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This below is Chapter 5 Section 3:
World War of Ideologies?
In 1930, a delegation from the German Red Front Fighters’ League traveled to Siberia, and their spokesman assured the (later) Marshal Blücher that the German proletariat would stab the bourgeoisie in the back if the Soviet Union was attacked. A year later, the founder of the pan-European movement, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, was so convinced of this view, which had been put forward again and again by communists since 1919, that he wrote in his book “Stalin & Co”: “Any European army that would try to fight against Moscow…would have innumerable enemies in its rear.” As late as 1936, the chairman of the “Profintern,” Losowski, asserted with great confidence that the imperialists, namely Germany, Poland and Japan, could be convinced that a war against the Soviet Union would also mean a war in their own country: “We know against whom the proletarians of these countries will turn their guns. You want to have war, gentlemen, try it. And you will have war in your own factories, mills and colonies.” No further evidence is needed to make it clear that, at least until 1939, supporters and opponents of Bolshevism were uniformly convinced that the Soviet Union, as the champion of an ideology, i.e. of a universal doctrine of the nature of historical movement and of the future destinies of mankind, had countless followers in all countries of the world who would not shrink from taking up arms in defense of the Soviet Union and for its victory. These supporters would be a clearly identifiable group, namely the proletariat, which, as the makers of surplus value, would crush the exploiting class of the bourgeoisie in order to establish the classless, non-multi-state and alienation-free state of socialism throughout the world. Even Galeazzo Ciano, Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy and Mussolini’s son-in-law, but an Anglophile at heart, anxiously asked the question in his diary on the evening of June 21, 1941: “If the Soviet army had greater power of resistance than the bourgeois countries , what reaction would that provoke in the proletarian masses of the world?” And in fact, as early as September 16, the Wehrmacht High Command had to state that since June 22, communist insurrectionary movements had broken out everywhere in the territories occupied by Germany, which were being uniformly directed by Moscow and required the harshest countermeasures.
On the other hand, Mussolini, in his reply to Hitler’s announcement of the start of the attack, had expressed confidence that “all anti-Bolshevik currents in the whole world” would now turn to the Axis, and Adolf Hitler in his speech on October 3, 1941, characterized Bolshevism and capitalism as “extremes” equidistant from the “principle of justice” for which the Axis powers waged their struggle for a new and better form of Europe. National Socialism thus emphatically raised a supranational claim, as demonstrated by its solidarity with its fascist Axis partner, and not infrequently proclaimed a “world struggle” which would unite all of Europe in the defense against the “Bolshevik monster” and the American “money Moloch.” The defensive background and the varying severity of the accusations were of course made clear often enough, because Bolshevism was repeatedly accused of having “slaughtered the entire national intelligentsia” in Russia and of wanting to prepare the same fate to all the leading classes of the world, while the main accusation against democracy was that it paved the way for Bolshevism. Sometimes a deep pessimism appeared in Hitler’s statements, when he predicted to Churchill and Roosevelt that Bolshevism would one day destroy their peoples as well. But one should not reduce Hitler’s worldview entirely to the emotions of defensiveness and fear: quite often the focus was on pride in having carried out a different and better revolution than Bolshevism, a revolution that opened up all state positions even to the poorest without limiting “the creative power of the old estates” or destroying national property. Hitler was therefore able to put behind him not only supranational fears, but also supranational hopes. His struggle was also ideological and tended to be supranational, although it could not be overlooked that this ideology was based on a harsh nationalism that placed so much focus on “the German people” and at best, “Nordic blood” so much at the center, that even solidarity with Italian fascism seemed to be on fragile ground.
But what Coudenhove-Kalergi or Losowski had foreseen did not materialize: the proletarian revolution in Europe as a response to Germany’s war against the first workers’ state. Hardly any German soldier defected to the enemy, who claimed to be a friend; not a single strike paralyzed armaments production, even in the “Protectorate” industry worked without disruption, and France remained essentially calm. On the contrary, Hitler could be sure of a millionfold echo when he spoke in a tone of deep contempt that the German soldiers had now become thoroughly acquainted with the so-called “paradise of the workers and peasants.”
