Theodor Adorno (1903–69) was a German-born intellectual, sociologist, philosopher, composer and a member of the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’ (a neo-Marxist group of thinkers who sought to explain the failure of left-wing revolution in Western Europe in the 1930s and the rise of Nazism). Like many, he recognized that the world could not be the same after the horrors of the Third Reich. Whatever one’s verdict on his overall political philosophy, he succeeded in summing up something of the profound impact of the Third Reich on the world that came after it: ‘After Auschwitz: no poetry.’1 Nazism had left Europe shattered and traumatized, and its effects are still with us.
In 1945, the Third Reich was brought so low that ‘Germany’s defeat was unambiguous’ and German support for Nazism had collapsed.2 Hitler’s immediate geo-political legacy was the advance of Soviet communism into the heart of Europe and consequently the Cold War that would last until the end of the 1980s. The states that found themselves east of the Iron Curtain did so as a direct consequence of the war that Hitler had launched and lost. But the shockwaves of the end of the Third Reich went further still. An exhausted Britain could no longer sustain its world role. The USA, in its war with Germany, had finally achieved military superpower status, which it still holds, while the cost of achieving its own version of this and maintaining that status would eventually lead to the collapse of the USSR in 1991.3 Ironically, it was the captured technical expertise of German scientists that made a massive contribution to the development of the post-war age of competing ballistic missiles.4
Within Germany itself it was the utter collapse of the Third Reich that saw the nation divided into zones between the victorious Allies, which would, by 1949, begin to harden into two distinct German states – one democratic in the West and the other a one-party-state in the East. In a dramatic reversal of the Nazi drive for Lebensraum in the East, the eastern borders of Germany were redrawn on a massive scale and this process pushed the Polish border far to the west of where it had stood in 1939. The victorious Soviets dismembered East Prussia (dividing it between the USSR and Poland) and the German lands to the east of the rivers Oder and Neisse were incorporated into Poland. This compensated Poland for its land that had been annexed by the USSR further east,5 and the Oder– Neisse line was recognized by Germany as Poland’s western frontier in 1970.6 As relations between the Western Allies and the USSR rapidly cooled, the planned peace treaty with a reunited Germany did not occur until 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
This redrawing of Germany’s eastern borders was accompanied by massive population movement as millions of Germans were expelled from the newly liberated states of Eastern Europe. Trekking westward during the winter of 1945–6, hundreds of thousands died. It has been estimated that between 1944 and 1950, somewhere in the region of 12 million Germans were expelled westward.7 By the latter date only about 12 per cent of the Germans living in Eastern Europe in 1939 were still resident there. It was the largest movement of any ethnic group in modern world history. And it came as a direct consequence of the actions and defeat of the Third Reich. The ethnic map of Europe – already brutally redrawn by the murderous actions of the Nazis – had been redrawn yet again by their defeat. Even in the twenty-first century tensions can still be raised between Germany and its neighbours in Poland and the Czech Republic by debates about compensating Germans expelled from the East and monuments commemorating their expulsion.8 The ghost of the Third Reich still haunts Central European relations.
More positively, the failure of the League of Nations to prevent the Second World War led to the establishment of the United Nations. In 1945, representatives of fifty countries met in San Francisco to draw up the United Nations Charter. One of its immediate tasks was the care of the vast number of displaced people caused by Nazi policies and by the upheaval of war. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which eventually was replaced by the International Refugee Organization (IRO), had been created by Allied planners well before the end of the war to deal with the anticipated crisis.9 The modern Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), founded in 1950, continues to develop this legacy of caring for those displaced by war, famine and natural disasters. Today, its staff of about 6,600 work in more than 110 countries and assist about 34 million people.10
Paradoxically, the failure of Hitler’s bid for European domination and his genocide against the Jews provided a stimulus to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East in the state of Israel.11 Since the late-nineteenth century, Zionist organizations had worked for the creation of a Jewish national state. Anti-Semitism in Europe caused many Jews to embrace this belief and Nazi persecution increased the commitment of many Jews to secure a defensible homeland. By 1945, Jews fleeing Nazi persecution had increased the Jewish population of British-administered Palestine to about 33 per cent of the total population. With the defeat of the Third Reich, many thousands of Jewish survivors sought to escape from Europe to find a new home in the Middle East. Existing trends may well have led to the establishment of Israel, even had Nazism not arisen, but what is clear is that, at the very least, the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s accelerated these trends. This was both from the perspective of Jews wishing to escape a continent that seemed bent on their destruction and from the perspective of an international community more open to Jewish aspirations following the horrors of the Final Solution.12
The actions of the Third Reich were also key factors leading to European integration that has transformed Europe since 1945. In 1951, the Treaty of Paris created the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). It aimed to strengthen the economies of Europe and make the outbreak of another war between Germany and France unthinkable. Since then, this partnership has been the ‘bedrock and motor of European economic integration’.13 By ensuring the integration of such important industries as coal and steel it turned these two traditional enemies into partners in the future development of Europe. As such it was a direct consequence of the trauma that had torn Europe apart between 1939 and 1945. In the absence of a formal peace treaty ending the Second World War, a revived Germany was peacefully reintegrated into Europe through economic cooperation.14 This first step in integration was followed by cooperation on a wider front through the European Economic Community (EEC) formed in 1957–8, the forerunner of the modern European Union (EU).15 The fact that the major states of Europe have been at peace since 1945 and that today Germany and France are allies is due to the transformation of European attitudes following the defeat of the Third Reich. For the same reason, German foreign policy is now committed to non-aggression, in direct contrast with the first forty-five years of the twentieth century, and its energies have been channelled into economic expansion.
