Three books by independent historians correct the prevailing narrative about the evil nature of monarchies, Franco’s Spain, and German history. 

I’m on my anti-revisionist hobbyhorse once again, by which I mean my frenzied attempt to undo the bad revisionism that overtook the historical profession during the last third of the 20th century. My own discipline was then overtaken by anti-fascists in overdrive and later by raving wokesters who have played havoc with the past in a way that disturbs me deeply. Fortunately, there have been countertendencies at work, and I’d like to call attention to three commendable illustrations of them. 

One is Kings, Queens, and Fallen Monarchies: Royal Dynasties in Interwar Europe by one of Chronicles’ contributors, Robert James Stove. In this elegantly written and exhaustively researched work, Stove examines the circumstances in which European monarchies were toppled between the two World Wars. Only three of the toppled monarchies, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, saw monarchs exercising real power who were overthrown in states that had critical international significance. The abolition of monarchies in Portugal, Albania, Bavaria, and (at least temporarily or intermittently) Spain and Greece may have mattered less in international politics, but as Stove shows, the loss of kings did nothing to improve the condition of these countries. 

Many now-fashionable historians may find it unseemly that Stove treats the waning of an institution that defined Western political life for many centuries as sympathetically as he does. And he doesn’t hide this predilection, as he dwells on the inextricable relationship between certain countries and their monarchical traditions. Quite understandably, Stove is more sympathetic to some monarchs than others. It is hard not to lament the fate of the saintly Karl, the last emperor of Austria and the last king of Hungary, who lost his throne in the debacle of World War I. Stove, to his credit, defends Karl’s attempt to reclaim the Hungarian throne in 1922, only to be opposed by his own regent, Miklós Horthy, who wanted to hold on to power even in violation of his oath of loyalty to his sovereign. 

Although it may be harder to sympathize with less saintly rulers, like the dissolute Alfonso XIII of Spain, the feckless Russian Czar, or the blundering (although not evil) Kaiser Wilhelm, Stove leaves the impression that European countries were better off with kings than without them. He also writes with remarkable detachment, even when describing revolutionary governments that may not suit his admirably traditional political tastes. Whether Stove is writing about the Russian Bolsheviks, Bavarian Communist revolutionaries in 1919, or Nazi schemers, he avoids moral grandstanding. Although he can be acidic in his humorous asides, he never wearies the reader by pronouncing holier-than-thou judgments. 

By the end of World War I, monarchy was a weakened institution. Those kings and queens who would hold on to their thrones into the post-World War II period became powerless figureheads, like the reigning postage-stamp monarchs of Great Britain, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, and Spain.

One takeaway from Stove’s book is that by the end of World War I, monarchy was a weakened institution. Those kings and queens who would hold on to their thrones into the post-World War II period became powerless figureheads, like the reigning postage-stamp monarchs of Great Britain, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, and Spain. The extraordinary efforts by the American occupation forces to topple the Italian monarchy made no practical difference in how that war-torn country would be ruled. Victor Emmanuel III, who was forced to abdicate the Italian throne in May 1946, after a referendum clumsily rigged by the American occupiers, exercised little power after the fascist takeover in 1922. His go-along attitude did change, however, fatefully on one occasion, when in July 1943 the king dismissed Mussolini as prime minister. 

But the tea leaves were not particularly encouraging for the institution of monarchy even in the 19th century, when “new monarchies” were created for such newly formed European nation-states as Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Belgium. The great powers that had a hand in setting up these governments found rulers for them, mostly German princes without royal thrones. Those who urged these moves may have been looking for noncontroversial heads of state who were not embroiled in local quarrels. Unfortunately, not all of the grafts took, and some of the imported German crown-holders and their descendants were sent packing.

In the case of France, as Stove demonstrates, the unsuccessful attempts to restore the French monarchy after the establishment of the Third Republic in 1871 may have been politically more important than any actual restoration. Monarchism without a monarch became a powerful, often disruptive, nationalist force in France, even if neither a Bourbon nor an Orléans was offered the French throne. The same development could be seen at work in other countries, such as interwar Germany or Spain in the 1930s, when restorationist movements may have had more impact than the actual return of monarchs. Much of Stove’s narrative shows why this was often the case. 

A work that also provides historiography in a different key is a study that appeared in 2023, La represión de la posguerra, (“Post-War Repression”)by Miguel Platón, a past contributor to the now hopelessly politically correct Spanish newspaper El Pais. Since I read Platón’s work in the French edition, which was ably translated and introduced by my longtime friend Arnaud Imatz, with a second erudite introduction by Stanley Payne, I was well acquainted with his argument before dipping into the text. 

Platón proves, after years of researching all available relevant records, that the figures provided by leftist historians and the present Spanish government for the reprisals inflicted on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War are ridiculously bloated. The number of 150,000 given by the American historian Gabriel Jackson is an invented figure, but one that other historians who share Jackson’s left-wing political views routinely repeat.

The figure Platón arrives at for the number of executions that occurred after the end of hostilities in 1939 is about 15,000, which is one that Payne, who may be the world’s leading authority on the civil war, accepts. Platón mentions circumstances that even nonpoliticized historians often neglect to examine when offering higher figures for postwar Spanish executions. Many death sentences were commuted by the head of state, General Francisco Franco. 

Moreover, what are sometimes mixed into accounts of postwar executions are the deaths of prisoners then in jail, that is, of prisoners who were not actually executed. Commutations of death sentences to prison sentences or full reprieves occurred frequently when a “blood crime” (crimen de sangre) could not be proved. Simply fighting for the opposing army on the battlefield was not sufficient grounds to justify an execution. As Payne has shown in his work, in 1937, half of the 200,000 Republican soldiers captured by the Nationalists were simply incorporated into their army.

On Sept. 5, 1939, the High Court of Military Justice, which became Spain’s supreme council of military justice, was put in charge of trying war criminals. Although military officers were involved in these trials, there were also “auditors” who examined the evidence and offered their own assessments of the “established facts.” These legal experts were, as Platón documents, usually dispassionate examiners of testimonies, even conflicting ones, and often voted to commute death sentences. 

The idea that those on trial were the innocent victims of fascist revenge was patently false. Many of these prisoners committed unspeakable atrocities against Catholic clergy and political officials who had the misfortune of falling under the left’s control. Although both sides during the war engaged in mass executions, Platón stresses that only the Republican side, particularly its anarchist faction, engaged with appalling regularity in gory, sadistic murders, particularly of priests and nuns. Many of Spain’s liberal (in the classical sense) literary and philosophical figures hailed the Nationalist uprising in July 1936, having seen the violence and mass murder that overtook the Spanish Republic by 1936. 

By the end of 1939, the number of war criminals swelled to 270,719, but this figure diminished afterward, mostly because prisoners were released. In October 1945, by decree of the Spanish Ministry of Justice, all prisoners serving sentences after fighting on the Republican side were released, providing they had done nothing “repugnant to human morality.” The same year, all prisoners serving sentences of 20 years or less were let go. 

Even prisoners who had been given life sentences, Platón points out, rarely served more than seven years. Keeping enemies in captivity was expensive for the victorious Nationalists, who had to deal with a shattered economy after the civil war. As long as their former enemies were no longer physically dangerous, it may have been concluded that the country was better off having war prisoners return to the national workforce than residing in prison cells at public expense.

Platón makes no secret (nor should he) that he is countering the obvious purpose of the Law of “Democratic Memory” passed on Oct. 19, 2022, by the Socialist-Communist government of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. The purpose of this government-fostered leftist project is exactly the same as that of the Law of “Historical Memory” promoted in 2007 by the Socialist government of the former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Both leftist governments have worked to hide the responsibility of the socialist trade union and party (the UGT and the PSOE) and ultimately of the Second Spanish Republic for the reign of chaos and wanton murder that preceded the 1936 Nationalist uprising.

It would be remiss of me not to mention for the sake of balance that Platón, like Stanley Payne in his The Spanish Civil War (2012), rebukes the Franco government for the high number of postwar executions. While both scholars dispute the figures the leftist Spanish regime and its favored historians have tried to sell the public, neither sets out to defend what they consider unnecessary postwar killing.

The attempt to view these historians as apologists for what, in any case, was a high number of executions—even considering what some of the executed prisoners had done—is entirely unfounded. It would have been possible for the Nationalists, or so I gather from reading Payne and Platón, to have shown more leniency toward the losing side without exposing the victors to grave danger. Such a course might have reduced the long-term bitterness that resulted from the Spanish Civil War. 

A third work I’m mentioning for commendation is Ralf Georg Reuth’s Hitler: Eine politische Biographie (“Hitler: A Political Biography”). Published in 2005, this almost 700-page biography of the Führer includes material that Reuth put into his subsequent work, particularly a defense of his now unfashionable view that Hitler was not “the inevitable result of the German past.” Although what Reuth says about Hitler seems eminently reasonable, he has not won fans among those who belabor the theory that pervasive evil characterizes German history. For example, the last book of German historian Fritz Fischer underscores in its title what has become the dominant view of Germany’s march toward the abyss: Hitler war kein Betriebsunfall (“Hitler Was No Accident”). 

Reuth, by contrast, shows to what extent Hitler’s ascent to power was the result of a series of unfortunate circumstances. He is clearly not writing what I call “penitential historiography,” that is, historical accounts intended to arouse feelings of collective guilt among Western nations and to render their populations submissive to “re-education.” Reuth, who has no interest in this profitable activity, is an independent historian who earns a living by selling his well-researched books to the public. He is not what Germans refer to as a Spinner (a self-absorbed eccentric), but rather a meticulous researcher and painfully precise writer.

In Reuth’s account of Hitler’s rise to power, from his unexceptional youth in the Austrian town of Braunau am Inn to his appointment as German Reichskanzler on Jan. 30, 1933, there is no attempt to force facts into a predetermined framework. Hitler was not raised as an anti-Semite; he held fairly progressive political views down to 1919, when he assumed the personality highlighted in his autobiography Mein Kampf. Further, in the absence of the German Depression and those self-destructive deals made by those who raised him to power, this demagogue would have died in obscurity. A series of ominous contingencies allowed Hitler to assume his dictatorial position, to wreak havoc on his own country and the rest of Europe, and to give substance to his anti-Semitic rhetoric by exterminating millions of Jews.

Hitler’s ascent to power assumes other circumstances that could not have been predicted around 1900, but which were essential for his political success: World War I, Germany’s defeat and the subsequent humiliating Treaty of Versailles, the Bolshevik Revolution and the fear of communist upheavals that events in Russia aroused throughout Europe. Reuth’s interpretive perspective is based on human events being determined by the unexpected, and in the case of Hitler’s rise to power, there is much evidence for this thesis.