On the other hand, he could not deny that he himself had made a pact with this regime and that it was he who had opened the way for it to Lemberg and Riga, where so many victims of the NKVD had now been found. And so, in his speech on November 8, 1941, he had to admit in the previous year he had been “perhaps somewhat burdened” by the martyrs of the movement, and only now did he look at their graves “almost as if redeemed.” After the “Friendship Pact” of 1939, Hitler’s ideology could no longer have the integrity and confidence that it had possessed at the “Party Congress of Honor” in 1936.
But Stalin also expressed himself in a strange way. He in no way called on the European proletariat to revolt against their oppressors and Hitler’s real backers, namely the capitalists; rather, in his speech on the 24th anniversary of the revolution on November 6, 1941, he noted with satisfaction that the “German strategists” had not succeeded in creating a general coalition against the USSR by intimidating the ruling circles in Great Britain and the USA with the “specter of revolution”; rather, Hitler’s people now berated the internal regime of England and America as a “plutocratic regime,” and Stalin no longer saw the contrast as a surface phenomenon, but rather he placed the “democratic freedoms” and the parliaments of these countries in stark contrast to that “party of medieval reaction and darkest pogroms,” which the Hitler party represented. Obviously, he now rejected the equation of fascism and capitalism, which had been a main thesis of the communist parties for so long, even more decisively than he had since 1935, because it virtually postulated a coalition which would have been fatal for the Soviet Union.
It would indeed have been impossible for Roosevelt to take up Wilson’s ideas again and proclaim as the goal of the United States “to cleanse the world of old evils and old diseases,” if Stalin, in turn, had brought up Lenin’s ideas of 1918 to the fore. Then he would have had to tell himself that he and his America were by no means merely a world disease and a “disgusting swamp” in Hitler’s eyes, as Molotov is said to have expressed himself in a conversation with the Lithuanian Foreign Minister in the summer of 1940. And in any case, it was far more in keeping with the inner content of the Bolshevik conviction when Molotov had said in the same conversation that the German bourgeoisie would one day come to an agreement with the Allied bourgeoisie against the rebellion of its starving proletariat, and then the Soviet Union would intervene and somewhere near the Rhine “the final battle between the proletariat and the degenerate bourgeoisie” would take place. Nothing like that was allowed to be said by Stalin now, and Roosevelt was not allowed to acknowledge anything like that: just like the National Socialist ideology, the ideologies of the Bolsheviks and the liberal internationalists in America were weakened by the events of the time, and the states that were waging a decisive battle for the fate of the world were indeed ideological states, but they were ideological states that had lost the integrity of 1918 and 1933.
In any case, countless people in Europe and outside Europe sided against the policies of their national governments or traditions on the side of one of these powers, or more precisely, with the Allies or with the Axis or, since the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, with Germany.
It would be incorrect to claim that the European resistance movements only came into serious existence after June 22, 1941, i.e. through the reaction of the communists to the attack against the Soviet Union. Rather, it became decisive for the character of the resistance movements in East and West that by June 1941 the communists had practically taken Hitler’s side against the Western imperialists and were still negotiating with the German occupation authorities in some places, while in London General de Gaulle had already become the symbolic figure of the French resistance. But the Polish resistance movement had also been formed long before June 1941, and it was England with its special organization “S.O.E.” (“Secret Operations Executive”), which promoted and nurtured all resistance movements in occupied Europe. But it cannot be denied that, on the one hand, the Comintern had already shown a considerable degree of open hostility towards Hitler’s Germany since the beginning of 1941 and, on the other hand, resistance had suddenly increased almost everywhere since June 22. Far more than before, the intention now came to the fore to provoke the harshest possible retaliation through assassinations against German soldiers and to generate ever greater hatred against the occupying power among the population, an intention that also determined the situation in the partisan struggle in the Soviet Union. The best-known paradigm was not a communist attack, but rather the assassination attempt against the incumbent Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, which was prepared by the Czech government in exile and which had the expected and at least calculated consequence of the destruction of the village of Lidice. Most overtly communist, as is well known, was Tito’s resistance movement in Yugoslavia, which was supported by the English against the bourgeois resistance movement of Draža Mihailovich, but was then internally reprimanded by Stalin precisely because of the openness of its objectives, according to Milovan Djilas’ report.
