David Olusoga & Casper W. Erichsen - The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide

In the late nineteenth century Germany was straining at the boundaries of its borders. Most of the Global South had been carved up by European powers. Britain, France, Italy all had their Empires. German capitalists needed more markets and more natural resources. They too wanted an empire that they could subjegate and pillage, like the other industrial powers. Five thousand miles from Germany, Namibia was to become the African country were German empire building began, and it became an experiment in racist control, genocidal war and colonial rule. The consequences for the people of Namibia, tribes like the Herero, Tibooi Nama and Bethanie Nama was appalling. 

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's remarkable history is a study of this history. But they are making a wider argument. What happened in Nambia was a trial for the Holocaust and the Nazis. As the authors say:

What Germany's armies and civilian administrators did in Namibia is today a lost history, but the Nazis knew it well. When the Schutztruppe attempted to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia a century ago, Hitler was a schoolboy of fifteen. In 1904, he lived in a continent that was electrified by the stories of German geroism and African barbarism emanating from what was then German South-West Africa.

Indeed Hitler was "closely associated" with one of the leading figures in the genocide. When Hitler joined the ranks for the far-right in 1922, it was "under the command of the charismatic Gerneral Franz von Epp, a violent, racist, military leader who firmly believed in "lebensraum". One of the startling things about this book is how words that readers will associated with the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War were first used in Nambia in the 1900s. Lebensraum was a term coined to justify the need of Germany to expand and build colonies. Konzentrationslager, the German translation of the English term Concentration Camp - first used in the Boer War - was used to describe the slave-labour camps in Namibia.

When "war" broke out between the German military and the Namibian people, it took place on racial lines:

From the start, the outburst of intense fury againt the Herero was channelled and manipulated by an array of nationalist and pro-colonial societies. Along with the right-wing press, they set out to portray the Herero as savages, their uprising motivated by innate brutality. Ignoring the facts, they repeatedly claimed that the Herero had launched an indiscriminate racial war and that, as savages, they fought without restraint. Many newspapers also carried reports of atrocities - most exaggerated, some entirely fabricated - claiming that a number of German children had been killed, that white women had been raped and that some of the male settlers who had been killed had had their noses and testicles cut off.

The racial war against the Nambian people was carried out in the brutal fashion. Those in command were imbued with hardened nationalist and racist views. On his way to Africa, von Epp wrote, "The world is being divided... With time we will inevitably need more space; only by the sword will we be able to get it. It will be up to our generation to achieve this. It is a matter of existence." 

But least that we conclude this was only a German problem, note that another volunteer for action in Namibia, "regarded the recent history of the United States as a model of how Germany might transform her own colonial frontiers". Economic "development" in the colony went alongside the "extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples". The camps were sources of slave labour for the colony, including for industrial corporations as well as individual families. But, it is crucial to emphasise, they were not work camps. Writing about one of the colony's heads, von Lindequist, the authors contrast the British in South Africa with Germany in Namibia:

Von Lindequist's promise to the Herero - that their suffering in the concentration camps might come to an end if their 'compatriots, who are still in the bush' surredered - bears the hallmarks of Kichener's earlier strategy. Yet there was one crucial difference. In the Boer War the concentration camps had been part of a strategy aimed at ending an ongoing insurgency. In German South-West Africa, the Herero were defeated when von Linsequist took command. As he admitted in mid-1906, they had no ability and no desire to fight. The concentration camps were not part of a military strategy.

The "defeat" however of the Namibian tribes came at a cost for Germany. Indeed the most inspiring chapters of The Kaiser's Holocaust are the remarkable story of the extended, guerilla war that fought the German army to a standstill. A war that was not marked by atrocity on the part of the Nama and Herero people, but rather the opposite. The Namibian fighters in fact treated women and children with kindness and did not arbitarily kill or rape them. Their warfare was directed against the male settlers and the army sent against them. Its a remarkable story of rebellion and war, against a foe unable to imagine that poorly armed black people were able to fight them to a standstill.

But eventually, by subterfuge and starvation, the Namibians were defeated. Led into concentration camps while being promised peace and relocation, they were taken to brutal torture and death. The lessons from German South-West Africa taught a new generation of far-right nationalists. Events in African were a blueprint for the Nazis own behaviour:

Soldiers and scientists whose careers began on the pastoral deserts of South-West Africa or in the killing fields of East Africa, Togo and Cameroon were to play leading roles in the Nazi tragedy. 

and

When designing the lasws needed to create the 'racial state'... the Nazis found a number of definiations and legal precedents, along with a whole lexicon of racial terminology, in legislation passed in Germany's former colonies.

The authors also show how the pattern that led to the "Kaiser's Holocaust" was also repeated in Eastern Europe as the needs of their racist programmes clased with the military needs of the Nazi economy:

The desire to exterminate or expel their racial enemies ran counter to a growing and desperate need for labour and concerns for the well-being of the fighting men. Tese contradictions were never fully solved, but as in South-West Africa, one solution was the creation of forced labour camps in which labour becames a means of liquidation.

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's book is a remarkable piece of history. It rescues a forgotten period of colonialism from deliberate obscurity. It reminds us again of the bloody reality of colonial rule, and it shows how Nazi ideology has a long and terrible antecedent. But it tells us something else. Reading this book at the same time as the Israeli state continued its murderous assault on the people of Gaza, the book reminds us that settler colonialism always rests on racist ideas and can have genocidal conclusions. If there is one other thing to remember, with this in mind, it is that the resistance of the people of South-West Africa was brave and principled, and that in Germany at least a minority on the left did seek to highlight and stop the war. Tragically that was not enough to stop the Kaiser's Holocaust. This book is an essential read for anyone trying to understand twentieth, and twenty-first, century history.

Related Reviews

Achebe - An Image of Africa
Hamouchene & Sandwell (eds) - Dismantling Green Colonialism
Lindqvist - 'Exterminate All The Brutes'
Pakenham - The Scramble for Africa
Rüger - Heligoland
Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Rodney - The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World

Karin Wieland - Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin & a century in two lives

Marlene Dietrich was one of the great artists, actors and performers of the early twentieth century. Her life was shaped by the twists and turns of the German Weimar period, when poverty, capitalist crisis and radical politics shaped a generation. Whatever the particular nature of her beliefs, Dietrich was one who was unafraid to call out things she disagreed with. While she could be a problem to work with, and her casual dismissal of lovers and relationships left many shocked and confused, she was, no doubt on the right side of history.

Leni Riefensthal an admirer of Hitler, a calculating careerist who saw in the Nazi regime a chance to become close to power, to advance herself and to share in the wealth and adoration that went with it. At times this meant she literally used Gypsy prisoners from concentration camps as film extras, before returning them to their inevitable deaths. That she herself was playing a romanticised gypsy in the film being made only heightens the horror. 

Karin Wieland's double biography tries to tie these two individuals together. It is a difficult task. There is little or no physical overlap between the two, though a photo of them together is included. Instead what Wieland is trying to do is to tell the story of the 20th century through the lives of her two subjects. As such the book ends up falling between biography and history and getting neither particularly well. 

What the reader gets from this book will depend on their particular interests. I approached it hoping to learn more about Dietrich, who for me is the enigmatic singer and actor, who threw her lot in with Hollywood and left German as the Nazis rose. Her principled refusal to return to Germany and act in Nazi films, despite her perennial lack of money, was a genuine blow to the propaganda efforts of Hitler's regime. As a result of this, and her choice to become the entertainer of choice for the US military, sparing no effort or personal discomfort to sing, perform and cheer up the troops on the front lines, felt more like a powerful effort at anti-fascism. But Wieland also makes it clear that Dietrich also found a renewed love of applause and adoration. Here she was at her best - not the leading lady from Hollywood, but the Weimar era cabaret superstar who had a instinctive ability to speak to the crowds. 

