EXTERMINATION STATES
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
The New York Times
November 4, 2007 Sunday
Late Edition – Final
Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of "Stalin: The Court of the
Red Tsar" and "Young Stalin."
Section 7; Column 0; Book Review Desk; Pg. 32
DYNAMIC OF DESTRUCTION
Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War.
By Alan Kramer.
Illustrated. 434 pp. Oxford University Press. $34.95.
Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Hitler supposedly said on Aug. 22, 1939, as he prepared his henchmen
for the savagery of race war and the slaughter of the Jews of Europe.
In many ways, this link between the genocide of the Armenians by the
Ottoman Empire in 1915 and the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis from
1941 to 1945 brings together the elements of Alan Kramer’s important
book, "Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First
World War." Kramer believes that the two world wars may be regarded
as a single four-decade trauma, and he argues that World War I was
considerably more than simply a new industrial form of warfare that
brutalized the modern world.
Destruction, Kramer says, became a deliberate policy in many, perhaps
all, of the combatant countries. This made possible not only conscious
hooliganism against great cultural monuments (like churches) but also
the creation of an actual culture of violence.
Kramer, an associate professor of history at Trinity College, Dublin,
believes that as the fighting intensified, the combatants embraced the
annihilation of soldiers and civilians as a military and political
policy. "The thesis," he writes, "is that there was a ‘dynamic of
destruction’ which produced the most extensive cultural devastation
and mass killing in Europe since the Thirty Years War."
An admirable work of analysis and narrative, Kramer’s book shows that
this killing culture was hardly inevitable. Although there were many
reasons for the dynamic of destruction to be found in the peculiarities
of the different political cultures, ultimately, he declares, the
orders were given by men, mainly military men. (This is an interesting
difference with World War II, where civilians — Stalin, Churchill,
Hitler, Roosevelt — were in real command.) These generals did not
have to give these orders. "The dynamic of destruction was not a law of
nature," Kramer argues. "It was man-made, capable of infinite variation
… capable of being stopped before ultimate self-destruction."
"Dynamic of Destruction" opens with a series of deliberate acts of
cultural vandalism by Germany at the start of the war: over several
days in August 1914, German forces in Louvain, Belgium, not only
murdered 248 innocent civilians in cold blood, but burned the city’s
ancient library to the ground. It was the start of a new style of
warfare. Kramer goes on to survey a European culture fascinated with
the purifying possibilities of violence, a culture that extended across
not just Germany but also Italy, Serbia and Russia, and the Ottoman
and Austro-Hungarian empires. This is the finest part of the book
because, while we tend to be very familiar with Germany and Britain,
the other participants are hardly known to Western readers at all.
Most of the Great Powers, except Britain, had aggressive war aims
that included the annexation of other countries. Such aims were
destructive to begin with, but became more so once it was clear there
would be no quick victory. For instance, Germany’s aims in the East
— the creation of a military-colonial state known as Ober Ost —
and its occupation of great swaths of Eastern Europe and Russia were
brutal and ruthless, providing a foundation for racial stereotyping
and merciless depredation. (Still, as Kramer takes care to note,
these were not "a pilot program for the Third Reich.")
In many ways, Kramer underlines the exceptionalism of Germany, where
the leadership really did crave a preventive war against its enemies.
But in some fine analysis, he shows that Germany wasn’t as exceptional
as all that. Italy was surprisingly aggressive, hoping to annex
portions of the Austro-Hungarian empire, while the Austro-Hungarian
military, under Gen. Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, was constantly
pushing for war. (In 1913, he called for war no fewer than 25
times.) Their aim was "the total annihilation of Serbia."
But the Austrians needed Germany’s backing to launch their war, and
Berlin, as Kramer explains, did not have to give it. It was understood
by all the Great Powers that Russia would be unable to stand by while
its little Orthodox brother Serbia was threatened.
When the Russians mobilized, the Germans recognized it as a defensive
move. "I have the impression," the Prussian military attache in St.
Petersburg reported to Berlin, "that here one has mobilized for fear
of imminent events, without aggressive intentions." Kaiser Wilhelm
wrote on this: "Correct, exactly so."
In some ways, the war against Serbia had been fought already in
the two Balkan wars of 1912-13, caused by the nationalist goals of
the region’s new states in conflict with the tottering Ottoman and
Habsburg empires — and in conflict with one another. Kramer comments
that while the Western front of World War I at least had good medical
care and sanitation, the Balkan wars and, afterward, the fighting
on the Eastern fronts produced "endemic disease and mass fatalities
among civilians." The massacre of tens of thousands of civilians
in Macedonia and Thrace by the Bulgarians was "not merely … a
short-term byproduct of war" but a "part of a longer-term project of
nation-state construction." Meanwhile, in crushing Serbia, Austria
and Germany killed 250,000 soldiers and 300,000 civilians out of 3.1
million. No combatant faced higher per capita losses.
War on the Eastern fronts was truly a war of annihilation, one with
racial overtones. Russia expelled 500,000 Jews and 743,000 Poles from
their homes near the front. And Kramer leaves us in no doubt that
the killing of a million Armenians was the deliberate policy of the
Ottoman Empire under Enver Pasha and the Young Turks.
The book’s survey of the Western front is less dramatic because we
know it so well. More gripping is the cultural material in the section
"War, Bodies and Minds," which contains truly jolting photographs and
excerpts from memoirs. I did not know that the British Army ran at
least two brothels in France. One memoir recounts the chilling sight
of French prostitutes plying their trade surrounded by the bodies of
dead men. An arresting photograph shows bare-breasted prostitutes at
a German brothel in Belgium, posing with German soldiers in spiked
Pickelhaube helmets. And there is no better illustration of the self-
mulitation that total war brings than the shocking photograph of a
"railwayman, mouth torn away and lower jaw gone."
This destruction of bodies and minds had two effects after World War
I: the pacifism and appeasement that were prominent in Britain and
France between the wars, and the worship of violence that gripped
Russia, Italy and Germany. The dynamic of destruction became a state
religion through the savage Terror of Bolshevism in Russia, and the
racial violence of Nazism in Germany.
Kramer is absolutely right to argue that Russian history should be
seen "in a continuum" from 1914 to 1921. World War I did brutalize
Russia, making revolution inevitable, but Kramer also points out
that the Russian civil war following the revolution was a disaster
that took 10 million lives (in battle, massacre, disease and famine),
many more than Russia’s losses in World War I. During the civil war,
the White terror was as bad as the Red terror. I found in my own
research into the letters and memoirs of Stalin and his comrades
that it was the experience of the civil war, not World War I (in
which few of the top Bolsheviks fought), that gave them their taste
for homicidal solutions. (Kramer might have added that Trotsky,
as a journalist reporting on the Balkan wars, was horrified by the
violence he witnessed — but then went on to mimic it when he was a
warlord in the Russian civil war.)
This stimulating, scholarly and shrewd book is as rich in original
ideas and accounts of unfamiliar aspects of World War I as it is
energetic in its revisionism. But, half narrative, half analysis,
it is densely written and sometimes pedantic. It may be hard going
at times for general readers.
Nonetheless, everyone can learn something from Kramer’s nuanced and
sensible conclusion: "Total war," he writes, "which tends towards
annihilation, bears within it the potential for genocide. Yet genocide
was not an inevitable consequence of total war."