A forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history

November 22, 2025November 23, 2025Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

A king sate on the rocky brow
Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis;
And ships, by thousands, lay below,
And men in nations—all were his!
He counted them at break of day –
And when the sun set, where were they?
Lord Byron, Don Juan

Christopher Allen, The Australian’s art critic, writes of how Greece’s antiquity presses in on the present. It is a lightweight piece, surveying as it does three millennia of history, from the days of the Greeks, Alexander, the Great and the Romans to those of the Ottomans and their successor states – but it is elucidating nonetheless.

It is a brief reminder of the veracity of the phrase “history is always with us”, and of how the past continues to shape the present through its influence on culture, human nature, and ongoing events – a constant guide, providing both cautionary tales and inspiration for the future, as we carry our history with us in our identities, cultures, societies and recurring patterns of behaviour. As author and activist James Baldwin is attributed to have said, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history”.

Greece has always lived a double life. To the casual visitor, it is a sun-splashed idyll of sea and sky, but its history tells a darker story – a long, hard ledger of heroes and horrors, and the stubborn will to survive wedged between warring empires. The last two and a half millennia have been less a tranquil Mediterranean tableau than a parade of conquerors, liberators, and the occasional poet-adventurer.

Over time, Greece has drawn to its shores soldiers and adventurers, poets and dreamers – and naive youths like myself. I hitch-hiked down from what was then Yugoslav in the summer of 1970, a young man with a second-hand rucksack and followed the looping Adriatic highway from Thessaloniki and Athens. I knew enough history to feel the charge of passing near Thermopylae, where Spartans once made their famous last stand against the might of Xerxes. But I wasn’t to learn until over half a century later that an army of ANZACs battled overwhelming odds just a valley away.

The past, in Greece, as in the Middle East, always stands just offstage, awaiting its cue and refusing to stay politely within its own century. It is not merely one of the world’s most benevolent postcards; it is a crossroads of empires, a battleground of ambitions, a cavalcade of famous names and places, where East and West have met, mingled, clashed, and sometimes embraced in the long swirl of history, where the mythic and the modern travel together.

One particular reference also reminds me of how history sends out roots, twigs and branches throughout the settled and hence recorded world.

Tempe, on Sydney’s Cooks River, wears its classical inheritance more openly than most Sydney suburbs. When Alexander Brodie Spark built Tempe House in the 1830s, he christened the estate after the Vale of Tempe in northern Greece – a narrow, ten-kilometre gorge carved by the Pineiós River as it threads between Olympus and Ossa. The poets imagined Poseidon’s trident had cleft the mountains to make it; Apollo and the Muses strolled beneath its laurels; sacred branches were cut there for Delphi. Spark, standing between his own modest “Mount Olympus” and the river, saw a faint echo of the Greek idyll and gave the place its name.

But the Vale of Tempe was never entirely pastoral. Armies have squeezed through that narrow defile for millennia. The Persians marched through it on their way south – Tempe lies just north of the iconic pass of Thermopylae, part of the same chain of passes that determined so much of Greek military history. And in the twentieth century it would again become a stage for outsiders in uniform.

In April 1941 Australian and New Zealand troops, together with British units, were thrown into Greece as Lustre Force – outnumbered, outgunned, and facing a German army with air superiority and modern communications. One of the hardest-fought delaying actions took place – inevitably, given the geography – at Tempe Gorge on 18 April (the featured image of this post, from the collection of the Australian War Museum). The Australian brigade was commanded by Brigadier A.S. Allen, who had formed the first battalion of the new AIF. His “Anzac Force” (apparently the last operational use of that designation) held the gorge long enough to impede the German advance and allow wider Allied withdrawals. The serene valley Spark had sentimentalised became, for a few violent hours, an Anzac bottleneck: those same narrow walls that once sheltered shrines now channelling rifle fire and Stuka attacks. Many of those men would soon find themselves on Crete, resisting the first large-scale parachute assault in military history.

And then – because Australia never resists a touch of Mediterranean whimsy—the Hellenic (and Hellenistic) echoes continue in our own neighbourhood on the Midnorth Coast. Halfway along the road from Bellingen to Coffs Harbour lies the township of Toormina, home to our closest shopping centre and to the Toormi pub. Its name began its life on the slopes of Mount Tauro in Sicily, in the ancient town of Taormina, the site of a famous amphitheater. In the 1980s local Italian residents of who were clients of developer Patrick Hargraves (the late father of a good friend of ours) suggested the name “Taormina” for the new subdivision. He liked the idea but clipped the opening “a” to make it more easily pronounceable- and Toormina entered the Gregory’s and thelocal vernacular.

So in our small corner of New South Wales, Greek myth, Persian marches, Anzac rearguards, and Sicilian nostalgia all whisper from the signposts. Tempe and Toormina: unlikely twins, proof that even the quietest suburb can carry the long shadows of the ancient world.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, Ottoman Redux – an alternative history and The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye

Uncovering a forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history

From ancient battles to World War II, a visit to Athens’ War Museum exposes the dramatic military history that shaped modern Greece. Christopher Allen’s deeply personal connection unravelled in the process.

James Stuart, View of the Erechtheion, Athens, October 1787. Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.

James Stuart, View of the Erechtheion, Athens, October 1787. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer. Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.

A little over 200 years ago, the Greeks began their war of independence from the Ottoman Empire, which had conquered most of the Byzantine world in the 15th century; the renaissance in Western Europe thus coincided with the beginning of a new dark age for the Greeks under Turkish oppression. Some islands held out for longer: Rhodes, home of the Knights of St John, was taken in 1522, forcing them to withdraw to Malta; Cyprus, ruled by the French Lusignan dynasty from the time of the Crusades and then by Venice, was brutally conquered in 1571, and Crete, held by Venice since 1205, finally fell after a generation-long siege in 1669.

The Ottoman Empire reached the apogee of its power in the early 18th century, but then began a slow decline, one of whose incidental effects was to make the Greek world more accessible to Western travellers: James Stuart and Nicholas Revett spent time in Athens from 1751 and published their Antiquities of Athens in several volumes in 1762. By the early 19th century, Greece had become part of the itinerary of the Grand Tour; by 1816, the Parthenon Frieze was in the British Museum and profoundly transformed modern understanding of Ancient Greek art.

Meanwhile the Greek War of Independence began with revolts in the Peloponnese in 1821 and a Declaration of Independence in 1822, eliciting a savage response from the Turks and sympathy from intellectuals and the educated public in Western European countries. The slaughter of the population of the island of Chios in 1822 led Eugène Delacroix to paint his famous Massacre at Chios, exhibited in the Salon of 1824 and purchased in the same year for the national collection; it is today in the Louvre. In 1823, the most famous poet of his day, Lord Byron, who had already demonstrated his sympathy for Armenian culture and independence from the Ottomans, went to Greece to help in the fight, both personally and financially.

This 1813 portrait by Phillips depicts Lord Byron, the famous English poet, wearing traditional Albanian attire. It captures his fascination with the Balkans and his travels, marking a moment of cultural exchange in his life. Picture: Alamy

This 1813 portrait by Phillips depicts Lord Byron in traditional Albanian attire. Alamy

Byron’s death in 1824 at Missolonghi only attracted more attention and sympathy to the cause of Greek freedom, and the great powers – Britain, France and Russia – warned the Turks about further repression, even though they were also committed, for different reasons, to maintaining the integrity of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. In 1827, at the Battle of Navarino, an international fleet led by the British and commanded by Sir Edward Codrington destroyed the Turkish and Egyptian navies. After further interventions on land by Russian and French forces, the Ottoman Empire was compelled, by the Treaty of Constantinople in 1832, to accept the independence of mainland Greece, although initially only as far north as the so-called Arta-Volos Line. The north, including Thessaly, Macedonia and Thrace, remained in Ottoman hands and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was born in the former Byzantine city of Salonika in 1881.

Instability in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s gave the new Greek nation the opportunity to annex the central region of Thessaly in 1881 (while Britain incidentally acquired Cyprus in 1878). Further important gains were made during the two Balkan Wars (1912-13): much of Epirus in the northwest as well as Salonika and most of southern Macedonia, most of the Aegean Islands and Crete; the British had already ceded the Ionian Islands in 1863 and the Italians would relinquish the Dodecanese after World War II in 1947. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of World War I, Greece had briefly seized eastern Thrace and territories in Anatolia, soon to be retaken by the Turks with immense loss of life in the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922.

Model of Byzantine warship from the War Museum

This is of course a very much simplified version of the extraordinarily complicated story of Balkan politics from the mid-19th century, which forms such an important part of the lead-up to World War I. All of these events were accompanied not only by terrible military casualties on all sides, but by massive disruption to the population of lands where people of different ethnicities and faiths had lived side-by-side for centuries as part of a multiethnic empire, including war crimes and atrocities against civilians and non-combatants. And Greeks who had previously enjoyed political and economic prominence throughout the Ottoman world, including the Phanariots of Constantinople, were first stripped of their privileges, then persecuted and finally expelled in the tragic population exchange of 1923.

All of these events and many more are covered in the exhibits at the Athens War Museum, which I had never visited until a few weeks ago, but which gives a vivid idea of the almost continuous warfare that has been carried on over the past couple of centuries in a land most tourists imagine as a paradise of sea, sun and waterside taverns. The events of the war of liberation, especially as we pass through so many bicentenaries in the current decade, are naturally well represented: there is, for example, a new and interactive display devoted to the sea battle of Navarino and events surrounding this decisive moment in the war.

There are portraits of the many famous leaders of the independence movement in their picturesque costumes, as well as dramatic reimaginings of heroic battles, and of course weapons and equipment of the time. The resonance of the Greek struggle in Western Europe is recalled in a copy of Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios, as well as a version of Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Lord Byron in exotic Albanian costume (1813), of which the original hangs in the British embassy at Athens; another replica by the artist himself, but only of the head and shoulders, is in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Eugène Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios

But there is much more about the history of Greece in Antiquity, and the chronological arrangement of the displays makes this an effective way to follow the sequence of events, especially the main episodes of the Persian Wars – with the great battles of Marathon in 490BC and Salamis in 480 – as well as the subsequent conflict between Athens and her quasi-subject states on one side and Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies on the other, known as the Peloponnesian War.

This disastrous war (431-404 BC) was followed in the second half of the fourth century by the rise of Philip of Macedon to hegemony, for the first time, over almost all of mainland Greece. After his assassination in 336, his young son, who became Alexander the Great, embarked on a spectacular campaign that led to the conquest of the whole of the vast Persian empire, from Egypt to what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan. Alexander’s conquests led to the extension of Greek language and civilisation deep into Asia, creating the international culture of the Hellenistic period, characterised among other things by a rich and complex exchange of ideas and forms between East and West.

He left an indelible impression on all the lands he conquered and is, for example, the first historical figure in the Persian national epic, the Shahname. By the time of Ferdowsi, who composed this masterpiece a millennium ago, the Persians had forgotten about the Achaemenid dynasty that first created the Persian empire in the sixth century BC; even the great site of Persepolis was and still is called Takht-e Jamshid, the throne of Jamshid, one of the mythical rulers from the great epic.

Each of Alexander’s battles – he is one of the handful of great generals never to have been defeated – is illustrated in clear diagrams, but they are also recalled in later images, in this case particularly in a series of 17th-century engravings whose story is probably unknown to almost all visitors to the museum. These are reproductions of gigantic paintings made as cartoons for tapestries commissioned by the young Louis XIV in the 1660s from Charles Le Brun, who was to become his court painter and who was later responsible for the decorations at Versailles, including the Hall of Mirrors. The series illustrates the valour but also the magnanimity of Alexander, as is clear from the moralising inscriptions attached in the engraved versions. For a long time, the huge canvases were not displayed at the Louvre, but for the last few decades have had their own room upstairs in the Sully wing.

Following the chronological sequence from antiquity we eventually get back to the war of independence and its sequels already mentioned above; but the story continues, after what the Greeks call the Asia Minor Catastrophe of the early 1920s, with a new calamity two decades later. For Mussolini invaded Greece in October 1940 expecting, like Putin in Ukraine, to achieve an easy victory and utterly underestimating the strength and resolve of the Greek army. By the following spring, it was clear that he was getting nowhere, and Hitler decided to come to his rescue by invading Greece in April 1941.

A. Bormans, engraving after Charles Le Brun Alexander and King Porus

An Allied army, mostly consisting of Australian and New Zealand troops as well as some British units, was hastily put together and sent from Egypt to Greece as Lustre Force. It was heavily outnumbered by the Germans, who were also massively better equipped and had the benefit of air cover and wireless radio communication. Nonetheless, the Allied army put up a determined resistance in a series of battles including one notable action on April 18, 1941 at Tempe Gorge commanded by my grandfather, then Brigadier AS Allen, who had formed the first battalion of the new AIF and taken our first troops to World War II. The brigade he commanded at Tempe was known as “Anzac Force”, apparently the last use of the term, after the designation Anzac Corps for the whole Australian and NZ component of Lustre Force.

After the evacuation of mainland Greece, my grandfather was sent to fight the Vichy French in Syria, but many of our troops were taken to Crete, where in May 1941 they were faced with the first and only large-scale parachute assault in military history, in which the Germans suffered appalling casualties but ultimately prevailed. Next year will be the 85th anniversary of these dramatic events in Greece and Crete, and among other things will be commemorated by an exhibition of Australian and NZ artists whom I accompanied on a two-week tour of these battlefields in the second half of October.

It was a moving experience to visit what are today the peaceful sites of such desperate battles almost three generations ago, aware at the same time of the long history of warfare in the same lands: the Persians marched through Tempe, which is just north of Thermopylae; Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus (now Farasala), which you pass on the train from Athens to Salonika (now Thessaloniki), and; Cassius and Brutus died at Philippi in Macedonia, defeated by the Caesarian forces of Octavian and Mark Antony.

Christopher Allen is the national art critic for Culture and has been writing in The Australian since 2008. He is an art historian and educator, teaching classical Greek and Latin. He has written an edited several books including Art in Australia and believes that the history of art in this country is often underestimated.

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100 years of Mein Kampf … the book that ravaged a continent

August 17, 2025August 17, 2025Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
W H Auden, Epitaph On A Tyrant (1939)

The English poet W. H. Auden spent some time in Berlin during the early 1930s – the last years of the Weimar Republic prior to the Nazi ascendency –Some commentators suggest that Auden actually wrote Epitaph on a Tyrant in Berlin. But It was published in 1939, the year that the Second World War broke out – and Auden had departed the city before the end of Weimar in 1933. But he was full aware of where the world was heading – during the mid-thirties, he’d briefly journeyed to Republican Spain in the midst of the Civil War and to Kuomintang China during its war with Japan – see In That Howling Infinite’s Journey to a war – Wystan and Christopher’s excellent adventure.

The poem has been interpreted as a very brief study in tyranny, but few could doubt whom Auden had in mind. In this very short poem, Auden turns a familiar phrase from the New Testament in upon itself evoking and then evicting ‘But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19:14). There is nothing Christlike about this tyrant: he will not suffer the little children to come unto him. The little children, instead, will be the ones to suffer. he also inverts a specific phrase by the nineteenth-century writer John Lothrop Motley, in The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1859), citing a report of 1584 about the death of the Dutch ruler William the Silent: ‘As long as he lived, he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.’

I recalled the poem, one of the very first of Auden’s poems I encountered nearly sixty years ago, as I was reading the essay republished below written by the most erudite economist and academic Henry Ergas on the occasion of the centenary of the publication on 16 August 1925, of Mein Kampf (lit. ‘My Struggle‘), Nazi Party founder and leader Adolf Hitler‘s combined autobiographical reflections and political manifesto, encompassing an uncompromising ideological programme of antisemitism, racial supremacy, and expansionist ambitions.

A century later, the impact of Mein Kampf on the world remains both undeniable and deeply troubling. Initially dismissed by some as the ramblings of a failed revolutionary, the book became the ideological blueprint for the Nazi regime, legitimising policies that culminated in the Holocaust and a world war that claimed tens of millions of lives. Beyond the destruction of the mid-twentieth century, Mein Kampf has endured as a symbol of hate literature, resurfacing periodically in extremist movements, political propaganda, and debates over free speech and censorship. Its centenary compels reflection not only on the book’s historical role in shaping one of the darkest chapters of human history, but also on the persistence of the prejudices and authoritarian impulses it so virulently expressed.

Mein Kampf‘s bitter harvest

The Second World War began on 2nd September 1939 with Germany’s sudden and unprovoked invasion of Poland on 2nd September, and Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany the day after. On 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east in accordance with the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, ,forever known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. a neutrality pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.

Japan formally entered the war on September 22, 1940 with the invasion of French Indochina, having been at war with China since 1931, and officially formed an alliance with Germany and Italy five days later. The United Kingdom declared war on the Empire of Japan on 8 December 1941, following the Japanese attacks on British Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong on the previous day, as well as in response to the bombing of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour on December 7. The United States to enter World War II the following day.

World War II ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, with Germany’s unconditional surrender, known as Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day). The war in the Asia Pacific concluded on September 2, 1945, with Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri, designated Victory over Japan Day (V-J Day). This followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan

The Nazis, with a little help from their allies and collaborators, murdered (there is no other word) an estimated six million Jews and 11 million others In camps and jails, reprisals and roundups, on the streets of cities, towns and villages, in fields and in forests, and in prison cells and torture chambers. And in the fog of war, the dearth of accurate records, and the vagaries of historical memory, the actual number is doubtless higher – much higher.

The term ‘Holocaust’ generally refers to the systematic and industrialized mass murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe – called the Shoah or ‘catastrophe’ by Jews. But the Nazis also murdered unimaginable numbers of non-Jewish people considered subhuman – Untermenschen (the Nazis had a way with words!) – or undesirable.

Non-Jewish victims of Nazism included Slavs who occupied the Reich’s ostensible lebensraum – living space, or more bluntly, land grab (Russians – some seven million – Poles, another two – Ukrainians, Serbs and others in Eastern Europe caught in the Wehrmacht mincer; Roma (gypsies); homosexuals; the mentally or physically disabled, and mentally ill; Soviet POWs who died in their tens of thousands; Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians who defied the regime; Jehovah’s Witnesses and Freemasons; Muslims; Spanish Republicans who had fled to France after the civil war; people of colour, especially the Afro-German Mischlinge, called “Rhineland Bastards” by Hitler and the Nazi regime; leftists, including communists, trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, and anarchists; capitalists, even, who antagonized the regime; and indeed every minority or dissident not considered Aryan (‘herrenvolk’ or part of the “master race”); French, Belgians, Luxemburgers, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Albanians, Yugoslavs, Albanians, and, after 1943, Italians, men, women and young people alike, involved with the resistance movements or simply caught up in reprisals; and anyone else who opposed or disagreed with the Nazi regime. See below, Ina Friedman’s The Other Victims of the Nazis and also, Wikipedia’s Victims of the Holocaust

Worldwide, over seventy million souls perished during World War II. We’ll never know just how many …

Lest we forget …

From In That Howling Infinite’s 2nd September 1939 – the rape of Poland (1)

The immoral mathematics of World War II – Deaths by Country

COUNTRY	MILITARY DEATHS	TOTAL CIVILIAN AND MILITARY DEATHS
Albania	30,000	30,200
Australia	39,800	40,500
Austria	261,000	384,700
Belgium	12,100	86,100
Brazil	1,000	2,000
Bulgaria	22,000	25,000
Canada	45,400	45,400
China	3-4,000,000	20,000,000
Czechoslovakia	25,000	345,000
Denmark	2,100	3,200
Dutch East Indies	—	3-4,000,000
Estonia	—	51,000
Ethiopia	5,000	100,000
Finland	95,000	97,000
France	217,600	567,600
French Indochina	—	1-1,500,000
Germany	5,533,000	6,600,000-8,800,000
Greece	20,000-35,000	300,000-800,000
Hungary	300,000	580,000
India	87,000	1,500,000-2,500,000
Italy	301,400	457,000
Japan	2,120,000	2,600,000-3,100,000
Korea	—	378,000-473,000
Latvia	—	227,000
Lithuania	—	353,000
Luxembourg	—	2,000
Malaya	—	100,000
Netherlands	17,000	301,000
New Zealand	11,900	11,900
Norway	3,000	9,500
Papua New Guinea	—	15,000
Philippines	57,000	500,000-1,000,000
Poland	240,000	5,600,000
Rumania	300,000	833,000
Singapore	—	50,000
South Africa	11,900	11,900
Soviet Union	8,800,000-10,700,000	24,000,000
United Kingdom	383,600	450,700
United States	416,800	418,500
Yugoslavia	446,000	1,000,000

WORLDWIDE CASUALTIES*

Battle Deaths	15,000,000
Battle Wounded	25,000,000
Civilian Deaths	45,000,000

*Worldwide casualty estimates vary widely in several sources. The number of civilian deaths in China alone might well be more than 50,000,000.

Read also, in In That Howling Infinite: Righteous Among the Nations and Las Treces Rosas – Spain’s Unquiet Graves

Mein Kampf made depravity the highest form of morality: Hitler’s ‘Nazi bible’ a playbook for hate

Henry Ergas The Australian, 16 August 2025

A picture-illustration showing Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1932 and his book, Mein Kampf. During WWII Hitler wore a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, highlighting his affinity with the ‘grunts’ on the line. Picture: Heinrich Hoffmann/Archive Photos/Getty Images

When Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was published exactly 100 years ago, the reviews were scathing. The reader, proclaimed the Frankfurter Zeitung, could draw from the book one conclusion and one conclusion only: that Hitler was finished. The influential Neue Zurcher Zeitung was no kinder, lambasting “the sterile rumination of an agitator who is incapable of rational thought and has lost his grip on reality”. As for Karl Kraus, the great Austrian essayist and critic, he famously dismissed it, quipping: “When I think of Hitler, nothing comes to mind.”

But while the book that would become known as “the Nazi bible” was hardly an immediate bestseller, it was far from being a dismal flop. By the end of 1925, nearly 10,000 copies had been sold, necessitating a second print run, and monthly sales seemed to be trending up. Even more consequentially, Mein Kampf, with its comprehensive elaboration of the Nazi world view, proved instrumental in consolidating Hitler’s until then tenuous position as the leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) or NSDAP. Both Hitler and Max Amann, who ran the Nazis’ publishing house, had good reason to be pleased.

After all, the initial circumstances of the book’s production were scarcely promising. When Hitler arrived at Landsberg prison in November 1923, following the failure of a farcically mismanaged putsch, he was assessed by the staff psychologist as “hysterical” and suicidal. However, having determined to end it all by embarking on a hunger strike, he sat down to write his valedictory statement – and with the full support of the prison’s director, a Nazi sympathiser who was happy to accommodate his every need, the project soon expanded, until the writing came to consume Hitler’s days.

Once Emil Georg, a director of the powerful Deutsche Bank and generous funder of the NSDAP, provided the aspiring writer with a top-of-the-line Remington typewriter, a writing table and all the stationery he required, Hitler’s new career as an author – the profession he proudly declared on his 1925 tax return – was well and truly under way.

The difficulty, however, was that Hitler wrote very much as he spoke. Page after page required substantial editing, if not complete revision. Some of it was undertaken by Rudolf Hess, who had a university degree, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, a German-American Harvard graduate. But many of the most difficult sections were eventually worked over by the unlikely duo of a music critic, Josef Stolzing-Cerny, and Bernhard Stempfle, a priest.

The greatest tensions arose in settling the title. Hitler, with his habitual grandiloquence, had called it Four and a Half Years of Battling Lies, Stupidity and Betrayal. Convinced that title would doom it to failure, Amann adamantly insisted on, and seems to have devised, a shorter alternative. Thus was Mein Kampf, the name that would go down in history, born.

Mein Kampf’s singular lack of focus proved to
be a strength.

Viewed superficially, the text, despite its editors’ best efforts, seems inchoate, veering across a bewildering range of grievances, pseudo-historical accounts and exhortations. Yet its singular lack of focus proved to be a strength. It meant there was something in it for each of the social groups the Nazis were attempting to mobilise, with every one of those groups finding the real or imagined harms that afflicted it covered in its pages. And whenever they were discussed, each group’s darkest nightmares were portrayed in striking, often lurid terms.

Hitler himself explained his approach in the book’s discussion of propaganda.

“Most people,” Hitler said, “are neither professors nor university graduates. They find abstract ideas hard to understand. As a result, any successful propaganda must limit itself to a very few points and to stereotypical formulations that appeal to instincts and feelings, making those abstract ideas vividly comprehensible.”

That is exactly what Mein Kampf set out to do – and it did so by hammering three basic themes: that the Germans were victims; that the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews; and that only a fight to the death against “world Jewry” could bring Germany’s redemption and return it to the pre-eminence that was its birthright and historic destiny.

What gave the book its resonance was that each of those themes was well and truly in the air. Nowhere was that clearer than in respect of victimhood.

Thus, the end of World War I had not been viewed in Germany as a military defeat. Rather, the widespread perception, vigorously propagated by General Erich Ludendorff, was that had the German army, which retained undisputed mastery over its home soil, not been “sabotaged” by liberals, freemasons, social democrats and communists, it would have held out, forcing the Allies to a settlement.

Key themes in Mein Kampf was that the Germans were victims and the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews.

The capitulation was, in other words, the result of a “stab in the back” that treacherously delivered the nation to the harsh, grotesquely unjust, treatment eventually meted out at Versailles by the war’s victors.

Closely associated with the resulting sense of unfairness, and of an undeserved defeat, was the smouldering resentment felt by returning soldiers.

World War I had ushered in the glorification of the rank and file, expressed in countries such as France, Britain and Australia by the erection of national memorials for the Unknown Soldier. Here was a figure that represented both the individual and the mass: sanctified by the nation, the Unknown Soldier also stood for the multitudes sent out to die and too quickly forgotten.

That was the case almost everywhere – but not in the newly established Weimar Republic. Unlike its counterparts, the republic erected no national monument, created no worthy memorial: the ghosts of the dead were left unburied.

Moreover, unable to deal with the trauma of the war, the republic accorded veterans no special status: even when their wounds made them entirely disabled, they were entitled only to the paltry benefits accorded to others suffering from similar levels of disability.

With the country’s new leaders abandoning those who had borne so many risks and so much pain on Germany’s behalf, an unbridgeable cleavage opened up between “those who had been there” – with all of their rage and frustration, fury and disillusionment – and those who had not. It is therefore no accident that both for innumerable forgotten soldiers and for the families who had lost their sons and fathers, Hitler, who had lived through the carnage, came to symbolise the unknown soldier of World War I.

Nor is it an accident that during World War II he always donned a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, thereby highlighting his unshakeable affinity with the “grunts” on the line.

Hitler, chancellor of Germany in 1933, is welcomed by supporters at Nuremberg. Picture: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The last, but perhaps most broadly felt, source of the sense of victimhood was the devastation wreaked by the “great inflation”.

The immediate effect of the price hikes, which began in 1921, accelerated in late 1922 and became a hyperinflation (that is, one involving monthly price increases of more than 50 per cent) in 1923 was to obliterate the savings of skilled workers, pensioners and the middle class. No less important, however, it also shattered those groups’ social standing which, in a society still geared to honour and respectability, relied on the ability to conspicuously maintain a dignified lifestyle appropriate for one’s status. Instead, for the first time in their lives, previously comfortable professionals, foremen and highly trained workers were reduced to a struggle of all against all, as they vainly attempted to sell once prized, often hard-earned assets that had suddenly – and mysteriously – become utterly valueless.

And as well as leaving a legacy of trauma, that experience created an enduring sense of unpredictability, casting the new republic as incapable of maintaining intact even the elementary foundations of daily life.

Stefan Zweig was therefore not exaggerating when he wrote, in his The World of Yesterday, that “nothing ever embittered the German people so much, nothing made them so furious with hate as the inflation. For the war, murderous as it was, had yet yielded hours of jubilation, with ringing of bells and fanfares of victory. And, being an incurably militaristic nation, Germany felt lifted in her pride by her temporary victories. But the inflation served only to make it feel soiled, cheated, and humiliated. A whole, scarred, generation could never forget or forgive.”

But where there are victims there must be victimisers – and Hitler delivered those too. Towering among them were the Jews.

Mein Kampf’s obsession with Jews is readily demonstrated: including cognate terms, such as Jewry, the 466 references to Jews in the book outnumber those to every other substantive term, including race (mentioned 323 times), Germany (306), war (305) and Marxism, which gets a paltry 194 – still ahead of national socialism and national socialists which, taken together, are referenced only 65 times.

It is certainly true that there is, in those obsessive references, virtually nothing original. Hitler’s tirades largely reassemble the anti-Semitic tropes that had emerged in the late 19th century and that were widely disseminated in a notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But Hitler’s formulation, while substantively irrational, was arguably more logical than most in the way it combined and superimposed elements from conventional anti-Semitism, pseudo-biology and social Darwinism.

Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial … from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. Hitler with Nazi officials in Munich in the summer of 1939, just before the start of WWII.

Thus, relying on a loose biological metaphor, it defined Jews as a parasite – but as one that had deliberate agency and that consciously (and collectively) sought to infect its victims, notably the “purer”, more advanced “races”.

Second, it asserted that the resulting infection was not only fatal to its victims but ultimately to their entire “race”.

Third, it projected on to that account the image of a Darwinian struggle that had been fought across recorded history’s entire course, between Jews on the one hand and the superior races on the other: a struggle that could end only with the extinction of the Jews or their adversaries.

And finally, it argued that, unless anti-Semites learnt to display the same degree of ruthlessness, the same insistence on ethnic loyalty, the same stealth and the same forms of manipulation of media and the public sphere, the Jews stood every chance of triumphing because they entirely lacked ethical standards, were exceptionally cunning, ambitious, aggressive and vindictive and – last but not least – had a natural bond to each other, combined with a murderous hatred of others.

The resulting portrayal of Jews was as terrifying as it was bizarre. Jews, it seemed, were chameleons, who were both subhuman yet extraordinarily capable, both fanatical Bolsheviks and natural capitalists, both physically repulsive yet immensely able to seduce and “infect” innocent Aryan maidens.

Moreover, they could shift effortlessly and surreptitiously from any one of those myriad shapes into any another, choosing whatever form was most likely to succeed in destroying their opponent.

As the great German philosopher Ernst Cassirer later recalled, he and his other Jewish friends found those claims “so absurd, so ridiculous, and so crazy, that we had trouble taking them seriously”. But others did not have any difficulty in doing so.

Many forces were at work. Some resulted from the war years. For example, the terrible food shortages caused by the British blockade (which was lifted only two years after the war ended) had resulted in spiralling prices for basics on the black market – with the finger being readily, although entirely incorrectly, pointed at alleged hoarding by Jews.

And more indirectly, but no less potently, the horrific second wave of the 1919 influenza pandemic, in which 400,000 Germans died, had given enormous prominence to notions of infection and contagion. As careful statistical studies subsequently showed, that prominence had enduring effects, as the Nazis secured significantly greater electoral support in the worst affected areas than in those where the death toll was lower.

