By Eric Vandenbroeck
Earlier I already investigated why the First
World War broke out.
As suggested, it is not without historical irony that the centenary of
the Great War was accompanied by civil war in Syria and Iraq, revolution in
Egypt, and violent clashes between Jews and Arabs over the Palestinian
question, as if to offer proof that many of the issues raised but not solved by
the First World War and its immediate aftermath are still with us today.
While the starting point of that story can be said to be the Russian Civil War(s) that followed the Bolsheviks
insurrection in November 1917, even if Europe experienced a short lived
period of stabilization between 1924 and 1929, the core issues raised but not
solved between 1917 and 1923 would return, with new urgency, to the
international and domestic political agenda after the onset of the Great
Depression in 1929.
True, from late 1923, after the signing of the Lausanne Treaty that
ended conflict in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, Europe as a whole entered a
period of relative political and economic stability.1 Internationally, a spirit
of rapprochement was embodied in agreements such as the 1924 Dawes Plan,
designed to make German reparations payments more manageable; the Locarno
Treaty of 1925, in which Germany acknowledged its new western borders, thereby
improving Berlin’s previously tense relationship with Paris; and the
Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which effectively banned war as an instrument of
foreign policy, except in self-defence. 2
The general climate of international rapprochement also allowed for a symbolic
reconciliation between Ankara and Athens during Venizelos’ penultimate term as
Prime Minister (1928– 32), culminating in the Treaty of Friendship (1930) that
settled the contentious issue of compensation for the destruction and
confiscation of property during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919– 22. Venizelos,
who had started that war, even proposed Atatürk for the Nobel Peace Prize. 3
In tandem with these developments, the most important international
organization of the 1920s and 1930s, the League of Nations, worked tirelessly
towards resolving the effects of the post-war refugee crises, while also making
substantial contributions, through its various agencies, to the fields of
healthcare, drug control, economic co-operation, labour
legislation, disarmament, and the prevention of ‘white slave’ trafficking. 4
Yet despite all of these encouraging signs, by 1929, Europe continued to
plunge into crisis and violent disorder. This was particularly true for
Germany, the recipient of significant US loans, which now had to be recalled
from businesses, prompting many of them to either go bankrupt or lay off their
employees. By 1931 one-third of the German workforce was unemployed, and
millions more were on precarious short-term contracts. 5
Neighboring Austria, still far from fully recovered from the effects of
the Great War, was also badly hit. The country had staggered from one economic
crisis to the next in the 1920s, dependent for its survival on financial
assistance from the Western Powers. Even before the Depression, unemployment
ran at well over 10 per cent a year, and this increased further during the
slump when the collapse of one of Austria’s largest banks, the Creditanstalt, sent shock waves through the banking system
in all of central Europe. Bulgaria and Hungary, already weak economically, were
also deeply affected by the Wall Street crash. 6
The economic and political crisis in Europe after 1929 fatally
undermined any remaining faith in democracy and prompted an intensified search
for New Orders that could cure the ills of Western capitalism and reverse the
injustices imposed on the defeated states of Europe in the period 1918– 20.
Parties of the extreme Left and Right, which had long denounced democracy as a
‘foreign’ and involuntarily adopted political system, enjoyed growing support
for their populist promises to resolve their countries’ economic and political
crises by radical means. 7
This particularly applied to Germany, where the slump catapulted
Hitler’s Nazi Party from the fringes of politics to its very centre. In the general elections of 1928, Hitler had
received no more than 2.8 per cent of the popular vote, a figure that would
increase to over 37 per cent in the federal elections of July 1932. Although
the Nazis did not create Germany’s economic and political crisis, they proved
to be its main beneficiary. Many voters increasingly viewed them as the only
viable alternative to the Communist Party, whose support had also grown
steadily in response to the same sense of crisis.
The apparent inability of liberal democracy to manage economic crisis
and bitter social conflict were crucial to Hitler’s election successes between
1929 and 1932.8 In other parts of Europe, too, the slump pushed voters towards
extremist parties and created excuses for politicians to bypass Parliament in
the name of ‘stability’ and ‘order’. Against Woodrow Wilson’s optimistic
predictions that the post-war world would be ‘safe for democracy’, most of the
democracies established in Europe in 1918 were eventually replaced by authoritarian
regimes of one kind or another. 9 In Bulgaria the right-wing Italian-and
German-inspired People’s Social Movement under Aleksander Tzankov
grew in strength, while on the Left, the Communist Bulgarian Workers’ Party
(BWP) enjoyed significant support in the cities. 10 In May 1934 a small elitist
organization of anti-royalist nationalists, ‘Zveno’,
executed a successful coup, supported by other right-wing groups. 11 The new
government abolished political parties and trade unions, introduced censorship,
and centralized the administration in pursuit of a corporate state along the
lines of the Italian Fascist model. Within less than a year, however, the Zvenari were forced out of office and their government was
replaced by a de facto royal dictatorship under Boris III and his obedient
Prime Minister, Georgi Kioseivanov. 12
In Austria, in early 1933, Chancellor Engelbert
Dollfuss shut down Parliament and assumed dictatorial powers, suppressing the
Left and banning the Austrian Nazis. When Dollfuss was murdered during an
attempted putsch by the Austrian Nazis in July 1934, he was succeeded by Kurt
Schuschnigg, who continued to rule by decree until Hitler decided to absorb
Austria into the German Reich by force in the Anschluss of 1938.13
By the mid-1930s authoritarian regimes or outright dictatorships of
various forms had become the norm across central and eastern Europe, and
appeared to hold the keys to the continent’s future. 14 Their common
denominator was a fundamental opposition to parliamentary democracy and Western
capitalism on the one hand, and anti-Bolshevism on the other. Yet profound
differences also existed between them. In Poland, for example, Józef Piłsudski, who had led his country to democracy and
independence in 1918, staged a military coup in 1926 and remained in power
until his death in 1935. Unlike many other states in central Europe, Piłsudski’s Poland never became a fascist dictatorship but
certainly more authoritarian than it had been prior to 1926.15 This would
become a common pattern in many of the successor states of eastern Europe,
sometimes through military putsches, as in Estonia and Latvia in 1934, or
through royal imposition, as in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In January 1929,
following the shooting of several leaders of the Croatian Peasant Party in
Parliament, Yugoslavia’s King Alexander dissolved Parliament and proclaimed a
royal dictatorship, only to be assassinated in Marseille five years later in
what quickly transpired to be a joint IMRO and Ustashe
operation. 16
The chaotic years after 1929 were generally accompanied by significant
outbursts of violence, often committed by individuals or groups that had
already played a prominent role between 1917 and 1923. Although physical
violence was much less widespread between 1923 and 1929, a broader culture of
violent rhetoric, uniformed politics and street fighting persisted throughout
the 1920s. On the Left, fantasies of exporting the Bolshevik revolution beyond
the Soviet Union were nurtured by the various Communist parties of Europe,
which Moscow controlled through the Comintern or
Third International (1919– 43). On the extreme Right, by contrast, paramilitary
movements as diverse as the Nazi storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA), the
Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Austrian Heimwehr, the Croation Ustashe, and Baltic Home
Guards such as the Lithuanian Riflemen Union, the Latvian Aizsargi,
and the Estonian Kaitseliit, all thrived on the idea
of violently opposing the lingering threat of a communist revolution, a fear
that dated back to 1917.
