Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices 9780857457394

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TERRITORIAL REVISIONISM AND THE ALLIES OF GERMANY IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

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Austrian and H absburg Studies General Editor: Gary B. Cohen

Published in Association with the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota Volume 1 Austrian Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives Edited by David F. Good, Margarete Grandner, and Mary Jo Maynes Volume 2 From World War to Waldheim: Culture and Politics in Austria and the United States Edited by David F. Good and Ruth Wodak Volume 3 Rethinking Vienna 1900 Edited by Steven Beller Volume 4 The Great Tradition and Its Legacy: The Evolution of Dramatic and Musical Theater in Austria and Central Europe Edited by Michael Cherlin, Halina Filipowicz, and Richard L. Rudolph Volume 5 Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe Edited by Nancy M. Wingfield Volume 6 Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe Edited by Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit Volume 7 The Environment and Sustainable Development in the New Central Europe Edited by Zbigniew Bochniarz and Gary B. Cohen Volume 8 Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1890–1914 Daniel Mark Vyletta Volume 9 The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Sumbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy Edited by Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky

Volume 10 Embodiments of Power: Building Baroque Cities in Europe Edited by Gary B. Cohen and Franz A. J. Szabo Volume 11 Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Differences in Central Europe, 1500–1800 Edited by Howard Louthan, Gary B. Cohen, and Franz A. J. Szabo Volume 12 “Vienna Is Different”: Jewish Writers in Austria from the Fin de Siècle to the Present Hillary Hope Herzog Volume 13 Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900–1934 Britta McEwen Volume 14 Journeys Into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire Edited by Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber Volume 15 Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices Edited by Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff, and Dieter Langewiesche Volume 16 The Viennese Cafe and Fin-de-Siecle Culture Edited by Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller Volume 17 Understanding Multiculturalism: The Habsburg Central European Experience Edited by Johannes Feichtinger and Gary B. Cohen

Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War Goals, Expectations, Practices

d Edited by

Marina Cattaruzza Stefan Dyroff and

Dieter Langewiesche

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First edition published in 2013 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2013, 2015 Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff and Dieter Langewiesche First paperback edition published in 2015 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Territorial revisionism and the allies of Germany in the Second World War : goals, expectations, practices / edited by Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff and Dieter Langewiesche.    p. cm. – (Austrian and Habsburg studies ; v.15)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-85745-738-7 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-78238-920-0 (paperback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-85745-739-4 (ebook)   1. World War, 1939-1945–Occupied territories. 2. World War, 1939–1945 – Territorial questions–Europe, Eastern. 3. World War, 1939–1945–Territorial ­questions–Europe, Central. 4. World War, 1939–1945–Collaborationists–Europe, Eastern. 5. World War, 1939–1945–Collaborationists–Europe, Central. 6. Europe, Eastern–Boundaries–History– 20th century. 7. Europe, Central–Boundaries–History–20th century. 8. Nationalism– Europe, Eastern–History–20th century. 9. Nationalism–Europe, Central–History–20th century. I. Cattaruzza, Marina, 1950– II. Dyroff, Stefan, 1976– III. Langewiesche, Dieter.   D802.E92T47 2012  940.53’2–dc23  2012017044 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-0-85745-738-7 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-920-0 paperback ISBN: 978-0-85745-739-4 ebook

CONTENTS

d Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Maps Introduction: Contextualizing Territorial Revisionism in East Central Europe: Goals, Expectations, and Practices Marina Cattaruzza and Dieter Langewiesche 1 The Worst of Friends: Germany’s Allies in East Central Europe— Struggles for Regional Dominance and Ethnic Cleansing, 1938–1945 István Deák

vii ix xi

1

17

The Role of Minorities 2 Minorities into Majorities: Sudeten German and Transylvanian Hungarian Political Elites as Actors of Revisionism before and during the Second World War Franz Sz. Horváth 3 The Ethnic Policy of the Third Reich toward the Volksdeutsche in Central and Eastern Europe Norbert Spannenberger

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Revisionism as a Driving Force 4 Revisionism in Regional Perspective Holly Case

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Contents

5 Hungarian Revisionism in Thought and Action, 1920–1941: Plans, Expectations, Reality Ignác Romsics 6 Bulgarian Territorial Revisionism and Bulgaria’s Rapprochement with the Third Reich Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk

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Practices of Revisionism 7 Politics and Military Action of Ethnic Ukrainian Collaboration for the “New European Order” Frank Grelka

126

8 Civil War in Occupied Territories: The Polish–Ukrainian Conflict during the Interwar Years and the Second World War Frank Golczewski

141

9 The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and Bulgarian Revisionism, 1923–1944 161 Stefan Troebst 10 Romania in the Second World War: Revisionist out of Necessity Mariana Hausleitner

173

Notes on Contributors Select Bibliography Index

193 197 206

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

d The editors heartily thank the following institutions for their financial support for the project “Territorial Revisionism” and for the publication of this volume: the DFG–Sonderforschungsbereich “Kriegserfahrung” [German Research Foundation–Special Research Cluster “Experiences of War”] at Tübingen University; the Swiss National Science Fund; the Max and Elsa Beer-Brawand Foundation in Berne; the Hochschulstiftung der Burgergemeinde Bern; the Italian Culture Institute in Zürich; and the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Berne. They also thank Nicholas Zücker for his help in the editing of the translated texts. Finally, they express their gratitude to Gary Cohen for his readiness to include their book in the “Austrian and Habsburg Studies” series.

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

d AK AO of the NSDAP

DNP GG GL IDRO IMARO IMRO ITRO MPO

NEDR

NSDR

NDH NSDAP OUN PKWN RKU

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Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army) Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP (Foreign Organization branch of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party) Deutsche Nationale Partei (German National Party in Czechoslovakia) Generalgouvernement (General Government) Gwardia Ludowa (Polish People’s Guard) Internal Dobrudjan Revolutionary Organization Internal Macedonian and Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Organization Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization Internal Thracian Revolutionary Organization Macedonian Political Organization of Northern America; from 1952 the Macedonian Patriotic Organization of Northern America Nationale Erneuerungsbewegung der Deutschen in Rumänien (National Movement for the Renewal of the Germans in Romania) Nationalsozialistische Selbsthilfebewegung der Deutschen in Rumänien (National Socialist Self-help movement of the Germans in Romania) Independent State of Croatia National Socialist German Worker’s Party Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego (Polish Committee of National Liberation) Reichskommissariat Ukraine

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List of Abbreviations

SMAC SHS SNOF SSI UCC UPA UVO VMRO-BNP VMRO-DPMNE VMRO-SMD VR VOMI

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Supreme Macedonian and Adrianopolitian Committee Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes Slavic National Liberation Front Special Service for Information Ukrainian Central Committee Ukraïnśka Povstanśka Armija (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) Ukrainian Military Organization IMRO-Bulgarian National Party IMRO-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity IMRO-Union of Macedonian Brotherhoods Volksdeutscher Rat (Ethnic German Council) Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Main Welfare Office for Ethnic Germans)

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Source: Richard Crampton, Atlas of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, Routledge, 1996, p. 136. By permission of Taylor & Francis.

Eastern Europe under Nazi Domination, Autumn 1942

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Peace Settlement, 1919–1923

Source: Richard Crampton, Atlas of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, Routledge, 1996, p. 36. By permission of Taylor & Francis.

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Territorial Changes, 1938–1941

Source: Richard Crampton, Atlas of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, Routledge, 1996, p. 134. By permission of Taylor & Francis.

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Introduction

CONTEXTUALIZING TERRITORIAL REVISIONISM IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE Goals, Expectations, and Practices

d

Marina Cattaruzza and Dieter Langewiesche

A

few years after the coming to power of Nazism in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. The states involved in this alliance and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany lies at the core of this volume. In other words, the volume deals with the phenomenon of territorial revisionism in the interwar period and in the Second World War. Our purpose is to show the usefulness of a historical approach which considers East Central Europe in the Second World War as a whole instead of narrowing the focus to the individual states involved. In our opinion, this perspective allows for a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the Second World War, which are still in need of illumination. These include: • The interaction between Nazi Germany and its allies in reshaping East Central Europe, and the pursuit of autonomous goals by Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and so on within the framework of the German policy of Lebensraum (“living space”) • The parallel wars waged by Germany’s allies with one another in pursuit of their own territorial goals • The radical policies—in some cases with genocidal features—implemented by Germany’s allies, and which can be likened very closely to Nazi policies1 • The common heritage of ethnic struggle in the multi-national empires of the  region and its transformation in the framework of the post-Versailles order

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Today, “territorial revisionism” does not seem to be a big issue—either in  modern history or in political science. At most the term recalls the policy of the German foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, who aimed to revise the German–Polish border after having settled controversies with France and Great Britain in Locarno in 1925. Further proof of the limited attention paid to this issue is the fact that it is not easy to find a definition of the concept in the most commonly cited lexicons of political science and international relations. At best, one finds this concise description in the German Brockhaus encyclopaedia: “Revisionism—keyword for attempts to change existing conditions, constitutions, laws or borders or to modify ideological statements.”2 Therefore we will utilize “territorial revisionism” for all manner of politics and military measures which attempted to change existing borders. In a paper published some years ago, Robert H. Jackson and Mark W. Zacher stated that between the Westphalian Peace at the end of the Thirty Years war (1648) and 1945, the percentage of wars ending with a redistribution of territory was around 80 per cent—that is to say that most interstate conflicts were settled with the handing over of territory. The extension of territory was the first source of security and wealth for a state; therefore, the maintenance and acquisition of territory was the prime object of international politics. Apart from war, territory could be gained through such things as inheritance, marriage, conquest, colonization, and purchase.3 But things became more complicated when sovereignty needed to be legitimized by “the will of the people”—that is, by the “nation.” According to the Italian historian Rosario Romeo, since the second half of the nineteenth century, “there was a place in Europe only for those states which could claim a national legitimacy.”4 Therefore, the multi-national empires suffered from a growing lack of legitimacy, which resulted in a fatal weakness when a major international clash, the First World War, broke out. The formidable impetus of the formula of the “self determination of people” proved invincible, perhaps beyond the hopes and expectations of its proponents among the Western allies.5

The European Scenario in the Interwar Period When America entered the First World War in 1917, its justification was that this was part of a struggle for human rights and democracy. Therein lay the core principle of the postwar order that the victorious allies sought to create: the people’s right to political self-determination in the form of a parliamentary democracy, which at the time could only be imagined as existing within a nation-state. To establish oneself as a nation in one’s own state was the focal point in most thinking about political self-determination. The end of the First World War seemed to provide the opportunity for dismantling the multi-national

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Habsburg monarchy along those lines and replacing it with nation-states. With the cessation of hostilities, parliamentary democracy applied to nation-states had become the dominant constitutional model for postwar Europe. Europe now consisted of twenty-eight states, nine of which had been newly added: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. But, against the optimistic expectations of Woodrow Wilson, who claimed that his intention was to fight a war to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy, the First World War introduced to Europe an era of insecurity and disorientation. In fact, for most people the war meant the end of the world as they had known it. On August 3, 1914, Sir Edward Grey had prophetically evoked the impending catastrophe: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” A time of great uncertainty had begun, a time of seeking new things. Parliamentary democracies won the war, but they lost the peace, for this war destroyed the foundations of an entire century. In the search for a new order capable of replacing the vanished bourgeois world, democratic principles were seen as a spent force.6 In most elections the liberals dissolved into small splinter groups, and new parties of the masses came into being with very different patterns of organization, mass mobilization, and other aims. The First World War increased political and social violence on a mass scale.7 In many states—such as Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Latvia—political parties both on the Left and on the Right set up their own armed militias. The state lost its monopoly over the use of force as it was challenged by organized groups which were able to exercise violence on their own for their own aims. Political assassinations and murders were the order of the day, and in many countries the war continued in the form of a civil war. In Germany, for instance, 354 people were killed for political reasons from 1918 to 1921, while in the last phase of the Weimar Republic street fighting caused some 400 casualties. In Bulgaria, unrest in 1923 claimed at least 20,000 lives.8 Even in Switzerland, a stronghold of political stability, there was a general strike. In 1938, there were sixty-five sovereign states in the world, only seventeen of which could be called parliamentary constitutional states. From the point of view of types of government, Europe was divided in two: in the north and west there were constitutional states with a democratic structure, against which stood a block of dictatorships in the south and east. This block included autocracies, dictatorships in the fascist mould, and the Soviet Union.9 It even appeared at times that fascist or authoritarian regimes might gain a foothold in the democratic heartlands of Western Europe.10 Dictatorship was now catching on as democracy had once done, and even a rule of terror could be based on the broad acceptance of the populace.11 Apparently, the new totalitarian and authoritarian dictatorships managed to

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address the problems of the modern age more forcefully, above all through the social and political reshaping of mass society according to radical new principles: Volksgemeinschaft, administration by Soviets and dictatorships of the proletariat, and pervasive fascist mass organizations and parties.12 With regard to international settlements, dictatorships appeared as the architects of a new European order which could improve the territorial situation established after the First World War. As the Swiss historian Jörg Fisch recently pointed out, the treaties signed at the Paris Peace Conference tried to reconcile two opposing principles: the traditional right of the victorious powers to establish the postwar order, and the new right to self-determination of the people.13 Fisch shows how at the peace conference the victorious as well as the defeated powers utilized the principle of self-determination as a powerful rhetorical device in order to achieve the most convenient international position. The unchallenged acceptance of the principle of self-determination imposed the necessity of ethical-juridical legitimacy regarding the ceding of territory. This was something new in the history of international relations.14 In reality, though, the right of self-determination was recognized in the Peace Treaties only for the victors and the successor states of Austria-Hungary (again without the losers: Austria and Hungary).15 Still, as the right to self-determination appeared to be self-evident, and not in need of further justification, the defeated powers were able to put forward their revisionist claims wrapped in a highly convincing discourse.16 As is generally known, the Anschluss of Austria by the Third Reich and its claims to the Sudetenland were supported by Great Britain under the “principle of self-determination.”17 Not only did Great Britain and France consent to a radical revision of the Treaty of Versailles, but this revision, carried out in the name of the defense of minorities, was acknowledged as legitimate and reasonable.18 It is no coincidence that the center of gravity for attempts at territorial revisionism in Europe was located in the lands of the old multi-national empires. In fact, as Hannah Arendt remarked perspicaciously, it seems that the drawing-up of boundaries for the new nation-states created in Paris in 1919 and 1920 simply served the purpose of reproducing the experiment of the Habsburg monarchy in miniature. Most of the new states were just as multi-national as the old empires had been, but in their perception of themselves they were “nation-states” in which their respective core nation was regarded as representing the whole population.19 Therefore, the rise of Nazi Germany as the most successful revisionist power, which based its politics on the criterion of race and radical anti-Semitism, set the agenda for its neighboring countries as well. The latter enacted plans of territorial enlargement, at least a partial elimination of the Jews, and ethnic engineering that, on the whole, provided considerable destructive potential on their own. Such plans were fitted to the general framework of the Third Reich’s New European Order.

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Revisionism in Practice As a consequence of the Munich Agreement of 1938, the Sudetenland was transferred from Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. But other states, such as Poland20 and Hungary,21 also demanded parts of Czechoslovakia for themselves: Poland claimed the district of Teschen, and Hungary desired Carpatho-Ukraine. Poland got the desired territory in direct negotiations with Czechoslovakia, whereas a small part of Carpatho-Ukraine together with a strip along the Slovak–Hungarian border was allotted to Hungary by Nazi Germany and Italy in the First Vienna Award of November 2, 1938.22 After Germany destroyed the rump state of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Hungary marched into Carpatho-Ukraine and held it until the final phase of the Second World War. The First Vienna Award, accomplished just one month after the Munich Agreement and greeted with benevolent indifference by the Western powers,23 marked a crucial turning point in the political alliances of East Central Europe. Germany proved itself to be both the unchallenged hegemonic power in the area and the determining factor of the “new order.” Alternative alliances, which were pursued up to that point, such as one between Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia under the patronage of Mussolini,24 suddenly became pointless. Fascist Italy itself signed the unfavorable and far-reaching Pact of Steel with Germany in May 1939. For Germany, the redrawing of borders in favor of its allies (or at least promises to do so) became a powerful tool for keeping alliances alive or gaining a new ally in the course of the Second World War.25 Such was the case with Romania, which definitively joined the German camp after the loss of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union in accordance with the Nazi–Soviet Pact. The Romanian alignment with Germany occurred despite the loss of northern Transylvania and Southern Dobrudja to Germany’s allies, Hungary and Bulgaria.26 Territorial gains or the recovery of territories previously lost played a crucial role in foreign and domestic policies in East Central Europe between 1918 and 1945, and even later. Territorial expansion, legitimized by more or less wellfounded national claims, was a key foreign-policy issue for states like Hungary, Bulgaria,27 and Yugoslavia.28 Even the Soviet Union was eager to reconquer territories which the Russian Empire had lost after the Bolshevik revolution, such as Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, the Baltic states, western Ukraine, and at least a part of Finland. Others, like the Slovaks, the Croats, and the Ukrainians, took advantage of the war in order to achieve a certain amount of political independence under the protection of Germany.29 Finally, a third pattern pertained to those states which lost territory as a consequence of others’ successful revisionism and hoped to recover it thanks to Germany: these were the already mentioned cases of Romania and Finland.

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To sum up, all these states (and various separatist movements) were revisionist in one way or another. All of them strived either to change the settlements agreed upon at the Paris Peace Conference, or to modify the new status quo established in the framework of the Nazi–Soviet Pact (even though, in the long term, neither Finland nor Romania achieved the revision of the boundaries set down in the terms of the Pact), or to achieve full state independence. Such goals were often pursued by these states against each other, through border infiltration by paramilitary forces,30 through claims on their neighbors’ territories, or by cooperation in seizing parts of states when they collapsed, such as Yugoslavia, which Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria carved up.31 Extremely brutal clashes between Poles and Ukrainians occurred in the regions under German occupation (Volhynia, the Zamość area under the General Government, and Eastern Galicia). Also, the Ukrainians in northern Bukovina were persecuted by Romanians despite Ukrainian collaboration with the Germans. Therefore, we may conclude that the different agents involved in these regional conflicts over possession of an ethnically cleansed territory were fighting their own war, quite different from the one the Germans were fighting. István Deák sustains here the thesis that the allies of Nazi Germany constantly sought to push to the fore their own agenda and to engage on the side of Germany only when doing so corresponded with their own aims. This fact meant, of course, a weakening of the Axis alliance and a narrowing of its military effectiveness.

The Minorities Issue The settlement of Versailles had assigned millions of people whose common language and ethnic self-perception were different from those of the majority population to states where they felt “foreign” or even in opposition. The most obvious cases were that of Germans, handed over to Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland,32 and of Magyars, divided between Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Sizeable Bulgarian minorities, meanwhile, were consigned to Romania and Greece, while Croats and Slovenes came under Italian sovereignty.33 Of course, not all people who were claimed as co-nationals shared nationalist or irredentist aims.34 In any case, the sharing-out of the empires among would-be nation-states,35 combined with revisionist agitation and the discredit heaped upon democracy and liberalism after the onset of the world-wide economic crisis36 in the 1930s, helped to radicalize existing minority networks. In the first section of this volume, Norbert Spannenberger shows that among German settlements in Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia there was a clear orientation toward National Socialist programs, forms of organization, and rituals. The German SS could easily put the volksdeutsche networks under their control and utilize them as a trump card in foreign policy.37 Franz Horváth demonstrates in his chapter on the

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German minority in Czechoslovakia and the Hungarian minority in Transylvania how different factors affected the attitude of representatives of minorities towards the host state. His contribution offers evidence of the fluid character of the revisionism advocated by minority networks: in both cases, territorial revisionism was actively supported by minorities after the outbreak of the world economic crisis, and particularly after 1937/38, when it became a politically viable aspiration. In contrast, in the 1920s, many representatives of the German and Hungarian minorities accepted the status quo and took part in the political life of Czechoslovakia and Romania. Overall, in the late 1930s, asserting minorityidentity and minority rights seemed to be successful and worthwhile projects.38

The Manifold Problems of the Heirs of East Central Europe’s Empires The states and movements involved in revisionist dynamics were without exception relatively new or only would-be states. They had appeared in the course of the dissolution of the Ottoman, Czarist, and Austrian-Hungarian Empires between 1878 and 1918/19 with no clear idea about adequate national boundaries.39 As a rule, nationalist politicians asserted the right of their nation to the largest possible territory, making use of a highly disparate and inconsistent set of arguments, which combined such things as historical rights (sometimes dating back to prehistoric times), an alleged cultural superiority linked with an exclusive claim to exercise the civilizing function in an area, geopolitical interests, integrative achievements regarding heterogeneous populations, and a more defined cultural identity in comparison to neighboring peoples.40 As Imanuel Geiss has rightly argued, such states utilized a “backwards projection” of nation and empire in order to justify historically their territorial claims as nation-states.41 For instance, the territorial horizon of Bulgaria was set, as Stefan Troebst points out in his chapter, by the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, even though the terms of that treaty were never enacted. The political elites of these states shared the conviction of the time that a state should prove its strength through territorial expansion and that war was a legitimate price to pay in order to achieve an enlargement of state power.42 At the same time, the new states of East Central Europe were relatively weak, non-homogeneous, plagued by dire economic and social problems (including the peasantry and land reform issues),43 and they also had inadequate control over their border regions.44 They were light years away from corresponding to the ideal type of a modern nation-state as described a few years ago by Charles Maier, and unable to mobilize fully the people and resources existing on their territory.45 Two factors primarily affected the minority question in the successor states of the old multi-national empires. First, under the Habsburg monarchy, the

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different groups had undergone a process of nationalization and politicization from the bottom up. In fact, the monarchy had sponsored a process of political democratization without trying to nationalize the people. As a consequence, people nationalized themselves, claiming pre-existing ethnic appurtenances or other criteria to prove the existence of their nation.46 Second, in the case of the Germans and the Hungarians, the minorities belonged to previous “master nations,”47 which were not used to being nationally oppressed or dispossessed. One of the ways the new states strived to strengthen the position of the “titular nation” was to get rid of at least some of their minorities. This objective was pursued so that the new states could establish themselves as worthy successors to the imperial order, to attain a sufficient degree of internal homogeneity corresponding to the criteria of a nation-state, and to stabilize their political power.48 The new states were faced with manifold concerns: border disputes, nationbuilding, economic problems, and an unstable international situation. The uncertainty of a significant proportion of the citizens of these states as to whether they actually belonged to the political community made things worse and created a palpable atmosphere of internal instability.49 The territorial premise of the sustainability of a political community, whereby “identity space” should coincide with “decision space,”50 failed to materialize in many parts of East Central Europe.

An Era of Revisionism? In all revisionist programs, a supposedly incorrect order needs to be replaced by a correct one, which corresponds more closely to the supposedly just claims of the states or movements involved. In the end, the fulfillment of revisionist claims inevitably led to new revisionisms being created, forming a vicious circle that arose out of a desire to possess as much territory as possible.51 Territorial revisionism became contagious: when revisionist claims were fulfilled, they made revisionists out of states that were previously territorially satisfied. A prime example is Romania, which almost doubled its territory at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919/20 and became revisionist after the Soviet Union and Hungary successfully regained parts of its territory in alliance with the Third Reich. Otherwise, successful revisionism had a demonstration effect: the handing over of the Sudetenland to Germany after the Munich Agreement of 1938 encouraged Poland and Hungary to annex Czechoslovakian territory for their part. The contributions to the second section of this volume, devoted to “revisionism as a driving force,” reveal the pervasiveness of revisionism in the interwar period and during the Second World War. Holly Case even advocates considering the period as an “era of revisionism.” She states that revisionism

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was an ideology, which as a guiding principle not only affected foreign policy but also internal policies, welfare, and patterns of behavior for considerable numbers of people. Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk and Ignác Romsics demonstrate how deeply and comprehensively revisionism was able to condition politics in Bulgaria and Hungary. In the first case it led to Bulgaria’s convergence with Nazi Germany and to accession to the Tripartite Pact in March 1941, and participation in the occupation of Yugoslavia. This alliance was not supported by ideological allegiances or by traditional loyalties, which, in fact, tied the people to Russia. Hungary, meanwhile, even incurred the risk of armed conflict with Romania on the eve of the Second Vienna Award by demanding the cession of part of Transylvania and finally gave up its policy of neutrality by accession to the Tripartite Pact on November 20, 1940. Already in 1938 Hungary had made significant concessions to its German minority, entitling it to autonomous administration through the Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn and thus endangering the internal cohesiveness of the state. A further main feature of revisionism highlighted by the contributions in the second section is its versatile nature: revisionism moved constantly in whatever might be the most promising direction. Bulgaria, for instance, desired Southern Dobrudja because it was a much easier territory to win than Western Thrace. Hungary occupied Carpatho-Ukraine in 1938/39 although Transylvania had a much higher priority in its revisionist agenda. We may add that Romania participated in the attack against the Soviet Union and hoped to get back Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940, and thus did not act on a purely anti-communist impulse.52 This does not mean that these territories were more important than northern Transylvania, which Romania had been compelled to cede to Hungary in the Second Vienna Award: they were just easier to achieve—or at least so it seemed! In the long run, Transylvania remained a non-negotiable aim for Romania and for Hungary as well. This explains why both countries could not overcome their animosity, although they were both allies of the Third Reich and members of the Tripartite Pact. Southern Dobrudja, by contrast, did not play a comparable role in relations between Romania and Bulgaria, which were not significantly affected by the handing over of the region. The third section of the volume focuses on “practices of revisionism,” with a specific emphasis on the implementation of ethnic cleansing, on sporadic mass killings of Jews and other “undesirable elements,” and collaboration with the Germans in the systematic deportation of Jews to the death camps. As István Deák points out, one of the main goals of the allies of Nazi Germany was to use “the war as an effective instrument for ridding their country of ethnic and religious minorities.” Nearly all of them engaged in some form of ethnic cleansing and genocide.53 Revisionism was closely interwoven with ethnonationalism—that is, with a conception of the nation based on supposedly “natural” and immutable features. Paradoxically, ethno-nationalism showed the

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greatest diffusion and deep-rootedness in areas where national allegiances were extremely fluid or at least of recent date, as illustrated by Frank Golczewski for the borderlands between Poland and Ukraine: “When Poles and Ukrainians fought each other, they fought for their relatively new national creed. The earlier confessional diversity of these lands had given way to an ethnic one: ethnicity had replaced confession. And ethnicity was one of those things people had learned to fight for.” The fatal combination of territorial revisionism and ethno-nationalism explains why the conquest of territories was accompanied in so many cases by ethnic cleansing, mass killing, and violence against the Jewish population. In the whole of East Central Europe, most political forces were convinced that having an ethnically homogeneous population was the indispensable basis of leading a nation to greatness.54 Mariana Hausleitner shows how a national program of “purification”—that is, of getting rid of Jews and other minorities by utilizing mass murder and ethnic cleansing as tools—gained renewed impetus in Romania after the country’s territorial losses to Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union. Particularly in border areas, murderous plans of ethnic engineering were implemented. The region of Transnistria, which was part of the Ukraine, became for some one hundred thousand Jews a sort of huge open death camp. At the same time, the expropriation of Jewish property and its redistribution among Romanian colonists in the border regions was carried out to secure the country’s borders, an obsession of Romanian political elites since the doubling of Romanian territory after the First World War. Frank Grelka examines the forms of collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists with Germany’s forces of occupation. Collaboration extended to the military and administrative spheres and included full participation in the Final Solution of the “Jewish question” as well as an attempt to eradicate Ukraine’s Polish inhabitants. What the Ukrainian nationalists hoped to achieve was a sort of autonomous status in the framework of the “New European Order,” that status to be exercised over a space which should be ethnically and racially “cleansed.” Stefan Troebst examines the role of the paramilitary terrorist organization, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), made up mostly of Bulgarian refugees from the territories ceded to Yugoslavia by the Treaty of Neuilly. IMRO was the most powerful terrorist group in the area and could rely on 5,000 fighters and additional terrorist cells. The function of IMRO in Bulgarian foreign policy was ambiguous: on the one hand, it might be utilized for dirty work under the cover of Bulgaria’s attempts at “peaceful revisionism,” while on the other hand IMRO was able to undermine the foreign policy of the Bulgarian government: rapprochement with Yugoslavia failed because of the paramilitary activities of IMRO in the Macedonian border regions.55 After Italy’s truce with the Western allies on September 8, 1943, IMRO even took up administrative responsibilities in northern Greece on behalf of the Germans.

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In their active participation in the destruction of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, the political elites of the countries allied with Nazi Germany behaved with ferocity combined with a pursuit of selective aims: foreign Jews and those settled in border regions or newly acquired territories were handed over to the Germans or starved to death, while Jewish citizens and Jews settled in the interiors of those countries were mostly spared deportation and death.56 Such considerations reopen the question of the relationship between Nazi Germany and the policies of its allies in the Second World War, and the nature of authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe as well. Genocidal anti-Semitism was promoted by broad sections of the political elite in Romania and Hungary. In Poland, too, the idea of expelling all Jews to Madagascar or to other inhospitable places enjoyed great popularity.57 According to Martin Broszat, it was “precisely antiSemitism . . . which proved to be one of the most effective vehicles of ideological conformity.”58 Such observations must lead us to reconsider certain notions about the specific features of German National Socialism and the relationship which developed between the far-reaching goals of Nazi Germany and the more modest, but absolutely congruent, aims of its allies regarding the annihilation of Jews, the elimination of ethnic minorities, and territorial revisionism.59 The revisionist (and expansionist) policies of the East Central European states show very similar patterns in their territorial aims and in the attempts to purge their acquisitions of those elements considered undesirable and ethnically “spurious” to the nation.60 Despite the evident similarities, historical research has so far mostly neglected taking a comprehensive approach to the issues of territorial revisionism and ethnic simplification in the Second World War. Even Timothy Snyder’s acclaimed groundbreaking study of the “bloodlands”—that is, the disputed war zone in the border regions between Germany and the Soviet Union—interprets the atrocities perpetrated in the Polish, Ukrainian, Baltic, and White Russian territories as the result of the clash of two totalitarian regimes, without considering the possibly autonomous role of minor players driven by ethno-national ideologies.61 The annihilation of the European Jews has up to now been treated either by an exclusive focus on Nazi Germany or has been seen within the framework of national histories of the Holocaust.62 Very few studies have tried to interpret the destruction of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe as a common attempt on the part of the anti-Semitic elites of those states,63 which should not necessarily be defined as “fascist,”64 to re-establish control over territories allegedly endangered by the Jewish presence,65 to annihilate an element considered as irrevocably alien to the state and nation, or to grab their possessions and create consensus among the non-Jewish population through the redistribution of expropriated goods and property.66 When we stress the great degree of political autonomy enjoyed by the states of East Central Europe and their individual responsibility for territorial revisionism,

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together with the elimination of ethnic minorities and the annihilation of the Jews, this obviously does not mean that we are losing sight of the fact that it was Nazi Germany’s expansionist policies and racial doctrine which first made it possible. But it is true that those policies and beliefs were used both by Germany’s allies and by their conquered peoples. From the perspective of the implementation of a “New European Order,” these “minor players” engaged in extremely bloody wars on their own with the aim of achieving the most favorable position in the redistribution of space and of gaining the most favorable position in the new hierarchy of European peoples. The politics of annihilation and forced population movement were implemented with the goal of achieving full control over the territory of the state, including its border regions, through ethno-national homogeneity. In the concluding pages of his reinterpretation of the history of postwar Europe, the late Tony Judt stated, “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket.”67 The policy of ethnic cleansing, which already existed in the nineteenth century whenever nation-states came into being in multi-national areas,68 has not yet been stored away in the memory of Europeans as a central part of the history of present-day Europe.

Notes 1. For some important insights, see: Christoph Dieckmann, Babette Qunikert, and Tatjana Tönsmeyer, “Editorial,” in eid. (eds), Kooperation und Verbrechen: Formen der “Kollaboration” im östlichen Europa, 1939–1945 (Göttingen, 2003), 9–21. 2. Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (Leipzig, 1998), vol. 18, 316. 3. Robert H. Jackson and Mark W. Zacher, “The Territorial Covenant: International Society and the Stabilization of Boundaries,” Working Paper No. 15, Institute of International Relations, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, 1997), 4, 2; Richard Rosecrance, “The Rise of the Virtual State,” Foreign Affairs (July–August, 1996): 45–61, esp. 48. 4. Rosario Romeo, “Nazione,” in Enciclopedia Italiana del Novecento (Rome, 1979), vol. 4, 525. 5. According to Jörg Fisch, Woodrow Wilson utilized the formula of the “right to selfdetermination” only to counter Lenin’s propaganda without considering the consequences of the acknowledgment of this principle by the victorious powers. Jörg Fisch, Das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker: Die Domestizierung einer Illusion (Munich, 2010), 156, 181. 6. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1999), 15–23. 7. For a general overview of European history still worth reading, see: Ernst Nolte, Die Krise des liberalen Systems und die Entwicklung der Faschismen (Munich, 1968). 8. Günther Mai, Europa 1918–1939 (Stuttgart, 2001), 170–71. 9. Cf. Stephen J. Lee, The European Dictatorships 1918–1945 (London, 2000). 10. See, e.g., Andreas Wirsching, Vom Weltkrieg zum Bürgerkrieg? Politischer Extremismus in Deutschland und Frankreich 1918–1933/39: Berlin und Paris im Vergleich (Munich, 1999); idem (ed.), Herausforderungen der parlamentarischen Demokratie: die Weimarer Republik im europäischen Vergleich (Munich, 2007); idem, “Political Violence in France and Italy after 1918,” Journal of Modern European History 1,1 (2003): 60–79; Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London, 2005).

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11. For a trenchant contribution, see: Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: How the Nazis Bought the German People (London, 2007), which is also on the participation of the occupied states of Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece in dispossessing the Jews; cf. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire (London, 2009), 416–70. 12. On “reactionary modernism” as an attitude which seeks to purify modernity from its negative, alienating effects, see: Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984). 13. Fisch, Das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker, 158. 14. Ibid., 159–62, 187. 15. István Deák, “The Habsburg Empire,” in Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (eds), After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, 1997), 133. 16. Fisch, Das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker, 186–88, 276–79. 17. Marina Cattaruzza, “‘Last Stop Expulsion’: The Minority Question and Forced Migration in East-Central Europe: 1918–1949,” Nations and Nationalism 16,1 (2010): 108–26, esp. 115–17; Fisch, Das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker, 193–97. 18. A.J.P. Taylor, On The Origins of the Second World War (Harmondsworth, 1965), 190–336. Both the French and the British governments had consented to German economic expansion into southeastern Europe during the Munich Conference. For France this meant the end of its ambitions in this former sphere of influence. See Christian Leitz, Nazi Foreign Policy 1933–1941: The Road to Global War (London, 2004), 98–99. 19. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), 260; Cattaruzza, “‘Last Stop Expulsion’,” 114. 20. Anna M. Cienciala, “Poland and the Munich Crisis, 1938: A Reappraisal,” East European Quarterly 3,2 (1969): 201–19; Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939 (Oxford, 2011), 686–90. 21. For a long perspective, see: István Deák, “A Fatal Compromise? The Debate over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000), 39–73, esp. 52. 22. Anthony Komjathy, “The First Vienna Award (November 2, 1938),” Austrian History Yearbook 15/16 (1979/1980): 131–56. 23. This point is particularly stressed in: Haim Shamir, “Une modeste revanche de Trianon: L’arbitrage de Vienne du 2 novembre 1938,” Revue d’Historie Diplomatique 104,1/2 (1990): 7–36. 24. Komjathy, “The First Vienna Award,” 145, 152, 154; Martin Broszat, “Deutschland-UngarnRumänien: Entwicklung und Grundfaktoren nationalsozialistischer Hegemonial- und Bündnispolitik 1938–1941,” Historische Zeitschrift 206 (1968): 45–96, here 66, 73–74; Leitz, Nazi Foreign Policy, 98–99. 25. Alfred Rieber, “Repressive Population Transfers in Central, Eastern and Southeastern  Europe,”  Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 16,1/2 (2000): 1–27, here 17. 26. Broszat, “Deutschland-Ungarn-Rumänien,” 82; Leitz, Nazi Foreign Policy, 92–104; Dennis Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944 (Basingstoke, 2006), 8–25. “On 4 July 1940, Romania joined the Berlin-Rome Axis. Hitler now cleverly exploited his position. In a letter of 13 July, he reminded Carol of his acceptance of the Anglo-French guarantee and made German protection conditional on the settlement of the outstanding territorial disputes with Hungary and Bulgaria over Transylvania and Dobrudja, which the cession of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina had triggered” (Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally, 22).

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27. See the contributions of Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk and Ignác Romsics in this volume. On Bulgaria, see also: Marshall Lee Miller, Bulgaria during the Second World War (Stanford, 1975), esp. 1–55. 28. On the strained Italian–Yugoslav relationship caused by Yugoslav irredentist agitation and the Italian repression of Slav minorities, see: Marina Cattaruzza, L’Italia e il confine orientale (Bologna, 2007), 168–205; ead., “The Making and Remaking of a Boundary: The Redrafting of the Eastern Border of Italy after the Two Worlds Wars,” Journal of Modern European History 9,1 (2011): 66–85, esp. 73–75. 29. Timothy Snyder, “The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing, 1943,” Past and Present 179 (2003): 197–234; Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder: The Second World War and Yugoslavia. (London, 2008), 22–48; Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Das Dritte Reich und die Slowakei 1939–1945: Politischer Alltag zwischen Kooperation und Eigensinn (Paderborn, 2003); Nevenko Bartulin, “The NDH as a ‘Central European Bulwark Against Italian Imperialism’: An Assessment of Croatian–Italian Relations within the German ‘New Order’ in Europe,” Review of Croatian History 3,1 (2007): 49–73. As István Deák rightly pointed out: “The post-World War I arrangements failed to fulfill the political ambitions of Slovak, Croatian, Bosnian and Ukrainian nationalists. Their day would come during World War II, but only so long as their protector, Nazi Germany, reigned supreme in the region” (Deák, “The Habsburg Empire,” 132). 30. On Bulgarian IMRO units, employed in the border regions between Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece, see the contribution of Stefan Troebst in this volume. 31. Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder; Marie-Janine Calic, Geschichte Jugoslawiens im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2010), 137–79. 32. Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann, Nationale Minderheiten zwischen Lobbyistentum und Grossmachtinteressen (Marburg, 2000), 35–49. 33. Hans Lemberg, “Der Weg zur Entstehung der Nationalstaaten in Ostmitteleuropa,” in Georg  Brunner (ed.), Osteuropa zwischen Nationalstaat und Integration (Berlin, 1995), 45–72. 34. See on this point: Roger Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 7–27. In Bohemia, for example, Czech parents chose to send their children to German schools despite nationalist propaganda. See: S. Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, 2008). 35. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 260. 36. Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge, 2004), 237–95; Mariana Hausleitner and Harald Roth (eds), Der Einfluß von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus auf Minderheiten in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa (Munich, 2006); Jerzy W. Borejsza and Klaus Ziemer (eds), Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes in Europe: Legacies and Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2006); Erwin Oberländer (ed.), Autoritäre Regime in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa, 1919–1944 (Paderborn, 2001). 37. On National Socialist influence on the official organization of European minorities from 1933 onwards, see Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann, Der Europäische Nationalitätenkongress 1925 bis 1938: nationale Minderheiten zwischen Lobbyistentum und Grossmachtinteressen (Marburg, 2000), 249–396; Martyn Housden, “Ethical Drift: Ewald Ammende, the Congress of European Nationalities and the Rise of German National Socialism,” Central and Eastern European Review 1 (2007): 2–31. 38. See Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 10, on the role of “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs” in producing a reification of ethnic groups: “By invoking groups they seek to evoke them, summon them, call them into being. Their categories are for doing—designed to stir, summon, justify, mobilize, kindle, and energize.”

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39. Cf. Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London, 2001); Barkey and von Hagen, After Empire. 40. For a nice listing of these and similar arguments, see the contributions of Ignác Romsics and Frank Golczewski in this volume. 41. Immanuel Geiss, “Imperien und Nationen: Zur universalhistorischen Topographie von Macht und Herrschaft,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 28 (1999): 57–91, here 84. On the link between nationalism and imperialism, see also Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “The Varieties of the Nation State in Modern History: Liberal, Imperialist, Fascist and Contemporary Notions of Nation and Nationality,” in Michael Mann (ed.), The Rise and Decline of the Nation State (Oxford, 1990), 210–26, here 220–24; for a global perspective, see Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2010), 565–70. 42. James J. Sheehan, Kontinent der Gewalt: Europas langer Weg zum Frieden (Munich, 2008), 17, 78, 200. 43. Christian Giordano, “Réformes agraires et tensions ethniques en Europe centrale et orientale,” Etudes Rurales 62 (2001): 205–28; id., “Ruralité et nation en Europe centrale et orientale,” Etudes Rurales 63 (2002): 45–66; id., “Land Reform and Ethnic Tensions in South East Europe,” in Jan Koehler and Christoph Zürcher (eds), Potentials of Disorder (Manchester, 2003), 75–90. 44. See Carlyle A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities (Oxford, 1934), 415–19. On the consequences of agrarian reform on minorities in border regions, Macartney states: “Meanwhile, various ‘land reform’ acts have been used to break up the solidarity of the minorities by settling among them, and on land to which they often had a better claim in equity, immigrants from the interior, who have too often been desperados of the worst character (since few but the toughest would undertake to settle thus in the midst of a hostile population)” (ibid., 417). 45. Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105,3 (2000): 807–31; id., “Transformations of Territoriality 1600–2000,” in Gundula Budde et al. (eds), Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen, 2005), 32–55; Dieter Langewiesche, “West European Nationalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Egbert Jahn (ed.), Nationalism in Late and Post-Communist Europe, vol. 1: The Failed Nationalism of the Multinational and Partial National States (Baden-Baden, 2008), 82–96. 46. Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 1–18; Cattaruzza, “‘Last Stop Expulsion’,” 111–13. 47. On Namier’s concept of “master nations,” see Andrea Graziosi, “Il mondo in Europa: Namier e il ‘Medio oriente europeo’, 1815–1948,” Contemporanea 10 (2007): 193–228; Linda Colley, Lewis Namier (London, 1989); Amy Ng, Nationalism and Political Liberty: Redlich, Namier, and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2004). 48. Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 136–37. 49. Dankwart A. Rustow, “Transition to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics 2,3 (1970): 337–63, esp. 350–52. 50. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History,” 823. 51. Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford, 2009). 52. Dieter Pohl, “Unter deutscher Hegemonie: Revisionismus, Rassismus und Gewalt bei den osteuropäischen Bündnispartnern des Dritten Reichs 1941/42,” in Lutz Klinkhammer, Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, and Thomas Schlemmer (eds), Die Achse im Krieg: Politik, Ideologie und Kriegsführung 1939–1945 (Paderborn, 2010), 244–54, here 250.

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53. Wolfgang Benz and Brigitte Mihok (eds), Holocaust an der Peripherie: Judenpolitik und Judenmord in Rumänien und Transnistrien 1940–1944 (Berlin, 2009); Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago, 2000); Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944/1945 (Stuttgart, 2002 ); David Bankier and Israel Gutman (eds), Nazi Europe and the Final Solution (Jerusalem, 2003); Tönsmeyer, Das Dritte Reich und die Slowakei, 137–62; Miller, Bulgaria during the Second World War, 93–106. 54. See, e.g., Marius Truda, “‘Rasse,’ Eugenik und Nationalismus in Rumänien während der 1940er Jahre,” in Benz and Mihok, Holocaust an der Peripherie, 161–71. 55. The fascist government in Italy was also confronted with similar problems when searching for a rapprochement with Yugoslavia: see Cattaruzza, “The Making and Remaking of a Boundary,” 73–77. 56. See Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally, 102–229; Viorel Achim, “Die Deportation der Juden nach Transnistrien im Kontext der Bevölkerungspolitik der Antonescu-Regierung,” in Benz and Mihok, Holocaust an der Peripherie, 151–60; Randolph Braham and R.L. Vago (eds), Holocaust in Hungary: Forty Years Later (New York, 1985); Frank Golczewski, “Die Kollaboration in der Ukraine,” in Dieckmann, Quinckert, and Tönsmeyer (eds), Kooperation und Verbrechen, 151–82. 57. Carla Tonini, Operazione Madagascar: la questione ebraica in Polonia 1918–1968 (Bologna, 1999); ead., “The Polish Plan for a Jewish Settlement in Madagascar 1936–1939,” POLIN 19 (2006): 467–77. 58. Broszat, “Deutschland—Ungarn—Rumänien,” 93. 59. Dieter Pohl, “Unter deutscher Hegemonie,” 254, reaches similar conclusions in a recent contribution on revisionism, racism, and violence on the part of Germany’s allies: “It seems clear that wide-ranging murder does not need totalitarian policy as a premise.” 60. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, 2005) 61–69; Dieckmann, Quinkert, and Tönsmeyer, “Editorial.” 61. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York, 2010). 62. Rare exceptions include: Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, 279–317; Bankier and Gutman, Nazi Europe and the Final Solution; Dieckmann, Quinkert, and Tönsmeyer (eds), Kooperation und Verbrechen. 63. Among them, Christian Gerlach, “Annexations in Europe and the Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1944,” East Central Europe 39,1 (2012), 137–56. 64. On the differences between fascist movements and authoritarian regimes in Eastern Central Europe, see Mann, Fascists, 261–352. Antonescu (Romania) and Tiszo (Slovakia) also developed their partially genocidal politics from the alleged “needs” of their country and not as an adaptation to Nazi Germany. See Jean Ancel, “The Opposition to the Antonescu Regime: Its Attitude towards the Jews during the Holocaust,” in Bankier and Gutman (eds), Nazi Europe and the Final solution, 339–60; Tönsmeyer, Das Dritte Reich und die Slowakei, 137–62. 65. Bogdan Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschiessen”: Die Brutalisierung des deutsch-sowjetischen Krieges im Sommer 1941 (Berlin, 2000), 147–295. 66. Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries; Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-century World (Cambridge, 2010). 67. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), 803. 68. A significant, though provocative, assessment can be found in: Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, 1995). See also Ulf Brunnbauer et al. (eds), Definitionsmacht, Utopie, Vergeltung: “Ethnische Säuberungen” im östlichen Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts (Münster, 2006).

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Chapter 1

THE WORST OF FRIENDS Germany’s Allies in East Central Europe—Struggles for Regional Dominance and Ethnic Cleansing, 1938–1945

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István Deák

T

he topic I seek to investigate is how Germany behaved toward its European allies and how the allies behaved both toward Germany and each other. My fundamental argument is that, far from having been powerless satellites, Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, and Bulgaria were, to a large extent, masters of their own fate. Moreover, Germany’s allies served as an inspiration to several countries which Germany had defeated and occupied, and which now aimed at securing a status approximating the sovereignty enjoyed in Hitler’s Europe by Germany’s official allies. As a consequence, it was not always easy to distinguish between Germany’s allies and such defeated countries as, for instance, France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and Serbia. I would even argue, somewhat provocatively, that most countries in Hitler’s Europe achieved, if not the power over all their important decisions, then a degree of autonomy which enabled them to establish strict control over, for example, their own pro-Nazi far-right opposition and their ethnic minorities. Moreover, they were able to turn the handling of the “Jewish question” to their own advantage, and they were free to determine in large measure their relations with their neighbors. In so doing, they often defied the German Nazis. In other words, regarding German policy in Europe, it was often a case of the tail wagging the dog. Only occupied Poland and the three Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were unable to engage in such relations because the Germans had not authorized them to form a central administration. Regarding Germany’s official allies, I propose to develop the following four theses, however briefly: the first is that the German alliance system was murky,

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confusing, and open to diverse interpretations; the second, that Germany’s allies possessed almost complete political independence, which gave them the freedom to maneuver but also made their leaders and the citizenry responsible for the war crimes and crimes against humanity they committed; the third, that many German allies were hostile to each other to an extent unheard of in history; and the fourth, that Germany’s allies—and, incidentally, Central and Eastern Europeans in general—used the war as an effective instrument for ridding their country of ethnic and religious minorities. In other words: they nearly all engaged in some form of ethnic cleansing. Before starting a more detailed discussion of these troubled relationships, we should remind ourselves of the element of chronology, which forces us to differentiate between three time periods. During the first phase, which lasted until the battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942/43, the alliance system was being gradually formed while there was a widespread conviction that Germany would win the war, making it indispensable to curry favor with the Führer. The second period began after Stalingrad and lasted until the summer of 1944, during which time every one of Germany’s allies, except Croatia, put out feelers to Germany’s enemies with a view toward an eventual surrender. By then, Italy had long attempted but only partly succeeded in joining the Anglo–American alliance. The third and last phase began in the late summer of 1944 when Romania, Finland, and Bulgaria changed sides while the Hungarian leadership refused to surrender, causing the country to perish with the Third Reich. Meanwhile, fascist Slovakia and Croatia rejoined their mother countries, miraculously transforming themselves into parts of the triumphant anti-fascist world coalition. Regarding the first thesis, the very term “Germany’s allies” intrigues and baffles because, unlike the scene during the First World War, when the Central Powers consisted of four distinct sovereign monarchies (Germany, AustriaHungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) the Nazi alliance system within Second World War Europe was much larger but also much less definable. Who, after all, were Germany’s real European allies? It is customary to regard two international treaties, namely the Anti-Comintern Pact, originally signed by Germany and Japan in 1936, and the Tripartite Pact of 1940 as the foundations of the Nazi alliance system. The problem is that the Tripartite Pact was joined neither by Croatia, which was Germany’s staunchest ally in the Balkans, nor by Finland, Germany’s second most important partner in the war against Russia. It is true that the Anti-Comintern Pact included both Croatia and Finland, but then we also find Denmark, a country occupied by Germany, and Spain, a neutral state, among its signatories, which renders the political and diplomatic value of the Anti-Comintern Pact debatable. Worse even, what makes a mockery out of the Anti-Comintern Pact is that its target, the Soviet Union, was Nazi Germany’s priceless ally until June 1941.

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One could argue, of course, that both Denmark and Spain were in reality German allies: Denmark, because it provided Germany with invaluable industrial and agricultural goods while it served as a much coveted safe haven for German troops in need of rest and recreation, and Spain because it sent a large army corps to Russia to fight on the side of the Germans. In this respect, neutral Spain was more useful to the Third Reich than Bulgaria, an official ally, which refused to commit troops to the war against Bolshevism and would not even break diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Going one step further, we might wonder whether Spain, Denmark, Vichy France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Protectorate, or even Switzerland and Sweden were not more useful to the German war effort than such official allies as fascist Croatia and Slovakia, in which internal revolts demanded German military intervention and cost the lives of thousands of German soldiers. Or how useful to Germany was its greatest ally, fascist Italy, which the German leaders increasingly saw as an intolerable burden?1 There were also Ukraine and the three Baltic countries which—unlike Serbia, Greece, and the Czech Protectorate—were not allowed to form a government under German domination, but in which a substantial part of the population actively supported the German war effort and sent so many young men into German service as to allow the formation of several Baltic and Ukrainian Waffen SS divisions. Why not consider them Germany’s allies? All in all then, we must admit that the German alliance system was complicated, informal, and confusing. Thus, historians are certainly right in granting the status of German allies only to such countries which had negotiated an alliance treaty with the Third Reich, namely, Italy, Finland,2 Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, and Bulgaria. Still, we should keep in mind that other countries offered more valuable assistance and caused less trouble to the Nazi leaders than some of Germany’s official allies. The second question to be discussed here is whether Germany’s allies possessed enough freedom for their activities to be more than an extension of German policies. The answer to this must be a categorical affirmation of their power of self-determination in such fundamental issues as whether to conclude an alliance with Germany, if and when to enter the war on the side of Hitler, and how much assistance to offer to the Nazi war effort. Again and again, the decision was not that of Germany but that of the governments allied to the Nazis. Consider, for instance, that in June 1941, Italy, Finland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia decided, with little or no German prodding, that they would join in Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. Finland participated solely to take revenge for the Winter War of 1939/40. Italy’s decision to join in the Barbarossa campaign derived, according to the historian Peter Gosztony, “from Mussolini’s megalomaniac wish to show his presence everywhere where the Germans have established themselves.”3 Other countries joined for fear that

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their neighbor would enter the war before them and thus would be the first to reap the fruits of a German victory. In particular, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia eyed each other with the greatest suspicion when joining in the fray. As another sign of their independence, the countries allied to Germany were at some point able to limit or even to cease their contribution to the war. In 1941, Finns and Romanians were alone in sending large armies to the front; in 1942, the Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, and Croats also made a major effort, but following the debacle at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942, the very same countries withdrew almost all their battered combat troops from the front line, and only the Finnish and Romanian contributions remained basically unchanged. On all these developments, the German high command had astonishingly little influence. For lack of anything better, German generals consoled themselves with the thought that Germany’s allies were of little use in any case. But why then, one might ask, had the Germans insisted, in 1942, that much larger allied armies appear at the front and why had the Germans assigned to them long sections of the front which, with their miserable armaments, the allied armies could not possibly defend? Let us remember also that allied Bulgaria, whose troops enjoyed a great reputation for bravery during the First World War, refused this time to engage a single one of its soldiers on the Eastern front. The greatest proof of political and military national independence was shown by the relative ease with which Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria seceded from the war in August/September 1944. Consider, for instance, that the Germans tried but failed to find a single Romanian general willing to set up a countergovernment following Romania’s surrender to the Soviet Union.4 Consider also that the Romanian, Finnish, and Bulgarian armies were willing to turn on their German ally at a moment’s notice. Germany’s allies were independent enough to decide how far they would go in cooperating with the Nazis in the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish question, an issue that the Germans considered the ultimate test of loyalty on the part of their allies. Jews within these countries were persecuted or tolerated, kept alive or killed less according to German wishes than according to what the respective governments thought was in the interest of their country. Thus the Bulgarians never gave in to German pressure and refused to hand over their Jewish population, but the same authorities sent the Jews of Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia to the Treblinka death camp. The Romanians engaged in their own monstrous Holocaust in Romanian-occupied northern Bukovina, Bessarabia, Transnistria, and Odessa, but they refused to hand over to the Germans the Jews of Walachia, Moldavia, and southern Transylvania. Slovakia delivered the absolute majority of its Jews to the gas chambers but more or less successfully preserved the survivors. In Italy, the Germans were able to grab Jews only following the collapse of Mussolini’s original fascist regime in late summer of 1943, and even then the municipal authorities, priests, nuns, and the general

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population successfully hid the great majority of Jews. Also, so long as Mussolini was in power, the Italian army fiercely protected the Jewish refugees in the Italian occupation zones of France, Croatia, Slovenia, Albania, and Greece.5 Only in the case of Hungary, which Hitler feared had fallen under Jewish influence and would want to change sides in the war, did he order a preventive invasion on March 19, 1944, and thus direct intervention in the “solution of the Jewish question.” Yet even the Hungarian government eventually managed to reassume control over such Jews whom it had not handed over to the Germans in the spring of 1944. In Hungary, despite drastic anti-Jewish legislation, most of the original 800,000 plus Jews (including some 100,000 Christians whom the law treated as Jews) were living under more or less normal conditions at the time of the German invasion; thereafter, the Hungarian authorities collected over 400,000 and sent them to Auschwitz. But in July 1944, Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s regent, forbade the deportation of the Jews of Budapest and of those Jewish men who were doing labor service within the Hungarian army. True, Adolf Eichmann managed to smuggle two more trainloads of Jewish victims from Hungary to Auschwitz, but then he was ordered out of the country. He returned only in October, following an SS-led coup d’état against the Horthy regime which had brought Ferenc Szálasi’s Arrow Cross party into power. Now mass deportations began again under Eichmann’s guidance, but soon thereafter the Arrow Cross ordered the creation of two major ghettoes in Budapest. In the vain hope of receiving diplomatic recognition from some neutral countries, the Arrow Cross regime defied Eichmann—although most probably not Heinrich Himmler, who was hoping to negotiate a personal treaty with the Western Allies. All in all, about 125,000 of Hungary’s Jews survived in Budapest, and even more elsewhere.6 In sum, all the Nazi’s allies solved their Jewish question in their own way, their actions having been characterized by a mixture of brutality and leniency, sheer cynicism and occasional humanitarian considerations, as well as by a desire to assert national sovereignty. Another proof of the independence of Germany’s allies, if further proof is needed, can be found in their tendency to take their cues from Mussolini’s Italy, the supposedly second-strongest country in Europe and the original member of the Berlin–Rome Axis. When Italy fell apart in September 1943, with its upper half undergoing German military occupation, the other allied countries lost their guiding light and hit out in every direction, often against each other. Only in the question of economic cooperation with Germany had Hitler’s allies no choice but to trade with Germany, in part because it was precisely in order to secure freedom of movement in military and political matters that Germany’s allies hastened to fulfill German economic requirements, and in part because their own prosperity depended on producing for and trading with Germany, at least so long as the Germans were able to give something in return.

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My third thesis concerns relations among Germany’s allies where I would argue that the main worry of the governments of most German allies was not the war itself but rather how the war and its end would affect their country’s relations with its neighbors. Every major political and military step taken by Germany’s allies was predicated on the fundamental consideration of relations with their neighbors. The aim of alliance members was to preserve, to gain, or to regain territory and, as a next step, either to get rid of their ethnic minorities or to make them politically impotent. Hence there was no end to the headaches for Germany, whose basic aim was to keep order among its allies and to secure their economic and, hopefully also, their military assistance. Hence also the German decision to support the well-established conservative-military elites in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Protectorate, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France, over the unruly extreme rightists. The latter were used only when no one else was available, which was what happened in Italy in the fall of 1943 and in Hungary in October 1944. In disputes among allies, Nazi Germany and—until the fall of 1943—Italy tried to act as impartial arbitrators: witness the Second Vienna Award of August 1940, which divided Transylvania between Hungary and Romania, as much as possible alongside ethnic lines. Certainly, the new borders were more judicious than the ones drawn up at the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, or again in Paris in 1946. Consider also the often frustrated efforts of a German-Italian military commission to arbitrate the mutual hatred of Romanians and Hungarians in divided Transylvania. However, as the historian Holly Case has demonstrated, the “German-Italian Officers’ Commission” was nearly powerless against the activist authorities in the two countries.7 Or let us take Croatia, where the German military plenipotentiary, the former Austro-Hungarian General Edmund Glaise-Horstenau, and even local representatives of the SS, complained in vain about the murderous fury of the Croatian Ustashe against their Serbian Orthodox neighbors.8 I wonder whether any alliance system, besides that of the Axis Powers, has ever included as many mutually hostile allies. True, the statement does not apply to Finland, which had no allies as neighbors. It was in East Central Europe and the Balkans that Germany’s allies confronted each other. Bulgaria had coveted and now more or less secured Southern Dobrudja, Thrace, and Macedonia: territories it had lost, or believed that it had lost as a result of the second Balkan War and the Treaty of Neuilly following the First World War. Elsewhere in the Balkans, Catholic Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Albanians fought a many-sided civil war. Their armed conflicts had been precipitated by foreign invasion in 1941, but thereafter the presence of German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian occupation forces only complicated the ethnic struggle, which was finally put to an end, not by the Germans or the Italians, but by Tito’s supra-national Yugoslav partisan armies.

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At least in the Balkans not all warring partners were official allies of Germany; in Central Europe, however, the three enemies—Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia—were. Here is a characteristic anecdote preserved by Count Galeazzo Ciano, fascist Italy’s foreign minister. In his famous Diary, this is what he wrote for May 11, 1942, a short time after the Hungarian prime minister, László Bárdossy, declared that Hungary was at war with the United States: Hungarian uneasiness is expressed by a little story, which is going the rounds in Budapest. The Hungarian minister declares war on the United States, but the official who receives the communication is not very well informed about European matters and hence asks several questions: He asks: “Is Hungary a republic?” “No, it is a kingdom.” “Then you have a king.” “No, we have an admiral.” “Then you have a fleet?” “No, we have no sea.” “Do you have any claims, then?” “Yes.” “Against America?” “No.” “Against Great Britain?” “No.” “Against Russia?” “No.” “But against whom do you have these claims?” “Against Rumania.” “Then, will you declare war on Rumania?” “No, sir. We are allies.”9

Ever since the formation, in 1921, of Yugoslavia’s, Romania’s, and Czechoslovakia’s so-called Little Entente alliance, the primary concern of the three countries was how to protect their newly acquired lands from Hungarian revisionism. For the signatories, Germany was at first only a secondary concern whereas, after Hitler’s rise to power, the Little Entente slowly disintegrated. Slovakia, which had declared its independence in March 1939, thanks to German support, kept nurturing a grievance over Hungary’s seizure, with German permission, of what used to be southern Slovakia in Czechoslovakia. In the same month, the Hungarians re-annexed Ruthenia, or Carpatho-Ukraine, again with German permission, after defeating the local Rusyn nationalists, and thereby cutting off direct communication between Slovakia and Romania. Worse even for Slovakia, there was now a common Hungarian–Polish border. A year and a half later, Hungarian diplomacy achieved its greatest success by persuading Germany and Italy to return northern Transylvania to Hungary.10 While the Hungarians set up their administration in Cluj/Kolozsvár/ Klausenburg, the Transylvanian principality’s historic capital, the Soviets seized Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, again with German consent, all good reasons for the Romanians to resent Nazi Germany’s hostile actions. But because Romania’s traditional protector, France, was clearly powerless, the Romanians had no choice but to join the German alliance: proof that in modern Europe the loss of a geopolitical patron inevitably leads to the search for a new one. Less than a year later, in March 1941, the last link in the Little Entente broke when Yugoslavia first joined the Tripartite Pact and then reneged on its commitment, causing Hitler to wreak untold destruction on that country. In April, Hungary joined in the German military attack on Yugoslavia, recovering the

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so-called Bačka region as well as some territories north of the Drava River. Thus, by June 1941, when Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, and Hungary were entering the war on the German side, the three successors to the Little Entente had territorial claims on Hungary as well as on some other parts of the region. Meanwhile, the Hungarians still felt grievously deprived of vast regions of what they liked to call, before 1918, the Hungarian Empire. In brief, both for Hungary and its neighbors, the new-fangled Pax Germanica represented but a brief lull in a protracted and many-sided struggle. It is interesting to contemplate how many times Germany’s allies came to blows between 1938 and the end of the war. Beginning in October 1938, units of the Ragged Guard (rongyosgárdisták), a paramilitary force created by the Hungarian government, infiltrated Slovakia and clashed with Czechoslovak troops. In March 1939, Hungarians fought pitched battles with so-called Sić Guards in Ruthenia who, just like the Hungarians, claimed German encouragement in trying to take possession of the province. In the same month, Hungarian troops entered Slovakia, forcing the latter to cede a small part of their country. At about the same time, Slovak and Hungarian airplanes battled each other in the skies and mutually bombarded each other’s territory. In September 1939, the Hungarian government denied permission to both Germany and Slovakia to use the Hungarian railroads for troop transports against Poland. Characteristically, the Hungarians would have allowed the Germans (but not the Slovaks) to pass through—but only in exchange for German diplomatic support of a Hungarian military attack on Romania. How the Hungarians imagined that they would succeed against an army which was many times the size of their own remains a mystery, but what is certain is that all through the Second World War the Romanian and Hungarian governments made preparations for attacking each other. In August 1940, following the Second Vienna Award, Hungarian troops occupied northern Transylvania. It seems that local Hungarian commanders provoked clashes with alleged Romanian guerillas so as to make the reconquest more of a heroic saga.11 A year later, while the Romanian and Hungarian armies were advancing together, as part of the same German army group against the Bolshevik enemy, troops of the two countries clashed at their common frontier. During the war against the Soviet Union, one of the German high command’s important concerns was how to separate Romanians from Hungarians, an especially difficult task as, for some strange reason, Romanians, Italians, Slovaks, Croats, and Hungarians were assembled within the German Army Group South. In the winter of 1942/43, on the Don River, only the Italian Eighth Army kept apart the Hungarian Second Army and the Romanian Third Army. As both sides made amply clear, any cooperation, even any meeting between the two allies, was out of the question.

