The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  As the German case illustrates, it was not always violent persecution that the minorities suffered; it was more that as the economic role of the state expanded in the 1920s – most obviously when ‘land reform’ (meaning selective expropriation and redistribution) was attempted or industries nationalized – so the opportunities for real and imagined discrimination also grew. German schools were closed down by the Czech authorities, while new Czech schools were built even in towns where only a few Czech families lived. Similar things went on in Poland, though the discrimination against Ukrainian and Byelorussian schools was more severe. Literally not one secondary school existed for ethnic minorities in inter-war Hungary, though there were 467 German primary schools. The Romanian authorities drove German-speaking teachers out of Bukovina if their grasp of Romanian was insufficient; one effect was to cripple the German literature department of Czernowitz’s once renowned university. German civil servants in Czechoslovakia were obliged to pass an examination in Czech; the effect was to halve the proportion of Germans in the civil service. The Polish post office refused to deliver letters addressed to the old German place names in West Prussia and Posen. In the same spirit, the Italian authorities forced the Germans of the Tyrol to learn Italian, while at the same time offering incentives to Italians to settle in the province. Political organization by German minorities was also hampered. In 1923, for example, the Polish government banned the Bydgoszcz-based Germandom League (Deutschtumsbund). Small wonder so many Germans opted to leave the so-called ‘lost territories’ and resettle in the reduced Reich. By 1926 some 85 per cent of the Germans in the towns of West Prussia and the formerly Prussian province of Posen had left. Those who remained were mostly isolated farmers or defiant landowners like the family of Oda Goerdeler, whose East Prussian estate became part of Działdowo county. As she recalled, the German community to which she belonged was ‘haunted by feelings of superiority, which had previously been taken for granted’. After 1919 they simply ‘sealed [themselves] off from the Polish element’.

  Yet the most vulnerable minority in Central and Eastern Europe were – as in the Russian civil war – not the Germans but the Jews. The very moment of national independence in many countries was marred by outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence. In the Slovakian town of Holesov, for example, two Jews were killed and virtually the entire Jewish quarter was gutted. In Lwów Polish troops ran amok in Jewish neighbourhoods, incensed by Jewish protestations of neutrality in the contest for the city between Poles and Ukrainians. A progrom at Chrzanow in November 1918 saw widespread looting and pillaging of Jewish homes and businesses; in Warsaw synagogues were burned. Further east, there were also pogroms in Vilnius and Pińsk – where Polish troops shot thirty-five people for the offence of distributing charitable donations from the United States – while in Hungary there was an anti-Semitic ‘White Terror’ following the suppression of the Jewish socialist Béla Kun’s short-lived soviet regime in Budapest. The revolutionary movement cut through these and other Jewish communities like a double-edged sword. Sometimes they were accused of having sided with the Germans during the war; sometimes they were accused of siding with the Bolsheviks during the Revolution.

  Violence gave way to discrimination during the 1920s, despite the fine words of the Minorities Treaties. In Poland Sunday became a compulsory day of rest for all. Jews who could not prove pre-war residence were denied Polish citizenship. It was difficult for a Jew to become a schoolteacher; to become a university professor was next to impossible. State assistance was made available to Polish schools only, not to Jewish schools. The number of Jewish students at Polish universities fell by half between in 1923 and 1937. As one Polish politician put it, the Jewish community was ‘a foreign body, dispersed in our organism so that it produces a pathological deformation. In this state of affairs it is impossible to find a way out other than the removal of the alien body, harmful through both its numbers and its uniqueness.’ The leader of the Nationalist Party, Roman Dwomski, spoke in similar terms. Not untypical of the post-war mood was the poem that appeared in Przeglad powszechny in December 1922:

  Jewry is contaminating Poland thoroughly:

  It scandalizes the young, destroys the unity of the common people.

  By means of the atheistic press it poisons the spirit,

  Incites to evil, provokes, divides…

  A terrible gangrene has infiltrated our body

  And we… are blind!

  The Jews have gained control of Polish business,

  As though we were imbeciles,

  And they cheat, extort, and steal,

  While we feed on fantasies,

  Our indolence grows in strength and size,

  And we… are blind!

