Book Review: The Vanquished

 I long ago became convinced by the argument that WWII was really a continuation of WWI, in the sense that the seeds of WWII were sown in 1918-19. What I hadn’t appreciated until I read this book is how much of the violence of WWI continued in various forms long after the Versailles treaty. I’ve read “The Guns of August” and “The Zimmerman Telegram” (Barbara Tuchman), “The Russian Revolution” (both the book by Richard Pipes and the one with the same title by Alan Moorehead), and recently read “Paris 1919” (Margret MacMillan). I’ve read “Balkan Ghosts” and “The Balkans” by Mischa Glenny, in order to better understand the history and nationalist divisions leading to the fall of Yugoslavia, a state that was created in 1918 under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. After I posted my review of “The Fall of the Ottomans” (Eugene Rogan), Edmund Neill recommended “The Vanquished” by Robert Gerwarth. I’d read it before, but I decided to re-read it.

Prior to WWI, empires were a major form of government across the planet: the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the British Empire and the Russian Empire. France had colonies in North Africa and Indochina. Germany had colonies in Africa and the South Pacific. Even the US was a kind of empire at the time, with territories/colonies in Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines. The end of WWI marked the break-up or beginning of the dissolution of empires, but they were often replaced with multi-ethnic entities that, while branded as nations, were in reality mini-empires with large ethnic sub-populations that remained in conflict. While history has often treated the period between Versailles and the Nazi invasion of Poland as a relatively peaceful interregnum, it was anything but that for most of the people who experienced the horror of WWI.

The link between the post-WWI violence and WWII is clear: “Nazi Germany and its overtly exterminationist imperial project of the later 1930s and early 1940s owed much to the logic of ethnic conflict and irredentism created by the Great War and the redrawing of borders in 1918-19.” (p. 214) One ethnicity that continued to suffer after the war was the Jewish populations in Russia and the former Austrian-Hungarian empire. As they sought refuge throughout Europe after the Great War, particularly in Germany, Austria and Poland, they were simultaneously blamed for loyalty to the empires in which they resided and for Boshevism, many of whose leaders in Russia were Jewish.

The Triple Entente powers, particularly France, saw huge swathes of real estate destroyed by bombardment and trench warfare, not to mention the deaths and maiming of their soldiers; it was understandable that they sought reparations. But a big problem with the Entente breakup of the Austrian-Hungarian, German and Ottoman Empires is that the egregious penalties levied against their people were to exact compensation and revenge from populations who had, since the war, rejected their empire overlords and set up quasi-democratic states. These states were not parties to the Central Powers, yet they had to come up with the gold, coal and livestock to compensate the victors while accepting refugees and rebuilding their war-shattered economy. It is no wonder that both the extremes of Boshevism and fascism became attractive panaceas to the many military and civilian survivors in these states.

The various battles and associated dislocations and atrocities that marked ethnic cleansing of minorities from 1919 through the 1920s, most a direct consequence of the Great War and its aftermath, are too many and lurid to summarize here. The grievances and resentments of the vanquished that smoldered in that decade fueled the bloodthirsty extremism on the right and the left. In Gerwarth’s words:

"Few politicians observed the developments in Anatolia between 1918 and 1923 with greater interest than Adolf Hitler, who would later profess that in the aftermath of the Great War he and Mussolini had looked up to Mustafa Kemal [who led the Turkish military victory over Greece and the violent expulsion of ethnic Greeks from Turkey] as a model of how defiance and will power could triumph over Western ‘aggression.’ Hitler not only admired Kemal’s uncompromising resistance to Allied pressure, but also sought to imitate his means of constructing a radically secular, nationalist and ethnically homogeneous nation state after a crushing military defeat. The CUP’s [Committee for Union and Progress that ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1913-18] genocidal wartime policies towards the Armenians and Kemal’s ruthless expulsion of Christian Ottomans featured prominently in the Nazi imagination. They became a source of inspiration and a model for Hitler’s plans and dreams in the years leading up to the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939.” (p. 247)

Far from being “the war to end all wars,” the Great War burned for the next decade. Efforts to mitigate conflict were ultimately thwarted by the great depression that began in 1929. Far from a world “safe for democracy,” populist parties on the left and right attacked advocates of democracy while promising stability and order, resulting in the now-familiar apotheosis of fascism that swept Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan. That said, Gerwarth acknowledges that there was nothing inevitable about the outbreak of war that became WWII. This is a critical point as false historical analogies proliferate. If there is a lesson today, it is that widespread poverty and suffering is exploited by extremists.

This is a well-written and scholarly book. The story is, of course, relentlessly depressing. There are no heroes, and we know how the story ends. I learned a lot, and it helped my understanding of 20th century history, the Cold War, and even events today unfolding in Ukraine. I’m glad I re-read it. I got much more out of it this time.