Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War

Goals, Expectations, Practices

Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff, Dieter Langewiesche, Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff, Dieter Langewiesche

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857457394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This "territorial revisionism" came to include all manner of political and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the war itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period and East European national histories.

Chapter 1

THE WORST OF FRIENDS
Germany’s Allies in East Central Europe—Struggles for Regional Dominance and Ethnic Cleansing, 1938–1945

István Deák

The topic I seek to investigate is how Germany behaved toward its European allies and how the allies behaved both toward Germany and each other. My fundamental argument is that, far from having been powerless satellites, Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, and Bulgaria were, to a large extent, masters of their own fate. Moreover, Germany’s allies served as an inspiration to several countries which Germany had defeated and occupied, and which now aimed at securing a status approximating the sovereignty enjoyed in Hitler’s Europe by Germany’s official allies. As a consequence, it was not always easy to distinguish between Germany’s allies and such defeated countries as, for instance, France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and Serbia. I would even argue, somewhat provocatively, that most countries in Hitler’s Europe achieved, if not the power over all their important decisions, then a degree of autonomy which enabled them to establish strict control over, for example, their own pro-Nazi far-right opposition and their ethnic minorities. Moreover, they were able to turn the handling of the “Jewish question” to their own advantage, and they were free to determine in large measure their relations with their neighbors. In so doing, they often defied the German Nazis. In other words, regarding German policy in Europe, it was often a case of the tail wagging the dog. Only occupied Poland and the three Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were unable to engage in such relations because the Germans had not authorized them to form a central administration.

Regarding Germany’s official allies, I propose to develop the following four theses, however briefly: the first is that the German alliance system was murky, confusing, and open to diverse interpretations; the second, that Germany’s allies possessed almost complete political independence, which gave them the freedom to maneuver but also made their leaders and the citizenry responsible for the war crimes and crimes against humanity they committed; the third, that many German allies were hostile to each other to an extent unheard of in history; and the fourth, that Germany’s allies—and, incidentally, Central and Eastern Europeans in general—used the war as an effective instrument for ridding their country of ethnic and religious minorities. In other words: they nearly all engaged in some form of ethnic cleansing.

Before starting a more detailed discussion of these troubled relationships, we should remind ourselves of the element of chronology, which forces us to differentiate between three time periods. During the first phase, which lasted until the battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942/43, the alliance system was being gradually formed while there was a widespread conviction that Germany would win the war, making it indispensable to curry favor with the Führer. The second period began after Stalingrad and lasted until the summer of 1944, during which time every one of Germany’s allies, except Croatia, put out feelers to Germany’s enemies with a view toward an eventual surrender. By then, Italy had long attempted but only partly succeeded in joining the Anglo–American alliance. The third and last phase began in the late summer of 1944 when Romania, Finland, and Bulgaria changed sides while the Hungarian leadership refused to surrender, causing the country to perish with the Third Reich. Meanwhile, fascist Slovakia and Croatia rejoined their mother countries, miraculously transforming themselves into parts of the triumphant anti-fascist world coalition.

Regarding the first thesis, the very term “Germany’s allies” intrigues and baffles because, unlike the scene during the First World War, when the Central Powers consisted of four distinct sovereign monarchies (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) the Nazi alliance system within Second World War Europe was much larger but also much less definable.

Who, after all, were Germany’s real European allies? It is customary to regard two international treaties, namely the Anti-Comintern Pact, originally signed by Germany and Japan in 1936, and the Tripartite Pact of 1940 as the foundations of the Nazi alliance system. The problem is that the Tripartite Pact was joined neither by Croatia, which was Germany’s staunchest ally in the Balkans, nor by Finland, Germany’s second most important partner in the war against Russia. It is true that the Anti-Comintern Pact included both Croatia and Finland, but then we also find Denmark, a country occupied by Germany, and Spain, a neutral state, among its signatories, which renders the political and diplomatic value of the Anti-Comintern Pact debatable. Worse even, what makes a mockery out of the Anti-Comintern Pact is that its target, the Soviet Union, was Nazi Germany’s priceless ally until June 1941.