But by far the greatest factor was the profound disruption of the post-war years, when everything Germans had taken as solid melted into thin air, leaving a pervasive feeling of bewilderment.

For all of its myriad flaws, the Kaiserreich, as the German Empire was known, had exuded a stability that made the future predictable. Now, with one seemingly incomprehensible event piling up on top of another, the desperate search to make sense of the world triggered an equally desperate search for someone to blame.

That was precisely what Hitler’s vast Jewish conspiracy offered. Mein Kampf, Heinrich Himmler pithily noted, was “a book that explains everything”. If it was so effective, Hannah Arendt later reflected, it was because its playing on tropes and stereotypes that were relatively familiar could, at least superficially, “fulfil this longing for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense”. All of a sudden, things fell into place – with consequences for Europe’s Jews that would forever sully Germany’s name.

Sign erected by British forces at the entrance to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Picture: Imperial War Museum

Bodies being flung into a mass grave at Belsen. Picture from the book Children’s House of Belsen, by camp survivor Hetty Verolme

If those horrendous consequences eventuated, it was because Mein Kampf did not only identify an alleged disease; it also set out a path to national redemption. In that respect, too, its main points were entirely unoriginal.

However, what was relatively new, and especially important, was the unadulterated celebration of death and violence in which they were couched.

Whether Hitler called for Jews to be massacred is a matter of interpretation. What is beyond any doubt is that he came as close to it as one possibly could. The Jews, he claimed, would “accentuate the struggle to the point of the hated adversary’s bloody extermination”. As that happened, it would be absolutely impossible to defeat them “without spilling their blood”. And when it came to that, their opponents, locked “in a titanic struggle”, would have to “send to Lucifer” – that is, to hell – “those who had mounted an assault on the skies”: that is, the Jews.

There would be, in the process, countless victims; but the Aryans who perished would be martyrs, “acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator”, and like Hitler himself “fighting for the work of the Lord”.

As with so much of Mein Kampf, the sheer violence of those calls, and of the text more generally, fell on fertile ground, again especially among veterans.

If those veterans had one thing in common it was the experience of “total war”, characterised by the ever-growing porousness of the boundaries between soldiers and civilians both as combatants and as targets of destruction.

Once they got to the front, it did not take long for ordinary soldiers to discard the fantasies of splendid bayonet charges across fields of flowers. Instead, burrowed underground in trenches filled with slime and excrement, rats and rotting body parts, what many learnt was that life was war, and war was life.

And at least for some, the sacrifice and devotion of their comrades also taught that violence brought out the best qualities in man.

Winifred Williams, a Welsh woman who became a friend and supporter, provided the paper on which Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while he was in jail.

Rendering that habituation to violence even more extreme was the experience of the 5 per cent or so of German soldiers who volunteered for Freikorps (Free Corps) units that fought, from 1918 to 1923, against the wave of revolutionary movements throughout central and eastern Europe.

Particularly in the Baltic states, those struggles were brutally uncompromising, with mass executions not only of adversaries but also of entire villages of helpless Jews. It was in those struggles that many ingredients of Nazism were forged – its symbols, like the death’s head and the swastika; its core staff, who later largely comprised the leading personnel first of the Nazi’s paramilitary units and then of the SS; and the unbridled anti-Semitic savagery of its killing squads. To all those who lived through those struggles, Mein Kampf seemed to perfectly capture their world view.

But Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial, too. Yes, Germany experienced the aftermath of World War I as an unmitigated disaster. Yet, from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. When the war finally ended, the survivors could not but feel an urge to endow it with meaning – with the hope that the countless deaths would be redeemed by creating a better future, not only for themselves but also for the nation, a future shorn of the causes of everything that had gone wrong.

And no one, in the chaos and misery of post-World War I Germany, painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler.

Death and destruction follow delirium as surely as dust and ashes follow fire. Two long decades, punctuated by Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, separated, almost precisely, the publication of Mein Kampf from the “Zero Hour”, as it became widely known, on May 7, 1945, when Germany, reduced to rubble, surrendered and officially ceased to exist. The vision – or hallucinations – Hitler had produced in Landsberg’s ja

Between those dates, the book’s fortunes closely tracked those of its author. After the crash of 1929, and the onset of the Depression, sales boomed; and once the Nazi regime was in place it became ubiquitous. A second volume had appeared in December 1926; it was added to the 400 pages of the first in 1930.

To cope with the length, the combined book was printed on extremely fine paper, exactly like a bible. Soon after that, an ever-wider range of formats – going from cheap paperback versions to extremely luxurious versions bound in leather – was offered to readers.

The regime recommended that municipalities give a good quality copy to newly married couples as they stepped out of the wedding ceremony; estimates vary but it seems two million couples benefited (if that is the right word). The book also became the standard prize in schools, workplaces and party organisations, bestowed on recipients with all the pomp the Fuhrer’s great work demanded. Altogether, by the “Zero Hour”, 12.5 million copies had found their way into the hands of potential readers – yielding Hitler copyright payments, partly deposited in a Swiss bank account, that made him an extremely wealthy man.

How many Germans actually read it is hard to say; the answers given to immediate post-war surveys were understandably evasive. What seems likely, however, is that its influence came less from the scrupulous consumption of the “Nazi bible” than from short excerpts, read out at meetings and over the radio or printed near the mastheads of major papers, as well as from the million or so copies of “reader’s digest”-like variants sold during the Reich’s golden years.

In the chaos and misery of post-WWI Germany, no one painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler

But its greatest impact was almost certainly indirect. Regardless of what ordinary Germans may or may not have done, abundant evidence shows it was carefully studied and frequently consulted by the Nazi leadership. The regime’s core principle, the so-called Fuhrerprinzip, specified that “what the Fuhrer says is law”: but what the Fuhrer had actually said, and even more so, what he wanted, was almost always hopelessly unclear – yet entire careers depended on guessing it accurately.

As a result, the everyday life of the Nazi hierarchy’s upper echelons was consumed in a competition to “work towards the Fuhrer”, as Hitler’s great biographer, Ian Kershaw, called it: that is, in trying to anticipate the Fuhrer’s will and show that no one could be more ruthless or determined in putting it into effect. It was in that process that Mein Kampf was absolutely fundamental, invariably referred to and systematically used.

And it was through that process that Hitler’s words made depravity the highest form of morality, atrocity the surest sign of heroism, and genocide the key to redemption.

Outside Germany, very few grasped that those horrors would unfold. Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and David Ben-Gurion were among those few, carefully annotating early versions and gasping at the book’s implications.

But their warnings were ignored because Mein Kampf was plainly the work of a madman. As the British Labour Party’s leading intellectual, Harold Laski, said, when he was asked why he dismissed it, rational men and women “could not bring themselves to contemplate such a world”, much less believe that “any child of the twentieth century” would regard it as a realistic possibility.

But the Nazi art of politics, as Joseph Goebbels concisely defined it, consisted precisely in making the impossible possible and the absolutely inconceivable a practical reality. That art did not disappear with Nazism’s demise, nor did the murderous anti-Semitism whose seeds Hitler sowed a century ago.

As we mark Mein Kampf’s grim anniversary, we must, this time, take them seriously.

Putin’s war … an ageing autocrat seeks his place in history

March 8, 2025March 8, 2025Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

In That Howling Infinite’ has written often about Russian and Ukrainian history, not only because personally it has been of long-term academic interest, but also, because of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

In In That Howling Infinite’s post, Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism, we wrote:

“Like many countries on the borders of powerful neighbours, Ukraine has long endured the slings and arrows of outrageous history. Its story, like that its neighbours, is long and complex. In competing national narratives, Russians and Ukrainians both claim credit for the creation of the Russian state, though others attribute this, with some credence, to the Vikings. The historical reality of Ukraine is complicated, a thousand-year history of changing religions, borders and peoples. The capital, Kyiv, was established hundreds of years before Moscow, although both Russians and Ukrainians claim Kyiv as a birthplace of their modern cultures, religion and language.

I highly recommend Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe, a well told and fascinating story of the origins of Ukraine and Belarus, and how their histories were intertwined, and entwined with those of of Poland, Lithuania (which was a large and powerful state once) and Russia. Ukraine has historically been the border between the catholic west and the orthodox east, the division running virtually down the middle. The name Ukraine is Slav for border land. Its geopolitical location and natural resources have led to the land being inflicted by invaders, civil wars, man-made famine and repression.

Eastern European countries, Ukraine included, have with good reason no love for Russia, be it Czarist, Soviet or Putin’s. Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and East Germans have seen Russian “peacekeeping” troops and tanks on their city streets, as have the Baltic countries, Afghans and Chechens. Millions of Ukrainians died under Stalin’s rule (and many, many millions of fellow-Soviet citizens). The 20th Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”.

We republish below a recent article in The Australian by Melbourne historian and academic Mark Edele. It gives the uninformed but interested reader a short but comprehensive history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine from the ninth century to the present day.

Here are posts in In That Howling Infinite, about Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe:

Putin’s puppet sells out Ukraine

Donald Trump’s bullying ‘peace plans’ to end the Ukraine war will only embolden Vladimir Putin, who fancies himself a leading a great power with historical rights beyond his borders.

Mark Edele, The Australian, 8 March 2025

Last weekend, the United States vacated the post of leader of the free world. Supporters of democracy the world over watching in disbelief as the US President and Vice-President berated, belittled, and bullied the leader of a democracy at war. On Monday, then, followed what this “great television”, as Donald Trump called it, was all about: a pretext to halt military aid to Ukraine, followed soon by the end of intelligence-sharing. The end goal: force Ukraine to the negotiation table with no security guarantees included in a “deal” with Vladimir Putin.

Four things will come out of an emboldened Russia now: more air raids on Ukraine’s civilians; a renewed push at the frontline; praise for the US administration and its visionary leader; and a disinformation campaign to convince the democratic world that black is white, up is down, left is right, Ukraine the aggressor and Russia the victim in this war. Astonishingly, we can also expect the White House to parrot such propaganda. Welcome to the era of strategic chaos.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted the obvious: The US’s shift from supporting its allies to courting Moscow “largely coincides with our vision”. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova ladled on now familiar Russian propaganda. Volodymyr Zelensky, she claimed, was the head of a “neo-Nazi regime”, a “corrupt individual who lost his grip on reality”, whose “outrageously rude behaviour during his stay in Washington … reaffirmed his status of the most dangerous threat to the international community”. Zelensky was an “irresponsible figure”, a “terrorist leader” who had “built a totalitarian state” and is “ruthlessly sending millions of his fellow citizens to their deaths”.

Sigmund Freud would have classified these statements as “projection”: they are true, but apply to Zakharova’s boss, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Born in 1952, Putin grew up in St Petersburg, then called Leningrad. Surrounded with stories of World War II, in which his father served and his brother perished, he came of age on the rough streets of Leningrad during the heydays of Soviet superpower. In 1975 he joined the KGB, an organisation that deeply formed his world view and behaviour. His sport is judo, a deeply tactical martial art focused on exploiting the opponent’s weaknesses and redirecting the adversary’s momentum.

Putin came of age on the rough streets of Leningrad during the heydays of Soviet superpower. Picture: AFP

After the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991, he served in the city administration of St Petersburg. Later he moved to Moscow to make a career in the administration of the first president of post-Soviet Russia. When Boris Yeltsin looked for a successor who would guarantee his own and his family’s safety, Putin’s name came up. He was seen as competent but unthreatening to the oligarchs running Russia at the time. In 1999, Putin became premier. Later the same year, he was appointed acting president. His tenure was defined by the brutal second Chechen War, which he prosecuted with utter ruthlessness. In 2000, he was elected President. He remained in this post until today, with a stint stepping back to the prime ministership in 2008-12, to get around term limitations in the constitution (subsequently changed).

In the quarter-century he ruled Russia, Putin broke the power of the oligarchs, rebuilt the state as a security organisation run by former KGB officers, suffocated free speech, pluralism and the opposition, and built one of the most unpleasant electoral dictatorships of the post-Soviet space. Despite an economy still only a quarter of that of the EU or the US (to say nothing of China’s), Putin fancies himself as leading a great power with a right to a sphere of influence and a major say in shaping the international order.

By the end of the second decade of his rule, however, the ageing dictator in the Kremlin began to worry about his legacy. His track record was mixed. The Russian population had been declining steadily until the 2010s. The following uptick was mostly undone again during and after the Covid pandemic, fuelling longstanding apocalyptic fears that the Russians would be dying out. The economy had grown significantly, but social inequality had exploded alongside, while political liberties continually atrophied. The Covid crisis was handled extremely poorly. Great-power status remained an aspiration. Putin worried what the history books would say about him. The answers respectable historians gave him when asked were evasive. And he was turning 70 in 2022.

History, and his place in it, obsessed Vladimir Vladimirovich. During his, quite extreme, Covid isolation, he read history books, immersing himself in the Russian imperialist tradition. Such historians had long denied that Ukraine was anything but a part of Russia. He summarised this traditional Russian view “on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in an essay of that title, published on July 12, 2021. It read like the musings of an ageing Russian imperialist. A bit over seven months later, it revealed itself as the ideological justification of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine and Russia: histories entangled but separate

At the heart of Putin’s worldview is that Russia continues to be a great power with historical rights on Ukraine. It thus bears repeating that Russia and Ukraine are separate nations, which trace their heritage back to a common origin: a collection of principalities centred on Kyiv, known as the Rus of the ninth to 13th centuries. After the Mongol invasions of the 1220s and 1230s, however, the southwestern and the northeastern parts of this civilisation developed in different and quite separate ways, eventually leading to Russia and Ukraine as we know them today. As a result of such divergence, Russian and Ukrainian have developed as separate, if related, languages.

Vladimir Putin attends the Victory Day military parade in central Moscow on May 9, 2024. Picture: AFP

Putin attends the Victory Day military parade in Moscow on May 9, 2024. AFP

Overlapping histories and linguistic similarities are not unique among nations. Both Germany and France claim the Frankish empire under Charlemagne (French) or Karl (German) as part of their deeper history. Yet nobody would suggest (any more) that therefore France should be part of Germany or vice-versa. Likewise, French and Portuguese have related grammatical structures and some overlap in vocabulary. And yet nobody would argue that Portuguese is a French dialect.

Ukrainians formed a state twice: once in 1649, the Cossack-led “Hetmanate” fighting for its independence from Poland; the second time in 1917-21, after both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires had collapsed in World War I. Both were defeated militarily, but both were important inspirations for a democratically minded national movement.

Ukraine’s lands and peoples came into the Russian orbit in stages. First was the disastrous Treaty of Periaslav of 1654, when the Hetmanate joined a temporary military alliance with Muscovy against Poland, which the Muscovites read as a subjugation under the autocrat instead. After much fighting and diplomatic manoeuvring, Poland and Russia agreed in 1667 that Moscow could control the lands east of the Dnipro (“left bank Ukraine”) as well as Kyiv on the “right bank”. When Poland was partitioned at the end of the 18th century, what was left of Ukraine came partially under Habsburg and partially under Romanov rule. At the end of World War I, Ukraine emerged as one of the successor states of the Romanov empire, alongside Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Poland and Bolshevik Russia. In contrast to these states, however, it did not survive the wars and civil wars that followed the disintegration of the empire in 1917.

In 1921, it was divided between the newly resurrected state of Poland and the emergent successor of the vast majority of the lands of the Romanov empire: Bolshevik Russia. Within the latter, Ukraine was granted a pseudo independence as one of the Union republics making up the newly formed “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, or USSR.

The Ukrainian SSR was a Bolshevik ploy to disarm national sentiment while reasserting imperial, and increasingly totalitarian, control by Moscow. In the long run, however, it allowed not just the maintenance but even the growth of national culture and national self-awareness. Ukraine also grew geographically. During World War II, the Soviets gobbled up the rest of Ukraine from Poland and Romania. In 1954, the government transferred Crimea to Ukraine, to ease the economic development of a region with no geographic connection to Russia. Thus Ukraine acquired its current, internationally recognised borders. Eventually, they provided a ready-made demarcation of post-imperial Ukraine, once the Soviet empire collapsed in 1989-91.

After the Soviet Union

Of the 15 successor states of the Soviet Union, Russia is the largest in terms of territory (17.1 million square kilometres). Ukraine, with 0.6 million square kilometres, comes third after Kazakhstan (2.7 million square kilometres). In a comparison of population sizes, Ukraine occupies the second position, with 37.7 million in 2023, according to the World Bank, quite a way behind Russia with 143.8 million. By comparison, the most populous country of the EU, Germany, has 83.3 million, while the EU as a whole counts 448.8 million.

Of the 15 successor states of the Soviet Union, Russia is the largest in terms of territory. Picture: istock

As the largest country in the post-Soviet region, in 2023 Russia had the largest GDP adjusted for purchasing power ($US6.5 trillion), followed by Kazakhstan ($US0.8 trillion) and Ukraine ($US0.6 trillion). Again, compare this to Germany ($US5.7 trillion) or Australia ($US1.9 trillion), to say nothing of the EU ($US26.4 trillion), the US ($US27.7 trillion) or China ($US34.7 trillion).

As far as the political system is concerned, between the breakdown of the Soviet empire and today Russia has been on a steady downwards slope, from some early democratic promises to ever darker authoritarianism. Ukraine, meanwhile, evolved in three waves of democratic surges followed by counter movements: the 1990s, the second half of the 2000s, and from the middle of the 2010s. While not the freest country in the post-Soviet space (that privilege belongs to the three Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all members of EU and NATO), it is in no way comparable to Russia. Zelensky was elected President in 2019 with 73 per cent of the vote. As of late February 2025, he had an approval rating of 52 per cent.

Zelensky was elected Ukraine President in 2019 with 73 per cent of the vote. Picture: AFP

Zelensky was elected president in 2019 with 73 per cent of the vote. AFP

The latest report on Ukraine from a Washington-based independent watchdog, Freedom House, notes that both the President and the current legislative were elected in free, competitive, and fair elections. Since 2022, there was some deterioration of political freedoms because of the war, including the suspension of elections due to martial law, new restrictions against parties that support Russia’s aggression, and greater control of the reporting in the main news channels. However, opposition parties continue to sit in parliament and their political activities “are generally not impeded by administrative restrictions or legal harassment”. Communication channels outside the official network, such as social media platforms, remain available and used freely.

All of this contrasts sharply to the repressive nature of Russian rule, not just in the occupied territories of Ukraine, but also in Russia itself. For 2025, Freedom House categorised Ukraine as a “transitional or hybrid regime”, while Russia was a “consolidated authoritarian regime”.

The war

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 after a popular revolution in Kyiv had ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. Russia illegally annexed Crimea and fostered a proxy war in Ukraine’s east, the Donbas, at times fought with regular Russian troops; at others by Russia-sponsored rebels. Most observers at the time assumed that this was the endgame: taking over Crimea was popular among Russians who saw it as their own Riviera; the frozen conflict in Ukraine’s east served as a festering wound keeping the recalcitrant democracy down.

Ukrainian firefighters push out a fire after a strike in Zaporizhzhia in 2022, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Picture: AFP

Ukrainian firefighters putout a fire after a strike in Zaporizhzhia in 2022. AFP

Two ceasefire agreements, Minsk I (September 5, 2014) and Minsk II (February 12, 2015), failed. After the first, Russia sent troops across the border to defeat Ukraine’s armed forces in the Second Battle of Donetsk Airport (September 2014 to January 2015) and the Battle of Debaltseve (January to February 2015). After the second, the frontlines remained frozen, but shelling and sporadic fighting continued. No part of the agreement was ever fully implemented and soldiers kept dying. The world, however, moved on.

Who had not moved on was Putin, dreaming of great power and empire. While convincing himself of the righteousness of his position by reading Russian imperial historiography, he observed “the West” move from crisis to crisis. In Europe, the liberal consensus was challenged by new-right populist movements. The UK was in political chaos. The US could not even execute an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan, unlike the Soviet army in 1988. And that army, now Russia’s, had been modernised significantly under Putin’s watch. It was time to strike.

Preparations for the invasion started shortly after the fall of Kabul in August 2021. By October, the US had conclusive evidence that Russia planned an assault with the goal of controlling all of Ukraine and eliminating its President. Between then and the start of the war, the US tried repeatedly to create diplomatic off-ramps for the Kremlin. Putin was not interested.

On February 24, 2022, Putin unleashed his war of conquest. Within 10 days, Ukraine’s military was supposed to be disabled, the country’s leaders arrested or executed, pro-Russian popular support mobilised, and resisters detained. By mid-August, all of Ukraine would be occupied, the plan went. Then, it could be either annexed or given over to a puppet regime.

The plan failed. There were few collaborators and much resistance. The battle for Hostomel airport was lost by the Russian airborne forces sent in at short notice; two groups of assassins sent to kill Zelensky were hunted down and eliminated; the columns advancing towards Kyiv were stopped by the fire of artillery and main battle tanks, both of Ukrainian origin. While social media was obsessed by the David-versus-Goliath spectacle of US-made shoulder-launched missiles taking out Russian tanks, the real damage was done using Ukraine’s own resources. Victory in the battle of Kyiv was achieved by late March 2022.

Over the next three years, the war changed from a battle of movement to position warfare and a war of attrition. Russia began to rely on massed use of artillery and the liberal sacrifice of manpower. This looked like WWII: the frontal assaults, the artillery barrages, the utter disregard for human resources. But there was a new element as well: terror attacks on civilians and their infrastructure. This was not a Soviet tradition: during WWII, it was British and US air forces that had flattened German and Japanese cities. Such bombing was not part of the Red Army’s military repertoire. Its air forces were geared towards support of ground troops, not “strategic” bombing of civilians.

In its changed focus on hurting civilians from the air, Putin’s army drew on the neo-imperial wars he had overseen: Chechnya and Syria. It was here that the Russian air force first flattened cities (Grozny in 1999-2000 and Aleppo in 2015-16) and it was this experience that now came to bear on the war in Ukraine. Except that here they did not control the airspace and did not face defenceless civilians they could simply “de-house” at will. Instead, they had to deal with an enemy capable of shooting down not just bombers, which as a result were not sent into Ukraine’s airspace, but also many of the missiles and drones sent from a safe distance.

While air assaults on civilian targets became part of the normalcy of Russia’s changing way of war, tactics on the ground also evolved: rather than mass assaults after preliminary artillery preparation, increasingly Russia used surprise attacks by small groups of storm troopers to conduct reconnaissance by force. If they encountered major resistance, they would then call in airstrikes or artillery barrages. They also stopped frontal assaults on fortified positions, bypassing and encircling them instead.

But none of this led to major breakthroughs. The war bogged down.

Russia was better prepared than Ukraine for a war of attrition. It had long built a food system that could withstand international isolation, demonstrating that a major war had been on the minds of the planners in the Kremlin for a very long time. The discrepancy in the size of both the economy and the population also meant Russia had the edge in the long run. And while the militarisation of the economy came with increasingly serious economic imbalances, they were not serious enough to force Putin’s dictatorship to back down. Instead, military salaries and the growing investments in military industries led to economic mini-booms in several of the regions that supplied the volunteers and the weapons to fight in Ukraine. To many Russians, this continues to be a profitable war.

Putin’s overall strategy thus shifted from a lightning war of conquest to outlasting the democratic world. Having the Soviet experience of extreme suffering and endurance in mind, and construing “the West” as weak, effeminate and degenerate, he had every confidence that Russia would be successful in the long run. With Trump’s election victory, this confidence grew. With his behaviour in the first six weeks in office, it must have soared. Putin has less reason than ever to compromise. And he can achieve much by playing Trump diplomatically.

What now?

After the spectacular dust-up in the Oval Office a week ago, doom and gloom have descended over Ukraine and its supporters. A pouting US President seems to assume that if he pulls the plug on Ukraine, the war will simply end: “Zelensky better move fast or is not going to have a Country left,” he wrote a week before he ambushed him in front of the cameras.

The withdrawal of US support is a serious setback for Ukraine. The US and Europe have provided about equal amounts of money to Ukraine. If Europe were to try to replace US contributions, it thus would have to double its financial commitments at a time when the economy is not exactly booming and will soon be further hit by Trump’s trade wars.

The withdrawal of US support is a serious setback for Ukraine. Picture: AFP

The withdrawal of US support is a serious setback for Ukraine. AFP

The major victims of Trump’s retreat will be Ukraine’s civilians. The US air defence systems currently protecting cities cannot be replaced easily. An increase in civilian deaths is the inevitable result. The withdrawal of intelligence is also a serious blow and difficult to substitute.

However, the EU’s economy is big enough to replace US contributions. An increase equal to 0.12 per cent of Europe’s GDP would suffice. Germany’s taxpayers spend three times more on domestic subsidies for diesel fuel than they devote to military aid to Ukraine. And production capacity is growing. At the start of the war, most military aid came from quickly depleting stockpiles. By 2024, the vast majority of materiel fuelling Ukraine’s war effort are newly produced weapons and equipment.

More than half of Ukraine’s weaponry is produced in Ukraine, a further 25 per cent comes from Europe. The 20 per cent the United States contributes is particularly valuable and high-quality, but it is not the backbone of Ukraine’s capacity. In a war of attrition heavily dependent on artillery, Europe will produce some two million artillery shells for Ukraine this year. The US, before Trump pulled the plug, was expected to deliver less than one million. Elon Musk’s Starlink, providing communications at the frontline, can be replaced with alternatives.

Thus, Ukraine’s defences are unlikely to collapse. Russia has been advancing recently, but progress was slow. By the third anniversary of the invasion, Russia controlled about 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, including some 4000 square kilometres gained in 2024. However, Ukraine is a big country. Russia’s 2024 gains represent a mere 0.6 per cent of Ukraine’s territory. Russia has not taken major cities in 2024 and urban life continues everywhere.

Meanwhile, Russia lost parts of the Kursk region to a counteroffensive the Russian military was unable to reverse. Russia has likely enough materiel for at least another year of fighting, but not enough for a major breakthrough.

In an assessment of the war written at the end of 2024, one of the most perceptive analysts of the military side of the war in Ukraine, exiled Russian historian and former civil rights activist Nikolai Mitrokhin, developed four possible scenarios for what could happen in 2025. None of them included a complete breakdown. His “catastrophic” scenario was a “partial collapse of the front due to the reduction of Ukrainian forward units”, leading to a “rapid advance of Russian units to the left bank of the Dnipro”. He predicted that this might lead to a leadership change, but also a further rallying around the flag and a continuation of the fight.

Less catastrophic would be a return to a grinding Russian offensive, as in 2024. “At the current rate of advance,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War in its Ukraine Fact Sheet of February 21, 2025, “it would take Russian forces over 83 years to capture the remaining 80 per cent of Ukraine, assuming that they can sustain massive personnel losses indefinitely”.

This outlook explains why Putin is so enthusiastic about Trump’s “peace plans”. They might achieve diplomatically what he cannot achieve on the battlefield: the subjugation of Russia’s democratic neighbour to neo-imperial domination.

Mark Edele is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states, in particular Russia. He is Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. His latest book is Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (Melbourne University Press, 2023

Trump and Vance ambush Zelensky at the White House

The first Intifada … Palestine 1936

October 9, 2024May 28, 2025Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

In 1929, there is violence at the Western Wall in Jerusalem – then a narrow alley named for Buraq, the steed with a human face that bore the Prophet Mohammed on his midnight journey to Jerusalem, and not the Kotel Plaza of today. The event, which was actually called the Buraq rising was incited by rumours that Jews planned to overrun the Haram al Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam. A massacre of Jews in Hebron in the south followed. These were a bleak precursor of the wars to come.

Fast forward to mid-April 1936. Following two incidents of killing carried out in by both Arabs and Jews, an Arab National Committee declared a strike in the city of Jaffa. National Committees were formed in other Palestinian cities and representatives of Arab parties formed the “Arab Higher Committee” led by Haj Amin al-Husseini. A general strike spread throughout Palestine, accompanied by the formation of Palestinian armed groups that started attacking British forces and Jewish settlements. Thus began the “Great Palestinian Revolt. It lasted for three years.

British troops run through Jerusalem’s’ Old City during the Great Revolt

Roots and fruits

The ongoing struggle with regard to the existence Israel and Palestine is justifiably regarded the most intractable conflict of modern times. Whilst most agree that its origins lie in the political and historical claims of two people, the Jewish Israelis and the predominantly Muslim Palestinians for control over a tiny wedge of one-time Ottoman territory between Lebanon and Syria in the north, Jordan in the east, and Egypt to the south, hemmed in by the Mediterranean Sea. There is less consensus as to when the Middle East Conflict as it has become known because of its longevity and its impact on its neighbours and the world in general, actually began.

Was it the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 promising a national home for Jews in an Ottoman governate already populated by Arabs, or the secretive Sykes Picot Agreement that preceded it in 1916, staking imperial Britain’ and France’s claim to political and economic influence (and oil pipelines) in the Levant? Was it the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine after the Treaty of Sèvres of 1922 which determined the dissolution of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Or was it the end of that British mandate and the unilateral declaration of Israeli independence in 1948 and the war that immediately followed?

In his book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) Israeli journalist and author Oren Kessler argues powerfully that the events in Mandatory Palestine between 1936 and 1939 shaped the subsequent history of the conflict for Israelis and Palestinians. The book identifies what was known at the time as The Great Revolt as the first Intifada, a popular uprising which actually sowed the seeds of the Arab military defeat of 1947-48 and the dispossession and displacement of over seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs, which has set the tone of the conflict for almost a century.

It is a tragic history shared with knowledge in hindsight of the decades of violence and bloodshed in the region that followed. It begins in the time before Palestine became political entity, when mainly Eastern European Jews began settling in progressively larger numbers to the consternation of the Arab populace.

The 1936 conflict stemmed from questions of how to divide the land and how to deal with the influx of Jewish people – questions that remain relevant today. In an extensive interview coinciding with the book’s publication (republished below) Kessler notes that, for the Arab residents, the problem was one of immigration and economics; for the Zionists, it was about finding a home. These two positions soon became irreconcilable issues, leading to sporadic violence and then to continual confrontation.

He believes that the Revolt is the point when both sides really came to see the conflict as zero sum. insofar that whichever community had the demographic majority in Palestine would be the one that would determine its fate. However, in the 1920s, the Jews were so far from that majority that both sides were able to postpone the final reckoning. In the 1930s, the Jews threatened to become a majority, and this was the immediate precursor to the rising. There was no way that the objective of bringing as many Jews to the land as possible could be achieved without bringing about some serious Arab pushback.

It is Kessler’s view that it was during revolt that a strong sense of Arab nationalism in Palestine extended beyond the urban elites to all corners of the country. All segments of Arab society – urban and rural, rich and poor, rival families, and even to a large extent Muslim and Christian – united in the same cause against Zionism and against its perceived enabler, the British Empire. The Arab public in Palestine was becoming increasingly politically aware and consciously perceiving itself as a distinct entity – distinct from its brethren in Syria, in large part because it has a different foe: not simply European imperialism but this very specific threat presented by Zionism.