In the wake of the Great Depression, these simmering conflicts escalated
into frequent clashes between political militants, as many countries returned
to the conditions similar to civil war that had prevailed during the immediate
post-war years. In the last phase of the Weimar Republic, for example,
street-fighting resulted in some 400 casualties, while in Austria the murder in
1934 of Chancellor Dollfuss was indicative of a more general surge in
politically motivated violence. 17 Worse still was the situation in Bulgaria,
where levels of violence had remained extremely high throughout the 1920s and
continued to escalate in the 1930s. In addition to communist and anti-communist
cycles of violence and repression, the country was haunted during the entire interwar
period by the unresolved Macedonian question. The Macedonian IMRO, emboldened
by its prominent role in the brutal murder of Prime Minister Stambolijski in 1923, and supported by Mussolini, further
intensified its operations, carrying out more than 460 armed operations in
Yugoslavia before 1934, including hundreds of assassinations and kidnappings of
members of the armed services and the gendarmerie. 18
Further west, Portugal and Spain also abandoned democracy and descended
into violence. Already in 1926 a coup in Lisbon established first the Ditadura Nacional and then the Estado Nuevo under António
de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968.19 In Madrid, General
Miguel Primo de Rivera imposed a military dictatorship in 1923, which lasted
until 1930. Following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1931, Spain returned to
democracy for six troubled years before its Popular Front coalition of
Socialists and Communists, in power from February 1936, was challenged by an
army coup that July. The Left, soon supported by International Brigades
composed of volunteers from around the world, rallied in defence
of the Republic and fought the nationalist putschists under General Francisco
Franco for the next three years. Matters were made worse by international
meddling in the conflict, with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy backing Franco
while the Spanish Left received some support from the Soviet Union. The civil
war killed more than half a million people, and eventually ended in Franco’s
victory. 20
By the later 1930s only two of the new states invented on the continent
of Europe in 1918 – Finland and Czechoslovakia – had survived as liberal
democracies. However, Czechoslovakia was destroyed when Hitler annexed the
Sudetenland in 1938, and then occupied the rest of the Czech territories in
March 1939, giving the occupied lands their pre-1918 Habsburg names of Bohemia
and Moravia. 21 Finland, meanwhile, managed to defend its independence against
the invading Red Army in the extremely violent Winter War of 1939– 40, but had
to accept reduced territory in the Treaty of Moscow (1940). 22
On the eve of the Second World War there were thus many fewer
democracies in Europe than there had been before the Great War. Even in the two
principal European victor states of the Great War, France and Britain, economic
instability had given rise to extremist movements. Although it was never a real
contender for power, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists claimed to have
some 50,000 members at the peak of its popularity in 1934.23 In France, both
the extreme Left and the Right were becoming increasingly militant.
Paramilitary organizations such as the royalist Action française
and the right-wing veterans’ organization Croix de Feu, proliferated, the
latter growing to a membership of nearly half a million in the mid-1930s. 24
Both Britain and France survived the radicalization of politics as democracies,
but the international situation they were facing in 1938– 9 was bleak.
Resurgent revisionist powers such as Germany and Italy in Europe and Japan in
the Far East were determined to tear apart whatever was left of the ailing
international system established in Paris in 1919. Although there was nothing
inevitable about the war that began in September 1939 and transformed into a
global conflict of unprecedented scale in 1941, many of the key issues at its
heart – and the way in which it was fought – can be traced back to the final
phase of the Great War and its immediate aftermath. Much of Europe before 1914
had prided itself on the relative legal security and stability that many of its
states provided for their citizens. Oddly, even during the First World War, the
states’ monopoly on force, upheld by the police, continued to prevail in the
huge swathes of territory away from the fighting fronts. One of the novelties
of the February Revolution in Russia in 1917 was that the pressures of war led
to the first major crack in this system, soon to be followed by its complete
implosion. As we have seen, it was defeat in the Great War, and the collapse of
the pre-war system, that allowed new actors to compete violently for power,
generally without the relative restraint that had characterized social and
political conflicts prior to 1914. The first fateful legacy of these years lay
in a new logic of violence that permeated domestic as well as international
conflicts, and culminated in the war on the Eastern Front during the Second
World War. The purpose of Nazi Germany’s Operation Barbarossa, launched in June
1941, was no longer to militarily defeat an opposing army and to impose harsh
conditions of peace on a defeated Soviet Union, but rather to destroy a regime
and annihilate significant proportions of the civilian population in the
process. Entire countries in central and eastern Europe were to be purged of
those deemed racially or politically undesirable. 25
This logic, which had a longer tradition in relation to the allegedly
‘inferior’ populations of the colonial world and which also underpinned the
Balkan Wars and the Armenian genocide, experienced a pan-European breakthrough
in the various conflicts between 1917 and 1923. This was a radical reversal of
the long-standing ambition of European policymakers since the Wars of Religion
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to tame armed conflict by
distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants, and by decriminalizing
the enemy as a iustus hostis.