On the other hand I had little interest in Riefenshtahl who, in my opinion had little talent, and whose close links to Nazism and Nazi leaders was carefully hidden through post-war manipulation. While she clearly had some talents as a director, it is also abundantly clear that these talents came through because of a close identification with the Nazi aesthetic cultivated by Hitler and Goebbels. 

I was, however, intrigued to see that Wieland pulls no punches in retelling Riefenshtahl's career. While there's less material that for Dietrich, she draws out the essential emptiness of Riefenshtahl's life. At the same time Wieland makes it very clear just how close to fascism and the Nazis the filmmaker was. Her post-war career is shaped by the same controlling, manipulative behaviour and a singular failure to atone for her sins. 

Unfortunately there is not enough of a parallel between the two figures to tell the story of the century. Indeed Dietrich isn't enough of a principled political thinker and Riefenshtahl's too limited an actor and performer to make the lives parallel. They just happened to live the same lives - with little or no overlap. At the end of her life Dietrich comes across as a sad, lonely and impoverished former great - someone who made some amazing films, with personal determination and principle. But she was at least a great performer and actor in her time. And after the war Dietrich was at least obsessed with trying to understand and atone for her native country's sins. Riefenshtahl comes across as a pig who got away with a host of crimes, and was accepted back by the establishment as soon as it could.

Readers wanting to learn more about either figure will find lots of material in this book of interest. But it failed too offer any insights into the period, or real connection between the two.

Related Reviews

Evans - Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich
Boyd - Travellers in the Third Reich

Lyndal Roper - Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War

Lyndal Roper is one of the most prominent historians of Germany in the Reformation era. Her books include an excellent biography of Martin Luther, which I reviewed here. Just in time for the 500th anniversary her monumental history of the German Peasants' War has been published. It has been eagerly anticipated by me and many others interested in the period. 

Roper argues that understanding the Reformation, and its "possiblities, as well as its limits" cannot be done without an understanding of the German Peasants' War. But likewise the War cannot be understood without knowing "the heady atmosphere of religious excitment in which it took place". The book begins with the context for the rebellion - the religious turmoil and the conditions of oppression and exploitation of the peasants. It was a very different world. One where

animals such as oxen, horses, cows, pigs, sheep and poultry lived closely with people, and where the vagaries of the weather mattered in a way that modern generations have often forgotten. The relationship between labour, harvest, and food was obvious, rather tahn mediated by powerful firms and complex industrial processes. The energy to drive machines came from water, from wood and from charcoal and it was clear who owned these resources and evident when they restricted access to them.

Roper casts peasant life (and struggles) in its ecological context - referencing the way they relied on, understood and shaped their landscape. She understands that their relationship to the land was more than a negative one, and she criticises contemporaries, even radicals such as Michael Gaismair, when they don't grasp the peasant ecological reality. 

Roper also shows how the context for the rebellion, and the Reformation, was a slowly changing world. Referring to the rebels' grievances she says: 

The sense of exploitation is unmistakable in these grievances, as is the sheer drudgery of agricultural labour. And yet the precise cause of the misery remains intangible, a fact that may well have increased the peasants' anger, while also making it harder to negotiate in the time honoured way, becamse more than just specific practices were at stake. Though they doubtless idealised a golden age that had never existed, peasants were complaining that relationships which had formerly been based on mutual respect had become matters of compulsion. The entire system had become more complex because of its growing entanglement in an economy where many owned rural rights.

The close links between exploitation of the peasants' labour, their ecological context and the rebellion's demands are drawn out well. As Roper writes in an illuminating sentence "for the peasants, the land was a working environment; for the lords it was a locale of peasure - and a resource to be exploited for profit." 

The rebellion condensed all the anger and frustrations that the peasants' were experiencing. Roper's book explores these well, but its strength is her understanding that the rebellion arose out of the context of the Reformation and a changing economy, but then went on to pose alternatives. The Reformation, she writes, "provided a set of ideas shown that such [existing] arrangements were 'not Christian'. They had to be transformed." In the early weeks of the rising, "lordship was exposed as a bond not of affection but of domination". Consequently, the "whole social structure therefore fissured under the impact of the peasants' revolt."

What was the alternative? Much is made, rightly in my opinion, of the politics of the more utopian minded of the radical leaders - Thomas Müntzer and Michael Gaismair in particular. But running through the peasant demands from 1524 and 1525 is a vision of a world turned both upsidedown - there would be no serfs, priests would be elected, taxes would be raised locally and controlled demoncratically. But it would also be a world that functioned in a new way. The vision was not of an anarchist utopia with no leaders, but one of a "new kind of authority in which men of respect, locally known and chosen, would have power". But what was this power? Roper suggests it would have been very different to the power known from feudalism:

It took imagination to conceive of a world without the lordship that the peasants knew. They probably did not want to overturn the entire system of authority, or at least not at first, nut merely to change the system of landlordship. And yet their slogn, "We want to have no lords". addressed everyone - peasants, miners and townsfolk alike - because everyone had some experience of lordship in its different forms or could tell a story about the overbearing behaviour of some lord or other. In its place they wanted a society based on mutuality, brotherhood and trust... they began to envision a world without the familiar semifeudal structures, with a new kind of rulership that would give them agency and the power to decide.

It was a great vision, and the ruling class had to destroy it by drowning it in blood. In her grasp of this, and other key dynamics of the period and the rebellion, Roper's book is exemplary. 

Roper writes from a feminist viewpoint,and she does her best to highlight the central role of women in the rebellion. While we know only a few names of women involved in the rebellion, Roper does give us many examples of their anonymous involvement. I didn't always agree with the conclusions that arose from this viewpoint, such as her suggestion that the anonymous author of the remarkable revolutionary pamphlet To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry is writing an explicity "male vision" of revolution. Here the problem is partly language. "Brotherly love" and "brother" in the context of mass rebellion, may well be meant to include women. But it might simply not have mattered to the ordinary women and men who were engaged in a revolutionary struggle and were constructing their own "vision" and challenging those who were holding on to older stereotypes and prejudices. 

Roper makes some important points about sexual violence in the conflict. She notes that the threat of such violence was used by some of the peasants against the wives and daughters of the lords, their enemies. But she concludes "the peasant armies do not appear to have used rape as a tool of domination". The counter-revolutionary forces on the other hand, did use such violence on a large scale. Given the accusations levelled against the peasants by their contemporary enemies, and ones since, this is an important corrective. 

Roper's argues that the peasants' "ideal of brotherhood created potential kinship even with the lords, constraining the wish to make the enemy's women bear one's children." I think this gets closer to an understanding of the Peasants' War as a revolutionary movement, motivated by ideals. The discipline of its participants in the peasant armies arises out of common radical visions and politics.

But its on the question of revolution that Roper is less clear. This is particularly obvious in her critique of Marx and Engels. 

She goes so far as to say that "an unwillingness to theorise how peasants engaged in revolution was one of Marxism's great failures". This is a unhelpful, and inaccurate, generalisation. In fact Marx's analysis of the peasantry is remarkably useful for understanding the failure of the peasants to achieve their aims in 16th century Germany. Roper dismisses Marx's comment that the peasantry is a "sack of potatoes". She does this because she understands it as meaning that "peasants are all the same". But Marx was actually discussing the economic reality of a peasant economy,  that it is made up of multitudes of independent producers. Following the "potato" quote, Marx wrote:

Insofar as millions of [peasant] families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. 

The differing interests of the peasant households would inevitably lead to tensions and contradictions that would undermine any victory over the feudal lords, unless there could be a breakthrough elsewhere in society. But in 16th century Germany, the economic base in the urban areas was insufficiently developed to allow the urban producers to build a society based on collective production. Thus the best that the peasants could hope for was to win some temporary space and defeat particular lords, but they could not hope to defeat feudalism and institute a new social order. This is the source of Engels' powerful passage about Thomas Münzter being a leader ahead of his time. He could imagine the future, but not be in a position to win it, but nevertheless be compelled to fight for it. 