One could argue, of course, that both Denmark and Spain were in reality German allies: Denmark, because it provided Germany with invaluable industrial and agricultural goods while it served as a much coveted safe haven for German troops in need of rest and recreation, and Spain because it sent a large army corps to Russia to fight on the side of the Germans. In this respect, neutral Spain was more useful to the Third Reich than Bulgaria, an official ally, which refused to commit troops to the war against Bolshevism and would not even break diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Going one step further, we might wonder whether Spain, Denmark, Vichy France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Protectorate, or even Switzerland and Sweden were not more useful to the German war effort than such official allies as fascist Croatia and Slovakia, in which internal revolts demanded German military intervention and cost the lives of thousands of German soldiers. Or how useful to Germany was its greatest ally, fascist Italy, which the German leaders increasingly saw as an intolerable burden?¹

There were also Ukraine and the three Baltic countries which—unlike Serbia, Greece, and the Czech Protectorate—were not allowed to form a government under German domination, but in which a substantial part of the population actively supported the German war effort and sent so many young men into German service as to allow the formation of several Baltic and Ukrainian Waffen SS divisions. Why not consider them Germany’s allies?

All in all then, we must admit that the German alliance system was complicated, informal, and confusing. Thus, historians are certainly right in granting the status of German allies only to such countries which had negotiated an alliance treaty with the Third Reich, namely, Italy, Finland,² Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, and Bulgaria. Still, we should keep in mind that other countries offered more valuable assistance and caused less trouble to the Nazi leaders than some of Germany’s official allies.

The second question to be discussed here is whether Germany’s allies possessed enough freedom for their activities to be more than an extension of German policies. The answer to this must be a categorical affirmation of their power of self-determination in such fundamental issues as whether to conclude an alliance with Germany, if and when to enter the war on the side of Hitler, and how much assistance to offer to the Nazi war effort. Again and again, the decision was not that of Germany but that of the governments allied to the Nazis. Consider, for instance, that in June 1941, Italy, Finland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia decided, with little or no German prodding, that they would join in Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. Finland participated solely to take revenge for the Winter War of 1939/40. Italy’s decision to join in the Barbarossa campaign derived, according to the historian Peter Gosztony, “from Mussolini’s megalomaniac wish to show his presence everywhere where the Germans have established themselves.”³ Other countries joined for fear that their neighbor would enter the war before them and thus would be the first to reap the fruits of a German victory. In particular, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia eyed each other with the greatest suspicion when joining in the fray.

As another sign of their independence, the countries allied to Germany were at some point able to limit or even to cease their contribution to the war. In 1941, Finns and Romanians were alone in sending large armies to the front; in 1942, the Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, and Croats also made a major effort, but following the debacle at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942, the very same countries withdrew almost all their battered combat troops from the front line, and only the Finnish and Romanian contributions remained basically unchanged. On all these developments, the German high command had astonishingly little influence. For lack of anything better, German generals consoled themselves with the thought that Germany’s allies were of little use in any case. But why then, one might ask, had the Germans insisted, in 1942, that much larger allied armies appear at the front and why had the Germans assigned to them long sections of the front which, with their miserable armaments, the allied armies could not possibly defend? Let us remember also that allied Bulgaria, whose troops enjoyed a great reputation for bravery during the First World War, refused this time to engage a single one of its soldiers on the Eastern front.

The greatest proof of political and military national independence was shown by the relative ease with which Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria seceded from the war in August/September 1944. Consider, for instance, that the Germans tried but failed to find a single Romanian general willing to set up a counter-government following Romania’s surrender to the Soviet Union.⁴ Consider also that the Romanian, Finnish, and Bulgarian armies were willing to turn on their German ally at a moment’s notice.

Germany’s allies were independent enough to decide how far they would go in cooperating with the Nazis in the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish question, an issue that the Germans considered the ultimate test of loyalty on the part of their allies. Jews within these countries were persecuted or tolerated, kept alive or killed less according to German wishes than according to what the respective governments thought was in the interest of their country. Thus the Bulgarians never gave in to German pressure and refused to hand over their Jewish population, but the same authorities sent the Jews of Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia to the Treblinka death camp. The Romanians engaged in their own monstrous Holocaust in Romanian-occupied northern Bukovina, Bessarabia, Transnistria, and Odessa, but they refused to hand over to the Germans the Jews of Walachia, Moldavia, and southern Transylvania. Slovakia delivered the absolute majority of its Jews to the gas chambers but more or less successfully preserved the survivors. In Italy, the Germans were able to grab Jews only following the collapse of Mussolini’s original fascist regime in late summer of 1943, and even then the municipal authorities, priests, nuns, and the general population successfully hid the great majority of Jews. Also, so long as Mussolini was in power, the Italian army fiercely protected the Jewish refugees in the Italian occupation zones of France, Croatia, Slovenia, Albania, and Greece.⁵