  Things were not a great deal better in Romania. Jews were not given full citizenship unless they had served in the Romanian army or been born of two parents both of whom had also been born in Romania. Jewish enrolment in universities was restricted. In Bukovina the introduction of a Romanian school-leaving examination in 1926 caused all but two out of ninety-four Jewish candidates to fail. Only through bribery could non-Romanian candidates hope to pass.

  There were three possible responses to such discrimination. The first was to leave. Yet despite the importance of Zionism in Polish-Jewish politics, only a small proportion of Polish Jews drew the conclusion that they would be better off trying to find a Jewish state in the new ‘home’ their people had been granted in what was now the British ‘mandate’ in Palestine. Even in the 1930s just 82,000 Polish Jews emigrated there, though as we shall see this also reflected British nervousness about the effect of continued Jewish immigration on Palestine’s internal stability. In fact, only a minority of Polish Zionists were committed to systematic colonization of the Holy Land; the majority were just as interested in what could be achieved in Poland itself. It was easier in more ways than one for a West Prussian to leave Poland for neighbouring Germany than for a Jew to leave Poland for the more distant Holy Land.

  A second possibility was to withdraw into a more or less segregated Jewish society within a society. This came quite naturally to the relatively poor Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim of the Galician shtetl, the majority of whom still cleaved to Orthodox observance and attire and would probably have chosen segregation under any circumstances. But segregation was not unique to them. Itzik Manger, the leading Yiddish poet, spoke no Polish despite having lived in Warsaw for years. In Antoni Słonimski’s words, there was an ‘ethnic border which ran through the town somewhere around Bielanska Street, separating Srodmiescie from the Jewish district’. ‘The ghetto district of Craców’, remarked the British author Hugh Seton-Watson, ‘is little less different from the Christian quarter than is an Arab town from the west end of London.’ Segregation was more than a residential phenomenon. Typically, there was a Polish socialist party and two Jewish socialist parties, the Bund and Zionist Poale Zion. There was a thriving Yiddish and Hebrew press and a proliferation of Yiddish and Hebrew schools. Rich Jews went to different holiday resorts from rich Poles. They might deal with Poles when it came to business, but their relations went no further. In Poland Judaism was not just a religion; it was also a national identity. Clear majorities of those who described themselves as Jewish by religion – 74 per cent in the census of 1921 – also described themselves as Jewish by nationality.

  The third possibility was assimilation. In Brańsk, for example, Jewish and Polish children played together in a band that performed at parties and weddings. In Kołomyja friendships between Poles and Jews were so common that it was said ‘every Jew has his Pole’. Even on the edge of Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Kraków, it was possible to live ‘in a sort of isolation from Polish society’ while at the same time ‘absorbing Polish culture, Polish poetry, or Polish music and art in the depths of [one’s] being’. To the generation of Polish Jews who grew up in the 1920s this was a widely shared experience; a majority of them attended Polish language schools. Yet even those Jews who had long sought assimilation
, like the Magyarized Jews of Budapest, the Romanized Jews of Bucharest or the Germanized Jews of Prague, found they were viewed with only slightly less suspicion than the Orthodox Jews of the shtetls. Trudi Levi, both of whose parents were atheists, grew up on the Hungarian-Austrian border speaking both Magyar and German with equal fluency; but the Hungarian authorities insisted that all Jews learn Hebrew even if, like the Levis, they had abandoned religious observance. Elizabeth Wiskem-ann was shocked to find Sudeten Germans boycotting Jewish shops by the early 1930s, not something that would have happened in pre-war Bohemia. Many Prague Jews became conscious of their Jewish origins only when they encountered such anti-Semitism. Abraham Rotfarb, a Jew born and raised in Warsaw, expressed the acute, agonizing vulnerability that so many assimilated Jews came to feel in the inter-war years:

  I am a poor assimilated soul. I am a Jew and a Pole, or rather I was a Jew, but gradually under the influence of my environment, under the influence of the place where I lived, and under the influence of the language, the culture, and the literature, I have also become a Pole. I loved Poland. Its language, its culture, and most of all the fact of its liberation and the heroism of its independent struggle, all pluck at my heartstrings and fire my feelings and enthusiasm. But I do not love that Poland which, for no apparent reason, hates me, that Poland which tears at my heart and soul, which drives me into a state of apathy, melancholy, and dark depression. Poland has taken away my happiness, it has turned me into a dog who, not having any ambitions of his own, asks only not to be abandoned in the wasteland of culture but to be drawn along the road of Polish cultural life. Poland has brought me up as a Pole, but brands me a Jew who has to be driven out. I want to be a Pole, you have not let me; I want to be a Jew, but I don’t know how, I have become alienated from Jewishness. (I do not like myself as a Jew.) I am already lost.

  The two minorities with the most to lose under the new post-war dispensation might conceivably have made common cause. In cities like Prague, after all, the relationship between Germans and Jews had long been characterized by symbiosis more than conflict. Throughout the 1920s Jews in Czechoslovakia were far more likely to send their children to German-speaking than to Czech-speaking schools. When riots broke out in Prague in November 1920, following reports that a Czech school had been forcibly closed down in Cheb, both Germans and Jews were attacked. The Latvian Thunder Cross pledged to ‘eradicate with sword and fire every German, Jew, Pole and even Latvian who threatens Latvian independence and welfare’. Indeed, there were Jews, like Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the Polish Zionist leader, who sincerely hoped for a united front of German and Jewish minorities. Yet far from uniting in their common adversity, insecure Germans turned against even more insecure Jews. In 1920 and again in 1923 demonstrations in favour of keeping Upper Silesia German escalated into pogrom-like attacks on Jewish property. As early as 1925, doctors in Breslau founded a medical association that excluded Jews and began campaigning for a boycott of Jewish doctors. Gregor von Rezzori described how Romanians and Germans alike could agree on one thing: their contempt for Jews. An encounter between a Romanian youth ‘wearing the well-known costume of short, sleeveless and colourfully embroidered sheepskin jacket, and coarse linen shirt over linen trousers tightly belted in blue-yellow-and-red’ and a German student, dressed in the uniform of one of the German duelling fraternities (‘stiff collar, kepi worn at a snappy angle, fraternity colours displayed across the chest on a broad ribbon’) might have come to blows. But on this occasion

  both are distracted by the appearance of a Hasidic rabbi in black caftan, with the pale skin of a bookworm and long corkscrew side-locks under a fox-pelt hat, an apparition that forthwith unites the former opponents in the happy recognition that the newcomer is the natural target of their aggression.

  As Rezzori recalled, all the other groups in Cernaŭti ‘despised the Jews, notwithstanding that Jews not only played an economically decisive role but, in cultural matters, were the group who nurtured traditional values as well as newly developing ones’. This was not a traditional attitude but something new. As we have seen, prior to Bukovina’s incorporation in Romania, Germans and Jews had attended the same schools and been members of the same cultural associations. Between the wars this harmony gradually vanished. Few towns in Eastern Europe had seen a more advanced German-Jewish symbiosis. But here, as elsewhere in East Central Europe, there was to be no solidarity between the minorities; quite the reverse.

  THE DEATH THROES OF EMPIRE

  It was not just East Central Europe that posed a challenge for the peacemakers, however. In the erstwhile territory of the Ottoman Empire the fate of other multi-ethnic societies also had to be decided. These were not European societies, so naturally the West European powers assumed that they represented potential additions to their overseas empires. In 1916 the British and French agreed between themselves to carve up large tracts of the Ottoman territory, the former claiming what was to become Palestine, Jordan and the greater part of Iraq (then known as Mesopotamia), the latter Syria and the rest of Iraq. Under the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres these arrangements were confirmed and extended to satisfy the territorial cravings of other victorious powers. The Italians were given the Dodecanese Islands, including Rhodes and the Anatolian port of Kastellorizzo. The Greeks were to have Thrace and Western Anatolia, including the port of Smyrna (today Izmir). Armenia, Assyria and the Hejaz (now part of Saudi Arabia) were to be independent. Plebiscites were to decide the fate of Kurdistan and the area around Smyrna. Sèvres was to do for the Ottoman Empire what St Germain-en-Laye had done for the Habsburg Empire: to sheer it right down to the bone, but on the basis of imperialism rather than nationalism – though the British and French acquisitions were labelled ‘mandates’ rather than colonies, in deference to American and Arab sensibilities.

