AnarchoBolshevik

The liberal bourgeoisie’s refusal to prosecute Fascists for their atrocities against Ethiopians was more cringeworthy than you think.

Labour MP, Ben Riley, […] who had seen such Parliamentary evasion practiced previously, was not silenced. Reverting to the main issue, Ethiopia’s exclusion, he declared: “I have not seen the reply, but may I ask whether it is not a fact that all the Allied nations are entitled to be represented on that Commission except Ethiopia, and why is Ethiopia excluded?”

[Speaker for Foreign Affairs, Richard] Law was obliged to say something. Acting on the earlier Foreign Office brief, he lamely began by following the line pursued by Eden and Hall, and declared: “Generally speaking, the policy of the United Nations in this matter is only that those nations which were associated with this matter at the beginning should be members of the Commission.”

Then, doubtless realizing the inadequacy of this answer, he improvised. Seeking, like Hall, to make it appear that the British Government had no wish to exclude Ethiopia, he added, disarmingly, “I can assure the hon. Member […] that the Ethiopian Government were informed at the time these negotiations began and that they offered no comment on them.” Both observations were untrue, but since no one in the House knew this, Law’s “inexactitudes” passed uncorrected.

Law’s reply nevertheless created disquiet on the Opposition benches. Emanuel Shinwell, a prominent Labour member, and committed anti‐fascist, had not forgotten the use of poison‐gas in Ethiopia. He jumped up to ask the Supplementary question:

In view of the use of poison‐gas by the Italians against the Abyssinians, would it not be an act of justice to hand over Italian war criminals to the Ethiopians?

Law tried to stifle this question with four brief words: “That was another war.”

This attempt to discourage discussion provoked a Conservative MP, Kenneth Pickthorn, to ask, reflectively, “Is it part of the war for democracy that the elaboration of this new technique about trying war criminals should be completely accepted without discussion in this House or any effective discussion in this country?”

Law turned this question to his advantage, declaring with exaggeration: “There has been a good deal of discussion at Question time at any rate.”

That was not, however, the end of the story. Two further MPs intervened. The first, Sir Herbert Williams, a Conservative, defended the Government’s position, by questioning the right of Ethiopia to commission membership. He asked, sarcastically, “Can the right hon. Gentleman say on what fronts Ethiopian troops are now engaged in capturing any of these prisoners?”

Reginald Sorensen, a pacifist Labour member, then spoke more philosophically. “In view of the obvious difficulties and embarrassments which this and similar questions are causing,” he demanded, “could we not have some clearer definition as to what exactly a war criminal is and to what extent that should cover not only this campaign but others?”

To these interventions, the Government spokesman vouchsafed no reply.²⁸

(Emphasis added. Click here for trivia.)

President Franklin Roosevelt declared on 21 August that those “committing barbaric crimes” should, at the end of the war, be “subjected to due process of law.”⁵ On 7 October, he announced that the United States would “co‐operate […] in establishing a United Nations Commission for the investigation of war crimes,” and promised that “just and sure punishment” would be meted out to those “responsible for the organized murder of thousands of innocent persons” and “the commission of atrocities violating every tenet of Christian faith.”⁶

No comment.

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Click here for events that happened today (October 3).

1892: Sentaro Omori, Axis vice admiral, existed.
1894: Walter Warlimont, Deputy Chief of the Operations Staff of the Third Reich’s Armed Forces High Command, blighted the earth.
1904: Ernst‐Günther Schenck, SS doctor, joined him.
1932: Imperial luxury ocean liner Hikawa Maru departed Kobe for Seattle, her 13th round trip across the Pacific.
1934: The Fascists of Gil Robles entered the Spanish government, sparking four days of violence by the workers in Barcelona and Asturias.
1935: One hundred thousand Fascist troops & Askari mercenaries, headed by Emilio De Bono, invaded Ethiopia from Eritrea (without a formal declaration of war). Coincidentally, Brixia Model 35 light infantry mortars entered service with the Regio Esercito.
1937: Imperial flightcraft sank Chinese torpedo boat Hupeng at Jiangyin.
1939: Hans Frank ordered a ‘ruthless exploitation’ of occupied Poland.
1940: Vichy passed antisemitic laws that excluded Jews from positions in the army, government, commerce, industries, and the press (in other words, Vichy reduced France’s Jews to second‐class citizens). Philippe Pétain, Pierre Laval, Raphaël Alibert, Marcel Peyrouton, Paul Baudouin, Yves Bouthillier, Charles Huntzinger and François Darlan all signed this law.

Meanwhile, the Axis assaulted London, Worcester, Birmingham, and Wellingborough through single‐bomber raids. The Allies suffered damage at the De Havilland aircraft factory at Hatfield, while the Axis lost one Ju 88 bomber to ground‐based antiaircraft fire. Overnight, several small Axis raids targeted London again. Lastly, Prince Kotohito stepped down as the Chief of the IJA’s General Staff.
1941: At about 0001 hours, Axis submarine U‐431 sank Allied ship Hatasu east of Newfoundland, massacring forty humans, and only seven survived. Afterwards at the Berliner Sportpalast in Berlin, the Chancellery announced during a rally that the Third Reich had captured 2,500,000 Soviet prisoners of war, destroyed or captured 22,000 guns, destroyed or captured 18,000 tanks, destroyed 14,500 aircraft, and since 1939 had expanded by an area four times as large as Britain. The Chancellery stressed that the Soviet Union had been broken and would never rise again. Coincidentally in Russia, Panzergruppe 2 of the Armeeguppe Mitte captured Orel 220 miles south‐southwest of Moscow. Elsewhere, the Axis attempted to encircle the Soviet Bryansk Front.
1942: The Axis and the Eastern Allies both incurred heavy losses as the 6.Armee pushed the Soviet 62nd Army back to the Volga River at Stalingrad. Additionally, the first successful A4 test flight reached the altitude of 84.5 kilometers (52.5 miles) at Peenemünde.
1943: The Wehrmacht invaded Kos Island under a heavy air umbrella, and the Axis massacred ninety‐two civilians in Lingiades, Greece.
1944: The Third Reich’s Air Force III/KG 66 at Burg, near Magdeburg reported an inventory of thirteen Mistel unmanned glide bombs, of which tenwere serviceable. Five of the flightcraft took off on this night to attack the bridges at Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The weather conditions were poor and three of the vehicles crashed into the Teutoburger Wald; Oberst Horst Polster, the Staffelkapitän, died as did Unteroffizier Fritz Scheffler and Unteroffizier Paul Barinski. The other pilots could not find the target in the fog and yet another was brought down.

Additionally, the Axis established the first Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter unit at Achmer and Hesepe near Osnabrück under the command of Austrian‐born ace Major Walter Nowotny. The unit had thirty flightcraft distributed among two squadrons and took the task of intercepting USAAF day bomber raids on the heart of the Greater German Reich. As well, an Axis V‐2 rocket hit the Hellesdon Golf Course near Norwich, England at 1950 hours, injuring somebody and damaging a glasshouse, five farm buildings or barns, several haystacks, and one acre of sugar beet. On the other hand, Axis troops evacuated Tiddim, Burma.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2183070

Quoting Carl T. Schmidt’s The Corporate State in Action: Italy under Fascism, pages 135–6:

Yet despite the efforts of the Fascist régime to salvage property interests and promote recovery, Italy was in an unhappy condition at the end of 1934. For, after more than ten years of power. Fascism had been unable to solve Italy’s economic difficulties.

Mussolini was forced to admit: ‘We touched bottom some time ago. We shall go no farther down. Perhaps it would be hard to sink any lower. […] We are probably moving towards a period of humanity resting on a lower standard of living. We must not be alarmed at the prospect. Humanity is capable of asceticism such as we perhaps cannot conceive.’²³

Not long after, in inaugurating the Corporations, he announced: ‘One must not expect miracles.’²⁴ Industrial production remained at low ebb, foreign trade still fell off, unemployment was at a distressingly high level and efforts to combat it had had little substantial effect. All this was very harmful to Fascist prestige.

Continued economic troubles and the inner pressures of Fascism impelled the Dictatorship to seek escape in foreign fields. War might be a kind of public works vastly more effective in reviving industry than anything tried before. With their attention focused on the glories of the battlefield, the people might be diverted from an uncomfortable concern over their domestic misfortunes. And certainly a military victory would solidify the Fascist movement and restore its fading glamour.

In this crisis, the rulers themselves would learn that the machine they had built under whose dominion men must live in constant spiritual tension, in fear and uncertainty is above all an engine of warlike enterprise.

(Emphasis added.)

For many Africans, this was the real start of World War II, and Fascism’s reputation in the liberal régimes would never be the same. Ethiopia was the only nation‐state in Africa to have successfully resisted European imperialism up until this point, and the invasion was so shocking to the world that even many otherwise profascist Japanese were appalled (for a while).

It cost the lives of at least 350,000 Ethiopians, involved numerous unpunished war crimes, and brought Europe’s two Fascist empires closer together, serving as an important inspiration to the Third Reich. Its importance can hardly be overstated, but I suspect that many of us know little to nothing about his tragedy thanks to Eurocentrist education.

