Trapped between the Black Eagle & the Red Star:

At the beginning of 1945, even with the Pest side of the capital under siege, Szalási’s idiotic Arrow-Cross terror turned its attention to those who were helping the Jews of Budapest to survive until the Red Army could complete the ‘liberation’ of the whole city. Yet, even as they did so, the Red Army was also unleashing its own form of ‘revenge’ and terror on Hungarian citizens on the eastern suburbs and peripheral villages. Though the siege had begun at the end of 1944, the German army was ordered to hold the city to defend the Vienna Basin and the only oil field still at its disposal, the one in Zala County. But the war in the country did not end even after the siege of the Hungarian capital and its capitulation. Meanwhile, efforts were being made to have regular Hungarian troops take part in the final crushing of the Nazi Third Reich. A group of soldiers who wound up as prisoners of the Soviet armies initiated the establishment of a Hungarian legion, but they were not allowed to implement their plan.

The Provisional Government formed in Debrecen recruited a new democratic Hungarian army recruited in the ‘liberated’ part of the country, but it did not become battle-ready in time. Only the military cooperation of a single spontaneously rallied outfit, the Buda Voluntary Regiment, could be observed in the battle for Budapest. When the German Army’s attempt to break through the Allied lines in the Ardennes failed by early January, the few still combat-worthy élite guards, with the Sixth SS Panzer Army, were hastily transferred to Transdanubia, where, deployed around Lake Balaton, they were able to hold on to the Zala oil fields.

Above: Soviet soldiers in battle in Budapest on 14 January 1945. This photograph was taken four days before the liberation of Pest was completed. The complete defeat of German forces in the capital, including the equal numbers of Hungarian soldiers still supporting them, took until 13 February.

New Year in Pest – A Frightful Fortnight:

On New Year’s Eve, units of the Red Army overran Hungarian army positions around Pest. House-to-house fighting extended into the working quarters of the city, and Soviet soldiers penetrated the culverts of the inner district.  Often the two sides were separated by only one street or house. Aircraft squadrons continued to drop bombs, and fighter planes strafed streets that were deemed to be in enemy hands, though sometimes they were shooting at their own men. In the city centre, as the siege progressed slowly in their direction, the co-workers of Raoul Wallenberg, the Langfelder-Simon family, which had been placed under Swedish protection, moved from Üllői út to Révai utca, near to the Opera House.

Almost eighty people had moved into the apartment building which was rented by the Swedish Embassy. In the afternoon of 1 January, Arrow-Cross armed men shot the lock off the outside door. They smashed the door to the cellar, where the Swedish Embassy employees were living. To the accompaniment of shouting, swearing and threats, they pillaged all the families’ money and food. Meanwhile, someone managed to inform Wallenberg by telephone, and he sent a detective to intervene, thus avoiding more serious harassment or massacre on the spot. Wallenberg and Langfelder arrived later with an armed gendarme to guard the house. At that time, Wallenberg was forced to spend most of his time in hiding, and was constantly preoccupied with survival, his plans for Hungary and making the earliest possible contact with the Soviet forces. A few days later, a further five gendarmes were added and had served there for scarcely a fortnight when a further order sent them into the firing-line. No more was heard of them. With Wallenberg’s permission, Langfelder brought his two-year-old niece, Éva Simon there. Until then the child had found shelter and a home with a friendly Christian family in central Pest, an action which was strictly forbidden by decree. The house had been bombed, and so she had to be moved and from then on had remained with her parents.

On 5 January, following direct orders from the Szalási government, police and Arrow-Cross irregulars began emptying out the remaining ‘international houses’, those under the protection of the various neutral countries’ governments, most notably the Swedish and the Swiss. When the news reached Raoul Wallenberg, he offered a bribe of food and medications for them to leave his charges where they were.

On the night of 7 January, armed raids took place on the occupants of Jókai utca 1 in Terézváros where the Swedish Embassy had rented the second floor the previous autumn. Ten groups of activists operated in the rooms under the direction of Dr Béla Forgács and Dr Antal Léderer, caring for the Swedish protégés. The ever-more savage Arrow-Cross could not tolerate the Swedish presence any longer and meant to mop it up, paying no attention to the protected status of the various rented properties. In the raid, the first part of the nightmare was total plundering. Then, some two hundred people were turned out into the street, some of them being marched away, the women and children escorted to the ghetto, where ninety of them were crammed into the flats within a house in Akácfa utca.

Some of the men were tortured and shot on the way in the streets and squares or on the Danube embankment. Wallenberg searched for the kidnapped people but without success. Imre Nidosi, commander of the Arrow-Cross guard on the Pest side simply denied all knowledge of Swedish-protected persons being in his custody.

The Arrow-Cross marauders’ atrocities also struck at the Swedish embassy offices in Üllői út. On the evening of the 8th, they intimidated and robbed a hundred and fifty persons – for the most part, embassy employees – and then marched them off to the Mária Terézia barracks. Hans Weyermann, the active agent of the International Red Cross on the Pest side, made an interesting special report of that day. According to this, an agent of the Soviet State Security Police had dropped by parachute and appeared at his office. Asking to see Weyermann in private, he told him that he was expected to speak to the commander of the German defenders about avoiding needless bloodshed. The Germans were to spare hostages, political prisoners and occupants of the ghettoes, and in return, the Red Army would not trouble the civilian population and any calling to account would be done exclusively through the law and the courts. According to Lévai’s Wallenberg, Langfelder’s sister and brother-in-law, Dr Gyula Simon, last spoke to him on 10 January. He dashed in to see them for a few minutes in the Swedish Embassy building at Révai utca 16. His brother-in-law had been second-in-command of the building on 1 January at the time of the Arrow-Cross attack. Lévai tells us that on the evening of 10 January Károly Szabó reported that…

… the front was on Thököly út by the the Millenáris Sports Ground. There he had had a word with a captain, a friend of his, who was quite prepared to let him and his wife through, so he would gladly take Wallenberg and … Langfelder, as that was what Wallenberg wanted. Szabó said that that he too would go through with them and come back next day.

On the same night, Wallenberg took further steps and made preparations to travel. With the help of György Szöllősi and Langfelder, he secretly made the touring car ready for a long journey in the garage, hiding a large sum in gold and jewels in a petrol can. According to Szöllősi, their idea was first to go to Debrecen, and from there to Sweden, for Wallenberg to make his report. These details are confirmed in the memoirs of the gendarme, Lajos Bajusz, who also recalled that both men were very nervous before the journey. Sándor Erdey, a war reporter, later recalled that he had been asked by the restauranter of the ‘Paprika csárda’ (where he was a regular customer) to help a Jewish family to get to Pannónia utca. Erdey promised to do so, but immediately declined the “generous return favour” that was offered. Next morning, during an air-raid, he managed to transport the family, with the help of his brother. He went back to the restaurant for lunch, where he was spoken to by a ‘stranger’ according to his memoirs, which continued:

The well-dressed young man introduced himself, and it was Raoul Wallenberg, embassy counsellor. He too wanted to reward me, and was offended when I declined. As he put it, that would mean that he couldn’t ask me to do something else. With great difficulty he made his request known, and it was the same as the day before. I gave my consent, but asked that we should start within hours. Again, I asked for my brother’s help. I took the man entrusted to me and his fiancée from the address given to the Pannonia Hotel …

It’s not clear how Erdey recognised the ‘stranger’ as Wallenberg, especially as he does not record the language of the conversation. Since both men spoke good German, they would have had little difficulty in communicating. Neither is there any mention of Langfelder, Wallenberg’s ever-present driver. But the incident shows that the rescue of several people by car from Jókai utca by car was successful, and the Pannonia Hotel was indeed where several Jewish families found shelter, along with many other persecuted people. The manager, Sándor Kaufmann, succeeded, by much ingenuity and even more risk (later honoured at Yad Vashem), in protecting to the end those hiding from the persistent ‘Jew-hunt’ of the Arrow-Cross. On 11 January, Wallenberg and Langfelder said goodbye to their closest colleagues at the Hazai Bank. The secretary could now see that he no longer had the ways and means to continue his work. That night, they slept once more at László Ocskay’s roomy flat in Benczúr utca, which was in a building under Red Cross protection. Next day they set off by car, but turned back, presumably due to the Soviet advance. On the 13th, the front line reached the mid-point of Andrássy út and the parallel Benczúr utca. It was at this point, in both space and time, that Wallenberg tried to make contact with Marshal Malinovski. He reported personally to the Russians in Benczúr utca, using a note which apparently read, in Russian, ‘I come over’. He was then taken behind the Russian lines with a major and military escort, accompanied by Langfelder.

At about this time in Berlin, Wallenberg was under consideration in Berlin by the ‘Jewish expert’, a leading figure in the campaign for the destruction of the Jews of Europe. He had followed attentively the activity of Eichmann and knew a great deal about the diplomatic rescue attempts in Budapest. In a telegraphic summary, he informed Eichmann, then in Berlin, that ambassador Danielsson had gone into hiding and that Wallenberg had been placed under German protection. Although the precise details are still unclear, it seems that the Soviets intercepted this message, leading to Wallenberg’s arrest as a ‘suspected spy’ and his imprisonment by the Soviets.  By this time, Eichmann had become an embarrassment and encumbrance to the upper echelons of the SS. The next day, the 14th, the main military hospital in Budapest received a direct hit. Dying soldiers were left in destroyed buildings and the wounded piled up in makeshift hospitals, without medicine or nurses, lying in the cold cellars of the burned-out Parliament building and the Museum of Military History. A retreating German army unit blew up the Petöfi Bridge, then known as the Horthy Bridge. An Arrow-Cross group advanced into the ghetto and murdered several people they encountered before bein routed by Miksa Domonkos, a Jewish Council member with good contacts in the gendarmerie, together with a couple of policemen. In the streets, the advancing Soviet soldiers used captured civilians to shield them from enemy fire. In short order, the German military also adopted this tactic, but the strategy was ineffectual for both armies.

The Collapse of the Reich & Liberation of Auschwitz:

The collapse of the Reich was accelerating and every initiative of the German military leadership was a failure. The inner circle of the Nazi chiefs of staff clung on in blind faith that Hitler’s wonder-weapons would yet save them and their families from ignominious invasion and defeat. They wove fantasies, as the Hungarian political élite had done the previous year,  about making a separate peace, based on the mistaken belief that in no way would the West allow Stalin to penetrate deep into central Europe. Several saw the series of nightmare acts as the consequence of the fanatical genocidal activity of Eichmann. He was aware, as were the other Nazi leaders, that he occupied a prominent place on the Allies’ list of war criminals. The other SS leaders kept their distance from Eichmann as catastrophe loomed. They sat apart from him in the dining room of Hitler’s underground bunker in Berlin and did not invite the Obersturmbannführer to join them. The mass murderer pondered: Am I supposed to be the blackest sheep in the flock?

The deportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz had begun in March 1944, almost as soon as the SS arrived in Budapest (I have written elsewhere on this site about these) Eichmann led the special task force that gathered them in concentration camps and then loaded them in cattle trucks, deporting 437,000 of them there in just eight weeks. He later boasted to a crony that he would jump laughing into his grave for his part in the deaths of four million Jews. In a 1961 diary entry after his conviction in Israel of genocide, Eichmann wrote:

I saw the eeriness of the death machinery; wheel turning on wheel, like the mechanisms of a watch. And I saw those who maintained the machinery, who kept it going. I saw them, as they re-wound the mechanism; and I watched the second hand, as it rushed through the seconds; rushing like lives towards death. The greatest and most monumental dance of death of all time; this I saw.

The numbers of SS camp guards, Lagerschützen, at Auschwitz varied: very roughly in 1944 there were only 3,500 guarding the 110,000 inmates. There were also usually around eight hundred Sonderkommando prisoners at any one time. Out of the estimated seven thousand men and two hundred women guards who ‘served’ at Auschwitz during the war, only eight hundred were ever prosecuted. The rest merely disappeared into private life, and very many must have been able to escape with valuables stolen from the inmates. As the Russians advanced in the winter of 1944-45, Auschwitz was evacuated westwards in a terrible ‘death march’ of more than fifty miles in sub-zero temperatures. Those who could not keep up were shot and in all, around fifteen thousand died. Nor was the horror over even when the camps were liberated. Despicably, Polish villagers even killed some Jews after the end of the war in Europe when they returned to claim their property, as happened at the village of Jedwabne. We have no evidence of this happening in Hungary, but we know that very few of the Auschwitz survivors returned, and even fewer did so to resettle. This was certainly the case in the village of Apostag, where out of some six hundred Jews deported, fewer than six returned before emigrating (I have written about this elsewhere on this site).

Rationality might have dictated that, once the war looked as if it might be lost, the rail, military and human resources put into the Holocaust ought to have been immediately redirected to the military effort instead, and the Jews who could have been forced into contributing to the war effort ought to have been put to work rather than exterminated. This, after all, had been what had happened before March 1944 in Hungary. Yet a quite separate, entirely Nazi rationale argued that the worsening situation on the Eastern Front required if anything an intensification of the Holocaust, rather than a winding down. As Saul Friedlander has written:

Whipping up anti-Jewish frenzy was, in Hitler’s imagination, one of the best ways to hasten the falling apart of the enemy alliance … the Jews were the hidden link that kept Capitalism and Bolshevism together.

Furthermore, he asserted, if ‘Fortress Europe’ was about to be invaded, the domestic danger posed by the Jews in his diseased imagination needed to be eradicated as soon as possible. Finally, with the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January, his Final Solution to the Jewish ‘problem’ was brought to an end.

The Final Fight for Survival:

Yet, in Budapest at least, many of the Jews had survived, thanks largely to the letters of protection provided them by the Swedish and Swiss diplomats and their brave Hungarian colleagues and volunteers. The last few weeks of the siege were some of the most difficult to survive, however. None of the ‘safe’ houses protected by the Swedish and Swiss Red Cross was truly safe from the Arrow-Cross any more. The thundering sound of cannons was heard all the time and huge bombers flew low in the sky.

Nearly all of the people of Pest were starving, but especially the Jews, who were either in the ghettoes or in hiding, trying to get food without ration cards and only able to buy it after 5 p.m. By this time, Daisy Birnbaum (see her ‘letter of protection’ below) was back with her parents, unafraid even of the bombs, although they were walled in her uncle’s cellar. There were five of them, and their daily ration was a small slice of bread with margarine, so they were hungry all the time. They lived in what Daisy describes as a ‘nook’ behind a makeshift toilet wall for close to seven weeks with the help of neighbours and friends of her father. No other Jews remained in the house because they had all been taken to the ghetto. However, the few gentile families that remained soon moved down permanently to the cellar, due to the constant bombing of the nearby ‘Nyugati’ (Western) Railway Station.

Eventually, the Russian soldiers found them when they were searching for German soldiers by pressing stethoscopes to the walls. Hearing the hollow sound, they did not wait for a response but kicked the ‘communal’ toilet apart. They greeted them with machine guns at the ready as they crawled out from behind the destroyed wall, giving them part of their square-shaped black bread and bacon to eat. To begin with, the Russian soldiers behaved like liberators and were greeted as such, especially by the Jewish survivors, but that soon changed. Nevertheless, when the siege was finally ended in February 1945, it must have felt that, as it does so often in that part of central Europe, spring had come early, in both a physical and spiritual sense. Daisy Birnbaum recalled mixed feelings as most, though not all of her family were reunited:

During the spring of 1945, like the rest of the survivors, we tried to live as if those terrible months could have been erased from our memories. And we had not yet given up the hope that the deportees would return. The renewal of the Sunday lunches of the past also belonged to this noble effort. For about three years, Aunt Juliska appeared at our Sunday table. The poor thing wept every Sunday; from the soup until the end of the meal, her tears were flowing copiously. And she kept repeating to my mother: “You see, my dear, every stinking kike is back, only my darling Lajoska was killed”. Later she moved to her sister who lived in the countryside. 

Three other brief stories of survival remain to be retold here from Daisy’s little book about 1944, which many of her friends and their relatives sadly did not survive. The first is of her first ‘boyfriend’, György. His mother was one of those deported to Bergen-Belsen towards the end of the war who did not return and after the later liberation of that camp, Gyuri went to live with his aunt Ilus while his older brother, Pista, who had spent 1944 in Eger with false documents, moved in with another ‘survivor’ sister and her family. By the time Gyuri turned ten, his father, inforced labour in the army, was reported ‘missing’ before the German occupation. From then on, they lived in wretched misery with many others in a ‘Jewish house’, waiting to be deported. Probably with the help of their ‘Uncle Béla’, the family received the Swedish protective papers, Schutzpasse, and with about twenty strangers they were moved into the abandoned apartment of Aunt Ilus. There Gyuri survived the siege and the continuous Arrow-Cross raids. Almost daily, the thugs looked for any reason to take people out from the houses and shoot them into the Danube. In 1945, already free, but fully orphaned, Gyuri found himself in the same apartment in Pozsonyi út which he shared with Aunt Ilus and Ági, waiting for the return of Uncle Béla who was ‘spending time’ in the Soviet Union.

Above: Pista and Gyuri c. 1937.

Dr László, the father of Mihály or Misi (pictured above at Balassagyarmat in 1938), held the rank of lieutenant and worked as a physician in the First World War and also served in the Second. His maternal grandparents lived in Balassagyarmat, the family’s home since the eighteenth century. His grandfather was a member of the ‘Jewish gentry’, a well-to-do, respected landowner. Although he lived in Budapest with his family for most of the year, “Gyarmat” was his paradise where he, his mother and his sisters spent their summers. When his grandfather died in 1943, aged 62, the family ‘council’ decided that Misi’s mother should move back ‘home’ to manage the estate, as both uncles were in serving in forced labour camps. So Misi and his sister also stayed in Gyarmat and went to the Jewish school there. With the German occupation, the estate was confiscated and the family was required to return to Budapest. Those of the family who remained in Gyarmat, their friends and the rest of the Jews were crammed into cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz. Misi lost his maternal grandmother there, together with all his schoolmates from Gyarmat.

Hoping to avoid a similar fate, during the summer of 1944, Misi and his family converted to Catholicism. Whereas none of the churches had openly stood up for the persecuted, both children were saved by members of Catholic orders. Misi found refuge with the Collegium Josephinum whose Prioress was later awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for the nunnery’s role in saving sixty Jewish children and twenty adults from the Gestapo in 1944. Misi’s sister was saved by the Carmelite nuns of Kőbánya. Béla and Pali, his paternal uncles both wound up as forced labour soldiers on the Russian front, the former ‘disappearing’ and the latter surviving the siege of Stalingrad. Pali’s wife was deported to Auschwitz but, miraculously, both of them survived, as did Misi’s paternal grandmother who had remained in their Budapest apartment. She did not wear a yellow star and neither did she move into the ghetto, but somehow got through the war alive. It took thirty-five years for Misi to gather enough strength to visit Balassagyarmat, a similar story to many others who were forced to leave their beloved Hungarian villages. Many others never went back, and those still alive probably never will.

The final ‘survivor’s story’ recorded by Daisy Birnbaum is that of Ágnes, who was born in Endrőd, a small town in eastern Hungary, although her happiest summer memories were of her grandmother’s home at Zalaegerszeg in western Hungary. Ági’s much-adored father left their flat in Budapest for the forced labour camp ‘one evening in November’ and she never saw him again. She wrote the following piece of prose (an extract from which is given here) recalling the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, including her return to Endrőd:

New Year’s Eve, someone tells fortunes from the residue of some black liquid. Everybody prognosticates. The key turns to the right in the prayer-book: We will survive. Wedding band in the bottom of a glass of water. What do you see? A cross. Your father will not return. Tell us, dear spirit, when will the ghetto be liberated? Slowly, the name of a month appears on the paper: January.

In January, a Russian soldier enters the building and points toward the exit. Marching columns. We break into a yarn depot and on the way back we exchange thread for bread. I drop the ten rolls of machine twist I am supposed to carry. The snow is knee-high on the road; the soles of my shoes are of cardboard. I walk the distance of Monor to Szolnok, practically unconscious. From Szolnok on, there is a train, a beautiful, uncovered cattle-car, one can sit down in, and we reach the village in a day.

Returning to Endrőd was anything but simple for Ági. She couldn’t walk as her toes were frost-bitten. She was given two wooden planks by a local peasant. Fastening them to her feet, she practised walking. Her mother is suffering from scurvy due to vitamin deficiency; She worked on a hand-driven carding-machine, torturing her body to provide milk, bread and soap for them. There was no husband or father left in their lives. A small kitchen was to be their home; there they lived, unaware even of what was happening in the village. There were no newspapers, no radio. She wrote that: It might be three months before we learn what had happened beyond the borders of the country.

Their apartment in Budapest had been ransacked, therefore they tried to resume life at Endrőd, but after a while it became unbearable. They first moved to Szeged, and finally returned to Budapest. Of her relatives in the countryside, Ágnes’ uncle died of starvation at Kőszeg and her paternal grandparents were deported together with her father’s sister. They were put to work on a farm in Austria, where Ági’s grandfather drove a tractor. They survived, despite the ‘disappearance’ of their son, Ági’s father. Being Jewish was never a simple issue in her life because she would always remember the gigantic capital Zs in her father’s military record book, and that she had to grow up fatherless. However, she always felt that she was Hungarian, even if she had only by chance. She never left Hungary, because she chose to be a Hungarian … Like nearly all Budapest children of that time, and especially those of the Jewish elementary school on Hollán utca, Ágnes was just a generation away from country life, having relatives in the countryside. The deportations of 1944 fractured that connection forever for Hungary’s Jews. Outside the capital, all Jews were deported, and Jewish children survived the Holocaust just by chance, whereas after the war, Budapest was full of Jewish orphans and half-orphans, because from there the adults were taken to various forced labour camps and sent on death marches.

From February 1945, the children remained largely silent about the recent past, and only by coincidence did they learn that a classmate lived with her aunt or just with her mother. Daisy has written that they didn’t want to remember, just as the adult survivors hesitated to face the memories of the previous terrible years:

We who survived have survived, but there are events in life that one cannot really survive. We try not to think of them all the time, but they are there and rule our lives, and our basic reactions to most things. …

I am writing of middle-class families who were not particularly broad-minded, polished people, but who worked hard, reared their children and were happy when their small savings increased. Many remained in towns and villages in the countryside where they had always lived; from there they were carried off to various extermination camps. These were simple people: even their dreams were grey. But they died incredible deaths, prepared for them by diseased minds. Millions shared their fate but each suffered death individually, death that  would have been unimaginable if they ever contemplated the end of their lives: Killed by gas, shot in the head, death by starvation.

Alluding to Fateless, the English translation (2004) of the novel Sortalanság (1975) by Imre Kertész, Daisy comments that their perishing completed their ‘Fatelessness’ because they were robbed of their adulthood or old age, and of death with dignity. Some of her friends never even turned eleven, a fact that she has never been able to assimilate and a crime she cannot forgive.

The ‘Disappeared’ – The Mysterious Fate of Wallenberg & Langfelder:

On 14 January in Budapest, Wallenberg appeared in a Russian car. He said that he had transferred his effects and a briefcase containing 222,000 pengős to his flat in Erzsebét királyné utca in Zugló. This was at the ‘city limits’ and may have functioned as the first Soviet detention and interrogation centre at the rear of the advancing Red Army, but it’s perhaps more likely that he was in the Soviet headquarters which had been established at the Széchenyi baths building where he could have made contact with officers of high rank and position. On 15 January, there was one final attempt to blow up the Budapest ghetto. Kasztner claimed that the destruction was prevented by General Winkelmann, acting under the orders of Kurt Becher, the SS officer with whom Kasztner had been negotiating on behalf ‘the Joint’, the international Zionist organisation. Although Kasztner was in Vienna during the siege of Budapest, making the ‘trade’ of twenty million francs with Becher, he claimed that the high-ranking officer called Winkelmann, who forbade the Arrow-Cross government’s action. The Germans told the Arrow-Cross minister that emptying the ghetto would not be in the best interests of Germany. Of course, many claimed, at Nuremberg, that they had acted ‘heroically’ in terms of humanity in the dying days of the Reich.

On the morning of the 16th or 17th, Wallenberg caused a stir when he appeared at the International ghetto, at the Swedish Embassy office at Tátra utca 6, together with a Soviet lieutenant colonel and Langfelder. At this point, the eye-witness accounts differ, but they agree that he left in a car headed east of the city centre, towards Gödölő and Debrecen. But it seems that the Soviet motorcycle escort took them on a roundabout route through the city, either due to the military operations or to scout out the diplomat’s personal connections and learn of his future plans. It also appears that the promise that he was free to leave was pure bluff. But in 1947, the Soviet authorities issued a statement denying that Wallenberg and his Hungarian driver had been taken away by their forces. They pointed out that:

It must not be forgotten that in an area where the Soviet forces then were, in that period when very heavy fighting was taking place in Hungary, all sorts of possibilties could have arisen. Wallenberg travelled at his own risk in areas controlled by Soviet forces.

On the 16th, before Wallenberg’s putative departure for Debrecen, the quarter containing the ‘protected houses’ was liberated, and the morning of the 18th brought the other tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest release from the Arrow-Cross terror, from mining and from air-raids. Advancing from house-to-house (often from cellar to cellar), the Soviet forces reached the Károly körút end of the central ghetto. They demolished the wooden gates of the ghetto, and in several places the palisades too. Hansi Brand remembered that it had been snowing the night before and, when she looked outside, the smell of fresh snow seemed stronger than the stench of corpses and smoke. She also recalled the few moments of quiet after Pest fell. In front of ‘the Glass House’, the young halutzim ran out to hug and kiss the first Soviet soldiers they saw. Their enthusiasm was so great that some of the soldiers grabbed their guns to free themselves. The houses and gateways in the ghetto, the streets too, presented a lamentable sight, and the sight and stench of death dominated everywhere. Outside the arcade of the Dohány utca synagogue, heaps of corpses lay in the street, frozen hard. Burials began at once in the garden, and the victims lie there to this day. A total of 2,281 bodies were buried in twenty-four common graves, forty-five had been shot – twenty-four women and twenty-one men. The great majority had been dead for weeks and very many were totally naked so that a very large number were unidentifiable. A large proportion of the dead was elderly. Lack of vehicles made the work of burial more difficult, as did the frozen ground and the revulsion felt by the people.

After the Fall – The Battle for Buda:

Along the Danube, the hotels and restaurants were on fire. German and Hungarian troops withdrew from Pest into Buda and the Germans then blew up the five bridges across the Danube that linked the two halves of the city. Remnants of the German and Hungarian armies crossed over the badly damaged Chain Bridge into the ruins of the old Castle District just before the bridge was destroyed. There were thousands of casualties. The narrow streets and burning buildings made it difficult to reach the bridgehead, and the bridge itself was continually bombarded. Within Buda, particularly around the central fortress which was defended by SS troops, the fighting was intense. Buda also came under heavy attacks both from the air and by advancing Soviet troops from the west. Still, the German Command deemed that the hills were defendable. Of the thirty thousand  German soldiers who eventually tried to break out of Budapest, only 624 reached the German lines. On the same day that Pest fell to the Soviets, Domokos Szent-Iványi returned from his ill-fated diplomatic mission in Moscow, arriving in Debrecen, where a provisional Hungarian government had been formed, with the support of the Soviets. He recalled feeling ‘helpless’ as …

… power was already in the hands of the Russian secret service and the power and influence of Gerő, Rákosi … and of the Hungarian Secret Police was steadily growing.

The provisional government, headed by Miklós Béla Dálnoki, a general who had gone over to the Soviets, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in Moscow on 20 January. Under the terms of the agreement, Hungary was to declare war on Germany; evacuate all territory occupied since 31 December 1937, and pay $300 million in reparations to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. An Allied Control Commission was established to oversee compliance, and Soviet troops remained to occupy the country. Major-General William S Key headed the US delegation to the Commission, and arrived in Hungary in February, overseeing a force of thirty-six enlisted men and sixteen officers on the Commission’s staff.

Eventually, worn out by the sheer force of the Red Army attack, the Germans attempted to break out of their stronghold in Buda, and all but a few thousand were killed or captured. Meanwhile, with Wallenberg’s departure for Debrecen, the Swedish humanitarian action was considered finished in the Tátra utca office. The head of the office, Hugö Wohl, prepared a report and inventory. He put the number of the persons provided with protective passes (SP) and other official Swedish documents at four thousand, the number of Hungarian colleagues named as officials at two hundred, and the total number of their family numbers at four hundred. He estimated the number supplied with Red Cross letters of protection at 2,500. On 27 January, the same day as the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, a temporary executive committee made an announcement on behalf of the Royal Swedish Embassy. It addressed all the holders of the SP:

Seeing that persons of Jewish origin are now citizens enjoying equal rights, activity has come to a natural end.

More than two-thirds of the pre-war of Hungarian Jewish population perished in the Holocaust, and it might have been as high as three-quarters had it not been for the work of Wallenberg and the Swiss Vice-Consul, Carl Lutz, who rescued tens of thousands of European Jews, many of whom had found a haven in Budapest as Jewish refugees from all over central-eastern Europe. Lutz, a career diplomat who had been educated in the United States, was a religious man who was a convinced anti-Nazi. Seventy-two buildings in Budapest were declared annexes of the Swiss Legation, with diplomatic immunity. Working from the US Legation, because the Swiss represented US interests during the war, he is credited with saving over sixty thousand Jews.

On 9 February, the Budapest Police HQ announced that after 18 January the Soviet authorities had removed the police from their headquarters and barracks. Policemen had to make their way to work every day, and scarcely half of them reached their stations. They were picked up on such a scale that there were as many as three thousand of them in a prison camp in Gödöllő. Vilmos Bondor summed up the nature of the close of the fifty-one-day Battle of Budapest and the first months of 1945:

In the capital, chaos reigned. Russian deserters formed gangs of bandits and plundered. The pockets of SS did the same. The newly appointed Hungarian authorities looked on helplessly. They lacked manpower and experience. Police appointments were made from among the comrades, and those with any expertise were soon in prison. But what made their work more risible was that they were not to touch Russian soldiers, who did as they pleased.

Buda eventually fell on 13 February. The City finally surrendered. The entire siege of the capital had lasted one hundred days. The combined Soviet and Romanian losses in Budapest totalled more than seventy thousand men; the Hungarian army lost 16,500; the German army, thirty thousand. More than forty thousand civilians had been killed, including some seven thousand Jews.

About forty thousand Hungarian troops were taken prisoner by the Soviets. To round out the numbers, they took fifty thousand civilians as well. Everyone in uniform, even firefighters and postmen, was taken prisoner, as were men lining up for bread or going in search for water.  Around one-third of the soldiers and civilians were returned to Hungary after a few years of forced labour in the Soviet Union. Of the fifty thousand Jews ‘lent’ to the Reich to build fortifications around Vienna, only about twenty thousand were still alive in April 1945. Fewer than one in ten of the men in the Jewish labour brigades survived the war. During the fifty-one day battle, a quarter of the buildings were destroyed and three-quarters of them were damaged. Not a single bridge remained over the Danube. The ruins and rubble of the Chainbrige can be seen on the right. In the background, the effect of the fierce fighting around Buda Castle is apparent.  As at Stalingrad, Hitler did not permit any negotiation by his already completely conquered armies leading to some deal.

The German military command in Budapest asked for reinforcements, but Hitler had none to spare. Ignoring advice from his generals, he had thrown eight divisions into a last desperate counter-attack on the Allied troops in the Saar region in an attempt to retake the Ardennes borderlands in the ‘Battle of the Bulge’. The last attempt by the German forces in the capital in the Buda hills and the Pilis forests occurred through contravention of the Führer’s orders; by then it was futile to do so, however. Hitler’s determination to retain the possession of the Vienna Basin and the oil fields in Zala County by holding out in the Budapest area and thus buying time was also doomed to failure. When Hitler finally decided to send a Panzer division to Hungary, it was too late to relieve the besieged forces in Buda and was used instead to hold up the Red Army’s advance into western Hungary, with its important oil-fields. After Budapest was lost, Hitler’s Sixth Panzer Division still tried to hold out west of Lake Balaton against the combined Ukrainian and Russian assault.

‘Potato-peeling’ – The Mass Rapine of the Red Army:

Above: Two Red Army soldiers during the Battle of Budapest in the early weeks of 1945. The behaviour of some of the Soviet troops in the aftermath of the battle became infamous.

For their part, the soldiers of the Red Army, who had been told by Stalin to capture the Hungarian capital in ‘a few days’ had taken more than a hundred days to force a surrender. In the immediate aftermath of their victory, some of the Soviets took their frustrations on the women of Budapest. Ivan Polcz was one of the first to witness what happened. He was thirteen on 11 February, just two days before the surrender, and was the only child of a respectable middle-class Hungarian family. During the siege, he and his parents had hidden in the cellar of a relative’s house in the suburbs. They had all heard rumours of how the Soviets ‘did not respect women at all’ but many people did not believe that the Red Army soldiers would commit rape. Two nights before Ivan’s birthday, everyone in the cellar had heard heavy bombing. And then, he said, all of a sudden two Russian soldiers wearing white stormed into the cellar holding machine guns. The Red Army soldiers shouted that they were looking for Germans. Finding none, they ran back into the street. Horrified, Ivan watched as half an hour later German soldiers came into the cellar. But, not finding their enemy, they rushed away again. Then, on the night of his birthday, …

… an incredible number of Russian soldiers stormed into the cellar with guns. If it hadn’t been so frightening we would have been laughing our heads off because they were dressed with other people’s clothes. Men were even wearing women’s boots … They asked us if we had jewellery, but apart from taking our watches and some of the clothes which they liked they didn’t do anything. … And so we were quite OK with them. And we thought to ourselves that the idea they were aggressive with women, this is probably an invention of the Nazis to threaten us.

But a few days later, the atmosphere changed. At about ten o’clock at night, two Red Army soldiers came into the cellar where, by now, about twenty-five people were sheltering, a mixture of elderly couples, younger couples and children. The expressions on the soldiers’ faces were menacing. One of the young Hungarian husbands acted as interpreter and asked the soldiers what they wanted. When they told him, Ivan remembered, ‘he started to tremble’. They had said that they needed a woman:

Of course, the interpreter got frightened because he was a young man with a wife who was ther on one of those beds … so he said that there were only mothers and elderly people, and they should leave us alone. I was terribly afraid because my mother was … for her age, forty-eight … a good-looking woman. Next to her was her younger sister, and next to them was a counsellor from the embassy with his wife and his sixteen-year-old daughter.

When the soldiers reached the far end of the cellar they found a young blonde woman of seventeen, the maid of the couple who owned the villa. This was the woman they chose. They grabbed her and she started crying and pleading, shouting to the rest of the people in the cellar, Please help me! Help me! Ivan went on:

Everybody was frozen – a stone. … This was a terrible moment. I will never forget about it. Everybody knew by then that the women were in real danger. … And then something happened which was at first sight quite strange. The owner of the house, a retired military officer, started to talk to the maid. He said, “Please make this sacrifice for the sake of the country. And with this you will be able to save the other women here who will never forget this.” At the time, I thought this was a very mean statement, that he told her to “make this sacrifice on the altar of the Hungarian nation”, but in a way she did save my mother and all the other young women there. … Then there was quite a lot of crying and the Russian grabbed her and took her upstairs … and after fifteen minutes this girl staggered back down the stairs. She was absolutely collapsing, and she said that she had been the victim of a very fierce atrocity and rape, and this animal even beat her up because she had been crying. And of course everyone else was crying … when the saw this poor girl they didn’t even dare to look at her. … It was a terrible case. … Even today I can still remember it quite vividly and I get gossebumps, even though I am seventy-five years of age.    

The German and Arrow-Cross terror had been ended, but the survivors were already experiencing the first signs of a form of despotism and dictatorship which was just as inhuman in its consequences. In the aftermath of the Red Army’s advance across  Budapest, rape became almost ubiquitous. The pointless struggle had brought upon the country a series of ‘last-ditch’ sufferings, dreadful ruin and destruction. The worst suffering of the Hungarian population is due to the rape of women, a contemporary report from the Swiss embassy in Budapest asserted. The supporting evidence for this statement was clear:

Rapes – affecting all age groups from ten to seventy – are so common that very few women in Hungary have been spared. … The misery is made worse by the sad fact that many Russian soldiers are diseased and there are absolutely no medicines in Hungary.

Having hidden successfully from the Arrow-Cross for months, Jewish women and children were now just as much under threat from the Red Army as their gentile neighbours. One of Daisy Birnbaum’s friends, eleven-year-old Kati, had been hiding for weeks with her mother in the coal cellar of an apartment house where, from time to time, they received food from unknown benefactors who were not permitted to see them. Daisy commented that her mother saved her from sensing the deadly danger that surrounded them. Their area was liberated on 15 January, but at that point, Kati was not permitted out because her mother feared the Russians. The Soviet soldiers had a euphemism for their actions, which reveals how ‘routine’ and systematic it became. It was called ‘peeling potatoes’, based on the requirement of the subjugated women to help out in the military kitchens. However, they were taken from their homes and raped. Ági, a (then) twelve-year-old Jewish schoolfriend of Daisy’s, who went to live in a villa in Buda after her mother was taken into forced labour, recalled how, after finding her ‘Aunt Joli’, her mother’s friend there, they first came into contact with Russian soldiers:

There was very little to eat; they were all hungry, all the time. However, the sound of cannons was getting closer and, suddenly, Russian soldiers appeared in the street. Fortunately, Aunt Joli spoke Slovak and was able to communicate with them. Nonetheless, the Russians reappeared each night and behaved in a horrendous fashion, trying to carry off Aunt Joli ‘to peel potatoes’. She saved herself by pointing out that she had to take care of the children. The situation became unbearable, and they escaped on foot, until a horse-drawn carriage, heading for Budaörs, gave them a lift. There, they moved into an empty house, sharing it with a large number of refugees. However, just a few hours later, there too Russian soldiers arrived, drunk, threatening them with their machine guns, and wanting to take Aunt Joli with them. The children had to get up from their sleeping places to show how many of them were in Aunt Joli’s charge. The soldiers sobered up by the morning and apologised.

Ági B in 1939.

Hansi Brand, the wife of the Zionist activist Joel Brand, who worked closely with Rezső Kasztner to get the surviving Hungarian Jews from Budapest to Palestine, was also threatened by Soviet soldiers in the cellars, where she hid with her two children. One of her boys, although still quite small, told his mother to hide behind him in the corner. When the Russians told the women to come and help “peel potatoes”, Hansi remained in the corner, hidden by her two little boys while the other women went. She wondered how Dani knew what to do but later realised bitterly that “he had seen so much already, his childhood was lost.” She and her boys survived the siege underground.

Not all the women were able to escape the Russian soldiers, however.  The victims of rape included children like fifteen-year-old Ágnes Karlik, whose harrowing testimony has been recorded on the BBC Behind Closed Doors series which accompanies Laurence Rees’ (2008) book (see the list of sources below). Ágnes had been hiding in a cellar with her family during the siege and she found the first Red Army soldiers she met not unpleasant, … just making sure there were no enemies in the building. They didn’t stay long. They tried, actually, to be friendly. But then ‘these rough type of soldiers’ entered the building and they started to pull women out… to come and help peel potatoes. She and her sister were dragged outside, where there was snow on the ground, and into a tent nearby.  She was raped twice, once in the tent in front of her grandmother, and the second time the following night by two Soviet soldiers in a secluded section of the cellar. Her sister, aged fourteen, was also raped. They were sexually naive, having no idea what was happening to them, and the effect on Ágnes of these rapes was profound and lifelong:

For a long time I felt really resentful against men, being able to do such a thing without any sort of good reason. … It makes you feel really resentful against mankind, more or less.

In the hospital, immediately after the second attack, Ágnes was given an internal examination to check that she was not seriously injured. This was not an uncommon occurrence as a result of the severity and violence of the attacks that many women endured. Neither were these cases confined to Budapest, although – according to this author’s oral anecdotal sources – they seem to have been more common there. Medical student Barna Andrásofszky witnessed a case in a village outside the capital in the spring of 1945. He was called to a house by an elderly woman and was told that there was a sick young girl inside. When he went into the living room, he saw that it was in ‘disarray’ and a young woman of about twenty-five was lying on a bed, covered with a blanket:

I went up to her and took the blanket – it was covered with blood. And she was crying and she kept saying that she was going to die, and that she didn’t want to live any more.