  Yet all this presupposed that the Middle East could be treated as the passive object of traditional imperial designs. In reality, the same nationalist aspirations and ethnic conflicts that were creating such upheaval in Central and Eastern Europe were also at work on the other side of the Black Sea straits. The difference was that in Europe these forces worked slowly. It took nearly two decades to nullify the terms of the Treaty of St Germain-en-Laye. The Treaty of Sèvres, by contrast, was a dead letter within a matter of months.

  Even before the outbreak of the First World War, Turkey had been evolving from an empire into a nation state, inspired by the teachings of Ziya Gokalp, the prophet of a homogeneous Turkey with a uniform national culture (harsi millet). In 1908 the Young Turks – a group of intellectuals like Gokalp and army officers like Ismail Enver – had emerged as the dominant force in Ottoman politics. Their Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) aimed at modernizing the Empire lest it become simply another Asian subsidiary of the West or suffer a lingering death by a thousand territorial cuts. By 1913 they were in control in Constantinople. Like the Japanese before them, the Young Turks had taken the Germans as their role models. Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz acted as a military adviser to the Sultan between 1883 and 1895, though his influence was largely confined to officer training. In January 1914 another German general, Otto Liman von Sanders, was appointed the army’s Inspector General; meanwhile German bankers were cajoled by their government into financing the extension of the Berlin–Constantinople railway line as far as Baghdad. The Young Turks’ subsequent decision to join in the war on the side of Germany followed more or less logically from these initiatives. Nor was it strategically irrational, given the secret promises the British government had made to hand the Black Sea straits to Russia in the event of a swift Entente victory, and their own designs on the oilfields of Mesopotamia.

  For all their modernizing rhetoric, however, the Young Turks had suffered only reverses since coming to power. Bulgaria had declared independence and Austria had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Italians had occupied Libya. The Serbs and their confederates had defeated them in the First Balkan War, leaving a small piece of Thrace around Adrianople (Edirne) as the sol
e remnant of their Balkan empire. These experiences deepened the Young Turks’ mistrust of the non-Turkish populations within their borders. The far worse ravages of war* against the combined might of the British, French and Russian empires turned mistrust into murder, with malice aforethought. Nothing illustrates more clearly that the worst time to live under imperial rule is when that rule is crumbling. Not for the last time in the twentieth century, the decline and fall of an empire caused more bloodshed than its rise.

  Like the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, the Armenians were doubly vulnerable: not only a religious minority, but also a relatively wealthy group, disproportionately engaged in commerce. Like the Jews, they were heavily, though by no means exclusively, concentrated in one border region: the six vilayets (provinces) of Bitlis, Van, Erzu-rum, Mamuretü laziz, Diyarbakir and Sivas, on the Ottoman Empire’s eastern frontier. Like the Jews, although more credibly, the Armenians could be identified as sympathizing with an external threat, namely Russia, historically the Ottoman Empire’s most dangerous foe. Like the Serbs, they had their extremists, who aimed at independence through violence. There had in fact been state-sponsored attacks against them before.†In the mid-1890s irregular Kurdish troops had been unleashed against Armenian villages as the Ottoman authorities tried to reassert the Armenians’ subordinate status as infidel dhimmis, or non-Muslim citizens. The American ambassador estimated the number of people killed at more than 37,000. There was a fresh outbreak of violence at Adana in 1909, though this was not instigated by the Young Turks. The murderous campaign launched against the Armenians from 1915 to 1918 was qualitatively different, however; so much so that it is now widely acknowledged to have been the first true genocide. With good reason, the American consul in Smyrna declared that it ‘surpasse[d] in deliberate and long-protracted horror and in extent anything that has hitherto happened in the history of the world’.