The German resistance was a special case. It was not directed against an occupying power, but against the regime of its own state and, to some extent, against certain objectives of the regime rather than against the regime and its supreme leader as such. The Quakers certainly shared the beliefs of the foreign Quakers, and the Social Democrats, who were active in illegality, shared the goals of the emigrated party executive. Insofar as one may speak of resistance from workers or the youth or the students, it was mainly based on the harsh demands that the regime made even more insistently during the war. But as far as it was a question of resistance in the leading and the only class capable of acting, i.e. primarily in the Wehrmacht, there was mainly resistance from more or less nationalistic patriots, i.e. who were primarily committed to the principle of national self-determination and who fought Hitler’s objectives primarily because they threatened to plunge Germany into disaster. Almost all of them, and most notably Carl Goerdeler, believed until a relatively late date that the successes of Hitler’s revisionism, i.e. the annexation of Austria and the Sudeten territories, could be preserved as legitimate consequences of the right to self-determination in a timely compromise peace after the fall of the dictator. Of course, Tresckow, like Stauffenberg, had sympathized with National Socialism in the beginning, but the extent to which events nevertheless led them and those like them away from their inherited nationalism and even from the Prussian state ethos, the negotiations with the English in the winter of 1939/40, Hans Oster’s messages about Hitler’s intentions to attack with the Dutch military attaché, and finally Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt against the supreme warlord, to which there is not the remotest analogy to be found in the entire Prussian and German history, showed most strongly. However, not everyone made their decision in favor of one of the two worldviews, which now tended to rival each other: Ulrich von Hassell wanted to play the western or the eastern card, depending on the circumstances, and not even the men and women of the Kreisau Circle around Helmuth James von Moltke could have counted on the approval of American Democrats with their domestic reform plans.
The overwhelming majority of the prisoners of war, soldiers and officers, who founded the “National Committee of Free Germany” and the “Association of German Officers” in Soviet captivity in September 1943 were also nationally conscious and patriotic. They while they were prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. That Hitler had led Germany into war against an overwhelmingly powerful coalition and that he had to be overthrown if Germany was to be saved was the basic tenor of all the manifestos and appeals signed by Generals von Seydlitz, Korfes, Lattmann and many others, including finally also Field Marshal Paulus. But it was not always based on a narrow and purely political concept of fatherland. Against the system of lies and lawlessness, but also against the forced economy and cultural leveling, already in May 1942, the captain and teacher Dr. Ernst Hadermann gave an impressive speech in the Jelabuga camp, and by joining with German communists in anti-fascism, both sides at least tended to accept what had been unthinkable just a few years before: that the opposition between proletarians and bourgeois was not the most profound one of the era. And when, immediately before July 20, even in Germany, the right-wing Social Democrats Leber and Leuschner made contact with communists, they were very surprised to find that the latter seemed to have less radical views than themselves and were apparently even prepared to accept grand burghers as fellow fighters.
The step toward unreserved and active identification with the enemy was taken in Germany only by the small group of the “Red Orchestra” whose leading figures were the grandson of Grand Admiral Tirpitz, Harro Schulze-Boysen, and the nephew of the most respected theologian of the Wilhelmine period, Arvid Harnack. But even their espionage activities were apparently influenced not least by the old idea of the national revolutionary movement that Germany could only maintain its integrity and independence by cooperating with Soviet Russia.