Marx and Engels' argument that the peasants could not win in 1525, was not because they were "mesmerised by industrial production", but because he and Marx understood that it would take further economic development at the base of European society before a system of general abundance and sustainability could be created. Roper's attacks on Marxism here felt like they were responding more to the crude economistic Marxism of the East German historians than the actual ideas of Marx and Engels.

When I set out to write this post I hoped that I wouldn't end up writing the sort of review that just denounces an author for getting Marx completely wrong. I have probably failed in that ambition. So I want to emphasise that how remarkable I think that Lyndal Roper's book is. Even for those of us who have spent years reading about the subject she has found a wealth of new material. I read and re-read sections with great excitement and found fresh insights in every chapter and learnt a great deal. I should also add that I think the book is beautifully produced and illustrated. If I disagree with her I do share Roper's inspiration at the peasants' desire to fight for a better world. So while I disagree with Roper's theoretical framing I hope people will read and enjoy Summer of Fire and Blood. 

Related Reviews

Roper - Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
Scribner & Benecke - The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints
Bak (ed) - The German Peasant War of 1525
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Bax - The Peasants War in Germany
Engels - The Peasant War in Germany

Franz Mehring - Absolutism & Revolution in Germany 1525-1848

Franz Mehring was one of the most fascinating characters to come out of the great period of central European Marxist thought in the early 20th century. Initially an social democrat, he developed into a serious Marxist thinker and historian. When I originially picked up this book I assumed it was a single work, but in fact it is an edited volume of works about the history of Germany, written as educational booklets for the Marxist schools that were part of German Social Democracy in the 1900s. 

I was particularly interested in his writing on the German Reformation, "and its consequences", which built upon the insights and approach taken by Friedrich Engels in his writing on the German Peasants' War. Disappointingly for me, this is the shortest section, but nonetheless it is packed with insights. Especially around the consequences of the counter-revolutionary defeat of the peasantry. 

Mehring writes about the defeat, in a characteristicly colourful way, "the blood of the peasants flowed in rivers on German soil... and yet, in the long run, this fearful defeat did not worsen the position of the peasant class." He continues by explaining how all the other classes, "the clergy, the nobility and the towns" were victims of the revolution and its defeat, and continues:

Thus only the princes had any real advantages from the pesasants war. They seized the property of the Church; a gertaer or a lesser part of the nobility had to recognise their authority, and the fines from the towns flowed into their coffers. Apart from the secular principalities there were still, it is true, ecclesiastical rulers, town republics, and sovereigh Counts and Lords. But in gernal historical development in Germany was driving towards provincial centralisation and the subordination of all other estates of the empre by the princes.

He then goes on to say, "the German Reformation, after the revolutionary fire had been extinguished with the blood of the peasants, became a campaign of robbery and plunder by the German princes and their ever growing emancipation from Imperial authority". It is this that shapes the following centuries of politics for Germany, and these then form the basis for Mehrings remaining accounts in the book.

Some of this is difficult for readers not seeped in Germany history. I found the chapter on the evolution of the "Brandenburg-Prussian State" interesting, but hard work. This looks at the series of rulers of that crucial German state, such as the "enlightened despot" Frederick II, who was trapped in a situation where the economic evolution of his state did not match that of comparable monarchs across Europe. The importance of the French Revolution for Mehring is that it both demonstrates a way forward for the masses, and is the hammer that smashes upon the German anvil transforming Germany and shaping the outlook of its rulers. It was the French Revolution that "restored the vitality of a Germany that had defenerted in the swap of feudalism". By the 1830s, the situation was smoothering for the German bourgeoisie who were trapped by the older fetters of feudal relations, and by the realities of wider European politics. Mehring writes:

It was the renown, and the undoing, of this class [the German bourgeoisie] that it could win itse revolutiion gloriously enough in the cloudy heights of literature and philosophy, but never on level ground with bare fists and cold steel.

That said, the beginnings of capitalism within Germany at this time were seeing immense fortunes made for a tiny minority on the backs of hard labour for the masses. Mehring documents these realities, and the early struggles of the German proletariat. "The original accumulation of capital was only carried out in Germany in blood, misery and shame." 

The final section, and probably the most important, of Mehring's book deals with the 1848 revolution and the class struggles within. Again, this will introduce many names and events that the non-German reader might be unfamiliar with, but the chapter can be read as a sweeping introduction to the class tensions within the 1848 revolution as it evolved in Germany. But betraying its origin in works presented to students of the Social Democratic Party's internal schools, the book fails to really teach the modern reader the events and how they concluded. I found it useful and interesting, but intend to go away and study the period more, before returning to Mehring's analysis. I suspect that his detailed study of the class conflict and tensions within the revolution will help readers understand more general history's of the period. That said, there's much here, and this is an excellent example of the Marxist method in history.

Related Reviews

Mehring - Karl Marx: The Story of his Life

Greg Steinmetz - The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The life and times of Jacob Fugger

In 1526, the Tyrolean radical Michael Gaismair, wrote a remarkable document known as The Landesordnung. In it, he outlined how a radicaly democratic society could function, based on social justice, religious freedom, equality and, through curbing the actions of the rich and powerful. In it, he demanded that the mines, an important part of the Austrian economy, be bought under democratic control and taken off the likes the Fugger bankers. They, and their kin, had

forfeited their right to them for they [bought] them with money acquired by unjust usury in order to shed human blood. Thus also they deceived the common man and worker by paying his wages in defective goods…raised the price of spices and other products by buying up and hoarding stocks. They are to blame for the devaluation of the coinage, and the mints have to pay their inflated price for silver. They have made the poor pay for it, their wages have been lowered in order that the smelters can make some profit after buying the ore. They have raised the prices of all consumer goods after they gained a monopoly, and thus burdened the whole world with their unchristian usury. 

Sadly this quote doesn't appear in Greg Steinmetz' account of the life and times of Jacob Fugger. But having read it, one can certainly sympathise with Gaismair and the rebellious peasants and miners who flocked to his call. Fugger was indeed one of the richest men ever to have lived, and as Steinmetz's account makes clear Fugger was uniquely for his time, adept at seeing business opportunities and using his existing wealth and power to get further wealth and power. He counted among his clients kings, monarchs and popes, and he played politics like a giant game of chess across Europe all in order to further his own ambitions.

Unfortunately Steinmetz's book suffers from superficial analysis and simplistic comment. Writing of the great German radical Thomas Müntzer, Steinmetz says that he "was the most dangerous to Fugger. It was not because he had the most guns but because his populist agenda held enormous appeal". Müntzer did indeed rail against "the profiteering evildoers", but then so did many others. Müntzer was a threat because his brand of radicalism was linking up with a mass movement - not because he was uniquely radical. The revolutionary movement of 1525 was, after all, a massive challenge to all the powerful and weathly. 

Steinmetz charts Fugger's rise to power, and in particular highlighting the way he was able to extract wealth from labourers and use that to strengthen his hand. It is notable, and Marxists might appreciate knowning it, that the world's first capitalists and bankers were as ruthless as others. Despite the lack of serious competitors, Fugger seems personally driven to accumulate wealth for the sake of it. Even Steinmetz who is clearly sympathetic to the banker's lot is forced to acknowledge that Fugger's methods were devious and nasty. In the case of the repression of the peasantry and their allies, Steinmetz notes that Fugger "sponsored" "savagery".

Despite these insights, Steinmetz tends to give Fugger far more credit than he is due. He is portrayed as the figure who personally drives forward key moments in central European history. Steinmetz doesn't appear to be engaging in hyperbole when he improbably claims, that Fugger

roused commerce from its medieval slumber by persuading the pope to life the ban on moneylending. He helped save free enterprise from an early grave by financing the army that won the German Peasants; War, the first great clash between capitalism and communism. He broke the back of the Hanseatic League... He engineered a shady financial scheme that unitnetniotnally provoked Luther to write his Ninety-Five Theses... he most likely funded Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe.

