Britain, Germany and the Road to the Holocaust

British Attitudes towards Nazi Atrocities

Russell Wallis

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781780763453
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786723871
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

In the 1930s, the British public's emotional response to the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, including the bombing of Guernica, shaped the mass-politics of the age. Similarly, alleged German atrocities in World War I against the Belgians and the French had led to campaigns in Britain for donations to support the victims. Why then, was the British public seemingly less concerned with the treatment of Jews in Hitler's Germany?

Outlining a 'hierarchy of compassion', Russell Wallis seeks to show how and why the Holocaust met initially with such a muted response in Britain. Drawing on primary source material, Wallis shows why the Nuremberg laws, Kristallnacht and the creation of the Prague Ghetto were reported without great protest. Even after the reality of the 'Final Solution' was revealed to the British Parliament by Anthony Eden in 1942, the Holocaust remained a footnote to the war effort. Britain, Germany and the Road to the Holocaust is a study of the British relationship with Germany in the period, and a dissection of British attitudes towards the genocide in Europe.

1 The First World War and its Aftermath

GERMANS: ‘FRIGHTFULNESS’

In August 1914 German troops invaded Belgium in a preconceived plan to encircle French forces and prevent a two-front war. They encountered unexpectedly stiff resistance from a desperately outnumbered Belgian army, especially at the fortified cities of Liège and Antwerp. As well as targeting urban and industrial hubs, the Germans cut through a plethora of smaller towns, villages and rural settlements. It was in places such as Louvain, Aerschot and Dinant that German officers and troops subjected Belgian civilians to a campaign of terror. Troops destroyed public buildings, burned homes and murdered the inhabitants. They herded men, women and children into town squares or churches to be executed.¹

Over the following 50 months the Germans deported over 100,000 workers to make the weapons needed to sustain the military effort. Many were tortured for refusing to work and thousands were jailed on false charges, including the failure to inform on family or neighbours. Such behaviour evoked a widespread sense of terror.² Around a quarter of a million Belgian civilians lost their lives as a result of brutal military occupation policies, a figure that does not include those murdered in the autumn of 1914.³ Britons looked on dumbfounded. Few, if any, expected such brutality and inhumanity, at least in Western Europe, the ‘centre’ of world civilization. But it did not end there.

It was a similar story in northern France and Eastern Europe. French civilians were forced into labour camps and many thousands conscripted to support the German military machine. In the East, the German occupation of newly annexed areas ‘combined systematic exploitation’, as Mark Mazower puts it, ‘with violent pacification’.⁴ Here, German plans had a particular impact. This was where the high command, soldiers and, to a significant extent, the German population believed annexationist ambitions could be fulfilled. The ‘crude and untutored’ populations in the East would, in Vejas Liulevicius’s words, ‘be cultivated and ordered by German genius for organization’.⁵

Both the atrocities carried out during the initial stages of the war and the ongoing exploitation of conquered peoples cannot be explained by the vagaries of non-commissioned and junior officers. Rather, according to John Horne and Alan Kramer, action on the ground mirrored ‘high military policy’.⁶ There was some dissent over the ruthless and arbitrary repression of civilians among the military, but it was not strong enough to overcome the ‘collective fury of soldiers barely under discipline’ or ‘the authority of the military hierarchy and the impetus of a smoothly functioning machine of destruction’.⁷

The scale of suffering and destruction was without precedent in modern Western Europe.⁸ Nevertheless, Germans were convinced that their actions were either justifiable reprisals for a franc-tireur guerilla war waged by the Belgian populace, or the result of military necessity. Britons, however, saw things rather differently. Phrases sprang up to describe atrocities, such as ‘Prussianism’ or ‘atrociousness’, but the one that stuck in spite of its apparently anodyne connotations, the one that became a metonym for state-sponsored violence against defenceless civilians, was ‘frightfulness’. In order to understand British responses to reports of widespread and apparently officially endorsed brutality, we need to examine the longer-term context. Important, first of all, will be the development of attitudes to how war should be fought and, second, how Britons viewed Germans.

