Die beiden führenden Politiker, die in den 1940er Jahren den Begriff „Zweiter Dreißigjähriger Krieg“ prägten, waren Winston Churchill und Charles de Gaulle. In dieser Bezeichnung schwingen sowohl autobiografische als auch historische Elemente mit. Beide Männer betrachteten sich als Sieger beider Weltkriege: Sie standen für die siegreichen Armeen und Nationen von 1918 und 1945. Weder der eine noch der andere hatte diesen Erfolg allein errungen, aber beide verkörperten Nationalstolz und Wehrhaftigkeit überaus eindrucksvoll: Sie hatten Deutschland nicht nur einmal, sondern zweimal in die Knie gezwungen.

Unter mangelndem Selbstwertgefühl litten sie ohnehin nicht. So schrieb Churchill bereits 1906 in einem Brief an Violet Bonham Carter, die Tochter des britischen Premierministers Asquith, ihm sei klar, dass wir Menschen alle zerbrechliche Geschöpfe seien. „Wir sind alle Würmer“, bekräftigte er, „aber ich glaube, ich bin ein Glühwurm“. Charles de Gaulle war nüchterner als Churchill, doch dass er sein Land im Zweiten Weltkrieg aus der Niederlage zum Sieg geführt hatte, erfüllte ihn ebenso wie Churchill mit dem Gefühl einer schicksalhaften Bestimmung.

Ihr Stolz auf den Sieg ist gerechtfertigt. Beide waren imposante, gebieterische Gestalten, ein Traum für jeden Karikaturisten – der rundliche Mann mit seiner Zigarre nicht weniger als der hochgewachsene General mit der markanten Nase, die unter dem Képi hervorragte. Beide standen im Zweiten Weltkrieg allein da. Churchill nutzte die englische Sprache als Waffe, als im Mai und Juni 1940 eine deutsche Invasion und damit die britische Niederlage unausweichlich schienen – De Gaulle setzte kämpferisch auf den französischen Stolz, die französische Sprache und Ressourcen der Kolonialmacht als letztes Mittel, um die Hoffnung auf die Zukunft zu stärken.

Beide führten einen imperialen Krieg, um die glanzvolle Größe ihrer Nation wiederherzustellen. Letztlich war das Zerstören der imperialen Träume Deutschlands im Ersten Weltkrieg sowie Deutschlands, Italiens und Japans im Zweiten Weltkrieg jedoch so kostspielig, dass es für Frankreich und das Vereinigte Königreich zum doppelten Pyrrhussieg wurde. Sowohl Churchill als auch de Gaulle erkannten langsam, aber sicher, dass der Preis für den Sieg in Europa die Auflösung ihres geliebten Kolonialreichs war.

Daher dauerte es auch etwas, bis diese tragische Situation ins Bewusstsein gelangte. Als de Gaulle und Churchill Mitte der 1940er Jahre den Begriff „Zweiter Dreißigjähriger Krieg“ prägten, sonnten sie sich noch im Glanz ihres Triumphes. Durch den Sieg über Deutschland 1914-18 und 1939-45 gewannen das Vereinigte Königreich und Frankreich eine Vormachtstellung – nicht nur in Nordwesteuropa, sondern auch auf der Weltbühne. Das erwies sich jedoch als flüchtiger Moment, der davon abhing, wie lange die Vereinigten Staaten dafür bezahlten. Der Marshall-Plan stellte die wirtschaftliche Stabilität Europas wieder her und trug dazu bei, les trentes glorieuses, mit ihrem massiven Wachstums- und Entwicklungsschub, zu fördern. Diese Entwicklung verlieh dem Westen die nötige wirtschaftliche Stärke, die sowjetische Machtbestrebungen zurückzuweisen und schließlich niederzuringen. In dieser Zeit formierte sich Europa zu einem lockeren Staatenbund, weil es kein Imperium mehr hatte, das es als Waffenarsenal und Zufluchtsort nutzen konnte. Eine weitere Folge der beiden Weltkriege war eine Machtverschiebung zugunsten der USA, mit Europa in einer winzigen Nebenrolle.

In dieser Lage war die Darstellung der Geschehnisse als „Zweiter Dreißigjähriger Krieg“ Balsam für Churchill und de Gaulle wie auch für ihre Anhänger. Im Grunde projizierten die beiden Staatsmänner ihr eigenes Leben und ihre politische Karriere auf die Geschichte ihrer Nationen und Imperien. Ihre Erzählung hatte also durchaus einen wahren Kern, neigte insgesamt jedoch stark zu Verzerrungen, durch die globale Konflikte völlig andere Formen annahmen und völlig andere Folgen hatten. Derartige Ungereimtheiten erschwerten es Zeitgenossen wie Historikern, zwischen Fakt und Fiktion zu unterscheiden, wenn sie sich mit globalen Konflikten beschäftigten.

Der vorliegende Essay argumentiert, dass es zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen weitaus mehr Unterschiede gibt als Gemeinsamkeiten. Was Pierre Bourdieu die „biografische Illusion“ nannte – dass wir unser Leben als kontinuierliche Geschichte betrachten, die wir leicht selbst erzählen können – wird erst recht zu einem Zerrspiegel, wenn es in die selbstverfasste Autobiografie einfließt.¹ Für de Gaulle und Churchill wie auch für die jeweilige Gesellschaft, an deren Spitze sie standen, existierte nie ein langes, nahtloses Band, das die Geschichte beider Weltkriege zu einem einzigen dreißigjährigen Konflikt zusammenfasste.

Die Behauptung
Betrachten wir drei klassische Äußerungen der Vorstellung, dass es im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert einen zweiten Dreißigjährigen Krieg gab. Bei seiner Rückkehr aus Jalta im Januar 1945 erklärte Winston Churchill vor dem Unterhaus:

Ich habe die ganze Geschichte ab 1911 miterlebt. Damals erhielt ich einen Posten in der Admiralität, um die Flotte auf einen drohenden deutschen Krieg vorzubereiten. Im Wesentlichen scheint mir das die Geschichte eine einzige Geschichte eines Dreißigjährigen Krieges zu sein, oder eines mehr als Dreißigjährigen Krieges, in dem Briten, Russen, Amerikaner und Franzosen bis zum Äußersten gegangen sind, um der deutschen Aggression zu widerstehen. Sie alle zahlten dafür einen überaus schmerzlichen Preis, aber für niemanden waren die Folgen so entsetzlich wie für das russische Volk, dessen Land zwei Mal in weiten Teilen verwüstet wurde und dessen blutiger Kampf für die gemeinsame Sache Dutzende von Millionen russischer Menschenleben kostete – ein gemeinsames Anliegen, das nun zur endgültigen Vollendung kommt. Neben diesem Gefühl der Kontinuität, das ich persönlich empfinde, finde ich einen weiteren Grund bemerkenswert. Ohne die ungeheuren Anstrengungen und Opfer Russlands wäre Polen in den Händen der Deutschen dem Untergang geweiht gewesen. Nicht nur Polen als Staat und als Nation, sondern auch die Polen als Ethnie waren von Hitler dazu verdammt, vernichtet oder auf ein Dasein als unterwürfige Wesen reduziert zu werden. Dreieinhalb Millionen polnische Juden sollen bereits ermordet worden sein. Es ist sicher, dass eine enorme Anzahl von Menschen bei einem der schrecklichsten Akte der Grausamkeit, wahrscheinlich dem schrecklichsten Akt der Grausamkeit, der jemals den Weg des Menschen auf Erden verdunkelt hat, umgekommen ist. Als die Deutschen klar ihre Absicht bekundeten, die Polen zu einer unterworfenen und minderwertigen Ethnie unter dem „Herrenvolk“ zu machen, sind die russischen Truppen nun in einer plötzlichen Aktion vorgerückt. Dabei bieten sie beeindruckende militärische Kraft und Geschicklichkeit auf und sind inzwischen – übrigens kaum mehr als drei Wochen, nachdem wir diese Angelegenheiten hier erörtert hier haben –, schon von der Weichsel bis an die Oder gelangt. Dabei treiben sie die Deutschen vor sich her in den Untergang Ruin und befreien ganz Polen von der entsetzlichen Grausamkeit und Unterdrückung, unter der die Polen zugrunde gingen.²

Drei Jahre später, nachdem er 1945 den Krieg gewonnen und die Wiederwahl zum britischen Premierminister verloren hatte, verwendete Churchill den Begriff „Dreißigjähriger Krieg“ in einem friedlicheren Rahmen. Für kurze Zeit war er einer der stärksten Befürworter eines vereinten Europas, das als Bollwerk gegen die kommunistische Bedrohung im Osten Europas dienen sollte. Auf dem Europa-Kongress, der 1948 im niederländischen Den Haag –, genau einhundert Jahre nach dem „Völkerfrühling" von 1848 –, erklärte er vor den versammelten Delegierten:

Ich habe das Gefühl, dass die Menschheit nach diesem zweiten Dreißigjährigen Krieg –, denn darum handelt es sich bei dem, was wir gerade hinter uns haben –, eine Zeit der Ruhe braucht und sucht. Denn wie wenig verlangen die Millionen von Haushalten in Europa, die heute hier vertreten sind. Was ist es, was all diese Lohnempfänger, Handwerker, Soldaten und Ackerbauern brauchen, verdienen und, vielleicht auch durch äußere Einflüsse geleitet, verlangen? Steht ihnen nicht die Chance zu, sich ein Heim zu schaffen, die Früchte ihrer Arbeit zu ernten, ihren Frauen Liebe und Wertschätzung zu zeigen, ihre Kinder anständig zu erziehen und in Frieden und Sicherheit zu leben, ohne Angst oder Schikanen, monströsen Belastungen oder Ausbeutung in jedweder Form? Das ist ihr Herzenswunsch. Das ist es, was wir für sie erreichen wollen.³

Dies ist der Ursprung der Vorstellung, dass der zweite Dreißigjährige Krieg der Beginn dessen war, was Eric Hobsbawm als das „kurze“ zwanzigste Jahrhundert bezeichnete⁴: Churchill zufolge führten die beiden Weltkriege übergangslos zum Kalten Krieg, der 1989, 30 Jahre nach Churchills Tod, zu Ende ging. Charles de Gaulle teilte Churchills Gefallen an den vielen Aspekten, die im Begriff „Zweiter Dreißigjähriger Krieg“ mitklingen. Am 28. Juli 1946 bemerkte de Gaulle in Bar le Duc, unweit von Verdun, wo er 1916 in Kriegsgefangenschaft war:

Im Drama jenes Dreißigjährigen Krieges, den wir gerade gewonnen haben, gab es unzählige Wendungen, und jede Menge Akteure sind gekommen und gegangen. Wir Franzosen gehören zu denjenigen, die immer auf der Bühne geblieben sind und nie die Seite gewechselt haben. Die Umstände haben uns gezwungen, gelegentlich unsere Taktik zu ändern, manchmal am helllichten Tag auf dem Schlachtfeld, manchmal in der Nacht im Verborgenen. Aber letztlich haben wir nur eine einzige Art von Veteranen. Diejenigen von uns, die in der Vergangenheit an der Marne, an der Yser oder am Vardar angriffen, unterschieden sich nicht von denen, die gestern an der Somme festhielten, in Libyen bei Bir-Hakeim kämpften, Rom einnahmen, das Vercors verteidigten oder das Elsass befreiten. Die schmerzlichen Opfer der gemarterten Dörfer des Saulx-Tals fielen für die gleiche Sache wie die glorreichen Soldaten, die in Douaumont begraben sind. Was wären der Charakter und der Ausgang dieses Krieges gewesen, wenn er nicht vom ersten bis zum letzten Tag sowohl französisch als auch weltweit gewesen wäre? Was wäre der Friede von morgen, wenn er nicht ebenso der Friede Frankreichs wie der Friede der anderer wäre?⁵

Es ist bemerkenswert, dass de Gaulle die französische katholische Terminologie des „Märtyrertums“ verwendete, um die Opfer der beiden Weltkriege zu beschreiben, während Churchills protestantische englische Rhetorik üppig, aber weltlich war. Die politische und soziale Welt Großbritanniens hatte das Konzept des „Märtyrertums“ nach den Bürgerkriegen des 17. Jahrhunderts aufgegeben, während sowohl die revolutionären als auch die religiösen Traditionen im republikanischen Frankreich in der Märtyrer-Rhetorik weiterlebten.⁶

Eine alternative Auslegung
In diesen Reden liegen die Ursprünge einer Interpretation der Geschichte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, die viele Anhänger gefunden hat. Dennoch gibt es meiner Ansicht nach viele Gründe, sie abzulehnen. Betrachten wir einige von ihnen:

Hitler und der Wandel des Krieges
Der wichtigste Grund ist, dass ein Verschmelzen der beiden Weltkriege in inakzeptablem Maße unterbetont, welche Rolle Adolf Hitler und sein Umfeld bei der Veränderung der militärischen Spielregeln gespielt haben, indem sie den Krieg von einem Instrument der Politik zu einem Instrument der Vernichtung machten.

Es besteht kaum ein Zweifel daran, dass die deutsche Armee im Jahr 1914 nicht nur Kriegsverbrechen beging, sondern dass solch ein solches verbrecherisches Verhalten als Teil der operativen Notwendigkeit, die französische Hauptstadt in genau 42 Tagen zu erreichen, gesehen und akzeptiert wurde. Vielleicht 6.000 belgische Zivilisten wurden erschossen, und die meisten von ihnen stellten nicht die geringste Gefahr für die deutschen Truppen dar. Viele Vorfälle ereigneten sich, weil Deutsche befürchteten, dass belgische Zivilisten sich verhalten würden wie vormals die Francs Tireurs (Partisanen), die im Krieg von 1870 auf preußische Soldaten geschossen hatten. Phantasie an die Stelle der Vernunft, in der überhitzten Atmosphäre des Einmarschs einer Million deutscher Soldaten in Belgien, nicht um das Land zu erobern, sondern um die französische Hauptstadt zu erreichen und Frankreich in genau sechs Wochen zu besiegen.⁷

Diese Vorfälle wurden von der deutschen Armee und der deutschen Presse damals geleugnet und als hysterische Propaganda der Alliierten verspottet. Zudem bemühte sich die Weimarer Republik – als Nachfolger des für diese Verbrechen verantwortlichen Kaiserreichs – systematisch darum, die Anschuldigungen, deutsche Soldaten seien Kriegsverbrecher, zu widerlegen. All dies geschah vor dem Hintergrund der erzwungenen Unterzeichnung des Pariser Friedensvertrags durch die neue deutsche Regierung, die den Kaiser abgelöst hatte, am 28. Juni 1919. In Artikel 231 dieses Vertrags wurde betont, dass Deutschland, und nur Deutschland, für alle durch den Krieg verursachten Todesfälle, Schäden und Leiden verantwortlich sei. Alle politischen Parteien in Deutschland nach 1918 wiesen diesen Vorwurf zurück, ebenso wie Historiker, die die Kriegsursachen ein Jahrhundert später untersuchten. Der Stachel der Anklage eines ganzen Volkes war noch lange nach dem Waffenstillstand spürbar, und in diesem Zusammenhang ergibt die Kampagne zur Entlastung der deutschen Armee für die 1914 begangenen Verbrechen durchaus Sinn.

Halten wir nun einen Moment inne und wenden wir uns der deutschen Armee im Jahr 1941 zu. Nach dem Überfall auf die Sowjetunion machten sich die Einsatzgruppen (mobile Tötungskommandos) innerhalb von 24 Stunden ans Werk. Sie arbeiteten hinter den Linien der deutschen Infanterie und waren formell Teil der Sicherheitspolizei. Auf ihrem Vormarsch in die Sowjetunion deckte die deutsche Armee das Massaker an 1,5 bis 2 Millionen Menschen.

Die deutsche Armee im Zweiten Weltkrieg hatte nur noch wenig Ähnlichkeit mit der deutschen Armee des Ersten Weltkriegs. Die Einsatzgruppen waren der klare Beweis für die Umwälzung in der Militärkriminalität, für die Hitler und sein Umfeld die volle Verantwortung trugen. In Polen begannen sie 1939 hinter den Linien mit der Ermordung von Zivilisten und wiederholten diese Verbrechen, wo immer und wann immer die deutsche Armee in feindliches Gebiet einrückte und es besetzte.

Die 3.000 Mann der Einsatzgruppen waren in vier Abteilungen aufgeteilt. In jedem Fall wurden sie bei der Tötung von Zivilisten von Männern der Waffen-SS, der deutschen Armee, alliierten Truppen und lokalen Kollaborateuren unterstützt, die bei der Identifizierung der zu erschießenden Zivilisten halfen. In Babi Yar bei Kiew wurden im September 1941 innerhalb von zwei Tagen 33.000 Juden ermordet. Die Schätzungen schwanken, aber zwischen einer halben und einer Million Zivilisten wurden auf diese Weise und von diesen Einheiten getötet – von Verbrechern, die das verübten, was heute als „Holocaust durch Kugeln“ bekannt ist.⁸

Die meisten Historiker trennen die Geschichte der beiden Weltkriege wegen der verbrecherischen Degeneration der deutschen Armee ab dem Beginn des Zweiten Weltkriegs, zunächst in Polen und dann in der gesamten Sowjetunion. Ein Historiker, Daniel Goldhagen, war anderer Meinung und stellte seinen Fall in den Kontext eines zweiten Dreißigjährigen Krieges.⁹ Er vertrat die Ansicht, dass die Deutschen „willige Scharfrichter“ von Juden waren, die in großer Zahl, auf engem Raum, in Polen und der Sowjetunion lebten. Die Täter entstammten einer Kultur, die er als „eliminatorischen Antisemitismus“ bezeichnete. Seiner Meinung nach waren die zugrundeliegenden Vorurteile der Kitt, der die deutsche Nation zusammenhielt; sie hätten sich über Jahrhunderte aus antisemitischen Gedanken, Worten und Taten herausgebildet.

Im Ersten Weltkrieg hatte die deutsche Armee eine „Judenzählung“ durchgeführt, um zu zeigen, dass der Anteil der Juden an der Front, die bereit waren, für Deutschland zu bluten und zu sterben, viel geringer war als der Anteil der Juden in Deutschland insgesamt. Als die Volkszähler herausfanden, dass das Gegenteil der Fall war und dass der Anteil der Juden in der Armee höher war als im Volk, wurde die Volkszählung abrupt abgebrochen und die daraus zusammengestellte Dokumentation vernichtet.¹⁰

Der Weg von der Verbrennung von Dokumenten in einem Krieg zur Verbrennung von Leichen im folgenden Krieg war lang und gewunden. Die Weltwirtschaftskrise von 1929-32 ermöglichte es der NSDAP, sich zu einer Massenpartei zu entwickeln, die von vielen Wählern unterstützt wurde. Aus diesem Grund kam Hitler an die Macht – nicht wegen des Ersten Weltkriegs, sondern wegen des ganz andersartigen Krieges, den er und seine Partei in der Folge begannen. Die pure Radikalität des deutschen Antisemitismus unter den Nationalsozialisten ist das wichtigste Argument gegen die These, dass es zwischen 1914 und 1945 einen Dreißigjährigen Krieg gegeben hat.

Die bolschewistische Revolution und die Transformation von Krieg
Der zweite wichtige Fakt, der gegen die Behauptung spricht, es habe in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts einen Dreißigjährigen Krieg gegeben, ist, dass nicht 1914, sondern 1917 die Krise ausgelöst wurde, aus der die späteren Umwälzungen des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts hervorgingen. Als 1914 der Krieg ausbrach, war Lenin überzeugt, dass die Revolution um eine Generation verschoben werden müsse. In Frankreich gab es eine Liste mit militanten Sozialisten, die bei Kriegsausbruch verhaftet werden sollten, um zu verhindern, dass sie die Mobilisierung des Militärs behinderten. Keine einzige Person auf dieser Liste – dem berühmten Carnet B – wurde verhaftet, denn alle hatten sich freiwillig gemeldet. Sie hatten die Nation über die Revolution gestellt.¹¹

Drei Jahre später trat Russland unter den Bolschewiken aus dem Krieg aus. Diese Entscheidung gab Deutschland und seinen Verbündeten enormen Auftrieb, was 1918 im Friedensvertrag von Brest-Litowsk mündete. Widerwillig überließ die neue russische Führung Deutschland die informelle, aber klare Kontrolle über einen Großteil des europäischen Russlands. Das Ziel war eindeutig: Russland würde wie eine Kolonie ausgebeutet werden.

Was dann folgte, war jedoch alles andere als friedlich. Der Bürgerkrieg in Russland zwischen 1918 und 1921 sowie massive Gewalt nach 1918 in einem riesigen Gebiet, von Finnland bis zur Türkei, sind die eigentlichen Ursachen für die Transformation von Krieg in ein Massaker an der Zivilbevölkerung. Ich nenne dieses Phänomen die „Zivilistenisierung“ (im englischen Original: civilianization) von Krieg.

Die auf Zivilisten ausgeweitete Ausrichtung von Krieg
Es begann vor 1914 mit jedem einzelnen europäischen Kolonialprojekt. 1904 folgten Massaker auf einen Aufstand der Herero und Nama in Südwestafrika. Was 1914 in Belgien durch einmarschierende deutsche Truppen geschah, verblasst zu relativer Bedeutungslosigkeit im Vergleich zu den Gräueltaten von König Leopold im Kongo, der zunächst sein privater Machtbereich war und später belgische Kolonie wurde.

Der Unterschied zwischen dem Ersten Weltkrieg und der Folgezeit besteht darin, dass der Konflikt von 1914-18 ein dreiteiliger Kampf um die Vorherrschaft in Nordwesteuropa war. Churchill und de Gaulle machten aus dem anglo-französischen Widerstand gegen einen von Deutschland beherrschten Kontinent eine einzige enorme Kraftanstrengung – und gewannen. Diese Interpretation war nur teilweise zutreffend, da sowohl das Vereinigte Königreich als auch Frankreich von Anfang an ihre imperialen Besitzungen gegen ein deutsches Eindringen oder eine völlige Übernahme verteidigten. Im Zweiten Dreißigjährigen Krieg ging es immer um Europa, aber in den beiden Weltkriegen ging es gleichzeitig auch immer um das Imperium.

Westliche Intervention in der Russischen Revolution
Diese beiden Perspektiven – die westeuropäische und die imperiale – berücksichtigten Osteuropa nicht. Dieses Versäumnis wurde durch den Verlauf der Friedenskonferenz deutlich. An dem Tag, an dem Präsident Wilson Anfang 1919 seine Rückreise nach Washington antreten musste, um die Rede zur Lage der Nation zu halten, wurde er von Winston Churchill gefragt, ob die Delegierten kurz über Russland sprechen könnten. Wilson, der schon im Aufbruch war, hielt inne und schlug eine Vorbesprechung vor. Daraufhin entwickelte Churchill seine Idee einer militärischen Intervention in Russland, um das bolschewistische Regime zu stürzen. Wilson entgegnete, das sei nicht das, was er im Sinn gehabt habe. Die Konferenz stimmte weiteren Beratungen zu, und durch diesen Riss in der diplomatischen Mauer schmiedete Churchill eine Invasion von zehn Nationen in Russland.

Das Problem bei dieser halbherzigen Intervention in Russland war, dass sie immer zu klein war, um etwas zu bewirken. Die Alliierten setzten nicht genügend Kräfte ein, um Lenin und Trotzki zu stürzen. Der Grund dafür war, dass die Zivilbevölkerung der Alliierten kriegsmüde war. Eine beträchtliche Zahl von Anlegern hatte in Russland erhebliche Verluste erlitten; etwa ein Viertel des französischen Portfolios an Auslandsinvestitionen war in russischen Anleihen angelegt. Aber der Rest der Bevölkerung interessierte sich mehr für ein künftiges Leben in Friedenszeiten als dafür, für verlorene Investitionen in den Krieg zu ziehen. Das Eingreifen der Alliierten in Russland war – ebenso wie die alliierte Unterstützung für die griechische Armee in Anatolien – von Anfang an zum Scheitern verurteilt.

Man könnte auch sagen, dass Osteuropa und Russland für der Vereinigte Königreich und Frankreich von drittrangiger Bedeutung waren. An erster Stelle standen die Zerschlagung des deutschen Heers und das Versenken der deutschen Marine. Danach die Stärkung des britischen und das französischen Imperiums. Geschehnisse in Russland, waren auch von Bedeutung, aber erst nachdem die beiden anderen strategischen Ziele erreicht waren.

Churchill hat es entwaffnend gut ausgedrückt, als er die Zeit vor und nach 1918 mit folgendermaßen beschrieb: „Der Krieg der Giganten ist beendet, der Streit der Pygmäen hat begonnen“.¹² Mir sind keine verächtlichen und rassistischen Äußerungen dieser Art seitens de Gaulle bekannt, aber Frankreichs „Zivilisierungsmission“, die Mission civilisatrise, war von rassistischer und kultureller Herablassung gegenüber dunkelhäutigen Männern und Frauen durchdrungen. De Gaulle schien immun gegen die gängigen Vorurteile seiner Militärkohorte zu sein und kämpfte aus dem und für das französische Kaiserreich, als die Dritte Republik 1940 zusammenbrach.

Welche Vorurteile Churchill und de Gaulle auch gehabt haben mögen, jedenfalls verstanden sie einfach nicht, wie attraktiv der Kommunismus für die russischen Bauern nach dem Krieg war. Sie ahnten nicht, dass die militärische Intervention des Westens zum Sturz der Bolschewiki genau das Gegenteil von dem bewirken würde, was sie zu erreichen hofften. Churchill hasste den Kommunismus mit Leidenschaft. Er hatte Recht mit der blutrünstigen Rücksichtslosigkeit von Lenin und Trotzki, aber Unrecht damit, wie das russische Volk auf zehn westliche Armeen auf seinem Grund und Boden reagieren würde. Was die bäuerliche Bevölkerung sah, waren Männer, die die alte Ordnung wieder in Kraft setzen wollten. Und das bedeutete, dass sie, die Bauern, das Land, das sie gerade in ihren Besitz gebracht hatten, wieder verlieren würden. 1919 oder 1920 spielte es keine Rolle, dass eine kommunistische Regierung, die dem Volk Land gab, es eines Tages wieder übernehmen würde – was zählte, war, dass das Eingreifen des Westens in den russischen Bürgerkrieg ein Geschenk des Himmels für die Bolschewiki war.

Die französischen und britischen Militärführer, die den Krieg an der Westfront gewonnen hatten, konnten mit den verfügbaren Kräften und dem vorhandenen Material keinen Sieg herbeiführen. Foch und Frachte d'Esperey wollten 20 Divisionen, erhielten aber nur einen geringen Bruchteil davon. Dem britischen Kommandeur Sir Henry Rawlinson, Haigs Stellvertreter an der Somme, erging es nicht besser. Was ihnen noch verborgen war, ihre politischen Anführer aber nicht verhindern konnten: Nach dem Aderlass der letzten sechs Jahre forderte die Bevölkerung in jedem größeren Land Demobilisierung und Rückkehr zum Frieden.

Daher ist der zweite wichtige Grund für Zweifel an der These von einem Dreißigjährigen Krieg in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Sie vermischt einen Krieg, der vor den Russischen Revolutionen von 1917 begann, mit Kriegen, die das Ergebnis konterrevolutionärer Bestrebungen waren – Kriegen, die in den 1920er Jahren begannen und im Einmarsch der Nazis in die Sowjetunion 1941 gipfelten. Der Erste Weltkrieg der großen Imperialmächte endete mit der Niederlage Deutschlands und der Mittelmächte, zunächst 1918, als Deutschland seine Niederlage akzeptierte, und dann 1923, als die postimperiale Türkei ihren Krieg gegen Griechenland und seine Verbündeten für gewonnen erklärte. Die Türkei hat die Bedingungen des Friedensvertrags, der dem letzten Sultan des Osmanischen Reiches aufgezwungen wurde, praktisch neu geschrieben. Als Hitler und seine Anhänger in der Nazipartei 1923 das von München aus verfolgten, kamen sie zu dem Schluss, dass auch der Frieden, der den Deutschen 1919 aufgezwungen worden war, umgeschrieben werden konnte – und zwar mit Gewalt.

