The Coming of the Third Reich (12 page)

Peters’s fertile imagination and restless spirit led him to found a variety of organizations, including a Society for German Colonization in 1884, which merged with a like-minded group in 1887 to form the German Colonial Society. Such was Peters’s prominence, combined with the influence of his supporters, that Bismarck felt obliged to recognize his East African venture and declare a German protectorate over the areas he had explored, the first step in the creation of the German colony of Tanganyika. In 1890, however, Bismarck’s successor Leo von Caprivi agreed to surrender some of the territory Peters had claimed, most notably the island of Zanzibar, to the British in return for their cession to Germany of the North Sea island of Heligoland. Outraged, Peters chaired a meeting organized early in 1891 by a group of nationalists including the young civil servant Alfred Hugenberg, who was later to play a fateful role in the rise and triumph of Nazism. They founded a General German League, renamed the Pan-German League in 1894. The aim of the new organization was to push vigorously for German expansion abroad and the Germanization of national minorities at home. In this it was joined in 1894 by the Society for the Eastern Marches; this group, which had relatively close ties with government compared to those enjoyed by the Pan-Germans, devoted itself to the destruction of Polish identity in Germany’s eastern provinces. Another, not dissimilar organization, founded in 1881 in response to struggles over official languages in the Habsburg monarchy, was the German School Association, which sought to preserve the German language in areas of German settlement outside the boundaries of the Reich; it was later renamed the Association for Germandom Abroad, in recognition of a substantial broadening of its remit to cover all aspects of German culture in the rest of the world.
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More nationalist associations were to follow. The most significant, perhaps, was the Navy League, founded in 1898 with money from the arms manufacturer Krupp, who had an obvious interest in the construction of a big German navy being approved by the Reichstag at the time. Within a decade it was dwarfing the other nationalist groups, with a membership totalling well over 300,000 if affiliated organizations were counted as well. By contrast, the other nationalist pressure-groups were seldom able to exceed a membership of around 50,000, and the Pan-Germans seemed to be permanently stuck below the 20,000 mark.
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Most of these pressure-groups were run by professional agitators like August Keim, an army officer whose journalistic activities had caused him promotion problems. Such men were prominent in a number of nationalist associations and often provided their radical driving force; Keim, for example, was a leading figure in both the Navy League and the Defence League and founded other, less well known associations such as the German League for the Prevention of the Emancipation of Women (1912), which aimed to send women back to the home to bear more children for the Reich.
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Alongside such marginal men were ranged disgruntled notables seeking a new outlet for their political drive in an increasingly democratic world, where the deference to the propertied and the educated that had sustained the electoral fortunes of the National Liberals and other parties further to the right from the 1860s to the 1880s no longer functioned effectively. Many of these agitators had achieved their status by working hard to get a university degree then moving up slowly through the ranks of the less fashionable parts of the civil service. Here, too, a degree of social anxiety was an important driving force. Identification, perhaps over-identification, with the German nation gave all the leading figures in the nationalist associations, whatever their background, a sense of pride and belonging, and an object for commitment and mobilization.
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The membership of these various organizations also frequently overlapped, and it was far from unusual for two or more of them to make common cause in a particular political fight despite their frequent personal and political rivalries.

Alongside the specific aims that each organization followed, and irrespective of the frequent internal rows which plagued them, the nationalist associations generally agreed that Bismarck’s work of building the German nation was woefully incomplete and urgently needed to be pushed to its conclusion. Increasingly, too, they began to think that the Reich leadership was failing to do its duty in this respect. The nationalists’ beliefs were laid bare in a particularly dramatic way in 1912, when the Chairman of the Pan-German League, the lawyer Heinrich Class, writing under a pseudonym, published a manifesto with the arresting title:
If I Were the Kaiser.
