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.

World War One - a Geopolitical Turning Point

World War One changed the world. Not every war changes the geopolitical landscape. Border wars between Mexico and the United States during the 1800s and into the early 1900s didn’t change the way nations around the world related to each other.

The French and Indian War (1754 to 1763) didn’t change the way power was distributed among the major European powers, and it didn’t change the way they interacted with each other. But WWI did change the concepts which nations used to view themselves and to view other nations.

It seemed, perhaps, that the First World War exposed, or caused, the collapse of a centuries-old monarchical system in a number of European nations, and brought about “democracy” in many of them, as well as a new self-concept of what it means to be a nation.

Different parties use the word ‘democracy’ in various ways and with divergent definitions, so it is worth asking exactly what is meant by that word in various times and places.

Certainly, at the end of hostilities in November 1918, and at the treaty signing in 1919, and into the early 1920s, it seemed that democracy was taking root and blooming in Europe.

Quickly, however, this hoped-for freedom seemed to exhibit a fragility: Russia’s first free government under Kerensky lasted less than a year before falling to Lenin’s socialist thugs; Italy fell to Mussolini’s Fascists; several years later, Hitler’s national socialists grabbed power in Germany.

As energetically as it had begun, the movement toward democracy seemed to collapse in numerous places. Yet Europe did not resume the old monarchies. Instead a nightmarish series of totalitarian dictatorships would dominate the next few decades. One historian, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, writes:

The world-historic transformation from the ancien regime of royal or princely rulers to the new democratic-republican age of popularly elected or chosen rulers may be also characterized as that from Austria and the Austrian way to that of America and the American way. This is true for several reasons. First off, Austria initiated the war, and America brought it to a close. Austria lost, and America won. Austria was ruled by a monarch — Emperor Franz Joseph — and America by a democratically elected President — Professor Woodrow Wilson. More importantly, however, World War I was not a traditional war fought over limited territorial objectives, but an ideological one; and Austria and America respectively were (and were perceived as such by the contending parties) the two countries that most clearly embodied the ideas in conflict with each other.

Why did, in certain countries, the move to democracy get derailed and redesigned into dictatorship? Was there some germ of totalitarianism in this movement?

Given that Woodrow Wilson has a figurehead status, as Hoppe mentions above, it may well be that his schemes included a tragic flaw which would ultimately yield the bitter fruit of political oppression instead of the anticipated liberty.

Wilson had been reelected to the presidency in 1916 under the slogan, “he kept us out of the war.” The voters wanted either peace or isolationism, but they did not want to be part of WWI. Yet, as federal judge Andrew Napolitano writes, that would change quickly:

In April 1917, only a few months after Wilson’s election, however, America had declared its entry into the war. What had happened so that America’s peace candidate and the people who elected him were suddenly mobilizing for war, in one of the greatest historical turnarounds of all time?

Wilson’s reelection slogan would manifest itself to be utterly insincere. His clear goal was to bring the United States into the war. Wilson was not interested in the war itself, but in the powers which would be granted to him as a wartime leader. He imagined that he’d use those extra powers to reshape American society, so that at war’s end, a different nation would emerge.

Not content with redesigning the United States, Wilson also planned to redesign the world. Only by being a part of the war could he have a hand, he thought, in shaping the postwar world.

The truth is, Wilson was never the pacifist he had portrayed himself to be. Rather, his peace platform was a well-devised strategy to get himself elected president. In reality, he had goals on an international scale, which were his top priority, and he was willing to do anything to accomplish them, even if that meant lying about war and then conniving to enter it.

Events conspired against Wilson. In Europe, he was not able to shape the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and several other postwar treaties, to his liking. While he did have a chance to engage in some nation-building, the international framework remained largely the product of the European negotiators.

Inside the United State, the voters were quick to reject both Wilson’s “League of Nations” and his heavy-handed regulation: the election of Warren Harding was a rejection of Wilson. Harding’s major goals were deregulation and returning maximal liberty to the ordinary citizen.

Wilson was a major force behind introducing modern democracy into Europe. His version of democracy, however, was actually driven by his anti-democratic desire to give the government ever increasing control over ordinary citizens, and to have the “League of Nations” take control away from a nation’s voters.

In sum, the version of democracy which Wilson sought to institute in Europe contained inside itself the seeds of a very anti-democratic movement. Thus young democracies soon fell in Italy, Russia, and Germany.

