The July Crisis revealed that the Achilles heel of Europe's global primacy was the underdevelopment of the European states system. It was Europe's sudden expansion on its Balkan doorstep, the brittle structure of its multinational empires, and the chaotic politics of its smallest states that turned a political murder into a general war. The European balance of power was unable to cope with the final collapse of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. To a shrewd insider just before the war, it seemed obvious enough that international peace must depend on the judgment and skill of statesmen and diplomats. Indeed, the European war between the Triple Entente of Russia, :eand Britain and the Central Powers (Germany and AustriaHungary) quickly became global. At the end of October 1914 the nan Empire (fearful of the results of an Entente victory) joined entral Powers. That spread the war to the Caucasus, the Sinai ~r with British-ruled Egypt, and the Persian Gulf, then navally speaking a British lake. In East Asia, Japan joined the war as an ally itain, but with the obvious motive of seizing the Germans' Chinese base at Kiao-chao and their commercial rights in the nearby nee of Shantung (Shandong). In West, East and South West 1, colonial wars broke out between the British, French and Belon one side and the Germans on the other. And the war was lie. German surface-raiders and (increasingly) submarines waged war on the sea lanes radiating out from Britain, to choke off the suply of foodstuffs, raw materials and munitions on which the British Hort depended. The British in turn waged naval war by blockade squeeze the German economy, and deny it overseas sources of and strategic materials. Here was the proof that, with a world lmy and a single system of world politics, there was no escape the fallout of war, wherever it started. But if Europe's war had become global, it had to be settled within Europe itself.
By September I9I5 the German and Austrian armies had forced the Russians back to a defensive line deep inside their empire from Riga to Czernowitz) and occupied a vast frontier zone that they called '0ber-Ost'. They swallowed Serbia, and, with Bulgarian help, controlled a wide Balkan corridor towards the Ottoman Empire. Yet without victory in the west they could hardly hope to muster all the men and materiel to overcome Russia, with its bottomless pit of military manpower. In the Entente camp, the resilience of the Ottomans in Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Palestine - and, worse still, at Gallipoli - was a crushing disappointment. The soft underbelly of the Central Powers proved as hard as nails. Yet neither side drew the conclusion that the war had confirmed a balance of military power. Neither side accepted the case that a diplomatic solution was necessary.
As a result, the year I9I6 marked the beginning of a new phase in the war, and, as it turned out, a new phase in world history. The commitment to win whatever the cost lay behind the terrible slaughter at Verdun, on the Somme, and in Brusilov's offensive on the eastern front, where Russia lost more than a million men. As the losses mounted, the preconditions for peace in a post-war world became more and more drastic. Britain, France and Russia agreed to partition the Ottoman Empire. The break-up of Austria-Hungary into nation states became an Allied war aim. The reconstruction of Germany to obliterate its 'militarism' was the best guarantee of 'never again'. On the German side, it was the Russian 'menace' that had caused all the trouble. The final destruction of the tsarist empire became the minimum needed for post-war security.
Germany’s resort to unrestricted use of submarine warfare, in a desperate effort to shorten the war, was the catalyst for the entry of the United States in April 1917. Any peace settlement would now have to square the territorial aims of the European powers with the American demand for an 'open door' to trade and American antagonism to European-style empires at home and abroad. But most dramatic of all was the sudden collapse of the Russian monarchy. When Russia lacked the industrial strength to sustain its vast armies, it needed the help of its Western allies. But there lay the problem. With the Straits closed by Turkey, the only accessible ports through which aid could be sent were Archangel in the far north and Vladivostok in the far east, both far from ideal. Much of it piled up uselessly. Even if more had been sent, it is doubtful whether it would have made any difference. Russia's railway system could not cope with the strain of supplying the fronts, or transporting the food and fuel that were needed to keep its war economy going. In all the countries at war, the combination of hardship, anxiety and dissatisfaction with leaders who failed to bring victory created political tension. It seemed at first as if the new Russian state, with leaders answerable to the Duma, would have the patriotic drive, the public support and the political energy to rekindle the war effort and resume the offensive. But Russia's war economy was too badly damaged, and the organized discontent of the industrial workforce too deeply rooted, for any quick recovery. Perhaps only a German collapse could have saved the post-tsarist liberal state. And a little known fact, we explained how Germany made use of this weakness in our Case Study P.2.
The Bolshevik coup in October 1917 brought to power a revolutionary government who knew that their own survival meant Russia's leaving the war. Indeed, it was their promise of peace and their apparent support for the peasants' revolt that ensured a precarious triumph in the struggle for power. They were willing to pay the price paid in March 1918 at the town of Brest-Litovsk, where the peace treaty with Germany was signed. To buy peace from the Germans, the Bolsheviks were forced into concessions on a staggering scale. Most of western Russia, including Poland, the Baltic provinces and modern Belarus, had to be given up. The great salient that had made Russia a great power in Europe was simply wrenched away. But just as extraordinary was the loss of the Ukraine, where the invading Germans had promoted a separatist regime, the Rada. Russia's great grain basket (source of much of its export earnings before the war), its main source of coal, and its prime industrial centers were now controlled by a German client state. Indeed, the Brest-Litovsk treaty seemed only the prologue to a larger drama. German military power was set to extend all round the Black Sea, 'liberating' Russia's colonial territories in the Caucasus and perhaps beyond the Caspian. And, as civil war brewed in Russia's remaining lands, the grip of the centre on its old imperial periphery in Central Asia and the Far East provinces looked certain to fail. One great rivet that had clamped Eurasia together was breaking in half.
There can be no doubt that Germany did follow a Sonderweg, a 'special path' into modernity-but then so did other nations. The idea of singular German destructiveness and its fateful turn to fascism and genocide as a result of its alleged political backwardness and domination by a feudal military caste since Bismarck is challenged in this book by examining also Italy, the Balkan Wars 1912 and 1913, and Turkish policy towards its Greek and Armenian minorities. In fact, in the seldom studied period 1911 to 1914 many of the ideas of a militant, sometimes racist, nationalism, were not only developed in theory but tried out in practice, starting with Italy's invasion of Libya and ending with the mass atrocities committed by all sides in the Balkan In fact during this 'pre-war' period (often erroneously called the last years of peace) collective mentalities affected the policies of individual decision makers. The invention of national cultures and the mobilization of national culture for war were important both for these 'pre-war' wars and the World War; without wartime cultural mobilization it would be impossible to explain the birth of fascism.
The history of the origins of the First World War is often told as a story of the tensions in the Balkans and the war aims of Germany and AustriaHungary providing the background to the assassination at Sarajevo and the decision to launch a war. The Balkan wars of 1912-13 occasionally feature in the explanation, but Italy's invasion of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (the area known today as Libya) features at best as a footnote to the grand narrative. The war in Libya in I9II was not a cause of the world war, for there were no direct repercussions among the powers of Europe. Yet it had fateful consequences in the Balkans, and in a way it was also a vision of future warfare.
The destruction of Louvain, the mass killings of civilians on the western front in 1914, the genocide of the Armenians in 1915, the mutual mass slaughter of the trenches, the collective political violence in Russia after the Revolution, all had long-term causes in the history of mentalities, in military culture. or racism; but they were also clearly the result of orders issued by individual commanders and political leaders. Commanders could have decided otherwise, and sometimes did so, as we know from cases of avoided atrocities in the German army in 1914, or the cautious advance of the Allies in 1918 to spare the lives of infantrymen. Historical developments were contingent, not inevitable. This dynamic of destruction was not a law of nature however; rather, despite the tremendous pressure of nature, technology, and mentalities, it was man-made, capable of infinite variation, and exemplified with the German decision to end the war, capable of being stopped before ultimate self-destruction. The era of the First World War nevertheless witnessed a decisive step towards total war, as the tendency towards the erosion of the distinction between combatants and civilians or to be more precise, between combatants and non-combatants, became, more and more visible. Thus Mussolini' war against Abyssinia (today Ethiopia), which was both the last war 0f colonial conquest and the first fascist war in history, was waged with ruthless brutality against the entire population. Between 350,000 and 760,000 Ethiopians were killed in the course of a six-year war, most of them civilians, in which the technologically superior Italian forces terrorized the population with air power, bombing, poison gas, and collective punishments for guerrilla resistance.(See Petra Terhoeven, review article of Aram Mattioli, Experimentieifeld Gewalt. Der Abessinienkrieg und seine internationale Bedeutung 1935-1941 Zurich 2005 and Giulia Brogini Kunzi, Italien und der Abessinienkrieg 1935-36. Kolonialkrieg oder Totaler Krieg? Paderborn 2005.)
The new strategy derived directly from the lessons of the First World War. The Fascist regime based its war in Ethiopia on the theoretical concept of the 'guerra integrale' developed in the 1920Ssby the Italian military write Giulio Douhet, above all that massive aerial bombardment was to be used to cause maximum damage to the enemy in the shortest possible time, even if it contravened international law. Second, it was explicitly conceived as a racial war, to demonstrate the racial superiority of the conquerors, to 'improve the race', and to prepare the Italian army for a future war in Europe. Even if the decimation of the population was ne conceived as a genocidal war, the vast dimension of the killing pointed in that direction.
The triad of continuity, learning process, and radical discontinuity applies all the more to the Second World War. Nazi policies towards the German civilian population at war were characterized by the attempt to put into practice the Volksgemeinscheift, the 'people's community' derived from the concept of equality of sacrifice in the First World War, but this time racially defined. There was the phobia of the 1918 phenomenon, in other words the Nazi reading of the defeat of Germany by internal revolution, which produced the desire to maintain a high level of food supply. The concomitant of that policy was to attempt to eliminate all those from the German population who were described in 1921 by Binding and Hoche as 'lives unworthy of life' or in Nazi jargon 'useless mouths', through the policy of involuntary euthanasia of the mentally ill, as well as those who were defined as racial enemies. Industrialized warfare in the First World War, ruthless occupation policies, and the radical dynamic of destruction were not invented by Germany's pre-industrial elites or Junker officers. This was the war culture of the modem militarists, who put forward the most extreme ideas for the reorganization of society around the goal of warfare and the most limitless aims for a new European order: Ludendorff, Groener, Bauer, and Junger were middle-class men, not nobles. There is thus a certain historical logic in the fact that a petit-bourgeois dictator backed by an all-class mass movement and the old establishment should take up these extreme ideas, radically transform, and then implement them. And since we have used the term 'total war' it is appropriate here to provide a brief definition of its main characteristics. According to the historian Stig Forster, they can be summarized thus:
1.Total war
aims, which can include the demand for unconditional capitulation, or the
goal of the complete destruction of the enemy.
2.Total methods
of warfare: this amounts to the unrestricted violation of international
law and all principles of morality.
3.Total mobilization,
in which all human and material resources are exploited for the purpose
of warfare.
4.Total control:
central organization and control of all aspects of private and public life
for the purpose of warfare.
There was a pronounced tendency towards total mobilization and total control in Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union in the Second World War which went further than in the First World War, but this was a difference of degree rather than a completely new quality. In relation to methods of warfare, the Nazi war machine violated virtually every part of international law, the only exceptions being the choice not to use lethal poison gas in combat and not to maltreat western Allied prisoners of war, both for fear of retaliation. In regard to the aim of complete destruction, Nazi warfare fully met this criterion, limited only by the physical restrictions on its destructive capacity. Allied aerial warfare was the near-total response.In relation to genocide, Nazi policy was almost perfectly 'total'.
The history of antisemitism appears to reveal obvious continuities. The growing tensions during the First World War produced the first spike in the history of antisemitism in twentieth-century Germany, marked by the 'Jew census' in the army in 1916 and the spread of antisemitic ideology in rightwing parties after 1918. The election successes of the Nazi Party in the years 1930 to 1933 showed that one-,third of the German electorate supported a party which stood for extreme, even violent, racism, although several other political issues were more important in mobilizing voters than Nazi antisemitic ideology. The American author Daniel J. Goldhagen attempted to explain the Holocaust by reference to long-standing 'eliminatory antisemitism' widespread in German society and politics even before 1933. On the level of ideology, it is true that the Nazis' ideas were not original: most of them can be traced back to Pan-German ideas current on the extreme right in Germany and Austria before 1914. Yet when we examine the decisions leading to the genocide and its implementation, it is not the continuities between the First and the Second World Wars, but the discontinuities which are most striking. In the First World War and in the Weimar Republic the state actually attempted to prevent the spread of antisemitism; acts of antisemitic violence during the Republic were the work of extremists opposed to the state; by contrast, in the Third Reich antisemitism was raised to the status of official doctrine. Before 1933, Jews, like any other citizens, were afforded the protection of the law from arbitrary attack on their lives and property. Under the Nazi regime, they were gradually excluded from the civil service, public life, the private economy, and deprived of their civil rights, before being deported and murdered. The state actively encouraged theft, violence, and extreme brutality, overthrowing in the process the fundamentals of a state based on the rule of law as well as common humanity. Above all, the intention of genocide (in the sense of the aim of murdering all Europe's Jews) was not part of traditional antisemitism, nor even of the policy of the Third Reich, until late 1941.
The genocidal process of the Nazi regime resembled that of the Armenian genocide, but the similarities are due more to common patterns of political pathology than conscious emulation.
Official Turkish denials notwithstanding, the mass death of the Armenians was clearly caused by a deliberate policy of genocide. But in other states too, the politics of war entailed callous neglect and resulted in hunger for many hundreds of thousands of civilians who were regarded as expendable. During its retreat in 1915 the Russian army carried out an immensely destructive scorched earth policy that deliberately emulated that of 1812. Suspected hostile populations in the westem regions of the empire were deported to the east: at least 300,000 Lithuanians, 250,000 Latvians, at least 500,000 Jews, and 743,000 Poles to. The motivation was fear of betrayal by spies and deserters, and to leave no resources behind for the enemy. The death toll is impossible to establish, but in the administrative chaos and harsh conditions of Russia during the war it must have been considerable. Paranoid Great Russian chauvinism especially targeted Jews and Germans. Some 200,000 ethic Germans from Russian Poland were deported to Siberia. In Habsburg Galicia, occupied by the Russian army, there was a vicious antisemitic campaign, in which almost all Jews were suspected of espionage or betrayal, and subjected to arrest and deportation. The wave of antisemitism soon spread to the rest of the Russian army and society, with orders issued to scrutinize the conduct of Jews in the army; soon some officers were refusing to accept Jewish soldiers in their units. During the course of Russia's participation in the war, at least half a million Jews, possibly as many as one million, were driven from their homes. The point about the various deportations was not just their enormous scale. These violent disruptions of entire communities reflected the destructive potential of modem ideologies of ethno-nationalism, backed by the resources of a modem state with modem communications (telegraph and railways). Moreover, this was army policy, not necessarily that of the civilian authorities. The army gained the power to carry out policy in wartime in a way that was impossible in peacetime. The army's policy, ostensibly based on the fear that the Jews (and other ethnic minorities) might conduct espionage and betray secrets to the Germans, was a part of the shift in the nature of warfare between the French Revolution and the First World War from war between small professional armies and war between mobilized nations, in which some ethnic groups were defined as the nation and others defined as 'foreign'; it thus contributed to the emergence of antisemitic violence among soldiers and the local populations. (A.Kramer, Dynamics Of Destruction, 2007, p.151.)
It was certainly the case that the Nazi regime, like the Turkish CUP regime in 1915, constructed its victims as the 'enemy', associated them with perceived foreign enemies (the Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy'), and used provocation to justify eradication (the murder by a Jew of a German diplomat in Paris in 1938 which was the occasion for the pogroms known as 'Crystal Night'; and Hitler's rhetorical 'prophecy' of January 1939 that if the Jews were to unleash another world war, it would end with their destruction). It has never been properly resolved whether Hitler spoke the words ascribed to him: 'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?' (22 August 1939, shortly before the start of the Second World War). In fact, the genocide of the Armenians was widely known in inter-war Europe, but the important issue is that Hitler was preparing his closest followers and commanders to carry out ruthless extermination (in the first instance of the Polish elites) by pointing out that the Allies in the end had done little to punish the Turkish organizers of the genocide.
Equally pernicious was the associated myth of the Jews as shirkers and traitors. Why should this myth have spread in Germany, rather than Britain or France? Also preceding the end of the war, it was created by right-wing and antisemitic associations such as the Pan-German League which were influential both among army officers and outside the army. Already in 1914the antisemites were demanding 'investigations' into the war participation of Jews, and attempted to obtain harsh measures of racial discrimination. Despite the fact that Jews had faced discrimination in the army and were prohibited before 1914 from becoming officers in the Prussian army, they served in approximately the same proportion as the rest of the population. However soon, the antisemitic forces moved from the margin of German politics towards the centre. The Pan-German League had become influential in mainstream militarist nationalism, above all through the Fatherland Party, and in October 1918 the League chairman, Class, called for the formation of a 'resolute national party' which would conduct a 'ruthless struggle against Jews' in order 'to divert the people's anger' at the impending defeat.(See Dirk Stegmann, Dirk, 'Vom Neokonservatismus zum Protofaschismus: Konservative Partei, Vereine und Verbande 1893-1920', in ed, Bernd-]tirgen Wendt and Peter-Christian Witt, eds., Deutscher Konservatismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift fur Fritz Fischer zum 75. Geburtstag und zum 50. Doktorjubiliium (Bonn, 1983), pp. 199-230.)
In Germany the antisemites, who were obsessed by their stereotypes, lit upon the notion of the JewishBolshevist conspiracy, a new idea which proved to be so attractive to the extreme right that it henceforth became a fixed part of Nazi rhetoric. Although most German Jews were solid liberals who supported parties like the German Democratic Party (DDP), the German People's Party (DVP), and some would have supported the nationalist-conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) but for its antisemitism, the participation of Jews in some leading roles in the Russian Revolution and in the short lived revolution in 1919 in Bavaria lent a spurious rationale to the ideas of racism. Revenge for 'betrayal' in the war was therefore closely linked with the destruction of the internal racial and political enemy, and the JewishBolshevist conspiracy' was one hinge that joined the mass destruction of the First World War with the Holocaust of the Second World War. (For details see the upcoming book by Lorna Waddington Hitler's Crusade: Bolshevism and the Myth of the International Jewish Conspiracy,2007.)
One strong similarity in the genocidal process on the eastern front, 1914 to 1920, the Armenian genocide, 1915, and the genocide in the Second World War, was the causal relationship between military setbacks, racism/ antisemitism, and a tendency towards genocidal 'reprisals' evident in the conduct of the Tsarist army in the First World War, in the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915, during the Civil War in Russia, and in late 1941 in the German invasion of the Soviet Union.Yet there was a difference between the degree of intentionality between the vicious, but largely sporadic and unplanned genocidal violence against Jews in eastern Europe, 1914 to 1921, and the Nazi policy of genocide. After three decades of discussion between historians who argued that the Holocaust was the result purely of Hitler's will and his long-held plan (the intentionalist view), and those who argued that it arose incrementally out of the progressive radicalization of antisemitic policies in the competing power centers of the Nazi apparatus (the functionalist view), there can be no doubt that the mass murder was intended by Hitler and the Nazi elite, planned down to the last detail, and implemented by large staff of collaborators, administrators, and perpetrators of various degrees of direct complicity and responsibility. The genocide was not a natural catastrophe, but mass murder willed by human beings; the process was not run by machines, nor was it unstoppable. This raises questions of the relationship between the dynamic of destruction and genocide and the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. Total war, which tends towards annihilation, bears within it the potential for genocide. Yet genocide was not an inevitable consequence of total war; nor, as we now know from the experience of Rwanda in the 1990S, is total war even a necessary precondition for genocide.
In the First World War, not only with respect to genocide, but to war policy in general, in making the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, and in relation to the targeting of the cultural heritage, the decisions were taken by the military. (The exception to this rule was the genocide in Turkey, which was decided upon by the central committee of the CUP, not the army.) In the Second World War, decisions were taken by civilian leaders: Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, Truman. One important legacy of the First World War was therefore not the militarization of society in the sense that governments and the decision-making process were taken over by the military, but rather that civilian politicians, following the success of Clemenceau and Lloyd George, decided that war was too important to be left to the generals. That process went furthest in Germany, where the military was almost totally integrated into the Nazi state, and correspondingly made complicit in its crimes.
From the First to the Second World War, in general, then, there was an immense progression in the dynamic of destruction, with a terrible increase in combatant and non-combatant loss of life. Whereas civilians amounted to between one-sixth and one-third of the war dead in the First World War (depending on whether one counts deaths from the global influenza epidemic which was unrelated to the war), the proportion in the Second World War was around two-thirds. There were two main causes for this dramatic shift: the revolution in the technology of war, primarily aerial warfare, and the revolution in ideology, primarily racial warfare. Together they totally removed the distinction between civilians and soldiers, between 'home' and 'front'; as the historian Ian Kershaw has written, the Second World War was 'a popular war in the sense of the full involvement of the peoples of Europe in the fighting, and the suffering'.( Kershaw, 'War and political violence in twentieth-century Europe', journal Of Contemporary European History, 14 (2005), p. 11O.)
The relatively low level of civilian casualties from aerial bombardment during the First World War was due less to the observance of the laws of war than to the fact that the technology of aerial warfare was in its infancy. By the end of the war, however, the potential of aerial warfare for mass destruction was recognized by thinkers such as Douhet, and it was realized in almost every war since then. During the Second World War, German and then British air strategy targeted enemy civilians. This distinguished it from Allied economic warfare during the First World War, which could achieve its objectives practically without bloodshed. The Germans, applying the lessons of Douhet, bombed Warsaw in 1939 and Rotterdam in 1940 to terrorize the population and succeeded in gaining quick surrender. However, it was the democratic states which took the logic of annihilation through air war to its extreme. The British bombing of German cities, starting in 1941, culminated in the obliteration of half of Hamburg in August 1943 and of the historic heart of Dresden in February 1945. While German bombs killed some 60,000 British civilians, British and American bombing killed ten times as many German civilians. While the Anglo-American bombing campaign was a strategy embarked on only in response to attack, Nazi warfare was criminal from start to finish. It was a war of racial-biological annihilation to allow the German 'race' to dominate Europe by exploiting the inferior races and exterminating those deemed vermin. On 22 August 1939, Adolf Hitler explained to army commanders how the forthcoming war against Poland wa~ to be started: 'I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.' This is how it was to be waged: 'Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right. The greatest harshness ... The wholesale destruction of Poland is the military objective.' (Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945, Series D, vol. 7, p. 205.) In the First World War General Ludendorf (and others) drafted plans for the creation of a large strip of Polish border territory which would be settled by German colonists, and the Polish and Jewish population would be resettled further east. Yet these radical plans, which were discussed at highest level in the government and the military leadership, were never implemented, because the military leaders feared that such a violation of international law would have repercussions in international public opinion.( Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, 'Von "Ober Ost" nach "Ostland"?', in Die vergessenc Front. Der Osten 1914-15. Ereignis, Wirkung, Nachwirkung, ed. Gerhard P. Gross. Paderbom, etc: Schoningh, 2006, pp. 295-310.)
The Nazi policy of 'ethnic redistribution', which appears to be rooted in these proposals, was no continuation, but a radical break: for all the harshness of the occupations of I914-18, the German state did not carry out brutal mass population expulsions which were the order of the day from 1939 to 1945. Nazi warfare represented the ultimate radicalization of the war on enemy culture: ideological warfare for total subjugation, exploitation, and ultimately removal. While there was clearly a relationship between modem weapons of mass destruction and mass killing, it was thus the incursion of violence based on political ideologies, rather than weapons of mass destruction, which explains the highest death toll in the war. Poland and Yugoslavia suffered the greatest number of casualties in proportion to their population: Poland about 6 million, including 3 million Jews, and Yugoslavia about 1.2 million out of a population of approximately 16 million. From the first day of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the German army acted with extreme violence against the population and prisoners of war. This meant not only the brutal treatment of individuals, but the predisposition to commit murder against large groups. The soldiers, frequently nervous, feared 'francs-tireurs', or Polish resistance fighters, who, according to the troops' pre-war training, would attack 'treacherously'; although there was no guerrilla resistance entire villages were burned down on suspicion, and thousands of civilians were murdered. There was widespread violence against Jews, not only because they were thought to be the ringleaders of subversion, but also because of soldiers' general antisemitic prejudice, drummed into them by years of Nazi propaganda. Fully two years before the decision for genocide was taken, in other words, there was a consensus in principle that a genocidal war was to be conducted. (Bohler, 'Tragische Verstrickung oder Auftakt zum Vemichtungskrieg?', p. 50; cf Jochen Bohler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg. Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939. Frankfurt, 2006.)
Soviet policy towards Poland, although it was not genocidal, was not much less destructive. With the intention of eliminating its military and political elite, the Soviets executed 4,000 Polish officers at Katyn in 1940, killed at least another 33,000 officers, political leaders, and intellectuals, and arrested 100,000 civilians. The Yugoslav casualties resulted not only from the German invasion and the savage repression of the Yugoslav guerrilla resistance, but above all from what we could call the first Yugoslav civil war, in which Serbs were the victims of mass murder at the hands of the Croatian fascists, the Ustasa. In fact, violence was omnidirectional in the several overlapping wars in the Balkans. The Ustasa regime aimed to create an 'ethnically pure' state by expelling a third of the Serbs, forcibly converting one-third, and killing the rest. This amounted to a policy of genocide. But nationalist Serb Cetniks also targeted Croatians, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians; civil war broke out between the Cetniks and the Communist partisans; Croatian fascists killed Roma and Jews and handed them over to the Nazis for deportation to the death camps; and at the end of the war the victorious Communist partisans killed between 33,000 and 38,000 (actual or real) collaborators and political enemies. The ugly euphemism 'ethnic cleansing' (etnicko Ciscenje), which entered the political vocabulary of the world during the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990S, was in fact invented in 1941 or 1942, when it was used by both Croatian and Serb nationalists to designate their programme to deport or kill the 'other' people and create 'ethnically cleansed' territories. The treatment of prisoners of war by the Nazi and Communist regimes was also marked by a descent into barbarity. While about 5 per cent of the Russian prisoners of war in German captivity died in the First World War, in the Second World War, approximately 3.2 million Soviet prisoners out of a total of 5.2 million lost their lives in German captivity, a death rate of 61.5 per cent, because of a deliberate policy to starve them and work them to death. About 34 per cent of the 3 million German prisoners died in Soviet captivity. Yet it was mainly harsh conditions and administrative chaos that caused the high mortality of German prisoners, not deliberate violation of international law or a policy of annihilation; in that sense Soviet and Nazi treatment of prisoners diverged. Nazi racial ideology, the idea that the Soviet soldiers were 'sub-humans', drove the dynamic of destruction in Germany to its extreme.
The spatial dimension had a new quality in the Second World War, where the control of territory was determined partly by air power which notwithstanding all its legal and moral problems-in the end did make a crucial difference: Allied aerial superiority ensured the success of the Normandy invasion in 1944 and paralysed the German war economy by destroying its infrastructure. By late 1944, lack of oil and other essential supplies reduced the German army to near-immobility in a fast shrinking space confined to German territory. Occupation policy, too, marked a radical shift from the First World War, and not only was it designed for maximum exploitation of resources in order to avoid a repeat of the food shortages that caused civilian unrest. Its crucial feature was not even the vast territorial extent of the German occupation from North Africa to Norway and deep inside Russia; rather, it was a part of racial policy for the total reorganization of Europe. The dystopia of vast population transfers and the targeting of civilians had thus not only become thinkable, but was implemented, not only by the Nazistate, but to varying degrees by all the powers in the Second WorId War.
