Vansittartism

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vansittartism (Engl. Vansittartism ) is a British model of explanation for the German foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century.

The explanatory model named after the British diplomat Robert Gilbert Vansittart (1881–1957) states that the aggressive expansion policy belongs to the German national system. There are therefore no differences between Germans and National Socialists . Vansittart repeatedly suggested in the 1930s that Germany should be deterred and contained, and during the war he took the position that Germany had to be demilitarized after the war in order to ensure lasting European peace. Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain had already transferred Vansittart to the uninfluenced post of advisor to the government in 1937, since he saw in him an obstacle to the British policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler before the Munich Agreement in 1938.

A lecture given by Vansittart in a seven-part series of radio programs for the BBC was distributed over a million times in the spring of 1941 as a 70-page brochure entitled Black Record . The most prominent opposing position was represented by the publisher Victor Gollancz in his book Shall our children live or die? , which saw several editions in the year of publication 1942. A dispute broke out between these two positions among German emigrants and the British public. While the political journalist Heinrich Fraenkel turned against Vansittart in 1941, the Social Democrats Fritz Bieligk , Curt Geyer , Carl Herz , Walter Loeb , Kurt Lorenz and Bernhard Menne sided with Vansittart in a manifesto on March 2, 1942.

“The term 'Vansittartists' was used by the opponents of this group, but it correctly referred to the origin of this group, which lay outside of emigration. The 'Vansittartists' called themselves the 'Fight for Freedom' movement in England and the 'Society for the Prevention of World War III' in the USA. "

- Joachim Radkau : The exile ideology of the “other Germany” and the Vansittartists, p. 39.

The two Germany theory was also opposed to Vansittartism . Vansittart's supporters in the United States , which the discussion spread to in 1942, were not Social Democrats; the discussion there was largely limited to the German-speaking emigrants. While Vansittart's supporters in England were primarily a breakaway from the emigrated German Social Democrats, the majority of German exiles, especially the Sopade (exile SPD ) in London , criticized Vansittart's theses of equating National Socialism with Germany as English nationalism.

"The most sore point of 'Vansittartism' and the strongest argument of its opponents was the fact that its basic thesis 'Hitler is Germany' was identical to the basic thesis of Nazi propaganda [...]."

- Joachim Radkau : The exile ideology of the “other Germany” and the Vansittartists, p. 47.

“In this context, so-called Vansittartists were assumed to not only want to hold some high-ranking Nazis responsible in the sense of an 'outlaw theory', but rather to want to severely punish large parts of the entire German people because they were guilty overall. For this, the term 'collective guilt' was coined - from the German side. "

- Wolfgang Wippermann

The term Vansittartism is used today as a synonym for anti-German or Germanophobic and is often mentioned in connection with the Morgenthau plan or a collective guilt thesis.

literature

  • Robert Vansittart: Black Record. Germans past and present . Hamilton, London 1941.
  • Heinrich Fraenkel: Vansittart's gift for Goebbels. A German exile's answer to black record . Fabian Society, London [1941].
  • Victor Gollancz: Shall our children live or die? A reply to Lord Vansittart on the German problem . Gollancz, London 1942.
  • Curt Theodor Geyer / Walter Loeb: Gollancz in German Wonderland . Hutchinson, London et al. [1942].
  • Hans Kaiser: Vansittartism - Vansittartitis . In: Zeitschrift für Politik 32, 1942, pp. 691–698.
  • Willy Brandt : Forbrytere og andre tyskere (German: criminal and other Germans ) . Aschehoug, Oslo 1946 (Norwegian, German edition 2007).
  • Joachim Radkau: The exile ideology of the “other Germany” and the Vansittartists. About the attitude of German emigrants to Germany after 1933 . In: From Politics and Contemporary History . Supplement to the weekly newspaper Das Parlament , January 10, 1970, pp. 31–48.
  • Jörg later: Vansittart. British Debates on Germans and Nazis 1902–1945 . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-89244-692-X .
  • Matthias Wolbold: Talking about Germany. The radio speeches of Thomas Mann, Paul Tillich and Sir Robert Vansittart from the Second World War . Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8258-9024-4 (Tillich-Studien 17; also dissertation, Frankfurt am Main 2004).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ilona Nord, Yorick Spiegel (ed.): Searching for traces - Paul Tillich's ways of life and thinking , Tillich Studies Volume 5, Lit 2001, ISBN 3-8258-5043-9 , p. 193.
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Wippermann: "German Catastrophe". Meinecke, Ritter and the first historians' dispute . In: Gisela Bock , Daniel Schönpflug (Ed.): Friedrich Meinecke in his time . Steiner, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-515-08962-4 , pp. 177-191, here p. 182.