Barna was told that the young woman had been raped by between ten and fifteen men. She was bleeding intensely from internal injuries sustained in the attack. He could not stem the flow of blood, and the woman was taken away to a hospital. He commented on this experience:

It was very difficult to see as a reality what the Nazi propaganda was spreading. But here we could see that in reality. And also we heard about many other terrible situations like this.

There have been many Red Army veterans who have tried to contextualise these crimes as a common, if regrettable, historical occurrence in times of war. But in the context of the Second World War in Europe, this excuse is not sustainable. As far as the crime of rapine was concerned, the Soviets were ‘in a league of their own’ according to Laurence Rees and other historians. The Western Allies committed no comparable crimes of this enormity, and mass rape was not tolerated either as a ‘weapon’ of war or as one of the ‘spoils’ of war. In Hungary, both were used to excuse it, as it began before the surrender and continued long after. There are no accurate numbers for the overall number of women raped by Soviet men in Hungary, but the crime was clearly conducted on a massive scale. One estimate is that around fifty thousand were raped in Budapest alone, and, even today, the silence from the countryside can be interpreted as the result of the understandable reluctance of young women and their families to report the crime unless it resulted in a medical emergency, as in the case ‘coincidentally’ reported to Barna Andrásofszky. From the capital itself, some cases were reported to the Soviet military authorities in 1945. The report came from the Hungarian Communists in Köbánya, a suburb on the eastern approaches to the city. They claimed that when the Red Army arrived, they committed a series of sexual crimes in an outbreak of …

… mindless, savage hatred run riot. Mothers were raped by drunken soldiers in front of their children and husbands. Girls as young as twelve were dragged from their fathers and raped in succession by ten to fifteen soldiers and often infected with venereal disease. … We know that intelligent members of the Red Army are communists, but if we turn to them for help they have fits of rage and threaten to shoot us, saying: “And what did you do in the Soviet Union? You not only raped our wives before our eyes, but for good measure you killed them together with their children, set fire to our villages and razed our cities to the ground.”

As a result, nothing official was said about the crimes. Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, never referred to them. Although there were occasional attempts to enforce the official line that rape committed by Soviet soldiers was a crime, so few cases were prosecuted that it is impossible not to conclude that the offence was often tolerated by the Soviet authorities. One of the few Red Army soldiers prepared to acknowledge that rapes occurred at all in occupied eastern Europe, Fiodor Khropatiy, remarked that:

… no-one paid attention to these things. On the contrary, soldiers gossiped about it, and they were proud, they felt like heroes, that he slept with such and such a woman, one or two or three. This is what soldiers shared with each other … it was normal behaviour. Even if somebody was killed, such a thing wouldn’t be reported, to say nothing of the fact of a soldier sleeping with a girl. … I feel hurt, because our army earned itself such a reputation, and I feel angry about the people who were acting that way. I am negative about such things, very negative. … To some extent, I can understand the soldiers. If you are at war for four years, and in the most horrible conditions, this … violent behaviour can be justified. I can justify the sodiers’ desire to rape a woman, but not … the actual performance. Of course, it’s natural to understand the desire to have a woman, because officers and soldiers, for four years, were deprived of any sex.

Fiodor Khropatiy estimated that a sizeable minority, perhaps as great as thirty per cent, committed rape. Stalin himself justified this crime on more than one occasion when it was brought to his attention, in public, including in the winter of 1944-45, claiming, angrily, that his eastern European allies ought to understand if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle. On another occasion, when he was told that Red Army soldiers were sexually mistreating German refugees, he is reported to have said: We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have some initiative. The frustrations of the Red Army besiegers were first taken out on the women of Budapest in acts of mass rapine, but they were then repeated all across eastern Europe as 1945 progressed, especially in Germany.

The ‘Changing of the Guard’:

Aside from the physical and psychological toll on Hungary taken by the last year of the war in Eastern Europe, forty per cent of the national wealth, accumulated by the work of generations, had also been lost. Meanwhile, society had fallen apart, and it quickly turned out that it was incapable of resisting the new tyranny, the Stalinist dictatorship. On his return from Moscow to Debrecen on 18 January, Domokos Szent-Iványi had written in his manuscript journal of the desperate, almost hopeless situation in which Hungary found herself in 1945. He felt that the country had once again been ‘sacrificed by the West’ and that the dismemberment of Central and in particular East-Central Europe made possible the extension of Nazi and later of Soviet domination in Europe. In February, Colonel-General Gábor Faragho, one of the three original members of the Hungarian Delegation to the Kremlin, where he had signed the provisional armistice terms on 11 October, and who had now been made Minister for Food and Supplies, drove from Debrecen to Budapest, escorted by the Soviet military. Szent-Iványi asked Faragho to contact members of the “intelligentsia” to establish a liberal democratic Party, thus completing the political basis for a pluralist national assembly and interim government, since four parties had already been formed. Out of these conversations, ‘a rather non-viable political Party’ was formed.

But, in these early months of 1945, a coalition of parties, the National Independence Front had brought together the leading parties including the Smallholders, Communists and Social Democrats. Despite their conflicting outlooks and endeavours, consensus still prevailed as to the most immediate tasks. Its goals were to establish independence and break with Hitler; reconstruct the war-torn economy through land reform and some nationalisation of industry; encourage the efforts of private enterprise; maintain close co-operation with the neighbouring countries, with the United States and the Soviet Union. The first task in achieving these was to sign an armistice with the allies which took place on 20 January, requiring Hungary to liquidate all pro-German and Fascist organisations and to accept the supervision of the Allied Control Commission as to the execution of these stipulations. As the latter body was under the direction of Marshal Voroshilov, this last clause in effect legalised Soviet influence, especially as it was in the authority of the Commission to ban political parties, to arrest people and to exercise censorship.

The ‘changing of the guard’ also started at the differing levels of administration, and special committees were charged with ascertaining whether the post-1939 conduct of officials violated Hungarian interests. The gendarmerie was dissolved and its tasks transferred to a reorganised and enlarged police force. As both of these operations took place under the auspices of the Communist-dominated Ministry of the Interior, the results were quite predictable. Simultaneously with the banning of twenty-five parties and associations qualified as ‘extreme rightist’, the ÁVO (State Security Police) started to make arrests, and ‘people’s courts’, each consisting of lay members and a trained judge, began to prosecute those charged with war crimes. Similarly to 1919-20, among the sixty thousand who were charged and the ten thousand who were sentenced by summary procedures, there were many victims of a political showdown, and those who could not be brought to court but were considered as personae non-gratae were interned by the police without further ado. Nevertheless, the majority of those who received sentences were indeed guilty of crimes against humanity.

Of the wartime political leaders, Horthy was in exile in Portugal, where he eventually died, and Kallay and Lakatos were spared because of their anti-German stance, though it had been somewhat equivocal. But Bárdossy, Imrédy, Sztójay, Szálasi and the Arrow-Cross ministers were among the 189 executed. The Provisional Government also undertook land reform. All of the coalition parties agreed that the system of latifundia would be liquidated and that Hungary would be transformed from a country of three million landless labourers or peasants with seven acres or less into one whose agrarian sector was dominated by prosperous peasant farms or ‘small-holdings’, but also including collective large holdings.

The land reform had far-reaching social, economic and political consequences, not least because the Communist Party was able to use the glory of satisfying the hunger for land to win support in rural Hungary.  Their Minister for Agriculture in the coalition government, Imre Nagy, became especially popular, remembered from then on as ‘the land distributor’. Meanwhile, the Communists began to fill the political vacuum in Budapest, creating a mass party of half a million members as a result of an unscrupulous recruiting campaign. Among other social groups, some among the decimated Jewry joined out of gratitude to the liberators and a search for a new sense of community, while their previous tormentors, the Arrow-Cross men, were rewarded with impunity if they exchanged their green party membership card for a red one.

Village people recalled how at least one of their number, who had helped terrorise and deport the Jewish community in Apostag (whose synagogue, now the Village Hall, is pictured on the right) before its deportation, was not only able to escape justice for his crimes but also became a local policeman. Obviously, by the spring of 1945, the wheel of fate had come full circle. When the Soviet forces eventually ‘liberated’ the last Hungarian town in early April 1945, barely a month was left of World War II in Europe. Even before it had ended, the Hungarian people had been forced to exchange one form of dictatorship for another.

 

 

Sources:

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity: Raoul Wallenberg and his Aides in Budapest. Budapest: Corvina.

Marianna D. Birnbaum (2016), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

Laurence Rees (2008), World War Two Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West. London: BBC Books.

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. London: Constable.

Gyula Kodolányi & Nóra Szekér (eds.) (2013), Domokos Szent-Iványi: The Hungarian Independence Movement, 1939-46. Budapest: Hungarian Review Books.

 

Extracts & photos from Marianna ‘Daisy’ Birnbaum’s (2016) book, 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes:

Daisy, as named on her letter of protection

D. TAMÁS:

Tomi was born in Budapest, in 1931. His father owned a large factory that produced light fixtures; his mother was a concert pianist. The entirely assimilated family, living on the first floor of a Rózsadomb villa, decided to take the final step and converted to Catholicism, mainly to avoid the increasing restrictions affecting Jews.

Nonetheless, in June 1944 … they had to leave their home. Tomi, his mother and his older sister Edit were moved to a ‘Jewish House’. By then, Tomi’s father was forced in a forced labour camp. After October 15, all three had to report to the brick factory of Óbuda, from where they were supposed to be deported. Tomi’s father was able to provide them with Swiss protection documents and, therefore, three days later, they were moved to the overcrowded ghetto. In the ghetto, Tomi shared a room with six children but he succeeded in smuggling them all out because he had two copies of the document proving that he was a Roman Catholic. According to his plan, two boys left the ghetto (one at each exit) with the Christian documents. Outside they met, and one returned with both copies, and the ‘game’ went on until all seven of them were outside the ghetto walls.

Escaping thus from the ghetto, the thirteen-year-old Tomi first returned to the Rózsadomb villa to call on their neighbour … the Rector of Pázmány Péter Tudományegyetem (Hungary’s oldest university). With his help, Tomi was enrolled in school in the Seventh District where the Rector … accepted him as a ‘refugee from Győr’. Thereafter, Tomi regularly went to their old place of business, where, by arrangement, a ‘Strobmann’, … (the property) manager gave him money for his support. … 

On 10th December, when Tomi again went to get money, he learned that his father was in the … hospital of the ghetto, having avoided the fate of seventy-five other Jewish men whom the Arrow Cross soldiers shot into the Danube at the Lánchíd (Chain bridge). He was one of the three, who during the last seconds before the shots were fired, jumped into the water. At the Hotel Hungária, several hundred feet from the place of execution, on the order of a Hungarian officer, Tomi’s father was pulled out from the Danube and sent to the ghetto. ‘He was so fortunate that he didn’t even catch a cold,’ remembers Tomi. … 

On 15th December, on his way to class, Tomi was stopped by another ‘refugee’ who told him that the Arrow Cross was conducting a police raid in the school. He had no choice but to linger all day in the city park. There, at about ten o’clock in the evening, he was stopped by the security guard of the Opera House. Figuring out that the boy was Jewish, the man offered him shelter in his own home, fully aware of the danger to himself and his family that such as gesture implied. Thereafter, Tomi visited the hospital from his new hiding place until, on the advice of his father, he moved to his uncle in the ‘protected house’ … where he survived the siege of Budapest on the sixth floor, living on two slices of bread and three glasses of water a day for several weeks.

Tomi was liberated on January 15, 1945. Ten days later he learned that both his parents and his sister had survived. … the Arrow Cross soldiers (seventeen of them) were tried and hanged for the murder of the seventy-three Jews, while Tomi’s father richly rewarded the man who had hidden and saved his son.

ÉVIKE:

She was my second cousin, but I thought of her as my closest relative because we were inseparable in Komárom, because we were both only children and of the same age, and because I, who was three weeks older, only seldom boasted with that advantage. My mother and Aunt Manci, Évike’s mother, were first cousins and close friends; they were even sent together to a boarding school in Wiesbaden. … Aunt Manci’s family was deported and Évike too was taken to Auschwitz. I often wonder: Who held her hand on the ramp as they stood in front of Mengele?   

NAIL POLISH

Our friend Ági C. also lived in Komárom. … We were mean little girls: Ági very much wanted to play with us, and she often had to pay a high price for that. We soiled her dress, and when we spilt nail polish over her hair had to be cut short. Aunt Ilus forbade her to come over to play with us, and Uncle Jenő complained to my grandparents. I was seriously scolded, and my grandfather wrote to my parents … I have her picture in front of me: I am deeply ashamed and feel very sad.

Ági was deported to Auschwitz with her mother where they were immediately gassed. Uncle Jenő, who was for years in a labour camp, survived those terrible times by some miracle and returned to Komárom in 1945. He found no one alive from his family and lived alone for months in their old house until he met Rózsi, an early acquaintance. She too had been sent to Auschwitz with her mother and her own daughter, also named Ági. The child clung to her grandmother. Therefore those two were sent to the gas chamber and Rózsi found herself on the other side with those who had survived the first selection. She was transferred from Auschwitz and worked in an ammunition factory. Broken, the lone survivor from her family, Rózsi too returned to Komárom. After a relatively short time, Rózsi and Uncle Jenő decided to marry.

Soon after, four or five young women, survivors who had been taken to Sweden after the liberation of the camps in order to help their recovery, returned to Komárom. They recognised Rózsi as the dreaded ‘capo’ (a prisoner assigned by the Nazis to supervise the rest of the prisoners in the camp) who beat and tortured them in Auschwitz and later in the ammunition factory where they too had been transferred. … They visited Uncle Jenő and – obviously – told him of what Rózsi had been known for in the camps.

Allegedly, Uncle Jenő pounced on Rózsi, who barely protected herself, and almost strangled her. With a great effort, the neighbours succeeded in pulling her off Rózsi; they placed the gasping woman on the grass and tried to revive her. Uncle Jenő went into the house, returned with a bag and disappeared from Komárom. It was later rumoured that he had gone to Palestine … two days later, Rózsi too left town.

   

Individualism & Collectivism:

According to the eminent ‘man of letters’ of the twentieth century, Raymond Williams (1983), the term ‘Socialist’ emerged as a philosophical description in the early nineteenth century. In that century and beyond, it could be used in two ways, which have had profound effects on the use of the term by radically different political tendencies. Of course, social was the merely descriptive term for a society in its now predominant sense of the system of common life; a social reformer wished to reform this system. But ‘social’ was also …

… an emphatic and distinguishing term, explicitly contrasted with ‘individual’ and ‘individualist’ theories of society.

Naturally, there has always been a great deal of interaction and overlap between these two meanings, but their varying effect can be seen in the beginning in the formation of the term. In the first sense, it was viewed as an extension of ‘liberalism’ as it referred to radical political reform of the social order, to develop, extend and secure the main liberal values for all members of society; political freedom, the ending of privileges and formal inequalities, social justice (conceived as ‘equity’ between different individuals and groups). In the second sense, it was seen as the ‘enemy’ of competitive, individualist forms of society, specifically industrial capitalism with its system of wage-labour. Truly social forms depended on practical co-operation and mutuality, which in turn could not be achieved while there was still private (individual) ownership of the means of production. Real freedom could not be achieved, basic equalities could not be ended, social justice (conceived as a just social order rather than simply ‘equity’ between individuals) could not be established unless a society based on private property was replaced by one based on social ownership and control.

Yet, also in this period, movements describing themselves as ‘socialist’, for example, the English Fabians, powerfully revived what was really a variant sense in which ‘socialism’ was seen as necessary to complete liberalism, rather than as an alternative theory of society. To George Bernard Shaw and others in Britain and Ireland, socialism was the economic side of the democratic ideal (Fabian Essays, 33) and its achievement was an inevitable prolongation of the earlier tendencies which Liberalism had represented. Opposing this view, and emphasising the resistance of the capitalist economic system to such ‘inevitable’ development, William Morris used the word communism. Engels, in his Preface of 1888, looking back to the Communist Manifesto which he and Marx had written in 1848, observed:

We could not have called it a ‘Socialist’ manifesto. In 1847, Socialism was a middle-class movement. Socialism was, on the continent at least, respectable; Communism was the very opposite.

Marx & Engels at work at the time of publishing The Communist Manifesto.

For a time, the stresses between employers and employees led to the worldwide dissemination of the very harsh and elementary form of communism which is associated with Karl Marx in particular. However, we need to view Marx’s political economy in its proper context as an integral shift in thinking about how to interpret the new industrial world which had grown up ‘like Topsy’ around the common man. It was only as the nineteenth century developed, according to H. G. Wells, that:

… men began to realise that property was not one simple thing but  a great complex of ownerships of different values and consequences … that there is a very great range of things, railways, machinery of various sorts, homes, cultivated gardens, pleasure-boats, for example, which need each to be considered very particularly to determine how far and under what limitations it may come under private ownership, and how far it falls into the public domain and may be administered and let out by the state in the collective interest.   

Wells, writing his well-known book in 1922, A Short History of the World, expressed the dichotomy in the following terms:

On the one hand are the individualists, who would protect and enlarge our present freedoms with what we possess, and on the other hand the socialists, who would pool our ownerships and restrain our proprietary acts. In practice one will find every graduation between the extreme individualist, who will scarcely tolerate a tax of any sort to support a government, and the communist, who would deny any possessions at all.

The ordinary socialist of today is what is called a collectivist; he would allow a considerable amount of private property, but put such affairs as education, transport, mines, land-owning, most mass production of staple articles, and the like, into the hands of a highly organised state. Nowadays there does seem to be a gradual convergence of reasonable men towards a scientifically studied and planned socialism.

Without such a programme, Engels had realised, there could not be a united Socialist Party permanently, and every attempt to found one would fail. Indeed, the political independence of the nascent Labour Party from the Liberal Party was always in doubt until in 1918 it accepted a Socialist constitution.

Socialism as a Matter of ‘Faith’ – Methodist or Marxist?:

British Socialists possessed a ‘faith’ in the righteousness and ultimate victory of their cause which acted as a powerful driving force. This faith owed as much to Methodism as to Marxism, being based both on Christian principles and the analysis of contemporary society first presented by Marx and Engels. Much of this analysis was modified, however, by Hyndman and the Fabians, by Morris and Blatchford, though it still had a comprehensive reality for those who accepted it. To its working-class adherents, like my own grandparents who founded and campaigned for it in Coventry, it gave a sense of purpose and pride in class consciousness; to middle-class philanthropists, it afforded the consolation that they were working in solidarity with a range of tendencies of social change and progress. As Pelling concluded in his seminal work, the history of the world had often shown the dynamic qualities of a faith devoutly held, like that of the early Christians, the Calvinist reformers and the millenarian sects of the seventeenth century. Faith may feed on illusions, but it is capable of conquering reality.

The fact was that the British working class as a whole had no use for the conception of violent revolution. Any leader who failed to recognise this could not expect to win widespread support. Economic grievances could temporarily arouse bitter discontent as they had done in the early years of the industrial revolution. But dislocations of this type were for the most part transitory: a permanent political organization of the working class needed to disavow the use of violence. Only those who recognised this could effectively set in motion the movement to form a Labour Party. At the time Keir Hardie (right) retired from the chairmanship of the ILP in 1900, it had captured trade-union support, with the ultimate objective of tapping trade union funds for the attainment of political power.

But soon the ILP was deeply in debt and was only saved from bankruptcy by the generosity of wealthy supporters such as George Cadbury, who, as a Quaker, appreciated its stance against the Boer War. With Hardie’s re-election to Parliament, and the reaction against imperialism, the ILP’s position steadily improved, and it began to build itself up again and gained fresh recruits. By 1906 it was as strong as it had not yet the full force of the Socialist revival of that time. The Labour Representation Committee was a pressure group founded in 1900 as an alliance of socialist organisations and trade unions, aimed at increasing representation for labour interests in the Parliament. The Socialists were a minority force within it, and even after the formation of the Labour Party and its adoption of Socialism as its political creed in 1918, many within the party were hostile to it as an ideology.  There is little doubt that most of the non-Socialist trade-union leaders would have been happy to stay in the Liberal Party, which most of them had belonged to in the past if the Liberals had made arrangements for a larger representation of the working classes among their Parliamentary candidates.

All along, there was little doubt that most of the non-Socialist trade-union leaders would have been happy to stay in the Liberal Party if that party had made arrangements for a larger representation of the working class among their Parliamentary candidates. Again and again, it was the fault of the official Liberal Party constituency caucuses that this did not happen; and it was the behaviour of these that set many of the workers’ leaders thinking in terms of a separate party. Even Keir Hardie’s revolt at Mid-Lanark in 1888 had been directed, not against Gladstone’s policies, but against the system by which the local association chose its candidate. The subsequent success of the ILP was largely due to the failure of its rivals, the Labour Electoral Association, to make any satisfactory terms with the Liberal Party for the fuller representation of Labour. Its leader, Threlfall, had been forced to admit the complete failure of its policy in 1894:

It is a curious commentary upon this ‘ideal system’ that of the thirteen Labour members representing England and Wales in the present House, four ran in opposition to, or without recognising the existence of the caucus, five represent constituencies where the miners absolutely dominate the position … and only four either captured the caucus or out-generalled it. It is … a waste of time to advise the working classes to attend … they regard it as a middle-class machine; they have neither the time nor the inclination to compete with the wire-pullers who work it, and they have a decided objection to being made the puppets of anyone. It has served its purpose, and it has carried the people through one state of its development: but as it exists today it is too narrow and too much hampered with class prejudice to be a reflex of the expanding democratic and labour sentiment.

Herbert Gladstone, later to become the Liberal Chief Whip, also recognised that the constituencies, for social, financial and trade reasons are extremely slow to adopt Labour candidates. The Fabians also found that their attempts to ‘permeate’ the associations with potential candidates were met with the refusal of the moneyed men to finance the caucus. The principal reason why money was required was that there was no system for the payment of MPs. This was a reform that the Liberal leaders might have taken up much earlier than they did, thus removing a motivating factor in the support given by smaller unions to the idea of a separate Labour Party. As early as 1897, E. Cowey, a prominent Lib-Lab leader of the Yorkshire Miners moved a resolution at the 1897 TUC in favour of State payment of MPs, saying that:

… money was still the golden key that opened the door to a seat in the House of Commons. Only large and powerful societies could … afford to keep their representatives in such a responsible and expensive position. … The payment of members was absolutely necessary to the success of the Labour movement.

But it was not until 1911, after the Osborne Judgement, that the Liberal Party gave this priority and passed it into law; in the meantime, the smaller unions had already wedded themselves to the idea of a separate Labour Party. For these reasons, it is not difficult to see why the Liberal Party failed to retain the popularity that it had once enjoyed among the ‘responsible’ leaders of the trade unions. As Ramsay MacDonald observed to Herbert Samuel, We didn’t leave the Liberals: They kicked us out and slammed the door in our faces. As the LEA faded away after 1895-96, the ILP steadily asserted itself as the hope of the working-class for parliamentary representation. Thus, the early components of the Labour Party formed a curious mixture of political idealists and hard-headed trade unionists: of convinced Socialists and loyal, but disheartened Gladstonian Liberals.

The Establishment of the Parliamentary Labour Party:

The great difficulty the LRC had to face was the maintenance of an independent political line by all its members. Richard Bell, one of the only two MPs representing it in 1900 Parliament, saw no need to hold himself aloof from the Liberals, and in 1904-5, when he refused to sign the Labour Party constitution, he had to be expelled. There was similar trouble with the three Labour MPs elected at by-elections before 1906: two of them, Shackleton and Henderson were reprimanded in 1904 for appearing in support of a Liberal by-election candidate. It was only in 1906, with the election of a substantial group of thirty MPs who drew a regular salary from the LRC, that the Labour Party was established as a genuine parliamentary party. Part of the problem had been the financial weakness of the Socialist societies as compared with the trade unions. Even in 1901, before many of the big trade unions switched their allegiance, the societies made up less than one-sixteenth of the total affiliated party membership. They were further weakened by the secession of the SDF and by the Fabian Society losing respect over its support for jingoism; the ILP was also, once more, on the verge of bankruptcy. In 1906, it contributed to the LRC based on a nominal sixteen thousand members, and the Socialist societies’ proportion of the LRC’s contributing membership had sunk to one-fiftieth.

Above: A Liberal Party rally during the 1906 General Election. Though often rowdy, rallies were vital in mobilising voters. As the early twentieth century progressed, political parties made increasing use of the new forms of mass media: radio and newsreel, in addition to newspapers and journals.

Furthermore, many of the political difficulties of the Labour Party’s early years arose from the fact that the ILP, although committed to the line of independence, was nevertheless sympathetic to the Liberal Party in policy terms. It favoured Free Trade over Chamberlain’s policy of Protection and was fiercely opposed the Education Act of 1902, which established state-controlled elementary schools, as did most Nonconformist supporters of both Liberal and Labour causes. Sidney Webb had had a role in the design of this act, but the Manchester Guardian was able to say of the 1901 ILP Conference that: What must strike a Liberal … is … how much of the proceedings are devoted to the advocacy of traditional Liberal principles.

After Champion was finally discredited, the former Liberals had it all their own way in the ILP’s leadership. Ramsay MacDonald, whom Hardie described as the party’s greatest intellectual asset, sided with the Liberals against the Fabian Socialists on almost every immediate issue of the time; and Hardie, who had been much more friendly to the Radicals since the outbreak of the South African War, in October 1901, publicly advocated a frank, open and above-board agreement … for well-defined purposes with the anti-war Liberals. Eighteen months later Hardie was apparently prepared to connive at MacDonald’s secret electoral understanding with the Liberal whips. With both the leaders and the rank-and-file of the Socialist wing showing little enthusiasm for the pacifist stance of MacDonald and Hardie, the non-Socialist elements gravitated further towards an alliance with the anti-war Liberals. Between 1903 and 1906 the new party machine had been brought into existence, and whatever the political views of its officers, it soon began to build up among them a vested interest in its maintenance, which has continued through to the present day, despite immense strains at times.

The officials of the great trade unions had made up their minds in favour of having a distinct party of Labour, and so long as their industrial strength continued to grow, the strength of the political organisation would also increase. In the pre-war years which followed, however, there were doubts about the value of political action, and the new industrial unions absorbed ‘syndicalist’ ideas from across the continent and the USA. These were often born out of a traditional distrust of ‘leaders’ within the movement which was often stoked by personal feuds between them as well as disagreements on policy; there were also stresses and strains arising out of wars, rumours of war and revolutions in Europe. Some of the unions, especially the Miners’ Federation, ‘the Fed’, suffered from the peaks and troughs of the international trade cycle, resulting in further radicalisation. Others among the ‘new unions’ of 1889 became more moderate as they became more established. In the thirty years of its life, the new party increased its aggregate poll and share of the vote in every General Election it fought. Despite the persistence of its plurality of ideas and interests, or perhaps because of it, the essential unity of the party remained intact. As Pelling concluded:

The association of Socialist faith and trade-union interest, of hope for an ideal future and fear for an endangered present, seemed on the point of disruption at times: yet it survived, for a variety of reasons … because in the years before the party’s birth there had been men and women who believed that the unity of the working-class movement, both in industry and politics, was an object to be striven for, just as now most of their successors regard it as an achievement to be maintained.

In British politics as a whole, the electoral system underwent profound changes over the early twentieth century. In 1900, only seven out of ten adult men (and no women) were qualified to vote. Four million men were excluded from the franchise and there were nearly half a million plural voters, including around two thousand men with four or more votes. Despite the continued restrictions on the franchise,  the SDF continued to field independent socialist candidates. The picture above was taken during the Haggerston by-election of July 1908 and shows a suffragette, ‘Miss Maloney’ speaking from a Clarion Van in the cause of the SDF candidate, Herbert Burrows. During the five-day campaign in the safe Liberal seat, the van was parked outside the Liberal Party HQ. Burrows was a popular figure in East London, where he had helped Annie Besant organise the 1888 matchgirls’ strike at Bryant and May’s factory. The issue of female suffrage was a strong factor in the campaign, and the Liberal candidate, Warren, had the support of Mary MacArthur’s National Union of Women Workers. However, many notable suffragettes, including the Pankhursts, were opposed to his candidature, because he was a supporter of Asquith. The result brought a victory for the Tory, Rupert Guinness, the brewer, with Burrows finishing in third place with half the votes gained by Warren.

After the ‘Landslide’, Erosion & the Rise of Labour:

Above: The Bethnal Green by-election of 1914. Door-to-door canvassing was, at it still remains, an important aspect of electioneering. Though women did not get the vote until 1918, this candidate seeks support on the doorstep from a female shopkeeper. His attention is an early indication of the growing importance of women at election-time.

The Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith had initiated, between 1906 and 1914, a series of social and political reforms of a far-reaching character. But the emphasis here is placed upon the period 1914-22 in identifying the role of the Labour Party concerning Liberal decline. Whether Dangerfield’s idea of the ‘strange death of Liberal England’ between 1910 and 1914 is a valid thesis is still strongly debated among historians. Its significance lies in its identification of the basic strains upon Liberalism caused by the political and industrial crises. Liberalism was, and still is (at least to some extent), an ideology of individual and social conscience. It was the 1914-18 War which tested that conscience rather than the earlier threats. The War also brought about an independent Labour representation in Parliament, a result of the breakdown of the Gladstone-MacDonald Pact of 1903. The nature of ‘total war’ brought many basic Liberal principles into question. It led to the leadership of Asquith being challenged first with the creation of a more broadly based coalition in May 1915 and then being superseded following the split with Lloyd George in December 1916. For the Liberal Party, this meant a rift, never to be healed, between Asquithian and Coalition Liberals.

Universal male suffrage was achieved in 1918, when, after a long struggle, women over the age of thirty were also permitted to vote. In 1928, the age limit was lowered to twenty-one, equal with men. The principle of single-member, equal-sized constituencies was accepted in 1885, though it was not completely achieved until 1948. Voting behaviour also changed significantly. Most obviously, Labour replaced the Liberals as one of the two major political parties after 1918. The beginnings of this change, which took effect on a largely local and regional basis, can be seen in the map of the 1918 General Election, shown below. In 1918, British politics was based upon the relationship between the Liberal and Conservative parties. They were, in many ways, sides of the same coin. They accepted both the logic of consensus politics and the benefits of a capitalist society.

John Buchan, the Conservative politician and writer, described the 1918 General Election as a ‘blunder’.  He claimed that Statesmen, who had criticised soldiers harshly for their blindness, were now in their own province to be no less myopic. The instinct which led to the election was right, but its conduct was disastrous. For the sitting members, the test of patriotism was a solitary division in the House of Commons in the preceding May on a criticism of the Government by a distinguished staff-officer, one which was neither factious or unfair. Those who had remained ‘docile’ were given ‘coupons’ to fight the election on behalf of the Coalition Government, but the ‘malcontents’ were outlawed. The coupon candidates swept the board, giving the Government a huge working majority with 484 members; Labour returned fifty-nine members, and the non-coalition Liberals were reduced to little more than a score of seats. But although this was a landslide for Lloyd George, that victory for ‘the man who won the war’ should not blind us to the poor performance of the Asquithian Liberals, the vulnerability of many of the Coalition Liberals with their seats in industrial working-class areas to Labour advance and the 22.2 per cent of the total vote received by the Labour Party. ‘Fusion’ between Coalition Liberals and Conservatives seemed possible in 1919-20, the creation of a ‘centre’ party to counter the reactionary right and the revolutionary left, but Lloyd George did not grasp this opportunity and by 1921 it was too late.

The result of the ‘coupon election’ was one of the least representative parliaments in British history. A batch of leaderless trade unionists constituted the official Opposition; the rest was, in Lloyd George’s words, ‘a chamber of commerce’. It was an assembly of well-to-do mediocrities. The election created impatience in many classes, in returning soldiers, in munitions workers and in Labour circles in general. It gravely weakened the prestige of Parliament, which had been largely in abeyance during the war, and which could not afford any decline in its status at a time when many minds were turning away from constitutionalism. Above all, it weakened the authority of Britain in the coming peace councils. Lloyd George went to these councils bound by extravagant election pledges. Overall, the first three decades of the century witnessed the development of class-based voting, with the Labour support concentrated in areas of heavy industry in Wales, the Midlands and North of England and Central Scotland, while the Conservatives held a near-monopoly of seats in the rural South of England, and the Liberals held on to the more sparsely-populated constituencies in the ‘Celtic fringes’ of Wales and Scotland and, to begin with, the more rural areas of East Anglia, Yorkshire and the North-East of England. This set the voting patterns for the rest of the century. In her diary for 1918, Beatrice Webb made a ‘prophetic’ statement:

The Liberal Party which had for years governed the Empire has been reduced to an insignificant fraction with all its leaders without exception at the bottom of the poll. … Lloyd George with his conservative phalanx is apparently in complete command of the situation; as the only alternative Government there stands the Labour Party with its completely Socialist programme and its utopia of the equalitarian state.

Syndicalists & Socialist ‘Heroes’ of the Unemployed.

Outside Parliament, the Socialists kept up their agitation for ‘Work, not charity’ relentlessly during the first decade of the century, the SDF leading the unemployed on regular sorties into the heart of Mayfair. The photograph below of Westminster unemployed, printed from an SDF lantern slide, gives a vivid picture of the strength of the demonstrators as they ‘invaded’ Berkeley Square in November 1905. The Central Workers’ Committee had organised a vast demonstration of the unemployed. Assembling on the morning of 20 November on the Embankment, contingents marched from all parts of the capital. From Islington, Shoreditch, Hackney and Bethnal Green, unemployed men were led by Dick Greenwood of the SDF and Parson Brooks, the ‘socialist chaplain’. Two thousand walked from Hammersmith and Fulham, stopping on the way in Eaton Square to eat sandwiches provided by the SDF. The Woolwich men, two-hundred-strong, tramped to Greenwich, crossing the river by steamboat. Fifteen hundred arrived from Poplar, organised by the Labour Representation Committee and led by George Lansbury and two of his aldermen. The trade unions supporting the demonstration unfurled their magnificent silk banner with colours of crimson and gold, green and silver, bearing the names of the organised working class; the Gasworkers, Riggers, Coal Porters, French Polishers, Machine Rulers and many more.

As the march moved away from the Embankment, they were led by the banner of the Westminster Unemployed, as seen in the photograph, with the slogan by heavens our rights are worth fighting for. Curse your charity, we want work was the theme as the SDF with trade union support swept towards the homes of the wealthy. Twenty thousand roared approval at a Hyde Park rally after the ‘incursion’; as Jack Williams told them, you have starved too long. … come out and parade the West End every day. He read a telegram from Keir Hardie urging them not to hide in the slums, but to come out and back us in fighting to win the right to work. Like Hardie, Williams was born into poverty and escaped from the workhouse at the age of ten, climbing the walls of the Hornsey Union to freedom. The other speakers at the rally included the trade union leaders Margaret Bondfield and Harry Gosling, but it was the fiery passion of Jack Williams that had the crowd roaring support. He led the workless to the doors of the rich, marching them on one occasion down Bond Street as policemen stood purposefully with their backs to the jewellers’ windows. On another ‘invasion day’, they marched to Belgrave Square, and caused consternation as a red carpet laid across the pavement for a society wedding was torn to shreds by the boots of the unemployed.

Earlier in the year, London had seen the arrival of two marches from the Midlands. The first was from Raunds of Northampton, members of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, going in a body to the War Office to protest against cheap labour policy of the department in purchasing service boots at prices below an agreed tariff. Once again, the organiser of the march was a prominent member of the SDF, James Gribble, who had worked in the boot and shoe trade since he was twelve years old. He organised the march on military lines, selecting only the fittest men from hundreds of volunteers and appointing three ‘officers’ to take command of his men who were divided into six companies. With bicycle outriders and a horse-drawn ambulance, General Gribble, as he was dubbed, took no risks of his army falling by the wayside.

Another procession to London to be commemorated by a series of postcards was the march of four hundred unemployed from Leicester, representing two thousand men and their families. Negatives of the original cards, including the one above, were sent to Leicester Museum by an old socialist, Robert Barnes, who produced the photographs, including that shown above, from those in the possession of the organising secretary of the march, George White. Their journey was arduous and miserable, the men trampling through driving continuous rain, shoes leaking, with topcoats made from sacks and living on bread, cheese and cocoa. The march was supposed to be welcomed in London by the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party at a mass meeting in Hyde Park in support of the Unemployed Bill, which was opposed by many trade unions because it provided that the unemployed under local authority assistance should work at less than the union rate for the public works they undertook. Along the way, the marchers learned that the King had refused their request for an audience and it was a tired, ragged and soddened army that was given shelter and a meat tea by the Salvation Army at Edgware and asked by Ramsay MacDonald to sign the pledge! On Whit Monday the weather brightened and so did the men, marching cheerfully to Parliament Hill Fields (shown above), where MacDonald addressed a crowd on more than six thousand on behalf of the ILP. Keir Hardie also sent a telegram describing their march as ‘heroic’.

An unusual postcard was that shown above, depicting the SDF agitator Ernest Marklew dressed in broad-arrowed prison clothes, picking oakum, published in 1906. The card is one of a small of socialist commemorative cards that belonged to a pioneer member of the ILP. It is a reminder of the long years of struggle by early socialists to establish the right of free speech in public places. The SDF had long been harassed by police while holding open-air meetings and heavy fines and imprisonment with hard labour had been imposed by middle-class magistrates on socialists accused of obstruction and refusal to pay fines. At Nelson in Lancashire, as well as in other towns and cities including the capital, socialists persisted in speaking at regular ‘pitches’ despite repeated harassment. As one speaker was arrested, another one would take his place, and thousands would turn out every Sunday, some from curiosity, others to lend support, as police fought their way through crowds to drag away speaker after speaker. The secretary of the Nelson branch of the SDF, Bryan Chapman, was also imprisoned during the free speech fight there. Marklew was sent to prison for fourteen days and Chapman got seven days. Arrests and battles followed each Sunday for months and the usual attendance of hundreds for an SDF open-air meeting swelled to thousands. The photograph of Marklew (above) was posted in a studio and sold by the SDF to raise money for the socialist cause.

In 1908, the Manchester unemployed tried a new tactic to draw public attention to their plight. On Sunday, 14 September, following a meeting of about five hundred workless men, they were urged to march on Manchester Cathedral and the photograph above shows them pouring into the cathedral during worship, watched by the mostly middle-class communicants. The Dean, Bishop Weldon, appeared and agreed to speak on unemployment if they could come back during the afternoon. That afternoon nearly three thousand men assembled in Stevenson Square. About fifteen hundred then marched to the cathedral where the bishop welcomed them but said it wasn’t the province of the church to organise work but, if it was necessary to raise a special fund, many of us will willingly deprive ourselves to aid what is being done. The vicar of Rochdale preached a sermon in which he offered sympathy on behalf of the Church. When the men interrupted, the Dean had to declare the service over. After the service, the leader of the unemployed, a man named Freewood, read the prayer that he had intended to read in the cathedral, ending with…

O Lord we beseech thee to move thy servant Bishop Knox (Archbishop of Canterbury) to see that something more than sympathy is needed and that his influence brought to bear on our Parliament might bear some fruit.

The rising militancy of the trade unions and the determination of the government to meet the militancy with armed force if necessary was shown first during the Cambrian Combine strike in 1910 in the Rhondda Valleys which led to serious rioting in Tonypandy and clashes with police leading to the death of one miner. Winston Churchill, then Liberal Home Secretary, deployed both cavalry and infantry units, the latter drawing bayonets on picketing miners. I have written about in detail elsewhere on this site. The picture above (top) shows miners waiting to go into a mass ‘Federation’ meeting at the Empire Theatre, Tonypandy in November 1910. Below it, Trehafod miners are pictured picking coal from the slag-heaps during the dispute, which continued into 1911.

Above: A soup kitchen during the Cambrian Combine strike, 1910-11.