The British government made early efforts at keeping the peace, but these proved fruitless. And when the revolt erupted in 1936, it sent a royal commission to Palestine, known to history as the Peel Commission, to examine the causes of the revolt. It proposed in effect the first ‘two state solution.’ The Emir Abdullah of Transjordan publicly accepted this plan. The main rival clan to the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, privately signaled that they were amenable – not thrilled, but amenable. And their allies held the mayorships of many important cities – Jaffa, Haifa, and even Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem, which today are centres of militancy. And yet the Mufti makes very clear that he regards this plan as a degradation and a humiliation, and all of these erstwhile supporters of partition suddenly realise that they are against partition.

Kessler believes that this is the point at which a certain uncompromising line became the default position amongst the Arab leadership of Palestine, with dire consequences for the Palestinians themselves, and when Yishuv leader David Ben Gurion saw an opportunity to achieve his long-standing objective of creating a self-sufficient Jewish polity, one that could feed itself, house itself, defend itself, employ itself, without any help from anyone – neither British or Arabs. When the Arabs called a general strike and boycott, cut all contacts with the Jewish and British economies and closed the port of Jaffa in Spring 1936, he lobbied successfully with the British to allow the Jews to open their own port in Tel Aviv, ultimately causing a lot of economic pain to the Arabs and helping the Jews in their state-building enterprise.

This is a mosaic history, capturing the chaotic events on the ground through snippets of action. And also, the people involved.

There are heroes and villains aplenty in this relatively untold story. The urbane and erudite nationalists Muhammed Amal and George Antonius who strive for middle ground against increasingly insurmountable odds, and who died alone and exiled having failed to head off the final showdown that is today known as Al Nakba. The farseeing, resolute, and humourless Ben Gurion and the affable, optimistic Chaim Weizmann, who became Israel’s first prime minister and president respectively. The New York born Golda Meyerson, more of a realist than either leader, who would also one day become prime minister. The irascible revisionist Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinski, the forebear of today’s virulent rightwing nationalists

The hardliner Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini, whose uncompromising stance, malign political influence, and conspiratorial association with the Nazis set the stage for a long general strike, the Great Revolt, and ultimately, the débâcle of 1948. The flamboyant rebel leaders, Syrian Izz al Din al Qassam, who is memorialized in the name of the Hamas military wing and a Gaza-made rocket, and Fawzi al Qawuqji. Qassam was gunned down by British soldiers during the revolt whilst Qawuqji lived on to become one of the most effective militia leaders in the war of 1948, and to perish therein. Both are remembered today as Palestinian martyrs whilst the Mufti is an arguably embarrassing footnote of history. There’s an article about his relatively unremarked death at the end of this post.

Amin al-Husseini in 1929

And in the British corner, the well-intentioned high commissioners who vainly endeavoured to reconcile the claims of two aspirant nations in one tiny land, and quixotic figures like the unorthodox soldier Ord Wingate who believed he was fulfilling prophecy by establishing the nucleus of what would become the IDF (like many charismatic British military heroes, and particularly General Gordon and Baden-Powell, both admirers and detractors regarded him a potential nut-case); and the Australian-born ex-soldier Lelland Andrews, assistant district commissioner for Galilee, who also conceived of his mission as divinely ordained. Lewis was murdered by Arab gunmen and Wingate went down in an aeroplane over Burma during WW2.

There are appearances from among many others, Lloyd George, Winton Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Franklin D Eisenhower and Joseph Kennedy.

The book highlights the work of powerful British functionaries in handling early confrontations: they are memorialized for starting commissions to study the matter and to generate ideas, though many of their ideas weren’t followed or were followed to ill effect. None solved the problem, making this account of the earliest days of the conflict all the more heartbreaking.

All under the shadow of the impending Shoah, and the inevitable showdown that would culminate in al Nakba.

The road to Al Nakba

Kessler argues that the Arab social fabric and economy are completely torn and shattered by the end of this revolt that in many ways the final reckoning for Palestine between Jews and Arabs – the civil war that erupts in 1947 – is actually won by one side and lost by the other nearly a decade earlier.

The final paragraphs of Kessler’s enthralling book are worth quoting because they draw a clear line between the events of the Great Revolt and the catastrophe, al Nakba, of 1948:

“For the Jews, perhaps the greatest shift was psychological. they had withstood of powerful sustained assault and lived to tell about it. One book on Zionist leaders” thinking in this era is titled Abandonment of Illusions. The belief of material gains would bring Arab consent now naïve and, worse, dangerous. Instead, by the end of the revolt and the start of the world war, much of Palestine’s Jewish mainstream had accepted the fact that the country’s fate would ultimately be determined and maintained by force.

“By 1939, the Yishuv had achieved the demographic weight, control of strategic areas of land, and much of the weaponry and military organization that would be needed as a springboard for taking over the country within less than a decade”, writes the Palestinian American historian Rasheed Khalidi.

Khalid argues that the Palestinian catastrophe of 1947 -1949 was predicated on a series of previous failures: “a deeply divided leadership, exceedingly limited finances, no centrally organized military forces or centralized administrative organs, and no reliable allies. They faced a Jewish society in Palestine which although small relative to theirs, was political unified, had centralized para-state institutions, and was increasingly well-led and extremely highly motivated”.

For Palestinians, he maintains, the Nakba – the catastrophe of their military drubbing, dispossession and dispersal – was but a forgone conclusion. For them, the terrible events that bookended the year 1948 “were no more than a postlude, a tragic epilogue to the shattering defeat of 1936- 39”.

The Great Revolt, Kessler says, has cast its shadow over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since – for the Arabs, for the Jews, and for attempts to resolve the conflict. It is still remembered by Palestinians and Israelis alike. Palestinian folk songs still celebrate the revolt, and in my he regards the. BDS movement as direct descendant of the general strike that preceded the revolt. The two-state solution that is still the international community’s favoured solution to the conflict is but a variation of that original partition plan of 1937.

In so many ways, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this revolt rages on.

Kessler’s interview in Fathom e-zine follows, together with serval informative articles on the Great Revolt and its aftermath

For more on Israel and Palestine in In That Howling Infinite, see: A Middle East Miscellany

The picture at the head of this post shows British troops marching through Ibn Khatib Square in 1936 past King David’s Citadel and towards the Jaffa Gate

British policemen disperse an Arab mob during the Jaffa riots in April 1936 (The Illustrated London News)

Jews evacuate the Old City of Jerusalem after Arab riots in 1936.

An interview with Oren Kessler

by Oren Kessler

Oren Kessler’s new book Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) argues powerfully that events in Mandatory Palestine between 1936 and 1939 have shaped the subsequent history of the conflict for Israelis and Palestinians. Called ‘the definitive study’ by Michael Oren, Kessler’s book identifies the revolt as the true first intifada, an uprising which laid the ground for the Arab defeat in 1947-48 and which has set the tone of the conflict for almost a century. He sat down with Fathom deputy editor Jack Omer-Jackaman to discuss the book, recently released in the UK.

Jack Omer-Jackaman: The general reader, in English at least, has lacked a history of the Great Revolt and its repercussions. What have they been missing and with what consequences for our understanding of the conflict?

Oren Kessler: I argue that although this is an Arab revolt, it is as much a Jewish story as an Arab story. From the Arab perspective it’s an extremely formative event – it’s the crucible in which Palestinian Arab identity coalesced as virtually all strands of Arab society came together in a common purpose against a common foe. But on the Jewish side this is an equally seminal and decisive event. It’s often forgotten but this is the period in which the words ‘Jewish State’ first appear on the international agenda – not just the ‘national home’ promised in the Balfour Declaration, but a Jewish state to all intents and purposes, as part of a ‘two-state solution.’ It’s also the period in which the British Empire sows the seeds for a Jewish army. So, in all of these ways this is a hugely formative chapter in the history in the Land of Israel/Palestine, for the conflict itself, and for attempts to resolve it. The degree to which this chapter hasn’t gotten its due is actually quite startling. It’s not entirely clear to me why such a pivotal event right before the Second World War hasn’t gotten its due in English outside of a handful of academic works.

JOJ: And why has the 1936-1939 Revolt been relatively ignored?

OK: It’s a very good question. In the book I quote Professor Mustafa Kabha of the Open University of Israel, who argues that in the Palestinian narrative and consciousness, the revolt has been side-lined, marginalised by the overwhelming primacy of the Nakba. The Nakba is much ‘easier’ to fit into the narrative because, from the Palestinian perspective, it’s the moment at which they are betrayed and unjustly treated by Zionism, by British Imperialism, even by their fellow Arabs who fail to rescue them from the Zionist menace. Whereas dealing with 1936-39 requires a lot more soul-searching. There is a huge convulsion of Arab infighting in this period – there is much Arab bloodshed at the hands of fellow Arabs. That is a lot more difficult for a national narrative to rationalise.

Every national movement has its narrative and its storyline, and the Jewish national narrative tends to be quite forward moving: from the first wave of immigration in the late 19^th Century, on to the Balfour Declaration, the start of the British Mandate and the Jewish state-building of the 1920s and 30s, then the agony of the Holocaust and finally the redemption of statehood. That’s essentially the Zionist story, and I think a large-scale, concerted nationalist uprising against that story is a somewhat unwelcome blip in the narrative arc.

JOJ: Let’s set the geopolitical scene at that time: talk to us about the connections between European and local events.

OK: Throughout the book, I bounce back and forth between the situations in Palestine and Europe, because they’re inseparable – certainly from a British perspective, and equally from a Jewish one. The revolt begins only three years after Hitler comes to power in Germany in 1933. There are also other antisemitic movements ascendent across Europe, in places like Poland, Hungary and Romania, and very many Jews are desperate to leave. But almost all potential sanctuaries in the world have been closed; the US has been almost closed to immigration since the Immigration Act of 1924. In many ways, Palestine is the only significant possible refuge left for the Jews of Europe. So Jewish immigration into Palestine is skyrocketing in these years – the Jewish population there doubles in the first half of the 1930s. In 1935, 60,000 Jews come into Palestine, which is nearly double that of the year before, so the Jews are approaching 30 per cent of the population by the time the revolt erupts. The revolt is thus a direct result of the European situation, since it’s very clear to the Arabs of Palestine that if things continue this way, Palestine will have a Jewish majority before long.

From a British perspective, the war clouds looming over Europe make it very difficult for the British army to quash the revolt. They simply don’t have the manpower for it, at least until the Munich Agreement of 1938, granting Hitler the Sudetenland. With the appeasement of Hitler, Britain and all of Europe breathe a sigh of relief and buy some time (at least that’s how it felt at the time). After Munich the British are able to send two divisions to Palestine, which constitutes the largest British army deployment in the interwar period. This is another reason it’s startling that this era has been so overlooked.

JOJ: That leads us neatly onto the next topic, which looks at the balance of power post and ante the revolt. How does each side – and let’s include the British – go into the period and how do they emerge?

OK: Until Munich, the British are severely undermanned in Palestine, and this directly benefits the Jews because this is the period in which the British finally accede to a long-standing demand by the Haganah – the Jewish self-defence group that is technically illegal but tolerated by the British – to arm and train Jews in large numbers. And that’s what happens: 15,000-20,000 Jews join the Palestine Police as Jewish Supernumerary Police. And though they receive their weapons, training and part of their salary from the British government, it’s clear to everyone that they’re ultimately answerable to the Haganah. So the Jews, led by David Ben-Gurion – already in this era the clear leader of Palestine’s Jews – are able to turn adversity to advantage and make tremendous gains, militarily and otherwise, throughout the Arab revolt.

it’s the mirror image for the Arab side. The revolt to crush Zionism crushes the Arabs instead. The initial unity of the revolt’s first phase under the leadership of Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini – which includes a six-month general strike – gives way in the second phase (from Autumn 1937) to a convulsion of infighting and score settling. Several thousand Arabs are killed by their fellow Arabs, and the Arab leadership – namely the mufti and his associates – is driven into exile. And of course the British begin taking very heavy-handed measures – including a number of incidents that qualify as atrocities – to quash the revolt. Huge numbers of Arab men are put in prison or killed by the British, and thousands of homes demolished. The Arab social fabric and economy are completely torn and shattered by the end of this revolt. I argue in the book, and this is an argument that has also been made by the Palestinian-American professor Rashid Khalidi, that in many ways the final reckoning for Palestine between Jews and Arabs – the civil war that erupts in 1947 – is actually won by one side and lost by the other nearly a decade earlier.

JOJ: The popular narrative is that Palestinian nationalism – as distinct from wider Arab or Syrian nationalism – was a product of the 1930s. What did your study of the period tell you about this?

OK: I think Palestine is sui generis in many ways, including the development of nationalism there. In my view it is during the Arab revolt that a strong sense of Arab nationalism in Palestine extends beyond the urban elites to all corners of the country. All segments of Arab society – urban and rural, rich and poor, rival families, and even to a large extent Muslim and Christian – unite in the same mission against Zionism and against its perceived handmaiden: the British Empire.

The Arab public in Palestine is growing increasingly politically aware and consciously perceiving itself as a distinct entity – distinct from its brethren in Syria, in large part because it has a different foe: not simply European imperialism but this very specific threat presented by Zionism.

JOJ: So was the 1936-1939 Revolt the crucial event in the origins of the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Was this the point at which it became zero sum for both sides? Or was it just the first time there was a wider realisation of this?

OK: I’ve lost track of how many people who, when I start telling them about my book, assume I’m referring to the Hebron massacre of 1929. In my view the Hebron riots were just that: they were riots, they were an outburst of terrorism, but not a sustained nationalist uprising in the way that the Great Revolt of 1936 is – not an intifada in the parlance of today. I think in many ways, the Revolt is when both sides really come to see this conflict as zero sum. But it was always in a way zero sum in that whichever community has the demographic majority in Palestine would be the one that would determine its fate. This is an age in which the world is moving, however haltingly, from imperialism towards self-determination, and it is clear to both Jews and Arabs alike that having a majority would be absolutely key. However, in the 1920s, the Jews were so far from that majority that both sides were able to postpone the final reckoning. In the 1930s, the Jews are threatening to become a majority, and that’s the immediate precursor to this revolt erupting.

JOJ: Is it fair to say that the tone was set at this time, on the Palestinian side, for this being a conflict that demands hardliners? That the tone was set of leadership by extremists like Qassam and Hajj Amin[1] and not more moderate figures like Faisal or the Nashashibis?

OK: Yes, I do think that this is the period in which the intransigent line taken by Hajj Amin becomes not just mainstream but one from which it is very dangerous to deviate. Hajj Amin, even after fleeing the country in Autumn of 1937, manages to exert his will over the revolt from afar, and anyone who dares step out of line or contemplate reaching some sort of modus vivendi with the Zionist movement tends to find himself dead or in some other serious trouble. A prime example of that is the reaction among prominent Arabs to the partition plan. In late 1936, the British government sends a royal commission to Palestine, known to history as the Peel Commission, to examine the causes of the revolt, and famously it proposes the first ‘two state solution.’ The Emir Abdullah of Transjordan publicly accepts this plan. The main rival clan to the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, privately signal that they are amenable; not thrilled, but amenable. And their allies hold the mayorships of quite a few important cities – Jaffa, Haifa, and even Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem, which today are centres of militancy. And yet the Mufti makes very clear that he regards this plan as a degradation and a humiliation, and all of these erstwhile supporters of partition suddenly realise that they are against partition. So yes, I do think that this is the point at which a certain uncompromising line becomes the default one amongst the Arab leadership of Palestine, with really devastating results for the Palestinians themselves.

JOJ: Let’s look to the Jewish side. Is it the first, or at least a formative, time when differing approaches to state-building and self-defence within the Zionist movement are clearly exposed?

OK: Absolutely. During the Arab Revolt the Haganah adheres to a policy called havlagah, meaning self-restraint, despite the revolt’s very high toll in Jewish blood. Some 500 Jews are killed in this revolt; these are huge numbers, comparable to those in the Second Intifada in much more recent times. The logic is to convince the British that they can be trusted with weapons and, as mentioned earlier, that’s exactly what happens. The Irgun – the Revisionist, right-wing dissident Zionist group, whose ideological leader is Vladimir Jabotinsky – has a very different view, much more in line with ‘an eye for an eye’. They believe that it has to be made very clear to the Arabs that Jewish blood could not be shed unanswered, and that taking the fight to the Arabs, including civilians, would have a deterrent effect. We see dozens of Irgun attacks targeting Arab civilians during the revolt. I don’t think there’s any other way to describe this than terrorism – this isn’t ‘collateral damage’ in an attempt to target militants, but a mentality in which ‘If the Arabs target our civilians, we’ll target theirs’. So, there’s a real schism between these two Zionist movements, but the Haganah are able to convince the British that they are in control and are the mainstream, and that the Irgun is merely a fringe group. And that’s how this crucial British-Jewish military cooperation begins.

JOJ: Could the Yishuv leadership have acted any differently in the years prior to the revolt and forestalled it? Or not without sacrificing immigration?

OK: A very good question, and one which gets back to this question of whether it’s a zero sum conflict. I don’t agree with the rose-tinted analyses of history that I sometimes hear, which claim that in the Ottoman and early Mandate eras the two communities were able to get along in peace and it is somehow British mismanagement that prompted the conflict. Rather it seems to me that when the Jews were a minority, they didn’t present too much of a disruption to the status quo, but as soon as they began to threaten to reach a majority, there is almost no alternative to this conflict breaking out. That’s how Ben-Gurion looks at this situation throughout, and he never agrees to even slowimmigration. By contrast, Chaim Weizmann, head of the world Zionist Organisation, is willing to slow immigration to try to cultivate Arab goodwill and cooperation. I don’t see how that objective of bringing as many Jews to the land as possible could be achieved without bringing about some serious Arab pushback.

JOJ: To what extent was the Arab general strike self-defeating in allowing Ben-Gurion unprecedented opportunities for a key Zionist priority: the conquest of labour?[2]

The general strike starts almost at the very beginning of the revolt and lasts six months – still one of the longest general strikes anywhere in history. It is a source of great Arab pride. As I mentioned, Ben-Gurion really is an expert in turning adversity into advantage. He sees a tremendous opportunity to achieve his long-standing objective of creating a self-sufficient Jewish polity, one that could feed itself, house itself, defend itself, employ itself, without any help from anyone – not the British or the Arabs. In the strike, the Arabs cut all contacts with the Jewish and British economies, and when Jaffa port closed in Spring of 1936, Ben-Gurion pleads successfully with the British to allow the Jews to open their own port in Tel Aviv. The British agree and Ben Gurion is euphoric, hailing the fact that the Jews now have an outlet to the world as a second Balfour Declaration. That’s just one example of how the Arab strike and boycott ultimately cause a lot of economic pain to the Arabs and help the Jews in their state-building enterprise.

JOJ: You benefited tremendously from the declassification of the Peel Commission’s secret testimonies, which threw up some fascinating revelations. What did we learn about the origins of the Balfour Declaration, for example?

This was one of the most interesting troves of archival documents that I found in my research. The British Government kept the Peel Commission documents classified for 80 years, and they were very quietly declassified only in 2017. I wrote an article in Fathom in 2020 about the 1937 secret testimony of David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration, on why the government had issued that historic and controversial document. Explaining his decision of two decades earlier, he says the Jews ‘are a dangerous people to quarrel with, but they are a very helpful people if you can get them on your side.’ He says that he and his ministry were very concerned, in the midst of the First World War, that the Jews of America and Russia might not support the allies but go over to the German side. There were even murmurings that the Germans were thinking of a ‘Balfour Declaration’ of their own. Lloyd George makes very clear in this testimony that that was a primary reason that the Declaration was given at that time. And he says that, in his opinion, the declaration more than paid for itself by the help that the Jews of America and Russia gave in various ways during the war.

JOJ: Herbert Samuel’s testimony was interesting, too.

OK: Samuel was the first High Commissioner for Palestine, as well as a Jew and a Zionist. In his testimony he is asked why he appointed Hajj Amin as Grand Mufti in the first place in the early 1920s – this is the only occasion I’ve ever seen him asked about this decision, which is one of the most fateful taken in the entire history of the Israeli-Arab conflict. He basically says, and I’m paraphrasing: ‘look, I had no choice. We had to appoint someone from the Husseini family because we had already given the other great Arab families various other perks, and so the Husseinis needed to get the muftiship. And Amin was the only Husseini with the requisite religious education having studied at al Azhar in Egypt.’ Samuel doesn’t admit it was a mistake but defends the decision and says that Hajj Amin had more or less behaved well until that point. (That is not quite true: the British had sentenced him in absentia for rabble rousing in 1920.) These are fascinating documents that were originally slated for destruction; the witnesses who give testimony do so on that understanding. But one very forward-looking British official has the foresight to stow them away, scribbling in the margins that they chronicle ‘an important chapter in the history of Palestine and the Jewish people, and will, no doubt, be of considerable value to the historians of the remote future.’

JOJ: Let’s look at Peel’s partition proposals a little deeper. We tend, optimistically, to think that decisions taken by high level politicians and civil servants are subject to forensic detail and informed by expert knowledge. How does the British process for proposing the first two-state solution correct us on this?

OK: That is one of the most fascinating discoveries contained in the secret testimonies: just how this two-state solution is arrived at. One of the commission members is an Oxford don by the name of Professor Reginald Coupland, an Africa-focused historian not particularly well-versed in the Middle East. He arrives at the idea that just as the Greeks and Turks were separated after World War One, in what he referred to as a ‘clean cut’, so Jews and Arabs need to be separated in that same way. It is really Coupland, with the help of a few British colonial servants in Palestine, who pushes through this idea of a two-state solution. And they do so quite hastily – when you look at the minutes of these secret testimonies, it’s just a few pages in which they discuss the practicability and the details of such a solution. It’s Coupland, an irrigation advisor by the name of Douglas Harris, and the assistant district commissioner for Galilee, Lewis Andrews (who shortly thereafter is assassinated) who draft the first two-state solution, which becomes the ideological template for every subsequent attempted solution to the conflict, from the UN’s exactly a decade later onto the various subsequent iterations until our time.

JOJ: Let’s talk about another piece of Mandate administration, the 1939 MacDonald White Paper, which barred Jews entry to Palestine just months before the outbreak of World War Two. Does your book have anything to say on this that is new?

OK: There’s a general familiarity, at least among Jews, with the White Paper and that it is a bad an unjust thing. But the genesis of the White Paper has not been researched to the degree it deserves, and in the book I devote a whole chapter to it. The Colonial Secretary at the time is Malcolm MacDonald, who is only 37 years old (he is the son of the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald). This is the Chamberlain government, which is dedicated to appeasement, not just in Europe but in the Middle East. Even though MacDonald is a member of the National Labour Party, he is a loyal member of the ministry and determines, with the advice of senior officials in the army and the government, that some drastic changes need to be made to Britain’s Palestine policy in such a crucial period. There is a feeling that world war would break out at any point and that Muslim opinion, particularly in India, has to be appeased, lest Muslim subjects of the empire side with Hitler.

When you look at the discussion, you see that the British policy makers plan to go far in the direction of Arab demands when they call the St James’s Conference in 1939. And yet, throughout these negotiations, they go quite a bit farther even than they originally intend. So, where 60,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine in 1935, the 1939 White Paper limits Jewish immigration to a total of 75,000 over five years, after which Palestine would become an independent state. The White Paper doesn’t say an independent Arab state, but of course if Jewish immigration is limited to keep the Jews under 35 or 40 per cent of the population, it’s clear to everyone that this would be a de facto Arab state. This is mid-1939, when the Jews of Europe are most desperate to find sanctuary outside of Europe, and the White Paper is seen by the Jews and their supporters as a tremendous betrayal, and a reneging not just on the Peel Commission plan of two years previous, but on the Balfour Declaration itself.

This is one of the tremendous ‘what ifs’ of history: what would have happened had the White Paper not been passed, or had the Peel partition plan of 1937 gone through? Ben-Gurion, after the Holocaust, said that had the Jews had the small state promised to them in 1937, six million could have been saved. I think that’s perhaps an overstatement: I’m not sure that the very small state offered to them was developed enough to absorb six million people. It was Golda Meir who said that had the Jewish state been established (and the White Paper not implemented), hundreds of thousands could have been saved: I think that’s a plausible reading of history. The White Paper is what finally turns Ben-Gurion against the British. It’s when he decides that the British-Zionist partnership is essentially over and when he starts to look across the ocean to America as the great potential supporter of Zionism.

JOJ: Finally, it’s fascinating to see how the 1936-1939 Revolt and this period lives in the iconography of both Israelis and Palestinians. You don’t have to look too hard to see it referenced or deployed in the present day. It occupies a place of glory for Palestinians, which is rather ironic given its role in the catastrophe of 1948. And on the Israeli side, it was referenced not too long ago by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

OK: I argue that the revolt has cast its shadow over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since – for the Arabs, for the Jews, and for attempts to resolve the conflict. Just recently, for example, in the Gaza conflict of May 2021, you may remember that the war extended to the battlefield of social media. When the Arabs of Israel and the West Bank joined together in a one-day strike, Twitter was abuzz with comparisons to 1936. And, as you mention, Bezalel Smotrich tweeted: ‘the riots of the Arab enemy take us back many years to the great Arab revolt. Back then a hostile British government protected rioters. Today a worthless, weak Jewish government, a contaminated judiciary and a law enforcement system emasculated by dangerous post-national and post-modern notions…’ Palestinian folk songs still celebrate the revolt, and in my view the BDS movement is a direct descendant of the general strike. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, the two-state solution that is still the international community’s the favoured solution to the conflict is simply a variation of the original partition plan of 1937. In so many ways, for both Israelis and Palestinians, this revolt rages on.

[1] Editor’s note: Hajj Amin al Husseini, appointed by the British Mandate as Grand Mufti in 1921, would become a determined supporter of Nazi Germany. At his 1941 meeting with Hitler, Hajj Amin declared himself ‘fully reassured and satisfied’ with Hitler’s reassurance that once having achieved the ‘total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe… Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere’. In 1943, the SS enlisted Hajj Amin to lead a recruitment drive among Bosnian Muslims, SS Main Office Chief Berger noting the ‘extraordinarily successful impact’ of the Mufti’s activities.

[2] Editor’s note: The concept of Kibbush Haavoda, the conquest of labour, was a key plank in Labour Zionism. Its priorities were the encouraging of manual and agricultural labour amongst Jewish immigrants to Palestine and a reliance on Jewish labour for the Jewish economy

Great Arab Revolt, 1936-1939

A Popular Uprising Facing a Ruthless Repression

https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/158/great-arab-revolt-1936-1939

In 1936, widespread Palestinian dissatisfaction with Britain’s governance erupted into open rebellion. Several key dynamics and events can be seen as setting the stage for this uprising. In Palestine, as elsewhere, the 1930s had been a time of intense economic disruption. Rural Palestinians were hit hard by debt and dispossession, and such pressures were only exacerbated by British policies and Zionist imperatives of land purchases and “Hebrew labor.” Rural to urban migration swelled Haifa and Jaffa with poor Palestinians in search of work, and new attendant forms of political organizing emerged that emphasized youth, religion, class, and ideology over older elite-based structures. Meanwhile, rising anti-Semitism—especially its state-supported variant—in Europe led to an increase of Jewish immigration, legal and illegal, in Palestine.

Unsurprisingly, the combination of these various trends produced periodic upheavals, from the 1929 al-Buraq Uprising to multicity demonstrations in 1933 against the British Mandate. In October 1935, the discovery of a shipment of arms in the Jaffa port destined for the Haganah fueled Palestinian concerns that the Zionist movement was introducing the human and military resources necessary for its state-building project under the nose of the British. Meanwhile, the popular and populist Syrian Shaykh Izzeddin al-Qassam , who preached to the slum-dwelling rural transplants near Haifa’s rail yards and who had spent the early 1930s building a cell-based paramilitary network, was killed in a firefight with British forces in November 1935. Qassam’s funeral in Haifa elicited a mass outpouring of public outrage. These events are often seen as direct predecessors of the mass Palestinian uprising that took place in 1936.

The Great Palestinian Rebellion , or the Great Arab Revolt, as this uprising came to be known, lasted for three years and can be generally divided into three phases. The first phase lasted from the spring of 1936 to July 1937. With tensions throughout Palestine running high since the fall of 1935, the revolt was ignited in mid-April 1936 when followers of Qassam attacked a convoy of trucks between Nablus and Tulkarm , killing two Jewish drivers. The next day, the Irgun killed two Palestinian workers near Petah Tikva , and in the following days, deadly disturbances ensued in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. In Nablus, an Arab National Committee was formed and a strike was called on 19 April. National Committees in other cities echoed the call to strike, and on 25 April the Arab Higher Committee (Lajna) (AHC) was formed, chaired by Haj Amin al-Husseini , to coordinate and support a nationwide general strike, which was launched on 8 May.

The strike was widely observed and brought commercial and economic activity in the Palestinian sector to a standstill. Meanwhile, Palestinians throughout the countryside came together in armed groups to attack—at first sporadically, but with increasing organization— British and Zionist targets. Some Arab volunteers joined the rebels from outside Palestine, though their numbers remained small in this period. The British employed various tactics in an attempt to break the strike and to quell the rural insurrection. The ranks of British and Jewish policemen swelled and Palestinians were subjected to house searches, night raids, beatings, imprisonment, torture, and deportation. Large areas of Jaffa’s Old City were demolished, and the British called in military reinforcements.

Concurrent with military operations and repressive measures, the British government dispatched a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel to investigate the root causes of the revolt. In October 1936, under the combined pressure of British policies, other Arab heads of state, and the effects of a six-month general strike on the Palestinian population, the AHC called off the strike and agreed to appear before the Peel Commission . A period of lower intensity conflict prevailed as the Peel Commission toured the country, but tensions continued to build in anticipation of the commission’s report. In July 1937, the Peel Commission published its report, recommending Palestine’s partition into Jewish and Arab states. Dismayed by this negation of their desires and demands, the Palestinian population relaunched their armed insurgency with renewed intensity, initiating the second phase of the revolt.

This second phase, lasting from July 1937 until the fall of 1938, witnessed significant gains by the Palestinian rebels. Large swaths of the hilly Palestinian interior, including for a time the Old City of Jerusalem , fell fully under rebel control. Rebels established institutions, most significantly courts and a postal service, to replace the British Mandate structures they sought to dismantle. The British, meanwhile, imposed even harsher measures to try to quash the revolt. The AHC and all Palestinian political parties were outlawed, political and community leaders were arrested, and a number of high-profile public figures exiled. The military aspects of counterinsurgency intensified, and British tanks, airplanes, and heavy artillery were deployed throughout Palestine. The British also meted out collective punishment: thousands of Palestinians were relegated to “detention camps”; residential quarters were destroyed; schools were closed; villages were collectively fined and forced to billet British troops and police. Zionist military institutions took advantage of the situation to build up their capacities with British support. By early 1939, members of the Jewish Settlement Police (about 14,000) were subsidized, uniformed, and armed by the British government as a thinly veiled front for the Haganah, and so-called Special Night Squads comprising Jewish and British members launched “special operations” against Palestinian villages.