Besteht damit eine Verbindung zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen? Sicherlich nicht, denn der Konflikt von 1914-18 wurde bis zum bitteren Ende von imperialen Mächten ausgetragen, deren Weltanschauung nur wenig Ähnlichkeit mit der von Hitler oder Lenin hatte. Beide sahen Krieg und Revolution als symbiotisch miteinander verbunden an. Die nationalsozialistische „Revolution der Rasse“ war, wie die bolschewistische Revolution der Arbeiterklasse, eine Form der ständigen Kriegsführung, so wie der Krieg eine Form der ständigen Revolution war. Und angesichts der Virulenz der Nazi-Ideologie und ihres biologischen Determinismus wurden Krieg und Revolution zu einem Test der rassischen Überlegenheit. Entweder würde die deutsche Nation den Kommunismus (und seine vermeintlichen Verbündeten, die Juden) vernichten, oder die deutsche Nation würde untergehen, und das zu Recht, da sie nicht die Ausdauer hatte, den „Rassenfeind“ zu besiegen. Diese Form der selbstmörderischen Logik hat nichts mit dem Denken derjenigen gemein, die den Ersten Weltkrieg angezettelt haben. Mit Hitler und Lenin endete die Vision von Clausewitz, dass Krieg Politik mit anderen Mitteln sei. Stattdessen wurde der Krieg zur Ausrottung eines rassischen Feindes, von dem man glaubte, er hege völkermörderische Absichten gegen die germanische Rasse selbst.

Diese irrsinnige Vorstellung von konkurrierenden Völkermorden war weit entfernt von der Realität. Aber das machte die Idee, dass das deutsche Volk entweder töten oder getötet werden musste, nicht weniger attraktiv. Die Konsequenz daraus hieß, nicht nur alle Kommunisten zu töten, sondern auch Juden und Polen und andere laut ihrer Ideologie rassisch minderwertige Völker, die sich mit den vorgenannten verbündeten. Angesichts der verbrecherischen Logik des Krieges der Nazis in der Sowjetunion kann man also unmöglich an der Annahme festzuhalten, dass es zwischen 1914 und 1945 einen Dreißigjährigen Krieg gab.

Die Technologie der Kriegsführung
Das dritte Argument gegen die Annahme, dass es zwischen 1914 und 1945 einen Dreißigjährigen Krieg gab, ist die Tatsache, dass sich diese beiden weltweiten Konflikte durch technologische Entwicklungen in der Kriegsführung radikal voneinander unterscheiden.

Betrachten wir zunächst den Luftkrieg. Im Konflikt von 1914-18 setzten alle kämpfenden Mächte Flugzeuge als Augen der Artillerie ein. An der Westfront waren Abwehrbatterie-Operationen ein wesentlicher Bestandteil der offensiven Kriegsführung. Der Grund dafür war, dass die Infanterie nicht vorrücken konnte, solange die feindliche Artillerie die ins Niemandsland vorrückenden Einheiten zerstören konnte. Die genaue Bestimmung der Artilleriestellungen wurde zu einem wesentlichen Bestandteil der Planung von Infanteriebewegungen. Hier erfüllten die Luftstreitkräfte einen wesentlichen Zweck.

Nachdem sich die Technologie der Flugzeugproduktion in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren entwickelt hatte, löste sich die Luftwaffe von der Infanterie und wurde zu einer eigenständigen offensiven Kriegswaffe. Hätte Deutschland 1914 über die Art von Luftmacht verfügt, die es in den 1930er Jahren entwickelte, hätte es die Eisenbahnen zerstören können, die die Verteidigung von Paris sowohl 1914 als auch bei der letzten deutschen Großoffensive des Krieges 1918 ermöglichten. Die deutsche Luftmacht im Jahr 1940 demonstrierte den enormen Unterschied zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen.

Es stimmt, dass es im Ersten Weltkrieg auf beiden Seiten Versuche gab, Stadtzentren zu bombardieren. London und Köln wurden getroffen, und in Paris starben über 1.000 Menschen bei der Bombardierung der Hauptstadt durch deutsche Artillerie und Luftangriffe. Durch technologische Entwicklung wurde der Luftkrieg gegen Zentren der Zivilbevölkerung 25 Jahre später zu einer lebenswichtigen militärischen Operation. Der Blitzkrieg wurde durch den Konflikt von 1914-18 vorweggenommen.

Die Auswirkungen von Bombardements der Zivilbevölkerung wurden jedoch auf beiden Seiten des Krieges von 1939-45 falsch eingeschätzt. Sowohl die britischen als auch die deutschen Planer glaubten, sie könnten den zivilen Widerstand brechen, indem sie städtische Zentren bombardierten und Zivilisten töteten. Beide lagen falsch. Zum einen hatten beide Kombattanten komplexe Pläne zur Diversifizierung und zum Schutz wesentlicher Elemente des Munitionssektors, zum anderen könnte es sein, dass die Reaktion der Zivilbevölkerung auf die intensiven Bombardierungen ihren Willen, weiterzumachen noch verstärkt hat.

Der Grenzfall in dieser Frage trennt einmal mehr die beiden Weltkriege: Der Einsatz von Atomwaffen gegen Japan – von Waffen, die ursprünglich für den Einsatz in Deutschland entwickelt wurden – beendete den Zweiten Weltkrieg. Die Zerstörung von Hiroshima und Nagasaki hat in der Tat gezeigt, wozu Luftmacht imstande ist, aber eigentlich war ihr Hauptzweck, das Leben der alliierten Soldaten zu schonen, indem sie einen Infanterieangriff auf das japanische Festland unnötig machte. Im Ersten Weltkrieg wurde Deutschland besiegt, ohne dass es zu einer Invasion kam. Das Ende der beiden Weltkriege grenzt sie deutlich voneinander ab und damit von jedem Versuch, sie in einem Gesamtpaket, dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, zu vereinen.

Auch eine andere technologische Entwicklung zeigt die radikalen Brüche zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen. Deutsche Chemiker ermöglichten es der Infanterie 1915 während der zweiten Schlacht von Ypern an der Westfront, Chlorgas freizusetzen. Später wurden große Mengen an Phosgengas und Senfgas eingesetzt. 1918 war etwa jede vierte an der Westfront abgefeuerte Artilleriegranate eine Gasgranate. Die Zivilbevölkerung bereitete sich auf die Freisetzung von Gas auf Zivilisten vor. Dazu kam es jedoch nie.

Im Gegensatz dazu wurde im Zweiten Weltkrieg auf den europäischen Schlachtfeldern kein Gas eingesetzt. Das lag wahrscheinlich daran, dass der Konflikt von 1914-18 kaum Beweise für operative Vorteile durch den Einsatz solcher Waffen lieferte. Denn bei ungünstigen Windverhältnissen, würden sich die Angreifer selbst vergiften. Im Gegensatz dazu wurde Gas in den von den Nazis errichteten Vernichtungslagern in großem Umfang zur Ermordung der jüdischen Bevölkerung Europas und anderer von ihnen so kategorisierter „Untermenschen“ eingesetzt.

Japanische Truppen setzten in China Gaswaffen in großen Mengen ein. Sie führten auch Experimente zum Einsatz biologischer Waffen an chinesischen und anderen Kriegsgefangenen durch. Shiro Ishii leitete die Einheit 731 der japanischen Armee, eine Einheit, die biologische Waffen vorbereitete, die in der Mandschurei und anderswo in China eingesetzt wurden.¹³

Auch hier liegen die historischen Vorgänge in den beiden Weltkriegen hinsichtlich der chemischen und biologischen Kriegsführung meilenweit auseinander. Am besten lässt sich das so ausdrücken, dass der Erste Weltkrieg das Vorzimmer zum Holocaust und zu anderen chemischen und biologischen Kriegsverbrechen war. Der Erste Weltkrieg machte Massenvernichtung denkbar und damit machbar. Doch erst mit der nationalsozialistischen Revolution wurde aus einer bloßen Möglichkeit das Verbrechen des Jahrhunderts. Hier zeigt sich einmal mehr, dass wir die radikalen Unterschiede zwischen den Ursachen, dem Verlauf und den Folgen der beiden Weltkriege unbedingt beachten müssen.

Fazit
Einige Forscher, die die beiden Konflikte zu einer Einheit namens „Der Dreißigjährige Krieg des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts“ verflechten, haben dafür autobiografische Gründe. Churchill und de Gaulle haben ihr Leben auf diese Weise gestaltet.

Andere hatten ideologische Gründe für ihr Vorgehen. Der Historiker Ernst Nolte war ein Befürworter der Interpretation als Dreißigjähriger Krieg, denn sie ermöglichte ihm zu behaupten, dass die bolschewistische Revolution, ein Produkt des Ersten Weltkriegs, der Ursprung und die Inspiration der nationalsozialistischen Bewegung war. Damit meinte er, dass die mörderische Geschichte der ersten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts eine europäische, oder besser gesagt, eine von Deutschland geführte Reaktion gegen die „asiatische Barbarei“ war. Die Verbrechen der Nazis waren reaktiv und defensiv, ausgelöst durch kommunistische Verbrechen, die ihnen vorausgingen. Dies ist der Kern seiner Auffassung, dass die beiden Weltkriege Teil eines europäischen Bürgerkriegs waren, der 1945 zu Ende ging.

Noltes revisionistische Veröffentlichungen entfachten in den 1980er Jahren den so genannten Historikerstreit. Für Nolte war der Holocaust kein Einzelfall, sondern Teil eines durch die bolschewistische Revolution ausgelösten Bürgerkriegs. Der Vernichtungskrieg von 1941-45 wurde von Hitler geführt, um einen kommunistischen Holocaust in Deutschland zu verhindern, falls der Krieg verloren werden sollte. Kommunistische Verbrechen und nationalsozialistische Verbrechen wurden als grausame Folgen des Bürgerkriegs miteinander verbunden.¹⁴

Andere Historiker lehnten die Theorie eines Dreißigjährigen Krieges ab, weil sie sie darin eine [unzulässige] Möglichkeit erkannten, Nazi-Verbrechen zu normalisieren.¹⁵ Die Kontroverse zog sich durch mehrere Jahrzehnte, geriet dann aber in Vergessenheit, vor allem, weil sich unterschiedlichste deutsche Politiker, von Willy Brandt bis Angela Merkel, weigerten, ihre Haltung zu ändern, dass Deutschland für den Holocaust verantwortlich sei und dass es ein Band zwischen der deutschen Nation und dem jüdischen Volk gebe, das nicht beschädigt werden dürfe und könne.

In anderen Teilen Europas tauchte die Vorstellung von einem zweiten Dreißigjährigen Krieg gelegentlich wieder auf. Das Entsetzen über die hemmungslose Brutalität Stalins und seiner Schergen veranlasste einige Beobachter, Kommunismus und Nationalsozialismus gleichzusetzen. Heute (2024) jedoch teilen die meisten europäischen Historiker zwar die moralische Abscheu, nicht aber das historische Urteil. Die vielleicht ausgewogenste Schlussfolgerung, auf die wir uns alle einigen können, lautet: Beide Weltkriege waren mit nichts vergleichbare Albträume, und jeder für sich verdient einen speziellen Platz in einer der Bolgias, der Höllengräben in Dantes Inferno.

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¹ Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Biographical Illusion’, in Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, with the assistance of Gregor Schima (eds), Biography in theory (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), pp. 201–16.
² https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/68a6136f-a7cf-40cf-9765-af120da30526/publishable_en.pdf Accessed 26 November 2024.
³ https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/58118da1-af22-48c0-bc88-93cda974f42c/publishable_en.pdf Accessed 26 November 2024.
⁴ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Penguin Books, 1996).
⁵ https://mjp.univ-perp.fr/textes/degaulle28071946.htm Accessed 26 November 2024.
⁶ Jay Winter, War beyond Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), ch. 5.
⁷ John Horne and Alan Kramer, Germany Atrocities in 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
⁸ Patrick Desbois, La Shoah par balles: la mort en plein jour (Paris: Plon, 2019); Ronald Headland, Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941–1943 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992); Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York, NY: Knopf, 2002); Jürgen Matthäus, Jochen Böhler and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), and Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2010).
⁹ Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (New York, NY: Alfred Knopf, 1996).
¹⁰ Jay Winter, ‘Antisemitism in the First World War’, in Steven Katz (ed.), The Cambridge History of Antisemitism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), vol. 1, ch. 1.
¹¹ Jean-Jacques Becker, Le Carnet B (Paris: PUF, 1964).
¹² As cited in Peter Gatrell, ‘War after the War: Conflicts, 1919–1923’, in John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), p. 558.
¹³ Yang Yan-Jun and Tam Yue-Him, Unit 731: Laboratory of the Devil, Auschwitz of the East: Japanese Biological Warfare in China 1933–45 (Stroud: Fonthill Media, 2018).
¹⁴ Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1987), and Nolte, ‘Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will. Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht gehalten werden konnte’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1986.
¹⁵ Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum "Historikerstreit" (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988).

The two leaders who coined the term ‘the Second Thirty Years’ War’ in the 1940s were Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. The term had autobiographical as well as historical resonance. In their own eyes, both men had won both world wars. They stood for the armies and nations victorious in 1918 and 1945. While neither had achieved victory alone, both were towering symbols of national pride and defiance. They had brought Germany to its knees not once but twice.

Neither man ever suffered from a paucity of self-esteem. As early as 1906, Churchill said in a letter to Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, that he recognized that we humans are frail creatures. ‘We are all worms’, he affirmed, ‘but I do believe that I am a glow worm.’ Charles de Gaulle was more austere than Churchill, but he was charged with the same sense of destiny as Churchill felt in having led his country from defeat to victory in the Second World War.

There is justice in their pride in victory. Both commanding and imperious figures, they were a caricaturist’s dream – the rotund man with the cigar no less than the tall general with a prominent nose projecting from his kepi. Both stood alone in the Second World War. Churchill mobilized the English language when a German invasion of England and British defeat looked inevitable in May and June 1940. De Gaulle mobilized French pride, the French language and France’s imperial resources when there was nothing else left to bolster hope in the future.

Both fought an imperial war to restore the grandeur of their nations. And yet destroying the imperial dreams of Germany in the Great War and of Germany, Italy and Japan in the Second World War was so costly as to constitute a double Pyrrhic victory for both France and Britain. Both Churchill and de Gaulle came to know, slowly but surely, that the price of victory in Europe was the liquidation of their beloved empires themselves.

Recognition of that tragic reality took time. In the mid-1940s, when de Gaulle and Churchill coined the term ‘the Second Thirty Years’ War’, they were still measuring and basking in the glow of victory. Defeating Germany in 1914–18 and 1939–45 gave Britain and France a commanding position in northwestern Europe and on the global stage. And yet that moment of mastery was evanescent, since it would last only as long as the United States paid for it. The Marshall Plan restored European economic stability and helped fuel les trentes glorieuses, the massive surge of growth and development that provided the West with the economic strength needed to deflect and then to defeat Soviet power. The reason Europe reconstructed itself as a loose federation of states was that it was no longer able to use their empires as an arsenal and a refuge. American power dwarfed European power in the aftermath of the two world wars.

That is why the story of a second Thirty Years’ War was so comforting to them and their supporters. In effect Churchill and de Gaulle projected their own lives and political careers onto the history of their nations and their empires. And while there was more than an element of truth in their doing so, there was also an even greater element of distortion, one that has made it difficult for contemporaries and historians to distinguish between global conflicts that took on entirely different forms and had entirely different consequences.

The argument of this essay is that the differences between the two world wars overwhelmingly outweigh their similarities. What Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, called the biographical illusion – that we see our lives as one continuous narrative that we can narrate ourselves – becomes even more of a distorting mirror when it enters into the self-fashioning of autobiography.¹ For de Gaulle and Churchill, as much as for the societies they led, there never was a seamless web binding together the history of the two world wars into one thirty-year conflict.

The claim
Let us consider three classic statements of the notion that there was in the 20th century a second Thirty Years’ War. On his return from Yalta in January 1945, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons:

I have lived through the whole story since 1911 when I was sent to the Admiralty to prepare the Fleet for an impending German war. In its main essentials it seems to me to be one story of a 30 years’ war, or more than a 30 years’ war, in which British, Russians, Americans and French have struggled to their utmost to resist German aggression at a cost most grievous to all of them, but to none more frightful than to the Russian people, whose country has twice been ravaged over vast areas and whose blood has been poured out in tens of millions of lives in a common cause now reaching final accomplishment. There is a second reason which appeals to me apart from this sense of continuity which I personally feel. But for the prodigious exertions and sacrifices of Russia, Poland was doomed to utter destruction at the hands of the Germans. Not only Poland as a State and as a nation, but the Poles as a race were doomed by Hitler to be destroyed or reduced to a servile station. Three and a half million Polish Jews are said to have been actually slaughtered. It is certain that enormous numbers have perished in one of the most horrifying acts of cruelty, probably the most horrifying act of cruelty, which has ever darkened the passage of man on the earth. When the Germans had clearly avowed their intention of making the Poles a subject and lower grade race under the Herrenvolk, suddenly, by a superb effort of military force and skill, the Russian Armies, in little more than three weeks, since in fact we spoke on these matters here, have advanced from the Vistula to the Oder, driving the Germans in ruin before them and freeing the whole of Poland from the awful cruelty and oppression under which the Poles were writhing.²

Three years later, after having won the war and lost the election to remain Prime Minister of Britain in 1945, Churchill used the term the ‘Thiry Years’ War’ in a more peaceable setting. For a brief period he was one of the strongest advocates of a united Europe, to serve as a bulwark against the communist menace in the east of Europe. At the Congress of Europe convened in Brussels in 1948, 100 years after the ‘springtime of peoples’ of 1848, he told the assembled delegates:

I have the feeling that after the second Thirty Years' War, for that is what it is, through which we have just passed, mankind needs and seeks a period of rest. After all, how little it is that the millions of homes in Europe represented here today are asking. What is it that all these wage-earners, skilled artisans, soldiers and tillers of the soil require, deserve, and may be led to demand? Is it not a fair chance to make a home, to reap the fruits of their toil, to cherish their wives, to bring up their children in a decent manner and to dwell in peace and safety, without fear or bullying or monstrous burdens or exploitations, however this may be imposed upon them? That is their heart's desire. That is what we mean to win for them.³

Here is the germ of the idea that the second Thirty Years’ War was the beginning of what Eric Hobsbawm termed the ‘short twentieth century’.⁴ The two world wars, he claimed, seamlessly led to the Cold War, which came to an end in 1989, 30 years after Churchill’s death. Charles de Gaulle shared Churchill’s fondness for the resonance of the term the second Thirty Years’ War. On 28 July 1946 at Bar le Duc, not far from Verdun, where he was taken as a prisoner of war in 1916, de Gaulle observed:

The drama of the Thirty Years' War, which we have just won, has involved many twists and turns and seen many actors come and go. We French are among those who always remained on the stage and never changed sides. Circumstances have forced us to vary our tactics, sometimes in the broad daylight of the battlefields, sometimes in the night of secrecy. But we ultimately have only one kind of veterans. Those of ours who, in the past, attacked on the Marne, on the Yser or on the Vardar, were no different from those who, yesterday, clung to the Somme, fought hard at Bir-Hakeim, took Rome, defended the Vercors or liberated Alsace. The painful victims of the martyred villages of the Saulx valley fell for the same cause as the glorious soldiers buried at Douaumont. What would have been the character and outcome of this war if, from the first to the last day, it had not been French as well as world-wide? What would peace be tomorrow if it were not to be the peace of France as well as that of others?⁵

It is striking that de Gaulle used the French Catholic terminology of ‘martyrdom’ to describe the victims of the two world wars, while Churchill’s Protestant English rhetoric was rotund but secular. The British political and social world had given up the concept of ‘martyrdom’ after the civil wars of the 17th century, while both revolutionary and religious traditions in Republican France lived on in the rhetoric of the martyr.⁶

An alternative interpretation
In these speeches lie the origins of an interpretation of 20th-century history that has attracted many followers. And yet it is my belief that there are many reasons to reject it. Let us consider some of them.

Hitler and the transformation of war
The first reason is that fusing together the two world wars understates unacceptably the role that Adolph Hitler and his circle played in transforming the rules of engagement of military life in such a way as to turn war from being an instrument of policy into war as being an instrument of extermination.

There is little doubt that the German army in 1914 not only engaged in war crimes, but also that such criminal behavior was observed and accepted as part of the operational necessity of reaching the French capital in precisely 42 days. Perhaps 6,000 Belgian civilians were shot, and most of them presented not the slightest threat to German troops. Many incidents grew out of the fear that Belgian civilians would replicate the behavior of Francs Tireurs, or partisans, who had shot at Prussian soldiers in the war of 1870. Fantasy replaced reason in an overheated atmosphere of the invasion of Belgium by one million German troops, not to conquer the country but to reach the French capital and defeat France in precisely six weeks’ time.⁷

This set of incidents was denied by the German army and the German press at the time, derided as hysterical Allied propaganda. Furthermore, the Weimar Republic that replaced the Kaiserreich responsible for these crimes engaged in a systematic effort to disprove the accusations that German soldiers were war criminals. All this was in the context of the forced signature of the new German government that replaced the Kaiser on the peace treaty at Paris on 28 June 1919. Article 231 of that treaty insisted that Germany and only Germany was responsible for all the death, damage and suffering occasioned by the war. All political parties in post-1918 Germany rejected this accusation, as have historians investigating war origins a century later. The sting of the indictment of a whole nation was felt long after the Armistice, and the campaign to exculpate the German army for crimes committed in 1914 makes perfect sense in this context.

Now let us take a breath and turn to the German army in 1941. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, the work of the Einzatzgruppen, or mobile killing groups, began within 24 hours. They worked behind the lines of the German infantry, and were formally part of the security police. The German army while moving forward into the Soviet Union provided cover for the massacre of between 1.5 million and 2 million people.

The German army in the Second World War bore very little resemblance to the German army of the First World War. The Einzatzgruppen were positive proof of the revolution in military criminality, responsibility for which lay entirely in the hands of Hitler and his circle. They started killing civilians behind the lines in Poland in 1939 and repeated these crimes wherever and whenever the German army moved into and occupied enemy territory.

The 3,000 men who staffed the Einzatzgruppen were divided into four sections. In every case they were joined in killing civilians by men of the Waffen-SS, the German army, allied troops and local collaborators, who helped identify the civilians to be shot. Over two days in September 1941, 33,000 Jews were murdered at Babi Yar near Kyiv. Estimates vary, but between 0.5 million and 1 million civilians were killed in this way and by these units, perpetrators of what is now known as the ‘Holocaust by bullets’.⁸

Most historians separate the history of the two world wars because of the criminal degeneration of the German army from the very outset of the Second World War, first in Poland, and then throughout the Soviet Union. One historian, Daniel Goldhagen, dissented, and presented his case within the context of a second Thirty Years’ War.⁹ Goldhagen believed that the German people were ‘willing executioners’ of Jews, heavily concentrated in Poland and the Soviet Union. The perpetrators emerged from a culture of what he termed ‘eliminationist antisemitism’. This prejudice was the glue that held the German nation together, and had been distilled over centuries of antisemitic thoughts, words and deeds.

In the First World War, the German army had launched a ‘Jew Census’ to show that the proportion of Jews at the front, willing to bleed and die for Germany, was much less than the proportion of Jews in Germany as a whole. When the census takers found out that the opposite was the case, and that there was a higher proportion of Jews in the army than in the nation, the census was halted abruptly and the documentation it had put together was destroyed.¹⁰

The path from burning documents in one war to burning bodies in the following war was long and crooked. The world economic crisis of 1929–32 enabled the Nazi party to emerge as a mass party with mass electoral support. This is why Hitler came to power, not because of the First World War, but because of the very different war he and his party launched in its aftermath. The very radicalism of German antisemitism under the Nazis is the first reason to reject the argument that there was one Thirty Years’ War between 1914 and 1945.

The Bolshevik Revolution and the transformation of war
The second major reason to reject the claim that there was a Thirty Years’ War in the first half of the twentieth century is that it was not 1914 but 1917 that created the crisis out of which the later upheavals of the 20th century emerged. When war broke out in 1914, Lenin was convinced that the revolution had to be postponed for a generation. In France, there was a list of socialist militants who would be arrested on the outbreak of war, to prevent them from interfering with military mobilization. Not a single name on that list – the famous Carnet B – was arrested, since they had all joined up. They chose nation over revolution.¹¹

Three years later, the Bolsheviks took Russia out of the war. This decision was a massive boost to Germany and her allies, translated into an imperial peace at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. Reluctantly Russia’s new leaders gave Germany informal though clear control over much of European Russia. The aim was clear. Russia would be exploited like a colony.

What followed though was anything but peace. The civil war in Russia between 1918 and 1921, and massive violence after 1918 in a great swathe extending from Finland to Turkey, are the real sources of the transforming of war into the massacre of civilians. I call this phenomenon the ‘civilianization of war’.

The civilianization of war
It began before 1914 in every single European colonial project. Massacre followed a revolt of the Herero and the Nama people in southwest Africa in 1904. What happened in Belgium in 1914 at the hands of invading German troops pales into relative insignificance when compared to the atrocities perpetrated by King Leopold in the Congo, initially his private fiefdom, later a Belgian colony.

What separated the First World War from the period following is that the 1914–18 conflict was a three-part struggle for dominance over northwestern Europe. Churchill and de Gaulle combined into one massive effort Anglo-French resistance to a German-dominated continent, and they won it. That interpretation was only partially true, since from the start both Britain and France were defending their imperial holdings from German penetration or outright takeover. The second Thirty Years’ War was always about Europe, but the two world wars were at the same time always about empire.

Western intervention in the Russian Revolution
These two perspectives – the Western European and the imperial – left out Eastern Europe. That omission was obvious in the way the peace conference proceeded. On the day in early 1919 President Woodrow Wilson had to start his journey back to Washington to give the state of the union address, he was asked by Winston Churchill if the delegates might spend a bit of time talking about Russia. Wilson paused while preparing to leave, and said yes, they could have a preliminary discussion. Churchill then developed his idea for a military intervention in Russia to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. Wilson said that was not what he had in mind. The conference agreed to further deliberations, and through that crack in the diplomatic wall Churchill forged a ten-nation invasion of Russia.

The problem with this half-hearted intervention in Russia was that it was always too small to make a difference. The Allies did not commit the manpower needed to overthrow Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The reason was that domestic opinion in the Allied camp had had enough of war. It was true that a very large population of investors had lost their shirts in Russia; roughly one-quarter of the French portfolio of overseas investments was in Russian bonds. But the rest of the population was more interested in restarting their peacetime lives than in going to war for lost investments. Allied intervention in Russia – like Allied backing for the Greek army in Anatolia – was doomed from the start.

One way to put it is to say that Eastern Europe and Russia were of tertiary importance to Britain and France. First came breaking the German army and scuttling the German navy. Then came shoring up the British and French empires. What happened in Russia mattered, but only after the other two strategic objectives were realized.

Churchill put it disarmingly well when he described the period before and after 1918 in these terms: ‘The war of the giants has ended; the quarrel of the pygmies has begun.’¹² I have no knowledge of contemptuous and racist sentiment of this kind by de Gaulle, but France’s mission civilisatrise was shot through with racial and cultural condescension towards men and women of color. De Gaulle seemed to be immune from the common prejudices of his military cohort, and fought from and for the French empire when the Third Republic collapsed in 1940.

Whatever their prejudices, Churchill and de Gaulle simply did not understand the appeal of communism to Russian peasants after the war. They had no idea that Western military intervention to overthrow the Bolsheviks was bound to produce just the opposite of what they hoped it would achieve. Churchill hated communism with a passion. He was right about the bloodthirsty ruthlessness of Lenin and Trotsky, but wrong about how the Russian people would react to the presence of ten Western armies on their soil. What peasants saw were men intending to return the old order of power, and that meant their losing the land the peasantry had just seized. In 1919 or 1920, it mattered not one iota that a communist government that gave land to the people would take it back some day; what mattered was that Western intervention in the Russian civil war was a godsend to the Bolsheviks.

