CHAPTER FIVE
After the wounds left by the bitter division over Germany’s role in the war, chances that a united workers’ movement would give strength to the newborn republic were slight, as was evident almost immediately. The speed with which the monarchical system was wiped away within less than a week — having been regarded as invincible little more than four years previously — stunned Germany’s political establishment. On 10 November 1918, the two socialist parties formed a revolutionary government that consisted of three Majority Socialist and three Independent Socialist members, under the impressive title of ‘The Council of the People’s Deputies’. Far-reaching social and constitutional reforms were decreed.
Behind the scenes, though, a less united picture was emerging. Frightened, like most Germans, that the revolution would lead to Bolshevik chaos, Friedrich Ebert, the SPD leader and member of the council — a man known for his saying that ‘he hated revolution like sin’ — made an agreement with General Groener (who had succeeded Ludendorff as commander-in-chief) to secure the survival of the Reichswehr. Less than a week later, Karl Legien, the leader of the German trade union movement, made a pact with industrialist Hugo Stinnes not to tamper with the existing economic structure. This was the logical continuation of the reformist approach most party and union leaders had followed before the outbreak of war. The SPD leaders’ objective was clear: the establishment of democracy, already decreed in the final stages of the war, as quickly as possible. Social changes were to come gradually through the ballot box and through the trade unions, taking onto account prevailing economic conditions. The SPD saw their role as a caretaker government, to thwart radicalism until a National Assembly had been elected.
The Independent Socialist Party favoured a parliamentary system with majority rule as a long-term aim, but they wanted to use the council system to clear the path for more genuine social democracy. In their opinion, the nation’s institutions had to be reformed and the power of the old establishment had to be curbed. They doubted that those who ran the public service, the army, judiciary, and police, the universities, the education system in general, and other vital institutions would accept major political and social changes. There was substance to this view. Conservative ideology in pre-war Germany had little respect for Western parliamentarianism, which was considered to have an aura of corruption, if not decadence. The ruling establishment thought that the Prussian bureaucracy was more efficient than the Western system, as Germany’s rapid developments in all fields had shown. Subsequently, the Reichstag was often referred to as a Schwatzbude (the chatter box). Moreover, the people who had acquired power in the revolution, the workers, were detested by the class-conscious German upper and middle classes. Even when the party supported the empire by voting for the war credits in August 1914, the reaction of the conservatives was ‘ice-cold’, as chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg noted, not without concern. Conservatives feared that, one day, concessions would have to be made. The warnings sounded by the Independent Socialists, as the subsequent history of the Weimar Republic was to reveal, were justified.
Calls for Marxist revolutionary action were confined to the Spartacists, a small but vociferous group of radicals. The Spartacists had no significant following at the end of 1918, and were in no position to stage anything resembling a proletarian revolution. This did not stop some fanatical editors from vicious and aggressive polemics in their media, heightening fear of the Bolshevik threat. Indiscriminate shots by members of the old army into a peaceful demonstration in Berlin on 6 December, which killed several workers, marked the beginning of the bloody end of the Revolution. Confrontation between supporters and opponents of the SPD’s policies continued throughout December. In the Workers and Soldiers Council, the uncompromising attitude of the Majority Socialists leaders towards workers’ dissent led to the withdrawal of the three Independent Socialists by the end of the month. Three SPD members took their place.
Bloodshed reached its first peak in the so-called ‘Spartacist Putsch’ of early January in Berlin. The name is misleading because, although Spartacists participated, it was revolutionary shop stewards who organised this ill-fated attempt to take control of the capital. In practice, they got no further than occupying several newspaper offices. Rosa Luxemburg, one of the leading theoreticians of the Spartacists, had spoken against the coup plan, foreseeing that such action would not only be ineffective but would also lead to unnecessary bloodshed. To Luxemburg, the revolution had already failed. She believed that only a properly educated working class in the Marxian sense could achieve a successful revolution — a working class that had understood its historical mission. However, when fighting broke out, she expressed solidarity with the rebellious workers. Troops loyal to the government soon gained the upper hand, particularly as Gustav Noske, one of the new SPD members on the Council of Peoples Delegates, had called in the ‘Freecorps’, newly formed military units made up of officers and soldiers of the old army establishment. Noske, having been placed in charge of this ‘cleaning-up’ operation against militant workers, became known for his saying that someone had to take on the role of the ‘bloodhound’ of the revolution — illustrating the neo-Machiavellian attitude prevailing in sections of the SPD. The Freikorps, aptly described as the ‘vanguard of fascism’, staged a massive bloodbath. Among the many victims were Rosa Luxemburg and fellow Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht. Both were murdered and their bodies thrown into the Berlin Canal.
The election of the National Assembly on 19 January resulted in a three-party centre-left coalition of Majority Socialists, left-liberals, and Catholics, which had gained more than three-quarters of the total vote. The Independent Socialists received only 7.6 per cent of the vote, compared to the SPD’s 38 per cent. This is easy to explain. The Majority Socialists were in a much stronger position to fight the election, controlling most of the workers’ media and enjoying the support of the imperial establishment. Its calls for a return to law and order, and slow, peaceful progress, were more attractive to the bulk of the workforce weary of instability after more than four years of war. In particular, the SPD leaders made effective use of the ‘Bolshevik threat’. Nevertheless, the two workers parties together had gained an impressive 45.5 per cent of the vote, an increase of almost 10 per cent over the last peacetime election. Had they managed to overcome their differences and agree on a common program, with such a large following they would have held a strong position in the new political system.
Dissatisfaction with the SPD’s decision to form a coalition with middle-class parties soon emerged, however, and spread rapidly through much of the workforce. Over the next fifteen months there were uprisings in Berlin, the Ruhr region, parts of central Germany, Munich, and other industrial centres. They served as a reminder of how much revolutionary potential had been accumulated. Unrest in Berlin after the suppression of the ‘Spartacist Putsch’, for example, was so strong that members of the National Assembly preferred to leave the capital and hold their constituent sessions in the Thuringian town of Weimar, a centre of German cultural tradition. The Weimar Republic took its name from this town. In the end, the workers’ uprisings proved to be too disorganised, lacking in sufficient support, military equipment, and central leadership. They were eventually put down by the Freecorps in bloody fashion. In the Ruhr uprising of March 1920, for example, over a thousand workers lost their lives.1
On 6 June 1920, a new Reichstag election was held. The result was a bitter blow for the SPD and its policies. Its share of the vote almost halved from 38 per cent to just over 21 per cent. Its opponents in the labour movement, the Independent Socialists (at 17.9 per cent) and the newly founded Communist Party, which had emerged from the Spartacists (2.1 per cent), together almost matched the SDP vote.
The Independent Socialists enjoyed their election success only briefly. The party split four months after the 6 June election over the issue of admission to the Third International, which Lenin had established in Moscow in 1919. The main conditions of entry required the adoption of the name ‘Communist Party’, and a firm commitment towards working for a proletarian revolution. Of the 900,000 party members, only a third supported common cause with the communists. Subsequent elections showed that the Independent Socialists had no electoral appeal, and they disappeared from the political scene. The Communist Party became the third largest in the Reichstag, gaining between 12 and 14 per cent of the vote in all subsequent Reichstag elections. This following was not enough to challenge, let alone topple, the political, economic, or military establishment of the Republic, but it was enough to ensure that fear of communism remained a key issue until the Nazi ‘seizure of power’. The Bolshevik threat joined the Treaty of Versailles as the chief spectre haunting Weimar Germany’s political life and, in the opinion of many Germans, was the chief reason for the Republic’s inglorious end.