The third phase of the rebellion lasted roughly from the fall of 1938 to the summer of 1939. The British dispatched another commission of inquiry, this one headed by Sir John Woodhead , to examine the technical aspects of implementing partition. In November 1938, the Woodhead Commission report concluded that partition was not practicable, marking a certain British retreat from the Peel recommendation. At the same time, however, the British launched an all-out offensive: in 1939 more Palestinians were killed, more were executed (by hanging), and nearly twice as many were detained than in 1938. Such brutality placed immense pressure on the rebels, exacerbating rifts between the political leadership of the AHC exiled in Damascus and local leadership on the ground, between rebel bands and village populations that were expected to support and supply them, and ultimately between Palestinians who remained committed to the revolt and those willing to reach a compromise with the British. British-supported Palestinian “Peace Bands” were dispatched to battle their compatriots.

In May 1939, the British government published a new White Paperthat proposed the following: Britain’s obligations to the Jewish national home had been substantially fulfilled; indefinite mass Jewish immigration to and land acquisition in Palestine would contradict Britain’s obligations to the Palestinians; within the next five years, no more than 75,000 Jews would be allowed into the country, after which Jewish immigration would be subject to “Arab acquiescence”; land transfers would be permitted in certain areas, but restricted and prohibited in others, to protect Palestinians from landlessness; and an independent unitary state would be established after ten years, conditional on favorable Palestinian-Jewish relations.

The combined impact of Britain’s military and diplomatic efforts brought the rebellion to an end in the late summer of 1939. Over the revolt’s three years, some 5,000 Palestinians had been killed and nearly 15,000 wounded. The Palestinian leadership had been exiled, assassinated, imprisoned, and made to turn against one another. At the same time, the White Paper—despite its limitations—offered certain concessions to the rebels’ demands. Whatever gains Palestinians might have made through the revolt, however, were quickly overtaken by the larger geopolitical processes of World War II , and the combined British-Zionist assault on Palestinian political and social life during the revolt had a long-lasting impact.

Alex Winder

Selected Bibliography:

Anderson, Charles W. “State of Formation from Below and the Great Revolt in Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 47, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): 39-55.

Hughes, Matthew. “From Law and Order to Pacification: Britain’s Suppression of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 39, no.2 (Winter 2010): 6–22.

Kanafani, Ghassan. The 1936–39 Revolt in Palestine.

Shbeib, Samih. “Poetry of Rebellion: The Life, Verse and Death of Nuh Ibrahim during the 1936–39 Revolt.” Jerusalem Quarterly 25 (Winter 2006): 65–78.

Sufian, Sandy. “Anatomy of the 1936-39 Revolt: Images of the Body in Political Cartoons of Mandatory Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 37, no.2 (Winter 2008): 23–42.

Swedenburg, Ted. Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003.

Britain says releasing a 1941 document about Palestine might ‘undermine security’

Tom Susrez May 13, 2019

“VISIT OF H.R.H. PRINCESS MARY AND THE EARL OF HARWOOD. MARCH 1934. PRINCESS MARY, THE EARL OF HARWOOD, AND THE GRAND MUFTI, ETC. AT THE MOSQUE EL-AKSA [I.E., AL-AQSA IN JERUSALEM].” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4221.

A two-part archive, labeled “Activities of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem” and dated 1940-1941, sits in Britain’s National Archives in Kew. This writer successfully had the first part declassified in 2014. The second part remains sealed. My 2018 attempt to have these ten pages declassified was refused on the grounds that the archive might “undermine the security of the country [Britain] and its citizens.”[1] None of its secrets are to be available until January, 2042; and if the paired file is any precedent, even in 2042 it will be released only in redacted form.

The ‘Grand Mufti’ in the archive’s heading is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader whom posterity best remembers for his alignment with the Italian and German fascists; and the years 1940-1941 place him not in Palestine, but in Iraq — and if the second archive extends to late 1941, in Europe. What could possibly be hidden in a World War II document about a long-dead Nazi sympathizer that would present such a risk to British national security eight decades later, that none of it can be revealed? At present, only the UK government censors know; but the answer may have less to do with the fascists and al-Husseini than with British misdeeds in Iraq, and less to do with Britain’s national security than with its historical embarrassment.

When in 1921 votes were cast for the new Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini came in last among the four candidates. But votes in Palestine mattered as little then as they do now, and the British, Palestine’s novice replacement occupiers for the Ottomans, handed the post to al-Husseini. At first, he proved to be an asset to the British. But as the years passed, his opposition to Zionism, support for Palestinian nationalism, and ultimately his involvement in the 1936 Palestinian uprising, led to calls for his arrest.

Photograph labelled 'Arab demonstrations on Oct. 13 and 27, 1933. In Jerusalem and Jaffa. Return of Grand Mufti from India. Met by hundreds of cars at Gethsemane, Nov. 17, 1933.'

“ARAB DEMONSTRATIONS ON OCT. 13 AND 27, 1933. IN JERUSALEM AND JAFFA. RETURN OF GRAND MUFTI FROM INDIA. MET BY HUNDREDS OF CARS AT GETHSEMANE, NOV. 17, 1933.” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, LC-M33- 4218.

In mid-October of 1937, he fled from hiding in Palestine to Beirut. Two years later and six weeks after the outbreak of World War II, in mid-October of 1939, he slipped to Baghdad, where his sympathies for the Italian fascists further alarmed the British. Fast-forward another two years to late 1941, and al-Husseini is in Europe, meeting with Benito Mussolini on the 27th of October, and on the 28th of November meeting with the Führer himself at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

Al-Husseini’s motivation for embracing the Axis was likely a combination of selfish political opportunism and the belief that the alignment would help safeguard against the takeover of Palestine by the Zionists. The reasoning, however grotesque, was the same used by Lehi (the ‘Stern Gang’) in its own attempted collaboration with the fascists: Britain was the obstacle both to Palestinian liberation, and to unbridled Zionism, and for both the Mufti and Lehi, defeating that obstacle meant embracing its enemies. Even the ‘mainstream’ David Ben-Gurion had no moral qualms about taking advantage of Britain’s struggle against the Nazis — a struggle for which his Jewish Agency was already conspicuously unhelpful — by exploiting Britain’s post-war vulnerabilities.[2]

Posterity has treated Lehi’s and the Mufti’s flirtations with the fascists quite differently. Lehi, the most fanatical of the major Zionist terror organizations, was transformed into freedom fighters, and ex-Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir was twice elected as Israeli Prime Minister. In contrast, Zionist leaders quickly seized on al-Husseini’s past to smear not just him, but the Palestinians as a people, as Nazis.

The use of al-Husseini’s unsavory history to ‘justify’ anti-Palestinian racism continues to the present day. Most bizarrely, in 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Hitler had not intended to exterminate the Jews — that is, not until al-Husseini planted the words in his ear — which translates as “got the idea from the Palestinians”. A private citizen would likely have been arrested under German law for this attempt to rewrite the Holocaust.

THE MUFTI OF JERUSALEM, SAYID AMIN AL HUSSEINI, MEETS WITH HITLER, NOVEMBER 1941.

Iraq won limited independence in 1932, just before the Nazis came to power. When the Mufti ensconced himself in Iraq seven years later, the country was under nominally ‘pro-British’ Prime Ministers, and Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah for the four-year-old king, Faisal II. This uneasy British-Iraqi equilibrium ended on first day of April 1941, when four Iraqi officers known as the Golden Square, wanting full independence (and similarly aligning themselves with the fascists in the foolish belief that doing so would help them get it), staged a coup d’état. It lasted two months. British troops ousted the coup on the first day of June — and as they did, anti-Jewish riots rocked Baghdad. An estimated 180 Jewish Iraqis were killed and 240 wounded in this pogrom known as the Farhud.

Why would the momentary power vacuum of the British takeover lead to anti-Jewish terror? While doing research for my 2016 book, State of Terror, I was intrigued by the claim of one Iraqi Jewish witness, Naeim Giladi, that these ‘Arab’ riots were orchestrated by the British to justify their return to power.[3] Indeed, the riots seemed unnatural in a society where Jews had lived for two and a half millennia, and the “pro-Axis” Golden Square takeover two months earlier had not precipitated any such pogrom. Yet it was also true that Zionism had created ethnic resentment, and Giladi did not question that junior officers of the Iraqi army were involved in the violence. The evidence provided by Giladi was compelling enough to seek out clues among British source documents that were not available to him.

And that, along with the hope of shedding new light on the Mufti’s pro-fascist activities, brought me to the archive at issue and my qualified (redacted) success in getting the first part declassified– officially titled, CO 733/420/19. Not surprisingly, much of the file focused on legitimate worry over the Mufti’s dealings with the Italian fascists. Some of the British voices recorded considered him to be a serious threat to the war effort, and a report entitled “Inside Information” spoke of the Mufti’s place in an alleged “German shadow government in Arabia”. Others dismissed this as “typical of the sort of stuff which literary refugees put into their memoirs in order to make them dramatic” and suggested that the Mufti’s influence was overstated.

Whatever the case, by October 1940, the Foreign Office was considering various methods for “putting an end to the Mufti’s intrigues with the Italians”, and by mid-November,

it was decided that the only really effective means of securing a control over him [the Mufti] would be a military occupation of Iraq.

British plans of a coup were no longer mere discussion, but a plan already in progress:

We may be able to clip the Mufti’s wings when we can get a new Government in Iraq. F.O. [Foreign Office] are working on this”.

So, the British were already working on re-occupying Iraq five months before the April 1941 ‘Golden Square’ coup.

A prominent thread of the archive was: How to effect a British coup without further alienating ‘the Arab world’ in the midst of the war, beyond what the empowering of Zionism had already done? Harold MacMichael, High Commissioner for Palestine, suggested the idea “that documents incriminating the Mufti have been found in Libya” that can be used to embarrass him among his followers; but others “felt some hesitation … knowing, as we should, there was no truth in the statement.”

But frustratingly, the trail stops in late 1940; to know anything conclusive we need the second part’s forbidden ten pages: CO 733/420/19/1.

The redacted first part partially supports, or at least does not challenge, Giladi’s claim. It proves that Britain was planning regime change and sought a pretext, but gives no hint as to whether ethnic violence was to be that pretext. Interestingly, Lehi had at the time reached the same conclusion as Giladi: its Communique claimed that “Churchill’s Government is responsible for the pogrom in Baghdad”.[4]

Does the public have the right to see still-secret archives such as CO 733/420/19/1? In this case, the gatekeepers claimed to be protecting us from the Forbidden Fruit of “curiosity”: They claimed to be distinguishing between “information that would benefit the public good”, and “information that would meet public curiosity”, and decided on our behalf that this archive fit the latter.[1] We are to believe that an eight-decade-old archive on an important issue remains sealed because it would merely satisfy our lust for salacious gossip.

Perhaps no assessment of past British manipulation in Iraq would have given pause to the Blair government before signing on to the US’s vastly more catastrophic Iraqi ‘regime change’ of 2003, promoted with none of 1940’s hesitation about using forged ‘African’ documents — this time around Niger, instead of Libya. But history has not even a chance of teaching us, if its lessons are kept hidden from the people themselves.

Note: According to Giladi, the riots of 1941 “gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq” that would culminate with the (proven) Israeli false-flag ‘terrorism’ that emptied most of Iraq’s Jewish population a decade later. Documents in Kew seen by the author support this. But to be sure, the Zionists were not connected with the alleged British maneuvers of 1941.

1. Correspondence from the UK government, explaining its refusal to allow me access to CO 733/420/19/1:

Section 23(1) (security bodies and security matters): We have considered whether the balance of the public interest favours releasing or withholding this information. After careful consideration, we have determined that the public interest in releasing the information you have requested is outweighed by the public interest in maintaining the exemption. It is in the public interest that our security agencies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that would assist those determined to undermine the security of the country and its citizens.

The judiciary differentiates between information that would benefit the public good and information that would meet public curiosity. It does not consider the latter to be a ‘public interest’ in favour of disclosure. In this case, disclosure would neither meaningfully improve transparency nor assist public debate, and disclosure would not therefore benefit the public good.

2. Ben-Gurion looked ahead to when the end of the war would leave Britain militarily weakened and geographically dispersed, and economically ruined. He cited the occupation of Vilna by the Poles after World War I as a precedent for the tactic. For him, the end of WWII only presented an opportunity for the takeover of Palestine with less physical resistance; it also left Britain at the mercy of the United States for economic relief, which the Jewish Agency exploited by pressuring US politicians to make that assistance contingent on supporting Zionist claims to Palestine. At a mid-December 1945 secret meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, Ben-Gurion stressed that “our activities should be directed from Washington and not from London”, noting that “Jewish influence in America is powerful and able to cause damage to the interests of Great Britain”, as it “depends to a great extent on America economically” and would “not be able to ignore American pressure if we succeed in bringing this pressure to bear”. He lauded Rabbi Abba Silver in the US for his aggressiveness on the issue, while noting that he was nonetheless “a little fanatical and may go too far”. (TNA, FO 1093/508). The Irgun was more direct in 1946, stating that Britain’s commuting of two terrorists’ death sentences and other accommodations to the Zionists “has been done with the sole purpose to calm American opposition against the American loan to Britain”. (TNA, KV 5-36). Meanwhile, in the US that year Rabbi Silver’s bluntness on the tactic worried Moshe Shertok (a future prime minister). Although like Ben-Gurion, Shertok said that “we shall exploit to the maximum the American pressure on the British Government”, in particular the pre-election period (and in particular New York), but urged “care and wisdom in this” so as not to give ammunition to “anti-Zionists and the anti-semites in general”. Shertok criticized Silver for saying publicly that “he and his supporters opposed the loan to be granted to the British Government”. (TNA, CO 537/1715)

3. Suárez, Thomas, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel[Skyscraper, 2016, and Interlink, 2017]; In Arabic, هكذا أقيمت المستعمرة [Kuwait, 2018]; in French, Comment le terrorisme a créé Israël[Investig’Action, 2019]
Giladi, Naeim, Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews [Dandelion, 2006]

4. Lehi, Communique, No. 21/41, dated 1st of August 1941

Update: This post originally referred to the “four-year-old Prime Minister, ‘Abd al-Ilah,” not the four-year-old King Faisal under Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah. Commenter Jon S. corrected us, and the post has been changed.

The day the Mufti died

Yes, Hajj Amin al-Husayni collaborated with the Nazis, but that’s not why he was dropped from the Palestinian narrative

Martin Kramer, Times of Israel Blogs, July 5, 202

Please note that the posts on The Blogs are contributed by third parties. The opinions, facts and any media content in them are presented solely by the authors, and neither The Times of Israel nor its partners assume any responsibility for them. Please contact us in case of abuse. In case of abuse,

“To His Eminence the Grand Mufti as a memento. H. Himmler. July 4, 1943.” Israel State Archives.

Fifty years ago, on July 4, 1974, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, passed away in Beirut, Lebanon, at the American University Hospital. At age 79, he died of natural causes. The Mufti had faded from the headlines a decade earlier. In 1961, his name had resurfaced numerous times during the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann. But a couple of years later, the Palestinian cause gained a new face in Yasser Arafat. With that, the Mufti entered his final eclipse.

When he died, the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem asked the Israeli authorities for permission to bury him in the city. Israel refused the request. Any Palestinian who wanted to attend the funeral in Lebanon would be allowed to do so, but the Mufti of Jerusalem would not be buried in Jerusalem. Instead, the Mufti was laid to rest in the Palestinian “Martyrs’ Cemetery” in Beirut.

The Mufti was appointed to his position by the British in 1921. Within the British Empire, authorities preferred to work through “native” institutions, even if they had to create them on the fly. So they established a supreme council for Palestine’s Muslims and placed the Mufti at its helm. Although he lacked religious qualifications, he came from a leading family and appeared capable of striking deals.

In fact, he used his position to oppose the Jewish “National Home” policy of the Mandate. The “Arab Revolt” of 1936 finally convinced the British that he had to go, and in 1937 he fled the country.

After a period in Lebanon, he ended up in Iraq, where he helped foment a coup against the pro-British regime. When British forces suppressed the coup, he fled again, making his way through Tehran and Rome to Berlin. There, the Nazi regime used him to stir up Arabs and Muslims against the Allies. He was photographed with Hitler and Himmler, recruited Muslims to fight for the Axis, and attempted to secure promises of independence for colonized Arabs and Muslims. None of his efforts met with much success. His role, if any, in the Holocaust is a contested matter. Hitler and his henchmen hardly needed any prompting to execute their genocidal plans. Clearly, though, the Mufti rooted for Jewish destruction from the fifty-yard line.

After the Nazi collapse, he fell into French hands and spent a year in comfortable house detention near Paris. Later, he fled to Egypt and subsequently moved in and out of Syria and Lebanon. Following the Arab debacle of 1948, Egypt established an “All Palestine Government” in the refugee-choked Gaza Strip, leaving the presidency open for the Mufti. It didn’t last long. He continued to maneuver through Arab politics, but he was yesterday’s man to a new generation of Palestinians born in exile. During the Eichmann trial, the prosecution sought to implicate the Mufti as an accomplice. Yet the Mossad never came after him, and he didn’t die a martyr’s death.

Man without a country

The Mufti was a formidable politician. In 1951, a State Department-CIA profile of him opened with this evocative enumeration of his many talents, which is worth quoting at length:

King of no country, having no army, exiled, forever poised for flight from one country to another in disguise, he has survived because of his remarkable ability to play the British against the French, the French against the British, and the Americans against both; and also because he has become a symbol among the Arabs for defending them against the Zionists. His suave penchant for intrigue, his delicate manipulation of one Arab faction against another, combined with the popularity of his slogan of a united Muslim world, has made him a symbol and a force in the Middle East that is difficult to cope with and well nigh impossible to destroy. The names of Machiavelli, Richelieu, and Metternich come to mind to describe him, yet none of these apply. Alone, without a state, he plays an international game on behalf of his fellow Muslims. That they are ungrateful, unprepared, and divided by complex and innumerable schisms, does not deter him from his dream.

Profilers would later write similar things about Arafat, but the Mufti had none of Arafat’s cultivated dishevelment. He was manicured, even chic:

The Mufti is a man of striking appearance. Vigorous, erect, and proud, like a number of Palestinian Arabs he has pink-white skin and blue eyes. His hair and beard, formerly a foxy red, is now grey. He always wears an ankle length black robe and a tarbush wound with a spotless turban. Part of his charm lies in his deep Oriental courtesy; he sees a visitor not only to the door, but to the gate as well, and speeds him on his way with blessings. Another of his assets is his well-modulated voice and his cultured Arabic vocabulary. He can both preach and argue effectively, and is well versed in all the problems of Islam and Arab nationalism. His mystical devotion to his cause, which is indivisibly bound up with his personal and family aggrandizement, has been unflagging, and he has never deviated from his theme. For his numerous illiterate followers, such political consistency and simplicity has its advantages. The Mufti has always known well how to exploit Muslim hatred of ‘infidel’ rule.

So why did the Mufti fade into obscurity? (By 1951, he was on his way out.) Many mistakenly believe his collaboration with Hitler and the Nazis discredited him. It didn’t. Not only did the Arabs not care, but Western governments eyed the Mufti with self-interest. The general view in foreign ministries held that he had picked the wrong side in the war, but not more than that.

The above-quoted American report expressed this view perfectly: “While the Zionists consider him slightly worse than Mephistopheles and have used him as a symbol of Nazism, this is false. He cared nothing about Nazism and did not work well with Germans. He regarded them merely as instruments to be used for his own aims.” If so, why not open a discreet line to him and let him roam the world unimpeded?

Nakba stigma

What finally discredited the Mufti in Arab opinion, where it mattered most, was his role in the 1948 war. It was a war he wanted and believed his side would win. In late 1947, the British sent someone to see if there might be some behind-the-scenes flexibility in his stance on partition, which he had completely rejected. There wasn’t. He explained:

As regards the withdrawal of British troops from Palestine, we would not mind. We do not fear the Jews, their Stern, Irgun, Haganah. We might lose at first. We would have many losses, but in the end we must win. Remember Mussolini, who talked of 8,000,000 bayonets, who bluffed the world that he had turned the macaronis back into Romans. For 21 years he made this bluff, and what happened when his Romans were put to the test? They crumbled into nothing. So with the Zionists. They will eventually crumble into nothing, and we do not fear the result, unless of course Britain or America or some other Great Power intervenes. Even then we shall fight and the Arab world will be perpetually hostile. Nor do we want you to substitute American or United Nations troops for the British. That would be even worse. We want no foreign troops. Leave us to fight it out ourselves.

This underestimation of the Zionists proved disastrous, even more so than his overestimation of the Axis. He later wrote his memoirs, blaming “imperialist” intervention, Arab internal divisions, and world Zionist mind-control for the 1948 defeat. To no avail: his name became inseparable from the Nakba, the loss of Arab Palestine to the Jews. His reputation hit rock bottom, along with that of the other failed Arab rulers of 1948.

Upon his death in 1974, he received a grand sendoff in Beirut from the PLO. In 1970, Arafat had transferred the PLO headquarters from Jordan to Lebanon, and the funeral finalized his status as the sole leader of the Palestinian people. Four months later, Arafat addressed the world from the podium of the UN General Assembly, achieving an international legitimacy that the Mufti could never have imagined.

The PLO then dropped the Mufti from the Palestinian narrative; nothing bears his name. Even Hamas, which inherited his uncompromising rigidity and Jew-hatred, doesn’t include him in their pantheon. (Their man is Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a firebrand “martyr” killed by the British in 1935.)

If anyone still dwells on the Mufti, it’s the Israelis, including their current prime minister, who find him useful as a supposed link between the Palestinian cause and Nazism. One can understand Palestinians who push back on this; the Mufti was no Eichmann. But that doesn’t excuse Palestinian reluctance to wrestle candidly with the Mufti’s legacy. He personified the refusal to see Israel as it is and an unwillingness to imagine a compromise. Until Palestinians exorcise his ghost, it will continue to haunt them.

The many lives of an unsung Anzac hero

July 27, 2024August 12, 2024Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Once upon a war

Back in the last century, before ANZAC Day became the secular Christmas that it has become, before marketing people and populist politicians saw its commercial and political potential, before the fatal shore became a crowded place of annual pilgrimage, my Turkish friend, the late Naim Mehmet Turfan, gave me a grainy picture of a Turkish soldier at Gelibolu carrying a large howitzer shell on his back. Then there was this great film by Australian director Peter Weir, starring young Mel Gibson and Mark Lee. There were these images of small boats approaching a dark and alien shore, of Light Horsemen sadly farewelling their Walers as they embarked as infantry, and of the doomed Colonel Barton humming along to a gramophone recording of Bizet’s beautiful duet from The Pearl Fishers, ‘Au fond du temple saint’ before joining his men in the forlorn hope of The Nek …

At the heart of the Anzac Day remembrance is the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’ role the Dardanelles campaign of 1915-16, Winston Churchill’s grandiose and ill-conceived plan to take the Ottoman Empire out of the war by seizing the strategic strait between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, thereby threatening Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. It was a military failure. From the initial seaborne assault to the evacuation, it lasted eight months and cost 114,000 lives with 230,000 wounded.

In 1915, Australians greeted the landings at Gallipoli with unbridled enthusiasm as a nation-making event. But it wasn’t long before they were counting the dreadful cost. More than 8000 Australians died during the Gallipoli campaign. As a loyal member of the British Empire, Australia eventually sent 330,000 men overseas to fight for the King. Volunteers all, not all of them white men – despite the authorities’ policy of recruiting only Australians of Anglo-Celtic stock, their ranks included many indigenous, Chinese and others. By the time the war ended in 1918, 60,000 of them were dead. As the late historian Ken Inglis once pointed out: “If we count as family a person’s parents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins, then every second Australian family was bereaved by the war.

Gallipoli is cited as the crucible of Australian nationhood, but the Anzacs’ part in the doomed campaign was but a sideshow of the wider campaign. Although it is celebrated in Australian song and story, it was the Ottomans’ most significant victory in the war that was to destroy the seven-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire secure the reputation of its most successful general Mustafa Kemal, who as Ataturk, became the founder of modern Turkey.

Some thirty-four thousand British soldiers died on the peninsula, including 3,400 Irishmen who are remembered In The Foggy Dew, one of the most lyrical and poignant of the Irish rebel songs: Right proudly high over Dublin town, they hung out the flag of war. ‘Twas better to die ‘neath that Irish sky than at Suvla or at Sud el Bar…Twas England bade our Wild Geese go that small nations might be free, But their lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves or the fringe of the grey North Sea.

Ten thousand Frenchmen perished too, many of these being “colonial” troops from West and North Africa. Australia lost near on ten thousand and New Zealand three. Some 1,400 Indian soldiers perished for the King Emperor. Fifty seven thousand allied soldiers died, and seventy five thousand were wounded. The Ottoman army lost fifty seven thousand men, and one hundred and seven thousand were wounded (although these figures are probably much higher). An overlooked fact is that some two thirds of the “Turkish” solders in Kemal’s division were actually Arabs from present day Syrian and Palestine. Gallipoli was indeed a multicultural microcosm of a world at war.

Whilst the flower of antipodean youth is said to have perished on Gallipoli’s fatal shore, this was just the overture. Anzac troops were dispatched to the Western Front, and between 1919 and 1918, 45,000 Aussies died there and 124,000 were wounded.

Once upon a war, the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915-16 was a sideshow to the bigger theatres of the Eastern and Western Fronts. To some, it was a reminder that they could not stomach Winston Churchill for this was said to be his greatest stuff up in a career replete with such (although they would admit that he more than exonerated himself his and Britain’s Finest Hour). For many Australians and New Zealanders, it was a national baptism of fire, of youthful sacrifice on the altar of Empire. And notwithstanding the military defeat and retreat, the folly and foolhardiness, in the harrowing adversity and heroism, lay the bones of a young country’s enduring creation myth.
Former soldier James Brown, Anzac’s Long Shadow

Official war historian Charles Bean went ashore at Anzac Cove on 25 April, more than 5 hours after the first troops. Here is his first dispatch (it was not published in Australia until 13th May):

It was eighteen minutes past four on the morning of Sunday, 25th April, when the first boat grounded. So far not a shot had been fired by the enemy. Colonel McLagan’s orders to his brigade were that shots, if possible, were not to be fired till daybreak, but the business was to be carried through with the bayonet. The men leapt into the water, and the first of them had just reached the beach when fire was opened on them from the trenches on the foothills which rise immediately from the beach. The landing place consists of a small bay about half-a-mile from point to point with two much larger bays north and south. The country rather resembles the Hawkesbury River country in New South Wales, the hills rising immediately from the sea to 600 feet [183m]. To the north these ridges cluster to a summit nearly 1,000 feet [305m] high. Further northward the ranges become even higher. The summit just mentioned sends out a series of long ridges running south-westward, with steep gullies between them, very much like the hills and gullies about the north of Sydney, covered with low scrub very similar to a dwarfed gum tree scrub. The chief difference is that there are no big trees, but many precipices and sheer slopes of gravel. One ridge comes down to the sea at the small bay above mentioned and ends in two knolls about 100 feet [30m] high, one at each point of the bay.

It was from these that fire was first opened on the troops as they landed. Bullets struck fireworks out of the stones along the beach. The men did not wait to be hit, but wherever they landed they simply rushed straight up the steep slopes. Other small boats which had cast off from the warships and steam launches which towed them, were digging for the beach with oars. These occupied the attention of the Turks in the trenches, and almost before the Turks had time to collect their senses, the first boatloads were well up towards the trenches. Few Turks awaited the bayonet. It is said that one huge Queenslander swung his rifle by the muzzle, and, after braining one Turk, caught another and flung him over his shoulder. I do not know if this story is true, but when we landed some hours later, there was said to have been a dead Turk on the beach with his head smashed in. It is impossible to say which battalion landed first, because several landed together. The Turks in the trenches facing the landing had run, but those on the other flank and on the ridges and gullies still kept up a fire upon the boats coming in shore, and that portion of the covering force which landed last came under a heavy fire before it reached the beach. The Turks had a machine gun in the valley on our left, and this seems to have been turned on to the boats containing part of the Twelfth Battalion. Three of these boats are still lying on the beach some way before they could be rescued. Two stretcher-bearers of the Second Battalion who went along the beach during the day to effect a rescue were both shot by the Turks. Finally, a party waited for dark, and crept along the beach, rescuing nine men who had been in the boats two days, afraid to move for fear of attracting fire. The work of the stretcher-bearers all through a week of hard fighting has been beyond all praise.

And this was just the beginning …

More on the Anzacs in In That Howling Infinite: Tel al Sabi – Tarkeeth’s ANZAC Story

On 27th July 2024, the Australian published extracts from a recently published biography of Henry Koba Freame, adventurer, soldier, orchardist and interpreter. It provides such a stirring account of the landing of Australian soldiers at what is now Anzac Cove on 25th April 2015 and the subsequent Gallipoli campaign that it was worth republishing below. But first, a brief summary of Freame’s eventful life.

The road to Gallipoli

Wykeham Henry Koba Freame is believed to have been born on 28 February 1885 at Osaka, Japan, though on his enlistment in the Australian Imperial Force he gave his birthplace as Kitscoty, Canada. He was the son of Henry Freame, sometime teacher of English at the Kai-sei Gakko in Japan, and a Japanese woman, Shizu, née Kitagawa. As he was fluent in Japanese and spoke English with an accent it is likely that he was brought up in Japan. In 1906 he was a merchant seaman and on 19 July of that year married Edith May Soppitt at St John’s Anglican Church, Middlesbrough, England.

Freame probably came to Australia in 1911 and on enlisting in the A.I.F. on 28 August 1914 described himself as a horse-breaker of Glen Innes, New South Wales. Posted to the 1st Battalion as a private, he embarked for Egypt on the troopship Afric on 18 October and was promoted lance corporal on 7 January 1915. On 25 April he landed at Anzac and after three days of heavy fighting was promoted sergeant. He was awarded one of the A.I.F.’s first Distinguished Conduct Medals for ‘displaying the utmost gallantry in taking water to the firing-line although twice hit by snipers’. He was mentioned in dispatches for his work at Monash Valley in June when Charles Bean described him as ‘probably the most trusted scout at Anzac’.

Having served in the Hottentot rising of 1904-06 in German East Africa and in the Mexican wars, Freame was an accomplished scout before joining the A.I.F. He had an uncanny sense of direction and would wriggle like an eel deep into no man’s land, and at night even into enemy trenches, to pick up information. His dark complexion and peculiar intonation of speech had led his companions to believe that he was Mexican—an impression which he reinforced at Anzac where, in cowboy fashion, he carried two revolvers in holsters on his belt, another in a holster under his armpit and a bowie knife in his boot pocket. On 15 August he was wounded during operations at Lone Pine and was evacuated to Australia. He was discharged as medically unfit on 20 November 1916.

Freame settled on the Kentucky estate in New England, New South Wales, when the estate was subdivided for a soldier settlement scheme, and was appointed government storekeeper. He eventually acquired a Kentucky block and was a successful orchardist. His wife died in 1939 and on 16 August 1940 he married Harriett Elizabeth Brainwood, nurse and divorced petitioner, at St John’s Anglican Church, Milson’s Point, Sydney. With the outbreak of World War II he offered his services to the Australian Military Forces and in December 1939 was planted among the Japanese community in Sydney as an agent by military intelligence. In September 1940 he was appointed as an interpreter on the staff of the first Australian legation to Tokyo.

