Good day Hivers and Book Clubbers,
Back with more books. Though once again, not a physical copy; as far as I can tell, this one has been out of print for quite a while. The book I'm writing about today is titled 'Unfinished Victory', written by British historian Arthur Bryant. Originally released in 1940, it amounts to about 300 pages total, though the font/lettertype is pretty large, so you race through it quite quickly.
A remarkable point of view
The book covers a quite well-trodden part of history: Germany and Central Europe between the World Wars. Most books regarding this period are cursed with the benefit of hindsight, which influences how one writes about Weimar Germany (1919-1933). Bryant, who released this book in 1940 but had written it before the advent of WWII, is able to see the rise of Hitler and the troubles of central Europe without the shadow of WWII being cast over it. The fact that he manages a relatively even-handed approach as an Englishman is quite commendable.
Not weapons but Hunger
One of the main points driven home in the early part of the book is quite simple: obviously war costs many lives due to combat. WWII was quite even for a long time when you only look at the battles: it lasted for four years without a clear victor.
But there are other ways to bring your enemy to its knees, and in the case of Germany and Austria, this was the British naval blockade. Britannia rules the waves, and even though the German Empire had gone through a massive shipbuilding program in the early 1900s, it would be no match for the British Navy. So they used it to stifle imports towards central Europe. Most important was food; Germany and Austria relied on imports for many essential foodstuffs.
They tried to manage the incoming shortage by rationing; bread-lines became a common sight in Central Europe, and rations became smaller and smaller as the war went on. The best food went towards the front to keep the soldiers healthy. But in the hinterlands, disease and famine set in. Diseases like Tuberculosis rose dramatically in frequency, child mortality was higher than it had been for decades, and people died of hunger.
As rough as the war was on the civilian populations of Britain and France, they never came close to this level of suffering. There was rationing in Britain, and the front-line of the war had blown a sizeable part of Northern France to smithereens, but it had never come to famine on this level.
Versailles and its discontents
The treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain and Trianon (1919) were not promotors of a durable peace, but a small-minded form of revenge, and a new hotbed of instability. This is both the opinion of Bryant in this book, and one I already held before reading it. Bryant summarizes them well. Alsace-Lorraine, gained by the newly-founded German Empire in 1871 from France, was taken back by the French.
This was the least of its territorial woes, though. In the East: Poland reappeared on the European map for the first time in well over a century. For this, the Germans had to cede Posen and West-Prussia. This lead to two very large issues: hundreds of thousands of Germans (estimates vary wildly as to the exact numbers/percentages) now end up within a revanchist Polish state. Often, German towns surrounded by a Polish hinterland were now incorporated into Poland.
Most obvious was Danzig; a city with a 90% German population was now declared a 'Free city', because the Versailles treaty stipulated that Poland needed an outlet to the sea, that sea being the Baltic. Danzig was the obvious candidate for this.
Another issue was that Germany was now rent in two: East-Prussia was now separated from the German 'mainland' by a sizeable strip of Polish territory, that used to be West-Prussia. The issues of Danzig and the Corridor would be the geopolitical headache that was the main casus belli for Germany against Poland in 1939.
Austria, or whats left of it
Versailles is the best-known, but Saint-Germain and Trianon were in certain ways worse. Where Germany lost about 10% of its land, the Austrian Empire completely disintegrated into smaller states. What was left of Austria (the part that corresponds with Austria on the map today) petitioned several times to join Germany, but was rebuffed/vetoed by the Entente powers several times in the newly-founded League of Nations. Since WWII, it has often been claimed that Hitler 'conquered' Austria against its own wishes. This assertion, looking at the behaviour of Austria between the wars, is obviously wrong.
Czechoslovakia appeared on the map. This wildly illogical state ran counter to the Wilsonian idea of 'self-determination for all small peoples': the Czechs were able to bully the other ethnic groups due to their numbers in this newly-founded democracy. There were three other ethnic groups: the Slovaks, who were historically bound to Hungary, not the Czechs. The Ruthenes, who would today be considered Ukrainians, who lived in the Trans-Carpathian 'tail' of Czechoslovakia. And then, once again, there were Germans, about 3,5 million of them. Their displeasure with being part of this new Czecho-Slovak state would be the cause of the Munich crisis in 1938, where they appealed to join Germany in the lands where they formed the majority, known as the Sudetenland.
Trianon
Hungary, in a sense, was worst off. Not only did it lose vast swathes of land, it also had to deal with a communist revolution. It lost Slovakia (and a few hundred thousand Hungarians with it) to newly-formed Czechoslovakia. It lost the Vojvodina and Croatia to the newly-formed Yugoslavia. Most importantly, it lost Transylvania to the Romanians. All in all, it meant that a third of the ethnic Hungarians now were outside of Hungary's borders, which in the case of Transylvania is still true to this day.
Conclusion
I'm having trouble to keep things short, as usual. I might write a part two on this one to talk about the internal affairs of Germany specifically, which is also the main story of the book, but I got side-tracked a bit. History is interesting, who can blame me. I'll see you all in the next review, whether that is the second part of this one, or for a wholly different book. Until then,
-Pieter Nijmeijer
(Top image; front page of the book)