The fact that the old beliefs and emotions were still alive among the communists was demonstrated most clearly by those who were not or only marginally reached by the instructions from headquarters. “I die as what I lived, as a class fighter,” a member of a communist resistance group wrote to his father before his execution in May 1943, and he added in a postscript: “Better to die for the Soviet Union than to live for fascism." A year later, another group asserted in a leaflet intended for Eastern workers and captured Red Army soldiers: “The terrible contradictions between the capitalist powers and their wars are setting the proletarian masses of Europe and the USSR in motion. Fascism is only the tombstone that covers the declining class.” This is what Molotov must have meant, if the Lithuanian Foreign Minister rendered him correctly, and this is exactly what Roosevelt could not have known if he wanted to continue to count Stalin as part of his family. The new unity among the Allies and among those who felt solidarity with them in their nations or against their nations was probably a deceptive unity.
But whatever the solidity of the extremely paradoxical alliance between the state of socialism and the main power of capitalism, no one could doubt that Soviet communism was able to evoke a genuine and supranational identification and that Roosevelt was able to rearticulate a conviction which was older than capitalism and which had survived in the midst of all the changes. Such identification was much less obvious in the opposing camp. It is true that there were a considerable number of fascist movements in Europe, and they had consistently sided with Hitler since at least June 22, 1941: in addition to Italian fascism, there were, among others, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, and the Nasjonal Samling in Norway , the Parti Populaire Français in France, the Rodobrana in Slovakia, the Ustasha in Croatia. But all of them, in their origins or traditions, had been initially radical nationalist reactions to the internationalist and mostly socialist ideas and realities of the first post-war period. They could not agree therefore in their “pro” because one aspired to a powerful Greater Romania, the other to a strong Greater Hungary, the third demanded separation from a federation of states, and the fourth and the original wanted to restore the Roman Empire. Only the “anti” formed the common ground, namely the “anti” of a decisive anti-communism. Of course, communism as anti-capitalism for its part arose from an “anti-,” and through its alleged realization in a large state it entered into a peculiar relationship with facts such as power, structure and professional army, which it nevertheless wanted to eliminate. The more the communist faith gained in menace and lost its persuasiveness through its connection with Soviet reality, the more the mere “anti” of the fascist movements was able to enrich itself with social thoughts and ultimately claim to be the timely “Third Way” between the extremes of Soviet communism and American capitalism. The question was whether and how the supranational solidarity of an ideology could gain the upper hand over the starting point of mere national or ethnic self-affirmation.
An obvious solution presented itself when, after the opening of the Soviet Union by the German attack, the entire strangeness of the Stalinist state became apparent to the German, Italian, Romanian and Spanish soldiers. The most trivial and questionable attempt to turn the experience of this strangeness into an ideology was the brochure “Der Untermensch” published by the main office of the SS in 1942. Besides the despicable and foolish attempt to derive the type of subhuman or even Asiatic from the emaciated faces of some prisoners of war, an early and general horror image was nevertheless conjured up, the horror image of the bloodthirsty commissar and the fanatical female soldiers, and above all the pitiful wooden huts of the Russian farmers and the miserable apartments of Russian workers were contrasted with the far richer and more cultivated living conditions of Europe in a way that reminded the informed observer of the cheerful figures of socialist realism, but which, despite its obvious one-sidedness, was not implausible to the ordinary soldiers of many European nations. At any rate, those German soldiers saw the situation in this way, whose “Field Letters from the East” was published by an official in the Ministry of Propaganda in 1941 and would undoubtedly not have been published if he had considered them to be mere propaganda, which would have been perceived as distorted or dishonest by the mass of German soldiers. There was talk of the “accursed” or “wretched” country in which one hungers “just for the sight of a clean house or a few well-tended gardens,” in which the farmers, robbed of their land, live in “economic drudgery,” such as had not been worse in the darkest German Middle Ages. The streets were nothing but sandy paths, and villages and towns consist of small wooden huts, between which there rose only a few palaces of the party or the “bigwigs”; an unemployed person in Germany lived “like a king compared to these people.” Of course, the question had to be asked why the rich Germany had attacked such a poor country, and it was answered by pointing to the “good and modern weapons” that the commissioners had squeezed out of this poverty, and the commissioners or even the Jews were held responsible for the horrible pictures that several of the letter writers claim to have seen themselves: men, women and children nailed to the walls, victims walled up in the cellars of prisons and agonizingly suffocated, even torture chambers with gas burners installed inside used to torture the victims to death. All of this gave rise to the imperative call for European solidarity in the fight against an inhumane and anti-European system. Who knew that an Italian fascism magazine had been called “Anti-Europe” and who wanted to admit that there were concentration camps and torture chambers not only in the Soviet Union? There were very few who, like Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, were of the opinion that the Germans were being completely misinformed about the Soviet Union and that the Russian officers he had to interrogate were for the most part intelligent and educated people.