Early in April 1941, however, Freame returned to Australia because of ill health and was admitted to North Sydney Hospital suffering from a severe throat condition which greatly impaired his speech. He died on 27 May and was buried in Northern Suburbs cemetery with Anglican rites. His death certificate records the cause of death as cancer though Freame himself and later his wife alleged that he had been the victim of a garrotting in Japan. He considered that the attack was the consequence of the injudicious wording of the announcement in the Australian press of his posting to Tokyo. He had been described as employed by the Defence Department at a time when he was telling his Japanese acquaintances another story. Extant evidence provides no definite clarification of the circumstances of his death, though the claim of garrotting was investigated, and rejected, at the time.

James W. Courtney, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 8,1981

How did we forget this Anzac hero?

Ryan Butta, The Australian, 26 July 2024

Harry Freame in 1915 before departing for Gallipoli

In the years after World War I, Harry Freame had a legitimate claim to be considered the most famous Anzac soldier to have landed at Gallipoli. Born in Japan and raised as a Samurai, he was the recipient of the first Distinguished Conduct Medal to be awarded to an Australian soldier for his efforts in those first bloody days of Gallipoli, and his name was legend among the Australian troops who had fought that tragic battle. As the landing turned into trench warfare, the troops knew Harry risked his neck each night to venture out into no-man’s land and map the Turkish defences.

Harry was on personal terms with the key Anzac commanders, and in the postwar years generals would visit him and reminisce about the war. Australia’s official war historian for World War I, Charles Bean, who first met Harry in June 1915, was fascinated by Harry his whole life. The Australian public came to know Harry through the newspapers of the day that splashed his wartime exploits of courage and daring across their pages.

What became of him?

The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli by Ryan Butta

Harry Freame’s boots hit the sands of Anzac Cove at around 7.40am on April 25, 1915. He was part of D Company, 1st Battalion. By the time they landed, Anzac Beach, as it came to be known, was already strewn with the broken and bloodied bodies of the men and pack animals that had come before them on that infamous morning.

It wasn’t Harry’s first sight of the region – he had sailed this way before – and it wasn’t his first taste of war.

There is a picture of Harry taken before the landing, most likely in Egypt. In it he is in full uniform, flat-brimmed hat, a bandana tied around his neck, wire clippers and binoculars attached to his belt. He holds his Lee–Enfield full wood .303 rifle by the barrel, the butt resting on the ground. He is looking slightly downwards at the camera. There is none of the naive merriment so often seen in the pictures of young Australian soldiers who had mistaken war for a great boys’ own adventure. But nor is there any fear in those eyes. Harry knew what he was in for, and he was ready for it.

As he waded through the waist-high water towards the sand, Harry carried in his pack three days’ rations and an extra 150 rounds of ammunition. He would have heeded the warning of Lieutenant General William Birdwood, the British officer in overall command of the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) forces, who had advised the troops prior to landing to drink as much water as they could, as once ashore supply of food and water could not be guaranteed for at least three days.

The landing itself had been rehearsed as much as possible on the nearby Greek islands, under conditions nothing like what Harry and the rest of the Anzacs would soon face, but as the 1st Battalion’s official war diary records, “we knew very little of the actual plans for the attack – in fact, the whole thing seemed to be rather in the air, and so it proved”.

All that the officers of the 1st Battalion knew was that the 3rd Brigade was to land first and rush the enemy positions. When Harry and D Company landed on Anzac Beach, they had no idea what success, if any, the 3rd Brigade had had. Judging by the dead and dying who littered the beach, staining the Aegean waters red, and the enemy bullets and shells that whistled around their heads and whipped the waves to foam, it could be easily believed that none of the 3rd Brigade had survived that hellfire of a dawn.

Harry at age the age of 24

■ ■ ■

Harry’s battalion formed up just north of Anzac Beach, in the shadow of Ari Burnu, sheltered from the murderous fire being poured down upon the landing from the peaks of Gaba Tepe, and waited for orders. When the orders came, they “were very vague”, alluding to nothing more than the need for the battalion to reinforce the firing line. But to reinforce a firing line, you needed to first find the firing line, and when the men looked up towards the imposing ridges and valleys that confronted them, there was no firing line.

The ridges above the beaches were crawling with pockets of men, some engaged in isolated fights, hand-to-hand combat wherein they lived or died by the thrust of their bayonets or the quickness of their wits.

Recalling that bloody morning, poet John Masefield wrote:

“All over the broken hills there were isolated fights to the death, men falling into gullies and being bayoneted, sudden duels, point blank, where men crawling through the scrub met each other and life went to the quicker finger, heroic deaths, where some half section which had lost touch were caught by ten times their strength and charged and died.

“No man of our side knew that cracked and fissured jungle. Men broke through it on to machine guns, or showed up on a crest and were blown to pieces, or leaped down from it into some sap or trench, to catch the bombs flung at them and hurl them at the thrower.

“Going as they did, up cliffs, through scrub, over ground … they passed many hidden Turks, who were thus left to shoot them in the back or to fire down at the boats, from perhaps only fifty yards away.”

■ ■ ■

The firing line, a concept easily imagined in the safety of an officer’s headquarters, was non-existent on the actual field of battle. On that first morning there was just a mad rush for high ground, up the forbidding slopes and into the ridges and valleys that held not only Turkish and German and Syrian troops and gunners but also the hope of cover and survival.

A primeval need to push further and further inland gripped the soldiers, in the hope that there, beyond the next valley, the next ridge, lay safety.

By 10am, with clothes still heavy with sea water after the landing and many of their rifles jammed with sand, now useful only for bayonet thrusts and charges, Harry and what elements of D Company were able to be formed up left the beach and set off for the ridges. Coming upon officers from the 3rd Battalion, D Company was redirected to the hill known as Baby 700, where reinforcements were urgently needed.

Through dense, waist-high scrub of gorse-like bushes and along the dried-up water courses littered with boulders, the men forged ahead uphill, legs heavy but the words of the commanding officers to advance, advance, advance running through their heads. Many of the men of D Company who fought their way up towards Baby 700 that clear bright morning would etch their names into the history of the Anzacs and the 1st Battalion: Major FJ Kindon, second-in-command of 1st Battalion; Major Blair Swannell, commanding officer of D Company; Captain Harold Jacobs, second-in-command of D Company; Lieutenant Geoffrey Street; and Captain Alfred Shout, the man who would leave Gallipoli the most decorated soldier of all, though sadly not with his life. And beside Shout, as was so often the case in the blood-soaked months that followed, in lock step, there was Lance Corporal Harry Freame.

Strategically important, Baby 700 had been the focus of intense fighting all morning, with remnants of the Australian 9th, 11th and 12th battalions all joining the battle as the Turkish troops advanced and retreated in a series of intense skirmishes conducted under the continuous hail of shrapnel fire from unseen Turkish positions. The approaches to Baby 700 were complicated by folds of ridges and valleys, and in these the Australian men became detached from their companies and lost until they could connect up with other Australian soldiers, sometimes from their own company, sometimes not.

Freame at his final Anzac Day march, in 1940.

By 11am, Harry and D Company had reached The Nek, a thin strip of ridge that connected to Baby 700. The area was being held by Captain Lalor and men of the 12th Battalion. Lalor was the grandson of Peter Lalor, the man who had led the revolt at Eureka. With him on that morning on the approaches to Baby 700, Lalor carried a magnificent sword, said to be the one used by his grandfather at that famous stockade. Swords had been prohibited to be carried during the landing, but Lalor had disregarded the order.

Across The Nek on the slopes of Baby 700, Turkish troops were gathering. Joining up with Lalor’s group, the newly arrived men of D Company formed up and charged the Turkish troops, driving them back into a gully before advancing up Baby 700.

After reaching the summit, D Company started to dig into that hardscrabble ground. The Turkish troops they had driven before them had retreated, but only to a previously unseen trench, and from here they poured heavy fire on the entrenching D Company. It was here that D Company’s commander, Major Blair Swannell, was killed on that first morning, shot dead just as he had earlier predicted he would be to his mates aboard the Minnewaska in the predawn fog before the landing.

Against the fierce Turkish assault, the Australians had only their rifles (when they worked), bayonets and pistols. The naval guns offered no support, as those manning them were afraid of firing on their own troops in the complicated mess of invaders and invaded that swarmed the hills of the peninsula.

A few artillery guns had been brought ashore at midday but were then ordered to be sent back out to the boats. Other commanders had refused to allow their guns to be landed, such was the chaos on the beaches, and it wasn’t until dusk that the first artillery guns came into action in support of the Australian troops.

The Australian firing line on Baby 700 could not hold, and over the course of the morning the Australian troops moved over the summit only to be thrown back by vicious counterattacks no fewer than five times.

In the midst of the fighting, there was Harry Freame, moving from position to position, scouting the ground and enemy positions, running messages between commanding officers.

At one point Harry and a small group of men drove a contingent of Turkish troops from a trench. But having gained the trench they found they were then held in place by persistent enemy fire. The men hadn’t heeded the words of Lieutenant General Birdwood, and who could blame them, and they were out of water, exhausted and near death. Without water they felt that they would soon perish or be forced to surrender.

Harry called for volunteers to brave the bullets and shrapnel and go for water. None raised a hand or spoke a word, so over the side of the trench he went, collecting water bottles from those who would never thirst again, fallen soldiers whose twisted repose could never be mistaken for the sleeping, a last look, a last thought of home or their best girl held fast in a glassy eye like a butterfly trapped in amber.

When Harry returned, he brought not only precious water but food and pickaxes for the grateful men.

All day the fighting raged on Baby 700, with ground taken then lost, the attackers and counterattackers continually changing roles, the air perfumed with the smell of the wild thyme that had been lashed by the bullets and shrapnel bursts. And as the day stretched on, still the men had no idea where the firing line was, only supposing that it was somewhere ahead of them, always somewhere over the next ridge, and that they must get to it. And if they could not advance, then at all costs they tried to hold on to whatever patch of land they had come to stop on.

At around 4.30pm, as D Company, reinforced now with New Zealand troops, fought to hold the right side of the Baby 700 slope, a massive Turkish counterattack was launched that peeled the Australians off the slope. Alfred Shout, who had been with Lalor when he was killed, had earlier left Harry and fourteen men at The Nek with orders to hold it no matter what. The small group came under intense fire and before long only nine men were left, and by the time Shout returned, retreating from Baby 700, only Harry and one other man held the position. The rest lay dead or dying about them. Shout ordered them both to follow him in retreat towards the beach.

After regrouping on the beach, Shout and Harry then set about rounding up men from various battalions, a combination of the stragglers and shirkers, the lost and the shell-shocked. Harry collected around two hundred men and led them back up the slopes to reinforce the New Zealand troops who were holding Walker’s Ridge, a key position leading back to Baby 700, which was by now firmly in Turkish hands.

■ ■ ■

Recording the efforts of Lance Corporal Harry Freame on that chaotic first day at Anzac Cove, official war correspondent Charles Bean wrote:

“With such fighters as Lieutenant A.J. Shout, Lieutenant G.A. Street and Lieutenant Jacobs, all of his own battalion, he and others held vital positions in that constantly moving and changing fight but none was so ubiquitous as he, now holding a key position on The Nek leading to Baby 700, now finding for his commander the scattered parts of his battalion.”

As night fell on the evening of April 25, the fighting abated only somewhat; rifle fire and shrapnel bursts echoed through the night. At around midnight, Lieutenant General Birdwood sent an urgent message to his commander-in-chief, Sir Ian Hamilton, urging an immediate evacuation of the peninsula. Hamilton, from the comfort of the HMS Queen Elizabeth, was having none of it, advising Birdwood that he had “got through the difficult business and you have only to dig, dig, dig until you are safe”.

Freame with his stepsister in 1898.

The following morning, April 26, the hills of the peninsula rang with the sounds of shovels, digging, digging, digging. Those not digging or engaged in holding a position were out scouring the ravines and hillsides for the wounded and missing, and it was while thus engaged that Harry came across a detachment of men under the command of Captain Harold Jacobs sheltering in a trench at Quinn’s Post. The men had had no water to drink and were in a desperate state. Harry offered to go for water and without a second thought braved the enemy fire that came in from unseen snipers and dashed back down the valley from where he had just come. He soon returned with the promised water, allowing the position to be held.

Realising that Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard Dobbin, the company commander, would need information on Captain Jacobs’ position and situation, Harry was again up and over the side of the trench, making his way back down the valley to where Lieutenant-Colonel Dobbin was located. As Harry approached Dobbin’s trench, he was heard to yell out, ‘All right!’ Arriving, he delivered his message to Dobbin. Mission accomplished, it was only then that Harry revealed that on the descent he’d been struck twice by snipers’ bullets, once through the fingers of the left hand and once through the left arm.

For the duration of the fighting at Gallipoli, Quinn’s Post remained the Anzacs’ most advanced position and the key to their defensive positions. It would never have been held if not for the bravery of Harry Freame.

Charles Bean later noted that very few men received decorations for the deeds performed at the Anzac Cove landings. But when the recommendations came out, the name Harry Freame was first among them. His citation read: “Has displayed the utmost gallantry in taking water to the firing line, though twice hit by sniper fire.” Harry’s commanding officer further reported: “Since I have assumed command of the Brigade, Serjeant Freame has almost daily performed some action worthy of recognition in the shape of carrying out night reconnaissance, conveying messages through dangerous zones etc etc. He is a fine fearless soldier who I strongly recommend for recognition.”

■ ■ ■

The recommendation was heeded and Harry, for his work over those first days of Gallipoli, was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. Writing both publicly and privately years after the war, Bean offered the view that Harry should have been awarded the Victoria Cross and that the only reason he wasn’t awarded the VC was because, “Australian commanders hesitated to set up for that hallowed decoration any standard short of the impossible. I think that it is safe to say but for that Harry would have been awarded the highest decoration”.

When I set out to write this book, I wanted to discover why we had forgotten Harry Freame. Why, when our schoolchildren learn of the history of the Anzacs, do they learn more about a donkey than a man who was known at the time as the Marvel of Gallipoli? And I wanted to know why the Australian government covered up their role in the death of Harry Freame, why the man Charles Bean described as probably the most trusted scout at Gallipoli was never believed when he said, “They got me”.

This is an extract from The Bravest Scout At Gallipoli by Ryan Butta (Affirm Press) out now.

Wystan and Christopher’s excellent adventure

June 25, 2024September 9, 2024Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

As evening fell the day’s oppression lifted
Far peaks came into focus, it had rained.
Across wide lawns and cultured flowers drifted
The conversation of the highly trained.
Two gardeners watched them pass and priced their shoes
A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive
For them to finish their exchange of views.
It seemed a picture of the private life.
Far off, no matter what good they intended
The armies waited for a verbal error
With all the instruments for causing pain
And on the issue of their charm depended
A land laid waste, its towns in terror
And all its young men slain.
Embassy, WH Auden, from Journey to a War

In 1938, English writers WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood were commissioned by their publishers to write a travel book about the East. Auden was already established as one of Britain’s foremost poets whilst his friend and onetime lover Isherwood was acclaimed as an author and dramatist. His Berlin Stories, two novels set in the last days of the Weimar Republic and today acclaimed as classics of modern fiction; the semi autobiographical Goodbye to Berlin (1939) inspired the remarkable musical Cabaret (1966).

By adventurous choice they went to China for six months, their journey coinciding with Imperial Japan’s brutal invasion. American poet and educator Mildred Boie, reviewing the book for Atlantic in November 1939, takes up the story:

“With the good fortune of famous and attractive young men they were helped and shown about by everybody from coolies to ambassadors, journalists to generals. They behaved, as they observed and wrote (to judge from the diary), with the engaging frankness and immaturity of English schoolboys, with the ingenious confidence and casual incompleteness of amateurs. But these qualities are inadequate for reporting war, for evaluating life and death in so desperate and disastrously complicated a country as China. The authors were not only amateurs as foreign correspondents, they were also dilettantes: they played at getting to the front, at taking notes on slums, at dashing from formal garden parties to meetings with intellectuals and busy military and diplomatic leaders. They suffered almost as much, certainly as consciously, from blisters, constipation, boredom, sleeplessness, and hangovers as from the shape of poverty, the taste of fear, the sight and smell of death. They were always safe, always outside.”

Collectively, perhaps, we most resemble a group of characters in one of Jules Verne’s stories about lunatic English explorers.

War is bombing an already disused arsenal, missing it and killing a few old women. War is lying in a stable with a gangrenous leg. War is drinking hot water in a barn and worrying about one’s wife. War is a handful of lost and terrified men in the mountains, shooting at something moving in the undergrowth. War is waiting for days with nothing to do; shouting down a dead telephone; going without sleep, or sex, or a wash. War is untidy, inefficient, obscure, and largely a matter of chance.

On their safe return, the pair put together Journey to a War, travel book in prose and verse that was published in 1939. The book is in three parts: a series of poems by Auden describing his and Isherwood’s journey to China in 1938; a “Travel-Diary” by Isherwood (including material first drafted by Auden) about their travels in China itself, and their observations of the Sino-Japanese War; and “In Time of War: A Sonnet Sequence with a Verse Commentary” by Auden, with reflections on the contemporary world and their experiences in China. The book also contains a selection of photographs by Auden.

I am never much good at defending the British Empire, even when drunk
Christopher Isherwood

I republish below an excellent article in the blog Books and Boots – Reflections on Books and Art. It provides a more detailed background to the genesis of the book, setting the geopolitical scene, describing Auden’s anticlimactic and, it would seem, personally disappointing visit to Spain during its civil war, and the poetry within.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, Better read than dead … books, poetry and reading

WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood

Journey To A War by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (1939)

When we awoke early next morning the train was crossing a wide valley of paddy fields. The rising sun struck its beams across the surfaces of innumerable miniature lakes; in the middle distance farmhouses seemed actually to be floating on water. Here and there a low mound rose a few feet above the level of the plain, with a weed-grown, ruinous pagoda, standing upon it, visible for miles around. Peasants with water-buffaloes were industriously ploughing their arable liquid into a thick, brown soup.
(Journey To A War, p.191)

Collectively, perhaps, we most resemble a group of characters in one of Jules Verne’s stories about lunatic English explorers. (p.104)

The Sino-Japanese War

In July 1937 – exactly a year after the start of the Spanish Civil War – Japan attacked China. It was hardly a surprise. In 1931 the so-called ‘Mukden Incident’ had helped spark the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (the large area to the north east of China, just above Beijing). The Chinese were defeated and Japan created a new puppet state, Manchukuo (setting up the last Qing emperor as its puppet ruler) through which to rule Manchuria.

Going further back, in 1894–1895 China, then still under the rule of the Qing dynasty, was defeated by Japan in what came to be called the First Sino-Japanese War. China had been forced to cede Taiwan to Japan and to recognise the independence of Korea which had, in classical times, been under Chinese domination.

In other words, for 40 years the rising power of militaristic, modernising Japan had been slowly nibbling away at rotten China, seizing Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria. Now the military junta in Tokyo decided the time was right to take another bite, engineered an ‘incident’ at the Marco Polo bridge on the trade route to Beijing, and used this as a pretext to attack Beijing in the north and Shanghai in the south.

Thus there was quite a lot of military and political history to get to grips with in order to understand the situation in China, but what made it even more confusing was the fact that China itself was a divided nation. First, the nominal government – the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang under its leader Chiang Kai-shek – had only with difficulty put down or paid off the powerful warlords who for decades had ruled local regions of China after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.

But second, Chiang faced stiff competition from the Chinese Communist Party. The two parties had lived in uneasy alliance until Chiang staged a massacre of communists in Shanghai in 1927 which brought the tension between Chinese nationalists and communists into the open.

It was the three-way destabilisation of China during this period – warlords v. Nationalists v. Communists – which had helped Japan invade and take over Manchuria. Prompted by the 1937 Japanese attack the Nationalists and Communists formed an uneasy alliance.

Auden in Spain

Meanwhile, back in Europe, the great political issue of the age was the Spanish Civil War which began when General Franco led a military uprising against the democratically elected government in July 1936. Like many high-minded, middle class liberals, Auden and Isherwood both felt the time had come to put their money where their mouths were. Auden did actually travel to Spain in January 1937 and was there till March, apparently trying to volunteer to drive an ambulance in the medical service. Instead, red tape and the communists who were increasingly running the Republican forces apparently blocked him from getting a useful job. He tried to help out at the radio station but discovered its broadcasts were weak and there were no vacancies.

Frustrated and embarrassed, Auden was back in England by mid-March 1937. The long-term impact of the trip was his own surprise at how much it upset him to see the churches of Barcelona which had all been torched and gutted by a furious radical populace as symbols of oppression. Auden was shocked, and then shocked at his reaction. Wasn’t he meant to be a socialist, a communist even, like lots of other writers of his generation? The Spain trip was the start of the slow process of realisation which was to lead him back to overt Christian faith in the 1940s.

Also Auden saw at first hand the infighting on the Republican side between the communist party slavishly obeying Stalin’s orders, and the more radical Trotskyite and Anarchist parties who, later in 1937, it would crush. Later he paid credit to George Orwell’s book Homage To Catalonia for explaining the complex political manoeuvring far better than he could have. But watching the Republicans fight among themselves made him realise it was far from being a simple case of black and white, of Democracy against Fascism.

So by March 1938 Auden had returned to Britain, where he was uncharacteristically silent about his experiences, and got on with writing, editing new works for publication (not least an edition of his play The Ascent of F6 and Letters From Iceland).

Meanwhile, Christopher Isherwood was living in Paris managing his on-again, off-again relationship with his German boyfriend Heinz. And although he had accommodated Auden on an overnight stop in the French capital and waved him off on the train south to Spain, Isherwood hadn’t lifted a finger for the Great Cause.

Then, in June 1937, Auden’s American publisher, Bennet Cerf of Random House, had suggested that after the reasonable sales of his travel book about Iceland, maybe Auden would be interested in writing another travel book, this time travelling to the East. Isherwood was a good suggestion as collaborator because they had just worked closely on the stage play, The Ascent of F6 and had begun work on a successor, which was to end up becoming the pay On The Frontier. The pair were considering the travel idea when the Japanese attacked China, quickly took Beijing and besieged Shanghai.

At once they seized on this as the subject of the journey and the book. Neither had really engaged with the war in Spain; travelling east would be a way to make amends and to report on what many people considered to be the Eastern Front of what was developing into a worldwide war between Fascism (in this case Japan) and Democracy (in this case the Chinese Nationalists).

China also had the attraction that, unlike Spain, it wouldn’t be stuffed full of eminent literary figures falling over themselves to write poems and plays and novels and speeches. Spain had been a very competitive environment for a writer. Far fewer people knew or cared about China: it would be their own little war.

And so Auden and Isherwood left England in January 1938, boat from Dover then training it across France, then taking a boat from Marseilles to Hong Kong, via Egypt, Colombo and Singapore.

Journey to a War

Journey To A War is not as good as Letter From Iceland, it’s less high spirited and funny. There isn’t a big linking poem like Letter To Lord Byron to pull it together, and there isn’t the variety of all the different prose and verse forms Auden and MacNeice cooked up for the earlier book.

Instead it overwhelmingly consists of Isherwood’s very long prose diary of what happened to them and what they saw in their three months journey around unoccupied China.

The book opens with a series of sonnets and this was the form Auden chose to give the book poetic unity – sonnets, after all, lend themselves to sequences which develop themes and ideas, notably the Sonnets of Shakespeare, or his contemporaries Spencer and Sidney. There’s a collection of half a dozen of them right at the start, which give quick impressions of places they visited en route to China (Macau, Hong Kong). Then, 250 pages of Isherwood prose later, there’s the sonnet sequence titled In Time of War.

But instead of the bright and extrovert tone of Letters From Iceland, Auden’s sonnets are often obscure. They are clearly addressing some kind of important issues but it’s not always clear what. This is because they are very personal and inward-looking. Auden is clearly wrestling with his sense of liberal guilt. The results are rather gloomy. Spain had disillusioned him immensely. He went to Spain thinking the forces of Evil were objective and external. But his first-hand experience of the internecine bickering on the Republican side quickly showed him there is no Good Side, there are no Heroes. History is made by all of us and so – all of us are to blame for what happens. Travel as far as you want, you’re only running away from the truth. If we want to cure the world, it is we ourselves that we need to cure first.

Where does this journey look which the watcher upon the quay,
Standing under his evil star, so bitterly envies,
As the mountains swim away with slow calm strokes
And the gulls abandon their vow? Does it promise a juster life?

Alone with his heart at last, does the fortunate traveler find
In the vague touch of a breeze, the fickle flash of a wave,
Proofs that somewhere exists, really, the Good Place,
Convincing as those that children find in stones and holes?

No, he discovers nothing: he does not want to arrive.
His journey is false, his unreal excitement really an illness
On a false island where the heart cannot act and will not suffer:
He condones his fever; he is weaker than he thought; his weakness is real…

(from The Voyage by W.H. Auden)

‘An illness on a false island’ which is clearly England, a place ‘where the heart cannot act’. The traveller is trying to escape himself but cannot and glumly realises ‘he is weaker than he thought’. Or the thumping final couplet of the sonnet about Hong Kong:

We cannot postulate a General Will;
For what we are, we have ourselves to blame.

Isherwood’s diary

Luckily, the prose sections of the book are written by Isherwood and these are much more fun. He keeps up the giggling schoolboy persona of the novel he’d recently published, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), he notes the way the Chinese pronounce their names Au Dung and Y Hsaio Wu, he sounds wide-eyed and optimistic. He hadn’t seen what Auden had seen in Spain, wasn’t struggling with the same doubts.

On February 28 1938 they leave Hong Kong by steamer for Canton and Isherwood finds everyone and everything hilarious. Look a Japanese gunboat! Listen, the sound of bombs falling! He has same facility for the disarmingly blunt image which he deploys in the Berlin stories. The mayor of Canton (Mr Tsang Yan-fu) is always beaming, has a face like a melon with a slice cut out of it. After dinner the Chinese general entertains them by singing Chinese opera, showing how different characters are given different tones and registers (‘the romantic hero emits a sound like a midnight cat’).

He refers to the whole trip as a dream and as a landscape from Alice in Wonderland – they expected Chinese people to behave as in a Gilbert & Sullivan opera and had rehearsed elaborate compliments, and are disarmed when they’re much more down to earth. The train journey on through Hunan province is boring, the tea tastes of fish, they amuse themselves by reading out an Anthony Trollope novel or singing in mock operatic voices.

But this sense of unreality which dogs them is simply because both of them didn’t have a clue what was going on, what was at stake, the military situation, had never seen fighting or battle and weren’t proper journalists. They were privileged dilettantes, ‘mere trippers’, as Isherwood shamefacedly explains when they meet real war correspondents at a press conference (p.53).

In Hankow the Consul gives them Chiang, a middle-aged man with the manners of a perfect butler to be their guide. They attend the official war briefings alongside American and Australian journalists, they meet Mr Donald, Chiang Kai-shek’s military adviser, the German adviser General von Falkenhausen, Agnes Smedley, Madame Chiang Kai-shek herself, and with delight are reunited with Robert Capa, the soon-to-be legendary American war photographer who’d they’d met on the boat out. They attend traditional Chinese opera, which Isherwood observes with the eye of a professional playwright.

They catch the train to Cheng-chow which has been repeatedly bombed by the Japanese, capably looked after by their ‘boy’, Chiang. They are heading north on the train when they learn that Kwei-teh has fallen, nonetheless they decide to press on to Kai-feng. With them is an exuberant and seasoned American doctor, McClure, who takes them to watch some operations. They walk round the stinking foetid town. They go to the public baths which stink of urine. Then they catch a train to Sü-chow. And then onto Li Kwo Yi where they argue with Chinese commanding officers (General Chang Tschen) to allow them to go right up to the front line, a town divided by the Great Canal.

If you’ve no idea where any of these places are, join the club. I was reading an old edition but, even so, it had no map at all of any part of the journey. Which is ludicrous. The only map anywhere appears to have been on the front cover of the hardback edition, replaced (uselessly) by an anti-war cartoon on the paperback editions, and even this doesn’t show their actual route.

With no indication where any of these places are, unless you are prepared to read it with an atlas open at your side, Isherwood’s long prose text becomes a stream of clever observations largely divorced from their context. Even an atlas is not that useful given that Isherwood uses the old form of the placenames, all of which, along with most people’s names, have changed. Thus Sian, capital of Shen-si province, is now Xian, capital of Shaanxi Province, Sü-chow is now Suzhou, and so on.

We are intended to enjoy the surreal aspects of travelling in a deeply foreign land – the village restaurant which was papered entirely with pages of American tabloid magazines, and so covered with photos of gangsters and revelations about fashionable divorcees (p.126); or the expensive hotel in Sian whose menu included ‘Hat cake’ and ‘FF potatoes’ (p.141). Beheading is a common punishment because the Chinese believe a body needs to be complete to enter the afterlife. They meet lots of tough and brave American missionaries, mostly from the American south.

Finally, back in Hankow (Hankou) they become part of polite society again, are invited to a party of Chinese intellectuals, a party given by the British admiral and consul, where they meet the legendary travel writer Peter Fleming and his actress wife Celia Johnson, the British ambassador Archibald Kerr, the American communist-supporting journalist, Agnes Smedley (p.156). Fleming pops up a lot later at their hotel in Tunki, and is too suave, handsome and self-assured to possibly be real.

Militarily, Journey To A War confirms the opinions of the modern histories of the war I’ve read, namely that the Nationalist side was hampered by corruption, bad leadership and, above all, lack of arms & ammunition. When they retook cities which had been under communist influence the Chiang’s Nationalists realised they needed some kind of ideology which matched the communists’ emphasis on a pure life and so, in 1934, invented the New Life Movement i.e. stricter morals, which Madame Chiang politely explains.

Isherwood notices the large number of White Russian exiles, often running shops, come down in the world. This reminds me of the Russian nanny J.G. Ballard had during his boyhood in 1930s Shanghai, as described in his autobiography Miracles of Life.

From pages 100 to 150 or so our intrepid duo had hoped to approach the front line in the north and had crept up to it in a few places, but ultimately refused permission to go further, to visit the Eighth Route Army, and so have come by boat back down the Yangtze River to Hankou. Now they plan to travel south-east towards the other main front, where the Japanese have taken Shanghai and Nanjing.

On the Emperor of Japan’s birthday there is a particularly large air-raid on Hankow and they make themselves comfortable on the hotel lawn to watch it. The Arsenal across the river takes a pasting and they go to see the corpses. 500 were killed. Nice Emperor of Japan.

They take a river steamer to Kiukiang and stay at the extraordinary luxury hotel named Journey’s End and run by the wonderfully eccentric Mr Charleton. They catch the train from Kiukiang to Nanchang, stay there a few days, then the train on to Kin-hwa (modern Jinhua). Here they are horrified to discover their arrival has been anticipated and they are treated like minor royalty, including a trip to the best restaurant in town with 12 of the city’s top dignitaries.