The French and British military leaders who had won the war on the Western front could not conjure up a victory with the forces and materiel they had at their disposal. Ferdinand Foch and Louis Franchet d’Espèrey wanted 20 divisions; they got a small fraction of what they demanded. British commander Sir Henry Rawlinson, Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s second in command on the Somme, fared no better. What they could not see was that their political masters could not avoid what the public in every major country clamored for: demobilization and a return to peace after the bloodletting of the previous six years.

Thus, the second major reason for casting doubt on the argument that there was a Thirty Years’ War in the first half of the 20th century is that it conflates a war that began before the Russian Revolutions of 1917 with wars that were the product of counter-revolutionary efforts beginning in the 1920s and culminating in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The First World War of the great imperial powers ended with the defeat of Germany and the Central Powers first in 1918, when Germany accepted defeat, and then in 1923 when post-imperial Turkey declared victory in her war against Greece and her allied backers. Turkey in effect rewrote the terms of the peace treaty forced down the throat of the last Sultan of the Ottoman empire. Watching from Munich in 1923, Hitler and his followers in the Nazi party concluded that the peace that had been forced on the Germans in 1919 could be rewritten too, and by force.

Does that link the two world wars? Certainly not, since the conflict of 1914–18 was fought to a bitter end by imperial powers whose vision of the world bore precious little resemblance to the views of either Hitler or Lenin. Both saw war and revolution as symbiotically related. The National Socialist racial revolution, like the Bolshevik Revolution of the working class, was a form of continuous warfare, just as war was a form of continuous revolution. And given the virulence of Nazi ideology, and its biological determinism, war and revolution became a test of racial superiority. Either the German nation would destroy communism (and its putative allies the Jews), or the German nation would perish, and rightly so, since it did not have the stamina to defeat the racial enemy. This form of suicidal logic has nothing in common with the thinking of those who executed the First World War. With Hitler and Lenin, the vision of Carl von Clausewitz that war was politics by other means came to an end. Instead, war became the extermination of a racial enemy imagined as having genocidal intentions on the German race itself.

This mad vision of competing genocides bore no resemblance to reality. But that did not reduce the attractiveness of the idea that the German people had to kill or be killed, and that meant kill not only all communists, but Jews and Poles and other racially inferior peoples who allied with them. Once we see the criminal logic of the Nazi’s war in the Soviet Union, it becomes impossible to entertain the idea that there was a Thirty Years’ War between 1914 and 1945.

The technology of warfare
The third reason to dissent from the view that there was a Thirty Years’ War between 1914 and 1945 is that technological developments in the waging of war radically separate the two world conflicts.

Let us consider air war first. In the 1914–18 conflict, all combatant powers used airplanes as the eyes of the artillery. On the Western front, counter-battery operations were an essential part of offensive warfare. This was because the infantry could not move forward as long as enemy artillery could wreck units advancing into no man’s land. Pinpointing artillery dispositions became essential parts of planning infantry movements. Here is where the air forces served an essential purpose.

Once the technology of aircraft production had developed in the 1920s and 1930s, air power became separate from the infantry and an offensive weapon of war in its own right. Had Germany in 1914 had the kind of air power it developed in the 1930s, it could have destroyed the railways that made the defense of Paris possible both in 1914 and again in the last major German offensive of the war in 1918. German air power in 1940 showed the massive difference between the two world wars.

It is true that there were attempts launched by both sides to bombard urban centers in the First World War. Both London and Cologne here hit, and over 1,000 people died in Paris during the German artillery and aerial bombardment of the capital. Technological developments turned aerial warfare against civilian population centers into vital military operations 25 years later. The Blitz was indeed prefigured in the 1914–18 conflict.

However, the effect of bombing on civilians was misinterpreted on both sides of the 1939–45 conflict. Both British and German planners believed they could break the back of civilian resistance by bombing urban centers and killing civilians. Both were wrong. It was not only that both combatants had complex plans to diversify and protect essential elements in the munitions sector, but also that the reaction of civilians to intensive bombardment may have hardened their will to carry on.

The limit case of this argument once more separates the two world wars. The use of atomic weapons against Japan – weapons originally developed for use in Germany – brought the Second World War to an end. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did indeed show what air power could do, but its primary purpose was to save Allied lives, by rendering unnecessary an infantry assault on the Japanese mainland. In the First World War, Germany was defeated without having been invaded. The end of the two world wars separates each of them from any attempt to bind them together in an envelope called the Thirty Years’ War of the 20th century.

Another technological development also shows the radical discontinuities between the two world wars. German chemists gave the infantry the possibility of releasing chlorine gas on the Western front during the second battle of Ypres in 1915. Later, phosgene gas and mustard gas were deployed heavily. In 1918 roughly one in every four artillery shell fired on the Western front was a gas shell. Civilians prepared for the release of gas on civilian populations, but that never took place.

In contrast, gas was not used on European battlefields during the Second World War. This was probably because there was little evidence drawn from the 1914–18 conflict that deploying such weapons had operational advantages. After all, if the wind started to blow the wrong way, the attacking forces would wind up poisoning themselves. In contrast, gas was used extensively both in the death camps built by the Nazis to murder Europe’s Jewish population and other ‘subhumans’.

Japanese troops used gas weapons extensively in China. They also conducted experiments in the use of biological weapons on Chinese and other prisoners of war. Surgeon General Shiro Ishii headed up Unit 731 of the Japanese army, a unit that prepared biological weapons deployed in Manchuria and elsewhere in China.¹³

Once again, there are yawning gaps separating the history of chemical and biological warfare in the two world wars. The best way to put it is to say that the First World War was the antechamber to the Holocaust and to other chemical and biological war crimes. The Great War made mass extermination thinkable, and therefore doable. But the Nazi revolution was necessary before a possibility turned into the crime of the century. Here too we see the need to respect the radical differences between the causes, conduct and consequences of the two world wars.

Conclusion
Some of those who braid together the two conflicts into a unity called the Thirty Years’ War of the 20th century have autobiographical reasons for doing so. Churchill and de Gaulle framed their lives in this way.

Others have had ideological reasons for doing so. Historian Ernst Nolte was a supporter of the Thirty Years’ War interpretation, since it enabled him to say that the Bolshevik Revolution, a product of the First World War was the origin and inspiration of the Nazi movement. By that he meant that the murderous history of the first half of the 20th century was a European, or rather German-led, reaction against ‘Asiatic barbarism’. Nazi crimes were reactive and defensive, triggered by the communist crimes that preceded them. This is the core of his view that the two world wars were part of a European civil war that came to an end in 1945.

Nolte’s revisionist publications set alight what was called the Historikerstreit or the quarrel among historians in the 1980s. To Nolte, the Holocaust was not unique, but part of a civil war triggered by the Bolshevik Revolution. The exterminatory war of 1941–5 was waged by Hitler to forestall a communist Holocaust in Germany should the war be lost. Communist crimes and Nazi crimes were bound together as the vicious consequences of civil war.¹⁴

Other historians refused to accept the theory of a Thirty Years’ War as a way of normalizing Nazi crimes.¹⁵ The controversy went on for decades, but it faded out primarily because successive German political leaders, from Willy Brandt to Angela Merkel, refused to change their view that Germany remained responsible for the Holocaust, and that there was a bond between the German nation and the Jewish people that must not and could not be broken.

In other parts of Europe, the notion of a second Thirty Years’ War has resurfaced from time to time. Horror at the depravity of Stalin and his henchmen led some observers to equate communism and Nazism. Most European historians today (2024) share the moral revulsion but not the historical judgment. Perhaps the most balanced conclusion on which we can all agree is that the two world wars were singular nightmares, each deserving its place in one of the bolgias of Dante’s Inferno.

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¹ Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Biographical Illusion’, in Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, with the assistance of Gregor Schima (eds), Biography in theory (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), pp. 201–16.
² https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/68a6136f-a7cf-40cf-9765-af120da30526/publishable_en.pdf Accessed 26 November 2024.
³ https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/58118da1-af22-48c0-bc88-93cda974f42c/publishable_en.pdf Accessed 26 November 2024.
⁴ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Penguin Books, 1996).
⁵ https://mjp.univ-perp.fr/textes/degaulle28071946.htm Accessed 26 November 2024.
⁶ Jay Winter, War beyond Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), ch. 5.
⁷ John Horne and Alan Kramer, Germany Atrocities in 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
⁸ Patrick Desbois, La Shoah par balles: la mort en plein jour (Paris: Plon, 2019); Ronald Headland, Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941–1943 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992); Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York, NY: Knopf, 2002); Jürgen Matthäus, Jochen Böhler and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), and Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2010).
⁹ Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (New York, NY: Alfred Knopf, 1996).
¹⁰ Jay Winter, ‘Antisemitism in the First World War’, in Steven Katz (ed.), The Cambridge History of Antisemitism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), vol. 1, ch. 1.
¹¹ Jean-Jacques Becker, Le Carnet B (Paris: PUF, 1964).
¹² As cited in Peter Gatrell, ‘War after the War: Conflicts, 1919–1923’, in John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), p. 558.
¹³ Yang Yan-Jun and Tam Yue-Him, Unit 731: Laboratory of the Devil, Auschwitz of the East: Japanese Biological Warfare in China 1933–45 (Stroud: Fonthill Media, 2018).
¹⁴ Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1987), and Nolte, ‘Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will. Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht gehalten werden konnte’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1986.
¹⁵ Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum "Historikerstreit" (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988).

The end of the Second World War was, and indeed still is, a prime caesura in the new and recent history of Europe and the world. There are many reasons to recall this turning point, especially as the 80th anniversary of its end approaches in 2025. One of the most pressing reasons is the current fragility of the world order, which took shape during three decades of violent and tragic upheavals – spanning the First and Second World Wars (1914–45) – and is now once again beginning to crumble before our eyes. Seeing this makes us anxiously wonder what the future world order will look like and what will happen before it emerges.

The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945 with the surrender of Germany and the war in the Far East on 2 September 1945 with that of Japan. The significance of the end of the Second World War varies according to which perspective is taken, geographically, but also socially and politically.

From the point of view of ‘ordinary’ Europeans living at the time, the dominant feeling was one of relief. Mass deaths had ended, the Holocaust had ceased, the last concentration camps still in the hands of the SS had been liberated, the bombings had stopped and soldiers no longer died at the front. Although it should be mentioned that the last clashes with German troops still took place on 12 May 1945, and the last German unit capitulated on 4 September 1945 on Spitsbergen. For the liberated in Germany, the surviving prisoners, prisoners of war and forced labourers, a new phase of their lives was beginning. Citizens of the countries of the victorious coalition celebrated the end of the war nightmare and the victory on city streets, rejoicing in the hope of the return of loved ones who had been scattered by the war and an improvement in their living conditions. Though mostly overwhelmed by the sense of defeat and humiliation, the Germans were also relieved by the end of hostilities. Significantly, the behaviour of the Nazi authorities in the final days of the war, combining senseless cruelty with cowardice, meant that hardly anyone felt any regret at the fall of the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’.

However, when one looks at the end of the war from the perspective of politicians of the time, it is clear that the situation in Europe at the end of the war was far from a simple black-and-white scenario. Winston Churchill was tormented at the time by the vision of an isolated Britain, which alone – in the event of an American withdrawal across the Atlantic – would have to face the threat of Stalin’s vast Soviet army, buoyed by its victories, ready to move from the Elbe to conquer Western Europe. It was because of these concerns that Churchill insisted on another summit conference to work out a modus vivendi of the powers in post-war Europe and the world. This took place at Potsdam in late July and early August 1945. Contrary to Churchill’s fears, Stalin was aware of the scale of the Soviet Union’s losses, destruction and exhaustion, so he did not plan a march of communism for the time being. At the same time, the Soviet dictator demanded the establishment of Moscow’s full control over the states that the Soviet army had occupied as a result of the war (and with the acquiescence of the Anglo-American powers expressed at Tehran and Yalta). This led to a brutal crackdown on democratic forces in Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Even in Czechoslovakia, whose democratic authorities had been demonstrating loyalty to Moscow for several years, there was a communist putsch. Thus, at the turn of 1947 and 1948, highly repressive Stalinist communist governments were installed in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, as well as in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. This created a compact political-military bloc with the Soviet Union at the head. Only Yugoslavia, under Marshal Josip Tito, broke away from Moscow’s hegemony, but retained its communist system, which over time was considerably liberalised.

In the first months after the end of the war, the United States succumbed to illusions of the possibility of allied cooperation with the Soviet Union. However, the growing difficulties in that regard and the rise in outbreaks of conflict, such as in Greece, Turkey, Iran, occupied Germany and China, led Washington to change its policy towards the Soviets. It was all the easier for the Americans to make this change as they had a sense of their own power, stemming from their possession, as the only country, of nuclear weapons (the so-called American nuclear monopoly lasted until 1949), which were used in the first days of August 1945 destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moreover, as a result of the war, the US gained an incredible economic advantage over any potential competitor, consolidated as early as 1944 with the creation of the so-called Bretton Woods system, in which the US dollar was recognised as the world currency and guarantor of the stability and development of the capitalist economy. Although not intending to start a new war to destroy the power of the Soviets, President Harry Truman decided to put the brakes on the expansion of their influence. This concept, known as the containment doctrine or the Truman Doctrine (1947), contributed to the development of a comprehensive plan to support the post-war economic reconstruction of Western Europe, which was making very slow progress. This was the origin of the European Recovery Program, widely known as the Marshall Plan (1948). A year later, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was established, a defence alliance of the countries of Western Europe, the USA and Canada, which owed its power above all to the American armed forces and their nuclear arsenal. Thus, just three to four years after the end of the Second World War, a second political-military bloc was created and the world political order took on a bipolar form. Although the two blocs were hostile to each other, they had comparable military potentials with nuclear arsenals at their core, resulting in mutual deterrence. Their relations were characterised by permanent tension and repeated attempts to weaken the opposing side, including through wars waged on the periphery of both spheres of influence, while avoiding direct confrontation between the superpowers, which could lead to the use of nuclear weapons with fatal consequences for each side. This state of affairs led to what is known as the ‘Cold War’. It began soon after the final shots of the Second World War had been fired and ended 40 years later with the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the fall of the Soviet Union (1989–91). The United States became the sole superpower for a time, and the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama could hopefully spin a vision of the ‘end of history’ – the reign of liberal democracy throughout the world.

While during the Cold War relations between the blocs described here were generally balanced in terms of military power and deterrence, the paths of their internal development went in different directions. Western states became liberal democracies with market economies, building welfare states and consumer societies. The extinction of conflicts between the constituent states became characteristic for Western Europe, which initiated a process in which interests were in practice harmonised. These trends developed rather quickly into progressive integration, the key stages of which were the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1957, the introduction of the Common Agricultural Policy in 1962, the adoption of the Schengen Agreement in 1985 and finally the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which brought the European Union into being.

Meanwhile, the development of the countries of the Soviet sphere of influence followed completely different vectors. Indivisible rule was exercised there by communist parties by means of the tight ideological supervision of societies thanks to their almost total control over the circulation of information. Questioning any element of this system of power was met with repression by an extensive and specialised political police apparatus. The economies of these countries were described as planned, or more accurately as command and control. In the absence of free market competition, a ‘deficit society’ developed, in which, for example, having a telephone (a landline, of course) was a rare privilege, and the quality of goods and the level of services, and also labour productivity, left much to be desired. In the 1970s and 1980s, the planned economies of the communist countries, by nature not very receptive to innovation, definitely lost touch with the advanced technologies of the third industrial revolution. They were unable to keep pace with the West even in the hitherto much-honoured field of arms production. Their failure to win this competition became an indirect cause of the collapse of communist rule and of the Soviet Union.

Another consequence of the Second World War was decolonisation, or, as it used to be called, the end of world domination by the white man. In 1947, the British, carrying out their wartime promises, left India and, shortly afterwards, their remaining colonies in Asia (with the exception of Hong Kong). The Japanese, who had pursued their conquests during the war under the slogan ‘Asia for Asians’, rekindled the unstoppable aspirations for independence of the Dutch and French possessions in Asia. At the same time, Arab countries gained real sovereignty and the State of Israel was established in the Middle East. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, almost all African colonies gained independence. The situation in China was peculiar, where in 1949, after eight years of ferocious war with Japan and three years of equally bloody civil war, the Communists took power under Mao Zedong. With them came the eradication of Western influence, and also Moscow’s influence proved relatively short-lived and superficial. However, as a result of the regime’s ideological follies and its adventurous foreign policy, leading to the isolation of the country, China’s enormous potential remained dormant until Mao’s death in 1976. Shortly thereafter, China experienced four decades of rapid economic growth and civilisational progress, with Beijing’s international clout expanding rapidly, thanks to opening up its economy to the world. These results were achieved without depleting Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly of power, using extreme methods to maintain it. Today, in terms of economic and military potential China competes with the United States and, together with Russia and India, and many African and Latin American countries, aspires to co-determine the new world order.

When considering the caesura that marked the end of the Second World War in the spring and summer of 1945, it is important to remember the events that preceded this historic turning point: both the massive struggles of the warring parties and the victims of war and genocide committed by the totalitarian regimes of the time, including the unprecedented crime of the Holocaust. The number of victims of the Second World War is estimated at around 60 million people. It is also worth remembering the short-, medium- and long-term consequences of this calamity, which to a large extent shaped the world in which we have lived up until now, and which is only just becoming a thing of the past and undergoing a fundamental transformation.

We are used to treating the trial at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg as an obvious aftermath of the war. And yet, at the time, immediately after the end of the war, the very idea of putting on trial people who had acted in accordance with the laws of their state, trying them for crimes that were not codified in written law (e.g. crimes against peace, or crimes against humanity) aroused quite widespread opposition and even indignation among some lawyers.

Even for that part of the legal world which did not doubt that the crimes of the Second World War should be accounted for in judicial terms, unanswered questions remained: how to judge mass, even industrial-scale murders, for what and on what basis to judge those who ‘merely’ gave orders and commands? In a world of sovereign states, do governments have the right to try the leaders of other states? Is this not a dangerous precedent?

The helplessness of the justice system in the face of mass, organised crimes was aptly expressed during the trial of the KL Lublin (Majdanek) staff by the Polish prosecutor Jerzy Sawicki, who, incidentally, was also the Polish delegate during the Nuremberg trial: ‘I am supposed to speak about the guilt of the defendants, i.e. I am supposed to put their guilt into words. Your Honour, words are the creation of people, and what happened there is inhuman. [I know that normally when a prosecutor stands before the court and asks for a death sentence, a shudder of horror goes through the court, the prosecutor and the audience. I feel all my powerlessness when the words “death penalty” are pronounced in this courtroom’.

It seems that most of the legal dilemmas faced by lawyers during the Nuremberg trials, whatever aspect they concerned, were ultimately located in the age-old tension/conflict between the Roman ‘judicial’ approach to law and the modern ‘legislative’ approach. The former concept was largely based on axiology, seeing legal norms in the perspective of morality derived from natural laws (St Thomas, Kant’s categorical imperative). Its proponents were charged with the accusation that interpreting legal rules on the basis of an ambiguous, unspecific and undefined morality had the effect of departing from legal rules and giving lawyers too wide a field of interpretation. The latter notion, over time referred to as legal positivism, prevailed in the early 20th century in continental Europe. It favoured a reasoned, rational approach to law, which was primarily reduced to the legal norm; moreover, the radical version of legal positivism emphasised that there was no necessary connection between law and morality (John Austin, Rudolf von Ihering). The discussion taking place among legal scholars still during and just after the war was in essence a debate between positivists and proponents of natural law. The former believed that the crimes of the Second World War could be judged with the help of existing laws and existing jurisprudence. The latter pointed out that the mass scale and specificity of the crimes required new legal solutions. It is important to note that the goal of both was to try and convict the criminals, but they wanted to achieve this by different methods.

Justice for the victors?
One of the main general criticisms of the Nuremberg trials was and still is that they were a manifestation of ‘victors’ justice’, which only prosecuted and punished crimes committed by the Axis states, while the Allies, most notably the Soviet Union, were not held accountable for their own war crimes. Critics argue that the selective application of justice undermined the credibility of the trials.

Indeed, Nuremberg was a ‘court of the victors over the vanquished’, but it was the only possible tribunal in the political situation of the time. Any trial, even the best-prepared one, is subject to the subjectivity of the judges, to human error, let alone a trial before an international tribunal in which the conflicting interests of four powers clashed and a defeated Germany tried desperately to defend itself.

Faced with a whole series of dilemmas and legal doubts, only the will of the politicians could push through the establishment of the International Military Tribunal. Pragmatism and political realism stood above procedural deficiencies, the subjectivity of the judges, and the impossibility of trying Soviet criminals. Awareness of these shortcomings accompanied both politicians and lawyers from the very beginning. The prosecutor on the British side, Sir Hartley Shawcross, wrote 20 years after the trial: ‘The wisest legal arguments pale into insignificance and even become irrelevant in the face of the facts which have been proved, including by the use of official Nazi documents. What happened [during the Third Reich period] touched the conscience of all civilised nations, including the German people, and even cried out for judgement and punishment.’

It is also worth remembering that even during the war the response to information about the mass murders carried out by the Germans was suggestions that extrajudicial punishment be administered to them. As early as 1941, Theodore N. Kaufman self-published his book Germany Must Perish, in which he proposed the sterilisation of the entire German nation. According to the author’s calculations, it would take four months to sterilise the male German population by some 25,000 surgeons, and about three years for women. The plan of the American finance minister Henry Morgenthau, who believed that Germany would be a security risk even after demilitarisation, was well known and considered after the war, so in his book Germany Is Our Problem (1945) he advocated making Germany an entirely agricultural country in order to deprive it of an economic base for war. Even Winston Churchill himself believed (W. Churchill’s dispatch to A. Eden of 17 September 1944) that most of the German leadership (50 to 100 people) should be executed without trial. In the perspective of the above ideas, any judicial solution was a victory for common sense and the principles of Western civilisation.

Today, it is not easy for us to understand the legal dilemmas of the time - the international trial of criminals from Rwanda, Yugoslavia or Sudan seems obvious to us, but it is worth remembering that after the atrocities of the war, innovative interpretations of the law raised fears of creating new chaos, the effect of which could be to undermine the legal foundations of Western civilisation. The most striking example is the comment by US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone: ‘...I would like to inform you that the Supreme Court had nothing to do, either directly or indirectly, with the Nuremberg trials or the actions of the government that authorized them’. In a private letter, he wrote: ‘The Nuremberg trials are an attempt to justify the use of the power of the victor over the vanquished, since the vanquished caused the aggressive war’. He feared the lasting effects of the instrumental use of law in international politics.

Acting in accordance with the law of one’s own state
One of the fundamental dilemmas of the Nuremberg trials was the very fact of the establishment of an international tribunal. Western political thought was dominated by the Act of State principle, particularly firmly rooted in Anglo-Saxon law, derived directly from the concept of state sovereignty. This principle implies that, in an anarchic international system, the authorities of one state do not have the right to judge the authorities of another state, since the legal principles established by the sovereign are the law in its territory.¹.According to this interpretation, a person acting on behalf, or in the interest, of a state cannot be held personally responsible for their actions; he or she is, as it were, subject to immunity on the grounds that their acts are presumptively legal, since they comply with the law established by the sovereign. Lawyers, both European and American, realised that a complete abandonment of the Act of State principle could be a dangerous precedent and could provide a legal basis for future interference in the internal legal system of sovereign states. The Nazi period provided an argument for many positivists to move away from the overly principled dominance of formalism over axiology and the overly radical separation of law and morality. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg finally recognised the primacy of the prohibition on planning and waging aggressive war over the absolute sovereignty of the state. Moreover, among some of the lawyers involved in the work of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) there was a conviction which one of them, Hersh Lauterpacht, formulated clearly as follows: ‘... the community of nations has in the past claimed and successfully asserted the right to intercede on behalf of the violated rights of man trampled upon by the State in a manner calculated to shock the moral sense of mankind. The right of humanitarian intervention has for a long time been considered to form part of the law of nations’². With regard to German crimes, he was convinced that the ‘fate of the accused ... serves as irrefutable proof that the scope of exclusive domestic jurisdiction ends where crimes against humanity begin’³.

Ultimately, the dilemma of ‘acting according to the law of the state’ was also resolved by the so-called Radbruch Formula. Its author proceeded from the premise that if the international community wanted to reckon with German crimes, which were committed according to criteria of legality but completely ignored elementary principles of morality, it could not resort to state law, as it did not provide for, or even prevent, such a reckoning. On the basis of a Roman jurisprudential maxim, Radbruch formulated the principle henceforth known in law as the Radbruch Formula: lex iniustissima non est lex, which can be translated as: a grossly unjust law is not a law. Thus, the law established by the legitimate government of the German Reich, by the fact of drastically violating natural law, became, according to Radbruch, a highly unjust law and therefore not valid. In the end, therefore, a sense of justice proved more important than dogmatic adherence to principles. It should also be stressed that this approach was also fostered by European public opinion, agitated by the evidence of war-time crimes being successively revealed.

For lawyers dealing with international law, this was one of the greatest dilemmas in history, concerning not only the application of principles, but above all the place of morals and values in international law. The legal interpretation that eventually prevailed at Nuremberg also makes it possible to try contemporary war criminals from the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda, among others. The undermining of the positivist conception of law by the premises contained in Radbruch formula made it possible to move beyond the dichotomy of the dispute: justice for the victors versus impunity for the perpetrators. Article 8 of the IMT Charter finally recognised that acting on the orders of a government or superior did not absolve criminal responsibility, although it may result in leniency. It was also emphasised that in the event of a conflict between national and international law the individual has a duty to comply with the latter, as in such a situation national law is not binding on the citizen.

Lex retro non agit!
The Nuremberg trials introduced new categories of crimes: ‘against humanity’ and “waging aggressive war” (against peace), which were not clearly defined in international law before the war. The so-called retroactivity of these provisions, i.e. the violation of two legal principles: nullum crimen sine lege (nulla poena sine lege) and lex retro non agit, was questionable. Since the legal terms themselves - crimes against humanity and crimes against peace - appeared after they had been committed by Nazi Germans, many legal scholars doubted whether the fundamental principles of law were being violated when trying war criminals. Disputes over the principle and interpretation of retroactivity also took place among the jurists of the IMT, including between the head of the American delegation, Robert H. Jackson, who believed that it was more important to try the criminals than to doubt the lex retro principle, and the advisor to the French delegation, Prof. André Gros, who had a lot of doubts on this issue.

In the end, Article 6 of the IMT Charter included the following provision: ‘The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility’. Article 6 was followed by a list of international crimes, including participation in a war of aggression and participation in a conspiracy (collusion) to commit one of the crimes against peace.

A witness at the Nuremberg trials, the Bavarian Social Democrat Wilhelm Hoegner, summarised these contentions as follows: ‘I remain of the opinion that the Nuremberg trials were contrary to the legal principle of nulla poena sine lege. After all, there were extraordinary circumstances, and this trial was the only chance to settle accounts with the criminal Nazi gang.’

Procedural objections and moral relativism
During the trials, the prosecutors were themselves a party to the conflict, so it was easy to formulate allegations of a lack of independence. The Tribunal was a military court with representatives of four powers, representing four different cultures and legal traditions (continental system, common law system, Soviet law). The jurists did not adopt any catalogue of procedural rules under which the proceedings were to take place, although it is clear that American law had the greatest influence on the final shape of the trial. The four powers did, however, reach a compromise on the application of substantive law, i.e. the legal norms applied before the tribunal.

The absence of a two-instance system, i.e. the possibility of an appeal against the verdict, was questionable. This was a political decision, motivated primarily by the Tribunal’s mode of work (ad hoc tribunal) ⁴. The political authorities wanted to try the defendants relatively quickly and definitively, hence the decision to make the verdicts final and indisputable. In view of the beginning of the Cold War, lengthy trials could be seen as a tool of the game between the Western Allies and the Soviets.