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Romanians, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Croats denounced each other for plunder, corruption, and maltreatment of the civilian population. Romanians and Slovaks accused the Hungarians of having arrived at a modus vivendi in their zone of occupation with local anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet Ukrainian guerrillas, as well as of fraternizing with Poles and Jews. Not even the terrible debacles of the winter of 1942/43 could bring together the allies, even though all complained bitterly about mistreatment by German troops during the precipitous withdrawal from the Don region. It was reported again and again that during the flight in sub-zero temperatures Germans had seized the horse-drawn wagons of their allies, threw the wounded into the snow, evicted soldiers from their night-quarters in miserable peasant huts, and shot those who protested. Hungarian, Romanian, Italian, and Slovak soldiers who tried to hoist themselves on a German truck had their fingers crushed. There were reports of gunfights with the Germans but no account I know of shows the allies teaming up against the brutal German soldiers.12 Romania seceded from the war on August 23, 1944, a turn of events more devastating for Germany than the defeat at Stalingrad. A sign of growing German impotence by 1944 was that the German high command could do nothing about Romanian generals ignoring German instructions well before the fateful day of August 23. In fact, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, and Slovak commanders often acted on their own, but this was nothing compared with the gradual disentanglement of Romanian troops from the German embrace well before Romania’s surrender to the Soviet Union. For a fleeting moment, the surrender of Romania appeared to the Hungarian high command not as an unmitigated disaster but as a golden opportunity for reconquering southern Transylvania and for planting of the national flag on yet another Carpathian range. While the Red Army raced from Bessarabia, through Bucharest, to the southern Carpathians, and the Romanian army was regrouping, two Hungarian armies entered some southern Transylvanian cities, set up a military administration there, and ordered the Jews to wear the yellow star. Ghettoization also began immediately.13 Unfortunately for the Hungarians, Red Army units arrived in southern Transylvania within a few days and the Hungarians had to withdraw into Rump Hungary (as defined by the Treaty of Trianon), there to be followed by Soviet and Romanian troops. By December, Soviets and Romanians were besieging the Hungarian capital. By not joining the Romanians in the change of sides, Hungary lost the last opportunity to avoid the near total destruction of their country; unfortunately, their mutual enmity had prevented any kind of cooperation between the two so-called allies. Let me take the liberty at this point of mentioning my personal experience with the spectacle of hungry, disheveled, ragged German troops fleeing across Transylvania. They were begging for food, thereby erasing the well-engrained

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East European image of German soldiers as elegant, self-assured semi-gods. Yet this mythical image had been crucial for the achievement of German supremacy in the region. All in all, the German alliance brought varying results to its members. Finland would not have been any worse off if it had stayed out of the German–Soviet war. Instead, not only did it suffer terribly as well as inflicting terrible losses on others, but in 1944 it was forced to give up more territory to the Soviets than it had following the Winter War of 1939/40. It also had to subject itself to the foreign political dictates of the Soviet Union. But at least domestically Finland was completely spared Bolshevization. Slovakia and Croatia considered their participation in the war as an exercise in sovereignty. This was all the more beneficial to the two countries as, after the war they were reintegrated into Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia respectively, thus escaping punishment for their wartime behavior. It is true, however, that their national courts punished many individual Croats and Slovaks after the war and that Tito’s partisans massacred thousands. Ultimately, however, Slovaks and Croats achieved their national purpose of ridding themselves of the German and Jewish inhabitants of the land, as well as of inheriting their property. Whereas Slovakia was left with only a thoroughly intimidated Hungarian minority, Croatia’s problems with Serbs and Muslims were far more serious and led to a terrible internecine war. Still, what counts in nationalist eyes is that both Croatia and Slovakia are free, and that the vast majority of their inhabitants are of Slovak and, respectively, of Croatian nationality. Despite all the clever maneuvering of its king and politicians, Bulgaria did not escape the ravages of war. American bombers repeatedly devastated the capital and, following an undeserved Soviet declaration of war, the country suffered military occupation, a communist takeover as well as one of the most ruthless political purges in history. Moreover, Bulgaria had to declare war on Germany which had caused it no grief in the past. The 100,000 soldiers of the Bulgarian First Army14 fought their way to Central Europe, suffering huge casualties, yet at the subsequent peace treaties, the country had to consent to the loss of territories. Romania’s change of sides hastened the end of the war by several months; yet the conflict cost the Romanian people half a million dead, two-thirds of them by fighting on the side of the Germans, one-third by fighting against them. This is not counting the 300,000 odd Jews the Romanians had killed. At the peace treaty at the end of the Second World War Romania regained northern Transylvania but not Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Also, for some reason, the country subsequently fell under the sway of one of the most brutal communist dictatorships. Finally, Romania did not even become purely Romanian, because, unlike others in Eastern Europe, it had not expelled its German minority. Instead, a later Romanian regime invented the clever device of selling its German citizens to the German Federal Republic. As for Romania’s surviving

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Jews, they mostly left the country. So now Romania has only the Hungarians and the Roma as important minorities; there are signs, however, that the problems between Romanians and Hungarians are less acute than they were when the two countries were allies. They are even more cordial today than they had been under the “fraternal communist” regimes of Kádár and Ceauşescu. Hungary was, of course, the principal loser of both world wars. Not only did the German alliance bring devastation to the country that only Poland’s, Russia’s, and Germany’s own losses surpassed, but it was not allowed to keep any of the territories it had regained between 1938 and 1941. Instead, at the end of the Second World War, Hungary was obliged to give up three villages to Czechoslovakia—as usual in complete defiance of the principle of ethnic selfdetermination. Moreover, it is hard to see in what way the killing of hundreds of thousands of generally highly assimilated Jews and the postwar expulsion of over two hundred thousand generally assimilated Germans profited the country. Certainly some Hungarians see this as a gain for Rump Hungary and what its nationalists have always hoped for: a country almost without ethnic diversity. On the other hand, the country lost its two most dynamic minorities.15 The attempt of Eastern Europeans to assimilate or to expel their ethnic minorities is as old as nationalism. Anti-Jewish measures must be counted among this activity, even though the Jews were a special case because of traditional religious prejudice, lack of a foreign protector, and the Jews’ own tradition of trusting and obeying the authorities. Culturally and religiously, the Jews were the “other,” and yet many among them had become enviably prosperous and successful. Among the countries allied to Germany, Jews were both numerically and proportionally well represented in Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary, much less so in Bulgaria and Croatia, and very little in Finland.16 After 1918, the Jewish presence became statistically crucial in the new states of Eastern Europe because their choice of a nationality could tip the balance for or against the new dominant nation. In both Slovakia and Romania, Jews were pressured to choose either the new dominant nation or to declare themselves of Jewish nationality. But no matter what nationality the Jews chose, the notion spread in anti-Semitic circles, whether Romanian, Slovak, or Hungarian, that the Jews were traitors. In Transylvania, they suffered the double jeopardy of being both Hungarians and Jews; in Bessarabia, which the Soviets had seized in 1940 and the Romanians seized back in 1941, Jews suffered the double jeopardy of being Jews as well as seen as pro-Soviet communists. All this made it easier for the Hungarian authorities to deport the Jews of northern Transylvania to Auschwitz; it also lent “legitimacy” to the massacre of Jews by the Romanian soldiers and gendarmes in Bessarabia and other Romanian provinces formerly under Soviet occupation. The attempted elimination of the Jews was only the first step in the process of ethnic purification, a most popular measure in all countries, whether allied to Germany or defeated by them. Or, as Heinrich Himmler said, time was ripe for

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“the un-mixing of peoples.” Hungarians, Romanians, and Slovaks were not the only ethnic cleansers. While they rid themselves of most of their Jews, Nazism’s East European victims, such as the Poles and Czechs, rid themselves both of the Jews and of their entire German minority. As President Edvard Beneš enunciated while still in exile in London: “We are preparing the final solution of the question of our Germans and Hungarians since the new republic will be a Czechoslovak nation state.”17 Amazingly, this murderously racist program was approved in 1945 at Potsdam by all the great powers. Altogether, maybe thirteen million Germans fled, were expelled, or were killed in the postwar years. As a result, today’s Eastern Europe is not only largely judenfrei but also largely deutschenfrei. In addition, millions of Poles, Ukrainians, and others were driven out of their homes and transferred elsewhere. However, because these issues are much larger than those we are discussing here, let us just remind ourselves that while fascism, Nazism and communism have proven to be transitional phenomena, the consequences of ethnic cleansing will remain with us forever. Today, Nazi Germany, communist Russia, conservative aristocratic Hungary, and clericofascist Slovakia reside in the dustbin of history; but the devastations brought about by ethnic cleansing are, alas, irreparable.

Notes 1. Dr Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary, “They [the Italians] are not fit to serve on the Eastern front; they are not fit for North Africa; they are not even fit for the anti-aircraft batteries at home. The Führer is right to wonder why they are making war at all”—quoted in Peter Gosztony, Deutschlands Waffengefährten an der Ostfront, 1941–1945 (Stuttgart, 1981), 216. 2. Note that Germany and Finland never entered into a formal political alliance; the contacts and agreements between the two countries were purely economic and military. Still, Finland joined in the war following total mobilization four days after the beginning of Barbarossa and remained at war with the Allied Powers until September 1944. In brief, for all practical purposes, Germany and Finland were official allies. It is also true, however, that in December 1941, the Finnish government halted the advance of its troops near Leningrad and at the Karelian frontier and no amount of German pressure could bring them to attack any further. See Waldemar Erfurth, Der finnische Krieg, 1941–1944 (Wiesbaden, 1997), and Olli Vehvilainen, Finland in the Second World War: Between Germany and Russia, trans. Gerard McAlester (Basingstoke, 2002). 3. Peter Gosztony, Hitlers fremde Heere: Das Schicksal der nichtdeutschen Armeen in Ostfeldzug (Düsseldorf, 1976), 100. 4. On the miraculous Romanian volte-face in August 1944: see, among others, Dinu C. Giurescu, Romania in the Second World War (1939–1945), trans. Eugenia Elena Popescu (Boulder, 2000), 347–62. 5. On the Italian army’s protection of Jews in Italian-controlled areas of Europe: see, especially, Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941–1943 (New York, 1990). 6. The most substantial source on the Final Solution in Hungary is: Randolphl L. Braham (ed.), The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols. (New York and Detroit, 1994).

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7. Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford, 2009), 150–74. 8. See Peter Broucek (ed.), Ein General im Zwielicht: Die Erinnerungen Edmund Glaises von Horstenau, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1980–1988), vol. 3. 9. Galeazzo Ciano, Ciano’s Diary 1939–1943, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge (London, 1947), 467–68. 10. Note that when we talk of Transylvania after the First World War, we mean a territory that was twice the size of the historic principality of Transylvania; it encompassed large areas that had always been under direct Hungarian rule. Nor could the Hungarians forget that the area that Romania had acquired at the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 was larger than what had remained for the Hungarians of the kingdom of Hungary. 11. According to contemporary Romanian official statistics, the incoming Hungarian troops murdered 919 civilians in northern Transylvania: see Giurescu, Romania in the Second World War, 71–72. 12. Italian officers were particularly bitter about the cruelties the Germans soldiers perpetrated on Italian soldiers during the great retreat from the Don River. See, Ministero della Guerra/ Stato Maggiore Esercito (ed.), L’8a Armata Italiana della seconda battaglia difensiva del Don, (Rome, 1946), 68 et passim. On more than one occasion, Hungarians engaged in a firefight with German soldiers. As a Hungarian officer noted later: “We had three enemies: the cold, the hunger, and the Germans”—cited in Gosztony, Hitlers Fremde Heeren, 388. 13. Krisztián Ungváry, A magyar honvédség a második világháborúban (Budapest, 2005), 324. 14. Peter Gosztony, Stalins fremde Heere: Das Schicksal der nichtsowjetischen Truppen im Rahmen der Roten Armee 1941–1945 (Bonn, 1991), 193. 15. The new conservative nationalist Hungarian government’s policy is to offer dual citizenship to fellow nationals living abroad; this, however, without threatening the territorial integrity of neighboring countries. 16. It must be noted here that in all of Hitler’s Europe the Finnish army alone drafted Jews into its ranks; in fact, more than 300 of them served in the war against the Soviet Union, making these Jews unwilling fellow-fighters of the German armed forces. See Hannu Rautkallio, “Finland,” in Israel Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4 vols. (New York, 1990), vol. 2, 493. 17. Cited in Kálmán Janics, Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority, 1945-1948 (Boulder, 1982), 72.

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Chapter 2

MINORITIES INTO MAJORITIES Sudeten German and Transylvanian Hungarian Political Elites as Actors of Revisionism before and during the Second World War

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Introduction A lot of research has been done concerning minority radicalization in interwar Eastern Europe in recent years. In particular, scholars have focused on how German minorities developed their ideologies, which influences they received from the German government in Berlin, and what impact the domestic policies of the countries in which they lived had on their political strategies. There have also been several influential studies related to the Hungarian minorities in Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Moreover, recently a comparative history of Hungarian minorities between 1918 and today was published in Budapest.1 Though there is much more research still to do, in my opinion the current state of research related to minorities in interwar Eastern Europe is good. The lack of comparative studies in the historiography has been the subject of many complaints by scholars. This is all the more true regarding research on the history of ethnic minorities in the twentieth century, as only few studies dealing with similar aspects of their history in a comparative way can be found.2 The Sudeten Germans and the Transylvanian Hungarians, for example, share many features: both of them had become ethnic minorities against their will in 1918. After only two decades of minority existence their political status changed once again for a couple of years (in 1938 and 1940 respectively). Over the following years both ethnic groups were faced with not only the difficulties of the war but the new responsibility as a leading political group. This ended

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with the cessation of the war, and Sudeten German territories became part of Czechoslovakia and Transylvania part of Romania. After the Second World War these similarities ceased to exist: the Sudeten Germans were expelled from where they had lived for centuries, and thus they did not face a minority existence from that point on. The Transylvanian Hungarians faced the communist regime which was installed in Romania and imposed a series of restrictions on them, but at least they could remain in the region where they had lived for centuries. The similarities mentioned raise several questions relating to the behavior of the Germans and Hungarians.3 What I am interested in are questions within the revisionist frame. What kind of revisionist plans did both minorities develop in the interwar period before the external powers made border changes a reality? What were the minorities’ first reactions after they had overcome their status and had become members of the majority society? Did they create a regional identity in the interwar period which they tried to keep alive in the new situation after 1938 and 1940? What kind of geopolitical or demographic strategies did they have regarding the future of the Sudeten German and Transylvanian territories? What about a minority solidarity which may have existed in the interwar period between Jews and Germans or Hungarians? Finally, if we take into consideration the way Germans and Hungarians were treated in the interwar period, the main question seems to be whether or not they “learnt” something. How did they treat the former majorities who were now in a minority situation, the Czechs and Romanians? First, some general theoretical and terminological remarks and definitions are necessary. The section that follows deals with the political elites of both minorities and their revisionist plans in the interwar period. Finally, the last section analyses the Germans and Hungarians as members of the ethnic majority dominating other ethnic and religious groups in the years from 1938 to 1940.

Minority Groups, Revisionism, and Loyalty: Some Remarks on Terminology When consulting the literature on this subject one encounters the remarkable fact that a lot of historians use labels such as “the” Germans or Hungarians. Thus, they suggest a homogeneous group and fail to further differentiate within these ethnic groups. This seems to be the biggest mistake when speaking about minorities. Therefore, the first step in discussing the behavior of these minorities is to make it clear that we are dealing with diverse groups. Like the Germans, the Hungarians too were much divided into Catholic, Protestant and Jewish groups. Factory workers influenced by communist ideas belonged to this minority, as well as more conservative peasants and smallholders, bourgeois circles as well as more liberal people.4 The majority of the political elites and intelligentsia were

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educated, of course, in Germany and Hungary. Still, in the interwar period some strata of the minority societies were already integrated into the political institutions of the new states. Therefore, if minority leaders made political demands in the name of “Germans” or “Hungarians,” they effectively “constructed” a group which was not as homogeneous as their remarks assumed. Moreover, in many cases, minority politicians made arguments for political or economic programs as if they were the only legitimate representatives of their groups. No wonder, then, that they had very clear opinions about so-called “group enemies.” By excluding some people they created and redefined their own groups. Actually, this is what Rogers Brubaker calls “groupism” as it is performed by “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs.”5 Therefore, to avoid generalizations and to avoid mistaking the ideological positions of individuals for the attitude of a whole ethnic group, it is extraordinarily important to mention from case to case the name and political stance of each person we are talking about. Discussing minority revisionism and radicalization cannot be done without Brubaker’s concept of “nationalizing states.” For Brubaker, the nation-building process continues even after the creation of a new, so-called nation-state. The majority politicians nationalize their own society and its various strata, but the society of national minorities and different groups within it are included or at least affected by this process too. Brubaker’s system of relational fields underlines the mutual influences between minority groups, the new nation-state and the minority’s motherland.6 Taking into consideration Brubaker’s concept, two main and common aspects of minority radicalization become clear: the oft-used expression of the so-called “fifth column” exclusively stresses the impact of the motherland, but it ignores the influences of the nation-state’s government as well as the independent ideological development of minorities on their own. Secondly, each actor consists of a huge number of separate actors, separate lobbies and pressure groups. They influence each other within their own community, but they are also influenced by foreign movements and groups of the “other side,” and there always exists a certain rivalry between them. This way, they get each other all worked up, and this is how the ideological radicalization of minorities actually takes place. Once again it is important to underline that we cannot talk about the revisionism of “the Germans” in the Sudetenland or of “the Transylvanian Hungarians” but only about that of some groups or individuals within both minorities. Another important concept is that of “revisionism.” First of all it is necessary to liberate it from the kind of moral attitude which we often find, even in scholarly literature.7 The Hungarian scholarly literature in particular has shown that the term has not only a geographical dimension but a biographical one too. In Hungary, the geographical dimension means that some actors of revisionism preferred a so-called restitutio in integrum—the recreation of prewar Hungary along the borders of 1914.8 Ethnic revisionism occurred when a politician’s

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plans concentrated on regions with a Hungarian majority (often near Hungary’s borders) which he reclaimed for Hungary. Of course, plans and imaginations often mixed ethnographic, demographic and economic reasons, and they should be interpreted as a compromise and means for achieving at least a partial revision of Hungary’s border (just as in the case of the Hungarian prime minister, Gyula Gömbös, in 1934).9 The geographical dimension of revisionism covers other aspects, like taking into consideration railway lines or ideas of regional autonomy within existing borders or outside of them.10 Therefore, the different revisionist concepts must not be seen as a static and coherent ideology but more as a dynamic pool of developing ideas which could be changed depending on the international system of power and the personal interests of the politicians we are talking about. The personal dimension of revisionism, which should be understood as a dynamic development of individual choices and decisions, is important too. We can understand the behavior of minority politicians only if we take the statements they made seriously and if we explain the changes in their opinions depending on the domestic and international political situation. This is obvious when applied to persons such as Konrad Henlein (1898–1945), a leading German politician in Czechoslovakia, but there are some Transylvanian Hungarian examples as well. In the case of Henlein, the statements he made could not be more contradictory. Obviously, the political opinions of Henlein developed and changed between 1930 and 1937. In the early 1930s he was a member of the Kameradschaftsbund.11 This union of young people was suspected by the National Socialists of supporting the creation of a “Sudeten German people” with an identity and spirit of their own. The intention of the Kameradschaftsbund was not to promote a move towards Germany. They envisioned a move away from Germany and hoped to shape Czechoslovakia using the model of Switzerland, at least according to other radical Sudeten German circles in 1933.12 Indeed, Henlein himself used the term “Sudeten German tribe” (sudetendeutscher Stamm) shortly after he founded the Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront in October 1933.13 Such a program was, of course, anathema to all those who argued in favor of the existence of a single, united German nation despite its dispersal across various state borders. Moreover, Henlein harshly criticized National Socialist ideology and agitated for liberalism and individualism, which he saw as the main difference between himself and National Socialist views.14 Of course, this can be seen as an expression of a tactical attitude to ease and mislead the authorities.15 The statement was possibly inspired or somehow motivated by the fear that the Czech authorities would forbid his organization.16 Still, it is hard to deny that it fits very well with the concept of the Kameradschaftsbund since the situation of international politics did not encouraged revisionist tendencies in 1934.17 This situation changed, however, after 1935. The return of the Saar region to Germany, the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, and Italian warmongering in

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Africa marked the coming to prominence of authoritarian, fascist and National Socialist states in Europe. Two of them, Italy and Germany, were considered to be countries with revisionist aspirations. Along with the internal situation in Czechoslovakia, this development contributed decisively to the radicalization of the Sudeten German Party, which had been the successor organization to the Heimatfront since 1935. Additionally, taking into consideration the pressure of more radical Sudeten German politicians who fell under the influence of National Socialist ideology, the successes of the so-called “Activist” Parties Convention of February 1937, and finally the loss of some important comrades like Heinz Rutha,18 it is clear that the rapprochement of Henlein with the Third Reich was a slow, complex and multi-causal development which culminated in the famous “letter of subordination” in November 1937.19 The Sudeten German Party had realized, Henlein claimed in his letter to Adolf Hitler, that a compromise between the Germans and Czechs was not possible. The problem had to be solved by Germany, and the leadership of his party would cooperate with Germany in political issues.20 Moreover, Henlein assumed that not only his party but the Sudeten Germans as a whole supported National Socialist ideology, though they had to hide their real feelings due to the circumstances of the time.21 Thus, the development of Henlein’s attitude between 1930 and 1937 shows not only the chronological and tactical nature of revisionism but it exemplifies Brubaker’s system of relational fields too. Henlein claimed to represent all Sudeten Germans, though this ethnic group was not a homogeneous bloc. The Social Democrats were in constant combat with the Sudeten German Party, for example.22 The radical demands of Henlein’s party influenced not only the behavior of the other German parties but that of the government in Prague as well. The politics of the Czechs did not satisfy Henlein, and after the fall of 1937 the directives he received from Berlin further complicated the situation. Árpád Paál (1880–1944), a leading politician of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, is also a good example for showing the slow development of revisionist ideas. The change of rule in Transylvania interrupted the ongoing career of Árpád Paál in the state administration. First, in 1918 and during early 1919, he co-organized the so-called “passive resistance” of Hungarians against the Romanian state, which was then installing its power in the region.23 After the Treaty of Trianon, and with Romanian administration in Transylvania firmly established, Paál began to convince Hungarians about the necessity of political activity. Together with two other journalists, Paál co-authored a pamphlet entitled “Crying Words to the Hungarians of Transylvania, Bánság, Körösvidék and Máramaros” in 1921. Its aim was to convince Hungarians that they had to overcome their passivity and integrate themselves into the Romanian political system.24 Thereafter, Paál became a leading figure in Hungarian political life, and even one of the four vice-presidents of the Hungarian National Party. At this time, he belonged to the more progressive part of the party, which criticized the

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strong nationalist Hungarian government in Budapest and its anti-Semitism.25 At the same time, Paál tried to strengthen his contacts with those Romanian politicians who were in favor of resolving a series of minority problems. The issue of revisionism was a secondary problem for him, as revealed by a strategic paper written in 1927, at the beginning of the revisionist campaign started by Lord Rothermere.26 In this paper, probably addressed to other leading party members, he wrote that his generation could only hope to witness a neutralization and permeability of the actual borders.27 In the second half of the 1920s, Paál was most of all concerned with the attempts of the Romanian government to achieve a Romanian majority in all fields of Transylvanian society. When in 1928 the Transylvanian-rooted Peasant Party came into power, Paál realized that not even this party was interested in minority rights or in the equal treatment of minorities. This experience, combined with his own political marginalization within the Hungarian National Party, led to Paál’s ideological radicalization in the early 1930s. His world-view became more and more conservative and the articles he wrote for newspapers began to have strong nationalistic and anti-Semitic overtones.28 Therefore, in the case of Paál we can suppose that he held revisionist hopes in the early 1930s, though his political claims focused on plans for Hungarian administrative autonomy within Romania. Paál was one of the few Hungarians who expressed their revisionist desires when Hitler seized power on February 1, 1933.29 Still, his statements were very vague, and it is doubtful whether he really believed in the realization of his desires. Only during the 1930s, at which point the Hungarian minority experienced a series of discriminatory acts by the Romanian government and fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had increased their power significantly, did Paál’s revisionist conviction became strong. By 1937/38, after Germany’s first revisionist successes, we can be sure that Paál’s political vision consisted of the earliest possible return of a huge part of Transylvania to Hungary with German help.30 To sum up, the case of Paál shows that people’s revisionist ideas often underwent development over time rather than being a constant and unchallengeable conviction held for over twenty years. Revisionist politics or attitudes always have something to do with loyalty. Still, it is very difficult to define what this means as loyalty is a feeling, part of someone’s emotional life, and therefore impossible to prove or to objectify.31 Moreover, following Martin Schulze Wessel’s definition, “loyalty” can be seen as a “category of social activity and feeling.”32 It can be found between persons or communities of different hierarchical ranks, but also between communities on the same level. Loyalty as a politico-ideological attitude bound up with national consciousness and nationalism is a modern phenomena. In premodern societies, local, religious or (later on) class loyalty was more common than the kind of politico-ideological (and national) loyalty of interwar revisionist or anti-revisionist forces.33 Many

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regions in interwar Transylvania were still dominated by such premodern structures in their political and social relationships.34 As contemporary sociological research of the interwar period has shown, “loyalty” was very often a politicoideological category the common people (peasants, members of the working class) did not understand as it hardly related to the problems of their everyday life.35 Anyway, loyalty was and is something most people only offer if they get something in return for it. For example, Károly Kós, a Transylvanian Hungarian politician, offered the Romanian state the loyalty of the Hungarian minority should they be granted “national autonomy.”36

Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians as Revisionist Minorities Due to the state of the available sources, revisionist thoughts and problems of loyalty are more easily detectable when analyzing the statements made by members of the political elites. In this section I turn to better understand the mentalities of both the minorities under consideration here, as well as their party systems, their political contacts with their “homeland,” their generational conflicts and, finally, their revisionist plans. There were two striking similarities in the political life of Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians. The first one was the struggle between the “activist” and “passive” wings, the second one the desire for political unity. The struggle between both wings mentioned was about involvement in domestic politics after the huge shock of the sovereignity changes that occurred in 1918/19.37 The fight expressed the antagonism of two ideological orientations: the passive or “negativist” circles did not accept the new states, boycotted their existence and hoped that without their participation the new administration would not function. The activist side, however, tried to strengthen the position of minorities, participating in elections, the administration and legislation. In the case of both minorities, each side had its own political parties. After a couple of years, at least in Czechoslovakia, members of some Sudeten German parties even participated in government. The political goal of the Sudeten German activist parties (and in a smaller measure those of the Hungarians too) was to cooperate with parties of the ethnic majority. In both cases, the final aim was a reorganization of the state into a multi-national grouping of different ethnicities with some sort of autonomy for the minorities within.38 On that score, the Sudeten Germans can be regarded as better integrated into the political system than the Transylvanian Hungarians. One explanation for this may be the variety of Sudeten German parties—a political landscape that can be compared with that of Weimar Germany.39 Among the different German parties and orientations it was less complicated for the Czech parties to find a partner than

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it was in Romania for the Romanians. In Transylvania, the Hungarians were soon quite successful at founding a single party with the task of representing all Hungarians, regardless of political, economic or religious origin and outlook.40 The Hungarian National Party, founded in 1922, unified two former parties (a more “activist” and the “passive” one). One of their great achievements was that no other Hungarian party could seriously challenge its leading role within the political life of the Hungarian minority during its existence until 1938. Several attempts at founding a party with a leftist ideology failed in 1927 and 1932, as they received only small support at the polls.41 This shows that the majority of Hungarian voters were satisfied with the politics of the Hungarian National Party. The reason for this satisfaction was that unlike the parties of the Sudeten Germans prior to 1935, the Hungarian National Party saw itself as a coherent union of all ideologies and of all Transylvanian Hungarians regardless of their social or religious origins. Even if they did not achieve very much in the Romanian Parliament, the Hungarian politicians eased the severity of laws through personal contacts.42 Several aspects considered by Ronald Smelser to characterize the Sudeten German Party—which was an heir to some older societies, such as the association that aimed to protect German minorities (Volkstumsverband) and the party of local dignitaries (Honoratiorenpartei)—are valid for the Hungarian National Party too.43 The following aspects belong to the essence and structure of both parties (though regarding the Sudeten German Party we are speaking about the time before October 1937): personal disputes and intrigues replaced political or ideological struggles, a strong intertwining between politicians and journalists, a leadership committee which discussed each issue in detail and had a tendency to express very emotional and pathetic proclamations instead of concrete political programs.44 The issue of political diversity and cohesion had a double relevance in minority life: First, the rivalry between different groups and parties made the intervention of organizations and institutions from the minority’s “homeland” easier. This was obvious in the case of the German minorities until 1937, when the German government unified its politics toward Eastern European German minorities.45 In the case of the Hungarian minorities, the government in Budapest had already centralized financial and other kinds of support by the beginning of the 1920s. The Transylvanian Hungarians received support for all of their institutions (schools, scholarships, the press, and so on) from a sole association coordinated by the office of the Hungarian Prime Minister and by the Ministry of Finance.46 The case of the German minorities shows the influence of this diversity on minority radicalization. As the organizations of the homeland had each its own financial means, ideological concepts, and goals, they supported different minority organizations. Minority cohesion thus had the advantage that rivalries could be fought out within one party, and neither minority politicians nor society automatically became radicalized in the way ideologically diversified

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ethnic groups had. Like a vicious circle, minority diversity resulted in a further deepening of political disunity, as the case of the Sudeten Germans or of the Germans in Romania proved.47 The financial support both minorities received made it easier for the governments in Berlin and Budapest to demand the subordination of minority leaders.48 In the case of the Sudeten Germans, Henlein’s so-called “letter of subordination” of November 1937 can be seen as the latest date at which this subordination to the Third Reich was achieved.49 This was the background of the demand made by Hitler that Henlein should claim more political concessions from the Czech government than it could possibly give. The dispute about the Transylvanian question between Hungary and Romania entered its critical phase in 1939.50 Thus, it is no wonder that in early 1940 the Hungarian prime minister, Pál Teleki, issued a reprimand to the political leader of the Transylvanian Hungarians, Miklós Bánffy. The Hungarians did not even demand as many concessions as the Romanian government was ready to give, believed Teleki.51 The content of the statements made by Hitler and Teleki show that both minorities had become followers and subordinates of their homelands. They also reveal that in the last phase of territorial disputes ethnic minorities are often only mere objects of international politics. Maybe the most important question in the context of national minority revisionism is about the attitude of minority parties toward the state they live in. Was it more important for minority parties to achieve some substantial improvement in favor of their ethnic group (maybe in coalition with non-minority parties) or rather to follow the instructions received from their homeland? Did the minorities prefer constructive cooperation in legislation or did they prefer to be in opposition? In the Sudeten German case, a leaflet of the Deutsche Nationalpartei (DNP) appeared in 1926 declaring that “we do not have to make Sudeten German politics, but the politics of the entire German [nation].”52 It must be mentioned, however, that though the DNP was one of two important “negativist” parties, the number of its supporters was rather small. The other Sudeten German parties, following the specific interests of their supporters, did not adopt such an attitude. It is interesting that there is a statement quite similar to that of the DNP made by the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia. Géza Szüllő, the chairman of the (Hungarian) National Christian Socialist Party said quite openly that for his party the maintaining of national consciousness among the Hungarians was of greater importance than issues related to domestic or agricultural politics.53 Moreover, in 1928, in a secret note, he declared: “The difficulty of my position is that I do not want . . . to create a satisfied nationality of Hungarians in Czechoslovakia; my task is that the Hungarians should not remain in the Czech lands [sic] and I am not doing politics in favor of the Hungarians in Czechoslovakia but Hungary’s politics at all.”54 Thus, Szüllő’s strategy explicitly hinged on the idea that, the worse the Hungarian’s situation was, the closer was an end to the minority situation, to be overcome by changing national borders.

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For revisionism’s sake, by 1928 he was more interested in the disadvantages that came from being a minority in Czechoslovakia than any benefits thereof. According to the available sources, the party of the Transylvanian Hungarians did not systematically develop its attitude toward the Romanian state. The day of Transylvania’s unification with the Romanian kingdom was not taken as a holiday by the Hungarian National Party, explained one of its politicians in Parliament in 1932.55 Nevertheless, Hungarian politicians did declare their loyalty to Romania several times. Generally, it can be said that the Hungarian National Party considered the task of revision an issue appropriate to Hungary’s foreign policy. In 1918, the Transylvanian question was decided by foreign powers without asking the people of the region, and the conviction of Hungarian politicians in Romania was that this would remain the case in the future. Thus, until 1937/38 they invested a lot of energy in attempts to improve the economic and social situation of the Hungarian minority through the work of legislation.56 Therefore, the assumption made by the Austrian political scientist Karl Braunias seems to be valid. In 1926, he stated that it is wrong to believe that all border minorities in Romania shared irredentist feelings. If the Romanian state satisfied its minorities with some cultural concessions, the state could gain the support of those minorities.57 The successes of the Sudeten German activist parties in the mid 1920s also exemplified the support their politics of integration had within the German population in Czechoslovakia. What research on minorities has not take into consideration until now is that minority radicalization is most of all a form of generational radicalization. As Nándor Bárdi points out, minority history can be interpreted as the history of generations and of their succession.58 In the 1920s, both of the minority populations under discussion here still had leaders socialized and educated in the pre-First World War era. They were committed to a series of traditional rules and procedures which they took for granted. Partially, this way of doing politics made them appear to be conservatives in the 1920s. Later on in the 1930s, they often held onto some principles—like equality before the law regardless of religion—which, in the new ideological atmosphere, almost made liberal people of them.59 During this decade, their opinions and methods concerning minority issues were considered by many to be antiquated.60 Since the mid 1930s, the political scene in Sudetenland as well as in Transylvania was dominated more and more by the younger generation born between 1895 and 1910. Some of them, such as Konrad Henlein and István Sulyok,61 had participated in the First World War and had a specifically military way of thinking and speaking which mirrored their experiences. The lack of accommodation with the pre-First World War value system was important for their behavior as minority politicians. Because they did not grow up with them, they did not have to say goodbye to some democratic principles or to prewar imaginations related to social and economic progress and to the extension of political rights. Instead, they were

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members of a well-educated, dynamic and rationalist generation, which, in German literature, is called the “generation of objectivity.”62 Thus, the members of the younger generation were not only dissatisfied with the ways and methods the  older generations used to fight for minority rights and equality, but they were receptive to more radical influences too. Among the Sudeten Germans, the Kameradschaftsbund can be viewed as an example of this tendency, as too can the Hitel circle in Transylvania.63 Interwar minority radicalization, therefore, can be interpreted as a clash of generations. Within both minorities, contradictions between the older and younger generations became obvious in the second half of the 1920s.64 Partially, the gap between the generations was a demographic one: it was considered that a whole generation had been killed on the battlefields.65 However, under the pressure of the majority state, probably the bigger part of these younger generations fell under the influence of völkisch and nationalist ideas they had “imported” from the homeland. Völkisch ideas were especially attractive as they promised the creation of a new, nationally homogeneous, anti-liberal and authoritarian society of equal men without subordination and free of any perceived influence of foreigners or Jews.66 Also, unifying tendencies—such as the wish to create a homogeneous community of people of the same tongue, shared beliefs and political convictions—were present among the Hungarian and the German youth. This way, völkisch ideas seemed to be the right key for solving the minority problem, which for the Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians was the most important one.67 Within the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, a group of young intellectuals gathered around the periodical Hitel. With strong ties to Hungary, they hoped that by using some völkisch concepts they could contribute to a spiritual, cultural and political renewal of the minority.68 Anti-democratic, anti-liberal and communitarian ideas, as well as partially anti-Semitic ones, are to be found in the journal. Still, unlike Henlein and his circle, the young intellectuals of the Hitel circle—all born between 1900 and 1910, and some of them with strong political ambitions—did not found their own party. The reason for this restraint was not their integration into the Hungarian National Party; indeed, the lack of such integration was criticized by the younger generations. More probably, it was Budapest which was satisfied with the Hungarian National Party. The younger generations knew, thus, that they would not receive any substantial ideological or financial support from Budapest for founding a new party. After the banning of the Hungarian National Party in 1938, several members of the Hitel circle (such as Albrecht Dezső and Sándor Vita) participated in the Hungarian People’s Community, founded in 1939. Though the younger members were appointed to some leading positions, the old functionaries of the Hungarian National Party still held the most influential positions.69 Real political influence of the younger generation was only achieved after the Second Vienna Award of 1940, and came in the form of membership in the Transylvanian Party.

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However, every discussion of revisionism remains fruitless without analyzing the revisionist plans developed by members of the Hungarian and German minorities. As mentioned, Konrad Henlein was only seriously interested in cooperating with Hitler and German foreign policy regarding changes to the borders of Czechoslovakia after the second half of 1937. Regarding the Transylvanian Hungarians, the assumption that there was radicalization in this matter on several levels between the end of the First World War and the late 1930s seems to be the most convincing explanation.70 This radicalization explains why, only after Hungary’s and Germany’s first revisionist successes, this minority’s political elites had developed coherent revisionist plans. What can we say when comparing the German and Hungarian plans created in a minority situation before the borders were changed? There is scant information on German plans relating to territorial issues developed before the Munich Agreement of September 1938. Of course, the famous Grundplanung O. A. has to be mentioned here. Presumably, this plan was written by some anonymous authors between May and August 1938.71 Its starting point was that Germany should annex all those Bohemian lands that had lain along the borders of the German Reich in 1866. The justification for this was not based on the ethnic argument that the Sudeten Germans belonged to the German nation but on the so-called “historical rights” of Germany to Bohemian lands that had belonged to Germany since the Middle Ages.72 This reference to “historical rights” is interesting as similar arguments were used by Hungarian revisionists too. Still, in the age of national self-determination, they were very anachronistic and Hungarian politicians failed to convince anybody with such arguments.73 For the majority of the Transylvanian Hungarian political elite after 1938, the question was not anymore if the union of Transylvania with Hungary should happen but in which way. Unlike the Germans, the Hungarians had developed several, and some very sophisticated, plans on how the borders should be redrawn and how Transylvania should be administered as part of Hungary. Another difference between the German and the Hungarian plans was the lack of any military aspects on the Hungarian part, whereas the Grundplanung dealt with this issue in several chapters.74 It is significant that the Hungarian plans on the future and division of Transylvania were only developed when the Sudeten German question became hotly disputed in 1938. Still, this is not so surprising considering the attention paid by the Hungarians to the developments in Czechoslovakia between March and October 1938. Analyzing the articles that appeared in the Hungarian press, sympathy for Sudeten German demands (as they were manifested in the program edited by Henlein in Karlsbad, for example)75 becomes clear. The reason for this sympathy was that the emerging annexation of the Sudetenland was a test case of the revision of borders in favor of an ethnic minority. Besides, due to censorship, it was easier for the Hungarian press to write about the Sudeten

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German complaints than about those of the Transylvanian Hungarians. Due to the similarity of the situation, the reader obviously understood that, though the articles dealt with German demands, the authors were actually thinking about Transylvania.76 Shortly after the Munich Agreement, and during debates between Hungary and Czechoslovakia on solving their territorial dispute, the Transylvanian clergyman András Balázs developed a detailed revisionist plan. Balázs belonged to the Roman Catholic Church and was a leading member of the Hungarian National Party.77 In his plan, which was sent to Budapest, he suggested dividing Transylvania using ethnic and partially geographic principles. The plan can be regarded as being in anticipation of the Second Vienna Award as it contained the Szekler regions, which had to be linked by a corridor with Hungary.78 Balázs admitted that his plan would create a new Romanian minority within Hungary and a huge number of Hungarians would remain in the southern part of Transylvania under Romanian rule. But he argued that the Transylvanian question could be solved forever by a population exchange between Romania and Hungary. It is interesting that Balázs did not try to justify his proposal of population exchange but only referred to the one made between Greece and Turkey in 1923. This shows how arbitrarily politicians at the time decided the fate of whole populations. Still, it also makes clear how desperate Transylvanian Hungarian politicians were in 1938, as some of them accepted even the negative aspects of the proposed exchange. A way of solving the Transylvanian question could have been the implementation of population exchanges and the resettlement of Hungarians. But the opinion of Hungarian politicians and journalists was divided on this issue. While some of them (like Árpád Paál) obviously supported a population exchange combined with territorial revision, others criticized the similar resettlement of the German population of the Baltic states as inhuman and cruel.79 In 1939, the Hungarian government asked the Transylvanian lawyer and conservative politician Artúr Balogh to formulate a draft proposal on how Transylvania should be administrated after it was annexed. In his draft, Balogh favored the creation of an autonomous Transylvanian region. This integrated region would again belong to Hungary, and all three ethnic groups—Hungarians, Romanians and Germans—should get equal rights. Balogh wanted to provide the region with a Parliament of its own, a governor and other public authorities.80 In religious and educational issues, the regional authority should possess legislative and executive power. Probably the most important item in this program was that each ethnic group should have a right of veto in cases where they did not agree with parliamentary decisions which concerned them. Thus, after twenty years of minority existence, Balogh knew that the Hungarian government could and should not continue the minority politics it had practiced before 1918. But Balogh was also aware of the difficulties of minority life, and he was also very

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pessimistic about the behavior of the Romanians. He was convinced that after twenty years of being in the position of rule-makers the Romanians would not be satisfied with any concessions whatsoever if they would be forced into a minority position again.

Dominating Others: Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians as Members of the Ruling Nation The aim of this chapter is to analyze the behavior of the Germans and Hungarians as members of the ruling nation. Probably the biggest similarity in both of these minorities’ behavior can be found when comparing the joyful reactions to their respective unions in 1938 and 1940. The extraordinary ecstasy shown during the marching in of German and Hungarian troops and in the presence of Hitler and Horthy in the “liberated” cities illustrate the unanimous consent of the population and is documented in numerous speeches and pictures.81 Still, there are two remarkable differences between the Germans and the Hungarians. While in the Sudetenland the ideological enemies of National Socialist ideology were immediately put behind bars (unless they fled to Prague), in Transylvania at least some parts of the political left welcomed the Hungarian soldiers. The second difference is that the Germans showed gratitude for their “liberation” only to Hitler and his abilities but nobody else. The Hungarians, however, were most of all grateful to Admiral Horthy, though Hitler and Mussolini were mentioned in several speeches too. Besides Horthy, places and streets in Transylvania were also named after Hitler and Mussolini.82 How the German and Hungarian minorities preserved and developed a kind of special and regional identity during the interwar years is another issue worth comparing. Due to the totalitarian character of the Nazi regime, the Sudeten Germans had fewer possibilities in this regard than the Hungarians. This was for two reasons: In Germany and especially within the National Socialist movement and party, the idea of a single Volksgemeinschaft dominated every area of public life. Thus the Sudeten German Party was forcibly swallowed by the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP). Though it was not an automatic process and each person was verified individually, most members of the Sudeten German Party became members of the Nazi party.83 The Sudeten German territory shaped the so-called Sudetengau, which was to be a Mustergau, a model county that conformed to the wishes of its political elites. The second reason for this weakness, already mentioned above, was the lack of a traditional and strong local Sudeten German ethnic or group identity. Only in the 1930s did the proponents of such an identity somehow succeed in their efforts. Still, theories about the existence of a so-called Sudeten German “tribe,” which were partially supported by members of the Kameradschaftsbund, were disputed and

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very controversial. The concept of a singular Sudeten German tribe meant not only claiming the existence of a cultural community with autonomist aspirations, but it could also be associated with an exclusive group identity. This, however, was combated by the more radical forces whose thoughts lay more with the idea of national unity. Therefore interest in the concept of a Sudeten German tribe decreased in the 1930s.84 This explains why after 1938 most Sudeten Germans did not feel that they had to give up something important and valuable in order to integrate themselves completely into the German nation. It has to be mentioned, however, that Konrad Henlein tried several times as the leader of the Sudetengau to accentuate local positions and attitudes during the 1940s, albeit in a very cautious way. The attempts he made in that direction are considered by recent authors to have failed.85 In Transylvania, however, the situation was completely different. First of all, in 1940 the creation of a Transylvanian Party was allowed and even supported by Pál Teleki, the Hungarian prime minister. His aim was to maintain the political unity of the Transylvanian Hungarians and to propel a group that was loyal to him into Parliament.86 Concerning the Hungarians, another interesting and important issue is how they succeeded in preserving their ideology of Transylvanianism, which underwent a metamorphosis. In the interwar period, mostly in the 1920s, this ideology was quite popular among Hungarian intellectuals and politicians. It was welcomed and supported by some Transylvanian Saxons and a few Romanian intellectuals too. The proponents of this ideology claimed the existence of a special “Transylvanian spirit” which was owned by all three Transylvanian ethnic groups. From this starting point, the proponents wanted a kind of political Transylvanian coalition against the policies of centralization and nation building conducted by the Romanian government.87 Ultimately, the ideological fights in the 1930s and the strengthening of rightwing movements within all three ethnic groups led to this ideology’s decline. Furthermore, Hungarian politicians from Budapest criticized the spiritual aspects of Transylvanianism as early as 1928. They were frightened that such a regional ideology would alienate Transylvanian Hungarians from the Hungarian nation.88 Therefore, in the 1930s interest in this particular ideology ceased. Yet, after 1940 this “Transylvanian spirit” was reactivated, but now directed against Budapest. By assuming a special Hungarian identity in Transylvania, the idea now was to preserve a kind of separation and spiritual independence from the mainstream ideological movements in Budapest. At the same time, the Transylvanian Party claimed to represent the ideology of a “new Europe” which should be built under German leadership.89 Due to the experiences of the interwar period, the Transylvanian Hungarians could better understand the need for national cohesion in their relationship with the Romanians or of some measures against the Jews. This was the belief of the Transylvanian Party and the essence of the “new Transylvanianism” of the 1940s. This way, the Transylvanian Party

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propagated a kind of special role for Transylvanian Hungarian elites quite similar to Sudeten German efforts at building a Mustergau within Germany. Similarities between Transylvania and the Sudeten lands can be found in several respects. The implementation of the Gau Sudetenland was a kind of separation which was intended by Transylvanian elites too. The lack of real autonomy, however, was a common experience. In the Sudetenland moderate politicians with ties to the former Kameradschaftsbund were discredited by accusations of homosexuality.90 Names of Transylvanian politicians considered to be not radical enough appeared in some lists of supposed Freemasons in 1942.91 In both regions elements of a “frontier ideology” can be found in the statements of political elites. The argument was that their special experience of being a minority and their “national fight” against “national enemies” (Czechs and Romanians) in the border regions entitled them to a privileged position within the state.92 Differences between the new regions and the old countries or homelands were part of a self-image which was deliberately cultivated. Such attempts of distancing were made easier by several aspects of daily life experienced by Hungarians and Germans in their contacts with the newly introduced administration. First of all, they were disappointed by the fact that most of the administrative positions were occupied by foreigners and not by local persons.93 Though this was done for logical reasons, as during the interwar period the number of minority members of the administration was very low,94 the Hungarians as well as the Sudeten Germans regarded this development as a deliberate measure of discrimination.95 Moreover, they often felt treated like second-class citizens in the country they wanted to live in. Thus, the long-term experience of the Hungarians and Sudeten Germans was that they got something different from what they had wished while they were still a minority society. Probably the most interesting issue relating to the behavior of both ethnic groups concerns if and how their relationship to the Jews, Czechs and Romanians changed during the Second World War. German–Jewish and Hungarian–Jewish relations in the interwar period can be characterized as occurring between two groups without political power. In Transylvania this relationship was a symbiotic one, characterized by mutual solidarity with regard to politics and cultural relationships.96 This situation changed, however, after the Second Vienna Award. This change was apparent among some of the right-wing oriented younger elites from the Hitel circle, but even the political program of the Transylvanian Party itself contained anti-Semitic demands.97 In 1941, the Transylvanian Party supported the third anti-Semitic law brought before Parliament. In 1944, the Transylvanian administration cooperated in the forming of ghettos. The ideological background to this behavior was the widespread anti-Semitism in intellectual and political circles that had been present since the second half of the 1930s. Furthermore, people in general thought that they had a moral right to demand economic positions held by Jews as they felt that they had suffered

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enough themselves in the interwar period. This suffering now had to be compensated for by the looting of Jewish properties.98 Therefore, in my opinion interwar Hungarian–Jewish solidarity was undermined by a majority of Transylvanian Hungarian society. The German–Jewish relationship in the Sudetenland differed somewhat from that of the Hungarian–Jewish one in Transylvania. In the interwar period within Czechoslovakia, some German organizations like the Deutscher Turnverband had excluded Jews and were dominated by anti-Semitic ideas.99 This ideological radicalization is also illustrated by the fact that the Sudeten German Party forbade Jews becoming members in the spring of 1938. However, anti-Semitism existed in other parties too. Thus, for many Jews, anti-Semitism was an everyday experience, though for the Sudeten Germans the Czechs were the number one enemy.100 Even before the Munich Agreement, anti-Jewish clashes and riots happened in the Sudeten German territories. Several publications underline the participation of many Germans in the anti-Jewish pogrom of November 1938.101 In the last months of 1938, the Nazi terror was so comprehensive that in the spring of 1939 only 10 per cent (2,400 people) of the initial Jewish population remained in the Sudetenland. Sudeten German memorandums, written before and after the outbreak of the war, are full of anti-Semitic stereotypes and demands. For example, Karl Hermann Frank, secretary of state of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, planned the elimination of all people with “Jewish blood” in 1940.102 The aim of this measure was the ethnic homogenization of the region as a precondition of its later Germanization. In several memoirs, Sudeten Germans proposed the “Aryanization” of the Jewish economy in favor of a German one.103 Like the Transylvanian Hungarians, the Sudeten Germans considered “Aryanization”—that is, the looting of Jewish wealth—to be legitimate compensation for their “suffering” in the interwar period.104 That the Sudeten German population participated in and profited from the expropriation, expulsion and deportation of the remaining Jewish population in 1942 is obvious.105 Still, due to the low number of Jews in the Sudeten region (less than 1 per cent of the population were Jews or had a relationship to Jews, while in Transylvania the figure was more than 6 per cent),106 the so-called “Jewish question” seems to have played a much smaller role than in Transylvania. How can German–Czech and Hungarian–Romanian relationships be characterized? Actually, this is the question of whether both former minorities tried to break the old vicious circle of fighting and discrimination. Even considering that wartime is never a good time for reconciliation, it is surprising that in both regions the Czech and Romanian minorities were regarded as dangerous enemies. In both regions several plans were developed to achieve ethnic homogeneity by population exchange, population transfers, expulsion and assimilation.107 Overall, the Czech and Romanian populations were discriminated against in both regions through cultural, economic and political measures against

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which the Germans and Hungarians had fought only a couple of years previously. Obviously, both the Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians considered the war a unique period in which to gain demographic and cultural superiority, a period which would never come again.

Conclusion In spite of many differences, there are a lot of similarities in the ideological attitude and behavior of the Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians, be that in the status of revisionist minorities or—following German annexation in 1938 and 1940 respectively—as members of the majority. Following Martin Zückert, minority loyalty can best be understood by analyzing it within the frame of the state’s offer of integration and the acceptance of statehood by the minority.108 In the case of both minorities there was no acceptance of Romanian and Czechoslovak statehood following the redrawing of national boundaries following the First World War. Just like the Transylvanian Hungarians, the Sudeten Germans also opposed belonging to the new state in which they found themselves. Becoming a minority against their will—in spite of their supposed right to self-determination—not only caused a shock but also engendered a huge amount of mistrust toward the democratic principles of the victorious powers.109 None of the minorities received a serious integration offer (the Romanian constitution did not even mention the existence of minorities, and in Czechoslovakia the state ideology was directed against the non-Slavic ethnicities).110 Still, economic prosperity, political stability and everyday life in the 1920s led to the foundation of some “activist” parties within these minorities. They proposed rapprochement with the new political circumstances. This situation changed, however, during the 1930s. The aim of this study was to argue in favor of a multi-causal explanation which takes into consideration internal and external developments as well as ideological radicalization within both minorities. This interpretation seems to be in accord with recent studies and analyses of Sudeten German and Transylvanian Hungarian political attitudes.111 In both cases we are dealing with a change in attitudes toward statehood. This change occurred after the economic crisis of 1929, and in parallel to the advancement of the German National Socialists and their coming to power in 1933. However, the National Socialist influence was not immediately successful. Minority radicalization needed other parameters—like discrimination by the state, the fear of being swamped by foreigners in areas that were dominated by Germans and Hungarians, and the fear of losing their own national identity in that process. Moreover, minority radicalization was also an issue of generation change as the old elites had some ideological scruples the younger ones did not have. The attraction of the kin-state and of its ideology grew with its successes

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in international politics. In the Hungarian case, however, not only the prestige of Hungary played a significant role but that of the Third Reich too. All these developments, slowly but constantly, collectively caused the minorities to reject the new state they had previously accepted but which they had never really liked. The point in time of this rejection cannot be precisely estimated. But if Jaksch stated in June 1938 that the activist Social Democrat Party had become a minority among the Sudeten Germans, the assumption of widespread revisionism at this time seems very probable.112 In Transylvania the first border changes of 1938 made it clear to everyone that border revisions were not just vague promises but had become reality.113 The creation of detailed revisionist plans on how border changes should be carried out, only a short time before the changes were realized—with the Munich Award and the destruction of Czechoslovakia some months later—justified the assumption of the slow development of these plans stretched out over several stages. Whatever plans they made, as was the case had in 1919, the minorities did not get the opportunity of deciding their own fate, and neither were they seriously involved in the installation of a new order and administration. Still, the number of Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians in the new administration has to be underlined and cannot be disregarded. As members of the now-ruling nation, both former minorities had the self-image and the pretension of being the “best” and “truest” Germans and Hungarians. By living in border regions with everyday contacts to other ethnic groups they developed a kind of a “frontier ideology.” The result was that they regarded themselves as outposts in the national struggle, as a spiritual and militaristic avant-garde of the nation. Due to their participation in the administration, the Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians could influence politics against Jews and Czechs or Romanians to a certain extent. They carried out measures against these ethnic groups and developed plans for ethnic rearrangement and of population transfers with the aim of national homogenization. All this shows their complete integration in and subordination to the so-called national interests propagated by the political center. This meant, of course, the partially forced but partially voluntary abandonment of interwar pretensions with regard to possessing a distinct regional identity and culture, now dropped in favor of national unity. The contradiction between both minorities’ interwar political goals—equal treatment by the ethnic majority, free development of minority culture, protection of the minority region’s demographic structure, and so on—and their behavior in their newly achieved majority position is remarkable. Almost nothing was left of the tolerance the minorities demanded for themselves in the interwar period. According to some comparative studies, however, forgetting former demands was common to other Central European minorities when the status quo changed.114 This brings up the question of generalization: can we, for example, assume that the results of this

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study are valid for all or most German and Hungarian ethnic groups during the war? In spite of some existing differences, the similarities shown in this study suggest the consequence of transferability. Finally, at least two differences should be mentioned as well. The first one is the consciousness of the Sudeten Germans of being part of one of the biggest and strongest nations in Europe. The result of this consciousness was, for example, the essence of the revisionist idea of the Grundplanung O.A. which was characterized by an integral revisionism. From the beginning, most Hungarian plans were more modest and oriented along ethnic lines. The second difference can be found in the way both minorities were treated by Czechs and Romanians after the war. While Edvard Beneš and leading Czech politicians planned the partial expulsion of Sudeten Germans as early as during the war, something which they later carried out,115 the case of the Transylvanian Hungarians is more complicated. Some Romanian wartime plans proposed the expulsion of the majority of nonRomanians from the territory of interwar Romania.116 Still, Romanian demands at the Paris peace conference in 1947 no longer contained the transfer or expulsion of Hungarians.117 The Romanian delegation instead invoked a statement of the only Hungarian organization allowed from November 1945 onward. The Hungarian People’s Union, dominated by Social Democrats and Communists, decided to support the Romanian government’s foreign policy.118 In its statement, the Union refused not only border changes but any autonomist solution or population exchanges as well.119 With this Hungarian support, the Romanian government demanded back the Transylvanian territories lost in 1940, and was assisted in this by the Soviet Union. Thus, in this situation the Romanian government did not see the necessity for an expulsion of Hungarians. Therefore, this issue was not a matter of discussion at the Paris talks. After the war, while the Sudeten Germans achieved their wish of belonging to Germany—albeit in a way which turned out to be a nightmare rather than a dream—the Transylvanian Hungarians got to remain in their native country, albeit in a minority position.120

Notes 1. Nándor Bárdi, Csilla Fedinec and László Szarka (eds), Kisebbségi magyar közösségek a 20. században (Budapest, 2008). 2. One of the few exceptions is: Marina Cattaruzza, “Endstation Vertreibung: Minderheitenfrage und Zwangsmigrationen in Ostmitteleuropa, 1919–1949,” Journal of Modern European History 6,1 (2008): 5–29. 3. In the 1980s, a research project on German and Hungarian minorities in Central Europe since 1918 was carried out in Germany. The results were published in Edgar Hösch and Gerhard Seewann (eds), Aspekte ethnischer Identität. Ergebnisse des Forschungsprojekts “Deutsche und Magyaren als nationale Minderheiten im Donauraum” (Munich, 1991). See the study of Gerhard Seewann, “Ungarische und deutsche Minderheiten im Donau-Karpatenbecken 1918–1980: Ein typologischer Vergleich ihrer Entwicklung,” ibid., 395–409.

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4. Rudolf Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit? Der sudetendeutsche Volkstumskampf in den Beziehungen zwischen der Weimarer Republik und der CSR (Stuttgart, 1977), 43–48; Franz Sz. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung: Politische Strategien der ungarischen Minderheitselite in Rumänien 1931–1940 (Munich, 2007), 53. 5. Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, 2004), 10; Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, 1996), 15n, 56n, 61n. 6. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 58n. 7. In this sense, see, e.g. Ion Scurtu and Gheorghe Buzatu, Istoria Românilor în sec. XX. (1918–1948) (Bucharest, 1999), 46. 8. Anikó Kovács-Bertrand, Der ungarische Revisionismus nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Der publizistische Kampf gegen den Friedensvertrag von Trianon (1918–1931) (Munich, 1997); Miklós Zeidler, Ideas on Territorial Revision in Hungary 1920–1945 (Boulder, 2007). 9. Miklós Zeidler, “Die Konzeption von Gyula Gömbös über eine Territorialrevision 1934,” Ungarn Jahrbuch 24 (1998/99): 165–95; Zeidler, Ideas, 159–61. 10. Zeidler, Ideas. 11. Jörg. K. Hoensch, “Der Kameradschaftsbund, Konrad Henlein und die Anfänge der Sudetendeutschen Heimatfront,” in Eduard Mühle (ed.), Mentalitäten–Nationen– Spannungsfelder: Studien zu Mittel- und Osteuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Marburg, 2001), 101–35. 12. Ralf Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!” Konrad Henlein und der Reichsgau Sudetenland (1938–1945) (Munich, 2000), 35–36. 13. Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 36. 14. Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 36. 15. It cannot be the task of this study to deliver a comprehensive characterization of the Sudeten German Party and its tactics. The latest discussion on this was caused by the thesis of Christoph Boyer and Jaroslav Kučera, “Alte Argumente im neuen Licht,” Bohemia 38 (1997): 358–68. Among other things, they claim that Henlein’s statement in Böhmisch Leipa (Česká Lípa) was motivated only by his double-tongued strategy. In the same journal volume responses can be found: Ronald Smelser, “Von alten und neuen Fragestellungen,” Bohemia 38 (1997): 358-71; Václav Kurál, “Zwischen Othmar Spann und Adolf Hitler,” Bohemia 38 (1997): 371–76; and Ralf Gebel, “Zwischen Volkstumskampf und Nationalsozialismus,” Bohemia 38 (1997): 376–85. Important here is the article by Kurál (374, 376), who several times underlines the process, character and development of the ideology of the party. Gebel (382–85) believes in the authenticity of Henlein’s statement from 1934. In this context, Wilfried Jilge speaks of a “complex process of radicalization”: Jilge, “Zwischen Autoritarismus und Totalitarismus: Anmerkungen zu einer Kontroverse,” Bohemia 39 (1998): 96–109. 16. Interestingly, only a couple of months before, radical German minority politicians in Romania made similar statements about their loyalty too, though it hardly made any sense accusing them of disloyalty. See Johannes Böhm, Die Deutschen in Rumänien und das Dritte Reich 1933–1940 (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 66. 17. Zeidler, Ideas, 150n. 18. Mark Cornwall, “Heinrich Rutha and the Unravelling of a Homosexual Scandal in 1930s Czechoslovakia,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8,3 (2002): 319–47, esp. 337n. 19. In my opinion, the interaction of all these causes is described very convincingly, though with a strong accent on the internal situation in Czechoslovakia, by Detlef Brandes, Die Sudetendeutschen im Krisenjahr 1938 (Munich, 2008), 25–55; Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 46–48.