Only in the case of Hungary, which Hitler feared had fallen under Jewish influence and would want to change sides in the war, did he order a preventive invasion on March 19, 1944, and thus direct intervention in the “solution of the Jewish question.” Yet even the Hungarian government eventually managed to reassume control over such Jews whom it had not handed over to the Germans in the spring of 1944.

In Hungary, despite drastic anti-Jewish legislation, most of the original 800,000 plus Jews (including some 100,000 Christians whom the law treated as Jews) were living under more or less normal conditions at the time of the German invasion; thereafter, the Hungarian authorities collected over 400,000 and sent them to Auschwitz. But in July 1944, Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s regent, forbade the deportation of the Jews of Budapest and of those Jewish men who were doing labor service within the Hungarian army. True, Adolf Eichmann managed to smuggle two more trainloads of Jewish victims from Hungary to Auschwitz, but then he was ordered out of the country. He returned only in October, following an SS-led coup d’état against the Horthy regime which had brought Ferenc Szálasi’s Arrow Cross party into power. Now mass deportations began again under Eichmann’s guidance, but soon thereafter the Arrow Cross ordered the creation of two major ghettoes in Budapest. In the vain hope of receiving diplomatic recognition from some neutral countries, the Arrow Cross regime defied Eichmann—although most probably not Heinrich Himmler, who was hoping to negotiate a personal treaty with the Western Allies. All in all, about 125,000 of Hungary’s Jews survived in Budapest, and even more elsewhere.⁶

In sum, all the Nazi’s allies solved their Jewish question in their own way, their actions having been characterized by a mixture of brutality and leniency, sheer cynicism and occasional humanitarian considerations, as well as by a desire to assert national sovereignty.

Another proof of the independence of Germany’s allies, if further proof is needed, can be found in their tendency to take their cues from Mussolini’s Italy, the supposedly second-strongest country in Europe and the original member of the Berlin–Rome Axis. When Italy fell apart in September 1943, with its upper half undergoing German military occupation, the other allied countries lost their guiding light and hit out in every direction, often against each other.

Only in the question of economic cooperation with Germany had Hitler’s allies no choice but to trade with Germany, in part because it was precisely in order to secure freedom of movement in military and political matters that Germany’s allies hastened to fulfill German economic requirements, and in part because their own prosperity depended on producing for and trading with Germany, at least so long as the Germans were able to give something in return.

My third thesis concerns relations among Germany’s allies where I would argue that the main worry of the governments of most German allies was not the war itself but rather how the war and its end would affect their country’s relations with its neighbors. Every major political and military step taken by Germany’s allies was predicated on the fundamental consideration of relations with their neighbors. The aim of alliance members was to preserve, to gain, or to regain territory and, as a next step, either to get rid of their ethnic minorities or to make them politically impotent. Hence there was no end to the headaches for Germany, whose basic aim was to keep order among its allies and to secure their economic and, hopefully also, their military assistance. Hence also the German decision to support the well-established conservative-military elites in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Protectorate, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France, over the unruly extreme rightists. The latter were used only when no one else was available, which was what happened in Italy in the fall of 1943 and in Hungary in October 1944.

In disputes among allies, Nazi Germany and—until the fall of 1943—Italy tried to act as impartial arbitrators: witness the Second Vienna Award of August 1940, which divided Transylvania between Hungary and Romania, as much as possible alongside ethnic lines. Certainly, the new borders were more judicious than the ones drawn up at the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, or again in Paris in 1946. Consider also the often frustrated efforts of a German-Italian military commission to arbitrate the mutual hatred of Romanians and Hungarians in divided Transylvania. However, as the historian Holly Case has demonstrated, the “German-Italian Officers’ Commission” was nearly powerless against the activist authorities in the two countries.⁷

Or let us take Croatia, where the German military plenipotentiary, the former Austro-Hungarian General Edmund Glaise-Horstenau, and even local representatives of the SS, complained in vain about the murderous fury of the Croatian Ustashe against thei...