Auden and I developed a private game: it was a point of honour to praise most warmly the dishes you liked least. ‘Delicious,’ Auden murmured, as he munched what was, apparently, a small sponge soaked in glue. I replied by devouring, with smiles of exquisite pleasure, an orange which taste of bitter aloes and contained, at its centre, a large weevil. (p.195)

They are taken by car to the town of Tunki. They try to get permission to push on to see the front near the Tai Lake, They have to cope with the officious newspaperman, A.W. Kao. This man gives a brisk confident explanation of what’s happening at the front. Neither Auden nor Isherwood believe it. Isherwood’s explanation describes scenes they’ve seen on their visit, but also hints at what Auden might have seen on his (mysterious) trip to civil war Spain. Auden is given a speech defining the nature of modern war:

War is bombing an already disused arsenal, missing it and killing a few old women. War is lying in a stable with a gangrenous leg. War is drinking hot water in a barn and worrying about one’s wife. War is a handful of lost and terrified men in the mountains, shooting at something moving in the undergrowth. War is waiting for days with nothing to do; shouting down a dead telephone; going without sleep, or sex, or a wash. War is untidy, inefficient, obscure, and largely a matter of chance. (p.202)

Peter Fleming turns up looking gorgeous, professional, highly motivated, speaking good Chinese. He attends briefings, manages the locals with perfect manners. They organise an outing towards the front, with sedan chairs, bearers, two or three local notables (T.Y. Liu, A.W. Kao, Mr Ching, Major Yang, Shien), Fleming is indefatigable. On they plod to Siaofeng, Ti-pu and Meiki. Here the atmosphere is very restless, the miltary authorities are visibly unhappy to see them, half their own Chinese want to get away. The spend a troubled night, with people coming and going at the military headquarters where they’ve bivouaced and, after breakfast, they give in to the Chinese badgering, turn about, and retrace their steps. Twelve hours later the town of Meiki fell to the Japanese. On they plod up a steep hillside, carried by coolies, and down the precipitous other side, down to Tien-mu-shan and then by car to Yu-tsien (p.229).

We stopped to get petrol near a restaurant where they were cooking bamboo in all its forms – including the strips used for making chairs. That, I thought, is so typical of this country. Nothing is specifically either eatable or uneatable. You could being munching a hat, or bite a mouthful out of a wall; equally, you could build a hut with the food provided at lunch. Everything is everything. (p.230)

Isherwood hates Chinese food and, eventually, Auden agrees. At Kin-hwa Fleming leaves them. It’s a shame they’ve ended up getting on famously. It’s interesting that both Auden and Isherwood initially were against him because he went to Eton. The narcissism of minor differences knows no limits.

They say goodbye to all the people they’ve met in Kin-hwa and set off by bus for Wenchow. They take a river steamer from Wenchow to Shanghai.

Arrival in Shanghai on 25 May signals the end of their adventures. They stay in the chaotic, colourful, corrupt city till 12 June. Fascinating to think that over in his house in the International Settlement, young James Graham Ballard was playing with his toy soldiers, dreaming about flying and laying the grounds for one of the most distinctive and bizarre voices in post-war fiction.

And Isherwood confirms the strange, deliriously surreal atmosphere of a Chinese city which had been invaded and conquered by the Japanese, who had destroyed a good deal of the Chinese city but left the International and the French Settlements intact. They attend receptions at the British Embassy, are the guest of a British businessman hosting high-level Japs.

There is no doubt Auden and Isherwood hate the Japanese, can’t see the flag hanging everywhere without thinking about all the times in the past four months when they’ve ducked into cover as Japanese bombers rumbled overhead and fighters swooped to strafe the roads.

This is the only section of this long book with real bite. Isherwood interviews a British factory inspector who describes the appalling conditions Chinese workers endure and notes that they’ll all be made much worse by the Japanese conquerors.

Schoolboys

It’s a truism to point out that the Auden Generation was deeply marked by its experience of English public schools, but it is still striking to see how often the first analogy they reach for is from their jolly public schools, endless comparisons with school speeches and prize days and headmasters.

Under the camera’s eye [Chiang kai-shek] stiffened visibly like a schoolboy who is warned to hold himself upright (p.68)
Mission-doctors [we were told] were obliged to smoke in secret, like schoolboys (p.88)
They scattered over the fields, shouting to each other, laughing, turning somersaults, like schoolboys arriving at the scene of a Sunday school picnic (p.142)
The admiral, with his great thrusting naked chin… and the Consul-General, looking like a white-haired schoolboy, receive their guests. (p.156)
[Mr A.O. Kao] has a smooth, adolescent face, whose natural charm is spoiled by a perpetual pout and by his fussy school-prefect’s air of authority (p.201)
Producing a pencil, postulating our interest as a matter of course, he drew highroads, shaded in towns, arrowed troop movements; lecturing us like the brilliant sixth-form boy who takes the juniors in history while the headmaster is away. (p.200)
The cling and huddle in the new disaster
Like children sent to school (p.278)
With those whose brains are empty as a school in August (p.291)

The photos

At the end of the huge slab of 250 pages of solid text, the book then had 31 pages of badly reproduced black and white photos taken by Auden. In fact there are 2 per page, so that’s 62 snaps in all.

I don’t think there’s any getting round the fact that they’re average to poor. Some are portraits of people they met, notably Chiang kai-shek and Madame Chiang, Chou en-lai of the communists, and celebrities such as Peter Fleming the dashing travel writer and Robert Capa the handsome war photographer. A dozen or more named people, Chinese, missionaries and so on. And then lots of anonymous soldiers and scenes, the dead from an air raid, the derailed steam train, coolies in poverty, a Japanese prisoner of war, a Japanese soldier keeping guard in Shanghai, Auden with soldiers in a trench and so on.

Remarkably, few if any of these seem to be online. I can’t imagine they’re particularly valuable and their only purpose would be to publicise the book and promote Auden and Isherwood’s writings generally, so I can’t imagine why the copyright holders have banned them. If I owned them, I’d create a proper annotated online gallery for students and fans to refer to.

In Time of War

The book then contains a sequence of 27 sonnets by Auden titled In Time of War. In later collections he retitled them Sonnets from China. They are, on the whole, tiresomely oracular, allegorical and obscure. The earlier ones seem to be retelling elements of the Bible, Genesis etc as if recapitulating the early history of mankind. These then somehow morph into the ills of modern society with its bombers.

But one of them stands out from the rest because it reports real details and rises to real angry eloquence.

Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking; Dachau.

(Sonnet XVI from In Time of War)

Those last lines have stayed with me all my life. Nanking. Dachau. The darkness at the heart of the twentieth century.

Commentary

The last thing in the book is a long poem in triplets, from pages 289 to 301 and titled simply Commentary.

It’s a sort of rewrite of Spain, again giving a hawk’s eye view of history and society, the world and human evolution. It starts off describing what they’ve seen in Auden’s characteristic sweeping style, leaping from one brightly described detail to another, before wandering off to give snapshots of great thinkers from Plato to Hegel.

But at quite a few points voices emerge to deliver speeches. Then, on the last page, the Commentary becomes extremely didactic, ending with a speech by the Voice of Man, no less, the kind of speech he turned out by the score for his plays and choruses and earlier 1930s poems.

But in this context it seems inadequate to the vast and catastrophic war in China which they have just glimpsed, and which was to last for another seven years (till Japan’s defeat in 1945) and was itself followed by the bitter civil war (1945-48) which was only ended by the triumph of Mao Zedong’s communist party early in 1949.

The Japanese invasion of 1937 turned out to be just the start of a decade of terror and atrocity, and Auden’s response is to have the ‘Voice of Man’ preach:

‘O teach me to outgrow my madness.

It’s better to be sane than mad, or liked than dreaded;
It’s better to sit down to nice meals than nasty;
It’s better to sleep two than single; it’s better to be happy.

Ruffle the perfect manners of the frozen heart,
And once again compel it to be awkward and alive,
To all it suffered once a silent witness.

Clear from the head the masses of impressive rubble;
Rally the lost and trembling forces of the will,
Gather them up and let them loose upon the earth,

Till they construct at last a human justice,
The contribution of our star, within a shadow
Of which uplifting, loving, and constraining power
All other reasons may rejoice and operate.‘

It yet another of his prayers, deliberately personal in scale, addressed mostly to chums from public school, fellow poets, friendly dons and reviewers. It is calling on people who are already well-fed, well-educated and mostly decent chaps to be a bit more decent, if that’s alright. But ‘ruffling up your perfect manners’ wasn’t going to stop Franco or the Japs, Hitler or Stalin.

It is ironic of Auden to ask people to remove from their heads ‘impressive rubble’, which I take to mean the luggage of an expensive education in the arts – as that is precisely what he was going to use to make a living out of for the next 35 years and which was to underpin and inform all his later works.

And there are numerous small but characteristic examples of learnèd wit it here, such as when they light a fire which is so smokey that it forces them out of the room and Auden wittily remarks, ‘Better to die like Zola than Captain Scott’ (i.e. of smoke asphyxiation rather than from freezing).

In this respect the Commentary is another grand speech which, like the grand speeches in the plays he’d just written with Isherwood, was, in the end, addressed to himself. Once again, as with Spain, Auden has used a huge historical event to conduct a lengthy self-analysis.

Auden’s contemporary readers were impressed, as ever, by his style and fluency but, as ever, critical of his strange inability to engage with anything outside himself and, specifically, to rise to the occasion of such a massive historical event.

Half way through the text Isherwood tells a story about Auden’s complete conviction that the train they’re on won’t be shot at by the Japanese, whose lines they are going to travel very close to. Sure enough the train emerges on to a stretch of line where it is clearly visible from the forward Japanese lines, which they know to contain heavy artillery, and so they pass a few minutes of terror, petrified that the Japanese might start shelling any second. In the event, there is no shelling, and the train veers away to safety. ‘See. I told you so,’ says Auden, and Isherwood reflects that there’s no arguing with ‘the complacency of a mystic’.

It’s a joke at his old mate’s expense and yet I thought, yes – complacency – in Auden’s case complacency means undeviating confidence in his own mind and art to hold off, inspect and analyse. He creates a rhetoric of concern but it is nothing more than that, a poet’s rhetoric, fine to admire but which changes nothing.

And he knew this, had realised it during the trip to Spain, and had lost heart in the political verse of the 1930s. The pair returned from China via America, where all mod cons were laid on by his American publishers and Auden realised that here was a much bigger, richer, more relaxed, open, friendly and less politically pressurised environment in which to think and write.

He returned to England just long enough to wind up his affairs, pack his bags, then in January 1939 he and Isherwood sailed back to the States which would become his home for the next 30 years, and set about rewriting or suppressing many of his most striking poems from the troubled Thirties, trying to rewrite and then censor what he came to think of as his own dishonesty, pursuing a quest for his own personal version of The Truth.

1930s reviews

Journey To A War by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (1939)

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/06/19/journey-to-a-war-w-h-auden-christopher-isherwood/?page_id=37896

So far away from home – the Diggers who fought in Spain

May 3, 2023May 3, 2023Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

We’ve poured the wine of anger
On the graves of honest men.
We’ve raised the banner once before
We’ll raise it once again.
In the holy ground of memory
The dragon’s teeth are sown.
We’ll send our sons to die again
So far away from home.
Paul Hemphill, I Gotta Book

Eighty four years ago last month, the Spanish cities of Madrid and Valencia fell to the nationalist forces of Francisco Franco. Victory was proclaimed as Franco placed his sword to rest upon the altar of a church declaring that he wouldn’t raise the blade again until Spain was in peril. The Spanish Civil War that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives (upwards of half a million, possibly up to two) was at an end; the long march of the generalissimo was over and the reign of the Caudillo had begun. It endured until his death in 1975.

The Spanish Civil War was long, brutal and bloody, and medieval in its savagery. It was a war of armies and of militias, of men and women, of skirmishes and set-piece battles, of massacres and reprisals, and of wars within wars. It saw cities besieged and starved into surrender and towns destroyed by bombers and heavy artillery. It cut a swathe across the country leaving scars that endure to this day.

It became a proxy war for three dictators – Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin – who dispatched men and machines to fight under false flags in what would appear in retrospect to be a rehearsal for wars to come. It was a magnet for idealists and activists of disparate political creeds and from many lands who were to fight and die on both sides, including the celebrated International Brigades. It lured writers and poets who were to chronicle its confusion and carnage, including Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, WH Auden, André Malraux and Arthur Koastler. Many perished, the most famous being the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, murdered by Nationalist militia and buried in an unmarked grave, one of many unquiet graves scattered throughout the land.

We republish below a remarkable story of that long forgotten army in a long-forgotten war, and also, an article about the International Brigades.

See also, in In That Howling Infinite, Las Treces Rosas – Spain’s Unquiet Graves

‘Brothers in arms, a long way from home’: the first Australians to fight fascism overseas

The discovery of a rare photo from the Spanish civil war raises questions about why volunteers from Australia are not commemorated

The grainy, sepia photograph shows two men, an Australian and a New Zealander. Sydney dock worker Jack Franklyn is partly obscured by bush, leaning forward, his rifle poised and ready. New Zealander Bert Bryan, bare-chested and wearing a beret, crouches at the edge of a trench while shooting at the enemy. They’re in Spain, the battle of Ebro in 1938, and the fact they are fighting together in one of the Spanish civil war’s most seminal and bloody battles lends a gritty new dimension to the revered legend of Anzac.

The photograph was recently discovered among personal mementoes in the western Sydney home of 80-year-old Vanessa McNeill. Her father, Wollongong steel worker Jim McNeill fought the fascists alongside Bryan and Franklyn at Ebro, which began 85 years ago this July. McNeill was shot by a machine gun at Ebro, his second wounding in Spain.

McNeill entrusted the photograph, along with a dusty suitcase of her father’s papers, photographs, postcards, publications, and castanets with ribbons in the colours of the fallen Spanish Republic to historian Michael Samaras. Samaras placed most of the material with the local Illawarra Museum, and now he is offering the photo to the Australian War Memorial.

Despite Australia’s obsessive celebration of overseas military conflicts since colonial days, the experiences of its people who fought and died in the Spanish Civil War rate barely a mention in official military history or commemoration.

Their remarkable stories might be known to their now aged children and, perhaps, grandchildren. And the actions of a few have been chronicled in books. They were certainly covered in contemporary newspapers. But the 70 or so Australians who joined the International Brigades to fight or serve as nurses in support of the Spanish Republic’s bitter, failed military resistance to Franco’s fascist forces are not acknowledged.

This, despite the fact that all of the volunteers were precocious military opponents of global fascism when many countries – including the conservative Menzies government of Australia – were still set on appeasement of fascist leaders like Franco and Hitler. Indeed, some of the Australian International Brigadiers had previously battled the fascist New Guard on Australia’s streets in the early 1930s. Others, meanwhile, returned from the Spanish civil war and immediately signed up to fight fascist Nazi Germany and Italy in the second world war once Australia joined.

The incredible stories – of why they volunteered, how they reached Spain, their experiences of combat, their unlikely survival and their deaths – deserve formal national remembrance. That most of those Australians who served in the International Brigades were of the sharp left – including many communists and unionists – doubtless contributes to the official amnesia about them.

Consequently, most of the personal collections – letters, postcards, journal writings, photographs and ephemera – of the Australians who went and returned have probably been confined to boxes in suburban attics and sheds or worse, to landfill.

That’s why the discovery of the photograph is so significant; it might be the only known photograph that depicts an Australian fighting in the Spanish civil war.

“It is a powerful image,” says Samaras. “There they are, an Australian and a New Zealander, brothers in arms, a long way from home, fighting a doomed campaign. The Anzac echoes are strong, however members of the International Brigades did not go to war because their government sent them, they were instead motivated by deeply felt personal convictions.

“There are a handful of photographs of Australian members of the International Brigades in reserve [conflict] areas, but this is the only photo I’ve seen of them in action. If anyone has another, it would be great to see it,” Samaras says.

On the reverse side of the photograph, beneath the names of Bryan and Franklyn, is written in McNeill’s hand:

Hill 481 near Gandesa [Battle of Ebro]

Where Bill Young died

Bill Young, an Australian who died fighting in the Spanish civil war. — Bill Young, an Australian who died fighting in the Spanish civil war

It is unclear if McNeill took the photograph. But it is invaluable, regardless, for its evocation of the experiences – and post-International Brigades life – of several Australians and the New Zealander, Bryan. A portal into their pasts and futures.

Bill Young is described in a May 1948 booklet, Australians In Spain, as having been known in the International Brigades as “the Big Aussie”. He worked in the bush and in construction, and was member of the Communist party (like McNeill and Carter) before stowing away on a coal bunker set for Europe. After he was discovered the ship, two hands short, enlisted him as crew.

“In the Ebro fighting he was put in charge of his section when the NCOs [noncommissioned officers] were killed. In the critical attempt to take the hill dominating Gandesa, which was held by Moors and fascist Italians and heavily fortified, Young led an attack – and did not come back. His body was never found.”

In a 1974 interview with Wendy Lowenstein for her book Weevils In The Flour, McNeill recounted how “Bill was a marvelous thrower of the hand grenade.” McNeill said Young was killed in a burst of machine gun fire beside the famous British International Brigadier Lewis Clive.

Young is listed on a memorial in Spain, along with Clive and two other Australians killed at Ebro.

Another photo taken after Ebro, late in 1938, depicts a group of Australians including Franklyn and Wollongong co-steelworkers Carter and McNeill, and New Zealanders including Bryan. Bryan apparently wears the same beret he had in combat. They present wiry, proud and hardened though still youthful, combat survivors. There are traces of smiles. Steely-eyes.

Ironically they had come through battle with Franco’s fascist forces and were preparing to return home while Australia was still appeasing fascism – including Hitler’s Third Reich.

In July 1939, for example, Australian prime minister Robert Menzies said, “History will label Hitler as one of the really great men of the century.”

When McNeill and Franklyn returned to Australia they enlisted to fight fascists again in the second world war (McNeill, by then 39, put his age down by six years so he might join on the first day of enlistments in Wollongong).

All would have been deeply affected by the brutality of Ebro where casualties and fatalities among the brigades were high. Timaru-born Bryan certainly returned home a damaged man.

According to New Zealand Geographic magazine, “He arrived in Spain in early 1938 and came through the horrific Battle of the Ebro before being repatriated. He was severely affected by his experiences under fire, never fully recovered and died of alcoholism in 1961.”

New Zealand and Australian International Brigadiers awaiting repatriation from Spain. Back row, left to right: Kevin Rebecchi (Australia), Lloyd Edmonds (Melbourne, Australia), William ‘Murn’ MacDonald (Wellington & Dunedin, NZ), Joe Carter (Sydney, Australia). Front row, left to right: Jack Franklyn (Australia), Bert Bryan (Wellington & Dunedin, NZ), Jim McNeill (Sydney, Australia). Photograph: National Library of New Zealand

Vanessa McNeill says her father, Jim – 37 when he went to Spain – carried for life the trauma of his Spanish experience. “Some aspects of his health were challenging for the rest of his life, due to his service [in Spain]. He was not a young man when he went to Spain, not young to be involved in something so hideous when the fascists did such terrible things to the people resisting them.”

McNeill was stationed in England during the second world war, where he met his English wife, Mabel, who worked for the Committee for Spanish Relief in support of the republicans. He was medically discharged in 1943, due largely to his civil war wounds, and returned to Australia. Both Vanessa’s parents remained committed communists.

In Australians in Spain, McNeill wrote “… it has to be remembered that at the time a man wanting to fight for democracy in Spain was looked on almost as a criminal by the [Australian] ‘powers that be’ and many Australians had to leave for Spain secretly and furtively without even letting their friends know.

“Just as there were men of all countries in the Brigades so there were men of many different political and religious beliefs. Communists and Labor party men fought side by side with Irish republicans, members of Youth Leagues, Christian Pacifists and men of no particular party.’’

McNeill said the International Brigades represented “something written in the blood of men of all countries who had died together in a new sort of a war.

“Not a national war, but a war for the liberation of all men and women of all nations. And the International Brigade that fought in Spain is today part of a bigger International Brigade of the millions of men and women – democrats of all lands – who carry on the struggle for human liberation.”

McNeill’s mate from the Wollongong steelworks, Joe Carter, had earlier been an itinerant bush labourer and “swaggie” in the 1920s. He first joined the Communist party of Australia in 1930 but was expelled in 1931 for being “drunk and not disciplined”. He re-joined the party in 1937 and went to Spain “in cahoots” with McNeill where, as a machine gunner, he too fought at Ebro.

The International Brigades and the Communist party of Spain made detailed pre-repatriation assessments of every volunteer. It seems Carter had redeemed himself in the party’s eyes.

“This comrade has had a good record… and is one of the most sober of all the comrades. Indications seem to show that he has definitely overcome the weaknesses for which he was expelled in 1931”.

While the precise number of Australians who went remains unclear, there is an unofficial memorial in Canberra’s Lennox Gardens, dedicated to what it says were the 70 Australian men and women (women mostly served as nurses and support and supply workers) who participated in the civil war on the side of the Spanish republic. According to the Australian War Memorial, 66 Australians served in the International Brigades. This excludes several people of Spanish descent who went home to fight. About a quarter were killed.

Only one Australian, Nugent Bull, is known to have served in Franco’s forces.

Republicans battle for the Alcazar in Toledo where rebels are shelteredin July 1936.

Before he went to Spain, Young was, according to his mate McNeill writing in Australians in Spain: “A good man with his fists when fists were needed, he helped to defend workers’ meetings against attacks from the fascist New Guard in the Depression days.”

Long before he fought in Spain, McNeill was himself violently clashing with members of the New Guard – a fiercely pro-monarchist, anti-communist, secretive pro-fascist organization – on the streets of Sydney.

In Weevils in the Flour, McNeill recounts almost being shot dead in the “conservative, well-to-do suburb” of Drummoyne on the western shores of Sydney harbour.

“A New Guard shot at me at a [Communist party] council meeting in Drummoyne . . . I felt a bullet whistle past my ear. I was hit once or twice in Spain, in the International Brigade, but I never felt one come closer than this without actually hitting me.” The incident was confirmed in a contemporary newspaper report.

Jim McNeill died at the Concord Repatriation hospital in 1976.

Jack Franklyn, the Australian pictured in combat in Spain, did not have such a long life. But then as Tribune, the official paper of the Communist party of Australia, mused upon his death, “few men have packed so much adventure into 50 years as did Jack Franklyn”.

Born in Lancashire, England, he fought on the European western front for four years during the first world war. He then came to Australia via the United States during the Great Depression, worked on the docks and became a militant, strike-leading unionist. He was deported from Darwin to Fremantle due to his militancy, and from there sailed to England en route to Spain. After fighting in Spain where “he showed the fearlessness in the face of danger that had been his characteristic” he returned to the Sydney docks. He signed up for the second world war but due to the physical toll of the Spanish conflict, he was medically discharged without seeing action.

After Franklyn died in a 1945 Sydney waterside industrial accident, 400 trade unionists marched in a procession in front of his coffin at the funeral.

Vanessa McNeill believes official acknowledgment of Australian volunteers to the International Brigades is long overdue.

“The [Australian] War Memorial has not really commemorated or had anything much to do with those who went to the Spanish civil war. The country as a whole has not given appropriate recognition to those who went and fought and often died. That’s because the government of the day was set on appeasement and did not condone what the volunteers were doing,” she said.

A bugler plays the last post at the Stone of Remembrance during Anzac Day commemorations at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, Tuesday, 25 April, 2023. — The Australian War Memorial on Anzac Day 2023.
Those who died in Spain are not on the roll of honour.
Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

While the war memorial has a small collection of photographs, manuscripts and memorabilia of Australians who fought in Spain, those who died there are not on the roll of honour which records Australian service deaths.

Samaras believes the lack of acknowledgment is “partly due to the enormity of the second world war which followed so closely – it overshadows everything”.

“But it is also true that the men and women who went from Australia to help the Spanish Republic resist the fascists are an awkward and uncomfortable reminder that not everyone followed the official policy of appeasement.”

The Communist party was banned in Australia under national security laws in June 1940 because it stood with Stalinist Russia’s opposition to the second world war on the grounds that it was an imperialist conflict. This changed after the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. Regardless, communists like McNeill and Franklyn ignored official Communist party stricture and volunteered immediately to fight in the second world war.

Samaras says, “The Australians who fought for the Spanish Republic were of the broad left. The Communist party was strongly represented and there was a handful of ALP members, but most were not formally party affiliated. But perhaps any association with communism, especially during the cold war, was sufficient to suppress the recognition they were due as the first Australians to fight fascism.
Paul Daley writes about Indigenous history, Australian culture and national identity for Guardian Australia. He has won a number of journalism prizes including two Walkley awards, the Paul Lyneham award for political journalism and two Kennedy awards. He is a novelist and playwright whose books have been shortlisted in major literary prizes and is the author of the political novel Challenge

The contested legacy of the International Brigades

In the 1930s, thousands of men and women around the world enlisted to fight fascism in Spain. Many survivors went on to play a key role in the fight against the Nazis – but, in some cases, later became powerful servants of brutal regimes

by Giles Tremlett, The Guardian, 22 October 2022

The British Battalion of the XV International Brigade circa 1937

Photograph: Express/Getty Images

Virgilio Fernández del Real sent his last testament via WhatsApp on 28 November 2019. I opened the video to see him propped up in bed at his colonial-era haçienda in Guanajuato, Mexico. Bloodshot eyes peered out above a rampant white beard. A big red, gold and purple flag, representing Spain’s short-lived republican democracy from the 1930s, was spread out behind him. “My birthday is on 26 December, when I will be 101,” he wheezed in Spanish, though he clearly did not believe he would make it. “I still have the strength to say: ‘¡Viva la República Española!’”

Nine days before that birthday, his wife, Estela, sent another message: “Fifteen minutes ago, Virgilio went on his journey to the Father’s house, transcending into the infinite. He is no longer suffering.”

They had stayed in my Madrid apartment 18 months earlier, so that Virgilio could recover from a two-week hospital stay after having fallen ill during a visit to Spain. My kitchen became a shrine as visitors trooped through, anxious to thank Virgilio for serving in a volunteer army called the International Brigades. That unit of 35,000 foreigners from 80 of today’s nations had fought against fascism in the Spanish civil war and been disbanded in 1938, a year before the short-lived democratic republic was finally extinguished. More than 50 years later, their actions still resonated.

A 1937 poster declaring ‘All The People Of The World Are United With Spain’. — 1937 poster declaring ‘All The People Of The World Are United With Spain’.
Photograph: Buyenlarge/Getty Images

The republic is an emotional touchstone for leftwing Spaniards, but admirers of the volunteers are spread across the world. Groups devoted to their memory exist in the US, Britain and half a dozen European countries. Mention of them can provoke sudden displays of enthusiasm, as I discovered when I began researching the group: a Spanish journalist pulled down his shirt to reveal the Brigades’ triangular symbol tattooed on his shoulder; a German in California sang their songs; and a Scottish writer at a neoliberal magazine talked wistfully about an uncle from Glasgow who had volunteered. David Simon, creator of The Wire, is now planning a drama series about the International Brigades.

Elsewhere, opinion is dramatically opposed. In Poland, streets dedicated to the Dabrowski battalion of the International Brigades are being renamed by the Institute of National Remembrance, which oversees a controversial “decommunisation” law passed by the ultraconservative Law and Justice party in 2017. The brigaders had “served Stalinism”, their Polish critics argued. They were not entirely wrong.

History is neither neat nor clean, especially when it comes to past wars. The first casualty of war is said to be truth, but really it is nuance. War presents stark, binary choices. Kill or be killed. One side or the other. The truth is more complex than that, as the story of the International Brigades and their afterlife shows.

In early October 1936, a 21-year-old classics graduate from Cambridge, Bernard Knox, slipped an old pistol into his bag and passed through the border control at Dover on his way to Spain. The pistol belonged to a Cambridge professor of ancient Greek called Francis Cornford, who had last used it as an officer in the first world war. Cornford had given it to his son, John, a 20-year-old poet and friend of Knox’s who was travelling with him. Knox carried the gun because Cornford’s passport showed he had already been to Spain, and police were suspicious of visitors to a country where, in July, Franco and his generals had started a civil war. Britain was promoting non-intervention – a sop to Hitler and Mussolini, whose troops were blatantly fighting for Franco. It did not want British volunteers taking part.

In the early days of the civil war, before returning to Britain to recruit volunteers, Cornford had joined one of the militias that emerged when, in response to the coup, a counter-revolution broke out inside the republic. Socialists, anarchists, communists and regionalists in Catalonia and elsewhere grabbed control of the streets. Militias abounded, with women also donning uniforms and carrying weapons. “The women are fine,” wrote Felicia Browne, a British artist who joined a militia group. They were heady days, with the streets of Barcelona daubed in revolutionary slogans described by another volunteer fighter, George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia as “startling and overwhelming”.

Men and women in a Spanish militia in 1936. — Men and women in a Spanish militia, 1936. Photograph: Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images

While recruiting, Cornford had depicted the conflict as a dusty, lazy revolutionary war – much as people imagined the Mexican revolution that ended in 1920 – rather than the sophisticated scientific destruction it soon became. His group had no idea which unit they would join, but when they reached Spain, the International Brigades had just been formed. The Communist International, or Co mintern, the Moscow-based organisation advocating for world communism, did the arranging. The arrival of spontaneous volunteers such as these provided the impulse. Another recruit, Winston Churchill’s rebel nephew Esmond Romilly, had cycled across France fuelled by coffee and cognac before volunteering and declaring himself a member of “that very large class of unskilled labourers with a public-school accent”. He sailed on a boat from Marseille, with watch duty split in two-hour shifts between French, Germans, Poles, Italians, Yugoslavs, Belgians, Flemish and Russian-speakers.

Poorly armed and virtually untrained, the first volunteers found themselves defending Madrid against Franco’s experienced and ferocious colonial force, the Army of Africa, just a few weeks later. Cornford’s group operated a machine gun in the philosophy faculty of the brand-new University City campus. They built barricades out of thick tomes on early-19th-century German philosophy and Indian metaphysics. Enemy bullets gave up before reaching page 350, making them believe old tales of soldiers saved by Bibles in breast pockets. “I think I killed a fascist,” Cornford, a former pacifist, wrote excitedly to his girlfriend, Margot Heinemann, on 8 December. “Fifteen or 16 of them were running from a bombardment … If it is true, it’s a fluke.”

After Franco’s colonial army was airlifted from north Africa to Seville by German planes in an operation that Hitler personally named Operation Magic Fire (inspired by a section of Wagner’s opera Siegfried), it had swept easily towards Madrid. It was halted at the University City, and the International Brigades were hailed as heroes in Spain and elsewhere. Their discipline set an example to the chaotic republican army, even if some volunteers mistakenly thought idealism could replace training – and paid with their lives. The young and previously untried war photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro took their pictures, and they were lionised by Ernest Hemingway and the New York Times, among others. War correspondents of almost all nationalities blessed their luck at being able to find frontline sources among the brigaders who spoke their language.