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20. Brandes, Die Sudetendeutschen, 50. The letter is printed in Václav Král (ed.), Die Deutschen in der Tschechoslowakei 1933–1947: Dokumentensammlung (Prague, 1964), 83, 140–45. 21. Brandes, Die Sudetendeutschen, 50. 22. On the attitude of the social democrats, see Nancy M. Wingfield, Minority Politics in a Multinational State: The German Social Democrats in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938 (Boulder, 1989), 146–60. 23. Zsolt K. Lengyel, Auf der Suche nach dem Kompromiß: Ursprünge und Gestalten des frühen Transsilvanismus 1918–1928 (Munich, 1993), 103–11. 24. Nándor Bárdi, “Die minderheitspolitischen Strategien der ungarischen Bevölkerung in Rumänien zwischen den Weltkriegen,” Südostforschungen 58 (1999): 267–312, esp. 271. 25. Franz Sz. Horváth, “Utak, tévutak, zsákutcák: Paál Árpád két világháború politikai nézeteiről” in Balázs Ablonczy et al. (eds), Folyamatok a változásban: A hatalomváltások társadalmi hatásai Közép-Európában a XX. században (Budapest, 2005), 117–61. 26. For detailed information on this campaign, see: Zeidler, Ideas, 103–17; Ignác Romsics, “Hungary’s Place in the Sun: A British Newspaper Article and its Hungarian Repercussions,” in László Péter and Martyn Rady (eds), British–Hungarian Relations since 1848 (London, 2004), 195–204. 27. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 96. 28. Horváth, “Utak, tévutak, zsákutcák,” 136–44. 29. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 177. 30. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 272–88, 323–47. 31. Otto Luchterhandt, Nationale Minderheiten und Loyalität (Cologne, 1997), 18. 32. Martin Schulze Wessel, “‘Loyalität’ als geschichtlicher Grundbegriff und Forschungskonzept: Zur Einleitung,” in idem (ed.), Loyalitäten in der Tschechoslowakischen Republik 1918–1938: Politische, nationale und kulturelle Zugehörigkeiten (Munich, 2004), 1–22. 33. Loyalty to a group characterized by ethnic categories has, thus, a lot to do with the emergence of modern nationalism: see, e.g. Hans Ulrich Wehler, Nationalismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen (Munich, 2001), 16–17; Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nationen und Nationalismus: Mythos und Realität (Frankfurt, 2004), 31–32. 34. In the Sudeten Lands we have partially another situation, due to its more industrialized and more modern structure: see Jaworski, Vorposten, 15–22. Still, even here, no city had more than 50,000 inhabitants in 1936: Wingfield, Minority Politics, 3. 35. This was one result of a survey made by the young Hungarian scholar and politician Imre Mikó in several Transylvanian villages with ethnically mixed populations in 1931. See: Imre Mikó, Az erdélyi falu és a nemzetiségi kérdés (Csíkszereda, 1998, reprint), 129–33, and Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 116–18. 36. Lengyel, Auf der Suche nach dem Kompromiß, 170–72; Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 59n. 37. Ladislav Lipscher gives several examples for this shock: Lipscher, “Die parteipolitische Struktur der Minderheiten und ihre staatsrechtlichen Vorstellungen zur Lösung der nationalen Frage in der Tschechoslowakei (1918–1930),” Bohemia 22 (1981): 342–80, esp. 343–45. 38. Jörg Kracik, Die Politik des deutschen Aktivismus in der Tschechoslowakei 1920–1938 (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 8n. 39. Friedrich Prinz, “Auf dem Weg in die Moderne,” in idem (ed.), Böhmen und Mähren (Berlin, 1993), 390. 40. Bárdi, “Minderheitspolitische Strategien,” 285–96. 41. For the results of the elections in Romania, see: Scurtu and Buzatu, Istoria Românilor; the variety of political orientations within the Hungarian minority is discussed by Bárdi, “Minderheitspolitische Strategien.”

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42. The self image and political strategies of the Hungarian Party are discussed by Franz Sz. Horváth, “Die Ungarische Landespartei im politischen Leben Rumäniens 1930–1938: Selbstverständnis und gesellschaftspolitische Strategien,” in Ralph Tuchtenhagen et al. (eds), Ethnische und soziale Konflikte im neuzeitlichen Osteuropa: Festschrift für Heinz-Dietrich Löwe zum 60. Geburtstag (Hamburg, 2004), 247–75. 43. Ronald M. Smelser, “Die Henleinpartei: Eine Deutung,” in Karl Bosl (ed.), Die Erste Tschechoslowakische Republik als multinationaler Parteienstaat (Munich, 1979), 187–203. 44. Of course, this listing is generalizing; cf. Smelser, “Die Henleinpartei,” 190–92; Horváth, “Die Ungarische Landespartei.” 45. Tammo Luther, Volkstumspolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1933–1938: Die Auslanddeutschen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Traditionalisten und Nationalsozialisten (Wiesbaden, 2004). 46. Nándor Bárdi, ““Aktion Osten’: Die Unterstützung ungarischer Institutionen in Rumänien durch das Mutterland Ungarn in den 1920er Jahren,” Ungarn Jahrbuch 23 (1997): 287–335. 47. Böhm, Die Deutschen in Rumänien; Anthony Komjáthy and Rebecca Stockwell (eds), German Minorities and the Third Reich: Ethnic Germans of East Central Europe between the Wars (New York, 1980), 103–24. 48. For some details on the amounts received by the Sudeten German Party, see: Boyer and Kucera, “Alte Argumente im neuen Licht,” 359 n.1, and Kural, “Zwischen Othmar Spann,” 373; Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 50. 49. A detailed analysis of Henlein’s letter was written by Ronald M. Smelser, Das Sudetenproblem und das Dritte Reich 1933–1938: Von der Volkstumspolitik zur Nationalsozialistischen Außenpolitik (Munich, 1980), 184–87. 50. Friedrich Christof, Befriedung im Donauraum: Der Zweite Wiener Schiedsspruch und die deutsch-ungarischen diplomatischen Beziehungen 1939–1942 (Frankfurt am Main, 1998); Béni L. Balogh, A magyar-román kapcsolatok 1939–1940-ben és a második bécsi döntés (Csíkszereda, 2002). 51. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 317. 52. Jaworski, Vorposten, 57. 53. Béla Angyal, “A ‘magyarországi’ és a ‘magyar’ politika vitája a Felvidéken: A Magyar Nemzeti Párt ‘reálpolitikája’ az 1920-as évek közepén,” in Nándor Bárdi and Csilla Fedinec (eds), Etnopolitika: A közösségi, magán- és nemzetközi érdekek viszonyrendszere Közép-Európában (Budapest, 2003), 127–41. 54. Angyal, “A ‘magyarországi’ és a ‘magyar’ politika vitája,” 139. 55. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 38. 56. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 139–58, 214–30. 57. Karl Braunias, “Das Minderheitenproblem als rumänisches Grenzproblem,” Zeitschrift für Geopolitik 3,10 (1926): 754–61, esp. 760. 58. Nándor Bárdi, “Generation Groups in the History of Hungarian Minority Elites,” Regio 8 (2005): 109–25. 59. In the case of the Sudeten Germans, Franz Spina (1868–1938), member of the Agrarian Party, and Christian Mayr-Harting (1874–1948), member of the Christian-Socialist Party, can be mentioned here. For more details, see: Lipscher, “Die parteipolitische Struktur,” 352–64, and Prinz, Böhmen, 391. In the Hungarian case, Elemér Jakabffy (1881–1963), vice-president of the Hungarian Party, and (Count) György Bethlen (1888–1968), between 1926 and 1938 president of the Hungarian Party, should be mentioned; Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 229–30, 248–50, 401. 60. For some Sudeten German examples, see: Jaworski, Vorposten, 175n. 61. For biographical approaches to Henlein, see: Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 43–51; Smelser, Sudetenproblem, 64–67; Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 402.

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62. Ulrich Herbert: “‘Generation der Sachlichkeit’: Die völkische Studentenbewegung der frühen zwanziger Jahre in Deutschland,” in Frank Bajohr et al. (eds), Zivilisation und Barbarei: Die widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne (Hamburg, 1991), 115–44. 63. Jilge, “Zwischen Autoritarismus,” 100–1, 104–6. 64. Brandes, Die Sudetendeutschen, 145n; Andreas Luh, Der Deutsche Turnverband in der Ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik: Vom völkischen Vereinsbetrieb zur volkspolitischen Bewegung (Munich, 1988), 136–58. 65. Luh, Der Deutsche Turnverband, 166. Here, Luh cites a contemporary article which mentions the lack of age groups between 25 and 40 years. The Transylvanian Hungarian lawyer and politician Imre Mikó (1911–1977) was himself an active member of the younger generation. In his book about the history of the Transylvanian Hungarians (first published in 1941), he mentions the lack of fifteen age groups of Hungarians too. See: Imre Mikó, Huszonkét év. Az erdélyi magyarság politikai története 1918. December 1-től 1940. augusztus 30.-ig (Budapest, 1988, reprint), 188. 66. Jilge, “Zwischen Autoritarismus,” 104–6; Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 193–99. 67. For a detailed analysis of Voelkish thought, see: Uwe Puschner, Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich: Sprache—Rasse—Religion (Darmstadt, 2001); idem, “Anti-semitism and German Volkish Ideology,” in Hubert Cancik and Uwe Puschner (eds), Antisemitismus, Paganismus, Völkische Religion (Munich, 2004), 55–65. 68. Zsuzsanna Török, “Planning the National Minority: Strategies of the Journal Hitel in Romania, 1935–44,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 7,2 (2001): 57–74. 69. This is true even if Count Miklós Bánffy was the president of the new organization, though he was not a member of the former Hungarian Party. For details, see: Bárdi, “Minderheitspolitische Strategien,” 293–96. 70. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 371–85. 71. This is the date given by Václav Král, who edited the document in Die Vergangenheit warnt: Dokumente über die Germanisierungs- und Austilgungspolitik der Naziokkupanten in der Tschechoslowakei (Prague, 1960), 27. 72. “Grundplanung O.A.,” in Král, Die Vergangenheit warnt, 27. 73. According to Zeidler, Ideas, 72: “the weakest arguments against the dismemberment of Hungary were the historical and civilizational ones. They were the most partisan ones which appeared positive only from the Hungarian perspective. Looked at from the other side they could easily be denied and repudiated.” 74. “Grundplanung O.A.,” in Král, Die Vergangenheit warnt, 30–34, 37n. 75. For an analysis of this program in the context of international politics, see: Helmuth K. G. Rönnefarth, Die Sudetenkrise in der internationalen Politik: Entstehung—Verlauf— Auswirkung, Vol. 1 (Wiesbaden, 1961), 227–77; cf. Brandes, Die Sudetendeutschen, 108. 76. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 324–29. 77. On his biography, see Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 340, n.208. 78. For the German translation of Balázs’s plan and its visualization in a map, see Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 393–96 and 399. 79. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 339n, 342n. 80. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 346. 81. Volker Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen im NS-Staat. Politik und Stimmung der Bevo``lkerung im Reichsgau Sudetenland (1938-1945) (Essen, 1999), 71–82; Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 64–69; Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 359–68; Jósa Piroska, Virágszőnyeg a váradi utcaköveken (Nagyvárad, 2007).

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82. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 364. On “renaming” streets, places, and buildings in the city of Klausenburg, see: Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford, 2009), 132–39. 83. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 131–37. 84. Brandes, Die Sudetendeutschen, 94. 85. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 450. 86. Balázs Ablonczy, Pál Teleki (1874–1941): The Life of a Controversial Hungarian Politician (Boulder, 2006), 219. 87. Lengyel, Auf der Suche nach dem Kompromiß, 383–407. For a recent but very superficial overview which neglects the scientific literature, see: Ion Calafeteanu, “About the Idea of ‘Transylvanianism’,” Valahian Journal of Historical Studies 7/8 (2007): 7–16. 88. Ernö Ligeti, Súly alatt a pálma: Egy nemzedék szellemi élete. 22 év kisebbségi sorsban (Csíkszereda, 2004), 141n. Similar accusations concerning the address of Henlein were made in the Sudeten lands too; see Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 35n. 89. Gábor Egry, Az erdélyiség “színeváltozása,” Kísérlet az Erdélyi Párt ideológiájának és identitáspolitikájának elemzésére 1940–1941 (Budapest, 2008), 104, 108n, 132. 90. Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 177. 91. Dániel Csatári, Forgószélben (Magyar-román viszony 1940–1945) (Budapest, 1969), 255. 92. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 128, 138, 323; Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 183; Egry, Az erdélyiség, 115, 179. 93. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 149, 152; Edit Csilléry, “Közalkalmazottak és köztisztviselők Észak-Erdélyben a második bécsi döntést követően,” Limes 19,2 (2009): 73–93. 94. Csilléry, “Közalkalmazottak”, 78–80. 95. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 89n; Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 212, 223; Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 367. 96. Ladislau Gyémánt, The Jews of Transylvania: A Historical Destiny (Cluj-Napoca, 2004). 97. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 365n; Egry, Az erdélyiség, 159. 98. Franz Sz. Horváth, “Volkstumspolitik, soziale Kompensation und wirtschaftliche Wiedergutmachung: Der Holocaust in Nordsiebenbürgen,” in Johannes Hürter and Jürgen Zarusky (eds), Besatzung, Kollaboration, Holocaust: Neue Studien zur Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden (Munich, 2008), 115–50. 99. Luh, Der Deutsche Turnverband, 49n. 100. Jörg Osterloh, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung im Reichsgau Sudetenland 1938–1945 (Munich, 2006), 558. 101. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 102–6; Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 75–78; Osterloh, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, 185–233; Brandes, Die Sudetendeutschen, 85–87. 102. “Vorschläge zur Vorbereitung der Germanisierung (Umvolkung) im Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren,” in Král, Die Vergangenheit warnt, 110–17. 103. “Die Aufgaben der Wirtschaft bei der Eindeutschung des Protektorates Böhmen und Mähren,” in Král, Die Vergangenheit warnt, 99–108; Osterloh, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, 560. 104. Osterloh, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, 568. 105. See document number 375 in: Král, Die Deutschen in der Tschechoslowakei, 473. 106. Osterloh, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, 53n; Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 76; Gyémánt, Jews of Transylvania, 270. 107. Egry, Az erdélyiség, 137–56; Horváth, “Volkstumspolitik”; Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 279–87, 323–34; Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”, 275–327. 108. Martin Zückert, “Vom Aktivismus zur Staatsnegation? Die Sudetendeutschen zwischen Staatsakzeptanz, regional-nationalistischer Bewegung und dem nationalsozialistischen

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110. 111.

112.

113.

114.

115. 116.

117.

118. 119.

120.

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Deutschland,” in Peter Haslinger and Joachim von Puttkamer (eds), Staat, Loyalität und Minderheiten in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa 1918–1941 (Munich, 2007), 69–99. For the Sudeten Germans, democracy means to be without power claimed Wenzel Jaksch, a leading politician of the social democrats, quoted by Brandes, Die Sudetendeutschen, 188. The Hungarian criticism on democracy can be found in Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 180. Zückert, “Vom Aktivismus zur Staatsnegation?”, 97; Lengyel, Auf der Suche nach dem Kompromiß, 239. Zückert, “Vom Aktivismus zur Staatsnegation?”, 94, 97, speaks about the “development” and “dynamics” of, as well as a “process of transformation” in, Sudeten German behavior. Cf. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 380–84. Brandes, Die Sudetendeutschen, 180. According to some Czech police reports, round about 80 to 90 per cent of the Sudeten Germans would have voted in favor being annexed by Germany in May 1938: Brandes, Die Sudetendeutschen, 76. In relation to revisionism, see my discussion of a utopian wish (1928–1930), first revisionist hopes (1933), and a strong revisionist belief after 1937, in Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung, 380–84. In this regard, Gábor Egry compares the behavior of Transylvanian Romanians after 1918 with that of the Slovakian Hungarians after 1938 and that of the Transylvanian Hungarians after 1940: Egry, “Dreams Come True or Nightmares? Central European Regional Elites and their Ideologies after ‘Returning to the Homeland’, 1918–1944,” (unpublished paper). Detlef Brandes, Der Weg zur Vertreibung 1938-1945. Pläne und Entscheidungen zum “Transfer” der Deutschen aus der Tschechoslowakei und Polen (Munich 2001), 84–91, 150–71. Viorel Achim, “Romanian–German Collaboration in Ethnopolitics: The Case of Sabin Manuila,” in Michael Fahlbusch and Ingo Haar (eds), German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945 (New York, 2005), 139–54; Viorel Achim, “The Romanian Population Exchange Project. Elaborated by Sabin Manula in October 1941,” Annali dell’Istituto storico italogermanico in Trento 27 (2001): 593–617. Ignác Romsics, Az 1947-es párizsi békeszerződés (Budapest, 2006), 117–25, 204–25. The book has also appeared in German under the title Kriegsziele und Nachkriegsordnung in Ostmitteleuropa: der Pariser Friedensvertrag von 1947 mit Ungarn (Herne, 2009). Romsics, Az 1947-es párizsi békeszerződés, 121n. Other Transylvanian Hungarian circles, however, did not agree with this decision, but they could not articulate their wishes. The statement was published in Zoltán Nagy Mihály and Ágoston Olti (eds), Érdekképviselet vagy pártpolitika? Iratok a Magyar Népi Szövetség történetéhez 1944–1953 (Csíkszereda, 2009), 214–16. On the history of Transylvanian Hungary during the communist period, see: Elemér Illyés, National Minorities in Romania: Change in Transylvania (Hamilton, 1982); Othmar Kolar, Rumänien und seine nationalen Minderheiten 1918 bis heute (Vienna, 1997). On that of the Sudeten Germans after 1945: Prinz, “Auf dem Weg in die Moderne.”

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Chapter 3

THE ETHNIC POLICY OF THE THIRD REICH TOWARD THE VOLKSDEUTSCHE IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

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Norbert Spannenberger

N

ational Socialist ethnic policy utilized the German ethnic minorities of East Central and Southeast Europe for the promotion of expansionist aims in a conscious and deliberate fashion. This does not in any way represent a continuity of minority policy from the Weimar Republic era, but, rather, is based upon ideas articulated in 1936 and formally adopted and enacted from 1937 onwards. After the creation of the Rome–Berlin axis, the Third Reich followed a concrete politics in Southeastern Europe. At the same time, the structures of the so called Deutschtumsverbände were adapted to the party organization of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP). This coup happened relatively quickly, only some three to four years after the “seizure of power” in January 1933, and appeared as a resounding success for the NSDAP, or more exactly for the SS. The most important results of this restructuring were as follows. First, despite a structure that, from the outside, may have appeared as multilayered, it was a highly centralized construction under the control of the SS. Even if the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) had at least some nominal influence on German minority issues, the real decision-making was the preserve of the SS. Second, the uniform treatment of all German minorities, their practical Gleichschaltung, was promoted. On the eve of the Second World War this was an understandable strategy, as the Volksgruppen organizations could potentially have played an important role as a source of untapped economic and—especially during the war—military power. Despite extensive planning, National Socialist ethnic policies were never executed thoroughly and therefore never underwent

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a continuous and integrated development. The scope and focus of these ethnic policies depended on particular political relations to individual countries, and also on the level of organization of the specific German minority, which differed greatly from group to group. Third, the Nazis’ attempt to implement these policies resulted in completely differing outcomes in the individual states of the Danube area. These differing outcomes will be illustrated here by discussing several examples. On April 9, 1925 Carl Georg Bruns, the legal consultant for German ethnic groups in Europe, presented a memorandum to the German Foreign Office. He argued—in accordance with the political orientation of his time—for the secret support of ethnic German groups, since, with the promotion of a sense of togetherness between all Germans, Berlin’s influence in Europe would automatically increase. Such a strategy appears to have stood to reason as, from Estonia to Yugoslavia, over 8 million Germans lived in minority status and almost every fourth member of an ethnic minority in Eastern and Southeastern Europe was German. There were two main goals of the ethnic minority policy in the Weimar Republic: the promotion of “a distinct German self-confidence and consciousness of a sense of belonging to a wider German-ness” among ethnic Germans abroad, and the promotion of various movements toward the autonomy of these ethnic groups, as “today, the German minorities would be suppressed and wiped out without attracting attention abroad if it were not for the resonance that their fate receives in Germany—a resonance that regrettably is not strong enough.” This program of patronage was not, however, a goal in itself. Gustav Stresemann was fearful that Germany could become “in the question of nationalities an object of foreign politics.” A carefully orchestrated policy of protection for these minorities would halt the danger of the further marginalization and discrimination of German minorities. By “winning substantial influence in East Central Europe” Germany could overcome the “deeply engraved distrust of the eastern peoples,” which, according to the German Foreign Office in 1925 could have been “a deciding factor concerning the revision of borders.”1 Concerning the changing and restructuring of borders, an explicit distinction was drawn between Eastern and Southeastern Europe: border restructuring was irrelevant for German interests in Southeastern Europe, so the whole strategy of redrawing borders was focused upon Eastern Europe. A distinction was made between Zwangsminderheiten (forced minorities) that came about as a result of the Versailles Treaty—in north Schleswig (numbering 25,000), the Memelland (70,000), Poland (300,000), the Sudetenland and Slovakia (3.5 million), South Tyrol (250,000), Alsace-Lorraine (1.5 million), Prussian Moresnet (5,000), and Eupen Malmedy (50,000)—and the eigentlichen Minderheiten (actual minorities). To the latter belonged the Germans in the Baltic (150,000), Hungary (500,000), Yugoslavia (circa 700,000), Romania (500,000), and “the former Russian Empire” (2 million).2 For the Zwangsminderheiten—even before the

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National Socialists gained power—the motto Heim ins Reich! (Come home to the Reich!)—in the sense of a territorial revision—was prevalent as long as their territories lay alongside the borders of the Reich.3 In Southeastern Europe, on the other hand, the stabilization and building of diplomatic and economic relationships with the states of the region retained the highest priority, and local German minorities played a largely subordinate role with regard to the minority politics of the Weimar Republic. However, one may only to a very small extent speak of a personnel and organizational continuity of Volksgruppen policy in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. In the mid 1930s a change of elites occurred in the jungle that the various so-called Volksgruppen organizations constituted, even if this change was not visible to the wider public. The organization of the Weimar period was completely dissolved, radically transformed or incorporated into party structures. For the purposes of this essay the SS-Hauptamt (Main Office) is of chief importance. From 1933 onward, Rudolf Hess was given responsibility for the question of Germans abroad, and in that authority he established the Volksdeutscher Rat (VR), or Council for Ethnic Germans, as a coordinating body. More traditionally oriented Volkstumskämpfer, who were not members of the NSDAP and thus believed that they would not be “brought into line,” filled this council. The VR proved to be less than efficient, especially as the Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP (Foreign Organization of the National Socialist Party) under the leadership of Wilhelm Bohle, also fought for influence in the same areas. Hess eventually asked SS member Otto von Kursell to attempt to unify both associations, an attempt that proved unsuccessful, not least due to the impatience of his party colleagues. The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VOMI), the ethnic German “central” authority, was founded in 1937 and led by Werner Lorenz and Hermann Behrends. VOMI came to take over all levers of power for the supervision of Germans abroad within the party structure, which became a victory for the SS as VOMI was incorporated into the SS-Hauptamt.4 The practical political conditions on the ground in Southeastern Europe played a much more important role than the existing literature suggests. The foreign policy decisions of the Third Reich made absolutely clear that they were ready to sacrifice specific German minorities in the interest of “higher” political goals, a fact that became apparent not just in South Tyrol and Poland, but also in Hungary. The best known case was, of course, South Tyrol, where the Anschluss with Austria and the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia prompted Hitler to sign an official agreement with Mussolini regarding the alpine territory.5 The Nazi propaganda machine subsequently went into overdrive in order to defend the myth of the National Socialist Party, which would, at all times and places, support and strive for the “interests of the German Volk” as a homogeneous entity.6 After the signing of numerous economic agreements with the states of Southeastern Europe, the influence of Germany in the area grew.7 Volksgruppen

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policy was a subordinated aspect of this progress in expanding influence in the region. It was around this time that the various Volksgruppen associations were subordinated to the VOMI.8 However, the supervision of German minorities was still, at least nominally, the responsibility of the German Foreign Office. These structural processes also strained Heinrich Himmler in his attempt to gain more responsibility concerning the question of the Volksgruppen in foreign policy—an attempt that was ultimately successful. This development marked an organizational change for National Socialist Volksgruppen policy, as German ethnic minorities, from the perspective of the SS, could also be utilized in order to gain foreign policy influence, thereby also undermining the authority and influence of the German Foreign Office. This was accompanied by the ideological redefinition of Volksgruppen policy, which, after the successes of Danzig, the Sudetenland and Austria, was no longer seen as “protective work in the sense of cultural supervision” in the established fashion. With the “growing strength and power of the Reich” and the incorporation of the mass of bordering Germans—in Austria in 1938 and in 1939 with the destruction of Czechoslovakia and Poland—the main interest now lay with the Germans of Southeastern Europe, which numbered over 2 million.9 At this point the Germans of Southeastern Europe came into focus as useful agents of National Socialist foreign policy. The goal was to “reeducate” them in such a way that they “would act in every situation as a member of the Reich.”10 The ideological legitimization of Volksgruppen policy was followed very quickly by organizational changes. With the “Führer edict” of July 2, 1938, VOMI was legitimized as the “central organ” of the Volksgruppen question. It was provided with substantial financial resources, and other agencies were forbidden from dealing with questions relating to Germans living abroad.11 “What was initially seen as a coordinating authority of the party, quickly developed into an SS-dominated magnet that very quickly incorporated an increased number of areas and organizations relating to Volksgruppen policy.”12

Minority Politics and German Volksgruppen in Southeastern Europe What strategies did Southeastern European states use in relation to German minorities in light of contemporaneous revisionist politics? The relevant specialist literature has presumed a homogeneous National Socialist Volksgruppen policy in this region, while also presupposing a certain stereotypical notion of a unified Southeastern European sense of “German-ness.”13 Thus, it is perhaps understandable that a certain predilection for presenting either the Yugoslavian or the Romanian German Volksgruppe as a model for the region can be found within the relevant literature.14 More recent research reveals distinct differences

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between the Volksgruppen organizations of Southeastern Europe, and therefore points to the fact that a representative, exemplary schematic base for analysis is not really permissible.15 The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire greatly benefited Romania and Yugoslavia territorially. In the new, larger Romania, Germans constituted 714,000 or 5.9 per cent of the overall population, while Yugoslavia, according to the first post-First World War census, contained 514,000 Germans, or 4.7 per cent of the total population. The Germans within Hungary were numerically similar, with a figure of 551,000, but there they constituted 6.9 per cent of the overall population and were thus by some distance the largest minority in the region. In Romania and Yugoslavia it proved possible, despite extensive differences in minority politics, to win over the German minorities to oppose Hungarian revisionist ambitions. This support, however, could not necessarily be taken for granted: The Swabian elite in the Yugoslavian Vojvodina and in the Romanian east Banat were, due to their socialization during the Habsburg period, well disposed towards the Hungarians. Many of them made themselves available for the services of Hungarian revisionism, a fact that has not been altogether satisfactorily explained or analyzed in the existing literature.16 From the diplomatic correspondence between Budapest and Berlin, we know that the official position of the German Volksgruppen in Yugoslavia and Romania often provided a spur for intervention on the part of Hungarian diplomacy, asking Berlin to redirect their policies in other directions, which, of course, the government of the Reich did not comply with.17 The existing literature usually draws an imaginary parallel development between the German Volksgruppen of these three states in order to emphasize a “crisis” within a specific Volksgruppe and to explain the turn towards the Third Reich.18 Yet, what did this “crisis” within the three individual countries look like, if there was one at all? In Romania, the leadership role of the Saxons in Transylvania within the German minority was a given. Yet this still did not solve the problem of how a solely ethnically defined minority could exist within the new reality of a nationstate. In 1925 Friedrich Teutsch got to the heart of the new situation: “The Saxon Nation-University [the old form of organization and property-based community] is dead, it just remains to be buried, its will read and estate divided.”19 Already in 1919 the Saxons, even as attempts were being made to form a Greater Romania, sought the right for every German in the state “to organize themselves politically as a unified free nation, with the ability to fulfill their special cultural, national and economic needs . . . through the establishment of a state constitution,” including rights of taxation and the “most viable possible national differentiation among administrative areas.” This demand for the recognition of a “political nation” was rejected by the Bucharest government, fearful as they were of the creation of a “state within a state.”20 The völkisch movements appeared to

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offer an escape route from what was perceived as a political dead end, and by 1930 a National Socialist movement had been established that eventually, in 1932, defined the aims of the Saxons as congruent with the Nazi party. The Selbsthilfe (Self-help) cooperative, founded in 1922 by Fritz Fabritius, along with its accompanying and same-named newspaper, soon became the crystallization point for opposition against support for official Romanian politics. On May 22, 1932, Fabritius founded the Nationalsozialistische Selbsthilfebewegung der Deutschen in Rumänien (NSDR), or National Socialist Self-help Movement for Germans in Romania, whose twenty-five-point program was specifically oriented toward the Nazi model. In June 1932 the name of their newspaper was changed to Ostdeutscher Beobachter (East German Observer). In its closing communiqué on November 6, 1932, the Sachsentag (Saxon Day), the traditional gathering of the local Volkstum members, declared: “Building on the realization that race and Volkstum are God-given estates, which therefore are a hallowed gift and a responsibility, from the knowledge that an obsession with greed and selfishness, veiled as Volksfremd [foreign, unknown to the Volk] leads to Bolshevism, the people’s assembly sees as its utmost duty to openly declare support for the spirit and teachings of Adolf Hitler.”21 After the temporary banning of Fabritius’s organization on November 29, 1933, at the beginning of 1934 it regrouped under the name of the Nationale Erneuerungsbewegung der Deutschen in Rumänien (NEDR), or National Movement for the Renewal of Germans in Romania. After extensive infighting and personal quarrels, Fabritius took over the chairmanship of the Verband der Deutschen in Rumänien (Association of Germans in Romania) in June 1935, while his former colleagues, led by Waldemar Gust, founded the Deutsche Volkspartei in Rumänien (German People’s Party of Romania). The latter association came under the control of the Deutschtumsverbände (German-ness associations) of the Reich, which were also controlled by the SS. After 1938, when both Romanian German Associations were unified, the VOMI forced what they termed its “most radical” members to go into exile in Germany. At the same time, well established societal structures such as the Lutheran Church were repressed as a “Volkstum organization.” In other words: Contrary to the German Volksgruppen in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary, the Germans in Romania saw their main problem to be not their relationship with their host state based on the more classical form of minority rights. They defined their major challenge as the reorganization of their own Volksgruppe along egalitarian principles. Support for the Bucharest government became the primary policy and dialogue regarding the maintenance of established minority rights became a second-order question.22 In order to achieve these goals Fabritius drew up a plan for a statute of autonomy. However, at this time, December 15, 1938, the Romanian king passed a law establishing political unity in the state within the framework of a combined Front for National

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Reawakening (Frontul Renaşterii Naţionale). After the passing of this law, there was no place for plans of autonomy and, as a result, the SS called Fabritius to Germany and installed Wolfgang Bruckner in his place. This episode illuminates two important aspects: Firstly, good relations with the respective regime in the region had priority, and therefore Volkstum-oriented demands had to be reined in. Secondly, the personnel politics and political orientation of the German ethnic minority were very much regulated by the SS, in the guise of the Deutschtumsverbände and VOMI. In Yugoslavia the Schwäbisch-Deutscher Kulturbund (Swabian-German Cultural Association), founded in 1920, had economic and social functions, while political responsibilities for the ethnic Germans lay in the hands of the Partei der Deutschen des Königreichs der Serben, Kroaten und Slowenen (Party for the Germans of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes). As in Romania, this party also strove to vote with the relevant government block. When in 1929 ethnically based parties were forbidden, the German representatives supported the Yugoslav Radical Union (Radikalna Unija). Yet, similar to Romania, oppositional movements also existed—mostly engaged in by the younger generation that questioned the conservative course of their “elders.” They were not chiefly occupied with the minority question. As Sepp Janko, the Erneuerer (renewer), and later chief of the Germans in the Banat wrote: “Social justice, the creation of secure jobs . . . solidarity between the social classes . . . That was the basis for our socialism of the Volk . . . I was convinced that our task was firstly social and secondly related to ethnic issues, a conviction I constantly shared at official meetings. Our ethnic matters were, to a large degree, secure.”23 The Erneuerungsbewegung (movement of renewal) could not abolish established structures, yet it offered the SS the possibility of involving itself in the matter in order to end the “crisis” within the leadership of the ethnic Germans. In 1938, VOMI became involved in this power struggle and made sure that Sepp Janko was made the leader of the minority.24 In Hungary, by comparison, the main concern was chiefly with völkisch and ethnic-minority matters, as here did not even exist an autonomous cultural association, let alone a Volksgruppen organization, as in the neighboring states. For the Hungarian state, minority politics meant the conscious “dissolution” and integration of minorities, while in Romania and Yugoslavia the support of German minorities was needed in the defense against Hungarian revisionist ambitions.25 The Treaty of Trianon (June 1920) stirred up a generally hostile attitude toward minorities among ethnic Hungarians. The so called “consolidation politics” of the István Bethlen era from 1921 to 1931 initiated a period in which a paternalistic attitude by the state toward the cultural organization of the German minority was taken, but nevertheless the Germans were still utilized in the service of revisionist politics. The Ungarländischer Deutscher Volksbildungsverein (Hungarian German People’s Educational Association) was founded with official

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state permission in 1924, entered the Hungarian Revisionist League, and propagated the idea of a “generous Hungarian minority politics” in its media organs, as well as publicly through other minority organizations until 1932. Their main goal was to make the idea of returning to Hungary more attractive to German minorities in neighboring countries. From the perspective of the Hungarian elite, a deutscher Kulturverein (German cultural association) had to be tolerated for one main reason, namely, to win Germany over to its ambitions concerning the redrawing of borders, which could be achieved with Berlin’s influence upon the German minorities of neighboring states. The “crisis” in Hungary arose in 1933 as the Hungarian elites themselves announced new “rules of the game.” Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös (who ruled between 1932 and 1936) played this card unreservedly and let Berlin know that he would “protect” Hungarian Germans from assimilation if they managed to get the Germans of Romania and Yugoslavia onto the side of active Hungarian revisionist politics, while otherwise they would be very quickly integrated. While this attempt to pressure the Germans by the Hungarian state was being made, some infighting occurred over the leadership of the Hungarian German Volksbildungsverein. Yet the opposition movement based around Richard Huss and Franz A. Basch did not define itself ideologically but largely in terms of minority politics.26 The Hungarian elite was very conscious of the fact that the minority question could help advance their revisionist politics. The mobilization of co-nationals beyond state borders was, from the very beginning, an integral part of Hungarian revisionism. It was this practice in combination with the tradition of Hungarian nationality politics that contributed to the fact that Budapest could never overcome its own ethnic and political dilemmas. Thus they always feared, often in a state of panic, that foreign states would be able to harness minority questions for their own goals—even though Budapest itself consciously exploited this topic in the very same manner. The question of revision was also connected with that of German minorities in the Danube area, and the dynamic of revisionism was dictated by the short-term intentions of various agents. Nothing illustrates this more than the fact that from 1937 on Austria also engaged in this theme. Budapest was not necessarily displeased when Vienna depicted itself as the embodiment of “Catholic and better German-ness.” On the whole these efforts were unsuccessful, yet they should and could be better and more accurately reflected within contemporary research. It is also obvious that this Austrian initiative occurred simultaneously with the increased activity of VOMI within the region as a whole.27 Created under pressure from the German Reich, the Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn (People’s Federation for Germans in Hungary) was established in November 1938. It was an association based solely on culture, and their areas of competence were decided upon by the Hungarian government until its disbandment in 1944. The naming and instituting of the federation’s chairman

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could not occur without the written permission of the Hungarian government, and Franz Basch only became leader of the federation after an agreement was reached between the Hungarian prime minister and the German Foreign Office.28

National Socialist Volksgruppen Politics in Practice The structural reorganization of Volksgruppen policy around 1937 occurred in a very discreet fashion and remained very much in the background, remaining unnoticed even by contemporaneous observers abroad. The contours of change can more readily be described in their actual initiation. The ideological principles underlying the change were declared openly only after the beginning of the war. The “Führer speeches” of February 20 and September 12, 1938, made clear that a new chapter of Volksgruppen policy would begin. Seen in conjunction with the Anschluss and the “Sudeten crisis,” these speeches display the consequences of changes in accordance with National Socialist foreign policy: Volksgruppen policy now constituted a part of a new order of power. The following actions were recommended. First, the creation of Volkstum organizations where there were none (Hungary), as well as their advancement through the manipulation of crises where they already existed (Yugoslavia and Romania). Second, the replacement of established elites in the Volkstum organizations by direct intervention, bringing in a new leadership whose bravery and loyalty to Berlin could be counted upon. Third, maintaining the Volkstum organizations through bilateral agreements where necessary; that is, in Croatia, but not in west Banat, where a German military administration had been introduced. Fourth, the restructuring of these organizations according to National Socialist principles and use of the Nazi party as a model (Volksgruppen organizations). Fifth, the extensive incorporation of all resources from German minorities, through the Volksgruppen organizations, to further the interests of the Reich, especially in relation to the war. And finally, furthering the short-term goal of resettling ethnic Germans according to the Heim ins Reich model while the long-term goal of a “New Europe” in which Germans would colonize large parts of Eastern Europe was being prepared. The SS utilized these crises in the established leadership of German ethnic groups in Romania and Yugoslavia. The result was that in both countries a new leadership elite was established that owed their position to the SS. In Romania this involvement was more successful than in Yugoslavia, as on November 9, 1940 Andreas Schmidt, brother-in-law to Gottlob Berger, was named as the new leader of the Volksgruppe. After the suppression of Yugoslavia, Janko was made Volksgruppenführer (leader of the minority) in west Banat, occupied by the Wehrmacht, while Branimir Altgeyer served in this function in Croatia. In

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Hungary, Basch was, until the middle of 1940, Vereinsvorsitzender (chairman of the association) and not Volksgruppenführer (leader of the minority).29 A precedent was established in Slovakia for the contractual framework of a Volksgruppe in their home country, where, after the defeat of Czechoslovakia, a legal blueprint was drawn up concerning the German ethnic minority that was to serve as a model for all Southeastern European states.30 The “most problematic” country in the region was Hungary, where only a cultural association existed, and the Hungarian government categorically rejected any direct involvement by Berlin. The disagreement between Hungary and Romania about the Transylvanian area presented the first opportunity for the Nazis. On the evening before the second Vienna Award in Belvedere Castle, they forced the representatives of both governments into signing the so-called Wiener Volksgruppenabkommen (Viennese Agreement on Ethnic Groups) on August 30, 1940. This allowed the granting of collective and autonomous structures to the respective Volksgruppe by the government. This contractual assurance compelled the German Volksgruppen and the respective governments to cooperate politically. With this agreement, the German minority should no longer have constituted a potential for conflict in inter-state relations, while the interests of the allied and/or friendly governments of Southeastern Europe would also be married to those of the Third Reich. This intended cooperation functioned best in Romania, where the Volksgruppe became a part of the Front for National Rebirth, the unified fascist party. The Hungarian government successfully circumvented the agreement until May 1944. From the perspective of the SS this only became a major problem after the fall of Yugoslavia because—with the Germans from the reinstated “Hungarian” territory of Bačka, as well as those from northern Transylvania—Hungarian Germans now numbered 800,000, by far the largest German minority in Southeastern Europe. The Croatian leader Ante Pavelić and the Serbian prime minister, Milan Nedić, officially declared that the Third Reich was the guardian of their German minorities. In June 1941 the German minority in Croatia received a legal and public representative, as the Volksgruppe leader Altgayer became state secretary and a member of the Croatian Parliament (Sabor). Within the framework of existing Croatian law he thereby acquired the right to enact decrees, so that, just as in Romania, the German minority could rule its political, social, cultural, and economic life itself. A decree issued on October 30, 1941 regulated the public use of the German language and the swastika.31 “Today,” declared VOMI at the time, “the [Southeastern] Volksgruppen are at different stages of cultural, social and political development, yet have shown, under the growing influence of the Reich, a new sense of character.” Yet, this no longer met the expectations of the SS.32 The “perhaps most important” requirement was now the incorporation of the “inner circle of the Volksgruppen in full alignment with the spirit and life-forms of the National Socialist Reich,”

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which would resemble a cultural transformation of wide range. In 1943 the leading Volksgruppen expert Franz Ronneberger spoke of this task as, “a problem that today, to a certain extent, still remains to be solved by the leadership of the Volksgruppen.”33 As with the case of Andreas Schmidt in Romania, the Volksgruppen in Banat and Croatia formed paramilitary groups (Deutsche Mannschaft, literally ‘German Team’), youth organizations (Deutsche Jugend und Bund Deutscher Mädel, German Youth and the Association of German Girls), as well as charity organizations (such as the Wirtschaftlicher Kriegsdienst der Heimat und Winterhilfswerk, Economic War Service for Homeland and Winter Aid). Within the framework of the Volksbund, an economic organization was created in Hungary in 1941 after much effort. The prime minister treated the Deutsche Jugend, which consciously defined itself as National Socialist, separately rather than within the auspices of the Volksbund, even if this fact was largely unknown except to those directly involved.34 The wide-ranging incorporation of all aspects of the Volksgruppen and their organizations into the war machine—or, as the Nazis termed it, making their “political or biological potential useful”—occurred in very diverse ways.35 This can be illustrated by the example of applications for enlistment in the Waffen SS. The losses of the Waffen SS on the Eastern front in the third year of the war were extensive: from June to November 1941, 35,000 soldiers and 1,200 officers were lost.36 On December 18, 1941, Himmler announced that he was expecting an influx of up to 60,000 ethnic German soldiers from Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.37 Why not, indeed, from Croatia or Banat? Banat was ruled by a military administration and the Volksgruppe leadership would have been able to deliver the required “human personnel” without problems. The German envoy signed a contract with Croatia on September 16, 1941, in which it was agreed that 10 per cent of the ethnic Germans would become part of the Wehrmacht, the rest constituting part of the Ustashe militia, albeit in specifically German units. In this case it was the duty of the Volksgruppe leadership to ensure that all able-bodied men were enlisted without exception.38 In Romania such measures were resisted and it took one-and-a-half years until an agreement could be reached between both governments.39 Romania did not wish to accept such an infringement upon its sovereignty. Only from March 9, 1943 onward could Mihai Antonescu officially recruit Waffen SS members until the end of the war.40 This was not true for Hungary, where the German government did not have to exercise any pressure in order to incorporate young men into the Waffen SS. The Hungarian government hoped, through active enlistment into the Waffen SS, to “remove” a part of their German population and to decrease their own level of actual participation with regard to the waging of war. Thus, Waffen SS officers openly recruited for enlistment in the Waffen SS together with the Hungarians and, after the urging and active encouragement of the Hungarian government, the Volksgruppen organization

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took care of advertising and propaganda. The first Waffen SS enlistment was not even finished by June 1942 when the Hungarian government promised another 10,000 ethnic Germans for the Waffen SS for 1943.41 The Hungarian example greatly encouraged developments in Romania, where, with government approval, the Volksgruppen leadership often exercised brutal terror in the search for “volunteers.” Up to March 1944, 57,000 soldiers from this Volksgruppe served in German army units, thus constituting 9.6 per cent of the total number of ethnic Germans from Romania. In Croatia the numbers proved similar: the Volksgruppe consisted of 175,000 people, of which 16,350 served in a unit of the German army. The two extremes are represented by west Banat and Hungary: in west Banat 16.3 per cent of the ethnic German population entered the army, while in Hungary the equivalent figure was never more than 2.9 per cent. Thus, excepting Hungary, all Volksgruppen experienced very severe losses. Apart from these military aspects, all German ethnic groups were confronted with the fact that they could at any time be resettled, if this met with the interests of the Third Reich. Active Volksgruppenpolitik began in Southeastern Europe with so-called Heim ins Reich measures, which were brought to an early end in 1941 with the resettlement of Germans from Gottschee in Slovenia and from Bosnia. Hitler declared the start of the repatriation of “endangered splinter members of the German Volk” whose continued existence had to be ensured in his October 6, 1939 Reichstag speech. When in September 1940 Germans from areas controlled by the Soviet Union, such as Bessarabia, Bukovina, South Dobrudja and Old Romania were resettled, the question of further resettlement also began to be discussed. In connection with the Heim ins Reich idea, Horthy explicitly asked Hitler in a letter about the resettlement of the Hungarian Germans, a letter that went unanswered by Hitler.42 Thereafter the leader of the ethnic Germans, Basch, according to his own statements, held conversations with Himmler, who wanted the resettlement of Hungarian Germans in order to help “calm Hungary.”43 Himmler also hinted at the resettlement of the remaining Volksgruppe after the war while inspecting the Volksdeutsche Waffen SS in west Banat.44 In connection with the resettlement of the Bosnian Germans, Himmler also suggested the resettlement of the Croatian Germans in autumn 1942. The Zagreb consul Siegfried Kasche and the German Foreign Office both disagreed with this plan. In order to halt the plans of the SS, the German Foreign Office asked Hitler about his personal position on the matter, and, in accordance with advice from the Reich’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, he also disagreed with this course of action.45 Although these questions were largely put off the agenda, the Hungarian prime minister, Miklós Kállay, informed Basch in 1943 that the government of the Third Reich had guaranteed him that the Hungarian Germans would be resettled after the war in accordance with the wishes of the Budapest government. Ribbentrop confirmed this during his Hungarian visit in June 1943.46

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With that, the circle was complete. Nothing displays the lack of scruples with regard to the actions of the SS more than the question of resettlement, which was undoubtedly not gratefully greeted by ethnic Germans, an attitude that the SS simply chose to ignore. The existence of these German ethnic groups, therefore, would simply, and unthinkingly, be dissolved whenever the “interests of the Reich” demanded.

Notes 1. Carl Georg Bruns, “Die kulturelle Autonomie für völkische Minderheiten,” draft from April 9 1925, Bundesarchiv Koblenz R 43.1/560; and Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Die Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1990), 196. 2. Switzerland, Luxemburg and Lichtenstein were “naturally” (selbstverständlich) not included here as ethnic minorities. For the context, see: Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann, Der Europäische Nationalitätenkongress 1925 bis 1938: Nationale Minderheiten zwischen Lobbystentum und Großmachtinteressen (Marburg, 2000); for the idea of Volksgemeinschaft by other nations, see: Ferdinand von Uexküll-Güldenband, “Ansätze zur Verwirklichung des Volksgemeinschaftsgedankens: Die nationale Organisation des Polentums,” Nation und Staat 5 (1931/32): 470–78. 3. Paul Rohrbach, Deutschtum in Not! (Berlin/Leipzig, 1926), 10; Ewald Ammende, “Richtlinien zur Begründung der Volksgemeinschaft, Nation und Staat 5 (1931/32): 464–70; Josip Wilfan, “Die Organisierung der Volksgemeinschaft,” Nation und Staat 5 (1931/32): 445–64. 4. See Tammo Luther, Volkstumpolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1933–1938: Die Auslandsdeutschen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Traditionalisten und Nationalsozialisten (Wiesbaden, 2004), 145–59. 5. Alfons Gruber, Südtirol unter dem Faschismus (Bozen, 1978), 215–31. While the Anschluss with Austria was declared to be the highpoint of völkische Politik by the Nazi propaganda machine, South Tyrol also expected its own Anschluss. As soon as the agreement with the Italians was signed, however, trouble broke out in Innsbruck. At the same time Ciano expressed his joy in his diary: ibid., 231. 6. The Nazis were, however, not the first to perceive such a pragmatic step as legitimate. Hugenberg and the Deutschnationale Volkspartei also called for the sacrifice of South Tyrol in order to facilitate Mussolini’s support in relation to Austrian defence and to win rights for the Reichsdeutschen. See: Lajos Kerekes, Abenddämerung einer Demokratie. Mussolini: Gömbös und die Heimwehr (Vienna, 1966), 32–34. 7. See Gotthold Rhode, “Die südosteuropäischen Staaten von der Neuordnung nach dem I: Weltkrieg bis zur Ära der Volksdemokratien,” in Theodor Schieder (ed.), Handbuch der europäischen Geschichte, vol. 7/2 (Stuttgart, 1979), 1144; and Edgar Hösch, Geschichte der Balkanländer: Von der Frühzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1993), 220–21. 8. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Außenpolitik 1933–1938 (Frankfurt am Main, 1968), 237. 9. Franz Ronnenberger, “Gedanken zum Volksgruppenproblem,” Donaueuropa 3/3 (1943): 191–97, 193. 10. Ronnenberger, “Gedanken zum Volksgruppenproblem,” 196–97. 11. See Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Außenpolitik, 243. 12. Heinz Höhne, Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf: Die Geschichte der SS (Munich, 1997), 256.

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13. See, e.g: Endre Arató, “Der ‘Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn’: eine fünfte Kolonne des Hitlerfaschismus. Bemerkungen zu einigen ‘historischen’ Arbeiten Johann Weidleins,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte der volksdemokratischen Länder Europas 5 (1961): 289–96; Loránt Tilkovszky, Ungarn und die deutsche Volksgruppenpolitik 1938–1945 (Cologne, 1981); Johann Böhm, “Das ‘Dritte Reich’ und die historische Entwicklung der Deutschen Südosteuropas von 1933–1945,” Halbjahresschrift für südosteuropäische Geschichte, Literatur und Politik 5/1 (1993): 7–25; Michael George Hillinger, The German National Movement in Interwar Hungary (New York, 1973). For more differentiated approaches see Gerhard Seewann, “Das Ungarndeutschtum 1918-1988,” in Edgar Hösch and Gerhard Seewann (eds), Aspekte ethnischer Identität: Ergebnisse des Forschungsprojekts “Deutsche und Magyaren als nationale Minderheiten im Donauraum” (Munich, 1991), 299–303; and Thomas Spira, German– Hungarian Relations and the Swabian Problem from Károlyi to Gömbös 1919–1936 (New York 1977). 14. Michael Fahlbusch, Wissenschaft im Dienst der nationalsozialistischen Politik? Die “Volksdeutschen Forschungsgemeinschaften” von 1931–1945 (Baden-Baden, 1999), 292 15. See, e.g., Ottmar Traşcă, “Rumäniendeutsche in Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS 1940-1944,” in Jerzy Kochanowski and Maike Sach (eds), Die “Volksdeutschen” in Polen, Frankreich, Ungarn und der Tschechoslowakei: Mythos und Realität (Osnabrück, 2006), 273–316. 16. Jakob Bleyer supplied—with the help of an efficient information network—beneficial reports to the Budapest government concerning the “ceded” Hungarian areas of Romania and Yugoslavia in 1919: Copy of a letter to the Foreign Minister, Prímási levéltár Esztergom (Archives of the Archbishop Esztergom), 2624/1919, Cat. D/C. 17. Hungary had extensive experience of Volkstumskampf or “battles for ethnicity,” which had constituted an integral part of the political discourse in the country since the turn of the century. See: Petra Balaton, A Székely Akció története. I Források (Budapest, 2004). 18. See note 15. 19. Quoted in Wolfgang Kessler, “Universitas Saxonum,” in Wolfgang Kessler (ed.), Gruppenautonomie in Siebenbürgen: 500 Jahre siebenbürgisch-sächsische Nationsuniversität (Cologne, 1990), 3–29, 23. 20. Kessler, “Universitas Saxonum,” 31; see also William Totok, “Der nathlose Übergang? Rumäniendeutsche im Faschismus und Stalisnismus,” Halbjahresschrift für südosteuropäische Geschichte, Literatur und Politik 7 (1995): 16–41; on the context, see: Ion Gheorghe, Rumäniens Weg zum Satellitenstaat (Heidelberg, 1952). 21. Harald Roth, Politische Struktur und Strömungen bei den Siebenbürger Sachsen 1919–1933 (Cologne, 1994). 22. Günter Schödl, “Lange Abschiede: Die Südostdeutschen und ihre Vaterländer (1918–1945),” in idem (ed.), Land an der Donau: Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas (Berlin, 1995), 455–650, here 612. 23. Sepp Janko, Weg und Ende der deutschen Volksgruppe in Jugoslawien (Graz, 1982), 26, 27. 24. Zoran Janjetović, “Die Konflikte zwischen Serben und Donauschwaben,” in SüdostForschungen 58 (1999): 119–68. For an eye-witness report, see: Valentin Oberkersch, Die Deutschen in Syrmien, Slawonien, Kroatien und Bosnien (Munich, 1989). 25. For the context of these aspects and the aims of Hungarian minority politics, see: “The Actual Minority Situation, 1930,” Magyar Országos Levéltár Budapest, Miniszterelnökségi Iratok (Hungarian National Archives Budapest, Prime Minister’s Office Files), K 28, Fasz. 13, Tit. 57; Vince Paál and Gerhard Seewann (eds), Augenzeuge dreier Epochen: Die Memoiren des ungarischen Außenministers Gustav Gratz 1875–1945 (Munich, 2009), 489–508. 26. Norbert Spannenberger, “The Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn: A National Socialist Organisation or an Ethnic Minority Organisation Striving to Emancipate?” Specimina Nova

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28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

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2 (2000): 71–87; on the context, see: Carlile A. Macartney, Hungary and her Successors 1919–1937: The Treaty of Trianon and its Consequences (London, 1937). For example, the Canon of Salzburg, Leonhard Steinwender, wrote: “The gift of the German Volk is, for us Catholics, the holy bequest of a 1000 year old history . . . The creation of a large German living space, which would allow the German nation to fulfil its Abendland task, is . . . deeply interconnected with the spread of the Christian religion . . . The Catholics of the German Motherland are connected by fate to the whole German Volk” (Die volksdeutsche Sendung ist uns Katholiken das heilige Vermächtnis einer tausendjährigen Geschichte Die Schaffung des großen deutschen Lebensraumes, der die deutsche Nation zur Erfüllung ihrer abendländlichen Aufgabe befähigte, ist innigst verbunden mit der Ausbreitung der christlichen Religion. Mit dem ganzen deutschen Volke sind die Katholiken des deutschen Mutterlandes schicksalhaft verbunden), Die Getreuen 9/5 (1932): 129–34; see also: Gusztáv Gratz, Magyarország a két háború között, ed. Vince Paál (Budapest, 2002), 288–89. For more on this topic, see: Norbert Spannenberger, Der Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn 1938–1944 unter Horthy und Hitler (Munich, 2005), 154–63. On Basch, see: Gerhard Seewann and Norbert Spannenberger (eds), Akten des Volksgerichtsprozesses gegen Franz A. Basch, Volksgruppenführer der Deutschen in Ungarn, Budapest 1945/46 (Munich, 1999), xxxvii–lxii. See Jörg K. Hoensch, Die Slowakei und Hitlers Ostpolitik (Cologne, 1965), 180–82; on the context, also see: further Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Das Dritte Reich und die Slowakei 1939–1945: Politischer Alltag zwischen Kooperation und Eigensinn (Paderborn, 2003); Michal Schvarc, Martin Holák and David Schriffl (eds), Das Dritte Reich und die Entstehung des Slowakischen Staates (Bratislava, 2008), lix–lxxxvi. See Holm Sundhausen, “Zur Geschichte der Waffen-SS in Kroatien 1941-1945,” SüdostForschungen 30 (1971): 176–96. Isbert-Report, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 57/1391. Ronneberger, “Gedanken zum Volksgruppenproblem,” 194. Here he refers to an article of Arnold Weingärtner that appeared in Nation und Staat, the magazine of the Volksgruppen, entitled “Die deutschen Volkgruppen im Umbau,” which analyzed the position of ethnic Germans. See files from the ministerial advisor László Fritz, member of the second department of the prime minister: Evangélikus Országos Levéltár Budapest (Lutheran National Archives Budapest), Fritz Estate. This collection of files will soon be published. Quotation from Ernst Ritter, Das Deutsche Ausland-Institut in Stuttgart 1917–1945: Ein Beispiel deutscher Volkstumarbeit zwischen den Weltkriegen (Wiesbaden, 1976), 11. “The Waffen-SS had to take losses that would have broken the back of other units” (Höhne, Der Orden, 437–38). Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin (Political Archives of the German Foreign Office, Berlin), Inl. II 325, Bd. 1. Oberkersch, Die Deutschen, 400–1. On this issue, see: Hans-Werner Schuster, “Der Wehrdienst der Rumäniendeutschen im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Siebenbürgische Semesterblätter 1 (1987): 158–72. Paul Milita, Zwischen Hitler, Stalin und Antonescu: Rumäniendeutsche in der Waffen-SS (Cologne, 2007), 131–40. Spannenberger, Der Volksbund, 309–30. The letter is in Horthy Miklós titkos iratai, eds Miklós Szinai and László Szücs (Budapest, 1963), no. 46. Seewann and Spannenberger, Akten des Volksgerichtprozesses, 31.

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44. General Staff Report of November 3, 1942, Magyar Országos Levéltár Budapest, Külügyminisztériumi iratok (Hungarian National Archives Budapest, files from the Foreign Ministry Files), K 63, Fasz. 205, Tit. 21/7. 45. See Oberkersch, Die Deutschen, 388–90. 46. Tilkovszky, Ungarn und die deutsche Volksgruppenpolitik, 218–30.

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Chapter 4

REVISIONISM IN REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE

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Introduction During the Second World War, each one of the Tripartite Pact member states in East Central Europe was pursuing a politics of revision. What makes the Second World War a period deserving of special consideration in the history of revisionism is the pervasiveness of revisionist sentiment and policy. No state in the region felt its territorial aspirations fully satisfied, and most maintained significant territorial grievances with their neighbors. The fact that a revisionist consensus existed throughout the region makes it a fruitful terrain for a broad, comparative, and above all transnational analysis of the strategies, politics, and rhetoric of revisionism. I thus want to focus here on precisely these transnational, interactive aspects, highlighting the extent to which state actors and populations watched, tracked, and reacted to one another’s revisionist politics, how they perceived and mimicked or self-consciously departed from strategies employed by their neighbors, and how the constant multi-sided competition and surveillance altered the dynamic of revisionist strategies and affected the way policies were formed and carried out on the ground. The bulk of the historiography of revisionism to date has focused on the interwar period and on the most prominent revisionist states: Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria.1 These states were actively and boisterously revisionist during the interwar period, but the success of their revisionist aspirations during the Second World War meant that they—in their turn—made revisionists out of other

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states. Furthermore, the Second World War saw the creation of two new states, Croatia and Slovakia, whose appearance on the scene permanently altered the power dynamic within the region and set new precedents for later revisionist politics. Their presence marked a shift from separatist aspirations to revisionist ones, as the new leadership in states that had not previously existed focused not only on maintaining a geopolitical presence, but also on expanding it. Finally, the interwar history of revisionism tends to neglect the ways in which revisionism as a policy and a practice was cemented into the geopolitical order during the Second World War. Revisionism deserves a longer and wider history, a more complete history, and above all a more transnational history. For insofar as it evolved out of the nineteenth-century “questions”—such as the “Eastern question,” the “Macedonian question,” the “Transylvanian question,” and so on—it was always inherently about several states and required reflection on the very nature of statehood itself, as well as on the form and legitimacy of the international system as a whole.

Revisionism as Ideology In contemplating the nature of revisionism, we find many of the trappings of a modern ideology, bound as it was to notions of progress and teleology. For revisionism—like socialism, communism, and nationalism—the end point was always known or assumed, and was a point generally situated in the future (and oftentimes also the past), but never in the present. Revisionists also faced many of the same systemic challenges as socialists, in that their goals had a clearly stated end point that had to be reached in order for the polity to become whole and fulfill its potential. And like socialists, revisionists were wary of announcing the full achievement of that goal and wracked by disagreement over both the extent and means employed in their revisionist struggle. This disagreement is exemplified in a speech made by the Bulgarian prime minister, Bogdan Filov, in September 1942, following his state’s multiple territorial annexations, in which he could only declare that reunification had “nearly” been achieved.2 Revisionism does not at first sight constitute a comprehensive theory of society, as an ideology is presumed to do, nor does it appear to proscribe a lifestyle for individuals or impact on social relations. And yet existing scholarship on revisionism for this region has shown how revisionist thinking affected and permeated a range of issues, spanning marriage to education, pensions to law enforcement, and therefore was as much about social and domestic policy as it was about foreign policy.3 My contribution will thus give special emphasis to the way revisionist ideas alighted on a variety of the problems of statecraft, including military engagement, minority policy, and legal practices, in addition to the more obvious strategies of alliance and cultural propaganda.