Now, concerning the documentary: it is a bit crude and archaic at times, and being made for television it inevitably suffers from time constraints, but it is still quite good for beginners and anybody who is more orientated towards visual learning. It also provides examples of U.S. attitudes towards Mussolini pre‐1935, something that antisocialists rarely discuss.

Alternatively, Lion of Judah is an hour longer and is lush with precious archived footage, but it almost feels like a stereotypical nature documentary with its painfully long pauses between narrations, its lengthy shots of almost everything that the Italians and Ethiopians were doing (from dancing to pedestrianism), and the subtitles are difficult to read, but beggars can’t be choosers. (There are a few modern, amateur documentaries available, but I am reluctant to recommend them given that the authors are centrist chumps.)

Further reading:

*The Invasion of Ethiopia — Mussolini’s […] Plan For Restoration of the Roman Empire*

Prelude to World War II

Click here for more.

My humblest request is that we not let the memory of this tragedy fade away. Where other educators have failed in their duty, we must not fail in ours.

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Click here for other events that happened today (October 3).

1892: Sentaro Omori, Axis vice admiral, existed.
1894: Walter Warlimont, Deputy Chief of the Operations Staff of the Third Reich’s Armed Forces High Command, blighted the earth.
1904: Ernst‐Günther Schenck, SS doctor, joined him.
1932: Imperial luxury ocean liner Hikawa Maru departed Kobe for Seattle, her 13th round trip across the Pacific.
1934: The Fascists of Gil Robles entered the Spanish government, sparking four days of violence by the workers in Barcelona and Asturias.
1935: Brixia Model 35 light infantry mortars entered service with the Regio Esercito. 1937: Imperial flightcraft sank Chinese torpedo boat Hupeng at Jiangyin.
1939: Hans Frank ordered a ‘ruthless exploitation’ of occupied Poland.
1940: Vichy passed antisemitic laws that excluded Jews from positions in the army, government, commerce, industries, and the press (in other words, Vichy reduced France’s Jews to second‐class citizens). Philippe Pétain, Pierre Laval, Raphaël Alibert, Marcel Peyrouton, Paul Baudouin, Yves Bouthillier, Charles Huntzinger and François Darlan all signed this law.

Meanwhile, the Axis assaulted London, Worcester, Birmingham, and Wellingborough through single‐bomber raids. The Allies suffered damage at the De Havilland aircraft factory at Hatfield, while the Axis lost one Ju 88 bomber to ground‐based antiaircraft fire. Overnight, several small Axis raids targeted London again. Lastly, Prince Kotohito stepped down as the Chief of the IJA’s General Staff.
1941: At about 0001 hours, Axis submarine U‐431 sank Allied ship Hatasu east of Newfoundland, massacring forty humans, and only seven survived. Afterwards at the Berliner Sportpalast in Berlin, the Chancellery announced during a rally that the Third Reich had captured 2,500,000 Soviet prisoners of war, destroyed or captured 22,000 guns, destroyed or captured 18,000 tanks, destroyed 14,500 aircraft, and since 1939 had expanded by an area four times as large as Britain. The Chancellery stressed that the Soviet Union had been broken and would never rise again. Coincidentally in Russia, Panzergruppe 2 of the Armeeguppe Mitte captured Orel 220 miles south‐southwest of Moscow. Elsewhere, the Axis attempted to encircle the Soviet Bryansk Front.
1942: The Axis and the Eastern Allies both incurred heavy losses as the 6.Armee pushed the Soviet 62nd Army back to the Volga River at Stalingrad. Additionally, the first successful A4 test flight reached the altitude of 84.5 kilometers (52.5 miles) at Peenemünde.
1943: The Wehrmacht invaded Kos Island under a heavy air umbrella, and the Axis massacred ninety‐two civilians in Lingiades, Greece.
1944: The Third Reich’s Air Force III/KG 66 at Burg, near Magdeburg reported an inventory of thirteen Mistel unmanned glide bombs, of which tenwere serviceable. Five of the flightcraft took off on this night to attack the bridges at Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The weather conditions were poor and three of the vehicles crashed into the Teutoburger Wald; Oberst Horst Polster, the Staffelkapitän, died as did Unteroffizier Fritz Scheffler and Unteroffizier Paul Barinski. The other pilots could not find the target in the fog and yet another was brought down.

Additionally, the Axis established the first Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter unit at Achmer and Hesepe near Osnabrück under the command of Austrian‐born ace Major Walter Nowotny. The unit had thirty flightcraft distributed among two squadrons and took the task of intercepting USAAF day bomber raids on the heart of the Greater German Reich. As well, an Axis V‐2 rocket hit the Hellesdon Golf Course near Norwich, England at 1950 hours, injuring somebody and damaging a glasshouse, five farm buildings or barns, several haystacks, and one acre of sugar beet. On the other hand, Axis troops evacuated Tiddim, Burma.

I’m kind of embarrassed that we’re going to end up celebrating the New Year thirteen weeks late again! Oh well. We’ll beat you to the punch one of these days, as soon as we catch you off guard!

Anyway, here is some history that someone may find interesting: Rosh Hashanah with the Early Israelites. Quote:

Part of the new year celebration ritual in ancient Near Eastern cultures was the solemn procession of the god, whose image would be removed from the temple precinct, paraded, and then returned to it. This ritual served a practical function, since the god’s quarters needed to be purified—a practice referred to in the Bible with the verbs kappēr and ṭahēr, and associated with Yom Kippur, also part of the New Year season.[28]

In addition, it gave the god’s many non-priestly and non-royal worshipers direct access to the deity, unavailable to them during the year. In the Babylonian New Year festival, the king is reported to have taken the god Marduk “by the hand,” leading the image back into the temple.

In Israel and Judah, a similar ritual appears to have taken place with the portable shrine in which YHWH was mysteriously present.[29] The Ark proceeded amid acclamation (tĕrûᴄâ) and blasts of the horn (qôl šōpār, 2 Samuel 6:15). In the premonarchic period, this would have been led by the priests, while in the monarchic period, the king would have taken a leading rôle in these proceedings.

A fine illustration of the king’s rôle is preserved in the narrative about David’s transfer of the Ark to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6). Donned like a priest in a linen ephod, David led the Ark to its resting-place. Although the story narrates a one-time event, it is modeled after the annual procession of the Ark.[30] In a similar manner, the Judean kings would have taken the lead in the procession of the Ark.

The participation of the king was a powerful means to consolidate the position of the human king, with rather obvious political implications: G‐d was king on high, and the monarch was his deputy on earth. The few psalms that celebrate the human ruler as G‐d’s son on earth (such as Psalms 2 and 110) likely originated in the context of the New Year celebration. Certainly, the presentation of the king as a priestly figure (Psalm 110:4) is entirely in keeping with his rôle in the procession.

I’m kind of embarrassed that we’re going to end up celebrating the New Year thirteen weeks late again! Oh well. We’ll beat you to the punch one of these days, as soon as we catch you off guard!

Anyway, here is some history that someone may find interesting: Rosh Hashanah with the Early Israelites. Quote:

Part of the new year celebration ritual in ancient Near Eastern cultures was the solemn procession of the god, whose image would be removed from the temple precinct, paraded, and then returned to it. This ritual served a practical function, since the god’s quarters needed to be purified—a practice referred to in the Bible with the verbs kappēr and ṭahēr, and associated with Yom Kippur, also part of the New Year season.[28]

In addition, it gave the god’s many non-priestly and non-royal worshipers direct access to the deity, unavailable to them during the year. In the Babylonian New Year festival, the king is reported to have taken the god Marduk “by the hand,” leading the image back into the temple.

In Israel and Judah, a similar ritual appears to have taken place with the portable shrine in which YHWH was mysteriously present.[29] The Ark proceeded amid acclamation (tĕrûᴄâ) and blasts of the horn (qôl šōpār, 2 Samuel 6:15). In the premonarchic period, this would have been led by the priests, while in the monarchic period, the king would have taken a leading rôle in these proceedings.

A fine illustration of the king’s rôle is preserved in the narrative about David’s transfer of the Ark to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6). Donned like a priest in a linen ephod, David led the Ark to its resting-place. Although the story narrates a one-time event, it is modeled after the annual procession of the Ark.[30] In a similar manner, the Judean kings would have taken the lead in the procession of the Ark.

