A New Nationalist Europe Under Hitler

Concepts of Europe and Transnational Networks in the National Socialist Sphere of Influence, 1933–1945

Johannes Dafinger, Dieter Pohl, Johannes Dafinger, Dieter Pohl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351627719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Nazis, fascists and völkisch conservatives in different European countries not only cooperated internationally in the fields of culture, science, economy, and persecution of Jews, but also developed ideas for a racist and ethno-nationalist Europe under Hitler. The present volume attempts to combine an analysis of Nazi Germany's transnational relations with an evaluation of the discourse that accompanied these relations.

Part I

Concepts of Europe

1 “Volksgruppen Rights” versus “Minorities Protections”

The evolution of German and Austrian political order paradigms from the 1920s to 1945^*

Ulrich Prehn

This chapter looks at the evolution of “Volksgruppenrecht” (the body of laws concerning ethnonational groups and their collective rights) in German and Austrian debates from the 1920s to the end of World War II. After World War I, the New Order in Europe – especially with the territorial changes dictated by the Paris Peace Conference treaties – intensified many of the conflicts between ethnic minorities (or to use the term of the time, “national minorities”), some of them long-standing. Criticisms (as heard not only in Germany) of the Geneva “minorities protection” mechanisms established after the First World War led to demands for the implementation of new international or supranational legal structures, as proposed during the course of the 1920s and 1930s by German activists on nationalities issues and German scholars of constitutional law, international law, and “Volkswissenschaften” (“Volk studies/sciences,” Volk meaning “people” but here with ethnonationalist connotations). In analyzing these developments, one needs to ask how much these initiatives were actually oriented (and from the very beginning) towards establishing a new political order based on inequality. This chapter will also examine the extent and ways in which these ideas influenced the planning, implementation, and legitimation of German occupational rule, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, and consider what other ideas – sometimes compatible, sometimes deviating – were being developed in Europe at the time, in terms of conceptualizing a political order based on “Volksgruppen” (or “ethnonational groups,” singular: “Volksgruppe”), and/or a “völkisch, Großraum-oriented political order” (völkisch referring to ethnonationalist ideologies, and Großraum meaning “greater region” in terms of sphere of influence).

“Artgleichheit” (“conspecificity”) instead of equality: from “Minorities Protections” to “Volksgruppen rights”

As the main authority for settling minorities conflicts after World War I, the newly established League of Nations (headquartered in Geneva) installed legal mechanisms that were meant to guarantee anti-discrimination protections to the individual¹ – and not to collectives or corporate entities such as “Volksgruppen” – along with the possibility of a complaints procedure in case of violations. The main objective was to avoid granting any “collective group rights leading to the creation of ‘states within a state.’”² As the political scientist Samuel Salzborn has astutely outlined, the collective rights approach is based on segregation along linguistic/cultural and ethnic lines (and sometimes “racial” ones too), striving for a “model based on special laws for ethnic collectives” based on these differentiation strategies and “special statuses.”³ It is certainly true that the League of Nations, in establishing minorities protection frameworks, was not capable of solving every conflict arising from the incompatibility between one paradigm based on nation-states and another paradigm based on linguistic, cultural, or “Volkstum” membership (Volkstum or “folkdom” refers to the entire utterances of an ethnic collective over time). However, German and Austrian revisionists and “Volkstum”-oriented political activists were particularly outspoken in lambasting the “Geneva system” from the very start as representing a despised liberalism fixated on nation-states and an internationalism based on “Gleichmacherei” (“forcing all to be the same”), which they branded as being too “Western” (as opposed to Central European) as well as “formaldemokratisch” (“democratic in form only”). For example, Karl Christian von Loesch, departmental chair of Volkstum Studies and Volksgruppen Issues at the Foreign Studies Faculty of the University of Berlin since 1940,⁴ spoke disparagingly in 1935 of a “liberal age, with its disorderliness in the relations between Völker, which the Geneva States’ Club was incapable of resolving” (Völker is the plural of Volk). According to him, it was only through “‘thinking in terms of Völker’ and National Socialism’s fundamental rejection of assimilation” that a “suitable foundation has been created … for the Völker themselves to become the building blocks of political structures facilitating the greater good and stability.”⁵ In a speech delivered at the Twelfth European Nationalities’ Congress (held in Geneva on 16 and 17 September 1936), the lawyer Hans Neuwirth (a politician who in 1935 had switched from the Christian Socialist Party to Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party in the Czechoslovak parliament) was in agreement when he called for the “recognition of Volkspersönlichkeiten [Volk as a collective person], as the foundation for further European development,” while also stressing reassuringly that he did not mean “anything like the changing of a territorial status,” but instead new forms of constitutional law and international law – which was something no less radical.⁶

