The Holocaust began on the Western Front in 1918. Not in the obvious sense; the killing of European Jewry as state policy was still a generation away. But the men who would do it, the country in which they would do it, and the political ideas they would do it in the name of, all came directly out of the German experience of the First World War. Take away 1914 to 1918 and there is no plausible road from imperial Germany to the gas chambers. The route always runs through the trenches.
The shock of 1918
Germany entered the First World War in August 1914 with broad public enthusiasm and a confident expectation of victory. For four years the German army held its lines and pushed forward in the east. Russian forces collapsed in 1917 and Germany imposed a punitive peace at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. By the spring of 1918 the German High Command had transferred huge resources to a final offensive in the west, intended to win the war before the Americans could deploy in numbers. The offensive failed. Allied forces counter-attacked in August. The German army began to retreat. Mutinies broke out in the German fleet. The High Command, which had been running the country in all but name since 1916, told the Kaiser the war was lost.
What German civilians knew was that the food blockade had reduced them to near-starvation, that millions of their men had died, and that the army was retreating. What they were not told was that the army had been beaten in the field. The High Command, in the last weeks of the war, deliberately arranged that the armistice should be signed by a civilian government rather than by themselves. The result was that the soldiers who came home in late 1918 came home to a country whose new government had signed a peace they thought their army should never have agreed to.
The stab in the back
The myth that followed was the most consequential lie in modern European history. It said that Germany had not been defeated militarily. It said that the army had been ready to fight on. It said that the country had been stabbed in the back by traitors at home: by socialists, by communists, by liberals, and above all by Jews. The fact that around 100,000 German Jews had served in the German army, that around 12,000 had been killed in action, that the very first German officer to win the Iron Cross First Class in the war had been Jewish, made no difference. The Jews who had fought were not the Jews the myth was about. The Jews of the myth were Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg and the unnamed Bolshevik conspirators who had supposedly engineered the German defeat for their own ends.
The stab-in-the-back myth was promoted from the start by the senior figures of the German military. General Erich Ludendorff, the effective head of the German war effort in its closing years, was one of its loudest advocates. The myth gave the Reichswehr a way to refuse responsibility for the defeat. It gave conservative politicians a useful enemy. It gave the German public a story that did not require them to accept that their war effort had been beaten. The myth was historically false in every detail. It became, within a few years, the founding doctrine of every right-wing party in Germany and the unifying theme of the broader nationalist movement.
The brutalisation
Around two million German soldiers had been killed in the war. Several million more came home wounded, mutilated, gassed, blinded, or psychologically broken. The medical category we would now call post-traumatic stress was barely understood. Many of the survivors found peacetime intolerable. The Freikorps, the irregular paramilitary units that the new German government used to suppress communist uprisings in 1919 and 1920, were largely made up of demobilised soldiers who could not adjust to civilian life and went looking for a fight. They found one. The Freikorps put down the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in January 1919 and murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. They fought in the Baltic against communist and Polish forces. They formed the recruiting pool from which the Nazi SA was later built.
Adolf Hitler’s war is the case study. He had been a regimental runner with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry, decorated twice with the Iron Cross, gassed at Ypres in October 1918. He was in a military hospital recovering when news of the armistice reached him. He recorded later that he had wept and resolved at that moment to enter politics. The young men around him in the Munich barracks in 1919 had similar stories: the war that had defined their lives had been ended, in their view, by a betrayal at home. They could not forgive it. They became the leadership cadre of the Nazi Party.
The Treaty of Versailles
The peace terms imposed on Germany in June 1919 confirmed everything the right-wing nationalists wanted to believe. Germany lost around 13 per cent of its territory and 10 per cent of its population, including all of its overseas colonies and parts of its eastern territory transferred to the new state of Poland. The German army was capped at 100,000 men. The Rhineland was demilitarised. The clause that did the most political damage was Article 231, the so-called war guilt clause, in which Germany was made to accept sole responsibility for the war. Reparations were set at amounts that would, depending on whose calculations you accepted, ruin the German economy for a generation.
The terms were not as harsh as the German nationalists claimed; the Versailles settlement was less punitive than the peace Germany itself had imposed on Soviet Russia at Brest-Litovsk a year earlier. But it was harsh enough, and the war guilt clause in particular gave the German right wing a permanent political stick to beat the Weimar government with. Every German government from 1919 to 1933 had to govern under the shadow of a peace treaty that the population overwhelmingly rejected as unjust. That is most of what made the Weimar Republic ungovernable.
The line from Ypres to Auschwitz
None of this made the Holocaust inevitable. Many countries lost wars, suffered humiliating peace settlements, and produced bitter veteran populations without going on to commit genocide. What the First World War did was lay down the conditions in which a movement like the Nazi Party could be born and could find an audience. The men who took power in 1933 had been junior soldiers in 1918. The first members of the SA had been Freikorps fighters in 1919. The political language of the regime, with its constant invocation of betrayal, sacrifice, blood and renewal, was the language of veterans who had not let the war end. By the time the killing began in 1941, the Western Front of 1918 was thirty years in the past. The men ordering the killings were the same men who had not been able to accept the result.
See also
Sources
- Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, Allen Lane, 2016
- Richard Bessel, Germany After the First World War, Oxford University Press, 1993
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, Allen Lane, 1998
- USHMM: World War I