Wilson and WWI: Making the World Dangerous for Democracy

When historians say that the first World War marks a turning-point in history, which they predictably do, what do they mean? In a trivial sense, of course, any event is a turning-point in history.

World War One was and is significant. What makes it significant? It marked a change in governmental structures, and in the worldviews and ideologies which supported those structures, in many nations around the world.

Prior to the war, monarchs controlled most of Europe. After the war, republics structured around freely-elected representatives filled the continent, and the few monarchs who remained were largely symbolic.

Suddenly, almost everyone was eligible to vote. Suddenly, almost everyone discussed politics. As Woodrow Wilson had said, it seemed that

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

This explosion of suffrage must have been heartwarming, and its confusion amusing, to supporters of freedom in the early 1920s as Europe seemed to finally emerge into its political adulthood. It seemed as if the era of liberty had finally arrived. One scholar, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, summarizes those years this way:

In Europe, the militarily defeated Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, and Habsburgs had to abdicate or resign, and Russia, Germany, and Austria became democratic republics with universal — male and female — suffrage and parliamentary governments. Likewise, all of the newly created successor states with the sole exception of Yugoslavia adopted democratic republican constitutions. In Turkey and Greece, the monarchies were overthrown. And even where monarchies remained nominally in existence, as in Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, monarchs no longer exercised any governing power. Universal adult suffrage was introduced, and all government power was vested in parliaments and "public" officials.

The apparent flowering of liberty would be, however, short lived. Russia’s one chance at freedom, the Kerensky government, lasted less than a year before it was brutally crushed by Lenin’s socialist communist Bolsheviks.

Likewise, Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s national socialism both ended freely elected representative governments. The world was not safe for democracy. Dictatorships and various forms of totalitarianism were on the rise. Why? What happened to the noble-sounding rhetoric with which Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into World War I?

There was, perhaps, a flaw in the effort from the very beginning. President Wilson’s thinking had been shaped by individuals like the German Chancellor Bismarck and the American writer Herbert Croly. Their commitment to the causes of personal liberty and individual freedom were, mildly put, not strong.

Croly in particular had already been an influence on one other U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt. When Roosevelt abandoned his “trust busting” image and reshaped his political thinking, Croly was there, helping Roosevelt formulate a “New Nationalism” - behind that slogan lay the concept that the government would regulate large parts of the economy as well as large parts of private life.

Instead of directly opposing privately-owned business, as Roosevelt had done during his “trust busting” days, he would now envision a synergistic relationship between corporations and government, in which powerful business leaders would join forces with federal officials to control the nation’s activities. Instead of free market capitalism, Croly nudged Roosevelt toward crony capitalism.

Croly and Roosevelt abandoned personal liberty and individual freedom, and sought to place control in the hands of an oligarchic group of federal bureaucrats and corporate executives. When Roosevelt’s political career began to wane, and Wilson’s began to wax, Croly joined Wilson. Wilson’s enterprise to make the world safe for democracy was infested by a very anti-democratic ideologue, Herbert Croly. Historian Jonah Goldberg writes:

The most influential thinker along these lines — and another great admirer of Bismarck’s — was the man who served as the intellectual bridge between Roosevelt and Wilson: Herbert Croly, the author of The Promise of American Life, the founding editor of the New Republic, and the guru behind Roosevelt’s New Nationalism.

So it was, then, that America’s entry into WWI was driven by an anti-democratic desire on the part of Herbert Croly to exploit the wartime economy to advance his own agenda of oligarchic control. Despite Wilson’s rhetoric, Croly explicitly opposed the usual American notions of freedom, equality, and democracy.

Echoing some aspects of the French Revolution, which used some of the same words, and harbored the same desire to undermine those very words, writers like Croly ensured that America’s efforts in WWI contained the seeds, not of freedom, but of an elitist government which would seek to manage the personal affairs of citizens. Jonah Goldberg continues:

Croly’s New Republic was relentless in its push for war. In the magazine’s very first editorial, written by Croly, the editors expressed their hope that war “should bring with it a political and economic organization better able to redeem its obligations at home.” Two years later Croly again expressed his hope that America’s entry into the war would provide “the tonic of a serious moral adventure.” A week before America joined the war, Walter Lippmann (who would later write much of Wilson’s Fourteen Points) promised that hostilities would bring out a “transvaluation of values as radical as anything in the history of intellect.” This was a transparent invocation of Nietzsche’s call for overturning all traditional morality. Not coincidentally, Lippmann was a protégé of William James’s, and his call to use war to smash the old order illustrates how similar Nietzscheans and American pragmatists were in their conclusions and, often, their principles. Indeed, Lippmann was sounding the pragmatist’s trumpet when he declared that our understanding of such ideas as democracy, liberty, and equality would have to be rethought from their foundations “as fearlessly as religious dogmas were in the nineteenth century.”