Some of the objections to the trials are of a more ethical nature, although to some extent they also relate to procedure, e.g. jury selection or unequal access to trial information. One can paraphrase the title of this text and write that the Themis at Nuremberg was one-eyed - she saw the German crimes but not the Soviet ones. Moreover, the Soviet lawyers at Nuremberg were themselves implicated in the crimes of the Soviet system. Morally, such a situation is of course unacceptable, but politically, under the circumstances, there was no alternative. The fact that there were Soviet lawyers, primarily judges, meant that much of the evidence of Soviet crimes, for example the Soviet aggression against Poland or the case of the Katyn massacre, was dismissed and the evidence was regarded as falsification.

German defenders often referred to the principle et tu quoque (Latin for ‘and you too’), an attempt to point out that the accusing Allies had themselves committed similar acts for which they accused German leaders. The defence counsels argued that German bombings of, for example, Coventry or London, were no different from Allied raids on Dresden or Leipzig. Similar allegations were made about the murder of German prisoners of war especially by the Soviets. These arguments sought to undermine the moral and legal legitimacy of the Tribunal.

The diversity of the verdicts, including the acquittal of some defendants, may be indicative of the fairness and insight of the Tribunal, which reflected on the individual guilt of each defendant. However, upon closer inspection of the judges’ behind-the-scenes deliberations, this picture is no longer so clear-cut. After the disclosure of Judge Biddle’s personal notes (thirty years after the Nuremberg trials), the bargaining over the sentences to be handed down came to light. This only confirms the primacy of politics over justice, perhaps better described as a ‘synergy of politics and justice’.

Criminals behind the desk and executors of orders
A phenomenon of the National Socialist system was the fact of the ‘total mobilisation’ of German society and the massive support given to Hitler. ⁵ That was support of the simple worker and the farmer, but also members of scientific and intellectual elites and by representatives of large industrial concerns. Ultimately, they created a system that organised a powerful machine of violence and extermination during the Second World War. The number of NSDAP membership cards issued reached 10.7 million, meaning that one in five adult Germans belonged to the Nazi party. As many as 17.3 million soldiers served in the Wehrmacht from 1939 to 1945 (of whom 15.6 million were Germans and Austrians). The most conservative estimate by German historians of the Wehrmacht’s involvement in the atrocities - particularly on the Eastern Front - is 5%; this would mean that more than 700,000 soldiers may have committed them. If we add to these figures members of SS formations, officials of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, and representatives of large industrial concerns supporting Hitler, we get a picture of the entanglement and scale of support given to Hitler by the German people. In December 1963, 22 members of the Auschwitz staff stood trial in Frankfurt am Main. Already in the indictment, prosecutor Fritz Bauer pre-empted the defence arguments, writing: ‘It was not the case that there was only Nazi Hitler and only Nazi Himmler in Germany. There were hundreds of thousands, millions of others who carried it out not only because they were ordered to do so, but also because it corresponded to their own world view, which they adopted voluntarily.’ The Allies cannot be accused of trying only the most important representatives of the Third Reich at Nuremberg, because that was precisely the purpose of the trial. The selection of those who would sit on the dock was not only a matter of justice, but above all a matter of politics. The German Reich was to be tried at Nuremberg, represented by people from various institutions and spheres of life (from political activists, propagandists, military commanders to representatives of the business community). It is worth remembering that the main perpetrators escaped responsibility by committing suicide (Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler) or by fleeing abroad (Eichmann and Mengele, among others). The purpose of the trial was to develop the legal basis and jurisprudence that was later to be used by the courts before which lesser functionaries of the Nazi regime were to be tried. Of course, it should be remembered that the conflict between the Western powers and the Soviet Union dubbed the Cold War effectively rendered the planned denazification and trial of criminals impossible.

When it came to trying the guilty, a much more serious issue was that of ‘behind-the-scenes perpetrators’ who had not directly committed the crimes. This dilemma also applied to some commanders of concentration and death camps who themselves had not participated in the crimes directly. The resolution of this dilemma was all the more pressing because even before or during the Nuremberg trials, others were still taking place before American and British courts. ⁶

To resolve similar dilemmas, the concept of a multi-person crime, involving ‘taking part’ in a joint action, was used. This concept should not be confused with collective responsibility. The perpetrator of a multi-person international crime could have been an organisation, such as the SS, the Gestapo or even a specific ministry. In both Britain and the United States, there were legal constructs to try people who did not commit crimes directly. These were the concepts of collusion and conspiracy. Prior to the war, these were primarily used to try organised crime or economic crime, such as the Mafia. In this case, we are dealing with a plurality of perpetrators accused of jointly committing the crime, so the prosecution had to prove that the accused participated in a joint plan and had knowledge of its criminal objectives. The adoption of such premise in the trial of German criminals also made it possible to consider the very membership of certain organisations as participation in a conspiracy to wage a war of aggression. Such a concept was pushed by the American lawyer Murrey C. Bernays as early as 1944, as he submitted successive memoranda to the American government suggesting the use of the concept of conspiracy (collusion) to try not only individuals, but also organisations such as the Gestapo, SS, or SA. He suggested that a tribunal to try war criminals should link the criminal acts to the doctrine and policies of the Third Reich. Ultimately, the indictments and sentences in trials held even before the Nuremberg trials used the concept of a common plan/design, aiming at aggression or domination of other nations. The British used this concept in the trial of the Bergen-Belsen staff, and in November 1945, in the Almelo trial, a British military court explicitly stated that the ‘responsibility of the members of the group is equal to that of the man who fired the actual shot’.

This concept provoked fierce protests from lawyers outside the common law circle, including the French, who insisted on adherence to the continental principle of individual criminal responsibility. However, it was acknowledged that ‘aggression is by definition a multi-person crime, so the doctrine of conspiracy does not substantially increase the burden on defendants’. The prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials eventually formulated four charges, the first of which concerned participation in the creation and execution of a common plan, i.e. a conspiracy aimed at crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecution team wanted to show that this conspiracy had been formed many years before the outbreak of war, namely its beginning in 1919, when the NSDAP was founded. The indictment emphasised a close connection between the charge of conspiracy and the commission of crimes against peace. Anyone who was to be convicted of participation in a conspiracy or a crime against peace had to be proven to have participated in a specific war of aggression.

The solution finally adopted allowed the leaders of the German Reich to be tried at Nuremberg and was reflected in the Charter of the IMT (Article 6): ‘The Tribunal ... shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes: (...)planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing’. At the same time, Article 7 emphasised that ‘The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government Departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment’. Finally, the Nuremberg principles recognised that the preparation of a(n) (war of) aggression was a conspiracy involving participation in preparatory activities leading to aggression or awareness of the existence of a plan of aggression.

Related to the above issue is also the problem of acting on orders, which primarily concerns members of military organisations, but also officers of paramilitary formations. This is a particularly difficult issue, as the security system of states is largely based on the subordination of the security apparatus and the army. It is difficult to imagine that states would tolerate any subjective assessment of an order by a subordinate. This was the line of defence adopted by many lawyers who defended the German perpetrators, especially military ones (including Alfred Jodl, Wilhelm Keitel, or Erich Raeder). The defendants’ invocation of a ‘no-win situation’ would have meant that any, even worst, acts could be justified. Moreover, as the prosecutor Robert H. Jackson emphasised, ‘Hitler’s decisions would have been of no effect unless they had been carried out by Keitel and Jodl and the other men under him’. The Nuremberg law was based on the primacy of international law over the norms of domestic law in this regard. From the point of view of the law, the mere fact of acting on orders did not absolve the accused from liability; more important in the course of the proceedings were ‘mitigating circumstances’. The average executor of an order was most often not in a position to assess whether the order given to him was in accordance with international law or not, and therefore whether he could refuse to obey it. On the other hand, he was certainly convinced that the order was in accordance with German law and therefore legal, because under the Nazi system, as underscored by the defence lawyer at the Nuremberg trial Hermann Jahrreiß: ‘Hitler’s order was already a law before the Second World War (...). The Führer’s order was binding, that is legally binding’. The trials assessed whether the executor was aware of the criminal nature of the order or of the consequences of carrying it out and whether he had a realistic possibility of refusing to carry out the order. While both of these aspects may have been possible mitigating circumstances, they did not release one from responsibility in accordance with Article 8 of the IMT Charter: ‘The fact that the Defendant acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility, but may be considered in mitigation of punishment if the Tribunal determines that justice so requires’. For the sake of completeness, it is worth adding that paragraph 47 of the 1872 Reich Code, which was in force during the First and Second World Wars, contained a regulation with regard to acting on orders. The provision of interest to us reads: ‘A subordinate who obeys an order shall be liable to punishment if it was known to him that his superior’s order concerned an action whose purpose was a common or military offence’. So the Nuremberg regulations on this issue were largely in line with the German law hitherto in force.

Impact on post-war reconstruction
The Nuremberg trials, but also other trials of German criminals, were not received with much enthusiasm by their fellow countrymen. From a psychological point of view, this should not be surprising. The reluctance to settle accounts with the past meant the unwillingness to admit guilt. The mechanisms of denial were similar to other such cases; above all, the past was not talked about. Blame was shifted to others, leaders who behaved cowardly and committed suicide were accused, leaving the nation at the mercy of the victors. Crimes were explained by following orders, acting in accordance with the German law of the time. It was repeated that the German people had no idea of the crimes.

The attitude of the Germans to the Nazi past, but also to reckoning with it, can be traced quite accurately thanks to opinion polls taken during these years. The Office of Military Government for Germany (U.S.) (OMGUS) set up a special department for surveys in the American occupation zone, later extending their reach to other western zones and sectors of Berlin. Between 1945 and 1949, more than 70 surveys were carried out on large groups of respondents. Replying to the question about the guilt of the defendants tried at Nuremberg, respondents in the American occupation zone answered as follows: in 1945, 70% answered that they were guilty, in 1946, guilt was acknowledged by 75% of the respondents, but in August 1946, only 52% believed that the defendants were guilty. After the verdict was pronounced, 55% of the respondents thought the sentence was fair and 21% thought it was too lenient. When asked in October 1946 about the collective guilt of the Germans for the war (Kriegsschuld), as many as 92% of Germans answered that they were not guilty and 51% were willing to consider that those Germans who supported Hitler’s regime were partly to blame (Teilschuld). As many as 83% of Germans believed that ‘both sides’ fighting in the war had committed crimes against peace and against humanity.

It is fundamentally misguided to consider the Nuremberg trials from an ex-post perspective as a factor in deepening the post-war divisions in Germany by focusing on retaliation rather than reconciliation. Historical experience shows that the absence of a form of response to evil must result in a large-scale undermining of pro-justice convictions. A sense of harm, a failure to punish perpetrators, a fundamental sense of injustice can cause concrete losses and deficits both politically and socially. The sense of injustice gives rise to the desire for revenge (e.g. the conflict in Rwanda in the 1990s, or today’s post-colonial movements). In the short term, the processes may have deepened internal divisions in Germany and internationally. The focus on punishing the guilty without creating space for dialogue made some Germans feel that they were victims of the victors rather than partners in the construction of the post-war order. However, the long-term effects were unequivocally positive. The process helped solidify universal principles of accountability for war crimes and became the foundation for modern international law. It also contributed to the democratisation of West Germany and its integration into the West.

The years following the Second World War were an example of the implementation of so-called transitional justice in the Western occupation zones. The ultimate goal of such a process is a reform of institutions, social reconciliation and the prevention of future human rights violations. However, the path to this goal first leads through the use of legal mechanisms (courts, tribunals, commissions for crime prosecution) to hold perpetrators accountable and redress the wrongs of the victims. The legacy of Nuremberg continues to influence contemporary discussions about how to reconcile justice with the need to ‘heal the wounds of conflict’.

Summary
To put it in the language of political realism - the Nuremberg trials were a tool adequate for its time. The IMT was hostage to the political situation, but there was no other alternative at the time.

A breakthrough achievement was the introduction of the principle that individuals, not states, could be held responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This marked a major change in international criminal law.

Although today no-one questions the Nuremberg principles and, moreover, we are able to appreciate the achievements of the IMT with the benefit of hindsight and, unfortunately, subsequent crimes perpetrated elsewhere (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Russia), it is worth remembering the enormous controversy that surrounded the very idea of an ‘international court’. Discussions among lawyers, which took place even before the decision to set up the Nuremberg Tribunal, could have led to a stalemate in which international justice would have judged only the direct executors of the crimes, but would have been powerless against the decision-makers who gave the orders that resulted in genocide. The very fact of the establishment of the IMT ended speculation on this aspect, and although doubts and controversy have remained, the decision itself regarding the establishment of the IMT is not challenged now.

NOTES
¹ When writing about the anarchic international system what I have in mind is Hobbes’ perception of the international system as a world ‘without Leviathan’, that is with no supreme power over sovereign nation states.
² A British lawyer of Polish-Jewish origin residing in England since 1923. He played a major part in forming a catalogue of crimes judged by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. He co-created the term ‘crime against humanity’.
³ This view was presented in the closing statement of the British prosecutor in Nuremberg Hartley Shawcross, whose speeches were written by Lauterpacht; Quoted after: A. Bryl, Zbrodnie przeciwko ludzkości…, op. cit., pp. 50–61, here: 56–57.
⁴ An ad hoc tribunal, i.e. one set up temporarily to try and punish a specific crime and specific persons.
⁵ The term ‘total mobilisation’ was formulated by Ernst Jünger in his 1930 essay Die totale Mobilmachung.He notes that conflict has ceased to be a domain of professional armies and elites, to become a confrontation between entire societies, involving each social stratum and each aspect of life.
⁶ The biggest of them were trials of the staff of KL Bergen- Belsen (17 October–17 November 1945), KL Dachau (15 November–13 December 1945) and KL Mauthausen-Gusen (29 March–13 May 1946).

In a world overshadowed by terror and brutality, the story of Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their six young children shines as a beacon of humanity and moral clarity. Living in the quiet village of Markowa in southeastern Poland during the dark years of the Holocaust, the Ulmas epitomized the extraordinary courage of ordinary people. Risking everything, they sheltered eight Jewish neighbours in their modest home, defying the oppressive machinery of Nazi Germany. Their ultimate sacrifice—losing their lives and those of their children—stands as a profound testament to the power of empathy and faith in the face of unimaginable danger.

Rooted in Humility, Elevated by Vision
In the serene village of Markowa in southeastern Poland, Józef and Wiktoria Ulma were a beacon of resilience, intellect, and humanity. Their lives, though marked by simplicity, were extraordinary in their depth and purpose. Józef, born in 1900, was a man of immense curiosity and practical genius. Despite having only four years of formal education and six months at an agricultural school, he transcended his humble beginnings. His interests were vast, ranging from horticulture to photography. Józef established Markowa’s first fruit tree nursery, constructed a home wind turbine for electricity, and captured village life with his camera, creating an invaluable visual archive. He exemplified a peasant intelligentsia—a man deeply tied to the land yet yearning for intellectual growth.
Wiktoria, born in 1912, was equally remarkable. Orphaned at a young age, she displayed resilience and a zest for life, attending courses at a local Folk High School and engaging in cultural activities like village theatre. Together, the Ulmas created a household filled with love, learning, and faith. Parents to six children and expecting a seventh, their lives revolved around nurturing not only their family but also their community.

A World Turned Dark: The German Occupation
Before the Second World War, Markowa was a quiet, close-knit community of about 4,500 residents, including around 120 Jews. While cultural and religious differences meant that Polish and Jewish residents lived somewhat parallel lives, relations were amicable. Jewish families in Markowa primarily engaged in trade and farming, their children attending schools alongside Polish peers. Religious gatherings often took place in nearby Łańcut, at a synagogue that likely welcomed the Goldman family—the very neighbors the Ulmas would later risk everything to protect.
The peaceful life of the Ulmas and their neighbours shattered with the German invasion of Poland in 1939. For the Jewish community of Markowa the occupation brought swift and devastating oppression. Early restrictions, such as wearing the Star of David, escalated into forced labour, deportations, and mass executions. By 1942, ‘Operation Reinhardt’ sought to exterminate the Jewish population in the General Government area, leaving Jewish families in Markowa desperate for refuge.
Markowa fell under the jurisdiction of brutal German and local collaborators, including the infamous Konstanty Kindler, a volksdeutsch known for his ruthlessness. Daily life became a litany of terror: curfews, forced labour, and deportations were commonplace. The Jewish residents, targeted with relentless persecution, were subjected to confiscations, ghettos, and ultimately, extermination.
The Ulmas, known for their kindness and connection to local Jewish families, did not hesitate. In December 1942, they opened their modest home to eight Jews: Saul Goldman, his four sons, two daughters, and a young child. For over a year, these individuals lived hidden within the Ulmas’ home, sharing the family’s meagre resources. Such an act of defiance carried the ultimate risk; under the German Nazi decrees, anyone aiding Jews faced immediate execution, a punishment that extended to entire households.

The Tragedy That Silenced Markowa
The Ulmas’ courageous choice to protect their Jewish neighbours did not remain a secret. Suspicion grew as the family purchased unusually large quantities of food, arousing local curiosity. In March 1944, the German authorities were tipped off—likely by Włodzimierz Leś, a collaborator who had previously extorted and betrayed Jews in the area.
In the early hours of March 24, German gendarmes and local collaborators arrived at the Ulma home. The brutality was swift and unrelenting. The eight Jewish individuals hiding in the house were executed immediately. Józef and Wiktoria were then dragged outside and shot. As Wiktoria fell, in the throes of childbirth, the executioners made a harrowing decision: they would kill the children too. Eight-year-old Stanisława, six-year-old Barbara, five-year-old Władysław, four-year-old Franciszek, three-year-old Antoni, and 1.5-year-old Maria were all executed. In an instant, 17 lives were extinguished, including Wiktoria’s unborn child.
The massacre did not end with death. The perpetrators looted the Ulma farm and held a macabre celebration at the site of the execution. The villagers of Markowa were forced to bury the dead, creating two graves—one for the Ulmas and another for the Jews they had sheltered. The tragedy left an indelible scar on the community.

The Aftermath: Injustice and Memory
The perpetrators of the Markowa massacre largely escaped justice. While Włodzimierz Leś was executed by the Polish Underground in 1944, the German commander, Eilert Dieken, lived out his post-war years as a respected citizen in Lower Saxony, untouched by accountability. Josef Kokott, another participant, was eventually tried and sentenced to death in Poland, though his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1980.
The Ulmas, however, were not forgotten. In 1995, Yad Vashem honored Józef and Wiktoria as Righteous Among the Nations. Their names joined a sacred list of those who risked everything to save Jews during the Holocaust. In 2016, a museum dedicated to Poles who rescued Jews during World War II was opened in Markowa, bearing the Ulma family’s name. Each year, March 24 is observed as the National Day of Remembrance of Poles Saving Jews Under German Occupation, a tribute to their sacrifice and the bravery of others like them.

Faith in Action: The Ulmas’ Moral Compass
The Ulmas were guided by an unshakable faith. Their well-worn Bible contained underlined passages from the parable of the Good Samaritan and the commandment to love one’s neighbour, reflecting the principles that shaped their actions. These were not mere ideals; they were convictions put into practice, even at the cost of their lives. Their choice to shelter Jews was an act of profound moral courage, rooted in love and a sense of shared humanity.
The family’s beatification by the Catholic Church in 2023 underscores their spiritual legacy. While their recognition as Righteous Among the Nations resonates deeply within Jewish memory, their elevation to sainthood amplifies their story on a global scale, reminding Catholics and non-Catholics alike of the universal values they represent: compassion, sacrifice, and unwavering moral clarity.

A Symbol of Universal Values
What makes the Ulmas’ story uniquely compelling is not just the magnitude of their sacrifice but the life they led before their tragic end. Józef and Wiktoria were not wealthy, educated elites, but rather a humble couple driven by intellectual curiosity, strong faith, and a sense of communal responsibility. They cultivated their farm, raised their children, and enriched their village through Józef’s photography, ingenuity, and activism. Their decision to protect others in a time of extreme peril was not born of wealth or privilege but of an extraordinary humanity that transcended fear.
The Ulma family’s story transcends national and religious boundaries. It is a testament to the enduring power of human dignity in the face of unspeakable evil. Like Jan Karski and Witold Pilecki, the Ulmas stand as symbols of resistance and humanity during one of history’s darkest chapters. Their legacy challenges us to reflect on our own capacity for courage and compassion.
Today, as their names appear in museums, textbooks, and prayers, the Ulmas remind the world that even in the bleakest times, ordinary people can achieve extraordinary heroism. Their story is not merely one of martyrdom but a beacon of hope and a call to action for future generations.

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References:
"Wiktoria and Józef Ulma - Meet the Ulma Family The Ulma family from Markowa (Institute of National Remembrance)
"Historia rodziny Ulmów, dzień w którym ich zamordowano został ustanowiony Narodowym Dniem Pamięci Polaków Ratujących Żydów pod okupacją niemiecką. (Oddział Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej w Rzeszowie)
"Biografia - Błogosławiona Rodzina Ulmów, Józef i Wiktoria oraz siedmioro ich dzieci

Before the war

30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler becomes the Chancellor of Germany.
22 March 1933 First German concentration camp created in Dachau, Germany.
25 November 1936 Nazi Germany and Japan sign the Anti-Comintern Pact, directed against communism and the USSR. Italy joins the pact in 1937.
7 July 1937 Japanese attack on China, beginning of the Japanese-Chinese War.
12 March 1938 Anschluss of Austria. Austria is incorporated into Germany.
30 September 1938 Munich Agreement – part of Czechoslovakia is incorporated by Germany. To keep the peace European powers agreed to Hitler’s demands.

1939

14 March 1939 Slovakia supported by Germany declares independence from Czechoslovakia. On 15 March Germany invades Czechoslovakia and establishes the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
3 May 1939 Stalin replaced Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who was identified with the anti-German position. This was a significant move to improve the relations between the Soviet Union and Germany.
23 August 1939 - The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed not to attack each other and to remain neutral if attacked by a third power. Secret clauses in the pact divided up other countries into respective spheres of influence in Central and Eastern Europe, including a partitioning of Poland.
1 September 1939 German attack on Poland, triggering the Second World War.
3 September 1939 UK and France declare war on Germany.
17 September 1939 USSR attack on Poland and the incorporation of its eastern borderlands, more than one-half of Polish territory.
28 September 1939 Capitulation of Warsaw, German occupation of the western half of Poland.
8 October 1939 The Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto (Yiddish: פּיִעטריקאָװ) was created in Piotrków Trybunalski. It was the first Nazi ghetto in occupied Europe.

1940

9 April – 10 June 1940 German attack on Denmark and Norway, beginning the German occupation of these countries
13 March 1940 After the Winter War with Finland (30.11.39-13.03.40) the USSR incorporates some important territories but fails to create a Finish SSR.
10 May – 25 June 1940 Battle of France. German attack on France, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg, which fall under German occupation.
June 1940 USSR incorporates the Baltic States.
26 May – 4 June 1940 The Dunkirk evacuation of Allied soldiers from France.
22 June 1940 Germany defeated France. In the southern half of France, Germany created a puppet French State (État français) – so-called Vichy France.
28 June 1940 the Soviet Union started the occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina.
10 July – 31 October 1940 Battle of Britain. UK’s successful defence against German air force attacks.

1941

11 March 1941 Lend-Lease policy – USA’s financial and military aid for the countries fighting the Axis.
20 May – 1 June 1941 The German invaded Crete, Greece
22 June 1941 Germany launches operation Barbarossa. USSR joins the Allies after German attack.
8 September 1941 The start of the German siege of Leningrad.
2 October 1941 – 7 January 1942 Battle of Moscow. Soviets fend off an attack by the German army. Start of the Soviet counteroffensive in the centre and northern front.
7 December 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese.
8 December 1941 The United States enter the war.
9 December 1941 China joins the Allies against the Axis.

1942

1 January 1942 Declaration of the United Nations signed by the Big Four (USA, UK, USSR and China). The document formalized the alliance against the Axis and was a basis for the United Nations.
20 January 1942 Wannsee Conference. 15 senior officials of Nazi Germany met to ensure all administrative leaders about implementing of the “Final Solution (die Endlösung) to the Jewish Question”. As a result a network of extermination camps was built in which millions of Jews were murdered.
4 – 8 May 1942 Pacific War: Battle of the Coral Sea. Naval battle between Japanese and American-Australian forces. Allied forces stop the Japanese advance into the Pacific.
4 – 7 June 1942 Battle of Midway. American victory against Japan in a naval and air battle. First and decisive American victory in the Pacific War.
7 August 1942 – 9 February 1943 Guadalcanal Campaign. Major Allied victory over Japan in a series of land battles. Start of the American offensive in the Pacific.
23 October – 11 November 1942 Second battle of El-Alamain. Important victory of the Allies against the Axis in North Africa.
8–16 November 1942 Operation Torch. Allied invasion of North Africa (Casablanca, Oran and Algiers) controlled by Vichy France. Results in Allied victory.
22–26 November 1942 First Cairo Conference. Chiang Kaishek, Churchill and Roosevelt discussed fighting Japan until its unconditional surrender and seized territories had been reclaimed.

1943

14 – 24 January 1943 Casablanca Conference. Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle decided to fight until an unconditional surrender (without any guarantees to the defeated party) of Germany.
19 April – 16 May 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Casualties: up to 40,000 insurgents and civilians.
17 July 1942 – 2 February 1943 Battle of Stalingrad. Soviet victory over Germany – the turning point of the war on the eastern front.
5 July – 23 August 1943 Battle of Kursk. Soviet victory over Germany. Start of the Red Army offensive on the Eastern front.
10 July – 8 September 1943 Allied attack on Sicily. The southern part of Italy falls under Allied rule.
28 November – 1 December 1943 Tehran Conference. First meeting of the Big Three – Churchill (UK), Roosevelt (USA) and Stalin (USSR).The leaders decided to open a new front in France.

1944

17 January – 18 May 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino. Allied victory over Axis forces in Italy.
27 January 1944 End of the siege of Leningrad. Over two year-long (900 days) siege causes mass death from starvation of almost 1,000,000 civilians. Finally, the Soviets lift the siege of the city.
6 June – 31 August 1944 Operation Overlord. Landing in Normandy and Allied offensive in France.
20 July 1944 20 July plot. Germany army officer, Claus von Stauffenberg attempted to kill Hitler by detonating an explosive hidden in a briefcase, however failed due to the location of the bomb at the time of detonation, the blast only dealing minor injuries to Hitler.
23 July 1944 Liberation of Majdanek Extermination Camp. On the night of 22-23 July 1944, Soviet soldiers of the Red Army came upon Majdanek, the first of the Nazi camps to be liberated. They freed just under 500 prisoners.
1 August – 2 October 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Casualties: 150–180,000 insurgents and civilians. Insurgents were not helped by Soviet forces stationed on the right bank of the Vistula River.
15 August 1944 Operation Dragoon. Allied attack on southern France.
19–25 August 1944 Uprising in Paris, followed by liberation of the city by the Western Allies. Casualities: 1–1,300 insurgents and civilians.
29 August – 28 October 1944 Uprising in Slovakia. Casualties: 4,000 insurgents and civilians
17 October – 26 December 1944 Battle of Leyte. Allied victory, first step in freeing the Philippines from Japanese occupation.

1945

27 January 1945 Liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp. The German Nazi concentration camp and extermination camp in occupied Poland where more than a million people were murdered as part of the Nazis' "Final Solution" to the Jewish question—was liberated by the Soviet Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive.
12 January – 4 February 1945 Red Army winter offensive. Soviets capture Poland west of the Vistula River and advance on Berlin.
4–11 February 1945 Yalta Conference where the Big Three decided on the division of Germany into four occupation zones and set the Polish eastern border on the Curzon line. The conference effectively allowed the USSR to expand its sphere of influence to Central Europe.
13–15 February 1945 Allied bombing of Dresden. It completely destroys the city and causes the death of thousands of civilians.
16 April – 2 May 1945 Battle of Berlin. Soviet victory and fall of Nazi Germany.
5–9 May 1945 Uprising in Prague. Casualties: 8–9,000 insurgents and civilians.
8 May 1945 Unconditional surrender of Germany. The end of war in Europe.
25 April – 26 June 1945 San Francisco Conference and foundation of the United Nations.
17 July – 2 August 1945 Potsdam Conference where the Big Three established rules by which the Allies would govern Germany, set the new borders of Germany and Poland, decided on the resettlement of Germans and called on Japan to surrender.
6 August 1945 First American nuclear attack on Hiroshima, Japan.
9 August 1945 Second and last American nuclear attack, on Nagasaki, Japan. Soviet attack on Manchukuo (Japanese puppet state) in Manchuria.
2 September 1945 Unconditional surrender of Japan. The end of war in the Pacific theatre.
20 November 1945 Nuremberg trials of The International Military Tribunal.

