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  DEATH OF A NATION

  DEATH OF A NATION

  A New History of Germany

  Stephen R A’Barrow

  Book Guild Publishing

  Sussex, England

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  The Book Guild Ltd

  The Werks

  45 Church Road

  Hove, BN3 2BE

  Copyright © Stephen R A’Barrow 2015

  The right of Stephen R A’Barrow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Typesetting in Times by

  YHT Ltd, London

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  A catalogue record for this book is available from

  The British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 910298 49 7

  ePub ISBN 978 1 910508 81 7

  Mobi ISBN 978 1 910508 82 4

  This book is dedicated to the forgotten victims of war.

  ‘Some duties are to be observed, even towards those from

  whom you have received injury. For vengeance and

  punishment have their due bounds.’

  Cicero.

  Contents

  Preface

  Historiography

  Maps

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 – The Early Germans: From Barbarians at the Gates of Rome to Holy Roman Emperors

  Germania

  The Great Migration of the Germanic Tribes

  Chapter 2 – The Rise and Fall of the First Reich: The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation

  The Legacy of Charlemagne’s 1,000-Year Reich

  The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in an Era before the Nation State

  What Kind of State was the Holy Roman Empire?

  The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation: Hubris and Nemesis

  The Break-up of the Empire and the Rise of Nations

  The French Push on the Rhine and the Destruction of the Holy Roman Empire

  Chapter 3 – The Rise and Fall of German Central Europe

  Bohemia: The Heart of Europe

  Bohemia’s Greatest Kings

  Return of the Habsburgs

  The Rise of Czech Nationalism

  T.G. Masaryk’s Role in the Creation of the ‘Miracle of Czechoslovakia’

  Hitler and ‘Heim ins Reich’ (Home to the Reich)

  Edvard Beneš: Genocidal Bureaucrat

  Feverish Ethnic Cleansing

  A Desolate Kingdom

  Chapter 4 – Prussia: From The ‘Sandpit of Europe’ To European Power Broker

  Changing Perceptions of Prussia

  The Crusader State

  The Advance of the Teutonic Knights Along the Baltic Coast

  The Coming of the Prussian State

  Prussia: From Geographical Region to the Name for a State

  Frederick the Great

  Prussia’s High Water Mark

  Napoleonic Tonic and German Whispers

  Restoration Europe After the Era of Napoleon

  Thinking about Germany

  The 1848 Revolutions in Germany, Prussia and Austria

  Bismarck (the Great) and a Prussian Germany

  Bismarck Steers a Course for Germany

  The End of the Concert

  Chapter 5 – The Second Reich: In an Age of Global Imperialism

  The Second Reich

  Wilhelmian Germany: The German Victorian Era

  European and American Imperialism Before the First World War

  The Americas: Indian Wars in the Age of Imperialism

  Russia: Ruler of the East

  British Imperialism and the ‘White Man’s Burden’

  German Imperialism and the Pursuit of ‘Weltmacht’ (World Power)

  Kaiser Wilhelm and the Countdown to the First World War

  Chapter 6 – From Empire to Republic: The First World War and Weimar

  The Inevitability of War

  The Motives of the Great Powers at the Outbreak of the First World War

  The Blame Game

  Escape Through War

  The Sum Total of War

  Shock and Revolution in 1918

  The Cost of Versailles

  The List

  Punishment

  Payment

  Prevention

  Legacy

  Weimar and the Perfect Storm

  The Three Phases of Weimar

  Chapter 7 – The Third Reich: From Total War to War Without End

  Hitlerism vs. Nazism

  Foreign Policy: A Fool’s Errand?

  Hitler’s War

  Stalin’s War

  Why Hitler Remains Front and Centre

  Anti-Semitism: A History of Unremitting Persecution

  Why?

  Poland Reborn

  Polish Pretensions Between the Wars

  Hell Descends on Poland

  Chapter 8 – The End is Nigh: Victory or Death

  Victory or Death

  The Precipice

  Collapse

  The Fate of the Fortresses

  A Senseless Struggle

  End Game

  How Poland’s Modern Frontiers Came into Being

  Now It’s Your Turn: Polish Administration of Former German Territories

  Comparisons in Ethnic Cleansing

  Postscript to How Poland’s Modern Frontiers Came into Being

  Missing and Forgotten

  Zero Hour

  Chapter 9 – The Aftermath: A Nation Disappears

  The Occupation

  The Ten Thousand

  A Freebooter’s Paradise

  Economic Dismantlement

  The Hunger Winters of 1945–48

  Conclusions

  Epilogue

  Postscript:

  A Personal Journey Through a Kingdom of Ghosts

  East Prussia: A Rural Idyll Lost

  Forgotten Silesia

  Euro Regions: The Possibilities

  Euro Regions: The Relative Successes

  Europe and Hopes for the Future

  Appendices

  Notes on Appendices

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Photographic Acknowledgements

  Index

  Author’s Note

  Throughout this book I have used the German names of people and places unless there are very well known anglicised versions. For example, when describing Friedrich der Grosse I refer to him as Frederick the Great. However, I have not anglicised Kaiser Wilhelm as Kaiser William nor have I called Heinrich Himmler Henry Himmler. In terms of place names I have used the German form when they were part of one German constellation or another and put their modern Czech, French, Polish or Russian equivalents in brackets afterwards, wherever I felt this was appropriate.

  Preface

  Death of a nation? Germany?? A strange proposition for a nation with the largest economy in Europe, the paymaster of the European Union and the country that appears to control not only the purse strings but also the terms of all Eurozone ‘bailouts’. The nation which in 2014 won the football World Cup for the fourth time is very much alive, isn’t it!?

  One German academic was flabbergasted at the title, asking me ‘How can you give this title to your book?’ To which I answered, ‘Is
Prussia still very much alive? How about Silesia? How about German Bohemia? How many Germans know that Prague was twice the de facto capital of the First Reich? And what about the Austrians’ relationship with their shared past? Beyond that there was no Germany from 1945–1949 when the Allies comprehensively dismantled the Reich that Bismarck established. And if we want to get on to the question of whether the Germans still possess a tangible sense of national identity at all then I think even you’d have to admit that any notion of a German national identity is exceptionally fractured, at best.’ My colleague paused and said, ‘Those names are ghosts from our past, most of which are best left forgotten.’ An incomprehensible answer from a German historian but it underscores some of the points I will go on to make in this book. Beyond that, saddled with the interminable guilt and shame of being German foisted upon them from all quarters for the ‘collective responsibility’ for two world wars and the holocaust, the Germans, it appears, have decided to demographically fade away, as though the weight of this afflicted consciousness has simply become too much to bear. Whereas the UK, France and USA have seen their post-war populations increase significantly, Germany’s has been in sharp decline and is set to decrease further from 81 to 68 million by 2050.

  For most of us in Western Europe, we can enjoy looking back through our family histories and tracing our origins back to places whose names, historical markers and populations have remained largely unchanged for centuries. For many in Central and Eastern Europe, following wholesale population replacements during and after the Second World War, this has become all but impossible. Tens of millions of people in a zone between the 12–39th lines of longitude from the Bohemian borderlands to the Karelian lakes lost their homelands and in most cases the states that annexed them have been busy writing their former owners out of the official histories and obliterating their memory brick-by-brick. The murderous destruction of Jewish communities across Europe by the Nazis is well documented. The destruction of communities and cultures of Finns in Karelia, Germans in Prussia, Hungarians in Transylvania, Italians in Istria, Poles in Lviv and Vilnius to name but a few are far less well known and have received far less attention.

  In Death of a Nation I have set out to put into a much broader historical context the enormous human and cultural cost to Germany and German Austria of losing two world wars and the damage this has done to their sense of national identity. To gain a sense of just how cataclysmic the changes were, you only need to look at a map of Europe in 1914 and compare it to one of Europe today to see the sheer scale of a wholesale reordering of the Continent. What isn’t immediately comprehensible to most however is the way in which this reshaping of Europe’s borders, along much more ethnically homogenous lines, was undertaken.

  In the case of German-speaking Europe, it took the First World War to hugely diminish German Austria and the Second to emasculate Germany by expunging Prussia from the map of Europe altogether. By means of an overview prior to the break-up of Austria Hungary, 25 per cent of the old empire’s population had been German Austrians. Once the borders had been redrawn they received just 12 per cent of the old empire’s territory with half of them ending up on the wrong side of newly drawn borders in neighbouring and now mostly hostile nations. As for Germany, before the First World War she consisted of 540,740 square kilometres, the third largest nation in Europe after Russia and Austria Hungary. Today a reunited Germany holds sway over 357,668 square kilometres, making her Europe’s seventh largest nation in terms of area after Russia, Ukraine, France, Spain, Sweden and Norway! German Austria and Germany’s territorial losses, including only their German-speaking populations, amounted to an area greater than that of the entire United Kingdom. And it was not just the borders that moved; the people left stranded on the wrong side of all too often arbitrarily-drawn borders also ‘had to be expelled’.