Tom Mann, one of the leaders of the great dock strike of 1889, founder of the militant Workers’ Union, first secretary of the ILP and first secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, arrived back in England in May 1910, after eight years of trade union activity in Australia. By that time, he was a labour leader of international renown with a capacity for appearing at the centre of a struggle, as a catalyst for action. He returned from his years abroad as an advocate for syndicalism, or ‘industrial unionism’, as a means of winning working-class power. Within eight weeks of arriving home, he had launched a small publication, The Industrial Syndicalist. He wrote,

… What is called for? What will have to be the essential conditions for the success of any such movement? That it should be avowedly and clearly revolutionary in aim and method. We therefore most certainly favour strikes and we will always do our best to help strikers.

He was not to have to wait long before leading one of the fiercest strikes of the decade. Following his ideas of industrial unionism, by November he had formed the thirty-six unions organising transport into the National Transport Federation. After winning the first stage of the battle against the International Shipping Federation for union recognition, the lesson of solidarity was clear in Liverpool on 28 June 1911, when four thousand dockers came out demanding recognition of the National Union of Dock Labourers. Churchill drafted troops into Liverpool and sent two gunboats up the Mersey with their guns trained on the port. Cavalry and infantry with fixed bayonets were deployed and hundreds of long, stout staves were ordered for the police. Mann answered this by telling the Liverpool strikers:

Let Churchill do his utmost, his best or his worst, let him order ten times more troops to Liverpool, not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can take the vessels out of the docks to sea.

On 24 August, with all their demands conceded, the strike was called off. The success of the dockers and the railwaymen, during the first national railway stoppage, seemed to inspire a revolt of women workers in the area of London’s dockland during a heatwave in August. The photograph above showing the distribution of loaves of bread outside the Labour Institute in Bermondsey survives as a relic of an uprising of the unorganised. Women and girls walked out of jam, biscuit and pickle factories and marched around Bermondsey calling on other women in the food factories to join them in claiming an increase in their incredibly low wages. Out came the women and girls from the factories with household names; Spillers’, Pearce Duffs’, Hartley’s and Lipton’s, where they worked for as little as seven shillings a week. Laughing, singing, welcoming the escape from the stifling factories, they were joined by Labour leaders including Ben Tillett, the Dockers’ leader (pictured below), Mary MacArthur, Herbert Burrows and Dr Salter addressing fifteen thousand of their fellow strikers in Southwark Park. Within three weeks, increases had been won at eighteen of the twenty-one factories where the women had struck.

It is doubtful whether British society has ever been so beset with contradictions as it was in 1914. A Liberal Government was in power, though only just; it depended on the votes of Labour and Irish Nationalist MPs. A vast programme of social reform lay behind it, but a vast agenda of social unrest awaited it every day. There was widespread working-class unrest; beginning in 1910, there had been a wave of strikes, conducted with extreme bitterness on all sides, sweeping through the country, with every prospect of a final confrontation in the autumn of 1914. Ben Tillett, looking back on these years in 1931, called them:

A strange, hectic period of our economic history! It was a great upsurge of elemental forces. It seemed as if the dispossessed and disinherited class in various parts of the country were all simultaneously moved to assert their claims upon society.

‘Memories and Refections’, 1931.

The Disunited Kingdom at the Outbreak of War:

It was to a disunited kingdom, with a militant Suffragette movement ‘alongside’ militant trade unionism in Britain, the Army in Ireland in a state of mutiny and Ulster on the verge of civil war over ‘Home Rule’, that war came in August. At once another contradiction was exposed. The ruling Liberal Party was strongly tinged with pacifism, yet it was also the Party which had carried through, under Lord Haldane, the most effective military reforms in British history. The people as a whole were largely unaware of them; indeed it was almost completely unaware of its Army, except when war was actually in progress, or when disagreeable occurrences like the Curragh Mutiny reached the headlines and was the cause of ‘wild delight’ on the opposition Conservative benches in the House of Commons. A powerful counter-note to this was struck by a Labour MP, Colonel Ward, which would nevertheless have been considered dangerous had it been uttered outside the protection of privilege that the House provided. In ringing tones, he warned the Tories that, if they wanted a Civil War, they could have it: If there was to be a mutiny in the Army, it would a mutiny of the working class. Britain was a naval power, much admired around the world as the shield of British democracy, but the Army, characterised in Rudyard Kipling’s poem Tommy, was viewed with far less respect, particularly by the lower middle class and the ‘respectable working class’ and especially in the ‘chapel-going’ areas of Wales and the rural Midlands and ‘West Country’ of England, where ‘red-coats’ were seen as ‘scum’.

For socialists, although not all pacifists, the war was a negation of internationalism, splitting the movement as workers from one country hastened to shoot down the workers of another. On 2 August 1914, just two days before the declaration of war, a huge anti-war meeting was held in Trafalgar Square. Called by the British section of the International Socialist Bureau, a manifesto, whose signatories included Keir Hardie and Arthur Henderson, was read to the gathering, it ended with the words down with the class rule, down with the rule of brute force, down with war, up with the peaceful rule of the people. Speakers included Will Thorne, Mary MacArthur, Margaret Bondfield, Herbert Burrows and Keir Hardie. Three days later, the Labour Party supported the war. H. G. Wells proclaimed the sword had been drawn for peace. Labour and trade union leaders joined in recruiting campaigns and Will Thorne became a Lieutenant Colonel in the West Ham Volunteers. Workers enlisted in their hundreds of thousands and it was left to the pacifist section of the labour movement together with a handful of true internationalists to preserve the socialist conscience. The ILP published an anti-war manifesto that declared:

Out of the darkness and the depth we hail our working class comrades of every land. Across the roar of guns we send sympathy and greetings to the German socialists. …

This was truly a cry out of the darkness.  The slogans on the posters in the recruiting photograph on the right attest to the prevailing jingoism of the times.  In his own constituency of Aberdare, Keir Hardie, the apostle of British socialism was booed as he declared he was going to oppose this war in the interests of civilisation and the class to which he belonged.

These words were brave and sincere, but also soon lost in the vortex of hate which soon flowed from the outbreak of war, and a tired and saddened Hardie slowly died as the workers rushed in their hundreds of thousands to join the recruiting queues to enlist for the bloodiest slaughter in the history of mankind to date. The same British workers who had been hailing their German proletarian comrades just days before, now saw them as enemies and aggressors, crying out Down with Germany!

The dominant mood, in the early August days of 1914, was one of euphoria, as can be seen on the faces in the photograph above, taken outside the recruiting office.

The weather seemed to have a lot to do with it.  A mood of national unity was suddenly reborn, one which leading figures in the Labour movement found difficult to resist and remain in leadership. When Ramsay MacDonald (pictured below) resigned as Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party because of his own opposition to the war, Henderson was ready to take his place.

But resignation in these circumstances did not come cheaply either. One contemporary who had met him once before 1914 and had failed to be impressed,  except by his remarkable good looks. M. A. Hamilton had also heard him speak after this and had been considerably impressed. But what had ‘thrilled’ his observers in 1914 was his going out into the wilderness:

We accepted the legend of rejected office, and gloried in it, as in the courage of his assault on Edward Grey. Meeting him in those days at 44 Bedford Square, one could not but admire an aloof dignity in which there was no hint of self-conscious pomp. This admiration steadily mounted, as MacDonald was singled out for attack. He was assailed, incessantly, as a pro-German pacifist who cared nothing for his country. He got all the brick-bats; they were numerous and edgy, and he minded them, a lot.

Arthur Henderson was, according to E. A. Jenkins in his biography, From Foundry to Foreign Office (1944), a typical Northcountryman, who liked to talk about religious or political ‘topics of the hour’. Henderson became a Methodist in 1879 (having previously been a Congregationalist) and became a local lay-preacher. Henderson worked at Robert Stephenson and Sons’ General Foundry Works from the age of twelve. After finishing his apprenticeship there aged seventeen, he moved to Southampton for a year and then returned to work as an iron moulder (a type of foundryman) in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After he lost his job in 1884, he concentrated on preaching. In 1892, Henderson entered the complex world of trade union politics when he was elected as a paid organiser for the Friendly Society of Iron Founders and its representative on the North East Conciliation Board. Henderson believed that strikes caused more harm than they were worth and tried to avoid them whenever he could. For this reason, he opposed the formation of the General Federation of Trade Unions, as he was convinced that it would lead to more strikes.

In 1900, Henderson (shown on the left in the photo from 1906, with other leading figures in the party), was one of the 129 trade union and socialist delegates who passed Keir Hardie’s motion to create the Labour Representation Committee (LRC). In 1903, he was elected Treasurer of the LRC and was also elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Barnard Castle at a by-election.

In 1906, the LRC changed its name to the Labour Party and won 29 seats at the general election. In 1908, when Hardie resigned as Leader of the Labour Party, Henderson was elected to replace him. He remained Leader until his own resignation two years later, in 1910. In 1915, following Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s decision to create a coalition government, Henderson became the first member of the Labour Party to become a member of the Cabinet, as President of the Board of Education.

‘Total War’ – the Views of Working-class Men & Women:

Despite the vitriolic attacks on pacifist politicians like MacDonald at home, there was a more satirical tone expressed in the voice of the Army in its marching songs as it arrived in the fields of Flanders and northern France. This was the Regular Army, the sardonic, unemotional, matter-of-fact voice of the widely-despised ‘Tommy Atkins’ who, as usual, was being expected to do the dirty work, was quite prepared to do it and was not sentimental about it. It had few illusions and its attitudes, had they been aware of them, would have further shocked their fellow-countrymen. In contrast to the general public mood, it was not fuelled by hatred of Germany but, in true mercenary spirit, it would have been equally ready to fight the French. Its motto was, We’ll do it. What is it? Sixty per cent of the men in the ranks of the 1914 British Expeditionary Force were reservists, called back to the colours. For many of them, their return to Army life was a distressing uprooting from their homes and occupations. Yet theirs was also an odd satisfaction in obeying the call.

But the Regular Army, even with its reservists, was simply not large enough for the needs of continental war. There would need to be something else, and this need was quickly perceived by Lord Kitchener, the new Secretary of State for War. Out of this perception came the ‘Kitchener Armies’ or ‘New Army’, an extraordinary manifestation of patriotism which brought over 2.25 million volunteers into the colours in the first fourteen months of the war. As the Front-line war dragged on over the next three years, the endless casualty lists recorded the toll of human life; the physical destruction mounted day by day. It was not surprising that nerves frayed and revulsion mounted among those who had to endure all these sufferings. To make them endurable, the soldiers invented a class-conscious vocabulary and style of humour all of their own, closely modelled upon that of the ‘old Regulars’, as demonstrated in the following anonymous parody of the parable of the sower:

Some fell by the wayside, and the Sergeant-Majors sprang up and choked them. 

Making shells

The demand of the generals for more and more young men for the muddy walk to mutilation and death on the Western Front inevitably resulted in the depletion of labour available for industry and the increase in opportunities for women to replace them at home. Of course, there were problems and a degree of resistance especially from male workers in skilled industries such as engineering. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers, an all-male union with a long tradition of craft skill, saw the introduction of lower-paid unskilled labour as a threat to post-war job security and wage-rates. The answer was the ‘Shells and Fuses Agreement’ whereby the unions would accept ‘dilution of labour’ for the duration of the war. In effect, the trade unions were asked to accept the introduction of a twelve-hour working day, the unlimited subdivision of jobs, the scrapping of apprenticeship agreements and the introduction of unskilled labour to produce the hardware of war. Safeguards and rights painstakingly fought for by trades unionists over half a century or more were set aside until the end of the war. No similar sacrifice was to be asked of the employers who were enabled to make rich profits by speeding up production and introducing unrestricted unskilled labour at cheap wage-rates.

Above: Oxide breaking at Beckton Gas Works.

The doubts of trade unionists about the large-scale introduction of female labour into industries were expressed in a composite resolution at the 1915 Trades Union Congress from two craft unions asking for committees to be set up to ensure the replacement of women at the close of the war by more suitable male labour. The real threat, however, was the inequality of pay between men and women and, to their credit, many trade union leaders insisted on equal pay for women doing equal work, achieving some limited success. The government sided firmly with employers against the unions and in June 1915 the new coalition government dropped all pretence at negotiation on the question of existing industrial practices and introduced a Munitions of War Bill to force dilution of labour by unskilled men and women on the unions. The war opened many industries to women and there is no shortage of propaganda-style photographs like the one above, showing women in ‘unladylike’ work, cleaning railway engines, filling shells, and humping coal sacks. Although of an official nature, they do represent women at the kind of heavy industrial work that would not have been readily open to them before the outbreak of the war.

It was the mass participation of women in the War effort – in industry, in the Civil Service, and in the Forces – which produced the result so deeply desired and defiantly demanded by the pre-war Suffragette Movement. In March 1917, the House of Commons passed the Women’s Suffrage Bill by 341 votes to 62, setting out a scheme for electoral reform to come into operation at the end of the War. The motion was moved by Asquith, who, according to The Times’ Michael McDonagh, gave a fine speech recanted the stout opposition which he gave to votes for women before the War. Women, he said, had worked out their own salvation in the War. But, even in the latter stages of the war, women’s participation was not greeted with universal enthusiasm by their menfolk at the Front, nor did they admire how it was sometimes ‘forcibly’ obtained. One soldier’s letter to his wife which was censored from May 1918 was quite threatening on the subject, also perhaps revealing the social conservatism which existed in working-class homes:

Well, I am afraid there will be trouble if they try to take married women into the WAAC. We men can stand a lot, but they are nearing the danger zone when they wish to force our wives into service. Goodness, the damned infernal impudence of wanting our wives! Why, if anyone came for you while I was at home, I’d slit his throat open. I’m not bragging; I’m saying what I mean. How little they understand us, they are running up against trouble with a vengeance; they will find they have signed their death warrant.

Lloyd George’s Visit to Clydeside & Labour’s Socialist Programme:

While many trade union and Labour leaders who supported the war acquiesced in the increased exploitation of industrial workers, other sections began a wave of resistance, demanding payment of the proper rate for the job where new workers were introduced, controls on company profits and a guarantee that the men away at the front would have jobs waiting for them when they returned after the war. The strongest opposition was led by the Clyde Workers’ Committee, a group of shop stewards elected directly from the shop floor under the chairmanship of Willie Gallacher. The Clyde workers had already conducted a strike for higher pay in February 1915, and the newly formed committee was more than ready for Lloyd George (above) when he travelled to the Clyde at Christmas of that year as Minister of Munitions to plead the case for dilution as a patriotic duty. Against the advice of his officials, Lloyd George was obliged to meet with the shop stewards and hear out their case for workers’ control of the factories. At a meeting in St. Andrew’s Hall held on Christmas Day, he had the experience of having to stand on the platform while the entire audience got to their feet and sang The Red Flag.

The effect of the protests on the Clyde and the continuing agitation by women trade unionists did result in 1916 in an amendment to the Munitions Act which gave statutory force in ‘the rate for the job’ where women did the same skilled work as men. Unions recruited the new women workers and by 1918 the membership of those affiliated to the TUC had risen by well over two million since the outbreak of war, totalling two and a half million. Women and girls who had been unorganised domestic servants, and/ or working-class housewives had been introduced to a range of jobs never before open to them and most importantly, they had been brought into the organised trade union movement for the first time. Even before the end of the war, however, the growing divisions in British society, later to be signalled by the General Strike of 1926, were already widening. In January 1916, the government had arrested Gallacher, Johnny Muir and Walter Bell, the leaders of the Clyde Workers’ Committee, on charges of attempting to cause mutiny, sedition or disaffection among the civilian population. Ernest Bevin, speaking in the Leeds Coliseum on 3 June 1917, joined in the radical trade union war of words with the Coalition Government:

We all know that in the industrial world the capitalists would give us peace tomorrow if we would surrender. But I am not going to surrender. I am not going to be a pacifist in the industrial movement. I believe that even in our own country there will have to be the shedding of blood to attain the freedom we require …

In 1916, David Lloyd George forced Asquith to resign and replaced him as Prime Minister. Arthur Henderson became a member of the small War Cabinet with the post of Minister without Portfolio. (The other Labour representatives who joined Henderson in Lloyd George’s coalition government were John Hodge, who became Minister of Labour, and George Barnes, who became Minister of Pensions.) Henderson resigned in August 1917 after his proposal for an international conference on the war was rejected by the rest of the Cabinet. He then turned his attention to building a strong constituency-based support network for the Labour Party. Previously, it had little national organisation, based largely on branches of unions and socialist societies. Working with Ramsay MacDonald and Sidney Webb, Henderson in 1918 established a national network of constituency organisations. They operated separately from the trade unions and the National Executive Committee and were open to everyone sympathetic to the party’s policies. Henderson lost his seat in the ‘Coupon Election’ of 14 December 1918 but returned to Parliament in 1919 after winning a by-election in Widnes. He then secured the adoption of a comprehensive statement of party policies, as drafted by Sidney Webb. Entitled “Labour and the New Social Order,” it remained the basic Labour platform until 1950. It proclaimed a socialist party whose principles included a guaranteed minimum standard of living for everyone, nationalisation of industry, and heavy taxation of large incomes and of wealth.

Bevin’s ‘Docker’s Breakfast’, Poverty & ‘Poplarism’:

There were mutinies in the armed forces which continued during the period of demobilisation into 1919, reminding the upper classes rather uncomfortably of the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent revolutions on the continent. They were followed by a series of strikes which led The Times (27 September 1919) to proclaim that this war, like the war with Germany, must be a fight to the finish. The civil strife which had arisen towards the end of the war continued principally among the miners, shipbuilders, railwaymen and farm workers, that is, in the declining sections of the economy. Ernest Bevin, pictured below, the national organiser of the Dockers’ Union, used his own experience of poverty and his deep knowledge of and feeling for the dockworkers in presenting the case for higher wages to the Shaw inquiry of 1920. The potatoes are peeled into a chipped enamel bowl, while the little girl watching is wearing boots that must have come from her brother.

‘The Dockers’ KC’ was an appreciative title won by Ernest Bevin when he argued the case for a sixteen shillings a day minimum wage and de-casualisation of their labour at the Shaw Inquiry in 1920. Bevin, a thirty-nine-year-old national organiser of the Dockers’ Union was given the task of putting the case for the Transport Federation. His performance was brilliant. Though lacking in formal education, he spoke for eleven hours, vividly describing the history, work, poverty, danger of a docker’s life and scoring heavily in exchanges with the Chairman of the Port of London Authority, the wealthy Lord Devonport, an old enemy of dock workers. While the two sides were involved in academic arguments as to whether or not a docker and his family could live on the employers’ proposed wage of three pounds thirteen shillings and sixpence a week, Bevin went shopping in Camden Town. That evening he prepared a ‘docker’s breakfast’ (shown above) and took the plates into court.

When Professor Bowley, the employers’ expert witness, went into the witness box, calculating the precise number of calories on which a man could live and work, Bevin pushed scraps of bacon, bread and fish he had prepared before him and asked the Cambridge professor if that was sufficient for a man who had to carry heavy sacks of grain all day. The witness protested. You have never carried 2cwt bags on your back continuously for eight hours? Bevin fired. The professor answered that he hadn’t, and Bevin then produced a menu from the Savoy Hotel and asked him to calculate the calories in a shipowners’ lunch! The outcome of the Inquiry was a triumph for Bevin, and the court condemned the system of casual labour, awarding a national minimum wage of sixteen shillings a day for a forty-four hour week. Bevin went on, of course, to become a leading figure in the trade union and Labour movement over the next four decades.

Historians often date Britain’s ‘hungry years’ as beginning in 1929 with the ‘Great Depression’, but for many workers, they never had a beginning, since the depression, unemployment and hunger were a permanent condition of their lives and one from which they received only occasional relief. In March 1921, Poplar, a borough in London’s East End, blighted with mass unemployment, casual dock labour, rotten housing and slum landlords, reached a breaking point. It was hardly equitable that a rich borough such as a Westminster, where a penny rate raised more than thirty thousand pounds, maintained only eleven hundred on outdoor relief, while Poplar, where a penny rate raised only three thousand pounds had to maintain forty-four thousand. The East End of London as a whole, with only a quarter of the paying capacity of the West End, had seventeen times the liability. Faced with a massive increase in the rate, a burden the poor could not carry, the Council refused to cut the level of relief to the unemployed and decided not to pay the quarter of a million pounds due to the central authority, the London County Council, carrying a rate of four shillings and fourpence in the pound, to meet the needs of the Council and the Board of Guardians.

This was the essence of the conflict that was to lead to the imprisonment of the mayor and the majority of the socialist members of the Council and the introduction of a new word into the English language, ‘Poplarism’. Summoned to appear at the High Court on 29 July the Council marched in procession from Bow with the mace bearer at their head, the mayor wearing his chain of office and all beneath a banner saying ‘Poplar Borough Council marching to the High Court and possibly to prison’. Following the councillors, who included Edgar Lansbury and his father, the ‘uncrowned King of the East End’, the kindly George Lansbury, came the people of Poplar. The court ordered payment, the councillors refused and in September, nearly the whole of the Council was sent to prison for contempt. Fifteen thousand marched to Holloway, many of the women carrying babies (as shown in the photo above) where Minnie Lansbury and four other women were taken. While Herbert Morrison deplored their actions and J. H. Thomas called the councillors ‘wastrels’, the fight continued even inside the prison.

A council meeting was held in Brixton Prison, the women being brought from Holloway to attend. Outside, ten thousand enrolled in the Tenants’ Defence League and pledged to refuse to pay rent if the councillors asked. The High Court released the councillors in October so that they could attend a conference to discuss the whole matter. The result was a victory for Poplar. The Council had made their first charge the care of the sick, orphaned, aged, widowed, workless and homeless and forced the introduction of a Bill equalising rate burdens between the rich and poor. The two photographs of Poplar residents and councillors are taken from an album presented to one of the councillors at a Council meeting the following year. The caption to the picture of the Poplar women carrying the loaves given by the Guardians is entitled ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ while the photograph of the councillors features Alderman Hopwood with his pipe, ‘surrounded by his bodyguard’.

The photograph above shows the outing of Norland Ward Women’s Group of the North Kensington Labour Party. The woman on the left in the front row is carrying the Party’s red flag and most of the group are wearing red rosettes. The substantial-looking Labour Club proclaims ‘Socialism’ and ‘Recreation’ and the women in their prettiest dresses have no doubt earned their break from the shop, factory, housework and local canvassing for the party. Charabanc day trips were a popular working-class leisure activity during the 1920s and the elected representatives of the Labour and trade union movement enjoyed them as much as the membership. Charabanc pictures from the early twenties are common and include those of the annual outings of workers from scores of factories on jaunts to Dartmoor and Epping Forest. The charabancs chugged along at a maximum of twelve miles per hour.

(to be continued…)

 

The British Labour Party, 1983-2019:

The British Labour Party published its manifesto for the forthcoming General Election in early December 2019. The Party itself claims that it represents its most radical offering to the British electorate ever. Certainly, it is the most left-wing programme to be put forward since the 1983 Election, at which the then leader, Michael Foot, was later accused by Gerald Kauffman of writing ‘the longest suicide note in history’. As a result, Margaret Thatcher won a landslide victory which led to her remaining in power for a further seven years, and the Tories until 1997. There were other factors, of course, not least among them the victory over Argentina in the Falklands Islands in 1982. I campaigned for Labour in Carmarthen in 1983 and, at least in that three-way marginal, Labour defeated both the Tories and Plaid Cymru. Michael Foot delivered a fiery, left-wing speech in the constituency and inspired us, students, to knock on doors in working-class areas of the town to secure their vote for the Labour candidate, Dr Roger Thomas. Across Wales and the UK, however, the Tories destroyed the Labour Party in a manner no-one could have anticipated. In 2019, are we now headed for a similar scale of defeat? Has the Corbyn-led leftward lurch finally brought the party to the end of the road? Or is there an underestimated level of support for radical, redistributive policies in today’s Britain which could yet bring in a government which, to invert the words of a former speaker and Labour MP, George Thomas, would seem to owe more to Marxism than Methodism? To understand these issues, we need to look back to the origins of the Labour Party, founded by, among others, my own grandparents.

The Marx Memorial Library at 37a Clerkenwell Green, London, home to Walter Crane’s ‘Twentieth Century Press’ in the 1890s

Organising the Labourers, 1870-1879:

My great-grandparents were agricultural labourers and marched with Methodist lay-preacher Joseph Arch in the 1860s and 1870s to organise their fellow villagers into the Warwickshire Agricultural Labourers’ Union and then the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union in 1872. One of my great-great-uncles became one of its first local full-time officers. By 1875, NALU was fifty-eight thousand strong and organised into thirty-eight districts, despite fierce opposition from farmers, landlords, and parish priests. It was against this triple tyranny that the farm labourers struggled to build trade unionism in the countryside. Added to that was the sense of isolation, both at work and in the nature of village life. A labourer might work alone in fields from dawn till dusk, a life of unremitting toil unrelieved by holidays for a wage of twelve pounds a year. Even when working alongside his fellows he saw little of the world beyond his master’s farm, the primitive tied cottage in which he lived and a semblance of social life at the village pub. Nor did he share in the fruits of the earth on which he toiled; the harvester, like the one in the photograph below, who killed a rabbit bolting from the last of the corn could find himself before the local magistrate, invariably a farmer. It took a special kind of courage to stand with a few fellow-labourers and sing:

Ye tillers of the soil,

Assert your manhood then,

You get your living by hard toil,

Then all be union men.

Meanwhile, the industrial advances of the middle-Victorian era eliminated the immediate risk of serious social discontent among the workers, and especially among their potential leaders, the skilled artisans and factory employees. The plight of the poor was made worse by the fact that many more of them lived in towns. In 1871, sixty-two per cent of the population of England and Wales was classed in the census as urban; by 1911 it would reach eighty per cent of a much larger total. Yet in a country like Britain, with a long-established aristocracy and a traditional class system, no very high degree of social fluidity could be attained even in the heyday of industrial capitalism. On the contrary, large-scale industry developed class solidarity among the workers which in the end facilitated effective political election in the interest of labour as a whole. By 1871 the Trades Union Congress had been established and accepted as the central parliament of labour, meeting annually, and its Parliamentary Committee was the recognised agent for applying pressure on behalf of the trades unions at the centre of government. By the Acts of 1871, the trade unions secured a legal status; in the same year, the engineers of north-east England revived the Nine Hours movement and won a strike for this object. In 1875, a Conservative government, showing itself as sensitive as the Liberals to the pressure of the unions in industrial matters, passed two acts which satisfied the unions in respect of breach of contract and picketing.

There were also a few local labour associations active in securing representation for working men on local authorities, and sometimes, as in Birmingham in the 1870s, they carried on their work without any understanding with an existing party. But on a national scale, it is not surprising that few labour leaders regarded the establishment of an entirely independent workers’ party as a practical possibility. Most of them accepted Gladstone’s leadership, for it had been he who had championed the cause of working-class suffrage in the previous decade, and on many issues of policy, the leaders of the artisans found themselves in alliance with the Liberals. The Liberal Party was not a monolithic structure: and the acceptance of the leadership of Gladstone on general questions did not necessarily mean that the labour interest need forego its special organisation. In the circumstances of the time, there was no reason why the Labour Representation League should not continue to exist among, and indeed to struggle against, the other elements of the Liberal Party. This struggle could and did continue at the constituency level. The failure of the League to maintain itself even on those terms indicates the unwillingness of the middle-class Liberals to see working men elected as their representatives. John Bright himself accused the League of disorganising the party unless what are called working-class representatives could be returned. Henry Broadbent, the Secretary of the League, in his rejoinder to this, admitted the failure of its policy:

Up to the present, the number of seats contested by labour candidates have been very few, and in some of these cases the seats sought to be won were those held by the Conservatives, and in many of those instances we singularly enough found large numbers of the middle class electors preferred voting for the Tories rather than support a working-class candidate. Surely, then, we are the aggrieved party. …

Above & below: The Paris Commune of 1871.

It was true that the policy of finding Liberal seats for labour candidates had few successes and many failures. At the 1874 election two miners were elected, Thomas Burt for Morpeth and Alexander McDonald for Stafford; but this was a miserable showing for an electorate, the majority of which now consisted of members of the working class. Nevertheless, there were signs of a developing sympathy among them for Socialism at the time of the Paris Commune of 1871 (depicted above). These were mainly to be found among the writings of the Republican movement which sprang up in the period 1871-74 when eighty-four Republican clubs were founded in Britain. But the disagreement among their leaders over the issue of ‘social revolution’ led to division and decline. Its Socialist doctrine was limited to a vague ‘Owenism’, for although Marx was living in London at this time, pursuing his research at the reading room of the British Museum (below), his works were little known in Britain. Nevertheless, Robert Owen’s thinking was not entirely without influence, as it was at this period that many trade unions took up schemes for co-operative production, buying collieries and engineering works in which to try out these ideas. In the years 1874 to 1880, while the Liberals were out of power, it was difficult for a labourist opposition to establish itself as distinct from that of the Liberals.

By 1878, the Labour Representation League had ceased to attract any public attention and the more independent trade unions, mostly those most vulnerable to the severe trade depression of the late seventies, were killed off by the bad times. Arch’s Agricultural Labourers’ Union was especially hard hit and its membership rapidly declined. In 1881, Arch appeared in person before the Royal Commission on Agriculture, claiming that the only way to ensure higher wages for farm labourers was to reduce the numbers in ‘the market’ through emigration. His Union had aided the emigration of seven hundred thousand men, women and children over the previous nine years, together with the Canadian government. Similarly, the New Zealand government, anxious to overcome the disadvantages of the long, expensive and uncomfortable sea journeys of British emigrants, had offered, from 1873, free passages, especially to agricultural labourers and their families. With the backing of NALU, many families took up the offer, and between 1871 and 1880, the New Zealand government provided over a hundred thousand immigrants with assisted passages.

This trade union participation in what became known as ‘Liberal Imperialism’ presented a serious challenge to the growth of Socialism in Britain. In general, millworkers and miners were absorbed in their economic struggle for better wages and conditions. This laid some of them open to the argument that faced with stiffening foreign competition and tariffs, Britain could only hold on to or improve its prosperity by having more and more colonies. This ‘bread-and-butter’ argument had a rational flavour, and it would seem that when trade was good most workers were prepared to give it a good hearing. When trading conditions were bad, and especially capital and labour were more at odds than usual, it usually fell into the background, and the instinctive assumptions and loyalties of the class struggle usually took its place. But what historians now refer to as the ‘Great Depression’, far from encouraging that growth and the break-up of the Liberal Party, actually discouraged working-class militancy and destroyed the more ‘advanced’ and independent elements among the working classes in both the agricultural and industrial areas of the Midlands and South of England.

Most of the time, the working classes were simply shut in their own world and its own affairs, including trade union and co-operative activities, the club-life of the public house, the football ground and the chapel, to be either enthusiastic or antagonistic towards imperialism. It never became for them what it was for those higher up; a definite creed, philosophy of life, a mission. But if a long-sustained effort to indoctrinate them with jingoism was rewarded with acquiescence rather than with wholehearted assent, this meant equally that socialist or labour leaders who tried to transform indifference into anti-imperialism met with even smaller success. Some trade union and Socialist spokesmen were reviving an opposition to the empire that had been voiced by Ernest Jones the Chartist, the spirited attacks on it by intellectuals and radical groups fell on deaf working-class ears. Writing to Kautsky in September 1882, Engels commented on working-class attitudes to the empire in response to a question from his continental ‘comrade’:

You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as what the bourgeois think. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.

Neither could Owenite Socialism, identified with Utopian experiments and lacking any systematic economic theory, provide a basis for a practical political programme. Writing in 1881, Engels felt bound to admit that the working class of Britain had become the tail of the great Liberal Party. The new orientation of economic thought was influenced not only by the impact of the depression but also by long-term changes in the structure of industry which earlier economists had not predicted. The family firms were being replaced by more impersonal limited companies, in which ownership was divorced from managerial skill and from direct contact with labour. As a result, the opportunities for social advancement were curtailed and the workers’ class solidarity was increased. This did not happen uniformly in all industries, and by the mid-eighties, it was common only in iron, shipbuilding and heavy engineering. But the tendency was the same everywhere, and it seemed very possible that it might lead to the substitution of monopoly for competition in the end, as Marx had forecast. But though he had been living in London since 1849, Marx was virtually unknown at this time, even by Liberal Radicals. His major works were written in German and had not been translated into English, and they were more concerned with events on the continent. Engels was better known as a critic of the industrial system in England.

Engels in a photograph taken in the 1870s

In the earlier years of the Victorian period, there had always been those intellectuals who maintained that the existing industrial system was unjust or ugly or both. The most notable of those who took this view were Carlyle and Ruskin, both of whom were popular in the later nineteenth century. Ruskin had founded a Utopian experiment, St George’s Guild, and bought a farm where a little group of Sheffield Socialists attempted without success to set up a self-sufficient community. His essays on political economy, Unto this Last (1860), and his letters to working men, known as Fors Clavigera (1871-84), did much to encourage the growing spirit of collectivism. They revived, in simple and impressive language, many of the criticisms of classical economics which had first been voiced by the ‘Ricardian Socialists’ of the 1820s. Not that Ruskin had read the works of these writers, who were completely forgotten in this period except for the occasional footnote in Marx. Ruskin was the great amateur of political economy, but influential for all that. It was not without reason that Keir Hardie and many other labour leaders regarded Carlyle and Ruskin as more important in shaping their political views than any writers more fully versed in the abstractions of economic theory.

It would be difficult to argue that any of the British labour leaders at the end of the nineteenth century, except for a very few Marxists, were able to build their political views upon a reasoned philosophical basis. The British Socialists at this time were a small and scattered minority. The London Commonwealth Club, which John Hales had represented at the Ghent Socialist Congress of 1877, seems to have died out before the end of the decade. Hales led the opposition to Marx and Engels in the British Section of the First Socialist International (pictured below) and tried to revive the Club by founding the International Labour Union in 1877-8 but this, too, was a very short-lived organisation, despite attracting the support of several leading ‘advanced radicals’. What interest there was in Socialism sprang very largely from the success of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which in 1877 had polled nearly half a million votes and had won thirteen seats in the Reichstag.

Engels speaking to the Congress of the First International in the Hague in 1872.

In 1879, an old Chartist, John Sketchley of Birmingham, published a pamphlet entitled The Principles of Social Democracy which sought to show, based on the German SPD, what the programme of a similar party in Britain might be. In Birmingham, Sketchley tried to organise a Midland Social Democratic Association, linking to the city’s working-class politics of the early 1870s. Other Socialist propagandists of the time were Henry Travis, a doctor, who published occasional pamphlets on Owenism, and a young journalist, Ernest Belfort Bax, who knew Germany well, had read Marx’s Das Kapital in the original and had written articles on Marxism in the monthly magazine, Modern Thought in 1879. Also, in 1880, the Rose Street club of German exiles expanded rapidly due to the influx of refugees from the regressive legislation in Germany and Austria, developing an English section although it continued to publish only in German. When the Russian scientist and socialist Peter Kropotkin visited England to lecture on Socialism in 1881, he found himself addressing ‘ridiculously small audiences’. Two years later, Marx’s death in London would have passed unnoticed by The Times had its Paris correspondent not sent a paragraph on his European reputation.

Liberal Hegemony & the Birth of Socialism, 1880-84:

Clearly, at the time of the General Election in 1880, Socialism in Britain was as yet a movement without indigenous strength. Until the early 1880s, there had been no organised working-class support for major democratic reform since the death of the Chartist movement in the late 1840s. The mid-Victorian period was generally one of prosperity, rising wages and full employment, at least for ‘skilled’ workers. The Reform Act of 1867, which extended the franchise to most of the adult male population, was a move towards democratic reform through legislation. At the same time, British socialism acquired some new ideas from refugees who had fled from persecution under autocratic continental governments in the 1870s. The hold of the Liberal Party over the working-class vote was shown to be stronger than ever. Only three working men were returned at the 1880 Election, all of them as Liberals: Henry Broadhurst, Secretary of the TUC, joined Thomas Burt and Alexander McDonald at Westminster. The election showed the strength of Joseph Chamberlain’s new Radical pressure group, the National Liberal Foundation, which dominated the constituency parties to the advantage of the middle-classes and the alarm of labour leaders. The Liberals had a clear majority of seventy-two seats in the new House of Commons. In late 1880 a new weekly paper, the Radical, was established in London ostensibly in opposition to the new Liberal government’s policy of applying coercion in Ireland. However, the leading article in the first issue deplored the small number of labour representatives in Parliament.

The protagonists of this alliance of Radicals and Irish included Helen Taylor, the stepdaughter of John Stuart Mill, T. P. O’Connor and former Chartists. There followed a proposal for a more permanent organisation of ‘advanced’ Radicals, an idea which seems to have originated with H. M. Hyndman, a Tory Radical who was defeated at Marylebone in the 1880 election, and H. A. M. Butler-Johnstone, MP for Canterbury for many years before resigning over differences with the Tory Party in 1878. He stood as an independent in the 1880 election but was defeated. The views of these two men on ‘the Eastern Question’ provided an unlikely link with Karl Marx, whose advice they sought. In response to their invitation, delegates from various London clubs and associations met at the headquarters of the Social Democrats in Rose Street in an attempt to unite, if possible, all societies willing to adopt Radical programme with a powerful Democratic party. The meeting urged…

… the necessity of the formation of a New Party, the grand object of which should be the direct representation of labour. In addition to Parliamentary reform, the new party would, of course, have to deal with the question of improvement in the social condition of the people. 

A resolution was passed without opposition in favour of an attempt to establish ‘a labour party’, and a committee of nine was appointed to draft a programme. These included liberal trades unionists, social democrats, working-class Radicals, together with Hyndman and Butler-Johnstone. The foundation conference took place in June 1881, and a long advertisement in the Radical invited delegates from advanced political organisations, trade societies and clubs throughout the country. The advertisement advocated a social and political programme which shall unite the great body of the people, quite irrespective of party. The programme was to include attention to labour interests, economy, constitutional reform, the end of coercion in Ireland, and full publicity for the discussion of imperial and foreign affairs. Hyndman’s hand can be detected in the composition of this statement and it is evident that he played an active part in the shaping of the new party. When the conference took place, it was decided that the ‘party’ should rather be called the ‘Democratic Federation’, perhaps in a deliberate attempt to copy and rival Chamberlain’s National Liberal Federation which had proved all too successful in establishing middle-class hegemony over the constituency caucuses.

Writing to Bernstein in May 1881, Engels had already decided, however, that the Federation was quite without significance because it could only arouse interest on the Irish question. Hyndman’s conversion to Marxian Socialism had taken place on a trip to America the previous year when he read a copy of the French version of Marx’s Kapital given him by Butler-Johnstone. In January 1881 he had published an article in the influential monthly, the Nineteenth Century, which he entitled The Dawn of a Revolutionary Epoch. In June, at the inaugural conference of the Democratic Federation, he distributed to all the delegates a little book he had written called England for All, in which he expounded the views of Marx without mentioning his name. This annoyed Marx and their relations became strained. Marx wrote to his friend Sorge of his irritation with Hyndman’s publication:

It pretends to be written as an exposition of the programme of the ‘Democratic Federation’ – a recently formed association of different English and Scottish radical societies, half bourgeois, half proletarian. The chapters on Labour and Capital are simply literal extracts from … ‘Das Kapital’, but the fellow mentions neither the book nor its author … As to myself, the fellow wrote stupid letters of excuse, for instance, that “the English don’t like to be taught by foreigners”, that “my name was so much detested”, etc. For all that, his little book, so far as it pilfers ‘Das Kapital’ makes good propoganda, although the man is a weak vessel, and very far from having even the patience – the first condition of learning anything – to study a matter thoroughly.

Above: The last photograph of Marx, taken in the spring of 1882 in Algeria.

