Germany by Helmut Walser Smith

Author:Helmut Walser Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781631491788
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2020-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

German occupation of territory during World War I brought Class’s vision in closer proximity to reality than is commonly supposed. By the end of 1916, Germany had already come to occupy an area nearly the size of its prewar territorial holdings, with almost 16 million people under its direct control, and another 3.4 million under a puppet government in Romania.60 Of its various occupation regimes, the most brutal was Ober Ost, a military government set up by General Erich Ludendorff in 1915 and encompassing Courland, Lithuania, and Białystok-Grodno. Run nearly unfettered as a colonial occupation, Ober Ost imposed “a rigid suffocating order,” as one contemporary observed, on close to 3 million people.61 The German occupiers inventoried local possessions, requisitioned agricultural produce, denuded forests, and conscripted impoverished men and women into work camps, barely feeding them enough to survive. They also combed the countryside for laborers in “regular hunts,” as one account of abuses put it.62

An unexpected set of events soon made German hegemony in the east a near reality. In the winter of 1916–1917, a struggling Russian army began its hunger-induced dissolution, and the February Revolution, which dethroned the Romanovs, brought the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky to power. Aware of the territorial stakes, Kerensky chose to continue fighting. The German high command responded with a daring and dangerous measure. In a deliberate provocation intended to create domestic unrest, the German army transported a revolutionary by the name of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in a sealed boxcar from his exile in Switzerland across German territory to Finland Station. His appearance in the Russian capital radicalized the revolution, and his party, soon to be named the Bolsheviks, took power in October 1917. Almost immediately, the Bolsheviks ended Russian participation in what seemed to them an imperialist war.

Urged on by the radical nationalist lobby, Germany took full advantage of the collapsed empire. With the signing of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk on March 3, 1918, the German Empire dramatically expanded its eastern reach, directly annexing territory that stretched to Kaunas in Lithuania, Grodno in White Russia, and Lublin in the southern parts of what would become Poland. More remarkable still was what Germany took away from Russia. It deprived the old czarist empire of a quarter of its population and stripped it of Finland, Estonia, Livonia, Poland, Ukraine, and Crimea. This area, containing Russia’s major industrial centers, coal reserves, and roughly a third of its agricultural land, was three times the size of prewar Imperial Germany.63 Only eighty-five miles now separated German-controlled Narva from St. Petersburg (now renamed Petrograd), while Moscow lay just over three hundred miles from German-held Mogilev. Moreover, anyone looking at a map could see the proximity of Germany and its satellites to the Black and even Caspian Seas, and could even imagine a concentrated German foray into the Middle East. As the ensuing Russian Civil War raged, and the western periphery of its old empire threatened to break away, Germany contemplated, in the words of the historian John Darwin, a “vast reordering of the whole Eurasian landmass.

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