Union had (by 275 votes to 153) approved the motion that “this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.”

Paper Allies

Franco declared absolute victory on April 1, 1939, five months before Hitler’s tanks advanced into Poland. If the Spanish Republicans had felt abandoned by Britain and France, the Poles’ disappointment soon curdled into a deep sense of betrayal. Britain and France, writes Roger Moorhouse in his book Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II, were obliged by treaty to declare war on Germany if Hitler refused to withdraw, which they did on September 3. But the two powers then “did nothing to aid their ally, shamefully leaving Poland to its fate.”

Poland 1939

That fate had been prepared in August 1939 by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a “non-aggression” treaty between the Soviet Union and Germany. Hitler had accepted that eastern Poland, Bessarabia, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia up to the Dvina river would fall “within the Soviet sphere of influence.” When Stalin demanded all of Latvia, Hitler agreed. “With that,” writes Moorhouse, “the fate of some 23 million people across Central Europe was sealed.” One in five Poles would die during WWII.

Just as Tremlett exhaustively relates the battles in Spain, so Moorhouse details Polish forces’ extraordinarily brave but invariably doomed efforts to defy the overwhelming odds stacked against them. Moorhouse considers the oft-repeated tales of “cavalry against tanks” a grotesque “myth” (often spread by the absent British and French) and a gratuitous insult to Poland’s stubborn defenders. Perhaps so, but the myth is grounded in reality: the splendid charges by saber-wielding Polish cavalry could never defeat the Nazis’ mechanized might and the Soviet Red Army’s invasion from the east. Poland managed to delay its inevitable surrender only to October 6.

Moorhouse’s achievement is to set the battles in their historical context. He notes, for example, that neither Germany nor Russia, now part of the Soviet Union, were reconciled to the territorial losses they suffered at the end of WWI. In the view of Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, Poland was “the monstrous bastard of the Peace of Versailles.” In a pithy summary of Poland’s plight as Britain and France dithered on the sidelines, Moorhouse writes: “Poland would be exposed to every horror that modern conflict could devise. Just as the Wehrmacht unleashed a race war against the Poles in the west, so the Red Army imported class war in the east.”

The consequences were horrific, and Wehrmacht atrocities became almost routine. Villages were set on fire, and the assassination of a single German officer would prompt the execution of 50 Polish civilians. And “where Jews were not shot outright,” Moorhouse notes, “they could be forced to clean the streets on their hands and knees.”

The Red Army was equally guilty. “Massacres and maltreatment were seen as justified – of officers, in particular, because, in Soviet eyes, most were trebly damned: as Catholics, Poles, and noblemen.” The most egregious atrocity, coming months after Poland’s surrender, was the massacre of around 22,000 imprisoned Polish military officers in the Katyn forest in western Russia. Only in 1992 did a post-Soviet Russian government admit to its responsibility for the slaughter.

The Leaders We Deserve?

These four books deliver dispiriting lessons, notably regarding the mistake of appeasement (Moorhouse pictures UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain “defending Poland with words and consonants alone”) and political leaders’ readiness to sacrifice their professed principles. The obvious example is the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which put fascism and communism temporarily on the same side – with Molotov infamously calling fascism “a matter of taste” – before Hitler made the fatal error in 1941 of invading the Soviet Union.

The cliché is that history is written by the winners. The British bombing of Dresden during WWII or America’s 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are thus rarely described as war crimes. As Hitler said just before he attacked Poland, “the victor will never be asked if he told the truth.”

But, as Trump has proven, truth can be a malleable concept. Referring to Trump’s unfounded claim that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen, the German journalist Jochen Bittner wrote recently in the New York Times: “One hundred years ago, amid the implosions of Imperial Germany, powerful conservatives who led the country into war refused to accept that they had lost. Their denial gave birth to arguably the most potent and disastrous political lie of the 20th century – the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth.”

Trump is not Hitler, and America is not the Weimar Republic. What the interwar period shows is that false narratives, craven political choices, and escalating appeasement can have dreadful consequences that may not emerge immediately.

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