The SPD recovered from the setback of the June 1920 election. It continued working constructively for the success of democracy, occasionally joining multi-party coalitions, even forming government itself for a brief period. But it was to no avail in the end. When an Austrian lance-corporal managed to established himself at the helm, communists and social democrats alike ended up in concentration camps, where few survived.
Although labour movements worldwide were affected by the success of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution and their subsequent attempt to take over workers’ movements everywhere, nowhere was the resulting split so harmful as in post-war Germany.
Weimar politics and the Versailles Peace Treaty
The Weimar constitution was among the most advanced in the world. There was universal suffrage, with all men and women above the age of 21 having the right to vote. Provision was made for small parties to have a voice in the Reichstag: under a system of proportional representation, each political party was entitled to one member for every 60,000 votes received. There was no censorship of the press, and freedom of speech, as well as political, religious, and artistic expression, was guaranteed. The union movement was legalised — a longstanding goal of the German labour movement — and the eight-hour day, minimum wages, collective bargaining, and unemployment payments were decreed. Above all, an impressive free and comprehensive health and welfare system for all citizens was introduced (as it turned out, a fair share of these generous schemes were paid for with American money).2 Organised labour in small to medium enterprises fared well. Industrial barons in the huge iron, steel, and mining industries, however, were as reluctant as ever to abandon their ‘Herr im Haus’ (master in the house) stance, and firmly opposed these welfare policies and the system of collective bargaining. Not surprisingly, many of the workers in their plants turned to communism.
Proportional representation did not necessarily assist with the formation of stable coalition cabinets, but the claim that Weimar’s electoral system undermined government does not bear scrutiny.3 More serious shortcomings of the Weimar constitution were articles providing the president with emergency powers: article 53 allowed for the dismissal of cabinets at will; article 25 enabled the president to dismiss the Reichstag at any time and to call new elections; and, in particular, article 48 provided sweeping emergency powers enacting rule by decree and e of the army in times of trouble. Although article 48 was intended to be used only in exceptional circumstances, Weimar’s first president, Ebert, applied it 136 times. During the Ruhr conflict of 1920, he frequently enforced the article to give post-facto legal sanction to summary executions of members of the workers’ Red Army.4 In the final years of the Republic, president Hindenburg’s continuous reliance on article 48 contributed to the rise of the Nazis.
The June Reichstag election saw the vote of the three democratic parties — the SPD, the Catholic Centre Party, and the German Democratic Party or DVD, the successor of the pre-war left-liberal Progressive People’s Party, reduced from 76.2 per cent to 43.6 per cent. They were not able to form a government in their own right in subsequent elections, and government could only be formed in co-operation with opponents of Weimar’s political system. Coalition with the communists — detested by the other parties as much as the communists detested them — was out of the question. There were two right-wing parties. The German National People’s Party or Nationalists (the DNVP, the conservatives of the Kaiser’s time) were opposed to the Republic and wanted the return of the Bismarckian Reich and the Kaiser. They gained, on average, 20 per cent of the vote, but participated — reluctantly — in only two of Weimar’s 21 cabinets. More inclined to compromise was the German People’s Party (DVP), the successor of the pro-Bismarckian National-Liberals. Although they would have preferred a return to the pre-war order, they were willing to regularly participate in coalition governments.
Governing Weimar was a difficult and tedious process. In the fourteen years of the Republic, there were 20 different coalitions. Reichstag coalitions normally had to settle for the lowest common denominator, and added little to the overall quality of the Republic’s political life.
A compounding difficulty was the political attitude of the dominant sections of German society. The old guard of the Kaiser’s time still held key positions in the upper levels of the civil service, the judiciary, the army, and the education system, and they held little sympathy for the new order. Many senior civil servants were opposed to the Republic, but they carried on their administrative duties, and by and large refrained from undermining the Weimar system. More damaging was the stand taken by the German judiciary. Whereas in the British legal system, judges were appointed to their position after a long period at the bar, the German judiciary was trained for this task from the beginning of their university education. The majority of Weimar’s judges had served during the Kaiser’s time, and still adhered to the principles and values of Imperial Germany.
Imperial law-making in pre-war Germany has been branded as ‘Klassenjustiz’ — justice meted out according to social standing. As a result, the German working class suffered from legal injustices, a process that continued into the Weimar Republic. Crimes committed by the political left received severe sentences; criminals of nationalist right-wing persuasion were more lightly dealt with. A contemporary critique pointed out that the twenty political murders committed by the left between 1919 and 1922 resulted in ten executions and prison sentences averaging 15 years. In contrast, of the 354 murders which were said to have been committed by right-wing activists, only 24 led to convictions, there were no executions, and prison sentences amounted to a mere four months on average. Twenty-three right-wing murderers who had confessed to their crimes were in fact acquitted by the courts.5
Right-wing terrorists targeted leading politicians. Reichstag Centre Party deputy Matthias Erzberger was assassinated in August 1921. The assassins escaped to Czechoslovakia, were given hero status in Nazi Germany, and received short prison sentences after the Second World War in the Federal Republic.
Walther Rathenau, at the time of his murder the Republic’s foreign minister, fell victim in July 1922. Of the thirteen people charged, one was sentenced to fifteen years jail for having been an accomplice to murder, three were acquitted, and the rest were given prison sentences ranging from one year to five.
Independent Socialist leader Hugo Haase was shot on 8 October by Johann Voss, a leather worker. Haase died a month later. His assassin was judged mentally ill, and no charges were laid.
In March 1920, when it seemed that Freecorps units were about to be disbanded, its mercenaries marched on Berlin, where they installed a government lead by Wolfgang Kapp, a former public servant with extreme right-wing views. The Reichswehr refused to support the legitimate government, which again sought refuge in Weimar. Rebuffed, it was forced to move to Stuttgart, the capital of Württemberg, in the south-west of Germany. The ineptitude of the Putschists, together with a general strike, brought about the collapse of the Kapp Putsch. Five hundred people were involved, but charges of high treason were laid against only one hundred, of whom a handful were eventually put on trial. All that resulted was a single sentence. General Lüttwitz, one of the leaders of the putsch, was forced into retirement on his general’s pension.
By and large, it was individuals who suffered from legal improprieties during the Weimar Republic, but the wholesale maladministration of justice in the November 1923 uprising in Munich had more far-reaching consequences. Commonly referred to as the ‘Beer Hall Putsch’, its chief instigator was Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Munich based National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). He was charged with and found of guilty of high treason. Four policemen had been shot dead in the attempt, offences which should have carried the death penalty. Instead, Hitler was sentenced to a mere five years’ confinement in the prison fortress of Landsberg. The jury felt that even this was too severe, but the presiding judge assured them that the prisoner would be eligible for parole after six months. In the end, Hitler spent nine comfortable months at the old castle, working on an account of his life that was published a year later under the title Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’). Had proper justice been meted out, Hitler’s career would have been over.