1946

5 March 1946 Iron Curtain Speech - Winston Churchill delivers his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, marking the beginning of the Cold War era and highlighting the division between Western democracies and Eastern communist states.
19 September 1946 Churchill’s speech in Zurich, stressing the role of a united Europe.

1947

12 March 1947 Truman Doctrine Announced - President Harry S. Truman articulates the Truman Doctrine, pledging to support Greece and Turkey against communist expansion, which signifies the start of the U.S. policy of containment.
5 June 1947 Marshall Plan Proposed - Secretary of State George Marshall outlines the European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan, which provides economic assistance to rebuild Western European economies.

Every year since 2013, the ENRS has marked the European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Totalitarian Regimes on the anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23, 1939. What is the meaning of a commemorative pin and the media campaign “Remember. August 23”? What makes this date so significant? Agnieszka Mazur-Olczak explains its importance in European history and in our calendar.

The European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes was first commemorated on 23 August 2011 in Warsaw, under the auspices of the Polish Presidency. During this event, the Warsaw Declaration was signed, in which the signatories emphasised the importance of maintaining the memory of the criminal consequences of totalitarian regimes in the consciousness of Europeans and called on the EU to support, research, and collect documentation related to the crimes committed by these regimes.

The Warsaw Declaration was signed a year after the ENRS was founded. In 2013, our organisation first conceived the idea of how to commemorate August 23. We decided to create a pin that would serve as a symbol of remembrance for the victims of totalitarianism.

Why is the ENRS so committed to spreading awareness about this date?

Our core mission is to foster a shared memory of the difficult history of the 20th century. These two regimes significantly marked that history, which is why, from the very beginning, the ENRS recognised that August 23 is an important day for us and that we should be strongly involved in its commemoration. We have always been aware that this date is not deeply rooted in the memory of Western Europeans, as they were not as severely affected by the communist regime. As a result, August 23 is not a date that the West associates with the outbreak of the Second World War. However, it is impossible to talk about the Second World War without mentioning August 23, because it was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that paved the way for these totalitarian regimes. It allowed them to temporarily suspend military actions against each other while simultaneously enabling them to wreak destruction on the territories they divided between themselves.

What is the 'Remember. August 23' campaign about?

When the project was launched in 2013, our colleagues developed an idea of a pin and an informative note. The design of the pin refers to International Black Ribbon Day, which has been observed since 1986. The note explains what this date symbolises and why it is so significant in the history of Europe, and even the world. The note from 2013 featured a collage of images of selected victims from both totalitarian regimes, which we obtained from archives. Over the years, we have modified the design of the card. The next edition had an educational dimension, presenting a map that showed the spread of both totalitarian regimes across Europe, following the division line established by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. This map became the main motif of our project for several years. Based on it, we created a short animation where red and black colours sweep across Europe. This simple graphic trick perfectly illustrated what happened at that time, which is why the animation is still frequently used by the media and shown at conferences commemorating August 23. This year, we diversified our notes by creating twelve versions featuring the heroes of our spots, along with QR codes that lead to our website where people can watch their related stories.

Because we wanted the campaign to become more media-friendly, in 2018, we came up with the idea of creating a series of short films. We collaborated with producer Piotr Kornobis, and this led to the first two scripts telling the stories of Mala and Edek – lovers from Auschwitz – and Peter Mansfeld, the youngest victim of the 1956 uprising in Hungary. These films were very well received by our social media audience. We also managed to air them on several European television programmes. Their success showed us that it was worth continuing the series. We also saw potential in the fact that the European Network is based on partnerships from different countries. We believed that by showcasing the profiles of dissidents from various nationalities, we could collectively commemorate this date, and our partners indeed became very engaged in promoting their stories.

For several years now, we have been sending our pins to various institutions across Europe so that on this day, the public visiting museums and memorial sites can wear the pin as a sign of solidarity with the victims and as a mark of respect for those individuals. Thanks to our media efforts, August 23 has become so recognisable that now institutions are writing to us asking for pins and inquiring whether we have produced a new spot.

What message do the characters featured in the spots want to convey to us?

I think all these films tell us that resistance makes sense. They all tell us that every totalitarian regime, regardless of when it arises, will eventually be overthrown. Each of our characters is different, each story is told differently, but they all share one common denominator: each character has become a symbol of resistance in their country.

The strength of this campaign lies in its diversity. Sometimes the hero speaks to us in the first person. Sometimes their story is told by their mother. Sometimes it’s a letter, as in the case of the film about Milada Horáková, where the narrator reads a letter she wrote to her then fifteen-year-old daughter the day before her execution. Her daughter was only able to read it forty years later.

If you watch these films and you’re a mother, you can identify with the spot about Mansfeld or Milada Horáková. If you are in love and want to focus only on the pleasant things in your life, then the stories of people who couldn’t experience their love in freedom and joy because they were surrounded by a dark world will resonate with you. If you enjoy literature and watch the spot about Jan Kroos, you’ll think about how, for centuries, every totalitarian regime has burned books that were dangerous to them. Everyone, regardless of their country, can find a character in these stories that will touch them and make them want to learn more about them, to understand how and why their fate unfolded the way it did.

The heroes of these films are often people who survived one totalitarian regime during the Second World War, only to be thrown into another by history because they ended up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. For instance, the story of Boris Romanchenko resonates most strongly with me. He survived the Second World War and was a prisoner in concentration camps, later living in Ukraine, which was dependent on the Soviet Union, and in 2022 he was killed by a bomb dropped on Putin’s orders. These heroes have qualities that deeply resonate with us.

This year, representatives of the Roma community from Germany and the Czech Republic were added to the gallery of characters. What determined this choice?

In 2015, the European Parliament designated August 2 as the Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. The Roma are a social group that also suffered greatly during the Second World War, and who still face exclusion and discrimination today. When we were searching for Roma heroes, we found that there are very few photographs of them and that their stories are poorly documented because people are not very interested in this topic. We decided it would be good to give them a voice too and to show that, in addition to typical national groups, there is also a community that lives in various countries. We all interact with them, but we are unaware of the tragedy they experienced during the Second World War. This year, we are working on two spots that will premiere in a few days. One of this year's featured figures is Johann Trollmann, a boxer. During the recent Olympics in Paris, we were captivated by the athletes' performances and admired the results of their hard work. Trollmann was also an athlete. What’s more, before the outbreak of the Second World War, he was a huge star in Germany, which ultimately led to his death. We believe it is worth telling this story. In the film, we present a picture of a wonderful young rebel who could have provided many people with the sporting excitement that we all enjoy, admire, and follow. However, Trollmann had to die simply because he was of the wrong race. This is something we should remind people of, because we cannot divide people into those of the right race and those who are not.

Why do we need this campaign? Why now? Why specifically on August 23?

I think that in recent years, there has been a lot of disinformation in the public sphere regarding historical facts. We have seen this recently in speeches at the UN or in Putin’s addresses. I believe that reminding people today of what August 23 represents is to show that this contemporary dictator is moving towards the division of Europe almost along the same line that was drawn in the 1939 pact. Today, it is extremely important to know these heroes and their stories, to remind people that there were individuals who opposed the regime. A short 30-second film cannot tell us the whole story, but it can inspire us to seek out more information and delve into historical facts.

Today, in an age of disinformation and at the same time information overload, we want to use our films to bring a story closer to people and provoke the viewer to read more about it. The biographies of these characters can be found on our website and under each film on our YouTube channel. The most important thing is to understand the historical context. These times are not so distant that they couldn’t return. The truth is, we never know when this Pandora's box might be opened again.

In 2015 the European Parliament declared 2 August as the European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. Since then, commemorations have been organised in many European countries to remember the victims of the brutal persecution and genocide suffered by the Roma and Sinti during the Second World War. Today, on the 80th anniversary of these events, more than ever, we should remember this tragic part of European history, understand its consequences and strive to ensure that its memory does not disappear from our consciousness.

Discrimination, classification and eugenics: a road to genocide
The genocide of the Roma and Sinti was one of the darkest chapters of the Second World War. Like the Jews, they were victims of the brutal persecution of the Nazi regime. Imprisoned in concentration camps and ghettos, murdered in gas chambers and subjected to other methods of extermination, they became victims of the German Nazi genocide whose mark is still felt in the Roma community today.

Nazi ideology based on racism and eugenics proclaimed the superiority of the Aryan race over others. Due to their cultural difference, the Roma and Sinti were perceived as an ‘inferior race’, ‘undesirable’ and incompatible with the ideal of German society. Because of their nomadic lifestyle, they were described as ‘antisocial’ and ‘criminal’, inherently inclined to commit crimes. They were considered a threat to the purity of the Aryan race and the social order. Already from the early 1930s, the Roma and Sinti in Germany were subjected to discrimination and persecution. Their rights were systematically restricted and racial segregation was introduced.

After Hitler came to power in 1933, the treatment towards them became harsher. Many Roma persons were subjected to forced sterilisation. In the acts implementing the Nuremberg Laws, the Romani were deprived of their civil rights just like Jews. They were subjected to preventive police control and sent to ‘re-education centres’. In 1938, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and Gestapo, issued a decree bearing the title ‘Combating the Gypsy Plague’, which stated that the Roma (Gypsies) were a racial and social threat to the German people. The decree ordered the intensification of police and administrative measures against the Sinti and Romani, including their registration, segregation and internment in special camps. This decree formed the basis for mass arrests and internment in existing concentration camps in Germany and Austria, such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Mittelbau-Dora, Natzweiler-Struthof, Gross-Rosen and Ravensbrück, for example. New internment and transit camps were also successively created for them. Initially, the Roma and Sinti were forced to wear black triangles, classifying them as ‘antisocial’, or green triangles, denoting ‘professional criminals’. Eventually, they were assigned a brown triangle with the letter Z (Zigeuner, German for ‘Gypsy’). Terrible conditions prevailed in these camps leading to the death of many inmates. Roma prisoners were subjected to pseudo-scientific medical experiments. Conditions in the Berlin-Marzahn, Lackenbach and Salzburg camps were among the worst.

The Romani Holocaust
The first mass persecution took place after the outbreak of the Second World War. On 21 September 1939, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the deportation of 30,000 Roma from Germany and Austria to occupied Poland. In May 1940, some 2,500 Roma were deported to the Lublin District in the General Government (occupied Poland), where they were placed in Jewish ghettos or sent to labour camps. Many of them died as a result of the harsh conditions of forced labour. The rest were most likely later murdered in the gas chambers of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka.

In the autumn of 1941, the German police deported around 5,000 Roma persons from Austria to the Łódź ghetto, where hundreds died from a typhus epidemic and lack of basic necessities. Those who survived were transported to the camp at Kulmhof (Chełmno nad Nerem) in 1942 and were murdered in mobile gas chambers.
In December 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation to KL Auschwitz¹ of all the Roma and Sinti of the Third Reich. They were sent to Auschwitz II–Birkenau and placed in a special section known as the ‘Gypsy camp’ (Zigeunerlager). The conditions there were conducive to the spread of infectious diseases such as typhus, smallpox and dysentery, which significantly reduced the camp population. In addition, pseudo-scientific medical experiments were carried out on them. At the end of March 1943, about 1,700 Roma brought from the Bialystok region were murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau, and in May 1944 the camp management decided to liquidate the entire ‘Gypsy camp’. SS guards surrounded the camp, but the Roma incarcerated in there, having learned about the SS’s plans, armed themselves, resisted and refused to leave. The SS retreated and decided to first transfer about 3,000 Roma to Auschwitz I and other concentration camps. The final operation aimed at liquidating the ‘Gypsy camp’ took place two months later, on the night of 2–3 August. As a result, some 4,300 Sinti and Roma, mainly the sick, the elderly, women and children, perished in the gas chambers of Birkenau. This mass murder became a symbol of the suffering and heroism of the Roma community, and the date was chosen as International Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. The total number of Romani victims at Auschwitz is estimated to be around 21,000 out of the 23,000 Sinti and Roma deported there.

In German-occupied Europe, the fate of the Roma varied according to local conditions. They were interned, used as forced labourers or killed. Einsatzgruppen units and other mobile units killed the Romani in the Baltic States, occupied Poland and the USSR. In occupied Serbia, Roma men were executed en masse. In France, the Vichy authorities interned thousands of Roma, and in Romania some 26,000 were deported to Transnistria, where many died of disease and starvation. In Croatia, the Ustasha regime killed almost the entire Roma population, some 25,000 people.

The scale of the crime and the fight for genocide recognition
The exact number of the Sinti and Roma who died during the Second World War remains unknown due to the lack of accurate data on their number living in Europe before the war and the relatively late international recognition of this genocide. It is estimated that before the war the Romani population was between 1 and 1.5 million. Historians estimate that at least 250,000 European Sinti and Roma were killed by the Germans and their allies, although some scholars suggest that the number could be as high as 500,000.

The Nazi genocide destroyed numerous Roma communities, and the Romani suffered psychological and physical trauma, making it difficult to rebuild their cultural and social networks. After the war, however, discrimination against the Roma continued. Throughout Europe, they continued to experience various forms of discrimination, both institutional and of a social nature. These diverse forms of discrimination had a long-lasting impact on the Roma in Europe, perpetuating their marginalisation and social exclusion.

Unlike the genocide of Jews, that of the Roma was not recognised immediately after the war. The courts in West Germany, for example, ruled that actions taken against the Roma before 1943 were legal, which closed the way to compensation for the thousands of victims who were imprisoned, forcibly sterilised and deported. Police harassment and discrimination continued and the post-war authorities seized the Nazi regime’s files. It was not until 1965 that German law recognised that acts of persecution prior to 1943 were racially motivated, allowing Roma to claim compensation. However, many of those able to do so had already died. It was only in March 1982 that the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt officially recognised the German Sinti and Roma as victims of genocide.

‘Porajmos’, Holocaust and ‘Samudaripen’
Today there are many terms used to describe the extermination of the Roma. Some of them are the subject of ongoing discussions and debates. This situation demonstrates the different perspectives and approaches to this tragedy not only by researchers and organisations working on the subject, but also by the Roma communities themselves.

The term ‘Porajmos’, meaning ‘devouring’ or ‘burning’, was introduced by the scholar Ian Hancock in the 1990s to describe the Romani genocide. However, its use is controversial, as in some dialects it denotes ‘rape’, which many Roma find offensive.

Another term is ‘Samudaripen’, meaning ‘total destruction’. Introduced by the linguist and researcher Marcel Courthiade in the 1970s, it is preferred by some Roma communities for being more precise.

The term ‘Holocaust’ is also sometimes used to describe the extermination of the Roma and Sinti, but can be considered controversial as it is commonly associated with the extermination of Jews. The use of the same term for different groups of victims can lead to confusion and be seen as blurring the specificity of each group’s experience.

Other terms used by Roma communities include: ‘Kali Traš’ (Black Fear) and ‘Berša Bibahtale’ (Unhappy Years). The diversity of these terms shows the importance of recognising the unique experiences of different Roma groups. Besides, the terminology used by different Roma ethnic groups to describe their genocide is also important from a social and psychological perspective. This is because these names are loaded with emotional and cultural meaning, helping us understand the suffering and trauma of these communities. Hence, the inclusion of these terms in public discourse is important for the recognition and commemoration of this specific form of genocide.

The use of appropriate terms is also important for education and public awareness. It allows for a better understanding and appreciation of the history of the Romani, avoiding oversimplification and confusion between different experiences of genocide.

Why do we want to remember today?
The shadow of the extermination of the Roma, the horrific genocide perpetrated by the German Nazis during the Second World War still hangs over us. Today in Europe, the Romani are still victims of hate crime, violence, persecution, expulsion and racial discrimination. Therefore, the remembrance of this tragedy should not only be a moral obligation to the victims and their families, but also a key element in building a better future. The importance of this remembrance is multidimensional and involves both the Roma community and society as a whole.

The extermination of the Roma left lasting wounds in their community. However, today the memory of this event is becoming part of their identity and cultural heritage. Learning about their history can strengthen the sense of togetherness and belonging within the Romani community, which was cut off from its roots as a result of the genocide.

The Romani ‘Holocaust’ did not happen in a vacuum. It was the culmination of centuries of discrimination and prejudice deeply rooted in European history. Education on the subject can raise awareness of the mechanisms of exclusion and persecution that marked the fate of the Roma. Such analysis allows for a better understanding of the mechanisms leading to other genocides and crimes against humanity. This knowledge is invaluable in identifying threats and taking preventive action to protect future generations from similar tragedies, as well as counteracting negative phenomena such as racism and xenophobia.

Remembrance-related challenges
Commemorating the annihilation of the Roma and Sinti faces numerous difficulties owing to both historical neglect and current challenges. For many years, the tragedy has been ignored, leading to insufficient public awareness and the victims fading from memory.

One of the main challenges is the lack of sufficient resources and support from state and local authorities. In many countries where the Roma and Sinti were victims of mass atrocities during the war, their commemoration was marginalised. This has resulted in the absence of monuments, museums and educational programmes to help preserve the memory of this tragedy. In addition, Roma communities often face prejudice and a lack of understanding from the rest of society, which hinders their efforts to acknowledge and commemorate their own history.

The lack of access to sources on the extermination of the Roma and Sinti is another major problem. This history is far less well documented compared to the other genocides of the Second World War. There is a lack of source material, such as biographies, testimonies and documents. In addition, there is a poorly developed written tradition in the Roma community, which further hinders the preservation and transmission of history. The lack of their own media to promote and report on Roma history and the limited international representation of Roma to claim recognition of their suffering during the Second World War are additional barriers to the commemoration process.

Another important challenge is the need to integrate the story of the Romani tragedy into the broader narrative of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Often the history of the Roma and Sinti is treated as marginal, instead of being an integral part of the story of the Nazi genocide. As a result, many people are unaware of the scale and cruelty that affected these communities. To remedy this, museums, educational institutions and school curricula need to integrate the topic of the Romani genocide into their programmes. This will ensure a fuller understanding of the scale and diversity of the Holocaust, which is key to preserving the memory of all its victims.

Good practice and modern initiatives
A number of activities are currently underway to commemorate the Sinti and Roma extermination. These initiatives aim to preserve the memory of the victims, educate the public and combat prejudice.

Monuments, museums and cultural institutions dedicated to the commemoration of the Romani genocide are being established in some European countries. In 1997 the Documentation and Cultural Centre of the German Sinti and Roma² opened in Heidelberg as the first institution of its kind in the world. In 2001 a permanent Roma exhibition presenting the theme of the Roma extermination was created at the Auschwitz Museum. In turn, the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism (Nazism) was unveiled in Berlin in 2012.³

It is also important to take care of existing memorials in order to preserve their historical significance. An example of such efforts is the opening of the Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia in Lety u Písku in the Czech Republic in May 2024. This museum was established on the site on the grounds of a former concentration camp where more than 1,300 Roma were held between 1942 and 1943, of whom more than 300 died and the rest were deported to extermination camps, mainly Auschwitz. It should be noted that for many years the camp grounds were used by an industrial pig farm, which aroused much controversy and protests from the Roma community. The museum at Lety u Písku was established as a result of long-standing efforts and pressure from both the Roma community and international human rights organisations.

Various institutions and NGOs play a key role in the commemoration of the Romani genocide. International initiatives such as the European Holocaust Memorial Day for the Sinti and Roma⁴ have raised public awareness, creating a space for Romani voices to be heard and promoting values of equality and respect. The Central Council of the German Sinti and Roma founded in 1982⁵ stages numerous educational events, exhibitions and conferences in Germany and other countries.

International youth initiatives such as the annual ‘Dikh he na bister’ (‘Look and don’t forget’ in Romani) play an important role in the commemoration process. This visit to Kraków and Auschwitz-Birkenau aims to commemorate day of liquidation of the ‘Gypsy camp’, where the remaining 4,300 Roma and Sinti were murdered.⁶ The organisation of festivals, concerts and exhibitions dedicated to the history of the Roma and Sinti supports awareness-building among the general public.

The international cooperation of various organisations, mainly the Council of Europe,⁷ Office for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe/Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OECD/ODIHR),⁸ UNESCO⁹ and Internation Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)¹⁰ contributes to promoting the remembrance of the Romani and Sinti genocide in Europe. The funding of educational projects and research on Roma history, the development of guidelines and the publication of books and articles are crucial for education and memory preservation.

In the EU Roma strategic framework, adopted in 2020, and in the European Council Recommendation, the European Commission and EU Member States committed themselves to countering antigypsyism. This framework is based on equality, social and economic inclusion and participation. The European Commission has extended the global #ProtectTheFacts campaign¹¹ to include the plight of the Romani. The Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme has prioritised projects on remembrance of the Nazi genocide, education and research on the subject and the fight against denialism.

Contemporary good practice and international initiatives show that the activities aimed at preserving the memory of the extermination of the Roma and Sinti in Europe are on the rise. Through these activities, history can be preserved and a more informed and integrated society can be built. NGOs, Roma communities and international institutions are working together to ensure that the Roma tragedy is not forgotten. Despite the many challenges, these initiatives bring about positive change and raise public awareness of the Roma and Sinti extermination.

ENDNOTES
¹ The KL (i.e. Concentration Camp) Auschwitz was a German Nazi concentration and death camp complex operating in occupied Poland, near Oświęcim, between 1940 and 1945. It consisted of three main parts: Auschwitz I (mother camp), Auschwitz II–Birkenau (death camp) and Auschwitz III–Monowitz (labour camp). Auschwitz has become a symbol of the Holocaust, where some 1.1 million people, mainly Jews but also Poles, Roma and prisoners of other nationalities, were murdered under brutal conditions.
² https://dokuzentrum.sintiundroma.de/ (accessed 1 August 2024).
³ https://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/memorials/memorial-to-the-sinti-and-roma-of-europe-murdered-under-national-socialism/ (accessed 1 August 2024).
⁴ https://www.roma-sinti-holocaust-memorial-day.eu/ (accessed 1 August 2024).
⁵ https://zentralrat.sintiundroma.de/en/ (accessed 1 August 2024).
⁶ https://2august.eu/ (accessed 1 August 2024).
⁷ https://pjp-eu.coe.int/en/web/inclusive-education-for-roma-children/texts-2; https://rm.coe.int/168008b633; https://www.coe.int/en/web/roma-and-travellers/roma-history-factsheets (accessed 1 August 2024).
⁸ https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/9/b/135396.pdf (accessed 1 August 2024).
⁹ https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/shedding-light-roma-genocide-take-part-protectthefacts-campaign (accessed 1 August 2024).
¹⁰ https://holocaustremembrance.com/what-we-do/our-work/ihra-project-recommendations-teaching-learning-genocide-roma (accessed 1 August 2024).
¹¹ https://www.againstholocaustdistortion.org/ (accessed 1 August 2024).

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Piotr Trojański, PhD, Professor at the University of the National Education Commission, Kraków (Poland)

Proofreading: Caroline Brooke Johnson

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Agnieszka Mazur-Olczak, Deputy Head of the Projects Department at the ENRS, in an interview about our travelling exhibition ‘Between Life and Death. Stories of Rescue During the Holocaust’.

What is ‘Between Life and Death’?

‘Between Life and Death’ is an exhibition that is very contemporary, despite discussing historical events. It tells the story of the dark and light sides of humanity, presenting accounts from individuals in various countries who found themselves in extreme situations. This includes those who had to save their own lives and those who, for various reasons, chose to take the risk and help them. What is most important to me is that as we travel the world with this project, I consistently hear that despite the exhibition recounting difficult war stories, it always conveys a sense of hope.

How did it all start?

It began with the European Commission, which wanted to organise a significant event on January 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day, in 2018. At the ENRS, we conceived the idea of creating an exhibition and reached out to the Polin Museum and the Silent Heroes Memorial Centre in Berlin. While developing the concept, we realised that no exhibition had ever presented both perspectives —the rescuer and the rescued— and that we could combine them. We believed that, through the European Network's partnerships and the vital involvement of the Polin Museum, we could find suitable partners. We sought institutions with interesting, documented stories that they were willing to share to promote their collections. We had very little time to prepare this exhibition; it was an intensive three-month effort involving two curators who created the content and a team of academic consultants. Despite the time pressure, everything came together thanks to our contacts and determination.

How did you choose the characters featured in the exhibition?

The selection process varied by country. We always consulted with our national partners regarding the stories we wanted to showcase. The exhibition is structured to display stories from individual countries, and each country has a national partner involved in the work. The authors either searched for characters on the Yad Vashem lists, or our partners recommended them based on their materials or knowledge of compelling stories. We also aimed to highlight lesser-known cases. For instance, instead of featuring the well-known Ulma family for the Polish panel, we chose the Gawrychs. Similarly, for the Dutch section, we did not present Anne Frank, as her story is widely known. It was also crucial that our partners had contact with the witnesses to history, so we could invite them to the exhibition openings.

Did you manage to meet the witnesses to history personally?

Yes. The first significant meeting was in 2018, during the exhibition's inauguration at the European Commission headquarters. Ms Elżbieta Ficowska, Ms Elisabeth Drillich, and Mr Shochot, a Lithuanian survivor, attended the opening. It was a deeply moving experience for both them and the audience. Whenever we present the exhibition, we strive to invite a person featured in the exhibition to the opening. I remember Ms Zita Kurz's profound emotion when she realised someone was interested in her story during the exhibition's debut in Bratislava. These meetings are incredibly poignant, transforming the stories from mere panels with photos into encounters with living individuals. Often, these stories seem destined for tragic endings, yet many of these individuals went on to lead significant lives.

Who is this exhibition for? Who visits it, and who would you recommend it to?

The exhibition attracts a diverse audience, depending on its location, but we always aim to engage young people. ‘Between Life and Death’ is not just about the past; it is very much about the present. Each country's panel begins by depicting the situation of Jews before the German occupation and how it changed. It illustrates how significant and tragic events can stem from seemingly small, insignificant laws. The lack of societal response—whether due to inability or unwillingness—led to the exclusion, deportation, and murder of this group. This is highly relevant today. Young people often say, ‘I'm not going to vote because I'm not interested in politics’ and this exhibition shows that you may not be interested in politics, but politics is always very much interested in you, and demonstrates that it profoundly affects everyone. This exhibition serves as both a warning and a powerful narrative, showing that even small actions can be crucial for someone's survival. We never know when we might find ourselves in such a situation.

‘Between Life and Death’ has already visited many countries, including Japan. You often accompany it. What can you say about its reception in different countries? Have you encountered any surprising reactions from visitors?

Regardless of the location, I consistently hear two praises. Firstly, visitors often expect an exhibition about humanity's dark side, but they leave feeling hopeful. Secondly, compliments frequently go to the graphic design studio that collaborated with us. The exhibition's design is not a simple set of boards; it is compact and adaptable to various spaces, always attracting attention. Visitors are naturally curious about their national panels and often learn something new. Young people, in particular, are motivated to explore similar stories or delve into their country's history and its contemporary implications.

Where did the idea for a panel of diplomats included in the exhibition a few years later come from?

The idea for a panel dedicated to righteous diplomats originated from our Hungarian colleagues. Initially, the Hungarian contribution included a passage about a community of international diplomats who helped Jews in Budapest. However, our colleagues wanted their panel to mirror the others, showcasing both a rescuer and a survivor. I became interested in the Yad Vashem list, which is updated annually, and discovered Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat in Kaunas who helped Jews, including many from Poland. We decided to highlight diplomats as a special professional group with unique opportunities to help. This new panel, showing diplomats from different countries, emerged from this idea. Following its creation, the exhibition's trip to Japan was conceived. And just then, the pandemic broke out… Initially, it seemed a hindrance but allowed us to develop the project further. Although "Between Life and Death" couldn't travel around Europe, it went to Japan, where exhibitions were permitted. This break enabled us to create additional material, including a film about the diplomats and nine educational packages on the Holocaust available on our hi-story platform.

