European Politics in the 1930s.

For the next month or so, I'll be writing blog posts on the Norwegian experience during the Second World War.  In order to make sense of what happened during World War II, we'll have to spend some time talking about what had been happening in Europe as a whole politically during the decade prior to the outbreak of war. 

(Note: in the 1930s and 1940s, there was a nation called the Soviet Union, which was composed of what is today Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and a number of other countries.  At the time, people used the term Soviet Union and Russia pretty much interchangeably, and, for the purposes of this blog, so will I).

Map of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
From: http://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/EU/EU14-01.html

In the 1930s, different European countries had very different kinds of governments--some countries were democracies, one country was communist, and still others were fascist.

Some European governments were democratic--that is, they held free elections on a regular basis.  In these countries, people were free to express their political opinions without fear of arrest and newspapers were not afraid to criticize the government.  Many western European countries--Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway--fell into this category.

Other countries, instead of being democratic, were communist or fascist.  Let's talk about the communist country first--the Soviet Union--otherwise known as the U.S.S.R (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).

What does it mean when we say a country is communist?   Communism is a philosophy that traces its origins to the 1800s.  Communists believed that in a modern industrial free-market economy, factory owners became fabulously wealthy by exploiting their workers, who in turn were left impoverished.  Communists argued that the way to remedy this inequality was to have a revolution in which the workers would seize control of the government and the factories and where these workers would then make sure that there were no extremes of poverty or wealth.  

At the start of the 1930s, the only communist regime (or government) in Europe was the Soviet Union.  In the Soviet Union, the factories were run by the government, and over the course of the 1930s the government confiscated the private land owned by peasants in order to form giant state-run farms.   The Soviet government was extremely repressive, or authoritarian.   The Communist party was the only legal political party.  There were no free elections.  Newspapers were controlled by the government.  The dictator of the Soviet Union was Joseph Stalin, who was so worried that someone might try to overthrow him that his regime arrested countless Soviet citizens suspected of disloyalty and executed them or consigned them to grim imprisonment.   Those jailed or shot by the Soviet regime in the 1930s ranged from army officers (Stalin was afraid of a military coup) to peasants (especially those who protested when the government seized their land) to artists and writers (Stalin feared their influence).

Joseph Stalin at work.

From: http://europe.stanford.edu/news/norman_naimark_redefines_genocide_20100928/

Stalin's secret police maintained a corps of undercover informers ready to denounce their fellow citizens for disloyalty to the government.

The intense press censorship concealed many of the worst aspects of life in the Soviet Union from people in other countries, and the government-controlled media portrayed life in Russia as safe, happy, and prosperous.   The combination of censorship and propaganda helps explain why some people in other parts of Europe looked at the Soviet system as a role model.  In democratic countries such as France, Denmark, and Norway, there were small communist parties that ran candidates for office.   But these parties remained a definite minority--most Europeans, feared communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular.

Other countries in Europe were fascist in nature.  Fascism is a political movement that became prominent in the 1920s.  Fascists argued that democratic governments were weak and ineffectual and that the most effective type of governance was a dictatorship.  There was no need to have free elections or civil liberties once a proper dictator was in power--elections and dissent would only hinder a leader in doing what needed to be done for the good of the country.   Fascists were racist--they believed that humanity was divided into different races, and a typical fascist would maintain that the race to which he or she supposedly belonged was superior to other races.  Fascists usually thought that the natural state of human affairs was war, and that this was a good thing, as they believed that war cleaned society of impurities.

Fascists condemned communism as tyrannical and the Soviet Union as a threat to the rest of Europe.  One of the reason that fascists were able to win as much pubic support as they did in the 1930s is because they were so emphatic in their denunciations of communism (or, as it was also known, Bolshevism).

Two major countries had fascist governments in the 1930s: Italy and Germany.  Italy was ruled by Benito Mussolini, who was head of and founder of the Fascist party in that country.  Mussolini jailed his political opponents, muzzled the media, glorified war, and sought to demonstrate the superiority of Italy by invading Ethiopia in 1935.

Benito Mussolini.

From: http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/dof/italy/captioned/horse.htm

In 1933, another country succumbed to fascism--Germany.  Since 1919, Germany had been, more or less, a democratic nation.  But in January of 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany (a position akin to the presidency in the U.S.) and quickly acquired dictatorial powers.  Many of his political opponents were beaten, arrested, or murdered, while others fled abroad.  All non-Nazi political parties were banned, while newspapers, movies, and the radio were censored by the government.

Hitler in a 1938 speech.