During the 1920s, as questions of political order were being considered by German and Austrian scholars and activists addressing nationalities issues, they developed the idea of “Konnationale” (“co-nationals”), which emphasized the ties between groups from ostensibly the same “nation” or “Volkstum”. The proponents of this “co-nationals” concept were striving to establish it as a new, internationally binding legal paradigm,⁷ which would benefit first and foremost the various German “Volksgruppen” that existed in other state territories. This was a legal principle that was no longer based purely on relations between states, but one that also considered the links between “Volksgruppen”, a paradigm partially rooted in notions of the medieval Personenverbandsstaat (a state prioritizing feudalistic interpersonal obligations over strictly territorial claims) as well as other older traditions of natural law, particularly those found in regions of German influence and settlement. “Deutschtum” activists (“German-dom” activists, who promoted ethnic German interests) viewed legislated agreements on the cultural autonomy of constituent nationalities (such as the one implemented in Estonia in 1925) as a fundamental legal instrument towards realizing a “supranational Volksgemeinschaft” (the latter term referring to an “ethnonational community”).⁸

The reorientation of German initiatives addressing nationalities policies became clear at the Berliner Schlussbesprechung (“Berlin Final Discussion”),⁹ which took place in March 1928 with over 170 participants representing various “Deutschtum” associations, scholarly institutions, and governmental bodies, thereby concluding a longer series of “policy consultations on eastern issues” that had begun in early 1927. On 17 March 1928, the participants of the Berliner Schlussbesprechung ratified their “European goals,” declaring that “Just as the eighteenth century brought recognition of ‘human rights’ for every individual [note the quotation marks], so must the twentieth century bring recognition of ‘Volk rights’ for every Volk entity.”¹⁰ The ideas outlined here were in fact very much “Deutschtum-centric,” as made clear by a particular passage in the “Basic Principles for Future Work in the East” formulated shortly before, which the Deutscher Schutzbund für die Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschen (German Defence League for Frontier Germans and Germans Abroad) had labeled “Not for publication!” The second part of these “Basic Principles” stated that one urgent task was to build legal structures that more strongly

arise from German legal thought and the German position of responsibility within the Central European region. The groundwork for this projected reform of the state paradigm should be laid through the corresponding intellectual swaying of public opinion in all countries that come into consideration.¹¹

In right-wing intellectual circles in Germany after World War I – and even to a large extent within its bourgeois liberal camp – the idea of the “chosenness” of the German Volk, with its “central position” in Europe, was as equally widespread as the idea of a German “Central European” mission, which involved the “self-defensive struggle” against Bolshevism and/or against the self-determination rights of so-called small Völker and nations.¹² An example of this can be found in a 1928 magazine article by Rudolf Brandsch, chair of the Verband der deutschen Volksgruppen in Europa (Association of German Ethnic Groups in Europe). In his view, the

German Volksgruppen were chosen by destiny to form a strong nucleus – in the midst of the onslaught of eastern chaos, in the midst of impotent Kleinstaaterei [“small-state fragmentation”] and the most deplorable of economic and cultural turmoil – so that it can bring together these various energies that will form, in the future Europe, the bulwark of law, justice and freedom.¹³

The idea of “Volksgruppen rights” became increasingly important in Germany’s domestic politics too, even before the National Socialist rise to power. For example, the parliamentary contingent of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei(German National People’s Party) proposed the following resolution on 10 December 1930:

The Reichstag should resolve:

[to petition] the Reich government to appoint a committee … that, in view of the upcoming negotiations of the European Committee at the League of Nations, will take up the drafting of legislation (in accordance with Article 4 of the Reich constitution) for those German Volksgruppen that have been assigned by international treaties to the state of an alien Volk. This legislation is to safeguard the rights that the Volksgruppen and their members are entitled to, not only in regards to the potential relationships between them and the state of their Volk, but also between them and the alien state.¹⁴

Alongside these efforts to draw up legal frameworks for relations between nationalities, Völker, and states, there was also a tendency among ethnopolitical thinkers to invoke the trailblazing role of Germans in the “Volkstum struggle.” For example, in 1932 the sociologist Max Hildebert Boehm (who founded a “Volk theory” largely argued along ethnic/cultural lines)¹⁵ went so far as to describe German “Volksgruppen” as “the Freikorps [volunteer troops] of the militant Volk concept in Europe and the world.”¹⁶ However, the real militancy of German “Volksgruppen” in Europe would only emerge after Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in October 1933, and further increase after the so-called Sudeten crisis.¹⁷

In his agenda-defining essay entitled “Minorities Protections or Volksgruppen Rights?” Gustav Adolf Walz – the rector of Breslau University and a National Socialist scholar of constitutional and international law – highlighted the basic political and philosophical contradiction between the two legal paradigms cited in his essay title: “In opposition to Gleichartigkeit [equalness] as the dominant principle that structures the liberal world, there now arises Artgleichheit [conspecificity] as the grouping principle of the emerging v...