Germany 1918

 

GERMANY 1918 – 1945

 

In November 1918 the German army on the western front surrendered and Germany capitulated.  Germany’s allies, Austria-Hungary and Turkey also surrendered.  The German army was still an intact fighting force, but it had suffered significant defeats, mainly because of the arrival of fresh American troops.  The subsequent peace treaty, the Treaty of Versailles, was attended by all the main combatants except for Russia which had been knocked out of the war in 1917 and had concluded a separate peace with Germany, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.  The other defeated countries concluded separate peace treaties with the allies.  Heads of state and generals attended but also experts like the economist John Maynard Keynes.  Keynes believed that Germany should be supported economically because of its pivotal and essential role and that there should be an economic plan to rescue Europe.  The French, however, had witnessed the immense sacrifice of its people, it had been French soil that had been fought over.  They, therefore, favoured a settlement which came to be seen as vindictive designed to subdue and limit the German economy and armed forces and make it incapable of further military action.  The Germans had to accept a war guilt clause and had to accept the conditions of the settlement without negotiation.  Acceptance of the terms of the Versailles Treaty was regarded as a humiliation for Germany by members of the nationalist and far-right political community that included Adolph Hitler.  This group invented the legend that the German army had been stabbed in the back by Jews and Marxists and that the members of the civilian government who signed the Treaty were the ‘November criminals’.  By this time Erich Ludendorff, former Quartermaster of the German army, realised that events were no longer under his control, and he fled, wearing a disguise, to Sweden.  This meant that civilians who had not been in power during the war since Germany had been under direct military rule by Hindenburg and Ludendorff since 1916, were left to sign the Treaty.

Keyne’s subsequent book The Economic Consequences of the Peace outlined his views which were to be vindicated.  Both Germany and Italy used Keynesian economic methods to pull their economies out of the economic crisis that engulfed them in the 1920s and 30s.  Keynes realised that in the absence of an economic plan for Germany and hence Europe that Germany would gradually be overcome by extremists and that the Versailles Treaty guaranteed that a new war was inevitable. 

There were both left and right-wing putsches in the years following 1918 in Germany.  A Communist revolution in Berlin culminated in the assassination of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the KPD (Kommunist Partei Deutschland) by members of the Freikorps, a right-wing militia, and the Stahlhelm or steel helmets which consisted of army veterans.  In 1920 the Kapp putsch, orchestrated by right-wing opponents of the Weimar Republic, followed but was suppressed by forces loyal to the Republic.  This was not to be the last attempted putsch as the Weimar Republic attempted to integrate mass discontent in the wake of military defeat.

Following the conclusion of the armistice the Kaiser abdicated and went to live privately in Holland.  Prince Max of Baden became German Chancellor and began to establish the legislative and constitutional framework for the new Republic.  The HQ of the Republic was to be Weimar rather than Berlin, the traditional capital.  Furthermore, Berlin was too full of violence and discontent at this stage to be considered as German capital.  Weimar was a minor city in the German state of Thuringia.  It had been a significant cultural centre in the 18th and 19th centuries when major German writers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Frederich von Schiller both resided there.  By the 20th century Weimar was a relative backwater and symbolised cultural values rather than militarism, qualities that the new leaders of Germany sought to promote.  However, Berlin was still the cultural, scientific, and economic powerhouse of Germany.

The Weimar Republic was to have an elected Reichstag based on proportional representation.  The head of government was the Chancellor (Kanzler), usually the leader of the party with the most seats.  The head of state was an elected President whose status was mainly symbolic although he was able to balance out the powers of government and legislature.  Elections to the Reichstag were to take place every 5 years and presidential elections every 7 years.  Proportional representation meant that it was almost impossible for any one party to gain a majority, so government was mainly a case of coalitions that constantly shifted.  PR also had the effect of nurturing small anti-democratic parties like the Communist Party and the NSDAP, both of whom were committed to the destruction of the Republic. 

During the 1920s important moves were made to reform the terms of the Versailles settlement.  The Dawes and Young plans were attempts by American financiers to resuscitate the German economy on terms highly favourable to them.  The Kelogg-Briand pact was a re-negotiation of the repayments that Germany had been forced to make at Versailles, but this time Germany had a say in the terms.  These initiatives were the work of Gustave Stresemann, German Chancellor, in response to hyperinflation caused by economic collapse.  Stresemann attempted to re-float the German mark which had become valueless by creating the Rentenmark and Rentenbanks linked to the gold standard to maintain the new currencies value.

These political moves all took place against a backdrop of continuing political violence, culminating in the assassination of Walter Rathenau, Minister of Finance, and a Jew, by members of the Freikorps.  In 1923, a small Bavarian right-wing party, the NSDAP, led by Adolph Hitler, attempted to march on Berlin in imitation of Benito Mussolini’s Italian fascist movement’s march on Rome.  The putsch occurred in Munich and came to be known as the “beer hall putsch”.  The Bavarian police, armed with carbines, met the Nazi stormtroopers with a volley of shots and the march on Berlin collapsed.  Goering was shot in the leg but escaped and left Germany for Sweden.  Hitler fell, he had dislocated his shoulder.  Hitler was gaoled for his part in the coup and went to Landsberg gaol where he began to write his life story Mein Kampf.  (My Struggle) He received a short gaol sentence of 5 years for treason and was released within a year on good conduct.  A Communist who committed treason would have been executed.

The Nazis, as they came to be known, were now a banned organisation.  The other parties included the SPD (Socialisiches Partei Deutschland) which supported the Republic and its legalistic basis.  The first President of the Republic, Frederich Ebert, had been a member of the SPD.  The SPD were a centre left party that believed in legality and the gradual achievement of Socialism through the reform of Capitalism.  To the left of them was the KPD which believed that gradualism was doomed and that only Communist revolution could achieve Socialism.  The KPD had a significant number of delegates in the Reichstag which meant that the left-wing vote was split.  This gave the right an opportunity.  Both the SPD and the KPD had their own paramilitary organisations like the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung) or Brownshirts because of their brown paramilitary uniforms.  These were the SPD’s Reichsbanner and the KPD’s Red Front Fighters.  The SA were terrified of the RFF who they recognised could deal out and return everything they received.

Another supporter of the Republic was the Centre Party (Zentrum) which was Catholic and conservative.  Support for the Centre Party was found mainly in the south and west of Germany.  Catholics and Socialists had suffered repression in Bismarck’s time because Bismarck had attempted to secularise education, for instance, and resisted the international reach of the Vatican.  One of the last legitimate Weimar Chancellors, Heinrich Bruning, and his successor Franz von Papen, belonged to the Centre Party.  Support for the NSDAP was mainly in the north, east and centre of Germany among Protestants.  Later Hitler was to pacify the Vatican by signing a concordat with the Pope.

Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933 by President Hindenburg and set about establishing a one-party state with himself as Leader (Fuehrer).  The event that offered him the opportunity to do this was the burning of the Reichstag or parliament by a loner, a Dutch communist called Marius van der Lubbe.  This gave Hitler the opportunity to use President Hindenburg’s special powers to suppress opponents and fundamental democratic freedoms.  It also involved considerable illegality on the part of the Nazi movement.  Members of the SPD and the KPD were rounded up by the Brownshirts and taken into “protective custody”, a euphemism meaning that they were interned without trial or rights in concentration camps and gaols.


 

THE THIRD REICH 1933 – 39

 

Hitler initiated his Chancellorship by destroying opposition parties like the SPD and KPD.  The leadership of the SPD went into exile in Czechoslovakia, a liberal country with an intact democratic system, and many leading members of the KPD fled to Russia where they faced persecution.

Hitler’s next great opponent were conservative forces within Germany like the army and the church.  The German churches, however, required a more careful, subtle strategy.  In 1933 Hitler signed a Concordat with the Pope which established a doctrine of non-interference by the Vatican in Germany’s internal affairs.  In return the Catholic Centre party was dissolved.  The Concordat was never entirely successful, but Hitler did not dare revoke it.  To the Nazis, the Catholic church with its international organisation and structure, was still a major threat as it had been for former Chancellor Otto von Bismarck who had waged a campaign against it in the 1880s.  The Protestant church which was both anti-Communist and anti-Semitic (since the days of Martin Luther) and had no international organisation like the Catholics, was more pliable.  It became divided into a Nazi sponsored church called the German Christian church and the Confessing Church which opposed some elements of Nazi doctrine such as the sterilisation programme for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped.  Leading protesters like Pastor Niemoeller were sent to concentration camps like Dachau.

Nazi coordination (Gleichschaltung) of the country meant that even innocuous, non-political activities now came under the auspices of the party.  Coordination affected every part of society.  There was also the police state.  Free speech in social contexts was now outlawed under the law against “malicious gossip”.  German civilians could be denounced to the Gestapo by friends, neighbours and even their children.  Opponents were put in “protective custody” and removed to concentration camps.  The free press was eliminated and only Nazi newspapers like the Volkischer Beobachter (Racial Observer) and Julius Streicher’s Der Stormer (The Attacker) were permitted.

German businesses were gradually Aryanised meaning that Jewish owners were bullied out of companies and, from 1933 onwards, Nazi racial laws banned Jews from the Civil Service.  Jews comprised only 1% of the German population and they were among the most loyal and conforming citizens.  Nazi propaganda aimed to whip up hysterical antisemitism and racial hatred.  Antisemitism served the purposes of the dictatorship and was encouraged when the regime’s popularity began to decline.  In 1935 the Nuremburg laws codified antisemitism, even though it was still unclear as to what exactly was meant by the term ‘Jew’?  Was it a religious or a racial term?  Many German Jews were secularised and no longer practised their religion, so did the new laws apply to them?  The Nuremburg laws sought to clarify these matters, but their underlying rationale was arbitrary like many other attempts at racial legislation. 

Hitler was also able to calm down the pogroms and antisemitic attacks.  For instance, during the Olympics he had to incorporate four half-Jews into the German team when the USA, among other countries, threatened a boycott.  Antisemitic banners and posters were taken down around Garmisch Partenkirchen, for members of the international sporting community were arriving and Hitler recognised that the Olympics were a flagship for the regime.

The first political crisis of the Third Reich occurred in late June 1934.  Hitler came under pressure from President Hindenburg to supress radical elements in the Brownshirts, particularly Hitler’s friend and erstwhile ally Ernst Roehm who was calling for a second revolution which probably meant a progressive takeover by anti-capitalist elements within the SA.  On the infamous Night of the Long Knives (Nacht der Langenen Messer) Roehm was liquidated as were elements of the SA and many of Hitler’s former critics such as the leader of the northern wing of the NSDAP and its key organiser, Gregor Strasser.  Other victims included former Chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher who helped Hitler into power.  He was killed along with his wife Elizabeth.  A priest who had helped Hitler with his German grammar when he was writing Mein Kampf was eliminated too.  The event was depicted by Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment, as the defeat of a left-wing and aristocratic putsch.  The law was subsequently altered to allow legitimacy for Hitler’s acts but, in truth, the putsch was an illusion.  Afterwards, Hitler received a telegram of congratulations from President Hindenburg.  Edgar Junge who had written a speech for former Chancellor Franz von Papen which he delivered at the University of Marburg, criticising the violence of the SA, was also executed.  Von Papen was fortunate to escape with his life, for his assassination could not have been explained since he was close to President Hindenburg. He was made ambassador to Austria and effectively sidelined.

Following this pivotal event President Hindenburg died.  Instead of a new Presidential election, Hitler incorporated the Chancellorship into the Presidency, thus assuming both roles, and called himself the Leader (der Fuehrer).  In effect this removed all the careful checks and balances that had been installed in the German constitution at the beginning of the Weimar Republic.  The Republic was finished, and Germany had become a one-party state.  The assassination of Roehm and other elements of the SA was vital in ensuring the loyalty of the army to the Third Reich.  Without the support of the police and the army, as had been seen in the Putsch of 1923 in Munich, the Nazis would have been unable to rule effectively.  Every member of the German army now had to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler himself, thus binding the army much closer to the person of the Leader.

Hitler set to work to address the economic crisis triggered by the Wall Street Crash in 1929.  He recognised that Germany needed cars and motorways.  Unemployment was critical and had risen to unprecedented levels.  Hitler initiated a programme to build motorways (Autobahn) paying for the project by printing or borrowing money.  Ultimately only 20% of the road building programme was ever completed.  What really revitalised the economy was rearmament and conscription which was re-introduced in 1935.  Hitler realised this by repudiating the Versailles Treaty which had stated that the German army must consist of only 100,000 soldiers, tanks and aircraft were prohibited.  Most German now had jobs and, whatever their personal reservations were about the regime, most non-Jewish Germans accepted its achievements.

Other projects included the Strength through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) programme which provided holidays, sports opportunities, and cultural trips for many Germans at a time when few Germans moved outside their area or played sports like tennis or golf which were seen as the preserve of the middle and upper classes.  Block bookings of cruise ships, sports facilities, and theatres brought opportunities to millions of working-class Germans which had hitherto been totally outside their experience.  However, members of the party or the Gestapo would always be present on these holidays to make sure that ideological indoctrination was still ongoing, and no one made the mistake of speaking freely.  A massive Strength through Joy building project at Prora on the Baltic Island of Rugen was abandoned at the beginning of the war.

The Nazis also initiated a Winter Aid programme, consisting of unofficial donations (and some official donations too) collected by members of the SA.  The donations were intended to help the poor and needy.

Hitler had begun his career as a would-be artist and regarded culture as central to his plan for the Third Reich.  The infamous exhibition of degenerate art of 1936-7 went on tour round Germany consisted of works by artists like Kandinsky, Picasso, Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Edward Munch.  The exhibition proved incredibly popular, roughly one million people attended it.  It was intended to point out the failings of abstract and experimental art.  Hitler simultaneously organised an exhibition of art that he felt represented National Socialist values at the Haus der deutschen Kunst in Munich, (an art gallery designed on the Neo-Classical principles approved by Hitler himself).  Hitler rejected cosmopolitan, modernist art movements like surrealism, cubism, and expressionism in favour of his own taste for pointless kitsch and gigantic realist statues of thrusting German supermen. 

Music was less easy to police since it is more abstract than the other arts but obviously any composer with Jewish connections was repressed, even substantial figures like Richard Strauss who the Nazi regime favoured and promoted.  Strauss had collaborated with librettist Hugo von Hoffmanstahl on various operas, but he happened to be Jewish.  Even some of Mozart’s operas were supressed since Mozart’s first librettist Lorenzo da Ponte was also a Jew.  Perhaps the only authentic and major German musical work completed in the Nazi era was by former war veteran and Munich composer Carl Orff.  This was his Carmina Burana and its primitive, powerful outlines and content indicate immense energy, dynamism and movement, qualities admired by the Nazis (although its perhaps better known today as the accompaniment to an advert for Old Spice after shave tonic).  However, the Nazis criticised the libretto which was in Latin and therefore unpatriotic and contrary to authentic German values. 

The only major German writer to remain was the Nobel Prize winning playwright Gerhard Hauptmann who had become famous for his play Die Webern (The Weavers), an account of an uprising by discontented Silesian weavers in the 19th century.  But Hauptmann was too old now to leave.  His involvement with projects like the racial hygiene movement placed him on the lunatic fringe.  Another Nobel Prize winning author was novelist Thomas Mann.  Mann was married to the daughter of an eminent Jewish family in Munich and his liberal values were at odds with National Socialism, so he departed for Switzerland.  His brother Heinrich Mann, a more vocal opponent of the Nazis, fled to France.  These writers were important enough not to depend on the domestic market for their income and they could virtually live anywhere.  The only major literary figure to support the Nazis was Gottfried Benn who had made his reputation before and after WW1 with his expressionist poetry.

In this period 1933-39 Hitler’s foreign policy was based on re-armament and repudiation of the hated Versailles Treaty, which Keynes had defined as a ‘Carthaginian peace’ meaning that it was harsh and vindictive.  Hitler’s first move in international politics was a plebiscite that returned the Saarland, a coal mining region in the West, to Germany.  This was followed by the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1935-6.  Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty the Rhineland was not allowed to be occupied by the German military.  When Germany had threatened to renege on its payments under the treaty in 1923, the French army had marched in and stripped assets and resources.  Hitler pushed a force of 3,000 soldiers up to the frontier backed up by a further force of 30,000 and gave them orders to rush back over the border if the French began to mobilise.  In the event, there was no response and Hitler’s gamble had paid off. 

Hitler’s next move was the creation of Greater Germany (Grossdeutschland), an ideal of the pan-German movement which had demanded the incorporation of all Germans within an enlarged German Reich.  In practice this meant an Anschluss or connection with Austria.  In 1934 an attempted Nazi putsch following the assassination of Austrian dictator Englebert Dolfuss had been suppressed and Dolfuss was replaced by Kurt von Schuschnigg.  By 1936 political union was now welcomed and the German army marched across the border encountering no opposition.  The British informed Schuschnigg that they could not help him.  Hitler’s homeland was now part of an expanded German Reich.

Hitler now viewed the minority German community living in the border region of Czechoslovakia as another opportunity to expand the Reich.  However, at this point opposition to Hitler’s plans from Britain and France resulted in the Munich Agreement of 1938.  British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain travelled to Munich and made an agreement with Hitler that effectively surrendered the Sudetenland to Germany and offered a guarantee of peace with Britain for 10 years.  In the event the agreement only lasted for two years.  The German army moved into the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, a rich country with democratic traditions and an effective army, was dismembered.  What is now the Czech Republic, became the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.  Territory was also ceded to Poland and Hungary.  The west’s policy of appeasement had failed, Hitler had expanded the Reich, seized large new territories, more much needed manpower including the important Skoda works in the Czech Republic, a large arms industry, and a well-equipped professional army too.  Hitler now turned his gaze to Poland.

Paul Murphy

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