How did the exhibition's reception change, if at all, after Russia's attack on Ukraine? Do you see any differences?

Yes, there have been changes. This is especially evident at openings, where directors and political representatives frequently mention Ukraine's tragedy. Just before the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, we were preparing to take the exhibition to Dnipro, Lviv, and other locations in Ukraine. I recall a conversation with Professor Rydel just days before the war began; he emphasised the need to support Ukrainians by bringing the exhibition there. Although these plans are currently on hold, we hope they will be realised soon. We have an excellent Ukrainian panel and a committed Ukrainian partner who helped set it up and participated in the exhibition's 2018 opening in Brussels.

What is your favourite part of the exhibition?

My favourite part is the section on diplomats, as I was heavily involved in it. It is incredible that an interest in diplomacy and curiosity about a Japanese person who wanted to help some people led to a new narrative for the exhibition. Additionally, for the first time, the exhibition has been translated into the host country's language, because until then, there was only an English version. Nowadays we also have a Slovak version, which is travelling around Slovakia. I hope to see it translated into many more languages for broader tours. The Polish panel is also a favourite, particularly due to the enriching experiences with Mrs Elżbieta Ficowska, but I see the entire exhibition as a cohesive whole and I treat it a bit like my own child.

You must have had numerous adventures during the preparation and journey of the exhibition. Is there any event that particularly stands out?

I will always remember the first presentation at the European Commission headquarters, which included many high-ranking officials. Just before the event, Ms Marta Cygan brought us a poem by Mr Ficowski, "Both Your Mothers," written for Elżbieta Ficowska and translated into several languages. We distributed it to the interpreters at the event. At the end of the ceremony, after each survivor had shared their story, Ms Cygan read the poem. It was incredibly moving, with many leaving the room in tears, especially as the poem's subject, Elżbieta Ficowska, was present among us. At that moment, I realised the exhibition's profound importance and felt that all our efforts were worthwhile. Ever since then, the exhibition has continued to surprise and impact us in many ways.

What are your plans for the exhibition? Are you thinking about expanding it? What is the next country you plan to visit?

We are currently working on the Estonian panel. The Estonians expressed a desire to join the project and showcase their stories, so the exhibition will soon be displayed in Tallinn.

The Wednesday of 23 August 1939 marks an extraordinarily important date in the history of Central Europe, indeed all of Europe.

On that day, Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister under the German Reich, flew to Moscow and, after brief negotiations with Vyacheslav Molotov, Soviet foreign commissioner, signed – in the presence of Joseph Stalin himself – the non-aggression agreement between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, soon to be known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop (or the Hitler–Stalin) Pact.

The most important part of that document, with a direct impact on the developments in Europe in the following days and weeks, was the secret additional protocol, which divided Central and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. The former was to include the western half of Poland and Lithuania (soon to be handed over to Moscow), while the latter the eastern half of Poland, Finland, Estonia and Latvia, as well as Romanian Bessarabia.

Hitler feared a war on two fronts, and at the same time insisted the arrangements be made quickly because of the imminent arrival of the autumn rains and fog, which could stop the Blitzkrieg (German: Lightning War), making it much easier for the Poles to defend themselves. In order to achieve his aims, he had to secure at least the neutrality – and preferably active cooperation – of the Soviets during the attack on Poland and the subsequent showdown with the West. This was the reason why the German side willingly and speedily agreed to such a vast expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence and in practice the borders of the USSR. Looking at the scene from a different perspective, one can see that without Stalin’s agreement and cooperation with Hitler, who ‘just a while ago’ was the number one enemy for the communists, the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 would almost certainly not have occurred, and any additional months of peace might have changed the fate of the world.

Germany and the Soviet Union did not give Europe and the world that chance, however. On 1 September 1939, Germany attacked Poland, soon followed by the USSR, which did the same on 17 September. In the areas occupied by the Wehrmacht and the Soviet army, war crimes were committed from the very first days of the onslaught. Soon deportations of Poles to concentration and forced labour camps and the Soviet Gulag incarceration facilities began. The repressions were aimed at the broadly defined leadership and opinion-forming class. In the spring of 1940 during the Katyn Massacre, the Soviets murdered more than 20,000 Polish prisoners of war. On 30 November 1939 the Soviet Union invaded Finland, which – thanks to a fierce defence – managed to save its independence. In the autumn of 1939, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had to conclude friendship agreements with the USSR and allow the Soviet army into their territory. After less than a year, at the beginning of August 1940, all three were incorporated into the USSR. In June 1940 the Soviets, threatening to invade the country, forced Romania to hand over Bessarabia and the northern half of Bukovina. Cruel repressions took place in the Baltic states occupied by the USSR, especially the deportation of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to Siberia. The Finns and Romanians had to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the areas annexed by the Soviets, and those who remained were exposed to Soviet repression. At the same time, the Germans had already murdered a significant part of the Polish intelligentsia, established the Auschwitz concentration camp and set up ghettos for Jews.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact concluded on 23 August Pandora’s box. On that day the worst plagues prepared by the totalitarian systems – Nazism and Stalinist communism – were inflicted on Europe. The choice of 23 August as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes is therefore fully justified.

We remember little, increasingly little, of 20th-century history. Generally only as much as the most powerful media of memory record for a while in the collective imagination: the most repeated themes of major films, symbols inscribed in school textbooks and mainstream museum practices.

At the same time, a wave of protests continues to rise for the introduction into the ‘catalogue of compulsory memory’ of the forgotten, wronged and humiliated victims whom we have not previously remembered or only pretended not to notice. What criterion should be adopted in this competition for the ever-shrinking tiny piece of public attention, of collective memory? Maybe it is worth remembering those victims who seem to be the most forgotten, who have not left communities of mourners, who have been completely ‘trampled into the ground’ (sometimes quite literally) who have not had any system of cultural symbols created around their suffering?

Let me give one example. I wonder how many history books in the world, how many films, how many museums focusing on 20th-century history mention a single order, preserved in writing and already available to professional researchers for years, on the basis of which 111,091 people were executed? There are few such crimes, even in the bloody history of the 20th century. This one, in fact, was five times larger in scale than the Katyn operation, certainly better known and commemorated, but which claimed the lives of ‘only’ some 22,000 Polish officers and prisoners of war on the basis of Stalin’s decision of March 1940.

The order whose victims I take the liberty of reminding you of here was issued in the same political circle, only three years earlier, even before the outbreak of the Second World War. It was order no. 00485 of 11 August 1937 issued by the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, on the basis of a decision two days earlier by the Politburo of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). It was an order for the genocide of the Polish minority living in the USSR at the time. There was probably no single document before that entailed the deliberate liquidation of such a large number of people on the basis of ethnicity. Yezhov proclaimed the fight against the ‘fascist-insurgent, spying, sabotage, defeatist and terrorist activities of Polish intelligence in the USSR’. He also set a clear task for subordinate NKVD services throughout the country: a ‘complete liquidation of the hitherto untouched broad, diversionary and insurgent backup resources’ and the ‘basic human reserves’ of Polish intelligence in the USSR’.

Such ‘backup resources’ and ‘basic reserves’ could be formed by anyone who had Polish nationality entered in their passports. According to the 1926 census in the USSR, there were 782,000 such people. According to the following census (1939), the number of Poles in the USSR decreased to 626,000. This was precisely the effect of the system of unprecedented persecution to which Poles were subjected in the Stalinist state. More than 150,000 of those who were shot dead (not just in 1937–38) died during deportations or starved to death in 1932–33. At least every second adult male was deprived of life in this Polish community of fate.

Groundbreaking in understanding the scale of this operation was the work of Russian researchers from the Memorial Nikita Petrov and Arseniy Roginsky (1993 and 1997, respectively), who presented official internal NKVD reporting. These are its figures: in the Polish operation, 143,810 people were arrested between September 1937 and September 1938. Of these, 111,091 were executed. Not all of them were ethnic Poles, whose number among those slaughtered in this one operation is estimated between 85,000 to 95,000. However, Poles were systematically killed in the Soviet state in other operations as well: they were the victims of the anti-kulak operation of 1930–31, the Great Famine of 1932–33 both in Ukraine and Kazakhstan (after all, it was not only Ukrainians and not only Kazakhs who died from starvation), and as a result of successive waves of arrests and deportations of the Polish population first from the border areas with the Second Polish Republic in Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, and then in 1936 from these republics to Kazakhstan in general. At the height of the terror (1937–38), Poles were also shot en masse as part of smaller NKVD schemes, such as the German operation (liquidating ‘German spies’), the ‘cleansing’ of the NKVD itself from the Polish element still introduced to it in large numbers by a Bolshevik revolutionary and politician Felix Dzerzhinsky, and many others.

The validity of order no. 00485, originally intended to be in force for three months, was extended to nearly two years. Its deadly effects were completed four days later by another order issued by Yezhov. It was numbered 00486, and concerned the families of ‘traitors to the fatherland’ (not just Poles). Only those who had betrayed their loved ones could avoid arrest. Children over the age of 15 were subject to ‘adult’ repression. Younger ones were to be sent to orphanages or to work.

The exceptional scale of repression directed by the Soviet state against Poles has been pointed out by Harvard University professor Terry Martin. On the basis of a named list of victims shot in Leningrad in the period 1937–38, he calculated that Poles were killed 31 times more often than their number in the city would suggest. In other words, a Pole in and around Leningrad was 31 times less likely to survive during the height of the Great Terror than the average resident of the city most affected by Stalin’s crimes. Yale University professor Timothy Snyder calculated the following numbers for the entire Soviet Union at the time of the Great Terror: the Poles were, unfortunately, a chosen people in it. Stalin’s choice determined that they were 40 times more likely to be shot than the average for all nations of the USSR. Poles accounted for 0.4 per cent of the total population in the USSR, while they made up around 13–14 per cent of the victims in the 681,000 executed between 1937 and 1938. So much for dry statistics based on NKVD data. But, as Snyder rightly wrote in his monograph Bloodlands (2010), we must above all remember that each victim had a name, each has an individual biography and each deserves human remembrance. With poignant empathy, the fate of Poles murdered as part of NKVD operations in Ukraine in 1937–38 was portrayed by perhaps the most eminent contemporary scholar of the Stalinist system, Professor Hiroaki Kuromiya of Indiana University. In his book The Voices of the Dead (American edition 2007), we can see this great crime through the prism of the individual fates of people executed simply for saying ‘Poland is a good country’ (this was interpreted as ‘fascist agitation’), or for refusing to renounce a Polish husband or wife.

The memory of this crime must be claimed in the name of historical truth about the times of the Great Terror. This concept, linked to the years 1937–38, present in all history textbooks (including Polish ones) of the 20th century, is most often limited to Stalin’s crackdown on the old Leninist cadres and the Red Army’s top brass. Today’s historical propaganda in Russia, uncritically adopted by the dominant part of the media in Poland, presents the Great Terror, or the Great Purge, as an internal tragedy of the Russians, a ‘domestic conflict’ that only Russians have the right to talk about. Meanwhile, according to NKVD data, of the 681,000 people executed between 1937 and 1938, 247,000 were victims of ‘nationality operations’ (led by the Polish), and more than 350,000 were kulaks (not necessarily Russians; there were also a great many Poles among them, but certainly no communists in this category). The Polish victims, so numerous in this terrible crime, remain silent. We cannot give them a voice, but we can, and we must, restore their memory. We cannot allow them to be dissolved in the false image of the Great Purge, in which only Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev or Tukhachevsky are remembered.

There are not any graves left behind for the victims of the ‘Polish operation’. There was no Anna Akhmatova to mourn them in her Requiem, nor Arthur Koestler to show their fate in Darkness at Noon. These were ordinary people, not generals, not renowned poets or worldfamous political activists. They were killed and their families deported deep into the Soviet Union, condemned to oblivion alone. They did not leave influential friends to claim their memory. Then came the Second World War and its great tragedies. There was no room left for the memory of the victims murdered before that war to be cultivated by its later victors.

Yet it is precisely for this reason that once we know about them, we should not forget them. It is for the same reason that we should not forget the great sacrifice of the Jewish genocide committed by German Nazism. We must remember the victims of the crime all the more strongly: the more they seem forgotten, nameless, powerless – this is what humanity, our humanity, demands of us. Would it not be worthwhile to become aware of the existence of these people, each of whom had a name, each of whom had a face, but each of whom became Homo sacer (a person made worthless and located outside the law) – exactly as Giorgio Agamben depicted it on the basis of the Holocaust experience described by Primo Levi. Perhaps it is worth showing, also to today’s world, this example of a great crime that transforms people into victims – killed with impunity but not sacrificed – into ones excluded from the bios, simply because they belonged to a group chosen by political power to be shot dead.

She was already 17 when she accidentally learned that everything she knew about herself was untrue. That the mother she was with, Stanisława Bussoldowa, did not give birth to her at all, but took care of a six-month-old baby, saved at the last moment from annihilation in a world that no longer existed. That Elżunia was not after all a diminutive of Elżbieta (Elizabeth), but a Jewish name, in Hebrew, Elishew. This name, as well as her likeness, was left by Henia Koppel, a Jewish woman, Elżbieta Ficowska’s ‘real’ mother, whose face Elżbieta never knew.

Born under an imprisoned star

Elżbieta Ficowska’s mother, Henia Koppel, gave birth to her in the Warsaw ghetto. To save the child, she decided to move her to the Aryan side. The six-month-old baby was given medicine to sleep, placed in a wooden box with holes in it so she could breathe, hidden among the bricks and taken away from the Warsaw ghetto. The box also contained a silver spoon on which was engraved her name and her date of birth: ‘Elżunia, 5 I 1942’, the only trace of a surviving identity.

Elżbieta has no idea what her parents looked like. She has no photographs. Years later she managed to track down two of her mother’s friends from grammar school, who described her mother as a beautiful blonde with blue eyes. Her father was much older, stocky, black-haired and black-eyed. This is the only image she has of them.

‘I have seen so many photographs of nameless Jews in old German film chronicles. I always stare at them searchingly, and sometimes I succumb to the illusion that I might somehow recognise my loved ones, even though I know it is impossible. I don’t know their faces, I only see them in my imagination’, she later said in an interview.

From that world to this world

The child was taken out of the ghetto by Stanisława Bussoldowa’s stepson, Paweł Bussold, who had a pass to the ghetto. Elżbieta was supposed to go to a woman, but the latter fell ill with tuberculosis. Although she had not planned to, Bussoldowa took good care of Elżunia. During the years of German occupation, she provided assistance to Jews from the Warsaw ghetto, collaborating with Irena Sendler. Stanisława Bussoldowa worked as a feldsher and midwife at a health centre on Działdowska Street in Warsaw. The facility organised money for Jews locked behind the walls of the Warsaw ghetto. She also delivered food ration cards to the ghetto, took people to the so-called Aryan side and delivered babies of Jewish women hiding in occupied Warsaw.

On a daily basis, the young girl was looked after by a nanny – Janina Peciak. She would receive phone calls from the child’s mother from the ghetto and put the receiver to the chattering little girl. The last time she called was in October 1942.

Henia perished on 3 November 1943, in the forced-labour camp in Poniatowa. Elżbieta’s father, Josel, perished during the major liquidation operation of the Warsaw ghetto (July–September 1942). He was shot at the Umschlagplatz when he refused to get into a wagon. They were disappeared like the world she had never managed to get to know and had no chance to know from the Aryan side.

Washed you of orphanhood and swaddled you in love

As Elżbieta Ficowska recalls, her foster mother offered her a happy childhood full of love. When Stanisława Bussoldowa took in Elżunia, she was already in her 60s; her children were grown up and she herself was a widow already. She gave her foster daughter a lot of wholesome and mature love. She was a well-looked after child, and everyone around her did their best to make her feel as comfortable and as safe as possible. This is why Stanisława Bussoldowa protected her from a premature clash with history. Out of concern for the child, Stanisława Bussoldowa did not allow Elżbieta to find out about her Jewish origins for a long time. During the war, she was hidden from the Germans. After the war, she was also hidden from the Jewish organisations seeking to recover the children who had been saved.

Not to be surprised at all when you say – I am

Elżbieta Ficowska found out about her Jewish origins at the age of 17 by accident. A friend, with whom she attended the Felician Sisters’ School in Wawer, asked her one day why she hadn’t told her she was Jewish. Elżbieta thought it was nonsense, completely untrue. However, this information planted a seed of anxiety in her, and her imagination increasingly suggested videos from the past and various, as well as strange stories. Such as the one from when she was in the cemetery and noticed that the date of her father’s death, Stanisława’s husband, died two years before she was born. She was then told that the stonemason had got the date on the gravestone wrong, and she did not pursue the story further.

In the same way that she didn’t make the connection, while she was with her nanny in a vegetable shop in Michalina, when someone asked her if the Jews coming from America had already been there. She had no idea that after the war there were Jews in Poland who wanted to find the Jewish children rescued from the Holocaust and take them to Jewish families in America or Israel.

Eventually Elżbieta Ficowska learned about her Jewish background from her Polish mother. After an argument, she ran away from home to a friend’s house. She hid in the basement and refused to come out. When she was found by her mother, they had their first and only conversation about how she became her daughter. ‘It was so difficult for her and for me that we never went back to it again,’ Elżbieta Ficowska confessed in an interview.

I keep both my mothers with me

Henia Koppel (1919?–1943) and Stanisława Bussoldowa (1886–1968) were both mothers to Elżbieta Ficowska. The first, who gave her life ‘under an imprisoned star’, gave up her daughter in order to save her life, and the second spared her of orphanhood and swaddled her in love. Both risked their own lives.

‘I keep both my mothers with me and will do that till the end. Their presence reminds me that there is nothing more destructive than hatred and nothing more precious than human kindness,’ says Elżbieta.

A tribute to both of them is a poem by Jerzy Ficowski, poet and husband of Elżbieta Ficowska. ‘Both Your Mothers’ is dedicated to Bieta, as Jerzy affectionately addressed his wife by this nickname, and commemorates the story of two mothers, two maternal loves, and is a monument to their sacrificial love.

***

Both Your Mothers

for Bieta

Under a futile Torah
under an imprisoned star
your mother gave birth to you

You have proof of her
beyond doubt and death
the scar of the navel
the sign of parting for ever
which had n time to hurt you

this you know

Later you slept in a bundle
carried out of the ghetto
someone said in a chest
knocked together somewhere in Nowolipie Street
with a hole to let air in
but not fear
hidden in a cartload of bricks

You slipped out in this little coffin
redeemed by stealth
from that world to this world
all the way to the Aryan side
and fire took over
the corner you left vacant

So you did not cry
crying could have meant death
luminal hummed you
its lullaby
And you nearly were not
so that you could be

But the mother
who was saved in you
could now step into crowded death
happily incomplete
could instead of memory give you
for a parting gift
her own likeness
and a date and a name

so much

And at once a chance
someone hastily
bustled about your sleep
and then stayed for a long always
and washed you of orphanhood
and swaddled you in love
and became the answer
to your first word

That was how
both your mothers taught you
not to be surprised at all
when you say
I am

[translated by Keith Bosley]

As is well known, Poland suffered enormous human and material losses during the Second World War. These losses were relatively - i.e. in relation to the pre-war population - the largest in Europe. Moreover, the German Nazi occupation authorities embarked on a cruel and humiliating programme of degrading the Polish nation to the function of an uneducated workforce. This provoked widespread and strong Polish resistance during the war and, once it ended, condemnation, resentment and even hatred towards Germans in general, based on the largely correct conviction that a large part of German society supported Hitler’s regime. Of course, the generalisations presented here should not be taken literally, but as a characterisation of a certain dominant tendency.

In Germany, a certain section of society may not have known the horrifying facts about the occupation of Poland, while another section effectively pushed the tragic truth about it out of its consciousness. Under these conditions - especially in the western occupation zones, from which the Federal Republic of Germany was formed in 1949 - Poles came to be seen as the main culprits for the great misfortune of the German people, which was considered to be the loss of the eastern part of the former Germany and the displacement of the German population living there until then. German critics of Poland and the Poles did not want to understand that these territories were compensation for the even more extensive areas that the Soviet Union had taken from Poland, and not simple territorial spoils. Importantly, it was the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin who at the Big Three conference in Potsdam pushed through the course of the Polish western border and the displacement of the German population from Poland within the new borders.

This mutual antagonism was exploited by politics in both countries. In Poland, Stalin installed the rule of the communists, who were very unpopular among the Polish population and there was a partisan war against their rule in the country. One of the very few aspects of the reality of the time in which the positions of the communists and the Polish population appeared to agree was the hostility to the Germans and the conviction that Poland necessarily needed the territories taken from the Germans in order to rebuild and in the future develop. For this reason, the communists literally nurtured hostility to Germany and the Germans, as it was probably the most important factor at least partially legitimising their power in Poland.

On the other hand, in the Federal Republic of Germany - created by the decision of the Western occupying powers (the United States, Great Britain and France) after the beginning of the Cold War in 1949–1950 - recalling the alleged and actual guilt of Poles and hostility towards the Polish People’s Republic as an ally of the Soviets was politically very convenient, as it emphasised the pro-Western stance of this new German state and at the same time relegated the moral and legal reckoning with German Nazi crimes to the very background. In addition, certain provisions of the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 allowed the West German side to claim that the actually existing Polish-German border on the Oder and Neisse rivers was not definitively established and therefore Germany still existed within the 1937 borders. This argumentation, as one can easily guess, caused much concern in Poland for the future of the country.

As we know, a communist state was created in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany in 1949 under the name of the German Democratic Republic. Despite their declared friendship, relations between communist Poland and communist East Germany were only seemingly correct. In 1950, East Germany, on the express orders of Moscow, signed a treaty with Poland on the recognition of the new border, but the two governments were still very distrustful of each other and competed fiercely for the favours of the Soviet hegemon.

Although the resentment and alienation prevailing between Poles and Germans was deep and almost universal, keen minds on both sides of the unrecognised border increasingly came to the conclusion that such a state of affairs must end one day and that the two large nations in the middle of Europe could not live with their backs turned to each other. In 1956, Władysław Gomułka, a politician described as a ‘national communist’, took power in Poland. Just after the war, he had been Minister for what was known as the Recovered Territories, as the communist propaganda named the territories taken from Germany, and well acquainted with the complexity of the situation of these territories. One of his important foreign policy goals was to have the Oder-Neisse border recognised by the Federal Republic of Germany. He was keen to do this because he wanted to weaken Moscow’s role as the sole protector of communist Poland and create more stable conditions for the country’s development than before. In the Federal Republic of Germany, its first Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had already made it his policy objective in the early 1950s to establish normal, correct relations with France, Israel and, precisely, Poland, as he saw in this an opportunity for Germany to return quickly to the ranks of respected members of the international community. While the normalisation of relations with France and Israel had indeed already taken place in the 1950s, progress in relations with Poland had to wait much longer. Despite confidential talks that had been ongoing since 1957 (Carlo Schmid, Berthold Beitz), their only achievements were an initial trade agreement and the opening of trade representations in each country in 1963.

Regardless of the politicians’ unsuccessful attempts, the late 1950s and early 1960s saw the emergence of tendencies in Germany, especially among the younger generation, to settle the Nazi past of German society. In the case of those following the Christian ethic, this led to the learning about and confession of guilt, as well as repentance and atonement. In 1958, the Evangelical youth organisation Aktion Sühnezeichen (Sign of Repentance Action) was founded in Germany, which dedicated itself to such simple but very meaningful activities outside Germany as working to clean up former crime scenes, mostly concentration camps, and caring for former prisoners who were sick and infirm. At the beginning of the 1960s, activists of the Christian churches in Germany began to increasingly convince German society to abandon the idea of revising the existing border with Poland and to seek understanding and reconciliation with the Poles. Information about the change of mood in Germany reached Poland, arousing more and more lively interest in the Catholic Church, a dominant force here. The most perspicacious among the Catholic clergy and intellectuals were aware that the hatred of Germans pouring profusely from the communist media and into the heads of children and young people at school, was profoundly immoral from a Christian point of view and further weakened the mental ties between Poles and the free democratic world.

In assessing the situation at the time, we must remember that the communist authorities in Poland harshly persecuted the Catholic Church, whose adherents were well over 80 per cent of Polish society until 1956. The Communists imprisoned many bishops and priests for years on trumped-up charges, made it difficult for Catholics to practise their religion and discriminated against them. The most notorious of the prisoners was the head of the Church in Poland, the Primate of Poland Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. He was released from custody in 1956, at which time the repressions against the clergy and the faithful eased somewhat, but nevertheless relations between the communist state and the Catholic Church were still very tense.

Between 1962 and 1965, the Second Vatican Council took place in Rome, its aim being a profound modernisation of the Catholic Church. The participating Polish cardinals and bishops, who shared their experiences of coexistence between Church and state guided by an anti-religious ideology, made many contacts with representatives of other churches. They used them to invite bishops from all over the world to the great celebrations planned in 1966 for the Millennium, the 1,000th anniversary of the adoption of the Christian faith by the Polish ruler Prince Mieszko I and his state. On 18 November 1965, in the last days of the Council, a comprehensive letter signed by 36 top representatives of the Polish episcopate and containing such an invitation was handed over to the German bishops. The author of the letter was the Archbishop of Wrocław Bolesław Kominek, a clergyman who had grown up both in Polish and German culture. The concluding sentences of this document included the words:

In this most Christian, but also very human spirit, we extend to you, sitting here on the benches of the concluding Council, our hands and grant forgiveness as well as ask for it. And if you, German bishops ... fraternally embrace these outstretched hands, then only then will we be able to celebrate our Millennium in a most Christian manner with peace of conscience.

The words we grant forgiveness, as well as ask for it[1] have become the foundation of German-Polish reconciliation and a leitmotif of many other reconciliation processes. Today, these words can be found on the author’s memorial and commemorated in dozens of different ways.

The reply of the German episcopate sent on 5 December 1965 was polite and diplomatic, but completely in line with the formal legal position of the Federal Republic of Germany towards Poland. It also did not contain such an emotional plea for forgiveness, which - on the face of it - marked the failure of the Polish bishops’ initiative. A few days later, the communist authorities in Poland unleashed a violent propaganda campaign against the Church and the signatories of the letter. The bishops were accused of violating the government’s exclusive competence in foreign policy and of betraying the Polish raison d’état by addressing the Germans with these words. Communist Party chief Gomółka was so furious with the bishops that he seriously considered arresting them or deporting them from Poland to the Vatican. Questions were raised about who had given them the right to forgive the Germans and what the Poles were supposed to apologise to them for. A major problem was that the content of the letter to the German bishops also came as a surprise to Polish Catholics, and criticism of this act of forgiveness was voiced in many Catholic milieus.

Over the next few months, however, the bishops successfully convinced Catholics in Poland that, twenty years after the war, a religious and moral act of forgiveness was necessary and imperative. In time, the communist campaign against the authors of the letter also weakened, as it turned out that this appeal had nevertheless been noticed in West Germany and had become an impulse to increasingly seek dialogue with the Poles. Moreover, in December 1966, a government was formed in the Federal Republic of Germany, with the Social Democrat Willy Brandt as Foreign Minister and Deputy Chancellor, who began to implement a plan for what is known as Ostpolitik (eastern policy), whose motto was Wandel durch Annäherung (change through rapprochement). This policy was to lead to the establishment and expansion of relations with the Soviet Union and the countries of the Soviet bloc, including Poland in particular. In October 1969, Willy Brandt became Chancellor and a year later visited Poland, where he signed a treaty for the normalisation of relations with Poland, the most important part of which was the recognition of the Oder-Neisse border as Poland’s western border and the declaration of the renunciation of all mutual territorial claims. On the same day, the German Chancellor made an unexpected gesture that became a true icon of reconciliation. Laying a wreath at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw, he knelt in humility.