The participation of the king was a powerful means to consolidate the position of the human king, with rather obvious political implications: G‐d was king on high, and the monarch was his deputy on earth. The few psalms that celebrate the human ruler as G‐d’s son on earth (such as Psalms 2 and 110) likely originated in the context of the New Year celebration. Certainly, the presentation of the king as a priestly figure (Psalm 110:4) is entirely in keeping with his rôle in the procession.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5823211

On 9 April 1933, a few weeks after Adolf Hitler’s nomination as Reich Chancellor, a group of communist activists tore down the German flag of the German general consulate in Beirut and wrote explicit slogans on its walls: “Down with Hitler, the tyrant, the executer of the German workers! The German workers and their heroic Communist Party shall live!”⁸

For a broader, left‐leaning spectrum, including not only the Syrian–Lebanese Communist Party but other non‐party‐affiliated workers, students, and intellectuals as well, opposition against fascism gradually shifted to the center of ideological and strategic debates.⁹

[…]

The threat of fascist coups in Europe, the formation of Popular Fronts in France and Spain, and [Fascist] preparations for an attack against Abyssinia in 1935 ever more highlighted the need to revise the [Communist] party’s isolationist strategy. In close contact with the Comintern and the French [Communist Party], the communist movement in Lebanon and Syria set up a Committee for the Popular Struggle in Defense of Ethiopia explicitly meant to raise public awareness and to create broader alliances against fascism in the Arab world itself.¹⁴

In addition to the publication of the clandestine newspaper Nidal al‐Shaʻb (People’s Struggle) and the takeover of the renowned monthly cultural magazine Al‐Duhur (Ages), the organization of strikes and manifestations extended the popular basis of its activities—and further shifted its political priorities to questions of Arab independence, national unity, and the struggle for Palestine.¹⁵

Internationally, the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, held in July–August 1935 in Moscow, marked a turning point for Communist strategies vis‐à‐vis Italian Fascism and German [Fascism], confirming the gradual revision of past tactics whose devastating consequences had become all too visible in the ultimate defeat of political opposition in [the Third Reich].

The proceedings of the conference and the speeches by representatives of the national communist parties highlighted these changes, drawing particular attention to the need to unite mainstream nationalist forces in an attempt to thwart further fascist successes. Summarizing recent developments in Syria and Lebanon, Yusuf Khattar al‐Hilu, the delegate of the Syrian Communist Party, outlined the menaces posed by several imperialist powers striving to extend their influence into the Arab world:

Italian Fascist propaganda has greatly increased in recent times. Each year Mussolini’s agents organize free trips to Italy for young Arabs. The station Radio Bari broadcasts Arabic‐language programs three times a week about “Italian–Arab friendship” and “fascist well‐being” in Italy. It is the same with German fascism. Hitler has purchased the largest bourgeois newspapers in Syria which every day are full of photographs and articles about Hitlerism, which they represent as the “saviour of the German people.” Nazi agents try to use the national hatred the Arab people have for French imperialism to obtain their fascist goals.¹⁶

The resulting strategy to confront [Fascism] echoed the dilemma of the communist movement under French mandate rule. The congress’s decision to form broad popular fronts in Europe and national fronts in the colonies further emphasized the national struggle of the colonized populations, shifting attention from local “reactionary” powers and social and political rights to imperialism and European fascist régimes. The [Fascist] invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 gave credibility to these needs.

As in the case of Libya, Italy’s latest aggression illustrated the immediate dangers posed by European fascism. The struggle against fascism as a threat to independence increasingly served to mobilize popular support and helped link the [Communist Party] to mainstream nationalist currents. While larger sectors of the local population continued to voice fascination for the [German Reich], Italy’s brutal policies in Libya and its attack against Abyssinia had fostered the image of fascism as an imperialist power.

Notwithstanding significant efforts to ameliorate its standing in the Middle East, suspicion of [Fascist] ambitions was shared—as in Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq—by many in Lebanon and Syria.¹⁷

[…]

The [Fascist] advance against France in summer 1940 left the Levantine public in a state of shock. On 22 June 1940 the German–French armistice agreement was signed. Three days later, on 25 June, a similar agreement was concluded in Rome between Italy and France.

The agreed‐on conventions were intended to regulate France’s relations to the Axis and to set preliminary rules for cooperation and the administration of territories affected by the French defeat. Both armistice conventions called for the demobilization and disarmament of French forces not required for an immediate preservation of public order and territorial defence.²⁹

Despite the immediate influence of the Axis and the rule of Vichy forces in the mandates, opposition to rapprochements to the Axis and its agents had not completely ceased. Local communist circles were among the most outspoken objectors of the Axis’s growing influence. The publication of the clandestine newspaper Nidal al‐Shaʻb in the name of the party was part of their activities.³⁰

As a handwritten pamphlet consisting of a few pages, the paper provided one of the rare opportunities to voice uncensored criticism of the local government and its Axis partners. Demands for an amelioration of the economic and social conditions were linked to calls for neutrality of the mandates in the international conflict. Despite its explicit criticism of the Axis as an immediate threat and the most aggressive expression of imperialist rule, such a position did not imply concession to the Allied powers.

On the eve of the Iraqi–British conflict, in March 1941, the paper strongly criticized not only Axis ambitions in Africa and the Arab Middle East but British intentions as well, with its slogan “No British, no Germans, no Italians, but bread, freedom and independence!”³¹ Under current conditions, neither European power could count on sympathies among the local population. As imperialist states driven by shared interests in the region, they were no allies in the struggle for independence, political rights, and economic prosperity.

[…]

News of the Soviet army’s encirclement of Berlin had reached the Levantine public in the early evening of 24 April 1945. Soon after, large crowds took to the streets. People gathered spontaneously in Beirut and other Lebanese and Syrian cities. From a local perspective, the war against [the Western Axis] had effectively come to an end.

(Emphasis added.)

Quoting Harvey Henry Smith’s Area Handbook for Lebanon, page 299:

Upon the surrender of the Vichy […] troops in [West Asia] in July 1941, volunteers from the Troupes Spéciales du Levant were enlisted in the [Allies] and saw action in north Africa, Italy, and Southern France.

In June 1943 the [Allies] reconstituted units of the Troupes Spéciales du Levant, which then operated as part of the British forces in the Middle East. In 1945, as a result of continuing pressure by Lebanese leaders for control of their own forces, [Paris] turned over to them the Lebanese units of the Troupes Spéciales du Levant. These units totaled about 3,000 men and became the nucleus of the present Lebanese Army.

In 1942, these troops participated in the Battle of Bir Hakeim against the Wehrmacht.

(Mirror.)

To salvage the bond market and raise revenue, in 1936 the régime offered to convert the Redeemable Bond—purchased at L. 80 with a nominal value of L. 100 but now valued at only L. 68 on the market—into a new bond of L. 100 nominal value, if the bondholder paid L. 15 in cash. With little alternative, most bondholders accepted the conversion, generating six billion lire net.⁷⁶ While these bonds generated some revenue, they mostly allowed the state to monopolize savings capital and control inflation.⁷⁷

Raising capital by restricting liquidity and suppressing consumption also led to wage compression among workers, as economic historians Vera Zamagni, Maria Gómez‐León, and Giacomo Gabbuti demonstrated; the wages of industrial workers, in particular, declined or stagnated, even as industry flourished.⁷⁸ Workers’ well‐being, measured by any metric, fell substantially throughout the 1930s. For example, the number of under‐nourished Italians grew from one in five in 1922 to one in three by 1938.⁷⁹

As working‐class tables grew more spartan, the property owners remained relatively unmolested.⁸⁰ After 1936, Thaon di Revel studied various tax reforms to target the wealthy, but few were successfully introduced, such as a 10% withholding tax on the coupons of all private bearing securities and other taxes to limit the distribution of dividends.

More serious reforms failed. Property owners decried the October 1936 special property tax as a “forced loan,” pressuring the régime to modify the measure to allow property holders to borrow the taxed amount from the bank, in effect, using the tax as cover for further money creation.⁸¹ Consequently, the régime continued to rely primarily on indirect taxes, which disproportionately affected working‐class consumers and increased inequality.⁸²

By creating money, soaking up liquidity, and suppressing consumption, the régime financed military operations and multi‐million‐lire public contracts to [Fascist] industrial firms, especially those in IRI’s portfolio, to supply and support the invading armies.

The largest civil expense was road construction, which represented some 81% of public expenditure on civil projects (ca. 8,075 million lire).⁸³ Most of the work was done by Italy’s premier road construction company, Puricelli. By 1936, the firm had been taken over by IRI and its leader, Piero Puricelli, was replaced with a man of IRI’s choice, suggesting it was more closely controlled than other firms in IRI’s portfolio.⁸⁴

According to economic historian Gian Luca Podestà, Puricelli obtained 1.3 billion lire in public contracts to build roads in AOI between 1936 and 1940, putting the company in the black by 1939.⁸⁵ By February 1939, the Italians had built or reinforced an estimated 3,352 km of road in AOI.⁸⁶

All sorts of enterprises popped up to supply and service the advancing [Fascist] military apparatus and the construction sites across the Horn. One of the largest was trucking, as everyone and everything had to be trucked from the low‐lying Italian Red Sea ports to the Ethiopian high plains.