Far from seeking to export the spirit of liberty as the United States had fostered it, Croly steered Wilson’s diplomatic efforts into shaping a government which would seek to gain more, not less, control over its citizens. Wilson’s effort to make the world safe for democracy contained the seed of a movement to erase democracy.

Thus the rise of dictatorships in Europe, and the rise of the Soviets in Russia, were an organic extension of Wilson’s policy.

Joseph Goebbels: Financing Mass Murder

When Hitler’s National Socialist regime took power in January 1933, its repulsive nature was already known, but few could guess what horrifying evil it would perpetrate. Yet the seeds for that genocide were sown early, as the Nazis reorganized society for their purposes.

Each step taken in the Gleichschaltung - the “coordination” - of the private and public lives of ordinary citizens was done with a view toward enslaving the ordinary people to the will of the National Socialist party. In this sense, then, economic policies laid the foundation for the “Final Solution” and the Holocaust.

Early in 1933, Joseph Goebbels, in his official capacity as one of Hitler’s highest appointees, addressed gatherings of leaders from various industrial sectors. He noted that many of them had seen the political instability in Germany during the previous several years as a cause for economic stagnation. Goebbels assured the managers that the Nazis would remain in power for many years, stabilize the economy and the political situation, and thereby create a foundation for economic growth. Goebbels said:

Production would thus have every reason to be secure on the basis of this fact. By the same token, though, there can be no doubt anywhere that the National Socialist movement will intervene in the economy and in general cultural questions.

While assuring the business leaders that they would have the stability they desired, he also warned them that free enterprise, along with other forms of liberty, was on its way out.

In the quest for total control of all areas of life, the Nazis could not tolerate the idea of entrepreneurs being able to take unfettered initiatives to launch new businesses, or new products within older businesses. Even if such government control came at the cost of economic hardship on ordinary middle-class families, the National Socialists would yet demand it.

By flatly stating that the Nazi government would “intervene in the economy,” Goebbels was laying a foundation for a system which would brutally murder millions of innocent men, women, children. To make his message clear, he continued by saying that

The state has the duty to step in as regulator.

The next step in creating an economic basis for the horrifying Endlösung was taxation. For the National Socialists, taxation served a dual purpose. It was simultaneously an instrument by which they could control the populace, and it was a way to fund their plans.

Free discussion about economics, or about nearly anything else, soon was both risky and rare inside Germany after the Machtergreifung in January 1933. But writers in nearby countries were still free to observe and analyze. Basel’s National-Zeitung, located in neutral Switzerland, commented in February 1939:

In addition to the armaments race, in terms of numbers of guns, planes, trained soldiers, cadres, etc., there is another “race” among so-called civilized nations that is frequently overlooked - that is, the monstrous growth of taxes with which the citizens are burdened. In this field, too, the Third Reich has registered top accomplishments. It is devoutly to be wished that those in some capitalistic circles in Switzerland and other democracies who are afflicted with admiration for the “order” existing in dictatorial countries, also occasionally give this problem of taxation some attention. In particular, the 1 per cent arms-defense tax over which we are now wrangling in Switzerland must appear as very moderate when compared with what the “racial comrades” in Greater Germany have to pay for their Führer’s dreams of glory.

Not only did the Nazis impose harsh taxation on the people; they did so at a time when prices were rising faster than wages. Needless to say, the hardships inflicted upon the common middle-class people didn’t concern the elites in the National Socialist party.

The Low Countries were still free, and could publish observations about the Nazi economy, in 1937. They wouldn’t be overtaken until early 1940. In May 1937, the Luxemburger Wort noted:

For the first time in a considerable period, the Institute for Market Analysis has analyzed retail prices and the cost of living in Germany. While several weeks ago it was still maintained that the cost of living had advanced by only 3.4 per cent during the four years of National Socialist direction of the economy, the Institute now admits an actual increase of 7.2 per cent. The figures are based on the consumption of the average worker’s family, but they can be regarded as only conditionally valid for the whole population, since numerous relief measures and special allowances have been created for certain low-income categories.