Historians have long warned against overrating the importance of the individual in history. In his monograph In Defence of History, Cambridge don Richard J. Evans raises the question of whether history would have taken a different course had Hitler, for example, died in 1928. The chances of Weimar’s democracy surviving the 1929 Depression, he argues, were small. A right-wing dictatorship or the return of the monarchy, ‘would almost certainly have led to a similar sequence of events to that which took place anyway: rearmament, revision of the Treaty of Versailles, Anschluss in Austria, and the resumption, with more energy and determination than ever before, of the drive for conquest which had been so evident in Germany’s war aims between 1914 and 1918’.6Even anti-Semitism was by no means confined to the Nazis. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether without Hitler’s tireless dedication and, eventually, his large popular appeal, the NSDAP would have gained office and the subsequent course of history would have plunged to such a unique level of evil.
The German army was even more opposed to the Republic than the judiciary was. At its head stood General Hans von Seeckt, an authoritarian reactionary who, wearing a monocle over his left eye, epitomised the old Prussian officer class. He refused to assist the government during the Kapp Putsch, and worked consistently towards undermining Weimar democracy. Evans’ claim that as far as foreign policies were concerned, there was little difference in the ambitions of the German military and the policies pursued later by the National Socialists, can readily be demonstrated. Consider, for example, a memorandum prepared in 1926 by Colonel Joachim von Stülpnagel, a leading army official, on behalf of the Reichswehr for the German Foreign Office:
The immediate aim of German policy must be the regaining of full sovereignty over the area retained by Germany, the firm acquisition of those areas at present separated from her and the reacquisition of those areas essential to the German economy. That is to say: (1) liberation of the Rhineland and the Saar area; (2) the abolition of the Corridor and the regaining of Polish upper Silesia; (3) the Anschluss of German Austria; (4) the regaining of her world position will be the task for the distant future … It is certainly to be assumed that a reborn Germany will eventually come into conflict with the American-English powers in the struggle for raw materials and markets, and that she will then need adequate maritime forces. But this conflict will be fought on the basis of a firm European position, after a new solution of the Franco-German problem has been achieved through either peace or war.7
Establishment of a ‘firm European position’ implied armed conflict and territorial annexation.
The one unifying element in Weimar Germany’s political system was hatred of the Versailles Peace Treaty, coupled with a determination to repudiate most of it. Article 231 was the chief target. To combat the allegation that Germany had been responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914, the German Foreign Office arranged for the publication of a large number of documents aimed at illustrating that Germany was no more guilty than any other of the great powers. The scholars chosen to carry out this project were Johannes Lepsius, a Protestant missionary and orientalist; Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, professor of law at Hamburg University; and the librarian Friedrich Thimme. Published between 1922 and 1927, Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette amounted to a collection of forty volumes, in 54 parts, of German Foreign Office documents on various aspects of international relations between 1871 and 1914. The enterprise was financed by the Foreign Office itself, though this was hidden from the public. The editors’ claim that their selection was guided solely by scholarly considerations and made in complete objectivity is unconvincing.
Until this time, foreign-policy matters had not been published in a major way. The documents provide some insight into the conduct of Europe’s diplomatic history in the decades preceding the war. The material presented in Grosse Politik illustrates that there was rivalry and a steady deterioration in European relations, and that the foreign policies pursued by all the powers were influenced by vested national and/or imperial interests, security matters, and defence arrangements.
There was nothing new or of major importance in the documents published, and they do not provide an answer to the question of how war had come about in 1914. Documents were selected only from files of the pre-war Foreign Office, and there was no material from other offices involved in war preparations, such as the War Ministry, the General Staff, the Navy Office, or the bureau responsible for the economic preparation for war. The documents selected were often shortened and, indeed, falsified. In particular, the 1914 July crisis is inadequately dealt with:
[T]he editors failed to include (perhaps destroyed) a number of utterly critical documents: the discussion on 5 and 6 July at Potsdam not only among German leaders but also with Austro-Hungarian representatives, the detailed analysis of the Viennese ultimatum to Serbia, missing in Die Grosse Politik but handed to the Baden plenipotentiary on July 20, any and all contacts between Wilhelm II and his political as well as military leaders after the monarch’s return from his northern cruise on 27 July, and, last but not least, any and all notes pertaining to important telephone calls, telegraphs or other verbal communications.8
The only three documents listed for July 1914 concern a planned British-Russian Naval agreement.
The Foreign Office also established a ‘war guilt department’ (Kriegsschuldreferat) to distribute material. It published an historical journal, Die Kriegsschuldfrage, which influenced scholars in Britain and the USA to adopt a more pro-German attitude in regard to the outbreak of war and the Versailles Peace Treaty.
All historical accounts and history textbooks from primary to tertiary levels continued to glorify Germany’s Prussian past and to allege that the Allies had encircled the German empire and wanted to destroy the German nation — and, to top it off, they now blamed Germany for the outbreak of war and were attempting to ruin the country economically.
On the other hand, anything implying German responsibility for the events of July–August 1914 was suppressed, and authors were persecuted. Some of the documents that should have been included in Grosse Politik were presented in a further study, conducted by Hermann Kantorowicz, relating to the origins of the war. Gutachten zur Kriegsschuldfrage 1914 (‘Report on the question of war guilt 1914’) was never published during the Weimar Republic. It was brought out decades later in the wake of a revisionist debate about the causes of the war that was set off by Fritz Fischer.
Kantorowicz was born in Posen in 1877, the son of a Jewish spirit merchant who had moved his business to Berlin around the turn of the century. He studied law in Berlin, and was appointed lecturer in 1907 at the University of Freiburg, where he became professor in 1913. Frequent contact with British officer POWs during the war resulted in his admiration of England and contributed to his embracing the new parliamentary democracy with enthusiasm. He attracted negative headlines in late 1921 when he wrote a newspaper article criticising the glorification of Bismarck and his policies, which he saw still permeating German thinking. The article provoked a backlash from the university’s establishment and the political right. But surprisingly, it was he — ‘a Jew, an Anglophile, a pacifist, a republican, and a democrat’9 — who was asked to write a report on the events of July 1914.
Kantorowicz had gained the support of Eugen Fischer-Baling, general secretary of the Reichstag’s commission investigating the causes of the war, who was impressed by Kantorowicz’s democratic fervour and his lucid thoughts. Kantorowicz worked on the project between 1921 and 1927, and, on its completion, was confronted by strong opposition from the Foreign Office, which wanted the publication stopped at all costs. He also saw his academic future impeded. The Foreign Office did everything to prevent his appointment to the chair of the Law Faculty at the University of Kiel. Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, in particular, warned that the publication of Kantorowicz’s findings and his appointment to the Kiel Chair would greatly damage Germany’s international reputation:
The report, if published, will definitely damage our reputation abroad because by laying the chief blame for the outbreak of the World War upon Austria and Germany he plays into the hands of the Entente propaganda. Professor Kantorowicz’s meagre and quibbling method to judge and evaluate events according to legal principles strips his presentation of all credibility. Moreover his arguments are based on such poor scientific foundations that there should be no difficulty to prove him wrong. But what I object to most is the spiteful way the report is presented. As there is no scientific objectivity to his argument, and as we have succeeded thanks to untiring efforts over the last years to persuade practically the entire world of a more realistic assessment of the events leading up to the war, his work will be viewed with embarrassment even in countries not favourably inclined to us. All told we are dealing with a sorry effort, which because of its low quality, is not likely to cause the damage that I originally feared.10
Kantorowicz was eventually appointed to Kiel, but the Nazi takeover of power in Germany forced him to flee to England. Cambridge University offered him the position of assistant director of research in law, an office he held until his death in 1940.