He was not modest in his aims. If he had the power wielded by Wilhelm II, Class let it be known, he would deal first of all with the internal enemies of the Reich, the Social Democrats and the Jews. The Social Democratic victory in the Reichstag elections earlier in the year was, he thundered, the result of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the nation. The Jews were subverting German art, destroying German creativity, corrupting the German masses. If he were Kaiser, Class wrote, they would immediately lose their civil rights and be classified as aliens. The Social Democrats would be banned and their leading officials, parliamentary deputies, newspaper editors and union secretaries would be expelled from Germany. The Reichstag suffrage would be restructured so as to give more voting power to the educated and the propertied, and only the best men would be allowed to bear office. National rallies and patriotic festivals would rally the mass of the people to the national cause.
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Internal pacification, the nationalists argued, would include the suppression of minority cultures such as that of the Poles in the eastern provinces of Prussia, driving them from their landholdings, banning the use of their language, and using force if necessary to bring the supposedly inferior and uncivilized ‘Slavs’ to heel. Led by Class, the Pan-Germans and their allies advocated a massive arms build-up, greater even than that already launched by the Navy Laws from 1898 onwards. This would be followed by a war in which Germany would conquer Europe and annex German-speaking areas such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and Austria. They brushed aside any consideration for the other nationalities who inhabited these areas, and passed over the linguistic and cultural differences that made it unlikely that even Flemish separatists in Belgium, let alone other kinds of political dissident, would support them. They added on Romania for strategic reasons. And they noted that the Belgian and Dutch overseas possessions, including, for example, the Congo, would provide the basis for a massive new colonial empire that would far outweigh its British counterpart. Borrowing eclectically from Nietzsche, Langbehn, Darwin, Treitschke and other writers, and frequently vulgarizing their ideas in the process, wrenching them out of context, or simplifying them to the point of unrecognizability, the Pan-Germans and their nationalist allies founded their ideology on a world-view that had struggle, conflict, ‘Aryan’ ethnic superiority, antisemitism and the will to power as its core beliefs.
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However, at the same time as they harboured these almost limitless ambitions for German world domination, the Pan-German League and the other nationalist associations also sounded a strong note of alarm, even despondency, about Germany’s current state and future prospects. The German people, they believed, were surrounded by enemies, from the ‘Slavs’ and ‘Latins’ encircling Germany from without, to the Jews, Jesuits, socialists and sundry subversive agitators and conspirators undermining it from within. Pan-German racism was expressed in the linguistic usage through which they reduced every nation to a simple, uniformly acting racial entity - ‘Germandom’, ‘Slavdom’, ‘Anglo-Saxondom’ or ‘Jewdom’. Other races were outbreeding the Germans and threatening to ‘flood’ them; or, like the French, they were declining and therefore exerting a corrupting influence through their decadence. The extreme nationalists portrayed themselves as voices in the wilderness; unless they were heard, it would be too late. Desperate peril demanded desperate remedies. Only by a return to the racial roots of the German nation in the peasantry, the self-employed artisan and small businessman, and the traditional nuclear family, could the situation be rescued. The big cities were sinks of un-German immorality and disorder. Strong measures were needed to restore order, decency and a properly German concept of culture. A new Bismarck was needed, tough, ruthless, unafraid to pursue aggressive policies at home and abroad, if the nation was to be saved.
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As time went on, the nationalist associations became more vocal in their criticism of the German government for what they regarded as its weakness at home and abroad. Jolted into radical action by the Social Democratic election victory of 1912, following on what they regarded as the humiliating outcome for Germany of an international crisis over Morocco the previous year, the usually quarrelsome nationalist associations joined forces in support for the newly founded Defence League, which aimed to do for the army what the Navy League had done for the fleet. The new organization was far more independent from the government than the Navy League was; it shared in full the views of the Pan-Germans, and it achieved a membership of 90,000 within two years of its foundation in 1912, giving the Pan-Germans the kind of mass base they had always failed to create for themselves. Meanwhile, the Pan-Germans launched a joint campaign with the Colonial Society to persuade the government to stop recognizing the legal validity of marriages between German settlers and black Africans in the colonies. Prominent members of the Conservative Party began to work with the Pan-Germans. In August 1913 the Agrarian League, a huge pressure-group of large and small landowners with very close ties to the Conservatives, joined with the Central Association of German Industrialists and the national organization of artisans and handicraftsmen to form the ‘Cartel of Productive Estates’. Not only did the Cartel have a membership running into the millions, it also incorporated many of the central aims and beliefs of the Pan-Germans, including the sidelining or elimination of the Reichstag, the suppression of the Social Democrats and the pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy up to and including the launching of a major war of conquest.