Like Brecht, we might wonder who else built Thebes of the Seven Gates? The problem is that this account fails to acknowledge the very real changes taking place within the economic base of European society in the early 16th century. The changes that were driving all sorts of economic, political and theological changes and opening up a space for others. By placing these changes in the hands of one individual (to be fair Steinmetz does say "helped") the authors is simply engaging in that favourite bourgeois fantasy of the individual discontected from society and the wider world. 

Tragically there are no modern biographies of Jacob Fugger, and Steinmetz has at least written one that covers the key moments of Fugger's life. Sadly its not without fault. It also has some annoying mistakes. Fugger claims that Müntzer was finally defeated in battle at Mühlhausen "a small city Müntzer gad seuzed and sought to run as a communist utopia". But this is wrong. The battle took place at Frankenhausen, and is today marked by a significant museum.

Greg Steinmetz's biography of Fugger will likely have a renewed readership as a result of the anniversary of the Peasants' War. It is perhaps most charitable to say that it is the sort of biography you would expect "a securities analyst for a money management firm in New York" to write, and use it as a jumping off point for more serious studies elsewhere.

Related Reviews

Klaassen - Michael Gaismair: Revolutionary and Reformer
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Baylor - The German Reformation & the Peasants' War: A Brief History with Documents
Drummond - The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer

Rudolf Hoess - Commandant of Auschwitz

This is, in everyway possible an utterly repugnant book. I must start out by saying two things. Firstly none of the proceeds from this publication go to Hoess' family. The publishers say that royalties go the "help the few survivors from the Auschwitz camps". Secondly, reading this book is an insight into the minds of the figures who made the Holocaust happen. Written as it while under arrest and facing trial for crimes against humanity, it is naturally distorted and with much self-justification. The shocking thing is that Hoess is surprisingly unashamed of his actions.

Hoess starts his book with his childhood, in a strictly Catholic family. He was himself expected to become a priest, and his parents seem strict, but highly moral. He says, without any sense of self-irony, that "I was taught that my highest duty was to help those in need". From his early life he believed in the importance of service, duty and obeyance of orders from those in superior positions. He eventually served in the First World War in Iraq, and like many Nazis, he saw action in the Freikorps. This led to his imprisonment for his role in the murder of a far-right figure who was believed to have betrayed another nationalist to the authorities. Following his imprisonment, Hoess who was already a Nazi member, lived in a far-right rural commune, until the new Nazi regime found him a position in the Concentration Camp system. Hoess' knowledge and contact with leading Nazis in the aftermath of WW1 say him rise quickly - as did his commitment to the cause, and his organisational skills.

This background is important. Partly because it is important to understand the trajectory that Hoess took to get his position runing Auschwitz. Mostly however it ensures that the reader understands that Hoess was a committed Nazi. He wasn't in charge of the world's most appalling death camp because he was good at organisation. He was in charge because he was committed to Nazi ideology and to following the orders of the regime's leaders. 

According to the Auschwitz museum, about 1.1 million people died in the camp. Most of these died while Hoess was in charge. It is impossible then for the reader to be anything but shocked by Hoess' comments. He says, for instance, of his work in Auschwitz:

I though that the construction and completion of the camp itself were more than enough to keep me occupied, but this first progress report served only to set in motion an endless and unbroken chain of fresh tasks and further projects. From the very beginning I was so absorbed, I mist say obsessed, with my task that every fresh difficulty only increased my zeal. I was determined that nothing should get me down. My pride would not allow it. I lived only for my work.

"I lived only for my work" in the death machine that was Auschwitz is such an extraordinary statement that it takes the readers breath away. With paragraph's like the above, it can seem that Hoess is trying to depict himself as a technical functionary, obsessed with the details of the "machine" but unconnected to the wider murder of the camp. Indeed, Hoess's anger at the extreme Nazism of the Der Stürmer newspaper, the newspaper that was avidly read by SS staff in the camp for its extreme antisemitism, is because it undermined the proper functioning of the camp and "far from serving serious anti-Semitism, it did a great deal of harm". This is a theme for Hoess. His frustrations at problems in the camp are because he is frustrated at being unable to properly carry out his order. Hoess himself explains.

When in the summer of 1941 [Himmler] gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally to carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or consequences. It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order. Nevertheless the reasons behind the extermination programme seemed to me right. I did not reflect on it at the time: i had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.

While he says that he did not form an opinion at the time. He does not allow himself to argue that it was wrong after the event. Indeed, much of his criticism of the extermination policy comes, not from a moral outrage, but because he thinks it was a waste of labour. Thus the millions of Jews and others who died in the camps are dismissed by Hoess.

Indeed Hoess "watching the killing" himself. The sections of the book where he describes this, and the individual tragedies his witnessed are some of the most difficult pieces of writing I have ever read. Time and again he says things like "the killing of these Russian prisoners-of-war did not cause me much concern at the time". Hoess is more focused on describing the technical solutions, and supply problems that hampered the extermination programme. In fact, at times, the book reads most as a tract written to prove that Hoess was good at his job. Hoess was happy in his work, "In Auschwitz I truly had no reason to complain that I was bored". He continues by explaining that when he was "deeply affected by some incident" he was able to go riding, or see his family, until the "terrible pictures" had been "chased away". Homelife was idylic:

My family... were well provided for inAuschwitz. Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammelled life. My wife's garden was a paradise of flowers. The prisoners never missed an opportunity for doing some little act of kindness to my wife or children, and thus attracting their attention.

I will spare the reader here by not quoting the passages were Hoess indifferently describes the murder of people, or watching their deaths through the windows of the gas chambers, or his efforts to make the process more efficient. In his introduction Primo Levi says that the book is "filled with evil, and this evil is narrated with a disturbing bureaucratic obtuseness; it has no literary quality, and reading it is agony". He continues that Hoess comes across as "a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel, who sometimes blatantly lies".

The "bureaucratic obtuseness" that Levi refers to is accurate. But we have to be careful at simply seeing Hoess' actions as just reflecting the "banality of evil". What Hoess did and describes in this book reflects that he was more than just a functionary. He was committed to Nazism. His strict obeyance of orders flowed not from having a personality that enjoyed organisational work, but because he saw in Himmler and Hitler leaders who he was personally and politically commited to. He was a Nazi through and through, and his last paragraph statement that he was "unknowingly a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich" is exposed as a lie by every preceeding paragraph. Hoess was not a cog in an office far away from the camps. He was looking in through the glass observation panels as trainload after trainload of Jewish people died. He was also happy to kill himself. To those SS men whose moral was sapped he could only offer inspiration by reminding them of the Nazis' plan. 

My interest in Rudolf Hoess came from seeing the recent film Zone of Interest. If anything this book exposes Hoess as a far nastier and brutal person than the film does. I don't think I have previously read a book by a Nazi. It has left me feeling sick and angry. But also committed to making sure that the 21st century fascists never get a chance at power again.

Related Reviews

Evans - Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich
Evans - Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial
Roseman - The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution
Mazower - Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution

Christopher S. Mackay - False Prophets and Preachers: Henry Gresbeck's Account of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster

This is a remarkable account of a remarkable series of events. From February 1534 until the early summer of 1535, the German city of Münster came under the rule of the Anabaptists. Then, Anabaptists were at the forefront of the most radical interpretation of the Reformation, and had developed a significantly radical vision of how society should be run. The Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster began as a radical utopian experiment in living, including the redistribution of wealth and resources. But for a number of reasons, particularly the appaling conditions caused by the siege of the city by the region's hostile bishop and lord, the experiment collapsed into a vicious theocratic state. 

The Anabaptists were inspired by a specific reading of sections of the bible, which drove their actions:

Acts 4 seemed to validate direct inspiration of men through the Holy Spirit; verses 32 through 37 were taken to mean that the followers of Christ should share their goods communally, and the radicals’ confiscation of the property of the faithful in Münster was one of the more shocking events to sixteenth-century (and later) sensibilities.