While the Nazi government proceeded with its plan to regulate the economy while taxing ordinary people despite a rising cost of living, the functionaries within the National Socialist regime felt no pain. While a kilogram of bread cost around 32 Reichspfennige (imperial pennies) in 1937, the Nazi leaders were receiving enormous paychecks. In Budapest, the Hungarian newspaper Pester Lloyd was still free, in February 1940, to report the salaries of National Socialist officers:

On the basis of a new Reich salary scale, according to reports from Berlin, the commander of a department of the armed forces, the chief of staff of the supreme command of the armed forces, and the chief of the German Reich police are now receiving a salary of 26,550 Reichsmarks annually. Secretaries of state, presiding judges of the superior courts, general-colonels, general-admirals, generals, and admirals receive 24,000 Reichsmarks per year.

Not content with general regulation of the economy, the Nazi government began setting precise price controls on various consumer products. Like other National Socialist regulations, these were imposed with strict regimentation. In January 1939, the Frankfurter Zeitung was able to report that

Police administrative offices have been advised to pay increased attention to price control and to entrust this important task to specially qualified police officers, who are to be exempted from other duties.

The Nazi eradication of economic liberty, then, had three main features: regulation and intervention (including price controls), rising taxation, and nationalization of industries and businesses. The last feature is exemplified in the Reichswerke Hermann Göring. Rendering into English as the “Hermann Göring Works,” it began in July 1937 as a government takeover of the Salzgitter iron mines.

From the beginning, the National Socialist government used wiretapping, surveillance, intimidation, extortion, and personal threats to undermine, preempt, and disable competition from the private sector. The “Hermann Göring Works” expanded to takeover other steel factories and manufacturing facilities.

While the government nationalized and took over various production facilities from the private sector, the ever-shrinking room left for free enterprise suffered. In his history of National Socialism, William Shirer writes

Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never ending “special contributions” to the party, the businessmen, who had welcomed Hitler’s regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned. One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing Germany at the outbreak of the war, he recognized that the “Nazi regime has ruined German industry.” And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, “What a fool [Dummkopf] I was!”

The Nazi party was accurate when it called itself the “National Socialist” party - it nationalized an increasing amount of the country’s industry, and socialized sectors like healthcare and education. Regulations, price controls, and increasing taxation inflicted suffering on all income classes - party members were immune, but not even the wealthy industrialists were protected from Nazi savagery.

National Socialist economics laid the foundations for the horrifying genocide. The Holocaust would not have been possible in a land with a truly free market, with a thriving private sector, and with minimalist taxation.

Disney's Swing Kids - Did the Nazis Enjoy Jazz?

In 1993, Disney released a movie titled Swing Kids. Dramatically powerful, the movie told a story about teenagers living during Hitler’s National Socialist reign in Germany. The young people enjoyed American-style jazz, but it was forbidden by the government. The music became a form of resistance, and the students met more-or-less secretly to listen, and dance, to it.

Against their wills, some of these students joined, or were forced to join, the Hitler Youth organization, and later, others ended up in the military fighting for the National Socialist cause. They retained, however, their resisting spirit, and became involved in various secret underground activities to lessen the effectiveness of Hitler’s government.

The film’s plot is both gripping and moving. But is it accurate? Despite the massive destruction of the war, which obliterated some of evidence, and despite intervening seventy or eighty years between current readers and the events in question, there is enough data to allow for a critical examination of the movie’s storyline.

To be sure, many of the upper-level National Socialist leaders, who were charged with the task of sorting out which parts of popular culture were compatible with Naziism and which parts weren’t, viewed jazz with suspicion. This form of music had three strikes against it: it was associated with the United States, it was associated with African-Americans, and it was associated with Jews.

Historians routinely cite the 1938 exhibition, staged in Düsseldorf, and its accompanying poster and pamphlet titled Entartete Musik. Hans Severus Ziegler, better known as Staatsrat Dr. H.S. Ziegler, organized the event to promote the National Socialist view of music.