Gutachten zur Kriegsschuldfrage was shelved by the Foreign Office, but was rediscovered in microfilm form by American scholars twenty years after World War II. The Foreign Office’s fury at Kantorowicz’s survey is easy to understand, because his findings undermined the official version of German innocence peddled by the Kriegsschuldreferat. Documents referred to in Kantorowicz’s study include Wilhelm II’s ‘Blanco-Vollmacht’ (blank cheque) for Austria-Hungary to take any action considered necessary against the Kingdom of Serbia, and the Kaiser’s subsequent confirmation that the German empire would honour its alliance obligation to Habsburg should tsarist Russia declare war.11 He also pointed out that under article three of the Triple-Alliance agreement, Germany had not been obliged to come to Austria-Hungary’s assistance in July 1914. Article 3 stipulated that the casus foederis (Bündnispflicht) in the Triple Alliance would come into existence only if one of the partners were the victim of an unprovoked attack by two major powers. This was not the case in July 1914. Russia had not attacked the Danube Monarchy; instead, the Austrian government declared war on Russia on 6 August on German insistence. In the absence of an unprovoked attack, Kantorowicz lamented that the German people ‘had been led to the slaughter’ via a treaty obligation that did not exist.12
Subsequent documents illustrated Austria-Hungary’s determination to cripple Serbia, which was supported in Berlin, and showed that warnings from the British government failed to stop Vienna’s declaration of war on 28 July. Kantorowicz did not see the mobilisation of the Russian army as a necessarily aggressive act. The tsar’s claim that this step was a precautionary measure may well have been valid; the Netherlands and Switzerland had also ordered full mobilisation on that day. Kantorowicz felt that Berlin was responsible for the subsequent escalation of the war: although the government regarded the Russian mobilisation as a defensive measure, it nevertheless embarked upon preventive warfare as outlined in the Schlieffen Plan.13 The German declaration of war on Russia on 1 August and on France on 3 August, together with the German invasion of Belgium in the morning of 4 August, turned a regional war into a global war.14
The Foreign Office was further outraged by Kantorowicz’s account of the extent to which the principle of preventive warfare had gripped Germany’s political and military elites. His references to statements made by Bethmann-Hollweg in the final days of peace, that the impression had to be be given ‘that Germany was forced into the war’, that under no circumstances should the German people get the impression that this was otherwise, and that it was ‘most important that Russia must be seen as the guilty party’ for the widening of the conflict, brought the office’s anger to boiling point.15 With the Gutachten unpublished, Kantorowicz saw six years of intense work wasted.
Worse was the fate of the left-wing journalist Felix Fechenbach, who was charged after having published in 1919 Bavarian files suggesting Germany’s responsibility for the First World War. He was accused of having damaged Germany’s position at the Versailles Peace Conference, and was sentenced to eleven years imprisonment by a ‘People’s Court’. These courts had been set up during the Bavarian Revolution of 1918 to dispense summary justice to looters and murderers. Their function, however, was soon widened to deal with ‘treason’ cases. They were outlawed by the Weimar constitution, but ‘People’s Courts’ continued to function in Bavaria for a further five years. Those charged had no right of appeal against their verdicts.16
The leading Social-Democratic revisionist Eduard Bernstein urged the party at its first post-war congress, held in Weimar in June 1919, to tell the truth about the war, but he was firmly opposed. Refusal to face reality was bound to have grave consequences:
The incessant din about the injustices heaped upon a defeated Germany, allegedly undefeated in the field and stabbed in the back at home, in effect serve to reinforce an idea that things would be normal if only the external burdens, imposed by the allies, could be lifted. That is to say, the constant — indeed ritual — complaints about Versailles in effect served to disguise the extent to which the War really had impoverished Germany … These illusions were dangerous … [because] … as long as the truth about the War, its causes and consequences remained excluded from mainstream public political discussion, it was impossible to face harsh economic and political realities … Responsible politics remained a hostage to myths about the First World War, and Weimar democracy eventually had to pay the price.17
John Maynard Keynes and other appeasers
Enlargement of the German navy had led Britain to abandon its policy of ‘splendid isolation’ and to enter into an entente cordial with France in 1904 and with Russia in 1907. The subsequent years saw a general deterioration in British-German relations. This policy of moving away from their ‘racial cousins’ on the continent by siding with the Latin French and the Slavonic Russians caused apprehension among sections of Britain’s social and intellectual elite and middle classes. Throughout the nineteenth century, Oxbridge historians had emphasised Britain’s Germanic past, and German achievements in the arts and sciences were widely admired. An image of two Germanys began to emerge: the traditional Germany of cultural achievements, of Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and Wagner, and the Prussian Germany — expansionist, militarist, aggressive, and arrogant.18
Apart from a small group of pacifists, Britain’s war effort enjoyed the full support of the country, but this consensus started breaking down during the peacemaking process. Parliamentarians, leading churchmen, journalists, and members of the British delegation at Paris claimed that the terms imposed on Germany were far too harsh. Perhaps spending the war in the safety of the workplace or home had inclined some to call for a generous peace. Younger civil servants in the Treasury and Foreign Office may also have seen their hopes for a new and better world dashed. Among these was John Maynard Keynes.
First Baron Keynes of Tilton was born at Cambridge in 1883, son of John Neville Keynes, a lecturer in moral sciences at Cambridge University, and his wife, Florence Ada Keynes, a local social reformer. John Maynard showed from his early youth great talent in all subjects, and above all in mathematics. He won a scholarship to Eton College in 1897, entered King’s College at Cambridge in 1902, and graduated with a first class B.A. in mathematics in 1904. His career as public servant began in October 1906 as a clerk in the India Office. The quality of his publications on various economic aspects over the next years saw him appointed to a position at the Treasury shortly after the outbreak of war. This appointment was soon to lead him into moral conflict.
In his Cambridge days, Keynes had befriended a group of young intellectuals with pacifist leanings known as the Bloomsbury Circle. Most of his friends had applied for exemption from military service as conscientious objectors — and were facing severe consequences. Keynes himself toyed with the idea of becoming a conscientious objector, which would have meant resigning from the Treasury, but eventually decided against it. A bitter confrontation with his Bloomsbury friends followed.19
Sent to Paris as chief Treasury representative of the British delegation at Versailles, he established himself as the leading advocate for moderate peace terms. His estimate that Germany would not be able to pay more than £3 billion brought upon his head the wrath of the chair of the Reparation Commission, Billy Hughes, and of the ‘heavenly twins’, Lords Cunliffe and Sumner. The German counter-proposal of £5 billion in gold undermined his reputation.20 Although the final amount Germany would pay was yet to be specified, Keynes felt that the treaty was repugnant, resigned from the Treasury, and immediately began to work on what would become The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
According to his biographer, it was not only the Peace Conference that led to his furious attacks upon Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and other participants in the peacemaking process. He felt guilt for his part in the war. Other historians saw the reasons for the jeremiad that flowed from his pen in his resentment ‘at seeing his authority usurped by the deaf little Australian Prime Minister and the detestable “heavenly twins”.’21 An American observer claimed that ‘Keynes got sore because they wouldn’t take his advice, his nerve broke and he quit.’22
The Germanophile sentiments of his social class and peer group influenced his Economic Consequences. The fact that he fell in love with a German financial delegate to the conference, the banker Dr. Melchior, was another influence,23 as was his dislike of the French. Keynes did not want to be objective. Passions were to guide him. The book, he admitted, ‘is the child of much emotions’.24
‘Paris’, he wrote, ‘was a morass, a nightmare, and everyone there was morbid’, the atmosphere ‘hot and poisoned’, the halls ‘treacherous’, the conference rooms ‘a thieves’ kitchen’. The statesmen at the conference were ‘dangerous spellbinders … most hypocritical draftsmen’, inspired by ‘debauchery of thought and speech’. Their labours were ‘empty and arid intrigue’. President Wilson was a ‘blind and deaf Don Quixote … playing a blind man’s bluff’. He was ‘bamboozled’ by the French Chauvinist and the Welsh Siren. The treaty was clothed with a ‘web of Jesuit exegesis’, its provisions were ‘dishonourable’, ‘abhorrent and detestable’, revealing ‘imbecile greed’ reducing ‘Germany to servitude’, perpetrating its economic ruin, starving and crippling its children. All told, Versailles was a ‘Carthaginian Peace’, a huge repository of vindictiveness, masquerading as justice — ‘one of the most outrageous acts of a cruel victor in civilised history’.25
Overpowering emotions have led to outstanding literature. They do not provide a good basis, however, for the writing of a monograph on the economic consequences of the Versailles Peace Treaty, and Keynes’ book is flawed.