In any case, volunteers from almost all European countries came together to fight against communism, and from them a large number of foreign-national SS formations were created. The “Freikorps Danmark” was put together from Danes, Walloon volunteers from the Degrelle movement formed the SS Storm Brigade Wallonia, and towards the end of the war an entire SS division made up of Frenchmen was called “Charlemagne.” A significant number of Estonians and Latvians joined the Wehrmacht soon after June 22, and later they also became SS divisions. Just as the Spanish Civil War was an international conflict on both sides, Germany’s war against the Soviet Union was also an international war. If the Soviet Union was obviously not reluctant to allow the Polish army, which it raised from the comrades of the Katyn victims, to go to the Western Allies, before forming its own auxiliary troops from Poles and Romanians at a later stage, the European volunteers fought in the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS to the end, and it cannot be doubted that many of them rallied to the banners of National Socialist Germany out of conviction and not out of mere opportunism. However, especially among the most convinced, the motive was palpable to fight for the right to independence of their countries in the future Europe of a “New Order” by contributing blood, the right to an independence which they apparently no longer considered self-evident and inviolable.
Future independence of the Turkestan and Tatar units of the Waffen-SS still had to be won, through which the Aryan racial concept was now exploded after the Germanic one, so that one could tend to speak of a world movement against Bolshevism, outside of the Jews no one was excluded. (English or American associations, of course, did not exist in the German or German-Italian camp, but there were some important or at least interesting intellectuals such as Ezra Pound and the son of the former India Minister Amery.) But only the question of Russian volunteers could be compared to a litmus test, whereby the supranational character of an ideological claim could be examined.
Russian volunteers were numerous in the German Wehrmacht at an early stage. But they remained without recognized status for a long time, and their inclusion initially took place in a purely pragmatic manner. During the hardships and difficulties of the first winter of the war, numerous formations had employed Russian prisoners of war who volunteered to serve as auxiliaries, and since the experience was generally good, quite a few of them were equipped with weapons, for example to guard depots or even to fight partisans. In 1942, the first genuine units were formed, such as the “Kaminski Brigade,” and the group leader in the organization department of the Army General Staff, Lieutenant Colonel Stauffenberg—already recognized at the time as a man of outstanding ability and determination—used all his talents to make the formation of Russian volunteer units possible. In doing so, he encountered determined resistance from the Wehrmacht High Command and indirectly from Hitler, who wanted to keep a completely free hand vis-à-vis Russia, but to whom certain events from the civil war were obviously were present, namely the defection of entire regiments to the Bolsheviks. If nevertheless, in the fall of 1942, Russians “who were willing to help” already numbered in the hundreds of thousands, this was due to the fact that the individual army groups and also the General Staff still had possibilities for action into which Hitler had no insight. Furthermore, the deployment of “legions” of the other peoples of the Soviet Union took place with his full consent, and the boundaries were often difficult to draw. Why should not the “General of the Eastern Troops” also have Russians under his command?
But all those officers in the staffs of the army groups—among them primarily Colonel Tresckow from Army Group Center—in the general staff and in the Wehrmacht propaganda department, who had a clear awareness of the impending loss of the war acknowledged that only the formation of a National Russian government under the leadership of a man known to the Soviet population could still turn the tide and give a stimulating purpose to the war. For them there was no question that, despite the terrible experiences of the first winter of the war, there were enough peasants among the Russian prisoners of war who hated the collective farm system, and enough officers whose family members had perished in NKVD camps. But they also knew that the successes would be very limited and that the propaganda would not gain any credibility among the soldiers of the Red Army and the population of the Soviet hinterland as long as it was not accompanied by reliable assurances about Russia’s future fate. The leadership of the Eastern Ministry also sympathized more and more with such ideas, although they continued to adhere to the goal of an independent Ukraine.