Mid‐sized trucking companies, like Gondrand Transports, saw the imperial project as a chance to make themselves a globally significant firm. Even very small companies like Gotti S.p.A. of Massa Lombardo, a company with only eight trucks, jumped at the opportunities offered by the imperial market flush with public money.⁸⁷

The booming battlefront economy pulled Italy’s under‐ and unemployed workers to AOI. An estimated 330,000 Italian soldiers and militiamen, together with 100,000 militarized Italian workers, were in East Africa by late‐Spring 1936.⁸⁸ Many furloughed soldiers stayed. An estimated 102,548 Italians migrated to AOI in 1936 alone.⁸⁹

By June 1937, an estimated 63,530 Italians were employed as roadworkers, alongside 43,720 “native” workers, and 10,680 Yemeni and Sudanese workers.⁹⁰ Unskilled Italian workers could expect to make about ten times the daily wage of an equivalent African worker (ca. 1934–1936) and about twice what they earned in Italy. The differences were even greater for Italian skilled workers and professionals, who had ample opportunities as African workers were summarily removed from skilled positions and excluded from most forms of skilled work.⁹¹

This seems like a good spot to stop the excerpt, but there are a few more paragraphs that I wish to quote as they feel particularly relevant given recent events.

[A]s the war dragged on, Guarneri and Thaon di Revel grew increasingly concerned about Italy’s reserves and Italy’s difficulty accessing foreign markets.¹⁰⁰ In October 1936, Guarneri and Thaon di Revel convinced Mussolini to devalue the lira under the guise of pegging it to the floating dollar. This devaluation of more than 40% would enable Italy to continue buying and selling on foreign markets.¹⁰¹

Guarneri privately urged Mussolini to be cautious with the treasury reserves—as the liberal government had been—because Italy would need them to rejoin the global capitalist market.¹⁰² Extending the Italian economy so far was a colossal risk.

And it did not pay off.

The war was neither lightning‐fast nor conclusive. The [Fascists] confronted a much stronger and more enduring resistance than they had anticipated. By early 1937, the [Fascists] occupied only the main cities of Ethiopia and some of the hinterlands. The countryside was a stronghold for the Ethiopian resistance, which grew only stronger in response to the régime’s brutal attacks on the civilian population. The regions around Gondar, Lake Tana, and Addis Ababa were in continuous revolt (see Fig. 2).¹⁰³

Not only did the war last longer than expected, but the cost ballooned. While more research is needed to establish exact expenditures, even Podestà’s conservative estimates show the régime far exceeded the estimated 2,400 million lire per year in expenditures (Table 1).¹⁰⁴

Maione, in contrast, estimates [that] the [Fascists] spent in total 57,303 million lire (1935–40).¹⁰⁵ By most estimates, the occupation and colonization of AOI amounted to about 25% of all public expenditure and between 10–12% of national income.¹⁰⁶

The war was the most important factor in increasing these expenses. Roads were also costly, especially because the hastily built roads needed constant repairs.¹⁰⁷ Moreover, [the Kingdom of] Italy had to use its reserves to buy war matériel, including petroleum, and pay taxes and service fees at Djibouti in French Somaliland and the British‐controlled Suez.¹⁰⁸ And it was precisely here—the weakest point in the Italian economy—that the League of Nations’ economic sanctions hit the hardest.¹⁰⁹

While sanctions eased in 1936 and European powers had largely accepted [Fascist] Italy’s claims to Ethiopia by 1937, Ethiopians continued to resist [Fascism].¹¹¹ As a result, agricultural output in the Horn of Africa diminished substantially due to the ongoing conflict, land seizures and failed agricultural experiments, and the number of Africans abandoning agriculture for wage work.¹¹²

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

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Click here for events that happened today (October 2).

1847: Paul von Hindenburg, conservative who helped promote the NSDAP to institutional power, was born.
1934: Helsinki signed the ‘Agreement concerning Payments in connection with Goods Transactions between the Two Countries’ in Berlin.
1935: Benito Mussolini announced amid a large gathering of ministers, state secretaries and specially selected foreign dignitaries that war with Ethiopia was imminent.
1938: Alexandru Averescu, profascist Romanian, dropped dead.
1939: Friedrich Ruge received a clasp to his Iron Cross 1st Class medal, and Luftwaffe Friegerkorps X under the command of General Hans Geissler formed at Hamburg. The Korps would specialise in anti‐shipping operations.
1940: Berlin ordered Hans Frank and other Axis officials in occupied Poland to keep the standard of living low and to deprive the Polish population of education, for the Poles were now nothing but lowly labourers for the Fascist bourgeoisie. Additionally, Berlin ordered that the Polish gentry be exterminated. Apart from that, a Ju 88 bomber became lost in the darkness during an early morning reconnaissance mission and landed at Brightlingsea, Essex, England at 0630 hours before falling into Allied captivity. During the day, the Luftwaffe launched six raids of Bf 109 and Bf 110 fighters and fighter‐bombers against London and Kent in southern England; only one of the raids contained bombers. The Axis lost five bombers and five Bf 109 aircraft. Overnight, the Axis bombed London, Manchester, and Newcastle.
1941: The remainder of Armeegruppe Mitte launched Operation Typhoon, the attack on Moscow. Meanwhile, Panzergruppe 2 under General Guderian became split into two pincers at Sevsk, Russia; the northern pincer moved toward Bryansk while the northeastern pincer moved toward Orel. After sundown, Axis bombers attacked the Tyneside and Tees‐side areas in northern England (massacring fifty humans, destroying 250 buildings, and severely damaging shipbuilding and repairing facilities at South Shields) and the Dover area in southeastern England (slaughtering ten folk).

As well, Axis submarine U‐94 chased and attacked Allied tanker San Florentino west of Ireland over a course of six hours, sinking her at 0552 hours; twenty‐three folk died but thirty‐five lived. Two and a half hundred miles east of Iceland at 0652 hours, Axis submarine U‐562 sank the Allied catapult‐armed merchant ship Empire Wave, ending twenty‐nine lives but leaving thirty‐one alive. At 0709 hours, west of Ireland, Axis submarine U‐575 sank the Netherlandish merchant ship Tuva, killing somebody (but leaving thirty‐four alive). Finally, the third Messerschmitt Me 163A rocket‐powered prototype flightcraft, piloted by Heini Dittmar, achieved an unofficial world speed record of 623.85 mph.
1942: Z35 launched at the DeSchiMAG shipyard in Bremen, and Heinrich Prinz zu Sayn‐Wittgenstein received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.
1943: Berlin issued orders to deport Danish Jews to concentration camps. On the other hand, the Ar 234V‐2 jet bomber suffered a fire in its wing and crashed at Rheine Airfield north of Munster, killing test pilot Flugkapitän Selle.
1944: The Wehrmacht terminated the Warsaw Uprising after sixty‐three days of fighting largely due to its enemy’s want of food and ammunition. Although the Axis occupation forces suffered sixteen thousand dead, it still massacred 15,200 insurgents and 200,000 civilians, and it devastated many buildings in the fighting. Likewise, Friedrich Christiansen ordered a raid on the village of Putten, Gelderland, the Netherlands as retaliation for the murder of his subordinate Leutnant Sommers by resistance fighters. The Axis subsequently executed many civilians and deported 661 men to labor camps. In Lapland, General Lothar Rendulic ordered the Axis’s 20th Mountain Army to open hostilities against the Finnish III Army Corps.

On 20 February, not long after the [Axis’s new] administration was set up [in Italy], the newspaper reported on a meeting between the gauleiter and a workers’ delegation. Rainer had begun by making a speech of welcome in which he expounded a favourite concept of [Fascism’s] social ideology: the [supposed] elimination of all social classes and distinctions. ‘The supreme law of all true socialism’, he said, ‘should be that there is no privileged class and no one is entitled to live at other people’s expense’.

After which, reported the Deutsche Adria Zeitung, he held a long conversation with the workers, ‘discussing economic and social matters and listening to their requests’,⁴¹ promising that the latter would receive the fullest consideration from the [Axis] authorities.

The real experience of workers in the operations zone was quite different from this rosy propaganda picture. No doubt Rainer was sincere in his desire to review wages and salaries, and he made a demagogic promise personally to ensure the creation of a welfare system; but the scanty measures actually taken were quite insufficient to guarantee workers, especially manual workers, a decent standard of living, and if improvements were made to working conditions in the factories, they merely papered over the cracks.

Propaganda carried small conviction to people who endured daily privation and overwork; shipyard workers in particular — to whom communism had much more appeal than [Fascism] — were prominent in the Italian resistance, many of them joining the ‘Garibaldi’ brigades in the mountains of Friuli.

Conditions were particularly bad for those working for the Todt organisation, either on the impressive defences being constructed to guard against a potential Allied invasion of the Adriatic coast or on securing vital road and rail links, which were being continually damaged by partisan attacks.⁴²

While the propagandists promised new clothes and shoes, abundant food and generous wages, the Todt workers — ostensibly volunteers, but most of them under coercion — were forced to work in appalling conditions, dressed in rags, living in improvised barracks near the building sites, ill‐fed and subject to implacable [Axis] surveillance.

The wages, it is true, were not to be despised, being rather above the regional average. But those who benefited most from Rainer’s labour policies were not the manual workers but the numerous entrepreneurs who chose to collaborate with the [Axis] and made huge profits out of munitions orders with the help of a thoroughly browbeaten workforce.

This is why no anticommunist’s appeals to the proletariat should be taken seriously: benefits for the lower classes invariably cut into the upper classes’ funds. One cannot serve two masters.