Keynes reiterated the false claim made by Count Brockdorff-Rantzau in his speech replying to the presentation of the Fourteen Points that the treaty ‘would sign the death-sentence of many millions of Germans, men, women, and children’. The malnutrition that observers noticed was caused by a distribution system which favoured the military and kept rations for the civilian population scarcely above subsistence levels. The ending of the war brought internal improvements in distribution, and food entered Germany from neutral countries.
It was ambitious of Keynes to attempt a major analysis of Germany’s ability to meet reparation claims in view of the huge overall dislocation of industry and commerce in all countries brought about by the war, the uncertainty of international trade conditions post-war, and the absence of reliable data about Germany’s economic potential. Other factors affecting the viability of his study were questions not yet settled at the time of writing, to do with collecting the booty and the liability amount. None of Keynes’ Cassandra calls eventuated.
Nevertheless, his arguments were accepted more or less without question by an increasingly guilt-ridden English-speaking world. Those who finally analysed his claims in detail found them wanting. French economist Étienne Mantoux wrote The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes during the Second World War. He was killed in action one week before Germany capitulated. His monograph, which debunked Keynes’s book as a self-fulfilling prophesy, was published posthumously by his son Paul Mantoux, but went virtually unnoticed,26perhaps because the author was a Frenchman. It is worthwhile presenting his conclusions, which left the emperor with few clothes, verbatim:
In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Mr. Keynes predicted that the Treaty, if it was carried into effect, ‘must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organisation, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live’. Europe would be threatened with ‘a long, silent process of semi-starvation, and of a gradual, steady lowering of the standards of life and comfort’. Ten years after the Treaty, European production was well above its pre-war level, and European standards of living had never been higher.
He predicted that the iron output of Europe would decline as a consequence of the Treaty. In the ten years that followed the Treaty, the iron output of Europe, which had fallen considerably during the War, increased almost continuously. In 1929, Europe produced 10 per cent more iron than in the record year 1913, and would no doubt have produced still more had not the producers combined to restrict output for fear of injuring prices by overproduction.
He predicted that the iron and steel output of Germany would diminish. By 1927, Germany produced nearly 30 per cent more iron and 38 per cent more steel than in the record year 1913, within the same territorial limits.
He predicted that the efficiency of the German coal-mining industry lowered by the War, would remain low as a consequence of the Peace. By 1925, the efficiency of labour, which had dropped seriously in the meantime, was already higher, in the Ruhr coal industries, than in 1913; in 1927 it was higher by nearly 20 per cent; and in 1929 by more than 30 per cent.
He predicted that a pre-war level of output could not be expected in the German coal industry. In 1920, 1921, and 1922, coal output was well above the average level of the five years preceding the war, within the same territorial limits. It fell sharply in 1923, and was slightly below pre-war average in 1924. It was above that average in 1925; and in 1926, it was already higher than in the record year 1913.
He predicted that Germany ‘cannot export coal in the near future … if she is to continue as an industrial nation. In the first year following the Treaty, Germany exported (net) 15 million tons of coal; and in 1926 she exported (net) 35 million tons, or twice [Mantoux’s italics] the amount of the average (1909–13) pre-war exports of all [Mantoux’s italics] her pre-war territories.
He predicted that the German mercantile marine ‘cannot be restored for many years to come on a scale adequate to meet the requirements of her own commerce’. The total German tonnage was a little above 5 millions in 1913. It was reduced in 1920 to 673,000; but in 1924 it already approached 3 million tons; in 1930 it was well above 4 million, and German liners were the wonder of the transatlantic world.
He predicted that ‘after what she has suffered in the war and by the Peace’, Germany’s annual savings would ‘fall far short of what they were before’. The monthly increase in German savings bank deposits was 84 million in 1913; in 1925 it had become 103 million; and in 1928 it was nearly 210 million.
He predicted that Germany’s annual surplus would be reduced to less than 2 milliard marks. In 1925, the net accumulation of domestic capital was estimated at 6.4 milliards, and in 1927 at 7.6 milliards.