26 In the internal and international armed conflicts discussed in this book,
and again in the civil wars and inter-state wars from the mid-1930s onwards, by
contrast, opponents were often portrayed and perceived as criminalized and
dehumanized enemies undeserving of mercy or military restraint. The
distinctions between civilians and combatants, already blurred during the First
World War, completely vanished in this type of conflict. It is no coincidence
that both during the period between 1918 and 1923 and again from the 1930s, the
number of civilians murdered in armed conflicts generally exceeded those of
soldiers killed. The criminalization and dehumanization of the enemy was not
only reserved for external foes. It also applied to internal enemies of
different guises. Central to this new attitude towards ‘enemy civilians’ was
the widely perceived need to cleanse communities of their ‘alien’ elements
before a utopian new society could emerge, and to root out those who were
perceived to be harmful to the balance of the community. On the political
Right, the belief that only an ethnically homogeneous national community,
cleansed of internal enemies, was capable of winning the war of the future –
which many considered inevitable – constituted a powerful component of the
common currency of radical politics and action in Europe between 1917 and the
1940s; this was especially so in those countries frustrated with the outcomes
of both the Great War and post-war conflicts. On the radical Left, the idea of
the ‘purified community’ had a different meaning, and violence was primarily
directed against real or perceived class enemies. Yet political persecution in
the Soviet Union (which culminated in the Great Purge of 1937– 8 that
eventually killed off 1 per cent of the Soviet Union’s adult population) was
also more generally directed against suspect population groups and potential
‘fifth columns’ in a future war with Nazi Germany, which Stalin anticipated
would take place in the mid-to late 1940s. 27
In the vanquished states of the Great War, the direction and purpose of
internal violence was further guided by the widely held belief that the outcome
of that war had remained open until 1918, and that the defeat of the Central
Powers was nothing but the result of treason on the home front. References to
this ‘betrayal’ and to ‘unfinished business’ were common. 28 In Nazi Germany in
particular, those groups allegedly responsible for the events of November 1918
(communists, Jews, pacifists) featured prominently as victims of Nazi terror
from the moment of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. From the mid-1930s the
terror became more systematic, as Hitler began preparing the nation for war. He
was determined to prevent a repeat of November 1918 when – in his view and that
of many other Germans – a small minority of revolutionaries and Jews on the
home front had betrayed the war effort and caused military collapse. The Nazis’
obsession with the idea of internal betrayal loomed large until the spring of
1945, when thousands of deserters or alleged ‘defeatists’ were shot or strung
up on lamp posts and trees along German roads as the Allies crossed the border
into the Reich. Most German soldiers, however, did not require such gruesome
reminders. Driven on by fear of Red Army retribution and the belief that death
with honor intact was preferable to a repeat of 1918, the Wehrmacht fought on
futilely until the bitter end, thereby causing the deaths of a further 1.5
million soldiers in the last three months of the war. 29
In Italy, too, an obsession with internal divisions dating back to the
Great War played out violently, as Mussolini’s regime subjected real or
potential dissenters to arrests, intimidation through violence, and forced
resettlement to remote parts of southern Italy. The Gestapo’s Italian
equivalent, the political police or ‘PolPol’, formed
in 1926, worked hand in hand with the Organization for Vigilance and Repression
of Anti-Fascism (OVRA), whose job it was to monitor the correspondence of
dissidents. Similar to the Gestapo, the PolPol and
OVRA employed a large number of informers, some of them former socialists or
communists either coerced into collaboration or persuaded to work for the
regime through financial incentives. 30
The continuation of a logic of violence was also traceable in the former
Habsburg lands in which crude notions of violently ‘un-mixing’ the region’s
ethnic complexity, coupled with militant anti-Bolshevism and radicalized
anti-Semitism, created fateful legacies. The Hungarian White Terror of 1919– 20
had given an indication of the widespread chauvinist and racist mood in the
country at the end of the Great War, notably through the widespread pogroms
against Jews. It revived with added fury (and on an even broader popular basis)
between the early 1930s and the mid-1940s, culminating in the active
collaboration of some Hungarians with the Nazis in the systematic mass murder
of the Hungarian Jews. 31 The same attitudes were also felt in Austria, where
traditional anti-Semitism and anti-Slav sentiments, reinforced during the Great
War and through Jewish migration from east-central Europe to Vienna in its
wake, would resurface with renewed intensity after the brief moment of relative
stabilization in the mid-1920s gave way to economic depression and political
turmoil. 32
This kind and level of violence was not in itself particularly
surprising as the violent actors of 1917– 23 were often identical with those
who would unleash a new cycle of violence in the 1930s and early 1940s. For
many German, Austrian and Hungarian fascists of the 1930s, the experiences of
1918– 19 provided a decisive catalyst for political radicalization and a
catalogue of political agendas, whose implementation was merely postponed
during the years of relative stability between 1923 and 1929. Some of the most
prominent paramilitary activists of the immediate post-war period would
resurface in the central European dictatorships of the Right, not only in
Italy, where the veterans of fascist squads were given prominent positions in
Mussolini’s dictatorship. 33 In Hungary, too, leading Arrow Cross members such
as Ferenc Szálasi and others repeatedly pointed to
the period between November 1918 and the signing of the Trianon Treaty in June
1920 as the moment of their ‘political awakening’. In 1932 the most notorious
Hungarian paramilitary leaders of the post-war years, Pal Prónay
and Gyula Ostenburg,
founded the short-lived Hungarian National Fascist Party (Magyar Országos Fascist Párt). When
Hitler handed power to Szálasi’s Arrow Cross in
Hungary in 1944, Prónay helped to put together a new
militia, which fought against the Red Army between December 1944 and February
1945 during the Battle of Budapest. 34
In Austria, too, personal continuities between the armed conflicts of
the immediate post-First World War period and their sequel from 1939 are easy
to identify. Robert Ritter von Greim, for example,
once the leader of the Tyrolese branch of the paramilitary Oberland League,
briefly became Hermann Göring’s successor as
commander of the German Luftwaffe. Other Austrian paramilitaries from the
period following the First World War also enjoyed high-powered careers during
the Second World War: Hanns Albin Rauter,
who had contributed decisively to the radicalization of the Styrian Heimwehr, became Higher SS and Police Chief in the
Nazi-occupied Netherlands, while his compatriot and friend, Ernst
Kaltenbrunner, succeeded Reinhard Heydrich as head of the Nazis’ major terror
agency, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), in 1943. For all of these men,
fascist dictatorships provided the opportunity to settle old scores and ‘solve’
some of the issues that the inglorious defeat of 1918, coupled with the
perceived threat of Bolshevik revolution and imperial collapse, had raised.