Besides wooing workers in the regional economy, the [Axis] propagandists had another primordial objective: to persuade as many local men as possible to go and work in [the Third Reich], either in munitions factories or for the Todt organisation. This recruitment of workers was a major preoccupation, vigorously pursued by the [Axis] occupiers all over Italy, not merely in the Adriatisches Küstenland: it engaged the attention of both the Reich plenipotentiary for the employment of labour, Friedrich Sauckel, and the Wehrmacht.

When calls for volunteers proved unprofitable, from early 1944 Sauckel’s organisation began to round up workers. But even forced recruitment did not yield the expected results: from 8 September onwards a mere 87,517 Italians went to [the Greater German Reich], whereas [Axis officials] had expected to send at least a million and a half.

As Klinkhammer has pointed out, this failure was partly caused by rivalry between various elements in the [Axis] occupation apparatus, and partly by curbs imposed on German rapacity by the RSI, whose representatives were quite successful in frustrating deportation plans, at least at local level.⁴³

(Emphasis added in all cases. Click here for more.)

To defend the region’s Italian character and preserve its traditional politico‐social orientation, Coceani and Pagnini, with the approval of the great majority of Trieste’s business community, preferred to support the [Axis], whom they saw as the only force capable of combating the Slav and communist partisans.

But this pretence that the [collaborationist] authorities were defending national values, and their anti‐Slav pact with the [Greater German Reich], proved substantially counterproductive, giving the impression that the local Italian population was radically, indeed violently, nationalistic and negating attempts by the Italian resistance to forge a national identity based on the defence of the political liberties destroyed by the ‘border’ Fascists.

Nationalism apart, some of Trieste’s leading businessmen and financiers chose collaboration in the hope of reaping huge short‐term profits from [Axis] orders and, in the longer term, of re‐establishing themselves at the centre of [Axis]‐dominated Europe, as [Axis] propaganda had promised they would do.

But it was when evoking defence against the partisan threat, and the region’s commercial ambitions, that Rainer’s legitimising strategy scored its greatest successes:

social demagogy and the will to power can be seen as the common denominators of Nazi administrators, and this would ensure the collaboration of local groups (particularly ship‐builders, insurance agents and forwarding agents) who were willing to adapt to the new conditions in the hope of securing a leading position — and their own future — in the south‐eastern corner of the greater Reich. Of course there were serious conflicts of interest and of course the German take‐over was not a painless one […] but each and every potential conflict was suppressed by the determination to avoid overt clashes and acknowledge the common interest of defence against the Slavs and Communists. It is hard to imagine a more perfect fusion between class and national interests.⁷¹

Here we can see the Axis’s usage of both the carrot and the stick: when the Fascist bourgeoisie’s promises and (very modest) concessions failed to attract workers, it called in the muscle.

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Click here for events that happened today (October 1).

1878: Othmar Spann, Austrian protofascist, stained the earth.
1936: Francisco Franco became the head of Spain’s Nationalist government. (Coincidentally, the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia dissolved itself, handing control of Catalan defence militias over to the Generalitat.)
1938: Pursuant to the Munich Agreement signed the day before, the Third Reich commenced the military occupation and annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
1939: After a month‐long siege, the Wehrmacht occupied Warsaw.
1940: Small Axis raids of twenty to seventy flightcraft each attacked RAF airfields in England, though London was untargeted during the day. The Axis lost four fighters (and the Allies lost five fighters with four pilots). Overnight, the Axis bombed London. Additionally, Luftwaffe ace Erich Hartmann began basic training with Friegerausbildungsregiment 10 at Neukuhren, near Königsberg in Ostpreußen or East Prussia.
1941: Operations began at the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, and the Axis established Italian ‘M’ battalions. Apart from that, Wilhelm Keitel ordered that, in regards to the hostages the Wehrmacht had been holding and executing in retaliation of partisan attacks, choice of victims would be important, as well known victims would have greater effect in keeping the occupied peoples in line.
1942: Egmont Prinz zur Lippe‐Weißenfeld became the commanding officer of the 1st Group of the Nachtjagdgeschwader 3 wing as Kurt Fricke received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross and Francis Tuker received the temporary rank of major general. On a side note, USS Grouper torpedoed Lisbon Maru, not knowing that the ship was carrying British prisoners of war from Hong Kong.
1943: The Gestapo arrested two hundred twenty Danish Jews, and troops from the Wehrmacht’s 1st Mountain Division massacred eighty‐seven people in the village of Lingiades, Greece in retaliation for the murder of Oberstleutnant Josef Salminger by partisans. On the other hand, the Axis lost Naples to the partisans and then the Allies. Finally, the Axis set up a zone of operations, the Adriatisches Küstenland (Adriatic Coast), in Italy.
1944: The Axis‐occupied island of Jersey became a Fortress, but the Axis garrison at Calais, France capitulated to the Allies.
1945: Shizuichi Tanaka, the Axis’s Military Governor of the Philippines, took his own life.
1946: Nuremberg trials sentenced several leading German Fascists to death or imprisonment.
1959: Enrico De Nicola, President of Fascist Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in the early 1920s, expired.
1994: Paul Lorenzen, Fascist philosophist and mathematician, perished.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/76983

Liechtenstein
‘An official investigation into Liechtenstein's World War II history […] has found that forced labor from a [Axis] concentration camp worked on estates owned by the royal family in [Axis]‐occupied Austria at the time.’ (Source.)

Portugal
By 1938, the Third Reich was the Estado Novo (Portugal)’s second largest trading partner. Its balance of trade went from a $90 million shortfall in 1939 to a $68 million surplus in ’42; the Bank of Portugal’s assets more than tripled and those in the private banks nearly doubled during World War II’s first four years. The Third Reich depended on the Estado Novo’s rich wolframite and tungsten ore deposits, which were critical for producing more war munitions and particularly the armour‐piercing kind. Tungsten ore was so valuable that the Allies tried to buy as much as possible before the Reich could, and when that failed they used economic sanctions on the Estado Novo in 1944, but the Reich bypassed this by simply cloaking its mining interests there. (Source.) Finally, the Estado Novo was home to dozens of Portuguese men who fought alongside their Spanish brethren in the Blue Division.

Spain
This is the most obvious addition, but few of us are familiar with the details. Like the Estado Novo, the Spanish State supplied the Third Reich with wolframite, but it also channelled oil thereinto. (Source.) Likewise, while never officially part of the Axis, the Spanish ruling class still sent about 47,000 other anticommunists, and medical services, to assist in the reinvasion of Soviet Eurasia. Read Transnational Exchange in the Nazi New Order for the details in that regard. Finally, the Spanish ruling class sent a good deal of arms to the Third Reich; it vended 85,350 copies of the Astra 300, for example, to the Third Reich during the 1940s.

Sweden
The Swedish ruling class was not only complicit in ‘Aryanisation’ but also built some of its wealth on supplying the Third Reich’s war effort with scarce essential resources (such as iron ore) for weapons, possibly prolonging World War II by one year. (Source.) Despite its neutrality policy, the Swedish ruling class smuggled Fascist weaponry to Finland, used scores of thousands of railroad cars to transport over a million military personnel on leave to the Reich and another million to Norway from 1940 to ’43, and at least a hundred Swedish anticommunists directly assisted the Axis in warfare. They, like some of the Baltic anticommunists (Baltutlämningen) who took refuge there, never suffered either extradition or prosecution when they returned to the Kingdom of Sweden.

Switzerland
Some have written entire books on how Swiss banking benefited the Third Reich. In short, this was the most frequent client among all of the so‐called ‘neutral’ countries due to its liberal policies and willingly supplied the Third Reich with loans, gold reserves, munitions, machines, oil, electricity, aluminium, and much more. Additionally, the Swiss ruling class collaborated with the Fascist bourgeoisie in inhibiting the movement of Jews and legally ‘Jewish’ people.

Turkey
Turkish chromite was essential for the Third Reich’s defence industries, particularly for hardening steel for armour. It was so critical, in fact, that the Reich’s war production probably would have shut down in only ten months if Turkey’s ruling class stopped giving any to the Reich. The Turkish ruling class signed the Treaty of Friendship with the Reich’s in June 1941 (it almost officially joined the Anti‐Comintern Pact) and it did not cease shipping chromite ore to the Reich until international pressure overwhelmed the Turks in April 1944. (Source.) Although the Turkish government did declare war in 1945, it appears that this was simply a diplomatic maneuver and it meant nothing in practice militarily.