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These extreme nationalist pressure-groups were not the product of any kind of manipulative strategy by Wilhelmine elites; they were a genuinely populist movement of political mobilization from below. But they had no constituency at all in the working class; the furthest their reservoir of support went down the social scale was to white-collar workers and clerks, one of whose trade unions, the virulently antisemitic German-National Commercial Employees’ Union, railed against the Jewish business interests which they supposed were keeping their members’ wages down, and attacked the intrusion of women into secretarial and administrative positions as the product of Jewish attempts to destroy the German family.
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Yet the new prominence of the nationalist associations from 1912 onwards put huge pressure on the German government. It became even greater as the Pan-Germans won new friends in the right-wing press. One of the Pan-Germans’ supporters, the retired general Konstantin von Gebsattel, impressed by
If I Were the Kaiser,
composed a lengthy memorandum calling for a fight against ‘Jewish machinations and rabble-rousing by Social Democratic leaders’, a Reich that was ‘not parliamentarian’, a Kaiser who really ruled instead of being just a figurehead and conducted an aggressive foreign policy with an ‘armoured fist’, and a franchise which restricted the influence of the masses to a minimum.

In the proposals put forward in the memorandum, Jews were to be treated as aliens, barred from acquiring land and deprived of their property if they emigrated. They were to be excluded from state-run professions such as the civil service, the law, the universities and the army. Baptism, of course, made no difference to the fact that someone was a Jew in Gebsattel’s eyes; anyone with more than a quarter of ‘Jewish blood’ in his or her veins was to be treated as a Jew and not a German. The ‘Jewish press’ was to be closed down. All this was necessary because, he said, the whole life of Germany was dominated by ‘the Jewish spirit’, which was superficial, negative, destructively critical and materialistic. It was time for the true German spirit to re-emerge - deep, positive and idealistic. All this was to be brought about by an effective
coup d’état
from above, secured by the declaration of a military state of siege and the introduction of martial law. Gebsattel and his friend the Pan-German leader Heinrich Class regarded the memorandum as moderate in tone. The alleged moderation had a reason; the idea was to send it to Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, the heir to the throne, who was known for his sympathies with the nationalist cause. He in turn forwarded it with enthusiasm to his father and to the man currently holding the office of state once occupied by Bismarck, Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg.
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Bethmann and the Kaiser courteously but firmly rejected Gebsattel’s ideas, regarding them as impractical and indeed dangerous to the stability of the monarchy. The Reich Chancellor admitted that the ‘Jewish Question’ was an area in which there were ’great dangers for Germany’s further development’. But, he went on, Gebsattel’s draconian solutions could not be taken seriously. The Kaiser poured more cold water on the proposals by warning his son that Gebsattel was a ‘weird enthusiast’ whose ideas were often ‘downright childish’. Still, he too conceded that even if it was economically inadvisable to expel the Jews from Germany, it was important to ‘exclude the Jewish influence from the army and the administration and as far as possible to limit it in all the activities of art and literature’. In the press, too, he considered, ‘Jewdom has found its most dangerous happy-hunting-ground’, though a general restriction of press freedom as advocated by Gebsattel would, he thought, be counter-productive. Antisemitic stereotypes had thus penetrated to the highest levels of the state, reinforced in the Kaiser’s case by his own reading of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,
which he praised as a wake-up call to the German nation. Moreover, as the Pan-Germans, undeterred, stepped up their criticism of the Chancellor both in public and behind the scenes, Bethmann felt increasingly constrained to adopt a tough line in his foreign policy, with fateful results in the crisis that led to the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914.
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