In this way, Hyndman lost his brief friendship with Karl Marx and, as a result, that of Friedrich Engels as well. Marx died in 1883, but Engels lived on in London until 1895, aspiring to direct the Socialist movement from behind the scenes. His hostility to Hyndman was to have serious consequences for the movement. Marx and Engels were not, themselves, easy people to get on with, and they were sometimes poor judges of character. Hyndman nicknamed Engels the Grand Lama of the Regents Park Road, a reference to his self-imposed seclusion in his house there, and Engels spoke of Hyndman as an arch-Conservative and extremely chauvinistic but not stupid careerist, who behaved pretty shabbily to Marx, and for that reason was dropped by us personally. Hyndman was by no means a careerist, as his subsequent unrewarding toil in the Socialist movement was to show: Marx himself was perhaps closer to the truth when he described him as self-satisfied and garrulous. Bernard Shaw classified him …

… with the free-thinking English gentlemen-republicans of the last half of the nineteenth century: with Dilke, Burton Auberon Herbert, Wilfred Seawen Blunt, Laurence Oliphant: great globe-trotters, writers, ‘frondeurs’, brilliant and accomplished cosmopolitans so far as their various abilities permitted, all more interested in the world than in themselves, and in themselves than in official decorations; consequently unpurchasable, their price being too high for any modern commercial Government to pay.      

Hyndman’s Conservative origins and leanings made him suspect to many of the Radicals, who mostly preferred the Liberals if they had to choose between the parties. In his Marylebone election address, he had declared his opposition to disestablishment and Irish Home Rule and this was not forgotten by his contemporaries. Following his ‘conversion’ to Marxian thinking, and under its influence, he soon gave up these views, but he was still sufficiently conservative in his leanings to arrange a meeting with Disraeli, now the Earl of Beaconsfield, at which he poured forth his views, apparently in the hope that the Tory Party might adopt them. Disraeli listened patiently and politely but told him that private property which you hope to communise and vested interests which you openly threaten, have a great many to speak up for them still. Despite this rebuttal, Hyndman always hated the Liberals more than the Tories, a feature which was to distinguish his politics from those of many of the other British Socialists. The Democratic Federation’s intransigent opposition to the Liberal Party became unpalatable to many of its early members. Its vigorous support for a Land League candidate against the Liberal nominee at a by-election in Tyrone in the autumn of 1881, at which it issued a denunciation of ‘capitalist radicalism’ in a special manifesto, led to the defection of all the Radical clubs and its original membership contracted. As Socialism began to spread, however, Hyndman was able to convert it into an openly Socialist body at the annual conference in 1883. The Federation now adopted his declaration of principles, Socialism Made Plain, but it did not change its name until the following year when it became the Social Democratic Federation.

The new recruits to Socialism who joined Hyndman in running the Federation, several young public school men, included H. H. Champion and R. P. B. Frost, who had been contemporaries at Marlborough and held office in the newly founded Land Reform Union, which publicised the views of Henry George in Britain. A more notable convert was William Morris, already a radical writer and artist with a distinguished reputation and an honorary fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. Morris had been active in the Eastern Question Association, which had brought him into contact with Liberal labour leaders a few years before, so his attitude to this question was Gladstonian, the opposite to that of Marx and Hyndman. But he had not been active in the land agitation, and it was Ruskin rather than George who seems to have been his introduction to Socialism. Therefore, as the working-class Radicals left the Federation, the middle-class Socialists came in. Paradoxically, however, by November 1882, Morris had decided that no really far-reaching reforms would be carried out by a party under middle-class control. He wrote:

Radicalism is on the wrong line … and will never develop into anything more than Radicalism … it is made by the middle classes and will always be under the control of rich capitalists: they will have no objection to its political development if they think they can stop it there: but as to real social changes, they will not allow them if they can help it.

So it was that on 13 January 1883 he committed himself to socialism by joining the Democratic Federation. Becoming a Socialist at the age of forty-nine was not a step which he took lightly. During the winter of 1882-83, he attended a series of lectures, intended as an introduction to Socialism, organised by the Federation. Immediately after joining, he read Das Kapital in French, as it had not then been translated into English. Marx died two months after Morris joined the Federation, and Morris therefore never met him. Nevertheless, Morris regarded himself as a communist and his adoption of the socialist cause was, at first, based on an instinctive response to what he felt to be injustices of capitalism. In Marx’s account of the alienation of the worker in an industrial society, and of his liberation through the class struggle, he found a theoretical base to underpin these instincts. He summed up his position in a letter to C. E. Maurice in July 1883:

In looking into matters social and political I have but one rule, that in thinking of the condition of any body of men I should ask myself, ‘How could you bear it yourself? What would you feel if you were poor against the system under which you live?’ … the answer to it has more and more made me ashamed of my own position, and more and more made me feel that if I had not been born rich or well-to-do I should have found my position unendurable, and should have been a mere rebel against what would have seemed to me a system of robbery and injustice. … this … is a matter of religion to me: the contrasts of rich and poor … ought not to be endured by either rich or poor. … such a system can only be destroyed, it seems to me, by the united discontent of numbers; isolated acts of a few persons in the middle and upper classes seeming to me … quite powerless against it: in other words the antagonism of classes, which the system has bred, is the natural necessary instrument of its destruction. … I am quite sure that the change which will overthrow our present system will come sooner or later: on the middle classes to a great extent it depends whether it will come peacefully or violently.

Early on, Morris had understood that there were serious ideological, strategic and tactical divisions within the Federation, not to mention clashes of personality. Morris wrote about these divisions in his letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones in August 1883:

Small as our body is, we are not without dissensions in it. Some of the more ardent members look upon Hyndman as too opportunist, and there is truth in that; he is sanguine of speedy change happening somehow and is inclined to intrigue and the making of a party. … I … think the aim of Socialists should be the founding of a religion, towards which end compromise is no use, and we only want to have those with us who will be with us to the end.

These millenarian beliefs also had an impact on Morris ‘inner’ struggles with his own conscience. The contradiction between his socialist views and his position as a wealthy, middle-class businessman was from the first pointed out by his critics. His workers do not appear to have been disturbed by this apparent inconsistency, however, because Morris treated them with respect as fellow workers and paid them more than average wages. In any case, he felt (perhaps all too conveniently for him personally) that individual tinkering with the system, in the form of profit-sharing, was useless – it must be overthrown in its entirety. He regarded revolution, whether violent or not, as a historical necessity which would certainly come in his lifetime. Nevertheless, in 1884 he calculated that every worker in his employment should receive an extra sixteen pounds a year. He also introduced a form of profit-sharing for his ‘core’ employees, though the Firm overall remained a standard limited company.

Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery; photographed c. 1895.

In 1884, the Federation became the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and seemed to have every hope of rapid progress. Though not strong in numbers, the SDF had important footholds in the Land Reform Union and the National Secular Society, and it had both weekly and monthly journals in addition to the services of some able men and women, including William Morris and Annie Besant. When, in March 1884, it organised a procession to the grave of Marx in Highgate cemetery on the first anniversary of his death, those who took part amounted, according to Morris, to over a thousand, with another two or three thousand onlookers. This was, at least, a beginning, Morris thought. Once convinced of the rightness of Socialism, Morris threw himself into the work of the Federation, not allowing himself to be deterred by his instinctive dislike and distrust of Hyndman. Morris resolved to tolerate the leader of the Federation because of his genuine belief in Socialism. Unlike Morris, he had met Marx and, like Morris, had converted to Socialism after reading Das Kapital. Morris told his business manager that as he is trying to do what I think ought to be done, I feel that everyone who has similar ideas ought to help him. 

Marx (standing with Engels) with his daughters (seated), Jenny, Eleanor & Laura, c. 1867

The Social Democratic Federation aimed to educate the working class and to organise them for the socialist revolution which members of the Federation believed to be imminent. In his book, The Historical Basis of Socialism in Britain (1883), Hyndman had implied that the time would be ripe in 1889, the centenary of the French Revolution. It was, however, the disagreement about the means of achieving Socialism that brought the clashes of personality into prominence. Hyndman had captured the Democratic Federation for Socialism, and he expected to go on dominating it and leading it along the line of policy which he favoured. But he did not find favour in all quarters: Marx and Engels never regarded him as a genuine Socialist by their standards, and although Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, was a member of the SDF, both she and her partner, the scientist Edward Aveling (of whom G. B. Shaw, scarcely exaggerating said, he seduced every woman he met, and borrowed from every man) regarded Hyndman with suspicion. Indeed, he was dictatorial, devious and vain; what Morris had identified as Hyndman’s genuine belief in Socialism was now more obviously accompanied by his desire to use the Federation as a vehicle for his parliamentary ambition. He wanted it to become a conventional political party, campaigning for reforms and, as soon as possible, putting up candidates for local and parliamentary elections.

William Morris resented Hyndman’s domineering ways and eventually decided that he could no longer tolerate him. At the SDF conference in June 1884, it was decided not to put up parliamentary candidates and Hyndman was displaced as president; instead, members of the executive took turns to act as chairman. Nevertheless, as Morris recognised, Hyndman was determined to be master, and though Morris did not oppose getting members into parliament once the Federation had a strong enough base, he did not feel that it should be their aim at all costs, as Hyndman did. In particular, Morris was very much opposed to sordid electioneering and to gaining concessions by doing deals with other parties. Along with others in the SDF, he felt that their principal aim should be the preparation of the working classes for their part in the coming revolution: Education towards Revolution seems to me to express in three words what our policy should be. 

Despite Morris’ efforts to act as a mediator in the intrigue and in-fighting with the Hyndmanites, the crisis came in December 1884. The split took place on 27 December, when ten members of the Executive Council resigned, denouncing what in a signed statement they called the attempt to substitute arbitrary rule therein for fraternal co-operation. The signatories included Morris himself, Eleanor Marx and Aveling, More congenial to Morris was Belfort Bax, a journalist, musician and philosopher, who was a confidant of Engels with whom Morris later collaborated in writing Socialism, its Growth and Outcome (1893). The remaining nine members, led by Hyndman, remained in control of the remnants of the SDF. On the day of the split, and even before the critical Council meeting took place, Morris received an ex-cathedra summons to visit Engels, who gave him his advice on the way to organise a new organisation. Next day Morris acquired headquarters for it: as it had the support of the two leagues of London and Scotland, the new ‘party’ was called The Socialist League. The League began to publish a new journal, Commonweal which in Morris’ hands was a paper of real literary merit. Morris much regretted the split, realising that it had seriously weakened the socialist cause, and hoped that before long the British Socialists might be reunited in one party. Indeed, in his last years, he himself did rejoin the SDF. The two associations managed to stay on reasonably amicable terms. Nevertheless, writing in the Commonweal in 1890, Morris bitterly described the Federation as composed in the early days of …

… a few working men, less successful even in the wretched life of labour than their fellows: a sprinkling of the intellectual proletariat … one or two outsiders in the game political, a few refugees from the bureaucratic tyranny of foreign governments; and here and there an unpractical, half-cracked artist or author.

Educators, Agitators & Trades Unionists, 1885-89:

But in spite of Morris’s great activity up and down the country, the League did not displace the SDF and after six months it still had only two affiliated bodies and eight branches with 230 members. When Morris resigned from the SDF, its membership amounted to no more than five hundred. Morris became depressed about this, as he wrote to Mrs Burne-Jones in May 1885:

I am in low spirits about the prospects of our ‘party’, if I can dignify a little knot of men by such a word. … You see we are such a few, and hard as we work we don’t seem to pick up people to take over our places when we demit. … I have no more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of ‘civilisation’, which I know now is doomed to destruction, and probably before long … and how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies. … 

This letter explains very clearly the nature of Morris’s views on the character of the future Socialist revolution. Like Hyndman, he believed in a coming catastrophe and even looked forward to it with millenarian enthusiasm, though he did not, like Hyndman, regard himself as marked out for revolutionary leadership. Rather, he believed that the immediate role of the Socialist was to educate people for the great inevitable change which could bring back the simpler, sounder society of medieval times when craftsmen took pride in their work and when there was no capitalist exploitation or industrial ugliness. In this thinking, he was clearly influenced by Ruskin, shaping a criticism of contemporary that was to form the basis of Syndicalism and Guild Socialism in the early twentieth century. Morris disagreed with those who favoured efforts to get Socialists elected onto public bodies, including Parliament because he thought that this would encourage careerists and threaten the purity of the Socialist ideal with the corruption and compromise inevitably involved in politics. But even his own Socialist League divided on this issue, a division which hastened its collapse at the end of the decade. Morris was a fully convinced Socialist, and though he did not know much about Marxian economics, he was quite prepared to take them on trust. His attitude is well illustrated by his answer to a Hyndmanite questioner who asked, Does Comrade Morris accept Marx’s Theory of Value? He replied bluntly:

To speak frankly, I do not know what Marx’s Theory of Value is, and I’m damned if I want to know. Truth to say, my friends, I have tried to understand  Marx’s theory, but political economy is not my line, and much of it appears to me to be dreary rubbish. But I am, I hope, a Socialist none the less. It is enough political economy for me to know that the idle rich class is rich and the working class is poor, and that the rich are rich because they rob the poor. …

In retrospect, Morris’ fine literary and artistic gifts make him, for many, the most attractive personality among the early British Socialists. But to contemporaries, especially among the working class, his opposition to Parliamentary action was unpopular. The SDF, by contrast, seemed more practical than the Socialist League, and better organised as a party. Morris saw his role as that of a propagandist, educating the working classes in socialist theory. As he explained in an interview with the Liberal newspaper, Daily News, in January 1885,

… the discontented must know what they are aiming at when they overthrow the old order of things. My belief is that the old order can only be overthrown by force, and for that reason it is all the more important than the revolution … should not be an ignorant, but an educated revolution.

By the summer of 1886, the Socialist League’s membership had risen to seven hundred. Morris’ political work took two forms, writing and public speaking. He was well aware of his deficiencies as a speaker, particularly before a working-class audience, with whom he found it a great drawback that I can’t speak roughly to them and unaffectedly. He candidly commented to Georgiana Burne-Jones that this revealed the great class gulf that lay between him and them. He regarded writing lectures as a laborious chore. He lectured 120 times between 1885 and 1886, touring East Anglia, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Scotland, also travelling to Dublin. In addition, he played a full part in the Socialist League’s campaign of open-air speaking on Sunday mornings. Despite the failures in his delivery and his tendency to speak over the heads of his audience, his sincerity was impressive; so was the simple fact that such a famous man was prepared to devote so much time to speaking on street corners or visiting the East End to address sometimes no more than a handful of workers.

A  severe trade depression in the mid-1880s brought high unemployment and a receptive audience. Attempts by the police to suppress socialist speakers addressing crowds in public places created a good deal of unrest and further publicity for the socialist cause. It united the disparate radical and socialist groups in opposition to the police. The Socialist League offered support to the SDF after charges of obstruction were brought against its speakers in the summer of 1885. In September, Morris himself was arrested and brought before a magistrate, accused of striking a policeman and breaking the strap on his helmet during an uproar in court after a socialist speaker had been sentenced to two months’ hard labour, having been found guilty of obstruction. Morris denied the charge, and when questioned about his identity, replied, I am an artistic and literary man, pretty well known, I think, throughout Europe. He was allowed to go free. His arrest was the best possible publicity for the Socialist League, was reported as far afield as the United States and rallied supporters to the cause of free speech. But the contrast between the court’s treatment of Morris and of his working-class comrades was highlighted both on this occasion and in the following August, when Morris and two others, both working men, were arrested for obstruction. Morris was fined only a shilling because, as the judge explained, as a gentleman, he would at once see, when it was pointed out to him, that such meetings were a nuisance, and would desist in taking part in them. His two working-class accomplices, however, were both fined twenty pounds and bound over to keep the peace for twelve months. Unable to pay, they were sent to prison for two months.

There was a further division in the mid-eighties among the early Socialists, between those who were for placing economic problems in the prime place, and those who favoured subordinating them to ethical concerns. The former founded, early in 1884, a separate society which they called the Fabian Society, taking the name from the Roman general ‘Fabius’ who waited patiently for his opportunity to strike against Hannibal. Apart from the fact that they were Socialists, it is difficult to determine what the Fabians’ views actually were. Right from the start, the Society was opposed to the revolutionary views of the SDF; while Bernard Shaw, who attended his first meeting in May 1884 and was elected to membership in September, later declared that the constitutionalism which now distinguishes us as being as alien at those early meetings as it was at those of the SDF or the Socialist League. Although most of its early members were constitutionalists, some were revolutionaries and even anarchists. The Fabian Society was not committed to ‘constitutionalism’ at first, only to ‘caution’, which nevertheless was an implied criticism of the tactics of the SDF. It’s clear that, in some quarters, Fabian Socialism became something of a fashion of the middle-class ‘drawing-room’ which kept out nearly all the proletarians in favour of a very miscellaneous audience.

The first Fabian Tract, issued in April 1884, entitled Why are the Many Poor? simply stated the extent of wealth and poverty but offered no remedy. The second tract, issued in September, was drawn up by Shaw in his most scintillating style and advocated Land Nationalisation, State competition in industries, the abolition of gender inequalities and of all types of privilege. It concluded with the rather stark observation that we had rather face a Civil War than another century of suffering as the present one has been. At this time Shaw was an aspiring novelist, so far unknown. His political interests had first been aroused by Henry George, whom he heard speak in London in 1884:

He struck me dumb and shunted me from barren agnostic controversy to economics. I read his ‘Progress and Poverty’, and wet to a meeting of Hyndman’s Marxist Democratic Federation, where I rose and protested against its drawing a red herring across the trail blazed by George. I was contemptuously dismissed as a novice who had not read the great frst volume of Marx’s ‘Capital’.

I promptly read it, and returned to announce my complete conversion to it. Immediately contempt changed to awe, for Hyndman’s disciples had not read the book themselves, it being then accessible only in Deville’s French version in the British Museum reading room, my daily resort.

The reading room of the British Museum, used by both Marx and then by G. B. Shaw,

the former when writing Das Kapital, the second when reading it.

In 1884-5, Shaw was prepared, in his enthusiasm for Marx, to defend him against all comers. But even then, so far as a revolution by violence was concerned, Shaw was beginning to have doubts, and by February 1885 he was urging the middle-classes to join the Socialist movement to counteract the influence of a mob of desperate sufferers abandoned to the leadership of exasperated sentimentalists and fanatical theorists.  this precept, he brought into the Fabian Society his friend Sidney Webb, a clerk in the Foreign Office, who was a disciple of John Stuart Mill. He had, at Shaw’s suggestion, read Marx, but had not been converted to Marxian Socialism. Shortly afterwards, Annie Besant, who had a long record of Radical agitation, also joined the Fabian Society, and under these new and able recruits, it developed a distinctive constitutionalist strategy within British Socialism.

The 1884 extensions of the electorate spelt the end of the already moribund principle of government non-intervention in the economic sphere. As soon as the control of elections passed out of the hands of those who paid income tax, the age-old doctrine of laissez-faire was dead. But it was a far greater leap to Socialism in the stricter sense of either the ‘Marxists’ or of the Fabians, who were more eclectic in their reading of political economy. In 1885, the Socialists were not an electoral force at all, since it was impossible for a body like the SDF, with just a few thousand members, to fight a Parliamentary election, unless those members were al concentrated into one constituency. Despite having never fought an election, however, they were determined to do so. First of all, in October it put up four candidates for the London district school boards. All were unsuccessful, but the system of cumulative voting to some extent concealed the severity of their defeat. Then its leaders began to plan the Parliamentary campaign, but the difficulty was their lack of finance. Desperate to find a new source of funding for the Federation ahead of the General Election, they approached the Liberal Party in the guise of Joseph Chamberlain who was trying to rally the agricultural labourers, miners and the Nonconformists, without alienating the industrialists. They hoped that if they promised him their support, Chamberlain would give them a seat to contest in the Birmingham area: but though he met the Socialist leaders, he rejected their proposals.

In 1883, one of Hyndman’s young recruits, H. H. Champion had become the secretary of the Social Democratic Federation, having similar political attitudes to those of Hyndman as a ‘Tory Socialist’. Then, in 1885, Champion received an offer of funds through a former Marxist and member of the First International who was then working as a Conservative agent. The money was offered for two candidatures in London, which the contributors no doubt thought would split the Liberal vote. Accordingly, two working-men members were put up, J. E. Williams for Hampstead and John Fielding for Kennington. Neither was a working-class constituency, and the candidates got only fifty-nine votes between them. Another SDF candidate, John Burns, an unemployed engineer, stood in Nottingham, however, where he polled 598 votes. The reaction to the London candidature fiasco was immediate and furious. Outside the party, the result of the so-called ‘Tory Gold’ scandal was that there was almost universal condemnation of the SDF, and even the Fabian Society passed a resolution expressing strong disapproval. J. Hunter Watts, who, as treasurer of the SDF, had been left in the dark by Hyndman and Champion, and a member of the Executive Council denounced the two leaders for ‘irresponsibility’ and for trying to run the Federation in military-style. Another schism took place in the Federation, with a new body called the ‘Socialist Union’ being set up, one of whose ‘bright sparks’ was a young Scotsman named James Ramsay Macdonald, who had picked up Socialist ideas in Bristol before settling in London. Both the Bristol and Nottingham SDF branches came over to the Socialist Union, and new affiliates were formed at Carlisle and Manchester. But there was little demand for a fresh Socialist organisation and, lacking wealthy backers, it did not last long.

In 1886-87, the SDF had been organising demonstrations of the poor and unemployed in Trafalgar Square and elsewhere in London and the south-east, resulting in their leaders’ arrests. In 1887, Engels was also encouraging Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling in their agitation in East London. Morris continued to embarrass the authorities and the police who did not know how to deal with him at demonstrations and were reluctant to arrest him. Well aware of this, Morris tried to be present as often as possible when there was liable to be trouble with the police, who were often brutal in their treatment of working-class agitators. Even in loyal London, the Jubilee year saw, on 13 November 1887, ‘Bloody Sunday’ – as it became known – when troops were used to clear Trafalgar Square while other British troops were ‘pacifying’ Upper Burma.  A meeting which had first been called to protest against Coercion in Ireland became a huge demonstration in defence of free speech in Trafalgar Square, attracting support from all radical and socialist organisations. Processions attempting to enter the square in defiance of an official ban were broken up by police charges in which two of the demonstrators were killed and two hundred hospitalised. The following Sunday a young worker, Alfred Linnell, died after being ridden down by a mounted policeman in Northumberland Avenue, one of the streets leading into Trafalgar Square. His death became the focus for popular outrage, and the procession at his funeral on 16 December was the largest in London since the death of Wellington in 1852. Morris was one of the pallbearers and made an emotive speech at the graveside. The funeral concluded with a song specially composed by him for the occasion which was sold to benefit Linnell’s orphans as a broadsheet, with a design by Walter Crane (see part two).

Morris continued to write extensively for the cause, especially in The Commonweal, the journal of the Socialist League which became a weekly in May 1886, with Morris as sole editor. He also financed the paper and was one of its principal contributors. Two of his major later works, The Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere (1890) were published in the journal in serial form. In the latter, Morris looked to the future for hope. This utopian novel is perhaps the most accessible of Morris’ writings for the modern reader. In it, the narrator falls asleep in Hammersmith and wakes up in the future. In 1952, a revolution has taken place and the narrator finds an ideal society in which people work for pleasure, mechanisation and private property have been abolished, and there is no money. There is equality of class and sex, and there are no cities; people live in smaller rural communities, working on the land and at hand-crafts in harmony with the natural world. By the time he wrote this, Morris had come to realise that the hoped-for revolution was further away than he thought.

The Socialist League lingered on, consisting not only of anarchists but also of the Marx-Engels clique who while not hostile to Parliamentary methods, did not rule out the possibility of violent revolution. Engels, a shrewd political strategist, had already put on record for British readers his view of how the Socialists could win power in Britain. In his articles for Shipton’s Labour Standard (1881), he had advised them to build up a labour party which, provided that from the start it was independent of the parties of the ruling class, he believed would gradually become more and more Socialist as time went on. He now drew fresh inspiration from the example of the American United Labour Parties, considering that there was an immediate question of forming an English Labour Party with an independent class programme. Writing to Bernstein in May 1887, Engels claimed that the Radical clubs were…

… aroused by the American example and consequently were now seriously thinking of creating an independent labour party.

This policy had begun to attract other members of the League: among these, whom Engels called ‘our people’, occur the names of young men active in the Socialist League, including J. L. Mahon who, temporarily resident in Newcastle, wrote to Engels in June advocating an amalgamation of the various little organisations in one broad definite political platform. They had been largely responsible for the establishment, early in 1887, of a North of England Socialist Federation among the Northumberland miners, another indication of a real attempt to bring Socialism to the working class. This was built up jointly by SDF and League agitators in the course of the Great Miners’ Strike of 1887. Although the nearest attempt yet made to create a mass movement, it was a transient success, for with the settlement of the strike its branches, numbering twenty-four at the peak, rapidly faded away. Yet the published aims of the North of England Federation were an indication of the way young Socialists were thinking. There were four, but it was the second point which caused most controversy within the League:

Striving to conquer political power by promoting the election of Socialists to Parliament, local governments, school boards, and other administrative bodies.

Morris was sceptical of the practicability of this aim and expressed the hope that our friends will see the futility of sending (or trying to send) Socialists or anyone else to Parliament before they have learned it by long and bitter experience. But Morris could not escape the implications of this clash of opinions within the League: as early as March 1887, he noted in his diary, Whatever happens, I fear that as an organisation we shall come to nothing, though personal feeling may hold us together. The issue was raised at the annual conference that year, and, on being defeated, most of the supporters of Parliamentary action retired from active participation in the running of the League. After the annual conference of the following year, 1888, when they were again defeated, their point of view was explicitly repudiated in a statement by the Council of the League, and they took no further part in its work. The Bloomsbury branch, which included the Marx-Avelings and several German Marxists, left and transformed itself into the independent Bloomsbury Socialist Society. Meanwhile, Mahon and his friends seceded and formed a ‘Labour Union’ which aimed at providing a national platform. It published a document pointing to what the Irish Party have achieved by a similar course of action, which attracted the signature of a Scottish miner, James Keir Hardie (see part two) among other sponsors, but it, too, petered out after a few years as a working-class group in Hoxton (in Hackney). Morris, meanwhile, often despaired at the apathy of the men he was trying to convert, though he also understood and sympathised with their demoralisation:

If I were to spend ten hours a day at work I despised and hated, I should spend my leisure, I hope, in political agitation, but, I fear, in drinking …

( … to be continued…)

The Royal Oak & the Graf Spee; Orkney to Montevideo:

Above: HMS Royal Oak at anchor in 1937

Eighty years ago, On 14 October 1939, HMS Royal Oak was anchored at Scapa Flow in Orkney, Scotland, when she was torpedoed by Lieutenant-Commander Günther Prien’s submarine U-47. It got through a fifty-foot gap in the defences of Scapa Flow and fired seven torpedoes at the 29,000-ton battleship, of which three hit the ship, capsizing it. After the sinking of HMS Courageous the previous month, this was an almost equally spectacular symbolic success for the Kriegsmarine. Of Royal Oak‘s complement of 1,234 men and boys, 835 were killed, 810 in only thirteen minutes that night, the others dying later of their wounds.  While the loss of the outdated ship, the first of the five Royal Navy battleships and battlecruisers sunk in the Second World War, did little to affect the numerical superiority enjoyed by the British navy and its Allies, the sinking had a considerable effect on wartime morale. The raid made an immediate celebrity and war hero out of Günther Prien, who became the first German submarine officer to be awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Before the sinking of Royal Oak, the Royal Navy had considered the naval base at Scapa Flow impregnable to submarine attack, and U-47‘s raid demonstrated that the German Navy was capable of bringing the war to British home waters. The shock resulted in rapid changes to dockland security and the construction of the Churchill Barriers around Scapa Flow.

One task of the U-boats was to place magnetic mines in the sea-lanes around the British Isles; this could be done by low-flying Heinkel He-IIIS and by E-boats (motor torpedo boats, shown in the painting on the right) and destroyers. Lacking a large surface fleet, the German Navy used small vessels for fast hit-and-run attacks.

By the end of November, these had sunk twenty-nine British ships, including the destroyer HMS Gipsy and had also put the brand-new cruiser HMS Belfast out of action for three years. Through the immense bravery of bomb-disposal experts Lieutenant-Commanders R C Lewis and J. G. D. Ouvry, who removed the two detonators, one of which was ticking audibly, from a mine spotted in the Thames Estuary, the secrets of the steel-hull activated device were discovered. Within a month, Admiralty scientists had discovered ways of counteracting the mines by fitting electric cables around ships’ hulls, to create a negative magnetic, or ‘degaussed’ field. Soon afterwards a means of blowing up the mines, using wooden-hulled trawlers towing buoyant electrical cables, was also invented.

The map above shows the early stages of the Battle of the Atlantic, from 1939 to 1941, with the green line showing the areas of severe U-boat impact. While in the U-boat Germany had deployed a potentially war-winning weapon and it also had three purpose-built ‘pocket-battleship’ commerce raiders and two powerful modern battleships, the Bismarck and the Tirpitz, launched early in the war, there were always too few to challenge the Royal Navy directly. Instead, as in the First World War, Germany was once again made use of its limited naval resources to attack Britain’s sea communications. Its formidable capital ships were used as raiders against British commerce. Tracking down and destroying these threats severely stretched British resources. It was the spotting, disabling and forced scuttling of the German pocket battleship the Admiral Graf Spee that was the RN’s greatest victory during the so-called Phoney War. Operating off South American coast, Captain Hans Lansdorff’s ship had enjoyed considerable success at the beginning of the war, sinking ten ships totalling more than fifty thousand tons. The term ‘pocket’ battleship is somewhat misleading, however, since although a limit of ten thousand tons had been imposed on German warships by the Treaty of Versailles, once the Graf Spee was loaded up with her six eight-inch, eight 5.9-inch and six 4.1-inch guns, as well as ammunition and stores, she weighed more than half as much again.

In the Battle of the River Plate on 13 December, off the coast of Uruguay, the German ship took on the eight-inch guns of the cruiser HMS Exeter, along with the six-inch guns of the light cruisers HMS Ajax and the New Zealander-crewed HMS Achilles, badly damaging the first two ships. However, she was eventually outfought by the three British cruisers and was forced into the harbour of Montevideo, capital of neutral Uruguay, on 15 December by the pounding she had received. Langsdorff then magnanimously released the Allied sailors he captured from ships he had sunk, who reported they had been well-treated. Then, mistakenly trusting to BBC radio broadcasts about the imminent arrival of the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal and the battlecruiser HMS Renown, and unable to hire a small plane to see whether this was in fact so, Langsdorff then sailed the Graf Spee to the entrance of Montevideo  harbour just before dusk on Sunday, 17 December and scuttled her. The explosions were watched by over twenty thousand spectators on the shore and heard on the radio by millions around the world. In fact, only the cruiser HMS Cumberland had managed to reach Montevideo; the BBC had patriotically participated in releasing a giant ‘fake news’ story. Five days later, Langsdorff shot himself.

Back to Europe: Poland, the Baltic States & Finland:

Meanwhile, in Poland, by 5 October, resistance to the Nazi-Soviet Pact forces had ended; 217,000 Polish soldiers taken captive by Soviets, 619,000 by Germans; up to 100,000 escaped via Lithuania, Hungary and Romania to join Free Polish forces under General Wladyslaw Sikorski, Prime Minister in exile in Angers, France. Seventy thousand Polish soldiers and twenty-five thousand civilians had been killed, and 130,000 soldiers lay wounded. A hundred thousand Poles in the Russian ‘sector’ were arrested by the NKVD and sent to concentration camps, from which hardly any returned. Adolf Hitler travelled to Warsaw by special train to visit victorious troops. Then, on 10 October, Admiral Erich Raeder urged Hitler to consider invading Norway as a way of protecting the transportation of iron ore from northern Sweden to Germany and establishing U-boat stations along the fjords, especially at Trondheim. Hitler ordered the OKW to start planning for an invasion in January 1940. At that point, Hitler did not want to divert troops from the attack he was planning in the west and was persuaded to do so only by signs that the Allies were planning to invade Norway themselves, possibly using aid for Finland as a cloak for their actions.

Raoul Wallenberg’s Protective Passports:

After a month in the Hungarian capital, the Secretary of the Swedish Embassy there, Raoul Wallenberg, had to decide quickly on the form of Schutz Pass, or ‘protective passport’ (‘SP’) he would use in his humanitarian relief work with the Jews of Budapest. He attached a specimen to his report to Stockholm of 16 August. It was an important part of his assignment to provide 1,500 Hungarians with temporary passports as protective documents. These could be persons with very close family links with Sweden, or who had been for a long time closely connected to Swedish commercial life, a number that rose later to 4,500. The issue of the new Swedish protective document came with a structure:  a long-term Swedish connection had to be proved documentarily, while the Schutzbrief issued by Langlet had no such condition attached. Wallenberg quickly perceived the scope of humanitarian action. He was a good organiser and had numerous Hungarian colleagues in the accomplishment of tasks. He soon appreciated the unreliability of the Hungarian political élite and its tendency to vacillate, experiencing the many ways in which responsibility could be evaded. Most of his Hungarian acquaintances were ashamed of what was happening to the Jews but insisted that the brutality was exclusively the work of the Germans. Unlike them, he saw clearly what could be described as the Hungarian hara-kiri, and stressed the responsibility of Hungarians, making it clear that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in Hungary. He pointed out that Jews on forced labour were not allowed to take shelter during air-raids, leading him to the conclusion that the Christian population evinced only a very luke-warm sympathy, and that it would be very difficult for the Jews to avoid their doom by flight.

The Swedish protective passport in Hungarian and German, with the holder’s photograph, was not acknowledged in international law and had no force. Nonetheless, its influence could not be underestimated. In the summer of 1944, it commanded a certain respect and carried a message. In the presence of immediate lethal danger, many saw in it the chance of escape, of organised defence and the embodiment of their hopes of survival. In August more and more groups of Jews in fear of deportation came to him. The news of his protective passport spread like wildfire and long queues waited on Gellérthegy outside the Humanitarian Section of the Swedish Embassy. From 16 August, a further building was rented and applicants were received from 4 p.m., with questionnaires filled in and six photographs. These were the conditions imposed by the Hungarian government for asylum documents. On the 22nd, the Ministry produced an order on the subject of the exemption of individuals from the regulations relating to Jews. By mid-September, the strength of Wallenberg’s Hungarian apparatus was approaching a hundred. He provided extra accommodation for them at Gellérthegy and also on Naphegy, where ten rooms and a cellar were rented, and round-the-clock shift-work was instituted.

The taking on of colleagues, the formation of an effective organisation and the thorough checking of the data submitted in applications for the Swedish document all took time. The apparatus required for this grew constantly. On 29 September, he reported to the Swedish Foreign Ministry that the entire staff including families number about three hundred persons and are exempt from wearing stars and forced labour. By that time 2,700 letters of protection had been issued and the numbers of those who had gained exemptions from wearing stars exceeded the original 4,500 by a further 1,100. For the first four months of the humanitarian action, it would have been impossible for the Swedish passport of protection to be handed out as a gift to those who did not have clear Swedish connections. That came later when the Arrow Cross reign of terror meant that people were in fear for their lives in an imminent sense. Then, resourceful Jews would copy names (similar to their own) and addresses from the Swedish telephone directories held in the Budapest head post office and send a ‘reply paid’ telegram. Kind-hearted Swedes, realising that the sender was pleading for his or her life, would then confirm the ‘relationship’ by return telegram. Wallenberg’s biographer, Jenő Lévai, has concluded that very many obtained protective passports and escaped through letters or reply telegrams from complete strangers.

The embassy’s work offered reasonable security against the constant threat of deportation. Those employed on humanitarian work received a legitimising card from the Embassy of the Kingdom of Sweden in Budapest and a special personal card from the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior. This exempted them from wearing the yellow Star of David and from the ever-more widespread duties of forced labour within the army. Wallenberg had essentially established a system of dual nationality, and this repeatedly aroused the suspicion of both the SS and the Hungarian authorities. According to a German Embassy note of 29 September, the director of the Budapest political section of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry was thinking that the Swedish Embassy should be called to order in a responsible, clear and sharp tone.

By mid-October, Vilmos Langfelder’s family had come under the protection of the Swedish Embassy and he moved to the central office of the Humanitarian Section at Űllői út on the Pest side of the city. Langfelder probably came into contact with Wallenberg because of his knowledge of German and his ability to drive. Within a short time, he had become the Swedish diplomat’s close associate as his chauffeur. His SP had been issued on 20 August, when he had belonged to a forced labour unit under Swedish protection. Langfelder took charge of Elek Kelecsényi’s Steyr car for the purpose of life-saving work. According to Lévai, Wallenberg sent out an Instruction which set out what had to be done to save holders of Swedish protective documents from the clutches of armed bandits, potentially a lethal undertaking. This summed up the dramatic essence of the immediate life-saving work:

Members of this section must be on constant duty day and night. There are no days off. If anyone is arrested, let them hope for much help, and if they do good work let them not expect thanks.

Langfelder frequently found himself driving Wallenberg, at night, to someplace where people needed his protection. Among the couriers and agents, disappearances were frequent, especially when they went into one of the Arrow Cross houses to inquire about a missing person, exposing themselves to a world of pain and indescribable horrors. Increasingly, abductions and murders were carried out in broad daylight. László Hollós and Ödön Ullman were on their way to inform Wallenberg of an Arrow Cross assault on a hospital when they were arrested and murdered.  In the countryside, the role of the Hungarian actress Vali Rácz has also been recognised by Israel. She hid many families from Budapest in her home in the countryside after the initial deportations but was denounced to the invading Red Army for fraternising with German soldiers (in order to protect her ‘guests’) and almost shot as a collaborator. A Red Army Colonel intervened to stop this and she was exonerated. There were also some members of the army and police who saved people (Pál Szalai, Károly Szabó, and other officers who took Jews out from camps with fake papers) as well as some local church institutions and personalities.

Rudolph Kasztner also deserves special attention because of his enduring negotiations with Eichmann to prevent deportations to Auschwitz, succeeding only minimally, by sending Jews to still horrific labour battalions in Austria and ultimately saving 1,680 Jews on what became known as ‘Kastner’s train’, which by the beginning of August had left Bergen-Belsen with its human ‘cargo’ bound for Palestine.

Those left in the ‘Jewish houses’ and the ghettoes were increasingly targeted for forced labour gangs. They were lined up in the streets, marched off, ceaselessly shouted at, trudging off to Óbuda in broad daylight. Klára Tüdős’ recollection draws a concise picture for posterity:

Dreadful rumours circulated about Jews interned at brick-works and cattle-trucks with barbed wire on them, and as dawn broke processions of people wearing stars would set off in the streets of Pest. These things are mixed up inside me together with the wailing of sirens, like a delirious dream.

The Extreme Right’s Reign of Terror begins:

The coming to power of Ferenc Szálasi and his followers on 15 October through the armed intervention of the SS was the nadir of the Horthy régime, its bloodstained final act. Under the Arrow Cross Party, terror became the tool of the totalitarianism of the extreme Right. Its ranks were swelled in particular by the lumpen elements of the underworld and misguided youth that could recognise the chance for unrestrained robbery and violence. On 15 October, Daisy Lászlo’s father, the tallest man in the apartment block, removed the yellow star from the front door. By the afternoon, however, he realised that with this act he had risked his life again. Since he was aware of the politics of the janitor’s wife, he secretly left the house in the dark, but before the doors would have been locked. She must have said something to the Arrow Cross thugs, however, because the following evening a heavily intoxicated young man, wearing the party uniform, kept banging on the Lászlo family’s door, looking for Mr Lászlo. The story continues below, in Daisy’s own words:

He searched every room, causing terrible alarm among the families placed there because he pushed and shoved everybody, shouted and took whatever he laid his eyes on. He was brandishing his revolver, and we were scared that he would start shooting. There was a large table in the entrance hall of the apartment, around which we took our meals, mostly together. He dragged off the tablecloth and packed in it the stuff he had collected from the various rooms. It seemed that he had forgotten why he had come and we were hoping that he would take the bundle and leave. He was proceeding toward the front door when he changed his mind, returned and demanded a drink. Jews were not permitted to purchase alcohol, but somebody must have had something stashed away, because after a short discussion, a bottle appeared on the table. While he was sipping from the bottle, he … informed us that he was an actor. He jumped on the dining room table, and began reciting Petőfi’s poem, ‘The Lunatic’. 

