The Crusades as Culture War: Europe Loses

The centuries before, during, and after the Crusades contain complex cultural interactions, some warlike, some peaceful. The first Crusade was proposed in 1095 and launched in 1096. The end of the era of the Crusades cannot be as easily established, but by the early 1400s, the era was over.

The dynamic at work in these centuries starts in the year 711 A.D., with the unprovoked invasion of Spain by Islamic armies. The majority of Spain would be occupied and under the strict control of these armies for several centuries. The cultural impact included the demolition of both churches and synagogues. Non-Muslims were subjected to a legal code, called the Pact of Umar. Attributed to Umar I, also known as Umar ibn al-Khattab, this set of laws governed non-Muslims in all regions conquered by Islamic armies, although the details varied from place to place.

The Pact of Umar regulated the lives, and restricted the freedom, of non-Muslims in many ways; for example, it prohibited celebrations of Easter, Palm Sunday, and other non-Muslim holidays; it required that buildings owned by non-Muslims be shorter than the buildings owned by Muslims.

Spain was not the only point of cultural contact. Islamic military forces invaded a number of islands in the Mediterranean - Sicily, Crete, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta - and the southern coast of France. They even organized a decade-long permanent occupation of southern Italy.

Cultural influences went in both directions. While the Muslims inflicted the Pact of Umar on the native people of the lands they captured, they also learned from the non-Muslims. As historian Irma Simonton Black notes, Islam gained scientific and artistic treasures from the cultures it conquered:

From the Greeks in Constantinople, now Istanbul, the Moslem or Mohammedan Arabs and Turks learned about the science and art of Greece.

(Constantinople was not conquered and renamed until 1453, long after the era of the Crusades. But it had yielded its wealth of Greco-Roman classical literature centuries before it fell.)

By 1095, Europe had suffered through several centuries of Islamic invasions and conquests. Seeking to secure a peaceful existence, one purpose of the Crusades was to put a stop to the continuous attacks of Muslim military forces. Europe hoped to end this aggression by containing it at its source, rather than waiting until Islamic armies showed up in the middle of France - as they had actually done in 732.

When Europeans arrived in the Middle East, or ‘Near East’ as it is sometimes called, they saw the legendary horsemanship and swordsmanship of the Islamic military, tales of which they had long heard. Europeans were amazed at the skill and precision with which a group of mounted Muslims, galloping at high speed, could dash through a village and lop the heads off many unsuspecting villagers. European swordsmen were slow and clumsy by contrast.

The knights and common folk accompanying them found much to intrigue and fascinate them in the Arab world. There were the beautifully polished curved steel swords so different from their own.

In fact, the Crusades must be counted as unsuccessful. The Europeans had hoped to put an end to Islamic aggression. In reality, they achieved at best a pause, not a permanent end, to Muslim attacks on Europe.

Further, the Crusades failed to achieve the contacts which Europe had hoped to establish with China and India. Land routes from southern Europe to southern Asia or to eastern Asia were blocked by Islamic forces. Land routes from northern Europe were blocked by mountains, deserts, and frozen tundra. The Crusades failed to accomplish much, as Irma Simonton Black puts it:

The Moslems eventually won control of all the overland trade routes to the East, to the faraway wonderlands of China and India.

The Crusades were, then, generally a failure. Europe failed to provide its own safety, and failed to gain overland routes to Asia. The result was the beginning exploratory voyages, leading to sea routes to India and China.

This historic voyages of Henry the Navigator, Bartolomeu Dias, and Vasco da Gama were European recognitions of Islam’s successful blockage of land routes. The Europeans, having been militarily defeated in their attempts to pacify the Middle East and open trade routes, gave up trying to use land routes to Asia, and instead launched a great wave of oceanic discoveries.

It was in this context, then, the Christopher Columbus was trying to find a new route to India. The voyages of Columbus can be seen as a direct result of Europe’s failure during the Crusades. Had Europe won, there would have been no motive to find a better route to Asia.

How the Soviets Restarted Concentration Camps

As the Second World War drew to an end, the world finally learned the horrors of the “Final Solution” and the cruel murder of millions of innocent Jewish Germans. As the armies of the triumphant Allies - the USA, the USSR, England, France, and others - liberated the ghastly concentration camps, the genocidal insanity of the Nazi Party was unmasked.

The Allies exposed this atrocity to the world’s attention. In the western parts of Germany, the armies of the English, French, and Americans put these camps on public display - first to educate the Germans about the evil they had enabled, second to inform the world about mass murder.

