Ben-Gurion united a historically disparate and divided people in a state of their own. As the Second World War broke out in Europe, he masterminded the smuggling of thousands of Jewish refugees into Palestine, while the nations of the world closed their doors to them. His directive to Palestinian Jews to join the British army to help fight the Nazis, at the same time as the British tried to bar Jewish immigration into Palestine, inspired international sympathy for the Zionist cause.
During the period of British rule, Ben-Gurion helped to create institutions—trade unions, agricultural associations, military forces—that would provide the skeleton of an independent Israel. He effectively created a shadow Jewish state within British Palestine, ready to assume power at a moment’s notice. Without this structure in place, it is hard to imagine that Israel would have been able to combat the simultaneous attacks of five Arab nations that took place within hours of the new state’s declaration of independence.
Ben-Gurion’s leadership during the post-independence years shows his great skill as a statesman. Even in the most heightened of crises Ben-Gurion—who was by nature something of an autocrat—refused to implement emergency measures that might undermine Israel’s commitment to democracy. The settlement of the Negev, once a desert but now one of Israel’s most prosperous regions, was instigated on his initiative. Having begun his life in Palestine as a farmhand, Ben-Gurion always believed that Zionism involved the conquest of land by Jewish labor, and when he retired he went to live on the kibbutz that he had helped to pioneer as a younger man.
Bold, mercurial, but unswerving in the courage of his Zionist and democratic convictions, Ben-Gurion’s decisions—not least his declaration of Israel’s independence—often seemed impossible or were in defiance of international pressure. He was a political moderate willing to be ruthless to secure the survival of the state. His secret agreement in 1956, by which Israel would invade Sinai to give Britain and France a pretext for seizing the Suez Canal, met with international condemnation. But Ben-Gurion defended the validity of his actions, and, in the event, it secured for Israel another eleven years of peace.
Ben-Gurion’s vision did not blind him to political reality, nor did his single-mindedness preclude empathy with Israel’s enemies. He was one of the first to recognize the validity of Arab objections to Zionism, and he consistently tried to accommodate the Arabs, despite accusations of treachery and opportunism from both sides of the Israeli political spectrum. After the Six Days’ War, he was a lone voice, wisely arguing that Israel should renounce its vast territorial gains, apart from a united Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Ben-Gurion sought to create a state that would be “A Light unto the Nations,” and, despite the difficulties presented by the demands of politics and security, he never abandoned a desire to abide by the highest moral standards. The role that this stubborn, fervently optimistic, resolute Zionist played in securing and defending a homeland for the Jewish people cannot be underestimated. Israel’s existence and democracy are a tribute to the tenacity of David Ben-Gurion.
Yet he also contributed to its flaws—its proportional representation, backed by Ben-Gurion, means that Israel’s destiny is at the mercy of tiny ultra-religious and nationalist parties, and its governments may never be strong enough to make the peace deals the country desperately needs.
HITLER
1889–1945
If one day the German nation is no longer sufficiently strong or sufficiently ready for sacrifice to stake its blood for its existence, then let it perish and be annihilated by some other stronger power …
Adolf Hitler, November 27, 1941
Adolf Hitler is the embodiment of the historical monster, the personification of evil and the organizer of the greatest crimes of mass-murder ever committed, responsible for a world war in which more than 70 million died, including 6 million in the Holocaust. No other name has earned such opprobrium or come to typify the depths to which humanity can sink. Amidst the horrors of history, the crimes of the Nazi Führer continue to occupy a unique place.
Born in Braunau am Inn in Austria, Hitler left school at sixteen without any qualifications. He suffered disappointment when his application to study to be an artist in Vienna was twice rejected. He struggled to survive in Vienna on the strength of his painting, imbibing nationalism and anti-Semitism.
In 1913 Hitler moved to Munich, and in August 1914 joined the German army, subsequently fighting on the Western Front and reaching the rank of corporal. When in November 1918 the German government agreed to an armistice, Hitler—and many other nationalistic Germans—believed that the undefeated German army had been “stabbed in the back.” He was appalled by the Treaty of Versailles, under which Germany lost much territory and most of its armed forces.
After the war, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party (DAP), impressed by its fusion of nationalism, anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism. Before long he won a reputation as a rabble-rousing orator, and in 1921 he became leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP)—the Nazi Party, evolving a cult of power worship, cleansing violence and wanton killing, racial superiority, eugenics and brutal leadership. He created a paramilitary wing, the SA (Sturmabteilung or Storm Division), headed by Ernst Röhm.
Inspired by Mussolini’s example in Italy, Hitler resolved to seize power, and in November 1923 in Munich launched an attempted putsch against the democratic Weimar Republic. This failed and he was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison—but served only a few months, during which period he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which exuded rampant anti-Semitism, anti-communism and militant nationalism. He also changed tactics, deciding to seek power through the ballot box—and then to replace democracy with an autocratic state.