He got totally carried away, stomping with his feet, his face distorted; he seemed in a trance. I do not know how much of the poem he had recited, whether he knew it by heart, or made mistakes, but when he finished there was a thunderous applause and … bows on the table, surrounded by his terrified public. … He told us that he would go home … but would return the following day and continue the recital. He threw the bundle over his shoulder and staggered out the front door. … stumbling toward the street corner. He did not return, neither the following day, nor ever. We did not know what had happened to him, but for days we feared that he would reappear. 

After Szálasi and his men took over the government a rapid series of changes of personnel took place in the organisations providing the protection of the regime. New organisations were formed including, on 17 October, the State Security Police, the Hungarian Gestapo, was re-formed. Its activity extended to all opponents of the Germans and the Arrow Cross, irrespective of rank or status. On the 26th, the ‘National Unit for Accountability’ came into being, responsible for extinguishing the lives of many civilians. In the implementation of its laws, decrees and orders, the régime could rely on the gendarmerie, the police and the armed formations of the Arrow Cross Party. In what followed, those that belonged to the service slaughtered a large number of army deserters, Jewish forced labourers and people arrested during raids, increasingly and frequently on the spot. Apart from the scale of the violence, the deluge of accompanying decrees, renewed orders and contradictory instructions increased the turmoil. A wholesale breakdown occurred in the army, the police and public administration. From 28 October, Arrow Cross members received regular payments from the state to carry out robbery and murder on a grand scale. They not only had the right to bear arms but also formed the local detective, investigative, interrogation and enquiry squads. They could act on their own authority to create the ever more tragic and corrupt conditions which they considered ‘order’. In the practice of totalitarian dictatorship, the paramilitary members of the Party knew no bounds.

A typical element of the Hungarista programme was the widespread persecution and terrorising of the Jews. Following the assumption of power, party terrorists attacked starred houses in Budapest and Jewish forced labour barracks. For example, one of Daisy’s schoolfriends, Marika, lived with her mother in what became a ‘Jewish house’ after 19 March. Marika’s biological father was not Jewish but he refused to marry Marika’s Jewish mother because he was a close crony of Miklós Horthy, entitled as vitéz (‘man of valour’), a title he would have lost if he had been known to have married a ‘Jewess’. In June, Marika had been sent to a summer camp in Balatonboglár, run by Sisters in the Catholic Church. She was given a fictitious name and false papers, along with two other girls. One night they were awakened by gendarmes and pulled out of bed. She was so traumatised by this that thereafter she frequently peed herself. She ‘escaped’ and left for Budapest on foot, where she eventually returned to her house where she fell into the arms of her mother, kissed and cried, and ate sausage in the pantry. Her return lasted until 15 October, when her mother greeted Horthy’s abortive proclamation by opening a bottle of champagne. Happiness lasted a very short time. Marika’s mother helped to forge documents, while her mother was placed in one of the ‘protected houses’. Once, when Marika was visiting her with her aunt Duncy, Arrow Cross soldiers raided the area. Her aunt yelled at one of them, outraged that he had dared to ask for her papers.

Meanwhile, Marika’s mother became seriously ill with meningitis, and her sister arranged for her to be taken (with false papers) to the Szent István Kórház. Marika could still visit her there, where she eventually died. One night her uncle urged them to leave their new house in Benczúr utca, and they found refuge in the cellar of a nearby pharmacy owned by a relative. Next day the Arrow Cross raided the house, ordered everyone in it down to the courtyard and shot them all dead. When the siege of Budapest began, Marika, her aunt and her grandmother did not dare go down to the air-raid shelter. By that time, they were living in hiding alongside Polish and Czech refugees. One day the Arrow Cross soldiers marched the refugees down to the bank of the Danube and shot them into the river. Daisy herself narrowly escaped a similar fate during that autumn, when she spent several days wandering alone, stealing her food from outside grocery stores. She found herself in Szent István Park and was thrown into a column of thirty people being marched towards the lower embankment of the Danube under the guns of two young Arrow Cross hoodlums. She recalled:

We progressed silently, adults and children, without anyone protesting or crying. But when we reached the small underpass, and I was hit by the familiar stench of urine, without thinking about the consequences, I simply turned right and left the group.

Nothing happened and no one called out. I turned around the corner … Only after the Liberation did I hear that Jews had been shot into the Danube from the lower embankment of the Pest side … I never mentioned this episode to anyone fearing that people would think I had made it up out of a need to create a heroic story; that I was ashamed that while so many from our family had been murdered, I had not come close enough to death.    

Another of Daisy’s friends, Vera S, had already lost her relatives in the countryside to Auschwitz in the summer, but she still lived in Budapest with her parents and grandparents, where their apartment building had become a ‘Jewish house’ and their apartment filled up with strangers. The residents were ordered down into the courtyard several times and were threatened with deportation. On one such occasion, when they were permitted to return to their apartment, they found the rooms ransacked and most of their belongings missing, even Vera’s dolls were gone. Then, shortly after 15 October, the men in the house were rounded up. Running to the balcony, Vera and her mother tried to see where the group was being taken, but Vera’s father, looking up and fearing for their safety, motioned with his hand, urging them to go back inside. That was the last time they saw him. A postcard arrived from Valkó, where they had been taken on foot. From there, Vera’s father was deported to a concentration camp. They knew nothing more of his fate.

Shortly after that, Vera’s mother had to report to the Óbuda brick factory and the children were placed in a Jewish orphanage. Vera escaped and rejoined her brother when their grandparents found shelter in a Swedish ‘protected house’. Their mother escaped from the brick factory, bought false papers from their former janitor, and went into hiding. The following day, the Arrow Cross took the orphans from the ghetto and shot them all into the Danube. Thereafter, Vera and her brother stayed with their grandparents where they lived with twenty other surviving children, in one room. These children knew nothing of their parents and were starving. One day, Vera’s mother arrived at the ‘protected house’ but Vera couldn’t recognise her because she had dyed her hair to fit her false papers. Vera later recalled:

She said that when the Russians fully surround the city, and we will have to die, she will return that we should die together. She did come back, but fortunately we did not die.

On 30 October, German soldiers arrived in the house on the Pest side of the Danube where Iván lived with his family. They entered their apartment in the company of Miki, the janitor’s son who was wearing his Arrow Cross uniform. Although Miki had been Iván’s friend and playmate for the past decade, that did not prevent him from handing him over to the Nazis. Requiring additional labourers, the Germans had the help of the Arrow Cross in collecting men over sixty and boys under sixteen from the surrounding ‘starred houses’. By then Iván’s father had been away for years in a forced labour camp, and after their paint shop had been closed under anti-Jewish legislation, his mother had supported their two boys, her mother and herself by making artificial flower arrangements. Iván and his group of conscripted labourers were taken to Lepsény in western Hungary where they were made by the Wehrmacht to organise a military depot next to the local railroad station. They worked there throughout November, emptying trains that carried military supplies and filling military trucks with winter clothing for soldiers. Iván later learned that his brother Ervin, who had a weaker constitution, had also been sent to Transdanubia and had died while digging ditches. He was buried in a mass grave near Győr. Iván was the only survivor from those who were taken from his apartment house.

Ágnes B, another of Daisy’s friends was just ten years old when her father was drafted as a forced labourer. Soon after 15 October, Arrow Cross soldiers came to their apartment house, where they lived with her mother’s sister’s family. They rounded up all the women under forty, including her mother, who did not resist, despite being only weeks away from her fortieth birthday. Ági recalled her leaving:

My mother put on a fur-lined coat because it had been very cold. I followed her across the yard until the gate and I watched as she joined the group of Jewish women. She wrote one card from the road to Austria, telling me that they had been placed in a pigsty overnight. I never saw her again…

Life for all the remaining Jews in Budapest became increasingly difficult, but the access to Swiss and Swedish protection documents could provide some amelioration. Daisy’s friend’s mother was able to procure copies of the ‘protection documents’ Wallenberg had been handing out, but it was too late to use them because the Germans occupied their house and transported both sets of grandparents to the ghetto. Kati was sent to live with distant relatives, where she got false papers and a new name to learn, along with the names of her seven new ‘sisters and brothers’. She was with relatives, but still felt ‘terribly alone’. Although she looked ‘Aryan’ (see the picture below), she was not allowed out on the street. Another friend, Tomi, was twelve in 1944, by which time his entirely assimilated family had decided to convert to Catholicism, mainly to avoid the increasing restrictions placed upon Jews. In June, they had been forced to leave their apartment on the first floor of a Rózsadomb villa and moved to a ‘Jewish house’. By this time, Tomi’s father was in a forced labour camp and after 15 October, all three had to report to the brick family of Óbuda, from where they were supposed to be deported. Tomi’s father was able to provide them with Swiss protection documents and, therefore, three days later, they were moved to the overcrowded ghetto.

Wallenberg’s Responses and Reports:

The sudden turn of events took the Swedish embassy organisation by surprise, as it did the humanitarian activists too. Wallenberg himself had been expecting Hungary to pull out of the war, which had been much talked about in Budapest social circles as the government’s intention. He was also calculating when the Red Army would reach Budapest, and was thinking of going back to Stockholm a few days before it happened. Up to 15 October, the Swedish Embassy had received eight thousand applications and 3,500 had been granted the SP. A week after Szálasi’s rise to power Wallenberg reported that armed bandits have attacked those in possession of protective passports and torn them up. The Hungarian staff had reacted to this unexpected turn of events by going into hiding, as he noted:

The events have had a catastrophic effect on the section, the entire staff has absented itself, and a car which was placed at our disposal free of charge, together with the keys of various locked places and cupboards etc., have vanished.

In order to put some spirit and courage back into his dismayed colleagues, Wallenberg cycled through the bandit-infested streets in order to pick up the threads of his work again, a procedure which was fraught with risks. Instead of the peace that many had yearned and hoped for a fresh wave of destruction began. On 16 October the head of the Arrow Cross Party staff decreed that Jews were not to leave their homes until further notice. Buildings designated by stars of David were to be kept shut day and night. Until further notice, only non-Jews might go in and out. Non-Jews were not allowed to visit Jews. On 18 October, one of his Swedish officers reported that the new government had introduced strict anti-Jewish regulations and that the entire Jewish staff of the Embassy was in mortal danger. A crowd of Jews seeking revenge was besieging the embassy, which was incapable of accommodating them.

In the course of renewed the renewed persecutions, the previous forms of protection lost their usefulness. Beginning on 20 October, armed Arrow Cross men lined up tens of thousands of men aged between sixteen and sixty, on two trotting-tracks, dividing them into labour-companies and took them off. The one suburban sports ground, in Zugló, became the mustering place for Jewish women, as directed on posters. The assigned Jews of the city were made to work on fortifications, digging defensive ditches. Renewed talks with the black-uniformed, green-shirted Arrow Cross leaders were required, as were new methods of saving people. Wallenberg quickly made contact with Szálasi’s Foreign Minister, Baron Gábor Kemény. In matters of the “Jewish Question” and other ‘Jew-related’ topics he later had to deal with the Foreign Ministry. On 21st, he reached an agreement with Kemény that the Hungarian authorities would give the staff of the Royal Swedish Embassy and members of their families exceptional treatment. They were exempted from wearing the yellow star; from all kinds of forced labour; they were not obliged to live in starred houses, and allowed to go out onto the streets without curfew. This rapid agreement gave hope to several hundred people by officially extending the scope of Swedish protection. It also gave Wallenberg the room to prevent the complete destruction of the Budapest Jews.

This became known, along with the change of régime in Budapest, on 24 October in Bern, Washington and New York (World Jewish Congress), at the Red Cross International Council centre in Geneva and elsewhere. However, the Szálasi government quickly realised its mistake, and drastically reduced the scope of the exemption by the end of October. On 29th, it restricted the circle of those exempted by a ‘variation of decree’. For his part, Wallenberg worked at adding to the exemption that had been obtained and at retaining the greater and lesser fruits of the talks. Protection from the embassy was, in reality, frequently nothing more than a thread of hope. The ‘protected’ houses offered an unstable, relative refuge. Security and day-to-day survival were unpredictable and depended on luck and the movements and whims of the armed Arrow Cross men. Exactly a year later, on 24 October 1945, Béla Zsedenyi, President of the Provisional National Assembly, meeting in Debrecen, thanked King Gustav V of Sweden, the Swedish people and the Swedish diplomatic mission in the name of the Hungarian nation for their help in the humanitarian activity in 1944. He described the defensive stand taken by embassy secretary Wallenberg as “invaluable service”, emphasising that…

… he had taken a selfless and heroic part of decisive significance in warding off the acts of mass muder planned against innocent and defenceless citizens, and by his resolve had succeeded in saving the good name of the Hungarian people from further stain.

By that time, Wallenberg had disappeared at the end of a bitter winter during which he and his staff at the Swedish Embassy Annex had succeeded in saving the lives of thousands more, enabling them to survive the war and the terror in Budapest.

Return to Auschwitz:

Those already deported from the Hungarian countryside to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau had no means of protection, of course, and continued to face ‘extermination’ in the camps. Daisy Lászlo’s Uncle Samu and his family had been deported to Auschwitz from Dunaszerdahely in the summer. His wife, Aunt Berta was his second cousin, a fact which was constantly mentioned on the fringes of family visits and gatherings because both of their boys had disabilities. The older son, Nándi, had a speech impediment, and the younger one, Ármin, was almost totally deaf. All that was learnt of the family in 1945 was that they were among the hundreds of thousands of victims, but neither the place nor the time of their deaths was known. In 2010, an Israeli relative found the story of Ármin’s last months among the files of the International Tracing Service in Germany. This showed that on 25 October, he was transferred from Dachau back to Auschwitz.

During the last months of the war, thousands of Jews were returned to Auschwitz for extermination because they were considered too weak to work. As is shown below, Ármin’s physical description (including height, eye colour, the shape of mouth and ears) accompanied the transfer. His mother’s maiden name, his permanent domicile were also recorded. His signature at the bottom of this document led Daisy to believe that Ármin’s had been a special case, perhaps because of his deafness. However, she then found out that during the autumn of 1944, over five hundred inmates were returned to Auschwitz within a few weeks, accompanied by the exact same documents. Clearly, the Nazi coup in Budapest had had indirect effects in quickening the death machine of Auschwitz.

Sources:

Andrew J Chandler (2012), As the Land Remembers Them. Kecskemét: self-published, http://www.chandlerozconsultants.wordpress.com.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. London: Constable (2008).

Nóra Szekér, Domokos Szent-Iványi and His Book, Part I, in Hungarian Review, Volume IV, No. 6. Budapest, November 2013

Domokos Szent-Iványi, The Hungarian Independence Movement, Excerpts, Descent into the Maelstrom, Hungarian Review, loc.cit.

Gyula Kodolányi & Nóra Szekér (2013), Domokos Szent-Iványi: The Hungarian Independence Movement, 1939-1946. Budapest: Hungarian Review Books.

James C Bennett & Michael J Lotus, America, England, Europe – Why do we differ? Hungarian Review, loc.cit.

Marc J Susser (ed.) (2007), The United States & Hungary; Paths of Diplomacy, 1848-2006. Washington: US Department of State.

István Lázár, (1989), The History of Hungary. Budapest: Corvina.

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity. Budapest: Corvina.

Marianna D. Birnbaum & Judith Flesch Rose (ed.)(2016), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

hmd_2013_-_vali_racz_case_study

The Eden Memorandum on Migration to Palestine:

The National Archives in London has recently released a secret document from 8 August 1944, a Memorandum prepared for the War Cabinet by Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, of an “offer” from Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, that, provided the United Kingdom and the United States governments could find sufficient accommodation, the Hungarian government would be prepared to allow all Jewish children under ten years of age, with visas for other countries, and all adults and children with Palestine immigration certificates, to leave Hungary. Horthy also announced that there would be no further transportations of Jews to Poland, i.e. to Auschwitz. This document, and the attached correspondence between Washington and Whitehall, is significant in that it clarifies the controversy about if, when and how Horthy acted to bring the deportations to an end, and to enable the remaining Jews (mainly trapped in Budapest, many of them refugees from other countries) to seek asylum elsewhere. The matter was discussed at the War Cabinet Committee on Refugees meeting on 4 June, although Eden himself was not present. The Government faced a dilemma, since refusing to accept this offer would result in a hostile public reaction both in the United States and Britain, but accepting it would be ‘risking civil war in Palestine owing to the inroad of Jews from Hungary into the Levant.’  Despite the obvious urgency of the situation, the Cabinet reached a ‘no-decision’. The proposal of the International Red Cross for the almost immediate removal of 41,000 Jews from Hungary to Romania alarmed the meeting, which was generally against joining the US in accepting. The Secretary of State for the Colonies argued that the British Empire would be signing a blank cheque which we could not honour.

Although both Foreign Office and Home Office secretaries argued that the offer should be accepted in concert with the USA, they felt that in doing so the US Government must accept that the British authorities should not be forced to deliver the impossible in terms of accommodating the refugees, and it was eventually agreed to extend the transit camp originally established for Yugoslav refugees, especially to contain a potential sudden influx of immigrants to Palestine. There had even been suspicions expressed within the Cabinet that Hitler himself had inspired Horthy’s offer in order to create fundamental difficulties for the Allies in the Near East by allowing an exodus of Jews. Certainly, at this point, we know that the Regency in Budapest was incapable of acting independently from the occupying Nazi forces and Hitler’s all-powerful agent in the capital, Veesenmayer. It was not until the end of the month that the Romanians defected from the Axis camp and it became possible for a more independent Hungarian government to be formed again, so the Allies were rightly cautious about any overtures from Budapest at this stage.

Colonel Koszorús’ Unparalleled Action:

However, not to accept the offer would give the Nazis and the pro-Nazi Hungarian government a propaganda coup, and Eden agreed that the acceptance of the offer should be widely publicised and that the Dominion governments should be asked to help in receiving some of the refugees. He also suggested that it might be necessary to establish a transit camp in Syria in order to prevent the situation in Palestine from becoming ‘acute’. In a flurry of telegrams, the US Government agreed to wait before accepting the offer until after the full British War Cabinet on 8th, although before writing his Cabinet memorandum, Eden had already sent a third telegram to Washington signalling the British Government’s acceptance, subject to the detailed terms of transport and accommodation being agreed by the two governments. What effect this agreement had in Hungary we do not yet know, neither can we say that the deportations had been ended by this time, whatever the Regent’s intentions might have been. Horthy had originally ordered their suspension on 6 July, but a further 45,000 Jews from Transdanubia and the County of Pest had continued to be deported after that date. The most effective action to shield the Jews of Budapest had been taken on the initiative of Colonel Ferenc Koszorús in July, having important consequences for the survival of the Regency into the later summer and autumn:

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust, Congressman Tom Lantos, a survivor of the Holocaust himself and a liberal Democrat who served as Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, recognised Colonel Ferenc Koszorús:

‘Colonel Koszorús’ unparalleled action (in July 1944) was the only case in which Axis powers used military force for the purpose of preventing the deportation of the Jews. As a result of his extraordinarily brave efforts, taken at great risk in an extremely volatile situation, the eventual takeover of Budapest by the Nazis was delayed by three and a half months. This hiatus allowed thousands of Jews to seek safety in Budapest, thus sparing them from certain execution. It also permitted the famous Raoul Wallenberg , who arrived in Budapest on 9 July 1944, to coordinate his successful and effective rescue mission…’

(Hon. Tom Lantos, ‘Ferenc Koszurús: A Hero of the Hungarian Holocaust’, Congressional Record, 26 May 1994.)

We know that the Sztójay Government had rescheduled the deportation of the Budapest Jews for 27 August, but the Romanians switched sides on 23rd, and it was Himmler who cancelled any further deportations on 27th.

Raids on the Roma & Horthy’s ‘Hiatus’:

Throughout August and September, the horrors of ‘all-out’ warfare had continued within Hungary and its occupied territories, with massacres by government troops and continued forced marches. These were also experienced increasingly by the Roma communities (pictured above). In August and September, the remaining Roma were subjected to raids on their villages, pressing the men into forced labour companies. The first massacre of gipsies took place on 5 October in Doboz, Békés County, where twenty Roma, including women and children, were killed by hand grenades and machine-guns of the Hungarian first armoured division’s military police, acting together with the local gendarmes. Later that month, the Roma were ordered not to leave their permanent residences. At the same time, there were some signs of hopes for peace that late summer. Regent Miklós Horthy could no longer stomach the activities of Eichmann’s SS, and this led to a ‘hiatus’ in the anti-Jewish campaign. On 29 August he sent word to Edmund Veesenmayer that he had decided there would be no more deportations, at least for the time being. With the transportation of Jews from the provinces completed, there were only the Jews in the capital left. Himmler approved the suspension of deportations and the continuation of negotiations through Kasztner and Brand. Himmler, like the Hungarian government itself, had been thinking of an acceptable way of bringing the war to an end. Once back in his office in Budapest, Kasztner was astonished to learn from Dieter Wisliceny that Eichmann and his unit had been ordered out of Hungary. You have won, the Nazi officer told him, the Sonderkommando is leaving. Eichmann, furious with Himmler’s vacillations, retired to sulk at his estate near Linz. The latter later compensated him with the order of an Iron Cross, ‘Second Class’.

In spite of the change to a more ‘neutral’ government under General Lakatos, Hungarian troops occupied parts of Southern Transylvania, Romania, and massacred hundreds of Jews, starting on 4 September. Soviet units then reached the borders established by Trianon later that month and then moved across these into Szeged, where Horthy had begun his journey to power twenty-five years earlier. His failure as an Axis ally was now complete as a gigantic tank battle took place around Debrecen in early October. By mid-October, the Soviet Red Army entered the outskirts of Pest and Horthy, finally, tried desperately to agree on an armistice. Throughout the short period of Géza Lakatos’ premiership, rumours had abounded in Budapest that Horthy was getting ready to exit the war and that all he needed was an honourable way out. He wanted to sue for peace, but not if that peace included Stalin. The British and the Americans were not interested and insisted that nothing less than unconditional surrender would do. Horthy’s insistence on hanging onto his German alliance, however reluctantly, did not help his country’s cause. In final desperation, Horthy sent Lieutenant General Gábor Faragho across the front lines to present Hungary’s case to the Russians. On 11 October, Faragho cabled a draft armistice agreement from Moscow requiring Hungary to give up, once again, its historic territories in Transylvania, everything he had fought for during his years as head of state. Horthy’s hesitation over this gave the Germans the time they needed to prepare a coup.

On Sunday morning, 15 October, there were rumours that the Regent’s son had been abducted, together with a general and two senior officers. It was a warm, sunny autumn morning. German planes had dropped leaflets over the city urging a rebellion against the government. Politicians had also been arrested. Hungarian Radio announced that the Regent would make a general proclamation at 1 p.m. In a soft and shaky voice, Horthy gave a long, detailed statement, in which he announced his decision to sign a separate peace treaty with the Allies, that Hungary had withdrawn from the war and had declared that it is returning to its neutral status. All laws relating to the repression of the Jewish population were revoked. The Reich had lost the war and had also broken its obligations to its Hungarian partner when it had occupied the country in March and arrested many Hungarian citizens. He blamed the Gestapo for dealing with the “Jewish problem” in an inhumane way and claimed that his nation had been forced to persecute the Jews.  The news spread like wildfire on what was a glorious autumn afternoon: Anna Porter has described the scenes…

…the sun was shining and the trees along the boulevards displayed their startling red, yellow and deep-purple colours as if the horrors of the past few weeks had not happened, as if the houses lining the avenues had not been turned into rubble. People came out of their cellars, put on their best clothes and walked, holding hands and greeting each other as in peacetime. Many Jews who had been in hiding paraded their newfound freedom; some tore the yellow stars off their breasts and ordered shots of pálinka in bars where they used to go, or dared to use a public telephone and take rides on streetcars where the tracks had not yet been bombed..

But the atmosphere of general euphoria did not last long. The Germans had listened into every conversation in Buda Castle and were not surprised by the attempt to break free. They were aware of the plan to bring two Hungarian regiments into the city and knew of the arming of the Jewish battalions. German troops and armoured vehicles appeared on the streets of Budapest and set up control points. A further announcement came over the waves: Horthy had been forced to abdicate, and the Hungarian Arrow Cross (Nazi) party has formed a government under its leader Ferenc Szálasi. Hungary was back in the war on the Axis side, and all anti-Jewish legislation was back in force. With the Arrow Cross in charge, the Jews realised that Eichmann would be back to complete their transportation and that random killings would be carried out by the Arrow Cross units themselves. Tom Leimdörfer recalls his family’s fears:

The lives of all of us were in immediate danger. What followed was six months of hell redeemed by some amazing bravery and kindness on the part of some who were willing to risk their lives for us.

Rudolph (Rézső) Kasztner, unlike the members of the Jewish Council, had no faith in Horthy’s protestations that he had been duped into allowing deportations in the first place and even less faith in Himmler’s change of heart. He pressed on with his negotiations for the lives of the remaining Jews of Budapest, Bratislava and Kolozsvár. In the late summer of 1944, a bloody insurrection erupted in Slovakia. A few parachutists from Britain and two Soviet airborne brigades also took part in the uprising, as did some Jewish partisans, including Rudolf Vrba, one of the authors of The Auschwitz Protocols. The uprising failed and led to further reprisals against Bratislava’s Jewish community. In Budapest itself, there was what Kasztner described as a brief lull in the terror in the early autumn. Nevertheless, there was a widespread belief that the Germans would pack up and go home. The cafés and restaurants were full, and no-one left even when the sirens sounded. By mid-October, the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts were ready to execute Stalin’s order to take Budapest quickly. Arrow Cross newspapers accused the Jews of signalling bombers from rooftops, directing bombs to specific targets. Raoul Wallenberg had opened the door of the Swedish Embassy and directed his staff to hand out Swedish protection papers to all Jewish applicants. The certificates claimed that the holders were Swedish citizens awaiting exit visas. The number of Jews with official Swedish papers exceeded 4,500 by the end of October, and another three thousand fake Swedish certificates were handed out by the Rescue Committee and its Halutz workers. They all waited for permits to leave the country and be allowed into Palestine. The Swiss Red Cross had received over three million Swiss francs from the Jewish ‘Joint’ in the US to pay for food in the protected Star Houses bearing the Swedish colours and in the Columbus Street camp.

Victims, Survivors and Heroes:

Tom Leimdorfer, pictured here as a young child during the war, has narrated the effect of the events of 15 October on his family’s struggle to survive in Budapest, and especially in terms of their decision to go into hiding:

By now, my grandparents (Sári and Ármin) and my aunt Juci all lived in our flat. Juci’s husband Gyuri was in a labour camp. He had a dreadful accident there in March 1943 when he fell off a scaffolding. For some time, his life was in the balance, but he recovered albeit with a back injury which gave him much pain for the rest of his life. He was allowed home when he was in plaster recuperating, but was then back again in the forced labour camp outside Budapest. As the family wondered what to do on the evening of my eventful second birthday, Dr. Groh arrived. A kindly medical consultant, he was one of my grandfather’s customers who became a friend. He was a Roman Catholic who was appalled by the treatment of Jews and by the apparent acquiescence of his church. He said we were in danger and should leave our home immediately as Jews were being herded from ‘marked’ houses to designated ghettos. He insisted that we should all (15 of us!) go into hiding with his family even though that risked their lives.

Dr. Groh and his wife had six children. They made a room available for us and kept its shutters closed. For the next eight days we huddled together in that room, joining the family when there was nobody around who might report our presence. With Arrow Cross gangs and police raids everywhere, this was not a safe hiding place and the Groh family were at great risk. In spite of their protests, we crept back to our home one night to pick up some essentials and left for different destinations. Soon after we left, an Allied air raid hit the Groh’s house and tragically one of their daughters was killed. The room where we had been hiding was a pile of rubble.

My mother and I first headed across the Danube to the Pest side, to a house protected by the Swedish Embassy, where ‘Feri bácsi’ and ‘Manci néni’ (my grandparents younger siblings) were already staying. The Swiss and Swedish embassies as well as some churches had tried to set up ‘protected houses’ outside the overcrowded main Jewish ghettos. These were not always ‘safe’ as the Arrow Cross raids were unpredictable and (depending on the particular gang commander) would carry out atrocities without respect for any foreign diplomacy or even orders from their own Nazi puppet government, with its very thin veneer of legality. There were no more trains for Auschwitz, but there were the ‘death marches’ towards Austria organised by Eichmann as well as the random Arrow Cross raids. Diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg did all they could to thwart the murderous onslaught by distributing Swedish and Swiss passports and demanding safety for their ‘citizens’, by declaring houses as being under their protection and by threatening allied retribution after the war. With the Russian army advancing, this had some effect.

 

After the Arrow Cross coup d’état on 15 October, tens of thousands of Jews of Budapest were sent on foot to the Austrian border in death marches, and most of the remaining forced labourers under Hungarian Army command were deported to Bergen-Belsen. One of these forced labourers was the poet, Miklós Radnóti.

 

On the same day the War Cabinet met in London, 8 August to discuss the proposed evacuation of Jewish children from Budapest, Miklós Radnóti wrote the following from his work camp in the mountains above Zagubica in Yugoslavia:

ROOT 

Root, now, gushes with its power, 

rain to drink and earth to grow,

and its dream is white as snow.

Earthed, it heaves above the earthly,

crafty in its clamberings,

arm clamped like a cable’s strings.

On its wrists pale worms are sleeping,

and its ankles worms caress;

world is but  wormeatenness.

Root, though, for the world cares nothing,

thrives and labours there below,

labours for the leafthick bough;

marvels at the bough it nurses,

liquors succulent and sweet,

feeds celestially sweet.

Root is what I am, rootpoet,

here at home among the worms,

finding here the poem’s terms.

I the root was once the flower,

under these dim tons my bower,

comes the shearing of the thread,

deathsaw wailing overhead.

Radnóti’s words continued to be prophetic. The death saw continued to ‘wail overhead’ for many caught up in the Hungarian holocaust. Miklós Radnóti himself was one of these, and one of Hungary’s greatest poets of the twentieth century. Born in Budapest in 1909, from its very beginning, Radnóti’s life was overshadowed by tragedy. At his birth, both his mother and twin brother died. The ‘Numerus Clausus Act’ of September 1920, the first anti-Semitic law in Europe, required that the number of Jews in Hungarian universities be reduced to six per cent. Barred from the University of Budapest, Radnóti enrolled at Szeged University, where he read French and Hungarian literature and was awarded a PhD in 1934. In response to the country’s shift to the right, there were a number of groups arising on the centre-left, liberal, populist and social democratic. Continuing in the liberal tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Hungarian poets, Radnóti was among the young people in favour of social change. He joined the Art Forum of Szeged Youth, a populist movement addressing the plight of Hungarian peasants, supporting agrarian reform. Drawing on Hungarian folklore, they identified with the national poet Sándor Petőfi and musicians like Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály.  Inspired by the left-wing idealism common among writers and artists of the time, both inside Hungary and from outside, Radnóti cherished the values he developed in this group for the rest of his life. He also insisted on his identity as a Catholic and a Hungarian poet for the rest of his life, though his country branded him as a Jew. Once identified as such, regardless of his own detentions, he was effectively sentenced to death.

Despite his darkest premonitions, Radnóti’s work also continued to flourish, especially after his marriage to his high school sweetheart, Fanni Gyarmati, who had been the central focus of his love poems since the late twenties. By the late thirties, he was widely recognised in literary circles. However, within three years, from 1938-41, three sequences of anti-Jewish laws were introduced. The first two defined who was Jewish and regulated the percentage of Jewish participation in various economic activities. The third created a forced labour system that became responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, including that of Radnóti himself. Following the Nazi blitzkrieg on Poland, he anticipated the full-scale destruction of Hungary, and became sick in the stomach, ridden by insomnia and near to collapse. Nevertheless, he recovered sufficiently to produce work of great innovation in the lyrical tradition, combining the classical forms of the ancients with modern sensibilities. In 1938 he published a collection of poems, Steep Road, and in 1940, three more collections, including a volume of prose writing, a selection of translations and his own Selected Poetry. Two more volumes followed in his lifetime.

He was caught up in the whirlwind of the Hungarian Holocaust which followed the Nazi takeover of the country in March 1944. He suffered unspeakable deprivation and died a horrifying, anonymous death. Taken by a freight train from Hungary to Yugoslavia in May 1944, he was shot and buried in a mass grave with twenty-one other forced labourers, on an unknown date between the sixth and tenth of November. He left behind poems of the utmost beauty and rarity that both express and illuminate Hungarian culture. Many of them convey moods and perceptions untainted by the horrors, while others offer first-hand accounts of the wholesale murder. Taken as a whole, they reveal the wide range of Radnóti’s imagination and the obligation he felt to give testimony to an existence engulfed by catastrophe. As well as being masterworks in the annals of the poetry of the last century, they are also documents of destruction. Through them, Radnóti subverted the horror of the Holocaust, in helping us to understand it.

Much of what he started, however, he was unable to finish, as from 1940 he was called up three times into slave labour units. He was worked to exhaustion in coalfields, sugar plants and ammunition factories during his first two call-ups and in his last, he was taken to the copper mines in Bor, Yugoslavia. However, under pressure from Soviet and Partisan forces, the German Army was forced to evacuate the Balkans. Radnóti’s squad was force-marched back to Hungary, to be transferred from there to slave-labour camps in Germany. Cold weather, exhaustion, hunger, savage beatings and killings meant that of marching column which contained 3,600 men on leaving Bor, only eight hundred crossed the Hungarian border. Marching on through Western Hungary in November, Radnóti began to lose his strength. His feet were covered with open blisters, such that he could no longer walk. It was probably on 8 November that the squad reached a brickyard in a town near Győr, where they spent the night. Next day three NCOs of the Hungarian Armed Forces separated Radnóti and twenty-one others from the column. Crowding them onto two borrowed carts, they took them first to a hospital, then to a school housing refugees. Neither had room for them, so the soldiers took them to the dam near Abda, where they were ordered to dig a ditch. The guards then shot them one by one into the ditch.

When his body was exhumed a year and a half later, his last poems, stained by dirt and blood, were found in the pocket of his raincoat. Within a few years of the end of the war, his poems, including these resurrected ones, became well-known to Hungarians, exalting and moving millions of them in the continuing gloom which followed. Radnóti’s place among the Hungarian masters was confirmed. Until now, they have not been so well-known outside Hungary, but Ozsváth and Turner’s recent volume seeks to call the attention of the English-speaking world to them, giving them the means to resound… and communicate the vital, immediate sense which characterizes the original. Radnóti’s last volume of poetry, Foamy Sky, was published posthumously in 1946, a volume which did not then contain the last five poems. Only after his body was exhumed were these five poems found, inscribed in the small camp notebook (pages of which are shown below) he had obtained in Bor. Two years later, the entire and complete volume was re-published. Since then it has been re-published many times in Hungary, but never in English, until now. Ozsváth concludes:

…the unforgettable formal music of his poems not only preserves his most personal perceptions but also echoes the lives and culture of all those who were murdered in the Holocaust.  And while they give account of the darkest hours of history, they also demonstrate the tremendous power of the human spirit to triumph over death.

The Swiss & Swedish Missions:

Meanwhile, the remaining Jewish population of Budapest were living at the same subsistence level as the general population, despite the claims of the political far right that they were having a cushy time. As a result of the persistent removals of rights, men away on compulsory forced labour, and the deaths of many in the process, mass impoverishment and demoralisation were more and more in evidence. Applications to officialdom from widows who had lost husbands went unanswered. The Jews’ yellow ration cards bought less food of inferior quality in the shops.

The Swedish and Swiss embassies and their diplomats Wallenberg, Anger and Lutz did all they could to ameliorate these conditions and to protect the Jews against recurrent threats of deportation, providing safe houses, exemptions from wearing yellow stars and from forced labour in the army. Wallenberg was appaled at the helplessness of the Jews crammed into the starred houses. Those in need were quickly given financial assistance. A wide range of Jews doing forced labour, who were reduced to rags, were helped and enabled to obtain shoes and clothing. A separate purchasing section of the Swedish Embassy was set up for this purpose.

Wallenberg had arrived in Budapest on 9 July with a brief as embassy secretary of assessing and reporting on conditions in Hungary with a view to the organisation of further ‘humanitarian’ action. The director of the American War Refugee Bureau (WRB) and of OSS, Iver C Olsen, had chosen him for the mission in Hungary. He also had the backing of the US ambassador in Stockholm and the Swedish Foreign Ministry. He was charged with a number of tasks: in addition to reporting on the situation in the country, he was to build up and run a Swedish relief organisation, and to support persecuted Jews and registered persons in Budapest with a view to their rescue. He was to collaborate closely with the International Red Cross, thereby to organise escape routes in various directions. In this matter, from mid-July, he called on the services of Carl Lutz at the Swiss Consulate, from whom he learnt of the talks between the officials of the ‘Reich’ and the Hungarian authorities, and of the purpose and text of the Swiss protective documents.

Carl Lutz, Switzerland’s Vice-Consul, worked from the US Legation, declaring seventy-two buildings in Budapest as annexes of the Swiss Legation, thereby saving over sixty thousand Jews. On 24 July, Lutz moved the Emigration Section to a building in the old business quarter of Pest. It was granted extra-territorial status, and the series of numbered emigration documents prepared in its offices was called a ‘collective passport’. This originally contained the names of 7,800 ’emigrating’ Hungarian Jews. From October, Swiss protective letters (Schutzbrief) in Hungarian and German were also issued. With the assistance of Zionist members of the opposition, these were steadily circulated to the nominated Jewish families, who also received certificates like the one pictured below which they could display on doors and in windows to declare their protection by the Swiss Consulate. When Szálasi came to power, these were mostly of symbolic value. Lutz’s wife, Gertrud Frankhauser was also devoted to this humanitarian work, and both of them were awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem later in their lives.

Above: Daisy Lászlo, as named on her letter of protection

(to be continued)

Surviving Auschwitz and the Budapest Ghettos:

Susan (Zsuzsa) Pollock was deported as a child of fourteen to Auschwitz from the Hungarian countryside in 1944. Her story is available to read and download at https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/susan-pollack/. Apart from those who survived Auschwitz, there were many children who escaped the death marches and Arrow Cross terror in Budapest, and survived, scarred by the experience of loss of family and friends. Here, I quote published and unpublished testimony from these children remembering that dreadful summer of 1944.

Tom’s Tale – Air Raids on Budapest:

The German occupation and the collaboration of the Hungarian state in it meant that the previous agreement with the Allies not to bomb the country was negated. The bombardment of Hungary began in the summer of 1944. The warm summer of 1944 was a summer of allied (mainly RAF) airstrikes. Two-year-old Tom Leimdorfer (whom I first met in the UK in 1987) often played outside in their small but secluded front garden on the Pest side of Budapest. They had a radio and were generally the first to hear the air raid warnings. The bombers normally came from the south and the direction given over the airwaves was: ‘Baja, Bácska, Budapest’.

These were amongst Tom’s first words, acting as an air raid warning to people in the flats above us as he ran around naked in the garden shouting ‘Baja, Bácska, Budapest!’ They would then all go down to the cellar, which served as a very inadequate air raid shelter.

The RAF was bombing them and their lives were under threat from them, but they were not ‘the enemy’ as far as Tom’s family was concerned. Tom’s father was ‘missing’ on the Russian front (pictured above with his unit) and Russian troops were advancing towards Hungary with all the uncertainties and horrors of a siege of Budapest approaching, but they were not their ‘enemy’ either, but their hoped-for liberators. Yet Tom’s maternal grandparents were taken by Hungarian special forces on the orders of the Gestapo with no objection or resistance from their neighbours. Looking back, Tom wrote that the ‘enemy’ was war and inhumanity, hatred and anti-Semitism.

Tom’s ‘official’ baby picture.

Tom Leimdorfer’s grandfather Aladár spent much of his time on his allotment just outside the small town of Szécsény, where he also kept bees, enjoying the simple life in retirement. Tom’s mother later told him that they last visited the elderly couple in early May 1944 (as shown in the picture of her with her mother, right), when Tom was 18 months old, just a few weeks before they were deported to Auschwitz. Tom is in no doubt that his grandparents would have been taken straight to the gas chambers on arrival. The story of the lively Jewish community in Szécsény was later told by the photographer Irén Ács in a moving account and photos of her friends and family. She also survived in Budapest, but nearly all her friends and family perished.

The Long Shadow of Auschwitz from Szécsény to Pest:

Early in May, the Jews of Szécsény were ordered to leave their homes and belongings apart from a small case with a change of clothes and essentials. They were restricted to a ghetto of a few houses near the school. On the 10 June 1944, they were taken under special forces’ escort to the county town of Balassagyarmat, some 20 km away. There were no Germans in Szécsény, the whole operation being carried out by Hungarian special forces. In Balassagyarmat, the Germans supervised the loading of the wagons from the whole region with ruthless efficiency. By nightfall, the long train of cattle wagons carrying over 2,500 men, women and children were on their way to Auschwitz. The memorial in the Jewish cemetery of Szécsény has 303 names of those killed in the Holocaust from that town of around 6,000 people. A similar fate befell villages across Hungary, where there was no time for any reaction, let alone organised resistance, by the Jewish families or their Christian neighbours.

Another ‘Jewish’ child in Budapest in 1944 was Marianna (‘Daisy’) Birnbaum (née László), who wrote up her family and friends’ stories in her 2016 volume, 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. In her introduction to this, she wrote:

1944 was the most important year of my life. My childhood ended in 1944 and what I experienced during that time determined the decades that were to follow. Ever since the age of ten, I see the world as I then saw it. In the battle between God and Satan. Satan won, but we have not been told. By now, I know that the perpetrator can be a victim at the same time. However, this awareness does not help me to give up that hopelessly ‘Manichaean’ view of the world that the year 1944 had created in me.

Due to luck and the bravery of my father, my parents… survived, but many of my relatives became the victims of German and Hungarian Nazism. … I also want to report on those who by some miracle had survived those terrible times, because their lives too had irrevocably changed.

In the summer of 1944, she and her mother rushed to her Uncle Lajos Benke (formerly Blau, pictured below) for advice when her father was taken by the Gestapo. For a while, having an ‘Aryan’ spouse exempted Jews from racial legislation. Although her Aunt Juliska was non-Jewish, Uncle Lajos was registered as a Jew. They lived in an elegant apartment in Buda. He could give them no advice, but would not allow his sister and niece to return to Pest due to the allied bombing. They spent three days there, but Daisy’s mother grew nervous and worried that they would cause trouble for their hosts. In order to take up residence, even temporarily, they should have registered with the local police, but Jews were not permitted to change residence and so it was safer for them to leave. Daisy became six that summer, so she had to wear a yellow star. By then, her father, who had paid a large bribe to a Gestapo officer, was temporarily free.

He also arranged Swiss protection for Uncle Lajos, who came to live with them in the apartment they shared with about twenty other people. In order to be with her husband, Aunt Juliska appeared daily in the house, despite exposing herself to the constant danger of air raids through these visits to the Jewish neighbourhood. Martial law was put into effect: Jews could only leave their so-called ‘protected houses’ for only two hours per day. In any case, she was never allowed to leave the house alone, though she sometimes rushed out in secret when she could no longer bear such a large number of people packed into the house, the permanent loud yelling and various other noises. Once outside, she walked down one of the main streets until stopping in front of the local patisserie. What happened next was one of those peculiar small acts of human compassion which randomly punctuated life during wartime:

… swallowing hard, I watched the children inside, sitting in the booths, licking their ice creams. Jews were banned from there, too, and I had not had ice cream since the summer before, because … by the time spring came, I was no longer permitted to enter such places.

Suddenly a shadow was cast upon the shop window and when I turned around, I saw a German soldier standing next to me. He must have been an officer because there were stars on his uniform. “Was magst du? Willst du ein buntes?” he asked. … Frightened, my response was barely audible. He took my hand and walked me with the yellow star on my dress into the patisserie and ordered two scoops of mixed ice cream for me. Of course, it was he who was being served but I believe that the people sitting inside understood what had happened.

The officer pressed the cone in my hand, paid and moved toward the exit. I followed him, the ice cream in one hand, the other that the soldier no longer held, hanging awkwardly, as if next me. I murmured my thanks as he hurried away without a backward glance. He was the one and only German soldier I had met during the war. Should I draw from this meeting a conclusion regarding the relationship between the German Nazi army and the Jews? 

The map shows the ghettos and zones set out in the deportation schedule. Places referred to in the text: Szécsény, Balassagyarmat, Szolnok, Komárom, Cinkota, Csepel, Kispest.

Daisy’s Relatives & Friends in Szolnok & Komárom:

Daisy’s father’s family lived in Szolnok, and her mother’s relatives were in Komárom, which was returned to Hungary through its Axis alliance. Of these two families, sixty-four perished in the various extermination camps, comprising men, women and children. Her father’s brother, her Uncle Bálint (above), was arrested on the German occupation of Szolnok, together with several of the wealthier Jews. They were beaten and tortured, first in the jail in the town and later in Budapest. Meanwhile, their families were deported from the town. Trains, made up of cattle cars, were already in the station when the gendarmes took Aunt Ilonka back to their home leaving Pista, aged twelve, on his own with a rucksack on his back, waiting for her in front of the wagons. She returned to the platform just as the huge doors were about to be slammed shut and locked. The gendarmes had been searching her home for hidden money and jewellery and had she not handed everything over, she would quite possibly have been beaten to death then and there. In the best case, she and Pista would have been put on the next train.

They did not know it at the time, but the first train was directed via Austria whereas the following one went directly to Auschwitz. Their catching the first meant the difference between possible survival and immediate death. They were eventually reunited with Bálint on an Austrian farm he had been deported to but found themselves separated again when taken to work at the Anker bakery in Vienna. They then survived an air raid and by the time they were transferred to Terezin concentration camp, there were no longer any trains being directed to Auschwitz. When they eventually all returned to Szolnok, they were able to begin a new life with the help of other jewels which Bálint had hidden in a different spot that he had shown only to Pista.

Bálint and Ilonka also had an elder son, who was twenty-three in 1944. He was known as ‘Sanyika’ (pictured above). Barred from university because he was Jewish, he was put to work in the extended family’s iron and metal plant, though at heart he was a poet. Drafted into the forced labour corps in the army in 1940-41, he was dispatched to the Carpathians. After his parents were deported, his poems (stored in the attic of the Szolnok house) were thrown about by neighbours who ransacked the place, searching for anything of value. Many years later, Pista met one of Sanyika’s friends in Budapest and two others in Israel. They told him that Sanyika had become desperate after he had learned of the deportations of his parents. He stopped caring about his own fate, clashed with the guards who beat him severely. When his three friends tried to escape, he refused to join them. It was a cruel twist of fate that those whom he believed to have died survived, whereas he disappeared without a trace and was thought to have perished.

Daisy’s mother’s family lived in Komárom and the neighbouring settlements. In early June 1944, Hungarian gendarmes put her grandparents into a freight train and sent them off to Auschwitz. Two letters from them have survived. The first was written to her around Christmas 1938, and the second came into her hands in 1995 when she found it among her mother’s papers. Her grandparents wrote it together, a day before they were deported from the Komáron ghetto. She realised that her mother must have carried the devastating message in her own clothing until after the liberation of Hungary and then when they escaped Hungary in 1956 and went to live in California. She reflected on how, when …

… soon after the war’s end I saw my parents – who were then in their thirties – having a good time (they even danced!), I was very angry at them for “forgetting so fast.” It took a long time of maturing until I understood that they forgot nothing: Just here and there they searched for a moment of joy in order to survive what had been barely survivable.

Her mother’s younger brother, József Blau, sent two postcards to family members in July 1944, one of which encouraged his cousin to send a postcard to deported relatives, which was limited to thirty words in German, placed in an envelope and given to the Jewish Council in Budapest from where it would be forwarded. We know now that, in order to avoid panic among the newly-arrived deportees at Auschwitz, the Nazis made them send postcards to their families from Waldsee. The cards could be picked up in the office of the Jewish Council at Budapest, Sip utca 12 on the basis of published lists. Characteristic of the Nazis’ infinite cynicism, there was no need to put stamps on the cards sent in response, because the cards were destroyed, either in the Council or at the next step, since the addressees were no longer alive. Daisy’s mother also had a cousin in Komárom, Aunt Manci, whose daughter, ‘Évike’, was of a similar age to Daisy so that they became inseparable friends (pictured below). Uncle Miki, Aunt Manci’s husband, had been called up to serve in a forced labour camp at the beginning of the war and after a short time he was declared ‘missing’. They never found out what had happened to him. Aunt Manci and Évike remained alone until, in the early summer of 1944, together with Marianna’s grandparents, Aunt Manci’s family was deported and Évike was also taken to Auschwitz. Daisy wrote that she often wondered: Who held her hand on the ramp as they stood in front of Mengele?

Another little friend in Komárom was Ági. She was also deported to Auschwitz with her mother where they were immediately gassed. Her father was in a labour camp at the time, but somehow survived and returned to Komárom in 1945. Jenő found no-one alive from his family and lived alone for months in their old house until he met Rózsi, a former acquaintance. She too had been sent to Auschwitz with her mother and her own daughter. The child clung to her grandmother which resulted in the two of them being sent immediately to the gas chamber. Rózsi, therefore, found herself in the other line of those who had survived the first selection. She was transferred from Auschwitz and worked in an ammunition factory. Broken, the lone survivor from her family, she also returned to Komárom and after a short time, she and Jenő decided to marry. However, soon after four or five young women who had spent some time recuperating after surviving the camps, also returned to Komárom. They recognised Rózsi as the “dreaded capo”, a prisoner assigned by the Nazis to supervise the rest of the prisoners in the camps. They visited Jenő and claimed that she had beaten and tortured them both in Auschwitz and later in the ammunition factory where they too had been transferred. Allegedly, he then pounced on her and almost strangled her. With a great effort, the neighbours succeeded in pulling him off Rózsi, taking her onto the grass outside to revive her. He then went into the house, left with a bag and disappeared from Komárom, reportedly for Palestine.

It was, again, a twist of fate which meant that Daisy was not sent to Auschwitz with her grandparents. When the Germans occupied Budapest in March 1944, her grandfather had demanded that her parents should send her to Komárom right away, accompanied by her friend Mariska, and they both set out for the Western Station soon after. However, when they arrived at the station, there were police and soldiers everywhere, demanding to see documents. When Mariska admitted that whereas she was a Christian, her companion was Jewish, they were barred from boarding the train. However, had she been allowed to board, she would almost certainly have been deported with her grandparents, ending her life in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In early June, her grandparents, along with the rest of the Jewish community of Komárom, were first moved to the ghetto and then, a few days later, they were all herded into cattle cars to be deported. Gazsi, their shop assistant and factotum, helped the Bau family, although the gendarmes threatened to put him on the train too. Daisy’s dog, Foxy, who had been cared for by Gazsi for the previous few weeks, began barking at this struggle, and one of the gendarmes shot him dead. Gazsi then ran to the post office from where he mailed the Bau’s last letter, adding the last details about Foxy. The letter arrived on 13 June, Daisy’s mother’s birthday, the letter which eventually came into their granddaughter’s possession over fifty years later. Daisy recalled its immediate effects:

Neither before, nor after, have I seen anything like this. With the letter in her hand, my mother ran through the apartment in circles, screaming and tearing out her hair (literally). I was merely told that my grandparents, in the company of many relatives, were ‘taken away’; no-one knew where. … I was around fifteen when I found out that (Foxy) had been shot… Since then, I have been mourning him as another Holocaust victim from my family.

Scarred Schoolfriends from Budapest:

In the capital itself, rumours had been circulating claiming that those who converted would not be deported so that many Jewish families tried to save themselves by seeking Protestant pastors who would help them by providing certificates of baptism without studying or preparation. In one of Uncle Józsi’s postcards, sent just before he was shot dead while being deported to Austria, he mentioned that some members of their larger family were visiting a parish priest. Tom Leimdorfer’s mother had already converted to Calvinism. Daisy’s father gained the assistance of the pastor of the Fóti út Evangelical Congregation and decided that both she and her mother should convert. Her mother, however, refused, and would not let her daughter attend either. Her father, therefore, got his ex-secretary to stand in for his wife, but he could not get a Christian child to stand in for Daisy, so she remained Jewish.

A number of Daisy’s friends and classmates also survived the year 1944 as children and grew up to be wounded people. Instead of losing their relatives to illness or old age, to traffic accidents or even random bombing, their family members were victims of a well-prepared genocide. ‘Tomi’ was born in Budapest in 1931. His father owned a large factory that produced light fixtures; his mother was a concert pianist. The entirely assimilated family, living on the first floor of a Rózsadomb villa, decided to take the final step and converted to Catholicism, mainly to avoid the increasing restrictions on Jews. Nonetheless, in June 1944, they had to leave their home, as Tomi, his mother and his older sister Edit were moved to a ‘Jewish house’. By then, his father was also in a forced labour camp. In October, all three of them had to report to the brick factory of Óbuda, from where they were supposed to be deported. Tomi’s father was able to provide them with Swiss protection documents and, therefore, three days later, they were moved to the overcrowded ghetto. There, Tomi shared a room with six children but he succeeded in smuggling them all out because he had two copies of the document proving that he was a Roman Catholic. Following his plan, two boys left the ghetto (one at each exit) with the documents, met outside, one returning with both copies so that the exeat could be repeated until all seven of them were outside the walls.

Ágnes, born in Budapest in December 1933, lived with her parents in an apartment which became crowded when her mother’s sister Irén, her husband Retső and their two sons moved in with them from the small town of Cinkota, near the capital, during the spring of 1944. Her father was soon drafted into the army, but as he was forty-six years old, he narrowly avoided being sent to the Russian front. Instead, he was directed into forced labour from where he was allowed to send a postcard to his family each week so that they were not too worried about him. Teaching at Ági’s elementary school was discontinued after 30 April and she had to wear a yellow star, a humiliating sign that had to be sewn on to each and every piece of outside clothing. The family was also forced to move to a house marked with a yellow star. Ági slept with her mother on a couch in the hallway. Jews were allowed to shop only after 10 a.m. by which time everything had gone from the shelves. Ági went to the local bakery and queued for bread, so at least they had fresh bread to eat. She did not remember whether they had ration cards, which were legally valid for Christians only. She did remember her Aunt Irén poking the worms out of a piece of meat and cooked it, but Ági refused to eat it. During the warm summer, the children played out on the flat roof, or on the staircase, as they were no longer permitted to go to the park. On 3 July, Ági’s Uncle Ernő and his sixteen-year-old son Péter went out to Csepel, the industrial island in the Danube, to look for work in order to avoid deportation. They were never seen again. The family later heard that they had been rounded up in a raid and later perished in Auschwitz, the father committing suicide by running into the electrified fence.

Before the spring of 1944, Marianna’s Jewish friends in Budapest led a very active outdoor life, getting ‘Brownie’ cameras and bicycles for their birthdays. As late as the winter of 1943-44, they went skying at Normafa, a popular skiing slope in the Buda Hills. However, outdoor life soon came to an abrupt end as Jewish families no longer dared to show themselves at places of leisure, even if not yet officially banned. They feared to call attention to themselves during the frequently conducted parasite roundups aimed primarily at Jews by Hungarian fascists. Following the Nazi occupation, they suddenly found themselves excluded from most public places and during the worst times the families lost contact with each other because they were ordered to live in different ‘Protected houses’. They didn’t meet again until 1945 when Marianna learnt that her best friend in Budapest, Marika, hidden in a nunnery, remained the sole survivor of her family. Her parents and her brother Andris were taken from their ‘protected house’ by the Arrow Cross paramilitaries and were shot into the Danube. Andris, Marianna’s first boyfriend, was just thirteen.

Ágota, or ‘Ágika’, was a silent little girl who loved her father more than she loved anyone. Whenever her father was at home from his forced labour service, Ágika always sat very close to him, but during the spring of 1944, she was at home alone with her mother, Ilus. When her husband was away, Ilus found it difficult to cope with the new world that seemed ready to destroy her and her family at any moment. She continually expected to be arrested by the Gestapo, a fear not quite unreasonable since Ágika’s father owned a rubber and tire factory which was now under the control of the Hungarian state, but could have been too useful a source for the Germans to allow to remain in the hands of the state. There were still a number of similarly wealthy Jewish families living in the same building. Once a green Mercedes stopped at the park entrance of the house, and a few minutes later, when the soldiers left, they took one of the tenants along. A few days later, when Ilus saw the distinctive Mercedes again from the window of the fifth-floor apartment, she assumed the worst when three soldiers got out and started towards the gate. As she heard the elevator approaching the upper floors, she grabbed her daughter and dragged her towards the balcony door, with the aim of throwing themselves off the balcony. Ágika struggled with her mother, preventing her from opening the door by biting her wrist before screaming at her:

You are not going to kill me, you murderer, I am going to wait for my Daddy!

While they continued to fight quite bitterly, the noise from the elevator shaft stopped, and the sound of boots could be heard from the floor below. Mother and daughter sat on the floor for some minutes, gasping for air, before bursting into tears. They were later hidden by a Christian family who, though well remunerated for doing so, were  risking their lives, as the ubiquitous posters chillingly proclaimed:

Whosoever hides Jews will be hacked to pieces.

Thanks to Ágika, the three of them survived the horrors of 1944. So did Gyuri, Ágika’s cousin, who moved in with them. His mother was the elder sister of Aunt Ilus and one of the many ‘who did not return’. His parents had divorced when Gyuri was little, so he lived with his mother, brother and maternal grandmother. His father was ‘reported missing’ earlier in the war, so Gyuri became a ‘half-orphan’ at the age of ten. In 1944, they lived in wretched misery with many others in a ‘Jewish house’ waiting to be deported. He later recalled the hostility of their ‘Christian’ neighbours:

We were gathering in the courtyard when the passers-by stopped in the street, cursing us and spitting at us over the iron fence. Watched by, and at the pleasure of the bastille crowd, we were taken in a long procession along Rákóczi út to the synagogue in Dohány utca.

Apparently, a German soldier filmed the entire action by the Hungarian gendarmes which can be viewed in the permanent collection of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The plan was to move the several hundred Jews to the railway station, but the manoeuvre was suddenly halted and all were marched back to the ‘Jewish house’, after being forced to hand over their watches, jewellery and the cash they had on them. With the help of relatives, Gyuri’s family then received Swedish protective papers and, together with twenty others, they were moved into the abandoned apartment of Aunt Ilus, which had become a Swedish ‘protected house’.

Kati was also born in Budapest in 1934. Her father owned a paper factory that he managed with his father and the family lived on the Pest side of the capital, in a house where one of the apartments on the upper floor belonged to them, while her grandparents’ apartment and the shop were on the ground floor. Although Kati’s father was conscripted to forced labour even before the war, they lived comfortably, without worries… until, at age nine and a half, the world changed around them. One of Kati’s most painful memories was that she had to go to school each day with the yellow star on her dress. Because their house was declared a ‘Jewish house’, they did not have to move. Instead, dozens of people were forcibly moved in with them. Kati took care of the younger children, among whom some were under six. She took them down to the air-raid shelter and played with them to distract them during the raids. One time, bombs were dropped very close by, but only shattered the windows and damaged a few pieces of furniture.

Then one day, while on his way to join his company, Hungarian soldiers removed Kati’s father from a train at Nagyvárad and, suddenly, he went missing without a trace. Kati’s mother was able to procure copies of the ‘protection documents’ Wallenberg had been handing out, but it was too late because the Germans occupied their house and transported both sets of grandparents to the ghetto. Kati was sent to live with distant relatives and one of her father’s employees got hold of false papers for her, with a new name, Aranka Sztinnyán. Although she was with relatives, she felt terribly alone. Although I looked Aryan, I was not permitted out on the street, she recalled. A few weeks later, Kati’s mother, who had escaped from the Óbuda brick factory, came to fetch her. Together with ten other relatives, Kati and her mother hid in the coal cellar of an apartment block where, from time to time, they received food from unknown benefactors who were not permitted to see them. Kati does not remember being hungry, neither was she scared, except for the bombs. Her mother saved her from sensing the daily danger that surrounded them. When they returned to their home following the ‘liberation’, they discovered that, except for her father, everybody had survived. Eventually, he too returned from Terezin at the end of the war, having survived ten different concentration camps.

Misi ‘Gyarmat’ was born into a ‘Jewish gentry’ family in Balassagyarmat, which had been the family’s home since the eighteenth century. His maternal grandfather, Ármin, was a well-to-do, well-respected local landowner. Although Misi’s parents lived in Budapest, ‘Gyarmat’ was the paradise where he, his mother and his younger sister Jutka spent their summers, immersing themselves in the pleasures of country life which offered unlimited freedom. His father, Dr László Gy. held the rank of lieutenant, working as a physician among the mountain rangers during World War I. In Apatin in Serbia, which was awarded to Hungary in 1941, László took over the medical practice of a young Christian doctor who was drafted to serve with the Second Hungarian Army on the Russian Front. He lived there between 1942 and 1944 when he went to live with his family in the ghetto in Budapest. When Misi’s maternal grandfather died in 1943, the family council decided that since both uncles were serving in forced labour camps, Misi’s mother would take over the management of the estate, and she and the children would not return to Budapest and Misi transferred to the Balassgyarmat Jewish school. Following the German occupation, the estate was immediately confiscated, and the family’s mobility was increasingly curtailed. The local Jews were moved into a hastily assembled ghetto and all those deemed ‘temporary lodgers’ were ordered to return immediately to their permanent places of residence. For Misi and his mother, this meant a return to Budapest, so his mother pleaded to be allowed to stay in Balassagyarmat in order to take care of her recently widowed mother. Her brother, home on leave, went to see the local police chief, but the captain denied the request, saying:

I am doing this in the interest of your sister, her children and for the memory of your father.

The meaning of this sentence became clear later, making it clear that the police chief knew exactly what would happen with the deportees. As in other villages throughout rural Hungary, he did nothing to rescue any of the local Jews but instead rendered fast and effective police work to accomplish their deportation. Next day, Misi, his sister and his mother left for Budapest. Two weeks later, those of their family who remained at Gyarmat, together with the rest of the Jewish community, were all crammed into cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz. One survivor later told them that, in the wagons, they had to travel standing, all packed in like sardines. One of the gendarmes stabbed the leg of an old woman who, due to her varicose veins, could not walk fast enough. Blood was spurting from her leg as she was pushed into the car. A dying man was shoved into another wagon and his body was not removed until six hours after his death, though the train did not leave until after those hours. Misi lost his grandmother in Auschwitz and all his childhood friends from Gyarmat.

Hoping to avoid deportation later that summer, Misi and his family converted to Catholicism. Whereas none of the churches stood up openly for the persecuted, during the worst period, both children were saved by members of the Catholic orders. Misi found refuge in the Collegium Josephinum on Andrássy Boulevard. Zsuzsa Van, the Prioress of the nunnery was later awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, on the memorial honouring those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews. Misi’s sister was saved by the Carmelite nuns in Kőbánya. Their paternal grandmother remained in the family apartment in Budapest, never sewed the yellow star on her own garments, yet somehow survived, along with both their paternal uncles. Thirty-five years later, Misi returned to his once-beloved Balassgyarmat for his first visit since those awful events.

Most of the children of Budapest of 1944 were just one generation away from country life and many, like Ágnes had been born in the countryside and still had relatives there. She had been born in Endrőd, a town in eastern Hungary, but by the time she was in the first form, her family had moved to Budapest and she became another of Daisy’s classmates at the Jewish elementary school on Hollán Street. Until 1944, Ágnes’s happiest moments were spent at her grandmother’s house at Zalaegerszeg in western Hungary. Her father, György, was a journalist and newspaper editor, politically aware and active. He took his little girl seriously, talking to her about politics and other grown-up topics. His sudden disappearance, therefore, created a void that has accompanied her throughout her life. In November 1943, unable to bear their confinement any longer, he left his hiding place, a loft, said goodbye as if he were just leaving for the forced labour camp, and was never seen again. She also lost her maternal grandmother that same year, from blood poisoning, Her only son died of starvation at Kőszeg. Her paternal grandparents were deported together with their daughter, György’s sister. They were sent to a farm in Austria where Ágnes’s grandfather, a rabbi in Hungary, drove a tractor. All three of them survived, saddened and scarred by their son’s disappearance. Ágnes always remembers the gigantic capital Zs (for ‘Zsidó’, ‘Jew’ in Hungarian) in her father’s military record book. Her poem to him stands for the unfathomable sense of loss many of these children have grown up with:

...

I feel, you are off. Stepping out,

a well-dressed vagrant,

you never really leave; you are just stepping out,

looking back, laughing, at age thirty-eight,

I’ll soon be back, you nod and wave.

Your birthday would have been the following day.

The Last Days of the War in the East:

It is a remarkable testimony to the dedication of the Nazis to complete their ‘final solution’ to ‘the Jewish Problem’ that their programme of deportations continued well into July. The huge Russian summer ground offensive, timed for the moment when attention in the Reich would be most concentrated on events in Normandy, was launched on 22 June 1944, the third anniversary of Operation Barbarossa. The counter-offensive, Operation Bagration (codenamed by Stalin after the great Georgian Marshal of the 1812 campaign). The attack was supported by four hundred guns per mile along a 350-mile front connecting Smolensk, Minsk and Warsaw. Bagration was intended to destroy the German Army Group Centre, opening the way to Berlin itself. The Red Army had almost total air cover, much of the Luftwaffe having been flown off westwards to try to deal with the Normandy offensive and the Combined Bomber Offensive. Much of the Third Panzer Army was destroyed in a few days and the hole created in the wildly overstretched German line was soon no less than 250 miles wide and a hundred miles deep, allowing major cities such as Vitebsk and Minsk to be recaptured on 25 June and 3 July respectively. By the latter date, the Russians had moved forward two hundred miles from their original lines. They encircled and captured 300,000 Germans at Minsk. Army Group Centre had effectively ceased to exist, leaving a vast gap between Army Group South and Army Group North. Bagration has been described by historians as being, from a German perspective, …

… one of the most sudden and complete military disasters in history. … even in the months following the Allied invasion of Normandy, German casualties in Russia continued to average four times the number in the West.

I have written about the tactical errors made by the German High Command, including Hitler himself, in my previous article. The movement of senior personnel on both the Eastern Front and, to a lesser extent, on Western Front, resembled a merry-go-round. Having been appointed commander-in-chief west in 1942, General Rundstedt was removed from command on 6 July 1944 after trying to persuade Hitler to adopt a more mobile defence strategy rather than fighting for every town and village in France. He was reappointed to his old post on the Eastern Front in command of Army Group South. By 10 July, twenty-five of the thirty-three divisions of Army Group Centre were trapped, with only a small number of troops able to extricate themselves. In the course of the sixty-eight days of this vast Kesselschladt (cauldron battle), the Red Army regained Belorussia and opened the way to attack East Prussia and the Baltic States. The year 1944 is thus seen as an annus mirabilis in today’s Russia. For all that is made of the British-American victory in the Falaise pocket, the successful Bagration offensive was ten times the size, yet it is hardly known of in the West.

On 14 July 1944, the Russians attacked south of the Pripet Marshes, capturing Lwow on the 27th. As a result, the Germans had been forced back to their Barbarossa start lines of three years earlier. Further south, Marshal Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front prepared to march on Belgrade, aided by Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav partisans. It was extraordinary, therefore, considering that the war’s outcome was in no doubt by the end of July 1944, that the Wehrmacht continued to operate as an efficient, disciplined fighting force well into the spring of 1945. The ‘Battle of Budapest’ played a major role in this. On 20 August, Marshal Vasilevsky began his drive to clear the Germans out of the Balkans, which saw spectacular successes as the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts crossed the River Prut and attacked Army Group South in Romania. With Hitler desperate to retain control of the Romanian oilfields, without which his planes and tanks would be forced to rely on failing synthetic fuel production within the Reich, he could not withdraw the Sixth Army, twenty divisions of which were therefore trapped between the Dnieper and the Prut by 23 August. On that same day, Romania surrendered, and soon afterwards changed sides and declared war on Germany: a hundred thousand German prisoners and much matérial were taken.

At the end of August, after the success of the D-day landings in Normandy had been secured, Horthy recovered his mental strength and replaced Sztójáy with one of his loyal Generals, Géza Lakatos. By then the war aims of the Horthy régime, the restoration of Hungary to its pre-Trianon status, were in tatters. The First and Second Awards and the acquisitions by force of arms would mean nothing after the defeat which now seemed inevitable. The fate of Transylvania was still in the balance in the summer of 1944, with everything depending on who would liberate the contested territories from the Germans. When Royal Romania succeeded in pulling out, the Soviet and Romanian forces combined forces began a joint attack and the weakened Hungarian Army was unable to contain them. By 31 August, the Red Army was in Bucharest, but despite having advanced 250 miles in ten days, it then actually speeded up, crossing two hundred miles to the Yugoslav border in the following six days.

Sources:

Marianna D. Birnbaum (2016), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. London: Constable.

Zsolt Zágoni (ed.)(2012), From Budapest to Bergen-Belsen: A Notebook from 1944. Published by the editor.

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity: Raoul Wallenberg and his Aides in Budapest. Budapest: Corvina.

Andrew Roberts (2010), Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. London: Penguin Books.

Gyula Kodolányi & Nóra Szekér (2013), Domokos Szent-Iványi: The Hungarian Independence Movement, 1939-1946. Budapest: Hungarian Review Books.

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Laurence Rees (2008), World War Two: Behind Closed Doors; Stalin, the Nazis, and the West. London: BBC Books.

Part Two; June – December:

The British Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, including (in the centre),

Arthur J Balfour & David Lloyd George, Foreign Secretary & Prime Minister.

This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.

(Marshal Foch at Versailles)

Victory Celebrations in London & Paris:

In the victory celebration parade that took place in London in July 1919 units of every ‘race and creed’ from Britain’s worldwide empire marched in symbolic unity. Men in their millions, latterly conscripted, had responded to the call to uphold the glorious traditions of the British race. 

Below: British sailors march through Whitehall in July 1919 to celebrate ‘Victory’.

Two weeks after witnessing the humiliating scenes in the Galerie des Glaces, Harold Nicolson watched the Allied victory procession make its way through the Arc de Triomphe. Perched high on the roof of the Hotel Astoria, he was overcome by a wave of patriotic fervour as he applauded the British Grenadiers and behind them hundreds and hundreds of British regimental flags – stiff, imperial, heavy with gold lettering, “Busaco”, “Inkerman”, “Waterloo” – while the crowd roared with enthusiasm. Cries of “Good Old Blighty” were heard. Harold wept at the spectacle of the most glorious, the most democratic and the most final of Britain’s victories. For Nicolson, these three months in Paris, despite his private agony and professional frustration, ended on an emotional high. But this sense of relief and elation at the coming of peace did not last long, either in Paris or London. The Treaty of Versailles did not deal, except incidentally, with the problems arising out of the liquidation of the Austro-Hungarian empire, nor with the two other ‘enemy’ powers, Turkey and Bulgaria. Four further treaties were required to deal with these: St. Germain, concluded with Austria in September 1919; Neuilly, with Bulgaria in November 1919; Trianon, with Hungary in June 1920, and Sévres, with Turkey in August 1920, though later replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

Above: At the Peace Conference at the Quai d’Orsay, by Sir William Orpen.

Unfinished Business – Break-up of the Austrian Empire:

The most spectacular change in the post-war map of Europe was the disappearance of the Hapsburg Empire, which for seventy years had been saved from collapse by its dynastic rulers. There was no unity between the different nationalities. Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Poles, Croats, and Slovenes were dominated by German and Magyar masters; yet because one dynasty had linked together in its chain of bondage a huge territory in Central Europe, centring on the Danube Basin, certain economic advantages accrued to its million inhabitants. There was free trade within the vast empire; a unified railway and river transport system and an outlet to the Adriatic Sea assisted the national trade and commerce. But the empire had already collapsed and its former territories were already split into seven territories before the conference started. Austria and Hungary were both reduced to the status of minor states before the treaties of St. Germain and Trianon were signed and sealed. The fragments of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy were in a dire condition. Austria was reduced to one great city and a narrow arc of productive land around it which could never form an economic unit by itself, and Hungary, recovering from Bolshevik Revolution was also bankrupt, confused and impotent. The map below illustrates the areas, races, population, and economic resources of the partitioned empire. A comparative study of the four sketch-maps reveals the different characteristics of these divisions:

From the ruins of the old Hapsburg Empire there emerged the small republic of Austria, mostly a mountainous territory in the Alps, with its huge capital, Vienna, retaining all that was left of its former greatness. Reduced by disease and starvation, its very existence threatened, Austria was one of the first states whose difficulties engaged the attention of the European statesmen. As a result of the Peace Settlement, there were many more small states than there had been in 1914. The League of Nations gave them their opportunity to co-operate and thus influence the decisions of the Great Powers. The frontiers of the countries in the Danube Basin were settled upon national lines. As a result, a group of aggressively national states was brought into being intent on securing economic as well as political independence, a situation dangerous alike to the prosperity and peace of Europe. Jealous of their neighbours and fearful of their former ruling peoples, the Germans of Austria and the Magyars of Hungary, they immediately began strengthening their military resources. At first, the ‘Peace’ appeared to be a decisive victory for democracy, as the autocratic empires of the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs and Romanovs were replaced by democratic republics. But the rival doctrines of Communism and Fascism began to undermine their stability almost as soon as they were created, and in these ideological positions, there was little room for representative institutions.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace:

While the Austrian and Turkish Empires were broken up, the German Empire was not drastically partitioned, as we saw in the first part of this article. This was chiefly because except at its eastern edges there were fewer national minorities under its sovereignty. However, it did lose all its overseas colonies and many thousands of German-speakers were placed under the rule of the new neighbouring states. These territorial losses alone were enough to create a sense of injustice in the minds of many Germans, but the effect of the economic provisions of the Treaty of Versailles was to convince them that the Allies were bent on their total ruin. The prosperity of Germany depended on her industrial and commercial development. The territorial annexations had taken away from her valuable mineral resources as well as fully grown industrial enterprises, e.g. textile-mills in Alsace. Not content with this, the Allies proceeded to imperil what remained by demanding reparations in the form of coal, the cession of railway stock, and its mercantile shipping; they interfered with her control over her navigable rivers and took away the special rights it had obtained in Morocco, Egypt and China. The reparations were to be paid in recompense for damage done to civilians in the Allied countries where the fighting had taken place.

The overall effect of these arrangements was to ruin Germany economically, and since all nations were, to some extent, mutually dependent on trade with each other, they caused economic distress throughout Europe. Germany had been at her last gasp before she surrendered, but surrender did not break the fortitude of its people. They crushed a communist attempt to follow the Soviet Russian model and produced, even while starving and bewildered, some semblance of a national Government. They received the harsh conditions of Versailles with protests but with dignity, and then they set themselves against desperate odds to rebuild their economy and society. The Allied blockade was continued well into the second half of 1919, and it was only the protests of the British soldiers on the Rhine that forced the Allies to attend to their duty of provisioning a starving population. A huge proportion of this, children especially, were suffering from malnutrition. There was an extreme shortage of raw materials, and there was no money to purchase these abroad, nor were there ships to import them. The highly developed agricultural system was in ruins and yet the country was saddled with a huge but yet undetermined debt. The new republic had to quickly improvise a new social order and governmental system, threatened by anarchy at home and Bolshevism from both within and without.

For a moment, but only for a moment, after the signing of the treaties, there was a sense of peace and stability. Then everywhere came unsettlement and confusion, economic or political, or both, except in the United States. Britain, desperately busy with setting her own house in order, was compelled to lend a hand in straightening out the world’s tangle which, of course, it had been party to creating. On the peace and prosperity of the globe depended its export trade, vast system of overseas lending and its position as a financial centre, as well as its hope of building up a new and better society and thereby winning something  from the sacrifice of war; and the interests of its Empire was vitally engaged in this ‘project’. The background to any picture of inter-war Britain must, therefore, be, as John Buchan put it in 1935, the vast shifting kaleidoscope of the world. By then, J M Keynes’ damning contemporary indictment of the French attitude at the Paris Conference had helped to develop the policy of ‘appeasement’, often confused with the ‘policy of fear’ of 1937-39. Appeasement had a coherent intellectual foundation with a high moral tone, as in Keynes’ famous book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which he published soon after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles:

In this forecast, he found support from Lloyd George and Winston Churchill among other leading politicians and thinkers in the early twenties. Although particularly critical of the French attitude at Paris, Keynes understood clearly enough its economic motives for this:

In spite … of France’s victorious issue from the present struggle … her future position remained precarious in the eyes of one (Clemenceau) who took the view that European civil war is to be regarded as a normal, or at least a recurrent, state of affairs for the future. … Hence the necessity of ‘guarantees’; and each guarantee that was taken, by increasing irritation and thus the probability of a subsequent ‘Revanche’ by Germany, made necessary yet further provisions to crush. Thus … a demand for a Carthaginian peace is inevitable. … By loss of territory and other measures (Germany’s) population was to be curtailed; but chiefly the economic system … the vast fabric built upon iron, coal, and transport, must be destroyed. … 

It is evident that Germany’s pre-war capacity to pay annual foreign tribute has not been unaffected by the almost total loss of her colonies, her overseas connections, her mercantile marine, and her foreign properties, by the cession of ten per cent of her territory and population, of one-third of her coal, and three-quarters of her iron ore, by two million casualties amongst men in the prime of life, by the starvation of her people for four years, by the burden of a vast war debt, by the depreciation of her currency to less than one-seventh of its former value, by the disruption of her allies and their territories, by Revolution at home and Bolshevism on her borders, and by all the unmeasured ruin in strength and hope of four years of all-swallowing war and final defeat.

Al this, one would have supposed, is evident. Yet most estimates of a great indemnity from Germany depend on the assumption that she is in a position to conduct in the future a vastly greater trade than ever she has had in the past. …

We cannot expect to legislate for a generation or more. … We cannot as reasonable men do better than base our policy on the evidence we have and adapt it to the five or ten years over which we may suppose ourselves to have some measure of prevision. … The fact that we have no adequate knowledge of Germany’s capacity to pay over a long period of years is no justification … for the statement that she can pay ten thousand million pounds.

If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.

(1924 edn.)

According to Gilbert, writing in the mid-1970s, Keynes destroyed British faith in Versailles by opening the ‘floodgates of criticism’. For the following twenty years, the Treaty was ‘assailed by means of his arguments’. But he may have underestimated the difficulties of peacemaking in 1919. The task of the Allied statesmen was indeed difficult, because they had to take into account the views of the peoples of Europe, not just their leaders, in re-drawing the map of Europe. In the former treaties in Vienna in 1815, for instance, they only had the claims of the rulers to consider.

Lines on the Map of Central Europe:

In the main, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs and Greeks had every reason to be satisfied with the treatment they received. Though divided for a century, the Poles had never ceased to resist their conquerors, and they speedily asserted their independence on the collapse of their oppressors. They were generously supported at the conference. Clemenceau welcomed the renaissance of Poland as a bulwark against Germany and Russia, and Wilson had proclaimed at the outset that it was the duty of European statesmen to assist the Poles. The Czechs were a cultured people long oppressed who had resisted their Austrian masters in the nineteenth century. France realised that the position of their land gave the northern Slavs a strategic position in Central Europe, forming a barrier against potential Austrian and Hungarian aggression. President Wilson was impressed by the Czech leaders, who welcomed the setting-up of the League of Nations enthusiastically.