But in the eastern parts of Germany, where the Soviet army invaded, a slightly different scenario took place. The Soviets, like the western Allies, ensured a public display of the camps, long enough for the local citizens to learn and for the world’s media to document. But, after that interval, the Soviets placed the camps off limits. Nobody could go near them.

What was happening in those camps?

The Soviets, after exposing those camps briefly to the world, made them once again secret, and restarted them. The Soviets operated some of the most notorious concentration camps, names like Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, for years after Germany had been liberated from the Nazi dictatorship.

The Soviet renovation and reoperation of the concentration camps was kept secret for many years. It was not until 1989/1990, when the Soviet puppet government in East Germany fell, that the full details of this operation were revealed to the world.

Although the Allies had liberated Germany from the Nazi dictatorship in April 1945, the Soviets had kept the concentration camps running until 1950. The Soviets, having invaded the eastern part of Germany, saw that the camps provided a mechanism for implementing their ideology.

The Soviets rounded up thousands and tens of thousands of civilians and added them to the camps.

There were differences between the Soviet operation of the camps and the Nazi operation of the camps. The Soviets targeted a slightly different mix of victims. The Nazis had sent, along with the millions of Jewish Germans, groups of communists and Slavs to the camps. The Soviets, obviously, did not send people to the camps for being Slavic or communist.

The Soviet operation of the concentration camps was not as well documented as the Nazi atrocities. The Nazis were meticulous in recording the name of prisoners, the dates of their arrivals, and the dates of their deaths. The Soviets, by contrast, killed thousands of people in the camps, but the data about who was killed and when remains incomplete.

Like the Nazis, the Soviets worked to hide their actions. The communists hid behind the high-sounding verbiage of the Allies. While presenting themselves to the world as liberators, the communists had in fact simply continued the operation of the death camps.

Historians Günter Agde, Lutz Prieß, and Peter Erler recount the humanitarian-sounding language with which the Soviet hid their atrocities:

1944/1945 schlug der von Deutschland entfesselte II. Weltkrieg auf das eigene Territorium zurück. Die drei Hauptverbündeten der Antihitlerkoalition - die UdSSR, USA, und Großbritannien - verbanden mit dem Ziel der bedingungslosen militärischen Kapitulation auch konsequenten Maßnahmen der Entmilitarisierung und Entnazifizierung sowie der Sühne von Verbrechen gegen Frieden und Menschlichkeit. Auf der Konferenz von 3. bis 11. Februar 1945 in Jalta beschlossen die alliierten „Großen Drei“, „alle Kriegsverbrecher einer gerechten und schnellen Bestrafung zuzuführen“ und „die nazistische Partei, die nazistischen Gesetze, Organisationen und Einrichtungen zu liquidieren, alle nazistischen und militaristischen Einflüsse in den öffentlichen Einrichtungen sowie dem kulturellen und wirtschaftlichen Leben des deutschen Volkes zu beseitigen und gemeinsam solche anderen Maßnahmen in Deutschland zu ergreifen, die sich für den künftigen Frieden und die Sicherheit der ganzen Welt als notwendig erweisen können.“

Although these events have been documented in detail by a number of historians, they still have not worked their way into the popular consciousness. Given a prompt like “Europe in the decade after WWII” or “the presence of the Soviet army in East Germany,” the average student or well-read adult is not likely to respond with the blunt and horrifying fact that, while the western Allies liberated the prisoners and put the camps on display to the world, the Soviets renovated the physical structures of the camps and restarted them, continuing mass murder for another five years.

Treachery among the Nazis

The bloodthirsty ruthlessness of the Nazis stands as one of the most horrifying chapters of modern history. Their eagerness to murder thousands and millions of innocent men, women, and children was, however, matched by the enthusiasm they displayed in their murderous intrigues against each other.

Power struggles among these “National Socialists” (the meaning of the word ‘Nazi’) were as lethal as the genocidal plans they carried out against Jews, Slavs, and others.

Even before they grabbed power in the German government in early 1933, they were plotting against each other within the National Socialist party. The narratives of these conspiracies are quite complex.

In 1930, for example, Kurt von Schleicher, a high officer in the German Army, sought to exploit the Nazis for his own political purposes. Schleicher himself was not a National Socialist, but thought that he could form a strategic alliance with them in order to further his career as he transitioned from military officer to civilian politician. Schleicher also assumed that he could keep the National Socialists under his control.

Schleicher chose Ernst Röhm (sometimes mentioned as ‘Rohm’ or ‘Roehm’ in texts) as his first contact within the Nazi organization. Schleicher thought perhaps to make a deal along these lines: he could offer Röhm a chance to have increased status as a military leader, by merging the German Army with Röhm’s National Socialist hoodlums, or by placing the German Army under them. In return, Röhm might be able to offer Schleicher decisive political influence among the Nazis.

Thus Schleicher planned that he could simultaneously use the National Socialists to advance his career and keep them under his control. This would turn out to be a disastrous mistake on Schleicher’s part.

Seeking ways to connect with Röhm, Schleicher used a mutual acquaintance and military officer, Franz Halder, to establish a working relationship. If Schleicher was not a Nazi, Halder went one step further, and was strongly opposed to the Nazis. Yet, oddly, Halder had a good working relationship with Röhm.

Years later, after both Röhm and Schleicher were dead, Halder would be active in underground conspiracies against Hitler. Halder would survive the war and be recognized for his anti-Nazi activity. Recounting how these machinations unfolded in 1930, several years before the actual Nazi seizure of power, historian T.N. Dupuy writes:

The first Nazi approached by Schleicher was Ernst Röhm, who had been an infantry captain during the war and had later served in the Free Corps movement. Having become a follower and close friend of Hitler, Röhm had been made the head of the paramilitary force which Hitler had created as early as 1921 - the Sturmabteilung (SA) or Storm Troops - and had been able to make good use of his military training and experience in developing this SA into an effective, disciplined force supporting the political aims of the party. Over the years Röhm had retained a personal friendship with an old Army colleague and fellow Bavarian, Lieutenant Colonel Franz Halder, of the General Staff. Halder was no Nazi, and was never in the slightest involved in the rumors and scandals of homosexual activities in which Röhm was implicated. Whether or not Schleicher met Röhm through Halder is not clear; in any event the lieutenant colonel seems to have sat in on some of the secret meetings between the former captain and the lieutenant general.

In early 1934, after the National Socialists been controlling Germany for almost a year, another officer, Werner von Fritsch, became concerned about precisely what Schleicher and Röhm hoped to achieve: some connection, be it merger or subordination, between the German Army and the Nazi thugs.

Fritsch occupied his influential position in the military as a successor to Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, who was adamantly opposed to Hitler and the National Socialists. Fritsch was also a successor to Hans von Seeckt, who was opposed to the National Socialists, having worked against their 1923 Putsch attempt, and yet was in some ways sympathetic to their goals.

But among some of Fritsch’s other predecessors in the officer ranks were those willing to support the Nazis. Werner von Blomberg, for example, was a high-ranking officer who would later occupy the civilian office of Minister of War while retaining his military commission as an officer (a most unusual arrangement), and who was an enthusiastic supporters of Hitler and the National Socialists. Walther von Reichenau, another high-ranking officer, was actually a member of the Nazi party.

Most senior officers in the German army regarded the Nazis as uncouth and vulgar. Even the few officers, like Blomberg and Reichenau, who encouraged the Nazis, felt that the thuggish behavior of Röhm’s vandals should never have any official cooperation with, much less control over, the army. These men retained a sense of honor about being a military officer, and naively felt that the Nazis would respect, or at least allow, such ethical behavior to continue.

Blomberg and Reichenau, while seduced into supporting the Nazis, were active in taking steps to prevent the SA from merging or controlling the army. In early 1934, they were part of an effort to persuade Hitler that there should be an internal purge within the National Socialist movement, and that Hitler would have to abandon his friend Röhm. They convinced Hitler that Röhm would have to be among those murdered in the purge.

Thus it was that Hitler gave order to have his close personal friend, a man who had faithfully served Hitler and the Nazi party for almost fifteen years, murdered. Historian Trevor Nevitt Dupuy writes:

Fritsch’s principal concern about the Nazis at this time was Röhm’s persistent effort to carry out the scheme he had so often discussed with Schleicher: to amalgamate the Army and the SA into a new German Army, which Röhm would dominate. Aside from the dangerous dilution which such a merger would cause in the superb quality of the small Army which Fritsch had inherited from Seeckt and Hammerstein, the idea of Röhm and his gangster and blatantly homosexual associates as participating members of the Army High Command was totally unacceptable to Fritsch - and even to such pro-Nazi alumni of the General Staff as Blomberg and Reichenau.

Thus, in the bloodthirsty ambition of National Socialism, internal struggles between Nazi leaders sometimes used non-Nazis, and even those opposed to Naziism, as unwitting pawns in vicious and deadly power plays.