He predicted that in the next thirty years, Germany could not possibly be expected to pay more than 2 milliard marks a year in Reparation. In the six years preceding September 1939, Germany, by Hitler’s showing, had spent each year on re-armament alone about seven times as much.27
With new sources becoming available in the second half of the twentieth century, Mantoux’s Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes has been vindicated by scholars in the field. Their studies have shown that a relatively moderate increase in taxation, coupled with an equally moderate reduction in consumption, would have enabled the Weimar Republic to meet the reparation debt.28 In fact, Stephen Shuker has shown that the net capital inflow ran towards Germany in the period 1919 to 1933 at a minimum of at least 2 per cent.29
The reparation terms obliged Germany to pay 50 billion gold marks. Keynes — expecting that the C Bonds would eventually be cancelled — advised the German government to accept.30 Despite his undisputed command of economics, he did not pick up that most of the London schedule was phony money. When, by the second half of the 1930s, it had become clear that Germany had not been ruined by the Treaty of Versailles but was recommencing its attempt to take possession of most of continental Europe, he saw that he had erred, and regretted having written The Economic Consequences of the Peace.31
It was too late. There is little to challenge Antony Levin’s summary of the Keynesian tragedy:
Despite his personal aversion towards the President, Keynes’s vision of regeneration was in its way as humane and inspiring as Wilson’s. His book was conceived as an instrument of correction and enlightenment, a vehicle ‘for the assertion of truth, the unveiling of illusions, and the dissipation of hate’ … If, as Colonel House had warned, ‘we are so stupid as to let Germany train and arm a large army and again become a menace to the world, we would deserve the fate which such folly would bring upon us’. But the accepted wisdom of centuries was overturned, the sagacity of ripe practitioners set at naught, the deep policy and nice calculations of Clemenceau or Foch dismissed at a stroke of the pen by a Cambridge don 35 years old. ‘Nous avons changé tout cela’ he wrote in effect; and such was the national mood which he expressed, that his paradoxes passed for home-truths. But Clio is not lightly defied: and to those who flout her admonitions, she brings if not nemesis, then certainly consequences. In this case, they came with disconcerting, with devastating speed. Keynes had assured the world of Germany’s utter prostration, her condemnation by the Treaty to decades of hopeless servitude and impoverishment — and now German, not French sentries, stood on the Rhine, armed to the hilt and not noticeably undernourished. Keynes awoke, dumbfounded at the spectacle, and, noted [Harold] Nicolson, ‘very defeatist’, as well he might be. It would be a melancholy pastime to speculate, of acreage of territory, of bridgehead secured, of tactical advances, of bloodless victories, on the value to the Wehrmacht of The Economic Consequences of the Peace.32
Harold Nicolson, another of the young public servants, should also have had second thoughts. He was a member of the Foreign Office delegation at Versailles, which had little influence on the peacemaking process. ‘Seldom in history’, he wrote, ‘has such vindictiveness cloaked itself in such unctuous sophistry’.33 Published in 1933, his Peacemaking 1919 presented the treaty as a product of confusion, turmoil, stress, overwork, and time pressure. To him, Paris was the ‘scurrying cacophony’, a ‘riot in a parrot house’ which created an atmosphere that made it impossible to devise a peace of moderation and fairness34 — only a ‘bloody bullying peace’.35
Many liberals soon joined the German attack on the Kriegsschuld article and other aspects of the treaty, and the need to redress the wrongs of Versailles became a basic part of the Weltanschaung of the chattering classes.36 Oxbridge soon joined the club. In October 1920, 57 eminent Oxford academics signed a letter expressing regret about the disruption of relations with their German and Austrian counterparts during the war, and appealed for the restoration of ‘a wider sympathy and better understanding between our kindred nations’. A few months later, students of the Cambridge and Oxford Union defeated motions to continue the Anglo-French Entente as the guiding principle of British foreign policy. Subsequent motions passed by unions at both universities regretted the crushing defeat of Germany, attacked the Treaty of Versailles, and — illustrating the ever-present racism of the English educated classes — claimed that ‘the selfishness of French policy since 1918 has condemned humanity to another World War’.37
Historians followed. George Peabody Gooch, the president of the Historical Association, took the lead by blaming the outbreak of war on all the major European powers, on the division of the continent, and on the ‘international anarchy’ that had caused a breakdown in international relations.38 Historians Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and W.H. Dawson also declared that the alliance system and the conduct of secret diplomacy was the fundamental cause.39 Raymond Beayley, vice-president of the Royal Historical Society, went furthest in his desire to clear Germany of major war guilt. He argued that ‘she had not plotted the Great War, had not desired a war, and had made genuine, though belated and ill-organised efforts to avert it’.40 These historians, when Hitler proceeded to dismantle the Versailles system in the 1930s, ‘urged acceptance of his aggression on the grounds that Germany’s grievances were valid’.41
From the start, British leaders had sought to undo anti-German aspects of the treaty. Lloyd George, to whom Versailles was merely ‘a temporary measure of a nature to satisfy public opinion’,42 was the first to undermine such critical aspects of the treaty as French security and reparation demands. They did this not necessarily through guilt or shame, but because Britain wanted to restore the international trade and payment system that had run the world’s pre-war economy. This needed Germany to be reintegrated again into the global system, which in turn meant dismantling the framework of European security created in Paris. Lloyd George’s unfortunate comment that ‘we all slid into the war’ was aimed at wooing German economic co-operation.
British governments over the next ten years worked towards reducing German reparation payments, ended military inspections, accelerated the withdrawal of troops from the Rhineland, and hastened the return of the Saar to the Reich. At the same time, they pressured France to disarm and to abandon its alliances with eastern European countries, and expressed sympathies for German revisionist ambitions in this region.43 The French, understandably, were increasingly concerned about their security. They pointed out that those who sought to restore authoritarianism, militarism, and aggression still held key positions in the civil service, the judiciary, the military, and the boards of heavy industry. Were Germany to gain control of central and east-central Europe, it would be too powerful for the Western powers to restrain. Marshal Foch warned repeatedly:
[Germany] would burst asunder all the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, one after the other. First the Polish Corridor would disappear, and then Czechoslovakia and Austria would rapidly follow, and instead of an already sufficiently powerful Germany of some 65 million inhabitants, we should be faced with a Germany of well over 100 millions, and then it would be too late for us to endeavour to check their ever-growing land hunger of power.44
J.H. Morgan, a member of the Inter-Allied Control Commission, drew attention to Germany’s extensive flouting of the disarmament clauses in 1925 and 1926. He reiterated that the High Command had not been suppressed, but reconstituted in a new guise; there had been a large intake and training of short-term recruits; few munitions factories had been converted to civilian production; and vast stock of arms had been found. Morgan warned that Germany, ‘the least idealistic nation in the world and the most realist, watches, waits, plans and despite her dynastic catastrophes, remains after the war more identical with what she was before than any other nation in Europe’.45
It was in vain. British leaders — convinced, or pretending to be convinced, that Germany was in the safe hands of democracy and fair government — would not listen. On 30 January 1933, the reactionary German political establishment brought Hitler into power. This was not the fault of the Versailles Peace Treaty.
The Nazi takeover of power
The Reichstag election on 19 January 1919 seemed a victory for forces working towards democracy in post-war Germany. The three parties that gained a majority, having between them secured three-quarters of all votes cast — the Social Democrats, the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), and the Centre Party — had sponsored the Reichstag’s ‘Peace Resolution’ of July 1917. This resolution blamed the Allies for having caused the war and for wanting to destroy Germany; and its mover, Matthias Erzberger, proclaimed that Germany was entitled to keep the conquered territories in east and west. Because of their support for the ‘move to peace’, these three parties were seen as providing evidence that the German empire was starting to embrace parliamentary democracy. This interpretation is wrong. The political uncertainty and disorder that followed the collapse of the Kaiser’s Germany, and above all the fear that the nation would be submerged in Bolshevism, encouraged people to vote for parties they hoped would prevent the worst. How far did these parties, referred to as the ‘Weimar Coalition’, stand behind the Republic?
The SPD leaders had embarked upon reformist policies and continued to stick with them. The party program, however, was still Marxist, expecting capitalism to end, with the workers replacing the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. Formal disassociation from Marxism in the form of a new party program, as happened after World War II, would have alienated a large part of the rank and file. Nevertheless, the SPD was a pillar of the Weimar Republic.
With qualifications, this was also true of the Centrists, who participated in most coalition governments. The Centre Party was above all Catholic, looking after the interests of a large Catholic minority in a Prussian-dominated Protestant Germany. In particular, the Zentrum defended Catholic interests in the education system, and fought against such evils of modern society as pornography and contraception. Catholic political conduct, however, was determined in Rome, and throughout the 1920s the Papacy was concerned about the spread of leftism that accompanied the process of democratisation.
The DDP was the only committed member of the Weimar Republic to participate in all governments. The democratic liberals, however, were victims of a huge swing in the 1920 Reichstag elections towards the conservative former national liberals. They lost thirty-six of their 75 seats, whereas the National Liberals increased theirs from nineteen to 65. The DDP continued to lose voters — only fourteen seats were won in the 1930 election, and by then they had ceased to play a significant part in the Republic’s political life.
Following the June 1920 election, as stated above, the Weimar Coalition parties never gained a majority, which meant that from thence government had to be formed with parties opposed to the Republic. The 1920 election also showed that if there was support for Weimar democracy among the middle classes, it was neither deep-seated nor long-lasting. Their disillusionment reached a peak with the hyper-inflation of 1923.
A steady decline in the mark had commenced during the war, when the German government resorted to the printing press to meet the ever-rising costs of war without having the economic resources to back it up. After the war, successive governments continued to print money rather than tackle the problem with more responsible economic policies, such as raising taxes (as most other national participants in the war had done). The mark declined from eight to the dollar in December 1918 to 7,000 to the dollar in December 1922. The subsequent occupation of the Ruhr was disastrous: by November 1923, the mark had fallen to 4,200 trillion to the dollar.
This was good luck for those who owed money, but for most other citizens the hyper-inflation was a frightful experience. Savings were wiped out. Employees had to carry home the mass of banknotes that made up their pay packets in baskets and wheel-barrows. People rushed to buy basic essentials before their salaries became worthless. Food was worst affected. It is reported, for example, that the cost of a cup of coffee, listed at 5,000 marks at the time of ordering, had risen to 8,000 by the time the customer asked for the bill. The price of a loaf of bread, 163 marks at the beginning of 1923, had risen to 229 billion by November. Families had to sell possessions to meet rising costs. Crowds rioted, shops were looted, and there were gunfights between miners invading rural areas to strip the fields bare and farmers who did not want to see their goods stolen or sold for worthless money.46
The nightmare was ended by DVP leader Gustav Stresemann, who was appointed chancellor and foreign minister in August 1923. He remained foreign minister until his death in October 1929. His chancellorship lasted only months, but that was enough time for him to succeed in negotiating the withdrawal of French troops from the Ruhr in return for a guarantee to meet reparations. By the end of the year, economic stability was restored.
The years of relative social peace that followed the turmoil of hyper-inflation saw a flourishing of cultural life. A large number of the twentieth century’s most outstanding artists were part of Weimar culture. They included painters Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Max Beckmann, and novelists Alfred Döblin, Erich Maria Remarque, and the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann. The novel of the last mentioned, The Blue Angel, a biting satire on bourgeois society, was made into a film starring Emil Jennings and Marlene Dietrich. Fritz Lang’s expressionist films Metropolis and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari became world famous. The Three-Penny Opera, an all-out attack on the decadence of capitalist society, ran for months in Berlin to capacity audiences every night. The text was written by Bertolt Brecht, and Kurt Weill composed the music. To Brecht, however, the box-office success of the play was a disappointment. Most of the crowd came to enjoy the catchy tunes and the witty lyrics, but were not interested in Brecht’s social message.
The Bauhaus was created by architects Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in March 1919 in Weimar. Designed primarily as an educational centre, it accommodated artist from all fields. Gropius saw no difference between a craftsperson and an artist. ‘Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn back to craft’. Art and architecture should be functional, contributing to a new future. Teachers at the Bauhaus included painters Wassily Kandinsky, Oscar Schlemmer, Paul Klee, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The modernity of the paintings and architectural designs was not appreciated by Weimar’s general population, nor the liberal lifestyle of the school’s male and female students. Funding was withdrawn in 1924. The Bauhaus then moved to Dessau in the small central German state of Anhalt, where it continued a troubled existence for a few more years before being closed down by the newly elected Nazi town council in 1931. The Bauhaus movement, nevertheless, continued to influence international modern architecture.
Because of the left-leaning tendencies of writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Alfred Döblin, the journalists Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzky, and Bauhaus director Hannes Mayer and other intellectuals, the broader public coined the term ‘Cultural Bolshevism’.
Most people did not like the new forms of entertainment from across the Atlantic either. American-style variety shows and new dances such as the Charleston and the foxtrot offended social conservatism. Jazz, in particular, angered traditional music lovers. Alfred Einstein, Germany’s leading music critic, wrote that jazz ‘was the most disgusting treason against all occidental civilised music’.47 That most jazz musicians performing in German nightclubs were black made things worse.
Promiscuity encouraged by the comparatively mild censorship laws in many German states also caused outrage. Berlin was seen a Sündenbabel. Stefan Zweig, the Austrian poet and novelist, was dumbfounded:
Even the Rome of Suetonius had not known orgies like the Berlin transvestite balls, where hundreds of men in women’s clothes and women in men’s clothes danced under the benevolent eyes of the police … made-up boys with artificial waistlines promenaded along the Kurfürstendamm — and not professionals alone: every high school student wanted to make some money, and in the darkened bars one could see high public officials and high financiers courting drunken sailors without shame … Young ladies proudly boasted that they were perverted, and to be suspected of virginity at sixteen would have been a disgrace in every school in Berlin.48
All this was perhaps exaggerated, but the staging of transvestite and other erotic shows in city nightclubs made people believe that the Republic was decadent and outside the norm of what they regarded as civilised social behaviour.
Belief that proud, traditional German values such as decency and honour were being eroded was also fostered by the changing role of women in society. Their share of the overall workforce did not differ significantly from pre-war levels, but by 1930 the share of female university students had risen to 16 per cent, opening the university and the legal and medical professions to women. They had been given the vote in 1918, and could stand for elections to local councils, state parliaments, or the Reichstag. This allowed them to play a more prominent part in public life. The conservatives felt that this trend should be remedied. The Nazi Party became more successful in elections in the late 1920s because of its demand that Germany’s future depended on the return of women to their proper place in the home as wives and mothers. This was an election trump card, particularly in rural and semi-rural areas.
The rise of the cheap ‘boulevard press’ in the 1920s also proved detrimental to Weimar democracy. Attacks on politicians, often plucked out of the air, alleging sexual or financial misconduct, harmed the Republic. The publicity given to murder trials and police investigations also helped create the impression that society was being submerged in a wave of violence.49 This impression was reinforced by the increasing street battles between the paramilitary arms of political parties, none more vicious than the clashes between the Nazis’ SA (Sturmabteilung) and the Communists’ Red Front. In short, the average citizen could see few positive achievements in the Weimar Republic.
