Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (31 page)

A variety of motives lay behind the marches—including the SS’s reluctance to allow prisoners to fall into Allied hands as well as the
desire to exploit them as slave labourers. But in some cases, journeys on foot or by train were so aimless that it seems the intention was simply to “continue the mass murder in the concentration camps by other means.” Marchers were starved, beaten and shot, particularly when they became too exhausted to keep up with the others. In addition to the brutality of the guards, the victims often had to contend with the active hostility of the civilian German population they passed through. Instances of help are also recorded. “In Christianstadt German women tried to give us bread, but the women guards wouldn’t permit it,” recorded one former prisoner. “One German woman with a human heart cried:
‘Ihr Elende, Ihr Unglückliche.’
The brutal woman guard yelled: ‘What are you doing pitying Jews?’ ” It is worth noting that there are no known instances of German bystanders losing their lives for expressing sympathy in the hearing of SS guards. Even so, disapproval and indifference outweighed pity: by early 1945, with the end in sight, many German civilians saw themselves as the prime victims of the war and remained blind to the misfortune of the marchers passing through their midst.
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In this terminal phase of Hitler’s empire, the barriers which had previously existed between the ordered world of the
Volksgemeinschaft
and the underworld of the camps now dissolved. The inmates emerged “like Martians” into the outside world. Their guards were no longer solely SS men, sworn to secrecy; they included retreating soldiers, civilians, Party officials and Hitler Youth members. Random shootings and massacres took place no longer within the camp perimeter, but by roadsides, in woods and on the outskirts of towns and villages in Germany and Austria.
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The ultimate technical problem arising from mass murder practised on this scale was how to dispose of the dead. In the extermination camps, corpses were burned on enormous pyres or in ovens. The random, ubiquitous killing of the final months could not be so easily tidied up. As the Germans retreated from the Lublin region, they made hasty and unsuccessful efforts to hide the traces of genocide. Klukowski noted with horror “the odor of decomposing bodies from the Jewish cemetery” where mass graves had been dug. The shocked Allied troops who liberated the camps in Germany forced local citizens—at places like Nordhausen, Gusen and Woebbelin—not merely
to inspect the mounds of corpses but to bury them, sometimes in the central squares and parks of their old and elegant towns.
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Overcome by nausea, an Austrian priest who entered Mauthausen several days after liberation noted: “A couple of times I was on the verge of throwing up. One indeed comes from civilization. And here inside?… What a sad achievement of our arrogant century, this hideousness, this sinking into an unprecedented lack of civilization, and on top of that in the heart of Europe!” But the dead lay outside the camps as well. In the years after the war, their graves dotted the roadsides of central Europe until local committees chose to remove these blots on the landscape by constructing collective memorials instead and disposing of the human remains. A newly sanitized rural landscape was created for the benefit of tourists and locals alike.
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In 1942 it had been decided to distribute the clothing and personal belongings of Auschwitz inmates as Christmas presents to
Volksdeutsche
settlers in the Ukraine. Later the scheme was expanded and trainloads of goods were sent off to the German pioneers. Genocide and resettlement were inextricably linked, for Hitler’s war aimed at the complete racial reconstitution of Europe.
⁷⁵

There were no historical parallels for such a project. In Europe neither Napoleon nor the Habsburgs had aimed at such an exclusive domination, but then Hitler’s upbringing as a German nationalist critic of Vienna helps explain the contrast with the methods of governance pursued by the Dual Monarchy. In its violence and racism, Nazi imperialism drew more from European precedents in Asia, Africa and—especially—the Americas. “When we eat wheat from Canada,” remarked Hitler one evening during the war, “we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.” On another occasion he described the Ukraine as “that new Indian Empire.” But if Europeans would have resented being ruled as the British ruled India, they were shocked at being submitted to an experience closer to that inflicted upon the native populations of the Americas.
⁷⁶

National Socialism started out claiming to be creating a New Order in Europe, but as racial ideology prevailed over economic rationality, the extreme violence implicit in this project became
clearer. “Gingerbread and whippings” was how Goebbels summed up their policy, but there was not enough of the former and too much of the latter. The “Great Living Space [
Grosslebensraum
] of the European family of nations” promised life to the Germans, an uncertain and precarious existence to most Europeans and extermination to the Jews. “If Europe can’t exist without us,” wrote Goebbels in his pro-European phase, “neither can we survive without Europe.” This turned out to be true. The Germans threw away their chance to dominate the continent after 1940 and their defeat led to their own catastrophe. Himmler’s original vision came to pass—the Germans were henceforth concentrated inside Germany—but it is doubtful whether he would have regarded the way this came about as a triumph.
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SIX

Blueprints for the Golden Age

The foundations of twentieth-century democracy have still to be laid
.

—E. H. CARR,
CONDITIONS OF PEACE

For a fleeting moment we have an opportunity to make an epoch—to open a Golden Age for all mankind
.

—C. STREIT,
UNION NOW

The reexamination of values and the heroic effort which might have saved the democracies from war if they had been attempted in time, are taking place and will take place in the midst of the ruins
.

—J. MARITAIN,
CHRISTIANISME ET DÉMOCRATIE

The Second World War and the confrontation with the reality of a Nazi New Order in Europe acted as a catalyst inside and outside the continent for a renewed attempt to define the place of the democratic nation-state in the modern world.

