All Dreadful on the Eastern Front
As I mentioned in my last post, reading up on German history has been eye-opening. Let me share an example.
We assume that right-wing authoritarians hate left-wing authoritarians more than anyone else on the political spectrum, and vice versa — fascists and communists don’t mix. Which means we’d assume that when the arch right-wing authoritarian military leaders who ran Germany during World War I (keeping the Kaiser occasionally informed) learned in 1917 that the arch left-wing revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, exiled in Switzerland, wished to return to Russia, they’d do nothing to help him, and perhaps go out of their way to thwart him. After all, Lenin, following Karl Marx, hoped the communist revolution would start in Germany, and rooted for Germany’s abused and underpaid industrial workers to rebel.
But aides to Erich Ludendorff, who was second only to Paul von Hindenburg in Germany’s military command, had a different idea: let’s help Lenin in hopes he’ll stoke revolutionary fervor in Russia, Germany’s foe to the east. The Germans had roughly a million men on the eastern front. If Russia plunged into civil war, those soldiers could be moved to the western front, where they could overwhelm the American reinforcements on their way to buttress the beleaguered French and British.
Ludendorff signed off on the plan, and Lenin eagerly climbed aboard a train that, despite wartime restrictions, crossed Germany expeditiously and soon reached Russia. We all know what happened next: the Czar was deposed and in March 1918 Lenin’s Bolsheviks quit the battlefield.
Germany then rushed its soldiers on the eastern front to France and smashed the allies, winning the war.
Not.
Ludendorff was Prussian (as was Hindenburg). Prussia was Germany’s Wild East, somewhat analogous to America’s Wild West in the 1800s: a vast plain where the Slavs were the Indians. With Russia out of the war, Ludendorff sent the troops into Poland, Estonia, and Latvia, hoping to win the east for good. Things were going well, but then the Allies — remember them, General Ludendorff? — scored the war’s biggest victory in the west, at Amiens, France, and made Germany’s defeat inevitable.
So the proto-fascist Prussians, by succeeding in their scheme to ignite a communist coup in Russia, put their worst enemies in power.
But here’s the thing: for the next fifteen years, both sides were fine with that! They had a common problem: the Treaty of Versailles created an independent Poland on land they considered their own. Lenin, perhaps feeling indebted to his Prussian benefactors of 1917 and still optimistic the communist revolution would spread to Germany, offered the Germans a way around the Treaty of Versailles’ prohibition against their use of advanced weaponry (such as airplanes and tanks) by inviting them to surreptitiously train at bases in the Soviet Union’s interior. Only after Lenin gave way to Stalin and Hitler became chancellor did the Red and German armies cease cooperating.
Which didn’t stop the two sides from signing a mutual non-aggression pact and dividing up Poland six years later, thus launching World War II. Not until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 did Germany and the Soviet Union finally become the implacable enemies their ideologies presupposed.
So the twentieth century’s ultimate fascists and communists, who avowedly had nothing in common, for a long time got along better with each other than anybody else. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. As The Fabulous Wife always says, the political spectrum isn’t a line, it’s a circle, with the extreme right and the extreme left the point at which it meets.
Nonetheless, I hadn’t known that. Had you? And lest you think it too strange to be true, rest assured I didn’t pick it up from some conspiracy-mongering crank’s website. German collusion in Lenin’s return to Russia has been documented separately by, among others, the historians Richard Pipes (The Russian Revolution) and Catherine Merridale (Lenin on the Train), and evidence of the German and Red armies’ cooperation can be found in the German Federal Archive (in German, so I can’t verify) and is broadly confirmed here.