Gustav Stresemann’s foreign policies were successful. He brokered an agreement, signed at Locarno in December 1925, with the foreign minister of France, Aristride Briand, the British foreign minister, Austen Chamberlain, and the U.S. banker Charles Dawes. The agreement recognised Germany’s western borders, but not its eastern boundaries. Locarno put Germany on the same footing as France, which, on British insistence, was asked to weaken its alliance system with eastern Europe. It opened the way for Germany to enter the League of Nations in September 1926, where it was immediately given a permanent seat on the league’s Council. Germany had gained Great Power status again — no mean achievement on Stresemann’s part. Nevertheless, the Locarno Pact was fiercely attacked by the political right for having abandoned German claims in the west. The DNVP left the coalition government, and Stresemann received a great deal of criticism from his own party. But Stresemann was not selling out. Only a few days after the ceremony at Locarno, he offered to repurchase Eupen-Malmedy from Belgium,50 and not much later he assured the Germans that Locarno did not rule out regaining Alsace-Lorraine.51
The Treaty of Locarno, Germany’s entry into the league, and the result of the 1928 election, which saw a sharp rise in the vote cast for the Social Democrats, has often been interpreted as evidence that Weimar democracy was stabilising. This was not the case. The DVP had participated in coalition governments, albeit reluctantly, but had begun to shift to the right even before Stresemann fell ill in the late 1920s (he died in October 1929). The DNVP, which had been opposed to Weimar from the beginning, shifted further to the right when Alfred Hugenberg, press baron and, in the Kaiser’s day, one of the most outspoken Pan-Germans, became chairman of the party in 1928. Finally, the Catholic Centre, one of the three ‘Weimar Coalition’ parties, also shifted to the political right under pressure from the Concordat, and had ceased to be a bulwark of Weimar democracy before 1930.52
The final act in the life of the trouble-ridden Republic began in October 1929. Aided by the Dawes Plan, the economic performance of Germany’s industries had begun to improve by the mid-1920s. Manufacturing, in particular, managed to regain most of its export markets, and by 1928 Germany’s industrial output had surpassed pre-World War I levels. The Dawes Plan, however, soon proved a double-edged sword. As stated above, part of the Dawes Plan involved injecting huge sums of American capital into the German economy. This greatly stimulated the nation’s economic recovery, but it had inherent dangers. Governments at all levels embarked on a vast spending spree, balancing their budgets with money from U.S. loans. In real terms, a huge deficit was building. Short-term loans were often invested in projects that were designed to return profits in the long term: if the market panicked, and the loans were recalled, grave problems could arise. This is what happened in the last fortnight of October 1929 when the New York sharemarket collapsed. In its wake, American banks and investors stopped lending money and/or started to withdraw their funds from Germany. Within weeks, the German economy was in chaos. Enterprises went bankrupt, banks started to collapse, and unemployment rose. Political consequences soon followed. A ‘Grand Coalition’, comprising Social Democrats and all the middle-class parties to the left of the DNVP, had formed after the May 1928 election. They united chiefly to secure the passing of the Young Plan in the face of hostile opposition from the far right. Having achieved this, the coalition fell apart. When the middle-class parties demanded an increase in the unemployment-insurance contribution — to meet the rapidly rising costs of unemployment insurance — the SPD-led government resigned in March 1930.
With no majority in the Reichstag, President Hindenburg, who had been elected to the office after Friedrich Ebert’s death in February 1925, was repeatedly called upon to rule by emergency decree, in particular by invoking Article 48. The chancellorship went into the hands of the Centre Party leader Heinrich Brüning, who for the next two years governed with a minority.
Brüning was a monarchist at heart, and saw in the monarchy the best system to free government from the interference of political parties. He attempted to solve the economic and political crisis by undertaking drastic cuts in government spending. The budget had to be balanced. Deficits were to be avoided, as was inflation. Because international loans were no longer available in 1930, a balanced budget could be achieved only by raising taxes and cutting expenditure. The government increased taxes on income, turnover, sugar, and beer, and introduced a series of new taxes — for example, a special tax on department-store sales and on mineral water. Even bachelors were taxed. Public servants had their salaries reduced on three occasions during 1931, by a total of 23 per cent. Overall wages were reduced to the level of 1927, a cut of approximately 10 per cent. Unemployment benefits, which had not been particularly generous previously, were cut by about 60 per cent. As a result of these measurers, business declined, and there was a wave of bankruptcies. The collapse of a major banking chain added to the chaos.
In the two years of Bruning’s government, unemployment rose from 2 million to 6 million. This was the official figure; it did not include those who, owing to long-term unemployment, had exhausted their claim for benefits. In addition, if the young, female seasonal, and casual workers were included, the total was more like 9 million.
The only sector of the economy receiving government assistance was East Elbian rural estate holders, who managed to win tariffs for their product, thus excluding cheap foreign agricultural imports that might have kept prices down. The combination of extensive unemployment and high food prices brought poverty and suffering to the majority of the German population.
Not surprisingly, Brüning was known as the ‘hunger chancellor’. Altogether, about 15 million people received their livelihood through social services or welfare organisations. The unemployed received their small unemployment benefit for about a year, then they had to depend on welfare, which in many cases meant that they could not afford a bed at night. Not unexpectedly, there was great unrest among the population.
The impact of the Depression was worse in Germany than elsewhere, not only in terms of poverty. Historians have referred to the effect of the psychological threat of losing one’s job. This is said to have affected about half the wage earners in France and Britain, and just over half in the United States, but virtually everyone in Germany. Moreover, in France and Britain there was relative job security for most white-collar workers, so that the middle stratum of society was less affected than in Germany, and they remained a stabilising, state-supporting element. This stabilising element did not exist in Germany; instead, the middle class became further alienated from the Republic.
An early chronicler of the Third Reich sums it up:
[A] sense of total discouragement and meaninglessness pervaded everything. Among the most striking concomitants of the Great Depression was an unprecedented wave of suicides. At first the victims were chiefly failed bankers and businessmen, but as the Depression deepened, members of the middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie more and more frequently took their lives. With their keen sense of status, many office workers, owners of small shops, and persons with small private incomes had long regarded poverty as a badge of social degradation. Quite often whole families chose death together. Dropping birth rates and rising death rates led to decreasing population in at least twenty of Germany’s major cities … And, as always, such eschatological moods were accompanied by wild hopes that sprang up like weeds, along with irrational longings for a complete alteration of the world. Charlatans, astrologers, clairvoyants, numerologists, and mediums flourished. These times of distress taught men, if not to pray, pseudo-religious feelings, and turned their eyes willy-nilly to those seemingly elect personalities who saw beyond mere human tasks and promised more than normality, order, and politics as usual — who offered, in fact, to restore to life its lost meaning.53
The Nazis gained from the misery of the people. They had done poorly in the May 1928 election, with a mere 2.6 per cent of the vote. By 1930, however, the rank and file had been tightly restructured, and the party was an efficient, well-led organisation. Relying on the oratorical skills of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Göbbels, the NSDAP was ready for the September 1930 election that Brüning had called to overcome the stalemate in the Reichstag. The Nazis did not offer concrete solutions for Germany’s economic malaise, but, through ‘powerful, simple slogans and images, frenetic, manic activity, marches, rallies, demonstrations, speeches, posters, placards and the like’, they were more than just an ordinary party — ‘they were a movement sweeping up the German people and carrying them unstoppably to a better future’.54 In fact, the Nazis promised everything to everyone. To the people in Germany’s rural and semi-rural regions, it was a return to decent, traditional German values; to the people in the cities, it was an end to street violence and a return to law and order.
The September 1930 election result was dramatic. The number of votes cast for the NSDAP increased from 800,000 to 6.4 million, its share of the vote went from 2.6 to 18.3 per cent, and its seats in the Reichstag went from 12 to 107. Although some of the gains may have come from the Social Democrats or the Communists, the majority came from the bourgeois parties. The reason for this big swing to the Nazis does not lie in the Versailles Treaty. All parties rejected the treaty. In contrast to other extreme right-wing parties, as stated above, the Nazis were chiefly concerned with restoring Germany’s eastern borders; their demands in the West were confined to the return of Eupen-Malmedy. It was the suffering caused by the Depression, and disillusionment with Weimar politics, that accounted for the Nazis’ rise in September 1930 and the subsequent doubling of their vote in November 1932 — not the Versailles Peace Treaty. The Versailles peace was not the reason for the political turmoil that led president Hindenburg to swear Hitler into office as reich-chancellor on 30 January 1933. Yet this is the story that has been told by many historians.55
Germany has blamed the political and economic malaise of the Republic on outside factors. The failure of democracy was also blamed on outside factors and not on Germany. ‘There are two reasons for Hitler’, announced the long-time SPD minister-president of Prussia, Otto Braun, shortly after the Nazis seized power: ‘Versailles and Moscow’.