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Revisionist and Anti-revisionist Solidarity: The Case of the Little Entente In 1940, Bulgaria’s King Boris thanked Hungarian leaders for their support of Bulgarian claims to Romanian territory, just a few days after Hungary had recovered northern Transylvania from Romania through Axis arbitration.4 Contemporary commentators as well as historians have often noted the revisionist solidarity between Bulgaria and Hungary leading up to and lasting through the Second World War. Hungarian and Bulgarian dissatisfaction with the terms of the post-First World War peace treaties was shared by the two senior partners in the Axis—Germany and Italy—which were not merely revisionist but even imperialist in their aspirations. Leaders in both Hungary and Bulgaria rejoiced at the collapse of the geopolitical order of Versailles, and with it the Little Entente alliance and the Balkan Entente. The 1934 Balkan Entente between Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Romania bore structural similarities to the 1921 Little Entente between Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia in that both were crafted to contain revisionist neighbors (Bulgaria and Hungary respectively). Thus, advocates and critics alike tended to see the Little Entente and the Balkan Entente as part of the same solution or problem. Georgi Genov, a Bulgarian professor of law and founder of the ultra-nationalist Bulgarian organization Otets Paisiı˘, commented in 1941, “We knew that both the Little Entente and the Balkan Entente were instruments for the support of the Versailles treaties and for repression [machkane] of the losing nations.”5 Following the 1940 Treaty of Craiova with Romania, and the April 1941 occupation of Greece and Yugoslavia, Bulgaria’s boundaries expanded at the expense of territory from the countries of the Balkan Entente. With the demise of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, new states appeared (Croatia and Slovakia) with oftentimes very different agendas than the state formations from which they had emerged. In particular, Croat leaders shared with many of their Bulgarian counterparts a suspicion of and hostility towards Serbs, which resulted in a certain degree of cooperation between them. But some of these new states’ agendas were quite similar to those of their predecessors, particularly in the matter of Hungarian revisionism. Croatia and Slovakia “inherited” a mistrustful stance toward Hungary from members of the Little Entente such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Attempts at cooperation between Croatia, Slovakia, and Romania during the Second World War—coupled with the persistent paranoia of Hungarian statesmen regarding the designs of bordering states—meant that the specter of the Little Entente still haunted the geopolitics of the region during the war, even though the international order that gave birth to the alliance was officially defunct. A study of the reincarnation of the Little Entente reveals how the proliferation of revisionist interests rendered revisionist solidarity more challenging during

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the war than it had been during the interwar period, and not merely because Germans forbade the creation of formal alliances between Axis members in the region. The history of the Little Entente as it progressed into the Second World War shows how competing domestic interests and the desire to create a long-term modus vivendi with neighboring states affected not only domestic and foreign policy around revisionist aims, but was understood to impact on the military capacity of the Axis as well. Despite their early enthusiasm when the Little Entente vanished, Hungary’s leaders hardly took its disappearance for granted. Almost immediately they began to suspect the successors of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (the Independent State of Croatia and the Slovak Republic, even Serbia) of seeking ties with Romania in an effort to reform the alliance and roll back the revisions of the Treaty of Trianon. Thus we read in the Hungarian government’s response to a Romanian memorandum of 1941: “The Romanian government still lives in the mistaken belief that it is a member of the . . . Little Entente and the eastern guard of the Paris-area peace dictates, and can thus . . . subordinate Hungary and freely continue the oppression of the Hungarian minority [in Transylvania].”6 That same year, the German foreign minister, Ribbentrop, told the Slovak foreign minister, Tuka, that, “in Hungary they were already asserting that the former Little Entente was being revived.”7 As recent scholarship has shown, the demise of the Little Entente was not something its former members and their successors took for granted either.8 There were a number of attempts to resurrect the alliance, both formal and informal. Although most were spearheaded by the Romanian foreign minister, Mihai Antonescu, statesmen and diplomats from Croatia, Slovakia, and Romania initiated a number of discussions with one another regarding the terms of cooperation in the interest of containing or undoing Hungarian revisionism.9 But relations between these states were fraught by a variety of issues relating both to the old order and state formations as well as to the new. Thus, for example, although Slovak president Jozef Tiso and the Croatian envoy to Slovakia, Dragutin Toth, declaimed “longstanding friendly relations in the past” and “a shared focus [smjerene] on [the] liberation from oppression” of the two states in speeches in August 1941, relations were frequently strained by several factors.10 In a famously awkward scene from the summer of 1941, for example, the Slovak envoy to Croatia, Karel Murgaš, drunkenly bawled out several Croat youth in the city of Slunj, saying that “the Slovak youth was dying for Croats and for Europe while the Croat youth were sitting in cafes . . . Pfui!”11 Romanian–Croatian relations were also periodically tense, especially around economic arrangements with geopolitical implications.12 The Slovak leadership was keen to form ties and establish good relations with Bulgaria, a state that had recently won territory from Romania.13 Furthermore, Hungarian statesmen were more ready to seek compromises with Croatia and Slovakia than they

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were with Romania, deploying a “divide and conquer” strategy to prevent the re-establishment of Little Entente-like ties between the three states.14 But the periodic tensions between representatives of a would-be resurrected Little Entente could not compare to the hostility these states’ leaders felt towards Hungary and their anxiety regarding further Hungarian revisionist designs. When asked by the Italians whether Romania would participate in the occupation of Yugoslavia, for example, the Romanian foreign minister, Mihai Antonescu, first asked whether the Hungarians would also participate. Upon learning they would, Antonescu’s answer was firm: Romania would never commit to “military action alongside Hungarian soldiers” and would not “attack a long-time ally which had stood for 20 years defending itself from Hungary.”15 The disappearance of the Little Entente did not therefore signal the end of the geopolitics of containing Hungarian revisionism. In June 1942, the following could be heard broadcast over the airwaves by Radio Greater Romania: “The new Europe is coming together. Whether it is called the ‘Little Entente’ or something else is not of the least importance. In any case it destroys all those who seek to realize their imperialist dreams in Central Europe.”16 The New European Order, like the Little Entente before it, was thus open to a variety of interpretations, and spokesmen for Axis-aligned regimes took full advantage of the elasticity of the concept in seeking their place within it. The differences between Tripartite Pact member-states’ visions of the New European Order came most starkly to light around the issue of revisionism and the question of whose revisionism had been “right” during the interwar period—the Little Entente and the Balkan Entente, or the revisionist states of Hungary and Bulgaria. Since all, or their successors, were Tripartite Pact members, the Germans and Italians were required to leave the matter ambiguous.17 But difficulties arose when the time came for Germany to push its allies to commit resources and troops to the Axis war effort, and most particularly to the offensive against the Soviet Union. Propaganda efforts had to be persuasive, and the Germans were all too aware that their allies’ primary preoccupation was not with the Bolshevik menace, but with one another. They thus deliberately encouraged a kind of competition between their allies, whereby statesmen were given to understand that the states that committed the most to the Axis war effort would be rewarded at the end of the war with territorial adjustments in their favor.18 Tying troop commitment to territory in this way made it clear that not all of Hitler’s allies would benefit equally from the alliance. Statesmen then began divining the tea leaves of German initiatives to glean who was most in Hitler’s favor, and also sought information on the level of their neighbors’ troop commitment to the Axis war effort.19 This was especially true during the run-up to Operation Barbarossa, including the period just prior to the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, and during the winter and spring of 1942, as the Germans were preparing for Operation Blue. As Hitler’s Foreign Ministry staff

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were trying to gather support among his allies in the region for the offensive against Yugoslavia, the Romanian government learned of a plan to grant formerly Yugoslav territory to its two revisionist neighbors—Hungary and Bulgaria— both of which had won territory from Romania in the late summer/early autumn of 1940. Romania’s foreign minister, Mihai Antonescu, commented angrily that “in the precise moment when we know we have to prepare public opinion and the Romanian consciousness for a military action against Russia,” Romania’s two revisionist neighbors were gaining territory.20 Antonescu’s outrage was intensified early in January 1942 when Ribbentrop gave a speech in Budapest in which he praised Hungary for representing the spirit of the New European Order. Going a step further, the German foreign minister also criticized “anti-revisionist states” that had earlier resisted “every reasonable and peaceful revision” of the postwar peace treaties.21 The leadership in Romania—lone survivor of the Little Entente—was incensed by the speech. Ion Antonescu and Mihai Antonescu repeatedly complained to the Germans about the speech and demanded an explanation.22 Meanwhile, leading Hungarian circles were contemplating how much to commit to the war in the East. This had been an issue since the first offensive against the Soviet Union during the previous summer, when the wisdom of joining the Axis alliance was first debated among the Hungarian ruling elite. Among representatives of that elite, many feared that committing too much to the Eastern Front would leave Hungary defenseless in the event of an attack by neighboring states. Although there were differences of opinion as to how this inter-state dynamic should be addressed, there was a general consensus that it was indeed a problem. One school of thought, represented by individuals like the Hungarian MP Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky in his book Our Place and Fate in Europe, called for “a sober compromise with the other Danube peoples and thorough cooperation with them on the basis of an equilibrium of real power, to realize the ancient principle of our nation, state and empire, its never-expiring purpose, and to fulfill our European mission.”23 In a letter to Prime Minister László Bárdossy dated August 5, 1941, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky declared that the “principle and most important interest” of the Hungarian state is “the preservation of our entire Honvéd army at any price.”24 Especially attuned to the South Slav problem, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky proposed the creation of a Hungarian–South Slav federation born of a political reconciliation to prevent the creation of an anti-Hungarian alliance of states like the Little Entente. In a speech before parliament on November 13, 1941, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky reiterated this position: “We must take care that the army is as strong and complete as possible, as well-trained and equipped as possible, as untapped as possible for those historic tasks that still lie before us . . . We cannot allow ourselves to be surprised the way we were in 1918.”25 The reference to 1918 in Bajcsy-Zsilinszky’s

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speech is to the circumstances of the immediate post-First World War period, when a militarily weakened Hungary was pushed out of territories to the north and east by nascent Little Entente forces. Unlike some in the Hungarian parliament, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky opposed Hungary’s alliance with the Axis, but his views about the preservation of Hungary’s armed forces met with broad approval. The logic behind them—namely that Hungary was encircled by hostile states who would seize any chance to attack—was shared by nearly the entirety of the political elite at the time. This reasoning left its mark on the official Hungarian response to Ribbentrop’s appeal for troops. In a letter to Hitler dated January 10, 1942, Horthy sought to explain why Hungary was not willing to commit the requested troops, preferring instead to keep some in reserve. He went down the list of Hungary’s neighbors one by one, suggesting that they were unreliable, on the whole casting Hungary as the embattled stronghold against a nexus of pan-Slavism and pro-Bolshevik peoples. The list began with Serbs and Croats, continued with a long section on the imminent treachery of the Romanians, and then the Slovaks. Nor were the Bulgarians, the only state in the region with whom the Hungarian regime had “the best friendly relations,” spared the sharp edge of Horthy’s tirade. At its climax, Horthy charged the Croats, Slovaks, and Romanians with trying to recreate the Little Entente and encircle and crush Hungary and betray Germany.26 We Hungarians live with an open gate to the Balkans, so to speak, surrounded by peoples whose hatred is focused against us. That hatred finds open expression even today. The reason is mainly that [these peoples] do not gladly go without Hungary’s valuable territories which were given to them at Paris. In the alliance and cooperation of the Romanians, Croats, and Slovaks we see forming around us another Little Entente which does not even try to conceal its hostile intentions.27

Horthy concluded his letter saying, “We are driven by the conviction that we can do the greatest service to Germany from where we are right now in Hungary.”28 The question of troop commitment came up again in March 1943, when the Germans asked the Hungarian leadership to send two or three divisions to help occupy parts of Serbia. The Hungarian defense minister told the Council of Ministers on March 10 that sending the requested divisions was a good idea, first because the Serbs would likely prefer Hungarian to German occupation and would therefore be grateful (!) to the Hungarians, and second because it would be difficult to resist German pressure to commit given that Hungary was pulling the Second Hungarian Army back from the Eastern Front.29 The Hungarian government nevertheless prepared a statement denying the requested troop commitment. In the statement, it justified the decision as follows: Every effort of Hungarian diplomacy is directed toward preventing the peoples surrounding us from entering into some new Little Entente formation. Such attempts

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by the aforementioned peoples—above all Romania, Croatia, and Slovakia—are already noticeable. In the case of an occupation the Serbs will certainly join them as the fourth. We must never forget even for a moment that even in the event of victory the peoples surrounding us will still be there, the nations will live on, and will continue their diplomatic game. It does not require much imagination to glean that their diplomatic collaboration will be directed primarily against Hungary. Wise government policy seeks to remove this possibility, or at the very least to dull its edge while the war is still underway. Our possible occupation of Serbia would achieve the exact opposite end.30

The solution to hostile neighbors, then, had moved closer to the position occupied by Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, who had more to say on the subject of how to handle the neighborhood dynamic. July 1943 marked two important developments in the history of revisionist agitation in the region. It was then that the former Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš actively sought (from exile) the recreation of the Little Entente, promising the Romanians that he would work “to restore Romania to her former position.”31 On July 29, just after the Italian defection from the Axis camp, the Hungarian prime minister, Miklós Kállay, hinted at a cooling of relations with the Axis during a speech to members of Parliament: “Hungarian politics did not begin with the Axis, but with Trianon,” he said.32 Two days later, in a famous memorandum dated July 31, 1943, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky called for the withdrawal of Hungarian troops from the Eastern Front, compromise with the Slovaks and South Slavs, and self-government for Transylvania and Carpatho-Ukraine.33 He restated this position on December 10, 1943. National self-defense demands that we defend our national borders against all—first and foremost against the hostile intentions of the Little Entente, which are in no way friendlier to us than the old one was. It is the basic duty of Hungarian politics, of the government, and of the Parliament to develop and preserve all military forces and to withdraw our forces now stationed outside our boundaries and concentrate them in the interest of defending our country.34

Although it is generally assumed that the revisionist aspirations of the states of East Central Europe played into the hands of the Germans at every turn, the history of the way Hungarian politicians and statesmen handled the perceived resurrection of the Little Entente reveals the extent to which revisionist politics influenced Axis members’ willingness to commit troops and engage in military action. This link could both serve and undermine German war plans. The same was true to an even greater extent for Bulgaria, which refused to commit any troops to the Axis war effort on the Eastern Front and instead participated only in the Axis-coordinated attacks on Yugoslavia and Greece, upon which Bulgaria had revisionist claims.

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Lessons and Models in the Geopolitics of Revisionism: Bulgaria and Romania Not all revisionisms were created equal, nor were they pursued with the same level of tenacity. Hungarian historians have lately been sorting through which of Hungary’s revisionist aims constituted first-order priorities (Transylvania) and which ones Hungarian political figures had essentially relinquished (Croatia, Slavonia). The former Hungarian consul to Zagreb, Antal Ullein-Reviczky, thus calmed an excited Croatian minister who had seen a revisionist propaganda map depicting the boundaries of Hungary including Croatia and Slavonia by telling him that the map was merely “historical,” not “political,” and that he personally found the whole thing “senseless.”35 A more striking case of the implicit “weighting” of revisionist aims is that of Romanian policy vis-à-vis revisionist Hungary versus Bulgaria. It is worth noting that the historic relationship between the Bulgarian and Romanian nationalist movements had frequently been one of a mutually understood symbiosis. The Bulgarian national movement found its feet during the mid nineteenth century in exile in Bucharest and elsewhere in the Danube principalities, where the reigns of centralized Ottoman authority were relatively slack.36 At the time many within the nationalist elite saw a “communion of interests” between Romanians and Bulgarians, such that one newspaper, which published in both languages, argued in 1864 that the Danube “need not be a border” between the two peoples.37 This early communion, however, had lost much of its appeal by the early twentieth century, and most notably during the course of the Second Balkan War, as the two aspiring nation-states fought over the future of contested Dobrudja. The territory was absorbed by Romania in 1913 (Treaty of Bucharest), but remained a flashpoint during the First World War and after. By 1940, mention of historic ties between Bulgaria and Romania was deployed not to dissolve the border but to shift it. Thus one Bulgarian journalist by the name of Penakov noted that, “the Bulgarian nation has contributed much to the cultural, military, and political development [vu˘zdigane] of the Romanians” as part of an argument for the return of Dobrudja to Bulgaria.38 Ultimately the Axis presided over a split of the territory between the two states with the Treaty of Craiova on September 7, 1940. But the romance of reciprocal knowledge and study was not terminated with the division of Dobrudja. The Romanian military attaché Alexandru Budiş wrote a book on Bulgaria published in 1942, covering geography, demographics, economy, and history in a largely detached, even moderately sympathetic tone. In the preface, Budiş lamented the fact that “profound and objective reciprocal knowledge of the Romanian and Bulgarian peoples is not yet a fact.”39 To correct this oversight, he began preparing his overview in early 1940, while tensions between the two states were heightened as the possibility of either territorial

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shifts or population exchange loomed. At the same time, a Bulgarian journalist prepared a critical overview of Romanian publications relating to the historical, demographic, and cultural features of the contested Dobrudja region.40 Recent historiography on Romanian–Bulgarian relations focuses on the population exchange that followed on the heels of Craiova, casting it as a wound that deepened rather than healed the rift between the two states’ interests.41 The population exchange was indeed disastrous, above all for the people who were moved or lost property and livelihoods in the exchange. Nevertheless, the hierarchy of the two states’ revisionist aspirations had a profound effect on the way leaders and statesmen from the two states felt about the other. It is this regional dynamic that explains a surprising—and less discussed—improvement in relations between Romania and Bulgaria that grew increasingly apparent as the war dragged on. On September 20, 1940, in a meeting between the Romanian minister of foreign affairs, Mihail Sturdza, and the Slovak envoy to Romania, Sturdza confided that relations had improved with Bulgaria since the Treaty of Craiova just two weeks before, and sharply deteriorated with Hungary following a series of atrocities committed by the Hungarian military in northern Transylvania during the re-annexation.42 The following day, hints of improving relations were evident even in Bogdan Filov’s speech to the National Assembly in celebration of the annexation of Southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria, in which he said, “Today on both sides [of the Bulgarian–Romanian border] everything is being done to restore the traditional good relations between Bulgaria and Romania in both countries’ interests.”43 Some political tensions remained, however, especially as members of the extreme right in both countries were dissatisfied with the terms of Craiova. On December 30, 1941, members of the Bulgarian legionnaires, who had been forced to merge with the ranks of the pro-government Brannik, put out a clandestine publication headed “Bulgarians—did you know??” In it they criticized the Bulgarian government for having sold themselves to the Freemasons and practiced favoritism. The authors then declared that the revisionist mandate vis-à-vis Romania had still not been met so long as “old Dobrudja” was still under Romanian state control and Bulgaria was not the sole “Great Power” in the Balkans.44 If attitudes in this period did not reflect outright belligerence between the two states, neither did they tend to consistently radiate a spirit of cooperation and goodwill, and were often characterized instead by a kind of mutual condescension. In a report of the Romanian consul in Varna to Mihai Antonescu on his “impressions and observations” during a visit to Bulgaria in March 1942, the consul wrote of Romanians and Bulgarians that, “in language, in customs, in songs and games [jocuri], in our everyday lives we have many things in common.” Nevertheless, Romanians are “individualists” (who just want to

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remain inside their own boundaries and have no desire to provoke their neighbors) while Bulgarians are “collectivists” (“with no political or cultural tolerance at all of the nationalities that live in their midst”) which gives them a tendency toward irredentism. The consul also wrote of their inferior bourgeoisie, dubbing Bulgaria “a minor neighbor,” but none of this should mean “that we continue to treat this people with the disdain we have shown them up till now,” for if Russia and Bolshevism should lose the war—and they most certainly would, felt the consul—then “we will find in the Bulgarian people a formidable partner for the construction of a civilization of work and order in this part of Europe.” He concluded that if the two states once created a grand empire, why could they not come together to form “a brilliant Romano-Bulgarian civilization”?45 A comparable air of superiority was evident among Bulgarian leaders as well vis-à-vis Romanians. “If some matter could be resolved here in a month, in Romania it would take a year,” wrote Bulgarian Prime Minister Filov in his diary on April 30, 1942.46 Yet by October 1942, following the complicated and far from smooth population exchange, the tone between the two former enemies frequently seemed to return to one of mid-nineteenth-century sympathy.47 A member of the Romanian legation in Bulgaria was invited to attend a ceremony for the dismantling of Bulgarian organizations that had formerly lobbied for recovery of Dobrudja.48 In his report on the occasion, the Romanian official noted that a Bulgarian orator at the ceremony had offered an elegy to friendship between Romania and Bulgaria and called on future speakers not to say anything to harm the good relations between the two states. The speaker also thanked Romania for yielding Dobrudja without bloodshed and thus allowing reconciliation between the two peoples, and offered a final round of thanks for Romania’s help in the Bulgarian struggle for national liberation in 1877. Commenting on the occasion, the Romanian official present opined that the Bulgarian revisionists who lobbied for the return of Dobrudja had demonstrated “a perseverance that could serve as an example to any nation with revisionist aspirations, particularly when these are more sacred and more legitimate than those with respect to a region as contested as Southern Dobrudja.” He concluded that the Bulgarians deserved the territory they had received from Romania, indeed that they had earned it. The subtext was that the Bulgarians were teaching the Romanians how to be good territorial revisionists, a skill they could then wield in the interest of recovering regions “more sacred and more legitimate”—namely, against Hungary in the bid to recover northern Transylvania. In a report from the General Directorate of the Romanian police to Ion Antonescu on the situation in Bulgaria as of May 1, 1942, the author noted that in relations with Romania, Bulgaria is satisfied with the territorial gains it made with the Treaty of Craiova. “The hatred of the Bulgarians is now focused against the Serbs, Greeks and Turks,” he wrote. Furthermore, though Bulgarians lost

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no love for Romanians, the report went on to say that Romania was seen as an important partner, second only to Germany in the realm of economic cooperation. The Romanian leadership’s preoccupation with Hungarian activities also came through in the report, in which the authors observed that Bulgarian relations with Hungary were very cordial, but as they were based on a shared interest in revisionism some of the cordiality had been lost now that the reasons for it were no longer there.49 Bulgarian–Hungarian ties were nevertheless still a matter of tension between Romania and Bulgaria, preventing full reconciliation. The author of the aforementioned report to Antonescu felt that Hungary was competing with Romania for economic ties with Bulgaria, and feared that a high-ranking Hungarian military official, Szombathely, had come to Bulgaria to discuss possibilities for a pact, one that would primarily serve Hungarian interests. In terms of public relations, the author noted that Hungarian films were shown regularly in Bulgaria and that: “Night clubs, taverns, and bars are all full of Hungarian women who sing in Hungarian and dance the csárdás as if they were in Budapest. Meanwhile Hungary is full of Bulgarian gardeners.” Nevertheless, as the informant noted with some satisfaction, “one Bulgarian said, with considerable bitterness, that this human compensation is of no advantage [to the Bulgarians] whatsoever.” The report concluded with the assertion that, “in the matter of forming closer ties with Romania, Bulgarians see only advantages and during our discussions show particular good faith in pursuing a true understanding with Romania.” This positive conclusion was qualified by the assumption that Bulgarians had little choice, “being surrounded by enemies on all sides, this political tendency [toward forming closer ties with Romania] is a manifestation of the national instinct which is seeking new forms of life as part of a new Europe.”50 Intermingled with the positive feelings about improved relations with Bulgaria was—as ever—the specter of Hungarian revisionism. In August 1942 there was an Axis right-wing youth get-together with Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians. A Romanian report on the event noted that Hungarians reawakened Bulgarian revisionism by singing the Bulgarian march, “Dobrogeanski krai,” yet in conversations with Romanian diplomats, Bulgarian leaders regretted the absence of Romanian youth.51 The Hungarian shadow appeared over Romanian–Bulgarian relations in a Romanian report from June as well, in which the author related that “in continuation of the work of Bulgarian–Romanian rapprochement,” the Bulgarian government approved “without hesitation” a Romanian request to set up a duty-free, tax-free Romanian store in Sofia, which would serve as “the most effective propaganda for Romania.” With no attempt to conceal his Schadenfreude, the author noted that “Hungarians look on with concern at all the manifestations of Bulgaro–Romanian friendship, and if they cannot prevent them, they seek to compete with them” by inviting the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra to

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Budapest for three concerts, for example, or having the Hungarian minister visit Bulgarian Thrace after which “he made declarations expressing how Bulgarian he found those provinces to be and how much sympathy for Hungary he encountered there.”52 A Romanian note from October 1942 maintained that although Kantardzhiev, the leader of the Bulgarian right-wing Ratnitsi, was adamant on the question of territorial reintegration, he also expressed “a great deal of sympathy for Romania and her leaders, from which can be concluded that he and many others consider the Treaty of Craiova to be the ultimate act in resolving misunderstanding between our two states.”53 As the above examples demonstrate, relations between Romania and Bulgaria during the war were far more variable and more prone to conciliatory overtures than Hungarian–Romanian relations, largely due to the fact that Southern Dobrudja was of considerably lower priority than northern Transylvania in Romanian wartime revisionist thinking. The pattern of relations between these three revisionist states throws into sharper relief the hierarchies of revisionism that colored wartime geopolitics and facilitated the diffusion of various diplomatic strategies across the region.

Revisionism and Domestic Policy Revisionism and territorial reshuffling also brought practical challenges for the states of the region, most notably in handling citizenship and property concerns. Once Bulgaria had grown to encompass Southern Dobrudja and Hungary had expanded into northern Transylvania at the expense of Romania, both states felt that they needed to undo the effects of the Romanian land reform of 1920/21 in those areas. On June 22, 1942, in an extraordinary session of the Bulgarian Assembly, lawmakers crafted legislation “for regulating the right to properties in Southern Dobrudja,” with special provisions providing “compensation for [properties] expropriated under Romanian rule.”54 The compensation of Bulgarians’ losses during the land reform as well as provisions for immigrants and refugees were duplicated in Hungary, where a special ministerial decree known as the 1,440/1941 allowed individuals to petition for compensation if they sold property at a fraction of its presumed value during the period of Romanian rule.55 Hungarian politicians in Transylvania even went so far as to propose that the newly re-annexed territory be used as a testing ground for a nationwide land reform. The Romanian government assiduously tracked these efforts at advantage reversal, and was especially quick to view them as part of a conspiracy of encirclement hatched by Romania’s two hostile neighbors to the south and west. In the  late summer of 1942, Romanian diplomats reported indignantly that a Hungarian film, Unquenched Thirst, on the expropriation of Hungarians

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in Transylvania under Romanian rule, was being screened to great acclaim in Bulgaria.56 Oftentimes policy relating to mobile and immobile property of annexed or displaced populations was linked to the proliferation of anti-Jewish legislation in these states. This nexus revealed the links between revisionist concerns and the treatment of Jews. In the case of Romania, provision for immigrants and refugees from ceded territories were made through the Romanian State Under-secretariat for Romanianization, Colonization and Inventory (SSRCI) and its sub-organ the Directorate of Refugees and Evacuated Populations, which handled the expropriation of the Jews as well as the resettlement of Romanians.57 Meanwhile, the concept of “Aryanization” in Slovakia was often interpreted by Slovak officials and political figures to mean clearing non-Slovaks (not merely Jews) out of business, trade, and industry.58 The practice of covering state budget shortfalls and economic woes with the confiscation of Jewish property was a common strategy employed by governments in the region and often tied to the perceived necessity to “nationalize” property in order to strengthen claims to territory. Bulgarian leaders criticized their Romanian counterparts for pursuing such policies, and Romanians charged Bulgarians with doing the same.59 Extending anti-Jewish policy and legislation to affect undesirable minorities—with confiscation of food and real estate, refusal to grant trade permits or citizenship, or in extreme cases assignment to labor battalions or large-scale reprisals or persecution—occurred frequently and with similar underlying motives.60 Comparable demographic considerations surfaced when state leaders discussed granting or denying citizenship to immigrants, colonists, refugees, and inhabitants of transferred areas.61 The territorial reshuffling necessitated gathering new statistics, not only to establish numbers but to support territorial claims. Hungary and Romania had censuses in 1941, in Bulgaria there was a census of the newly annexed territories in early December 1942, and the Slovak state conducted two censuses during the war, one in 1938 and the other in 1940.62 Leaders in each of these states were convinced that demographic data would play an important role in helping them retain acquired territories and potentially acquire still more—and with good reason. Census data had been heavily employed not only during the post-First World War peace conferences, but also during negotiations and Axis-mediated territorial agreements between states during the Second World War.63 Once in control of desired territories, regimes struggled to place an officialdom there that could relate to local populations and resolve tensions between the central government authority and the people living in those areas. The problem of so-called “parachutists”—or government bureaucrats coming from outside these newly annexed regions and being air-dropped into administrative positions—was widespread. In Hungary’s re-annexed territories, parachutists

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were often roundly condemned by the local population and the indigenous political elite.64 Bulgarian leaders also struggled with opposition to parachutists in Dobrudja and Macedonia. A Bulgarian police report on the attitude of the population in the “newly liberated territories” in mid October 1941 noted that in one village: “there were officials who behaved disrespectfully towards women. The impression of the Bulgarian regime is not the best here.” The same report warned against appointing members of the local population as mayors, since the locals had a “questionable commitment to the idea of an integral Bulgaria.”65 Eventually the regime sent an investigative commission to Thrace to meet with local authorities in an attempt to address growing dissatisfaction with the reported brutality of Bulgarian officials.66 In parts of Macedonia, the government even replaced the local administration.67 Another shared attribute of the way regional and state governments functioned concerns efforts to manufacture unity and eliminate party and opposition agitation in the interest of achieving revisionist aims. In a speech delivered at the closing of the 25th session of the Bulgarian National Assembly, Bogdan Filov told deputies that Bulgaria owed its revisionist successes to the abolition of political parties, an act which united all Bulgarians to work for a common cause. “Our mission,” he continued, “is to be able to see the entire Bulgarian people united under the scepter of the king, proceeding along the path of progress and success toward a brighter and happier future.”68 In the same vein, Hungarians eliminated political parties in re-annexed Transylvania, insisting that all politics be represented by a single “Transylvanian” party.69 There should be “no Party agitation in Transylvania, as this would weaken the Magyars against the Romanians,” we read in the Transylvanian Party’s program, adopted May 28, 1941.70 Although I have offered just a sampling here, it should be clear that the range of domestic policy affected by revisionist aspirations is truly breathtaking. Indeed it becomes difficult to find any aspect of state policy—domestic or foreign—that was not in some way influenced by these aspirations during the Second World War in this region. A more complete treatment of this issue would extend into the realm of state policy towards workers and families, and thus into factories, workshops, schools, churches, pubs, hospitals, markets, and theaters.71

Conclusion What happens when we give revisionism a longer—and wider—history? We discover that in the interactions and exchanges between multiple revisionist states, the kind of behavior and attitudes we have come to expect from revisionist powers is transformed and new priority hierarchies, partnerships, and tensions emerge. Furthermore, when considering several states together, we begin to

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see how revisionist politics impacted on domestic policy in unexpected ways, giving rise to differential policies in contested areas, and even affecting troop commitment strategies. The comparative, transnational study of wartime revisionism thus reveals the extent to which revisionism became the driving force behind both domestic and foreign policy for most—if not all—of these states during the Second World War. The capacity of revisionism to permeate these dual policy worlds, even if only for a short time, suggests that we may want to alter our understanding of revisionism’s nature. Because Nazi Germany subordinated revisionism to antiSemitism and anti-Bolshevism, Nazism became defined primarily by the latter two rather than by territorial revisionism, the objectives of which German policy outstripped in the first days of the war (or sooner). But in East Central Europe, that hierarchy of priorities was frequently reversed, especially in states that existed before the war (Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary). This is not to suggest that state leaders in the region were not anti-Semitic or anti-Bolshevik, or that they did not spin dreams of creating ethnically pure nation-states as bulwarks against Soviet expansion, but rather that the most prominent feature of their wartime policy was oriented towards regaining and/or retaining territory and therefore inconsistent in its dedication to the Axis, tracking that of the Nazis only for as long as the Germans proved willing and able to move boundaries. It may serve us then as scholars to take revisionism seriously, not merely as an aspect of foreign policy but as an ideology in itself, capable of permeating both foreign and domestic policy, and of eclipsing other ideologies we more commonly associate with the war.

Notes 1. It should be noted that with the coming to power of the Nazi regime in the 1930s Germany stands as an example of a revisionist state that was not merely revisionist but expansionist (some would say imperialist) in its territorial ambitions. See Andreas Hillgruber, “Die ‘Endlösung’ und das deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologischen Programms des Nationalsozialismus,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 20,2 (1972): 133–53. 2. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives (henceforth USHMMA), RG–25.020*12, fiche 4, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942–1944, vol. 39, Politica internă, pp.224–25. 3. See, e.g., Loránt Tilkovszky, Revízió és nemzetiségipolitika Magyarországon (Budapest, 1967).  I  have undertaken a more extensive treatment of this issue with regard to Hungarian and Romanian policy during the Second World War: Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford, 2009), 97–149. 4. Cited in Marshall Lee Miller, Bulgaria during the Second World War (Stanford, 1975), 30. 5. G.P. Genov, Rukhna poslednata postroiı˘ka na vesaı˘lskata sistema (Sofia, 1941), 17. 6. Magyar Országos Levéltár (Hungarian State Archives, henceforth MOL), K63 (Külügyminisztérium, Politikai osztály), 259. csomó. 1940–27. tétel./7./8., pp.556.

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7. Documents on German Foreign Policy (henceforth DGFP), 1918–1945, series D (1937–1945), vol.13, The War Years, June 23–December 11, 1941, doc.500, 825. 8. For an overview of discussions of anti-revisionist solidarity or attempts to reconstitute the Little Entente, see: Petre Otu (ed.), Pacea de mâine: Documentele ale Comisiei constituite în vederea pregătirii conferinţei de pace de după cel de-al doilea război mondial, 1942–1944 (Bucharest, 2006), 25; Hrvatski Državni Arhiv (Croatian State Archive; henceforth HDA), f.230, Poslanstvo NDH u Bukureštu, pp.6–7. 9. Slovenský Národný Archív (Slovak National Archive, henceforth SNA), Ministerstvo Zahraničných Veci (MZV), k.192, 4.617/1940, 66/1941, 291/1942. On cooperation between Croatia and Romania, see: Tsentralen Du˘rzhaven Arkhiv (Central State Archive, Bulgaria, henceforth TsDA), f.176K, Ministerstvo na Vu˘nshnite Raboti i Izpovedaniiata (MVRI), op.8, a.e.830, reel 1, p.87. On the leading role of Romanian statesmen, see: TsDA, F. 176K MVRI, op.8, a.e.830, reel 1, p.59; HDA, f.230, Poslanstvo NDH u Bukureštu, pp.3–4. 10. SNA, MZV, k.213, 4.961/1941. Incidentally, such speeches were relayed again almost verbatim by the subsequent Croatian envoy to Slovakia, who assumed his position in November 1941. SNA, MZV, k.214, 8.991/1941. For a partial overview of Slovak–Croat relations during the war, see: Miroslav Michela, “Vznik slovenského vyslanectva v Chorvátscu a činnosť Karola Murgaša, chargé d’affaires v Záhrebe v roku 1941,” in Slovenská Republika 1939–1945 očami mladých historikov II (Trnava, 2004), 97–123; Jan Rychlík, “Slovensko-chorvatské vtahy v letech 1941-1945,” Slovanské historické studie 26 (2000): 265–83; Miroslav Michela, “K otázke slovensko-chorvátskej kultúrnej spolupráce v rokoch 1941-1945,” Slavica Slovaca 38,2 (2003): 112–22. 11. HDA, f.227, MVP NDH Zagreb, 1941–1945, kut.1, Vrlo tajni spisi MVP-a (V.T.), 1941, br.16–230, V.T.40/1941. 12. HDA, f.230, Poslanstvo NDH u Bukureštu, pp.57–58. 13. SNA, MZV, k.48, 54.229/1940, 52.760/1940; SNA, MZV, k.118, 30.171/1941, 34.601/1941, 34.612/1941, 30.171/32.802/1941. 14. HDA, f.227, MVP NDH Zagreb, 1941–1945, kut.1, Izvještaji ureda ministra, a) dnevni izvještaji MVP poglavniku, 1942, br.1–79, p.7. 15. Stenogramele şedintelor consiliului de ministri: Guvernarea Ion Antonescu, vol.7 (Bucharest, 2003), 394–95. 16. România Mare (radio), 11. iun. 1942, cited from MOL, K63 (Külügyminisztérium, Politikai osztály), 257. csomó. 1940–27. tétel./7./E., Román-magyar viszony—Erdély, iktatlan, II. rész., p.31. 17. In April 1940, Goebbels told the German press: “If anyone asks how do you conceive the new Europe, we have to reply that we don’t know . . . Anybody can interpret it as they wish.” Reprinted in J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism, 1919–1945: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination, A Documentary Reader, vol. 3 (Exeter, 1988), doc. 631, 900. Efforts on the part of Ribbentrop to formalize the establishment of a europäische Staatenbund—as with a memorandum to Hitler from March 21, 1943—met with stony silence: Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik (henceforth ADAP), series E, vol.5, doc.229, 437–40. 18. See, e.g., Case, Between States, 67–96. 19. TsDA, f.176K, MVRI, op.8, a.e.1138, p.6; Case, Between States, 67–96. 20. Stenogramele şedintelor consiliului de ministri: Guvernarea Ion Antonescu, vol.7 (Bucharest, 2003), 395. The territories in question were northern Transylvania, which the Second Vienna Award gave to Hungary on August 30, and Southern Dobrudja, ceded to Bulgaria with the Treaty of Craiova, September 7, 1940. 21. Cited in Sebastian Balta, Rumänien und die Grossmächte in der Ära Antonescu, 1940–1944 (Stuttgart, 2005), 270–1.

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22. ADAP, E, I, dok. 112, 234, pp.203–5, 408–17. 23. Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, Helyünk és sorsunk Európában (Budapest, 1941), cited in Károly Vigh, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Endre, 1886–1944, a küldetés ember (Budapest, 1992), 202. 24. Lajos Kerekes (ed.), Allianz Hitler-Horthy-Mussolini: Dokumente zur ungarischen Aussenpolitik, 1933–1944 (Budapest, 1966), doc.115, 327. 25. BMF Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg (State and Military Archive, Freiburg, henceforth BMF), RW 50, Deutsch-italienische Offizierskommision zur Durchführung des Wiener Schiedsspruches vom 30.8.1940, 277, “Kammersitzung vom 13. Nov. 1941.” 26. Miklós Horthy, Horthy Miklós titkos iratai (Budapest, 1963), doc. 62, pp.314–19. 27. Horthy, Horthy Miklós titkos iratai, 316. 28. Horthy, Horthy Miklós titkos iratai, 317. 29. Horthy, Horthy Miklós titkos iratai, doc.71, p.365. 30. Horthy, Horthy Miklós titkos iratai, 367–68. Emphasis in original. 31. Cited in C.A. Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929–1945 (Edinburgh, 1956), vol. 2, 179. 32. Margit Balogh et al. (eds), A szakadék szélén: az MTI bizalmas jelentései 1943. július 22.-1944. március 10. (Budapest, 2006), 35. 33. Károly Vigh, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Endre, 1886–1944, a küldetés ember (Budapest, 1992), 225–26. 34. Balogh, A szakadék szélén, 80. 35. HDA, F. 1492, Poslanstvo NDH Budimpešta, First Folder (Poslanstvo NDH u Budimpešti, izdvojeno iz RSUP SRH-SDS), p.19. 36. Alexandru Gh. Budiş, Bulgaria (Bucharest, 1943), 161–62n. 37. Marian Petcu, Istoria Presei Române: Antologie (Bucharest, 2002), 257 38. Dr. Iv. St. Penakov, Predpostavki za Romu˘no-Bu˘lgarsko su˘lizhenie, skazka, proiznesena po pakana na d-voto na stolichnitie zhurnalisti (Sofia, 1940), 7. 39. Budiş, Bulgaria, 7. 40. Penakov, Predpostavki za Romu˘no-Bu˘lgarsko su˘lizhenie. 41. See, e.g., Vladimir Solonari, Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-allied Romania (Washington, 2010). 42. SNA, MZV, k.192, 3.309/1940. 43. Bulgaria, Narodno su˘branie, Dobrudzha: istoricheskitie zasedaniia na narodnoto su˘branie po prisu˘ediniavaneto na iuzhna dobrudzha ku˘m maı˘kata-otechestvo, 20. i 21. septembriı˘ 1940 godina (Sofia, 1940), 16. 44. USHMMA, RG–25.020*12, fiche 1, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942–1944, vol.39, Politica internă, p.5. 45. USHMMA, RG–25.020*12, fiche 1, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942–1944, vol.39, Politica internă, pp.41–43. 46. Bogdan Filov, Dnevnik (Sofia, 1990), 487. 47. SNA, MZV, k.192, 8.680/1942. 48. USHMMA, RG–25.020*12, fiche 4, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942–1944, vol.39, Politica internă, 554 file, pp.246–48. 49. USHMMA, RG–25.020*12, fiche 2, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942–1944, vol.39, Politica internă, pp.100–6. 50. Ibid. 51. The report concluded that not having Romanians there nevertheless avoided confrontation with the Hungarians: ibid., fiche 3, pp.181–83.

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52. 53. 54. 55.

Ibid., fiche 2, pp.123–24. Ibid., fiche 4, pp.241–42. Ibid., fiche 2, pp.127–29. There were a number of executive orders created to this end, among them No.970/1943 M.E. and No.2,790/1941 M.E. These related to the Hungarian state’s annulment of the Romanian land reform’s provisions with regard to forests and pastures respectively. Mihai Fătu and Mircea Muşat (eds), Horthyist-Fascist Terror in Northwestern Romania (Bucharest, 1986), 164–65. For a more comprehensive list of laws and decrees of this sort, see ibid., pp.148–75; see also Arhivele Naţionale Istorice Centrale (Central National Historical Archives, Romania, henceforth ANIC), Fond Ministerul de Interne, Dosar 438/1941, pp.13–16. USHMMA, RG–25.020*12, fiche 3, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942–1944, vol.39, Politica internă, pp.181–83. Lya Benjamin (ed.), Evreii din România între anii 1940–1944, vol.1, Legislaţia antievreiască (Bucharest, 1993), doc.37, 38, 134, 141. See Eduard Nižňanský, Holocaust na Slovensku 4.: Dokumenty nemeckej proveniencie, 1939– 1945 (Bratislava, 2003), 294; See also the issue of Gardista č. 13, 17. januára 1941, reproduced in Slovenské Národné Múzeum, Múzeum Židovskej Kultúry, Riešenie židovskej otázky na Slovensku, 1938-1945, Dokumenty, 4. časť (Bratislava, 1999), doc.45, 136. Filov, Dnevnik, 488; USHMMA, RG–25.020*12, fiche 4, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942–1944, vol.39, Politica internă, pp.249–51. See, e.g., MOL, K63, 254. csomó., 1940–27/7.I. tétel, 107–8. See also MOL, K63, 260. csomó., 1941–27/1(II). tétel, p.85; MOL, K63, 253. csomó., 1940–27/3. tétel, pp.5–7; USHMMA, RG–25.003, Romanian Ministry of National Defense, Archive of the General Staff concerning the Holocaust in Romania, reel 140, file 2370, pp.885–86; BMF, RW 50, 123/1942 Wehrdienst der ungarischen bzw. rumänischen Minderheit in Siebenbürgen und Frage der Reserveoffiziere in Nord- und Südsiebenbürgen, “Einberufung der Rumänen aus Nordsiebenbürgen zu Militäreinheiten und Arbeitskompanien”; Mihai Fătu (ed.), Din istoria Transilvaniei: Documente, 1931–1945 (Alexandria, 1999), doc.39 and 40, pp.235–36; USHMMA, RG–25.020*11, fiche 6, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Budapest, Hungary, A.M.A.E. Fond Budapesta, vol.6, pp.3–4, 27–33. USHMMA, RG–25.020*12, fiche 3, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942–1944, vol.39, Politica internă, pp.170–80, 221. On the Hungarian census, see: E. Árpád Varga, Fejezetek a jelenkori Erdély népesedéstörténetéből (Budapest, 1998). On the Romanian census, see: Recensământul din 1941: Transilvania (Cluj, 2002). On the Bulgarian census, see: D. Balevski, “Osnovni organizatsionni problemi na prebroyavaniyata na naselenieto v Bu˘lgariya prez perioda 1900–1985 g.” Naselenie 8,3 (1990): 22–43; and USHMMA, RG–25.020*12, fiche 3, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942–1944, vol.39, Politica internă, p.162. On the Slovak census, see: Územie a obyvateľstvo Slovenskej republiky a Prehľad obcí a okresov odstúpených Nemecku, Maďarsku a Poľsku (Bratislava, 1939). See, e.g., Macartney, October Fifteenth, 302; Gergely Sallai, Az első bécsi döntés (Budapest, 2002), 146n. Zsuzsanna Simon, “Erdély köz- és szakigazgatása a második bécsi döntés után,” Regio 6,4 (1995): 60–82, here p.68; Tilkovszky, Revízió és nemzetiségipolitika, 297; Ioan Hudiţă, Jurnal politic, vol.1 (Iaşi, 1998), 303. USHMMA, RG–46.009M, reel 6, Selected Records from the Ministry of the Interior of Bulgaria, fond 1, op.3, a.e.15, folder 22052, p.1.

56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

63. 64.

65.

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66. USHMMA, RG–25.020*12, fiche 2, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942–1944, vol.39, Politica internă, p.68. 67. USHMMA, RG–25.020*12, fiche 2, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920-1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942-1944, vol.39, Politica internă, pp.111– 12; ibid., fiche 4, pp.228, 239; USHMMA, RG–46–003, Ministry of Justice records, 1939– 1944, reel 5, fond 242, op.2, a.e.2357. 68. USHMMA, RG–25.020*12, fiche 1, Selected Records from Romanian Diplomatic Missions, 1920–1950, Sofia, Bulgaria, Dosar 71/Bulgaria, 1942–1944, vol.39, Politica internă, pp.45–49. 69. Zoltán Tibori Szabó, Teleki Béla erdélyisége: Embernek maradni embertelen időkben (Kolozsvár, 1993), 12–16, 29–30. 70. “Gróf Teleki Béla bejelenti az Erdélyi Párt magalakulását, 1941. jún. 17,” in Erdély a magyar képviselőházban, 1941 (Kolozsvár, 1942), pp.5–9. 71. For a more expansive treatment of the sort alluded to here, see Case, Between States.

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Chapter 5

HUNGARIAN REVISIONISM IN THOUGHT AND ACTION, 1920–1941 Plans, Expectations, Reality

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B

y virtue of the Treaty of Trianon, signed on June 4, 1920, Hungary’s territory (excluding Croatia) was reduced from 282,000 to 93,000 square kilometers, or to just under one-third of its former size, and its population from 18.2 to 7.9 million. Some 3.2 million (or 30 per cent) of the 10.6 million people living in the annexed territories were ethnic Hungarians. Of these, 1.6 million were located in Transylvania and other territories that were awarded to Romania. Some 1 million lived in Slovakia and Ruthenia, and nearly 500,000 in Yugoslavia. The number of Hungarians in the Burgenland area, part of Austria, was no more than 60,000 to 70,000.1 The majority of the Hungarian population considered Trianon and the loss of two-thirds of the country’s territory and one-third of the Magyar people a gross injustice. It followed from this that Hungarian public opinion was very receptive to a policy aimed at the revision of Trianon, especially the new frontiers it brought into being. Concerning the ways of achieving territorial revision, however, there were several perspectives in post-Trianon Hungary. Public opinion consistently demanded integral or total revision, and even the government considered this to be the ideal solution. In reality, the picture was more complicated. Integral revision, ethnic readjustments of borders, some intermediate solution, and autonomy for the minority groups in the lost territories each had their proponents and opponents. In the first section of this essay some typical variants of interwar Hungarian revisionism are treated. In the second part we discuss the actual territorial changes that took place between 1938 and 1941.

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Hungarian Revisionist Conceptions after Trianon The Hungarian ruling elite considered Trianon a historic accident and a crime committed against Hungarians. The typical answer of this group was a total rejection of acknowledging the territorial changes that the Treaty of Trianon brought about. From this standpoint the political platform of integral revision logically followed. If Trianon was totally unacceptable, if it was a crime, then historic Hungary should be restored entirely. This platform was supported by a variety of arguments. Some historians argued for Hungary’s priority in the Carpathian basin. As János Karácsonyi, a Catholic priest and professor of church history at the University of Budapest before the First World War, stressed in his essays published in the early 1920s, Hungarians alone held full historical rights to the territory of Greater Hungary because when they captured the Carpathian basin in the ninth century, the area was basically a no-man’s land. Historical thinking jumped from this observation to the conclusion that the Hungarian nation held an exclusive right to all territories between the Carpathians and the Adriatic.2 Albert Apponyi, both as leader of the Hungarian peace delegation in 1920 and as author of the opening essay in the famous propaganda book Justice for Hungary, published in 1928, emphasized the cultural superiority and extraordinary political gifts of Hungarians, which made them fit to function as a civilizing force in the region and to fulfill the role of protector of the Christian West at the same time.3 A third characteristic argument stressed the unusual geographical and economic unity of historic Hungary. This unity was characterized as being singular in Europe, and it was claimed that the forced dismemberment of this unity could no longer be upheld. According to this view, the reintegration of the detached parts of historic Hungary was an economic necessity, without which all of the peoples living in the region would experience disaster, famine, and a general decline. This view was also accepted and popularized by a number of eminent scholars and politicians, including Pál Teleki. “Geography,” he emphasized in university lectures he gave in the United States in the early 1920s, “is the most important nation-building factor,” and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919/20 had been seriously mistaken when, instead of geography and economy, it had based its decisions basically on linguistic differences.4 A further historic argument was based on Hungarian nationality policy, which was alleged to have been very tolerant since the days of Saint Stephen, the first king of Hungary. This theory, known as the “Saint Stephen state concept,” emphasized the peaceful coexistence of the various ethnic groups within Hungary over the centuries, and projected the re-establishment of this idealized coexistence in the form of a federation in which Hungarians would enjoy the status of primus inter pares. This solution, as the representatives of this interpretation emphasized, was desired not only by Hungarians but by the other nationality groups as well. Thus, the rebirth of historic Hungary was only a question of time.

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Gyula Szekfű, for example, an eminent historian of the time, popularized this deeply unhistorical and unrealistic approach. But it should also be noted that the Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi also subscribed to this theory, proving how popular and widespread it was in Hungarian society and politics.5 The approaches mentioned above did not remain unchallenged in the political thinking of the interwar period. Besides the concept of integral revision there were other visions and plans, including the program of ethnic revision, based on ethnicity and ethnic characteristics. Viewed from this perspective, the dissolution of the multiethnic Hungarian state was not as much a result of an arbitrary decision by the Great Powers, nor of some fatal mistake on the part of revolutionary governments, but, rather, an organic or natural consequence of historical development. As László Németh, a novelist and essayist put it: “The Habsburg monarchy broke up due to the final consequence of nationalism, the principle of ethnic self-determination. As soon as our nationalities had been attracted by this nineteenth-century principle, Hungary had no chance of surviving unchanged, [and] tolerance would have caused its break-up just as much as intolerance did.”6 This ethnic or linguistic approach was also characteristic of the various liberal and democratic forces of the period that formed the leftist opposition to the Horthy regime. In the name of the radical democrats, Rusztem Vámbéry declared in 1928: “We do not aim at anything else than the completion of the country following the ethnic pattern and the effective protection of Hungarian minorities.” A less radical but still liberal personality, Miksa Fenyő, wrote in 1935: “The revision must be nothing else than the re-annexation of the ethnically, exclusively or predominantly Hungarian regions along the frontiers.”7 Some intellectuals, such as the exiled Oszkár Jászi, a radical democrat, and the populist writer and essayist Dezső Szabó, went even further. They rejected not only the concept of integral revision but also the idea of a territorial solution at all. “The question,” Oszkár Jászi argued, “is unfit for a territorial solution. The problem is one of racial autonomy in language and culture, and the racial organization of populations within the common territory.” As a promising solution he proposed the establishment of a confederation of Danubian peoples.8 Dezső Szabó imagined an even larger cooperation: a confederation of all peoples living between the Germans in the west and Russians in the east. Hungary and its neighbors, he wrote, “have two nightmares: Germany and Russia,” and they can only escape from that if they establish the Confederation of East European States.9 A characteristic product of the rethinking of the Hungarian concept of state and nation concerned Transylvania. The maximalist program of Transylvanianism did not stop at demanding an autonomous province but actually desired having an independent Transylvania, or have the principality rejoin Hungary. Moderate voices, however, would have been satisfied by being granted territorial, political, cultural, and religious autonomy within Romania. Due to its peculiar character,

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Transylvanianism had contacts with revisionist ideologies and confederationalist, “Danubian” initiatives as well.10 The break with the idea of Saint Stephen’s empire, historical boundaries, and the various grand revisionist schemes, as well as the understanding of the consequences of the cultural-linguistic concept of the nation, received its most theoretical formulation in István Bibó’s essays, written during the Second World War, which were only published after the end of hostilities. In a long essay concerned with the distress of East European small states, he observed that: The stability of international demarcation in this region is to be sought not along historical borders (as in Western Europe) but along linguistic borders. All Western attempts to use historical unity for inculcating unified national consciousness into peoples speaking different languages, such as the primary examples of the Polish, the Hungarian, or the Bohemian experiments, failed irreversibly and by now their failures are more or less acknowledged. . . . All other purported views—those using arguments of geography, economics, strategy, the rounding-off of borders, ease of transportations, and God knows what else . . . are, in fact, completely meaningless. Using them on a large scale can lead to grave problems.11

The younger generation of the interwar period developed under the influence of Jászi, Szabó, Bibó, and others, and their influence was inestimable. Their own generation, however, were impervious to such ideas. As for the ruling elite and government circles, they entirely rejected these approaches, and state propaganda was based exclusively on the concept of integral revision. A typical example is that of Lord Rothermere’s first proposal of 1927. Rothermere had ethnic readjustment of the frontiers in mind, but his initiative was “corrected” by the writer Ferenc Herczeg, president of the Hungarian Revisionist League, who stated: “the so called Rothermere-line is not a Hungarian proposal . . . [T]he Hungarian nation does not surrender its right to [its] thousand-year-old territories.”12 The same attitude characterized Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, a leading anti-German figure as well, who even in 1943 wrote that, “Transylvania must be restored as a whole—as an integral unit—to the jurisdiction of the Holy Crown.”13 Even one of the most European-minded Hungarian writers of these years, Sándor Márai, shared the very same views. Repeating many of the stereotypes of the ruling elite’s self-image, he believed that “Magyars were entitled to a leading role in the Carpathian basin.” He even supposed that in postwar Europe only two nations would be given an “exceptionally important role”: “the Magyar in Southeastern Europe and the French in the West” of the continent.14

Hungarian Revisionist Politics by Negotiation and War Although border revision was always a top priority of interwar Hungarian foreign policy, the Versailles settlement including the post-Trianon status quo could not

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be seriously challenged until the mid 1930s. By this time, however, European diplomacy entered a new phase. The world was once more witnessing the buildup of two hostile power blocs. The reshaping of Europe initiated by Hitler and Mussolini opened up the possibility of the realization of Hungarian revisionism. Between 1938 and 1941 Hungary recovered in four stages more than one-third (more than half, if we discount Croatia) of the territory and more than five million of the people that it had lost. The first step was taken in 1938 as a consequence of the Munich Agreement. Although the Munich conference did not deal directly with the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia, a declaration attached to the main agreement urged the Hungarian and Czech governments to come to an understanding on disputed matters. If the issues were not settled within three months they were to be the subject of a further meeting between Germany, Italy, France, and Britain to resolve them. Talks between Hungarian and Slovak delegations commenced at Komárom on October 9. The Hungarians started off demanding that the entire Hungarianinhabited area along Slovakia’s Danube frontier should be handed over and a plebiscite held on the wishes of the population in Slovak and Ruthenian areas. The Slovak delegates opened with an offer of autonomy for the Hungarian areas without any territorial concession. In the later rounds, discussions brought the parties much closer to one another. The Hungarians limited their demands to the return of a predominantly Hungarian-inhabited frontier strip of somewhat more than 12,000 square kilometers, most of which (11,300 square kilometers) the Slovaks were, in the end, prepared to concede. However, agreement was still lacking on precisely where the new frontier should be drawn when it came to the towns of Bratislava (Pozsony), Nitra (Nyitra), Kosice (Kassa), Uzhgorod (Ungvár) and Munkacevo (Munkács) and their environs on the northern fringe of the area in question. The Hungarian census of 1910 indicated that these settlements generally had absolute or relative Hungarian majority populations, but the Czechoslovak census of 1930 listed them as having Slovak majorities. Under the Munich Agreement, a new conference ought to have taken place, but in view of British and French declarations of lack of interest, the matter was left to decide by Germany and Italy alone. The issue was resolved by the First Vienna Award of November 2, 1938, and involved a compromise. Bratislava and Nitra with their environs were to stay in Slovakia, the other four towns and environs were to be ceded to Hungary. With this, the country had won back almost 12,000 square kilometers of land and 1,050,000 inhabitants. According to the next Hungarian census (1941) the population in the regained territory was 84 per cent Hungarian by language, as compared to 57 per cent shown in the 1930 Czechoslovak census. The considerable difference between the two figures may be explicable, in part, by population movements in the intervening period, in part by switches in the declared loyalties

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of inhabitants having indeterminate or dual national affiliations, and also by technical differences in the conduct of the censuses. What lies beyond doubt, given the evidence of the Czechoslovaks’ own census data, is that the absolute majority of the population consisted of ethnic Hungarians.15 The circumstances of the First Vienna Award had made it clear that Germany’s support was crucial to any further revision, and so the Hungarian government took a number of steps to demonstrate goodwill toward the Nazi regime. At the end of November 1938 the German minority community in Hungary was allowed to set up a pro-Nazi organization, the Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn. In January 1939 Hungary announced its intention to leave the League of Nations and declared its wish to join the Anti-Comintern Pact. Regarding the strategic aim of creating a common border with Poland, a high priority was set on regaining Ruthenia. Sensing that the Czechoslovak state was on the verge of total disintegration, Hungary’s Council of Ministers decided at a meeting on March 10, 1939 that the territory should be seized through military action, whether Germany approved or not. After some hesitation, the Germans approval finally arrived. Although Hitler still insisted on the creation of a Slovak puppet state under German protection, he dropped his encouragement of the separatist ambitions of Ruthenian nationalists and ceded the territory to Hungary. Between March 15 and March 18, 1939, at the cost of only some minor skirmishes, the Hungarian army marched into Carpatho-Ukraine at the same time as the German Wehrmacht occupied Bohemia and Moravia and an independent Slovakia was being declared. A further chunk of around 12,000 square kilometers of land, with almost 700,000 inhabitants, was now back in Hungarian hands. In contrast to the territorial gain of the previous autumn, however, this time the bulk of the population in question—some 70 to 75 per cent of them— regarded themselves as of Ruthenian nationality. The proportion of Hungarians was somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent (according to the Czechoslovakian 1931 census and Hungarian data from 1941 respectively).16 The government led by Pál Teleki had made a big point of convincing such minorities that Hungary’s intentions were benevolent and, indeed, in line with the “Saint Stephen state concept” it planned to grant the territory wide-ranging autonomies. A bill giving concrete expression to that idea was even laid before Parliament in July 1940. Later, however, it was withdrawn, in part because it had come under fire from bigoted Hungarian nationalists, in part because of overriding reasons of wartime security.17 After the outbreak of the Second World War, Hungarian foreign policy was dictated by two basic objectives: to avoid involvement in armed conflict with the Great Powers (in other words, to maintain the country’s neutrality), and to fulfill its revisionist ambitions. As far as the latter aim was concerned, the most prized goal was Transylvania, due to its special place in Hungarian history, its natural resources, and the large Hungarian population still living there. The political

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and military leaders initially contemplated an independent military campaign, but given the considerable disparity in strength of the Romanian and Hungarian armies, that would clearly have been a highly risky undertaking. On top of that, Romania enjoyed significant international backing, both through specific Anglo–French guarantees of security and because Hitler too was opposed to any moves that might threaten the region’s stability and the delivery of Romanian oil supplies to Germany. These frustrations of revisionist dreams ended in the summer of 1940. The activity of the Soviet Union in the region created a new situation. A Soviet ultimatum demanding the return of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania was handed over on June 26, 1940. Simultaneously, the Hungarian government was informed that Stalin was considering a joint Soviet–Hungarian attack on Romania. To prevent this, Hitler finally gave his blessing to a revision of Romania’s border with Hungary, and in late July requested the Romanian government to prepare for bilateral negotiations with Hungary. The talks got under way at Turnu Severin in mid August 1940. Before leaving Budapest, the Hungarian delegation debated various options—amongst them a cantonization of Transylvania and the formation of an independent state—but ended up in favor of territorial division. The 70,000 square kilometers that Hungarians sought to have returned to them represented just over two-thirds of the total area of 102,000 square kilometers awarded to Romania in 1920. Since there was an overall majority of Romanian inhabitants in this area, the proposal was naturally unacceptable to the Romanian delegation, as was their counter-proposal that the Hungarian-inhabited areas should be given autonomy within Romania with a corresponding exchange of populations. The negotiations were broken off on August 24 and both countries mobilized for war. To avoid armed conflict, Hitler made an offer of joint German–Italian arbitration that was accepted by both countries. The outcome of this new round of arbitration, the Second Vienna Award of August 30, 1940, was the return to Hungary of 43,000 square kilometers of territory, along with 2.5 million inhabitants. It concerned the northern part of Transylvania, including the so-called Székely lands to the east. According to the Hungarian census of 1941, 52 per cent of the inhabitants were Hungarian, 38 per cent Romanian, and 10 per cent German. Romanian statistics from 1930 indicated 38 per cent Hungarians, 49 per cent Romanians and 13 per cent Germans. This suggests that Hungarians probably formed the relative majority of the population, but even so, more than one million Romanians thus became Hungarian citizens, and there were still around 400,000 Hungarians of southern Transylvania remaining in Romania.18 Romania viewed the Second Vienna Award as a national catastrophe. Hungary, on the other hand, rejoiced once again. Understandable though it was, the jubilation was unjustified. For a start, there were major international

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reservations about the legality of the decision, which had not attended the First Vienna Award: both the United States and Great Britain regarded it as a dictate that had been forced on Romania, and thus questioned its validity. But over and above this, the price that Hitler demanded from Hungary was steep. With its accession to Tripartite Pact on November 20, 1940, Hungary breached its selfdeclared principle of non-alliance, and thus ended the policy of neutrality that Teleki had been pursuing. From the autumn of 1940, Yugoslavia was left as the only neighboring state on which Hungary, having now lost much of its earlier independence in the sphere of foreign relations, could to some extent rely on. To keep such hopes alive, a pact of “eternal friendship” was signed in Belgrade in December 1940. However, events soon demonstrated that the pact was insufficient for protecting either party from their fate. After the political turn in Belgrade at the end of March 1941, Hitler decided to launch an assault on Yugoslavia and demanded assistance from Hungary as well as Italy and Bulgaria. The alternatives with which Hungarian policy-makers were confronted were either to accept Hitler’s demand—thereby achieving their final revisionist aims but also losing any sympathy for Hungary in the West, and even risking war with Great Britain—or else resist, thereby exposing the country to the risk of German occupation while retaining the sympathy of the Allied Powers. After serious hesitation, Hungary opted for participation in the war, but only after the break-up of Yugoslavia. Hungarian troops moved over the frontier on April 11, the day after the declaration of Croatian independence in Zagreb had signified the end of the Yugoslav state. In return for its military assistance, Hungary won back 11,500 square kilometers of territory. For the one million inhabitants living in the re-annexed territories, Hungarian data gives an ethnic breakdown of the population as follows: 39 per cent Hungarian, 19 per cent German, and 16 per cent Serb. The Yugoslavs, however, claimed the proportion of Hungarians to be only 30 per cent and the various Slav nationalities together to comprise over 43 per cent.19

Closing Remarks To sum up, between 1938 and 1941, Hungary’s territory expanded from 93,000 to 172,000 square kilometers, and its population from 9 to almost 15 million. Around one-half of the nearly 5 million “new” inhabitants were Hungarian, the others belonging to non-Hungarian communities. It meant that Hungary once more became a country with a sizeable non-Hungarian mix of minority groups, making up around 21 per cent of the total population.20 The new arrangements signified clearly that territoriality did not represent a perfect solution to ethnic problems in the Carpathian basin. That was the reason that American policy-makers and their academic advisers planned to adopt a more complex

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approach during and after the Second World War. In addition to economic and political cooperation in the region, they put forward three basic proposals: first, the adjustment of political frontiers along ethnic dividing lines, where and to whatever extent possible; second, the exchange of populations living near border areas; and third, the protection of minorities, international guarantees, and the sanctioning of minority rights to cultural and territorial autonomy in the case of large but remote enclaves.21 As is known, the territorial changes to Hungary carried out between 1938 and 1941 lasted only as long as the power of the main challengers to the Versailles settlements, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Although the Western Allies, especially the United States, supported a slight modification of the Hungarian–Romanian border in favor of Hungary, the territorial terms of the peace treaty signed with Hungary in Paris in 1947 were the same as at Trianon. Only at this point did Hungarians begin to acknowledge that further integral revision was unimaginable, and that even a compromise solution—a revision based on ethnic principles—had become unachievable. István Bibó, the outstanding political thinker of the last century, took the position that, in accepting the Trianon borders “both physically and spiritually,” Hungarians had only two options: avoiding “the vortex of mutual and bottomless hatred” they could strive for loyalty and moderation behooving small nations” and yet feel responsible for “the fate of Hungarians beyond the borders.”22 Others, such as Gyula Szekfű, the noted historian and ideologue of the period between the wars, took a similar position:. “We must give up the struggle and propaganda for revisionism once and for all,” he wrote in 1947, and we can have “only one wish” with regard to the neighboring states: “honorable observance of the civil rights of Hungarians living in their midst and their humane treatment.”23 The views of these two outstanding Hungarians more than half a century ago is still valid today, although with the political changes that occurred in 1989/90 ideas of revisionism have captured some marginal groups of Hungarian society once again.

Notes 1. Ignác Romsics, The Dismantling of Historic Hungary: The Peace Treaty of Trianon, 1920 (Wayne, 2002), 169–77. 2. János Karácsonyi, Történelmi jogunk hazánk területi épségéhez (Budapest, 1921). 3. Albert Apponyi, “The Historic Mission of Hungary and of States Aggrandised to Her Detriment,” in Justice for Hungary: Review and Criticism of the Effect of the Treaty of Trianon (London, 1928), 3–20. 4. Paul Teleki, The Evolution of Hungary and Its Place in European History (Williamstown, 1923), 211–43. For background also see: Balázs Ablonczy, Pál Teleki (1874–1941): The Life of a Conntroversial Hungarian Politician (Wayne, 2006), 97–103. 5. Krisztián Ungváry, “Szálasi Ferenc,” in Ignác Romsics and Iván Bertényi (eds), Trianon és a magyar politikai gondolkodás, 1920–1953 (Budapest, 1998), 117–33.; for Szekfű’s ideas, see: Steven Bela Vardy, Modern Hungarian Historiography (Boulder, 1976), 62–94.