  We tend to forget that from 8th May 1945 to 23rd May 1949 there was no Germany. In the intervening period there was no German state or state institutions and Germans were at the mercy of their occupiers. The Germany that Bismarck had fashioned was comprehensively dismembered, divided into occupation zones or simply annexed. The euphemism used for the annexation of Germany’s former eastern territories by Poland was that they were being put under Polish ‘administration’. For four long and horrific years, Stalin and his stooges in Poland, Czechoslovakia and beyond busied themselves with the ethnic reordering of Central Europe. By the time the German Federal Republic was proclaimed on 23rd May 1949, Prussia, which had been Germany’s largest and most powerful state and whose origins reached back to the early thirteenth century, had been wiped from the map of Europe by an Allied ‘proclamation’ on 25th February 1947, the first and only time a European state has been ‘legislated’ out of existence. And Bohemia and Moravia, which had been home to the likes of Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud and Oskar Schindler, as well as 60 per cent of Austria’s industrial base, had an entirely new identity grafted upon it and an absolute break was made with its millennial connection to German-speaking Europe.

  The fact that most modern historians have either chosen to completely ignore or simply gloss over the largest demographic, geographic and cultural ‘realignment’ in both German and modern European history makes their accounts all the more suspect. My favourite history teacher at school, who inspired my interest in the subject, who had fought the Germans in the deserts of North Africa and through Italy uttered the most fundamental truth about historians when he stated, ‘To understand any historian’s true prejudices, look not for what they have written about but for what they have failed to include!’

  It always helps to know a little about an author’s background and their inner motivations for writing a book. It’s also important for an author to confess any formative experiences that might have influenced his or her outlook. All students of history are taught to look for evidence of such influence and I think it is fundamentally misleading to try and conceal these. If you have something to say, and a reason for saying it, then that should be made clear to the reader at the outset.

  By means of an example, I cite a recently published popular work by Tony Judt, entitled Post War: A History of Europe Since 1945. The book was peppered with negative references about Germans and Germany, from the beginning of the book right through to the epilogue, where I discovered the following statement: ‘To ask each new generation of Germans to live forever in Hitler’s shadow, to require that they take on responsibility for the memory of Germany’s unique guilt and make it the very measure of their national identity, was the least that could be demanded.’(1) (my italics). The second edition paperback, printed in 2007, did not contain any references to the sources used. Nor did it give any inkling as to the reasons for the author’s apparent prejudice in the short biography that was placed on the rear inside cover. My curiosity remained unsatisfied, so I typed the author’s details into an Internet search engine only to discover that Judt was born in London in 1948, whereas his mother’s parents had immigrated to Britain from Russia, and his Belgian father was descended from a line of Lithuanian Rabbis — a family history that would not dispose you well toward Germans or Germany on either side.

  It is a sad reflection on the human condition to observe that there is no such thing as an objective history, and there is certainly no such thing as an objective history of Germany. The horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust are still too visceral and emotive to allow for that. All too many books continue to conclude their histories of Germany on 8th May 1945. If they do continue the history beyond that date, they either totally ignore or casually skirt the horrors of the immediate post-war period during the Allied occupation.

  Post-modernist theorists question the value of history. They would be on stronger ground if they were to simply question its ability to ever be truly objective. In the pantheon of the good and the great, Macaulay never attempted to conceal his Whig bias, Christopher Hill wrote a book on Lenin which failed to even mention Trotsky, and E.H. Carr’s sympathy for
the Soviet Union was hardly a secret. Indeed, Carr’s views on the nature of history and historicism would go so far as to state that we should only study history from the perspective of the victors, the losers having failed the test of history — an interesting viewpoint, but such a one-sided perspective doesn’t help anyone gain a more rounded understanding of events past; to gain that you have to read history from a variety of perspectives.

  Death Of A Nation has been a work in progress for twenty years, and one that has taken me ten years of solid research and writing to complete. It has been a personal journey based upon having lived, worked, and studied in Germany, on and off for the past four decades. I have travelled extensively throughout the country and through the areas that used to be part of Germany, both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I have talked to family and friends and interviewed those with a longer perspective on history than either just the twelve years of the Third Reich, or Germany from the ‘Year Zero’ of 1945.