On 9 April 1933, a few weeks after Adolf Hitler’s nomination as Reich Chancellor, a group of communist activists tore down the German flag of the German general consulate in Beirut and wrote explicit slogans on its walls: “Down with Hitler, the tyrant, the executer of the German workers! The German workers and their heroic Communist Party shall live!”⁸

For a broader, left‐leaning spectrum, including not only the Syrian–Lebanese Communist Party but other non‐party‐affiliated workers, students, and intellectuals as well, opposition against fascism gradually shifted to the center of ideological and strategic debates.⁹

[…]

The threat of fascist coups in Europe, the formation of Popular Fronts in France and Spain, and [Fascist] preparations for an attack against Abyssinia in 1935 ever more highlighted the need to revise the [Communist] party’s isolationist strategy. In close contact with the Comintern and the French [Communist Party], the communist movement in Lebanon and Syria set up a Committee for the Popular Struggle in Defense of Ethiopia explicitly meant to raise public awareness and to create broader alliances against fascism in the Arab world itself.¹⁴

In addition to the publication of the clandestine newspaper Nidal al‐Shaʻb (People’s Struggle) and the takeover of the renowned monthly cultural magazine Al‐Duhur (Ages), the organization of strikes and manifestations extended the popular basis of its activities—and further shifted its political priorities to questions of Arab independence, national unity, and the struggle for Palestine.¹⁵

Internationally, the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, held in July–August 1935 in Moscow, marked a turning point for Communist strategies vis‐à‐vis Italian Fascism and German [Fascism], confirming the gradual revision of past tactics whose devastating consequences had become all too visible in the ultimate defeat of political opposition in [the Third Reich].

The proceedings of the conference and the speeches by representatives of the national communist parties highlighted these changes, drawing particular attention to the need to unite mainstream nationalist forces in an attempt to thwart further fascist successes. Summarizing recent developments in Syria and Lebanon, Yusuf Khattar al‐Hilu, the delegate of the Syrian Communist Party, outlined the menaces posed by several imperialist powers striving to extend their influence into the Arab world:

Italian Fascist propaganda has greatly increased in recent times. Each year Mussolini’s agents organize free trips to Italy for young Arabs. The station Radio Bari broadcasts Arabic‐language programs three times a week about “Italian–Arab friendship” and “fascist well‐being” in Italy. It is the same with German fascism. Hitler has purchased the largest bourgeois newspapers in Syria which every day are full of photographs and articles about Hitlerism, which they represent as the “saviour of the German people.” Nazi agents try to use the national hatred the Arab people have for French imperialism to obtain their fascist goals.¹⁶

The resulting strategy to confront [Fascism] echoed the dilemma of the communist movement under French mandate rule. The congress’s decision to form broad popular fronts in Europe and national fronts in the colonies further emphasized the national struggle of the colonized populations, shifting attention from local “reactionary” powers and social and political rights to imperialism and European fascist régimes. The [Fascist] invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 gave credibility to these needs.

As in the case of Libya, Italy’s latest aggression illustrated the immediate dangers posed by European fascism. The struggle against fascism as a threat to independence increasingly served to mobilize popular support and helped link the [Communist Party] to mainstream nationalist currents. While larger sectors of the local population continued to voice fascination for the [German Reich], Italy’s brutal policies in Libya and its attack against Abyssinia had fostered the image of fascism as an imperialist power.

Notwithstanding significant efforts to ameliorate its standing in the Middle East, suspicion of [Fascist] ambitions was shared—as in Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq—by many in Lebanon and Syria.¹⁷

[…]

The [Fascist] advance against France in summer 1940 left the Levantine public in a state of shock. On 22 June 1940 the German–French armistice agreement was signed. Three days later, on 25 June, a similar agreement was concluded in Rome between Italy and France.

The agreed‐on conventions were intended to regulate France’s relations to the Axis and to set preliminary rules for cooperation and the administration of territories affected by the French defeat. Both armistice conventions called for the demobilization and disarmament of French forces not required for an immediate preservation of public order and territorial defence.²⁹

Despite the immediate influence of the Axis and the rule of Vichy forces in the mandates, opposition to rapprochements to the Axis and its agents had not completely ceased. Local communist circles were among the most outspoken objectors of the Axis’s growing influence. The publication of the clandestine newspaper Nidal al‐Shaʻb in the name of the party was part of their activities.³⁰

As a handwritten pamphlet consisting of a few pages, the paper provided one of the rare opportunities to voice uncensored criticism of the local government and its Axis partners. Demands for an amelioration of the economic and social conditions were linked to calls for neutrality of the mandates in the international conflict. Despite its explicit criticism of the Axis as an immediate threat and the most aggressive expression of imperialist rule, such a position did not imply concession to the Allied powers.

On the eve of the Iraqi–British conflict, in March 1941, the paper strongly criticized not only Axis ambitions in Africa and the Arab Middle East but British intentions as well, with its slogan “No British, no Germans, no Italians, but bread, freedom and independence!”³¹ Under current conditions, neither European power could count on sympathies among the local population. As imperialist states driven by shared interests in the region, they were no allies in the struggle for independence, political rights, and economic prosperity.

[…]

News of the Soviet army’s encirclement of Berlin had reached the Levantine public in the early evening of 24 April 1945. Soon after, large crowds took to the streets. People gathered spontaneously in Beirut and other Lebanese and Syrian cities. From a local perspective, the war against [the Western Axis] had effectively come to an end.

(Emphasis added.)

Quoting Harvey Henry Smith’s Area Handbook for Lebanon, page 299:

Upon the surrender of the Vichy […] troops in [West Asia] in July 1941, volunteers from the Troupes Spéciales du Levant were enlisted in the [Allies] and saw action in north Africa, Italy, and Southern France.

In June 1943 the [Allies] reconstituted units of the Troupes Spéciales du Levant, which then operated as part of the British forces in the Middle East. In 1945, as a result of continuing pressure by Lebanese leaders for control of their own forces, [Paris] turned over to them the Lebanese units of the Troupes Spéciales du Levant. These units totaled about 3,000 men and became the nucleus of the present Lebanese Army.

In 1942, these troops participated in the Battle of Bir Hakeim against the Wehrmacht.

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Click here for events that happened today (September 30).

1883: Bernhard Rust, Reich Minister of Science, Education and Culture, was unkind enough to exist.
1934: Erwin Rommel met Adolf Schicklgruber for the first time, and Reich Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht reported to his Chancellor on his progress of planning the German Reich’s economy for another war.
1935: The Third Reich commissioned U‐12 into service under the command of Kapitänleutnant Werner von Schmidt.
1936: Mutsu completed her reconstruction at Yokosuka Naval Arsenal.
1937: Imperial flightcraft bombarded Chinese coastal battery positions overlooking the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province.
1938: Shortly after midnight, Adolf Schicklgruber, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini, and Édouard Daladier (in that order) signed the Munich Agreement at the Führerbau building in München, which ceded Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich (the actual document was backdated to the previous day). Upon returning to the United Kingdom, Chamberlain announced outside 10 Downing Street in London that ‘I believe it is peace for our time’!
1939: As General Władysław Sikorski became the Polish government‐in‐exile’s prime minister, Reinhard Heydrich became the leader of new Reich Main Security Office, RSHA, and U‐23 completed her twoth war patrol. Additionally, Walther von Brauchitsch received the Clasps to his Iron Cross 2nd Class and 1st Class medals as well as the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross.
1940: Four Axis raids, each consisting of sixty to two hundred bombers and escorted by large numbers of fighters, crossed into southern England at 0900, 1000, 1300, and 1600 hours; some got through to London, but some did not drop their bombs as they had little visibility due to low clouds, overshooting their targets as radar operators misread the Knickebein radio beacon signals. Meanwhile, two groups of about one hundred bombers each attacked cities on the southern coast. On that day, the Axis lost fourteen bombers, twenty‐eight Bf 109 fighters, and one Bf 110 fighter (while the Allies lost 19 fighters and 8 pilots). The daylight attacks would represent the last major raids of such type conducted by the Luftwaffe. Overnight, the Axis bombed London, Liverpool, and several others cities; the aircraft factory at Yeovil was only lightly damaged as most bombs fell on the town instead.