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6. László Németh, “A magyar élet antinómiái,” in László Németh, Sorskérdések (Budapest, 1989), 119. 7. Cited by L. Zsuzsa Nagy, Liberális pártmozgalmak 1931–1945 (Budapest, 1986), 79. 8. Oscar Jászi, Revolution and Counter-revolution in Hungary (London, 1924), 234. 9. Dezső Szabó, Az egész látóhatár, vol.1 (Budapest, 1939), 211–36. 10. Piroska Balogh, “Transzilvanizmus: revízió vagy regionalizmus,” in Romsics and Bertényi Trianon, 156–74. For a more detailed treatment of Transylvanism, see: K. Zsolt Lengyel, Auf der Suche nach dem Kompromiß: Ursprünge und Gestalten des frühen Transsilvanismus 1918–1928 (Munich, 1993); and Franz Sz. Horváth, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung: Politische Strategien der ungarischen Minderheitselite in Rumänien 1931–1940 (Munich, 2007), 101–82. 11. István Bibó, Democracy, Revolution, Self-Determination: Selected Writings, ed. Károly Nagy (Boulder, 1991), 61–62. 12. Budapesti Hírlap, 28 July 1927. For more detailed treatment of the question, see: Miklós Zeidler, Ideas on Territorial Revision in Hungary 1920–1945 (Boulder, 2007), 103–44. 13. Andrew Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, Transylvania: Past and Future (Geneva, 1944), 152. 14. Sándor Márai, Röpirat a nemzetnevelés (Pozsony, 1993), 46–47, 72–75, 81–87. 15. Jörg K. Hoensch, Der ungarische Revisionismus und die Zerschlagung der Tschechoslowakei (Tübingen, 1967), 107–97. 16. Hoensch, Der ungarische Revisionismus, 216–89. 17. Balázs Ablonczy, Pál Teleki, 180–81, 219. 18. Balogh L. Béni, A magyar-román kapcsolatok 1939–1940-ben és a második bécsi döntés (Csíkszereda, 2002), 220–345. 19. Enikő Sajti E., Hungarians in the Voivodina 1918–1947 (Boulder, 2003), 191–223. 20. Ignác Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century (Budapest, 1999), 203–4. 21. Ignác Romsics (ed.), Wartime American Plans for a New Hungary (Boulder, 1992). 22. István Bibó, “A békeszerződés és a magyar demokrácia,” in István Kemény and Mátyás Sárközi (eds), István Bibó Összegyűjtött Munkái I. köt. (Bern, 1981), 199. 23. Gyula Szekfű, Forradalom után (Budapest, 1947), 69, 203.

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Chapter 6

BULGARIAN TERRITORIAL REVISIONISM AND BULGARIA’S RAPPROCHEMENT WITH THE THIRD REICH

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B

ulgaria’s decision to enter the First World War on September 15, 1915 as an ally of the Central Powers turned out to be a fateful, if not disastrous, choice for the state. This decision was preceded on the one hand by a contest of promises between the German coalition and the Entente, and on the other by a consideration of the relative pros and cons by the ruling bodies in Sofia. Bulgaria’s choice proved disastrous not only because the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918 dashed Bulgaria’s hopes of regaining its territories lost in the Second Balkan War, being, as it was, the main motive for giving up its neutrality. The primary result of the decision was that Bulgaria was deprived of other, even more valuable, territories, and at the same time was forced to pay heavy reparations and undergo an almost complete demilitarization. Among the territorial clauses of the Treaty of Neuilly signed by Bulgaria on November 27, 1919,1 the most important was the resolution depriving it of Western Thrace. First it was to be annexed by the Entente, followed—on the strength of the decision made in April 1920 at San Remo, and corroborated by a treaty of August 10 that year at Sèvres—by Greece.2 The most important asset of this area was its geo-strategic situation. Western Thrace—lying between the Maritsa River in the east and the Mesta in the west, the Rhodope mountains in the north and the Aegean Sea in the south—was of great political and economic value to the Bulgarian state. The region was especially important as it was part of the main strategic transit and trade routes that led from Macedonia and northern Greece through Eastern Thrace, Istanbul, and the Black Sea Straits to the eastern part of the Mediterranean, and from there to Africa and Asia. Moreover, control

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of Western Thrace gave Bulgaria’s navy and merchant marine their sole point of access to the open sea of the Aegean and thence the Mediterranean. The coast of the Black Sea alone did not provide Bulgaria with such comfort. The latter might at any moment become closed off if seagoing traffic was prevented from sailing through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, which would cut off Bulgaria from maritime communication with its allies and trade partners.3 A fact of equal importance was that Bulgaria drew from Western Thrace considerable economic benefits. The local soil favored cultivation of valuable products: tobacco, cotton, olives, grapes, and citrus fruits. Large deposits of zinc and lead ores, and conditions favorable to the construction of sea ports, were beneficial to the development of Bulgarian industry and foreign trade as well. Apart from its political and economic implications, the consequences of Bulgaria’s loss of Western Thrace extended into the psychological domain. We have to remember that the decision of the Allied Powers deeply affected the psyche of the Bulgarian nation, for whom the consequences of its involvement in the First World War signaled the downfall of the idea of a Greater Bulgaria stretching from the Black Sea to the Aegean. This was an idea which referred to the Bulgarian state at the height of its power in the Middle Ages. It is true that the full, Greater Bulgaria program was really only realized on paper, in the form of the Treaty of San Stefano, dictated to Ottoman Turkey by Russia in March 1878, and which was soon replaced by the Treaty of Berlin, which drastically curtailed Bulgarian territorial possessions. Nevertheless, as a result of its military successes in the First World War, Bulgaria gained territories that brought it closer to the ideal of San Stefano. Hence, the loss of the land that gave it access to the Aegean Sea—which at least partly gave Bulgarians a sense of being the heirs of the national program of Greater Bulgaria—caused real psychological shock. The sense of harm suffered because of the hard conditions of the Treaty of Neuilly were the basis of subsequent revisionist tendencies exhibited both by the ruling elite and by an overwhelming majority in Bulgarian society.4 However, Bulgaria’s territorial revisionism did not stop with Western Thrace. The territorial claims that Bulgaria brought forward embraced other lands lost after the First World War and given to its neighbors. Another serious loss suffered by Bulgaria was that of Southern Dobrudja. Together with Northern Dobrudja—situated between the lower Danube and the Black Sea, and annexed to Romania by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878—it was the cradle and granary of Bulgaria because of the large area of extremely fertile soil. Southern Dobrudja, where Bulgarians were in the majority, was annexed by Romania after the Second Balkan War of 1913. During the First World War, Bulgaria regained this territory for a few months, due to circumstances favorable to the German coalition on the front. But after the war was finished, the Treaty of Neuilly granted Southern Dobrudja to Romania.5

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Last but not least, Bulgaria lost its Western Outlands—embracing the regions of Bosilegrad and Tsaribrod, as well as some villages in the Kula and Strumitsa regions (part of Pirin Macedonia, later united with Vardar Macedonia)—in favor of Yugoslavia. It is worth noting that the lands annexed to Yugoslavia also included core territories of the Bulgarian state, which had belonged to Bulgaria since the Treaty of Berlin and had a predominantly Bulgarian population.6 Generally speaking, the outcome of the First World War meant a serious curtailment of Bulgaria’s territory, an intensification of its economic problems, and demilitarization meant that the country was forced to leave its borders undefended. Furthermore, because of the presence of the Supervisory Commission of the Entente and the Allied armies stationed on its territory, Bulgaria was, in fact, turned into an occupied country.

Postwar Revisionism and Postwar Alliances The consequences of Bulgaria’s participation in the First World War on the side of the Central Powers had from the very beginning been contested by Bulgarian society. Furthermore, the government in Sofia, though it subscribed to the Treaty of Neuilly, did not for a moment treat its decisions as binding and permanent solutions. Bulgaria’s ruling bodies were aware of their country’s international isolation and of the poor prospects for an improvement in its position in the Balkans. Given this situation, the political leadership of Bulgaria, in order not to remain passive, decided to pursue a policy of peaceful revisionism, based on Article 19 of the League of Nations’ Covenant and Article 48 of the Treaty of Neuilly. While the first was a kind of general principle, and made admittance for a revision of peace treaties, the second expressly obliged the powers of the Entente and Greece to guarantee Bulgaria free economic access to the Aegean Sea.7 However, both of these formal possibilities of revision were only theoretical, because their application, in the opinion of Paris and London, could create a precedent that would inevitably cause the erosion of the status quo established after the war. Neighboring countries were also unwilling to make any concessions in the matter of the actual unification of Bulgaria with Western Thrace. Hence, the Bulgarian policy of peaceful revisionism was doomed to failure from its very inception. The international position of Bulgaria in the Balkans could only improve—so it was estimated in Sofia—as a result of the patient and flexible endeavors of Bulgarian diplomacy, aimed at winning the confidence of the Great Powers, and by dispelling the suspicions of at least one of Bulgaria’s neighbors. However, this line of Sofia’s foreign policy in the Balkan region also encountered barriers. In fact, Bulgaria’s revisionist claims, directed against nearly all its neighbors, made them, though they were mutually in conflict, take a unanimous stand against Sofia in defense of the postwar, post-Neuilly territorial-cum-national order.

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Nevertheless, while striving to break the circle of ostracism, Bulgarian representatives first decided to make an effort at rapprochement with that neighbor whose interests—it seemed—were not opposed to their main revisionist claim: the recovery of territorial access to the Aegean Sea. In the international configuration that arose in the Balkans after the First World War, this state seemed to be the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (known, from 1929 on, as Yugoslavia). Moreover, the improvement in relations between Sofia and Belgrade created an opportunity for winning the approval and support of France for restoring to Bulgaria direct access to the Aegean coast in Western Thrace. In fact, Yugoslavia was the pillar of the pro-Versailles French system in this region of Europe.8 Therefore, it was imperative that Sofia make good neighborly relations with Yugoslavia a priority in its Balkan policy if it was ever to satisfy what was then seen as its most urgent territorial claim. The establishing of close relations with Greece and Turkey, or an alliance with their patron at that time, Italy, did not come into play. Such a direction in Bulgarian policy would have enforced Sofia’s resignation from or suspension of its endeavors aimed at regaining territorial access to the Aegean Sea. Moreover, a rapprochement with Rome could have meant that Bulgaria would come into conflict with Belgrade, since Italy would try to enlist its cooperation in the plan of dismembering Yugoslavia.9 Still, the pro-Yugoslav line adopted by Bulgaria did not produce the expected results. Despite the repeated declarations of its official representatives in Sofia of their readiness to improve the climate of mutual relations, Belgrade remained skeptical towards any revisionist claims made by the Bulgarians. Neither Bulgaria’s offer to compromise in the matter of territorial controversies, nor that of considerably reducing the movement of the armed units of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), itself created on Bulgarian territory, nor even the promise of abating Bulgarian claims to Macedonia and the Western Outlands, had any discernible effect on Belgrade. Thus, the cause of Bulgaria’s territorial access to the Aegean Sea did not win the support of Yugoslavia’s leaders. Undeterred, Sofia consistently endeavored to improve the climate of relations with its western neighbor in the first years following the war. By 1923, this had only led to the signing of an agreement at Nish in March, which—though it regulated some pressing problems—did not do away with the main reasons for the Bulgarian–Yugoslav controversy.10 Alongside its endeavors to achieve a rapprochement with Yugoslavia, the Bulgarian government took steps aimed at normalizing relations with Turkey, with which it had severed diplomatic relations under pressure from the Entente at the end of the First World War.11 Turkey was the only neighbor with whom Bulgaria was not engaged in territorial dispute. Furthermore, Turkey was the only state of a similar international status in postwar Europe. Both of these countries had had peace treaties imposed on them, and which limited their

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sovereignty to a similar extent, and thus stigmatized them; both were burdened with the odium of revisionism. Additionally, both were isolated in their regions as well as in Europe. However, in contrast to Turkey, which was able to field an armed opposition to the Treaty of Sèvres of August 10, 1920, Bulgaria could only appeal to the good will of the victorious states. But, although it did not follow the example of the Turkish fight against the dictates of the Entente, Bulgaria watched it with the utmost attention and approval. Moreover, in the years 1921/22 the Bulgarians actively assisted the followers of Kemal Pasha by sending volunteers to the Greek-Turkish front and providing Turkey with arms, munitions, and other equipment. As a matter of fact, the victory of Kemal Atatürk over the Greek army gave the Bulgarians hope for a future revision of the Treaty of Neuilly in matters concerning Western Thrace. Such a revision would be supported by the Kemal party, since the Treaty of Sèvres lost its binding power after Kemal’s victory.12 The complementary interests of both states led to the renewal of diplomatic relations, followed by the establishment of bilateral economic contacts. Still, good neighborly cooperation in the field of diplomacy and economy, as well as a lack of territorial disputes, did not signify an idyllic situation in Bulgarian– Turkish relations. One problem concerned the situation of Turkish refugees from the lands conquered by Bulgaria in the First Balkan War, who had not been recompensed for the property they had left behind. The other problem concerned Bulgarian refugees from Eastern Thrace, for whose return to their native country Sofia appealed in vain. There were also bilateral differences concerning the status of the Bulgarian minority in Turkey as well as the Turkish minority in Bulgaria. In addition, Bulgarians could not count on Turkey’s friendliness towards their revisionist claims because of differences in the politico-strategic interests of both states. Hence, during negotiations over the Treaty of Lausanne in the autumn of 1922, as a result of which Greece surrendered Eastern Thrace to Turkey, the Bulgarians vainly hoped for revisions to the treaties of Neuilly and Sèvres concerning Western Thrace. However, Turkey was not eager to support Bulgaria’s claim for regaining territorial access to the Aegean Sea. It is significant that the Turks, who took a revisionist stand in Lausanne concerning their own country, categorically demanded that the status quo established after the First World War not be changed in relation to Bulgaria, so as not to give it access to the open sea.13 In its effort to lessen the constraints of postwar peace dictates in the Balkan region, Sofia also made some attempts to overcome the impasse in its relations with Romania. These efforts, however, encountered insurmountable obstacles, since any initiative taken by the Bulgarian government to regulate disputes and establish at least a functional modus vivendi with Romania concealed for Bucharest a threat of being deprived of Southern Dobrudja. The request made in Bucharest in 1922 that Romania help Bulgaria secure a territorial

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corridor to the Aegean Sea met with a cool reaction. Any form of Bulgarian revisionism aroused in Romania a fear of possible Bulgarian designs on the Dobrudja province.14 We may say without exaggeration that in the interwar period Bulgarian–Romanian relations were almost completely determined by the question of Southern Dobrudja. This rendered impossible the solution of other issues of mutual interest and any improvement in relations between Sofia and Bucharest. The priority of Western Thrace in the hierarchy of Bulgarian territorial revisionism undoubtedly ruled out any chance of improvement in Bulgarian–Greek relations after the end of the First World War. Sofia’s claims—caused by the loss of Kavalla Macedonia (the eastern part of Aegean Macedonia, situated between the Mesta in the east and the Struma in the west) as a result of Bulgaria’s defeat in the Second Balkan War in 1913—were not the only ones. Other claims resulted from the loss of Western Thrace, and there were three controversial aspects of the Treaty of Neuilly: one territorial, another financial, and one concerning the situation of the Bulgarian minority in Greece. Because of Bulgarian–Greek enmity, Article 48 of the Treaty of Neuilly, and Articles 4 and 5 of the Treaty of Sèvres, which granted Bulgaria a right to preserve its economic zone in one of Greece’s Aegean ports, were nothing but a dead letter for the authorities in Bulgaria. In fact they were only willing to recognize communication with the Aegean Sea that took the form of a territorial corridor across the autonomous territory of Western Thrace, or at least across the area subject to the jurisdiction of the powers of the Entente. Only an enclave of this kind would—in the opinion of Sofia—guarantee Bulgaria free access to the Aegean Sea. Therefore the Bulgarians firmly rejected the proposals of Athens in 1923 (renewed in 1926) that offered them, under pressure from the Entente, a free-trade zone in one of the Aegean ports, with preference being given to Salonica.15 Thus, finally, the persistent endeavors of Bulgarian governments to gain the support of the Great Powers and neighboring states for the recovery of access to the Aegean Sea remained fruitless. Nor did Sofia succeed in its efforts to stop the stream of Bulgarians from Western Thrace and Kavalla Macedonia coming to Bulgaria as a result of the restrictive policy of Hellenization conducted by the Greek authorities. One must recall that after the conclusion of an agreement with Turkey about the exchange of populations in 1923, the Greek government had settled in Western Thrace and Kavalla Macedonia a population of over one million Greeks coming from Eastern Thrace, Istanbul, Asia Minor, the Caucasus and the coast of the Black Sea. The subsequent Greek colonization of Western Thrace and Kavalla Macedonia led to the large-scale exodus of Slavic people from these lands, permanently changing their earlier Slavic ethnic character.16 It is worth emphasizing that Bulgarian diplomacy between 1919 and 1923 was aimed at making the Entente grant Bulgaria direct territorial access to the Aegean Sea mainly for politico-strategic reasons, and Bulgaria consciously chose

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a pro-French orientation in its external political strategy. The course taken and followed consistently by all Bulgarian governments regarding Paris and its Balkan allies was motivated by a hope that with French assistance it would be possible to revise the status of Western Thrace. However, when this strategy failed, Bulgarian representatives, having lost their illusions concerning this matter after 1923, temporarily suspended this foreign policy strategy and started awaiting suitable international conditions. Meanwhile, the Bulgarian government concentrated its endeavors on improving the situation of Bulgarian minorities in Yugoslavia, Romania, and Greece, and on satisfying financial claims concerning the real estate left behind by Bulgarians in neighboring countries when they were forced to emigrate after the First World War. Only at the beginning of the 1930s, when a trend toward a revision of peace treaties emerged in European international relations, forcefully advocated by Germany and Italy, did Sofia initiate attempts at reviewing the economic and military clauses of the Treaty of Neuilly. As a result, in 1932 the clauses concerning reparations imposed on Bulgaria were abolished.17 This was the first stage in the gradual liquidation of the restrictions introduced through post-First World War peace treaties like that of Versailles and contested by revisionist states. The ban on armament imposed on Bulgaria, was, however, left in place. What dominated both the minds of Bulgarian society and its ruling elites was the painful awareness that they had achieved no progress in the revision of the most adverse territorial decisions of the Treaty of Neuilly.

Germany as the Main Revisionist Power Soon, however, following Hitler’s takeover in 1933 and the relentless offensive of the Third Reich against the order of things established in the Treaty of Versailles, a new political climate appeared in the international arena that proved favorable to Bulgarian revisionism. Indeed, Berlin’s renouncement in 1935 of the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, and the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, influenced Sofia’s foreign policy in the interwar years. Moreover, a shift in the winds of the postwar status quo was soon confirmed when fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. The common politico-ideological aims of Germany and Italy brought them closer together, which found its expression in the creation of the Berlin–Rome Axis on October 22, 1936. Italy’s accession to the Anti-Comintern Pact on November 6, 1937 finally sealed the orientation of Mussolini’s cabinet towards Nazi Germany. At the cost of giving Hitler a free hand in Austria, the Italians gained German promises that the Balkans would remain in the sphere of Italian interests.18 It might seem that the country best suited to assisting Bulgaria in its revisionist aims was fascist Italy, which consistently questioned the order established after

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the First World War and was especially interested in the Balkan region. Still, in comparison to Berlin’s all-out offensive in this respect, Rome proposed more moderate changes to the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. Besides, Italy, with less economic and military potential, was bound to respect Germany’s priority in its competition for influence in Bulgaria. But as Germany grew in importance with regard to the Bulgarian economy, so the influence of Italy declined.19 Another obstacle to siding with Rome stemmed from Italy’s anti-Yugoslav orientation, which clashed with Bulgaria’s policy of maintaining good relations with Yugoslavia. Thus, it was not fascist Italy but the Third Reich that appeared to offer hope to Bulgaria regarding the realization of its program of territorial revisionism. In the first place, the political and economic aims of both countries complemented one another. Hitler’s strategy of expansion towards the east and the south made the central situation of Bulgaria in the Balkans very important. And the Bulgarian market was extremely receptive to German industrial products—especially arms, munitions, and other military equipment—while peace-treaty clauses about the demilitarization of Bulgaria were still in force. The economy of the Third Reich, meanwhile, could meet some of the needs of the Wehrmacht with Bulgarian agricultural products and raw materials. Bulgaria was also a permanent and important client of German banks, which offered credit and loans on profitable terms.20 But Bulgaria found the most profitable aspect of its relations with the Third Reich in the evident convergence of their revisionist aims. Nevertheless, we should stress that there was no ideological affinity between the systems of the two states. It is impossible to identify the Nazi system of Germany with the authoritarian rule of King Boris III in Bulgaria. The fact that Sofia referred to its alliance with the German coalition during the First World War as a “brotherhood in arms” should be treated as a product of the diplomatic game conducted with Berlin. Reference to the sentiment of friendship that linked the Bulgarians and the Germans, appearing more and more frequently on the eve of the Second World War within Bulgarian propaganda and media, were mainly made for the sake of social opinion at home and abroad.21 The watchwords of revisionism spoken by the leadership of the Third Reich, followed by the concrete actions that overthrew the postwar order in Europe, appealed to Bulgaria’s leaders because of their promising content. While aligning itself with the anti-Versailles trend that demanded “understanding” and “tolerance” from the Western democracies regarding the revisionist claims of Germany and Italy, Sofia gradually gave up its earlier moderate stance toward the military and territorial clauses of the Treaty of Neuilly in favor of active participation in the struggle for achieving those aims. When Nazi territorial expansionism found concrete form in the Anschluss of Austria, Bulgarian revisionism gained more impetus. In this situation, Great Britain and France, as well as

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their pro-Versailles allies in the Balkans, found it necessary to pay more attention to the policy of Sofia. Initially, they tried to strengthen the Little Entente and the Balkan Entente by drawing Bulgaria closer to the latter organization. These plans, however, failed, since after 1936 the Little Entente had rapidly lost its significance, while the offer of Sofia’s accession to the Balkan Entente was categorically rejected by the Bulgarian government as contrary to the aims of their foreign policy. Bulgaria tightened its bonds with Yugoslavia, and in 1937 the two countries signed a bilateral pact of everlasting friendship. This rapprochement undermined the coherence of the Balkan Entente, and undermined the previous solidarity of its signatories in the face of Bulgarian revisionism.22 As a result Sofia found itself with the opportunity of formulating its claims openly, and efforts made to draw it into the fold of the Western democracies and the Axis Powers allowed Bulgaria to steer a middle course between them. This meant Sofia could maintain a non-aligned position and take advantage of contradictions between the two blocs. Bulgaria’s leaders certainly considered it too risky to follow Berlin in making a full-frontal attack on the Versailles system, or to realize the country’s revisionist aims under the protection of the military and economic power of Nazi Germany. What kept Boris III and the Bulgarian government from openly showing solidarity with the revisionist program of the Third Reich was, on the one hand, their fear of the reaction of their Balkan neighbors and the Western Powers, and on the other a lack of sufficient domestic support for the king’s authoritarian regime. Adopting too close a relationship with Berlin risked an outbreak of social discontent with probable dangerous consequences for the monarch and the government. Besides, Bulgaria’s leaders had to take into account that an alliance with Germany would lead to an effective subordination of Bulgaria to that country. And this would involve Bulgaria in war, the imminent outbreak of which was universally expected. Thus, the temptation to renounce the military clauses of post-First World War peace treaties and align Bulgarian revisionism with the Nazi program of “a new deal” in Europe, and so hopefully regain the lands lost between 1912 and 1918, was accompanied by the fear of being plunged into war. While taking into consideration ambivalent sentiments both among the political elite and society at large, Sofia initially seems to have counted on the Western Powers and the League of Nations to make voluntary concessions to Bulgarian revisionism. Hence, in trying to gain their confidence, Sofia was very restrained in putting forward its revisionist stipulations; meanwhile, in relations with the Third Reich it only placed emphasis on the development of economic contacts. It was impossible, however, to sustain this position for long. In fact, the dynamic growth in Bulgarian–German trade on terms established by the stronger partner soon led to the growing dependence of Sofia on Berlin. For the Germans, this was a convenient instrument of political influence. While taking advantage of Bulgaria’s

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demand for imports of German military equipment, an illegal trade necessitated by Bulgaria’s demilitarized status, Berlin tried to torpedo the endeavors of Great Britain, France, and Bulgaria’s neighbors aimed at enlisting it in the project of blocking the expansion of the Axis Powers in the Balkans. Although the king and the Bulgarian government kept pretending that they were still interested in good relations with the West, at the same time they continued to reject proposals for involving Bulgaria in a system of collective security in the Balkans. As a result, the Western democracies and Bulgaria’s Balkan neighbors decided to break the resistance of Sofia by abolishing the demilitarization clauses of the Treaty of Neuilly. On July 31, 1938, the Bulgarian premier, Georgi Kioseivanov, and his Greek counterpart, Ioannis Metaxas, the latter representing the signatories of the Balkan Entente, signed an agreement in Salonika on the remilitarization of Bulgaria that opened up the possibility of making legal purchases of military equipment with money borrowed from the Western Powers.23 Indeed, the consent given to the purchase of arms and munitions was not too big a concession on the part of Bulgaria’s neighbors, since the Bulgarian state was already well provided with German military equipment, imported earlier on. It is worth noting that the Salonika agreement aroused favorable responses in the international arena, and was well received by both the pro-Versailles and the revisionist blocs, despite their contradictory aims. In fact, the Western democracies and the Balkan countries associated with them saw the new agreement as an important element in the process of building the necessary structures of peace and security in the Balkans. The Third Reich and Italy, on the other hand, saw it as another step along the path of abolishing the Versailles system.24 A similar opinion was held by the Bulgarian leadership, which treated the abolition of the military clauses of the Treaty of Neuilly as the beginning of a new stage in the policy of revisionism—a revisionism which would be effected in a voluntary way, for Sofia still believed the restrictions imposed in Neuilly could be abolished without conflict. Still, the Bulgarian policy of territorial revisionism only seemed to get under way after the Munich Agreement of September 1938. The concessions made by the Western democracies in favor of Nazi Germany and at the cost of Czechoslovakia aroused enthusiasm among many Bulgarians. They perceived this event as opening the door on revisions to the post-First World War peace treaties, and at the same time they saw it as a green light for the unrestrained articulation of the territorial claims of Bulgaria. At the same time, however, the Munich Agreement caused considerable apprehension about the future fate of small countries and nations, which made Sofia cautious about undertaking any actions aimed at achieving their revisionist aims. However, the Bulgarian leadership found it more and more difficult to suppress public feeling fuelled by nationalist and pro-fascist organizations. This was especially difficult after the socalled First Vienna Award of November 2, 1938, in which the Third Reich and

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Italy manifestly sided with Hungarian revisionism by overturning the Treaty of Trianon and restoring to Hungary southern Slovakia and a part of CarpathoUkraine. This triggered an escalation of nationalist propaganda in Bulgaria that found its outlet in massive support for the revision of the territorial clauses of the Treaty of Neuilly, which, if carried through, would bring about a solution to what was perceived as an urgent national problem. The result was a polarization of the political scene in Bulgaria. The extremist forces sought to satisfy territorial claims though close cooperation with Germany, while the democratic opposition, without giving up their revisionist aims, emphasized the need to take actions that would improve the situation of Bulgarian minorities in neighboring countries, which they sought to do with the help of the Anglo–French bloc; leftist forces, on the other hand, with communists at the head, orientated themselves toward the Soviet Union, which openly declared its support for Bulgarian revisionism.25 In trying to ascertain the possibility of satisfying at least partially its territorial claims, Bulgaria started to sound them out. The earlier prioritization of Western Thrace in the hierarchy of territorial revisionism was replaced by a desire for the recovery of Southern Dobrudja, an aim that seemed more realistic at the time. The recovery of Southern Dobrudja seemed to the Bulgarian revisionists a concession that the Western democracies and their Balkan neighbors were more likely to accept. Sofia realized that while its recovery of Western Thrace was seen as absolutely inadmissible by Great Britain and France, these powers might ultimately agree to return the lands Bulgaria lost to Romania after the First World War if they could win Bulgaria’s accession to the structures of defense against the expansion of the Third Reich in the Balkans. Besides, the fact that Bulgarians formed a definite majority of the population in Southern Dobrudja was another point in its favor, Sofia hoped, and thus this was part of its argument for the recovery of the province.26 However, many complications prevented Bulgaria from simply declaring a wish to recover Southern Dobrudja. In the first place the soundings made by Sofia did not yield promising results. The Third Reich, interested in ensuring peace in the Balkans, had no wish to allow Bulgaria to act against Romania. A loyal ally of Berlin, Rome took a similar stance. The Western democracies, in their turn, made their support for the project conditional in ways that were unacceptable to the Bulgarian side. Neither could the illusion be maintained that the signatories to the Balkan Entente would be agreeable to the fulfillment of Bulgaria’s claims on Southern Dobrudja; Romania, of course, rejected these claims categorically. Bucharest thus remained intransigent, and relented only when the territorial integrity of the Romanian state was otherwise threatened by Moscow’s demand for the annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, to which the Third Reich consented.27 At the same time, Hungary demanded the return of Transylvania. Now Romania found that its partners in the Balkan Pact

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were not eager to give assistance to their ally. All this made Romania ready to enter into negotiations with Sofia. However, it soon turned out that these were only entered into as a way of gaining time in the hope that conditions more favorable to the interests of Romania might appear after the war.28 In the meantime, Sofia, which could not count on the Anglo–French bloc (especially after the downfall of France in 1940) or on the Axis Powers, perceived in its revisionist calculations a third possible partner: the Soviet Union. The emergence of the Soviet Union on the eve of the Second World War as a force to be reckoned with in the Balkans and Europe as a whole, along with its concrete plans for incorporating its western neighbors, as well as the Soviet– German rivalry for influence on the states of East Central Europe, aroused hopes among the Bulgarian leadership that the recovery of Southern Dobrudja might be realized by playing the Soviet card wisely. These hopes seemed to be justified because, in contrast to the vague and evasive reactions of Berlin and Rome to Bulgaria’s request for support for its claim on Southern Dobrudja, Moscow often expressed approval for the revision of the Bulgarian–Romanian border, and even declared that it would offer Bulgaria its armed support. Naturally, the Bulgarian king and government realized that the pro-Bulgarian attitude of the Soviets was dictated by a wish to lure and subordinate Bulgaria under the guise of politico-military alliance. The direct participation of Moscow in the recovery of Southern Dobrudja was, of course, rejected, since the cost would be the coming of communism to Bulgaria, something which was absolutely out of the question for Sofia. In this complex situation, Bulgaria’s rulers chose to use the offer of Soviet help concerning Sofia’s revisionist aims as a means of putting pressure on the Axis Powers. Thus, revealing Germany’s pre-eminent position in its foreign policy, Sofia asked for Berlin’s advice on how to react to Moscow’s offer of assistance in the recovery of Southern Dobrudja. In doing so, Sofia wanted to show that the Kremlin was ready to get involved in the fulfillment of Bulgarian claims, and at the same time to stimulate Berlin into contributing to an effective solution of the Dobrudja question while pushing the Soviet Union away from involvement.29 But the leaders of the Third Reich were still far from eager to come to the assistance of Bulgarian revisionism. While conducting war operations on the Western Front, they primarily wanted to maintain the status quo in Southeastern Europe. Therefore they advised the Bulgarians to restrain themselves in formulating territorial claims addressed to Bucharest. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union’s annexation of Bessarabia and north Bukovina, accomplished in 1940, started a dynamic process of territorial revision in this part of Eastern Europe. This mobilized Bulgaria’s rulers into once again playing the Soviet card in order to gain German support for the recovery of Southern Dobrudja. Playing this trump card required a lot of skill, since on the one hand due reserve had to be maintained so as not to allow a political rapprochement with Moscow, and on the other the Third Reich

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had to be convinced that tardiness in satisfying Bulgaria’s claims would make Sofia accept the otherwise unwanted help of the Soviets.

The Recovery of Southern Dobrudja In the middle of July 1940, the Bulgarian foreign minister, Ivan Popov, declared to the ambassadors of Germany and Italy that if Berlin would not help in meeting the expectations of Bulgaria, the latter would have no choice but to solve the Dobrudja question with the assistance of Moscow. Popov seemed to convince the leaders of the Axis Powers that the well known pro-Russian and pro-communist sympathies of some in Bulgaria, and even more the consistent support and potential military engagement of the Soviet Union in the recovery of Southern Dobrudja, would strengthen Soviet influence in the country.30 This, in turn, would undermine Nazi plans for extending the war against the Soviet Union, which required that the Balkan region remain under the complete control of the Third Reich. This appraisal of the international situation in East Central Europe led Berlin to the conclusion that the territorial integrity of Romania should be sacrificed for the sake of satisfying the revisionist claims of Bulgaria (and Hungary). This would not only push Moscow away from involvement in the problems of this part of the continent, but it would also make Sofia (and Budapest) more dependent on the Axis. Hitler’s decision, made in this spirit, was communicated to the authorities in Bucharest, and in its wake, on July 26, at the Führer’s residence in Salzburg, Popov and the Bulgarian premier, Bogdan Filov, obtained explicit German support for their claim concerning Southern Dobrudja, while the Romanian side was ordered by the Axis to enter into negotiations with Bulgaria without delay.31 After painstaking negotiations, which required further pressure to be exerted by the Third Reich on Bucharest, on September 7, 1940 (the Treaty of Craiova) both sides, at the request of Sofia, signed an agreement in which Romania ceded the Dobrudja province as defined by its 1912 borders to Bulgaria.32 The recovery of this territory was perceived as the first, bloodless victory for Bulgarian territorial revisionism by the Bulgarian leadership and society at large. Though it was not a “voluntary” concession, as the abolishment of the military clauses of the Treaty of Neuilly had been in 1938, it nevertheless considerably underpinned the authority of Boris III and his close associates, as well as vindicating the choice of close cooperation with the Third Reich and fascist Italy. Indeed, on balance, it was Berlin (and Rome) which had realized Bulgaria’s claims concerning Southern Dobrudja, though they did not do so on their own initiative nor without pursuing their own interests. In fact, the pro-Bulgarian attitude of the Axis Powers in the dispute between Sofia and Bucharest was a product of the international situation at the time, which happened to be favorable to Bulgarian revisionism.

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After the annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, the Kremlin persistently strived to further Soviet expansion in East Central Europe by, for example, actively supporting the claims that Sofia (and Budapest) addressed to Romania; it even offered the Bulgarians concrete armed support in the matter. The eagerness of the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the growing pressure of revisionist feelings in Bulgaria on the other, could certainly have weakened the influence of the Third Reich on Bulgaria, or even spelled its end. But the Nazi leadership did not want to allow this to happen. As regards Bulgaria’s preferences in the resolution of the Dobrudja question, we must remember that Sofia consented not only because of its obligations toward Germany but also because the king and his associates were afraid of a growth in Bolshevism in Bulgaria should Soviet intervention be the only course of action. By effectively eliminating the Kremlin from the whole process, the Bulgarian leadership reduced the role of Moscow to a bargaining chip in its relations with Berlin. Thus the readiness of the Soviet Union to assist in the aims of Bulgarian revisionism was skillfully turned to benefit the Bulgarian establishment. The manner in which Bulgaria secured German help for its revisionist cause in 1940 was certainly a great success for Bulgarian diplomacy during the Second World War. The solution to the Dobrudja question during the initial stages of the Second World War was a significant event in the modern history of Bulgaria. This was the only success, sanctioned by international law, of the territorial revisionism that was fundamental to Bulgarian foreign policy. The aims of revisionism had been adopted by nearly every government in Sofia following the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. It is worth stressing that the Treaty of Craiova, which restored Southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria, was recognized by both the Axis and Allied powers.33 The recovery of this territory after bilateral negotiations and the signing of an adequate agreement by the representatives of Bulgaria and Romania also justified leaving the Bulgarian–Romanian border unchanged after the end of the Second World War (this being agreed during the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947),34 regardless of the fact that Southern Dobrudja was regained with the help of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Though Romania ceded the territory under Axis pressure, it could not be denied that Bucharest agreed to this of its own free will. This was in contrast to the realization of Hungarian territorial revisionism, carried out by the arbitration of the Axis Powers, which obliged Romania to cede to Hungary a part of Slovakia, Carpatho-Ukraine and Transylvania.35 However, Berlin’s help in resolving the Dobrudja question was not disinterested. Hence, soon after satisfying Bulgaria’s claim, Berlin started to put even more pressure on it to join the Tripartite Pact. Such a decision, however, required the Bulgarian leadership to drop its declared neutrality and commit to full cooperation with the Axis Powers. So, although Boris III and his government felt that Germany should be rewarded for its help in securing Southern Dobrudja, and should not be discouraged from engaging in other revisionist

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claims involving Bulgaria, fear of being drawn into an armed conflict meant that they were far from willing to join the Tripartite Pact, or at least they desired delaying such an act as long as possible. Hence the Bulgarian monarch and his closest associates reacted evasively to the requests of the Third Reich, arguing that they were not prepared for war and were threatened by Great Britain and the signatories of the Balkan Entente (mainly Turkey and Yugoslavia).36 Besides, Bulgaria’s leaders were mindful of the fact that they had been warned by the King of England in October 1940 against allowing the Wehrmacht onto Bulgarian territory.37 It is worth adding that the same reasoning lay behind Sofia’s rejection of Mussolini’s request that Bulgaria take part in the attack on Greece in return for Italian support for Bulgarian claims to Western Thrace and Kavalla Macedonia.38 However, adopting a friendly policy towards the Axis Powers proved not to be a good basis for regaining these regions.

Bulgaria’s Accession to the Tripartite Pact Following the occupation of France and the considerable weakening of Great Britain, Berlin sought allies in the Balkans. Hence, after Hungary and Romania joined the Tripartite Pact,39 the leaders of the Third Reich decided it was time for the accession of Bulgaria. This was especially so because Bulgarian territorial revisionism, enlivened by the recovery of Southern Dobrudja, required— in Germany’s opinion—Bulgaria’s further engagement. However, despite Germany’s reasoning, Sofia was still uncertain what position to take. Its delaying tactics, and especially its maintenance of contacts with the British Foreign Office and the Soviet National Committee of Foreign Affairs, aroused suspicion and skepticism in Berlin as to the authenticity of Bulgaria’s “friendly neutrality.” Given this situation, on October 19, 1940, the leaders of the Third Reich proposed, in the tone of an ultimatum, that Bulgaria join the Tripartite Pact without delay.40 Though Sofia tried to postpone the moment of crossing the Rubicon, it realized that it had now become impossible to continue thwarting Germany’s intentions. Once Germany had decided to wage war in the Balkans, prior to Operation Barbarossa, it would no longer be satisfied with Sofia’s platonic declaration of friendship toward the Axis Powers while remaining outside the alliance. Boris III, having realized that Hitler’s army was ready to enter Bulgaria without Sofia’s consent, finally accepted the offer of an alliance with the Third Reich, thus allowing the Wehrmacht to march into Bulgaria during his meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden in November 1940.41 It is worth stressing that Bulgarian historiography does not appraise Bulgaria’s decision to join the Tripartite Pact in an unequivocal way. Some historians have maintained that this was the culmination of the pro-Nazi option consciously pursued by Bulgaria’s ruling elite.42 However, it would be wrong to identify the

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authoritarianism—termed “monarcho-fascism”—of the Bulgarian king and his entourage with the Nazism of the Third Reich. A diametrically opposed standpoint has been taken by researchers who have maintained that Sofia was in fact against joining the Nazi coalition, and that Bulgaria’s accession was solely caused by external pressures.43 Side by side with these extreme views there are other, more moderate, opinions, which present this radical step in Bulgarian foreign policy in a more nuanced light. Among those interpretations worthy of note are those which state that the Bulgarian monarch did indeed agree to enter into an alliance with Berlin, but in doing so he did not define the date when this decision would take effect; or simply that he consented only to giving the German army access to Bulgarian territory while not agreeing to joining the Tripartite Pact.44 Given the available sources, it seems indisputable that Boris III wanted to avoid the direct involvement of Bulgaria’s armed forces in the war operations conducted by Germany.45 And yet there was a certain inevitability to the subordination of his country to the designs of the Third Reich. In fact, since the early 1930s economic and political interdependence between Bulgaria and Germany had been growing, and this was in line with the growing revisionist spirit of Bulgarian society. After regaining Southern Dobrudja, the country was impatient to see its rulers regain other lands lost after the First World War. One has to remember that for many decades Bulgarian foreign policy was dominated by the spirit of territorial revisionism, which was itself supported by nearly all sections of Bulgarian society. By the autumn of 1940, this spirit had made the king and the government determined to use the favorable international situation as the basis for the recovery of Western Thrace and Kavalla Macedonia (and even Vardar Macedonia), despite the fact that this course of action was likely to lead their country into the conflagration of war. Moreover, the pro-German option of the decision-makers was stimulated by articles in the Bulgarian press which suggested that there was no alternative to joining the Nazi coalition, and that siding with the Western democracies, even if they were to win the war, would achieve nothing, for they would never allow Bulgaria to regain access to the Aegean Sea.46 Hence, from the point of view of Bulgarian territorial revisionism, the Third Reich was the only power that could assist Bulgaria in nullifying the various consequences of the Treaty of Neuilly. The Bulgarian leadership was confirmed in this conviction on the one hand by the military successes of Germany in the initial period of the Second World War, and on the other by a lack of belief in the military power of the Western democracies, the unwillingness of the latter to get involved in the problems of the states of East Central Europe, as well as the desire to avoid the possible political consequences of an alliance with the Soviet Union. Sofia was thus significantly constrained, unable to adopt any political line contrary to the interests of Berlin because its economy was subordinated to the German war machine. In the autumn of 1940 all these factors led Boris III

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to hitch Bulgaria to the Nazi war chariot, a decision which in fact could not be avoided. Meanwhile, to dispel fear in Sofia over making a formal decision that could not be reversed, Berlin argued that Bolshevism, by now the lot of the Baltic states, was the only alternative to joining the Tripartite Pact. Indeed, the leaders of the Third Reich were aware of the ruling elite’s fear of communist ideology, and of the threat to Bulgaria’s independence represented by the Soviets. At the same time, Germany lured Sofia with the promise that after joining the Tripartite Pact Bulgaria would regain Western Thrace and Kavalla Macedonia. Still, when the Bulgarian premier, Bogdan Filov, summoned up the courage to demand the annexation of Vardar Macedonia as well, Hitler and Ribbentrop, who were considering enlisting Yugoslavia in the alliance, replied in an evasive way.47 As a result, those in charge of Bulgarian foreign policy decided that in view of the strong determination of the Third Reich to pursue its war plans it was only logical to submit to Germany, especially since to do so might help in regaining the Aegean coast (and perhaps even Macedonia), whereas to oppose it might leave Bulgaria empty-handed or at the mercy of German aggression. Thus, before the dye was cast, Bulgarian decision-makers, guided by these calculations, obtained agreement from the Germans on two issues: the first was a written promise that Greek territories claimed by Bulgaria would be subject to annexation and transferred to Bulgaria; the second was Hitler’s agreement to leave Bulgaria out of the planned attack on Greece (the Maritsa operation), which was to guard Bulgaria against attack by its neighbors.48 Thus Sofia dropped its initial plan of regaining Western Thrace and Kavalla Macedonia by peaceful, diplomatic measures, as had been the case with Southern Dobrudja, and accepted that its revisionist aims would be realized by force, though without the direct participation of Bulgarian armed forces. It is worth noting that even before Bulgaria joined the Nazi coalition, Germany controlled crucial strategic centers in Bulgaria. The entire country was under the economic control of German banks and companies, and many bilateral economic agreements had been concluded without observing the parity of partners. Also, the Gestapo’s Middle Eastern headquarters had been established in Bulgaria.49 In this way, Bulgaria had become an economic and military base of the Third Reich. Finally, by signing the document confirming Bulgaria’s accession to the Tripartite Pact in Vienna on March 1, 1941,50 Bogdan Filov merely established officially an already existing state of affairs regarding Bulgaria’s economy and its policy on Germany. This impaired the sovereignty of the Bulgarian state and deepened its isolation in the international arena. This was, however, the price to be paid for the promised recovery of Western Thrace and the fulfillment of Bulgarian aspirations regarding Kavalla Macedonia, as the Bulgarian premier made clear in Parliament in his speech justifying Bulgaria’s accession to the Nazi coalition.51

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The reactions of Great Britain and the United States to this step were not especially hostile. London broke off diplomatic relations with Bulgaria, declared an economic blockade of the country, and threatened to declare war; Washington, meanwhile, simply froze Bulgarian accounts in American banks. In fact, the most moderate reaction of all was that of the Soviet Union, which simply expressed its disapproval of Sofia’s accession to the Tripartite Pact.52 This can be explained by Moscow’s wish to appear a loyal ally of the Third Reich at the time, as well as its wish to retain the freedom of maneuver in the Balkans. After joining the Axis Powers, Bulgaria’s basic obligation toward the German coalition was to give the Wehrmacht access to its territory and strategic infrastructure—roads, railroads, bridges, forts, airports, and so forth. Furthermore, Bulgaria was obliged to maintain the German army stationed in its territory. The Germans, having taken into consideration the reasons for Bulgaria’s refusal to become involved in military operations in the Balkans, reduced Bulgaria’s military participation to the protection of its own country and to protecting detachments of the German Twelfth Army in Bulgaria from attack and sabotage.53 After the crushing defeat of Yugoslavia and Greece by the Third Reich and its satellites in the spring of 1941, Germany withdrew its troops, which were needed for the attack on the Soviet Union in June. Thus the Nazi leaders became interested in making Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria take control of the occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece. Bulgarian troops were scheduled to be used mainly in Yugoslavia. On April 7, the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, conveyed to Sofia the Führer’s wish that three Bulgarian divisions occupy Vardar Macedonia. But it was only on April 18 that Ribbentrop defined in detail the areas to be occupied by Bulgarian troops. According to the telegram sent to the Bulgarian leadership, the occupied zone in Yugoslav Macedonia was demarcated by a line linking Pirot, Vranje, and Skopje, and hence along the Vardar River to the Greek border. Kavalla Macedonia and Western Thrace, on the other hand, could be entered by the Bulgarians quite freely, with the exception of the area east of a line between Svilengrad and Alexandroupoli, which was to remain a demilitarized zone in order to appease Turkey.54 In contrast to the shape of the territories taken from Greece, in principle accepted by Sofia, the borders of the territory to be occupied by the Bulgarian army in Yugoslavia were a cause of great disappointment to the Bulgarian ruling elite, who had hoped to gain control of a much larger area in Vardar Macedonia. Thus, on April 19, 1941, Boris III went to Hitler’s headquarters in Vienna and asked that the Bulgarian zone of occupation in Yugoslav Macedonia be expanded, while also making it clear that Bulgaria desired the acquisition of Salonika in Greek Macedonia.55 But the Germans themselves wanted to take control of Salonika, the biggest Macedonian port, while in the matter of western Vardar Macedonia they had to take into consideration the fact of Italian designs on the area.56 Finally, on April 27, as the Third Reich’s invasion of the Soviet

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Union approached, the Bulgarian zone of occupation was enlarged to include a part of Macedonia west of a line between Brod and Bitola, which included Ohrid, plus Moravsko, part of southeast Serbia. In Greece, the islands of Tassos and Samothrace were also added.57 Bulgaria’s bloodless incorporation of the territories that were the object of its revisionist pretensions—first Southern Dobrudja, then Vardar Macedonia, Kavalla Macedonia, and Western Thrace—accomplished within just nine months, between September 1940 and May 1941, was of tremendous significance for the Bulgarian ruling elite. It justified its pro-German foreign policy, since it enabled the elite to declare that the realization of Bulgaria’s most vital interests—that is, the satisfaction of its territorial claims over lands lying in neighboring countries—was due to its alliance with the Axis Powers. This also underpinned the prestige of Boris III, since Bulgarian propaganda addressed to audiences both home and abroad called him the “liberator Czar” who had managed to unite “lost Bulgarian lands,” a policy aim that Sofia had followed in vain for over twenty years following the Treaty of Neuilly.58 Meanwhile, despite the bombastic phraseology that presented the Bulgarian occupation of Vardar Macedonia and the Aegean coast in terms of the “incorporation of newly liberated lands” and the satisfaction of territorial aspirations, these areas were in fact simply zones of occupation, temporarily remaining under Bulgarian control. This was the standpoint of the Nazi leadership, reflected in a German political map of Southeast Europe, prepared in 1942, in which the borders between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and Bulgaria and Greece, had the form of temporary demarcation lines and not of state frontiers.59 This meant that the Bulgarian occupation of Yugoslav and Greek lands was not viewed by the Third Reich as a final and permanent incorporation of those territories by Bulgaria, for formally and legally they remained an open question. This state of affairs allowed Germany to manipulate its relationship with Bulgaria to its advantage. In practice, Berlin could control the Bulgarian authorities in the zones of occupation by threatening to take on economic and military obligations in the Balkans itself. This was the case when, as a consequence of the changing situation in the war toward the end of July 1941, the German leadership designated the defense of the Aegean coast against an expected Allied landing to Bulgarian troops owing to the withdrawal of the Wehrmacht from the area.60 On November 25, 1941, Berlin then forced Sofia to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, and on December 13 that year Sofia declared war against Great Britain and the United States, which soon entailed the bombing of Bulgarian territory.61 Finally, the Bulgarian authorities in “the newly liberated lands” agreed to the transportation of the local Jewish population to the extermination camps. In early March 1943, 4,273 Jews from Western Thrace and 7,567 from Macedonia were placed in camps set up in the “newly liberated” territories; they were then transported to German death camps in Polish territory.62 In June 1943, as Germany suffered more and more

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setbacks and as Yugoslav and Greek partisans grew in strength, the Bulgarian armed forces were engaged in stifling the resistance movement in Serbia and Aegean Macedonia.63 All these actions imposed on Bulgaria by the Germans substantially strengthened the position of the Third Reich in the Balkans and, indirectly, on the Eastern Front. On the other hand, despite the dependence of Bulgaria on Germany, the government in Sofia maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and effectively resisted German attempts to send Bulgarian troops to the Eastern Front. It also succeeded in maintaining good relations with Ankara.64

Conclusion To sum up, the significance of Bulgaria’s alliance with the Third Reich was, firstly, that it led to the participation of the Bulgarian army in Hitler’s attack upon Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941, with all the consequences of this action. On the other hand, the occupation of Yugoslav and Greek lands to which the Bulgarians had earlier laid claims, and which they were called upon to do so by the German leadership, was not dictated by the national interests of Bulgaria but resulted from the concrete demands of the Third Reich. In fact, Berlin treated Bulgaria instrumentally, allowing it to occupy those territories which, under Bulgarian administration, would in due course best serve the interests of the Third Reich. Soon, however, Nazi Germany’s regional, continental, and global dominance started to decline. The defeat of German troops near Moscow in December 1941, and especially their routing at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943, seriously complicated Bulgaria’s situation as a satellite of the Third Reich. Germany’s evident decline started the process of the disintegration of the ruling elite in Sofia, which came to a head at the end of August 1943, after the death of Boris III. This was accompanied by a growth in anti-government and anti-Nazi sentiments, subsequently augmented by the withdrawal of Italy from the war in September 1943 and the inevitable turn of the tide in favor of the Allied Powers. As a result, the National Front, created by the communists and bringing together the parties of the democratic opposition under the banner of fighting against the Germans, expanded its influence in Bulgaria. However, conditions for a coup were not ripe until the successful offensive of the Red Army into the Balkans in the late summer of 1944. On September 5, 1944, the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria; its formal pretext was the presence in Bulgaria of the armed forces of the Third Reich. In fact, Moscow wanted to forestall the arrival of the English and American armies, which might scupper the Kremlin’s plans for a communist takeover. The Third Ukrainian Front of the Red Army marched into Bulgaria on September 6; the Bulgarian government was forced to break off diplomatic

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relations with Germany and, two days later, it declared war on the Third Reich. As a result of this radical move, the one-time satellite of Germany became a member of the anti-Nazi coalition and fought against its former ally in the last stages of the Second World War.65 Translated by Agnieszka Kreczmar

Notes 1. Bogdan D. Kesjakov, Prinos kâm diplomatičeska istoriâ na Bâlgariâ: Nojski dogovor, vols. 2 and 3 (Sofia, 1936). 2. Staiko Trifonov, “Vâtrešna trakijska revolucionna organizaciâ 1920–1926,” Godišnik na Sofijskiâ Universitet, Filosofsko-Istoričeski Fakultet 69 (1975): 310. 3. Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk, “Kwestia Tracji Zachodniej w polityce międzynarodowej 1878–1919,” Studia z dziejów ZSRR i Europy Środkowej 20 (1984): 19–20. 4. Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk, Sprawa Tracji Zachodniej w polityce bułgarskiej (1919–1947) (Warsaw, 1991), 350–59. 5. Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk, “Uregulowanie kwestii dobrudżańskiej w stosunkach Bułgarii z Rumunią w okresie II wojny światowej,” Studia z dziejów Rosji i Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej 43 (2008): 117–30. 6. Zdravka Mičeva, “Problemât za zapadnata granica na Bâlgariâ i bâlgaro-jugoslavskite otnošeniâ,” Bâlgariâ 1300: Institucii i dâržavna tradiciâ, vol. 3 (Sofia, 1983), 271–73. 7. Ełzbieta Znamierowska-Rakk, “Sprawa dostępu Bułgarii do Morza Egejskiego w polityce bułgarskiej 1919–1923,” Studia z dziejów ZSRR i Europy Środkowej 25 (1990): 5–47. 8. Krustju Mančev and Valerian Bistricki, Bâlgariâ i neinite sâsedi 1931–1939 (Sofia, 1978), 18–21. 9. Ełzbieta Znamierowska-Rakk, “Bułgaria na Bałkanach po I wojnie światowej (1919–1923),” Balcanica Posnaniensia 6 (1993): 162–63. More extensively on Italian designs on Yugoslavia, see: Anna Garlicka, Polska-Jugosławia: Z dziejów stosunków politycznych 1934-1939 (Wrocław, 1977), 21–22; Marina Cattaruzza, L’Italia e il confine orientale (Bologna, 2007). 10. Mičeva, “Problemât za zapadnata granica,” 274–77; G. Vasilević , “Jugoslaviâ, nojskioj dogovor za mir so Bâlgariâ 1919–1939,” Glasnik 19,2 (1976): 156. More extensively, see: Milen Kumanov, “Niškata spogodba ot 1923 g.,” Vekove 5 (1972): 34–42. 11. “Dokumenti za bâlgaro-turskite otnošeniâ 1923-1928 g.,” Meždunarodni otnošeniâ (Sofia 1973), no. 3, 153. 12. More extensively, see: Stefan Velikov, Kemalskata revoluciâ i bâlgarskata obštestvenost (Sofia, 1966); Staiko Trifonov, “Komitet za svobodata na Trakiâ,” Vekove 4 (1981): 51; for a contribution in French, see: Stefan Velikov, “Kemal Atatürk et la Bulgarie,” Bulgarian Historical Review 2,1 (1974): 60–67. 13. Archiwum Akt Nowych (hereafter AAN), Ambasada Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej w Londynie (hereafter ARPL), folder 882, 29–33; “Dokumenti za bâlgaro-turskite otnošeniâ,” 157–59; Mančev and Bistricki, Bâlgariâ i neinite, 23. 14. AAN, ARPL, folder 8, 1–6. 15. Krum T. Dimčev, Bâlgariâ i izlazât na Egejsko more (Sofia, 1946), 24; Dimita˘r Dimitrov, Trakijskiât vâpros i ikonomičeskiât izlaz na Bâlgariâ na Egeâ (Paris, 1938), 54–55; Znamierowska-Rakk, Sprawa Tracji Zachodniej, 99–100. 16. Znamierowska-Rakk, Sprawa Tracji Zachodniej, 211–12

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17. Mančev and Bistricki, Bâlgariâ i neinite, 51; Bogdan Koszel, Rywalizacja niemiecko-włoska w Europie Środkowej i na Bałkanach w latach 1933–1941 (Poznań, 1987), 211–20. 18. Wiesław Balcerak, “Czynniki integrujące i osłabiające ‘ład wersalski’ w Europie ŚrodkowoWschodniej (1919–1939),” in Ład wersalski w Europie Środkowej (Wrocław, 1971), 52, 62; Henryk Batowski, “Ekspansja niemiecka w Europie Środkowej w latach 1919–1939,” Dzieje Najnowsze 3 (1973): 53–65; Galeazzo Ciano, Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge (London, 1948), 56–61; Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Rome–Berlin Axis: A History of the Relations between Hitler and Mussolini (London, 1949), 107. 19. Ilčo I. Dimitrov, Bâlgaro-italianski političeski otnošeniâ 1922–1943 (Sofia, 1976), 302. 20. Georgi G. Markov, Bâlgaro-germanskite otnošeniâ 1931–1939 (Sofia, 1984), 95–112, 147, 195–97, 208–9. 21. Jerzy Borejsza, Rzym a wspólnota faszystowska (Warsaw, 1981), 41–57; this book also appeared in Italian as well: Il fascismo e l’Europa orientale: dalla propaganda all’aggressione (Rome 1981). More extensively, see: Janusz Żarnowski (ed.), Dictatorships in East-Central Europe, 1918–1939: Anthologies (Wrocław, 1983). 22. Krustju Mančev and Valerian Bistricki, “Bâlgaro-jugoslavskoto sbliženie i Čechoslovakiâ (1933–1937),” Istoričeski Pregled 24 (1968): 3–30. 23. Eliza Campus, The Little Entente and the Balkan Alliance (Bucharest, 1978), 147; Vladimir K. Volkov, Mjunchenskij sgovor i balkanskije strany (Moscow, 1978), 91. 24. Dimitar Sirkov, “Bulgaria’s Foreign Policy 1938–1941,” Bulgarian Historical Review 4 (1979): 6–7. 25. Centralen dyržaven istoričeski archiv (hereafter CDIA), f.370, op.4, a.e.193, l.33–34; Volkov, Mjunchenskij sgovor, 108–9. More extensively, see: Dimitar Sirkov, “The Salonika Agreement of July 31, 1938,” Etudes Historiques 8 (1978): 349–62; Wiesław Balcerak, “System wersalski a państwa bałkańskie 1919–1939,” in Antoni Czubiński (ed.), Państwa bałkańskie w polityce imperializmu niemieckiego w latach 1871–1945 (Poznań, 1982), 140–45. 26. Znamierowska-Rakk, Sprawa Tracji Zachodniej, 151ff.; Antonina Kuzmanova, Balkanskata politika na Rumâniâ 1933–1939 (Sofia, 1984), 54ff. 27. Antonina Kuzmanova, “Dobrudžanskiât vâpros v meždunarodnite otnošeniâ (1938–1940),” in Hritso Hristov et al. (eds), Iz istoriâ na Dobrudža, Trakiâ i Makedoniâ, Izvestiâ na instituta za istoriâ, vol. 30 (Sofia, 1990), 153; Agnieszka Kastory, Rozbiór Rumunii w 1940 roku (Warsaw, 2002), 50–73. 28. Kuzmanova, “Dobrudžanskiât vâpros v meždunarodnite otnošeniâ,” 160. 29. Znamierowska-Rakk, “Uregulowanie kwestii dobrudżańskiej,” 125. 30. CDIA, f.316, op.1, a.e.236, l.64; Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945 (hereafter DGFP), vol. 9 (London, 1957), 207–8, 280. 31. Bogdan Filov, Dnevnik (Sofia, 1986), 205–10. 32. Nikolaj Genčev, “Vâzvrâ sˆane na Ûžna Dobrudža kâm Bâlgariâ prez 1940 g.,” Istoričeski Pregled 6 (1969): 58–73; idem, Vânšnata politika na Bâlgariâ 1938–1941 (Sofia, 1998), 110. 33. Znamierowska-Rakk, “Uregulowanie kwestii dobrudżańskiej,” 29–30. 34. Jerzy Jackowicz, Traktat pokojowy z Bułgarią 1947 r. (Wrocław, 1981), 125; Public Record Office (London), Foreign Office (hereafter PRO/FO), 371/24879. 35. Kostadin Gârdev, Bâlgariâ i Ungariâ 1923–1941 (Sofia, 1988), 136. 36. CDIA, f.176, op.8, a.e.7, l.36; Dimitrov, Bâlgaro-italianski političeski otnošeniâ, 394. 37. PRO/FO, 371/24878, 160–61; Elisabeth Barker, British Policy in South-east Europe in the Second World War (London, 1976), 57–58; George Rendel, The Sword and the Olive: Recollections of Diplomacy and Foreign Policy (1913–1954) (London, 1957), 168, 171. 38. CDIA, f.176, op.8, a.e.17, l.40.

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39. Mančev and Bistricki, Bâlgariâ i neinite, 246–47; Gârdev, Bâlgariâ i Ungariâ, 141. 40. CDIA, f.176, op.8, a.e.17, l.31; ibid., f.95, op.1, a.e.1, l.144. 41. Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik 1918-1945 (hereafter ADAP), series D, 1937–1945, vol. 9/1 (Bonn, 1964), doc.295, 406; CDIA, f.95, op.1, a.e.1, l.122–23. 42. Dimita˘r Mašev, “Progermanskata orientaciâ na bâlgarskoto pravitelstvo v navečerieto na Vtorata svetovna vojna,” Godišnik na Sofijskiâ Universitet, U ˇ uridičeski fakultet 55,1 (1964): 299–322; Vadim Dmitrievich Voznesenski, Car Boris, Hitler i legionerite (Sofia, 1971); Angel Iliev Bânkov et al. (eds), Istoriâ na Bâlgariâ, vol. 3 (Sofia, 1964), 309–14, 340–54. 43. Nikolaj Genčev, “Bâlgaro-germanski diplomatičeski otnošeniâ (1938–1941),” in Hristo Hristov et al. (eds), Bâlgarsko-germanskite otnošeniâ i vrâzki, vol. 1 (Sofia, 1972), 431–33. 44. Dimitar Sirkov, Vânšnata politika na Bâlgariâ 1938–1941 (Sofia, 1979), 261–63; Vitka Toškova, Bâlgariâ i Tretiât Rajch (1941–1944) (Sofia, 1975), 29. 45. Stilijan Najkov and Valentin Radev, Car Boris III v tajnite dokumenti na Tretiât Rajch 1939–1943 (Sofia, 1995), 105–11. 46. Znamierowska-Rakk, Sprawa Tracji Zachodniej, 172–73. 47. ADAP, vol. 11/2, doc.606, 848–54; Filov, Dnevnik, 203, 208. 48. ADAP, vol. 11/2, doc.658, 919–20; ibid., doc.659, 920–21; ibid., doc.660, 921–23; Filov, Dnevnik, 212–13; CDIA, f.456, op.1, a.e.4, l.22–28. 49. Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1983), 234; DGFP, series D, vol. 12 (Washington, 1953), doc.114, 203; Robert Lee Woolf, The Balkans in Our Time (Cambridge, 1974), 243. 50. CDIA, f.176, op.8, a.e.17, l.158. 51. Stenografski dnevnici na XXV Obiknoveno narodno sâbranie (hereafter SD), II redovna sesiâ (Sofia, 1941), 1603–4. 52. Ilčo I. Dimitrov, Anglija i Bâlgariâ 1938–1941: Navečerieto i načalo na Vtorata svetovna vojna (Sofia, 1983), 231–35; Stojan Rachev, Č’rčil, Bâlgariâ i Balkanite (Sofia, 1995), 97–127; Vitka Toškova, Sasˆ i Bâlgariâ 1919–1989: Političeski otnošeniâ (Sofia, 2007), 156–59; idem, “The Policy of the United States towards the Axis Satellites (1943–1944),” Bulgarian Historical Review 7,2 (1979): 3–26. 53. Toškova, Bâlgariâ i Tretiât Rajch, 37, 45–46; Dimitar Sirkov, “Kâm vâprosa na prisâedinjavaneto na Bâlgariâ kâm Tristranniâ pakt,” in V. Hadžinikolov et al. (eds), Bâlgarskogermanskite otnošeniâ i vrâzki, vol. 3 (Sofia, 1981), 459. 54. CDIA, f.176, op.15, a.e.8, l.50; ibid., f.456, op.1, a.e.5, 1.7–11; Dimitrov, Bâlgaro-italianski političeski otnošeniâ, 408; Toškova, Bâlgariâ i Tretiât Rajch, 52; ADAP, series D, vol. 12/2, doc.335, 449–51; Hagen Fleischer, Im Kreuzschatten der Mächte: Griechenland 1941–1944 (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), 68. 55. DGFP, series D, vol. 12, doc.609, 84–99. 56. CDIA, f.456, op.1, a.e.5, l.34–37; Toškova, Bâlgariâ i Tretiât Rajch, 54; Dimitrov, Bâlgaroitalianski političeski otnošeniâ, 409–11. 57. CDIA, f.456, op.1, a.e.5, l.65; Toškova, Bâlgariâ i Tretiât Rajch 55-7; Tadeusz Rawski, Wojna na Bałkanach: agresja hitlerowska na Jugosławię i Grecję (Warsaw, 1981), 400. 58. PRO/FO, 371/29740, 31; Ivan Paunovski, Monarchia przed sądem (Warsaw, 1974), 318; Lûbomir Lulčev, Tajnite na dvorcoviâ život: Dnevnik (1938–1944) (Sofia, 1992), 277ff.; SD, III redovna sesiâ (Sofia, 1942), 3–5; Foreign Relations of United States, Diplomatic Papers 1941, vol. 2 (Washington, 1959), 752. 59. Toškova, Bâlgariâ i Tretiât Rajch, 99. 60. Toškova, Bâlgariâ i Tretiât Rajch, 59. 61. Aleksy Deruga, “Polityka zagraniczna Bułgarii w 1944 r,” Dzieje Najnowsze 7 (1975): 130–31.