Hitler’s opportunity came with the arrival of the Great Depression. In subsequent elections, as the economy deteriorated, the Nazi Party increased its vote, becoming the largest party in the Reichstag (German Parliament) in July 1932, a position confirmed by elections in November. On January 30, 1933 Hitler was sworn in as chancellor.
After the burning down of the Reichstag in February 1933, Hitler suspended civil liberties and passed an enabling act, which allowed him to rule as dictator. Opposition was crushed. Hitler even turned the repression inwards: the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934 saw the murder of Röhm and the SA leadership by the SS (Schutzstaffel or Protection Squad). Two months later Hitler, backed by henchmen such as Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels, achieved absolute civil and military power when he became Führer (leader) and head of state.
The Nazis initiated an economic recovery, reducing unemployment and introducing ambitious new schemes such as the building of the brand-new autobahn (motorway) network. Many of Hitler’s erstwhile opponents were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Yet the economic miracle was largely achieved via a huge rearmament drive, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles—the first phase in Hitler’s broader determination to launch a deliberately barbaric European and racial war.
In March 1936 Hitler reoccupied the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland. He carefully noted the response of the international community—nothing. This encouraged him. In March 1938 he annexed Austria; in September he secured the German-speaking Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia; and in March 1939 he occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. In each instance, he experienced little resistance from the other European powers. He had fulfilled his core pledge: Versailles had been reduced to nothing more than a “scrap of paper.”
Hitler signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin which partitioned eastern Europe between these two brutal tyrants. In September 1939 Hitler conquered Poland, a move that triggered British and French declarations of war. But in the spring of 1940 the German armies turned west, conquering Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France in a lightning campaign. In 1941 both Yugoslavia and Greece fell, and only Britain remained undefeated. Hitler now dominated his barbaric continental empire and appeared impregn
able.
In June 1941, Hitler launched a surprise attack on Stalinist Russia in Operation Barbarossa, the largest and most brutal conflict in human history in which 26 million Soviets alone died. He moved east to command his greatest enterprise from military headquarters in eastern Poland (the Wolf’s Lair). German forces won a series of astonishing victories at the start of the Barbarossa campaign, almost taking Moscow, the Soviet capital, and capturing some 6 million prisoners.
Meanwhile another even more horrific project was gathering steam within Nazi-occupied Europe. Mein Kampf had spoken darkly of Hitler’s intentions toward the Jews, and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935–6, which deprived Jews of their civil rights in Germany, had hinted at worse to come. As the war clouds gathered toward the end of the decade there were more ominous signs: Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938 had brought a wave of attacks on Jewish homes and properties across Germany.
Hitler was initially content to enslave and starve the Slavs and drive the Jews out of German lands; they were interned in ghettos and concentration camps across occupied Poland. But he now ordered a policy of extermination, using Einsatzgruppen (task forces) to shoot a million Jews. Barbarossa served as the trigger and excuse for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Under Hitler’s orders to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Jews were dispatched to extermination camps to be slaughtered in gas chambers on an industrial scale. The Holocaust, as it became known, claimed 6 million Jewish lives, as well as the lives of many more minorities hated by the Nazis, including Gypsies, Slavs and homosexuals. It remains a crime of unparalleled magnitude.
But the Soviets defeated the Germans at Stalingrad in 1942–3. After their victory at Kursk in the summer of 1943, the Soviets slowly but inexorably destroyed Hitler’s empire, advancing all the way to Berlin. In June 1944, the Allies invaded northern France in the D-Day landings and started to fight their way to meet the Soviets in Germany itself. Yet an ever more deluded, brutal Hitler refused to countenance reality, demanding that his soldiers fight to the last man. As Germany was slowly crushed between the Red Army in the east and the British and Americans in the west, Hitler fled to the Führerbunker in Berlin on January 16, 1945, along with support staff and, later, Eva Braun and the Goebbels family. On April 16 the Red Army launched the Battle of Berlin, attacking in a pincer movement that swiftly smashed into the city.
Hitler spent his time ordering nonexistent armies to launch nonexistent offensives, denouncing his potential successors Goering and Himmler as traitors, and holding dainty tea parties with his devoted female secretaries. Elsewhere in the bunker, his SS guards and female staff held wild drunken orgies. On April 28, hearing of Himmler’s attempt to broker peace, Hitler furiously had SS officer Hermann Fegelein (Eva Braun’s brother-in-law and Himmler’s golden boy) shot in the Chancellery garden.
On April 29 Hitler married Eva Braun in a civil ceremony in the Führerbunker. The next day, Braun and Hitler swallowed cyanide capsules—previously tested on his dog, Blondi—and Hitler shot himself in the right temple. Scotching rumors that he escaped to South America, eyewitness claims that his body was burned were substantiated when officers of SMERSH (the Red Army counter-intelligence unit) discovered remains near the bunker, confirmed by dental records as Braun’s and Hitler’s. His skeleton was buried under the Magdeburg Soviet airbase in East Germany, then dug up and incinerated in 1970 on the orders of KGB chief Yuri Andropov. In 2000 part of the skull was put on display by the Federal Archives Service in Moscow.
NEHRU
1889–1964
A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.
