A murder of crows: the 1930's dark revisionists team up
World War Wednesday: 1930s
A common mistake of the “History Channel” method of storytelling is to focus on Adolf Hitler to such an extent that one could be forgiven for knowing nothing about the Nazis’ European allies, other than Italy. These were regimes that chose, of their own free will, to back the Nazi reordering of Europe and join the Axis alliance. Rabid and official antisemitism—unmitigated, vulgar Jew-hatred—was not a deal breaker for them. Just as Nazism was more than just Hitler, the Allies fought more than just Germany. Ignoring this fact can create the impression that the European members of the Axis were mindless satellites or victims of geography. For decades, for instance, Austria tried to portray itself as the first country violated by a Nazi invasion, rather than admitting the reality: Austrians largely welcomed union with Germany.
The facts of the case are damning of the 1930s: the Axis was a coalition of the willing. During that decade, debates over “right” and “left” were secondary to a shared hunger for territorial revisionism and revolutionary change. There was no ideological firebreak against imperialism.
Romania was Germany’s most significant military ally on the Eastern Front. It did not join because it was forced; rather, it fought for the same reasons as Germany: to recover territory it had lost. If that meant joining Hitler, the Romanians were on board. Heading west we run in Hungary, led by Admiral Horthy, the betrayer of the last Habsburg emperor, the Blessed Karl of Austria, last King of Hungary. Horthy ruled Hungary was clearly a revisionist and revolutionary power. Its primary goal was the reversal of the Treaty of Trianon where they lost the lands they ruled under the Habsburg empire to the non-Hungarian minorities who got their own countries after World War One. The Hungarians dreamed of restoring a 19th-century imperialist ethnic hierarchy in a 20th-century world of national self-determination; the Axis was to be Horthy’s vehicle for doing so. And finally Bulgaria wanted to turn the clock back to 1913 and the Second Balkan War. They joined the Hitler to take back the lands they believed were robbed from them in the 1910s by Greece and Yugoslavia.
And yet, perhaps the most important example of the 1930s black hole that vanished ideological barriers was Joseph Stalin’s decision to join the Nazi invasion of Poland—before launching his own wars to redraw Eastern Europe in the shape of the old Russian Empire only shaded a Marxist red. By supplying the German army’s invasions of Western Europe from the summer of 1939 to the summer of 1941—almost two years—the Soviet Union was the most important material ally and supporter of Nazi Germany. The Soviets helped Germany start a war that would turn genocidal and kill tens of millions, only to become the greatest victims themselves.
It was a decade where the option for tyranny was a freely chosen European phenomenon. When the pursuit of national grievance or revolutionary utopia was allowed to supersede the sanctity of the individual, the result was a functional convergence of the so-called right and left. The heirs of Lenin, the monarchists of Bulgaria and Romania, the treasonous autocrat of Hungary, and the original fascists in Italy too, all saw in Hitler’s mania an opportunity for themselves; one that was too hot to ignore. And they all burned.
