Grandfather Genocide

This is not a journal piece, but a simple introduction to the subject. Better texts are linked.

In the aftermath of how Hitler and the Kaiser (nobody remembers ‘hang the Kaiser’ in 1918 which was as ‘loud as hang Hitler’ in 1945 ) led Germany (Empire/Reich) to disaster, the wider public has forgotten how abhorrent Otto von Bismarck was. Some historians meanwhile whitewash his legacy in some atrocious books.

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Bismarck both engaged in genocide and inspired it.

Bismarck didn’t oversee the Holocaust, the Nazi anti-Slav lebensraum wars or the genocidal Herero Wars. He did lay the foundations for all three and bears a major part of the guilt for them.

Bismarck is not a shining titan of history, but an evil Slav-hating anti-Semite racist imperialist. He may have built modern Germany but if you say that, you must also accept he built the death camps. Or at least their ideological and political framework.

Here are the three keystones of future German genocide which Bismarck deliberately and consciously laid. It takes a lot of effort to ignore them.

(I’m not saying anything new - try reading one of the many books on the genocidal nature of Bismarck’s Germany rather than revelling in the blood and honour, there was no Good Prussia. They may have defeated Napoleon but his tyranny was more progressive than the stagnant Germanic dynasties - except perhaps the Britishised variant which took the opportunity to lubensraum India thorougly).

Antisemitism.

Bismarck was as cynical and evil as any 20th-century politician and a hundred times more competent. Political allies were tools to be used to an end, never friends.

Bismarck’s rise and building of a German empire were aided by the Liberals and bankers of old Prussia. A large part of these groups was highly assimilated but identifiable Jews. Remember that for the anti-semites and especially Nazis, Jewishness was both blood and a state of mind. Religion was a tiny aspect of Jewishness. A German bureaucrat with a huge moustache who went to a Berlin church every Sunday but a grandson of a prominent rabbi was as Jewish as the atheist born out of wedlock to an Isaac and Olga in Białystok.

Bismarck found it expedient at the appropriate time to throw the ‘Jews’ under the train of rampant Prusso-German imperialism to blame them both for the unprecedented economic depression of 1873 and the political squabbles that Germany went through in 1878. Bismarck was at heart a Junkers. A ‘good’ Junkers is an antisemite (and anti-Polish). This tradition continued in the vons generals of Nazi Germany who plotted against Hitler because he was a filthy corporal who lost a war, not because they objected to the Holocaust or the lebensraum genocide wars. They wanted to continue both. Bismarck made antisemitism modern and gave the Second Reich and its bastard child the Third Reich its Jew-hating DNA.

(An actual book, not a bad A-level high school quality piece)

(Another actual book)

The German ‘Liberals’ (mostly Lutheran), including the Christian Social Party, were as antisemitic or more than the Catholics and played the leading role in the Berlin Antisemitism Debate, a founding stone of German antisemitism. The railway to the gates of Arbeit Macht Frei starts in the Berlin (and Vienna) ‘liberal’ salons. This is despite the important role of Jews in the National Liberal Party - which took much of the blame for the crash of 1873, both politically and ethnically.

Paradoxically assimilated and assimilating Jews had played a supporting and appreciative role in Bismarck’s rise to power. He had seemed a hope in contrast to old Junkers, Catholic and Slavic antisemitism. Bismarck however had no friends. He was a political sociopath. Ruthlessly competent, ruthlessly evil. Bismarck would happily vault from combatting Catholics (and Poles) in tandem with ‘liberals’ to supporting the Catholics (but not the Poles) and back, as expedient.

Imperialism and colonialism

Yes, the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese did it first. The Belgians also created the apocalyptic Congo death empire. Let’s not whatabout because that’s deflection while the ‘everybody did it’ argument is both whatabout and infantile. The British and French can be accused of genocide but it didn’t reach Belgian, Spanish or German levels.

While at first, he was busy uniting ‘good Protestant’ Germany under Prussian rule, as his empire waxed in power over France and Austro-Hungary, Bismarck finally approved and encouraged colonization of SW Africa. This brought the German empire into conflict with the Herero people. Hitler’s Bandit Hunters details how the Imperial Germans learnt and refined the techniques which they would apply in their genocides on Jews and Slavs first on the Herero people (or perhaps franc-tireurs?), with equally as horrific results. Europeans didn’t notice or care about the suffering of the Herero and anyway slightly worse things were happening in the Congo. The Herero were killed by driving into the desert, a technique the Ottomans would copy with the Armenians, and in disease and brutality-ridden concentration camps. Whatabout British Boer camps? But the British invented concentration camps… No, they didn’t and the British versions used on Boers were deadly because of neglect and incompetence. The German camps for Hereros were deliberately exterminatory. The Germans explored and tested their options for brutality in a part of the world where their conduct would not be observed or commented on. However, they had already been testing oppression and repression techniques in Europe.

(A link to buy Philip Blood’s Bandenbekämpfung - Hitler’s Bandit Hunters and the SS In Nazi Occupied Europe - direct from Phil - covers earlier prototype genocide)

Bismarck had initially been opposed to colonization outside of Europe for a variety of reasons:

• The ‘best land’ was colonized. Diamond discoveries in SW Africa proved that somewhat wrong but the territories ‘left’ by the other Europeans were somewhat marginal, except for their exterminated inhabitants.
• Colonization would bring Germany into conflict with more powerful European countries. The defeat of mighty France in the Franco-Prussian war both decreased and increased the threat of France while Germany was inevitably on a collision course with Pax Brittanica. Austria was slowly turning from enemy to ally by the time that Africa was opened up by Bismarck.
• Germany had its hand full with the unruly Poles and industrializing Russian Empire. Oppression and occupation take effort. Poles were more difficult to handle than the Herero while watching the Russian, Austrian and French borders (+ Danish)

Kulturkampf and its Polish aspects

Raphael Lemkin in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and Soviet Genocide in Ukraine makes clear that cultural genocide is a form of genocide1:

The techniques of genocide, which the German occupant has developed in the various occupied countries, represent a concentrated and coordinated attack upon all elements of nationhood. Accordingly, genocide is being carried out in the following fields:

…

In the incorporated areas the local population is forbidden to use its language in schools and printing.