Czechoslovakia was, both industrially and politically, the most important of the new states which emerged out of the ruins of the Austrian empire. It consisted of Bohemia, a rich industrial and manufacturing region, with a fertile and intensively cultivated soil, densely populated with a literate people, the Czechs; Moravia, another important area, with a strategic position between the plains of the Vistula and the Danube, and the mountainous area in the Carpathians, Slovakia, where the cultivable areas were few and the minerals unimportant. The population there was sparsely distributed and illiterate; communications were difficult. Czechoslovakia, therefore, inherited from the Austrian Empire industrial wealth and fertile land which enabled it to be self-supporting. However, it still had large numbers of minorities along its frontiers, including Germans, Magyars and Ruthenians, which created internal difficulties in administration and led to unfriendly relations with Germany, Austria and Hungary, which surrounded it. These negated the advantages of its position in central Europe.

Romania had taken advantage of the weakness of Hungary to seize Transylvania, and the preoccupation of Russia with its civil war to take possession of Bessarabia; at the Peace Conference, it successfully asserted its claims to these on the grounds that Romanian people were in the majority. In many parts of these new territories, the ethnicities were very mixed, and the problem of achieving a fair division of the territories proved insoluble. In Southern Dobruja, however, there was unquestionably a Bulgarian majority, but this territory was left in Romanian hands. As a result of the Treaty of Neuilly in November 1919, Bulgaria was also forced to cede Western Thrace to Greece. The northern boundaries of Serbia and the Southern Slavs, what became the new state of ‘Yugoslavia’, were finalised under the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary in June 1920, but before that, Wilson supported the claims of the Southern Slavs against Italy, to whom the Allies had promised the lands along the Dalmatian coast, which was peopled by Slavs. Clemenceau agreed with Wilson, not because he was interested in the idea of satisfying the national aspirations of the Slavs, but because it afforded a practical method of detaching the provinces from Austria without the dangerous necessity of transferring them to Italy.

For the first time in modern history, Europe was divided along national lines, yet there were many injuries and injustices to minorities, especially to those who lived in the defeated countries. People of different nationalities, especially in the south-east of Europe, were inextricably intermingled; a great number of different solutions to the problems, apparently equally just, was possible. Frontiers which would enable nations to have a chance of economic existence had to be devised. To ensure this alongside satisfying national demands, the Allied statesmen were faced by an almost impossible task. Harold Nicholson’s views on the ‘mistakes’ and ‘misfortunes’ of the treaties scarcely changed over the years. He would argue that Britain’s freedom of action had been severely limited by its war-time treaties with Italy, France and Romania, and with the Arabs, in the short run beneficial but in the long run positively harmful. He would further argue that democratic diplomacy, being captive to narrow, partisan, democratic pressures, was ‘irresponsible’, and that the fundamental error of Versailles was the ‘spirit not the letter’ of the treaty. He blamed the peacemakers. They had not combined to elaborate a ‘formal procedure’, nor had they settled upon an ‘established programme’, the upshot being that their deliberations were ‘uncertain, intermittent and confused’.

The Allied Powers were in every case deliberately antagonistic to the claims of the defeated and it became obvious that decisions reached were frequently the result of other considerations than that of satisfying nationalities. Lands were transferred on the grounds that they were strategically important for the security of the new states, e.g. the Southern Tyrol, peopled by Austrians, was handed to Italy, while the German minorities of Bohemia, once in the Austrian Empire, were still included in the new northern Slav state of Czechoslovakia. Attempts were made to solve some of these difficult problems of satisfying nationalities by the use of ‘plebiscites’ where there was a doubt about to which state territory should be transferred. With the creation of the League of Nations, some states pledged to treat alien populations fairly and to respect their rights. The League undertook the responsibility of supervising the care of such governments towards their minority subjects. The map below illustrates the boundaries which were adjusted on the decision of the Allied statesmen as well as the principal areas where plebiscites were arranged:

The new Austria comprised a large area of the Eastern Alps, of little economic importance except for its forests, alpine pastures and scenic attractions, and a small plain along the Danube surrounding Vienna and along the Hungarian border (Burgenland). A third of the country’s population lived in the old capital, previously one of the most important cities in Europe. It had thus attracted in pre-war days large numbers of officials engaged in government, banking, insurance, transport and administration. These professionals were no longer required in such large numbers by 1919, as Vienna no longer supplied the needs of so large an empire; neither were its newspapers, clothes and furniture required in great quantities any more. The luxury-manufacturers of the city were excluded from the new countries which surrounded it by their imposition of high tariffs, and Austria could not easily export goods to buy the food that its people could not grow for themselves. The satisfaction of the national aspirations of the various peoples included in the old Austrian Empire created economic problems which affected the prosperity of all the states. Each tried to be self-supporting and erected tariff barriers against the others. Though they came to realize the folly of these restrictions on trade, attempts to form a Danubian Trade Federation proved unsuccessful.

Germans in Austria were forbidden to unite with Germany under article eighty of the Treaty, despite being entirely German in language and culture. This was confirmed in the Treaty of St. Germain, by which Austrians in the Tyrol, Galicia and Bohemia were also left under alien rule. Control of Galicia, a wealthy area across the Carpathians, passed to Poland. Its soil was fertile and productive, with coal, iron, zinc, salt and petroleum resources also contained beneath its earth. The western part of the region was inhabited by Poles, but in the eastern part, the people were Ruthenians, creating a difficult minorities problem. Attempts made by these people to unite with their fellows in sub-Carpathian Ukraine (then part of the USSR) were frustrated by the Polish Government, and an insurrection was ruthlessly crushed by Pilsudski (see below) in 1919. South Tyrol and Trentino were both Alpine territories. In the latter the majority of the population was Italian, but in South Tyrol, the Germans were in the majority, and the union of both provinces to Italy created grave dissatisfaction.

The Peace Settlement also disappointed Italy, however. The Allied offers made in the Secret Treaty of London by which Italy entered the war in 1915 were not fulfilled. Having acquired Trieste under this treaty, Italy now wished to consolidate its control over the northern Adriatic, including the entire Dalmatian coast down to, and including Albania. Meanwhile, the break-up of the Austrian empire had left the lands to be claimed by the Italians in the hands of the Serbians with the creation of Yugoslavia out of the south-western provinces of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia. They were largely mountainous areas of little economic importance. Their people were largely Slav in identity and so united with the Serbs to form the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which soon became known as Yugoslavia. Although a large country, its economic resources were limited and undeveloped. Its population also included large Magyar, German and Albanian Muslim minorities, within a country already combining Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians. From the beginning, the Croats resented the greater influence of the Serbs and therefore grew closer to their coreligionist Germans.

Italy failed to secure what it had been promised in 1915, the Dalmatian Coast, including Istria, and a Protectorate over Albania (see the map above). It did not even secure the port of Fiume, ‘the jewel of the Adriatic’, which had a large Italian population and had become a symbol of Italian nationalism and at the centre of Italy’s demands. In August 1919, Harold Nicolson attended an Allied meeting in Paris convened to sort out these problems. Italy put forward a series of transparent formulas designed to mask its true aims. The Italian delegate, M. Scialoga, suggested that Fiume and its hinterland should be recognised as a ‘free state’, but the island of Cherso, which dominated and effectively blocked the Gulf of Fiume, should be annexed to Italy, as should the high ground surrounding the port. The railway system, extending from Fiume island, should also be under Italian control. Abandoning all claims to Dalmatia, Scialoga nevertheless insisted that the Dalmatian coast must be neutralised, and called for Italian sovereignty over certain key areas; the zone of Zara, for example. Lastly, he put in a claim for a mandate over Albania.

By these means, Italy hoped to achieve mastery of the Adriatic, but their strategies failed to gain support from the British and the Americans, though the French were prepared for a deal ‘on any terms’. Nicholson backed the American delegate, Major Johnson, in repudiating Italian claims to Fiume and Istria. Eventually, it was agreed to set up Fiume as ‘a free city’, an arrangement ultimately accepted by both Italy and Yugoslavia. Bitterly disappointed, however, the Italians turned on their government, and there was great discontent throughout the country. This manifested itself in September 1919, a month after the Paris talks, when a group of soldiers, led by D’Annunzio, an admired national poet, attacked and seized Fiume. Nicholson considered him a fine poet, but a political dimwit, barnstorming out of ‘sheer swank’. D’Annunzio’s posturing proved him right. The Allies forced the Italian Government to expel them, and they returned to Italy indignant and disgusted at the weakness of their government.

Polish leaders realised that the War provided them with an opportunity to gain their freedom, though at first they did not anticipate complete independence and struggled only for self-government. Though the mass of the Poles fought in the Russian armies, an influential group, led by Pilsudski, supported Austria. In 1918 a group of Poles organised a National Committee in Paris and raised an army which fought on the Western Front. The Allies in return promised the Poles to complete independence. The independent Polish state was proclaimed at Warsaw and in Galicia immediately after the collapse of the Central Powers. The new state was represented at the Peace Conference, and its independence was recognised. The western frontier was agreed upon, with the provinces of Posen, West Prussia and Galicia to be included in the new Poland. The eastern frontier was settled provisionally, with the disturbed state of the Soviet state giving the Poles an opportunity to secure a more favourable frontier than they had had to begin with.

President Wilson had promised that Poland should have access to the sea. This involved adding to the indisputably Polish territory an area along the coast west of the Vistula delta in which there was a mixed population of Germans and Slavs. Germany strongly objected because East Prussia would be cut off from the rest of Germany; when the German President wished to visit his family estates in East Prussia he would have to cross a foreign state. In spite of the fact that its population was overwhelmingly German, the Poles claimed that the city of Danzig was the ‘natural outlet’ of the Vistula basin (see map above left). A compromise resulted in the creation of the tiny independent state of the ‘Free City of Danzig’, under the supervision of the League of Nations. Neither Germany nor Poland was satisfied with this arrangement, however. The fate of Upper Silesia was eventually settled by plebiscite (see map above right).

The division of the former Austrian territory of Teschen, an area with valuable coal-mines and the centre of a major railway network, on the Polish-Czechoslovak border, was arranged by the Allied Statesmen. How many members ever heard of Teschen? Lloyd George asked the House of Commons, disarmingly admitting that until recently he had not. Teschen presented the peacemakers with an intriguing problem: whether to honour the sacrosanct principle of national self-determination; or whether to secure the prosperity of a model, democratic state emerging in central Europe. Edvard Benes, then Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, told Nicolson, who had been charged with producing a report, that the fate of Teschen depended on the attitude adopted by the British Delegation. The territory was ethnically Polish by a ratio of two to one, but it was considered essential to Czechoslovakia’s economic well-being. In early 1919 fighting had broken out between the rival parties, a ceasefire being imposed by the Allies with some difficulty. Nicolson set out the options for the delegation: either appeasing Polish nationalism or, more precisely chauvinism, as he saw it, or allowing Czechoslovakia some economic breathing space. There was considerable friction between Poland and Czechoslovakia over this; the final settlement, reached after strong French pressure, effectively partitioned the region: the Czechs acquired the coal mines and most of the industrial basin of approximately 1,300 square kilometres; the City of Teschen was divided into Polish and Czechoslovak quarters, with the latter containing the invaluable railway station.

Policies of Punishment & Appeasement – Britain & France:

For the following ten years, Gilbert claimed, appeasement was the guiding philosophy of British foreign policy. British official opinion doubted whether a secure Europe could be based upon the treaties of 1919, and had strong hopes of obtaining serious revisions to those aspects of the treaties that seemed to contain the seeds of future conflict. With the disintegration in 1918 of the Russian, Turkish, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the final stage had been reached in a process that had begun in Europe during the Napoleonic wars – the evolution of strictly national as opposed to dynastic or strategic frontiers. Post-1918 diplomacy was geared towards securing the final rectifications of frontiers still not conforming to this principle. Most of these frontiers were the result of the Versailles boundaries which had been drawn to the disadvantage of Germany. Thus there were German-speaking people outside, but contiguous to the German frontier with Poland and Czechoslovakia. Many Germans lived in the frontier provinces of Alsace-Lorraine and Holstein, which were also lost to Germany. Germans in Danzig and Memel were detached from their mother country. The claims of Poland were preferred to those of Germany in the creation of the Polish Corridor to the sea and the in the division of the Silesian industrial area.

There were other national ‘inequalities’ which were also part of the Versailles Treaty, and which were equally prone to the ‘egalitarian touch of appeasement’. The German Government could only maintain itself against communist and nationalist opponents by a continuing protest against the impossible severity of the reparations clauses of the Treaty. They docilely submitted to the disarmament provisions at first. The problem of the next few years was how to square what France regarded as her rights and necessities with the hard facts of the difficult and dangerous situation Europe was in. For France, the War had ended in anxiety and disappointment. Germany had been defeated, but that defeat had not been the victory of France alone; without the help of Britain and America, the French leaders knew that they would have been beaten to the ground. The glory which was due of their soldiers’ heroism was revealed as tarnished and insubstantial. With a population of forty million, France had to live side-by-side with a population of sixty or seventy million who were not likely to forget Versailles. As John Buchan put it, …

She was in the position of a householder who has surprisingly knocked out a far more powerful burglar, and it was her aim to see that her assailant was not allowed to recover freedom of action. Therefore her policy … must be to keep Germany crippled and weak, and to surround her with hostile alliances. The terms of the Treaty, both as to reparations and disarmament, must be interpreted according to the strict letter. No one can deny that her fears were natural. It is easy for those who live high above a river to deprecate the nervousness of one whose house is on the flood level.

To Britain, it seemed that, with every sympathy for French anxiety, it was impossible to keep a great Power in perpetual tutelage, and that the only hope for France, as for the world, lay in establishing a new international system which would give political security to all its parts. Lloyd George, while he remained in power, strove honourably for this end. The disarmament of Germany, while France rearmed, was a German grievance which could either be met by disarming France or allowing Germany to rearm. Both alternatives were considered by British policy-makers, and when the first proved impossible to secure, the second became logically difficult to resist. A further ‘inequality’ was the exclusion of Germany from the League of Nations. British policy worked for German inclusion and looked forward to a time when the differences between the ‘Allied’ and ‘Enemy’ Powers, as embodied in the Treaty would disappear. The policy of appeasement, as practised from 1919, was wholly in Britain’s interest, of course. Britain’s policy-makers reasoned that the basis of European peace was a flourishing economic situation. Only by success in this policy could Britain avoid becoming involved, once again, in a war arising out of European national rivalries and ambitions.

At Paris, the British diplomats had vacillated between the Americans, who contended that under the League of Nations all international disputes would be settled by ‘sweet reasonableness’ and the French, who, obsessed with their own security, suffered from no such illusion. Harold Nicholson took his reasoning a step further by suggesting that if only the British had wholeheartedly supported either the American or the French perception of peace, a golden age of worldwide tranquillity and harmony might have been inaugurated for a century. Nicholson also remained consistent in his view that war-torn Paris was clearly the wrong venue for a peace conference. Geneva, he wrote, would have been a more judicious choice. In addition, given the circumstances, with passions running high among both public and politicians, he would have preferred to see an initial treaty followed by a final one, after a suitable cooling-off period. With the Congress of Vienna still in mind, he argued that it was a grave mistake to have treated Germany as a ‘pariah state’: the stability of Europe would have been better served by inviting it to participate in the conference, particularly as Bolshevism threatened to despoil the defeated country further. He damned the reparations clauses as patently absurd. As a result of the infamous ‘war guilt’ clause, the peace which emerged was unjust enough to cause resentment, but not forcible enough to render such resentment impotent. Summarising his overall disillusionment, Nicholson wrote (in 1933):

We came to Paris confident that the new order was about to be established; we left it convinced that the new order had merely fouled the old. We arrived as fervent apprentices in the school of Woodrow Wilson; we left as renegades.

If he had had to choose a hero at Paris, he would surely have chosen Lloyd George, fighting valiantly for a moderate peace, with Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister, and Smuts running a close second and third. Until the end of 1919, Nicolson was based mainly in Paris, working for Sir Eric Drummond, a senior Foreign Office mandarin and designate Secretary-General of the League of Nations. He was supremely confident that the League was a body which was certain to become of vital importance. … a great experiment. He was also putting the finishing touches to the treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. Lloyd George and Balfour had left Paris to immerse themselves in Westminster politics. Much committee work was delegated to him, particularly on those bodies dealing with the Czechoslovak and Greek questions. He scored a minor success regarding the vexed question of Teschen, and continued his involvement with the Austrian and Bulgarian treaties and delineating Albania’s frontiers in the face of Yugoslavia’s demands. He clashed with Lloyd George over the Italian policy, arguing for a tougher line in view of Italy’s recent mischievous behaviour. Lloyd George responded angrily: The Foreign Office always blocks me in whatever I wish to do. But as the year drew to a close, the most pressing issue was how to meet British commitments to Greece, an undertaking that was slowly but relentlessly unravelling.

Independence Struggles & Imperial Designs:

Above: (Unofficial) President Eamon de Valera inspects an IRA unit of ‘levies’

Refusing to sit in the British Parliament, the Sinn Féiners continued to meet in the Dublin Dáil (parliament), where they had declared the Republic of Ireland earlier in the year (see part one of this article). Eamon de Valera was elected President of the Republic and the MPs also elected their own ministers, set up their own law-courts and disregarded the authority of the Crown and the British Parliament altogether. Although severe measures were taken against them and the Dáil was suppressed, British law and order could not be restored. After the failure of the appeal to the Peace Conference in Paris, and amid the growing repression of Republicans, a more coherent campaign began for independence began, leading to the outbreak of a brutal war between the levies of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on the one side and the police on the other, enlarged by the “Black and Tan” auxiliaries, a part of the British army. James Craig, the Ulster Unionist MP and founder of the protestant paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force, who became the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in 1921, was already preparing for ‘partition’ in 1919:

From 1919 to 1921 the IRA killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers, and the police and ‘black and tans’ killed hundreds of IRA men in retaliation. In Dublin, there were IRA men and women everywhere, but it was hard for the British to find them. Michael Collins, the IRA leader, was known to the British authorities as a prisoner after the 1916 Uprising, but they didn’t even have a photo of him.

Meanwhile, another imperial dream came true in 1919 when Cecil Rhodes’ ‘Cape to Cairo’ scheme came into fruition when Britain took Tanganyika (now Tanzania) from Germany, completing that chain too. The Union of South Africa took over the administration of South-West Africa from Germany, and the spoils in the south Pacific were divided between Australia and New Zealand. With Britain’s existing Dominions and colonies, this all meant that the British Empire in 1919 was more extensive than it had ever been. But in fact, while the war had added new colonies to Britain’s ‘collection’, it had also weakened her grasp in her old ones. In the self-governing dominions, the co-operation with Britain which imperialists gloried in was misleading. That they had co-operated in wartime did not necessarily signify that they wished to be shackled in peace. The Great War was a European war which Britain only just won, with their support and at great cost in lives, especially for the ANZACs. Gallipoli had been just one of many defeats along the way; in itself, this had damaged the prestige and authority of the ‘mother country’. She had had to issue ‘promissory notes’ of ‘self-determination’ to the Egyptians, the Palestinian Arabs and the Indians, which they expected her to honour. The war had therefore provided an opportunity for a more vigorous assertion of nationalism with a harder edge than before.

The overthrow of the Turkish armies in 1918 was complete; all the provinces from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf were overrun, and the great cities of Baghdad, Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo were captured. The Turks were forced to acknowledge defeat and signed an armistice at Mudros in October 1918. Allied troops occupied Constantinople. However, it soon became apparent that settling the conflicting claims of the victorious powers would prove very difficult. By secret treaties made during the war, promises of Turkish territories had been made to Russia, Italy, France, Greece and to the Arabs. The Allied statesmen postponed the settlement of the difficult issues until they had settled the more urgent needs of Europe. They permitted the Greeks, however, to occupy the port of Smyrna in 1919 and supported the occupation with an Allied fleet. This action aroused indignation among the Turks.

The ‘Greek question’ had begun on a high note, with a virtual agreement between the British and American delegations in meeting most of the Greek Prime Minister Venizelos’s territorial goals. These included Smyrna and its hinterland, roughly corresponding with the Ottoman vilayet of Aydin, some form of international régime over Constantinople, and the whole of western and eastern Thrace up to the vicinity of the Turkish capital, claims that, if realised, would have given the Greeks control over the Straits. Harold Nicolson was, initially, among the many who fell for Venizelos’s charm, but he soon recognised, as did the Americans, that the Greek PM’s extravagant empire-building heralded disaster. Harold was instructed to inform Venizelos that there would have to be a compromise regarding the future of Thrace. Then the Smyrna landings were besmirched by Greek atrocities against the local Turkish populace, which sparked off the Turkish national revival under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk).

In the British Empire, the support and the opportunity for colonial aggrandisement were both there; consequently, the main result of the war for Britain was a considerable augmentation of its empire. The middle east was divided up in accordance with the secret war-time Sykes-Picot agreement (see map above, showing the division into ‘A’, for France, and ‘B’ for Britain). The Arabs were given the Arabian desert, Britain took for herself Palestine, Transjordan, the Persian Gulf states and Iraq: which together with its existing protectorates in Egypt, Cyprus and Aden made up a tidy little middle-eastern empire. Of course, Palestine and the other middle-eastern territories were not ‘annexations’ or even ‘colonies’. They were called ‘mandated’ territories (see the map below), which meant that they were entrusted to Britain and France by the League of Nations to administer in the interests of their inhabitants with a view to their eventual independence. Nevertheless, this award almost fulfilled Curzon’s old dream of a continuous belt of influence or control between the Mediterranean and India, which was completed in August 1919 when the final link in the chain, Persia, was secured by means of a one-sided, widely resented treaty.

In India, General Dyer’s violent massacre of the crowds at Amritsar considerably increased the natives’ resentment and united Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs against the British ‘Raj’. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi continued to mount his campaign of ‘passive resistance’, encouraging his mainly Hindu followers to refuse to co-operate with the British Government. Dyer’s unnecessary action was the child of the British mentality then dominating India. Jallianwalla Bagh quickened India’s political life and drew Gandhi into politics. In his evidence to the Hunter Committee Appointed by the Government of India to Investigate the Disturbances in the Punjab, given in November, he re-articulated his commitment to passive resistance and non-violence, Ahimsa, without which he said that there would be confusion and worse. He stated:

All terrorism is bad, whether put up in a good cause or bad. Every cause is good in the estimation of its champion. General Dyer (and he had thousands of Englishmen and women who honestly thought with him) enacted Jallianwalla Bagh for a cause which he undoubtedly believed to be good. He thought that by one act he had saved English lives and the Empire. That it was all a figment of his imagination cannot affect the valuation of the intensity of his conviction. … In other words, pure motives can never justify impure or violent action. …

Gandhi had always resisted political involvement. After his return to India, he had attended annual sessions of the Congress, but his public activity at these assemblies was usually limited to moving a resolution in support of the Indians in South Africa. But on the other hand, he was not simply interested in building a mass movement. In his November testimony, he commented:

I do not regard the force of numbers as necessary in a just cause, and in such a just cause every man, be he high or low, can have his remedy.

In Gandhi’s non-cooperation campaign, his followers boycotted British goods, refused to teach in British schools and ignored the British courts. They were imprisoned but offered no resistance. Gandhi’s programme included a number of ‘self-improvement’ elements:

• the development of hand-weaving in the villages;

• the prohibition of drugs and spirits;

• the granting of increased freedom to Hindu women;

• the co-operation of Hindus and Muslims;

• the breaking down of the ‘caste system’ as it affected the ‘Untouchables’, the lowest class of Hindus, who had been debarred from the communal life of India (they were banned from the temples and were not allowed to use the drinking-wells in the villages.

These points were also the key elements in his Satyagraha, his struggles with truth or the ‘spiritual force’ of non-violent resistance to British rule which dominated the next the next three decades in the campaign for Swaraj, the ‘self-rule’ or Independence of India.

Race Riots and Reconstruction in Britain in 1919:

As 1919 progressed, civil strife in Britain continued, principally among the miners, shipbuilders, railwaymen and farm workers, that is, in the declining sections of the economy. The standard of living had improved dramatically during the war, and the working-classes were determined to resist any diminution in their wages when it came to an end. There were also mutinies among those awaiting demobilization in the armed forces which reminded the upper classes uncomfortably of the Russian Revolution; they were followed by a series of strikes which led The Times to proclaim that this war, like the war with Germany, must be a fight to a finish (27 September 1919). The railwaymen, miners and transport-workers formed themselves into a ‘triple alliance’ in which they agreed to support each other in disputes.

The ‘showdown’ did not begin in earnest until 1921 and came to an end five years later, but in 1919 comparisons were drawn with the unforgiving bitterness of class war on the continent. The social divisions within Britain, however, were always mitigated by a number of factors: a common heritage of what it meant to be British; reverence for the monarchy; a residual common religion and national churches; the instinctive ‘communion’ of sport and a saving, self-deprecating humour.

This popular myth of social integration in Britain was exposed as somewhat fraudulent when it came to matters of ‘race’, ‘colour’ and ethnicity, however. The Cardiff ‘Race Riots’ of 1919 were an attack on the black and coloured community of Cardiff living in districts adjoining ‘the Docks’ when certain boarding-houses occupied by them were attacked. At 10.15 p.m. on the night of Wednesday 11 June, disturbances broke out in Butetown, as a result of an earlier incident involving black men and their families returning from a picnic. Some white women accompanied by coloured men had been passing in carriages through one of the main streets of Cardiff (possibly St Mary’s Street, see map above). When uncomplimentary remarks were made by people in the street, the coloured men left the carriages and an affray took place in which a number of white men and Police were injured. Some five minutes later, a white man named Harold Smart was killed. This escalated events as crowds were formed and began a more serious assault on Butetown, where the black population lived. The next day a prolonged storm restricted the disturbances until it cleared in the evening. About eighty soldiers were held in readiness, but the police and stipendiary magistrate deemed it unnecessary to use them. The Chief Constable’s report of the disturbances provides a clear statement of the distribution of ethnic settlements in 1919 and the effect of this on policing:

The coloured men comprised principally West Indians, West Africans, Somalis, Arabs and a few Indians. They live in boarding houses kept by coloured masters in an area bounded in the north by Bridge Street, the east by the Taff Vale Railway not very far distant, on the West by the Glamorganshire Canal, and on the South by Patrick Street. Some of the Arabs and Somalis live in the northernmost portion of this area but the majority, particularly the West Indian negroes, live in the southern portion. The area is divided by a junction of the Glamorganshire Canal which has two bridges, one in Bute Street and one at East Wharf.

The riots ripped through Cardiff’s Docklands. Credit: British Pathe

At first, the violence centred on the multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Tiger Bay. But it quickly spilt over to other parts of Cardiff. The police concentrated their attention on the southern portion of the area and, having secured this, they proceeded to clear the northern area, although they failed to prevent damage being done there. That evening many of the attacks were concentrated in that zone, while the police continued to defend the southern area, which had long been seen as the proper place for black minorities, known as early as 1907 as ‘Nigger Town’. The police decision to defend that area may have owed something to their view of what the proper social geography of the city was. The Northern district became a ‘no go’ area for blacks during the riots, and some black families had to move out of their homes, though they returned afterwards. Physical boundaries between, for example, the blacks and the Irish, were very important, and the policing of 1919 played its part in strengthening them. The Police claimed that they had done their best to cope with the Riots. After the turbulence had subsided, the Chief Constable observed:

The coloured races, the majority of whom were practically segregated in their own quarter in Bute town, are showing a tendency to move more freely in that portion of the city where the disturbances took place. … The police made strenuous efforts and succeeded in keeping the white population from the Southern portion by guarding the bridges as otherwise if they had penetrated into that area the black population would have probably fought with great desperation and inflicted grave loss of life.

Below – A newspaper report from June 1919:

Credit: ITV/Glamorgan Archives

What were the causes of the riots? They were sparked by racial tensions during a period of acute unemployment. In Cardiff’s docklands, servicemen who had returned from the war found themselves competing for jobs with a local workforce of largely black and Asian men, who were also desperate to make ends meet. The Chief Constable summarised the grievances of the black population as follows:

The coloured men resent their inability to secure employment on ships since the Armistice as they are being displaced by white crews; 

They are dissatisfied with the actions of the Government;

They regard themselves as British subjects;

They claim equal treatment with whites and contend that they fought for the British Empire during the war and manned their food ships during the submarine campaign.

By June, unemployment was a serious problem among the black community. According to the Chief Constable, the number and ‘nativity’ of the coloured seamen who were unemployed and living in the port were as follows:

Arabs – who claim to belong to Aden:  400

Somalis:  200

Egyptians:  50

Portuguese; Indians, Cingalese and Malays:  60

West Africans – Sierra Leone: 100

West Indians:  400

Roughly a half of these were seamen of different grades and the other half consisted of different men who had no experience as seamen until the war made it necessary to recruit them to man British Merchant shipping. Four of the principal Arab and Somali boarding masters met the Chief Constable in the middle of June to ask him to make representations to the Government on their behalf, as they had a large number of men ‘on their hands’ who were in debt to them and wholly dependent on them for subsistence. Some of these men had been unable to get a place on a ship for the past six months. This was, in part, due to the imposition of a ‘colour line’ on the engagement of crews.

The race riots of 1919 brought bloodshed to Cardiff. Three men died and hundreds more were injured. That same summer, the South Wales docklands of Newport and Barry also experienced brutal outbreaks of racial violence. The effects of the riots rippled throughout the Empire. From the start, the police felt that the answer lay in repatriation and this suggestion was made to the Home Office in a telephone conversation after the first two nights of the riots. However, the scheme which was introduced offering financial inducements failed to have an impact, unable to tempt people out of their established homes and relationships. Some were married to white women and so could not be repatriated; for other married men, the terms were simply impracticable. The funds available covered only a fraction of the costs involved and proved impossible to administer fairly. By August of 1919, some six hundred men had been repatriated. The voyages did not prove to be plain sailing either. The SS Orca which sailed from Cardiff on 31 August with 225 black mercantile ratings on board experienced what its owner described as a mutiny, exacerbated by the fact that the seamen went on board with arms, including revolvers, in their possession. The mutiny was instigated by a group of eighty prisoners who were boarded at Le Havre, but the mercantile ratings joined in what became a ‘general uprising’.

Nor did discontent end when they arrived in the West Indies. One group of repatriated men sent a complaint about their treatment to the Acting Governor of Jamaica. This took the form of a petition, dated 1 October 1919, in which they claimed that there had been an undercurrent of hostility towards blacks in Britain for some time before the riots began:

… there was a premeditation  on the part of the whites which savoured of criminality that before the mob started the race riot it was published in a newspaper in England that the Government must deport all the coloured people in England. … it was also further published that if the Government did not deport the coloured they the whites would take the law in their hands and see to it that they be got rid of;

… as we heard the cry of riot in the streets knowing that we were and are still loyal British subjects we kept in our houses but this did not deter the whites from their wanton and illegal attack for on the following day our houses were attacked… and we were compelled to hide ourselves in our houses as the rioters (whites) outnumbered us in the ratio of 100 to 1… and as we had no intention of rioting we had to lock ourselves in all the time and at one o’clock in the night we were taken out of our houses by the Government Black Maria and there locked up for days before we let out. … while the Government was taking out some of us the rioters… were setting fire to some of the coloured lodging houses; 

… on the following day a detective was detailed and sent round to all the houses taking statements of our entire debts and after receiving same he told us that the Government would give us the amount of money to pay same and when we arrived at our native home (British) we would receive ample compensation for our ill-treatment as we were bound to leave on the first ship; if we didn’t worst trouble would come on us.

… the riot by the whites on us was going on for fully eight days before the Authorities there could cope with it and attempted to take any proceedings to stop it.

… we have no monies; we are in a state of almost want and destitution having to move away so quickly all our belongings goods and chattels were left behind all we have to subsist on is the 25/- which was given to us by this Jamaica Government and this is a mere trifle as the high prices of food stuffs and the high cost of living, food, clothing etc. make it hard to live on.

In response to the allegations made in the petition, the police claimed that they were not aware that racial feeling was incited by the publication of articles in the press. Welsh Labour historian Neil Evans has suggested that this more general atmosphere of hostility was partly in response to racial clashes elsewhere in Britain and stemmed from the general mood of chauvinism engendered by the war. The authorities in Cardiff denied that any houses were fired during the riots, but reported that some furniture had been burned. They also denied the claim that ‘refugees’ were taken from their houses by night and conveyed in a “Black Maria”. The repatriation scheme was in place before the riots under the administration of the Board of Trade. Apparently, the Treasury arranged for payment of a re-settlement gratuity of six pounds per man on his arrival in his colony of origin. The Town Clerk of Cardiff claimed that the Riots only lasted for two days and were intermittent rather than continuous.

The Corporation had agreed on compensation claims to two of the boarding-house keepers and twelve other claimants, who had left Cardiff without leaving a forwarding address. But when some of the repatriated men arrived in Trinidad, the stories of their mistreatment in Cardiff played a part in the upheavals on the island in December 1919. One particularly gruesome story circulated there that a crowd in Cardiff had stopped the funeral of a black man, decapitated him and played football with the head. There is no documentary evidence of this, but references exist, apparently, in Colonial Office Papers. Eye-witnesses asserted later that the press had not told the full story of the riots, and that many violent incidents associated with the outbreak had not been reported to the police. Some of this testimony has only recently come to light. Leslie Clarke’s family found themselves caught up in the conflict. Leslie’s mother and grandparents were living in a quiet terraced street in the Grangetown area of the city, near where this author used to live as a student in the early eighties.

                           Above: Somerset Street in Grangetown. Credit: ITV Cymru Wales

Leslie’s grandmother was white; her grandfather was from Barbados: “A thousand people came rioting down the street looking for black people,” Leslie explained in a 2018 interview for HTV Wales.

                         Above: Leslie’s grandmother, Agnes Headley. Credit: Leslie Clarke 

“So my grandmother persuaded my grandfather to go out the back way and to climb over the wall and go and hide. She reckoned that nobody would hurt her.

“But they did. They beat her up. They beat her really badly.

“My mother was only nine at the time and she was terrified. She hid behind my grandmother’s skirts.”

Above: Leslie’s mother, Beatrice Headley. Credit: Leslie Clarke

 

The family home was looted. Rioters doused the downstairs rooms with paraffin, planning to set the building on fire. All that stopped them lighting the fuse was the discovery that the house was rented, owned by a white man. Leslie’s grandmother never recovered from the incident:

“She changed from then onwards. From being a bright, confident woman she became very withdrawn and quiet. She suffered a lot.”

Quite clearly, much of this oral testimony of the victims of the riots was not shared at the time because of fear of further reprisals. Even in recent years, white supremacists and extremists have continued to publish propagandised versions of the Riots. Despite the claims and counter-claims, the black ratings’ petition provides further evidence of such incidents and is a rare example of black victims’ viewpoint of racial violence, which would otherwise be hidden from history. In modern-day Cardiff, you won’t find any reminders of those riots. No memorial, no marker. They’ve become a forgotten chapter in the city’s history.

The promised post-war economic ‘Reconstruction’ of Britain was, however, not quite the ‘myth’ that some historians have made it out to be. In the economics of heavy industry, ‘war socialism’ disappeared as Lloyd George always meant it to, and with it went the sense, in the Labour movement at least, that an activist government would do something to moderate the inequities of the old industrial system. The coalition government, largely Conservative and Unionist in composition, was determined to dismantle as quickly as possible the state control of raw materials, manufacturing, communications, wages and rents. Demands by the trade unions for the nationalisation of the coal industry, the docks and the railways were swiftly swept aside. The termination of ‘war socialism’ and the restoration of monetary orthodoxy became synonymous with post-war ‘reconstruction’ in Britain. Tory traditionalism trumped any idea of the development of social democracy along continental lines. But there was still room for a continuation and perhaps completion of the ‘new Liberal’ reforms which had led to a nascent ‘welfare state’ before the crises of 1910-1914 and the impact of the World War.

The liberal historian and president of the Board of Education, H. A. L. Fisher raised the school-leaving age to fourteen, a small act, but one of immense significance, and wages and salaries were standardised throughout the country. Old-age pensions were doubled, and unemployment insurance extended to cover virtually the entire working population of Britain. Through the extended Unemployment Insurance scheme, which began to operate at the beginning of 1920, the state became involved in the ‘problem’ of unemployment in a way it had never been before the First World War. This was to lead, through all the stumblings of a stubborn mule, into unparalleled intervention in the social conditions of working-class communities throughout the nations and regions of Britain. Mass unemployment was to become a new phenomenon in the inter-war years, and one which had not been properly quantified before the War. The pre-war trade union figures had revealed an annual rate of under five per cent between 1883 and 1913, never getting above eight per cent. Between 1912 and 1914 London had the highest level of unemployment with an average of eight per cent, whereas south Wales had the lowest level at under three per cent. In the decade following the end of the war, these positions were entirely reversed, and average unemployment increased by as much as tenfold in certain regions and ‘black spots’.

Party Politics, ‘Pacifism’ & Foreign Policy:

During the war, party politics had been discarded, and the Coalition Government was set to continue under Lloyd George. In 1918-19 the Liberal Party was in a grave condition due to its internal divisions and the Labour Party had taken its place as the main party of opposition. It appeared that the party structure might change profoundly. In one way or another, it can be argued that the ‘challenge of Labour’ after the war confronted all the politicians who had come to prominence before 1914. Their uncertainty moving forward was to be compounded by the major extension of the franchise, among all adult males and partially among females in 1918. Lloyd George was convinced that he could govern through a combination of sheer charisma and tough political muscle. The coalition faced little opposition in parliament, where there were only fifty-nine Labour MPs and a withered ‘rump’ of ‘pure’ Liberals led by Asquith, who had never got over Lloyd George’s ‘coup’ against him in 1916. The prime minister rarely put in an appearance, preferring to preside instead from Downing Street, which became headquarters for a circle of cronies. Honours were up for sale and insider commercial favours were expected in return. Under the leadership of J. Ramsay MacDonald (pictured below), the Labour Party had adopted a Socialist programme in 1918; so for the first time, the party system had to adapt to the two opposition parties, Labour and the Asquithian Liberals, holding fundamentally opposite views. It failed to do so.

As early as 1919, it was evident that the relationship between the new democracy, based on universal suffrage, and foreign policy, might have to be worked out afresh in an international environment which was still far from stable. During the war, a group of intellectuals, publicists and politicians, both Liberal and Labour, had formed the Union of Democratic Control. In the view of this group, the outbreak of war had shown the futility and inappropriateness of existing diplomatic procedures and assumptions. Secret diplomacy belonged to a bygone era and it was time to involve ‘the people’ in policy-making, or at least to ensure that there was democratic control over decision-making. However, when it came to details, there was little unanimity about how either ‘democratic control’ or the League of Nations was to work. For some, the former concept went beyond parliamentary control and there was talk of plebiscites and referenda. Others concentrated on trying to devise mechanisms whereby the executive would be subject to scrutiny and restraint by various foreign policy committees of the House of Commons.

There was another popular post-war myth, that ‘the British people’ were inherently pacific and had only been involved in wars by the machinations of élites who initiated conflicts for their own ends. These views enjoyed some support and bore some influence on policy-makers. They blended with the contempt for secret treaties displayed both by Vladimir Lenin on the one hand and Woodrow Wilson on the other. They also related, albeit awkwardly, to the enthusiasm for the League of Nations on the centre-left of British politics. The more these matters were considered, however, the more difficult it became to locate both ‘foreign policy’ and ‘public opinion’. A similar range of views surrounded the League of Nations. Some supporters saw it as an embryonic world government, with ‘effective’ military sanctions at its disposal, whereas others believed that its essential purpose was to provide a forum for international debate and discussion. Enthusiasts supposed that its creation would render obsolete the notion of a specific British foreign policy. But, at the end of 1919, supporters of these new concepts and structures were still four years away from truly coming to power.

Sources:

John Buchan (1935), The King’s Grace, 1910-1935. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Irene Richards, et. al. (1938), A Sketch-Map History of the Great War and After. London: Harrap.

Norman Rose (2006), Harold Nicolson. London: Pimlico.

J. M. Keynes (1919, 1924), The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Neil Evans (1983), The South Wales Race Riots of 1919: a documentary postscript. Llafur (The Journal for the Study of Welsh Labour History), III. 4.