The Nazis had used the word Entartete - usually rendered 'decadent' - to describe the paintings they rejected as inappropriate. Now they applied it to music.

The poster designed to promote the event has become famous as a symbol of Hitler’s racism and hatred: it features a cartoonish and unkind image of an African-American, with a Star of David on his lapel, playing a saxophone. The image, which was also used for the cover of Ziegler’s pamphlet describing the exhibition, contains multiple ironies, intended or unintended: the saxophone is an instrument of German invention, and the number of jazz musicians who were simultaneously Jewish and African-American was probably zero at the time.

The National Socialist government condemned jazz music and swing music - the two terms can be understood as slightly different - as degenerate. In August 1941 in Hamburg, over 300 jazz fans, mostly teenagers, were arrested. The majority were released soon thereafter, but kept under surveillance; at least one was sent to a concentration camp.

So we have an official Nazi condemnation of jazz music, followed by police actions to disrupt jazz parties and arrest jazz fans: basic facts which seem to justify the narrative of Disney’s Swing Kids, and a romantically powerful narrative of an evil dictatorship oppressing a free-spirited art form.

But as is often the case in history, the facts are more complicated than this simple narrative.

Quickly after the National Socialists took over the German government in 1933, the principle of Gleichschaltung sought to bring all areas of life under the totalitarian control of Hitler’s government. Totalitarianism acknowledges no private sphere and subjugates all matters to the state.

The Nazis were keenly aware of the power of the media - radio and film. While technologically primitive in comparison to the electronic media which are in use nearly a century later, the media of the 1930s were nonetheless powerful in shaping attitudes.

Joseph Goebbels was aware of the popularity and power of ‘swing’ dance music. Rather than eliminate it, his Reichskulturkammer - a government office overseeing both highbrow and popular entertainment - actually organized jazz groups.

The Nazis hoped to have their own swing bands, and thereby displace audience demand for Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and the Dorsey brothers. Less than a year after Hitler grabbed power, a jazz group called Die Goldene Sieben was organized by the Reichskulturkammer in 1934.

At least one member of Die Goldene Sieben, pianist Willi Stech, was a member of the National Socialist party. In a totalitarian state, with media utterly controlled by the government, a jazz band formed by a government bureau and allowed to record, to give live performances, and to broadcast on the radio was a strong statement.

While some Nazis, like Hans Ziegler, may have found jazz to be ‘decadent,’ other - and more powerful - Nazis like Goebbels and his bureaucracy apparently felt that it was in the interests of the National Socialist government to produce swing music and promote it.

Die Goldene Sieben produced a string of hits and had a career over at least six or seven years. In May 1935, they recorded their hit “Sieht eine Frau Dich an” and in November 1936 they scored again with “Donner, Blitz, und Sonnenschein.” In addition to live performances, radio, and records, they were also filmed.

In May 1937 they had a hit with “Jawohl, Meine Herren.” Their last recordings seem to have been made in 1940. Their career faded when almost all public dancing came to an end as the war grew more serious. The abandoning of dance covered all forms - not only jazz.

Other swing acts were recording and performing at the same time as, and later than, Die Goldene Sieben. Peter Kreuder had success with “Gemeinsam” in 1938. Given the abandonment of dance after 1940, some of the swing artists turned to less danceable types of jazz, comparable to Benny Goodman’s work with small ensembles.

Theo Reuter’s “Wolgawellen,” recorded in 1940, got attention, and he recorded “Pergamino” in 1941, which was also popular.

Willy Berking was in the studio recording “Hallo Fräulein” in April 1943, after the devastating Battle of Stalingrad, and his “Tip-Top,” recorded in September 1943, was also a hit.

As late as March 1944, Ernst Landl, an Austrian, recorded “Tanz Mit Mir,” although wartime shortages made wide distribution impossible.

Historian Matthias Tischer writes that “In Hitlerdeutschland war Swing zwar nicht konsequent verboten” - “In Hitler’s Germany, swing music was never seriously forbidden.”

The teenagers harassed by the National Socialist police in Hamburg were possibly harassed merely because they were unruly teenagers, not because of the type of music they enjoyed.

While it is true that there was some rhetoric about jazz being ‘decadent’ - the Nazis certainly weren’t happy that some jazz musicians were either Jewish or Negro - it is also true that the powerful media offices of the government put energy into producing and distributing their own jazz and swing products.