The appalling atrocities of the Nazi regime led to the prosecution of at least some of those responsible, in the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals of 1945–9. These events played a major part in later developments in international law such as the Genocide Convention of 1948 (defining genocide and declaring it a crime under international law), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War of 1949 and its 1977 supplementary protocols. The court, established by UN Resolution 827 in 1993, to deal with war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, along with the court established by UN Resolution 955 in 1994, to deal with the Rwandan genocide, reveal an international community that now is prepared (if belatedly) to take action against war crimes and genocidal acts. This too can be seen as a long-term legacy of the Third Reich and its final defeat.16
Despite the collapse of Soviet communism and the reunification of Germany, which understandably caused historian Allan Bullock to comment that ‘The age of Hitler and Stalin is over’,17 the shadow of the Third Reich still lingers, well over half a century after its end. The character of Europe is still defined to a significant extent by the traumas unleashed by Hitler. The ethnic map of Europe in the twenty-first century is hugely different because of the Third Reich. The widespread Jewish culture, which was a characteristic feature of Poland and the western USSR in 1939, no longer exists. The German communities of Eastern Europe are largely gone. Eastern Europe is a different kind of place because of the Third Reich. This is a permanent change.
Positively, there is a clear determination to ensure that the horrors of Nazism are not repeated, by commemorations such as Holocaust Remembrance and educating modern young people about racism and intolerance. Alarming though is the evidence that there are still Holocaust deniers who refuse to acknowledge the enormity of the crimes of the Third Reich, and neo-Nazi groups who look back nostalgically to its ideology and its imagery. These groups are clearly minorities but they remind us that Nazism can still exert an appeal, especially at times of social stress.
That is why it is necessary that the ideology of the Third Reich, its appeal and its terrible effects must be studied and understood. We have to continue to ask ourselves: how was it possible? What were the wide-ranging factors that allowed the Third Reich to prosper and, for over a decade, to expand its influence? In doing this, it is necessary to examine it, not only as a German phenomenon, but also against the backdrop of wider European history and to recognize that its values briefly resonated with many people, principally inside, but also outside Germany. These questions cause us to recognize its unique character and at the same time to identify those features that were related to wider trends, experiences and ideologies. And these did not all vanish with the defeat of Germany in 1945. These are difficult questions and issues because they mean that we cannot label the Third Reich as being so unique that aspects of it could not happen again. Only when we come closer to understanding it can we have the insight necessary to confront its ideology – if it reappears in some new form – with the words of the White Rose movement: ‘We will not be silent.’
1. Often quoted in this form, or in the forms ‘Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, ‘No poetry after Auschwitz’ or ‘There can be no poetry after Auschwitz’.
2. Evans, Richard, The Third Reich at War, Penguin, 2009, pp. 738–9.
3. Overy, Richard, Why the Allies Won, revised edition, Pimlico, 2006, p. xiv.
4. Ibid., p. 298.
5. Hoffmeister, Gerhart and Tubach, Frederic C, Germany: From the Nazi Era to German Unification, Continuum, 1992, p. 56.
6. For an overview of the so-called ‘ostpolitik’, see Buchanan, Tom, Europe’s Troubled Peace, 1945–2000, Blackwell, 2006, pp. 171–3. Also, von Dannenberg, Julia, The Foundations of Ostpolitik: The Making of the Moscow Treaty between West Germany and the USSR, Oxford University Press, 2008.
7. Ther, Philipp and Siljak, Ana, Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001, p. 62.
8. Ingrao, Charles W, Szabo, Franz A. J., The Germans and the East, Purdue University Press, 2008, pp. 423–5.
9. Shephard, Ben, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War, Bodley Head, 2010, explores the refugee crisis following the war and the attempts to respond to it.
10. For an overview of the history of the UN, see Krasno, Jean E., The United Nations: Confronting the Challenges of a Global Society, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004. Also, Luard, Evan, Heater, Derek Benjamin, The United Nations: How it Works and What it Does, 2nd edn, Macmillan, 1994.
11. For an overview of the history of Israel, including its origins, see Gilbert, Martin, Israel: A History, Doubleday, 1998.
12. For an analysis concluding that Nazi genocide was the most important impetus for the formation of the state of Israel and a key feature in defining the identity, ideology, and politics of Israel, see Segev, Tom and Watzman, Haim (trans.), The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Domino Press, 1991.
13. Dedman, Martin, The Origins and Development of the European Union 1945–1995: A History of European Integration, Routledge, 2002, p. 2.
14. Ibid., p. 2.
15. For a detailed examination of its history, see Kaiser, Wolfram, Leucht, Brigitte and Rasmussen, Morten (eds), The History of the European Union: Origins of a Trans-and Supranational Polity 1950–72, Routledge, 2008.
16. Recent examples of genocide and the role of the international community in response to genocide and potential genocidal situations have been surveyed in Totten, Samuel (ed.), Genocide at the Millennium, Transaction Books, 2005. This is the fifth volume in the series Genocide: A Critical Bibliographical Review.
17. Bullock, Allan, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, Harper Collins, 1991, p. 1,079.