But until Henry Gresbeck's account became available, we've only had second hand sources as to what happened. Gresbeck was the only eyewitness to events within Münster who survived to write down his experiences. His survival was due to his escape from the siege toward its end and his betrayal of the city. This allowed the bishop's forces into the city where they began the most henious repression and pillaging. Hundreds of Anabaptists were killed and their leaders tortured and executed. 

Gresbeck's account is, as Christopher S. Mackay explains, extremely important. It is the only first hand account of Anabaptist Münster, and it provides important evidence to collaborate other sources. Mackay has done an amazing job of bringing together and translating the surviving copies of the original documents and creating a readable whole. But as Mackay warns, "Gresbeck’s retrospective account is not without its own difficulties". Principaly Gresbeck is silent on his own role during the period of the siege, and he is writing for a hostile ruler, intending to justify his own role in the capture of the city, and hoping to get back his own wealth and freedom.

Nonetheless, by reading criticially, and with the Mackay's superb annotations and footnotes we can learn alot about those strange and amazing times. Mackay also provides one of the best introductory accounts of the development of Anabaptist thinking, and the background to the Münster events. As he says:

The events of Münster are incomprehensible without a clear understanding that the main driving force behind the radical leaders was the belief that the events portrayed in the book of Apocalypse were about to come to pass and that they would play a prominent role as the 144,000 who would do battle with the forces of the Antichrist.

Gresbeck himself may, or may not have believed this. But it is notable that he did stay a lengthy time in Münster, not availing himself of opportunities to leave until absolutely necessary. Though, given that the besieging forces usuaully behaved appalling to those who did escape, and that punishment for those who were captured trying to get out was equally vicious, it's possible this was discretion being better than valour on Gresbeck's part. Mackay suggests however that while "abstract theological doctrines were not an issue of great concern to him. One is left with the impression that Gresbeck was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea that a community of socially and economically equal Christians was to be established in Münster."

That said, in his writing for the bishop, Gresbeck certainly hedges his bets. Here are some of his comments written after the defeat of Münster, about the redistribution of wealth:

The preacher Stutenberent continued, “It’s not appropriate for a Christian to have any money. Be it silver or gold, it’s unclean for a Christian. Everything that the Christian brothers and sisters have belongs to one person as much as to the next. You shall lack nothing, be it food or clothing, house and hearth. What you need you shall get, God will not let you lack anything. One thing should be just as common as the next, it belongs to us all. It’s mine as much as yours, and yours as much as mine.” This is how they convinced the people, so that they (some of them) brought their money, silver and gold, and all that they had. But in the city of Münster, the idea that the one person was to have as much as the next turned out unfairly.

Gresbeck's final caution here reads much like those who admonish 21st century revolutionaries that "it will never work". Nonetheless socialists today might be interested in reading about how the redistribution took place:

After the property became common in this way, they appointed three deacons in each parish who were to guard the property consisting of produce, grain, and meat, and any sort of foodstuffs that there were in the city. These deacons entered all the houses and examined what in the way of food, grain, and meat each person had in his house, and they wrote a list of everything that each person had in his house. These deacons went through the city. Each group of deacons went around their parish and were to examine what sort of poor people there were in the city and not let them lack anything. At first, they did this two or three times, but this practice was eventually forgotten because they still had provisions enough in the city. It was with a good appearance that they carried out this procedure in Münster. After they drew up the list for each house, no one had control over his possessions. But if they’d hidden on the side something that wasn’t listed, they were able to retain it. 

This redistribution of wealth was popular, and people did flock to Münster - no surprise given the prevailing poverty in wider society. But I am wary of those who suggest (as writers like Ernest Belfort Bax did) that Anabaptist Münster was some sort of precursor of the revolutionary Paris Commune. One reason for this was there was no democracy. As the siege progressed and deprivation increased power in Münster was concentrated in the hands of the self-declared king, John of Leiden. Gresbeck details how John of Leiden put himself at the top of a hierarchy of power that used violence to ensure his bidding was followed. While Gresbeck gives some account of events for laughs, he does give us an insight into how the "king" created a new, military, state that allowed him to enjoy wealth and food, while the masses inside the besieged town were reduced to eating cats, dogs and rats to survive. Hardly a socialist utopia. Instead this was a theocratic terror state that ruled by fear and murder.

One aspect of the Münster events that has led to much commentary was the institution of polygamy. This makes for some of the most distressing parts of Gresbeck's account. The rulers allowed men in Münster to take multiple wives, against the will of those women. This was justified on the basis of Old Testament scripture, suggesting that the men should have multiple wives and produce multiple offspring to spread Christianity. Whatever the ideological justification, it is clear that this was an incredibly oppressive experience for almost every women, and led to violence and rape, even of children. In fact this situation caused a small uprising against the Anabaptist rule, which John of Leiden stopped with brutal force. Gresbeck does detail other examples of hidden resistance, and people did escape and try to get messages out. But this was not the majority experience. It begs the question, why did Münster hold out so long? In part this is because of the threat of violence - both from the besiegers and from internally. It also was because people seemed to genuinelly believe, or were led to believe, that relief from outside was on its way - and there's so credibility to this. We know that sympathetic Anabaptists did try to rise up and come to the city's aid. But by the time it was desperately needed this was now just fantasy from King John, desperate to offer some hope to hold onto power.

By the time that Gresbeck escaped and led in Münster's enemies, it is clear from his account that the city was on its knees. That does not, however, justify the pillaging and mass murder of civilians by the invading forces. One of the reasons that Gresbeck's is the only account from an eyewitness, is that nearly everyone else was murdered. Münster's enemies wanted to end the rebellion. They also wanted to rub out any other idea that radicals should try and redistribute wealth elsewhere. One might speculate how things could have been different had the bishop not moved to isolate and break the rebellion immediately the Anabaptists were elected to power.

Henry Gresbeck's account of Münster is remarkable, if at times hard to read. It does however repay reading and Christopher S. Mackay has done a superb job of framing and producing Gresbeck's work in a format that is easily accessible to the contempoary reader. For those interested in the Radical Reformation and its consequences, it is a must read. Highly recommended.

Related Reviews

Bax - The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists
Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
Stayer - Anabaptists and the Sword
Kautsky - Communism in Central Europe in the time of the Reformation

Leon Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany

The recent election results in Germany should have left everyone on the left thinking about the rise of fascism and how it can be averted. While the situation is not the same as the 1930s, emboldened by the second election of Donald Trump there is nonetheless a terrifying rise in confidence for far-right and the fascist movements globally, especially in Europe. 

In the 1930s the Russian revolutionary Marxist Leon Trotsky led a battle within the international Communist movement over the direction of the Communist Parties. This battle was principly over revolutionary strategy and at the heart of his argument was the question of Germany. Germany had a big Commuist Party, and a recent revolutioanry experience. It also had a mass Nazi party, and discussions over tactics to challenge and defeat Hitler were key to the differing visions of Trotsky and the Stalinist left. Trotsky was isolated within the Communist movement, exiled from Russia, he relied on newspapers and letters from small numbers of supporters, who kept him informed. Nonetheless, despite his isolation, he kept up a steady stream of letters, articles, pamphlets and polemics that desperately urged a shift in the course of the German Communist Party (KPD) to enable it to defeat fascism.

The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany is a collection of these writing by Trotsky published by Pathfinder with an introduction from the Belgium Marxist Ernest Mandel. There is a wealth of material here, though readers without some knowledge of the period and the Communist Left, as well as Trotsky's isolation from the revolutionary movement could do well to read some background material. This is in part because Mandel's introduction and some of the introductionary material in this edition is either too brief, or, in the case of Mandel, aimed at a different audience of the 1960s when fascism was not an immediate threat.