Great power machinations kept cultural genocide out of the Genocide Convention in 1948.2 Political groups were also not recognized as a target of genocide for the same great power reasons.

Nonetheless, genocide by the destruction of culture is a form of genocide. Less violent but equally effective.

The Russian war in Ukraine employs a variety of techniques of genocide, some legally recognized as genocide, some not:

• Physical destruction (article II (a) )
• Deportation of children (article II (e) )
• Deportation of adults (not strictly part of the Genocide Convention as is the case with children)
• Cultural genocide (not part of the Genocide Convention)

The Russians did not invent cultural genocide. The Assyrians, Greeks, Israelites, Romans and especially the Teutonic Knights (eventually Prussians) employed techniques of cultural genocide alongside physical extermination. The Teutonic Knights were celebrated in Prussian and German pseudo-history and myths as the steel-clad embodiment of German military and cultural supremacy. Blood and iron. They utilized a variety of cultural genocide techniques including suppression of religion, bans on marriages, bans on language and physical extermination.

Bismarck was a good Prussian to the point of deliberately keeping the arguably more Germanic than Prussia, Catholic Austria, out of the nascent German Empire. Austria had a long proud history and had dominated Germany while the Prussian Dukes were the sometimes outright and sometimes nominal subjects of a rampant Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose great victory at Grunwald 1410 had sent the Teutonic Knights packing.

(Matejko Bitwa Pod Grunwaldem)

Those Knights became the new Prussians who eventually became the German Empire which ‘avenged’ Grunwald at Tannenberg in 1914 ignoring the fact that the Russian Empire that they had defeated was their partner and ally in partitioning the Commonwealth. Germans and especially Prussians like to lie about their imperial history. Bismarck was a worthy heir to the myth and truth of the Teutonic genocide. Hitler directly inherited his anti-Catholicism from Bismarck, despite or perhaps because of being Austrian - an ‘Austria-hating’ Austrian.

Like Bismarck and Hitler, Teutonic Knights had been masters of propaganda, which allowed them to engage in their crusades against the very pagan Old Prussians but also the very Catholic Poles in the 14th century (official Christianization 966). Some crusading foreigners invited to the Catholic cause by the Knights and the pro-Knight Pope might have been surprised by the crosses they faced on the field of Grunwald 1410, and the two masses the Poles held before the battle. Slightly after that defeat (1416), Johannesburg von Falkenberg demanded the extermination of Poles as inherently heretical. Maybe they hurt German feelings by proving that ‘inferior’ Slavs were better warriors. Poles would continue to do that.

(Germany threatened by Poles and Socialists, 1920 election poster, Wikipedia)

(August 1944 Poles again proved to be superior soldiers to the Ubermensch - after proving that in North Africa and Italy, and of course in the Kent skies)

The partitioning of Poland seemed to prove to Germans and especially Prussians that Poles were stupid, lazy and inherently indisciplined people, little better than the ‘savages’ that the rest of Europe was beginning to conquer the rest of the world. Britain, France, Spain and Portugal had their Americas, Africa and Asia while Germany had the vast East of Europe to ‘civilize’. This mission of course ignored the vast culture, history and wealth of the Polish and other Slav lands. Prussia had and the new German Bismarckian empire was born with an inferiority complex which it excised with blood and terror on the Slavs, especially the Poles.

Bismarck, as a good Prussian aristocrat, hated and despised Poles, as did his successive masters of the Hohenzollern family. Poles were literally Reichsfeinde, enemies of the Reich. You won’t read about that in bad history books.

„Hit the Poles so hard that they despair of their life; I have full sympathy with their condition, but if we want to survive, we can only exterminate them; the wolf, too, cannot help having been created by God as he is, but people shoot him for it if they can.“

Prussian oppression took legal forms, which the Nazis copied in their future occupation (as exhaustively documented by Lemkin). Examples under Bismarck would be:

• Buying up Polish land
• Ban on building ‘Polish’ housing including via Feuerstättengesetz (a ‘hearth’ license)
• Suppression of Polish language, especially in Church use
• Mass deportation from ‘German’ lands
• Generalized physical brutality by police and military, including during conscription

Bismarck’s hatred of Poles was combined with his hatred of Catholicism. Even Germans who were Catholic began to face Prussian Protestant Kulturkampfung, this was also a factor in discriminating and even warring with Austria. Up to and including World War I, the Germanic Prussian Empire tried to carve out lebensraum and purged Poles and Jews from lands that were always Polish - territory that the Russians had occupied. Bismarck had also effectively and brutally purged Poles and Polish Jews from many areas occupied previously. Obviously, Bismarck was long dead by WW1 but his policies were being carried out.

Kulturkampf which was a huge war on Catholicism with anti-Polish aspects is a defining aspect of Bismarck. Ignoring it is an insult to history.

Remember I said the Poles were better soldiers than the Germans? They were also better sailors, as Piorun proved vs the Bismarck.

PS Yes it’s Austria-Hungary. The use of Austria is to underline the very Germanic and very Anschlussable part of that unstable construct.

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