The laws of war

Prior to the Great War there was growing international pressure to place some limit on the use of force during wartime. The roots of this dated back to 1625, when the influential Dutch philosopher, political theorist and lawyer, Hugo Grotius, published his monumental treatise, On the Laws of War and Peace . Concerned to explore the rightful conduct of belligerents, Grotius took the rather chilling view that in war, things that were necessary to attain the end in view were permissible.⁹ Fortunately, this had many caveats and what was deemed ‘necessary’ was a matter of earnest conjecture. His work laid the foundation for modern international law.¹⁰ During the Enlightenment ideas about conduct in war and human rights were explored further. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract of 1762 pointed out that although war produced a legal relationship between nations, it did not ‘cover the civilian population’. Rousseau’s ideas influenced the French National Constituent Assembly which, believing that ‘ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man’ were ‘the sole cause of public calamities’, approved in 1789 the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’. Noble concepts – freedom, equality, rights of liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression – thus became enshrined in the constitution of a global power.¹¹

Although Abigail Green maintains that the lofty idealism of the late eighteenth century gave way to an increasingly defensive and combative nationalism and that the ‘story of human rights’ was ‘a story of failure’,¹² there were some notable moves towards limiting the deadly and destructive effects of war during the nineteenth century. The 1856 Treaty of Paris that signalled the end of the Crimean War spelled out, among other things, the rules of maritime law between nations. In 1864, the ‘Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded’ in war was ratified in Geneva, its first Convention. Later conventions in 1899 and 1907 suggest that the momentum behind calls to limit the employment of force during wartime was gathering pace. A wide range of concerns were addressed, such as the launching of projectiles and explosives from balloons, asphyxiating gases, expanding bullets and the protection of merchant vessels. Also discussed was the permanent neutrality of Switzerland and Belgium. Indeed, there were no fewer than 33 instructions, articles, resolutions and declarations issued between 1864 and 1914.¹³

What such measures lacked, though, was clarity and teeth. They were open to different interpretations and in the event of contravention, devoid of any coercive mechanism to enforce adherence. Despite the problems associated with garnering international consensus limiting the use of force, signatories were increasingly obliged to remain within agreed limits, and these limits were narrowing.¹⁴ The codifiers of war were aware that popular feeling about the subject was changing. Although the body of theory associated with a ‘just war’ was not the staple discussion at cafés and bars throughout the Western world, it was a focal point of an anxiety that grew in line with late nineteenth-century humanitarian sensibilities.¹⁵

Germany was a participant in discussions and a signatory to many of these attempts to make war less barbarous. Yet, there was a significant body of opinion inside Germany with beliefs that ran counter to the dominant Western trend. Make no mistake, Germany was not alone in taking a ‘pragmatic’ view of conflict, in which the most efficient route to victory was the most barbaric. Britain had blood on its hands, for example, because of its ruthless suppression of the 1857 Sepoy rebellion in India and brutal response to the 1865 slave revolt at Morant Bay in Jamaica. ¹⁶ Although neither could be classified as ‘war’ in the strictest sense, they were the result of a particularly harsh doctrine of force that was rightly assumed to have significant support in the homeland. In Britain, however, there was a trajectory of increased public dissent against colonial violence. The Jamaican rebellion evoked greater indignation than the rebellion in India, while the treatment of the Boers, Britain’s enemies in the Second Anglo–South African War (1899–1902), resulted in an even greater backlash against what the leader of the Liberal opposition, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, termed ‘methods of barbarism’.¹⁷ Of course, the British were better at pointing out the failings of other imperialist powers than their own and public outrage never seriously challenged Britain’s ‘right’ to possess an empire.¹⁸ But, the fact remains the public conscience was relatively well developed, and played an increasing role in political considerations about the use of force.