It was proof to the Germans themselves, to the Poles and to many observers around the world that a fundamental mental change had taken place in Germany, which on the German side opened the way to reconciliation. The agreement between the People’s Republic of Poland and the Federal Republic opened a new stage in Polish-German relations. In 1972 the German-Polish Textbook Commission was established, which exists to this day, with the task of issuing joint recommendations to authors of history textbooks in both countries on how - taking into account the latest state of scientific research - to present the history of German-Polish relations. It is worth mentioning that a team of authors working under the aegis of the Textbook Commission has since 2008 produced a set of secondary school history textbooks which are identical in content in the German and Polish versions. Thanks to the work of the German-Polish Textbook Commission, which has been going on for half a century, and the intensive scientific contacts between historians from both countries, which also began in the 1970s, the old academic disputes about the history of German-Polish relations have been resolved together. This is by no means to say that the common past is not a source of sometimes sharp disputes and tensions, but their cause is nowadays basically only the way the past is commemorated and not the historical facts. The former is the domain of politicians, the latter of historians.

In the 1970s, intensive German-Polish economic cooperation developed. It was driven by West German loans, which were large by the standards of the time, and were intended to bring about a modernisation leap in Poland, which had suffered from deep economic and technological backwardness in the previous decades. These intentions, implemented under the conditions of the communist planned economy, failed. In the course of time, it became apparent that the increasingly intensive contacts between the two societies, the tourist trips in both directions, the temporary work of Poles in Germany, the emerging city partnerships, cultural exchanges, etc., were of far greater importance. It should not be imagined that these contacts were as intensive and uncomplicated as they are today between friendly countries, but they were fundamentally different from what was possible in the Soviet Union and other communist countries.

One of the most spectacular successes of the then stage of German-Polish cooperation, with virtually all the hallmarks of reconciliation between the churches, was the election of the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyła as Pope, i.e. head of the worldwide Catholic Church, in 1978. Under the name John Paul II, he became one of the most recognisable and popular figures in the world at that time. Years later, it became clear that this election was mainly due to the very active support given to the Polish cardinal by the German members of the College of Cardinals.

At the same time, among the numerous illegal opposition organisations working in Poland for the reform or outright overthrow of communism, a clandestine think-tank called the Polish Independence Alliance emerged. It published expert reports on various aspects of Polish politics outside state control. This group published two texts on Polish-German relations. They concluded that an authentic and partnership-like Polish-German understanding was a necessary condition for Poland to liberate itself from Soviet hegemony and overthrow communism, for if Poles and Germans gained trust in each other and reconciled, any justification for Soviet guarantees of the territorial status quo in Poland would disappear. Moreover, expert reports by the secret think-tank concluded that the division of Germany into two states was completely unnatural and harmful to Poland, as the communist German Democratic Republic walled Poland off from Western Europe. Therefore, any steps leading to the reunification of this country by the Federal Republic of Germany should be supported. Such ideas went virtually unnoticed in West Germany, but their compelling logic had since become a permanent component of the geopolitical thought of the Polish anti-communist opposition.

In the summer of 1980, i.e. not long after the election of Pope John Paul II, the non-communist Independent and Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarity was established in Poland, which was in the midst of a severe economic crisis, after a huge wave of strikes, soon having nine million members. This huge peaceful political force attempted a radical democratisation of Poland, which the communists saw as a threat to their rule. On 13 December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s government imposed martial law, and the police and army arrested more than 10,000 Solidarity activists. A communist military dictatorship took power in Poland for several years, and a political and humanitarian crisis engulfed the country. West Germany’s attitude to these events in Poland was complicated, as the government of the Federal Republic, which had so far achieved much success with its change-through-rapprochement policy towards the Polish communists, was very reluctant towards the Solidarity Trade Union, as it disturbed - as it was believed in Bonn - this apparent harmony. For this reason, Solidarity as an organisation received hardly any support from the West German authorities. The attitude of German society was different. The powerful, spontaneous social movement, which courageously strove to democratise and expand the sphere of freedom in its homeland, aroused widespread support there. For this reason, in order to alleviate the consequences of the crisis in Poland manifesting itself in dramatic shortages of food, medicine and clothing, a massive campaign was organised in Germany to send parcels of food, medicine, baby food and clothing to Poland. This aid, going directly from individual German donors to Polish families or distributed by church structures, reached millions of Poles for several critical years. In the eyes of the Poles, this great aid campaign became visible proof to everyone that the Germans as a nation had changed and had now become friends who could be counted on in times of need. This was another foundation of the reconciliation process.

In the following years, the crisis of the communist state and the loss of credibility of its leaders was so great that in the spring of 1989 they decided to share power and responsibility for the state with the opposition and agreed to almost entirely democratic elections. In these elections (held on 4 June 1989), they suffered a crushing defeat and the first non-communist government in the entire Soviet bloc was soon formed under the leadership of Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The first foreign leader to visit the new Polish government was German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. It was a very special visit, as on its very first day, 9 November 1989, the infamous wall that had divided Berlin during the Cold War came down, marking the fall of the communist German Democratic Republic and opening up the prospect of German reunification. On 12 November 1989, during the remainder of Kohl’s visit to Poland, a ‘Reconciliation Mass’ took place in Krzyżowa in Silesia, where German opposition to Hitler had been active during the Second World War. During this political as well as religious ceremony, Polish Prime Minister Mazowiecki and the German Chancellor embraced each other, passing on the ‘sign of peace’ to each other. The news and photographs documenting this event became another symbol that spoke of progressive reconciliation.

As I mentioned, Poland had a positive attitude towards the expected German reunification. However, that process, according to the letter of the Potsdam Agreement of 1945, once again (this time for the last time) opened up the question of recognition of the Polish western border, which caused serious anxiety on the Polish side. This anxiety was not unfounded, as Chancellor Helmut Kohl, motivated by domestic political considerations, was for an exceptionally long time dragging his feet as regards deciding exactly how this recognition of the border with Poland was to take place. It was finally decided on 17 July 1990, during negotiations between the Foreign Ministers of the two German states, the four former occupying powers and the Polish Foreign Minister, who had been invited for this purpose.

The agreement on the definitive recognition of the German-Polish border itself was signed on 14 November 1990, and less than a year later a comprehensive agreement on good neighbourly and friendly cooperation between the two countries was concluded.

These pacts formed a very convenient basis for the development of cooperation. From the point of view of the reconciliation process between the two societies, the creation of a strong organisation called the German-Polish Youth Cooperation was of particular importance. Its task is to organise and co-finance exchanges of schoolchildren and university students, school partnerships, joint workshops, etc., all with the aim of getting the younger generation from both countries to know each other, which should then lead to their cooperation in adulthood as a matter of course. To date, more than three million participants have taken part in Youth Cooperation programmes. Thousands of city, municipal, county and regional partnerships were (and still are) established in the 1990s with a similar objective in mind. In the same period, the number of mixed German-Polish marriages skyrocketed and Polish women are still the most frequently married foreigners. In conclusion, one can venture to say that the 1990s saw a complete normalisation of German-Polish relations in the sphere of interpersonal and social relations, which can probably be described as reconciliation. And this state of affairs has proved to be permanent.

Harmonised with these overwhelmingly positive trends were the joint political actions of both countries. A strategic goal of Polish foreign policy, vigorously supported by Germany, was Poland’s membership of the European Union, opening up the fastest possible path to modernisation, as well as that of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), giving the country the best possible guarantee of security. Both of these goals were also in the interest of a reunified Germany, if only because of the opening up of the Polish market and Germany’s participation in Poland’s modernisation. At the same time, after Poland’s entry into NATO in 1999, Germany ceased to be a frontline state and gained considerable strategic depth. Consequently, one began to speak of the 1990s as a period of Polish-German ‘community of interest’.

This period essentially came to an end at the beginning of the 2000s. Incidentally, already in 1994 the German political scientist and publicist working in Poland, Klaus Bachmann, described Polish-German relations as ‘kitschy reconciliation’. He argued that, in order to achieve primary political goals, both countries avoided debate on contentious and controversial issues, thus distorting the true picture of mutual relations. In 2002, the first major friction in Polish-German relations occurred on the occasion of the Polish army’s decision to purchase American F-16 fighter jets, rather than French or Swedish aircraft as the Germans had expected. At the same time, Poland and Germany took a completely different stance on the US-Iraq conflict and the Second Gulf War. Poland demonstrably supported Washington’s plans and later even took a large occupation zone in Iraq, while Germany, together with France, Russia and China, refused to participate in this war and support the Americans. This was the first time in history that the Federal Republic of Germany overtly countered its hitherto major ally. Meanwhile, the Poles watched with growing concern Germany’s security policy, which boiled down to a rapid reduction in the size of its army and military expenditure, and the policy of the European Union, which showed a tragic helplessness towards the war in the former Yugoslavia.

At the same time, Vladimir Putin had been president in Russia since 1999, and already the first years of his rule indicated that authoritarianism and imperial tendencies were gradually resurfacing in Russia, which in principle necessarily led Poland to seek a rapprochement with the strongest NATO state, i.e. the United States, as the only real ‘donor’ of security in this part of the world.

The author of this shift in German policy was, as is well known, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, in power since 1998. He became an advocate of the notion that a partnership with Russia was of key importance to European security, and of the idea, shared with the French, of creating a ‘European power’ (Europäische Großmacht) as an independent player in world politics: independent and thus contesting the current position of the USA. One effect of Germany’s adoption of this vision of international relations was that it ignored warning signals concerning Russia and - above all - willingly joined in the construction of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline, which runs along the bottom of the Baltic Sea from Russia directly to Germany, thus bypassing all the countries lying between Russia and Germany. With Germany’s help, Russia gained the possibility to use gas blackmail against Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Germany, in turn, obtained large supplies of Russian natural gas at preferential prices. In Berlin, it was imagined that this would soon allow a profitable redistribution of this raw material in many European countries and, in addition, provide the German economy - already the strongest in Europe - with an additional competitive advantage, guaranteeing its position as an economic hegemon in the European Union. Germany has rejected all criticism of this pipeline, and has also torpedoed the idea of a European energy union, whereby the Union would buy gas for all its Member States and distribute it according to jointly accepted criteria.

As we know, Gerhard Schröder lost power in 2005 and, three weeks after leaving office as Chancellor, became Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Russian gas giant Gazprom. He thus discredited himself in the eyes of the public, but the German Government, led from then until last year by Angela Merkel, did not give up its strategic plan, supporting the construction of Nord Stream 2 after Nord Stream 1. Added to this was the plan pushed by Germany for the ecological transformation of the EU economy. This generally noble plan, however, assumed until this summer that natural gas would soon be the only accepted transition fuel in Europe until the ‘universal happiness’ of a carbon-free economy was achieved. Nuclear power was condemned in these plans, and the use of coal as a fuel and fracking of natural gas banned. In this way, the German-Russian gas plans gained even greater economic and strategic importance. It was not until Russia’s unlawful aggression against Ukraine in February this year and the cruel war that continues to this day that it became clear how misguided and dangerous these plans were for Germany itself and for Europe as a whole.

In the early 2000s, unexpectedly for the Poles, there was a tendency in Germany to highlight the German victims of the Second World War. This included the victims of Allied bombing in Germany and, for example, the victims of the Soviet army atrocities that occurred during the conquest of Germany. Most important, however, was the movement for the creation of the Centre against Expulsions, a modern memorial to the territories lost to Poland in eastern Germany, and above all to the hard and often tragic fate of the German population forcibly displaced from there. This was accompanied by demands for compensation to be paid to the displaced Germans and their descendants for property lost to Poland. It should be emphasised here that the forced migration of the German population after the Second World War was no taboo in either Germany or Poland up until that time. A great deal of research was done on the subject, including much conducted jointly by German and Polish historians, many books were published and several films made. However, from the 1960s onwards this subject was rarely present in the German cultural mainstream and it seemed that this aspect of the past was beginning to be treated in Germany as a closed page of history rather than something that could capture the memory and imagination of contemporary Germans.

Incidentally, Poland of the 1980s and 1990s also experienced a similar process of historicisation, symptomatic of which was a regression of interest in the history of the German occupation of Poland and the crimes committed at that time. Thus, the surprise of Polish politicians and public opinion at the change in German remembrance policy was great. In Poland, people began to suspect that - as it was said at the time - the Germans now wanted to rewrite the history of the Second World War. Meanwhile, the existing consensus between Poles and Germans on such elementary questions as who was to blame for the outbreak of war, who pursued a criminal and genocidal policy and towards whom, and who bore responsibility for it and why, was (and is) seen as the most important basis for reconciliation and good relations with Germany. Observing the developments at the time, many Poles thought that this whole mental and political construction would soon collapse. Even the first dangerous political moves were already made: when the German authorities gave preliminary support to the idea of building a Centre against Expulsions and did not distance themselves from demands for compensation for German property lost on Polish territories, the Polish Sejm passed a resolution in 2004 stating (truthfully) that Poland had not yet received reparations for the damage caused in Poland during the Second World War, and that the Parliament was therefore calling on the Polish Government to determine the amount of these losses.

This development, which threatened a serious crisis in mutual relations, alarmed people of goodwill in both countries, who managed to stop it. The German Government declared that it would never support private German demands for compensation against Poland and, moreover, did not allow the establishment of the Centre against Expulsions in the form initially planned. The institution documenting and commemorating the forced migration of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe was opened to the public in Berlin last year under a different name. The permanent exhibition presented there is very factual and objective in its content and does not reflect any accusations against Poland. In Berlin, there are plans to create a Memorial and Meeting Place for Poland, dedicated to the history of the German occupation in Poland.

In Poland, on the other hand, nothing has been done to impede the activities of the countless German-Polish NGOs, partnerships between towns and regions, joint scientific programmes and the like, which have mushroomed since 1989. They all form a highly resilient and durable tissue that cushions most of the negative impacts generated by current politics, eliminating, or at least delaying, their impact on public awareness. Consistent with this picture is the fact that the work on establishing the amount of reparations that Poland could demand from Germany took as long as eighteen years and ended with the publication of the first part of this document literally ten days ago, but it is not certain that the Polish side will ever use these findings to formally demand reparations from Germany. This does not change the fact that the temperature of Polish-German relations has dropped quite markedly after 2000 and both sides have had to abandon many exaggerated expectations of a reconciliation process that probably needs much more time than we expected.

 

[1] These words are an unambiguous reference to the sentence And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, found in the key prayer said by Christians, informally known as Our Father… .

 

photo: Andrzej Ślusarczyk - Template:Fundacja "Krzyżowa" dla Porozumienia Europejskiego

On 20 January 1942, several high-ranking dignitaries of the Third Reich met in a villa on Lake Wannsee. During the preceding weeks, the political situation in which the Nazi state found itself had clearly changed. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. At the same time, the lack of success in the Battle of Moscow meant that the vision of a quick defeat of the Soviet Union had been dispelled. However, they did not gather to hear about the situation on the fronts. The new reality opened up the opportunity for the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. The fate of European Jews, who were treated by Hitler as hostages, stopped being a potential bargaining pin preventing Americans to join war. Since it was obvious that the fighting in the East would not end soon, it was decided that the Final Solution should not be postponed until the defeat of Stalin. But what does the term exactly mean? Under this euphemistic term lay a crime unprecedented in the history of mankind: the will to bring about the systematic murder of the Jewish population in Europe.

Almost all copies of the minutes of the Vannsee Conference (the Wannsee Protocol) were destroyed by those in their possession. Consequently, our knowledge about the meeting would have been much poorer, had Robert Kempner not come across the only surviving copy in 1947. This German lawyer and fierce enemy of the Nazis was actively involved in the Nuremberg trials after the war. Kempner immediately noticed the extraordinary importance of the Protocol and thanks to his meticulous approach to the prosecution and a little luck, a shocking document related to a turning point in the history of the Holocaust is known today.

Despite the euphemisms used in the Wannsee Protocol, the picture of the meeting that emerges from the document is horrifying. The conference was opened by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office. He informed the audience that the aim of the meeting was to establish a common line of action regarding the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. At the same time, he stressed his key role in the implementation of the plans. On 31 July 1941, Herman Göring had already authorised him to take all necessary steps to this end. Over the course of six months, ideas concerning the involvement of specific Third Reich administrations changed, as did the aforementioned political situation, which slightly delayed the convening of the conference. In the end, Heydrich spoke to representatives of several ministries, offices and security police. Among those present were Wilhelm Stuckart, Secretary of State in the Ministry of the Interior, and Roland Freisler representing the Reich Ministry of Justice. The Nazi authorities in the occupied countries were represented by Hans Frank’s deputy, Josef Bühler, Secretary of State in the Government of the General Government and SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange, Commandant of the Security Police and SD in Riga. Heydrich himself was, incidentally, at the same time Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. The assembled listened to a summary of the existing policy towards the Jews and its limitations. In place of the forced emigration applied before, the concept of ‘evacuation to the East’ appeared. To illustrate the scale of the issue for the participants, data on the Jewish population in Europe were presented. Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich’s right hand man in the Final Solution, was responsible for compiling the data. After a lengthy enumeration, issues such as the organisation of ghettos for aging Jews and the fate of Jewish veterans who fought on the German side in the First World War were addressed. Later in the conference, Heydrich reminded the audience of who was a Jew under German law and presented a solution to the question of Mischlings (mixed-race people i.e. those with Jewish and non-Jewish ancestors). After a brief discussion, the meeting was closed, and the Chief of the Reich Security Main Office requested that the members of the meeting provide him with appropriate assistance in solving this ‘problem’.

In a meeting lasting barely an hour and a half, the fate of millions of people was sealed. But was the Wannsee Conference such a breakthrough? The German crimes against the Jews did not begin on 20 January 1942. However, it could be said that it was only from this date that ‘command genocide’ on an unprecedented scale began. The previous policy of forced emigration (practiced since the 1930s against German Jews) proved to be insufficient. In the political situation at the time, emigration to neutral countries was already on hold. In view of the size of the Jewish population in the territories occupied by the Third Reich, this solution could hardly have been considered feasible. Also unrealistic ware the ideas such as sending Jews to Madagascar. The only areas where they could be ‘evacuated’ were those captured by the Nazis in the east. Also, the policy of confining and slowly starving Jews in ghettos did not seem optimal. Starvation and labour were time-consuming. The racially obsessed Nazis also feared that by eliminating weaker individuals they would select the most resilient who could potentially revive the Jewish nation. The Wehrmacht’s war machine was followed by Einsatzgruppen units (full name ‘Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD’), which were to eliminate ideological and racial enemies in the rear of the army. However, the mass execution of civilians also had its drawbacks. It consumed time and valuable ammunition, and was a serious mental burden for most of the executioners. The Germans had been testing gas chambers for a long time. And it was this mean of mass executions that proved, with all other methods, to be the most desirable solution for the Nazis. They were faster, more efficient and allowed killing without direct contact between executioner and victims.

The Protocol of the Wannsee Conference contain a shocking sentence: ‘Europe is to be combed through from West to East in the course of the practical implementation of the Final Solution’. According to the list drawn up by Eichmann, and included on page six of the Protocol, the expected victims were to be more than eleven million. One cannot help but notice, however, that some of his calculations are rather peculiar. The list was divided into countries and territories A (basically under the direct control of the Reich) and B (allies, neutral countries, but also those with whom Germany was at war). Especially with regard to the latter, the somewhat naive approach and wishful thinking is glaring. It seems that Eichmann assumed that in the future it will be possible to ‘evacuate’ all of the European Jews, which would had been only possible with the final triumph of the Third Reich.

In compiling his list, Eichmann had at his disposal various data, not always reliable or up-to-date. For example, only two hundred people belonging to the Jewish community were attributed to Italian-occupied Albania, although the country had been a refuge for thousands of Jewish expats since the 1930s. These and other details somewhat contradict the notion of meticulous, bureaucratic precision of the Holocaust plans. Estonia stands out in particular on the list, being described as Judenfrei (i.e. free of Jews). The country’s pre-war Jewish population was not one of the most numerous, and the various repressions or displacements that befell this minority after the occupation of the country by the Soviet Union further depleted it. The intensified activities of the German occupying forces and their Estonian collaborators meant that as early as January 1942, the country could be proclaimed (although exaggeratedly) as the country in which the Jewish question had been finally resolved. Anyhow, only individual people survived the war.

The sixth page of the aforementioned Protocol has become one of the symbolic illustrations of the Holocaust because it shows like no other document the pan-European scale and the unprecedented nature of the Nazis’ murderous plan. In 2022, on the 80th anniversary of the infamous conference, the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (enrs.eu) and the Wannsee Conference House (ghwk.de) with the support of an international group of historians, have created an interactive website with infographics describing the history and contents of the sixth page of the Protocol. The infographics is available here: www.ghwk.de/statisticsandcatastrophe.

The aim of the project, called ‘Statistics and Catastrophe. Questioning Eichmann’s Numbers’, is to critically analyse the list, the statistics presented by Eichmann, and to show what tragedy is hidden in this bureaucratic document. The biographies of the victims are also an important part of the infographic – it is the victims of the Holocaust that we first and foremost need to remember about on the 80th anniversary of the Conference. Only a week later, on 27 January, there is another symbolic anniversary: the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, which is commemorated as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

transl. Mikołaj Sekrecki

On the seventeenth day of the Polish-German war in September 1939, as Poland was mounting stiff resistance against the invading German troops, it was attacked from the rear by the Red Army. This was a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed on 23 August 1939 under which the Republic of Poland was to be partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviets captured a large number of Polish prisoners of war (POWs), estimated at 240,000, including some 10,000 officers.(1) They were put at the disposal of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, in flagrant violation of the laws and customs of armed conflicts whereby the lives and health of enemy combatants were the sole responsibility of the government and military command of the state that held them captive.

The situation presented the Soviets with an enormous organisational problem of what to do with such a mass of people in the absence of the most rudimentary conditions to house them (lodging, food). It was decided that some of the prisoners – mainly privates from the seized eastern Polish provinces referred to by the Soviet authorities as Western Belarus and Western Ukraine – would be released, 25,000 of their number being kept as forced labour. Over 42,000 privates from the areas that had not been annexed by the USSR were handed over to the Germans. As regards officers, policemen and some civilians, they were isolated in three special NKVD camps in Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk. Of the three, the Ostashkov camp, where policemen were sent, was the biggest, numbering about 6,000 prisoners. Around 4,500 prisoners were held in Kozelsk and some 4,000 in Starobelsk.(2)

Conditions in the camps where rough. Prisoners were housed in extremely crowded rooms most of which were utterly unfit to be inhabited. Food was in drastically short supply and healthcare usually provided by fellow inmates who were doctors. Soldiers and policemen interned in September had to weather the harsh winter of 1939/1940 in their summer uniforms. POWs were put under constant surveillance, interrogated about their ‘hostile activities against the working classes in Poland of the masters’ and subjected to intensive ideological indoctrination in a primitive communist fashion. These efforts yielded very poor results as we can learn from internal NKVD reports.

The fate of the thousands of Polish POWs as well as those Polish citizens – some of whom were also military men – imprisoned in ‘Western Belarus’ and ‘Western Ukraine’ was debated during high-level meetings in Moscow. At the request of Beria, on 5 March 1940, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the highest decision-making body in the Soviet party-state, agreed to murder ‘14,700 people held captive in prisoner-of-war camps: former Polish officers, civil servants, landowners, policemen, intelligence agents, gendarmes, settlers and prison guards’ and ‘11,000 people held in prisons in the western provinces of Ukraine and Belarus: members of various counter-revolutionary organisations, former landowners, factory owners, former Polish officers, civil servants and fugitives.’(3) The 11,000 prisoners mentioned in Beria’s request and then later in the decision taken by the Political Bureau turned out to be overestimated. Eventually, the Katyn Massacre, which involved several locations beside the Katyn Forest, probably claimed the lives of 21,857 people, including 7,305 prison inmates. The genocidal decree of the Political Bureau followed the logic of other mass crimes perpetrated by the communist system, such as the ‘Polish operation’ of the NKVD in 1937-1938 when at least 110,000 Polish Soviet citizens were murdered.(4)

A special body of the NKVD – the Special Council (Osoboje Sowieszczanije) – was set up to manage the organisation of the genocide and ensure that, in spite of its enormous scale, it remained hidden from the public both home and abroad. Groups of henchmen, who were professional executioners, were recruited to murder captive soldiers and prisoners in facilities that belonged to the Regional Branches of the NKVD and other places prepared for that purpose.

The Special Council divided soldiers and prisoners into batches of about 100 people, drawing up what is known in historiography as ‘death lists’. It was on the basis of those lists that camp commanders would hand over a batch of POWs to NKVD Convoy Troops to be transported to internal prisons of designated Regional Branches of the NKVD accompanied by an order for the prison commanders to murder all the people on the list. As Russia has not yet released all supporting documents, we may only surmise that a similar procedure was followed in the case of prison inmates whose death transports were part of the same schedule as those of POWs.

POWs from Starobelsk were murdered in the Regional Branch of the NKVD in Kharkov and buried in mass graves in the ‘park zone’ outside the city. Those from Ostashkov were murdered in Kalinin (previously, and today, known as Tver) and buried in nearby Mednoye. POWs from Kozelsk were murdered over death pits in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.

So far, it has not been possible to establish the location of the murder and burial sites of over 7,300 prisoners. Those from the still missing Belarusian list most probably lie buried in Kurapaty near Minsk whilst those from the already declassified Ukrainian list are buried in different locations of which we only know Bykivnia near Kiev (currently a district of the city).

The murder was kept secret until the spring of 1943. On 13 April, Radio Berlin broadcast a message announcing the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk with the bodies of murdered Polish officers. Moscow immediately accused Germany of the crime.

Soviet efforts to blame the Katyn Massacre on the Germans were scuppered during the Nuremberg Trials. Nonetheless, what is known as ‘Katyn denial’ persisted for dozens of years to come and any attempts to challenge it were met with knee-jerk diplomatic protests from the USSR. Such was the case with the report drafted by the US Congress Select Committee chaired by Senator Ray Madden, official publications devoted to the subject or the first monuments commemorating the victims.

In Poland, even though the communist government spread lies about the perpetration of the crime for decades, the truth about the massacre was common knowledge among members of the general public. This was evident during the first wave of Solidarity protests when the topic came to the fore in the form of openly organised lectures and artistic events, samizdat publications, many small objects commemorating the massacre (e.g. badges, key fobs, pins), clandestine postage stamps or the Katyn Cross at the Powązki Military Cemetery. Despite the limited scope of samizdat publishing, the theme of the Katyn Massacre entered Polish culture, becoming a source of inspiration for writers and poets (e.g. Zbigniew Herbert, Włodzimierz Odojewski).

The introduction of martial law did little to stop popular calls to disclose the true nature of the Katyn Massacre. The government of the Polish People’s Republic was finally forced to bow to the pressure and initiate a dialogue with the Soviets about the ‘blank spots’ in this history of the two countries. However, it was only in the late 1980s, when perestroika and glastnost were launched, that the string of Katyn lies could be broken at long last. The final step was taken in April 1990 as the Soviets officially acknowledged that the crime of genocide against Polish POWs and prison inmates was perpetrated by the NKVD in the spring of 1940.(5)

Even though the responsibility for the Katyn Massacre was officially admitted, the fact has been virtually absent first in the Soviet and then Russian memory politics. The reason is that it does not fit in the myth of the great victory in the Second World War and the self-sacrificing struggle to save the world from fascism – just like Hitler and Stalin’s collusion in 1939, mass deportations, the enslavement of the Baltic states or the huge scale of marauding in the Red Army in 1944–1945. The tendency is well-illustrated by a judgement of Russia’s Supreme Military Prosecution Office declaring the Katyn Massacre a common crime falling under the statute of limitations.

In other countries, however, knowledge about Katyn is more or less common, in large measure thanks to the declassification of documents kept in British and American archives, but above all the widely distributed film Katyn by Andrzej Wajda and the growing number of monuments commemorating the victims of the genocide.

1. S. Ciesielski, W. Materski, A. Paczkowski, Represje sowieckie wobec Polaków i obywateli polskich, Warsaw 2002, p. 7.

2.For information about the life in the camps and their criminal liquidation supported by extensive documents, see Katyń. Dokumenty zbrodni, Vol. 1: Jeńcy nie wypowiedzianej wojny, Warsaw 1995; Vol. 2: Zagłada, Warsaw 1998.

3.Katyń. Dokumenty zbrodni, Vol. 1, doc. 217, p. 476.

4. For extensive information about the topic, see: T. Sommer, Operacja antypolska NKWD. Geneza i przebieg ludobójstwa popełnionego na Polakach w Związku Sowieckim, Warsaw 2014.

5. Katyń. Dokumenty zbrodni, Vol. 4: Echa Katynia, Warsaw 2006, doc. 123, p. 506.

The order set by the Treaty of Versailles that shaped interwar Europe and sanctioned the appearance of myriad independent states in East-Central Europe had a number of weaknesses, the key one being the absence of two large continental powers Germany and Russia while it was being decided. As regards the former, the public in the countries of the Entente affected by population losses and destruction as well as exhausted by a war of several years was so much reluctant towards Germany that it was plain impossible to treat it as a partner during the Paris peace conference. At the time of the event, Russia was experiencing a hard-thought civil war between Bolsheviks and representatives of the ancien regime, whose resolution was nowhere to be seen, and as a result – despite attempts at mediation – it proved futile to determine which party to the conflict should represent the country. Given the terms of peace dictated to Germany and isolation to surround victorious Soviet Russia, both powers rejected the Versailles system and sought its revision. That general attitude brought them closer and in 1922 they concluded an accord in Rapallo that formed the basis for their friendly political relations, intensive economic and military cooperation in the area of technology and the arms industry, as well as training.

In 1925, Germany signed treaties in Locarno with France, Belgium, Great Britain and Italy that guaranteed its western border as laid down in the Treaty of Versailles. However, it refused to sign a similar treaty with Poland and Czechoslovakia, which caused much concern in those countries, both because of the unambiguous though indirect threat issued by Germany and the stance taken by France, which by accepting that and not some other arrangement put into question its own loyalty towards Poland and Czechoslovakia. After Locarno, thanks to support of France and Great Britain, Germany joined the League of Nations and even received the status of a permanent member of its Council, the equivalent of today’s UN Security Council. That meant that Germany’s isolation was over and the country had become a member of the international community in its own right. Symbolic of those changes was the Nobel Peace Prize received by the German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann. As the new German policy caused concern in Moscow as regards future cooperation, the partnership between Germany and the Soviet Union was reinforced by a friendship accord concluded in Berlin in 1926 and extended in 1931.

At the turn of the 1920s and the 1930s, the Soviet Union took steps in order to ensure the country’s full participation in international relations and was an active and constructive participant in negotiations on the international Kellog-Briand Pact assuming renunciation of war as a tool of international policy (Treaty for Renunciation of War). Before that pact entered into force in February 1929, the ‘Litvinov Protocol’ was signed in Moscow where the USSR and its western neighbours, including Poland, decided that the provisions of the Kellog-Briand Pact would come into force even before its formal ratification. The Protocol paved the way towards intensification of Polish-Soviet relations, which resulted in the signing of a non-aggression pact between Poland and the USSR on 25 July 1932. It was a highly precise document which foresaw that the parties to it were also to treat as aggression: any act of violence that affects the integrity and inviolability of the territory or political independence of the other Contracting Party, even if such actions are not accompanied by a declaration of war and its all possible manifestations.

At the time of the Polish-Soviet rapprochement, Europe was experiencing growing tensions related to the successes of Adolf Hitler’s party heading for power in the German Reich. It was particularly strong in Polish-German relations, which is why Polish diplomats discreetly probed the French ally on several occasions, trying to establish how strong France’s response would be in the case of an armed conflict with Germany. The last such probe took place after Germany’s leaving the League of Nations on 14 October 1933. As all the attempts rendered negative results, the value of the alliance with France seen from the Polish perspective was significantly reduced. In the circumstances, the Polish envoy in Berlin Józef Lipski asked Adolf Hitler whether Germany took into consideration compensating Poland for its decreased sense of security as the former had left the League of Nations. That opened the way for the signing, on 26 January 1933 after intensive and secret negotiations, of a Declaration between Poland and Germany on non-application of violence. The European public was much surprised by the document since the Polish-German antagonism was considered insurmountable. Consequently, it was suspected that apart from the publicly known text of the declaration some secret convent was made under which Poland was joining the German side, which was not true, and – what is more – the declaration did contain a statement that its signing did not have any impact whatsoever on the legality of previous treaties and commitments made by the parties to it. To appease the Soviets, who also had concerns as to the true meaning of the Polish-German declaration, Poland concluded an agreement with them already in 1934 concerning the extension of the non-aggression pact until as late as 1945.

At that time, Polish politicians became convinced that the alliance with France – given its passive and submissive stance – might not continue to be the only pillar of the Polish security policy. Also, Poland had never harboured any illusions as to the ability of the League of Nations to ensure peace in Europe. Similarly sceptical was Poland’s attitude to the French-promoted attempts to set up a collective security system in East-Central Europe with an instrumental participation of the USSR, their obvious and direct result being ceding hegemony in this part of the continent to the Soviets. For that reason Marshal Józef Piłsudski, Poland’s de facto political leader, championed the notion that Warsaw needed to keep an even distance between Berlin and Moscow, as exemplified by somewhat symmetrical agreements concluded in 1932 and 1934, respectively. Soon to pass away, Piłsudski was at the same time issuing the warning that such a balance around Poland would not last for more than four years.

Thanks to the signing of the declaration, the relations between Poland and Germany improved very soon. Germany ended a customs war with Poland dating back to the time of the Weimar Republic and both sides adopted a milder attitude as regards their respective national minorities as well as softened virulent press propaganda. Some contacts were also established in the field of culture and high-level visits became relatively frequent. The initiative concerning closer ties came mostly from Germany, hoping to win Poland as an ally against the USSR. Yet it was a wrong calculation. Germany did not recognise the border with Poland, which for the latter was a sine qua non condition for any possible further rapprochement. No open or secret Polish-German political or military alliance took place. Poland – despite incentives – did not join the Anti-Comintern Pact, a loose grouping of countries allied with the Third Reich. Poland did not plan making any territorial gains in cooperation with Germany. The circle of Piłsudski’s supporters in power in Poland (known as the Sanation) did not support national socialism, and there were hardly any supporters of that movement among members of the opposition. Last but not least, there were also no cooperation between Poland and Germany as regards discrimination of Jews.

At first, the course of events in Europe confirmed that Piłsudski’s predictions were correct. In March 1935, Germany announced that it would not respect the arms restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. That step did not meet with any de facto response from France while Great Britain concluded a naval pact with Germany that sanctioned a considerable extension of the German navy. A year later, on 7 March 1936, German troops entered the Rhineland in a blatant violation of the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno. In the circumstances, Poland ensured France yet again of its readiness to meet its obligations stemming from their alliance in case of a conflict with Germany. However, neither France nor any of western countries, or the League of Nations, did anything more than issue purely verbal protests. Still, after long negotiations, on 6 September 1936 France granted Poland a large loan for modernisation of its armed forces, a proof that, although weakened, the Polish-French Alliance continued to be in force.

In May 1935, France and the USSR as well as Czechoslovakia and the USSR entered into bilateral agreements on mutual assistance in case of a German invasion. The Soviet-Czechoslovak accord was to become operational only under the condition that France offer military support to Czechoslovakia first (casus foederis). Looking good on paper, the agreements in question were de facto dead politically, inter alia because no serious attempt was made to agree with Poland how the Soviet Union sharing no border with Germany or Czechoslovakia was supposed to render military assistance to its new partners.

Poland’s political standing began to change radically when in 1938 Germany triggered the implementation of its expansive agenda and annexed Austria (12–13 March 1938), took control of Klaipeda at the expense of Lithuania (23 March 1938) and, in particular, partitioned Czechoslovakia. During a conference in Munich (29–30 September 1938), Czechoslovakia, although the most loyal ally of France, was pressed by its allies and agreed to cede to Germany a vast borderland known as the Sudetenland important in economic and strategic terms. Although no party to the conflict or participant of the Munich conference, Poland nevertheless forced crisis-ridden Czechoslovakia to cede Zaolzie (lands beyond the Olza River) to it. The contentious area populated mostly by Poles had been stealthily attacked and seized by Czechoslovak troops in 1920 when the Bolshevik army was poised for attack near Warsaw. Even if the taking control of Zaolzie by Polish troops on 2 October 1938 was much justified and the entire operation did not result from any arrangements with Germany, the impression it made in Europe was that Poland collaborated with Hitler.

On 24 October 1938, the Polish envoy in Berlin Józef Lipski received a list of demands from the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop intended as the basis for a new general arrangement of mutual relations between both countries. The German demands included the incorporation of the Free City of Gdańsk to the German Reich, the construction of an extraterritorial motorway and a railway link between East Prussia and the rest of the Reich, Poland’s joining the Anti-Comintern Pact as well as permanent political consultations between Poland and Germany. The objective behind the demands, extraordinarily moderate according to the Germans, was to force Poland to decide whether it supported Germany or not. Polish diplomats were greatly surprised by the German demands. For its part, Germany was astonished by Poland’s veiled and then unambiguous refusal to accept them as its conclusion was that such a step would turn the country into a German fiefdom while the Polish Government treated Poland’s territorial integrity and sovereignty as inalienable. When interned in Romania in 1940, the Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck did not mince words about the consequences of Poland’s hypothetical agreement: We would have conquered Russia together with Germany and then we would have been grazing cows for Hitler in the Ural.¹ The resolution of that stage of the Polish-German dispute came as a result of the German seizure of territorially reduced Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, with the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia established in Czechia and Slovakia becoming an independent state ‘under the care of the German Reich’. That move meant a violation of the relatively fresh Munich agreement as well as a crude exposure of the British and French appeasement policy, which both powers could not stomach any more. Responding, Great Britain decided to give Poland assurances on 31 March 1939, the basis for the British-Polish alliance. Conditioning its own policy towards Germany on Great Britain at that time, France also renewed its alliance with Poland. In response, on 28 April Adolf Hitler renounced the non-aggression pact with Poland as well as the naval accord with Great Britain. On 5 May 1939, Józef Beck delivered his great speech at the Sejm rejecting the German demands. It was clear that Poland and Germany were on a collision course now.

The events in Europe were closely followed by Joseph Stalin and Soviet diplomats. They were aware of their comfortable position as they could choose which side of the escalating conflict to support and which one would assure them more benefits. Since April, talks had been going on in Moscow with representatives of Great Britain and France yet no progress was being made as both countries treated them mainly as a kind of demonstration targeting Germany. In actual fact, Stalin had already decided to change the paradigm of the Soviet foreign policy, i.e. initiate cooperation with Hitler. The obstacle was the Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov, a son and brother of rabbis from Białystok born as Meir Wallach, distinguishing himself as a staunch enemy of Nazism and a passionate champion of bringing the USSR closer to western democracies. Already on 15 April 1939 during a sitting of the Politburo of the Bolshevik Party, Stalin rejected Litvinov arguments for an alliance with Great Britain and France. On 3 May 1939, Litvinov was formally dismissed and a purge took place among Soviet diplomats of Jewish origin. Litvinov was now replaced by Stalin’s blind follower, the cynical chair of the Council of People’s Commissars (equivalent of a Prime Minister) Vyacheslav Molotov. Talks went full steam ahead in the last days of July 1939. First, an extensive economic agreement was negotiated, providing for, inter alia, large supplies of Soviet raw materials to Germany. Following that success, the parties agreed to enter into political talks. Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow, and in the night from 23 to 24 August he negotiated a non-aggression pact with the Soviet partners. A more important and sensational part of the agreement was laid down in a secret protocol. It provided for a division of East-Central Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, the sphere of influence of the latter including Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia in Romania. As regards Poland, the Soviet Union additionally committed to invade it and occupy its eastern part up to the line marked by the rivers Narew, Vistula and San.

Thanks to the conscious action of an opposition-minded diplomat from the German embassy in Moscow, the content of the secret protocol was transmitted without delay to US, Italian and French diplomats. The British also had incomplete knowledge about it and it was they that passed on a veiled warning to the Polish ambassador Edward Raczyński who sent it to Warsaw. Unfortunately, Polish authorities at that time had an entirely false image of the Soviets and their politics. Polish intelligence in the USSR ‘got blind’ as a result of the ‘great purges’ of 1937–1938, and minister Beck was most probably surrounded by Soviet agents of influence. As a result, he was not aware of the Kremlin’s changed course towards Germany and he also thought that after Stalin’s great purges the Soviet Union and the Red Army were seriously weakened and de facto unable to launch any large-scale operations. Consequently, he failed to grasp how precarious Poland’s position had become. His optimism was reinforced by the signing of a military alliance with Great Britain on 25 August 1939.

Germany attacked Poland on 1 September 1939. On 3 September, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, which meant that one objective of the Polish foreign policy had been reached, that of not reducing the Polish-German war to a local conflict. Now, in compliance with the military agreements in force, the fighting Poles expected the allies to launch full-scale military operations within 15–16 days. Unfortunately, the allied commands concluded already on 4 September that they would not be able to effectively help Poland and that they would limit themselves to military demonstrations against Germany, focusing on preparations for future military action. That decision was finally confirmed by a conference of French and British Prime Ministers accompanied by highest-ranking commanders taking place in Abbeville on 12 September 1939. Those arrangements were not transmitted to Poland as that could have broken its spirit of resistance. It is known now, however, that the arrangements made in Abbeville were known to Soviet intelligence in no time at all. In that way, the Soviets were assured that the campaign mounted by Poland was doomed and they could safely hit the country from the east. In the morning of 17 September 1939, the Polish ambassador in Moscow Wacław Grzybowski was summoned to appear at the Foreign Affairs Commissariat where a note was read out to him saying that as the Polish state had ceased to exist, the non-aggression pact was not valid anymore and the Soviet army was entering Polish territory in order to protect the population of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. The Soviet note was based on a blatant lie as at the time of the Soviet invasion still around a half of Poland’s territory, including important administrative centres, was not occupied by the Germans and the Polish Government and chief command were present in Poland preparing the defence of the south-eastern part of the country (known as the Romanian Bridgehead). Despite Soviet assurances that the USSR was not involved in a war with Poland, bloody fights were taking place along the entire border, in some locations lasting until the first days of October 1939. The ‘Polesie’ Operational Group led by Gen. Franciszek Kleeberg fighting with Germans and Soviets capitulated on 6 October 1939. The German-Soviet brotherhood in arms was symbolically sealed by a joint victory parade in Brest-Litovsk received by Generals Heinz Guderian and Semyon Krivoshein. It took place as early as 22 September 1939.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, also known as the Stalin-Hitler Pact, paved the way for the latter’s attack on Poland, as it gave him certainty that no real help from the outside would reach Polish territory in the decisive weeks of the campaign. Further, the pact guaranteed Hitler that, not threatened from the east, he would be able to de facto conquer or control the entire continental Europe, install his occupation regimes throughout it and execute the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’. Managed from Moscow, the Comintern ordered communist parties across the world to stop anti-fascist propaganda and change entirely the course towards Germany, now together with the Soviet Union making a ‘camp of global peace’. The Polish state authorities – both when still in the country and later when in accordance with the Polish constitution they began to operate in exile, still enjoying full international recognition – on numerous occasions confirmed a state of war with the Soviet Union. However, they did not make a formal proclamation of a state of war with that state as its allies France and Great Britain remained neutral towards the USSR. Finland’s case was different as on 30 November 1939 it – a part of the Soviet sphere of influence specified in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – was attacked by the USSR and duly protested at the League of Nations, which after considering the complaint on 14 December 1939 stripped the USSR of its membership as an aggressor and called on its member states to aid Finland. In summary, it can be concluded that despite preliminary losses and obstacles, Germany and the Soviet Union in the interwar period became respected members of the international community in their own right yet as totalitarian regimes they betrayed that status by unleashing the most dreadful of wars inflicted on the human race to date.

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JAN RYDEL is a historian and his research areas are Central and Eastern Europe and Polish-German relations in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is the author of ‘Politics of History in Federal Republic of Germany. Legacy – Ideas – Practice’ (2011) and ‘Polish Occupation of North Western Germany. 1945–1948. An Unknown Chapter in Polish- German Relations’ (2000, German edition 2003). Until 2010 he was a researcher and a professor at Jagiellonian University and is currently a professor at the Pedagogical University of Cracow.

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LIST OF REFERENCES

1. Cited after Marek Kornat, ‘Idee i podstawy polityki zagranicznej II Rzeczypospolitej’, in: Marek Kornat, Wojciech Materski, Między pokojem a wojną. Szkice o dyplomacji polskiej, Warsaw 2015, p. 30

On 17 November 1939, the Germans targeted Czech students in response to anti-Nazi demonstrations which were held in Prague. The turbulent events not only inspired the creation of International Students’ Day, but are also inextricably linked to the beginning of the Velvet Revolution 50 years later.

 

The German occupation of Czechoslovakia started even before the beginning of the Second World War. As a result of the Munich Agreement – a failed attempt by Great Britain, France and Italy at appeasing expansionist intentions of Adolf Hitler and Nazi authorities – the northern, southern, and western parts of the country, known as Sudetenland, were ceased to Third Reich in autumn 1938. Few months later, on 15 March 1939 Hitler’s army invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia which, while nominally autonomous, was under Third Reich’s control¹. The move followed the creation of the First Slovak Republic, a client state of Nazi Germany, founded one day before in the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia.

During the first months of the Protectorate, the Czech public turned to passive resistance. Small acts expressing discontent over the loss of independence were observed. Many chose cultural venues to express their patriotic feelings. Performances of national compositions such as Bedřich Smetana’s “Má vlast” (in English: My fatherland)² inspired spontaneous singing of the national anthem³. The increasing displays of national sentiments eventually drew the ire of Nazi officials who soon prohibited singing patriotic songs in public space.

Regardless of official bans new acts of resistance occurred. One of them took place at the first anniversary of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1939 when boycott of all public transportation in Prague was organized. Everyone except the uninformed Germans went on foot for the entire day⁴. According to historian Mary Heimann, this grass-root social initiative was accompanied by flurry of leaflets and handbills suggesting more ways to protest peacefully against the German rule. Some flyers also encouraged to take part in a mass demonstration in Wenceslas Square that was to be held on the most emotive date in the political calendar, Czechoslovak Independence Day on 28 October⁵.

The evening before the demonstration the most popular sites of significance to the Czechoslovak history such as graves and monuments were decorated with flowers. Despite diplomat Jan Masaryk's⁶ pleas in BBC radio broadcast to "the nation" that no risks shall be taken, hundreds of Prague citizens turned out in the Square for peaceful protest. As demonstration was growing in size, protesters became bolder and started to express their patriotic feelings openly, singing the national anthem – in both Czech and Slovak – shouting anti-German slogans and demanding the return of the free Republic. Some groups of students vandalized German storefronts. The Nazis responded violently. German civilian police started to fire to the crowds at random. In result, 15 people were wounded and Václav Sedláček, 22-year old worker was killed. Second victim of the brutal repressions was Jan Opletal, popular medical student who died of injuries few days later.

Opetal’s funeral on November 15 gathered around 3,000 students. At the beginning, the procession, closely monitored by the security police, was peaceful. The situation grew tense as some smaller groups of students started to sing the hymn and patriotic songs and chant provocative slogans. The driver of the car of the Secretary of State Karl Herman Frank was beaten up. The incident maddened Frank who - as some historians suggest - insisted on treating Czechs with firmer hand.

In response to the events, on the night of 16 November 1939 Gestapo raided student dormitories in Prague and Brno arresting hundreds of students and taking many others from their homes. It is estimated that over 1,200 students were deported to Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp⁷. At dawn the next day, German shot nine alleged ringleaders of the demonstrations. Among them were eight students: Jaroslav Klíma, Jan Weinert, Josef Adamec, Jan Černý, Marek Frauwirth, Bedřich Koula, Václav Šafránek, František Skorkovský, as well as Professor Josef Matoušek. All Czech universities and institutes were closed; initially for three years, eventually till the end of the war – a move affecting nearly 20,000 students and university teachers. On 18 November, the Protectorate president Emil Hácha appealed not to engage in “senseless” and irresponsible resistance to the occupying German powers anymore, “lest Czechoslovakia face the same destruction as Poland”⁸.

November student protests were to be the last major Czech demonstration against the Protectorate government, but their victims and the determination in resistance against the Nazis were not to be forgotten. Two years later members of the Czechoslovak Army troops residing in England, including some of the former Prague students who managed to flee from the Protectorate, convinced student organizations of fourteen nations (including Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Greece and Poland) to honour Prague students and commemorate the tragic events by establishing 17 November the annual International Students’ Day. Many universities in Britain even interrupted their classes that year to read the proclamation and therefore to pay homage to the executed Czech students.

After the war, 17 November became a national holiday in Czechoslovakia. During the Cold War, the communist regime used the International Students’ Day for its own propaganda purposes but since the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, the commemorations of 17 November were only formulaic. Yet, the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Nazi atrocities in 1989 turned out to be exceptional. On 17 November, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a 15,000-strong student crowd assembled at the Albertov Campus of Charles University in Prague, expressing their criticism and discontent towards the hated regime, demanding democratization and reforms. Josef Šárka, a participant of the Jan Opletal’s funeral fifty years earlier, expressed his support by addressing the crowds at the university campus: “I am glad you are fighting for the same thing as we fought for back then.”⁹ The students continued their demonstration, marching towards Wenceslas Square while singing the national anthem. They were then ambushed and beaten up by riot police. The police action triggered few days of protests that turned out to be the spark which ignited the Velvet Revolution, leading to the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

Nowadays, 17 November is still a state holiday in Czechia and Slovakia although it is officially known and celebrated as the Day of Struggle for Freedom and Democracy. It commemorates both the anti-Nazi protests and the 1989 events.

The International Students’ Day is still observed on 17 November.

 

NOTES

1. Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia. The state that failed, Yale University Press 2009, p. 169.

2. “Má vlast” (My fatherland in Czech) is a set of six symphonic poems composed between 1874 and 1879 by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. Each piece refers to Bohemian heritage, landscape, history or legends.

3. William Mahoney, The history of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Greenwood 2011, p. 173.

4. Peter Demetz, „Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45: Memories and History, Terror and Resistance, Theater and Jazz, Film and Poetry, Politics and War, New York 2008, p. 89.

5. Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia. The state that.., p. 250.

6. Jan Masaryk was a prominent Czechoslovak diplomat and politician; son of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia. Since 1925 he had been an ambassador to UK, but resigned in protest against the occupation of Sudetenland. When a Czechoslovak government-in-exile was formed in Britain in 1940, he became the Foreign Minister. He remained in his post after the end of the war – even after the Czech coup of February 1948 in which the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, with Soviet backing, assumed undisputed control over the government of Czechoslovakia. Soon after the coup, on 10 March 1948, he was found dead, probably murdered on behest of the communist authorities.

7. Peter Demetz,. „Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45…., p. 136.

8. Brian Kennedy, The 17th of November: Remembering Jan Opletal, Martyr of an occupied nation, Radio Prague International Broadcast [Archive 17-11-2005].

9. Derek Sayer, Prague at the End of History, „New Perspectives” Vol. 27, No. 2/2019, p. 150.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia. The state that failed, Yale University Press 2009

Jerzy Tomaszewski, Czechy i Słowacja, Warsaw 2006

Brian Kennedy, The 17th of November: Remembering Jan Opletal, Martyr of an occupied nation, Radio Prague International Broadcast [Archive 17-11-2005] link https://www.radio.cz/en/section/panorama/the-17th-of-november-remembering-jan-opletal-martyr-of-an-occupied-nation [retrieved 10.11.2019]

William M. Mahoney, The history of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Greenwood 2011

Derek Sayer, Prague at the End of History, „New Perspectives” Vol. 27, No. 2/2019, pp. 149-160

Peter Demetz, „Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45: Memories and History, Terror and Resistance, Theater and Jazz, Film and Poetry, Politics and War, New York 2008

In the early hours of Friday morning, 1 September 1939, the German battleship Schleswig – Holstein fired first bullets at the Polish garrison located at the Westerplatte peninsula. The attack and the following Polish fierce resistance constituted what is now considered to be the first battle of the Second World War. But other acts of war unrolled almost simultaneously also in other parts of Poland – including the “Polish Guernica” or the air raid on Wieluń, the first attack of the Second World War involving civilian casualties.

In the interwar period, the Polish town of Wieluń lied about 20 km from the border with the Third Reich and was inhabited by around 16 000 people, including a sizable Jewish minority. With its brewery, two mills, bakery, power plant, brickyard, sawmills and sugar factory at the outskirts of the city, Wieluń had neither industrial nor strategically relevant investments. It resembled many other Polish rural municipalities relying on agriculture, craft and trade.

The peaceful existence of the town was brutally interrupted during the early hours of 1 September 1939. “I was woken up by the roar of sirens and the roar of planes. I didn't know what it was. I sat on the bed and asked my mother what is [going on]. My mother said: You know, baby, it's probably a test, but you better dress up”¹ – recalls Zofia Burchacińska who in 1939 was 11 years old and remains one of the last living eyewitnesses of the bombing. Her account can be seen in the documentary Wieluń. 13 cegieł [Wieluń. 13 bricks], along with that of Eugeniusz Kołodziejczyk, 12 years old at the time, who remembers calling: Dad, Dad! I can see the planes! Dad, Dad, bombs are falling while drawing lines on the sky. “[That’s when] the roar started. Hell had begun”².

One of the first bombs was dropped on the hospital visibly marked with a Red Cross sign. The raid lasted from the early morning until 2 pm. During that time 70% of the city was destroyed, including the synagogue, church and innumerable residential buildings. Between 700 to 2000 civilians were killed – the first civilian casualties of the Second World War (the exact number is unknown due to difficulties with identification).

The precise time of the bombing remains a topic of discussion. According to the accounts of the town’s inhabitants and of the Polish border guards, the first bombs fell at 4:40 am – five minutes before the first shots on Westerplatte. This would make the attack on Wieluń the beginning of the Second World War. The Luftwaffe documents and several other testimonies, however, indicate 5:40 am as the time when the air raid started. Some historians attribute this discrepancy to a summer time-difference between Poland and Germany (whose occurrence in itself is also being debated); others point to possible mistakes in witness accounts.

The rationale for choosing Wieluń for the attack is also an assumption for speculation. Since almost no strategically important sites were located within the town, some researches claim that the air ride was supposed to constitute a safe “real life test” for the Luftwaffe new dive bombers. Others note that the German army might have wanted to destroy the town’s train station and the nearby railroad tracks situated relatively close to the German-Polish border. Nevertheless, due to the sheer magnitude of the attack, many suspect that the main goal of the bombing might have been psychological – to create chaos and panic among the civilians and to diminish morale within the Polish Army.

Despite the aforementioned debates, Wieluń remains the first assault involving civilian casualties of the Second World War, and many see it as a symbol of Polish suffering during the war. As such, it is being compared to Guernica – a town destroyed in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, no less but by the same Luftwaffe forces under the command of the field marshal Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen.

 

1. Polish original: Rano obudził mnie ryk syren i ryk samolotów. Nie wiedziałam co to jest. Usiadłam na łóżku i spytałam mama co to. Mama powiedziała wiesz dziecko to chyba próby alarm ale lepiej się ubierz; at 10 min 50 sec: Wieluń. 13 cegieł, dir. Sławomir Górski, 2009

2. Polish original: Tata Tata, widzę samoloty, Tata tata bomby lecą. Zrobił się huk, zrobiło się piekło; at 14 min 58 sec: Wieluń. 13 cegieł, dir. Sławomir Górski, 2009

 

Bibliography:

Tadeusz Olejnik, Wieluń. Dzieje miasta 1793-1945, part II, Łódź-Wieluń, 2008

Tadeusz Olejnik, Wieluńska hekatomba. Początek wojny totalnej, Wieluń 2014

Wieluń był pierwszy. Bombardowania lotnicze miast regionu łódzkiego we wrześniu 1939 r., ed. Janusz Wróbel, Łódź 2009

Wieluń. 13 cegieł, dir. Sławomir Górski, 2009