A republican propaganda poster from 1937 declaring ‘United with the Spanish, we fight the Invader’. — Republican propaganda poster 1937 declaring
‘United with the Spanish, we fight the Invader’.
Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty

Fresh recruits arrived by their hundreds every week from as far away as China, Chile and Abyssinia, though most came from Europe or the Americas – and many were already political or economic exiles. At least one in 10 were Jews, rebelling against their position as fascism’s chosen victims. The American historian and veteran Albert Prago called the International Brigades “the vehicle through which Jews could offer the first organised armed resistance to European fascism.” In fact, almost all brigaders saw themselves fighting a global battle to stop fascism, in which Spain was just a part. With Hitler and Mussolini on the other side, that seemed obvious – if not to politicians in London, Paris or Washington.

Many of those first recruits had died, or been badly wounded, by the end of 1936. Cornford was killed at Lopera, in A ndalusia, the day after he turned 21. Knox had already been badly injured, falling to the ground with a fountain of blood spurting from his shoulder, convinced he was dying. “I was consumed with rage – furious, violent rage. Why me?” he recalled later. “I was just 21 and had barely begun living my life.” Volunteer British and American battalions – each of about 700 men – were not formed until the following year, and first fought at Jarama, about 20 miles from Madrid, that February. About 700 women also enlisted, but the republic sent militiawomen away from the frontline, and most served as doctors, nurses, translators or administrators.

The brigaders were shock troops who generally, but not always, fought courageously. Sometimes, they turned battles around. Other times they were routed. Those captured were mostly shot. Prisoners left alive were sent to a medieval monastery converted into a jail at San Pedro de Cardeña near Burgos and made to do fascist salutes. A German-trained military psychologist, Lt Col Antonio Vallejo-Najera, conducted tests designed to prove that Marxists (as he wrongly assumed they all were) were either psychopaths or congenitally dim. He satisfied himself that this really was the case, but – in an academic paper – expressed surprise that, even in jail, “the immense majority remain firmly attached to their ideas”.

It was not all heroics. A considerable number of International Brigade volunteers deserted. Some were shot by their own commanders for doing so. After capturing the town of Quinto, their senior officers ordered them to shoot all the enemy officers, sergeants and corporals. The victims were “kids just like us”, recalled the Canadian volunteer Peter Frye after being assigned to a firing squad. Women were often treated by the brigade’s French commander (and senior Comintern official) André Marty or his security staff as suspected spies. In one case, Marion Merriman, the wife of a senior American officer, was raped by an unnamed Slav officer. She kept silent about it, in order to prevent the American Abraham Lincoln battalion rebelling in her defence. “This must be my secret burden. I cannot tell anyone – ever,” she remembers telling herself in a memoir dedicated to her husband, Robert Hale Merriman, who was killed.

Nurses from the British-based Spanish Medical Aid Committee. — Nurses from the British-based Spanish Medical Aid Committee
Photograph: Daily Herald Archive/SSPL/Getty Images

By the time the last brigaders left Spain, 7,000 had died. They had lost their war. Franco declared victory on 1 April 1939 (he would rule as dictator until 1975). By then, most brigaders had returned home or were locked up by France with the rest of the fleeing republican army in vast camps as it dealt with one of Europe’s biggest refugee crises since the first world war. Those not welcome in their own countries – Germans, Italians, Poles and others – or later deemed “dangerous” by Vichy authorities spent several years in the French camps. Others who did return home were watched closely by police in their own countries. Britain’s MI5 held files on many, as did the Dutch police. Authorities painted them as dangerous, foolhardy or wrong. But that would not last.

Hitler invaded Poland exactly five months after Franco declared victory. Suddenly, almost everyone agreed that fascism had to be fought with weapons.

On 21 August 1941, French International Brigade veteran Pierre Georges and two colleagues met at the Barbès-Rochechouart metro station in Paris. All three carried pistols. Pierre had joined the International Brigades aged 17, been wounded at 19, imprisoned in occupied France, escaped and now, at 22, was training young communists to assassinate Germans from Hitler’s occupying army. Georges, better known as Colonel Fabien, jumped into a first-class carriage, shot a naval warrant officer called Alfons Moser and ran off before the train left. A few weeks later, an Italian veteran, Spartaco Guisco, helped kill Lt Col Karl Hotz, the military governor of Nantes. Hitler responded with mass executions – including of several brigaders, who had been locked up as a preventive measure.

Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces, was appalled. Fabien’s group had ignored his commands. “I order those in the occupied territory not to kill Germans,” he said, fearing the mass retaliations that soon came. But resistance had shifted to a new level, and De Gaulle had to change his mind. Fabien died in an accident later in the war, and now has a Paris metro station named after him. He was one of hundreds of brigade veterans, including women, to join the French Resistance. More than 100 were killed, but on 19 August 1944, it was another brigader, Henri Rol-Tanguy, who ordered the French force of the interior (FFI), to rise against German troops in Paris. A week later Gen Dietrich von Choltitz formally surrendered the city to Rol-Tanguy and Gen Philippe Leclerc.

When the second world war broke out, it had been natural for brigaders to enlist. They had fought fascism for three years, but the task had not been completed. In Britain and the US, they were initially viewed with mistrust, not least because of the Nazi Soviet non-aggression pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) of 1939, by which Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland. The former commander of the British battalion of the International Brigade, Tom Wintringham, approached the government with plans for a home guard. He was turned away, and instead founded a private academy of “ungentlemanly warfare” at the Osterley Park stately home, where brigade veterans and others taught people to make petrol bombs, ambush tanks and conduct guerilla warfare (the surrealist painter Roland Penrose taught camouflage).

Soon, however, it became clear that brigaders had extremely useful experience in warfare and formed a unique network throughout occupied Europe. Knox had emigrated to the US and was recruited by Gen “Wild” Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the forerunner to the CIA, which ran guerrilla operations. Sent to liaise with Italian partisans, he bonded with the commander after realising that he was a former brigader and that they had fought together in Madrid. “From then on, relations with the partisans were no problem,” Knox said. In fact, several Italian partisan armies were led by brigaders, as were all four of Tito’s communist armies in Yugoslavia. The former brigader Aldo Lampredi was one of three partisans who executed Mussolini and his lover Claretta Petacci in 1945. Lampredi’s Beretta pistol delivered the final shots. A fellow brigader, Randolfo Pacciardi, became Italy’s postwar minister of defence. Even German brigaders fought against Hitler, with writers Erich Weinert and Willi Bredel shouting propaganda at snowbound Nazi troops from the ruins of Stalingrad. Since their aim was the defeat of fascism, the brigaders could finally savour victory in 1945.

On 13 November 1989, Erich Mielke stood before the East German parliament to answer questions in his role as head of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the state security ministry, commonly known as the Stasi. Mielke was 82 years old, a veteran of the International Brigades, and had run the notorious secret police for three decades. He was known as the “master of fear”, after turning East Germany into what the writer Anna Funder, in her book Stasiland, called “the most perfected surveillance state of all time”. The Berlin Wall had come down four days earlier, and the assembly no longer considered its task to be rubber-stamping everything. Mielke had not realised. Facing unusually tough questioning, he raised his arms and declared: “I love all humanity! I really do!” The assembly dissolved into laughter. Five days later he resigned. In 1993, he was jailed for the 1931 murders of two Weimar Republic policemen.

The American Lincoln battalion of the International Brigades in Spain circa 1937. — The American Lincoln battalion of the International Brigades circa 1937
Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

Brigaders played a remarkable role in East Germany after 1945, since they were among the few people the Soviets trusted. Heinrich Rau headed the German economic commission, its first de facto government. At one stage all three armed ministries – defence, interior and state security – were run by brigaders. Such figures also provided a narrative of heroic German opposition to Hitler, which East Germany also tried to claim for itself. Much the same happened wherever Soviets or communist partisans took control after the second world war. Ferenc Münnich became prime minister of Hungary and machine gunner Mehmet Shehu was his counterpart in Albania for 27 years. Karlo Lukanov became Bulgaria’s deputy prime minister. In fact, the list of ministers, politburo members, generals, police chiefs and ambassadors who had been brigaders runs well into three figures. Many had been senior communists before the Spanish civil war, where exiled parties went en masse, seeking meaning for their existence. “We needed Spain more than the republic needed us,” quipped one Italian exile.

Their specialities, as soldiers, were defence and security. In the paranoid world of Stalinism, that also meant repression. Orwell had already spotted this in Spain, after the Marxist militia unit he fought for was banned and Barcelona’s walls were suddenly covered with “posters screaming from the hoardings that I and everyone like me was a fascist spy”. That experience inspired Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet most communist brigaders knew nothing about the horrors of Stalinism, and saw themselves as soldiers in a broad anti-fascist coalition. “Stalin was still a saint,” one explained later. Most eventually disabused themselves of that. Some, like Mielke, never did.

An International Brigades banner at an International Workers Memorial Day rally in Manchester in 2018. — International Brigades banner at an International Workers Memorial Day rally,
Manchester 2018. Photograph: SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty

In fact, a good number were purged, precisely because they had fought in Spain and been in contact with the outside world. They featured in show trials from Prague to Budapest. “I was a treacherous enemy within the Communist party. I am justly an object of contempt and deserve the maximum and the hardest punishment,” Czech veteran Otto Šling intoned before he was hanged after the notorious Slánský trial. Hungary’s foreign minister László Rajk was executed in 1949 after a trial in which 16 of 97 defendants were Spanish veterans. A suspicious number of those purged were Jews. In Poland, many lost jobs – and went into exile – after a wave of socialist antisemitism followed Israel’s victory in the six-day war in 1967.

This persecution was mirrored, in a lesser way, in the US. The screenwriter and former brigader Alvah Bessie was one of the Hollywood Ten jailed in 1950 for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Communist witch-hunting was partially balanced out by Ernest Hemingway, a brigades devotee who made the fictional American brigader Robert Jordan the hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Mostly, however, the cold war narrative won, not least because the brigades also produced several prominent Soviet spies. The most famous was Morris Cohen, who helped steal nuclear weapon blueprints from Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico.

On 18 July 2011, members of Norway’s Labour party’s Workers’ Youth League attending a summer camp on the island of Utøya unveiled a plaque to four young social democrats who had died in the International Brigades. The plaque bore poetry by Nordahl Grieg, a celebrated writer who had visited the brigades on the frontline. Four days after the unveiling, far-right gunman Anders Breivik reached the island, armed and posing as a policeman. He murdered 69 of those young people in the country’s worst massacre since the second world war, picking off teenagers as they tried to swim away. It was a tragic reminder that, even in the most advanced democracies, ideologies based on violence and tyranny refuse to go away.

For the families of brigade veterans, the fact that they fought one sort of tyranny, while some of them ended up serving another, complicates their memory. In Hungary, the niece of the writer, brigades commander Paul Lukács (AKA Béla Frankl and Máté Zalka), wanted to defend her adored uncle. When she and her daughter contacted me, they highlighted that, before being killed in action in Spain, Lukács suffered nightmares. The family destroyed his diary, which contained dangerously anti-Stalinist jottings.

An officer of the International Brigades lays twigs on the mass grave of soldiers who died fighting in the civil war, circa 1937. — An officer of the International Brigades lays twigs on the mass grave
of soldiers who died fighting in the civil war, circa 1937.
Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance told me that it viewed brigaders as “instruments of Soviet Union’s imperialist politics” and that some “took part in forced and brutal introduction of communism in Poland”. For communists outside the Soviet bloc, the contradiction is less intense. In his video testament, Virgilio Fernández del Real (by then only one of three Brigaders still known to be alive) had proudly announced that “I have been a communist since I was 14”, before adding that “we are not ruffians”. For those brigaders who were not communists, or simply saw themselves as anti-fascists, it seemed even simpler. They had done their duty, even if others looked down on them for associating with communists. After an illustrious behind-the-lines career during the second world war, for which he won France’s Croix de Guerre medal, Bernard Knox applied to study for a classics doctorate at Yale (he later directed the Center of Hellenic Studies at Harvard). At the interview, he was told by a professor that his time in Spain made him a “premature anti-fascist”. Knox was dumbfounded.

“How, I wondered, could anyone be a premature anti-fascist?” he recalled asking himself. “Could there be anything such as a premature antidote to a poison? A premature antiseptic? A premature antitoxin? A premature anti-racist? If you were not premature, what sort of anti-fascist were you supposed to be?”

The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War by Giles Tremlett is published by Bloomsbury and available at guardianbookshop.com

Большой террор … Stalin’s Great Terror

February 27, 2023December 3, 2025Paul Hemphill 7 Comments

You were taken away at dawn. I followed you
As one does when a corpse is being removed.
Children were crying in the darkened house.
A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God…
The cold of an icon was on your lips
A death-cold sweat on your brow –
I will never forget this; I will gather
To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy
Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.
Anna Akhmatova, Moscow 1935

I have written often in In That Howling Infinite on Russian and Ukrainian history. Although I am no expert, and profess an amateur interest only, I do possess a short and humble pedigree. Once in another lifetime, I read politics at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. My tutor in Soviet Studies was exiled Hungarian academic and historian Tibor Szamuely, Like many refugees from Communism, he was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919, and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers, and was called “Butcher Szamuely”. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where Tibor was born, and where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a Labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University. In 1964, then nearing 40, he was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England.

Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naive communist sympathiser and fellow-traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retired an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe.

He would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.

Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure.

A few years back, I retrieved from my archive a dissertation I wrote under Szamuely’s supervision in 1970, entitled How Rational Was The Great Purge? Reading it fifty years later, I was surprised to observe that my writing style, the content and the conclusions I drew have changed little over the years. In retrospect the tenor is somewhat naïf but it foreshadows a perspective that I’ve developed over the years of “walking in the shoes of others – contemplating what might be going through the heads of the protagonists, be they the Old Bolsheviks who became the sacrificial victims or Stalin himself. Fathoming the mind of “Uncle Joe”, as the Allied PR departments dubbed him during WWII when he was deemed a friend and indeed a bulwark against Nazi aggression, was a bit of a pretentious stretch for a twenty one year old, even though I did only have an audience of one – and did earn a “first” in Soviet Studies.

A couple of days ago, I pulled it out again to show Adèle, and discovered to my horror that the handwritten foolscap roneo had faded almost to the point of vanishing. In a bright light, I managed to recite it into iPad notes and transcribe it into a fresh document and have now the privilege to publish it in Into That Howling Infinite.

Privilege not pleasure, I must note. It does not make for easy reading.

When it was conceived, my dissertation was written with academic grades in mind, and particularly for Szamuely’s assessment alone. There is little explanation of context and of the events and personalities referred to therein (ironically, in the light of contemporary events, many of whom were Ukrainian and many, Jewish), and chronology was less important than argument. There was a word limit and also no need for explanation as my tutor knew, from his own academic and personal history, what had happened, who was what and who was who – and what became of them.

Most, sadly, did not die comfortable in their beds surrounded by family and friends, and more often than not in dark execution cells or in fields and forests beside their own graves. He was was also very much aware of the victims of the Great Purge and it’s many siblings, so many of them nameless, who perished during the Soviet Union’s two decades of terror, and for the millions – from the Baltic to the Crimea – who were deported en masse from ancestral lands to the Siberian or transported to the labour camps of the distant Gulags, to work, to starve, and to die.

The ordinary reader, of this blog and of world affairs generally is not very acquainted with the history and politics of Russia and the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Much of what casual observers know is learned from wide reading and often filtered through the distorted lenses of unreliable and potentially misleading and false analogies and partisan preconceptions, or worse, uninformed and prejudiced certainties. We see these in full flight in mainstream media commentary and particularly in social media with respect to the current conflict between Ukraine and its powerful neighbour. This article does not discus that conflict, although the reader will certainly see patterns, hear echoes and feel reverberations, for the consequences of events which occurred down the foggy ruins of time do indeed ricochet through history to strike us today.

And so, then, to my resurrected dissertation, which I have edited to include the full names of the principal actor. But first, some historical background to put it into perspective.

‘I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol, Yevgraf Zhivago”

The Great Terror

By strange symmetry, when I retrieved my now faded dissertation, I’d recently reread historian Robert Conquest’s tombstone of a book, The Great Terror, a relentless and harrowing narrative of arrests, trials, fabricated confessions, hostage-taking, deportations, torture and executions as Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Josef Stalin consolidated his rule, eliminated enemies real and imagined, and created his own model of a twentieth century socialist state.

It commenced with the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks, his former comrades in arms in the Russian Revolution of October 1917 (there were two revolutions that year) and the bloody civil war that followed, and then expanded to embrace all in the party and society at large who may or may not have shared his vision. Intellectuals, philosophers, writers, poets, musicians, priests, scientists, academics, teachers, civil servants, workers and peasants, and the Red Army’s Officer Corps – the latter being a contributing factor to the Soviet Union’s need to make a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and its disastrously slow response to Hitlers invasion in June 1941.

An estimated death toll is difficult to determine. In those dark days, people simply disappeared, and the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB and present day FSI) covered its tracks well. The official number for the “Great Purge” of 1936-38, or “the Yezhovchina”, named for Victor Yezhov, head of the NKVD and Stalin’s lord high executioner, stands at 1,548,366 detained persons, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day. Various historians claim that the real number of victims could be twice as much.

But the the arrests, executions, and deportations commenced as early as 1930 and continued right up until Stalin’s death in 1953. Conquest, in his The Great Terror: A Reassessment does the gloomy math: 1930-36, 7 million; 1937-1938, 3 million; 1039-53, 10 million. The number of deaths in the Soviet Union that were explicitly ordered by someone – in other words, the number of executions – is actually relatively low at around 1.5 million. The majority of the deaths were caused by neglect or repressive policies – for example, those who died in the Soviet gulags, those who died while being deported, and German civilians and Prisoners of War are believed to have perished while under Soviet guard.

The numbers who were transported, exiled, displaced, and scattered to concentration camps or far-eastern towns and villages were likewise incalculable – as Yevgraf, the brother of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago comments in the final scenes of David Lean’s beautiful but flawed movie):

“Indeed, as a policeman, I would say, get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home. Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was a better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol”

… and

“She (Lara) had come to Moscow to look for her child. I helped her as best I could, but I knew it was hopeless. I think I was a little in love with her. One day she went away and didn’t come back. She died or vanished somewhere, in one of the labor camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. That was quite common in those days”.

There are a myriad of books and films about these events. Wikipedia is as good a place as any to start. Robert Conquest’s is the most acclaimed – and rightly so. Then there is Arthur Koestler’s chilling novel, Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, which recounts the thoughts of an Old Bolshevik as he awaits death in the execution cells:

A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh leather of the revolver belt: but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder-straps of its uniform – and in whose name did it raised the dark pistol barrel?

Both books are cited often in my dissertation.

As for movies, there’s always David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, which realistically albeit melodramatically portrays the choices and compromises confronting ordinary, intellectual Russians in the years of revolution and civil war. And I would highly recommend the poignant but powerful Burnt by the Sun, a 1994 film by Russian director and screenwriter Nikita Mikhailkov and Azerbaijani screenwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov. The film depicts the story of a senior officer (played by Mikhalkov) and his family during the purge of the Red Army.

And there was the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose words open this piece, bearing sad witness to the imprisoned, the deported, the disappeared and the dead – including in their number, two husbands and her only son – memorializing the suffering of herself, her family and millions of her compatriots in her tortured testament, Requiem. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, she died of natural causes in March 1966. Russian born philosopher amd historian Isiah Berlin described the impact of her life:

“The widespread worship of her memory in Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel. The legend of her life and unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself, transformed her into a figure … not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history in (the twentieth) century”.

Anna Akhmatova, by Amedeo Modigliani

Russia’s Stations of the Cross did not cease with the end of the Terror. Three years later came Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the rapid blitzkreig that took the Wehrmacht to the gates of Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, and the bloody clawback that brought the Red Army to Berlin and to take captive the peoples of Eastern Europe.

Over twenty five million Soviet citizens died during the Great Patriotic War, of which just under ten million were military. Most died as a direct result of the military conflict that ranged from the Baltic to the Caucasus. But miilions also perished at the hands of the NKVD and in the forced mass deportations of “suspect” peoples, including the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tartars.

At wars’ end, the Terror rolled on, albeit at a lower setting. Josef Stalin remained suspicious, vengeful and paranoid, and the purges continued right up until the moment he departed this mortal coil (as depicted in dubious slapstick in Armando Iannucci‘s recent The Death of Stalin).

Many, many Red Army soldiers who had been taken captive by the Nazis were arrested on their return from captivity. Many were shot for ‘desertion’, and thousands sent to the Gulags. Whether they had surrendered or had been subdued and taken captive, often as fast-moving battle fronts left them stranded, abandoned and entrapped behind enemy lines, they were deemed cowards, traitors and enemies of the Soviet Union and its people. They were moreover doubly damned. Whether from behind the wire of concentration camps or as slave labourers in German mines, fields and factories, they had witnessed, come into contact with, and had been contaminated by the world outside.

In one of his most cited poems, The Caucasus, written in 1845, Ukraine’s national poet, the 19th-century bard Taras Shevchenko, who’d helped build national identity through his verse, which he composed in both Russian and Ukrainian, ridicules Russian expansionism and mourns the immense loss of life it had already wrought. He could have been writing about tyranny, repression and violence all around the world and through the ages:

“We groan beneath the yoke of hangmen while drunken justice sodden sleeps”.

How rational was the Great Purge?

Paul Hemphill, Reading, 17 June 1970

When veteran Bolshevik leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev had demanded reprisals against their comrade Leon Trotsky, party secretary Josef Vissarionovich Stalin replied: “a policy a lopping off heads is fraught with danger … you chop off one head today, another one tomorrow, still another one the day after – what in the end will be left of our party?” (Deutsche, Stalin, 344). Lenin himself and warned “let not blood flow between you” (Ibid 377). Yet in 1932, Stalin was forced to back down when having advocated the death sentence for oppositional activities, he met the opposition of Sergei Kirov, First Secretary of the Leningrad branch of the CPSU and the party – an opposition that may have contributed to Kirov’s untimely death in December 1934 and the events which followed). And in 1938, Trotsky was to proclaim that “Stalin is like a man who wants to quench his thirst with salted water” (Fainsod 356j). But not, in Stalin’s view, without reason.

Old Comrades Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev

“We are a country surrounded by capitalist states … The internal enemies of our revolution are the agents of capitalism of all countries. In fighting against enemies at home….fight the counterrevolutionary elements of all countries”. Thus, Stalin attempts to rationalize terror. In his grim novel Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler described “how there were two elements in our party. One consisted of adventurers who wanted to risk all we had won to promote the revolution abroad. We recognized this current to be dangerous and have liquidated it … We stand alone … We have only one duty: not to perish”. The survival of the week and embryonic socialist state in a hostile world depended upon the strictest unity within that state, and no oppositional tendencies could be tolerated. “We have only one duty: not to perish”.

Victor Hugo once wrote: “ Mr Bonaparte’s crime is not a crime it is called a necessity. Mr Bonaparte’s robberies are not robberies, they are called measures of state. Mr Bonaparte’s murders are not murders, they are called public safety”. Here then was Machiavellian rationalism in action. “As long as the capitalist encirclement costs, there will be be wreckers, deviationists, spies, terrorists” (Stalin in Fainsod ibid 356 … and an endless host of counterrevolutionaries, bourgeois nationalists, kulaks or German and Japanese agents plotting the demise of socialist Russia.

Before 1917, the purge been excepted within the party. “Unity of Will” and submission to central authority being vital in the face of Czarist repression. Compromise was comparable to treason, obedience, the highest virtue. After 1917 the need remained in order to overcome inertia, suspicion and ignorance, hostility, subversion and sabotage. Lenin had stressed “better fewer and better”, and the consolidation of the party by the constant self purging of fellow travellers. The class struggle did not cease with Red October.

Indeed, as Lenin had prognosticated in “State and Revolution”, it intensified, as external enemies would find allies in the party. Every step towards socialism met with fierce resistance from within: the trade union dispute, the polemics of Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev. When “enemies” infiltrate into the ranks of the vanguard itself, their suppression is not so easy as envisaged by Lenin’s ideals. In the years subsequent to the Civil War, therefore, constant vigilance and battle was all important. Yet the gradual liquidation of the old Bolsheviks in the years 1936 to 1938 pointed to less exalted motives, those of Stalin, using terror as a means for maintaining a monopoly of party leadership. The problem of reconciling this with the class struggle was solved by identifying any form of opposition to his rule with counterrevolution and espionage.

He effectively wrote the script that others followed. At his trial in August 1936 Kamenev confessed how “we have become fascists, we have organized counter-revolution against socialism. Zinoviev likewise: ”my defective Bolshevism was transformed into anti-Bolshevism, and through anti-Bolshevism, I arrived at fascism. Trotskyism is a variety of fascism and Zinovievism is a variety of Trotskyism” (Deutsche, The Prophet Outcast 333).

Having seized power after Lenin’s death, Stalin had to reconquer it again and again. Endless struggle will be terminated by the physical elimination of all whose party past or present attitudes made them potential opponents. Expulsion, Lenin’s penalty for “factionalism”, had been ineffective. Men who represented the potentiality of an alternative government of rival power centres had to be destroyed, be they active leaders or impotent symbols of opposition like Kamenev and Zinoviev. Reason justified the swift, merciless and all embracing preemptive strike to paralyse and to deter. Potential leaders, the men they influenced or were likely to influence, and an ever- widening circle of associates, friends and relative, who by the very nature of design were implicated. Vengefulness could engender opposition. Oppositional leaders had trained or promoted party man administrators and soldiers – in short, numberless alternative power centres.

The determining reason for Stalin‘s decision on his “final solution” lay perhaps in the realization that the mood of the Old Bolsheviks was one of hostility towards him, having remain unreconciled to personal dictatorship since the Kirov purges. Hostility could erupt into open challenge , and both he and his old comrades remembered the dying Lenin’s s pronouncement: “I propose to the comrades that they consider a means of removing Stalin from his post and appointing to it another person more patient, more loyal, more polite, and (relevant in this context) more considerate to his comrades” (Conquest 537)

When the “Trial of the Sixteen began in August 1936, Trotsky wrote how “Stalin is staging this trial in order to suppress discontent and opposition … (he) treats every criticism and every form of opposition as a conspiracy”. (Deutsche, Outcast 322). Yet, in 1932 Trotsky himself had recognises the need for “unity of will”, “the upsetting at the bureaucratic equilibrium would benefit the forces of counter revolution” (Deutsche Stalin 344). But times had changed, and for the type of man Trotsky represented, there was no place in the party.

The reason for hostility perhaps lay in the basic psychology of the Old Bolsheviks. Nikolai Bukharin told historian Boris Nicolaevsky in 1936 that “we had all been trained in the psychology of oppositionalists … we are critics, destructionionists not builders” (Nicolaevsky 60) Soviet Russia wanted builders, not idealists. Stalin needed therefore to eliminate this millstone, to bring a new ruling class aimed at positive construction and not schismatic criticism. The theorist and the visionary were being supplanted by the young , hard and ambitious New Soviet Man, sincere communists holding key posts which merged political and professional leadership. The integration and stabilization of the regime necessitated increased centralization and the concentration of power in the hands of a select elite. The growing stability called for greater efficiency and control, the crystallization of totalitarianism demanding authority and obedience, and the accountability of the citizen for his inability to adjust to the new pattern.

Economic and social change that was not spontaneous as a product of attitudes and social relationships needed terror as a motive force. The men of the old revolution with the old ideas and ideals were liabilities to the new revolution. The “new man” created by Stalin’s regime, without a revolutionary past or tradition, ignorant and suspicious of intellectual arguments propounded by the oppositions, they were Koestler’s “Neanderthalers”, the generation “that started to think after of the flood … a generation without an umbilical cord”. Provided by Stalin with guidance, nurtured on Stalin’s Marxism- Leninism, and on the concrete achievements of the Five Year Plan.

Bukharin, in Nikolaevsky’s interview, and Koestler’s Rubachov see the new man as their creations, inevitable to socialist progress. They realise that survival depends upon success, and if they fail, they can no longer serve the revolution. History absolves those who are right – but those who are wrong must pay. Tthey understand the mechanics of the system. They share to some extent the values of the rulers. The process of selection is vital to stability and progress. And they are fatalistically determinist, agreeing to fabricated confessions because there was no existence outside of the party. Stalinism was the acceptable alternative to the counter-revolution.

“In a war which may be only a few months away”, Gletkin tells Rubachov in Darkness at Noon, “such currents (that is disaffection and popular dissatisfaction) could lead to catastrophe … the party must be cast in one mold, filled with blind discipline and absolute trust”. In 1936 the chances of agreement with Germany were slim. Cases such as “the homosexual conspiracy” of 1933-34 gave substance to fabricated charges of treason and espionage.

The threat of war and undoubtedly heightened Stalin’s fears for his political survival. He remembered how the Bolsheviks has seized power in such conditions after 1914. It certainly gave him a pretext, and legitimacy sanctioned by popular patriotism, for what Deutsche called a “perverted psychological truth” which instigated a pre-emptive strike to prevent instability and collapse during a national emergency. Yet, wouldn’t a conciliatory policy aimed at creating voluntary, popular and national cooperation and solidarity have been more logical than the disorganisation and demoralisation which Stalin had invited? Purges are deliberate and planned, and Stalin in no doubt realised their consequences if not their scope.

The motive for the Yezhovchina, named for Victor Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, does not hold its own independently. Neither does that of protecting the revolution. Bukharin in 1936, and Nikita Khrushkev in his groundbreaking Secret Speech to a closed plenum of the Central Committee in February 1956 claimed that Stalin had used too extreme means when the economy had been strengthening, the exploiting classes destroyed, and the party consolidated ideologically and numerically. Stalin himself would not have downplayed his achievements merely to attack his enemies. In reality, the new range of the charges brought against the “enemies of the people” avoid the question of a specific motivation, whilst not once did the chief victim of so many conspiracies. and yet the author, manager and producer, appear in court as a witness. Once again therefore, Machiavellian motives appear to predominate – those of Stalin consolidating his personal power. Potential opponents must be kept in a state of permanent insecurity so that all embracing terror by the “lopping off of heads” of possible alternatives to the regime. The party is cleansed of infiltrators and careerists, opening channels for new blood more loyal and more efficient. Individuals, uncontrolled and undirected, were susceptible to intrigue, and hence the unreliable need to be replaced.

The Nikolaev case following the assassination of Kirov by Leonid Nicolaev in December 1934. Nikolaev and several suspected accomplices were convicted in the Moscow Trials and executed less than 30 days later, with complicity as a common charge for the condemned. Kirov’s assassination remains controversial and unsolved, with varying theories regarding the circumstances of his death., and provided a blueprint for discovery of accomplices and instigators, and the investigation of “ideologically undisarmed oppositions”, for “capacities for mischief” (Nicolaevsky 60), and for the punishment for the negligence of security and party organs for tolerating oppositional circles in their midst. In 1934, harmless Leningrad dissidents became terrorists; and in 1934, “Trotskyists” and ”Zinovievites” were tried, being told that by admitting complicity and condemning terrorism, they would check their own supporters.