The articles represent a number of different approaches of Trotsky to the immediate tasks of the left. The first is understanding the nature of fascism in the 1930s, the second tactics to defeat it, and finally, understanding fascism in the context of Marxist ideas of "bonapartism". There is, out of necessity, repetition. But there are some important conclusions worth noting. Firstly Trotsky's analysis of fascism as a counter-revolutionary force:

Fascism is a product of two conditions: a sharp social crisis on the one hand; the revolutioanry weakness of the German proletariat on the other. The weakness of the proletariat is in turn made up of two leements: the particularly historical role of the Social Democracy, this still powerful capitalist agency in the ranks of the proletariat, and the inability of the centrist leadership of the Communist Party to unite the workers under the banner of the revolution.

Trostky here is clearly writing of fascism in the 1930s, in a period of prolonged economic turmoil and an era when there was an urgent desire of the capitalist class to see the workers' movement blunted and weakened. Its not strictly true today, as fascism has grown in slightly different circumstances. Nonetheless Trotsky's repeated point that "fascism would actually fall to pieces if the CP were able to unite the working class, transforming it into a powerful revolutionary magnet for all the oppressed masses of the people" holds true. What does also remain true today is the way that fascist forces and the far-right in general are growing in the context of general despair at the way mainstream parties have failed to deliver anything for ordinary people. It is also true that in many parts of the world the left, an the trade union leadership have failed to lead the stort of struggles that could win gains for working people and begin to rebuild the movements that can challenge facism. 

Trotsky rages against the analysis of the KPD and the Communist International under Stalin that sees imminient failure for Hitler after each successive election. Trotsky's writings become increasingly desperate and you can feel his frustration at missed opportunities by the KPD fail to undermine the Nazis. The election results, with the Nazis share of the vote declining slightly, that that of the KPD increasing lead to ridculously optimistic positions. In the same piece that was the source of the quotes above, Germany, the Key to the International Situation, Trotsky writes a brilliant piece of analysis that is directly relevent to today. He points out that in the fight to stop fascism "votes are not decisive" the struggle is key:

The main strength of the fascists is their strength in numbers. Yes, they have received many votes. But in the social struggle, votes are not decisive. The main army of fascism still consists of the petty ourgeoisie and the new middle class: the small artisans and shopkeepers of the cities, the petty officials, the employees, the technical personnel, the intelligentsia, the impoverished peasantry. On the scales of election statistics a thousand fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand Commnuist votes. But on the scales of the revolutionary struggle a throusand workers in a one big factory represent a force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their wives and their mother-in-law. The great bulk of the fsascists consists of human dust.

How to mobilise this force? The KPD was convinced that it simply needed to declare itself the inheritors of the Russian Revolution and win people to abstract ideas of socialism. Their "third period", in which they labelled the Social Democrats, "social fascists", was designed to tell workers that reformists were the same as Nazis and draw people to the genuine socialists. It had the opposite effect. It prevented the left from uniting over a common programme of stopping the Nazis. The millions of voters for the KPD and the Social Democrats could have been a power to stop Hitler, but were wasted because of the KPD's sectarianism, a sectarianism that as Trotsky repeatedly points out, came directly from Stalin in Moscow.

Some of the most powerful, and tragic parts of this collection are the sections when Trotsky seeks to win people to this vision of a United Front. He draws on his experiences in the Russian Revolution, particularly that during the attempted Kornilov Coup, as well as the early experiences of the Communist International which drew out these ideas for how revolutionaries could relate to workers in a non-revolutionary period. Some of these arguments are surprisingly practical, and provide some of the most interesting and useful parts of the book for today's socialist movement. For instance, in For a Workers' United Front Against Fascism Trotsky writes:

Election agreements, parliamentary compromises concluded between the revolutionary party and the Social Democracy serve, as a rule, to the advanage of the SOcial Democracy. Practical agreements for mass action, for purposes of struggle, are always useful to the revolutionary party... No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whome to strike, and when to strike! Such an agreement can be conluded even with the devil himself, with his grandmother and event with Noske and Grzesinsky. One one condition, not to bind one's hands.

Predicitably, Trotsky's enemies seized on the last polemical idea to unite with the enemies of the workers, to defeat the immideate threat. Their criticisms ignored the body of the argument - a clear strategy to defeat fascism through unity of action by the left and a united workers movement. Trotsky also polemicises against those in the Communist movement who attack Trotskyism, and points out the hypocrisy and the failings. But Trotsky has no mass movement to win the argument and the German working class is defeated. The final chapters in this collection show Trotsky drawing his conclusion that the Communist International has failed and that a new International is needed. 

One surprising thing about this book is that Trotsky doesn't analyse fascism mcuh in terms of its racism and antisemitism. He is mostly concerned with the tactical needs of the movement, and fascism as a force that has "raised itself to power on thew backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organisations of the working class and the institutions of democracy".

He continues, "but fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital". But Trotsky is well aware that fascism is a reactionary ideology based on "darkness, ignorance and savagery". Writing as he does from 1930 onward he doesn't need to highlight its antisemitism and racism - it is everywhere evident. He does point out that:

Everything that should have been eliminated from the national oranism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.

But while it is true that fascism was the rule of monopoly capital. The Nazis did demand their blood payment and that's what led to the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jewish people as well as four million others, plus a global war that killed millions more. Trotsky did not live to see that, though he had a clear understanding that Hitler in power would lead to mass murder. It is, however, a bit unforgiveable that Mandel's introduction doesn't in attempt analyse in any way the Holocaust and events after the Nazis came to power. It is a strange omission on any level.

While much of this book is a polemic by Trotsky at a crisis moment for the European working class, there is much here of interest and importance to the revolutionary left today, trying to build against the growth of the far-right and understanding the role of figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Trotsky's writings cannot be directly applied to 2024. This sort of crude Marxism that takes positions from the past and superimposes them on the present was exactly what he was attacking Stalin for. But that doesn't mean that Trotsky's analysis is dated or irrelevant. Far from it. It'd encourage socialists today to read, or re-read these essays, and think about "how to strike, whome to strike, and when to strike".

Related Reviews

Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Trotsky - 1905
Trotsky - On Britain
Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
Cliff - Trotsky 1: Towards October
Cliff - Trotsky 2: Sword of the Revolution
Cliff - Trotsky 3: Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy
Dunn & Hugo Radice (eds) - 100 Years of Permanent Revolution: Results & Prospects

Elie Wiesel - Night

It feels inadequate, or impossible, to review a book like Night. Reading this short work is an incredibly emotional experience. It is the first hand account of Elie Wiesel's time in Auschwitz and then Buchenwald concentration camps. As such it is intensely brutal. It begins with his life in Romania, before the Nazis arrived, the naive illusion among the Jewish community that the war would be over before anything happened. Then the panic and despair as the community is forced into ghettos and onto trains. There is nothing cheerful here. Wiesel sees his mother and sisters as they disappear in one direction at the gates of Auschwitz, while he and his father, warned by a inmate to lie about their ages to make them eligible, become forced labourers.

This then is an account of brutality, of despair, of hunger and of the loss of faith. It is the story of millions of tragedies told through the eyes of one teenage eyewitness. Wiesel struggles to keep his father alive and is successful, almost too the end, when he dies just before liberation. 

As the Jews on Wiesel's train wait outside Auschwitz, some discuss rebellion. Even in their weakened state, some have knives and urged others to attack the guards. "But the older men begged their sons not to be foolish" says Wiesel. As the world sees the growth of the far-right and fascists, from the US to Eastern Europe, the most important lesson for me from Night is to stop the Nazis before the world goes that far again. Millions of people died in that death camp at the hands of the Nazis. Elie Wiesel's Night and indeed the remainder of his life, were dedicated to saying Never Again. That's why it must be read by every generation.

Related Reviews

Spiegelman - The Complete Maus
Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution
Roseman - The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution

Richard Grunberger - Red Rising in Bavaria

The Munich, or Bavarian, Revolution is an often neglected part of the amazing German revolutionary wave that took place at the end of 1918 and into 1919. The German Revolution was important for two reasons. Firstly it effectively ended the slaughter of World War One as sailors, soldiers and working people struck, marched and created workers councils. Secondly, it extended a hand of solidarity and hope to the people of Revolutionary Russia, briefly opening up the hope that the Soviet Republic would not remain isolated. The revolutionaries of Munich certainly understood this second aspect of their struggle. But what was the nature of the Munich rising itself?

