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inhabited by Russians, Jews and Poles. The towns of the Adriatic coast were often Italian; some Balkan towns were distinctly Greek or Turkish. Most striking of all were those cosmopolitan trading centres where no one ethnic group predominated. One of many examples that might be cited was Salonika, present-day Thessaloniki, an Ottoman port of Greek provenance where Jews slightly outnumbered Christians and Muslims. Each religious community could, in turn, be subdivided into sects andlinguistic sub-groups: there were Judesmo-speaking Sephardic Jews as well as Ashkenzim, Christian Greeks, Bulgarians and Macedonians – some speaking Greek, some Vlach, some a Slavic language – and myriad kinds of Muslim: Sufis, Bektashis and Mevlevis as well as Naqshbandis and Ma’min, who were converts from Judaism.
    However, with the emergence after 1800 of the nation state as an ideal for political organization, these heterogeneous arrangements began to break down. A number of ethnic groups were sufficiently large and well organized that by the early twentieth century they had already established their own nation states – Greece, Italy, Germany, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania – though in each case there were ethnic minorities within their borders and diaspora groups beyond their borders. * The Magyars enjoyed nearly all the privileges of independence as the junior partners within the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. The Czechs could aspire to some measure of political autonomy within Bohemia and Moravia. The Poles could dream of restoring their lost sovereignty at the expense of the three empires that had snuffed it out. But many other ethnic groups could not credibly aspire to statehood. Some were simply too few in number: Sorbs, Wends, Kashubes, Vlachs, Székelys, Carpatho-Rusyns and Lad-ins. Others were too scattered: the Sinti and Roma (often known, misleadingly, as Gypsies). Still others could aspire to build states only on the Ottoman periphery: the Jews and the Armenians.
    The more the model of the nation state was applied to Central and Eastern Europe, then, the greater the potential for conflict. The discrepancy between the reality of mixed settlement – a complex patchwork of pales and diasporas – and the ideal of homogeneouspolitical units was simply too great. The stakes, as national borders took on increasing importance, were too high, and diverging birth rates only served to heighten the anxieties of those who feared minority status. It was, in theory, conceivable that all the different ethnic groups in a new state would agree to subsume their differences in a new collective identity, or to share power in a federation of equals. But it turned out to be just as likely that a majority group would set itself up as sole, or at least senior, proprietor of the state and its assets. The more functions the state was expected to perform (and the number of these functions grew by leaps and bounds after 1900) the more tempting it became to exclude this or that minority from some or all of the benefits of citizenship, while at the same time ratcheting up the costs of residence in the form of taxation and other burdens.
    It is therefore no coincidence that so many of the locations where mass murder was perpetrated in the 1940s lay in precisely these regions of mixed settlement – in such many-named towns as Vilna/Wilna/Vilne/Vilnius, Lemberg/Lwów/L’viv and Czernowitz/Cernauti/Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi. Nor is it a coincidence that a significant number of leading Nazis came from beyond the eastern frontier of the German Reich of 1871. To give just a few examples: Alfred Rosenberg, author of
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
and a key figure in Nazi racial policy, was born in Reval/Tallinn, Estonia. The son of a German emigrant to Argentina, Walther Darré, Hitler’s Minister for Agriculture, developed his version of racial theory while breeding horses in East Prussia. The Nazi Secretary of State Herbert Backe was born in Batumi,