The trials of 1936-38 merely keynoted the purge, the grand design finding full realisation in prisons and camps. The slaughter of the Old Guard showed that their day was gone, that resistance and opposition to the new regime was futile. Their fall, in a power struggle which had been waged since Lenin’s death, had been completed after Kirov’s murder, yet they were now called upon to justify the purge, to vilify the victims to publicise and popularize the forthcoming purges.

The trials of “the sixteen (August 1936 – Kamenev and Zinoviev, and others), of “the seventeen” (January 1937 – Pyatkov, Sokolnikov and the so-called anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre), and of “the twenty one (March 1938 – Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, and the so called anti-Soviet Bloc of the Rightists and Trotskyists), saw the extermination of the Old Guard, and with it, the reputation of Trotsky, the arch-instigator and defendant in absentia. In colluding with Trotsky, the greatest “enemy of the people”, they were accused of treason, espionage, diversion, terrorism, and wr cling. They had plotted disrupt the economy to betray the Soviet state; they had plotted Kirov’s death, and had conspired to assassinate Stalin himself, together with others of his inner circle.

The case was different with popular national figures, and hence trial and publicity gave way to secrecy and speed trial “in camera”, illustrating Stalin’s determination bypassing even superficial legality. Hence, in secrecy, the party itself was purged by “electoral defeat” and arrest, by vigilance and police infiltration. 4434 Of 11,017 Moscow committee members were in 1937 new replacements, whilst elsewhere, 50 to 70% renovation was quite common, introducing new and ideologically pure cadres (Z Brzezinsky The Permanent Purge 94). Public trials would have strained loyalty and discipline.

This was also the case with the military, a fair accompli being necessary. In June 1937 civil war hero General Mikhail Tukachevsky and seven others were executed for treason and sabotage. Only by purging potentially disloyal or unduly independent commanders like Tukachevsky, who opposed politicisation, could be army be absorbed into the totalitarian system, and hence removing its strength as an alternative source of power while simultaneously developing its efficiency and its potency as a subordinate weapon. Whether a conspiracy existed or not is questionable, but but facility of suppression suggests the negative. Elimination would have been inevitable in order to insure full control in the event of war.

The purge of the Nationalities shows similar motivations. Nationalism had been contrary to the socialist ideals of international totalitarianism and international economics. Growing national resentment towards Russian central control had led Moscow to believe that national cadres and local leaders were responsible, whilst the atmosphere was highly conducive it the wide discovery of plots and conspiracies among the Nationalities. More objective reasoning saw the necessity of solidifying central control by removing sources independent national leadership, and hence, throughout the USSR bourgeois nationalists, deviationists, White Guards, kulaks and spies were exposed, the purges extending from the elimination of identifiable opponents to the impersonal elimination of thousands of suspects.

“Unity of Will” was all important, and all subsidiary elements had to be subordinated. Even the Comintern had to be cleansed to provide uniformity of policy in accordance with Soviet national interests, as opposed to Communist international interest. Soviet diplomats were removed. German, Hungarian, Polish, and Italian communists domiciled in the Soviet Union including former Hungarian strongman Bela Kun) were liquidated. Even in Spain, the KGB successfully purges the extremist left wing. Not even the KGB remained immune, Genrich Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov both falling to their own terror.

Stalin and Yezhov

In the industrial and agricultural sectors, also. the politically unreliable became scapegoats for failure, and inefficiency, to be replaced by the new generation of graduates in technical and professional fields. Technicians holding key posts in the economic structure, and intellectuals – natural critics – had to be submissive. Socialist competition being achievement orientated meant that failure to produce and to fulfill norms was tantamount to wrecking and sabotage. Failure demanded retribution: to deter, and to provide additional stimuli for greater endeavours. Yet, Stalin’s prime aim was total control – imprisonment have have been deterrent enough to encourage efficiency, whilst a general improvement in the standard of living was beginning emerge, giving little cause for such repression. Physical liquidation was primarily a means of control and not of production … as Lazar Kagonovich failed to note when, at the 18th Congress, he proclaimed: “ we have now cadres which carry out every directive of the party, of the Central Committee of the Soviet power, every directive of Comrade Stalin” (ibid 90).

Isaac Deutsche describes “Trial of the Sixteen”as “so hallucinatory in its masochism and sadism that it seemed to surpass human imagination” (Deutsche Outcast 332)…The defendants were made to crawl to their deaths amidst denunciation and self-derision. Although this justifies the character rather than the reason behind the Great Purge, it’s illustrates an all important function of the Purge as an institution – what Fainsod calls prophylactic and preventative.

The first Five Year Plan had brought a degree of stability, but the regime could not afford to let stability lapseinto inactivity. The messianic and totalitarian nature of the regime, demanded further goals, and further fervour and enthusiasm, to avoid the degeneration of party and the state. The internal emigration of the silent majority was synonymous with negation and opposition; and hence participation was vital. The policy of critique had originally been intended as an instrument of improvement, of exposing inefficiency, and error, but now, Kritika was associated with denunciation and Samokritika, with confession (often false), mutual suspicion, and fear of denunciation for lack of fervour, providing mass participation, synthetic enthusiasm, and Revolutionary, Watchfulness”… Legitimacy and consensus was thus created whilst also serving to crystallise and dramatise the policies of the government… The success of propaganda campaigns was shown during the public trials when frequent and hostile emotional outbursts often provided an ex post facto rationale for physical liquidation. State Prosecutor Andrev Vyshynski was symptomatic of the popular hysteria generated… “These mad dogs of capitalism, tried to tear limb from limb the best of the Soviet land… I am joining my angry indignant voice to the, rumbling voices of millions… I demand that dogs gone mad should be shot, every one of them … “ (Conquest 335)

Propaganda campaigns were aimed at dehumanising the enemies, and developing an atmosphere of hostility that stifled resistance. The supreme correctness of the regime was asserted and failings were attributed to the accused, who would be charged with conspiring with hostile powers (Germany, in particular) planning to destroy the fruits of the revolution … their fate was pragmatic; resistance was useless; the system is unchallengeable; the leadership is in fallible. Confession, wrote Koestler in Darkness at Noon, is “to gild the right to blacken the wrong … to make the opposition appear contemptible, to make the masses understand that opposition is a crime… Sympathy and pity for the opposition are danger to the country…The can be no martyrs or heroes – no potential focii for factionalism … they must die as degenerate traitors, and this must be impressed upon the uninformed, easily influenced masses … Hence the victim is often called upon to collaborate in his own moral and physical destruction, often willingly, as a final service to the party and to the revolution …his duty is “to gild the right, to blacken the wrong” … his wrong – he must pay!

To Soviet leaders, the purge is an instrument employed in a rational and predetermined fashion, cleansing the system of undesirable elements, and streamlining organisation, revitalising the system and eliminating alternative power centres. Such motives, provide rationalism enough – but Stalin perhaps sinned in his excess … If his fear of war and collapse had precipitated his actions, then disaster of 1941 revealed his folly. In advancing and preserving the revolution, at face value, the immediate consequence was of detriment. The liquidations had outstripped available replacements, whilst privation and hardship, damage and hatred amongst the influential sectors, severely hampered the development of Soviet society … Yet, the dynamic momentum of industrialisation had been maintained, and “new men” quickly adapted to their new responsibilities, whilst fear of an rest had led many to great endeavours in all fields of production … Yet, the economic and social needs of the Soviet state could not justify the bloodshed … When Stalin told the 18th Congress that “we shall have no further for resorting to the method of mass purges” (Deutsche Stalin 381), he was, perhaps primarily reviewing his own position, firmly established at the apex of a hierarchy of power of his making. Frederick Engels may have told Karl Marx that “terror consist mostly of useless cruelties, perpetuated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves” – and Stalin was certainly in need of reassurance in 1934: but on the eve of the great purge, Stalin had held a position of strength, his opposition defeated, his Politburo hand-picked. Yet, the very nature, personal dictatorships necessitated control at all levels of the system – supreme control, unlimited and in divided. His aim was total control, the vanguard of the revolution personified – and all other aims, all other motive were subordinate and indivisible from this. It is therefore rational to secure complete personal power? Khrushchev condemned Stalin as a mad man – but was not Stalin his teacher, and the teacher and mentor of the Soviet leadership after his death – and no one would obviously seriously admit that his creator (for this was just what Stalin was) was a madman …

The question invites to consideration whether the acquisition and the maintenance of power is rational, or whether, in Stalin’s case, it was a men’s to an end escapes explanation, whether power was his aim – and this he had achieved – or whether power was a necessary means of strengthening the Soviet state and economy, for despite failure and setback he did create a major industrial power. Totalitarian purges are unnecessarily carefully planned, and controlled from the centre. In Stalin’s case the purge was perhaps carried too far, and with detrimental consequences, by the sheer force own momentum, but the fact that Stalin had maintained control was demonstrated by the facility and efficiency which the purgers themselves, and in particular, Yezhov, of were also purged after 1938, Stalin’s targets within the party, the nationalities, the economy, the intelligentsia in the army, were categorised and identified. Potential enemies and obstacles to his total control were officially eliminated. From the Machiavellian standpoint, this was more rational than Hitler’s “Final Solution”, although in both cases, pretexts were created, whether sabotage or treason or “lebensraum”. But once again, subjectivity is strong when a word such as rational is employed. “Expedient” would perhaps be more applicable. Innocent victims were numberless as the circle widened, yet even then, the psychological and deterrent effect on the population was beneficial to the regime. The toll and ensuing atmosphere of insecurity in the wasteland called peace induced submission and facilitated control, necessitating only occasional and selective terror, such as employed during 1939-41 in the newly sovietised Baltic states… In its way, the Great Purge was in fact a “final solution”, ridding the regime of opposition, and the disunity it brought. To Stalin, unity was essential to progress, and perhaps, like Peter the Great, it was necessary to employ barbaric means to modernise a backward, and perhaps in western eyes, barbaric state, and to ride roughshod over all obstacles to achieve this end …

The Old Bolsheviks. Most perished

Bibliography

I Deutsche, Stalin
I Deutsche, The Prophet Outcast
M Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled
A Koastler, Darkness at Noon
H Finer, The Man in Horseback
R Conquest, The Great Terror
H Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite
Z Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge

17th September 1939 – the rape of Poland (2)

September 17, 2019September 17, 2019Paul Hemphill 6 Comments

On 17 September 1939, sixteen days after Germany invaded Poland from the west in an sudden and unprovoked assault [see our post 2nd September 1939 – the rape of Poland (1)], the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east in accordance with the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, ,forever know as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. a neutrality pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.

The Red Army vastly outnumbered the Polish army and the undeclared war lasted 20 days and ended on 6 October 1939 with division and annexation of the entire country territory by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Some 320,000 Polish soldiers became prisoners of war and a campaign of mass persecution in the newly-acquired territory began immediately with a wave of arrests and summary executions targeting Polish figures of authority such as military officers, police and priests. In May and June 1949 alone, some 22.000 polish officers, politicians, intellectuals and professionals were murdered in the Katyn Forest.There were other such massacres as the NKVD endeavoured to eliminate the Polish elite. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were transported from eastern Poland to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union in four major waves of deportation between 1939 and 1941.

In November 1939 the Soviets annexed the eternity under its control and some 13.5 million Polish citizens became Soviet subjects following sham elections. Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland until the summer of 1941, when they were expelled by the German army in the course of Operation Barbarossa, and the area was under German occupation until the Red Army reconquered it in the summer of 1944.

This was but the beginning.

Around six million Polish citizens perished during the Second World War about – one fifth of the pre-war population. Most were civilian victims of the war crimes and crimes against humanity during the occupation by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and half of them were Jews.

An estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during The Great Patriotic War that was to come, including as many as 11 million soldiers. Some seven million were killed in action and another 3.6 million perished in German POW camps.

And then there were the deportations. Some 2 million people were transported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics – ostensibly for treasonous collaboration with the invading Germans and anti-Soviet rebellion. Mere suspicion was sufficient to attract collective punishment. The Crimean Tartars were deported en masse, whilst Volga Germans, settled in Russia for centuries, and other non-Slavic nationalities of the strategic Crimea, Black Sea coast lands and northern Caucasus were also dispatched eastwards. Whilst many were permitted to return to their homelands in the years and sometimes decades after the war, we’ll never know how many perished in exile from violence or privation.

On the other side of the ledger, the Wehrmacht suffered three-quarters of its wartime losses fighting the Red Army. Some four million died in action and another 370,000 in the Soviet camp system. Some 600,000 soldiers of Germany allies, mostly Eastern Europeans, died also. In Stalingrad alone, the total Axis casualties (Germans, Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians) are believed to have been more than 800,000 dead, wounded, missing, or captured.

Having sowed the wind, Nazi Germany reaped the whirlwind when the tides of war changed and the Red Army retreated, recouped, stood firm and finally advanced, pushing onwards ever onwards until it reached Berlin. As the Soviets exacted revenge for the carnage and devastation wrought by the Wehrmacht, German citizens paid a heavy price. Civilian deaths, due to the flight and expulsion of Germans, Soviet atrocities and the transportation Germans for forced labour in the Soviet Union range from 500,000 to over 2 million.

These melancholy statistics are but a portion of the millions of lives lost or changed utterly by the events of September 1939.

Lest we forget …

They crossed over the border, the hour before dawn
Moving in lines through the day
Most of our planes were destroyed on the ground where they lay
Waiting for orders we held in the wood
Word from the front never came
By evening the sound of the gunfire was miles away
Ah, softly we move through the shadows, slip away through the trees
Crossing their lines in the mists in the fields on our hands and on our knees
And all that I ever was able to see
The fire in the air glowing red
Silhouetting the smoke on the breeze
Al Stewart, Roads to Moscow

Worldwide, over seventy million souls perished during World War II. We’ll never know just how many …

DEATHS BY COUNTRY

COUNTRY	MILITARY DEATHS	TOTAL CIVILIAN AND MILITARY DEATHS
Albania	30,000	30,200
Australia	39,800	40,500
Austria	261,000	384,700
Belgium	12,100	86,100
Brazil	1,000	2,000
Bulgaria	22,000	25,000
Canada	45,400	45,400
China	3-4,000,000	20,000,000
Czechoslovakia	25,000	345,000
Denmark	2,100	3,200
Dutch East Indies	—	3-4,000,000
Estonia	—	51,000
Ethiopia	5,000	100,000
Finland	95,000	97,000
France	217,600	567,600
French Indochina	—	1-1,500,000
Germany	5,533,000	6,600,000-8,800,000
Greece	20,000-35,000	300,000-800,000
Hungary	300,000	580,000
India	87,000	1,500,000-2,500,000
Italy	301,400	457,000
Japan	2,120,000	2,600,000-3,100,000
Korea	—	378,000-473,000
Latvia	—	227,000
Lithuania	—	353,000
Luxembourg	—	2,000
Malaya	—	100,000
Netherlands	17,000	301,000
New Zealand	11,900	11,900
Norway	3,000	9,500
Papua New Guinea	—	15,000
Philippines	57,000	500,000-1,000,000
Poland	240,000	5,600,000
Rumania	300,000	833,000
Singapore	—	50,000
South Africa	11,900	11,900
Soviet Union	8,800,000-10,700,000	24,000,000
United Kingdom	383,600	450,700
United States	416,800	418,500
Yugoslavia	446,000	1,000,000

WORLDWIDE CASUALTIES*

Battle Deaths	15,000,000
Battle Wounded	25,000,000
Civilian Deaths	45,000,000

*Worldwide casualty estimates vary widely in several sources. The number of civilian deaths in China alone might well be more than 50,000,000.

Postscript

Former Soviet spy, former Ukrainian government minister and author Viktor Suvorov kick-started a historiographical battle royal in the early eighties when he presented controversial evidence that contrary to long-held opinion, Stalin had planned to actually attack Germany in 1941, only to be preempted by Operation Barbarossa. Read more about it here.

See also, in In That Howling Infinite: Ghosts of the Gulag, The Death of Stalin is no laughing matter, and Thermidorian Thinking

2nd September 1939 – the rape of Poland (1)

September 6, 2019September 16, 2019Paul Hemphill 9 Comments

As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War, with Germany’s unprovoked invasion of Poland on 2nd September, and Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany the day after, let us bow our heads for the victims of Nazism.

Worldwide, over seventy million souls perished during World War II. We’ll never know just how many …

DEATHS BY COUNTRY

Country	Military Deaths	Total Civilian and Military Deaths
Albania	30,000	30,200
Australia	39,800	40,500
Austria	261,000	384,700
Belgium	12,100	86,100
Brazil	1,000	2,000
Bulgaria	22,000	25,000
Canada	45,400	45,400
China	3-4,000,000	20,000,000
Czechoslovakia	25,000	345,000
Denmark	2,100	3,200
Dutch East Indies	—	3-4,000,000
Estonia	—	51,000
Ethiopia	5,000	100,000
Finland	95,000	97,000
France	217,600	567,600
French Indochina	—	1-1,500,000
Germany	5,533,000	6,600,000-8,800,000
Greece	20,000-35,000	300,000-800,000
Hungary	300,000	580,000
India	87,000	1,500,000-2,500,000
Italy	301,400	457,000
Japan	2,120,000	2,600,000-3,100,000
Korea	—	378,000-473,000
Latvia	—	227,000
Lithuania	—	353,000
Luxembourg	—	2,000
Malaya	—	100,000
Netherlands	17,000	301,000
New Zealand	11,900	11,900
Norway	3,000	9,500
Papua New Guinea	—	15,000
Philippines	57,000	500,000-1,000,000
Poland	240,000	5,600,000
Rumania	300,000	833,000
Singapore	—	50,000
South Africa	11,900	11,900
Soviet Union	8,800,000-10,700,000	24,000,000
United Kingdom	383,600	450,700
United States	416,800	418,500
Yugoslavia	446,000	1,000,000

WORLDWIDE CASUALTIES*

Battle Deaths	15,000,000
Battle Wounded	25,000,000
Civilian Deaths	45,000,000

*Worldwide casualty estimates vary widely in several sources. The number of civilian deaths in China alone might well be more than 50,000,000.

Read also, in In That Howling Infinite: Righteous Among the Nations and Las Treces Rosas – Spain’s Unquiet Graves

The Other Victims of the Nazis

Ina R. Friedman

Fifty years after the end of World War II, few people are aware that Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis. In addition to six million Jews, more than five million non-Jews were murdered under the Nazi regime. Among them were Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, blacks, the physically and mentally disabled, political opponents of the Nazis, including Communists and Social Democrats, dissenting clergy, resistance fighters, prisoners of war, Slavic peoples, and many individuals from the artistic communities whose opinions and works Hitler condemned.1
The Nazis’ justification for genocide was the ancient claim, passed down through Nordic legends, that Germans were superior to all other groups and constituted a “master race.”

Who constituted this “master race?” Blue-eyed, blond-haired people of Nordic stock, or “Aryans.” As such, they had the right to declare who was worthy of life and who was not, who was to be maimed by sterilization or experimented upon in the interest of attaining racial purity, and who was to be used as slave labor to further the Nazi empire.

In the world the Nazis wished to create, Jews and Gypsies were to be eliminated as racially, socially, and physically defective. The deaf, the blind, the physically disabled, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and alcoholics were either to be sterilized or killed simply because they were viewed as “genetically defective.” Slavic people, though labeled racially inferior by the Germans, would be allowed to exist as slaves in order to supply the Nazis with free labor. Criminals, political enemies of the state, and homosexuals were pronounced socially undesirable and subject to the will of the Nazis.

Barely two months after attaining power, the Nazis laid the constitutional foundation for Hitler’s dictatorship with the passage of the Enabling Act on March 24, 1933. This legislation was subtitled “The Law to Remove Stress from the People and State.” It gave Hitler the right to pass any law without the approval of the Reichstag. In effect, the implementation of this law allowed the Nazis to completely ignore the civil and human rights previously guaranteed by the German constitution.

In addition to passing laws legalizing their denial of human rights, the Nazis began a press and radio propaganda campaign to portray their intended victims as rats, vermin, and Untermenschen (subhumans). Inmates of concentration camps were listed as Stuecks (pieces), with assigned numbers, rather than being permitted the dignity of a name. If a German gave these victims a thought, he was to think of them as animals.

Although belief in the theory that one race was superior to others was not unique to Hitler and the Nazis, the enthusiastic support given to Nazis by all facets of German society, particularly the scientific community, was unique.2 Geneticists, scientists, doctors, and anthropologists from the internationally acclaimed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute cooperated in the process of experimenting on human beings to prove the theory of a master race. Spurious experiments to “show” the inferiority of non-Nordic groups such as blacks, Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and others were conducted. Teachers embarrassed Jewish and Gypsy children by directing so-called scientific efforts that included measuring the sizes of their heads in order to prove so-called “mental deficiencies.” Other efforts by the scientific community included certifying that sterilization or annihilation was necessary for “undesirable groups.”

In 1943, Professor Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, wrote to a German newspaper: “It is a rare and special good fortune for a theoretical scientist to flourish at a time when the prevailing ideology welcomes it, and its findings immediately serve the policy of the state.”3 Professor Fischer’s “good fortune” included creating an environment that allowed Dr. Mengele and others who took the Hippocratic oath the right to experiment on human beings and to murder them in the “interest” of science. This included the experiments Mengele performed on Jewish and Gypsy twins in Auschwitz, injecting them with chemicals and germs. If one twin died, the other twin was murdered to compare their physiognomy.

In efforts to breed a master race, more than 300,000 German Aryans were sterilized and countless numbers were gassed, under a law passed on July 14, 1933, the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.” In his book Murderous Science, Dr. Benno Mueller-Hill notes that the aforementioned statute provided for compulsory sterilization in cases of “congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy . . . and severe alcoholism.”4 This included the blind and the deaf, even those who became deaf or blind from illnesses such as scarlet fever or from accidents.

A few years ago, on a trip to Germany, I interviewed deaf people who had been sterilized by the Nazis. In one case, a nine year-old girl had been removed from her school and taken to a hospital by the principal for sterilization. “When I came to,” she said, “I found my parents by my bed weeping.” To prevent them from protesting, the state had not notified them beforehand.

The Nazis also had a significant impact on the lives of black children, who were the offspring of German women and African soldiers stationed in the Rhineland after World War I. Many of these so-called “Rhineland Bastards” were picked up from the streets or from classrooms and sterilized, often without anesthesia. Due to the application of the “Law for the Prevention of Off-spring with Hereditary Defects,” which was passed in 1933, approximately 400 of these children were deprived of their right to reproduce.

Homosexuals were often given the choice of sterilization, castration, or incarceration in a concentration camp. This treatment was “legaquot; because of a law passed in 1871, under paragraph 175 of the German penal code, making homosexuality a criminal offense.5 Under the Nazis, thousands of persons were persecuted and punished on the charge of homosexuality. Many were sent to concentration camps, where they had to wear a pink triangle (rosa Windel).

When the war broke out in 1939, Hitler ordered the elimination of the severely retarded because they were “useless eaters.”6 Operating from headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin, the “T-4” program took the retarded to extermination centers and gassed them with carbon monoxide. In two years, from 1939 to 1941, more than 50,000 persons were killed in this program. In 1941, the Bishop of Muenster protested these gassings, and they were stopped. However, the victims had served their purpose as guinea pigs in the refinement of the use of gas for the mass killing of Jews and Gypsies. The lessons learned in these earlier executions were used in the death camps.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler had made known his antipathy toward Christianity. Reverence would be shown to Hitler and not to the traditional symbols of Christianity. Statues of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary would be banished and, in their place, the Fuehrer’s photographs would be displayed. The Old Testament was to be discarded as “a Jew book full of lies,” and Mein Kampf would supersede the New Testament. In place of the banished cross would stand the swastika.

Both the priests and ministers who spoke out against the Nazis were labeled “political opponents,” and “enemies of the state.” Many of these dissenters were sent to Dachau concentration camp, where a special barracks was set aside for religious leaders. This isolation was to keep the clergy from giving solace or rites to the rest of the prisoners. In the camps, the clergy, like other inmates, were used as slave laborers and in medical experiments.7 Of the 2,270 priests and ministers from nineteen occupied countries who were interned in Dachau, 1,034 perished.

The handful of Catholic priests in Germany who protested the actions of the Nazis was also punished. For example, Provost Bernard Lichtenberg of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin was arrested, imprisoned for two years, rearrested at the end of his sentence, and shipped to Dachau. He died en route.

In 1938, when Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich, a leader of the Catholic hierarchy, protested the persecution of Jews, the Nazis attempted to burn down his house.

Most clergymen either did not read Mein Kampf or ignored its foreshadowing of things to come, and thus the majority of Germany’s religious leaders supported Hitler’s nationalistic ambitions. Yet there were those among the religious community who did challenge the Nazis. Out of 17,000 Protestant clergy, three thousand were Evangelical Lutherans who opposed the Nazis. Some of the members of the group were arrested and sent to concentration camps-never to return. Others worked quietly in their opposition. Some spoke out because of Hitler’s attacks on the church, and a few because of his actions against the Jews.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, though few in number, also were seen as a threat to the Nazis. Not only did they oppose war and refuse to fight, but they also urged others not to serve. In addition, Witnesses refused to salute the flag or to say “Heil Hitler.” To a Jehovah’s Witness, saluting the flag or any authority other than Jehovah God is the same as worshipping idols.

Along these lines, my book The Other Victims: First Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis relates the story of the Kusserow family. Not only the parents, but also their eleven children, were punished for being Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1936, when the father, Franz Kusserow, refused to renounce his religion, he was put in jail until the end of the war. Two sons were executed because they refused induction into the army. Another son was incarcerated in Dachau, where he contracted tuberculosis and died shortly after the war. The three youngest children were sent to reform school for “re-education.” Mrs. Kusserow and the older girls were taken either to prison or to concentration camps.

The Gypsies, like the Jews, were condemned by the Nazis to complete annihilation for being racially impure, socially undesirable, and “mentally defective.”8 The persecution of Gypsies was not new in Germany. A “Central Office for the Fighting of the Gypsy Menace” had been established in 1899. In 1933, a plan to put thirty thousand Gypsies aboard ships and sink the ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean was abandoned, but many Gypsies were sterilized under a law that permitted the sterilization of “mental defectives.” In Dachau, Gypsies were used in experiments to test the amount of salt water an individual could drink before death occurred. At least half a million Gypsies were murdered by the Germans in the gas chambers, in experiments, or in general round-ups.

Although the Nazis declared Polish people Untermenschen, or subhumans, thousands of Polish children who were blond haired and blue eyed were separated from their families and sent to Germany to be raised in German homes as Aryans. The dark-haired, dark-eyed sisters and brothers remaining in Poland were to be taught only simple arithmetic, to sign their names, and to offer obedience to their German masters. Their purpose in life was to serve as slaves for the German empire. Anyone caught trying to give further instruction to Polish children was to be punished. Despite the ban on education, secret schools flourished in attics and basements.

Because of the ideological and racial antipathy toward Russian Communism, between two and three million Russian prisoners of war were purposely starved to death by the Nazis. Others were shipped in cattle cars to concentration or extermination camps. Most died of disease, exhaustion, or starvation.

No article on the non-Jewish victims would be complete without mentioning the first opponents of the Nazis: Germans who happened to be Communists or Social Democrats, judges and lawyers, or editors and journalists who had opposed the Nazis. They were the first to be arrested.

As soon as the Nazis came to power, the goal of eliminating all opposition took primacy. Trucks and police vans raced up and down the streets arresting any threat to Nazi rule, including those members of the artistic community who demanded cultural freedom. Books were burned. Authors and artists were either imprisoned or purposely denied the ability to earn a livelihood.

Even telling a joke about Hitler could lead to a death sentence. The evening before he was to give a concert, pianist Robert Kreitin remarked to the woman with whom he was staying, “You won’t have to keep Hitler’s picture over your mantle much longer. Germany’s losing the war.” The woman reported him to the Gestapo. The day of the concert, he was arrested and executed.

A few years ago, I conducted interviews in Germany for a biography, Flying Against The Wind: The Story of a Young Woman Who Defied the Nazis. The young woman, Cato Bontjes van Beek, was one of the few Germans to resist the Nazis. While she opposed the regime, her favorite cousin, Ulrich, supported Hitler and joined the Storm Troopers. Everyone I talked to described her blond-haired, blue-eyed cousin as “a sweet and sensitive person, an artist and a poet.”

“How was it possible,” I asked Cato’s mother, “that Ulrich was so fanatical about Hitler? He came from the same background as Cato.”

“When Ulrich looked in the mirror,” she said, “he saw the Master Race.”

It was people like Ulrich, along with the scientists and the judges who administered Nazi “justice,” who gave Hitler the manpower and the consent to murder six million Jews and five million non-Jews.

Although Hitler is dead, the theories that he espoused remain alive. With the modern tools being developed by biologists and other scientists, it is important for young people to be made aware that knowledge can be manipulated and turned into tools of destruction.

In every generation, educating the young is an awesome task. Today, with new scientific advances, the rapid spread of knowledge through computer networks, and the ability to alter the material being transmitted, it is more important than ever that students learn to think for themselves. Part of that learning process should include the devastating effects of prejudice. A true understanding of the history of the Holocaust would make that lesson clear.

Notes
1Susan Bachrach, Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust (Boston: Little Brown, 1995), 20.

2 Nora Levin, The Holocaust. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), 11-15

3 Eugen Fischer, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany) March 28, 1943.

4 Benno Mueller-Hill, Murderous Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 28.

5 Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (New York: Holt, 1986), 211-19.

6 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 46.

7 Barbara Distel, Dachau (Bruxelles: Comité International de Dachau, 1985), 11.

8 Ian Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Karoma Publishers, 1987), 63-6

9. BibliographyBethge, Eberhard. Costly Grace: An Illustrated Biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.Forman, James. The Traitor. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1970.Friedman, Ina. The Other Victims: First Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.—–. Flying Against the Wind: The Story of a Young Woman Who Defied the Nazis. Brookline: Lodgepole Press, 1995.Hancock, Ian. The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution. Ann Arbor: Karoma, Inc., 1986.Hanser, Richard. A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students Against Hitler. New York: Putnam, 1979.Kanfer, Stefan. The Eighth Sin. New York: Random House, 1978.Lukas, Richard C., ed. Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989.Mueller-Hill, Benno. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others. Germany 1933-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. New York: Holt, 1986.Ramati, Alexander. And the Violins Stopped Playing: A Story of the Gypsy Holocaust. New York: Watts, 1986.Snyder, L. Louis. Hitler’s German Enemies: Portraits of Heroes Who Fought the Nazis. New York: Hippocrene Press, 1990.Wise, Robert. The Pastors’ Barracks. Wheaton, Illinois: Victor Books, 1986.

Ina R. Friedman is the author of The Other Victims: First Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), which was cited in 1991 as one of the “Best Books” of the American Library Association-Young Adult Division. Her latest book, Flying Against the Wind: The Story of a Young Woman Who Defied the Nazis, is a biography of a German Christian who resisted the Nazis (Brookline, Massachusetts: Lodgepole Press, 1995).

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