To be sure, the relationship between post-1918 paramilitarism and the
various fascist movements of the 1930s and early 1940s was not always that
straightforward. Many prominent paramilitaries of the immediate post-war period
were dedicated anti-Bolsheviks and committed anti-Semites in 1918, but
eventually found their own political ambitions to be at odds with those of the
Nazis. The former Heimwehr leader, Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, who had
entertained close personal relations with Hitler after 1919 (and indeed
participated in the Nazis’ unsuccessful Munich putsch of November 1923),
opposed the Austrian Nazi movement in the 1930s, rejected his own post-war
anti-Semitism as ‘nonsense’, advocated Austrian independence in 1938, and even
served in the British and Free French forces as a fighter pilot during the
Second World War. 35 Starhemberg was not the only
prominent paramilitary who came to realize that his vision for a national
Austrian ‘rebirth’ was incompatible with that of Nazism. Captain Karl Burian, founder and head of the monarchist underground
organization ‘Ostara’ after the end of the Great War, paid for his continued
royalist beliefs with his arrest by the Gestapo and his execution in 1944.36
Even in Germany the ranks of former Freikorps leaders were purged, notably
during the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934 when several of them, now
within the SA leadership, were killed. This did not, of course, prevent the
Nazis from celebrating the Freikorps as their spiritual predecessors, who had
heroically and violently defied the peacemakers in Paris in 1919. Prominent
figures such as Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich emphasized their
Freikorps past, even if they had themselves only seen limited military action
after 1918. It is also telling that one of the largest monuments ever to be
built in the Third Reich was the Annaberg memorial in
Upper Silesia, celebrating the May 1921 victory of Freikorps soldiers over
Polish insurgents in the battle that raged over Silesia’s ‘Holy Mountain’.
Through their ‘victory in defeat’ at the Battle of Annaberg
the Freikorps embodied the kind of violent revisionism that the Nazis
implemented from the later 1930s onwards. 37 It is precisely this treaty
revisionism, driven by the desire to ‘redeem’ lost territory and populations,
that forms a second enduring legacy of the immediate post-war period. The
Lausanne Conference of 1923 had demonstrated that it was possible for a
defeated state to become a victorious one, as Mustafa Kemal succeeded in
tearing up the Treaty of Sèvres while also achieving
his aim to transform the ‘Turkic core’ of the Ottoman Empire into a
homogeneous, secular nation state. Both Hitler and Mussolini were impressed and
inspired by Kemal’s ‘success’ and his willingness to wage war, if necessary, to
confront Western imperialism. It was their shared determination to challenge
the international system established in 1919 that eventually brought Berlin and
Rome together, starting with their intervention in the Spanish Civil War and
the Pact of Friendship (1936) that was to form the basis of the wartime ‘Axis’.
38 In Italian and German propaganda the Pact of Friendship was celebrated as
the joining of forces between two long-suppressed but now re-emerging states
with common foes who had long sought to prevent them from assuming their
rightful place among the world’s Great Powers. 39 The alliance became global
when Hitler entered into a further pact with Japan, which was soon to be known
as the ‘Anti-Comintern Pact’. Despite Hitler’s racial
prejudices against the Japanese, he viewed the country as having complementary
geopolitical interests with Germany, notably in its mutual quest to overcome
the constraints of the international system established in Paris. Although
Japan was never ruled by a regime that could be described as ‘fascist’ in any
meaningful sense, leading politicians in Tokyo came to share some common ground
with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the 1930s. Most importantly, perhaps,
there was a common ideological rejection of the liberal political order on the
one hand and Soviet-style Bolshevism on the other, as well as the ambition to
provide a non-communist authoritarian alternative to both. 40
Furthermore, politicians in Tokyo had not forgotten that the United
States and the British Dominions prevented the inclusion of a ‘racial equality’
clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations, one of the key demands of
Japanese diplomats in Paris in 1919. Racial equality had been high up on
Tokyo’s political agenda ever since Japan emerged as the Far East’s economic
and military powerhouse in the second half of the nineteenth century, and even
more so after the country’s stunning victories over Chinese forces in the Sino-Japanese
War of 1894– 5, and over the Russian Empire ten years later. Still being denied
recognition as a racially equal partner after emerging victorious from the
First World War had left many in Japan feeling deeply offended. 41
Even if the full military alliance between Berlin, Tokyo and Rome was
yet to be formalized through the Tripartite Pact of September 1940
(subsequently joined by other revisionist states such as Hungary and Bulgaria),
it was the Pact of Friendship and the Anti-Comintern
Pact that first sent a very clear and alarming message to the rest of the
world’s Great Powers: the most staunchly revisionist powers in the world were
now working together in their attempts to overcome the remnants of the Paris
peace treaties. 42
The likelihood of a general war in Europe had increased significantly
since the mid-1930s, and neither Hitler nor Mussolini had ever made a secret of
their firm belief that this would be something positive, a way of bringing out
the “racial essence” of their people. Both agreed that a great reckoning with
the West and Soviet Russia was inevitable in the long run. Mussolini himself
described Italy’s intervention against the Western Allies from 1940 as a war
against ‘the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West who have
invariably hindered the progress and often threatened the very existence of the
Italian people’. 43
Hitler’s initial step towards the undoing of the Paris peace settlement
of 1919 had been to start Germany’s rearmament, thereby defying the provisions
of the Versailles Treaty. In March 1936, German troops entered the previously
demilitarized Rhineland, without prior consultation with Paris or London. Two
years later, Hitler annexed his native Austria, a move greeted by many Austrians
with outright enthusiasm over this ‘correction’ of the Treaty of St Germain.
Hitler received a triumphal welcome when he visited his birthplace of Braunau am Inn just over the Austrian border and again in
Vienna, as thousands of Austrians celebrated the Anschluss on the capital’s Heldenplatz.