It was therefore a major event when one of the best-known Soviet military commanders was captured in September 1942 and soon revealed that he rejected Stalin and Bolshevism and was prepared to cooperate with the Germans under certain conditions. Lieutenant General Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov was widely believed to have commanded the best of all Soviet divisions, and in October/November 1941 he, along with Zhukov, had contributed the most to the defense of Moscow. Then, as deputy commander of an army group and commander of the Second Shock Army, he had tried to carry out Stalin’s unrealistic order to liberate Leningrad, but after heavy fighting his army had perished at the Volkhov and he himself was captured after weeks of wandering in a state of complete exhaustion. He owed his brilliant career, in addition to his own ability, to the party he had joined in 1930, but he was the son of a peasant who had been forced to join a collective farm, and he had attended a spiritual seminary in his youth. So he always had certain reservations about Bolshevism and Stalin, but it was only the experience of the war that increased them to hatred. The story of its discovery by some German officers, such as the Baltic Captain Strik-Strikfeldt and the head of the “Foreign Armies East” department, Major General Gehlen, reads like a fantastic novel, and Vlasov repeatedly expressed to his German friends a stunned amazement at what extent individual initiative and free speech among intimates was still possible in this Germany. In the spring and summer of 1943 he actually seemed to be rising to the position of leader of a Russian counter-government: his “Open Letter” of March 3, 1943 fiercely attacked Stalin as the murderer of millions of Russian people and called upon the people “to fight for the completion of the revolution, to the creation of a new Russia and to fraternal unity with the peoples of Europe and especially with the great German people.” Even if the statements by Vlasov’s friends about the enormous and sudden increase in the number of defectors after this announcement were probably exaggerated, it can hardly be denied that Vlasov’s appearance made a very deep impression both in the areas still occupied by the Soviets and in the part of Russia occupied by Germany, and caused great anxiety in Moscow. On a trip to the front headquarters of Army Groups Center and North, Vlasov was treated almost as an equal by the commanding field marshals, and the population crowded up to kiss his hands. But it was precisely because of this that he attracted the attention of Hitler and Himmler, and a strict ban was imposed on further promoting “this Russian” except for mere propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, astonishingly, the preparations for setting up a Russian national army continued, and around Vlasov’s residence in Berlin-Dahlem and around the Dabendorf camp near Berlin, in a semi-illegal manner, all those forces that had fought each other fiercely in the civil war came together in a few representatives: the farmer’s son and general of the Red Army Vlasov, the political commissar Zhilenkov, the Jewish political commissar and former employee of Bukharin Zykov, the son of a clergyman Colonel Meandrow who died in exile, Air Force Colonel Maltsev who had been cruelly tortured by the NKVD, Sakharov the son of the former adjutant of Admiral Kolchak, and the emigrated Cossack generals Krasnov and Schkuro. There was no shortage of tensions, just as in the German resistance, which was also an alliance of various forces that had once fought each other mercilessly and thereby made Hitler’s triumph possible. And if one did not know exactly how many people were behind the men who carried out the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, there were nearly a million people gathered behind Vlasov’s supporters and allies at the same time. It must certainly remain a speculation how many millions there would have been if Vlasov had received the consent of Hitler and Himmler, not only in November 1944, but already in November 1942 or even just at the beginning of 1944, to establish the independent “Russian Liberation Army” under the sign of the white-blue St. Andrew’s Cross and to establish the “National Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia.” But it would not be an illegitimate speculation, as already proved by the fate of even the uninvolved Soviet prisoners of war after the end of the war. But the failure and the tragedy at least proved that for many Germans and countless Russians this war had been a liberation struggle after all, doomed to failure only because Hitler despite all the experiences he had rigidly clung to the concept that implied genocides and final solutions, because in the total egocentrism of the German race the concept was not yet ideological and in the will to destroy Judaism it could no longer be subsumed into the usual concept of ideology.