As a discussion gets longer, the likelihood of a comparison with the Nazis or Hitler approaches absolute certainty. Announced in 1990 by American lawyer Mike Godwin (source Wikipedia), this law that bears his name holds that in every conflict of opinion, especially on the web, sooner or later there will be someone who will compare an interlocutor with whom they disagree to the Führer. At that point the discussion ends, because the reference to absolute evil is disproportionate and leaves no room for other arguments. But this is not always true: as Moscow writer Leonid Bershidsky pointed out on Bloomberg View, in this March 2014 comparing Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler is unfortunately not entirely heresy. The annexation of Crimea, complete with a plebiscite under the shadow of foreign bayonets, irresistibly brings to mind the annexation of Austria by Germany in March 76, 1938 years ago. Even then there was a people (or at least a part of it) who, in the name of ties of language and blood, called for help from the soldiers of a powerful neighbor.

Photos from that period show images of enthusiastic crowds, of German soldiers passing between rows of men and women with their arms stiffened in the Nazi salute, of flags with the swastika waved by children and young people. In short, a large mass of the Austrian population was happy, just as the inhabitants of Crimea of ​​Russian origin are now happy about the annexation to Moscow. However, the will of the majority is not in and of itself an absolute source of legitimacy. In 1938, Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg had decided to call a referendum on unification with Germany. But before the vote, on March 11, there was a coup d'état by local Nazis (who, one might think, were not sure they were in the majority) and it was the end of Austrian independence. Then the usual plebiscite was held, with 99,7% of voters in favor of annexation (in Crimea the yes vote was 96,6%). The Treaty of Versailles, which sealed peace between the Entente Powers and defeated Germany in 1919, explicitly forbade the merger of the two German-speaking nations. But a weary and fearful Europe, grappling with the aftermath of the economic crisis triggered by the American Depression that began in 1929, chose not to react.

Thus, in October 1938, Germany, with impunity, always on the basis of the principle of nationality, took over the Sudetenland, the German-speaking region on the western borders of Czechoslovakia, suddenly rendering the sturdy Czech border fortifications useless. Then the fiction of distant brothers to be brought back to the common home also ended, and on March 15, 1939, Czechoslovakia, now disarmed, was invaded and dismembered, with the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia incorporated into the Reich and Slovakia entrusted to the puppet government of Monsignor Tiso. And finally, in September, it was the turn of Danzig, the German port on the Baltic that became Polish after the First World War. And the Second World War broke out. After all, it is not uncommon for annexations to be the first stage on a road that leads to war. Perhaps not immediately: in 1908, when Austria-Hungary took over Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Balkans, Europe bowed to the fait accompli. But Serbia continued to foment Bosnian nationalists from whose ranks came that Gavrilo Princip who, in Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, killed the heir to the Austrian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie.

And it was the pretext for the outbreak of the Great War. If, on the other hand, wars have just ended, the annexations of border territories to the detriment of the defeated cause incredible suffering: in 1945 the passage of East Prussia and Bessarabia and Bukovina to the Soviet Union, of the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line to Poland and of Istria and Dalmatia to Yugoslavia were enormous tragedies, with massacres and forced migrations of millions of people. Even if annexations are peaceful, they can create problems. When West Germany took over the former GDR, despite the generosity with which the operation was conducted, it brought unemployment and uprooting into its home. And today it is no coincidence that racism and neo-Nazism find fertile ground in the eastern Länder (at one time annexed by the USSR and then satellites of Moscow), whose inhabitants have not gone through the painful process of accepting the guilt of Nazism.

Territories and conquests

Austria In March 1938, with the Anschluss, Austria was annexed by the Third Reich to create Greater Germany. Sudetenland In September 1938, with the Munich Conference, Hitler's Germany annexed the German-speaking territories of Czechoslovakia. Gdansk Free City since June 1919 (Treaty of Versailles) it was occupied by the Third Reich in 1939. In 1950 East Germany ceded it to Poland. Bosnia and Herzegovina In April 1941, the independent state of Croatia was founded by pro-Nazi Ante Pavelic, which incorporated Bosnia-Herzegovina. Former German Reich East Prussia was divided between Poland, the USSR and Lithuania in 1945. Other regions such as Silesia and Pomerania went to Warsaw. Istria and Dalmatia On February 10, 1947, with the Treaty of Paris, Istria and Dalmatia, already in the hands of Tito's army, passed from Italy to Yugoslavia.

Paul Rastelli, «Corriere della Sera», 19/03/14

The Adriatic Observer