Up until the Anschluss of 1938, Hitler got away with undoing the
provisions of the Versailles Treaty, as many contemporaries, even in western
Europe, regarded his moves as a not altogether unreasonable correction of some
of the injustices built into the Paris peace settlements. It was only from the
summer of 1938 onwards, as Hitler began his assaults on other successor states
founded in 1918 and 1919, that this mood began to change. At the Munich
Conference in September 1938, London and Paris permitted Nazi Germany to absorb
the Sudetenland on the periphery of Czechoslovakia, where some three million
ethnic Germans lived, but they also made it clear that they would not tolerate
further expansion. Although a more general war was only narrowly avoided in
September 1938, Hitler had no intention of abandoning his aggressive foreign
policy. Instead, he stepped up the pace of military preparation and increased
pressure on the states of east-central Europe to join the Axis. By that stage
Hungary had already drawn closer to Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. In the wake
of the Munich settlement and Hitler’s occupation of the rest of the Czech lands
in March 1939, Hungary successfully demanded the return of a slice of Slovakia
and the whole of Ruthenia. More territorial gains were made by Budapest when,
following Hitler’s decision to wage a more general war in the East, the
Hungarian head of state Miklós Horthy secured
Hitler’s support for regaining two-fifths of Transylvania and part of the
Banat, at the expense of Romania and Yugoslavia. This revisionism gave Berlin a
uniquely strong hand as the Western Allies (until their betrayal of
Czechoslovakia) had by definition to stand by the borders established after the
Great War. Both Mussolini and Horthy to different degrees feared Hitler and
were suspicious of German military power, but by building their regimes on the
basis of post-war injustices, there was an unstoppable logic to their falling
into the Nazi orbit.
Bulgaria, too, fell in line with the other revisionist powers of Europe.
Up until 1938, Tsar Boris had tried to keep Bulgaria neutral, even if he agreed
with the Nazi aim of destroying the post-war peace-treaty system. But after the
Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 and the Munich Agreement in November, the
government in Sofia suddenly found itself under considerable domestic pressure
from the pro-Axis lobby, which rightly noted that Bulgaria was the only
defeated power of the Great War that had not yet benefited from territorial
revisions of the Paris peace treaties. After the outbreak of the Second World
War in September 1939, Bulgaria increasingly moved into the German camp. In
September 1940, Sofia regained the southern Dobrudja
after Germany had pressurized Romania into signing the Treaty of Craiova. In
the spring of 1941, Bulgaria officially joined the Axis and dispatched
occupation forces to Macedonia, Western Thrace, and parts of eastern Serbia to
free up Wehrmacht troops for the war further east. 44
At the heart of the European war that began in 1939 and turned global
two years later, there was thus not only a violent clash between incompatible
political regimes but also an attempt to regain lost territories and minorities
living under ‘foreign rule’ after 1918. For Hitler and the Nazis, the return of
these minorities was imperative, and the same was true for governments in
Budapest and Sofia. 45 For Hungary – Germany’s past and future wartime ally –
the loss of almost three million Magyars now living under Romanian,
Czechoslovak and Yugoslav rule was an injustice that needed to be redeemed.
Sofia felt the same way about the one million ethnic Bulgarians ‘lost’ to other
territories in 1919. Yet at the same time, expansionism – notably in the
German, Italian and Soviet cases, but also in that of Japan – went further and
amounted to nothing less than competing neo-imperial projects. Within Europe
this clash of neo-imperial projects played out violently in the former imperial
territories of east-central Europe that had become independent in 1918– 19.46
In the case of Japan, leading businessmen and army circles had for some
time called for territorial conquests in northern China to provide Japan with
secure areas for colonization and economic exploitation. For years, large Japanese
conglomerates (the zaibatsu) had operated the coal-mines and iron deposits of
Manchuria, protected by strong military forces, the so-called Kwantung Army.
Deteriorating relations with China and the growing Soviet threat from the north
endangered Tokyo’s interests in Manchuria at the same time as the Great
Depression hit the Japanese economy hard. At the instigation of right-wing
leaders of the Kwantung Army, Japanese forces seized the whole of Manchuria in
September 1931, establishing the puppet state of Manchukuo in February 1932.47
The Manchurian crisis and the League of Nations’ lack of determination
in its response to a Chinese plea for help offered an important lesson that was
not lost on the other revisionist states. They made events seemingly far away
part of the same network of challenges to the international order established
between 1918 and 1920. Mussolini viewed the West’s reaction (or lack thereof)
to the Manchurian crisis as an invitation to follow Tokyo’s example and adopted
a more aggressive foreign policy aimed at increasing Italian influence in the
Mediterranean and northern Africa, as well as enlarging Italy’s small colonial
inheritance (Libya, Somalia, Eritrea) into a second Roman Empire. 48 In 1932
the Italian Foreign Ministry began planning for the conquest of Ethiopia
(Abyssinia), one of the few countries in Africa that had not come under
colonial administration during the late nineteenth-century imperialist Scramble
for Africa. In October 1935, Italian troops invaded and victory was secured the
following spring, after Rome’s forces made indiscriminate use of poison gas and
aerial bombing against both military and civilian targets. 49
Japan’s violent expansion into northern China and Mussolini’s dreams of
a spazio vitale in northern
Africa and the Mediterranean, had its functional equivalent in Hitler’s
ambitions to carve out a Lebensraum in east-central Europe. 50 Hitler’s
imperial project of creating an ‘ethnically cleansed’ living space for his
people in the territories between Warsaw and the Ural Mountains had roots that
pre-dated the First World War. ‘The East’ had long been seen as a priority area
for economic domination and even colonization. 51 The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
that established Imperial Germany as a major (though short-lived) European land
empire in 1918 further reinforced the perception of eastern Europe as a realm
of possibilities. Hitler’s view of the East as a living space for Germany’s
growing population was a particularly extreme form of this widely discussed
idea, notably in its wartime implementation that saw the deliberate killing or
starving to death of millions of unwanted inhabitants. But even his obsession
with violently establishing a new racial order in the wide spaces of
east-central Europe was a direct response to Hitler’s reading of the events of
the past: if Imperial Germany had failed to ‘civilize’ and permanently
subjugate eastern Europe before and during the Great War, it was because the
means chosen at the time had not been radical enough. The war of the future
would have to be a ‘total war’, as Erich Ludendorff had called it in his book
of that name (Der Totale Krieg), first published in
1935. In Hitler’s understanding of the term, that total war could only be won
if it was waged against both domestic and international enemies. 52
Racism was at the core of the expansionism and empire-building of all
three Axis powers as it legitimized the conquest of territories inhabited by
‘inferior’ races – be they Slavs, Chinese, or African – and the killing or rape
of enemy civilians. Despite the rhetoric about its ambition to create a
pan-Asian ‘sphere of co-prosperity’, the Japanese regime allowed its soldiers
to sexually abuse and massacre Korean and Chinese civilians en
masse. 53 Even before the outbreak of the Second World War, Mussolini had
adopted a policy of liquidating large sections of Ethiopia’s intellectual and
professional community as a means of ‘pacifying’ the newly conquered territory.