ITV REPORT, 3 November 2018 at 9:00am, https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2018-11-03/one-thousand-people-came-rioting-down-the-street-reliving-a-notorious-chapter-in-cardiffs-past/

A Pictorial Appendix – These Tremendous Years:

Below: Piccadilly in 1919. Note that it is not a roundabout, and there was still room to move at walking pace across Piccadilly Circus. Note also: The “Old Bill” type bus, on what is now the wrong side of the street; as many men in uniform as not; “As You Were,” on at the London Pavilion; the ageless violet seller installed on the steps of Eros.

Above: The Summer of 1919 was very hot. The grass was burnt yellow, and the cricket ball dropped like a cannonball on the cracked earth. Victory weather, just right for a summer of Peace parades and celebrations. And just right for those who had to sleep out: the returning warrior found London short of houses.

 

Lady Astor, the first woman M.P., went to the House of Commons dressed as above. She was elected member for Plymouth in a by-election. Her speech after the declaration of the poll began: “Although I cannot say that the best man has won…” This first woman M.P. took the oath in the House sponsored by Lloyd George and Balfour. “I wish to be regarded as a regular working member,” she said, “not as a curiosity.”

Part One – January-June: A Tale of Five Cities.

The Winding Road to World Peace:

The New Year’s Eve of 1918 that hiccupped a welcome to the first year of peace began a long procession of almost hysterically happy crowds which took possession of London on every possible excuse. Life was not yet back to normal (it never got back to whatever ‘normal’ was): food was only beginning to be de-restricted – meat, sugar and butter coupons were no abolished until August; five million men were taking time to demobilize and were not finding jobs easily, and money was short. Any spare money was needed by the country, as the photograph of Trafalgar Square at the top of this article shows. The Victory, or “Peace and Joy” loan brought in forty million pounds in three days, and the smallest amount that could be invested was five pounds. The total collected was seven hundred million. By November 1919 there would be just 900,000 still in ‘khaki’ uniforms. The wounded, like those photographed above, later in the year, were given blue uniforms. More than two million were wounded, and in January one man died as a result of a bullet wound received in 1918.

At the beginning of 1919, “Hang the Kaiser!” was the cry in Britain. The newspapers discussed who would be his judges when he was brought from Holland to the Tower of London, and what they would do with him. Those who suggested that his life should be spared were considered unpatriotic, unless they also argued that, like Napoleon, he should be sent to St. Helena for the rest of his life. Despite an application for his surrender, he remained in the Netherlands. A Daily Express reporter who had first seen him at close quarters before the war said that over the previous four years, his hair had turned completely white.

At 11 a.m. on 3 January, Harold Nicolson (pictured below), a thirty-two-year-old diplomat at the Foreign Office, left Charing Cross station for Paris. He arrived at the Gare du Nord twelve hours later and drove without delay to the Hotel Majestic on the Avenue Kléber, where the British delegation to the Peace Conference was due to be housed.

Alwyn Parker, a Middle East specialist who had been made responsible for the well-being of the British delegates, had instituted a security-conscious, home-cooking environment consistent with sound British standards. Staffed by British domestic servants and reinforced by nameless security agents, the catering standards were, apparently, tasteless in the extreme.

 

Overworked and underpaid, Nicolson served as a technical adviser on the committees that were drawing up the new maps of central Europe and the Balkans. Sketching in fresh boundaries for Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Greece and Turkey consumed his working hours. Although he found the work ‘passionately interesting’, it was not all plain sailing. His letters reveal how at times he was conscience-stricken by the burdens imposed on him:

How fallible one feels here! A map – a pencil – tracing paper. Yet my courage fails at the thought of people whom our errant lines enclose or exclude, the happiness of several thousands of people. … Nobody who has not had experience of Committee work in actual practice can conceive of the difficulty of inducing a Frenchman, an Italian, an American and an Englishman to agree on anything.

Harold Nicolson & Vita Sackville-West at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919.

These committees were not concerned with constructing the framework of the newborn League of Nations, President Wilson’s obsessive brainchild. Still, they stood at the heart of the conference’s deliberations, dealing with the fate of national minorities, reconciling the all-too-often conflicting and exaggerated claims of the great and the small powers. It was approvingly noted that the French Premier, M. Clemenceau, always audible, was equally rude to both. And as the plenary sessions of the conference, the politicians had neither the time nor the knowledge to challenge the recommendations of the ‘experts’, they became, in effect, the arbiters of these disputes, the final court of appeal. It was a responsibility that Harold Nicolson could have done without. Interminable committee meetings, drafting endless position papers, irregular hours, hurried meals, late nights and competing with closed-minded politicians, all put Harold under an intolerable strain. Exhausted, he had reached the point when he found himself reading sentences twice over. He sought advice from Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, whom he usually found languid in his habits, usually draped over a chair, ‘always affable and benign’, at his apartment in the rue Nitot. Balfour told him to…

… return at once to the Majestic – arrived there, you will go to bed. For luncheon you will drink a bottle of Nuits St George and eat all you can possibly swallow. You will then sleep until four. You will then read some books which I shall lend you. For dinner you will have champagne and foie grás – a light dinner. You repeat this treatment until Sunday at three, when you drive alone to Versailles and back. In the evening of Sunday you dine – again alone, that is essential – at Larue and go to a play. By Monday you will be cured.

He did as he was told and on Monday he noted in his diary that he felt again a young and vigorous man. Refreshed, he returned to his duties which, of course, included faithfully serving Balfour’s needs. Harold worked in close tandem with Allen Leeper, an Australian graduate of Balliol College, Oxford with a working knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, Russian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian and Ladino. In keeping with the Zeitgeist, he was in favour of creating compact nation-states, to unite the Poles, Yugoslavs, Romanians, the Arabs and the Greeks, a process which would pave the way for the demise of the old, discredited system ruled by the Great Powers and lead to a new era regulated by the League of Nations and Wilsonianism. To Nicolson, at the time, these ideas were admirable, but later, writing in 1935, he thought they might appear utopian, but added even then that to many of us it still remains the most valid of all our visions.

Thirty nations met at Paris to discuss the post-war world. Bolshevik Russia and the defeated Central Powers were excluded. On the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Each of the other four which were signed subsequently was also named after an area or landmark of Paris. The Conference opened officially on 18 January 1919 at the Quai d’Orsay. Raymond Poincaré, the French President, greeted the delegates, but his Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau soon took command in his typical high-handed, machine-gunning fashion:

“Y a-t-il d’objections? Non? … Adopté!”

Harold Nicolson continued to be absorbed by the minutiae of the territorial commission’s deliberations, niggling questions that at a distance seem esoteric to an extreme, but which at the time took on grave importance. He explained to Balfour why the Italians should not be awarded Fiume, a judgement that was upheld by Wilson and Lloyd George. He was also considered something of a Czech expert and was impressed by Benes, the Czech Foreign Minister (pictured right), whom he described as altogether an intelligent, young, plausible little man with broad views. Benes based his case not so much on securing national rights as on sustaining the stability of central Europe. Nicolson agreed with this view and confidently told the Supreme Council that the historical border of Bohemia and Moravia needed to be respected, in spite of the fact that many Germans would be included. Teschen, Silesia, Oderburg were to be included in the new Czechoslovakia, along with Hungarian Ruthenia.

All the Allies were invited to the Peace Conference which met at Paris in January 1919, but the important decisions were made by the ‘Big Four’, pictured below. The German government had accepted the terms of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 because the Allies made a solemn promise that the principles which US President Woodrow Wilson had set out in the ‘Fourteen Points’ of his War Aims (see the map above) which he, and they, thought would form the basis of the peace settlement.

The ‘Four Big Men’ were (left to right), the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George; the Italian Prime Minister, Signor Orlando; France’s Premier, M.Clemenceau; and Woodrow Wilson, President of the USA. They were the big figures at the Paris Peace Conference.

Wilson’s ideas were, therefore, the hope of victors and vanquished alike, and he was sincerely anxious to carry out his promises. But he lost influence because he had few practical plans to offer upon which his ideas of a just settlement could be built. By the time John Buchan published his account of these events in 1935, many histories of the Peace Conference had already been written in detail in many volumes. Its work had been bitterly criticised, and on it had been blamed most of the later misfortunes of Europe. But, as he observed, …

… it is probable that our successors will take a friendlier view, and will recognise more fully the difficulties under which it achieved. Its position was very different from that of the Congress of Vienna in 1814. Then the victors held most of Europe and had armies ready and willing to carry out their commands: now they were so weary that the further use of force was almost unthinkable. Then a little group of grandees, akin in temper, met in dignified seclusion. Now a multitude of plenipotentiaries sat almost in public, surrounded by hordes of secretaries and journalists, and under the arc-lamp of suspicious popular opinion. 

The difference in the complexity and scale of the two conferences is shown by the resulting treaties. The hundred and twenty articles of the Treaty of Vienna were signed by seventeen delegates; the Treaty of Versailles contained 441 articles and seventy signatures. The business was so vast that the mechanism was constantly changing. At first, the main work was in the hands of a Council of Ten, representing the five great Powers; then it fell to the US President and the European Prime Ministers; at the end, the ‘dictators’ were Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Had the three ‘architects of destiny’ been fully in agreement, or had they been men with broader personalities and more open minds, both the peace process and its products might have been better. To be fair to them, however, all three had to take different circumstances into consideration besides the merits of each case.

Wilson, who had been detached from the actual conflict, might have been expected to bring a cool and dispassionate mind to the deliberations, as well as a unique authority. But he found himself, quite literally, on unfamiliar territory, and his political mistakes in his own country had made it doubtful that Americans would ratify his conclusions. In diplomatic skill, he was not the equal of the other statesmen. Because he believed that the establishment of the League of Nations was the only hope of permanent world peace, he soon had to compromise on matters where the views of the practical statesmen conflicted with the ideals of his fourteen points in order to secure their acceptance of the Covenant. Moreover, he had the support of only a small minority of his fellow Americans; those who upheld the traditional policy of non-intervention in European affairs were hostile to him. This hostility back home also weakened his prestige at the Conference. Eventually, the Senate of the USA refused to ratify his work in establishing the League of Nations so that the country did not join the organisation, and at the election following the treaties, he failed to be re-elected. It soon appeared to John Buchan, that Wilson’s was …

… the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and not the creed of a great people. His self-confidence led him to cast himself in too high a part, and he failed to play it … The framers of the Treaty of Vienna a century before were fortunate in that they were simpler men, whose assurance was better based, and who were happily detached from popular passions: “There are times when the finest intelligence in the world is less serviceable than the sound common sense of a ‘grand seigneur’.” (F.S. Oliver, The Endless Adventure: III, 109.)

Georges Clemenceau (left), French Premier & Woodrow Wilson, President of the USA.

As Chairman of the Peace Conference, Georges Clemenceau was a realist and had no faith in Wilson’s ideals. He was also an intense nationalist, whose policy was to give absolute priority to the security of France, and he translated every problem into the terms of an immediate and narrowly conceived national interest. He worked for the interests of France and France alone. He knew exactly what he wanted, which was to crush Germany while he had the chance. He regarded Franco-German hostility as natural and inevitable and wanted revenge not just for the Great War but also for the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 in which Paris was occupied and Alsace-Lorraine was surrendered. Had Germany won, he believed, France would not have been spared destruction. Now that Germany had been utterly defeated, he had the opportunity he had desired, to destroy its power to threaten the security of France. He dominated the conference and his uncompromising attitude earned him the epithet, ‘Tiger’.

David Lloyd George (above) was subtler and more far-sighted, taking broader views, but his power was weakened in his colleagues’ eyes by the election he had just fought and won on intransigent terms. Nevertheless, he recognised the need for a peace settlement that would help restore German prosperity as an important trading partner. He, therefore, favoured more moderate terms, but gave only limited support to Wilson’s ideals because Britain was bound by treaties concluded during the war for the satisfaction of her Allies at the expense of the defeated powers, and he was bound by his election pledge by which he had promised to ‘Make Germany Pay’, demanding penalties from the enemy. At least 700,000 British servicemen had perished in the Great War, and a million and a half had been wounded. Another 150,000 were lost to the influenza pandemic of 1918-19. Some 300,000 children had lost at least one parent. One in ten of an entire generation of young men had been wiped out. By 1919, the euphoria of victory was tempered with the reality as ex-servicemen returned to the fields and factories to seek their old jobs. If anything, As Simon Schama has put it, …

… this had to be the moment, perhaps the last, when the conditions that had produced the general massacre were removed. Away with the preposterous empires and monarchs and the tribal fantasies of churches and territories. Instead there would be created a League of Free Nations … This virtual international government, informed by science and motivated by disinterested guardianship of the fate of common humanity, must inaugurate a new history – otherwise the sacrifice the sacrifice of millions would have been perfectly futile, the bad joke of the grinning skull. 

Above: The Menin Road (detail), by Paul Nash, 1919

Fit for Heroes? – Boom-time Britain & the ‘Bolshevists’:

Britain was experiencing a post-war boom in trade, evidenced by the fact that the number of trade unionists rose to an unprecedented figure of almost eight million. As the unions flexed their muscles, thirty-five million days were lost by strikes and lock-outs, the highest figure since 1912. Trade unionists in Belfast and Glasgow fought bravely to reduce the working week to help absorb the demobbed servicemen. In Scotland, their demonstrations, which included (for the first time) serious demands for Home Rule, were viewed as ‘riots’ by the authorities. The demands were fuelled in part by the astonishingly disproportionate numbers of Scots casualties in the War: over a quarter of the 557,000 Scottish servicemen had been killed, compared with a rate of one in eight among the rest of the British army. Ironically, it was the long tradition of being the backbone of the imperial army, from the American Revolution to the Indian Mutiny, that had resulted in them being put in front line positions during the Great War, often in the ‘vanguard’ of some suicidal lurch ‘over the top’.

Despite this contribution, in Glasgow, an eighth of the population was still living in single-room accommodation and the Clydeside economy was especially vulnerable to retrenchment in the shipyards. As men were demobilized, unemployment rose and the unions responded with demands for a shorter working week, to spread the work and wages available as broadly as possible. The campaign for a 40-hour week, with improved conditions for the workers, took hold of organised labour. They also demanded the retention of wage and rent controls. When they were met with stark refusal, a forty-hour general strike was called, culminating on 31 January in a massive rally, organised by the trade unions, which took place on George Square in the city centre of Glasgow. Upwards of ninety thousand took part. A red flag and calls were made, for the first time, for the setting up of a separate Scottish workers’ republic. The police read the ‘Riot Act’ and their lines charged the demonstrators and, mindful of having been caught by surprise in Dublin by the Easter Rising of 1916, the government claimed that the demonstration was a ‘Bolshevist’ uprising, sending twelve thousand troops and six tanks (pictured above) to occupy what became known as ‘Red Clydeside’.

Many of these ‘Red Clydesiders’ soon found themselves ‘victimized’, out of work and on the road to England and its ‘new’ engineering and manufacturing centres. By 1919, for example, Coventry’s population had continued to grow from 130,000 in 1918 to 136,000, partly due to the delayed expansion of the British motor industry, inhibited during the War as manufacturing industry turned its attention to meeting wartime demand. As soon as hostilities were over the production of motor vehicles was again embraced with enthusiasm as both old and new contenders entered the market amongst the heavy competition. In 1919 and 1920 at least forty new car producing firms emerged. Many of these firms later failed and their names disappeared or were taken over by companies like Singer in Coventry, but in 1920 the President of the City’s Chamber of Commerce reflected on its recent growth:

Few towns and cities can point to a growth as quick and extensive as that which has been the lot of Coventry in the last two decades … The way Coventry has moved forward is more characteristic of a new American city fed by immigrants, than of one of the oldest cities in Great Britain.

Growth and immigration were beginning to have an effect on local politics. In 1919, as the city enjoyed its boom, so the fortunes of the Labour movement also prospered, with Labour capturing a third of the seats on the City Council. The short but strong national economic boom funded some, at least, of  Lloyd George’s promise to make ‘a country fit for heroes to live in’. Christopher Addison, the minister of reconstruction, oversaw the building of 200,000 homes, effectively marking the beginning of council house construction in Britain. Again, in 1920, the Coventry Chamber of Commerce was keen to advertise the fact that the Corporation had already, since the war, built a thousand houses for its workers at rates varying from six to ten shillings per week which were regarded as ‘comparatively low’.

Lloyd George’s only obvious rival was Winston Churchill. Having banged away in the 1918 election campaign about making Germany pay through the nose, Churchill then made appeals for greater flexibility and leniency, opposing the continuation of the naval blockade. But his calls to strangle the Russian Revolution at birth seemed to spring from a deep well of sentimental class solidarity with the Russian aristocracy and the Tsars which marked him out, in the view of many, as an aristocratic reactionary himself. Churchill was reckless as well as tireless in calling for a commitment of men and money to try to reverse the communist revolution in Russia by supporting the pro-Tsarist White Army, which was certainly no force for democracy. But if he was deliberately goading British socialists by harping on about the Bolsheviks as dictatorial conspirators, it turned out that his diagnosis of what had actually in Russia in October 1917 was exactly right. There was ample reason to feel gloomy about the fate of liberty in the new Soviet Russia. By 1919, anyone could see that what had been destroyed was not just the Constituent Assembly but any semblance of multi-party democracy in Russia. After the war, British, as well as American troops, occupied parts of Russia. There was disagreement within the Cabinet as well as in the country as to what the British attitude toward Russia ought to be. Lloyd George felt that the perpetuation of the civil war by foreign intervention would give the revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin, the perfect pretext to institutionalize his police state and find reinforcements for the Red Army, and he wrote to Churchill pointing this out to him in February 1919:

 Am very alarmed at your… planning war against the Bolsheviks. The Cabinet have never authorised such a proposal. They have never contemplated anything beyond supplying armies in anti-Bolshevik areas in Russia with necessary equipment to enable them to hold their own, and that only in the event of every effort of peaceable solution failing. A military enquiry as to the best method of giving material assistance to these Russian armies is all to the good, but do not forget that it is an essential part of the inquiry to ascertain the cost; and I also want you to bear in mind that the War Office reported to the Cabinet that according to their information intervention was driving the anti-Bolshevik parties in Russia into the ranks of the Bolshevists. 

The Empire – Nationalists Strike Back:

With the evaporation of the authority of the US President in Paris, and the limited tenure of the French wartime prime minister, his fellow peacemakers, it was Lloyd George who grew in stature as the future arbiter of the European settlement and world statesman. While France sought military security, Britain sought naval and commercial superiority through the destruction of the German Empire. The British Empire, as Curzon had boasted the previous year, had never been so omnipotent. But despite Curzon’s complacency, all was not well in the far-flung imperial posts. First of all, however, and closer to home, trouble was brewing again in Ireland. Following the 1918 general election, in which the old Nationalist party disappeared and Sinn Féin won most of the Irish seats. The members of Sinn Féin who had been elected to the Westminster parliament decided to set up their own Irish parliament, called Dáil Éireann, in Dublin, which first met in January 1919. It declared the Irish Republic in defiance of the British Crown for a second time. Eamon de Valera, who had escaped from an English jail, became its President and the King’s writ ceased to run in Ireland. At the same time, the Irish Volunteers, who now called themselves the Irish Republican Army (IRA) became increasingly violent.

In themselves, the pledges Britain made on imperial matters during the war did not determine anything that happened afterwards. Britain gave no one self-government simply because it had promised it to them. If it kept its promise, it was because the promise had raised expectations that could not be denied, making the plaintiffs stronger and even more resolute claimants. But if it had not had this effect, and if Britain could prevaricate or break a promise with impunity, it would. The colonial settlement when it came after the war, and as it was subsequently modified, was determined much more by the conditions of that time; the interests, strengths and weaknesses of different parties then, than by pledges and declarations made, cynically or irresponsibly, in the past. The conditions of 1919 determined that, initially, Britain would get a great deal out of the war for itself. In the first place, the fact that there were outright winners and losers meant that there were, suddenly, a large number of colonies ‘going begging’ in the world, with only Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Japan in a position to ‘snaffle them up’. Japan was satisfied with controlling the north Pacific, America didn’t want colonies and Italy, whose contribution to the Allied victory was seen as negligible, was not thought to deserve any. That left the German colonies in Africa and the Turkish territories in the Middle East as ‘gift horses’ for the British and the French if they wanted them, which they did.

Any British government of that era, of any colour, would probably have wanted its share, but the fact that the coalition government in 1919 was basically the same as the one that had fought the war and was full of imperialists made it even more probable. Balfour, Curzon and Milner (as Colonial Secretary) were not the kinds of men to look gift horses in the mouth and exercise colonial self-restraint, and neither were the Dominions which had fought, represented by Smuts in the Cabinet. Lloyd George himself was not much bothered about the empire either way and put up little resistance to his imperialists’ accepting extra colonies. If he had any qualms, Leopold Amery quieted them by writing to him at the end of the war, that whereas they had fought it over Europe, they would also…

… find ourselves compelled to complete the liberation of the Arabs, to make secure the independence of Persia, and if we can of Armenia, to protect tropical Africa from German economic and military exploitation. All these objects are justifiable in themselves and don’t become less so because they increase the general sphere of British influence. … And if, when all is over, … the British Commonwealth emerges greater in area and resources … who has the right to complain?

In 1919, the British empire seemed secure enough from external threats, but it was more vulnerable than ever to attacks from within. It might be able to deal with one at a time, but what if it were challenged by nationalists on three or four fronts simultaneously? The first of these opened up in North Africa in March, when Egyptian nationalists, inflamed by Britain’s refusal to allow them to put their case for independence to the Paris peace conference and by the arrest and exile of their leaders, began a series of demonstrations, riots, acts of sabotage, and assassinations of British army officers.

M. K. Gandhi

Meanwhile, in India, there was a series of boycotts, walk-outs and massacres led by the lawyer and hero of the campaign against the ‘pass laws’ in South Africa, M. K. Gandhi, who had recently arrived ‘home’. Nearly a million Indian troops had been in service, both in the ‘barracks in the east’ in Asia itself, on the Western Front, and, earlier in the war, in the disastrous campaign in Mesopotamia. Before the war, there had been violence and terrorism, but mainstream colonial nationalism had been represented by Gokhale’s Congress; moderate in its aims, not embracing absolute national independence, and in its aims, which were constitutional. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi’s movement, however, worked unconstitutionally, outside the system. His distinctive contribution to the nationalist struggle was ‘non-cooperation’. This spelt danger for the empire: danger which even in peace-time it might not be able to contain. In April there was a rash of rebellions in Punjab serious enough to convince General Dyer that the Indian Mutiny was about to be repeated: which persuaded him to open fire on a crowd of unarmed Indians in a public square outside the Sikh ‘Golden Temple’ in Amritsar, and to continue to firing into their backs until his ammunition ran out, killing at least 380 and wounding 1,200. Also in April, the first serious Arab-Jewish clash occurred in Palestine. In May, Britain was at war with Afghanistan, and about to go to war again, it seemed, with Turkey.

Towards the Treaties – The Big Three & The Council of Ten:

As the Paris conference moved forward, Harold Nicolson became increasingly depressed by the self-centred, ill-informed, arrogant behaviour of the world’s leaders who had gathered in Paris.

Ion Bratianu, the Romanian Prime Minister was a bearded woman, a forceful humbug, a Bucharest intellectual, a most unpleasing man who aspired to the status of a Great Power; the Baron Sidney Sonnino, the Italian Foreign Minister, emerged as the evil genius of the piece, obstructing everything with a breathtaking obstinacy and malevolence, while Signor Vittorio Orlando (pictured right), the Italian Prime Minister, was never able to rise to the level of his own intelligence. When the Italians decided to leave Paris in protest at their allies’ refusal to meet them half-way on their demands, Nicolson waved them off with a hearty “good riddance”, but they returned a fortnight later.

During the rest of the conference, Orlando remained interested only in securing an expansion of Italy’s territory and in discussions which concerned the satisfaction of these ambitions. Nicholson soon concluded that the conference was proceeding in a rather irresponsible and intermittent way. For this sorry state of affairs, ‘the Big Three’ were culpable, as far as he was concerned, especially Wilson. Hampered by his spiritual arrogance and the hard but narrow texture of his mind, he appeared conceited, obstinate, nonconformist … obsessed, in fact no better than a presbyterian dominie (schoolmaster/ pedagogue). Nicolson was not alone in this opinion: Wilson’s traits were soon picked up on by the Parisian press. Bitter at these public assaults on his character, Wilson contemplated moving the conference to Geneva, where he hoped to benefit from the more Calvinistic, sober and sympathetic Swiss. Paris was an unfortunate choice for a peace conference, as passions among the people were inflamed by close contact with the War and its miseries. Statesmen could not free themselves from the tense atmosphere that prevailed.

Wilson, Nicolson believed, was also responsible for what he and others regarded as a totally impracticable agenda and timetable. The three main subjects were territorial adjustments, reparations, and the provision of machinery to ensure peace. Under the first, the map of Europe was to be redrawn, and some parts of the map of the world. The Conference did not, of course, with a clean slate; the Austrian Empire had collapsed and fallen into pieces, and Poland and Czechoslovakia had already come into being. A number of treaties, not just that of Versailles, would be needed to lay down the new boundaries – St Germain, Trianon, Neuilly and Sévres. Mandates dealing with territories taken from enemy states were to be settled later by Allied Ministers sitting in the Supreme Council. But instead of giving top priority to the main purpose of the conference, the peace settlement with Germany, Wilson kept his colleagues busy playing word games in drafting the Covenant of the League of Nations, his pet cause, and by fiddling with the maps of central and eastern Europe and Asia Minor.  In this way, the German treaty was effectively put on hold until the end of March, nine weeks after the conference had opened.

David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister in 1919, at the height of his power, the man who won the war. As the head of the Conservative-Liberal-Labour wartime coalition, his government was returned at the General Election in December 1918, with an overwhelming majority of more than three hundred in the House of Commons. The majority in the total of votes was strangely less marked – five million for the government and 4.6 million against.

Neither did Lloyd George escape Nicolson’s criticism. Dressed in a bedint grey suit, the British PM hadn’t the faintest idea of what he is talking about, Nicolson complained. He tried to prime Balfour to protest against his Premier’s ‘madcap schemes’, but Balfour proved ‘infinitely tiresome’ and fobbed him off: Yes, that’s all very well, but what you say is pure aesthetics! But before long, Nicolson came to appreciate Lloyd George’s uphill struggle at the conference against those who were more extreme: Quick as a kingfisher, in Harold’s view, as he saw Lloyd George fending off excessive Italian or French demands, not always with complete success. He fought like a Welsh terrier, he told his father, as Lloyd George strove to modify the ‘punitive’ terms of the German treaty. Invited to attend meetings of ‘the Big Three’ in his capacity as an expert, Nicolson witnessed their capricious handling of affairs, which he recorded in his letters to his wife Vita:

Darling, it is appalling, those three ignorant and irresponsible men cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake, and with no one there except Hadji … Isn’t it terrible – the happiness of millions being decided in that way?

When he politely protested, Nicolson was condescendingly put down by Clemenceau: “Mais, voyez-vous, jeune homme … il faut aboutir.” But there were opportunities to advise and influence, or educate the three men, usually over a huge map on the carpet of a nearby study. Already dispirited at the way the conference was, or rather was not, proceeding, by mid-February Nicolson was beginning to despair, as he wrote to his father:

The Council of Ten are atrophied by the mass of material which pours in upon them … We are losing the peace rapidly and all the hard work is being wasted. The ten haven’t really finished off anything, except the League of Nations, and what does that mean to starving people at Kishinev, Hermannstadt and Prague? It is despairing.

In a similar vein to Oliver’s statement above, Nicolson added that What we want is a dictator for Europe and we haven’t got one: And never will have! As the conference ‘progressed’, both Europe and the Middle East continued in a state of confusion. The old empires had fallen; new nations had already set up governments. Starvation and disease aggravated the horrors resulting from war. The statesmen were forced to act quickly. They had to consider not only what they believed ought to be done, but also what their electorate demanded. On April Fool’s Day, Harold Nicolson and Leeper left Paris on a special mission headed by General Jan Smuts, the South African member of Britain’s War Cabinet. They were bound for Budapest where Nicolson had spent part of his childhood during his father’s diplomatic posting there and where, on 21 March, a communist revolution led by Béla Kun had taken place; their assignment was to investigate its ramifications. For the world’s leaders gathered in Paris, the spectre of Bolshevism was truly haunting Europe: it threatened widespread starvation, social chaos economic ruin, anarchy and a violent, shocking end to the old order. Harold wrote to his wife, Vita, about how the Germans made use of this threat:

They have always got the trump card, i.e. Bolshevism – and they will go Bolshevist the moment they feel it is hopeless to get good terms.

This was one of the main themes of Lloyd George’s cogently argued but largely ignored Fontainebleau memorandum. Small wonder, then, that Béla Kun’s strike for communism in Hungary registered many anxious moments for the Supreme Council. I have written more about Smuts’ mission to Budapest elsewhere on this site. During Nicolson’s absence from Paris, the prospects for a settlement based on Wilson’s new world order had receded. The French put forward extreme ideas that would extend French sovereignty or influence into the Rhineland. Lloyd George and Wilson hotly opposed these demands, seeing in them the seeds of another war. Eventually, a compromise was worked out that called for an allied occupation of the Rhineland with staged withdrawals, backed by an Anglo-American guarantee of the French frontiers. But Nicolson and many others harboured a ‘ghastly suspicion’ that the United States would not honour the signature of its delegates: it became the ghost at all our feasts, he wrote. From mid-May to mid-June the German treaty hung on a razor’s edge. Word reached Paris that the German government was prepared to sign it but that public opinion would not allow it without allied concessions. Nicolson agreed with the German public:

The more I read (the treaty), the sicker it makes me … If I were the Germans I shouldn’t sign for a moment. … The great crime is the reparations clauses, which were drawn up solely to please the House of Commons.

The peace treaties which resulted reflected the spirit of the conference, in which were represented opposing forces demanding, on the one hand, the rewards of victory, and on the other, the magnanimous settlement of conflicting claims designed to secure permanent peace. The result was a decisive triumph for the victors, but the influence of the need for a permanent peace was not entirely lost. On the one hand, there was no open discussion, and the main points of the settlement were secretly decided and imposed by the ‘Big Three’. The defeated Powers were disarmed, but the victors maintained their military strength.  On the other hand, it may be claimed that the map of Europe was redrawn to correspond with national divisions, to some extent at least and that the ‘Covenant of the League of Nations’ seemed to be a definite step towards the preservation of international peace. It formed the first part of each treaty, followed by territorial changes and disarmament clauses, such as the following from section one of the Treaty of Versailles:

By a date which must not be later than 31 March 1920, the German Army must not comprise more than seven divisions of infantry and three divisions of cavalry. 

By this article, the German Army was limited to a hundred thousand men and committed to the maintenance of order within the territory and to the control of frontiers. The long list of other restrictions included the prohibition of German use of submarines, tanks and poison gas. The disarmament of Germany was to be strictly enforced, but it was combined with a solemn pledge by the other nations themselves to disarm, which promised trouble in the future. In spite of Wilson’s principles, penal clauses were added to the treaties. The penal proposals, which had played so great a part in the ‘khaki’ election in Britain, were reduced more or less to the matter of reparations. Reparations were to be exacted from Germany alone; she had to undertake to pay the cost of the War, as her Allies were bankrupt. John Buchan commented on the futility of this exercise:

No victor has ever succeeded in reimbursing himself for his losses, and a strange blindness seemed on this point to have overtaken the public mind. 

While rich in capital wealth, this could not be ‘extracted’ for its creditors, and its exportable surplus had never been great and was now likely to be very small. It could only pay large sums by borrowing from one or other of the Allies. At Paris, there was no agreement on the total sum of reparations to be paid, but there was much talk about what items should be included in the reparations bill. Smuts, whom Harold Nicolson considered a splendid, wide-horizoned man, now showed that his character, though ‘simple’, was also exceptionally ‘intricate’. Concerned that the bulk of the reparations would go to France, he concocted a creative formula to include separation allowances for soldiers’ families, as well as pensions for widows and orphans. His prescription effectively doubled the potential bill, however, and would not have been to Nicolson’s liking. Yet a special committee of solemn ‘pundits’ in Britain had fixed its capacity to pay at the preposterous figure 24,000 million pounds sterling. The Conference reduced this sum to less than half, and in 1921 a special allied commission whittled it down to 6,600 million, then to two thousand, and in 1932 further payments were dropped. But more unfortunate still was the clause which extorted from Germany a confession of her sole responsibility for the War. This was article 231 of the Treaty, the notorious ‘war guilt’ clause, that compelled Germany and her allies to accept full responsibility for…

… causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed on them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.  

It was not, Buchan suggested in 1935, …

… the business of any conference to anticipate the judgment of history, and to force a proud nation to confess that her sacrifice had been a crime was a breach of the human decencies. 

The Final Week – Scuttling Ships & Salvaging the Settlement:

Could anyone salvage something from this mess? Surprisingly, perhaps, Nicolson looked to Lloyd George for this. Hitherto, he had been quite critical of Lloyd George’s policies, especially in Asia Minor, which eventually to lead to his downfall. As he sought to scale down the reparations bill, which he saw as ‘immoral and senseless’; to revise the territorial settlement in Silesia to Germany’s advantage; and to grant Germany membership of the League of Nations, Nicolson’s admiration grew, particularly as he fought alone. The French were, quite naturally, furious at him for what they considered to be a betrayal of their interests. By contrast, Wilson’s passivity infuriated Harold, who couldn’t understand why the US President would not take the opportunity to improve the draft treaty. He wrote again to his father, voicing the view of the younger generation of British diplomats:

There is not a single person among the younger people here who is not unhappy and disappointed at the terms. The only people who approve are the old fire-eaters.

After much hesitation, and under the threat of renewed force, the German government accepted the treaty. Despite his disappointment with its terms, Harold Nicolson breathed a huge sigh of relief that there would be no return to hostilities. Exactly a week before the treaty was due to be signed, however, there was a dramatic turn of events when Admiral von Reuter ordered the scuttling of the German fleet blockaded at Scapa Flow off Orkney, eight months after its surrender. This is shown in the pictures above and below. Of the seventy-four warships interned, forty-eight sank within an hour when the German sailors opened the sea-cocks on the Admiral’s order. He said that he was obeying the Kaiser’s orders, given to him before the war, that no German battleship should be allowed to fall into enemy hands, and denied that he was in breach of the Armistice terms, since he had had no notice of its extension beyond 21 June, the day of expiry. The German sailors risked their lives in carrying out von Reuter’s orders. At noon on the 21st, the German ensign was run up, the battleships began to settle, and their crews crowded into boats or swam for it. Some of the British guardships, uncertain of what was happening, opened fire, and there were over a hundred casualties.

The treaty was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Galerie des Glaces (‘Hall of Mirrors’) at the palace of Versailles, where half a century before the German Empire had been founded on the degradation of France. Harold Nicolson witnessed the occasion and recorded it in careful detail. The ‘Galerie’ was crowded, with seats for over a thousand. Clemenceau, small and yellow, orchestrated the proceedings. “Faites entrer les Allemands,” he called out. Dr Hermann Müller and Dr Johannes Bell, heads held high, eyes studying the ceiling, one looking like “the second fiddle” in a string ensemble, the other resembling “a privat-dozent“, were led to the table to sign the treaty. No-one spoke or moved. Having committed Germany to the treaty, they were escorted from the hall “like prisoners from the dock”. Over the “breathless silence”, Clemenceau rasped: “Messieurs, la séance est levée.”  Outside, salvoes were fired, while a squadron of aeroplanes flew overhead. Crowds cheered and yelled, “Vive Clemenceau … Vive l’Angleterre.” After the ceremony Clemenceau, with tears in his eyes, was heard to say: “Oui, c’est une belle journée.” Exhausted at the end of an extraordinary day, Nicolson lamented that it has all been horrible … To bed, sick of life.

General Smuts signed the Versailles Treaty only on the grounds that something of the kind, however imperfect, was needed before the real work of peace-making could begin. But, according to John Buchan, the Treaty proved to be a grave hindrance in that task. For John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, the ‘peace’ was a ‘Carthaginian’ imposition. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, first published in 1919, he wrote a damning indictment of both the process and product of the Treaty:

Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin. … Paris was a nightmare. … A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene. … Seated indeed amid the theatrical trappings of the French Saloons of State, one could wonder if the extraordinary visages of Wilson and Clemenceau, with their fixed hue and unchanging characterisation, were really faces at all and not the tragi-comic masks of some strange drama or puppet-show. …

For John Buchan, the hopeful element in what had been signed lay in its prefix – the Covenant of a new League of Nations, the one remnant left of Wilson’s dreams; the hope was that the reaction against the horrors of war might result in an abiding determination for peace. Machinery was provided to give a system to fulfil this desire. Membership of the League was open to any self-governing state which accepted its principles; it required its members to refrain from war until the quarrel had been submitted to its judgement and to take corporate action against any breaker of the peace. It was not a super-state with a military force as its sanction, but a league of states whose effectiveness in a crisis would depend upon how far its members would be prepared to act collectively. There was no abandonment of sovereign rights, except to a very minor extent. It began as a league of the victorious and neutral Powers, but the defeated Powers were given the right of delayed entry.

 

Above (Right): a facsimile of some of the signatures on the Treaty.

Concluding Versailles – A Toothless Treaty? The Covenant & Council of the League of Nations:

From the start, the League was handicapped by the facts that it was widely regarded as the caretaker of the Peace treaties and therefore suspect to those who found them difficult to come to terms with, and by the fact that the USA refused to join, thereby weakening any chance of collective action. But it was the best that could be done at that juncture by way of international cooperation, and even its flawed and modest beginnings were soon seen as an advance in peacemaking and peacekeeping in the world. It was often said in the 1920s and ’30s that a fundamental weakness of the League of Nations that it ‘lacked teeth’, that it was not prepared to threaten potential and actual aggressors with military force. However, the original clauses in the Covenant contradict this contention. They state that in the case of aggression or threat of aggression, the Council of the League should advise upon how this threat should be met: military action was not excluded. Moreover, if any member of the League did resort to war, the Council would recommend to the governments concerned what effective military, naval and air force the members of the League should contribute. Members of the League were expected to permit the passage through their territories of the armed forces of other members of the League. These articles, therefore, totally envisage the possibility of military action by the League in order to deter aggression. Although the requirement of unanimity on the part of the Council could effectively negate these provisions in certain circumstances, the ‘teeth’ were there, if only the principal Powers were willing to put them to work. In his course notes for the Open University, prepared in 1973, Arthur Marwick pointed to the scope of the problems facing the peacemakers in 1919:

A war on such an unprecedented scale obviously left problems of an unprecedented nature. Insulated as we have been in these islands, we can easily forget the immense problems involved in the collapse of old political frontiers, from the mixing of races in particular areas, from the reallocation of territorial boundaries, and from the transfer of populations…

The Treaty of Versailles altogether consists of 440 articles and it takes up 230 pages of Volume LIII of the ‘Parliamentary Papers’ for 1919. From the document itself, we can see the very real complexities and difficulties which faced the peacemakers. From the detail in some parts of the Treaty, we can see what peacemaking is really like, as distinct from the brief text-book accounts which merely summarise the broad principles; we can see what is involved in putting those principles into practice. The Treaty of Versailles expressed certain intentions about settling the map of Europe. But, as with all historical documents, we do learn things from it about the fundamental assumptions of the men who drafted it. And throughout the entire Treaty, there is a good deal of ‘unwitting testimony’ about the political events, social conditions and cultural attitudes in Europe in 1918-19. A rapid glance at the map below will show that a serious attempt was made in 1919 to arrange the frontiers of the states so that the main boundaries coincided with the national divisions of the European peoples. As a result of the treaties, only a small minority, about three per cent, was still under the subjection of other nationalities. In many cases, the peoples themselves had taken the initiative and proclaimed their independence and the peacemakers simply had to accept what had already been accomplished. Their task was ‘simply’ to fix the new boundaries of these ethnic groups. But in doing so, they were responsible for some gross injustices, as the map also shows.

(to be continued).