Chapter 3: Boring Stuff of Modern European History That We Usually Ignore
Yes, this is the boring chapter, the one we all often ignore in our history books. Yet the information here will turn out very useful for understanding many of the pivotal events leading up to WWII and the Holocaust. So I encourage you not to skip this chapter.
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Private German Militias Started One Month After the WWI November 1918 Armistice
According to Encyclopedia Britannica on German paramilitary units:
“Freikorps, any of several private paramilitary groups that first appeared in December 1918 in the wake of Germany’s defeat in World War I. Composed of ex-soldiers, unemployed youth, and other discontents and led by ex-officers and other former military personnel, they proliferated all over Germany in the spring and summer of 1919 and eventually numbered more than 65 corps of various names, sizes, and descriptions. Most were nationalistic and radically conservative or protofascist and were employed unofficially but effectively to put down left-wing revolts and uprisings in Berlin, Bremen, Brunswick, Hamburg, Halle, Leipzig, Silesia, Thuringia, and the Ruhr. They fought miniature wars and sometimes resorted to plunder and terror. Their members were involved in several political assassinations, of which the most dramatic was the 1922 murder of Walther Rathenau, the country’s foreign minister.” (We will get to this particular assassination later in this book.)
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We first have to take a quick overview of some consequences of the Treaty of Versailles signed on June 28, 1919, following the Paris Peace Conference begun in January 1919 at the end of WWI. We will, though, save the effects of the peace treaty on Germany until Chapter 4.
We will be going quickly over three important events:
• The creation of Czechoslovakia
• The creation of Yugoslavia
• The tightening of U.S. immigration
Below is a brief overview from the site of the Office of the Historian of the U.S. (still available online although no longer maintained).
“The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles: Negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference were complicated. The United Kingdom, France, and Italy fought together as the Allied Powers during the First World War. The United States entered the war in April 1917 as an Associated Power.
“Treaty negotiations were also weakened by the absence of other important nations. Russia had fought as one of the Allies until December 1917, when its new Bolshevik Government withdrew from the war. The Allied Powers refused to recognize the new Bolshevik Government and thus did not invite its representatives to the Peace Conference. The Allies also excluded the defeated Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria).
“According to French and British wishes, the Treaty of Versailles subjected Germany to strict punitive measures. The Treaty required the new German Government to surrender approximately 10 percent of its prewar territory in Europe and all of its overseas possessions. It placed the harbor city of Danzig (now Gdansk) and the coal-rich Saarland under the administration of the League of Nations, and allowed France to exploit the economic resources of the Saarland until 1935.”
Also from the Office of the Historian of the U.S.:
“The League of Nations, 1920: The League of Nations was an international organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, created after the First World War to provide a forum for resolving international disputes. Though first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson … for an equitable peace in Europe, the United States never became a member.”
Here’s part of an entry from the Encyclopedia Britannica on the newly formed Czechoslovakia:
“When the new country of Czechoslovakia was proclaimed on Oct. 28, 1918 … the first task of the new state, to establish its borders, was undertaken at the Paris Peace Conference, where the historical frontiers separating Bohemia and Moravia from Germany and Austria were approved, with minor rectifications, in favor of the new republic.
“The second task of the new government, to secure the loyalty of its approximately 15 million citizens, proved onerous as well. The borders of Czechoslovakia encompassed not only Czechs and Slovaks but also Germans, Hungarians, Ruthenians, and Poles. About 15 percent of the people were Slovaks; they were a valuable asset to the Czechs, who made up about half the population. Together, these two linguistically close groups constituted a healthy majority in the cobbled-together state.”
And here’s part of an entry from the Encyclopedia Britannica on the newly formed Yugoslavia:
“After the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 ended Ottoman rule in the Balkan Peninsula and Austria-Hungary was defeated in World War I, the Paris Peace Conference underwrote a new pattern of state boundaries in the Balkans. The major beneficiary there was a newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which comprised the former kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro (including Serbian-held Macedonia), as well as Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austrian territory in Dalmatia and Slovenia, and Hungarian land north of the Danube River.”