Apart from that, Axis submarine U‐37 sank Allied ship Samala west of Ireland at 1013 hours, massacring everyone aboard (65 crew, 1 gunner, and 2 passengers). At 2156 hours, in the same area, U‐37 sank Allied ship Heminge, killing somebody. Axis mines laid by destroyers Eckholdt, Riedel, Lody, Galster, Ihn, and Steinbrinck two days earlier off Falmouth in southwestern England destroyed two Allied vessels, resulting in twenty‐nine and fifteen deaths, respectively. Elsewhen, Karl Dönitz inspected the Axis submarine Alessandro Malaspina at Bordeaux, and Alpino Bagnolini ended her third war patrol arriving there.
1941: The Axis finished the Babi Yar massacre, but the Jager Report noted that the Axis exterminated 366 Jewish men, 483 Jewish women, and 597 Jewish children in Trakai, Lithuania (for a total of 1,446 people). As well, Operation Typhoon got an unofficial start when Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 attacked two days ahead of schedule, and Axis bombers attacked shipyards at Tyneside in northern England, severely damaging submarine HMS Sunfish.
1942: The Third Reich’s head of state publicly repeated his forecast of the annihilation of Jewry while a transport containing 610 Jews arrived at Auschwitz from the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands; the Axis registered 37 men and 118 women into the camp but exterminated the remaining 454. As well, Axis bombers attacked Lancing and Colchester, England, and Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss forbade his SS guards to consume raw fruits, raw vegetables, and raw milk due to the typhus epidemic in the camp. On the bright side, Hans‐Joachim Marseille, Axis pilot, died falling to his death.
1943: On the eve of the Jewish New Year, the Gestapo and Danish fascists began rounding up Danish Jews. A Danish businessman passed the news of the operation and passed the information to the Danish resistance, which then arranged fishing boats to ferry a large number of Danish Jews to Sweden. Meanwhile, SS‐Hauptsturmführer Eduard Weiter became the commandant of Dachau (replacing Martin Wei), and the Wehrmacht began evacuating Naples amidst continued fighting, leaving behind a burning city historic archive and many traps. A ‘wolfpack’ consisting of Axis submarines U‐703, U‐601, and U‐960 also attacked Soviet convoy VA‐18 near the Sergey Kirov Islands in the eastern Kara Sea and sank freighter Arhangelsk.
1944: The Third Reich commenced a counteroffensive to retake the Nijmegen salient, this having been captured by the Allies during Operation Market Garden. Likewise, a V‐1 flying bomb caused five deaths and many injuries when a row of houses was demolished at Ardleigh in Essex, England. The USAAF base at Thorpe Abbots, home of the 100th Bomb Group (‘The Bloody 100th’) reported buzz bombs flying over the airfield at one hundred fifty feet before exploding in the farm fields surrounding the base. A U.S. 8th Air Force 750‐bomber raid on Munster and Handorf in the Greater German Reich killed the Staffelkapitän and the training officer of Axis Air Force 7/KG3; records captured by the Allies showed that the Staffel had launched one hundred seventy‐seven flying bombs during thirteen nights of sorties in Sept. 1944.
1945: The Western Allies disbanded I‐401’s crew, and all of the officers and other men went back into the civilian population, including the few who had committed war crimes!
1946: Takashi Sakai, Axis governor of Hong Kong, died at the hands of a Chinese firing squad.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2121750

Quoting A.J.P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War, page 262:

It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo‐German declaration on the day after the Munich conference. Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.”

The [German–Soviet] pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs. The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also.

Andrew Rothstein’s The Munich Conspiracy is the perfect resource for learning more about this. Pages 70–2:

On September 26 [the Third Reich’s head of state] prepared the way for this by a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin, in which raving abuse of Czechoslovakia and Beneš, with denunciations of the U.S.S.R. and threats of war, was interspersed with assurances that this was “the last territorial claim which I have in Europe”, expressions of friendship for Britain, France and Poland, and of personal gratitude to Chamberlain.

This was well calculated to impress: since the British Ambassador in Berlin, at any rate, had freely revealed the same train of thought passing through his mind for many months, and Hitler knew from many sources that Nevile Henderson was not alone.

He followed up the speech with a personal letter to Chamberlain on the 27th (which the Prime Minister received the same evening), arguing in the most reasonable tones against various criticisms of his terms, offering to guarantee the independence of the remainder of Czechoslovakia once the German, Polish and Hungarian minorities had gone, and finishing with an invitation to Chamberlain to “continue your effort, for which I should like to take this opportunity of once more sincerely thanking you”—in order to prevent “Prague” from bringing about a general war.⁷²

The calculation was correct. Chamberlain snatched at the opportunity, and telegraphed next day to Hitler proposing an immediate Four‐Power Conference (i.e. including Italy). He had already informed the French Government, whose leaders were mainly concerned to get in ahead of Chamberlain (on the morning of the 28th) with an even more eager offer of co‐operation against Czechoslovakia—that it should be required to agree (on pain of losing any French support) to the immediate occupation by German troops of “all four sides of the Bohemian quadrilateral”.⁷³

Hitler had only to choose: and he preferred the British precisely because it involved the public participation of Britain and France in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, at his dictation. Mussolini, who feared that a war might end in disaster, supported Chamberlain in a series of messages to Hitler.⁷⁴

He sent the necessary invitations on the morning of the 28th; and the conference—Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier—met on the afternoon of the 29th, sitting until the early hours of the morning of the 30th. Mussolini already had the draft of a settlement, which had been drawn up the previous day by the Germans, and passed on to him by the Italian Ambassador at Berlin: and at a suitable moment, after a preliminary statement by Hitler on the usual lines, Mussolini produced it as his own.

The draft provided for evacuation of the “Sudeten–German” territory, according to a map drawn up by the Germans, between October 1 and 10 and without the destruction of any existing installations: an international commission (of the four Powers with Czechoslovakia) to supervise the evacuation: a plebiscite to be held in “doubtful territories”, which until then would be occupied by international forces: and German troops to begin occupying “predominantly German territory” on October 1.⁷⁵

After argument about the drafting of various passages, with intervals for meals, these points became the essential features of the Munich Agreement, signed on September 30. There were several additional points, designed to make the document more palatable to the public in Britain and France—since none of those present could have supposed that they would make the “carve‐up” more acceptable to Czechoslovakia.

Such were the provisions that the international commission should determine one particular zone which was to be occupied, the boundaries of which were doubtful at Munich: that there was to be the right of option for individuals: that Britain and France maintained the offer of an international guarantee of the new boundaries, made on September 19, and that [the Third Reich] and [Fascist] Italy would join it once the Polish and Hungarian minority questions were settled.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Further reading: The Munich Crisis, Politics and the People: International, Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (interview with author)

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Click here for other events that happened today (September 30).

1883: Bernhard Rust, Reich Minister of Science, Education and Culture, was unkind enough to exist.
1934: Erwin Rommel met Adolf Schicklgruber for the first time, and Reich Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht reported to his Chancellor on his progress of planning the German Reich’s economy for another war.
1935: The Third Reich commissioned U‐12 into service under the command of Kapitänleutnant Werner von Schmidt.
1936: Mutsu completed her reconstruction at Yokosuka Naval Arsenal.
1937: Imperial flightcraft bombarded Chinese coastal battery positions overlooking the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province.
1939: As General Władysław Sikorski became the Polish government‐in‐exile’s prime minister, Reinhard Heydrich became the leader of new Reich Main Security Office, RSHA, and U‐23 completed her twoth war patrol. Additionally, Walther von Brauchitsch received the Clasps to his Iron Cross 2nd Class and 1st Class medals as well as the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross.
1940: Four Axis raids, each consisting of sixty to two hundred bombers and escorted by large numbers of fighters, crossed into southern England at 0900, 1000, 1300, and 1600 hours; some got through to London, but some did not drop their bombs as they had little visibility due to low clouds, overshooting their targets as radar operators misread the Knickebein radio beacon signals. Meanwhile, two groups of about one hundred bombers each attacked cities on the southern coast. On that day, the Axis lost fourteen bombers, twenty‐eight Bf 109 fighters, and one Bf 110 fighter (while the Allies lost 19 fighters and 8 pilots). The daylight attacks would represent the last major raids of such type conducted by the Luftwaffe. Overnight, the Axis bombed London, Liverpool, and several others cities; the aircraft factory at Yeovil was only lightly damaged as most bombs fell on the town instead.

Apart from that, Axis submarine U‐37 sank Allied ship Samala west of Ireland at 1013 hours, massacring everyone aboard (65 crew, 1 gunner, and 2 passengers). At 2156 hours, in the same area, U‐37 sank Allied ship Heminge, killing somebody. Axis mines laid by destroyers Eckholdt, Riedel, Lody, Galster, Ihn, and Steinbrinck two days earlier off Falmouth in southwestern England destroyed two Allied vessels, resulting in twenty‐nine and fifteen deaths, respectively. Elsewhen, Karl Dönitz inspected the Axis submarine Alessandro Malaspina at Bordeaux, and Alpino Bagnolini ended her third war patrol arriving there.
1941: The Axis finished the Babi Yar massacre, but the Jager Report noted that the Axis exterminated 366 Jewish men, 483 Jewish women, and 597 Jewish children in Trakai, Lithuania (for a total of 1,446 people). As well, Operation Typhoon got an unofficial start when Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 attacked two days ahead of schedule, and Axis bombers attacked shipyards at Tyneside in northern England, severely damaging submarine HMS Sunfish.
1942: The Third Reich’s head of state publicly repeated his forecast of the annihilation of Jewry while a transport containing 610 Jews arrived at Auschwitz from the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands; the Axis registered 37 men and 118 women into the camp but exterminated the remaining 454. As well, Axis bombers attacked Lancing and Colchester, England, and Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss forbade his SS guards to consume raw fruits, raw vegetables, and raw milk due to the typhus epidemic in the camp. On the bright side, Hans‐Joachim Marseille, Axis pilot, died falling to his death.
1943: On the eve of the Jewish New Year, the Gestapo and Danish fascists began rounding up Danish Jews. A Danish businessman passed the news of the operation and passed the information to the Danish resistance, which then arranged fishing boats to ferry a large number of Danish Jews to Sweden. Meanwhile, SS‐Hauptsturmführer Eduard Weiter became the commandant of Dachau (replacing Martin Wei), and the Wehrmacht began evacuating Naples amidst continued fighting, leaving behind a burning city historic archive and many traps. A ‘wolfpack’ consisting of Axis submarines U‐703, U‐601, and U‐960 also attacked Soviet convoy VA‐18 near the Sergey Kirov Islands in the eastern Kara Sea and sank freighter Arhangelsk.
1944: The Third Reich commenced a counteroffensive to retake the Nijmegen salient, this having been captured by the Allies during Operation Market Garden. Likewise, a V‐1 flying bomb caused five deaths and many injuries when a row of houses was demolished at Ardleigh in Essex, England. The USAAF base at Thorpe Abbots, home of the 100th Bomb Group (‘The Bloody 100th’) reported buzz bombs flying over the airfield at one hundred fifty feet before exploding in the farm fields surrounding the base. A U.S. 8th Air Force 750‐bomber raid on Munster and Handorf in the Greater German Reich killed the Staffelkapitän and the training officer of Axis Air Force 7/KG3; records captured by the Allies showed that the Staffel had launched one hundred seventy‐seven flying bombs during thirteen nights of sorties in Sept. 1944.
1945: The Western Allies disbanded I‐401’s crew, and all of the officers and other men went back into the civilian population, including the few who had committed war crimes!
1946: Takashi Sakai, Axis governor of Hong Kong, died at the hands of a Chinese firing squad.