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62. David Koen, Todor Dobriânov and Rajna Manafova, Borbata na bâlgarskiâ narod za zaštita i spasâvane na evreite v Bâlgariâ prez Vtorata svetovna vojna (Sofia, 1978), 162–66, 173–74; Frederick B. Chary, The Bulgarian Jews, the Final Solution 1940–1944 (Pittsburgh, 1972), 127. 63. Vitka Toškova, “Bâlgariâ i voennopolitičeski planove na Germanskiâ imperializâm na Balkanite prez 1943,” in Hristov, Bâlgarsko-germanskite otnošeniâ i vrâzki, vol. 1, 475, 484–45; Irena Stawowy-Kawka, “Udział ludności Macedonii w wojnie narodowowyzwoleńczej Jugosławii,” in Czubiński, Państwa bałkańskie, 355; PRO/FO, 371/58581, 37–38, 43–44. 64. Znamierowska-Rakk, Sprawa Tracji Zachodniej, 210. 65. Margarita Goranova et al. (eds), Bâlgaro-sâvetski otnošeniâ i vrâzki: Dokumenti i materiali 1917–1944, vol. 2 (Sofia, 1977), 674–75; CDIA, f.284, op.1, a.e.8739, l.1–3; ibid., f.284, op.1, a.e.8742, l.1.

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Chapter 7

POLITICS AND MILITARY ACTION OF ETHNIC UKRAINIAN COLLABORATION FOR THE “NEW EUROPEAN ORDER”

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Frank Grelka

B

etween the First and Second World Wars, German–Ukrainian relations functioned according to a frequently performed script, even when the constellation of the principle actors varied.1 Despite the strong anti-Slavic orientation of Nazi ideology, Germany was still able to, and did in fact, use Ukrainian nationalist currents for its own ends. The political and military strategies of Ukrainian separatism were pitted against the goals and methods of Germany’s policies with respect to Poland and the Soviet Union. At the peak of German power over Eastern and Central Europe, Berlin proclaimed the idea of a conquest for Lebensraum in the east. In this context, the Lebensraum paradigm, and not territorial revisionism, was the dominant ideology at stake. In order to get a piece of the “Russian cake,” Ukrainians and other ethnic groups that collaborated with the Germans—such as the Byelorussians, Lithuanians, and Croatians— maintained firm illusions about German war aims. On June 26, 1941, four days after the German attack on the Soviet Union, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), formulated its political demands to the Reich Chancellery. The OUN, known as the dominant group of the Ukrainian national movement since the early 1930s, worked under the assumption that Germany was not only pursuing economic goals but also had political plans for Soviet Ukraine. The Nazi vision of a New Order in the East, they thought, could not be conceived without Ukraine’s economic potential. The advantageous size of Ukraine’s territory and population, thought the nationalists, could enable them to establish a wealthy nation-state. According to their view, a German-occupied Ukraine with titular nation status would be the sole partner as well as the only morally

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legitimate factor in maintaining order. At least this was the OUN expected, and they attached three postulates to a future New Order under German administration: first, the creation of an independent Ukrainian state; second, the integration of the Ukrainian state into a New European Economic Order; and third, a Ukrainian army.2 The Third Reich’s policy of Germanization was rooted in a vision of a social Darwinist struggle for supremacy between stronger and weaker peoples. German policy was at one and the same time a mask and a general instrument created in order to transform the Polish nation-state and the Ukrainian Soviet republic into colonies based on a tribal model of society.3 Most importantly, in such a society the Aryan race was deemed to be the superior culture and civilization with respect to other minor races, in particular the Jews and the Slavs. Secondly, the occupier viewed itself as the “master race” and therefore claimed the right to decide over the political and social existence of the population residing in the occupied areas. Economically, Ukraine was to be treated as a breadbasket that would allow Germany to become a global power.4 Ideologically, this model of a pre-state societal structure masked the plans of the German leadership under Hitler and Himmler to destroy the existing nation-states in the occupied territories of the East.5 According to their vision, the Ukraine was populated by inferior Slavs, and Ukrainians were labeled as Baltic peoples but racially still above those slated for immediate destruction: the Jews and Roma, followed by Poles and to a lesser extent the Great Russians and Byelorussians.6 In contrast to this view, the OUN saw itself as the avant-garde of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Eastern Galicia amidst interethnic rivalries. Obviously, such competing leitmotifs were clearly contradictory, a fact that leads to the underlying question of this article: Under what conditions did Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN commit themselves to German promises of a New European Order between 1938 and 1944? The principal attraction of Ukraine as a case study for the mechanisms of collaboration is that the basic motivation for nationalist collaboration was not political but ethnic in nature. For the Ukrainian nationalists, the war was another phase of a generation-old struggle against the dominant ethnic group, the Poles, and the Nazis were their unsatisfactory, albeit indispensable, allies in this new round of open ethnic struggle. Therefore, the Ukrainians worked with the Germans mainly in order to overcome domestic enemies.7 This was to be achieved by wiping out Poles, Russians, and Jews from “ethnic Ukrainian territories,” to use OUN jargon,8 through collaboration with the Nazis, something that became the principal policy of the OUN.9 From the German perspective, it was not Ukrainian state-building that was at issue but rather the destruction of the Polish and Russian peoples that formed the core of German–Ukrainian relations between 1939 and 1944. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the formation of a modern national consciousness had become more important than mere confessional

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differences—in fact, the majority of Poles were Roman Catholics whereas the Ukrainians were overwhelmingly Orthodox Catholics. In the cities, Poles formed the majority, whereas most Ukrainian people lived in the villages. The Polish nobility, however, owned a major part of the country. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Ukrainians made up 96 per cent of the peasant population of Galicia. This figure did not change much in the following decades.10 If it had not been for the distinction between the Greek (Orthodox) and Latin (Roman) rites, western Ukrainians might have become Polonized in the nineteenth century. In 1918, when Eastern Galicia fell to the newly emerged Polish state, the situation changed only marginally. Economic and political conditions led representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia to return to rural areas. Since there were no jobs for them in the city, they looked for jobs in the well-developed rural movements of social cooperatives. Thus the Ukrainian intelligentsia gained a hold over every part of social life in the countryside. As more and more academics moved back to the villages and small towns, social life started to develop there, leading to the creation of reading rooms, choirs, and amateur theaters in these communities.11 In addition to this trend, the political arena became more radical, and nationalist movements began influencing the identity of Ruthenian Ukrainians. The emerging Ukrainian elites wished to determine the specific traditions of the gente Rutheni and to break away from natione Poloni, which was depriving them of their historical roots. The Ukrainian rural population, and in particular the intelligentsia, had always been deeply rooted in their homeland. In an interview, Vasyl Mudry, leader of the Ukrainian National Democratic Union (one of the largest Ukrainian parties in Galicia) and vice-president of the Polish parliament, said: “Every Ukrainian academic had an agrarian background, either in the first or the second generation. There were very few academics born before 1848. The Ukrainian academic, doctor, or lawyer, is rooted to this soil with his own flesh and blood. Be it a brother or an uncle living in the village.”12 In general, Ukrainian nationalists traditionally stressed how for centuries, beginning with the ancient Kievan Rus’, much of Ukraine had either maintained close economic, political, and dynastic ties with Europe or had been incorporated into Central European states, such as Poland and Austria-Hungary. As a result, the ideas of Western humanism, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation all allegedly permeated into the Ukrainian world-view. By contrast, Russia, which was said to have traveled a substantially different historical trajectory from Ukraine, was relegated to the Eurasian cultural sphere. From this perspective Imperial Russian and then Soviet domination distorted and suppressed the essentially Western and European nature of Ukrainian culture, but could not eliminate it.13 The Polish side tried to hold on to the societal unity of the ancient pre-1772 Polish Republic and treated the Ukrainian national movement more as a social than a national or political problem.14 After the First World War, the struggle between Poles and Ukrainians for the dominant role in

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this former Habsburg Kronland escalated. The two groups sought national independence in order to assume the leading role in the region. Their respective goal was the integration of Galicia into either a Polish or a Ukrainian nation-state. Ukrainian nationalists always interpreted the incorporation of Galicia into the Polish state after 1921 as a form of Polish occupation, and they saw the Soviet occupation of Eastern Galicia from 1939 to 1941 as a transfer from Polish to Jewish dominance.

Political Collaboration The OUN did not achieve any of their political goals as presented to the Reich authorities in June 1941. An overestimation of their significance in the game of power politics was supplemented by a fatal misinterpretation of German propaganda with respect to Ukraine’s role in a new, German-ruled Europe. After the liquidation of the Polish government in Warsaw, the OUN expected the Wehrmacht to conquer the Soviet-occupied eastern Polish regions. The basis of this conviction was, in part, derived from German propaganda, which masked a meticulously planned war of conquest as a “European crusade against Bolshevism.”15 In order to explain the German–Ukrainian nexus, it is necessary to take a biographical approach. The myth of a Ukraine-friendly Reich originated among the elite of the Galician leadership of the OUN itself, of whom the majority were born in Galicia in the late Habsburg period, an era they saw as the golden age of Ukrainian renaissance in the region. They believed in Berlin’s purported mission of civilizing the East and imagined that German political goals would bring order, security, and justice to the region. In addition, Berlin—alongside Prague and Vienna—was regarded as a center of Ukrainian emigration in the years before the First World War. Numerous Ukrainian nationalists had studied and organized there in relative freedom. Not to be underestimated in this context were the steady assurances of moral support for the Ukrainian idea of a nationstate from representatives of the German Foreign Office and the Wehrmacht throughout the 1930s.16 With respect to fascist ideology, the militant methods and ambiguous vision of the future offered by the Nazis had parallels with the radicalism and terrorism of the OUN.17 The decisive impulse for the pro-German position of the OUN came in September 1939, when German troops freed the majority of the OUN leadership from a Polish concentration camp in Bereza Kartuska. Moreover, the German presence in west Ukraine meant an end to waves of arrests, executions, and deportations carried out by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Indeed, by June 1941, thousands of OUN supporters and leaders had been killed. According to one Polish study, up to 20,000 members of the OUN and their families had been

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deported and liquidated by the Soviets between 1939 and 1941.18 There were concrete reasons for the OUN’s anti-Bolshevik course. According to Ukrainian archival documents, Lavrentii Beria, chief of the NKVD, had ordered the elimination of Ukrainian nationalists in the eastern Polish territories just two days before the Red Army invaded Poland.19 As Timothy Snyder has pointed out, the OUN needed more than the restoration of a state; it needed the creation of a new one.20 With respect to Soviet pressure, the OUN became quite convinced that only a German invasion of Ukraine could improve the situation for their organization in their homeland. Typical of the OUN view was the statement of one of their spokesmen, in which the position of the Ukrainian state was given in the following way: Ukrainian society would continue to firmly support the Germans even if repression of the Ukrainian nationalist movement followed in the wake of the occupation of Soviet Ukraine.21 In its program of April 1941, the OUN explicitly saw itself as an ally of the German Reich: “The organization recognizes as allies of the Ukraine all states, political groups, and forces that are interested in the collapse of the Soviet Union and in the establishment of a sovereign, united, and independent Ukrainian state.”22 On June 30, 1941, after the retreat of the Red Army, the OUN declared a Ukrainian state in Lviv. For the sake of the Ukrainian state and the establishment of a global New Order, the declaration also stated the intention of cooperating closely with “Greater Germany.” At the same time, the foreign minister of the OUN government endeavored to achieve international recognition by informing the ambassadors of states allied to the Reich (Italy, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania) in Berlin, asking them to recognize the Lviv government.23 Not only did the OUN fail in its attempts to gain political recognition, but, within days, the OUN government was arrested by the German security police. From the beginning of the war in September 1939, Ukrainian politicians in Poland decided against the status quo ante and put their destiny in the hands of German totalitarianism. There was no reason, however, to harbor any great expectations of German policy toward Ukraine. Clear indications of the Nazi leadership’s anti-Ukrainian policies included the German–Polish Nonaggression Pact of January 1934, German acquiescence to the Hungarian annexation of Carpatho-Ukraine in March 1939, the partition of Poland that resulted from the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939, and the reaction to the proclamation of the OUN government on June 30, 1941. From Berlin’s point of view, the occupied territories did not, as a rule, present any politically significant players worthy of meaningful concessions from the Reich. Nonetheless, Germany made symbolic concessions to the Ukrainian national movement. The Wehrmacht sponsored the participation of Ukrainian troops in the invasion of Soviet Ukraine in June 1941. Ukrainian units were also encouraged to track down stragglers of the withdrawing Soviet army from

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Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. In addition, there was the collaboration of the OUN with German Einsatzgruppen in the first phase of the annihilation of Polish and Ukrainian Jewry.24 With the formation of a civil administration within the General Government (western Ukraine was subordinated on August 1, 1941) and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (incorporating southern and central Ukraine on September 1, 1941), a central task of the German police became, in addition to the extermination of the Jews, the political control of Ukrainian nationalist factions.25 On September 19, 1941, the Wehrmacht occupied the historic Ukrainian capital of Kiev. Physically, Kiev appeared to be a center of German–Ukrainian friendship, with the German swastika and the yellow-blue Ukrainian national flag flying side by side. Formally, leaders of the Ukrainian national revival supporting the OUN had been authorized to organize the administrative matters of the city. The Mel’nyk faction was able to exert a dominating influence on local politics in Kiev,26 comparable to that of the Bandera faction in western Ukrainian territories during the summer of 1941. Under the guise of administrative duties, Ukrainian nationalists infiltrated the German administrative system with the aim of Ukrainianizing public affairs in the capital.27 A wave of arrests directed at OUN members got underway in November 1941 in the eastern occupied territories as the Germans tried to purge local administrations and auxiliary police forces of OUN influence.28 As a result, by the end of 1942, the organizational structure of the OUN had been completely destroyed by the commander of the security police and security service in Ukraine. On December 4, 1942, at the height of German repression against the dominant national movement in Ukraine, the OUN headquarters, including a large armory in Lviv, were discovered, and the military head of the organization, Ivan Klimiv, arrested.29 Although the Germans persecuted the Ukrainians, the latter nonetheless adhered to their schedule. Berlin’s aim was something completely new—a colonial empire from the Atlantic to the Urals. While Ukrainian territorial revisionism ran counter to German plans for the Ukraine, Berlin’s allies shared similar goals, not least with respect to the Ukraine. Since the Munich Agreement of 1938, which paved the way for the German occupation of Czech lands and the Hungarian occupation of Carpatho-Ukraine, German policy had strived to build on the Axis alliance by addressing the various territorial grievances of would-be allies such as Romania and Bulgaria, and thus to prepare a coalition for war against the Soviet Union.

Administrative Collaboration Only at the outbreak of the Soviet campaign did the military agreement between Ukrainian nationalists and the Nazis afford a short-term basis for collaboration toward a “New European Order.”30 German racial politics proved to have a

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negative impact on the Ukrainians. Ukrainians put forward their ethnic claims, while German policy-makers regarded them as racially inferior. Unlike this very short alliance between Ukrainian nationalists and the Reich, political and military cooperation during the Second World War outlasted the unfulfilled vision of a Ukrainian satellite state. Interestingly enough, it was to a large extent a lively debate over the “German question” that led to a schism within the OUN in April 1940. The younger faction (OUN-B), which was led by Stepan Bandera, attacked the older generation, which had remained loyal to Colonel Andrii Mel’nyk’s faction, which seemed to give more emphasis to collaboration than to statehood.31 A representative of the conservative Mel’nyk faction of the OUN recognized the priorities of the moment and called upon his countrymen to work under German leadership for a new Europe in which the Ukrainian nation would also find its place: “A New Europe [arises] in which the Ukrainian nation will find its place, and the better it will be for us, the more we subordinate ourselves and work for this order. German leadership will also provide us guidance, and it is therefore to our benefit to collaborate with the German authorities.” 32 The author of these words was Volodymyr Kubiyovych, head of the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC), as the official representatives of the Ukrainians in the General Government was known. His correspondence with the administration of the government provides an excellent means for exploring separatism and collaboration in the occupied eastern territories.33 For the Germans, Kubiyovych was a natural choice as head of the UCC: he was politically inexperienced, enjoyed excellent contacts with Germans from before the war, and spoke fluent German. The UCC worked primarily to fulfill the everyday needs of their native population. Unlike the OUN, the UCC did more than just make demands for political representation. The UCC raised close collaboration in administrative affairs to a matter of principle. The UCC also made a point of avoiding contact with both the OUN-B and the Lviv “government” of June 30, 1941. On August 1, 1941, Eastern Galicia, as it had existed under the Habsburgs from 1772 until 1918, was incorporated into the General Government. From the perspective of the Ukrainian national movement, this region was the core of “ethnic Ukrainian territories.” Andrii Mel’nyk, the self-proclaimed “Führer of the Ukrainian Nation,” complained about this “renewed division” in protests to Himmler, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Alfred Rosenberg, then still Hitler’s commissioner for questions concerning the East.34 Mel’nyk’s rival, Bandera, protested personally at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, where his government had been held under arrest since July 7, 1941. While expressing their hope that the division of Ukrainian territories would prove to be a temporary administrative act within the occupied territories, the nationalists feared a territorial reorganization along the lines of the former Polish state borders.35

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In August 1941, the General Government’s main Department for the Interior authorized Kubiyovych to extend the authority of the UCC to the district of Galicia.36 As head of the only legal Ukrainian organization, Kubiyovych interpreted the formation of the district of Galicia as a positive development, signifying the unification of additional Ukrainian territories under German control.37 Far more than other groups, the Mel’nyk faction of the OUN conformed with German expectations of what a cooperative local organization should be. When the administration of the General Government superseded the military administration of the Wehrmacht, legal units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police began to replace the militias formed by the Bandera faction of the OUN. In recruiting local policemen, the Germans gave preference to applicants who had served as soldiers in the former Polish and Habsburg armies.38 The distinguishing characteristics of this unconditional cooperation with the German administration were the lack of demands for political power, loyalty, as well as anti-Semitic inclinations. From an objective viewpoint, the Ukrainian population saw itself in a better position, as in prewar Poland. General Governor Hans Frank granted the Ukrainians a limited auxiliary administration and a Ukrainian auxiliary police force. Ukrainian was recognized as an official language and was allowed to a limited extent in the administration. The Ukrainian school system was quickly expanded, while the Ukrainian churches experienced a new freedom of faith. While the property of Polish and Jewish entrepreneurs had been turned over to the German state and their factories closed down, Ukrainian farmers benefited from German nationality policies. Within the General Government, the Volksgruppe der Ukrainer (to use the official jargon in Cracow) enjoyed a position of relative privilege within the context of the Polish–Ukrainian antagonism that was deliberately sustained by the Germans.39 For example, during the expulsion of Jews and Poles from Polish territories annexed by the Reich to the General Government, the Germans made an effort to avoid resettling the expellees in areas with a Ukrainian majority.40 Also, when elements of the Generalplan Ost—the official plan to Germanize the East—were implemented by the General Government in late 1942 and early 1943, Ukrainians were largely spared. As a consequence, Ukrainians could count on a certain degree of Ukrainianization in German-occupied Poland. In the interest of the Ukrainian question in eastern Poland, in 1943/44 Kubiyovych even became a lobbyist for the expulsion of Poles and the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps. He repeatedly appealed to Hitler, Himmler, Frank, and even Adolf Eichmann, head of Jewish affairs and the evacuation desk within the SS-Hauptamt, the main office of the Gestapo, to prohibit “any resettlement of Poles and Jews in ethnic Ukrainian territories.”41 The policy of the Ukrainianization of public life in occupied Poland in no way contradicted the maximum economic exploitation of the Ukrainian population. In its negotiations with the German administration, the UCC tried to restrict forced migration to unskilled workers alone. Ultimately, more than half a million

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Ukrainians were sent to perform forced labor in the Reich between 1941 and 1943.42 In line with the traditional politics of the Ukrainian national movement since the nineteenth century, the UCC and the Mel’nyk faction of the OUN tried to diminish the Polish influence in the General Government and to involve the local elite in the new Ukrainian churches, schools, and trade cooperatives.43 As Kubiyovych commented on the New Order: “For the first time in ages, cadres of the local intelligentsia have returned to western Galicia. Once Polonized towns have gained back their former face. Teachers have returned to the villages. There are rural cooperatives. And the intelligentsia provides enlightenment to the native population. Our homelands now have an intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia their homelands.”44

Military Collaboration While Ukrainian collaboration was ethnic in nature, there was a strong military component in its institutional structure, the biographies of its members, and the skills it came to implement. Many of the Mel’nyk faction (OUN-M) had served in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War and spent the period between the wars as officers in the Polish army. The OUN-B consisted of professional terrorists equipped with excellent skills in underground organization. Ukrainian nationalists groups believed that they could provide units for German military intelligence, as had been done in 1939. In May 1941, the OUN-B drew up a plan on the eventuality of a German attack on the Soviet Union. The goal of the OUN was strategic collaboration with a forthcoming German military administration, which would allow Ukrainian hegemony over other political and ethnic groups at the local administrative level in western Ukraine: If a war against Moscow by other states reaches into Ukraine, a military occupation of Ukraine by foreign troops is inevitable. This will be the result of actual military strength and the very nature of the war itself. The fact is that Ukraine currently does not have the necessary military strength at its command to defend its borders against Moscow and depends on the military intervention of foreign troops on Ukrainian territory.45

According to the plan of May 1941, the OUN-B pursued a strategy of armed collaboration. In doing so, the Ukrainians aimed to make the OUN an essential partner and co-founder of a “New European Order.”46 A secondary aim was to cleanse ethnic Ukrainian territories of Polish, Jewish, and Russian elements. In what had been Yugoslavia, the Ustashe in Croatia had developed a degree of political and military independence in their persecution of Jews as well as that of Sinti and Roma.47 In the first weeks of occupation, the Germans gave the

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Ukrainian people the false impression that the Ukrainian nationalist movement would be tolerated. In advance of Operation Barbarossa, Ukrainian nationalists from both factions had trained with Wehrmacht and SS intelligence. Such German–Ukrainian collaboration signaled to the OUN that Ukrainian independence might find support from the German side. The initial declarations made by Wehrmacht propaganda units, which focused on the liberation of Ukrainians from the tyranny of “Jewish-Bolshevik” elements,48 fit the main criteria of the OUN for alliances with other states. This fact, as well a deeply rooted anti-Bolshevism and a commitment to serve the German campaign, encouraged the Ukrainian nationalists to compile their own survey of villages, which carefully listed ethnic groups and suspected Communist enemies.49 The pogroms that followed were meant to decimate the Jewish population, which the OUN regarded as the main supporter of the Bolshevik regime and thus the primary political enemy. The OUN set up militias whose main task was to arrest all Red Army soldiers and NKVD members until a town or village could be handed over to the Wehrmacht. Poles and Jews who were considered suspect were also arrested. Surviving contemporary documents also make clear that the OUN played a key role in the mass killings of the summer of 1941.50 The German police exploited the abilities of the Ukrainians and subsequently set up the Ukrainian auxiliary police, whose role in the Holocaust remains a subject of lively debate among scholars to this day.51 Analysis of West German investigations into the activities of Nazi perpetrators shows, however, that local collaboration in the Holocaust was widespread. Local police forces were an integral part of the German civilian administration and were therefore heavily involved in mass killings.52 The Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe demonstrated that the worst aspects of colonialism—forced population movements, slave labor, and mass murder— could be combined and implemented in the heart of “civilized Europe.” In an appeal to German soldiers at the start of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler did not deny the ideological essence of the war, but masked the real goal of conquest for Lebensraum with the idea of a “New Europe.” A few days after the start of the invasion, Hitler discussed with top representatives of the Nazi regime the  real objectives of this conflict: “Basically, it’s all about properly carving up this enormous cake so that we can first control it, second administer it, and third exploit it.”53 Following the defeat at Stalingrad, the SS allowed the creation of a Ukrainian SS combat unit, an idea previously dismissed due to the Nazis’ anti-Slavic prejudice. The UCC organized the creation of what was first called the SS Volunteer Rifles Division Galicia, known in shorthand as the SS Division Galicia. Kubiyovych assured Governor General Frank that his people were prepared to join in the battle against Bolshevism on the side of the Wehrmacht, just as they had done in 1941 during the retreat of the Red Army.54

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In the fall of 1942, disillusioned by the idea of the New Order, the OUN-B set up its own partisan forces, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). In the light of an impending collapse of the German Eastern Front in February 1943, when Kharkiv temporarily fell to the Red Army again and advance Soviet units neared Dnipropetrovs’k in March 1943, Ukrainian policemen began to leave their posts by the thousands in order to join the UPA, after which the Germans ratcheted up reprisals another degree. In southern Lublin, some 7,000 UPA fighters became active. According to the head of one German police outpost, these fighters sought to cleanse areas of eastern Poland of its Polish civilians. Because so many Ukrainian auxiliary police officers had already joined the UPA, the German police was no longer able to perform its duties.55 As the German police had provided the backbone of Nazi authority in the occupied territories, its marginalization undermined the occupation of the countryside.56 As the dominant force, the UPA was able to create political facts on the ground by imitating the German model. Especially after Stalingrad, when it appeared that the Soviets would win the war, the UPA prepared to engage in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Poles. The attacks were particularly widespread in the province of Volhynia, but the UPA also launched raids against Poles to the southwest of Galicia; all in all some 50,000 to 60,000 Poles were killed in these campaigns.57 The Ukrainians viewed their treatment of Poles as legitimate in the ongoing ethnic war, along the lines of German policies toward the Jews. Prior to the withdrawal of the Wehrmacht and the German civil administration,58 the UPA was finally in a position to implement its anti-Polish plan of action.59 This kind of nationalism was openly declared in peacetime, when there was no chance of political success, yet, in conditions of war, ethnic cleansing was national politics by other means, as an SS intelligence chief and police leader in the General Government wrote in a situation report in May 1944.60 Ukrainian nationalists expelled the Polish population from “ethnic Ukrainian territories” or tortured and murdered them. In late 1943, hatred of the Germans was undiminished, but the desire to fight the enemies who remained, namely the Russians and the Poles, proved more intense. With approaching defeat, the Germans and Ukrainians came to a sort of truce. German documents from 1943 and 1944 show repeated talks between the UPA, the SS, and the Wehrmacht.61 Although they were unable to agree on any concrete military operations, the German side stopped the political persecution of Ukrainians and gave the UPA a free hand in the mass murder of Polish civilians. In return, the Ukrainian side promised not to attack German units and to fight against Soviet partisan organizations.62 In 1944, the SS Division Galicia was routed in a hopeless battle with the Soviet army. The influence of this division on events on the battlefield turned out to be negligible, but then it was a product of Nazi German self-interest and expediency.63 As for the veterans of this SS Division, several thousand were ultimately able to find political asylum in the United Kingdom and Canada.64

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Conclusion The politics of German territorial revisionism and Ukrainian unrealized statehood in the aftermath of the First World War provided the framework of what became an explosion of major racial and ethnic conflict. The Ukrainians wanted the guarantee of their own nation-state, which was to be consolidated under German continental power. A letter from the OUN-M to the Reich Chancellery contains a quai-constitution for a “New European Order” suggesting state systems, borders, and political concepts for a future autonomous Ukrainian state. The ideal here was German hegemony in Eastern Europe, a Pax Germanica with a Ukrainian satellite state serving as a bulwark against an “eventually resurgent” Russia.65 In the short run, Ukrainians saw administrative and military collaboration with the Germans, through the OUN-M and OUN-B respectively, as an opportunity to establish their own regional political hegemony over Poles and Jews in the Ukraine. Different forms of collaboration at the political, administrative, and military levels by certain Ukrainian groups were the price to be paid for better treatment in the future New Order. In the context of East European history, Ukrainian nationalists were only one among several ethnic groups within Hitler’s coalition of willing collaborationists. With the destructive concepts of racial expansionism (the “New European Order” of German propaganda) and territorial rule legitimated by ethnic cleansing (“ethnic Ukrainian territories” in the language of Ukrainian nationalist propaganda), post-1918 concepts of territorial revisionism were drastically radicalized. German perpetrators themselves spoke of a Rassenkrieg (war of races) or jüdischer Krieg (Jewish war), identifying the goal of the German war with the destruction or decimation of groups of people. By contrast, in the agenda of the OUN, as Timothy Snyder argues, Poles were not defined as a racial group but as a “political collectivity.” They were expected to behave according to a predictably anti-Ukrainian political logic and were therefore to be removed in order to achieve the ethnic goal of a purely Ukrainian Lebensraum.66 In this sense, ethnic cleansing and anti-Semitism lay at the core of German–Ukrainian relations during the Second World War, ultimately involving Ukrainians in the Holocaust and provoking the start of the Polish–Ukrainian war in 1943.

Notes I wish to thank Ray Brandon for useful comments and advice on translation. 1. Frank Golczewski, Deutsche und Ukrainer 1914–1939 (Paderborn, 2010). 2. Bundesarchiv Koblenz (hereafter BK), R43II/1500, OUN an Reichskanzlei, June 26, 1941. 3. Frank Grelka‚“Der Befreiungskrieg als Beutezug. Zur Verschleierung der Kriegsziele für den deutschen Vormarsch durch die Ukraine 1918 und 1941,” in Timm C. Richter (ed.), Krieg und Verbrechen (Munich, 2006), 99–111.

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4. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York, 2010), 161. 5. Gerhard Eisenblätter, “Grundlinien der Politik des Reichs gegenüber dem Generalgouvernement, 1939–1945,” PhD thesis, Frankfurt University (Frankfurt, 1969), 81–82; Bogdan Musiał, “Niemiecka polityka narodowościowa w okupowanej Polsce w latach 1939–1945,” Pamięc i Sprawiedliwość 2,6 (2004): 13–36. 6. Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill, 2005), 24–27. 7. John A. Armstrong, “Collaborationism in World War II: The Integral Nationalist Variant in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Modern History 40,3 (1968): 406, 411. 8. This was rather a misnomer: ethnic Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN sought to incorporate all Ukrainians in one state through the annexation of Ukrainian ethnic territory in neighboring states (initially Poland and Soviet Ukraine), although vast parts of the same territories had a Polish, Jewish, Russian, or Byelorussian majorities (such as southern and eastern Soviet Ukraine, parts of Volhynia and even Galicia). 9. For a concise history of the nationalists’ anti-Jewish stereotype, see: Marco Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth: Ukrainian Nationalist Discussion about Jews, 1929–1947,” Nationalities Papers 39 (2011): 311–52. 10. Stanisław Stępień, “W kręgu badań nad społeczeństwem II Rzeczypospolitej: Społeczność ukraińska,” Przemyskie Zapiski Historyczne 4/5 (1987): 137–74. 11. Stanisław Stępień: “Ukraiński ‘ideał narodowy’ w okresie międzywojennym: Czynniki budujące świadomość narodową postrzegane z perspektywy polityków galicyjskich,” Warszawskie Zeszyty Ukrainoznawcze 15/16 (2003): 79–95. 12. Bunt Młodych, December 20, 1935–January 5, 1936. 13. Stephen Shulman, “The Cultural Foundations of Ukrainian National Identity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22,6 (1999): 1011–36. 14. Magdalene Kwiecińska, “Drobna szlachta w Galicji–między polskim a ukraińskim ruchem narodowym,” Sprawy Narodowościowe 34 (2009): 83–97. 15. Wolfram Wette, “Die propagandistische Begleitmusik zum deutschen Überfall auf die Sowjetunion am 22. Juni 1941,” in Gerd R. Überschär and Wolfram Wette (eds), Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), 65. 16. Frank Golczewski, “Ukrainische Reaktionen auf die deutsche Besatzung 1939/41,” in Wolfgang Benz, Gerhard Otto and Johannes Houwink ten Cate (eds), Anpassung, Kollaboration, Widerstand: Kollektive Reaktionen auf die Okkupation (Berlin, 1996), 199–213. Bundesarchiv Berlin (hereafter BB) R901/58440; Chicago Herald Tribune, February 9, 1939: “It is known only too well that in ‘Mein Kampf’ Herr Hitler penned a few covetous phrases about the Ukraine. In Berlin there is a great deal of talk about ‘the future Ukrainian campaign’ and the Ukrainian émigrés residing there have lately been courted, financed and organized by the Nazis. All this leads some observers to believe that a German march on the Ukraine is, beyond dispute, the next move on Herr Hitler’s agenda.” 17. Frank Golczewski, “Politische Konzepte des ukrainischen nicht sozialistischen Exils (Petljura– Lypynskyj–Donzow),” in A. Kappeler and G. Hausmann (eds), Ukraine: Gegenwart und Geschichte eines neuen Staates (Baden-Baden, 1993), 100–2. 18. Piotr Kołakowski, NKWD i GRU na ziemiach polskich 1939–1945 (Warsaw, 2002), 103–4. 19. Centralne Archiwum Ministerstwa Spraw Wewnętrznych i Administracji RP (ed.), Polska i Ukraina w latach trzydziestych-czterdziestych XX wieku, vol. 1 (1998), 24–25. 20. Timothy Synder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, 2003), 156. 21. Halina Czarnocka, Armia Krajowa w dokumentach, vol. 2 (London, 1973), 143.

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22. OUN, “Postanovy Druhoho Velykoho Zboru OUN shcho vibuvsia v kvitni 1941r.,” in Vydannia Zakordonnykh Chastyn OUN (ed.), OUN v svitli postanov velykykh zboriv, konferentsii ta inshykh dokumentiv z borot’by 1929–1955rr., ch.1 (Kiev, 1955), 31. 23. Frank Grelka, Die Ukrainische Nationalbewegung unter deutscher Besatzungsherrschaft 1918 und 1941/42 (Wiesbaden, 2005), 250ff. 24. Cf. Alexander Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia: The Ukrainian Police and the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs 34,2 (2004): 109–10. 25. Dieter Pohl, “Die Einsatzgruppe C,” in P. Klein (ed.), Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Berlin, 1997), 80–81. 26. The Melnykites was the colloquial name for those members of the OUN who supported Colonel Andrii Mel’nyk after the schism within the organization in 1940. Compared to their breakaway rivals, the Banderites, the Melnykites adhered closely to the initial principles of the OUN and were therefore considered conservative. 27. Grelka, Die Ukrainische Nationalbewegung, 407. 28. John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism (Englewood Cliffs, 1990), 90. 29. BB, R58/699, “Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten, Nr. 33,” December 11, 1942. 30. Armstrong, “Collaborationism in World War II,” 401. 31. Grelka, Die Ukrainische Nationalbewegung, 139ff. 32. Volodymyr Kubiyovych, Konechnist’ nashoï spivpratsi z nimets’koiu vladoiu (Cracow, 1942), 22. 33. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (ed.), “The Correspondence of the Ukrainian Central Committee in Cracow and Lviv with the German Authorities 1939–1944,” Research Report No.61, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta (Edmonton, 2000) 2 vols. 34. Tsentral’nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Vyshchykh Orhaniv Vlady Ukraïny (hereafter TDAVO), f.3833, op.1, sprava 73, “Lyst Mel’nyka do Himmlera pro priiednannia Zach. Ukr. v sklad Heneral. ‘Huber’,” July 28, 1941; ibid., “Lyst Mel’nyka do Ribbentropa pro priiednannia Zach. Ukr. v sklad Heneral. ‘Huber’,” July 24, 1941. 35. BK, R43II/1504b, “Stepan Bandera an den Herrn Deutschen Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler,” August 3, 1941. 36. BB, R58/215, “Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 47, Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD,” August 8, 1941. 37. Grelka, Die Ukrainische Nationalbewegung, 360ff. 38. BB, R58/216, “Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 52, Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD,” August 14, 1941. 39. Fritz Arlt (ed.), Übersicht über die Bevölkerungsverhältnisse im Generalgouvernement (Cracow, 1940), 46–47. 40. Archiwum Państwowe w Lublinie, Amt des Distriktes Lublin, sign. 891, “Protokoll über die am 22.4.40 beim SSPF stattgefundene Besprechung betreffend den Einsatz jüdischer Zwangsarbeiter.” 41. Quoted in Correspondence of the Ukrainian Central Committee, vol. 1, “Denkschrift des Ukrainischen Hauptausschusses an den Herrn Generalgouverneur Dr. Frank, 21.5.1941,” 242; ibid., 134–35; see also ibid., 143–51; Snyder, Reconstruction of Nations, 158. 42. Grelka, Die Ukrainische Nationalbewegung, 198ff. 43. On the Ukrainian economy during the General Government, see: Myrosław Sycz, Spółdzielczość ukraińska w Galicji w okresie II wojny światowej (Warsaw, 1997). 44. Kubiyovych, in Krakivs’ki Visti, January 7, 1940. 45. “Postanovy Druhoho Velykoho Zboru OUN shcho vibuvsia v kvitni 1941r.,” in OUN, OUN v svitli postanov Velykykh Zboriv, vol. 1, 51.

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46. TDAVO, f.3833, op.1, spr.5, “Rishennia ch. 1 Natsional’nykh zboriv ukraïntsiv: Akt vidnovlennia Ukrains’koï Derzhavy.” 47. Alexander Korb, “Nation-building and Mass Violence: The Independent State of Croatia, 1941–45,” in Jonathan C. Friedman (ed.), The Routledge History of the Holocaust (New York, 2010), 291–302. 48. Lower, Nazi Empire-building, 37. 49. Ivan Kazymyrovych Patryliak, “Viis’kovi plany OUN (B) u taiemnii instruktsiï revolutsiinoho providu (traven’ 1941r.),” Ukraïns’kyi Istorichnyi Zhurnal 2 (2002): 127–37. 50. Grelka, Die Ukrainische Nationalbewegung, 273ff. 51. For recent scholarly literature on the Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust, see the special section on “Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust,” Nationalities Papers 39 (2011). 52. See the investigation against members of the Einsatzkommando 4a as part of the Einsatzgruppe C in southern Ukraine: Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg, El48/2I, Landeskriminalamt Stuttgart, Bu.352, 353; ibid., El317III, Staatsanwaltschaft beim Landgericht Stuttgart, Bu.120; see also the investigation against police batallion 320 operating in parallel with the Einsatzgruppe C: Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg, B162/2879; 2892; 3148; 2900; 2902. 53. Gerd R. Ueberschär, “Dokumente zum ‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’ als Vernichtungskrieg im Osten,” in Ueberschär and Wette, Der deutsche Überfall, 276. 54. Correspondence of the Ukrainian Central Committee, vol. 2, “Kubiyovych to General Governor Frank,” 1201. 55. Bundesarchiv Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten, ZM534, vol. 1, “2. Gendarmerie-Hauptmannschaft Zamosc an Kommandeur der Gendarmerie in Lublin,” April 23, 1944. 56. Timothy Snyder, “The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing, 1943,” Past and Present 179 (2003): 217–19. 57. Norman M. Naimark, “The Killing Fields of the ‘East’: Three Hundred Years of Mass Killing in the Borderlands of Russia and Poland,” in Marija Wakouning, Wolfgang Mueller, and Michael Portmann (eds), Nation, Nationalitäten und Nationalismus im Östlichen Europa (Vienna, 2010), 179–200. 58. Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (hereafter BM), RH22/122, HSSPF–Rußland-Süd–Führungsstab f. Bandenbekämpfung, Abt. Ic Buch Nr. 51/43 g., June 30, 1943. 59. For a general overview of anti-Polish action, see: Grzegorz Motyka, Ukraińska Partyzantka, 1942–1960 (Warsaw, 2006), 381ff; Snyder, “The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing,” 221–28. 60. BB, R70 Polen/76, Der Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer im Generalgouvernement I c (BdS) Tgb. Nr. 138/44g, May 17, 1944. 61. Ukrainian nationalists and Wehrmacht staff of the 4th Tank Army High Command discussed general cooperation in “anti-partisan warfare” against “Jewish gangs” (jüdische Banden) in Eastern Galicia. See: BM, RH21-4/317, Tätigkeitsbericht I c, January 1–June 30, 1944. 62. BM, RH24-3/154, Ic-Feindaufklärung, January–June 1944. 63. Michael James Melnyk, To Battle: The Formation and History of the 14th Galician Waffen-SS Division (Solihull, 2002), 281; cf. Alexander Brakel, Unter Rotem Stern und Hakenkreuz: Baranowicze 1939 bis 1944 (Paderborn, 2009), 220–22, on the similar example of the White Ruthenian Home Army, formed by the Germans on February 23, 1944. 64. David Cesarani, Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (London, 2000), 102ff. 65. Correspondence of the Ukrainian Central Committee, vol. 1, “Denkschrift Kubiyovych/ Omeltshenko an Hitler,” June 11, 1941, 220–30. 66. Snyder, “The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing,” 232.

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Chapter 8

CIVIL WAR IN OCCUPIED TERRITORIES The Polish–Ukrainian Conflict during the Interwar Years and the Second World War

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W

hen it comes to Eastern Europe, the definition of nation-states is a nightmare. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when nationalist conceptions first gained ground among urban social elites—and which were in turn supported by a political awakening of peasants, workers, and the lower social strata—the whole of Eastern Europe was under the domination of three empires (or four, if we include Germany) that were not at all interested in fostering national separatism, though they were also unable to do anything against the developments that took place in their respective realms. Having no realistic opportunity of realizing their dreams, nationalist politicians developed maps that included all those areas where their co-nationals were actually living or had lived in historic or prehistoric times. These areas were, as a rule, very large. And not all of these maps actually reflected the actual ethnic-cum-national situation in a given area. Having said that, we must concede that disputes over borders, the concept of nations (inclusive/exclusive), and the “national” quality of a certain area were unavoidable. Even if we accept the idea that every person has a definite ethnic or national identity (which was far from true in Eastern Europe), settlement policies, regime changes, shifts in identification from one nationality to another, as well as political and cultural (including religious) assimilation, created a patchwork of identities that rendered futile any effort to impose a system of national homogeneity on the situation. Many nineteenth-century identifications were simply based on religious affiliation—Protestant, Catholic, Uniate, Orthodox, Jew—and to make things more complicated, families were often dispersed across

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national borders. In the light of this complex situation, this chapter will focus on the Polish–Ukrainian conflict during the interwar years and the Second World War.

National Disappointment In the Polish–Ukrainian context two basic ways of thinking competed with each other for legitimacy. In the case of Poland there were, first, the National Democrats (ND), a largely lower-class grouping whose vision of a Polish state was ethnic in concept. They perceived primordially Germanized Polish people far to the west of undisputed central Polish areas. Consequently, they demanded the creation of a Poland that would stretch far to the west to include the Germanized populations that would have to be re-Polonized (the Piast concept).1 To the second group, the Piłsudskites, such a nation-state seemed politically dangerous because it would lead to German–Polish competition. Instead, they preferred a historic concept of Polish statehood. The Poland they envisaged was to include those areas ruled by the Jagiellonian dynasty since the Middle Ages. This harked back to the time of the combined Polish-Lithuanian state, which included not only ethnic Lithuania but also what is today Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Russia. This second perspective was primarily an upper-class one, structurally premodern, and one based on rulers rather than on people. It was also one which made light of the fact that Józef Piłsudski, a descendant of the Polonized Lithuanian gentry, was also one of the founders of Polish socialism. Arguing that Poles were the more developed and “more cultural” social stratum, Piłsudski’s followers, while verbally “respecting” local non-Poles, were convinced that in the end they could educate the “lesser developed” eastern Slavs and turn them into Poles. Until then, the Slavs should live in a “federation” with the Poles, who, of course, would be the dominant partner.2 In a general sense, the ideologies of the National Democrats and the Piłsudskites were not peculiar to the Polish situation. Practically everywhere in Eastern Europe, different historical concepts, varying as to which historical period was referenced, competed with ethno-linguistic interpretations of the present situation. Whatever frontier was drawn, there would be a party, nation, or group willing to dispute it and call for it to be revised.3 In many cases the dispute was about which ethnic group was a “real” or “historic” one, and which was just a bunch of arrogant defenders of a dialectical group, an “ethnographic mass,” as the Berlin-based Polish Slavist Aleksander Brückner called Ukrainians.4 To Lithuanian nationalists, Vilnius, the capital of the Lithuanian grand dukes, had to be part of a new Lithuanian state, notwithstanding that the city itself was predominantly Polish and Jewish, with Poles also being the majority population in the city’s environs. Force won over argument in the Vilnius case. In October

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1920, Polish troops occupied the Vilnius area, created Central Lithuania (Litwa Środkowa), and annexed it to Poland after an election two years later. As a consequence, relations between Poland and Lithuania, with its capital now at Kaunas, were similar to those that now exist between North and South Korea—there was not even a postal connection between the two countries until Poland extracted a “normalization” referring to its German “friends” after the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. In Poland, the National Democrats and the Piłsudskites, differing on many political issues, agreed on a compromise: the ND represented Poland to the West, whereas Piłsudski cared for adding areas in the east. Here, however, the Poles encountered a rival. Ukrainians created a national concept of their own in the nineteenth century. But Ukrainian nationality is a disputed category even today, with Rusyns in Transcarpathia claiming a separate nationality and many Russians denying national status to what they call “Little Russians” (Malorossy), the term used in the Czarist empire. Historically, the southern areas of today’s Ukraine were unsuccessfully claimed by the Kievan Rus’ around the ninth and tenth centuries, though they were inhabited by Turkic or other steppe peoples, the Tatar Mongol Golden Horde, and the Crimean khanate, a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. Only in the eighteenth century were they resettled by Russia (as Novaja Rossija, “New Russia,” using settlers from all over Europe), after the Russian Empire under Catherine II and Prince Potemkin conquered the steppe and Crimea. Much of the eastern part of the Ukraine (Slobodskaja Ukraina, around present-day Kharkiv) had also been resettled and experienced an influx from all over Russia during the process of industrialization. Russia considered the central part of Ukraine to be Little Russia (Malorossija, corresponding with northern Great Russia), and even today the regular narrative of Russian history considers Kiev to be the cradle of Russia and the “mother of all Russian towns.” Only late in the nineteenth century did the historian Mykhaylo Hrushevsky develop a historical narrative that detached the Ukrainians from Russian history. The creation of two different nationalities has been a topic of many peaceful and bloody “discussions” from that time on. This corresponds with the similar position of Polish nationalists who view today’s western Ukraine (Eastern Galicia) as Ruś (Ruthenia). Still, in the Austrian (Ruthenen) and Polish (Rusini) terminology of the early twentieth century, Ruthenians (that is, Ukrainians from Galicia and Carpatho-Ukraine) were separated from Ukrainians who (at best) lived east of the Polish borders of 1772—that is, the borders before the first partition of Poland. And in Austrian Galicia, the Ruthenians (divided into Ukrainophiles and Russophiles) never really settled the question of whether they were Ukrainians, members of a separate nation, or a western part of the larger Russian nation. Only when the occupying Russians treated these who were pro-Moscow as badly as Ukrainian nationalists

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in 1914/15 did this orientation become a thing of the past. In the interwar period, when Poland fought and won against a Ukrainian army in 1918/19 and the Entente Powers finally accepted its ownership of Eastern Galicia in 1923, these territories were understood as an extension of Little Poland (Małopolska), the area dominated by Cracow (Kraków) and the counterpart of Great Poland (Wielkopolska), dominated by Posen (Poznań). Thus, after the First World War, it was renamed Eastern Little Poland (Małopolska Wschodnia). Whereas before the First World War, in the Austrian part of partitioned Poland, Polish and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) national consciousness was supported by a religious and later secular school system (both Polish Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Greek Catholic), and by peasant politicization triggered by general and local elections,5 in the mixed areas under Russian rule nothing of this kind happened. That is why in Volhynia, as opposed to Galicia, national and political consciousness remained a low-key affair. Here, as with areas to the north, such as Polissja (Polesie) and other parts of Byelorussia, some people even in the 1930s still defined themselves as locals (tutejsi) only, because they had not learned to identify themselves with another category, such as Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, or Byelorussian. The first efforts to bring about a Ukrainian state (in Kiev in 1917, and in Lviv in 1918) resulted in disasters. Whereas imperial Germany and, reluctantly, Austria supported a Ukrainian state (which was actually nearly destroyed by the Bolsheviks)—triggering its declaration of independence in January 1918 in order to sign a peace treaty (on February 9) and continue fighting Russia (up to the peace treaty signed on March 3, 1918)—the German and Austrian helpers turned into occupants who soon replaced the leftist government with a Ukrainian State under het’man Pavlo Skoropads’kyi who enjoyed a semi-monarchical status, but depended fully on the Germans and left with them in December 1918. Ukrainian republican, czarist Russian, communist, and peasant-anarchist governments and their armies fought each other until the disputed area was divided up between the Soviets and the Poles in 1921. Thereafter, non-Soviet Ukrainians became one of the most revisionist nations in the interwar period. And they began a search for possible helpers. Over the next few years—with most of Volhynia (except Zhytomyr) and Eastern Galicia now part of Poland, and central and eastern Ukraine under Soviet rule—different and rather unexpected developments took place. Soviet Ukraine, heavily Russified since the nineteenth century, was Ukrainized in the korenizatsiya, an effort by the Soviet communists to create a base for the party within the non-Russian ethnic groups of the Soviet Union. Agrarian reform that dispossessed estate owners (mostly Russian and Polish) appealed to the Ukrainian peasantry across the border.6 Combined with an extensive alphabetization drive that pushed literacy from around 20 per cent to more than 80 per cent during the interwar period, Soviet Ukrainians learned to

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write and speak Ukrainian in the USSR, thus presenting a constant example for their co-nationals under Polish rule. Though this soon ended in the 1930s and was replaced by Russification, forced collectivization, artificially created famine, and repression, Soviet communism continued to have followers in Polish Ukraine. On the Polish side, we find a double policy. In Eastern Galicia, Austrian prewar policy in the territories with a mixed Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish population had given rise to an extensive Ukrainian school and library (prosvita) network that supported the development of a national consciousness, national parties (even rivaling socialist parties),7 and resulted in competing state proclamations and wars. During the 1920s, pro-Soviet communism and growing nationalism (including terrorist attacks and murders of Polish and moderate Ukrainian politicians) gave rise to Polish “pacification” counter-attacks and efforts to Polonize and dispossess Ukrainians—and to change the demographic balance by bringing in Polish “colonists,” often demobilized soldiers. North of the former Austro–Russian border, in Polish Volhynia, the situation was different. During the period of Russian rule, the use of the Ukrainian language was banned and the Uniate Church was incorporated into that of Russian Orthodoxy in the 1830s; national consciousness here was as underdeveloped as the economy and other settlers (Germans, Czechs, Baptists), brought in during the nineteenth century, blurred the ethnic landscape. Poland separated these areas from “troublesome Galicia” and its nationalist Ukrainians by a police-guarded border (kordon sokalski) in order to prevent Galician Ukrainian nationalists agitating among “peaceful” Volhynian Ukrainians. When Piłsudski came to power in Poland following a coup d’état in 1926, he placed the administration of Volhynia under his friend Henryk Józewski. Born in Kiev, Józewski was a member of the Polish gentry; as well as being a painter, he had been Vice-Minister of Internal Affairs in Symon Petlyura’s short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1920. Following his appointment as governor of Volhynia, during his time in office he tried to alleviate the impact of national strife. Fostering a Volhynian regional identity that included both Poles and Ukrainians, Józewski supported Ukrainians in government and teaching positions, presenting his province as a counter-model to the Soviet one. In return, he demanded allegiance to the Polish state and banned Galician Ukrainian nationalist activity.8 In Galicia, on the other hand, political polarization within the Ukrainian community resulted in the development of two major political blocks in the 1930s: whereas the majority of the establishment supported the Ukrainian National Democratic Union (UNDO) under Milena Rudnytska and Vasyl’ Mudry, which tried to represent Ukrainian interests in Poland by legal and political means, many young people (peasants, gymnasia pupils, and university students) were attracted to the terrorist Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO)

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and its successor, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in 1929. When Poland became nationally radicalized after Piłsudski’s death in 1935, any prospects for peaceful Polish–Ukrainian cooperation vanished. Józewski had to change posts with the governor of Łódź, a radical Polish nationalist. UNDO declared an end to the “normalization” process of Ukrainian–Polish cooperation in 1938, and Polish nationalists started a new drive to colonize Ukrainian lands and dispossess Ukrainian churches (rewindykacja). Though UNDO declared its loyalty to the Polish state, when Germany attacked on September 1, 1939, many Ukrainians hoped that German support would bring about a change in their plight. Thus, national disappointment was the mood in this ethnically and historically mixed area at the beginning of the Second World War. Poles still were not sure of their territorial possessions and Ukrainians had repeatedly experienced setbacks regarding nationalist aspirations.

Hopes Set on the Great Powers We should divide the peoples and politicians of 1939 into two categories. Those who profited from the status quo wanted to continue to do so and, therefore, were for continuous peace. The others, who considered that they had lost in the first round of liberation after the First World War, expected change to come only from war—and that is why they were not at all interested in the preservation of peace. When we look at coalition partners, this gives us a clue to the events of 1939. Official Poland and Great Britain wanted to preserve the status quo. On the other hand, some Polish politicians dreamed of further expansion to the east, and they wanted closer ties with Germany; for them, even Nazi Germany seemed to be better than the older Weimar “Prussians” who were anti-Polish from the start. On the other hand, they were (with good reason) afraid of Germany, and that is why, in the end, they did not enter into an alliance with the Germans in 1939. After having realized that the Poles would not become their junior partners, the Germans decided to operate against them instead—in alliance with the Soviets. The Soviets wanted change, too. That is why as a partner they preferred Nazi Germany to Great Britain, with whose representatives in the summer of 1939 talks lingered on without coming to an agreement. Britain offered stability, Germany offered change, and the USSR was at that time still interested in something like a world revolution. Stalin’s lesson from the First World War was that, if a revolution should break out, one had to have war first and the following disaster would then foster revolutionary awareness. And Ukrainians of all creeds wanted change as well. They were currently without a state, so only a war

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could bring them the statehood (derzhavnist’) they wanted so dearly. Thus, many Ukrainians were pro-war. Even UNDO leaders, who at one stage pledged allegiance to Poland, among them Vasyl’ Mudry, were the first to offer to collaborate with the Germans as soon as they could do so—that is, in October 1939.9 The OUN—active against everything Polish, and having changed their statute into a fascist leadership-oriented organization in August 1939 in Rome—supported the German army with a small band of volunteer soldiers. When the Germans realized that the Soviets would stand by their promises and the latter entered the war on September 17, 1939 the OUN were brought back into the German zone of occupation, though not without being told that they would be used again as soon as possible. The Soviets, too, employed a national logic in their rationalization of the new (fifth) partition of Poland. Security for their compatriots in western Ukraine and western Byelorussia, the creation of a united (Soviet) Ukraine and Byelorussia, and the defeat of the Polish pany, considered to be model imperialists—those were the slogans of the USSR when the eastern parts of the Polish Republic were incorporated into the Soviet Union. In Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, Polish antiUkrainian policy was thus followed by nominally pro-Ukrainian Soviet policy. Being accompanied, however, by all the shortcomings, cruelties, and terror that was part of Sovietization, even most Ukrainians soon came to dislike what many of them (from the lower strata) had hoped would be a liberation. In this they did not differ from Jewish leftists, who in the first weeks welcomed the Soviets, too, if only because they saved them from being occupied by anti-Semitic Germany. Soon, however, both came to realize that Soviet domination would have positive effects only for a very small part of their respective communities. Whereas the Ukrainians could now hope for German intervention, the Jews could not. Between 1939 and 1941, the Germans treated the small group of Ukrainians that lived in German-occupied Poland (the General Government) well. The school and cooperative systems of the Ukrainian minority were expanded, Ukrainians could take over Jewish enterprises as fiduciaries, and they could become mayors instead of the Poles. In 1940, the cathedral of Chełm (Kholm), given to the Catholics after the First World War, was transferred to a newly created Autocephalous Orthodox Church of the General Government, whose southern parts became an Orthodox Ukrainian church. Poles, on the other hand, were the losers on both sides. On the German side, however, they, too, were compensated to a certain extent by profiting from the even worse treatment of the Jews. But on both sides of the German–Soviet demarcation line, it was now better to declare oneself a Ukrainian than a Pole. This possibility is one of the least researched in inter-ethnic relations—most people, including scholars, tend to accept nationality as a fixed category. This is not so, however. Whereas Germanization is a well-researched field, nationality changes among other nationalities have remained relatively unexplored.

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Admittedly, the survival of Jews as “Aryans” has been researched. Normally well-accepted categories of Jew and Pole/Ukrainian answer to a political logic. Zionists, Orthodox Jews and radical gentile nationalists try to impress on the public (even the learned ones) that these were stable categories. But they overlook the fact that—especially in Galicia—the borderline between Jew and Pole was very easily crossed, and that confessionalization, which made one’s creed a private affair, had progressed a long way in the larger cities where, as in Lviv, Polish nationalists as a rule counted the Jews as Poles in order to outnumber Ukrainians. The same holds true with the distinction between Pole and Ukrainian. For example, Volodymyr Kubiyovych, head of the Ukrainian Central Committee, established by the Germans in Cracow, had a Polish mother: two of her four children were brought up as Poles, two as Ukrainians. Even Volodymyr’s first wife was Polish. The brother of the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky from Lviv, Polish General Stanisław Szeptycki, considered himself to be unquestionably Polish (in fact his family descended from Polonized Ruthenian gentry). Andriy’s Christian name had been Roman before he chose to join the Ukrainians. This fluid nationality situation was countered with a specific kind of radicalism. Whereas one might think that a society with so many ethno-national crossovers would be more tolerant, the contrary was true. To a high degree, it was uncertainty (including that of national status) that made the respective groups profess their national attitude more uncompromisingly than one might expect. This might have been overcome in closer relationships, but even that rule did not always work.

The Changes of 1941 When Germany attacked the USSR on June 22, 1941, hope and fear were equally present. Whereas there was no place for independent Slavic states in the Germans’ Generalplan Ost, which foresaw the creation of the German Lebensraum, their Slavic allies had different expectations and hopes. Killing those who were pointed out to them to have been commissars or otherwise held communist sympathies, the German Einsatzgruppen that screened Soviet POWs for execution also searched for “reliable” men to help the Germans. Poles and Ukrainians in western Ukraine hoped that the Germans would either re-establish the old order (Poles) or bring them the statehood that their nationalist leaders had expected from the Germans. Further to the east, where political aims were not so prominent after many years of Soviet rule, the locals at least expected the Germans to return to re-establish a “bourgeois” way of production, including private enterprises and the redistribution of forcibly collectivized lands.

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Hitler himself declared on July 16, 1941,10 at a conference at his Wolfsschanze headquarters, that though the Germans should declare that they will act in the interest of local inhabitants, they should nevertheless shoot and deport the locals. On the other hand, he declared that he had no intention of transforming those people prematurely and unnecessarily into enemies. To this end, the Germans should continue to pretend that they were the bringers of freedom—though the Germans had no intention of leaving. This bogus “freedom” initiative resulted in the Ukrainians welcoming the Germans. One week after the invasion of the Soviet Union (and perhaps even before that date, because the relevant document referred to undocumented information given on June 17, 1941), Heydrich ordered his security-police task groups (Einsatzgruppen) “to activate without leaving a trace (spurlos auslösen) self-cleaning efforts of anti-communist and anti-Jewish circles.”11 There was not too much to be done, because many Ukrainians, indoctrinated by the antiJewish propaganda of the OUN that identified Jews with both communists and Russians, readily held their Jewish neighbors responsible for Soviet atrocities and started pogroms all over the German occupied areas.12 Though there is still uncertainty as to what extent these “self-cleaning efforts” were self-made or introduced by the Germans, it is clear that it was not difficult to find a sufficient number of locals to undertake pogroms and mass killings of Jews. As this happened in the first weeks of the German invasion, one cannot separate these massacres from the Ukrainian nationalist project of creating a Ukrainian state under German domination. In Lemberg (Lviv) on June 30, 1941, Yaroslav Stets’ko, the deputy leader of the Bandera faction of the OUN, and some of his comrades proclaimed a Ukrainian state, only to be arrested and deported to the German concentration camp at Sachsenhausen and other prisons in the following weeks as Eastern Galicia became the fifth district of the General Government. In a similar effort in Kiev, a Ukrainian National Council (Ukraïnśka Natsional’na Rada), created by the Mel’nyk faction of the 1940 split OUN immediately after practically all of the Jews of Ukraine’s capital had been shot in nearby Babiy Yar, operated until the city was brought under German civil authority under the notorious East Prussian Gauleiter Erich Koch, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (RKU). Leaders who continued to work politically had to flee (like Oleh Kandyba-Olzhych, who took refuge in Lviv but was arrested later) or they were shot in Babiy Yar (like the OUN martyr Olena Teliha). Thus, Ukrainians who had placed great hopes on the Germans were disappointed when their nationalist efforts remained unsuccessful. Whereas nationalist political leaders had hoped for Ukrainian statehood under German suzerainty that would finally bring them support against Poles, Russians, and Jews, areas where Ukrainians formed most or part of the population remained distributed between the General Government, the RKU, German military administration (the Rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Süd), Romania (Transnistria), and Hungary

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(Carpatho-Ukraine). Self-government was permitted up to the county level only, and the Germans, who had nominally sided with the Ukrainians before, now saw to it that nowhere (not even in the religious field) could national Ukrainian unity develop. The Germans followed the directives of July 16, 1941. Whereas most Jews were killed in 1941/42, Ukrainians were treated well under the General Government as they could be used against the Poles. Their Ukrainian Central Committee (Ukrainischer Hauptausschuss, UCC), headed by Kubiyovych, had much more power than the parallel Polish collaborationist organization, the Main Trustee Council (Rada Główna Opiekuńcza). Though both bodies were assigned mainly a charity role, the Ukrainian one developed into a kind of cultural ministry, an economic interest lobby (supporting Ukrainian cooperatives), and held close links to General Governor Hans Frank. When the German military found themselves in serious trouble after Stalingrad, and Goebbels proclaimed a different approach to the “eastern peoples” (Ostvölker), the UCC became the unparalleled guiding body for the Ukrainian (Galician) SS troops, formed under the General Government and which enjoyed a large influx of volunteers hoping for German support for Ukrainian statehood. On the one hand, German propaganda—namely, the “liberation” rhetoric of the first weeks of the war in 1941—seems clearly distinct from the German position after Stalingrad. In this respect it is not incorrect to speak of two distinct phases. On the other hand there were communal and territorial differentiations that transgress such a simple dualistic timeline. While the Germans were in fact only interested in ensuring their own dominant position, they were at the same time well aware that this end would be more easily reached if the locals not only cooperated but also linked their own objectives to that purpose. This did not mean in the least that these objectives would be tolerated or endorsed by the Germans in the long run—they would only be accepted as short-term goals and only if they served German aims. Alfred Rosenberg, the German minister for the occupied eastern territories, appointed in 1941, is sometimes described as someone who would have favored autonomy or even independence for Eastern non-Russian peoples, as long as they cooperated with the Germans.13 The aforementioned Erich Koch often serves as the negative counterpart to this seemingly tolerant approach. In fact, the two men did not differ very much. Whereas Rosenberg simply wanted to use the cooperation of local people for German ends—very much in line with what Hitler indicated on July 16, 1941—Koch was more blunt in that he used open force from the beginning, rather than camouflaging exploitative measures with promises of autonomy. To begin with, Koch clearly won the direct support of the German center. In his RKU, however, he had to rely on the locals as well. That is why political promises were replaced by temporary material incentives. These were especially

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promising, because Ukraine was used as a reservoir of food and manpower. Agricultural delivery rates were put so high that those who remained in Ukraine (and were not deported for forced labor) lived on the verge of starvation. German auxiliaries and German-appointed civil servants were in charge of the food stores and could thus support their closest family members. That is why many Ukrainians joined the auxiliary units, only to desert to the woods when this looked like a better solution.