Biological racism certainly went furthest in Germany, where Nazi anti-Semitism
under conditions of war posed a unique case in its ambition to murder each and
every Jew in German-occupied Europe. 54
After Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, his
vision for an ethnically cleansed eastern European empire was to clash
violently with both indigenous quests for national independence and Soviet
imperial ambitions for east-central Europe that also dated back to 1918.
Immediately after the end of the Great War, Lenin’s dream of recapturing the
recently lost western territories of the former Tsarist Empire had to be
temporarily abandoned when, in 1920, the Soviet government was forced to sign
peace treaties with Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, effectively renouncing
Moscow’s territorial claims in the Baltic region. A few months later, in March
1921, the Soviet-Polish Treaty of Riga had assigned western Belorussia, East
Galicia and Volhynia to Warsaw’s direct control. 55
Elsewhere, however, the Bolshevik regime had been more successful in
regaining vast territories temporarily lost in the final months of the Great
War. By the time Soviet Russia emerged from the civil war, Moscow had already
regained control over Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine. But the Bolsheviks’ ambitions did not end
there. By late 1939, in line with the secret clauses of the German-Soviet
Nonaggression Pact signed in August, Stalin re-established control over the
Baltic States and eastern Poland, leaving Finland as the only territory once
ruled by the Romanovs to permanently maintain its independence. Hitler’s
eventual failure to carve out an empire between Warsaw and the Urals after
1941, when he attacked the Soviet Union in violation of the provisions of the
German-Soviet Pact, gave Stalin an opportunity to expand the Soviet Empire even
further, by setting up clientele states in what was to become the Eastern Bloc.
Just thirty years after the Romanov Empire had collapsed for good in 1918, the
Soviet Union was larger and more powerful than Imperial Russia had ever been.
Contemporaries who lived through the period saw the continuities between
the years 1917– 23 and the Second World War more clearly than many scholars
have since. Leading politicians before and during the Second World War
continually referred back to the ‘post-war’ period in their attempts to make
sense of the world around them or to historically contextualize and justify
their geopolitical ambitions. In a famous 1939 speech to mark the twentieth
anniversary of the founding of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, Benito Mussolini, for example, emphasized
both the centrality of the post-war years for the rise of fascism and the need
to honor through deeds the memory of those who had died in the post-war
struggles:
On 23 March 1919 we raised the black flag of the fascist revolution, the
forerunner of European renewal. Veterans of the trenches and young men gathered
around this flag, forming squads that wished to march against cowardly
governments and against fatal Eastern ideologies, in order to free the people
from the evil influence of 1789. Thousands of comrades fell around this flag,
fighting like heroes, in the truest meaning of the Roman word, in the streets
and squares of Italy, in Africa and in Spain. Their memory is always alive and
present in our hearts. Some people may have forgotten the hardships of the
post-war years [someone from the crowd shouts: ‘Nobody!’], but the squadristi have not forgotten, they cannot forget [someone
from the crowd shouts: ‘Never!’].
Little over a year later, in June 1940, just as Italy joined the Axis in
a war that would see Italian troops deployed in the Mediterranean, north
Africa, the Balkans and Russia, Mussolini returned to this theme, suggesting
that the Fascists’ national ‘revolution’ was soon to be completed through a reckoning
with Italy’s external enemies. The war Italy was about to join, he claimed, was
‘nothing but a logical stage in the development of our revolution’.
Hitler, too, repeatedly referred back to the ‘post-war’ years in his
speeches and through symbolic gestures. His decision, for example, to have the
June 1940 armistice with France signed in the same railway carriage in Compiègne Forest in which the Germans had acknowledged
defeat in November 1918 was a heavily charged act, whose meaning was as widely
understood and appreciated as the annexation of Danzig and West Prussia the
previous year: the Führer was correcting the historical injustices brought upon
Germany at the end of the Great War.
In the Baltic States and Ukraine, too, the Second World War brought back
memories of the wars fought against the Red Army twenty years earlier. At least
initially, many nationalists in the region welcomed the German offensive
against the Soviet Union in June 1941 as the beginning of a return to
independent nationhood first established in 1918. To the north, in Finland,
during the 1939 attack by the Red Army, the reappointed commander-in-chief,
Carl Mannerheim, emphasized in his very first order to the Finnish Defense
Forces that the war ahead of them was nothing but the continuation of a
conflict that had begun in 1918: ‘Brave soldiers of Finland! As in 1918 our
hereditary enemy is once again attacking our country … This war is nothing
other than the final act of our War of Independence.’ In the event, the Winter War was not ‘the
final act’ of the story, as it was followed, between 1941 and 1944, by the
brutal Continuation War. Up to this day, many Finnish nationalists maintain
that their country never participated in the Second World War, but in a
conflict for national independence that played out violently in several
interconnected episodes between 1918 and 1944.
As the quotations from Mussolini and Mannerheim make abundantly clear,
contemporaries felt the lingering presence of the conflicts that had been
fought so violently at end of the Great War and during its immediate aftermath,
a period in European history that had destroyed old structures and created new
ones, simultaneously ending and expediting or initiating historical
developments. In the collective memory of the peoples of Europe this period
featured prominently either as one of revolutionary turmoil, national triumph,
or perceived national humiliation to be redeemed through yet another war. As
such, the period helps us to understand the logic and purpose of subsequent
cycles of violence that often extended beyond 1939. In the case of Yugoslavia
their legacies could still be felt in the 1990s when the multi-ethnic state,
which hitherto had been held together largely due to Josip Broz Tito, descended
into a brutal civil war during which all parties replayed, in their attempts at
self-justification, the horrors and injustices of the first half of the
century.
Beyond Europe’s shores, the legacies of the Great War and its immediate
aftermath could also be felt for decades. Back in 1918, Lenin’s and Wilson’s
talk of self-determination and the rights of small nations had inspired the
enemies of empire everywhere, from the Far East to northern Africa, where
nascent decolonization movements demanded racial equality, autonomy, or
outright independence. Such demands were generally met with violence, and there
was hardly a year in the interwar period when Paris or London was not involved
in quelling some form of colonial unrest within their respective empires. Even
if it was to take another and yet more murderous war between 1939 and 1945 to
usher the process of global imperial dissolution towards completion in the
1950s and 1960s, its origins coincide with the ‘Wilsonian moment’ of 1918 and
the further expansion of the British and French empires shortly
thereafter. The most durable of these
post-imperial conflicts proved to be those that haunted the Arab lands once
ruled by the Ottomans. Here violence has erupted with great regularity for nearly
a century.
1. On this theme, see the essays in Robert Gerwarth
(ed.), Twisted Paths: Europe 1914– 1945 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007). On economic recovery and relative political stability through
cooperation between American financial power and Britain’s political leverage,
see also Patrick Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America,
Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919– 1932
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
2. Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History
1919– 1933 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. Paschalis M. Kitromilides (ed.), Eleftherios Venizelos: The Trials of Statesmanship
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 223.
4. Patricia Clavin, ‘Europe and the League of
Nations’, in Gerwarth (ed.), Twisted Paths, 325– 54;
Pedersen, The Guardians; Steiner, The Lights that Failed. See also Alan Sharp,
Consequences of the Peace: The Versailles Settlement – Aftermath and Legacy
1919– 2010 (London: Haus, 2010), 217.
5. For a general survey of the Great Depression and its effects, see
Patricia Clavin, The Great Depression in Europe,
1929– 1939 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000). On Germany in
particular, see the classic account by Harold James, The German Slump: Politics
and Economics 1924– 1936 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
6. On Austria, see Eduard März, ‘Die große Depression in Österreich 1930–
1933’, in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 16 (1990), 409– 38. On Bulgaria and Hungary, see
M. C. Kaser and E. A. Radice
(eds), The Economic History of Eastern Europe 1919– 1975, vol. 2: Interwar
Policy, the War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); and Richard
J. Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century and After (London and New
York: Routledge, 1997).
7. On the dual economic and political crisis in interwar Europe, see
Robert Boyce, The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
8. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin,
2004), 232– 308.
9. Richard J. Overy, The Interwar Crisis,
1919– 1939 (Harlow: Pearson, 1994), 44ff; Woodrow Wilson’s quotation is from
his speech to the US Congress on 2 April 1917: http:// wwi.lib.byu.edu/ index.php/ Wilson% 27s_War_Message_to_Congress.
10. Dimitrina Petrova,
Aleksandar Tzankov i negovata partia: 1932– 1944
(Sofia: Dio Mira, 2011); Georgi Naumov,
Aleksandar Tzankov i Andrey
Lyapchev v politikata na darzhavnoto upravlenie (Sofia: IF 94, 2004).
11. See Valentina Zadgorska, Kragat ‘Zveno’ (1927– 1934)
(Sofia: ‘Sv. Kliment Ohridski’, 2008), 8.
12. On King Boris III and his rule, see Georgi Andreev, Koburgite i katastrofite
na Bulgaria (Sofia: Agato,
2005); Nedyu Nedev, Tsar
Boris III: Dvoretsat i tayniyat cabinet (Plovdiv: IK ‘Hermes’, 2009); Stefan Gruev, Korona ot trani (Sofia: Balgarski pisatel, 2009).
13. On Austria in this period, see, for example, Emmerich Tálos, Das austrofaschistische Herrschaftssystem: Österreich
1933– 1938 (Berlin, Münster and Vienna: LIT, 2013); Jill Lewis, ‘Austria: Heimwehr, NSDAP and the Christian Social State’, in
Aristotle A. Kalis (ed.), The Fascism Reader (London
and New York: Routledge, 2003), 212– 22. On violence in this period, see in particular Gerhard Botz: Gewalt in der Politik: Attentate,
Zusammenstöße, Putschversuche, Unruhen in Österreich 1918 bis 1938 (Munich:
Fink, 1983).
14. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s
Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 140– 1. See also Charles S.
Maier, Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2014), 273.
15. Christoph Kotowski,
Die ‘moralische Diktatur’ in Polen 1926 bis 1939: Faschismus oder autoritäres
Militärregime? (Munich: Grin, 2011); on the cult surrounding
his persona, see Heidi Hein-Kircher: Der Piłsudski-Kult
und seine Bedeutung für den polnischen Staat 1926– 1939 (Marburg:
Herder-Institut, 2001).
16. Dmitar Tasić,
‘The Assassination of King Alexander: The Swan Song of the Internal Macedonian
Revolutionary Organization’, in Donau. Tijdschrift over Zuidost-Europa (2008), 30–
9.
17. Gerhard Botz,
‘Gewaltkonjunkturen, Arbeitslosigkeit und gesellschaftliche Krisen: Formen
politischer Gewalt und Gewaltstrategien in der ersten Republik’, in Helmut
Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner (eds), Das Werden der
ersten Republik … der Rest ist Österreich, vol. 1 (Vienna: Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 2008), 229– 362, here
341.
18. Archive of Yugoslavia (Belgrade), 37 (Papers of Prime Minister Milan
Stojadinović), 22/ 326. On the context,
see Stefan Troebst,
Mussolini, Makedonien und die Mächte 1922– 1930. Die ‘Innere Makedonische
Revolutionäre Organisation’, in der Südosteuropapolitik des faschistischen
Italien (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1987).
19. Filipe de Meneses, Salazar: A Political
Biography (New York: Enigma Books, 2009).
20. The literature on this subject is extensive. For some recent work,
see Julián Casanova and Martin Douch, The Spanish
Republic and Civil War (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010); Nigel Townson, The Crisis of Democracy in Spain: Centrist Politics under
the Second Republic, 1931– 1936 (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2000);
Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Stanley Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain,
Germany, and World War II (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press,
2008); Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge
(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006).
21. Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
22. Robert Edwards, White Death: Russia’s War on Finland 1939– 40
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006).
23. Andrzej Olechnowicz, ‘Liberal Anti-Fascism
in the 1930s: The Case of Sir Ernest Barker’, in Albion: A Quarterly Journal
Concerned with British Studies 36 (2004), 636– 60, here 643. On the BUF more
generally, see Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’:
Fascists and Fascism in Britain between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 2006).
24. Philippe Bernard and Henri Dubief, The
Decline of the Third Republic, 1914– 1958 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 290.
25. Christian Gerlach,
Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord: Deutsche Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg
(Zürich and Munich: Pendo, 1998), 11– 53.
26. Jörn Leonhard, Die
Büchse der Pandora: Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs (Munich: C. H. Beck,
2014), 955; David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (London:
Simon and Schuster, 2013).
27. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Nicolas Werth, ‘The NKVD Mass Secret
Operation no. 00447 (August 1937– November 1938)’, Online Encyclopedia of Mass
Violence, published 24 May 2010, http:// www.massviolence.org/
The-NKVD-Mass-Secret-Operation-no-00447-August-1937.