Richard Grunberger's account of these events "Red Rising" is a readable, if problematic account. It was, as he abley describes, in 1919 that the counter-revolutionary Freikorps began their fascist reigns of terror. Practising for events under Hitler. The "Reds" in Munich executed 10 hostages. It was probably a tactical error, and certainly not one supported by the majority of rebels. But the counter-revolutionaries outnumbered this slaughter ten to one. Over one thousand revolutionaries, participants, by-standers and completely innocent people were killed in the orgy of violence that suppressed the revolution.

Unfortunately there is very little here about the revolution from the bottom up. Grunberger is more interested in the individuals who led, or put themselves at the head of the movement itself. He is fascinated more with their individual eccentric behaviours than with trying to understand the real dynamics of the movement. Kurt Eisner, the Prime Minister of the Bavarian Republic in the initial phases of the revolution, who was assassinated in February by the right-wing, seems to have been a volatile and unusual character. Franz Mehring, the leading German Marxist and biographer of Marx, described Eisner as an "aesthetic dilettante". It's probably an accurate depiction. 

Eisner's weakness was to try and find a way between bolshevism and Social Democracy. His quest for a revolution without Bolshevism meant he failed to see the threat from the right, or their handmaidens in the SPD. But he was not alone in this. Those that followed frequently made the same mistake. The most able leader seems to have been Eugen Leviné. Leviné did not allow the fledgling Communist Party to inistially support the rising, saying, according to Grunberger, "We can only take part in a republic of councils if it is proclaimed by the councils - and if the majority of them are communists". It seems a sensible policy - focusing on revolutionary movements from below, not the arbitary declaration of a Council Republic from above. Leviné's eventual participation was a recognition that once the battle was engaged Communists could not abstain. Though for Grunberger it's more of a reversal of position rather than an act of principle from a position of enormous weakness.

There are some real political weaknesses with the book. But there are stylistic problems too. Grunberger's descriptions of people are sometimes very off. The SPD leftist Erhard Auer is described as a "huge man with large hands" for no apparent reason.

Despite it's limitations there are some real glimpses into moments of working class power and bravery during the Munich Revolution. For those who only know the name Dachau because of the later concentration camp there, remember the workers of the town who fought the fascists there long before the Nazis came to power:

In the fighting that follow Red troops advanced into Dachau... At a cricial moment in thebattle workmen and women from the Dachau ordnance factory disconcerted the defenders by wading into the melee and shouting amidst the hail of bullets, "Don't shoot at your brothers!" When the White hesitated before firing on civilisans, the Red attacks pressed home their advantage, diarmed some of the enemy and drove the rest northwards from the town.

Similarly, Grunberger quotes from an eyewitness to an early meeting in the revolution, when a worker cuts through the rarefied debates of professors including Max Weber:

The crowd was so tightly packed that the waitresses 'ate' their way through it like woodworms. One was barely aware of the alcohol and tobacco fumes or human perspiration, because it was so important that the things that mattered could be said. Suddenly a pale young workman mounted the rostrum and said simply "Have you, or you, made an armstice offer? Yet we ought to do it - not the gentlemen in office. Let us seize a radio station and let us ordinary folk address the ordinary folk on the other side - right away there'll be peace." As he said this a problem occurred to him, and with a touching gesture in the direction of Max Weber's fellow academics o nthe platform, the young man continued: "Here these Herren Professoren, they know French! They'll know how to say it the way we mean it."

Sadly there is too little such flavour of "ordinary folk" in the book. It is these people and their hopes that made the German Revolution, and sadly this book doesn't deliver enough of this. That said, for a subject that is badly neglected in the literature of the Revolution, it is a decent overview. Socialists should read it to be reminded of the need to build revolutionary organisation ahead of the crucial battles. Otherwise we are, as Leviné famously said at his trial, "Communists are all dead men on leave".

Related Reviews

Broué - The German Revolution 1917-1923
Hippe - And Red is the Colour of Our Flag
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Alex J. Kay - Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing

One of the photos in Empire of Destruction is of Richard Jenne, a four year old child who was murdered in the "special children's ward" at Irsee Monastery by the head nurse, one Sister Mina Wörle. The killing of young Jenne was part of the systematic murder of patients with mental health issues by the Nazi regime. Jenne was probably one of the last children killed under this barbaric plan. Notably he was murered by Wörle three weeks after the end of the war. For her role in killing up to 100 children Wörle got just 18 months imprisonment.

The death of Richard Jenne is one moment in the mass killing undertaken by the Nazi government. It serves as a stark reminder of the human story behind the figures for Nazi mass murder. It is well known that over six million Jewish people in the Holocaust. In addition millions of others were systematically killed. These include people with mental and physical disabilities, Russian prisoners of war, Gypsy and Roma, Russian civilians and others. These mass killing each "possessed a racial (and racist) component". But Kay argues that central to them all was that how the Nazi regime considered these groups a barrier to Germany's ability to win the war. It is difficult or impossible, he argues, to separate "German wartime stratgy from Nazi genocidal racal policies". This approach is not universally accepted among historians of the Nazis.

Kay explains:

In view alone of this intertwinement of war and extermination, it makes a great deal of sense to consider the different strands of Nazi mass killing togheter rather than in isolation... This of course means going against the grain of most scholarship on the subject by examining the genocide of the European Jews alongside other Nazi mass-murder campaigns. 

In contrast to those who argue that the Holocaust must be considered separate to other mass killings, Kay argues that "taking an integrative approach to Nazi mass killing in no way contradicts the view - advocated here, too - that the Holocause was an unprecedented phenomenon."

I will not quote from any of the horrific eyewitness accounts to the murder, the description of events or the testimony of survivors. The book is perhaps one of the most difficult books I've ever read. There are relentless accounts of murder. Despite having read several books on the Holocaust and visited concentration camps and other places of Nazi killing, I don't think I've been quite so shocked and upset before. Indeed Kay explicitly warns the reader that the book is "harrowing". But reminds the reader that his "extensive use of testimony from survivors and other victims hopefully goes some small way towards giving them a voice". Bearing witness like this is of course important.

But also important is Kay's central argument that the racist policies of the Nazi regime, combined with their war aims allowed this to happen. It also built upon racist, antisemitic, eugenic and Malthusian ideas that predated Hitler. But once the regime was in power, and when the war had started, they took on an importance to the Nazis that was not anticipated. The logic of war, led to mass murder. For instance, Kay writes how the German military's systematic attempt to stop partisans in Eastern Europe was tied up with their belief in living space for Germans:

The measures taken by German forces in the context of their 'pacification' campaign constituted an attack on a substantial section of the Soviet population and, simultaneously, on the national and ethnc fabric of the state. These so called anti-partisan operations were in effect an attempt to depopulate the Soviet countryside. German forces massacred hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians, destroying thousands of homes and, indeed, entre villages in the process... The vast majority of the victims... had little or no connection to guerilla resistance, and virtually all of these deaths had a racist component.

It is worth noting that there were murders on this scale on the western front, which highlights the racial dimension to the war. Understanding all this however means comprehending Nazism as something more than antisemitism. There were "specifically Nazi motivations for mass killing", but no "monocausal explanation" for the "actions of the perpetrators" says Kay, and concludes:

The answer we seek can be found only in the interaction of tseveral factors converging in a specific historical circumstances. The conduct of the Holocaust perpetrators... cannot be unexplains in terms of their ideology alone, and yet cannot be understood without it.... The prevalence of radical ideological convictions during the years in querstion point to a shared and defining historical context. 

Hundreds of thousands of Germans under Hitler, "by virtue of a certain set of circumstances and the events of the preceding decades, were particularly radicalised and mre inclined to pursue extreme solutions to perceived problems." Those solutions murdered over ten million people.

Kay's book is an important study, that opens up a way of approaching mass murder and the nature of the Nazi regime. I am not quite sure he is able to the bottom of what the specific set of circumstances that led to the Nazi regime was. While he is right to point to the historical roots of mass murder in Germany, including the prevelant racism and eugenics, I also think we need to look deeper at the way the context of the end of World War One shocked and frightened a generation of the German middle classes, and allowed Hitler to mobilise by promising to stop the Marxists. In this context Richard J Evans recent Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich is good to read alongside Kay's book because it shows how those at all levels of the Nazis' machine were drawn to fascism and Hitler and motivated to do what they did. That said, Kay's history is important both to remind us of the horrors that took place and help us understand how they were organised. Never Again.

Related Reviews

Evans - Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich

Kershaw - Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris

Kershaw - Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis

Roseman - The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution

Mazower - Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe

Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution

Robert Dees - The Power of Peasants: Economics & politics of farming in medieval Germany (two volumes)

Robert Dees' The Power of Peasants is an explicit Marxist examination of the role of peasants in German, and wider European history. For that alone it should be celebrated. His central thesis is that the defeat of the German peasantry during 1525 led to the stagnation of the Germany economy, preventing the peasantry from further developing agricultural production. This, in turn, meant that the Germany failed to break free from feudalism until many centuries after other European countries. Its an important argument, that places the role of the producers central to historical development. The problem is that the book, at 1800 pages, obscures these insights with a huge amount of material. Since I have been asked to review this book elsewhere, I will post a link to that article when it is published.

Related Reviews

Scribner & Benecke - The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints
Bak (ed) - The German Peasant War of 1525
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Scribner (ed) - Germany: A New Social & Economic History, 1450-1630, Volume 1

Richard J. Evans - Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich

In his preface to Hitler's People noted historian Richard J. Evans asks, "Who were the Nazis?" What motivated them, and why did people follow them? Most importantly perhaps, he asks "What made otherwise normal people carry out, or approve, terrible and murderous atrocities against Nazism's real and supposed enemies?" This is not just a historical question for Evans. He argues that such questions have "gained new urgency and importance" as democracy is once again under threat from "strongmen and would-be dictators".

Understanding fascism in general, and Nazism in particular, benefits from a detailed study of history, and as the far-right and fascists gain ground, Evans is write to draw parallels to try and understand what is happening today. So how does Hitler's People do this?

Evans begins with a good, and lengthy, account of Hitler's own life, particularly his rise to power. In this he dismisses simplistic and crude reasoning behind his dictatorial policies. He concludes that it was "Hiter's ideological obsessions that provided the essential foundation for everything that happened in the Nazi movement and the Third Reich". Importantly this was not just Hitler's antisemitism. The Nazi leader's obsession with the "stab in the back" narrative, his hatred of the German Revolution and Communist politics and his racist beliefs in German "race" supremacy, directed his activity. But he could not have done it without "a close circle of immediate subordinates to sustain him, bolster his public image, boost his self-confidence and carry out his ideological programme."

The first section of the book looks at the closest of these, figures like Goring, Himmler, Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg. Later sections look at lower levels of the Nazi machine and government - from those who planned the Holocaust, to Generals and individual figures who ran the Concentration Camps. There are many similarities. Many of the figures, including key Nazi leaders, had authoritarian fathers. And it is interesting to see how abusive and bullying parents shaped their later behaviour. Evans however doesn't narrow down the Nazi regime to such simple arguments: "When there were millions of people... who grew up in families dominated by an authoritarian father, did only some of them become Nazis?"  Too much "stress" has been put on these factors by historians like Joachim C. Fest, argues Evans. Instead, he says:

Individual murderers in all countries, whatever the political system that governs them, commit their crimes in violation of punishments on them, while Nazi murderers and fanatical supporters of Hitler were legitimated by the Nazi movement and the Third Reich. Nazism released people from the normal constraints that society imposes on the violent and abusive desires that exist to a degree among all of us, and actively encouraged people to act them out. Ideological and historical context in the end was more important that individual psychology.

This can help explain how people were freed up to behave as they did. But it is not enough to explain why the Nazis gained support and eventually power. Understanding this requires looking deeper. One key point that Evans repeatedly notes is that the majority of the people who he describes have a deep-seated hatred toward the left, and Marxism/Communism. This hatred rests in the fear of revolution, and the anger at the German Revolution that they saw as ending Germany's ability to fight in WW1. This affected even those who didn't join the Nazis, but were around them. The far-right German Chancellor in 1932, Franz von Papen who helped bring Hitler to power, but never joined the Nazi Party, despite playing a key role in the government demonstrated this well. Evans writes, "conservatives like Papen put the destruction of democracy and the extirpation of 'Marxism' above any lingering conern for humanity, legality or decency."

But combined with this hatred and fear of Communism is the class basis of the support for the Nazis. As Evans explains:

Most Germans who belonged to the educated middle classes, the so called Bildunsbürgertum, comprising people with university degress and professional status, welcomed the coming of the Third Reich and collaborated with the Nazi regime to the end.... Under the Bismarckian Empire they had enjoyed a secure and respected place... a position they lost with Germany's defeat in World War I, the Revolution of 1918, the creation of the Weimar Republic with its enthronement of democratic rights ... and the advent of the feared and hated (and largely working-class) Social Democrats. If relatively few of them were Nazi fanatics, the great majority still openly or tacitly supported Hitler because they saw in him the guarantor of social order, national pride, economic stability and cultural tradition.

For some, the Nazis offered more - they offered work and stability in difficult economic times, as well as a chance to express their abhorrent ideas. The "solidily middleclass" Paul Zapp "served Nazism... because it offered a way out of career problems". But Evans is careful to point out that Zapp's prior politics meant that "he had no difficulty in executing [the regimes] decrees in the most murderous and brutal possible way." Zapp was head of a Sonderkommando that followed the German army into Eastern Europe killing hundreds of Jewish people in mass shootings.

Evans concludes that

Neither a concentration on individual pathology on the one hand, nor a sweeping account of national identity on the other, can explain how hundreds of thousands of Germans committed unspeakable atrocities behind the Eastern Front and elsewhere, as camp guards, SS killers, ghetto officers and others, and beyond that, remotely, sitting at their desks in Berlin. An explanation has to be found at an intermediate level between these two extremes.

It is notable that few of those whom Evans discusses abandoned their support, acknowledged wrongdoing, or the horrors that they had been party to. This is because those functionaries of the Holocaust came to the Nazis from "a right-wing familial and social milieu, in which antisemitism was common and German nationalism a given."

But as Evans says, understanding the Nazis rise to power means also understanding how a section of German society was driven wild by the threat to their very existence posed, even abstractly, by the left and the Communists. The economic crisis of the late 1920s, the defeat of Germany in WW1 and the German Revolution meant that a generation of middle class people felt their whole worldview threatened. To most of them Hitler offered salvation. They formed the ranks of the Nazis, and many went on to become part of the Holocaust that murdered millions of Jews, opponents of the regime and many millions of others the Nazis deemed unfit. Some, from higher class positions, were also attracted to Hitler, and not a few of these were also attracted by his promises.

Perhaps the only other thing to add, however, is that the book reminds me that the Nazis almost did not succeed. At crucial points before their coming to power, they were divided and weak. Had the left not failed to unite, and had it offered a radical alternative to Hitler, history could have been very different. Understanding the Nazis is one task for the current period. But another is remembering how they could, and can, be defeated. As Richard J. Evans concludes:

Only by situating the biographies of individual Nazi perpetrators, with all their idosyncracies and peculiarities, in these larger contexts, can we being to understand how Nazism exerted its baleful influnce. By doing this, we can perhaps start to recognize the threats that democracy and th eassertion of human rights are facing in our own time, and take action to counter then.

This excellent book is part of that fight.

Related Reviews

Evans - Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial
De Jong - Nazi Billionaires
Kershaw - Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris
Kershaw - Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis
Roseman - The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution
Mazower - Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution