The Coming of the Third Reich (15 page)

The real purpose of Article 231, however, was to legitimize the imposition by the Allies of punitive financial reparations on Germany in order to compensate the French and the Belgians, in particular, for the damage caused by four and a quarter years of German occupation They seized over two million tons of merchant ships, five thousand railway engines and 136,000 coaches, 24 million tons of coal and much more. Financial reparations were to be paid in gold over a number of years stretching far into the future.
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just in case this did not prevent Germany from financing a reconstruction of its armed might, the Treaty also obliged the army to be restricted to a maximum strength of 100,000, and banned the use of tanks, heavy artillery and conscription. Six million German rifles, over 15,000 aeroplanes, more than 130,000 machine guns and a great deal of other military equipment had to be destroyed. The German navy was effectively dismantled and barred from building any large new ships, and Germany was not allowed to have an air force at all. Such were the terms with which the Germans were presented as the condition of peace by the Western Allies in 1918-19.
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II

All of this was greeted with incredulous horror by the majority of Germans.
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The sense of outrage and disbelief that swept through the German upper and middle classes like a shock wave was almost universal, and had a massive impact on many working-class supporters of the moderate Social Democrats as well. Germany’s international strength and prestige had been on an upward course since unification in 1871, so most Germans felt, and now, suddenly, Germany had been brutally expelled from the ranks of the Great Powers and covered in what they considered to be undeserved shame. Versailles was condemned as a dictated peace, unilaterally imposed without the possibility of negotiation. The enthusiasm which so many middle-class Germans had demonstrated for war in 1914 flipped over into burning resentment at the terms of peace four years later.

In fact, the peace settlement created new opportunities for German foreign policy in East-Central Europe, where the once-mighty Habsburg and Romanov empires had been replaced by a squabbling congeries of small and unstable states such as Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. The Treaty’s territorial provisions were mild compared with what Germany would have imposed on the rest of Europe in the event of victory, as the programme drawn up by the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in September 1914 had clearly indicated in principle, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, concluded with the defeated Russians in the spring of 1918, had graphically demonstrated in practice. A German victory would have led to a huge reparations bill being served on the defeated Allies, too, no doubt many times larger than that which Bismarck had sent to the French after the war of 1870-71. The reparations bills that Germany actually did have to pay from 1919 onwards were not beyond the country’s resources to meet and. not unreasonable given the wanton destruction visited upon Belgium and France by the occupying German armies. In many ways, the peace settlement of 1918-19 was a brave attempt at marrying principle and pragmatism in a dramatically altered world. In other circumstances it might have stood a chance of success. But not in the circumstances of 1919, when almost any peace terms would have been condemned by German nationalists who felt they had been unjustly cheated of victory.
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The lengthy Allied military occupation of parts of western Germany, along the Rhine valley, from the end of the war until almost the end of the 1920s, also aroused widespread resentment and intensified German nationalism in the areas affected. One Social Democrat, born in 1888, and previously a pacifist, reported later: ‘I came to feel the rifle butt of the French and became patriotic again.’
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Although the British and the Americans stationed troops in a large area of the Rhineland, it was the French, both there and in the Saar, who aroused the most resentment. Particular outrage was caused by their banning of German patriotic songs and festivals, their encouragement of separatist movements in the area, and their outlawing of radical nationalist groups. A miner in the Saarland alleged that the state mines’ new French owners expressed their Germanophobia in their harsh treatment of the workers.
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Passive resistance, particularly amongst patriotic minor state officials such as railway clerks, who refused to work for the new French authorities, encouraged a hatred of the politicians in Berlin who had accepted this state of affairs, and a rejection of German democracy for failing to do anything about it.
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But if the peace settlement outraged the majority of ordinary Germans, that was nothing to the effect it had on the apostles of extreme nationalism, notably the Pan-Germans. The Pan-Germans had greeted the outbreak of war in 1914 with unbounded enthusiasm, verging on ecstasy. For men like Heinrich Class, it was the fulfilment of a lifetime’s dream. Things seemed at last to be going their way. The hugely ambitious plans for territorial annexation and European hegemony drawn up by the Pan-German League before the war now seemed to have a chance of becoming reality, as the government, led by Bethmann Hollweg, drew up a set of war aims that came very close to them in their sweep and scope. Pressure-groups such as the industrialists, and parties such as the Conservatives, all clamoured for extensive new territories to be added to the German Reich after victory.
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But victory did not come and opposition to annexationism grew. In these circumstances, Class and the Pan-Germans began to realize that they needed to make another serious attempt to broaden the basis of their support in order to put pressure on the government again. But as they tried out various schemes of alliance with other groups to this end, they were suddenly outflanked by a new movement, launched by Wolfgang Kapp, a former civil servant, estate owner and associate of the business magnate and founder-member of the Pan-Germans, Alfred Hugenberg. For Kapp, no nationalist movement would succeed without a mass base; and in September 1917, he launched the German Fatherland Party, whose programme centred on annexationist war aims, authoritarian constitutional changes, and other planks of the Pan-German platform. Backed by Class, by industrialists, by the former Naval Secretary Alfred von Tirpitz, and indeed by all the annexationist groups including the Conservative Party, the new organization presented itself as being above the party-political fray, committed only to the German nation, not to any abstract ideology. Teachers, Protestant pastors, army officers and many others jumped on the bandwagon. Within a year, the Fatherland Party was claiming a membership of no less than one and a quarter million.
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But all was not quite as it seemed. For a start, the membership figures were inflated by a lot of double-counting of people who were enrolled both as individuals and as members of constituent organizations, so that the true number of people. who belonged was no more than 445,000, according to an internal memorandum of September 1918. And then, Class and the Pan-Germans were quickly pushed aside because the leadership thought their association would deter potential supporters from less extreme parts of the political spectrum. The Fatherland Party ran into a great deal of opposition from liberals, and encountered massive suspicion from the government, who banned officers and troops from joining and told civil servants they were not to help it in any way. The party’s ambition to recruit the working class was frustrated both by the Social Democrats, who levelled withering criticism at its divisive ideology, and from the war wounded, whose attendance (by invitation) at a Fatherland Party meeting in Berlin in January 1918 led to angry exchanges with the speakers and resulted in the super-patriots in the audience throwing them out of the meeting and the police being called in to break up the fighting. All of this pointed to the fact that the Fatherland Party was in effect another version of previous ultra-nationalist movements, even more dominated than they were by middle-class notables. It did nothing new to win working-class support, it did not have any working-class speakers, and for all its demagogy, it entirely lacked the common touch. It stayed firmly within the boundaries of respectable politics, eschewed violence, and revealed, more than anything else, the bankruptcy of conventional Pan-German political ambitions; a bankruptcy confirmed when the Pan-German League proved unable to cope with the new political world of postwar Germany and fell into sectarian obscurity after 1918.
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III

What transformed the extreme nationalist scene was not the war itself, but the experience of defeat, revolution and armed conflict at the war’s end. A powerful role was played here by the myth of the ‘front generation’ of 1914-18, soldiers bound together in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice in a heroic cause which overcame all political, regional, social and religious differences. Writers such as Ernst Jünger, whose book
Storm of Steel
became a best-seller, celebrated the experience of the fighting man and cultivated the rapid growth of nostalgia for the unity of the wartime years.
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This myth exercised a powerful appeal in particular over the middle classes, for whom hardships shared, both in reality and in spirit, with workers and peasants in the trenches during the war, provided material for nostalgic literary celebration in the postwar years.
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Many soldiers bitterly resented the outbreak of revolution in 1918. Units returning from the front sometimes disarmed and arrested workers’ and soldiers’ councils in the localities through which they passed.
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Some combatants were converted to radical nationalism as revolutionaries offered them insults rather than plaudits on their return, forcing them to tear off their epaulettes and abandon their allegiance to the black-white-red Imperial flag. As one such veteran later recalled:

On 15 November 1918 I was on the way from the hospital at Bad Nauheim to my garrison at Brandenburg. As I was limping along with the aid of my cane at the Potsdam station in Berlin, a band of uniformed men, sporting red armbands, stopped me, and demanded that I surrender my epaulettes and insignia. I raised my stick in reply; but my rebellion was soon overcome. I was thrown (down?), and only the intervention of a railroad official saved me from my humiliating position. Hate flamed in me against the November criminals from that moment. As soon as my health improved somewhat, I joined forces with the groups devoted to the overthrow of the rebellion.
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Other soldiers experienced an ‘ignominious’ and ‘humiliating’ home-coming in a Germany that had overthrown the institutions for which they had been fighting. ‘Was it for this’, one of them later asked, ‘that the fresh youth of Germany was mowed down in hundreds of battles?’
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Another veteran, who had lost his leg in combat and was in a military hospital on 9 November 1918, reported:

I shall never forget the scene when a comrade without an arm came into the room and threw himself on his bed crying. The red rabble, which had never heard a bullet whistle, had assaulted him and torn off all his insignia and medals. We screamed with rage. For this kind of Germany we had sacrificed our blood and our health, and braved all the torments of hell and a world of enemies for years.
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‘Who had betrayed us?’, another asked, and the answer was not long in coming: ‘bandits who wanted to reduce Germany to a shambles ... fiendish aliens.’
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Such feelings were not universal among the troops, and the experience of defeat did not turn all the veterans into political cannon-fodder for the extreme right. Large numbers of troops had deserted at the end of the war, faced with the overwhelming force of their Allied opponents, and showed no desire to continue fighting.
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Millions of working-class soldiers went back to their previous political milieu, among the Social Democrats, or gravitated towards the Communists.
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Some of the veterans’ pressure-groups were adamant that they never wanted themselves or anyone else to go through again the kind of experiences to which they had been subjected in 1914-18. Yet, in the end, ex-soldiers and their resentments did play a crucial part in fostering a climate of violence and discontent after the war was over, and the shock of adjusting to peacetime conditions pushed many towards the far right. Those who were already politically socialized into conservative and nationalist traditions found their views radicalized in the new political context of the 1920s. On the left, too, a new willingness to use violence was conditioned by the experience, real or vicarious, of the war.
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As distance grew from the war, so the myth of the ‘front generation’ generated a widespread feeling that the veterans who had sacrificed so much for the nation during the war deserved far better treatment than they actually got, a feeling naturally shared by many veterans themselves.
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