The Change of the Tide After the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk in 1942/43, the Ukrainians realized that German domination would end very soon. It also did not escape their attention that relations between the Soviet Union and the Western Allied Powers had worsened as far as Eastern Europe was concerned. For Poles, it was the discovery of the Katyn massacres by the Germans and the ensuing propaganda campaign that was successful in breaking relations between the Polish government in exile and the USSR. From any perspective, the situation in mid 1943 was bizarre. At that time, the Germans had killed many more Poles than the Russians (even if one excludes Polish Jews from this number), but they now seemed to take a moralistic position against the Soviets, with whom they had been allied when the killings took place. Far from defending the Poles openly, they adopted a position of defending the Poles against the Soviets. Or so they thought, because subsequent efforts to build up an anti-Bolshevik European front, successful in many other countries, failed in most Polish areas. Ukrainian nationalists, strictly bound to cooperate with the Germans— notwithstanding their failed efforts at statehood of 1941—were in a highly difficult position. They feared the Soviets much more than the Germans. Ideologically, they were very far from the democratic model of the Western Allies, but they expected (like many Germans in 1945) that the Allies would turn to fighting the Soviets after Germany’s defeat, and they wanted to prepare for that. We will not treat extensively the ideological volte-face of the Ukrainian nationalists following their clandestine congress in the Ukrainian woods in 1943. At this meeting, the Third Extraordinary Grand Assembly of August 21 to 25, 1943, the Bandera faction of the OUN condemned “internationalist and fascist National Socialist programs and political concepts” as well as “Russian-Bolshevik communism” and proposed a “system of free peoples and independent states [as] the single best solution to the problem of world order.”14 This sounded all well and good, but that was only one half of the problem—the theoretical one. One might discuss here to what extent this was anything more than a move to follow Dmytro Dontsov’s rule that Ukrainian nationalists should always side with the enemies of Moscow (Russia), irrespective of their political perspectives.

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As Germany’s position began to decline, the Western Allies took their place with respect to Dontsov’s rule—as they had in the 1920s. Thus, the Ukrainians had to attach themselves to a new ally. Much more interesting is the fact that Ukrainian nationalists began to envision a postwar redrawing of the map of Eastern Europe. And in this they were not alone: nationalist and communist Poles at the same time formed paramilitary groups in preparation for the postwar period. When we hear about partisans in the Second World War, at first we assume that their main enemy was the occupying power: Germany (and in this we are supported by postwar propaganda, both by the Soviets and other official historiographies). Of course, this is not a wholly false perspective. But as important as the fight against the occupiers, and sometimes even more important, was the fight for positive objectives. In these offensive planning objectives, the Germans were only a transient factor. The real objective was the postwar map—and this had to differ from the one that had existed in 1939/40. Here, we come back to the main question of prewar Europe: Should the borders remain in their prewar form or should they be revised? Revisionism was the objective of the losers at the Paris Peace Conferences of 1919/20. At this stage in the war, one could declare, more or less audaciously, that the great powers that had fought a frontline war (Germany and the USSR) partly became of secondary importance in a very different war, in which different insurgents far from the front fought against each other. The main aim of this war was to clarify who would own disputed territories in the future. This was the political thinking of those days, and in many ways it did not change until recently. Whereas many politicians declared their allegiance to “ethnologically correct” nation-states (whatever that might mean), in fact the topic of the day was corriger la fortune by denationalizing, transferring, deporting, or killing those who were deemed to be undesirable. Of course, Germans and Soviets had started these moves in 1939 (just to pass over earlier examples). But the deportation of Poles and Jews from annexed Posen, Upper Silesia, and Wartheland came to a halt early in 1940 due to technical reasons and a protest by Governor General Hans Frank. More successful was the bringing in of “ethnic Germans” from what was then Soviet eastern Poland, the Baltic countries, and Bessarabia. After the deportation of Jews from Germany proper and Western Europe into the ghettoes and concentration camps, the first “non-Jewish” project was started in the Zamość area of the General Government late in 1942. On July 15, 1942, the head of the SS and police in Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, declared that the area around the town was to be renamed Himmlerstadt or Pflugstadt (this never happened) and would become the first German settler area in occupied Poland. The first resettlement took place in Skierbieszów on November 27, 1942.15 Whole Polish villages were emptied of their inhabitants, who were either killed, deported for forced labor, sent to German institutions

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for “Germanizable” children, or allowed to leave for other places (the so-called Rentendörfer, for old people and children). Their homes were then given to German families from Southeast Europe (Romania). In order to bring some kind of safety to the German settlers, the Nazis brought in 7,000 Ukrainians (who had formed a rural population in these areas, too) to Hrubieszów county and resettled them in abandoned Polish villages. The first reaction in these areas was the so-called Zamość Uprising (Powstanie zamojskie), a movement of Polish and Soviet partisans commencing in December 1942. The partisans destroyed both German and Ukrainian colonists’ homes and villages, and had such an impact that the resettlement drive was abandoned in March 1943. Between June and August 1943, German Wehrmacht, SS troops and Ukrainian auxiliaries “pacified” the area, deporting about 60,000 Poles from more than 150 villages. Ukrainians in the General Government were in a pro-German mood at the time, as the Germans had approved a new policy towards “eastern peoples” (Ostvölker) after Stalingrad. Under this plan, Ukrainians (but not Poles) would get a partial recognition by the creation of the SS Galicia division (14. Waffengrenadier Division of the SS)—and the Ukrainians in the GG (including the Uniate clergy) rejoiced: there were more than 80,000 volunteers, though the division would not accept more than about 15,000. The first military actions by the Polish armed underground (the Home Army [Armia Krajowa, AK], the communist People’s Guard [Gwardia Ludowa], and the peasants battalions) were conducted in retaliation for German atrocities, but in the end they were directed against Ukrainians too, who were considered to be collaborators. In fact they were, though many of them had been forced to move into former Polish homes or had joined others in the hope of finding a better living. The Germans considered the Ukrainians to be friendly, and the Ukrainian nationalists, for whom the eastern areas of the Lublin district were ethnic Ukrainian territory, endorsed this expansion of their “living space” (Lebensraum). We should keep in mind that Polish attacks on Ukrainians, carried out as revenge and to keep territory “Polish,” also triggered those of the Ukrainian nationalists that had come together in Volhynia, east of the Lublin district, late in 1942.16 The Ukrainian nationalists were a diverse group: members of disbanded pro-German paramilitary bodies like the Schutzmannschaften, Bandera-faction OUN nationalists (the OUN-B) and other smaller groups like the Bulbovtsy (Polisśka Sich, the original UPA), persecuted nationalists, peasants who had not delivered their contributions, Ukrainians who had escaped raids for forced labor, and those who had simply hidden out in the woods. Meanwhile, in those same woods there were also remnants of the Red Army, and Polish partisans of different (communist and non-communist) bodies. After the fighting in the Lublin area began and news of Soviet approaches arrived, the Ukrainian nationalist partisans, brought into a shape by the OUN-B

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as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukraïnśka Povstanśka Armija, UPA), started to attack Polish peasants in Volhynia on July 11, 1943. These events are emotionally raw even today; they were a taboo subject during the Soviet era and became a topic of discussion and dissent thereafter. Many publications by Polish veterans and nationalists present a gruesome picture of the events. In fact, both sides proceeded with considerable brutality. There was large-scale killing in these areas. Soviet deportations and brutalities were followed by mass murder by the German Einsatzgruppen, in which real or alleged communists—and Jews, of course—were killed upon denunciation. At the end of 1942, nearly all the inhabitants of ghettoes in Volhynia were liquidated by German police and Ukrainian auxiliaries. Partisans of different creeds fought against each other, and when news of German defeats in battles arrived, combined with that of Polish attacks on Ukrainians, individuals and groups used to brutal killing turned against those who now seemed to be their real enemies. Everybody expected the restitution of the prewar borders—and the Ukrainian nationalists did not want Volhynia and Eastern Galicia to fall into Polish hands again. There are differing timelines for these acts of terror. Some consider the attack on Oborky on November 13, 1942 to be the beginning; to others it was the massacre of Poles in Parośla Pierwsza near Sarny on February 9, 1943 (probably committed by Bulbovtsy partisans).17 The central events in Poland circle around July 11, 1943, when the UPA attacked about eighty villages in Volhynia. These actions continued, and in the second half of 1943 the UPA handed over the land they had gained, formerly owned by Poles, to Ukrainian peasants in what were deemed to be the “liberated areas.” These activities continued during the early months of 1944 and seeped into Eastern Galicia. Against these Ukrainian activities, a local Polish “self-defense” force was built up. These local militias, whose task was to defend Polish villages, were helped by the AK structures that also tried to reshape Volhynia and prepare the region for inclusion within a future Polish state. In January 1944, with the Red Army approaching, smaller units of the AK united to form the Twenty-seventh Volhynia Infantry Division. In 1944, the Germans controlled some of the main roads and towns, whereas Soviet, UPA, and AK partisans held different rural areas. All of them fought against each other for possession of the land. When the Red Army came close to Sarny in January 1944, the AK mobilized Poles for Action Thunderstorm (Akcja Burza). The strategic goal was to liberate Polish areas with Polish soldiers instead of them being liberated by the Soviets. On March 18, 1944, after having contacted the advancing Soviets, the Polish AK started military operations against the Germans. The Germans on the other hand united with Ukrainian troops (from the SS Galicia division, the UPA, and from auxiliary units) and fought against the Polish insurgents. During one of these raids in late February, the inhabitants of the village of Huta Pieniacka in the

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northern part of Eastern Galicia were annihilated in retaliation for the killing of two Ukrainian soldiers some days before. It remains unclear whether Ukrainians or Germans were the perpetrators of this massacre, which remains significant to this day: on February 28, 2009, both the Polish and the Ukrainian presidents took part in a commemorative ceremony there. Strange bedfellows sought and found each other. Whereas Polish and Ukrainian nationalists saw each other as enemies, both were against the communist underground and the Red Army. In that respect they shared a tactical goal with the Germans. So, it is no surprise that from 1943 on Germans retained contacts with Ukrainian nationalist partisans.18 Though both sides pretended that their contacts, talks, mutual assistance, and fights were “non-political,” in fact there was wholesale collaboration. The same holds true in the Nowogródek (Navahrudak) area of Byelorussia, where “Lech,” the local AK commander in Lida, arranged a ceasefire with the Germans in the winter of 1943/44, for which he was later court-martialed but acquitted.19 The main point, however, is that there was more than the German–Soviet war going on. There was fighting between nationalist Poles and nationalist Ukrainians, between nationalists and communist partisans, between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists on the one hand and the Red Army on the other (in 1946). Add to this that there were at times alliances between Germans and Ukrainians, and it is clear that there was a very complicated military and political situation. Again, we have to point to the fact that national self-identification was a novelty in these areas. Earlier, religious allegiance—as in premodern times—was the organizing force in communities, and in many cases this religious system was simply translated into a national one. To make things even more complicated, others persisted in their religious system though pledging allegiance to an incompatible national one. Ukrainian latynnyky, Ukrainian-speaking Roman Catholics who were either Ukrainian converts to Roman Catholicism or the descendants of Polish colonists who had partially assimilated to Ukrainian culture, were complemented by Orthodox Poles, still today considered somehow alien in the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church, whose majority is Ukrainian, Russian or Byelorussian. When Poles and Ukrainians fought each other, they fought for their relatively new national creed. The earlier confessional diversity of these lands had given way to an ethnic one: ethnicity had replaced confession. And ethnicity was one of those things people had learned to fight for. As the people fighting each other had only recently begun to identify themselves in national terms, I prefer the term “civil war” over “inter-ethnic war” for these events. Ethnicity was fluid—much more fluid than national ideologues from both sides would be ready to admit. But it was becoming stable, just like a lava flow that forms shapes out of fluid magma. The Nazis used these stabilizing ethnicities for the purpose of domination. The fight broke out when the ground

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was brutalized by the war the Germans had brought to these territories, and when they had demonstrated that killing others and changing the population were accepted instruments in this Volkstumskampf. The Germans actively motivated different nationalities to fight each other. They supported anti-Jewish propaganda, supported Ukrainians against Poles, and tolerated the “civil war” that unfolded because as long as the different partisan groups fought one another they did not fight the Germans. And when the locals then turned to the Germans for assistance, they helped the practically defeated Germans against the Red Army.

After the War After the war, the war went on. When the front moved away from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1944 there was no end to fighting in the disputed territories. On August 16, 1944, the Soviet Union forced a border treaty on the communist Poles of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, PKWN). This body was commonly known as the Lublin Committee, after establishing itself in the city, the first to be liberated by the Red Army east of the Curzon Line. The border treaty declared the Curzon Line with some small adjustments to be the Polish–Soviet border.20 What historians normally find most interesting about this treaty is the fact that the USSR had forced the communist Poles to accept most of the territorial acquisitions of 1939 (only the Białystok area returned to Poland). But there is another aspect to this, too. The new border was to be the dividing line between two nation-states. Far from the eyes of the Western Powers, more or less at the time the Germans were expelled from the areas east of the Oder and Lausitzer Neiße rivers, communist Poles and Soviets started an ethnic cleansing operation. The declared aim was to ethnically homogenize the areas around the border between the two states. This was facilitated by two treaties between the PKWN and the Ukrainian resp. the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic of September 9, 1944. These treaties provided for a voluntary population exchange: persons of Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Russian, and Ruthenian descent were free to cross the border into the territory now belonging to the Soviet Union, whereas people of Polish and Jewish descent, who were Polish citizens before September 17, 1939, could leave the Soviet areas for Poland. A similar treaty with Soviet Lithuania was signed on September 22. On July 6, 1945, these treaties were complemented by an agreement on the change of nationality of those involved. At first appearance, these treaties looked fine. In fact, there was no voluntariness: they soon resulted in forced expulsions on both sides. From Soviet Ukraine, about 750,000 Poles and Jews were transferred to Poland; from Byelorussia the

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number was about 300,000 to 400,000, and from Lithuania about 180,000. Meanwhile, about 480,000 Ukrainians were transferred from Poland to Soviet Ukraine.21 All these numbers are approximations only. At the time there was a civil war going on in the border areas: relics of the Polish nationalist underground reorganized in 1945 into the National Military Union (Narodowe Zjednoczenie Wojskowe). Former members of the London-oriented AK joined Freedom and Independence (Wolność i Niezawisłość), a dubious partisan body that temporarily even cooperated with the UPA, which was the main power opposing the “repatriations.” On the other side, there were the Red Army, members of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), and Polish communist military and paramilitary bodies (border guards, internal security corps, and police units). The Polish civil war came slowly to an end in 1948, and in the Ukraine the UPA was infiltrated and defeated by the Soviets in the early 1950s. Still, claims that Ukrainians were disloyal to the new states and supported the UPA led to the infamous Vistula Action (Akcja Wisła) in 1947, during which more than 140,000 Ukrainians were transferred from the southeastern border areas of Poland and scattered in the villages of formerly German territories. Most of them turned into Poles by a process of assimilation, whereas some retained their cultural background and developed a cultural network in Poland when this became possible again after Stalinism. Since the early 1990s some of them have returned to the towns they were expelled from. The southeastern corner of present-day Poland was never resettled. Remains of burnt-out villages, some with chimneys surviving, dot a landscape that has become one of the most beautiful national parks in Poland, the Bieszczady. Whereas the expulsions of the Germans have garnered attention, those of the mixed areas to the east were a taboo subject during the communist era.22 That is why the governments of both Poland and the Ukraine have tried to improve relations by publishing relevant documents and scholarly discussions of the “difficult questions.”23 On the other hand, however, militant nationalists want to make up for lost time: more prominent on the Polish side, plenty of nationalist pamphlets pronouncing against Ukrainian cruelties were issued in the 1990s.24 In the end, Ukrainian and Soviet revisionism was successful. Galicia and Volhynia, once known for their cultural mix, are now practically culturally homogeneous territories. The result of the Second World War was the destruction of territorial Jewry—this was done by the Germans. Poles and Ukrainians cleared their respective territories of the other nationality. German settlers left the territories with the retreating German army. Smaller groups like the Czechs left their territories after the war. The Soviets reclaimed what Russians had lost in the aftermath of the First World War and the USSR had regained with German help in 1939. Neither of the outcomes of revisionism fully responded to the wishes of the respective parties. Ukrainians would have preferred to keep Ukrainian-settled

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territories west of the present border in the area known as Zakerzonnja, the land behind the Curzon Line. Poles, meanwhile, have developed a romantic culture of remembrance concerning the Kresy, the eastern Polish possessions. Having lost their gains with the ceding of Ukraine and Belarus following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, we now witness (dangerous) Russian dreams to revise the map once again. Hopefully, much of the cultural ideology that underlay the violent atrocities of the past has changed. Between the wars, nobody in the region really liked the Jews and most nationalists scorned the multi-national empires of the past. Now, in Cracow a kind of Jewish Disneyland has been created in the formerly Jewish part of town, and in Lviv nostalgic cafés recreate the Poland of the 1920s and the style of fin de siècle Vienna. Up to the late nineteenth century, most Poles did not consider peasants to be their co-nationals, and up to the First World War Ukrainians fought over whether they were a separate nationality or Little Russians. Gorals, Lemkos, Hutsuls, and Boykos were, until very recently, free to define themselves in various ways. Given this very recent consolidation of national conscience, it seems astonishing how fiercely the respective groups fought each other on nationalist grounds. Or maybe not. Many of the modern definitions of nationality came from outside— learned from concepts developed in Central and Western Europe and imported in a modernization drive that included both technical advancement and nationalist exclusivity. Revisionism and modernism were two faces of this development; there was a desire to revise the situation in order to modernize. Modernization happened, and revisionism as its vehicle abounded between the First and the Second World Wars. The ideas of the revisionists mainly came from outside, brought in by the nationalist intelligentsia, a group of semi-intellectuals—mostly sons of popes, journalists, and teachers. They did not care for the big issues of the Second World War25 as they had their own agenda. For neglecting Germany’s plans, Ukrainians had to pay a heavy price. They were used as cheap laborers and cannon fodder. Poles were given up by their Western allies long before the civil war ended. “Heroism,” an activity which always fails to take into account reality, produced lots of sorrow. Still, we are unable to evaluate the relative significance of ideology and pragmatism in these battles. We need a much more open discussion of the referential frame of values that underlay them. And we have to further discuss if and how this framework changed.

Notes 1. A good introduction to this is: Albert S. Kotowski, Hitlers Bewegung im Urteil der polnischen Nationaldemokratie (Wiesbaden, 2000). 2. Kai von Jena, Polens Ostpolitik nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2010).

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3. This holds equally true of the Curzon Line suggested in December 1919 by the then British Foreign Minister. It was irrelevant at that time but became a basic tool during the Second World War. 4. Alexander Brückner [Aleksander Brückner], “Der ‘ukrainische’ Staat: Eine politische Utopie,” Das neue Deutschland, March 13, 1915, 157–60, 160. 5. Kai Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien (Göttingen, 2005). 6. As late as 1935, Mikhail Dubson’s film Granitsa (‘The border’) pictured the Soviet Ukrainian appeal to both Ukrainian and Jewish inhabitants across the Polish border. 7. Kerstin Jobst, Zwischen Nationalismus und Internationalismus: Die polnische und ukrainische Sozialdemokratie in Galizien von 1890 bis 1914 (Hamburg, 1996). 8. Cornelia Schenke, Nationalstaat und nationale Frage: Polen und die Ukrainer 1921–1939 (Hamburg, 2004); Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven, 2007). 9. Vasyl‘ Mudryj, “Odyn Propam’jatnyj Lyst i joho naslidky,” in Vasyl‘ Lev and Matvij Stachiv (eds), Na Pošanu simdesjatyriččja narodyn Romana Smal‘-Stoćkoho (New York, 1963), 340–46. 10. Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof, vol. 38 (Nuremberg, 1949), 86–94; cf. Eberhard Jäckel, “Hitlers doppeltes Kernstück,” in Roland G. Foerster (ed.), Unternehmen Barbarossa (Munich, 1993), 13–22. 11. Telex from Reinhard Heydrich to the heads of the Einsatzgruppen, June 29, 1941; cf. Peter Klein (ed.), Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Berlin, 1997), 319. 12. Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 2nd edn. (Munich, 2007), 569–71. 13. See, e.g., Roman Ilnytzkyj [Il’ny´ckyj], Deutschland und die Ukraine 1934–1945, vol. 1 (Munich, 1958), 3. 14. Myroslav Yurkevych, “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993), 708–10, online at: http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath= pages\O\R\OrganizationofUkrainianNationalists.htm. For a recent dissertation of the development of OUN ideology, see: Franziska Bruder, “Den ukrainischen Staat erkämpfen oder sterben!” Die Organisation Ukrainischer Nationalisten 1929–1948 (Berlin, 2007). 15. It was here that the former German Federal president Horst Köhler was born. 16. While they undoubtedly occurred, I do not follow up Polish attacks on Germans in this chapter. 17. Grzegorz Motyka, Ukraińska partyzantka 1942–1960 (Warsaw, 2006), 187. 18. These contacts are well documented in the excellent editions by Taras Hunczak, Litopys UPA, vols. 6 and 7 (Toronto, 1983). 19. Kazimierz Krajewski, “Der Bezirk Nowogródek der Heimatarmee,” in Bernhard Chiari (ed.), Die polnische Heimatarmee (Munich, 2003), 563–84, here 580–81. 20. The Lublin Committee reached Lublin on July 27, 1944. Soviet propaganda referred to a manifesto proclaimed in Chełm on July 22, 1944. July 22 was also the date of the Polish People’s Republic state holiday. In fact, on that day in 1944 nothing of the kind happened in the liberated area. The manifesto was published in Moscow and republished some days later in the liberated territory. “Umowa między Rzecząpospolitą Polską i Związkiem Socjalistycznych Republik Radzieckich o polsko - radzieckiej granicy państwowej, 16.8.1944.” The document was formally re-signed in Warsaw on February 4, 1946, and officially published in Dziennik Ustaw 35, 1947, dok.167, 557–59. 21. A first source edition was Eugeniusz Misiło, Repatriacja czy deportacja? 2 vols (Warsaw, 1996). A joint Polish-Ukrainian effort resulted in Jurij Šapoval and Jędrzej M. Tucholski (eds), Pereselennja Poljakiv ta Ukraïnciv 1944–1946 (Warsaw and Kiev, 2000). 22. One of the exceptions was the novel by Jan Gerhard, Łuny w Bieszczadach (Warsaw, 1959), which glorified Soviet and Polish communist fighters.

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23. This is the title of a series of Polish-Ukrainian discussions (Polska—Ukraina: Trudne pytania) on many aspects of twentieth century history, the last one published in 2006. 24. See, e.g., Artur Bata, Bieszczady w ogniu (Rzeszów, 1987); Jan Sokoł and Józef Sudo (eds), Kresy wschodnie we krwi polskiej tonące, 2nd edn. (Poznań, 2005); Edward Prus, Szatańskie igrzysko: Historia OUN (Wrocław, 2009). On Volhynia, see: Roman Kucharski, Krwawa łuna (Warsaw, 1997); Władysław Filar, Wydarzenia wołyńskie 1939–1944: W poszukiwaniu odpowiedzi na trudne pytania, 2nd edn. (Toruń, 2008). 25. This becomes clear when one hears the accounts of former SS Galicia soldiers in a Ukrainian TV documentary: Vijna—ukraïns’kyj rakhunok, part 8 (TV 1+1, 2002). This can be seen online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=JP&hl=ja&v=GVI-eW9mBQQ, retrieved May 20, 2011.

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Chapter 9

THE INTERNAL MACEDONIAN REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATION AND BULGARIAN REVISIONISM, 1923–1944

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Stefan Troebst

Vision Turned into Politics: The Bulgarian Syndrome of San Stefano It was a German federal chancellor who once dryly remarked, “If you have visions, go and see a doctor!”1 In applying this advice to the political elites of Bulgaria, one would expect them to spend significant parts of their life in the doctor’s waiting room. This comment rings true because, from the founding of the principality of Bulgaria at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 until the country’s accession to the European Union in 2007, it was a vision that decisively shaped Bulgaria’s foreign policy for almost 130 years. What is meant here is, of course, the Treaty of San Stefano, the preliminary Russian–Ottoman peace treaty of March 3, 1878, signed in the village of the same name, near Istanbul. At San Stefano, the victorious Czar forced upon the Sultan a Greater Bulgaria reaching from the Danube to the Aegean Sea and from the Black Sea to Lake Ohrid. This geopolitical design, however, did not become a political reality. Instead, a few months later at the Congress of Berlin, Greater Bulgaria was diminished in scope by a threefold excision: Macedonia and Thrace along with Saloniki remained integral parts of the Ottoman Empire; Plovdiv was made the capital of an autonomous Ottoman province called Eastern Rumelia; and a principality of Bulgaria under the suzerainty of the Sublime Porte was founded to the south of the Danube with Veliko Turnovo and then Sofia as its capital. The Treaty of Berlin of July 1878 came as a deep disappointment to the leaders of the Bulgarian nationalist movement who after a year of provisional

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Russian administration had just started working in their new capacities as cabinet ministers, army officers, state servants, and so on. The political elite of the new principality soon turned the new state into a tool to “regain” the territories “lost” in Berlin, first of all Macedonia and Thrace. The first step towards a realization of what was by now called San Stefano Bulgaria through a revision of the Treaty of Berlin was the “reunification” of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia in 1885. The second step was the setting up of a movement for the “liberation” of Ottoman Macedonia, consisting of the Internal Macedonian and Adrianopolitan (that is Thracian) Revolutionary Organization (IMARO) and the Supreme Macedonian and Adrianopolitian Committee (SMAC), founded in 1893 and 1895 respectively. These two organizations were loyal to Sofia and were to fight for the annexation of Macedonia by Bulgaria. The third step was the military occupation of northern Macedonia (also called Vardar Macedonia) and Western Thrace in the First World War. When Bulgarian troops had to withdraw from these territories in 1918, and the Paris Peace Conference restored Western Thrace to Greece and Vardar Macedonia to the Serbian-dominated Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia), a significant change took place in Bulgaria’s San Stefano program: for the next two decades, “peaceful revisionism” rather than military force was applied with the aim of a “return” of Macedonia and Thrace to “mother Bulgaria.” However, the formerly anti-Ottoman Macedonian movement reorganized itself in 1919 on Bulgarian territory to become the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). Its principal enemy from then on was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia). The leader of the Bulgarian government, Aleksandur Stamboliiski, the founder of the country’s peasant party, was hostile to the organization. When Stamboliiski was overthrown by the bourgeois opposition in 1923, IMRO took revenge by mutilating and killing him. It was the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939 that once again turned the dream of San Stefano Bulgaria into diplomatic initiatives and military alliances—a strategy that ultimately resulted in the “regaining” of Vardar Macedonia and Western Thrace. The years 1941 to 1944 brought a “re-enactment” of what had happened between 1915 and 1918: in the wake of the attack by German armed forces, the Bulgarian army came to occupy for a second time virtually the same territories it had lost to Serbia/Yugoslavia and Greece at the Paris Peace Conference.2 Once more, the vision of San Stefano was realized to a considerable degree. And when the Paris Peace Treaty with Bulgaria of 1946 brought another revision of the revision, the dream lingered on while acquiring various forms: First, in the late 1940s, a federation of Bulgaria and Tito’s Yugoslavia (with Macedonia as a link between the two) was envisioned. Then, after the Tito–Stalin split of 1948, another military occupation of Vardar Macedonia in the wake of a Soviet attack on Yugoslavia was envisioned. And finally, in 1991 the hope arose within Bulgaria that newly independent Macedonia would strive for voluntary “reunification.”

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None of these hopes, however, came to pass. Today, Bulgaria and Macedonia are neighboring but separate states, and the “special relationship” between them claimed by the Bulgarians is denied by most citizens of Macedonia. Also, Aegean Macedonia and Western Thrace remained parts of Greece, another neighbor of Bulgaria and nowadays its partner in the EU and NATO. Today, territorial revisionism, be it by peaceful means or by force, is no longer part of Bulgaria’s foreign policy—yet nevertheless the specter of San Stefano still haunts the Bulgarians, in particular their intellectual, cultural, clerical, and even political elites. Therefore, what is described in the following parts can only partly be labeled “history” and “memory.” For Bulgarian society and politics these topics still belong to a present reality. In this chapter three intertwined developments will be covered. First, two phases of Bulgarian revisionism in the interwar period: a “peaceful” one up to 1939 followed by one of tacit support of the Third Reich in 1940/41. Second, two differing phases in which the degree of IMRO’s influence on Bulgarian foreign policy varied: before 1934 it was strong while from 1934 to 1941 it was still present, yet in a much weaker form. And third, Bulgaria and IMRO in the German orbit from 1941 to 1944. Well into the 1930s the two terms cum concepts—Bulgarian and Bulgaria; Macedonian and Macedonia—did not exclude each other. On the contrary, in historical and political terms, Macedonia was perceived as a part of Bulgaria, and in ethnic and linguistic terms Macedonians were part of the Bulgarian ethnos, if not nation. Whether a Macedonian at that time called themselves “Macedonian,” “Bulgarian,” “Bulgaro-Macedonian,” or “Macedonian Bulgarian,” they basically meant the same thing: an Orthodox Christian speaker of the eastern variety of southern Slav languages. In addition, they implied that all members of this group should live in one state, called Bulgaria. The concept of a separate Macedonian state was a product of the late 1920s and was favored by just a small group within the Macedonian movement. The idea that next to the Bulgarian nation a Macedonian nation existed with its own identity, language, literature, history, and so on is of an even more recent nature. This concept was conceived in the 1930s and put into practice by Tito’s partisans at the end of the Second World War.

Peaceful Revisionism: Official Bulgarian Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period Between 1912 and 1918, Bulgaria fought three wars, of which it won one— the First Balkan War—but lost the two others—the Second Balkan War and the First World War. Still, its territory increased by 10 per cent. Nevertheless, the Treaty of Neuilly in 1919 was perceived by Bulgaria’s elites and the inhabitants of the country as a “national catastrophe.” The main reason for this was the fact

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that Vardar Macedonia—which from 1915 to 1918 was occupied respectively “liberated” by Bulgarian troops and administered by Sofia—became a part of the neighboring Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Furthermore, Western Thrace, also under Bulgarian occupation, and Aegean Macedonia became part of Greece. And finally, Southern Dobrudja was lost to Romania, and the Western Outlands around the towns of Pirot, Bosilegrad, and Tsaribrod were ceded to Yugoslavia. Pirin Macedonia and the Rhodope region, however, remained part of Bulgaria. Bulgarian revisionism after Neuilly had two faces: an official one of “peaceful” revisionist strategy aiming at a return of the “lost Bulgarian lands,” and an unofficial one represented by a number of semi-legal paramilitary nationalist movements based on Bulgarian territory and operating in coordination with the Bulgarian king, the army, and/or the government. The most influential ones were those from Macedonia, first among them the IMRO.3 Nationalist revolutionaries from what was then Greek Thrace set up an Internal Thracian Revolutionary Organization (ITRO), as did those of Southern Dobrudja, then in Romania, with the formation of the Internal Dobrudjan Revolutionary Organization (IDRO), and in the Western Outlands in Yugoslavia was formed the Revolutionary Organization for the Liberation of the Western Outlands (“Vurtop”).4 Official Bulgarian revisionism only formally strived for the “return” of Vardar Macedonia, Aegean Macedonia, Western Thrace, Southern Dobrudja and the Western Outlands—although in political rhetoric this aim was upheld consistently. In fact, all Bulgarian interwar governments excluded the use of military force against one or more of their neighbors, and instead hoped for a change in the international situation that would be to their own advantage. Four principles functioned as guidelines in Bulgaria’s foreign policy well into the 1930s: first, the most important international factor for Bulgaria was the League of Nations; second, Bulgaria pursued a policy of equidistance from Great Britain, France, and Italy while not reactivating historical and cultural ties with Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia; third, Bulgaria strictly obeyed the military and financial obligations of the Treaty of Neuilly; and fourth, Bulgaria kept an equidistance with her four neighbors, namely, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Romania.5 Although Sofia did not always stick closely to these principles—for example, it cultivated a special relationship with Mussolini’s Italy—the policy of “peaceful revisionism” was highly successful. The League of Nations substantially reduced Bulgaria’s reparation load (as set out in the Treaty of Neuilly), granted two large loans, abolished the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission for Bulgaria, and even intervened swiftly in Sofia’s favor when in 1925 the Greek army crossed into Bulgarian territory. Yet by 1936, the League of Nations had virtually disintegrated. At the same time, in 1934 the country’s four neighbors signed the Balkan Pact, completely encircling Bulgaria—a development which forced Bulgarian diplomacy to seek an alliance with one of its neighbors. It turned out

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that Yugoslavia was willing to make an offer, notwithstanding Bulgaria’s aspirations vis-à-vis Vardar Macedonia. But the emergence of King Boris III of SaxonyCoburg-Gotha as Bulgaria’s strong man from 1935 on led to an intensification of relations between Sofia and National Socialist Berlin. Still, for several years Bulgaria had great difficulty in reorienting itself between fascist Italy and the Third Reich on the one hand, and the Western Powers as well as the Soviet Union on the other. It was the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 which put an end to this difficult situation: now the two powers which mattered most for Bulgaria were allies, and Sofia’s “peaceful revisionism” acquired a different quality. It is in this context that the famous bon mot by King Boris III has to be understood: “My army is pro-German, my wife is Italian, my people are pro-Russian. I’m the only pro-Bulgarian in this country.”6 In 1940, the new Bulgarian government of the pro-German Bogdan Filov joined Hungary and the Soviet Union in pressing the Third Reich for territorial concessions at the expense of Romania. And with the Treaty of Craiova of September 7, 1940, Romania had to cede Southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria. Still, Bulgaria pursued a policy of formal neutrality between Nazi Germany and Great Britain.This situation changed in late 1940 when Hitler insisted on preparing his attack on Greece and Yugoslavia, Unternehmen Marita, from Bulgarian soil. On March 1, 1941, Bulgaria signed the German-Italian-Japanese Tripartite Pact; on March 2, German troops entered Bulgaria; and on April 6, the Wehrmacht invaded Greece and Yugoslavia from Bulgarian territory. After successful German military operations in the Balkans, Bulgaria was awarded with its desired territories—Yugoslav Vardar Macedonia and Greek Western Thrace—without a single shot from a Bulgarian gun being fired. Sofia’s “peaceful revisionism” had achieved two major aims in the direction of realizing the vision of San Stefano.7

Militant Revisionism: Bulgaria’s Informal Interwar Balkan Policy The unofficial face of Bulgarian revisionism was shaped by legal, semi-legal, illegal, and even terrorist emigré organizations, first of all by IMRO, but also by ITRO, IDRO, and “Vurtop.” They operated on and from Bulgarian territory against the neighboring states of Yugoslavia and Romania, and to a lesser degree against Greece. In contemporary Bulgarian terminology, these organizations were described as neotgovorni faktori—literally, political forces which cannot be held responsible for what they do since they are beyond the reach of state organs. The most powerful of these formations was IMRO—founded in 1893 in Ottoman Saloniki, reorganized in 1919 in Sofia, flourishing up to 1934 in Bulgaria, temporarily in disgrace there until 1941, resurrected under Croat and German protection until 1944, and disbanded and eliminated by Bulgarian and Yugoslav Communists in 1946. In particular, between 1919 and 1934,

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IMRO possessed not only “a state within a state”—the southwestern Bulgarian district of Petrich, also called Pirin Macedonia, bordering on Yugoslavia and Greece—but functioned temporarily as “a state above the state.”8 More often than not, this organization forced the king, political parties, individual politicians, army officers, judges, journalists, and others to do what it demanded of them—irrespective of the national interest of Bulgaria. In fact, between 1923 and 1934, at various occasions the Bulgarian state as such and its entire foreign policy towards Yugoslavia were virtually taken hostage by IMRO. Prime Minister Andrei Lyapchev, himself of Macedonian origin and in office from 1926 to 1931, openly confessed that IMRO and its ally Italy forced their will upon his government. As a result there was no rapprochement with Yugoslavia, no efficient control of the Bulgarian–Yugoslav border, and no giving in to British and French demands for narrowing the operational freedom of IMRO within Bulgaria. While Lyapchev, like other conservative, liberal and rightist Bulgarian politicians, sympathized with IMRO in principle, he opposed it in everyday politics and diplomacy. In doing so, he came under severe pressure not only from the organization itself but also from its sympathizers in his own government, as well as those in the military, the courts, and the Church. The same was true for his predecessor of the years 1923 to 1926, Aleksandur Tsankov, as well as for his successors up to 1934, Aleksandur Malinov and Nikola Mushanov. Up to 1929, IMRO’s declared aim was the “reunification” of all Macedonian territories with the Bulgarian state; from 1933 on, however, IMRO’s revised aim was the founding of “a free and independent Macedonia” as “a second Bulgarian state in the Balkans.” IMRO’s central committee was able to mobilize some 5,000 fighters plus terrorist cells within Bulgaria, as well as a tight logistical network of supporters in Yugoslav Macedonia and Albania, plus training camps in Hungary and Italy. Up to 1927, in spring and summer of each year, a mobile IMRO state consisting of 1,000 to 2,000 uniformed fighters operated in the Vardar region and engaged in open field battles with the Yugoslav army, other security forces, and Serbian counter-insurgents. In addition, IMRO had permanent structures in most of Europe’s capitals and major cities run by its diplomatic unit, the Foreign Representation. In interwar Europe, IMRO was unique in many respects. The Croatian Ustashe and Ukrainian terrorists in Poland had set up much smaller and less professional structures, and they were much more dependent on revisionist sponsor states like Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. Founded in exile in 1929 by Gustav Perčec and Ante Pavelić, the Ustashe remained a Croatian revolutionary organization with very little backing in Yugoslavia itself. Like the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), founded in 1920, and its 1929 successor, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), in Poland, the Ustashe never managed to control a territory as IMRO did in the Petrich region or set up a mobile and temporary state like IMRO in Yugoslav Macedonia.9 Also unlike the Ustashe, UVO, and OUN, IMRO could

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rely on a fiscal system of its own in Bulgaria (including several banks), on a highly lucrative tobacco monopoly, and on revenues from the production and distribution of opium.10 While connections between the IMRO and Ustashe were close from the beginning, and resulted in intense cooperation in the 1930s and early 1940s, no contacts with UVO or OUN are known of. IMRO, however, suffered from two serious weaknesses. First of all, serious differences of opinion occurred in its central committee after the assassination of its charismatic member Todor Aleksandrov in 1924. One faction led by General Aleksandur Protogerov opted for continuing with the tactics of full-fledged partisan warfare, while another one led by Ivan Mikhailov favored individual terrorist acts. After Mikhailov had Protogerov murdered in 1928, the organization split into two factions: a strong Mikhailovist wing and a weaker Protogerovist one led by Pero Shandanov. From 1928 to 1934, both factions engaged in bloody infighting and mass fratricide. IMRO’s second weakness was its poor diplomatic performance: Attempts at strategic alliances with Germany and the Soviet Union failed in 1923 and 1924 respectively, and a formal agreement with Mussolini’s Italy in 1927 proved to be a disappointment not only in terms of financial subsidies and the supply of military equipment but even harmful in terms of the central committee’s authority among the rank and file.11 By 1934, IMRO’s strength and prestige had decreased to such a degree that the organizers of a coup d’état in Sofia—namely, the Military League and the pro-Yugoslav political group Zveno—succeeded in destroying the organization’s stronghold in the Petrich region. IMRO was disbanded by the Bulgarian army within days and its leader Ivan Mikhailov sentenced to death. He managed, however, to flee to Turkey, where Kemal Atatürk granted him political asylum.12 It was the Marseille assassinations of October 1934 which partly restored IMRO’s international prestige. In close cooperation with Pavelić’s Ustashe, Mikhailov’s top hit man Vlado Chernozemski succeeded in assassinating the Yugoslav King Aleksandar I Karadjordjević and the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou.

Revision Achieved and Lost Again: Bulgaria and IMRO in the Second World War In the early 1940s, IMRO experienced a revival due to the founding of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) as well as the Bulgarian occupation of Vardar Macedonia and parts of Aegean Macedonia. Pavelić, now the leader (Poglavnik) of Ustashe Croatia, was a longstanding active supporter of the Macedonian cause and a personal friend of Mikhailov.13 Having moved in 1938 from Turkey to Poland, in 1939 to Germany, and in 1940 to Hungary, in 1941 Mikhailov settled in Zagreb where he functioned as personal foreign policy adviser to Pavelić. From Zagreb, Mikhailov reorganized the remnants of

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IMRO’s structures in Bulgaria and directed the establishment of new structures in what was now Bulgarian-occupied Vardar Macedonia. The recently published reports of the Bulgarian ambassador to Zagreb, Yordan Mechkarov, demonstrate Mikhailov’s influence on the Ustashe government.14 In April 1941, the pro-German Bulgarian government of Bogdan Filov was awarded with Greek and Yugoslav territories. In 1942, occupied Aegean and Vardar Macedonia were formally annexed to Bulgaria and turned into provinces governed directly from Sofia. Among the newly nominated mayors, judges, military commanders, police officers, teachers, and others were many IMRO members and activists.15 The close interaction between the organization and Bulgaria’s political, military, administrative, intellectual, and other elites which had been weakened in 1934 was now re-established. This was the reason why the king and the government tried to solve the issue of Mikhailov: On several occasions, the king’s emissaries tried to convince Mikhailov to return to Sofia where not only would he be granted amnesty but awarded with a high-level governmental position in Vardar Macedonia. However, Mikhailov refused and stayed on with Pavelić in Zagreb. Thus, from April 1941 on, when Bulgarian troops entered Yugoslav Macedonia alongside the Wehrmacht, up to September 1944, when they were forced to withdraw from there in the wake of the Red Army’s march on Sofia, relations between official Bulgaria and the IMRO leadership remained close yet tense. The king suspected that Mikhailov would turn against Bulgaria and set up a Macedonian state with German help. This was indeed Mikhailov’s political aim but he soon came to realize, first, that Berlin had no immediate interest in this scheme, and second, that the majority of his followers in Bulgaria proper and in annexed Vardar Macedonia favored actual “reunification” with Bulgaria over the vague prospect of Macedonian independence. So in 1941, 1942, and most of 1943 the situation remained as it was. However, things changed considerably when, in September 1943, Italy dropped out of the war and retreated from the Balkans. Now Berlin relied on IMRO in the administration of formerly Italian-occupied northern Greece. In the fall of 1943, the SS took over an irregular pro-IMRO military formation called Okhrana (Defense) from the Italians, which operated in the Greek districts of Kastoria, Florina, Pella, and Edessa. In coordination with Mikhailov in Zagreb, Okhrana commander-in-chief Atanas Kalchev set up a unit of 500 men which participated in German anti-partisan raids during the winter of 1943/44. In doing so, Kalchev made it clear to the Germans that Okhrana was part of IMRO and was now fighting for an independent Macedonian state and no longer for reunification with Bulgaria.16 During the spring and summer of 1944, IMRO and the SS then reorganized Okhrana into a regular military unit called Third Macedonian Brigade with a planned strength of 12,000 men. In fact, however, it consisted of just two battalions of 250 men each, initially under Kalchev’s command, who was later replaced by the IMRO member and Bulgarian air force

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officer Georgi (Gyosho) Dimchev. He and some fifty other IMRO members functioning as Okhrana’s officer corps chose Edessa as their headquarters. They hoped for a state-like Macedonian structure of governance in northern Greece under German occupation. When the German Army Group E evacuated Greece in September 1944, Okhrana was dissolved. While its officers moved to Skopje and Sofia, the rank and file joined the Slavic units of the Greek pro-communist partisan army of ELAS where they fought until the end of the Greek civil war in 1949 under the name of SNOF (Slavic National Liberation Front). In the summer of 1944, with the Red Army advancing swiftly into the Balkans and the German retreat from Greece and Yugoslavia thus in sight, Mikhailov even became a potential ally in Hitler’s Balkan policy: on August 29, 1944, the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, proposed to Hitler a contingency plan for the proclamation of a Macedonian puppet-state with Mikhailov as head. This was supposed to secure the German army’s withdrawal from the Balkans and open up the possibility for British diplomatic recognition of the new state, which then would prevent the Red Army from advancing into Macedonia. On September 1, Hitler issued a Führerbefehl ordering the SS, the Wehrmacht and the German legations in Zagreb and Sofia to carry out Ribbentrop’s proposal immediately. On September 5, Mikhailov arrived from Zagreb via Sofia in Skopje. After two days of consultations with his followers, he declined the German offer. With Germans and Bulgarians retreating, the British and the Soviets advancing, his own lieutenants defecting, and the communist partisans of Tito as well as the regional non-communist partisan movement of Metodiia Andonov-Chento gaining the upper hand, Mikhailov realized that it was by now too late for an independent Macedonian state.17 On September 6, 1944, the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria, and three days later the Red Army crossed into the country. By that time the Bulgarian authorities and military had already evacuated Vardar Macedonia; with Soviet consent, Western Thrace was held until October 20, and on November 12 the German army left Skopje. Bulgaria’s territorial gains were now lost and Mikhailov sought shelter in the Austrian Alps. In 1945 he was said to have moved temporarily to Franco’s Spain due to the issue of a Yugoslav warrant for his arrest, finally reappearing in Italy in 1948. Although he was never granted a US entry visa, he succeeded in reorganizing from exile in Italy the Macedonian Political Organization of Northern America (MPO), known from 1952 on as the Macedonian Patriotic Organization of Northern America, into an efficient legal successor organization to IMRO in the United States and Canada. In the mid 1980s, he re-established clandestine relations with Bulgaria under Todor Zhivkov in order to form a united front against the Yugoslav project of a Macedonian nation, and in 1990, after sixty years in exile, Mikhailov died in Rome peacefully at the age of 94. His former followers in communist Bulgaria and Tito’s Yugoslavia suffered a different fate. In Bulgaria, the Protogerovist

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(Shandanovist) wing of IMRO formed an alliance with the Communist Party during the Second World War, and after 1944 many of its members got positions in the new Committee for State Security. This enabled them to clamp down hard on their Mikhailovist rivals in 1946. Several leaders were executed, and the rank and file tried and imprisoned. And in communist Yugoslavia, attempts at the reorganization of Mikhailovist structures ended also on execution grounds and forced labor camps.

Legacies: IMRO and Contemporary Bulgarian and Macedonian Politics The interaction between IMRO and Bulgarian revisionism was intense. The organization tried to push the Bulgarian government away from the policy of peaceful revisionism toward a policy of militant revisionism in order to “liberate” Macedonia. By 1941, when Bulgaria got a second chance to occupy the Vardar region, IMRO had changed its program under Mikhailov’s leadership. This program no longer consisted of the reunification of Macedonia and Bulgaria but the establishment of a “free and independent Macedonia.” When Berlin finally terminated support for Sofia in 1944 and turned to Mikhailov, the military situation in the Balkans had changed to the advantage of the partisans and the Red Army. There is, however, a postscript: In 1989, political movements were set up in both Bulgaria and Macedonia under the label of IMRO. Yet, while the revived organization in Sofia—the IMRO Union of Macedonian Brotherhoods (VMRO-SMD), since 1996 the IMRO Bulgarian National Movement (VMROBND)—is Greater Bulgarian oriented and decidedly anti-Macedonian, the IMRO Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE) in Skopje favors the “re”-unification of Vardar Macedonia with Aegean and Pirin Macedonia and is sympathetic to neighboring Bulgaria despite their Macedonian nationalism. The current prime minister and president of Macedonia, Nikola Gruevski and Gorgi Ivanov respectively, are members of that party. And Bozhidar Dimitrov, director of the National Historical Museum of Bulgaria, and until 2010 the current Bulgarian government’s minister in charge of Bulgarians abroad, holds that today’s Macedonians are in fact Bulgarians, that there is no such thing as a Macedonian nation, and that the Macedonian language is just a dialect of Bulgarian literary language.18 Although Dimitrov stops short of advocating Bulgaria’s annexation of Macedonia, he makes it clear that in his view Macedonian statehood is not more than a regrettable accident in the contemporary history of the Balkans. The immense popularity of Dimitrov’s TV programs on Bulgarian history points to the fact that a considerable part of Bulgarians share his views. So it seems that in Bulgaria the vision of San Stefano still lingers, while in Macedonia political actors still dream of Mikhailov’s Greater Macedonia.

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Notes 1. Wolfgang Schäuble, “90. Geburtstag: Helmut Schmidt berauscht mit seiner Nüchternheit,” Die Welt, December 22, 2008 (http://www.welt.de/politik/article2916542/Helmut-Schmidtberauscht-mit-seiner-Nuechternheit.html). 2. Björn Opfer, Im Schatten des Krieges: Besatzung oder Anschluss—Befreiung oder Unterdrückung? Eine komparative Untersuchung über die bulgarische Herrschaft in Vardar-Makedonien 1915– 1918 und 1941–1944 (Münster, 2005). 3. Kostadin Paleshutski, Makedonskoto osvoboditelno dvizhenie sled Purvata svetovna voina (1918–1924) (Sofia, 1993); idem, Makedonskoto osvoboditelnoto dvizhenie 1924–1934 (Sofia, 1998); Spyridon Sfetas, Makedonien und interbalkanische Beziehungen 1920–1924 (Munich, 1992); Zoran Todorovski, Vnatreshnata Makedonska Revolutsionerna Organizatsiia 1924– 1934 (Skopje, 1997); Ivan Katardzhiev, Makedoniia sproti Vtorata svetska voina (Skopje, 1999); idem, Makedoniia megu Balkanskite i Vtorata svetska voina (Skopje, 2000); Aleksandur Grebenarov, Legalni i taini organizatsii na makedonskite bezhantsi v Bulgaria (1918–1947) (Sofia, 2006). 4. Dobrin Michev et al. (eds), Natsionalno-osvoboditelnoto dvizhenie na makedonskite i trakiiskite bulgari, vol. 4: Osvoboditelnite borbi sled Purvata svetovna voina 1919–1944 (Sofia, 2006); Staiko Trifonov, Bulgarskoto natsionalnoosvoboditelnoto dvizhenie v Trakiia 1919–1934 (Sofia, 1988); Petur Todorov, Osvoboditelnite borbi na Dobrudzha: Dobrudzhanskata revoliutsionna organizatsiia 1925–1940 (Sofia, 1992); Metodi Petrov, “Vurtop”: Revoliutsionna organizatsiia za osvobozhdenie na Zapadnite pokrainini (Sofia, 2003). 5. Iltscho Dimitrov, “Bulgarien in der europäischen Politik zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen (Vorläufige Schlussfolgerungen),” in Wolfgang Gesemann (ed.), Bulgarische Sprache, Literatur und Geschichte (Munich, 1980), 203–25; Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk, Sprawa Tracji Zachodniej w polityce bułgarskiej (1919–1947) (Warsaw, 1991). 6. Marshall Lee Miller, Bulgaria during the Second World War (Stanford, 1975), 1. 7. Hans-Joachim Hoppe, Bulgarien: Hitlers eigenwilliger Verbündeter. Eine Fallstudie zur nationalsozialistischen Südosteuropapolitik (Stuttgart, 1979). 8. Dimitur Tyulekov, Obrecheno rodolyubie: VMRO v Pirinsko 1919–1934 (Blagoevgrad, 2001). 9. Stefan Troebst, “Nationalismus und Gewalt im Osteuropa der Zwischenkriegszeit. Terroristische Separatismen im Vergleich,” Bulgarian Historical Review 24,2 (1996): 25–55. 10. Stefan Troebst, Mussolini, Makedonien und die Mächte 1922–1930: Die “Innere Makedonische Revolutionäre Organisation” in der Südosteuropapolitik des faschistischen Italien (Cologne, 1987), 88–128. 11. Ilcho Dimitrov, Bulgaro-italianski politicheski otnosheniia 1922–1943 (Sofia, 1976); Troebst, Mussolini, Makedonien und die Mächte. 12. Stefan Troebst, “Vanče Michajlov: teroristăt-bjurokrat,” Kultura, February 5, 2010, 10–11 (http://www.kultura.bg/bg/article/view/16572); idem, “Ivan Mihajlov im türkischen und polnischen Exil 1934–1939/40. Fragmente zur politischen Biographie des Chefs der ‘Inneren Makedonischen Revolutionären Organisation’,” Südost-Forschungen 46 (1987): 139–96. These and other articles are reprinted in: idem, Das makedonische Jahrhundert: Von den Anfängen nationalrevolutionärer Bewegung zum Abkommen von Ohrid 1893–2001 (Munich, 2007). 13. Bogdan Krizman, Pavelić i Ustaše (Zagreb, 1978); idem, Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija (Zagreb, 1980); idem, Pavelić i Treći Rajh, 2 vols. (Zagreb, 1983); idem, Pavelić u bjekstvu (Zagreb, 1986). 14. Milena Todorakov (ed.), Bulgariia i Nezavisimata Khurvatska Durzhava (1941–1944). Diplomaticheski dokumenti (Sofia, 2004); Nada Kisić-Kolanović (ed.), Poslanstvo NDH u Sofiji. Diplomatski izveštai 1941–1945, 2 vols (Zagreb, 2003); see also eadem (ed.), Zagreb—Sofija: Prijatelstvo po mjeri ratnog vremena 1941–1945 (Zagreb, 2003).

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15. Opfer, Im Schatten des Krieges. 16. Stefan Troebst, “I drasi tis ‘Ochrana’ stous nomous Kastorias, Florinas kai Pellas, 1943–1944,” in Hagen Fleischer and Nikos Svoronos (eds), I Ellada 1936–44: Diktatoria—katochi— antistasi. Praktika tou diethnous istorikou synedriu (Athens, 1989), 258–61. 17. Stefan Troebst, “‘Führerbefehl!’: Adolf Hitler und die Proklamation eines unabhängigen Makedonien (September 1944),” Osteuropa 52 (2002): 491–501. See also Marjan Dimitriievski, Makedoniia vo antifašistička vojna (1944–1945) (Skopje, 1995); idem (ed.), Tretiot Rajh i Makedoniia 1941–1945 (Skopje, 1995). 18. Bozhidar Dimitrov, The Ten Lies of Macedonism (Sofia, 2003).

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Chapter 10

ROMANIA IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR Revisionist out of Necessity

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T

he circumstances under which Romania was able to double its size in 1918 put severe strains on relations with almost all of its neighbors, with the exception of Poland. In an attempt to stifle the revolutionary processes in Eastern Europe, the Paris Peace Conference awarded territories to Romania in which only part of the population was Romanian. In January 1918 the Romanian army expelled the Soldiers’ Councils from neighboring Bessarabia, a territory which up to that time had been part of Russia and whose population had been 56 per cent Romanian. By March, Bessarabia had been incorporated into Romania. The surrender of its independence was supported by a few Romanian intellectuals and by the large landowners of all ethnic groups who had felt threatened by the radical demands of the Peasant Councils in the course of the Bolshevik Revolution. In Austrian Bukovina and Romania proper, large landowners appealed to the Romanian army for help in November 1918 because the Ukrainians planned to redistribute the land.1 But while protests by non-Romanians in Bukovina, who comprised 60 per cent of the population, were put down by martial law, the situation in Transylvania was different. Here most of the large landowners were Hungarian and it was the Romanian peasants who hoped that annexation would lead to a redistribution of land. Their needs were met by the radical land reform of 1921, in which the ethnic minorities were put at a disadvantage. Comprising 7.9 per cent of the population in 1930, the Hungarians were the largest minority and for a long time many refused to accept the new state. Indeed, the party of the ethnic Hungarians did not form an electoral alliance

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with a Romanian party until 1923.2 The Ukrainians, who constituted the majority of the population in northern Bukovina, set their hopes on the West Ukrainian People’s Republic. In the wake of the Republic’s collapse in 1919, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was created in 1922. Above all else it criticized the fact that the redistribution of the land had favored Romanian settlers and that Ukrainian schools had been transformed into Romanian ones. In the 1920s, Ukrainian political leaders in Bukovina were still influenced by the memory of the conditions they had enjoyed under Austrian rule and made efforts to form political alliances with Romanian parties. It wasn’t until the beginning of the 1930s, when negotiations for more rights for minorities in Romania had failed, that younger Ukrainians, much like the Ukrainians in Poland, began to pursue the goal of a Greater Ukraine.3 In Bessarabia in 1924, the forces that organized a revolt with the help of the Soviet Union were repressed with particular severity. At the same time the Romanian government took the occasion of the revolt to ban the Communist Party throughout the country. Thereafter only a few Communists remained active in the unions, ethnic minority parties, and in the Social Democratic Party.4 In the first part of this chapter I illustrate why Romania was unable to achieve internal stability during the interwar period despite the conspicuous addition of new territories after the First World War. In the second part I examine Romania’s ethnic policies, which date from the time of the Soviet invasion in 1941. Why did the army think it necessary to advance all the way to the Volga, and what specific objectives were pursued in the plans for “ethnic purification” in Romania and its acquired territories? In the conclusion I discuss a few institutions and people in Romania who prepared the way for the policies of ethnic deportation and resettlement.