Quoting Regula Ludi in Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States, pages 94–5:

In Bern, throughout the spring and summer of 1938, different agencies were tackling the problem of how to identify Jewish refugees at the border and distinguish them from other German travellers.⁵⁸ Anxious not to disturb ‘normal relations’ with the Third Reich, Swiss diplomats were eagerly seeking a practicable solution.

In May of 1938, Rothmund was the first to propose a visa requirement for the Jews only in an internal note. While his suggestion found the approval of colleagues from other government agencies, it did not resonate well with [Fascist] authorities. Such a provision was obviously in direct contradiction to the [Fascist] goal of removing Jews from the Third Reich. In addition, it would require mechanisms for the identification of Jews that were not yet in place.

By the end of July 1938, Swiss worries materialised: the [Third Reich] officially announced the replacement of Austrian passports by German ones.⁵⁹ Some time later in August, the idea to mark the passports of ‘non‐Aryan’ German citizens emerged in a letter by Hans Frölicher, the Swiss ambassador to Berlin.

However, the documents are not clear about whether German or Swiss negotiators first came up with this suggestion. They only testify to the persisting reluctance of the [Third Reich] to agree to any solution reducing the chances of emigration for the Jews. Eventually, in August of 1938, the Swiss threatened to reintroduce a general visa requirement. As Rothmund stressed, such a step would require German applicants to ‘present proof that they were Aryan’, which implied additional administrative work for Swiss consulates.⁶⁰

In addition, the general visa requirement would probably have failed to find federal government approval because of its unpredictable economic repercussions and potential damage to the tourist industry. As a bluff to speed up negotiations, however, it was successful. In early September, the Swiss sensed a breakthrough as the [Fascists] gave up their opposition and agreed to mark the passports of Jewish nationals, but they insisted on reciprocity. This entailed that the Swiss government condone discrimination against its own Jewish citizens.

Rothmund objected to this compromise, even though he had been the first to propose discriminatory measures, and he warned that such a step would not only alienate Swiss Jews, but also expose Switzerland internationally to the accusation of becoming embroiled in [Fascist] antisemitism. As a consequence he reiterated the demand for a general visa requirement. None of these considerations eventually entered the final agreement.

The German–Swiss Protocol of 29 September 1938 included the [Third Reich’s] promise to mark the passports of its nationals belonging to the ‘Jewish race’, to be defined according to the Nuremberg Laws, with a distinctive mark and thus prevent their holders from entering Switzerland. The mark should be a clearly visible and indelible ‘J’‐stamp, as the two parties agreed. The document also included provisions that introduced discrimination against Swiss Jews. Rothmund, who was directly involved in the last rounds of negotiations, did not endorse the agreement.

The Federal Council did not heed his reservations and adopted the Protocol in a meeting of 4 October 1938. Simultaneously, it introduced the visa requirement for ‘Non‐Aryan Germans’. It thereby allowed [Fascist] racial terminology and ‘German racial legislation to penetrate Swiss administrative law’.⁶¹ The federal authorities had to deal with the international and domestic protests that followed publication of the visa requirement.

This decision, however, was the only part of the whole story to become publicly known in 1938, in contrast to Switzerland’s active rôle in the preceding negotiations that only entered public knowledge through an Allied edition of German documents in 1953.⁶² Within days, on 15 October 1938, Sweden followed the Swiss example and signed a similar agreement with the [Third Reich].

More than ever, the federal authorities were zealously dedicated to fighting ‘foreign inundation’, but by the autumn of 1938 they had dropped all pretences, leaving no doubt of whom they had in mind when talking of ‘undesirable elements’. Official discourse no longer distinguished between Jewish foreigners and refugees but used the terms ‘emigrant’ and ‘Jew’ in an interchangeable way. And all those considered ‘emigrants’ were treated as if they were undocumented or even stateless persons.

The introduction of the visa requirement for German Jews was soon followed by mandatory visa for all ‘emigrants’ on 20 January 1939, regardless of their country of origin and subsequently also for holders of Czechoslovakian passports on 15 March 1938. Eventually, not only German Jews, but all Jews and any potential refugee had to reckon with expulsion, even when they arrived from a country that had no travel restrictions between itself and Switzerland.

As a consequence, they were trapped in a dilemma: either they risked being turned away when entering without permission or they forfeited almost any chance of acceptance when revealing their true intentions by submitting a visa application.

(Emphasis added.)

It may seem odd that the Third Reich wanted to prevent Jews and legally ‘Jewish’ people from escaping to the Swiss Confederation and the Kingdom of Sweden in the 1930s, but this was likely so as to maintain good relations with the Swiss and Swedish ruling classes, which were disinterested in providing for a huge influx of refugees.

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Click here for other events that happened today (September 29).

1881: Ludwig von Mises, Austrofascist turned neoclassical liberal, rudely burdened us all with his presence.
1912: Michelangelo Antonioni, Axis journalist and draftee, was born.
1933: The Third Reich passed a hereditary farm law that protected farmers against potential predatory practices by financial institutions, but it also bound the farmers to the land comparably to serfs.
1934: The Third Reich recommissioned Emden into service, with Karl Dönitz in command.
1936: The Nationalist cruiser Canarias sunk the Spanish Republican destroyer Almirante Juan Fernandez during a naval battle off the coast near Gibraltar.
1937: Imperial aircraft sank Chinese gunboat Chuyou.
1938: The Munich Conference between Adolf Schicklgruber, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini, and Édouard Daladier took place at the Führerbau building in München, during which London and Paris ceded Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich in an attempt to avoid war. The two Czechoslovakian representatives at the conference became locked in an adjacent room, unpermitted to actually participate in the negotiations.
1939: Berlin issued a repatriation order for the 86,000 ethnic Germans living in Estonia and Latvia, knowing that Moscow would soon demand the Baltics. Aside from that, the Imperialists reached the outskirts of Changsha, Hunan Province, China; the Empire of Japan had thus far suffered 40,000 casualties on this assault.
1940: At 1600 hours, a large group of Luftwaffe flightcraft, mostly fighters, conducted a sweep in Kent in southern England. This sweep failed to draw Allied fighters, but overnight the Axis heavily bombed London while assaulting Liverpool.
1941: The Einsatzgruppen, with the aid of Ukrainian anticommunists, commenced the two‐day Babi Yar massacre, resulting in the deaths of 50,000–96,000 Soviets (33,771 of whom were Jewish). Likewise, Berlin ordered that Leningrad be wiped out by artillery and aerial bombardment. The Third Reich could not and would not feed its population, which was of no use for the future of the Fascist bourgeoisie. Lastly, Reinhard Heydrich became Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.
1942: A lone Axis bomber assaulted the rural town of Petworth in Sussex County, England in the morning, destroying a boys’ school, killing twenty‐three folk (a score of whom were children), and seriously injuring thirty (two dozen of whom were children). The Axis also attacked Somerton, Somerset County; Shrewton, Wiltshire County; and Betteshanger Collthbourne, Kent County.

Aside from that, somebody informed Max Merten that, starting two days later, he would be the head of the Administrative and Economic Department of the Axis occupation administration in Thessaloniki. Meanwhile, Axis submarine I‐25 surfaced off Cape Blanco, Oregon in the early morning darkness. Warrant Officer Nobuo Fujita took off in I‐25’s Yokosuka E14Y “Glen” floatplane and flew inland from the Cape Blanco lighthouse and dropped two incendiary bombs on an Oregonian forest, but nobody reported any fire! This was the twoth and last ever aerial bombardment of the mainland United States.
1943: Axis occupation troops fought against the resistance in the Giuseppe Mazzini Square (where an Axis tank fired on the Italians), the Ponticelli district, the Capodichino military airfield, the Piazza Ottocalli square, and other locations in Naples. As the scale of the uprising continued to grow, Colonel Walter Schöll began negotiating with some of the Italian leaders, using captured resistance fighters as collateral.
1998: Bruno Munari, Axis artist, expired.