Jawahalarl Nehru, fondly nicknamed Pandit-ji, was the first prime minister of India, which he ruled for almost twenty years, and the father of the greatest democracy on earth. Yet he was also an often-flawed politician whose socialistic planning policies held back the Indian economy, whose centralizing tendencies exacerbated the tragedy of Partition and whose foreign policies played into the hands of the Soviets. However his legacy is not just the success of democratic India but also the most successful political dynasty of modern democracy: in east Asia and the Middle East, dynasty is central to power. India was dominated by Nehru and his family and remains so well into the 21st century.
The descendant of lawyers to the East India Company, Nehru was the son of Motilal Nehru, a successful and wealthy lawyer, anglicized and sophisticated, who was one of the leaders of the Indian Congress Party, at times its president. Nehru was given the best English education, studying at Harrow School, which had been attended by that long-time foe of Indian independence Winston Churchill himself—and then Trinity College, Cambridge. But Nehru—who at Harrow and Cambridge was sometimes known as Joe Nehru—was involved with his father and Gandhi in the independence movement from an early age. At times he and his father were arrested together and Nehru, despite conflicts with Gandhi during the 1930s, had emerged as a leader in his own right by the start of the war. Nehru spent much of the time in and out of British jails as the British government wrestled with the challenge of whether to keep India or give it independence. There were rumors of Nehru’s schisms with Gandhi but the latter recognized him as his protégé and heir in 1941.
By the end of the war it was clear that Britain would indeed yield to Indian demands for independence: in 1946 the British prime minister Clement Attlee dispatched a Cabinet mission to decide how to proceed. Consulting with the two leading parties, Nehru’s Congress representing the Hindus and the All-India Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the British proposed a decentralized India with some self-government for Muslim and Hindu provinces. Leader of the largest party in the newly elected Constituent Assembly, Nehru became the prime minister of a provisional government. Attlee sent Lord Louis Mountbatten out to India as the last viceroy with orders to grant independence no later than 1948. But Mountbatten himself made the fateful decision to accelerate events in 1947. Mountbatten was faced with opposition to dividing India from the Hindu elite and opposition from the Muslims to centralizing India under a Hindu elite. Under this mounting pressure, Mountbatten finally agreed to a hurried and ill-conceived partition of the Raj into two countries, India and Pakistan, that would result in the massacre of a million people—and a vast migration. Mountbatten was frustrated by Jinnah and the Muslims but became close to Nehru; it is likely that Nehru had an affair, or at least a romantic relationship with the formidable vicereine, Lady Edwina Mountbatten.
On August 15, 1947, Nehru declared Indian independence with the famous words:
Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.
Winning the first full elections and subsequent polls, Nehru became the first prime minister of an independent India and remained in office for the next sixteen years. He established democracy and stability in India, a colossal achievement, but many of his other policies were counterproductive.
A Fabian socialist, he practiced state planning on a scale that paralyzed and crippled the economy for decades. In foreign policy, his nonaligned movement, claiming neutrality between the USA and USSR, played into Soviet hands, bringing India far too close to the Soviets, who remained major funders of the Nehru/Congress family well into the 1970s: their KGB station in Delhi was the largest in the world.
In 1962 Nehru’s forward policy on the Chinese border led to a short but dangerous war Sino-Indian war. He died in office, but apart from democracy, his chief
legacies were his family and the Congress Party political machine.
From the earliest days of independence, his chief of staff and hostess had been his ambitious and ruthless only child, Indira, who had married Ferouz Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma) in 1941. By the 1960s, there were tensions between the old prime minister and his fiery daughter, whom he suspected of brazen ambition.
After the short premiership of Shashri, Indira Gandhi, despite being mocked by her rivals as “Dumb Doll,” won election as prime minister in 1966. In 1971, when East Pakistan tried to secede from Pakistan, Indira Gandhi backed the rebels and fought Pakistan in a short war, resulting in an independent Bangladesh. Victory over Pakistan made her overconfident. She won the 1971 election aided by her Eradicate Poverty campaign. But when she was indicted by the courts for electoral corruption and misuse of funds, she defied the resulting protests, refused to resign and declared a state of emergency, ruling by fiat, supported by her ambitious younger son and chosen heir, Sanjay. She imposed her powers ruthlessly, arresting thousands of opposition supporters. When she finally called elections in 1977, she and her son lost their seats and the new government arrested them and put them on trial.
However in 1980, Indira won a landslide election and returned to power until her assassination by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984. As prime minister, she was succeeded by her diffident and gentle eldest son, Rajiv, a pilot (Sanjay had been killed in a flying accident in 1980), who governed until 1989 when his corruption-tainted government lost the elections. He was assassinated by Tamil Tigers in 1991 but his Italian-born widow Sonia assumed leadership of the Congress Party, which won the election of 2004. Refusing to become premier herself, she appointed Manoman Singh as PM but remained the power behind the scenes. Her son Rahul Gandhi became general secretary of the party: the dynasty remains ascendant.
Titans of History Page 47