Leading up to 1914 there was serious discussion in Britain about the laws of war. The Institute of International Law, founded in 1872 ‘for the purpose of promoting unanimity in the fixation of the principles of international law’, was increasingly influential.¹⁹ In 1912, an expert on international law at the London School of Economics, Dr Alexander Pearce Higgins, published War and the Private Citizen, based on his inaugural lecture.²⁰ War, he argued, was ‘not a condition of anarchy’ and men who took part in it did not cease ‘to be moral beings responsible to one another, and to God’.²¹ He detailed the steps made to regulate warfare and pointed out that even in cases not covered by international agreements: ‘populations and belligerents remain under the protection and the rule of the principles of the law of nations as they result from the usages established between civilised nations, from the laws of humanity and the dictates of the public conscience’.²²

In other words, there were accepted limitations on what combatants could unleash either on military opponents or, crucially, on the civilians of enemy countries. This was not a controversial view in Britain.

In Germany, discussion about the nature of war, about what means should justify what ends, dated back to the Bismarckian era. As in Britain, it was mostly linked to the question of colonialism. The unification of Germany in 1871 heralded the birth of a national and imperialistic journey in which the tensions of ‘ethnic homogeneity over diversity, imperial enlargement over stasis, and Lebensraum as the route to biological survival’ were key components.²³ The constitution of the new Reich enshrined the idea of expansion. Yet, Bismarck was a cautious imperialist. Instead of opting for an expansionist model of national defence, he chose internal consolidation under Prussian leadership. This emphasised the identification and marginalisation of what he saw as the Reich’s internal foes.

However, by the late 1880s Bismarck’s cautious colonialism had become outmoded. His departure in 1890 signalled the rise of a more belligerent imperialism. The expansion of the navy allowed the masses to demonstrate their commitment to the Reich. Less Prussian than the army, arguably it aided national consolidation through ‘ship launches, and fleet reviews that blended regional symbols and imagined histories into a coherent fiction of German unity’. The Kaiser’s anti-British stance during the Second Anglo–South African War found a well of support among the working classes, officials, academics, clergymen, professionals and entrepreneurs. After the British defeat of the Boers, German imperialism still had opponents, especially in the Centre and Social Democratic Parties, but as Shelley Baronowski points out, opponents never had the leverage ‘to undermine the widespread conviction’, especially among the middle classes, ‘that Germany deserved to be a global power’.²⁴ All this had ramifications for the debate on how wars should be conducted.

This debate was somewhat dominated by nationalists and expansionists, such as history professor Heinrich von Treitschke and military historian Friedrich von Bernhardi. Treitschke was one of the most influential teachers and publicists of Bismarck’s Germany.²⁵ Increasingly deaf, he would shout from his lectern his disdain for the governments of non-Prussian states, women, socialists, Catholics, Poles and Jews to enraptured students. Famous for his proclamation, ‘the Jews are our misfortune’, he used the Volk concept with its emphasis on the visceral, immutable character of all Germans to underpin his advocacy of ruthless expansionism.²⁶ Treitschke preached about the ‘moral majesty of war’, claiming that Germans must ‘overcome the natural feelings of humanity for the sake of the fatherland’.²⁷ His influence after 1871 was considerable. It was evident, as his biographer Andreas Dorpalen points out, in the publication by former students of ‘an immense autobiographical literature, ranging from the memoirs of statesmen and politicians, officials and judges, to those of educators and newspapermen, doctors and scientists, lawyers, businessmen, and military leaders’.²⁸ His views were echoed in the wartime statements of renowned liberals such as Max Weber, the principal architect of modern social science, and Friedrich Naumann, the liberal publicist, politician and later co-founder of the German Democratic Party.²⁹

The next generation of German historians, reliant on the Prussian Ministry of Education, failed to create a critical distance between themselves and the dominant ideas of the Prusso–German monarchy.³⁰ However, Treitschke’s footprint was mostly discernable in the arguments of pan-Germans, who gave his ideas an even more harsh, radicalised edge. Their philosophy was a potentially explosive mix i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The First World War and its Aftermath
• 2. The Rehabilitation of Germany
• 3. Unlikely Victims
• 4. Jews under German Rule: a Hierarchy of Compassion
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography