Page 364 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

364 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

destroying the spiritual resistance of the belligerents by means of moral powers,”’ which
included ‘their destruction in the enemy country’.
German soldiers in the Second World War had a new kind of enemy perception, which
nevertheless had roots in the previous war. in the First World War trench newspapers and
ego documents of soldiers frequently spoke of Germany’s cultural superiority, and the dis-
course of the racial inferiority of the Slavs was equally perceptible. However, the perspec-
tive of the racial-ideological war of annihilation was absent. Yet in popular culture some
ominous signs were visible. In Richard Skowronnek’s juvenile book trilogy, Sturmzeichen,
Das große Feuer, and Die schwere Not, of which 250,000 copies had been sold by 1916 and
which was republished in 1933/34, the Russian soldiers in the war appear as drunken brutes.
The author has a kidnapped East Prussian district administrator say; ‘There can be no peace
with this dehumanized people. One has to beat them to death, man for man.’
The experience of the victorious war in the east and political violence after 1918 were
further important connections. Through the experience of the occupation in the Great War
and the short-lived dream of the eastern imperium the terms Volk and Raum were reconfig-
ured and interpreted in a racial sense; Ostforschung (research on the east) provided pseudo-
scientific legitimation; and the collective memory of the primitive chaos of the east was
transformed by the Nazis into their vision of the racial utopia.
The brutality of the Freikorps units in the Baltic in early 1919 was another important
link. Motivated by promises of colonial settlement, racialism, and hatred of the Bolsheviks,
they spread fear and terror; anticipating the extreme violence of the invasion of Poland
twenty years later, the ‘Baltic Landwehr’ killed over three thousand people in May/June
1919 in Riga alone, and several hundred more in other towns. the over 300 murders com-
mitted by members of extreme right-wing associations from 1919 to 1923 in Germany are
testimony to the increased readiness to resort to violence against political opponents. The
memory of heroic deeds in the Great War and the Freikorps fighting was kept alive with a
macabre cult of victimhood and death through countless publications and commemorations
of the fallen.
The history of antisemitism appears to show continuity from the First to the Second
World War. Antisemitism emerged as a mass phenomenon with a peak represented by the
‘Jew census’ in the army in 1916; there was a rise in antisemitism in political culture after
1918, and an openly violent antisemitic party came to power in 1933. The Nazi regime made
antisemitism into state doctrine. The army demonstrated its complicity with the Nazi regime
by anticipating the anti-Jewish measures of the Nuremberg racial laws in 1935 in its own
ranks; in the same year a War Ministry circular described Soviet party officials as ‘usually
dirty Jews’. By the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union the spectre of ‘Jewish Bolshe-
vism’ was a fixed enemy stereotype in the Wehrmacht.
However, it is not the continuities, but the discontinuities in the history of antisemitism
and the genocidal process which are more evident. lethal antisemitic violence was the ab-
solute exception in the Weimar years. In the war and the Weimar Republic the state tried to
stop the spread of antisemitism. Moreover, the genocidal intention was new: it had not been
a part of traditional antisemitism, and in fact it only became the aim of the regime in 1941.
Two decisive turns were necessary. The first turn from situational war crimes, committed