Republican and Fascist Germany

Themes and Variations in the History of Weimar and the Third Reich, 1918-1945

John Hiden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781317871811
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities
• Index: History

This important addition to modern German studies treats the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich as a continuum, exploring its themes through the 1920s and 1930s without artificial breaks. John Hiden looks at key issues in political, social and economic history, and in international relations. He highlights Germany's potentially constructive role in Europe before Hitler; analyses the country's structural problems; considers the importance of personalities and personal responsibility in the period; and examines the legacy of the Third Reich to postwar Germany. Filled with energy and ideas, the book has an intellectual substance far beyond its relatively modest length.

CHAPTER ONE
Policy for the sake of the Republic

The category of ‘strangely neglected topics’ revered by Kingsley Amis’s young history don, Jim Dixon, would not embrace the Treaty of Versailles, the central plank of the peace settlement at the end of the First World War. Bitterness could be expected from the losers but even winners were highly critical of the treaty. John Maynard Keynes’s gloomy 1920 diatribe, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, is simply one of the more successful titles on the subject jostling for space on library shelves. Leader of the Labour opposition in Britain, Ramsey MacDonald, said at roughly the same time that Europe was ‘beholding an act of madness unparalleled in history’.¹ Much later, in 1934, a study made by Gathorne-Hardy for the Royal Institute of International Affairs reported that ‘few apologists can now be found for the settlement’. This was partly because mistakes arose from hasty judgements reached in the troubled atmosphere following the Armistice, which militated against ‘sober decisions or a durable peace’. Yet the writer also criticized the idealistic aspects of peacemaking, remarking of self-determination that ‘the cardinal inherent vice of the doctrine lies in the fact that to apply it in practice inevitably involves its violation’.²

1. Cited in F. L. Carsten, Britain and the Weimar Republic. The British Documents (London, 1984), pp. 27–8.

2. G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs 1920 to 1934 (London, 1934), pp. 12, 16.

The peace treaties came to be seen as a central cause of the Second World War, an idea exemplified by E. H. Carr’s description of the interwar period as the ‘twenty years crisis’. Carr located unrest in the division created by the settlement between powers who were ‘satisfied’ – Great Britain, France, the United States - and those who were ‘dissatisfied’. The latter included Germany, Soviet Russia, Japan and Italy.³ German resentment against the Versailles terms, as well as the manner in which they were presented, was certainly one factor aiding Hitler’s rise to power. So, too, was the absence of a ‘timely or far sighted attempt to revise the peace treaties and to continue the necessarily unfinished work of the Paris Peace Conference’.⁴ On the other hand the post-war order manifested signs of better health in the mid-1920s, before its immune system was fatally undermined by the Great Depression. In this sense the Versailles peace itself can hardly be said to have ‘caused’ the Second World War.

3. E. H. Carr, Conditions of Peace (London, 1942), p. xi.

4. G. Schulz, Revolutions and Peace Treaties, 1917–1920 (London, 1972), p. 236.

THE CONDITIONS OF PEACE

Between the Reich’s surrender to superior military force in the autumn of 1918 and the signature of the Treaty of Versailles in the following summer harsh lessons were learned in the new international realities. The first was the Allied refusal to allow the Weimar Republic to negotiate at the peace conference. The German Foreign Minister, Count Ulrich Brockdorff-Rantzau, regarded this as inconsistent with President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, on which the Armistice had broadly been based. The throng of German officials and experts geared up to brief Germany’s six-man peace delegation shared the frustration, prompting Brockdorff-Rantzau to violate protocol by receiving the draft peace terms on 7 May from a seated position. Among the provisions causing most offence was that charging Germany with responsibility for bringing the war about. The Allies’ largely negative response to the German counterproposals of 29 May fell short of the sensitive, but whether there was a tactful way of reminding Germany of its defeat is open to doubt. After heated debates in the National Assembly the new SPD-Centrist coalition under Gustav Bauer announced that ‘Surrendering to superior force but without retracting its opinion regarding the unheard of injustice of the peace conditions the government of the German Republic therefore declares its readiness to accept and sign the peace conditions imposed by the Allied and Associated Governments.’

Criticism of the territorial settlement at Versailles evoked rejoinders about the Reich’s own harsh settlement with Russia under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Yet precisely that remembered image of their dominion made it harder for Germans to face the pruning of the Reich’s territory after 1919, particularly where changes benefited Poland. A visible token of the shift in relative power was the creation of the Polish ‘corridor’ - linking Poland to the Baltic sea at Danzig. It absorbed West Prussia and Posen (Poznan) from Germany and isolated East Prussia. Marienwerder and Allenstein, two districts of West and East Prussia, were allowed to remain with Germany only after plebiscites in 1920. An inconclusive vote on Upper Silesia in 1921 resulted in a partition of the area between Germany and Poland. The German-speaking city of Danzig became a ‘Free City’ under League supervision. It fell within the Polish customs frontier, however, and its foreign relations were under Poland’s direction. Germany had to relinquish control over Memel – which local Germans described as ‘our river but not our border’. It, too, was under Allied supervision until its seizure by Lithuania in 1923.⁵ The German Foreign Office viewed the cession of the Hultschin district to Czechoslovakia as less worrying. It sought to avoid anything ‘which might be construed as partisanship in the conflict between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia’, where economic prospects for the German minorities were more favourable than those confronting Germans left in Poland.⁶

5. On Danzig, C. M. Kimmich, The Free City. Danzig and German Foreign Policy 1919–1934 (New Haven, London, 1968), pp. 1–22. On Memel, V. Zalys, Ringen um Identität. Warum Litauen zwischen 1923 und 1939 im Memelgebiet keinen Erfolg hatte (Lüneberg, 1993), p. 37.

6. J. W. Bruegel, Czechoslovakia before Munich. The German Minorities and British Appeasement before Munich (Cambridge, 1973), p. 37.

In the west the settlement of the new German-Belgian and German–Danish borders was achieved with relative ease. The latter involved the division of Schleswig, the northern part joining Denmark whilst the southern area remained German. The districts of Eupen and Malmedy went to Belgium. The arrangements on the Franco-German border were more problematic. Inevitably, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France whilst the Saar was placed under an international commission of the League of Nations, with provisions for a plebiscite after fifteen years. Meanwhile the valuable mines fell into France’s waiting hands as part of the reparations for damage to French mining during the war. These provisions did not, however, satisfy the government in Paris. It wished to incorporate the Saar and indeed to exclude Germany from the Rhineland by restoring the borders of 1814. This idea was advanced on the eve of the Peace Conference by Marshal Foch and a few weeks later by the French cabinet, on the grounds that France could never be secure while Germany controlled the Rhineland militarily.⁷ Ultimately, the resistance of the British and American governments ensured the continuation of German sovereignty on both banks of the Rhine, although conditions were attached. One was the Allied occupation of the strategically important bridgeheads of Mainz, Coblenz and Cologne, as well as all German territories west of the Rhine. The Allied troops were to complete their evacuation over a fifteen-year period, possibly earlier if Germany demonstrated its goodwill and offered satisfactory guarantees of fulfilling its treaty obligations. In addition, the whole of the west bank of the Rhine was demilitarized, as well as a fifty-kilometre-wide strip on the east bank of the river.

7. Memo cited in P. S. Wandycz, France and her Eastern Allies 1919–1925. French–Czechoslovak–Polish Relations from the Paris Peace Conference to Locamo (Minneapolis, 1962), pp. 37–8.

The strategic weakening of Germany was completed by deep cuts in its armed forces. After 1919 the Weimar Republic was left with a regular army of 100,000 men and a navy of 15,000. The ban on conscription prevented any significant expansion of Germany’s military potential. Service in the new Reichswehr involved twelve years for the rank and file and twenty-five for officers, whilst no more than five per cent of effective forces could be replaced each year. The infamous and influential German General Staff, as well as the military academies and cadet schools were abolished. Mobilization measures or preparations for mobilization were forbidden. Severe restraints were placed on German war materials production. No offensive weapons, aeroplanes, tanks or submarines were permitted. With their powers of control and inspection under the Versailles Treaty the Allies had surely done what they could to bottle up Prussian militarism. Houdini himself might have refused the challenge. The rationale for leaving Germany virtually defenceless was, in the dry words of Part V of the peace treaty: ‘In order to render possible the initiation of a general limitation of the armaments of all nations.’ As if this were not enough, France was given, on 28 June 1919, treaties of guarantee by Britain and the United States, promising military support in the event of a German attack, although these lapsed in 1920. Having so to speak nailed down the coffin lid, the French sought to apply heavy weights too.

Germans felt that their territorial losses were harsh. As a result of the Treaty of Versailles more than 6 million Germans were left outside the new borders of the Weimar Republic. In the process 65,000 square kilometres of land were lost to the new Germany. The fact that union between Germany and Austria was expressly forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles was also regarded with great bitterness since popular opinion in both countries was then running in favour of Anschluss. The provision reinforced German arguments that the principle of self-determination was not applied fairly by the peace-makers. Territorial debits were completed with the loss of Germany’s colonies. The Reich’s African holdings were divided in the form of different classes of mandates, under the League of Nations, between Britain, South Africa, France and Belgium. A few small areas were annexed by France and Portugal. The Pacific territories were taken over by Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Japan.

To the reparations burden (considered in Chapter 5) must be added the depletion of Germany’s economic base through the loss of territories and possessions. A calculation of lost resources would include 14.6 per cent of Germany’s arable land, 74.5 per cent of its iron ore, 68.1 per cent of its zinc ore, 26 per cent of coal production, as well as the potash mines and textile industries of Alsace. German overseas investment was confiscated as was its property in enemy countries. Losses of shipping included all merchant ships in excess of 1,600 tons, half of the merchant fleet between 1,000 and 1,600 gross tons, a quarter of the fishing fleet and large quantities of rail locomotives and rolling stock. There were restrictions on German foreign trade through the imposition of a five-year ban on protective tariffs and the obligation of Germany to give the Allies most-favoured-nation treatment.⁸

8. A Survey of the Versailles Treaty’s text is in J. A. S. Grenville, The Major International Treaties 1914–1973. A History and Guide with Texts (London, 1974), pp. 59ff.

A NOTE ON GERMAN ‘REVISIONISM’

The debates in the National Assembly prior to 28 June made plain that Germans of every political hue would seek the revision of the peace terms, a process invariably regarded outside the Reich as harmful in itself. This arises partly from viewing Weimar foreign policy through the prism of the Third Reich. General accounts of the origins of ‘Hitler’s war’ in 1939 are legion but there are only two ‘standard’ works on Weimar foreign policy....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication Page
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1. Policy for the sake of the Republic
• 2. Democratic Prospects
• 3. The Parties
• 4. The Practice of Parliament
• 5. Governmental Plurality in the ‘Single-Party State’
• 6. Life at the Top; State Economic Policy and Big Business
• 7. Drudgery for Germany; The Path from Worker to Soldier of Labour
• 8. Feeding the Reich; Farmers and Politics
• 9. The Middle Classes; Angst and Reality
• 10. Policing the ‘People’s Community’
• 11. The ‘Racial War’ and its Legacy
• 12. The Quest for German Hegemony in Europe
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index