This chapter attempts to describe the various axes along which the wartime debate took place, a debate whose core concerned the rethinking of another New Europe to rival the authoritarian monster created by Berlin. It goes without saying, of course, that the Nazi New Order was not merely a spur to alternatives, but the very seedbed—in certain areas—of post-war realities; the continuities between Hitler’s Europe and Schuman’s are visible in economic—especially industrial—Franco-German cooperation, for instance; there are also the obvious continuities of personnel in state bureaucracies and administrations. But in the realm of political values and ideals these continuities were much less important.

Yet the Second World War did not start out—at least so far as London and Paris were concerned—as a war for a new order. The power of Nazi dreams contrasted from the outset with the ideological timidity of the British. “These people,” fired off an elderly H. G. Wells, “by a string of almost incredible blunders, have entangled what is left of their Empire in a great war to ‘end Hitler,’ and they have absolutely no suggestions to offer their antagonists and the world at large of what is to come after Hitler. Apparently they hope to paralyse Germany in some as yet unspecified fashion and then to go back to their golf links or the fishing stream and the doze by the fire after dinner.”
¹

The arrival of Churchill did not allay such criticism; indeed, following Dunkirk it intensified. At the Ministry of Information, Harold Nicolson contrasted the “revolutionary war” waged by the Germans with the British “conservative” war effort and urged that Whitehall respond to the need to ask people to fight for a “new order.” Conservative Party reformers felt similarly, while Attlee stressed the need not to fight “a conservative war” with “negative objectives.” Churchill himself disliked any talk about war aims or the post-war order; but the debate—in Addison’s words—“flowed around him.” As talk of a Nazi New Order captivated Europe in the summer of 1940, British policymakers came under pressure to outline a New Order of their own. The debate that ensued—in Britain and abroad—gave impetus to many of the ideas and values that would form the foundations of the post-war world.
²

REVIVING DEMOCRACY

By March 1941, one prominent British politician could write that “ ‘everybody’ is talking about the new order, the new kind of society, the new way of life, the new conception of man.” According to historian E. H. Carr, “the point at issue is not the necessity for a new order but the manner in which it shall be built.” Hitler could not win the war, in his view, but he would have performed “the perhaps indispensable function of sweeping away the litter of the old order.” Thus the struggle was “an episode in a revolution of social and political order.”
³

At the very heart of this revolution were the preservation and reassertion of democratic values in Europe. “Democracy! Perhaps no
word has ever been more devalued and ridiculed,” wrote the French resistance paper
Franc-Tireur
in March 1944. “Only yesterday it stood for long-winded committee speeches and parliamentary impotence.” Aware of the deep disaffection with the Third Republic in France, General de Gaulle expressly avoided raising the subject in his early broadcasts. “At the moment,” he wrote in July 1941, “the mass of the French people confuse the word democracy with the parliamentary regime as it operated in France before the war … That regime has been condemned by events and by public opinion.” It was this wholesale disillusionment with democracy in inter-war Europe which had led commentators like Ambassador Joe Kennedy to predict after the fall of France that “democracy is finished in England.” “The necessity for re-stating the democratic idea,” asserted R. W. G. MacKay, author of the best-selling
Peace Aims and the New Order
, “is the most fundamental question for us all just now.”
⁴

Chamberlain’s uncertain presentation of the case against Hitler typified for many critics the complacency, passivity and outmoded style of the prevailing “bourgeois” democratic tradition in western Europe. What was to become the wartime consensus rested upon the belief that in order to survive in Europe, democracy would have to be reinterpreted: the old liberal focus upon the value of political rights and liberties had not been enough to win the loyalty of the masses. “Democracy,” wrote a central European émigré in the USA “… must set its values against new ideals; it must show that it is able to adapt its psychology and its methods to the new times.” From such a perspective, the Atlantic Charter of August 1941 seemed woefully cautious and even conservative in its promises. “Nothing in the text suggests that we are in the middle of the greatest revolutionary war of all time … [This] has the drawback of suggesting that the democracies wish to preserve and maintain the methods of the past, while the totalitarian powers strive for something new and imaginative.” In Britain, even the Charter itself was downplayed, according to a scathing anonymous critic of British propaganda: “Speakers of the Ministry [of Information] lecture about the Empire, America, France, wartime cookery, the horrors of Nazi rule and Hitler’s new order, but they do not talk about
our
new order. There is, in fact, no recognition
of the war of ideas or of the social revolution through which we are living.”
⁵

Suspect as the notion may seem to revisionists today, social revolution hardly seems too strong a term to describe the dramatic changes wrought by the war both in Britain and in occupied Europe. Wartime dislocation and chaos—some sixty million changes of address were registered in Britain alone during the war—collapsed the social distances upon which the rigid pre-war class systems of Europe had rested. The impact of bombing, together with systematic evacuations and the mass panics and flight of millions of people (eight to twelve million, for example, covering hundreds of miles, during the mass panic in Belgium and France alone in the summer of 1940) brought classes and communities together which had formerly remained in ignorance of one another. Rationing demonstrated that government planning could be used for egalitarian ends and was as a result surprisingly popular. Hence the war itself, with the new roles assumed by government in managing the economy and society, demonstrated the truth of the reformers’ argument: democracy was indeed compatible with an interventionist state. According to Mass Observation in 1944: “Public feeling about controls is largely based on the belief that they are democratic, more democratic than the freedoms and liberties which in practice apply only to limited sections of the population.”
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