From: http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/images/thumbnails/

What was distinctive about the Nazi regime (or government) was the virulence of its racism.   Hitler believed that Germans belonged to a racial group called Nordics who he believed were biologically superior to other groups.   In particular, Hitler thought that the peoples who lived to the east of Germany, such as Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles, were inferior to Nordics.   Hitler's greatest hatred, however, was reserved for Jews, who he believed were genetically inferior and a threat to Germany.  Once Hitler came to power, his followers sought to inculcate this these ideas among German youth, issuing anti-Semitic and racist books to be used in school classrooms.  Hitler's racism guided his foreign policy.  His overarching goal was to create a massive empire for Germany in Eastern Europe.   In the 1920s, he had written that Germany needed additional lebensraum (a German word which roughly translates as living space) to the east; Hitler's goal was to take control of what is today Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, displace the people who lived there, and resettle the land with Germans.   In his own mind, he sought to justify this by contending that the people who lived in these areas--Jews, Poles, and Russians--were subhuman races who had no right to this land.   To achieve these goals--and also to fend off Britain and France, if they proved troublesome--Hitler dramatically expanded the German army, navy, and air force in the 1930s.  At the same time, he avoided voicing publicly his desire for such an empire, as this would have made neighboring countries nervous.

In other European countries, small fascist parties, very similar to their German and Italian counterparts, sprang up--in Britain there was the British Union of Fascists, and in Norway, there was the Nasjonal Samling party, founded by the eccentric Vidkun Quisling in 1933.  Nasjonal Samling translates as National Unity, and was abbreviated as NS.

Quisling as he appeared on the cover of a 1932 publication.  The following year he would found the Nasjonal Samling (National Union) party.  From: http://www.quislingutstillinga.no/indresikkerhet.html

Even before he founded the Nasjonal Samling, Quisling, like Hitler, had adopted an obsession with what both politicians termed the Nordic race.  In 1931, Quisling claimed that "our civilization, created and borne forward by the Nordic race and by Nordic elements in other races, is now threatened by the devastating activities of inferior races." (Qtd. in Fascism, 208-209).  As it turned out, Quisling's shortcomings helped doom his party to obscurity--at least in the 1930s.  As one historian noted, Quisling "was decidedly mediocre as an orator, [and] even worse as an organizer" (Kearsaudy, 39).  During the elections of the 1930s, the Nasjonal Samling never received more than 3 percent of the vote (Loock, 667-668). 

These fascist parties in places such as Norway and Britain admired Nazi Germany, but for the most part, Europeans grew alarmed about the increasingly repressive nature of the Nazi regime and about the rapid increase in German military might.  One of the most vociferous critics of Nazi Germany was a British politician named Winston Churchill, who urged that his country rearm rapidly to counter the growing German threat.

One of the most famous photographs of Winston Churchill, taken in 1941.

From: Library and Archives Canada: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/index-e.html

Britain and France did begin updating their armed forces, but containing Hitler proved to be a difficult task--largely because of the huge lack of trust between, on the one hand, the communist Soviet Union, and on the other, democratic Britain and France.  Though most Britons and French citizens viewed Hitler with alarm, they similarly regarded the Soviet Union as dangerous.  For his part, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin seems to have mistrusted the British almost as much as he did Nazi Germany.   Had the Soviets, the British, and the French been able to put aside their--quite substantial--differences, they could have created a coalition that would have more easily contained Hitler--but the tension between democratic and communist systems kept this from happening until Germany had already conquered much of the continent of Europe.

For its part, Norway, though more inclined to support Britain than Germany, still hoped to remain neutral should war break out.  In the late 1930s, it did begin revitalizing its armed forces.  Aside from Vidkun Quisling and his NS party, few Norwegians sympathized with Germany, and some were quite trenchant and prescient in their criticism of the German leader.  In 1933, a Norwegian psychiatrist, Johan Scharffenberg, authored a series of newspaper articles providing a psychological history and profile of Hitler.  "Is he [Hitler] going to be the savior of Germany, what millions of Germans hope and believe," asked Scharffenberg, "or is he just a seducer, a sick fool who is leading the country towards catastrophe?"  The psychiatrist concluded that the latter was the case, suggesting that the hardships and difficulties that Hitler had faced earlier in life had perhaps been the cause of his mental illness.  The German embassy in Norway complained about the articles and protested to the Norwegian government, but to no avail, at least initially.

Psychiatrist Johan Scharffenberg: Norwegian critic of Hitler.

From: http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/11/06/kultur/litteratur/bok/ideer/biografi/14168780/

In an article published in 1934, Scharffenberg characterized Hitler as follows: "I do not consider him normal; it is far more probable that he is a psychopath whose actions are determined by paranoid ideas."  (Quotes from Lavik).  The German embassy continued to protest, and eventually the Norwegian authorities interviewed the outspoken psychiatrist but declined to take legal action against him. 

Works cited:

Fascism. Roger Griffin, editor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Kearsaudy, François.  Norway 1940.  London: William Collins and Sons, 1990.

Lavik, Nils Johan. "A Psychiatrist Who Confronted Nazism." Political Psychology 10 (December 1989), 757-765.

Loock, Hans-Dietrich.  "Support for Nasjonal Samling in the Thirties." in Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism. Bergen:  Universitetsforlaget, 1980.