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Treaty of Trianon Separately Signed June 4, 1920, for Hungary
Encyclopedia Britannia explains:
“By the terms of the treaty, Hungary was shorn of at least two-thirds of its former territory and two-thirds of its inhabitants. Czechoslovakia was given Slovakia, sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, the region of Pressburg (Bratislava), and other minor sites. Austria received western Hungary (most of Burgenland). The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) took Croatia-Slavonia and part of the Banat. Romania received most of Banat and all of Transylvania. Italy received Fiume. Except for plebiscites in two small regions, all the transfers were effected without any plebiscites.” (boldface mine)
Yes, this is very confusing! The reason I included it here was to demonstrate why Hitler’s later promise of returning these lands to Hungary convinced Hungary to join the side of Nazi Germany.
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Station break: Let’s lighten up this chapter with an old joke that has affinity to this dizzying list of countries:
A tax collector comes every year to a peasant and collects the taxes in rubles. One year the tax collector asks for payment in zlotys. “Why zlotys?” the peasant asks. “Because this is no longer Russia; it’s now Poland,” the tax collector replies. “Thank heavens, I hated those Russian winters!”
Major changes in U.S. immigration policies:
Yes, all my grandparents came as immigrants to the U.S. – from Latvia, Tiraspol, Odessa – early in the 20th Century, although they didn’t all enter via the port of New York City. They were lucky they came then, because at that time Emma Lazarus’s poem was still accurate: “Give me your tired, your poor….”
Then after WWI that U.S. immigration hospitality underwent a dramatic shift. As Pew Research states on its site:
“By the early 1900s, the nation’s predominant immigration flow shifted away from northern and western European nations and toward southern and eastern Europe. In response, laws were passed in 1921 and 1924 to try to restore earlier immigration patterns by capping total annual immigration and imposing numerical quotas based on immigrant nationality that favored northern and western European countries.”
And for the Jews desperate to get away from Hitler once he took power in Germany in 1933 – those changes in U.S. immigration policy meant a death sentence for so many.
The above WWI poster is an enlistment poster for Jews in the U.S. to join the U.K. in fighting against Germany and its allies. My husband’s grandfather, Jacob Miller, an immigrant to the U.S., answered the call and was gassed fighting in France.
One more important historical addition for this book’s later narrative:
One year before the end of WWI, in a letter dated November 2, 1917, the British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote a statement of British support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This letter later came to be known as the Balfour Declaration.
Then, as Britannica Encyclopedia explains, the Conference of Sam Remo was held April 19-26, 1920:
“…international meeting convened at San Remo, on the Italian Riviera, to decide the future of the former territories of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, one of the defeated Central Powers in World War I; it was attended by the prime ministers of Great Britain, France, and Italy, and representatives of Japan, Greece, and Belgium.
“… the Conference of San Remo awarded the British government a mandate to control Palestine. With its formal approval by the League of Nations in 1922, this mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917.”
Hence the frequently used term “British Mandate Palestine.”
And to clarify the term Palestine:
Douglas J. Feith writes in the December 13, 2021, Mosaic Magazine article “The Forgotten History of the Term “Palestine’”:
“The ancient Romans pinned the name on the Land of Israel. In 135 CE, after stamping out the province of Judea’s second insurrection, the Romans renamed the province Syria Palaestina—that is, ‘Palestinian Syria.’ They did so resentfully, as a punishment, to obliterate the link between the Jews (in Hebrew, Y’hudim and in Latin Judaei) and the province (the Hebrew name of which was Y’hudah). ‘Palaestina’ referred to the Philistines, whose home base had been on the Mediterranean coast.” (boldface mine)
(Important to note: The U.S. did not join the League of Nations created after WWI.)
And having gone through this somewhat boring history lesson, we get to the publicly trumpeted start of the Holocaust: the STAB IN THE BACK German lie blaming the Communists and the Jews for Germany losing WWI …
NEXT CHAPTER: Chapter 4: The “Roaring Twenties” Weren’t So Wonderful for Defeated Germany