28. Hans-Christof Kraus,
Versailles und die Folgen: Außenpolitik zwischen Revisionismus und
Verständigung 1919– 1933 (Berlin: be.bra, 2013), 15–
33.
29. Michael Geyer, “‘ Endkampf” 1918 and 1945:
German Nationalism, Annihilation, and Self-Destruction’, in Richard Bessel, Alf
Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod
(eds), No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars of the 20th Century (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 37– 67. See also Ian Kershaw, The End:
The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944– 1945 (London and New
York: Allen Lane, 2011).
30. Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of
Mussolini’s Italy (London: The Bodley Head, 2012), 151ff.
31. Christian Gerlach
and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944– 1945
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2004).
32. For a good survey of the history of Jewish life and anti-Semitism in
Vienna, see Gerhard Botz, Nina Scholz, Michael Pollak
and Ivar Oxaal (eds), Eine zerstörte
Kultur. Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien
seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Czernin, 2002).
33. Matteo Millan, ‘The Institutionalization of Squadrismo:
Disciplining Paramilitary Violence in the Fascist Dictatorship’, in
Contemporary European History 22 (2013).
34. On Prónay’s role in the defence of Budapest, see Krisztián
Ungváry, A magyar honvédség a második világháborúban (Budapest: Osiris Kiadó,
2004), 418– 20; Béla Bodó, Pál
Prónay: Paramilitary Violence and Anti-Semitism in
Hungary, 1919– 1921 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).
35. In the 1930s, Starhemberg rejected the
myth of a Jewish world conspiracy as ‘nonsense’ and ‘scientific’ racism as a
propagandistic ‘lie’. Ernst Rüdiger
Starhemberg, ‘Aufzeichnungen des Fürsten Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg im Winter
1938/ 39 in Saint Gervais in Frankreich’, in Starhemberg Papers,
Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv Linz.
36. See the Gestapo file on Burian, in ÖStA, B 1394, Burian Papers. 37.
James Bjork and Robert Gerwarth, ‘The Annaberg as a German-Polish lieu de mémoire’,
in German History 25 (2007), 372– 400. 38. Elizabeth Wiskemann,
The Rome-Berlin Axis: A History of the Relations between Hitler and Mussolini
(New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 68. See also Jens Petersen, Hitler-Mussolini: Die Entstehung
der Achse Berlin-Rom 1933– 1936 (Tübingen: De Gruyter Niemeyer, 1973), 60.
39. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 2: Nemesis, 1936– 1945 (London: Penguin,
2001), 26.
40. Robert Gerwarth, ‘The Axis: Germany, Japan
and Italy on the Road to War’, in Richard J. B. Bosworth and Joe Maiolo (eds), The Cambridge History of the Second World
War, vol. 2: Politics and Ideology (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 21– 42.
41. Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality
Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 1998); Frederick R. Dickinson,
‘Commemorating the War in Post-Versailles Japan’, in John W. Steinberg, Bruce
W. Menning, David Schimmelpenninck
van der Oye, David Wolff and Shinji Yokote (eds), The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective:
World War Zero (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2005), 523– 43. See also Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea
(London: Penguin, 2013), 252– 5; and Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National
Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914– 1919 (Cambridge, MA, and London:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
42. On the Axis, see, for example, Shelley Baranowski, ‘Making the
Nation: Axis Imperialism in the Second World War’, in Nicholas Doumanis, The Oxford Handbook of Europe 1914– 1945 (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); MacGregor Knox, Common Destiny:
Dictatorship, Foreign Policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lutz Klinkhammer, Amedeo Osto Guerrazzi, and Thomas Schlemmer (eds), Die ‘Achse’ im Krieg: Politik, Ideologie und Kriegführung 1939– 1945 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, and
Zurich: Schöningh, 2010).
43. Knox, Common Destiny, 124.
44. Marshall Lee Miller, Bulgaria during the Second World War (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1975).
45. On the German case, see Mark Mazower,
Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York and London: Allen Lane,
2008).
46. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New
York: Basic Books, 2010).
47. Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–
1945: The Struggle for Survival (London: Allen Lane, 2014); Edward L. Dreyer,
China at War, 1901– 1949 (London: Longman, 1995); Louise Young, Japan’s Total
Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1998); Prasenjit Duara,
Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). On Manchukuo, see also Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, The Making of
Japanese Manchuria, 1904– 1932 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
48. Dennis Mack Smith, Mussolini’s Roman Empire (London: Longman, 1976).
On international politics in this period, see Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the
Dark: European International History, 1933– 1939 (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011); Anthony D’Agostino, The Rise of Global Powers:
International Politics in the Era of the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), 295– 302.
49. Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia under Mussolini:
Fascism and the Colonial Experience (London: Zed Books, 1985); Angelo Del Boca,
The Ethiopian War 1935– 1941 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969);
David Nicolle, The Italian Invasion of Abyssinia 1935– 1936 (Westminster, MD:
Osprey, 1997); George W. Baer, The Coming of the Italo-Ethiopian War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); idem, Test Case: Italy,
Ethiopia and the League of Nations (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press,
1976); H. James Burgwyn, Italian Foreign Policy in
the Interwar Period 1918– 1940 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).
50. Knox, Common Destiny; Davide Rodogno,
Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Gustavo Corni,
‘Impero e spazio vitale nella visione
e nella prassi delle dittature (1919– 1945)’, in
Ricerche di Storia Politica
3 (2006), 345– 57; Aristotle Kallis, Fascist Ideology: Territory and
Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922– 1945 (London: Routledge, 2000).
51. Philipp Ther, ‘Deutsche Geschichte als imperiale Geschichte: Polen,
slawophone Minderheiten und das Kaiserreich als
kontinentales Empire’, in Sebastian Conrad und Jürgen Osterhammel (eds), Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der
Welt 1871– 1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004), 129– 48.
52. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius,
War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation
in World War I (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Gregor Thum (ed.), Traumland
Osten: Deutsche Bilder vom östlichen Europa im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2006).
53. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers and Mark R.
Peattie, The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931– 1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996). On Korea, Alexis Dudden,
Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 2005).
54. Paul Brooker, The Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist
Italy, and Imperial Japan (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
On Japanese racism, see John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the
Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
55. Steiner, The Lights that Failed, notably chapter 5 (The Primacy of
Nationalism: Reconstruction in Eastern and Central Europe).
For updates click homepage
here