Minority Policies, Romanization, and Anti-Semitism in Romania, 1918–1941 At the Paris Peace Conference, Romanian representatives claimed that the lands they had conquered were “Romanian territories” and presented false statistics concerning the make up of the population. Thereafter, Romanian politicians declared that some of the minorities in the newly acquired territories were Romanians who had been victims of Austrian, Hungarian, and Russian efforts to rob them of their nationality. Because they had supposedly been deprived of the Romanian language for a number of generations, it was imperative that they now be allowed to speak it again. This argument was used to justify the policy of not offering non-Romanian pupils instruction in their own languages.5 Until the mid 1930s, the goal of this minority policy was to pressure minorities to present themselves as Romanian nationals. To an extent the attempt succeeded

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in the 1930 census, when some of the minority population registered themselves as being of “Romanian origin.” But others answered honestly, and did not list “Romanian” as their mother tongue. This census, which was directed by Sabin Manuilă, is regarded as the first reliable one in Romania. It recorded a population in which 28 per cent were non-Romanians.6 In the 1920s those who claimed to be Romanian nationals enjoyed many advantages. Since peasants accounted for more than 80 per cent of Romania’s population, the land reform of 1921 was of great political significance, and in the distribution of land in the border regions Romanians were favored. Still, the intended “Romanization” was not achieved, for many of the settlers soon moved on because they did not feel safe in villages where they constituted only a small minority.7 Many Romanian politicians failed to recognize the moment when revisionism actually became a real threat. Although Foreign Minister Nicolae Titulescu succeeded in establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1934, his successor made recognition of the eastern border a prerequisite for further agreements. But, for the Soviet Union this would have meant giving up Bessarabia. In relations with Hungary, meanwhile, Romanian politicians did not work for a settlement of differences but continually raised the matter of the discrimination experienced by the few Romanians who lived in Hungary. In 1937 a new Romanian foreign minister refused to accept a treaty drafted by his Hungarian counterpart, although it contained only a few minor points concerning better treatment of the Hungarian minority.8 As a consequence of this failure to reach a compromise, Hungarian irredentism emerged in 1938, financed by the Hungarian state.9 From 1938 onward, Mussolini supported Hungary’s revisionist demands while the Romanian regime still relied on its alliance with France and Great Britain. But from the moment the Popular Front took office in France, Romania’s relationship with it deteriorated. Before the First World War the Jewish minority was the largest, with about 4.5 per cent of the total population. Since most Jews were stateless, if they engaged in political activity they were arbitrarily expelled from the country. In comparison, the Jews under Habsburg rule had enjoyed full citizenship rights since 1867, while Russian Jews acquired them as the result of the February Revolution of 1917. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, despite its protests, Romania was forced to grant citizenship to all Jews and equal rights to minorities.10 In the 1930s, in order to take the wind out of the sails of rightwing groups, many Romanian politicians tried to make a name for themselves by supporting legislation to drive the Jews out of educational institutions and from the more important branches of the economy. The regime that introduced discriminatory measures against the Jews in 1937 tried to justify this policy by maintaining that, in this way, the Romanian middle class would be strengthened. In this connection, by 1939 more than one-third of Romanian Jews had been

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deprived of citizenship.11 The object of these measures was to force as many Jews as possible to emigrate. In Romania, the Left and the Jews made up the principle image of “the enemy” and during the Spanish Civil War the greater part of the press agitated against “Jewish-Bolshevism.” In 1936 the communists recruited young people for the International Brigades fighting in Spain. In the same year Ana Pauker, a prominent leader of the banned Communist Party, who was of Jewish origin, was sentenced to a ten-year prison term. The fact that her father-in-law was the co-owner of the most widely circulated liberal daily newspapers, Adevărul and Dimineaţa, was used by anti-Semites in their hate campaign. The rival right-wing newspaper, Universal, called for the “Jewish newspapers” to be burned. Their journalists were denounced as traitors who wanted to give Bessarabia to the Soviet Union.12 In December 1937, when the small National Christian Party formed a government, it banned Adevărul and Dimineaţa, as well as all Jewish newspapers.13 Increasingly the political police also persecuted Zionist groups because they took them to be communist fronts.14 By the end of 1937, racist views mixed with religious references were standard fare in the government-controlled and coordinated press. The ideas that Nichifor Crainic, a professor of theology, propagated in his book Orthodox Ethnocracy, published in 1937, spread rapidly. He demanded that only members of the Orthodox Church be permitted to occupy leading positions in Romania’s administration and business community. In order to “purify the nation,” the first thing that was needed, he argued, was to banish Jews from villages, and Romanian settlers should secure the border regions.15 Crainic’s ideas were taken up by many students who saw that if the plans to drive out the Jews were realized, their own opportunities for quick advancement would increase. Thus many students joined the Iron Guard, and by 1937 it had become the third strongest political party. All the regimes between 1937 and 1940 tried to gain the support of youth movements by passing laws that strongly favored ethnic Romanians (so called “Romanians of the blood”). The Hungarian minority protested successfully against such measures at the League of Nations, and the German minority likewise protested to representatives of the German Reich.16 By 1938 influential groups began to move from the center of society toward the right. In the 1930s the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in Transylvania began to hold politically “anti-revisionist meetings” directed against the Hungarian minority.17 At the same time, anti-Semitism increased. The Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, who was minister-president of Romania between February 1938 and March 1939, railed against so-called “Jewish parasites.”18 Powerful Romanian interest groups put pressure on the state to meet growing German demands for grain and oil, resulting in the German–Romanian economic agreement of March 1939.19

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The Redrawing of Romania’s Borders, 1938–1940 Despite extensive trade between Germany and Romania, following the occupation of Carpatho-Ukraine by Hungarian troops in November 1938, and again in March 1939, Romanian politicians feared a joint German–Hungarian invasion of Transylvania, and there were frequent border skirmishes.20 For this reason, in April 1939 the Romanians pressed the French and British governments to guarantee Romania’s territorial integrity. This did not protect Romania from the loss of its eastern provinces. In August 1939, in a secret supplementary protocol to the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the German foreign minister, Ribbentrop, recognized that Bessarabia belonged to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Meanwhile, the German Reich secured control of Romania’s oil fields.21 As a result of the Oil–Weapons Agreement of May 1940, the Romanians delivered growing quantities of oil to the German Reich during its invasion of France.22 But the hopes of Romania’s politicians that Hitler would therefore actively support Romania’s territorial integrity proved illusory, and the Romanian government was taken by surprise when, in June 1940, the German ambassador advised it to accede without a struggle to the Soviet demand for the evacuation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina.23 But it was not just the superiority of Soviet forces that accounts for the fact that only the Privy Council protested. The general staff had already informed the Privy Council that in the event of war on the eastern border, Hungary and Bulgaria could be expected to begin simultaneous invasions. Internal disorder was probably stirred because of the Iron Guard’s opposition to the authoritarian rule of King Carol II. Finally, since many younger army officers sympathized with the Iron Guard, the government could not be depended upon either.24 The depth of the crisis was revealed during the withdrawal from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina: many Romanian army units reached the new border at only half strength because the advancing Soviet troops encircled departing units in order to retain the soldiers that came from the abandoned provinces. In particular, many Ukrainians, Russians, and Hungarians deserted, as did some Romanians.25 The newspapers attributed the units’ disintegration to alleged attacks by “the Jews.” This lie was spread by military security at a time when anti-Semitic excesses were beginning.26 In Dorohoi on the first two days of July 1940, a unit that had been withdrawn from northern Bukovina murdered fifty Jews. Also there were more than 300 victims in the port of Galaţi, where soldiers shot Jews and others. These events took place in a mood of panic occasioned by the fear of further Soviet advances.27 Even before several members of the Iron Guard were taken into the government on July 4, 1940, the Jews were made scapegoats. But this ideological turn did not bring Romania hoped for guarantees from Hitler regarding its remaining

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territory: on July 15, Hitler demanded (territorial) concessions for Hungary.28 When the delegations were unable to reach an agreement, the Second Vienna Award was announced in which Hitler only partly consented to Hungary’s demands. But for Romania the loss of territory and 2.6 million inhabitants, of which about half were Romanian, was a crushing defeat.29 Both Romania and Hungary considered Transylvania to be part of their respective heartlands and neither side was satisfied with the partition set out in the Award, and following it no agreement was reached on the exchange of populations. The Hungarian army’s entrance into the territory was marked by many excesses, which led to the flight of thousands of Romanians. Along with refugees from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, some 200,000 displaced persons wandered aimlessly through territories left to Romania.30 In contrast, the return of Southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria took place in an orderly manner. This area, which had been annexed in 1913, was without symbolic meaning. The representatives of Romania and Bulgaria agreed on September 7, 1940 to an exchange of populations: 106,000 Romanians from Southern Dobrudja were resettled, and at the same time 60,000 Bulgarians voluntarily left Romania.31 Because northern Bukovina and Bessarabia became part of the Soviet Union, all Germans that still resided there were transported to the German Reich in September 1940. Afterwards, an additional 52,400 Germans from Romanian southern Bukovina and 13,680 from the Dodrudja received permission to resettle in the Reich.32 The Jews bore the greatest burden of the population displacements. Many Romanian refugees from Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia were cared for using means expropriated from the Jews. In October 1940 their property in land was nationalized, and after that they were driven out of many professions.33 However, these measures did not reduce the hardships of the many Romanian refugees who lived for years in provisional housing. Relations with Hungary remained extremely tense. The Special Service for Information (SSI), established in September 1940, alleged that the Hungarian army was preparing to occupy south Transylvania.34 But the conflict was suspended when Hungary and Romania joined the Tripartite Pact in November 1940. Both states pledged to avoid the theme of territorial claims in the press. The regimes hoped that border changes could be made in the future, and therefore agreed to the stationing of German military instructors on their territory.35 Romania’s unsuccessful foreign policy was blamed on King Carol II and on September 6, 1940 he was forced to abdicate in favor of his eighteen-year-old son Mihai. In this power vacuum, General Ion Antonescu and representatives of the Iron Guard took over. The alliance lasted only five months for, from the very beginning, they quarreled over the redistribution of Jewish property. Most of the commissioners involved in the process of “Romanization” were members of the

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Iron Guard; many personally enriched themselves and failed to properly manage the nationalized factories and businesses. In order to put a stop to corruption, in January 1941 General Antonescu decided that the Ministry of Economics should oversee the commissioners’ work. Thereupon the Iron Guard attempted to seize power but was defeated. Hitler had supported Antonescu in order to maintain stability in a country from whose territory the invasion of the Soviet Union was being prepared.36

The “Purification” of Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria, 1941–1944 General Antonescu blamed the failure of Romania’s foreign policy primarily on the Jews, and as early as September 1940 he demanded that the country be “purified” of all “alien” elements.37 On January 10, 1941, he announced that all Jews who had entered the country illegally would be confined to camps. In this connection he referred not only to refugees from the German Reich, but also to immigrants who had come to Romania after the First World War. The arrests were intended to force the Jews to emigrate. Similarly, all other “aliens who had entered the country illegally were to be forced to leave—Greeks, Armenians and Gypsies [Roma].”38 On January 14, the Swiss ambassador in Bucharest, René de Weck, described Antonescu’s charge that the Jews were Bolshevik sympathizers as an attempt to channel the people’s growing dissatisfaction.39 Step by step, Antonescu’s cabinet of experts implemented the policy of excluding Jews from the country’s economic life. In March 1941 their urban property was nationalized. Beginning in April 1941, the Jewish population was dragooned into forced labor, Jews living in rural communities were forced to move to the cities, and their property was confiscated by the state.40 The censored press did not criticize the Nazi–Soviet Pact and Romania’s territorial losses were blamed on “aliens” who had betrayed the country. The Jews in Bessarabia were branded communists and Russians, those in Bukovina Galicians, and those in Transylvania Hungarians.41 In March 1941, Ion Antonescu spoke to the Council of Ministers on the necessity of driving out the Ukrainians and other “aliens.” The Ukrainians alone amounted to more than half a million people.42 The German invasion of the Soviet Union made it possible for the Romanian army to reclaim territories it had lost in 1940. Since Bukovina had a Romanian population of only 44 per cent, and in Bessarabia the Romanians accounted for some 56 per cent, it was decided that the two territories should be “purified.” On July 3, 1941, Minister-President Mihai Antonescu explained to the civil servants who were to work there that the unique moment had now come in which to carry out the “purification of the nation,” and that the Jews and all other aliens were to be driven out of the two provinces.43 Subsequently, Romanian army units and

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members of the German Einsatzgruppe D murdered between 45,000 and 60,000 Jews.44 After this, the entire Jewish population of Bessarabia and a large part of that of Bukovina were deported. It is particularly difficult to establish the exact number of Jewish victims in Bessarabia because Jews had been deported during the time of Soviet rule in 1940/41, or had fled as the Red Army retreated.45 On July 8, 1941, Mihai Antonescu demanded the “forced migration” of Ukrainians, if necessary with machine guns.46 But German military leaders had already protested about the displacement of Jews at the rear of the military front, a measure about which they had not been consulted. There were also differing views in the German Reich concerning the future of the Ukrainians. At the end of June 1941 some members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Lviv tried to establish a sovereign state, but the attempt was suppressed by the German army. However, the Germans were unwilling to forgo the support provided by Ukrainian auxiliaries.47 In Bukovina, a Ukrainian council came into being that recruited volunteers and sent them to areas of German occupation. When the Ukrainians protested to General Antonescu against Romanian excesses, he interpreted this as an attempt to lay claim to northern Bukovina for a future Ukrainian state. In December 1941 he therefore banned the Ukrainian council and ordered the persecution of Ukrainian leaders by the police. Ukrainians who refused to pay war tributes were also severely punished. Beginning in January 1942, all propaganda by Ukrainians was forbidden, although its orientation was primarily anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik. Under threat of death, Ukrainians who were active as auxiliary police in areas of German occupation were not permitted to return to their families. When the Ukrainians complained about this in a note to the German ambassador in Bucharest, the Romanian authorities demanded the expulsion of the German SS member who had advised the Ukrainians in Chernivtsi. Many Ukrainians arrested for supporting the OUN were deported to Transnistria; by April 1943 the number had reached 3,400.48 In Romania in July 1941 there was a national consensus concerning the reconquest of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Even leaders of the banned middle-class parties called for the restoration of Greater Romania, a matter reported by Archibald Gibson, The Times correspondent in Bucharest.49 But when General Antonescu ordered Romanian units to cross the Dniester, Iuliu Maniu, the leader of the banned Peasant Party expressed reservations because Romania might therefore have to give up northern Transylvania. However, the government-directed press demanded the liberation of Romanians living in the Ukraine, and greatly exaggerated their number.50 The number of critical voices increased during the battle for Odessa, during which 70,000 died, but they fell silent after the establishment of the Romanian area of occupation between the Dniester and the southern Bug. The Romanian army, which advanced ever further toward the Crimea and the Volga, was

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supplied by Transnistrian harvests.51 The objective of the war was now the destruction of Bolshevism. The press printed appeals to the population to make contributions to the “Holy War” that would lead to a stable Greater Romania from the Tisza to the Bug. Radio Greater Romania referred to the Second Vienna Award as a serious error.52 Occasionally pamphlets also appeared which demanded the return of northern Transylvania. These publications, some of them written in German, were banned from being held by the libraries of the German Reich.53 In addition, the Romanian ambassador in Berlin, General Ion Gheorghe, protested continually against the conduct of the Hungarian army of occupation in northern Transylvania. A joint German–Italian commission investigated the charges.54 Maniu warned in October 1942 against the annexation of Transnistria because this could be interpreted as waiving the claim to northern Transylvania.55 However, the Romanian forces of occupation in Transnistria established themselves in a way that implied that the territory would belong to Romania permanently. The civilian governor, Gheorghe Alexianu, implemented what the press had propagated since 1937 under the name of “ethnocracy”: an ethnically structured hierarchy.56 The quarter million Romanians were the dominant nation while the rest of the 2.2 million inhabitants—with the exception of the Germans—were degraded to the status of forced laborers. Although the Romanians, most of whom lived in the countryside, continued to work on former kolkhozes, they had fewer taxes to pay than their Slavic neighbors. They were also expected to generate a group of tradesmen to replace the Jews. Romanian schools were built and the Patriarch of Bucharest sent an Orthodox mission to establish churches.57 The other privileged group in Transnistria was the so-called Volksdeutschen, ethnic Germans whose population was estimated at 130,000. The task forces of the German Security Police and the SD recruited an armed “self-defense force” of 5,000 people who scoured the villages in search of Jews, Roma, and communists, and shot those suspects they found.58 The great majority of the population in Transnistria consisted of Ukrainian peasants who had to deliver the larger part of their harvest to the Romanian army. When, as a result, they were no longer able to care for their working animals, protests were made and token strikes took place. The security forces kept a close watch on the population through spies and, just as in Bukovina, many Ukrainians were arrested. In particular, the military tribunals condemned to death those it believed to be communist partisans.59 Far worse was the fate of those Jews who had been driven out of Bessarabia and Bukovina into Transnistria. Most were quartered in deserted localities where, especially in the winter of 1941/42, they were exposed to death by starvation. To prevent beggars from spreading diseases to the surrounding area, the German

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“self-defense force” also took part in mass executions.60 Somewhere between 105,000 and 120,000 of the Jews who had been deported to Transnistria died. The exact number cannot be determined because Jews from Romania and Transnistria were imprisoned in the same camps.61 In the summer of 1942, additional Jews from Chernivtsi—who remained behind in 1941, thanks to the help of mayor Traian Popovici—were deported to Transnistria, and from there driven by a few district leaders over the Bug into German-occupied territory. Those able to work were put to work building roads, but the majority—the elderly, women, and children—were shot.62 As the Romanians continued to expel more and more Jews, the occupying German authorities protested. Eichmann had reached an agreement with Minister-President Mihai Antonescu in July 1942 that all Jews still in Romania were to be transported to the German death camps.63 When the transport plans became known in September 1942, some important officials at home and abroad protested. The Metropolitan of Transylvania argued that Romania should not treat the Jews any differently than the Hungarians did (at the time there were no deportations from Hungary). Representatives of the Vatican and the Red Cross also intervened.64 But the protest that most likely proved decisive was the warning made in September 1942 by the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that when the war was over Romania would be required to account for the whereabouts of the Jews.65 In addition, a considerable donation had been made to the Romanian government and the ministries realized that money from foreign parts would only be forthcoming for Jews who were alive.66 But while the condition of the Jews in Transnistria improved in 1943 as a result of the intervention of foreign officials, the conditions of the deported Roma remained catastrophic. In the summer and fall of 1942, more than 25,000 Roma were driven out of Romania. Since they too were billeted in deserted localities without provisions, more than half of them died.67

Who Planned and Organized the “Purification” of Romania? The initiator of the plans for the “national purification” of the territories conquered in 1941 was Sabin Manuilă, at the time Romania’s leading demographer. He had studied medicine and was in charge of the census of 1930. In 1934 he published a sharp criticism of Hungarian revisionism and argued that the privileged position of minorities in Transylvanian towns was disappearing.68 In 1935 he suggested the targeted settlement of Romanian colonists in order to “purify” the country’s western border. To create a more homogeneous population in Romania, in 1937 he proposed the return of Romanian nationals from Hungary in exchange for repatriating the Hungarians living in Romania.69

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In the same year he became the director of the Central Institute for Statistics (Institutul Central de Statistică) which in 1938 published the data of the 1930 census. Also in 1938 his atlas of the population structure appeared, in which the multiethnic border region with Hungary was presented as containing a Romanian majority.70 In imitation of the German Reich, where after 1937 the so called “islands of ethnic Germans” became a much used term, in 1939 some sociologists initiated research into the Romanian peasants of the Timok River valley in Yugoslavia. The fieldwork was conducted by Anton Golopenţia, who later became Manuilă’s deputy in the directorate of the Central Institute for Statistics. Golopenţia wrote his dissertation in Germany and adopted some views of his German colleagues.71 He criticized the trading dominance of the Jews of Bukovina and Bessarabia.72 In August 1940. Manuilă and Golopenţia accompanied the Romanian foreign minister, Mihail Manoilescu, to negotiations with Hungary. He presented plans for an extensive exchange of populations, which was no longer a viable option due to the partition of northern Transylvania in the Second Vienna Award.73 In 1940, Manuilă und Golopenţia, both of whom came from Transylvania, were confronted with the distress caused by the displacement of the more than 150,000 people from their homeland. Now politicians and their agents began to orient themselves to the methods that had been adopted following the Nazi– Soviet Pact for the resettlement of Germans from the Soviet Union in the German Reich. Jews and Poles had been expelled to make place for them. The new census, ordered in January 1941 by General Antonescu, commissioned Manuilă to identify the property that had been taken from Jews and given to Romanians. Just as the census began in April 1941, the Jews’ urban properties were expropriated. Friedrich Burgdörfer of the National Socialist Party’s Office of Racial Policy in Berlin participated in the census as an adviser.74 The publication office in Vienna printed thirty-five copies of the census results in their entirety exclusively for “internal official use” by the German authorities.75 In Romania the data concerning the Jews was used as the basis for the organization of forced labor. An agency issued passes in which the work place and the extra levies were noted. From May 1941 on, the National Center of Romanization, established under the Secretary for Romanization, Colonization and Inventory, was responsible for the expropriation of Jewish property and its redistribution among Romanian refugees.76 Following the reconquest of Bessarabia and Bukovina, Manuilă’s colleagues from the Central Institute were given new tasks. In August and September 1941 they registered Jewish property and its redistribution among the various ethnic groups. Since the census took place immediately following the deportation and mass murder of Jews in Transnistria, they recorded for “official use” the fact that in Bessarabia there were still 72,625 Jews, and in northern Bukovina, 71,950. In

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order to prevent the extent of mass murder becoming known, these results were not published.77 The number of Ukrainians was also kept secret since they were to be deported.78 The statisticians’ work on the plan presented to General Antonescu by Manuilă on October 15, 1941, had especially far reaching consequences. In it Manuilă described the steps by which at least 3.5 million non-Romanians could be exchanged or deported in order to make Greater Romania ethnically homogeneous. In order to ease tensions with Hungary, 1,350,000 Hungarians were to be resettled. He also wanted to deport Banat Serbs to the German area of occupation in Serbia, and to resettle Romanians from the Timok valley in the Serbs’ vacated farms. For Jews and Roma, he cynically noted that this would be a “one-way transfer.”79 All Slavs were to leave Romania, which amounted to almost a million people. His deputy Golopenţia thought that the approximately 100,000 Ukrainians and the Russians in southern Bessarabia should be expelled so that the Romanians who came from the Soviet Union could be resettled there.80 Under Golopenţia’s direction, a group of Romanian ethnologists and demographers followed the Axis armies and searched for Romanians. Primarily, this meant finding the descendents of colonists who had settled there in the eighteenth century. Only half a century later, beginning in 1994, some of the results of this group, which set out to identify and study Romanian settlements east of the river Bug, were published. Beginning in 1942, the ethnologists and demographers, well supplied with gifts of food and tobacco, criss-crossed Transnistria and later the German area of occupation. They gave gifts to every peasant who declared themselves to be Romanian and recorded their personal details. In view of the situation of dire poverty and the alternative of being transported to the German Reich for forced labor, many were able to recall Romanian ancestors. Some still knew Romanian folk songs and customs, and these were carefully noted. Of the approximately 30,000 people who were registered as Romanians, resettlement became a concrete reality for only about 5,000, most of whom received farms in Transnistria after the Ukrainian farmers had been expelled.81 Just as the expulsion of all Ukrainians from Bukovina and Bessarabia— planned for 1943—was about to begin, the German and Romanian armies needed all available transport capacity for their retreat in the wake of the Red Army’s swift advance. On November 5, 1943, Manuilă wrote to Golopenţia that their ideal could no longer be realized and that all that could be done now was to help a few individual families. He added that he would henceforth concern himself with the problem of the Jews in Transnistria because this would be an important issue at a future peace conference.82 Manuilă was among those who had formed a Peace Bureau (Biroul Păcii) in March 1943 on behalf of the country’s minister-president to prepare material

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on Romania’s claims, especially to northern Transylvania.83 In 1941 and 1943 Manuilă published his argument for a revision of the partition of Transylvania in German; then, in 1945, due to the changed situation, in English.84 After the Romanian units withdrew from the territory of the Soviet Union in early 1944, Manuilă succeeded in preparing an alibi to be used when the war ended. In his villa he concealed the leader of the Peasant Party, Iuliu Maniu, who, with a group of middle-class and leftist politicians, conspired to remove Ion Antonescu from power. Following the overthrow of Antonescu in August 1944, Manuilă became a state secretary under Maniu’s protection.85 At the close of 1944, the government discussed implementation the deportation of the ethnic German minority as forced laborers to the Soviet Union.86 In 1946, Manuilă drew up plans for removing Hungarians from Romania, which had not taken by the time of the 1946/47 Paris Peace Treaties. As an expert in demography, he took part in the conference in which northern Transylvania was returned to Romania. The Communists forced Manuilă to resign from the Central Institute for Statistics in August 1947, and in 1948 he fled and settled in the USA.87 Golopenţia, who had not taken part in any of the criminal planning, and indeed had aided some of the Jews deported to Transnistria, remained in Romania, where he died in 1951 in prison.88

Conclusion Without a doubt there is a direct relationship between the loss of territory that the Romanians suffered in 1940 and the policy of expelling and murdering Jews and Roma that began in 1941. In the fall of 1941, many Romanians shared the view of Ion Antonescu that a people’s strength depended on its racial purity. Still, it is not completely clear just what role the occupied territory of Transnistria played in the thinking of Romania’s political leadership. Only in the last ten years has research been conducted into Romania’s comprehensive plans for ethnic homogenization. During the Communist era, Romanian historians did not concern themselves with the policy of forced Romanization, nor with the genocide committed against the Jews and Roma who had been deported to Transnistria. Under Ceauşescu, only the crimes committed against Romanians and Jews during the Hungarian occupation of northern Transylvania were discussed.89 At the time, and with partially forged documents, several Romanians were portrayed as having rescued Jews in the part of northern Transylvania that had been separated from Romania.90 After 1990, research concerning the Second World War did not immediately increase because Ion Antonescu, the Romanian head of state between 1940 and 1944, was officially honored as a foe of Bolshevism, and many historians simply

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adopted his claim that he had fought on the Volga for the return of northern Transylvania.91 In 1991, Marshall Antonescu was honored in parliament as a martyr with a minute of silence.92 Many politicians argued that his execution in June 1946 had not been justified, and demanded his rehabilitation. Important streets were named after him and statues were erected to his memory. This cult was first brought to an end when Romania sought to join NATO and the European Union. Since there were powerful forces in Romania that denied that the Holocaust had taken place, in 2003 the Romanian president, Ion Iliescu, called an international commission into being to conduct a scholarly investigation into Romania’s role in the genocide. Concerning the persecution and murder of Jews, the commission was able to build on the previous work of historians from Israel, France, Germany, and the USA.93 There were, however, far fewer publications concerning the Roma.94 In 2004 the commission presented its findings in an extensive report which estimated that the number of Jews that had been killed in areas under Romanian control was between 280,000 and 380,000.95 It was not until the publication of the commission’s report in 2005 that a fainthearted discussion of Marshall Ion Antonescu’s role began. The Party of Greater Romania, which had strongly supported the movement for his rehabilitation, lost influence; in elections in 2000 it had won 20 per cent of the vote, but since 2008 it has not been represented in Parliament.96 The Romanian historian Viorel Achim has concluded that the plan for ethnic homogenization constituted an attempt to stabilize Romania’s borders and that Transnistria was a mere temporary territory of occupation: the planners’ main interest had been the return of northern Transylvania. In order to prevent the Germans claiming that Transnistria was compensation for the territories Romania had lost to Hungary, in the spring of 1942 Marshall Antonescu dropped plans for the Romanization of Transnistria. And it was after this decision that the Roma and the Jews were deported to Transnistria.97 But if Antonescu did not intend to incorporate Transnistria into the state of Romania, why did Bucharest continue to invest in it? Thus, in 1942, Romania began to construct an autobahn between Bucharest and Odessa. Meanwhile, the damage that had been done to the harbor in Odessa was repaired, and many factories in Transnistria were rebuilt. In Odessa the university was reopened, and many patriotic plays were performed in the Romanized National Theatre. In its schools, Romanian was made the obligatory foreign language.98 In order to find enough Romanians for the intended settlement of Transnistria, efforts to identify “ethnic Romanians” in the German areas of occupation were continued until the end of 1943. And the deportation of Jews from Transnistria to the German areas of occupation, which began in the summer of 1942, shows that an effort was being made to homogenize the population of Transnistria.

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Up to now only a small fraction of the records of Romanian policy during the war years has been evaluated; it is therefore reasonable to expect that in the coming years we will gain new knowledge of this period.

Notes 1. Mariana Hausleitner, Die Rumänisierung der Bukowina: Die Durchsetzung des nationalstaatlichen Anspruchs Großrumäniens 1918–1944 (Munich, 2001), 96–99. 2. The secret agreement with the People’s Party of general Alexandru Averescu lasted only three years. See: Franz Sz. Horvath, Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung: Politische Strategien der ungarischen Minderheitselite in Rumänien 1931–1940 (Munich, 2007), 67–71. 3. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, that was already active in Poland in 1929, strove for unification under the sign of a right-wing political movement. See: Hausleitner, Rumänisierung, 179. 4. Mariana Hausleitner, Deutsche und Juden in Bessarabien 1814–1941: Zur Minderheitenpolitik Russlands und Großrumäniens (Munich, 2005), 114–24. 5. Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, 2000), 60–68. 6. “Recensământul general al populaţiei României din 29. 12. 1930,” vol. 9 (Bucharest, 1938). For the basis of the distinction between “race” and mother tongue, see Sabin Manuilă, Etudes sur la démographie historique de la Roumanie (Cluj, 1992), 87. 7. Hausleitner, Rumänisierung, 150–57. 8. Raoul Bossy, Amintiri din viaţa diplomatică, vol. 1 (Bucharest, 1993), 324–26. 9. Horvath, Zwischen Ablehnung, 350. 10. On the conditions of the Jews in Romania during the nineteenth century, see Mariana Hausleitner, “Antisemitism in Romania,” in Hans-Christian Petersen and Samuel Salzborn (eds), Antisemitism in Eastern Europe: History and Present in Comparison (Frankfurt am Main, 2010), 199–204. 11. Iancu places the number of Jews deprived of citizenship at 36.7 per cent and Müller at 50 per cent. See: Carol Iancu, Evreii din România 1919–1938: De la emancipare la marginalizare (Bucharest, 2000), 263; Dietmar Müller, Staatsbürger auf Widerruf: Juden und Muslime als Alteritätspartner im rumänischen und serbischen Nationscode. Ethnonationale Staatsbürgerschaftskonzepte 1878–1941 (Wiesbaden, 2005), 458. 12. Robert Levi, Gloria şi decaderea Anei Pauker (Iaşi, 2002), 49; Christian Maner, Parlamentarismus in Rumänien (1930–1940): Demokratie im autoritären Umfeld (Munich, 1997), 323. 13. Hary Kuller (ed.), O istorie a evreilor din România în date, vol. 2 (Bucharest, 2000), 145. 14. Vitalie Văratic, Preliminarii la raptul Basarabiei şi nordului Bucovinei (Bucharest, 2000), 186–87. 15. Zigu Ornea, Anii treizeci: Extrema dreaptă românească (Bucharest, 1995), 246–50. 16. Hildrun Glass, Zerbrochene Nachbarschaft: Das deutsch-jüdische Verhältnis in Rumänien 1918–1938 (Munich, 1996), 544. 17. Hans-Christian Maner, “Voraussetzungen der autoritären Monarchie in Rumänien,” in Erwin Oberländer (ed.), Autoritäre Regime in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa 1919–1944 (Paderborn, 2001), 452. 18. Comisia internaţională pentru studierea holocaustului în România, “Raport final” (Iaşi, 2005), 36 and 49. 19. Florian Banu, Asalt asupra economiei României de la Solagra la SOVROM (1936–1956) (Bucharest, 2004), 36.

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20. Cristian Scarlat (ed.), Diplomaţi germani la Bucharest 1937–1944: Din memoriile dr. Rolf Pusch şi dr. Gerhard Stelzer (Bucharest, 2001), 111. 21. Armin Heinen, “Der Hitler-Stalin-Pakt und Rumänien,” in Erwin Oberländer (ed.), Hitler-Stalin-Pakt: Das Ende Ostmitteleuropas? (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 101–3 and 128. Browning also, and incorrectly, refers to Bukovina and underlines the importance of the oil fields. See: Christopher Browning, Die Entfesselung der “Endlösung”: Nationalsozialistische Judenpolitik 1939–1942 (Berlin, 2006), 312. 22. Herrmann Neubacher, Sonderauftrag Südost 1940–45: Bericht eines fliegenden Diplomaten (Göttingen, 1956), 40–41. 23. The Romanian foreign minister Gafencu received confidential information in 1939 concerning the secret agreement between Molotov and Ribbentrop on Bessarabia. What was new in 1940 was the additional demand that northern Bukovina was also to be surrendered. See: Andrej Angrick, “Im Wechselspiel der Kräfte. Impressionen zur deutschen Einflussnahme bei der Volkstumspolitik in Czernowitz vor ‘Barbarossa’ und nach Beginn des Überfalls auf die Sowjetunion,” in Alfred Gottwaldt, Norbert Kampe, and Peter Klein (eds), NS-Gewaltherrschaft: Beiträge zur historischen Forschung und juristischen Aufarbeitung (Berlin, 2005), 329–30. 24. Dana Beldiman, Armata şi Mişcarea Legionară 1927–1947 (Bucharest, 2002), 61. 25. Comisia, “Raport final,” 78. 26. Cristian Troncotă and Alin Spânu (eds), Documente SSI privind spaţiul sovietic 22 august 1939–23 august 1944 (Bucharest, 2004), 116–17. 27. Ottmar Traşcă and Dennis Deletant (eds), Al III-lea Reich şi holocaustul din România 1940–1944: Documente din arhivele germane (Bucharest, 2007), 131–36. 28. Rebecca Haynes, Romanian Policy towards Germany, 1936–1940 (Basingstoke, 2000), 148–49. 29. Georges Castellan, A History of the Romanians (Boulder, 1989), 204. 30. Keith Hitchins, Rumania 1866–1947 (Oxford, 1994), 463. 31. Anton Golopenţia, Românii de la est de Bug, vol. 1 (Bucharest, 2006), xiv. 32. Dirk Jachomowki, Die Umsiedlung der Bessarabien-, Bukowina- und Dobrudschadeutschen: Von der Volksgruppe in Rumänien zur “Siedlungsbrücke“ an der Reichsgrenze (Munich, 1984), 100. 33. Kuller, O istorie, 176–78. 34. Cristian Troncotă, Florin Pintilie, and Alin Spânu (eds), Documente SSI despre poziţia şi activităţile politice din România în perioada regimului autoritar 6 septembrie 1940–23 august 1944 (Bucharest, 2005), 118 and 124. 35. Mioara Anton, “The Status of Minorities in Romania in the Early Post-war Years 1944–1947,” Revue Roumaine d’Histoire 45,1–4 (2006): 240. 36. Dennis Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944 (New York, 2006), 68. 37. Vladimir Solonari, “‘Model Province’: Explaining the Holocaust of Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jewry,” Nationalities Papers 34,4 (2006): 477. 38. Armin Heinen, Rumänien, der Holocaust und die Logik der Gewalt (Munich, 2007), 56–57. 39. Ecouri dintr-o epocă tulbure. Documente elveţiene 1940–1944 (Bucharest, 1998), 82. 40. Kuller, O istorie, 181. 41. Alexandre Safran, Resisting the Storm: Romania 1940–1947, Memoirs (Jerusalem, 1987), 27. 42. Viorel Achim, “Die Deportation der Juden nach Transnistrien im Kontext der Bevölkerungspolitik der Antonescu-Regierung,” in Wolfgang Benz and Brigitte Mihok (eds), Holocaust an der Peripherie: Judenpolitik und Judenmord in Rumänien und Transnistrien 1940–1944 (Berlin, 2009), 154.

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43. Stenogramele şedintelor Consiliului de Miniştri, Guvernarea Ion Antonescu, Arhivele Naţionale ale României (ed.), vol. 4 (Bucharest, 2000), 2 and 57; Hausleitner, Rumänisierung, 380. 44. Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg, 2003), 147–72; Ralf Ogorreck, Die Einsatzgruppen und die “Genesis der Endlösung” (Berlin, 1996), 151–57. 45. As in eastern Poland and the Baltic states, in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina there was a similar continuity between Soviet repression and the crimes committed by the German occupying forces. These territories have been designated the “bloodlands”: Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York, 2010). For a survey of Nazi crimes, see: Yitzak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector (eds), The Einsatzgruppen Reports (New York, 1989). 46. Matatias Carp, Cartea neagră. Suferinţele evreior din România 1940–1944, vol. 3 (Bucharest, 1996), 96. 47. Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944: Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (Munich, 1996), 45; Grzegorz RossolinskiLiebe, “The ‘Ukrainian National Revolution’ of 1941: Discourse and Practice of a Fascist Movement,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Euroasian History 12,1 (2011), 83–114. 48. Hausleitner, Rumänisierung, 420–24; Stelian Mândruţ and Ottmar Traşcă, “Fritz Valjavec şi România,” Anuarul Institutului de Istorie ‘G. Bariţiu’ din Cluj-Napoca 46 (2009), 178–180; Pavel Moraru, Bucovina sub regimul Antonescu 1914–1944 (Chişinău, 2007), 100. 49. Dennis Deletant, Aliatul uitat al lui Hitler (Bucharest, 2006), 96. 50. Hausleitner, Rumänisierung, 381; Henri Prost, Destinul României 1918–1954 (Bucharest, 2004), 230–31. 51. Troncotă, Documente (2004), 146–47 and 181. 52. Mioara Anton, Propaganda şi Război 1941–1944 (Bucharest, 2007), 82 and 92. 53. Deutsche Nationalbibliographie, Verzeichnis der Schriften, die 1933–1945 nicht angezeigt werden durften (Leipzig, 1949). 54. Ion Gheorghe, Un dictator nefericit: Mareşalul Antonescu (Bucharest, 1996), 210. 55. Troncotă, Documente (2004), 289. 56. Mariana Hausleitner, “Auf dem Weg zur ‘Ethnokratie’: Rumänien in den Jahren des Zweiten Weltkriegs,” in Christoph Dieckmann, Babette Quinckert, and Tatjana Tönsmeyer (eds), Kooperation und Verbrechen: Formen der “Kollaboration” im östlichen Europa, 1939–1945 (Göttingen, 2003), 78–112. 57. Ekkehard Völkl, Transnistrien und Odessa (1941–1944) (Regensburg, 1996), 90. 58. Angrick, Besatzungspolitik, 277–91. 59. Völkl, Transnistrien, 35. 60. Andrej Angrick, “Zur Bedeutung des ‘Sonderkommandos R’ und des ‘Volksdeutschen Selbstsschutzes’ bei der Ermordung der Juden in Transnistrien,” in Benz and Mihok, Holocaust an der Peripherie, 81–94. 61. Comisia, “Raport final,” 388. 62. Andrej Angrick, “Annihilation and Labor: Jews and Thoroughfare IV in Central Ukraine,” in Wendy Lower and Ray Brandon (eds), The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington, 2008), 190–223; Hausleitner, Rumänisierung, 401–3 and 410. 63. David Cesarani, Adolf Eichmann: Bürokrat und Massenmörder (Berlin, 2004), 218; Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime 1940–1944 (Chicago, 2000), 242. 64. Carol Iancu, La Shoah en Roumanie (Montpelier, 2000), 27 and 29.

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65. Sebastian Balta, Rumänien und die Großmächte in der Ära Antonescu (1940–1944) (Stuttgart, 2005), 294. 66. Raul Hilberg, Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden, vol. 2, 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 846–47; Safran, Resisting the Storm, 227. 67. Brigitte Mihok, “Der ‘einseitige Transfer’: Die Deportation rumänischer Roma 1942–1944,” in Benz and Mihok, Holocaust an der Peripherie, 173–86. 68. Viorel Achim, “Sabin Manuilă despre ştiinţa demografiei ca argument contra revizuirii frontierelor,” in Alexandru Zub et al. (eds), Naţiunea română. Idealuri şi realităţi istorice (Bucharest, 2006), 319. 69. Viorel Achim, “Schimbul de populaţie în viziunea lui Sabin Manuilă,” Revista istorică 13,5/6 (2002): 137. 70. Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea During World War II (Stanford, 2009), 44–45. 71. The title of the thesis was: “Die Information der Staatsführung und die überlieferte Soziologie.” Golopenţia contributed to the study “Românii din Timoc.” See: Golopenţia, Românii, vol. 1, xi–xii. 72. Memoriul intocmit de Institutul Central de Statistică. Printed in: Lya Benjamin (ed.), Problema evreiască în stenogramele consiliului de Miniştri (Bucharest, 1996), 78. 73. Vladimir Trebici, Demografie: Excerpta et selecta (Bucharest, 1996), 158. 74. Viorel Achim, “Romanian–German Collaboration in Ethnopolitics: The Case of Sabin Manuila,” in Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch (eds), German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing 1920–1945 (New York, 2005), 145–46. 75. Wilfried Krallert (ed.), Die Bevölkerungszählung in Rumänien 1941 (Vienna, 1943). See also: Michael Fahlbusch, Wissenschaft im Dienst nationalsozialistischer Politik? Die “Volksdeutschen Forschungsgemeinschaften” von 1931–1945 (Baden-Baden, 1999), 637. 76. Hilberg, Die Vernichtung, vol. 3, 819–20. 77. Şedinţa Consililui de Miniştri, June 23, 1941; on this matter, see: Benjamin, Problema, 240–41. 78. Viorel Achim, “Proiectul guvernului de la Bucharest vizănd schimbul de populaţie românoruso-ucrainean (1943),” Revista istorică 11,5/6 (2000), 395–421. 79. Achim, “Romanian–German Collaboration,” 142; Achim, “The Romanian Population Exchange Project Elaborated by Sabin Manuilă in October 1941,” in Jahrbuch des italienischdeutschen historischen Instituts in Trient, XXVII (Bologna, 2002), 593–617. 80. Anton Golopenţia, Ultima carte, ed. Sanda Golopenţia (Bucharest, 2001), 450. 81. Rodica Solovei, Activitatea Guvernământului Transnistriei în domenniul social-economic şi cultural (Iaşi, 2004), 96; Anton Raţiu, Românii de la est de Bug (Bucharest, 1994), 29–33 and 55; Convorbiri neterminate: Corneliu Mănescu în dialog cu Lavinia Betea (Iaşi, 2001), 49–50. 82. Golopenţia, Ultima carte, 353. 83. Anton, Propaganda, 11 and 253–54. 84. Sabin Manuila, Die volkspolitischen Folgen der Teilung Siebenbürgens (Bucharest, 1941); idem, Die Folgen der Teilung Siebenbürgens in demographischer Hinsicht (Bucharest, 1943); idem, The Vienna Award and Its Demographical Consequences (Bucharest, 1945). 85. Golopenţia, Ultima carte, 289. 86. Hannelore Baier (ed.), Germanii din România (Sibiu, 2005), 22–28. 87. Achim, “Romanian–German Collaboration,” 140; Anton, “The Status of Minorities,” 237–43. 88. Golopenţia, Ultima carte, xviii and 329. 89. Mihai Fătu, Biserica românească din nord-vestul ţării sub ocupaţia horthystă 1940–1944 (Timişoara, 1985); Mihai Fătu and Mircea Muşat (eds), Horthyist Fascist Terror in Northwestern Romania (Bucharest, 1986).

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90. Randolph L. Braham: Romanian Nationalists and the Holocaust: The Political Exploitation of Unfounded Rescue Accounts (New York, 1998). 91. Adrian Pandea and Eftimie Ardeleanu, Românii în Crimea 1941–1944 (Bucharest, 1995), 26. 92. Balta, Rumänien, 15 93. Randolph L. Braham, The Destruction of Romanian and Ukrainian Jews During the Antonescu Era (New York, 1997); Mariana Hausleitner, Brigitte Mihok, and Juliane Wetzel (eds), Rumänien und der Holocaust: Zu den Massenverbrechen in Transnistrien 1941–1944 (Berlin, 2001). 94. Viorel Achim, Ţiganii în istoria României (Bucharest, 1998), 133–52; Lucian Nastasă and Andrea Varga (eds), Minorităţi etnoculturale: Mărturii documentare. Ţiganii din România 1919–1944 (Cluj, 2001). 95. International Commision on the Holocaust in Romania, “Final Report” (Iaşi, 2005), 381. 96. Gabriel Andreescu, Extremismul de dreapta în România (Cluj, 2003); Mariana Hausleitner, “Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Holocaust in Rumänien, Umdeuten, verschweigen, erinnern,” in Micha Brumlik and Karol Sauerland (eds), Die späte Aufarbeitung des Holocaust in Osteuropa (Frankfurt am Main, 2010), 71–89. 97. Achim, “Die Deportation der Juden,” 158–60. 98. Solovei, Activitatea, 118–19; Völkl, Transnistrien, 50–52 and 61.

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d Holly Case is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University and received her PhD from Stanford University. She is the author of Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (2009), and her research interests include: territorial competition, minorities, and visions of European statehood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marina Cattaruzza is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Bern and an outside member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her main research interests include: the history of the coastal regions of the Habsburg monarchy from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, minorities and forced population movements in twentieth-century Europe, the history of the east Italian border, and the history of historiography. Her recent publications include L’Italia e il confine orientale (4th edition, 2011), awarded the Piemonte Storia Prize, and Sozialisten an der Adria: Plurinationale Arbeiterbewegung in der Habsburger Monarchie (2011). István Deák is an Emeritus Professor at Columbia University. He was born in Hungary and studied history in Budapest, Paris, Munich, and at Columbia University, where he obtained his PhD in 1964. His publications include Weimar Germany’s Left-wing Intellectuals (1968), The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849 (1979), Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (1990), and Essays on Hitler’s Europe (2001). He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and New Republic, and an outside member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Stefan Dyroff received his PhD from the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) in 2006, since which he has been based in the Department of

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Contemporary History at the University of Bern. His current research focuses on state and social actors involved in the supervision of minority protection under the League of Nations, and his publications include Erinnerungskultur im deutsch-polnischen Kontaktbereich: Bromberg und der Nordosten der Provinz Posen (Wojewodschaft Poznań) 1871–1939 (2007). Frank Golczewski received his PhD in History in 1973 and in 1979 obtained a Habilitation in Modern and East European History from Cologne University. Between 1983 and 1994 he was Professor of Modern History at the University of the German Federal Army in Hamburg, and since 1994 he has been Professor of East European History at the University of Hamburg. His publications include Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 1881–1922 (1979), Russischer Nationalismus (1998), and Deutsche und Ukrainer, 1914–1939 (2010). Frank Grelka obtained his PhD in Eastern European History from the University of Bochum. A historian, researcher, and translator, since 2003 he has run HRA Berlin, an independent scientific consulting company involved in history and film projects in Poland, Belorussia, and the Ukraine. He is the author of Die ukrainische Nationalbewegung unter deutscher Besatzungsherrschaft 1918 und 1941/42 (2005). Mariana Hausleitner is Associate Lecturer in the Department of History and Cultural Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is also currently a research associate at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where she is involved in the project “The Danube Swabians in the Romanian and Serbian Banat, 1918–1949: Relations with their non German Neighbors.” Her recent publications include Die Rumänisierung der Bukowina: Die Durchsetzung des nationalstaatlichen Anspruchs Großrumäniens 1918–1941 (2001) and Deutsche und Juden in Bessarabien 1814–1941: Zur Minderheitenpolitik Russlands und Großrumäniens (2005). Franz Sz. Horváth received his PhD in 2006 and is currently an independent scholar in Frankfurt. His research interests include: ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe, Jewish–Gentile relations and anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the history of ideology. His publications include Zwischen Ablehnung und Anpassung: Die politischen Strategien der ungarischen Minderheitselite in Rumänien 1931–1940 (2007). Dieter Langewiesche is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Modern History, University of Tübingen, and is a winner of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, awarded by the German Research Foundation. He is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities as well as the German

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National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. His current research interests include: war and society, nationalism and national memory, the European revolutions of 1848, and the history of universities. Among his recent publications are Liberalism in Germany (2000), Europa zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1849 (2007), Reich, Nation, Föderation: Deutschland und Europa (2008), and Zeitwende: Geschichtsdenken heute (2009). He is also the co-editor of Europe in 1848 (2001) and Formen des Krieges: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (2007). Ignác Romsics is currently Professor of Modern Hungarian History at the University of Eger, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a former general secretary of the Hungarian Historical Society. He has previously taught at Indiana University, the University of Jyväskylä, and has held a visiting professorship at the Sorbonne. His publications include Wartime American Plans for a New Hungary (1992), István Bethlen (1995), Hungary in the Twentieth Century (1999), The Dismantling of Historic Hungary (2002), From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Birth of the Third Hungarian Republic, 1998–2001 (2007), and Kriegsziele und Nachkriegsordnung in Ostmitteleuropa: Der Pariser Friedensvertrag von 1947 mit Ungarn (2009). Norbert Spannenberger received his PhD from the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität München and is currently an assistant at the Seminar on Eastern and Southeastern European History at the University of Leipzig. Previously he was a research assistant at the Center for the History and Culture of East Central Europe at the University of Leipzig, and has also been a research assistant at the University of Bern. His recent publications include Der Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn 1938-1944 unter Horthy und Hitler (2002) and Die katholische Kirche in Ungarn 1918-1939. Positionierung im politischen System und «katholische Renaissance» (2006). Stefan Troebst is Professor of East European Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig and deputy director of the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe. His fields of research include: international and interethnic relations in modern Eastern Europe, and the comparative cultural history of contemporary Europe. He has published widely on the culture, history, and politics of the Balkans, East Central Europe, Russia, and the Baltic Sea region. His current research focuses on cultures of remembrance and the politics of history in post-dictator Europe as well as on regionalizing concepts in historical research. His recent publications include Das makedonische Jahrhundert. Von den Anfängen nationalrevolutionärer Bewegung zum Abkommen von Ohrid 1893-2001. Ausgewählte Aufsätze (2007) and Kulturstudien Ostmitteleuropas. Aufsätze und Essays (2006).

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Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk currently holds a professorship at the University of Warsaw and is the head of the Polish–Bulgarian Historical Commission. She is a member of the Macedonian Scientific Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria, and a member of the International Committee of Slavists. Her publications include Bulgarian Relations with Greece and Turkey after World War II (Polish edition, 1979); Western Thrace in Bulgarian Foreign Policy (1919–1947) (Polish edition, 1991); and The Idea of a Federation of the South Slavs after World War II (Polish edition, 2005).

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

d This select bibliography includes publications on Nazi Germany and its European Allies. We integrated contributions on states that are not the subject of articles in our volume (Finland, Slovakia, Croatia, and Italy) as no adequate contributions could be obtained. Ablonczy, Balázs. Pál Teleki (1874–1941): The Life of a Controversial Hungarian Politician. Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2006. Adelman, Jonathan R., ed. Hitler and his Allies in World War II. London: Routledge, 2007. Ahonen, Pertti, et al., ed. People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and its Aftermath. Oxford: Berg, 2008. Aly, Götz. Hitler’s Beneficiaries: How the Nazis Bought the German People. London: Verso, 2007. Arendt, Hannah. The Originis of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951. Axworthy, Mark. Axis Slovakia: Hitler’s Slavic Wedge. Bayside, NY: Axis Europa Books, 2002. Axworthy, Mark, Cornel Scafeş and Cristian Craciunoiu, eds. Third Axis, Fourth Ally: Romanian Armed Forces in the European War, 1941–1945. London: Arms and Armour, 1995. Balta, Sebastian. Rumänien und die Großmächte in der Ära Antonescu (1940–1944). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005. Bamberger-Stemmann, Sabine. Nationale Minderheiten zwischen Lobbyistentum und Grossmachtinteressen. Marburg: Herder, 2000. Bar Zohar, Michael. Beyond Hitler’s Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews. Avon, MA: Adams Media Corporation, 1998. Barker, Elisabeth. British Policy in South-east Europe in the Second World War. London: Macmillan, 1976. Barkey, Karen and von Hagen, Mark, eds. After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nationbuilding: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.

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INDEX

d Aegean Sea, 102–7, 117, 161 Albania, 21–22, 166 Aleksandar I Karadjordjević, King of Yugoslavia, 167 Aleksandrov, Todor, 167 Alexianu, Gheorghe, 181 Alsace-Lorraine, 57 Altgeyer, Branimir, 64 Ankara, 121 Antonescu, Ion, 16n64, 77, 82–83, 178–80, 183–86 Antonescu, Mihai, 66, 75–77, 81, 179–80, 182 Apponyi, Albert, 93 Atatürk, Kemal, 106, 167 Austria, 3–4, 58–59, 63, 68n5, 92, 108–9, 143–45, 166, 169, 173–74 Austria-Hungary (Habsburg monarchy), 3–4, 7, 18, 94, 128 Bačka, 24, 65 Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, Endre, 77–79, 95 Balázs, András, 42 Banat, 60, 62, 64, 66–67, 184 Bandera, Stepan, 131–33, 149, 151, 153 Bánffy, Miklós, 38, 53n69 Bárdossy, László, 23, 77 Barthou, Louis, 167 Basch, Franz, 63–65, 67, 70n29

CATTARUZZA PRINT.indd 206

Behrends, Hermann, 58 Belgium, 17, 19 Beneš, Edvard, 28, 49, 79 Bereza Kartuska, 129 Berger, Gottlob, 64 Berlin, 13n26, 21, 30, 34, 38, 56–57, 60, 63–65, 103–4, 108–21, 126, 129–32, 138n16, 142, 161–62, 165, 168, 170, 181, 183 Bessarabia, 5, 9, 13n26, 20, 23, 25–27, 67, 98, 112–13, 115, 152, 173–81, 183–84, 188n23, 189n45 Bibó, István, 95, 100 Black Sea, 102–3, 107, 161 Bohemia, 14n34, 41, 46, 58, 95, 97 Bohle, Wilhelm, 58 Boris III, King of Bulgaria, 26, 74, 109–11, 113–21, 164–66, 168 Bosporus, 103 Bratislava, 96 Brückner, Aleksander, 142 Bruns, Carl Georg, 57 Bucharest, 25, 60–61, 80, 106–7, 112–15, 179–81, 186 Budapest, 21, 23, 30, 35, 37–38, 40, 42, 44, 60, 63, 67, 69n16, 77, 83–84, 93, 98, 114–15 Budiş, Alexandru, 80 Bug, 180–82, 184

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Index

Bukovina, 5–6, 9, 13n26, 20, 23, 26, 67, 98, 112–13, 115, 173–74, 177–81, 183–84, 188n21, 188n23, 189n45 Bulgaria, 1, 3, 5–8, 10, 13n11, 13–14nn26–27, 14n30, 17–20, 22, 26–27, 72, 74–87, 88n20, 99, 102–21, 130–31, 161–70, 177–78 Burgdörfer, Friedrich, 183 Burgenland, 92 Byelorussia (White Russia), 11, 126–27, 138n8, 144, 147, 155–56 Canada, 136, 169 Carol II, King of Romania, 61, 177–78 Carpatho-Ukraine, 5, 9, 23, 79, 97, 112, 115, 130–31, 143, 150, 177 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 27, 185 Chełm, 147, 159n20 Chernivtsi, 180, 182 Chernozemski, Vlado, 167 Ciano, Galeazzo, 23, 68n5 Cluj (Klausenburg), 23, 54n82 Cracow, 133, 144, 148, 158 Crainic, Nichifor, 176 Crimea, 143, 180 Croatia (Ustashe), 14n29, 17–22, 24–27, 64–67, 73–75, 79–80, 88nn9–10, 92, 96, 99, 126, 130, 134, 166–68 Czech Protectorate, 19, 22 Czechoslovakia, 3, 5–8, 23–24, 26–28, 30–31, 33–34, 36, 38–39, 41–42, 46–48, 50n19, 59, 61, 65, 74–75, 96–97, 111 Danube, 57, 63, 77, 80, 96, 103, 161 Dardanelles, 103 Denmark, 17–19, 22 Dezsö, Albrecht, 40 Dimchev, Georgi (Gyosho), 169 Dniester, 180 Dobrudja (Southern), 5, 9, 13n26, 67, 80–82, 84, 86, 88n20, 103, 106–7, 112–18, 120, 164–65, 178

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207

Don, River (region), 24–25, 29n12 Drava, River, 24 Eichmann, Adolf, 21, 133, 182 Estonia, 3, 17, 57 Fabritius, Fritz, 61–62 Fenyő, Miksa, 94 Filov, Bogdan, 73, 81–82, 86, 114, 118, 165, 168 Finland, 3, 5–6, 17–20, 22, 26–27, 28n2, 29n16 France, 2, 4, 13n18, 17, 19, 21–23, 95–96, 98, 105, 108–9, 111–13, 116, 164, 166, 175, 177, 186 Frank, Hans, 133, 135, 150, 152 Galaţi, 177 Galicia (Eastern), 6, 127–29, 131–34, 136, 138n8, 140n61, 143–45, 147–49, 154–57, 179 General Government, 6, 131–34, 136, 139n43, 147, 149–50, 152–53 Genov, Georgi, 74 Gibson, Archibald, 180 Glaise-Horstenau, Edmund, 22 Globocnik, Odilo, 152 Goebbels, Joseph, 28n1, 88n17, 150 Golopenţia, Anton, 183–85, 190n71 Gömbös, Gyula, 33, 63 Great Britain (United Kingdom, England), 2, 4, 13n18, 23, 96, 99, 109, 111–12, 116, 119–21, 136, 146, 164–66, 169, 175, 177 Greece, 6, 10, 13n11, 14n30, 19, 21, 42, 74, 76, 79, 82, 102, 104–8, 116, 118–21, 128, 162–66, 168–69, 179 Grey, Sir Edward, 3 Gust, Waldemar, 61 Henlein, Konrad, 33–34, 38–41, 44, 50n15, 52n49, 52n61, 54n88 Herczeg, Ferenc, 95

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Index

Hess, Rudolf, 58 Himmler, Heinrich, 21, 27, 59, 66–67, 127, 132–33 Hitler, Adolf (Führer), 13n26, 17–19, 21, 23, 28n1, 29n16, 34–35, 38, 41, 43, 58–59, 61, 64, 67, 76, 78, 88n17, 96–99, 108–9, 114, 116, 118–19, 121, 127, 132–33, 135, 137, 138n16, 149–50, 165, 169, 177–79 Horthy, Miklós, 21, 43, 67, 78, 94 Hull, Cordell, 182 Hungary (Magyars), 1, 3–11, 13n26, 17–28, 29nn10–12, 29n15, 30–49, 49n3, 51–52nn41–42, 52n59, 52n65, 53n73, 55n109, 55n114, 55n118, 55n120, 57–58, 60–67, 69nn16–17, 69n25, 72, 74–87, 87n3, 88n20, 89n51, 89n55, 90n62, 92–100, 112, 114–16, 119, 130–31, 149, 165–67, 173–86 Huss, Richard, 63 Ion, Gheorghe, 181 Istanbul, 102, 107, 161 Italy, 3, 5–6, 10, 14n28, 16n55, 17–25, 28n1, 28n5, 29n12, 33–35, 68n5, 74, 76, 79, 83, 96, 98–100, 105, 108–9, 111–12, 114–16, 119, 121, 122n9, 130, 164–69, 181 Jaksch, Wenzel, 48, 55n109 Janko, Sepp, 62, 64 Jászi, Oszkár, 94–95 Józewski, Henryk, 145–46 Kádár, János, 27 Kalchev, Atanas, 168 Kállay, Miklós, 67, 79 Kandyba-Olzhych, Oleh, 149 Kantardzhiev, Asen, 84 Karácsonyi, János, 93 Karlsbad, 41 Kasche, Siegfried, 67 Kaunas, 143

CATTARUZZA PRINT.indd 208

Kharkiv, 136, 143 Kiev, 128, 131, 143–45, 149 Kioseivanov, Georgi, 111 Klimiv, Ivan, 131 Koch, Erich, 149–50 Kós, Károly, 36 Kubiyovych, Volodymyr, 132–35, 148, 150 Kursell, Otto von, 58 Latvia, 3, 17 Lithuania, 3, 17, 126, 142–43, 156–57 Lorenz, Werner, 58 Lublin, 136, 152–53, 156, 159n20 Lviv, 130–32, 144, 148–49, 158, 180 Lyapchev, Andrei, 166 Macedonia, 10, 20, 22, 73, 86, 102, 104–5, 107, 116–21, 161–70 Madagascar, 11 Malinov, Aleksandur, 166 Maniu, Iuliu, 180–81, 185 Manoilescu, Mihail, 183 Manuilă, Sabin, 175, 182–85 Márai, Sandor, 95 Mechkarov, Yordan, 168 Mel’nyk, Andrii, 131–34, 139n26, 149 Memel, 57 Metaxas, Ioannis, 111 Mihai, King of Romania, 61, 178 Mikhailov, Ivan, 167–70 Mikó, Imre, 51n35, 53n65 Moldavia, 20 Moravia, 46, 58, 97 Moscow, 112–15, 119, 121, 134, 143, 151, 159n20 Mudry, Vasyl’, 128, 145, 147 Murgaš, Karel, 75 Mushanov, Nikola, 166 Mussolini, Benito, 5, 19–21, 43, 58, 68n6, 96, 108, 116, 164, 167, 175 Nedić, Milan, 65 Németh, Lászlo, 94

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Index

Netherlands, 19, 22 Norway, 17 Odessa, 20, 180, 186 Ohrid, 120, 161 Ottoman Empire, 7, 18, 80, 103, 143, 161–62, 165 Páal, Árpád, 34–35, 42 Pauker, Ana, 176 Pavelić, Ante, 65, 166–68 Perčec, Gustav, 166 Petlyura, Symon, 145 Piłsudski, Józef, 142–43, 145–46 Poland, 2–3, 5–6, 8, 10–11, 17, 23, 25, 27–28, 57–59, 95, 97, 120, 126–37, 138n8, 140n59, 141–58, 159–60nn20–23, 166–67, 173–74, 183, 187n3, 189n45 Popov, Ivan, 114 Popovici, Traian, 182 Prague, 34, 43, 129 Protogerov, Aleksandur, 167, 169 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 67, 75, 77–78, 88n17, 118–19, 132, 169, 177, 188n23 Romania, 1, 3, 5–11, 13n11, 13n26, 17–20, 22–28, 28n4, 29nn10–11, 30–31, 34–39, 42–49, 50n16, 51n41, 55n114, 57, 59–67, 69n16, 74–87, 87n3, 88n9, 89n51, 90n55, 90n62, 92, 94, 98–100, 103, 106–8, 112–16, 130–31, 149, 153, 164–65, 173–87, 187n10 Rome, 13n26, 21, 56, 105, 108–9, 112–14, 147, 169 Ronneberger, Franz, 66 Rosenberg, Alfred, 132, 150 Rothermere, Lord, 35, 95 Rudnytska, Milena, 145 Saar, region, 33 Salonika (Salonica), 107, 111, 119 Sarny, 154

CATTARUZZA PRINT.indd 209

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209

Schleswig, 57 Schmidt, Andreas, 64, 66 Serbia, 17, 19, 22, 26, 74–75, 78–79, 82, 99, 105, 120–21, 162, 166, 184 Shandanov, Pero, 167, 170 Sheptytsky, Andriy, 148 Skopje, 119, 169, 170 Skoropads’kyi, Pavlo, 144 Slovakia, 5, 13n11, 14n29, 17–20, 23–28, 55n114, 57, 65–66, 73–75, 78–79, 81, 85, 88n10, 90n62, 92, 96–97, 112, 115, 130 Slovenia, 6, 21, 67 Sofia, 83, 102, 104–21, 161–62, 164–65, 167–70 Soviet Union (Russia, Czarist Empire, Bolshevik), 3–11, 18–20, 23–28, 29n16, 49, 57, 61, 67, 76–78, 82, 87, 94, 98, 103, 112–19, 121, 126–31, 134–37, 138n8, 142–58, 159n6, 159n20, 159n22, 161–62, 164–65, 167, 169, 173–79, 181, 183–85, 189n45 Spain, 18–19, 33, 169, 176 Stalin, Josip, 98, 146, 157, 162 Stalingrad, 18, 20, 25, 121, 135–36, 150– 51, 153 Stamboliiski, Aleksandur, 162 Stets’ko, Yaroslav, 149 Stresemann, Gustav, 2, 57 Sturdza, Mihail, 81 Sudetenland (Sudeten), 4–5, 8, 18, 20, 25, 30–41, 43–49, 50n15, 51n34, 52n48, 52nn59–60, 54n88, 55n109, 55nn111–12, 55n120, 57, 59, 64 Sulyok, Istvan, 39 Switzerland, 3, 19, 33, 68n2 Szabó, Dezső, 94–95 Szálasi, Ferenc, 21, 94 Szekfű, Gyula, 94, 100 Szüllö, Géza, 38 Teleki, Pál, 38, 44, 93, 97, 99 Teliha, Olena, 149

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210

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Index

Teschen, 5 Thrace (Western), 9, 20, 22, 84, 86, 102–8, 112, 116–20, 161–65, 169 Timok, 183–84 Tiso, Jozef, 75 Tisza, 181 Tito (Josip Broz), 22, 26, 162–63, 169 Toth, Dragutin, 75 Transnistria, 10, 20, 149, 179–86 Transylvania, 5, 7, 9, 13n26, 20, 22–27, 29nn10–11, 30–49, 51n35, 53n65, 55n114, 55n118, 55n120, 60, 65, 73–75, 79–82, 84–86, 88n20, 92, 94–95, 97–98, 112, 115, 173, 176–83, 185–86 Treblinka, 20 Tsankov, Aleksandur, 166 Tuka, Vojtech, 75 Turkey, 42, 74, 82, 103, 105–7, 116, 119, 164, 167 Tyrol, South, 57–58, 68nn5–6 Ukraine, 5–6, 9–11, 14n29, 19, 23, 25, 28, 79, 97, 112, 115, 121, 126–37, 138n8, 138n16, 139n43, 140nn51–52, 140n61, 141–58, 159n6, 159n21, 166, 173–74, 177, 179–81, 184, 187n3

CATTARUZZA PRINT.indd 210

Ullein-Reviczky, Antal, 80 United States of America, 2, 18, 23, 26, 99, 119, 121, 185–86 Vámbéry, Rusztem, 94 Vienna, 63, 118–19, 129, 158, 183 Vilnius, 142–43 Vita, Sándor, 40 Vojvodina, 60 Volga, 174, 180, 186 Volhynia, 6, 131, 136, 138n8, 144–45, 147, 153–54, 156–57, 160n24 Walachia, 20 Weck, René de, 179 Western Outlands, 104–5, 164 Wilson, Woodrow, 3, 12n5 Yugoslavia (Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), 3, 5–6, 9–10, 14n28, 14n30, 16n55, 22–23, 26, 30, 57, 59–65, 69n16, 74–77, 79, 92, 99, 104–5, 108–10, 116, 118–21, 122n9, 134, 162, 164–70, 183 Zagreb, 67, 80, 99, 167–69 Zamość, 6, 152–53

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