A Perfidious Distortion of History
Page 14
Part IV of the treaty, ‘German Rights and Interests outside Germany’, began with the German colonies (Articles 119–127). In its response to the Versailles Peace Treaty, Germany claimed to have been an exemplary colonial power, having abolished ‘devastating and incessant predatory warfare between the tribes’ and the ‘high-handedness of the chiefs and witch-doctors and the kidnapping of slaves and the slave trade’. All told, Germany had always looked to the welfare of the natives. In particular, it had brought peace and order to its colonies, and a well-organised system of native education provided vocational and agricultural schooling. The Allies dismissed these claims. They referred to pre-war studies, private and official, conducted in Germany into the Reich’s colonial administration, which pointed to cruel and methodical repression, arbitrary requisition of territory, and various forms of forced labour. 17 The first administration of Heinrich Ernst Göring (the father of the notorious Nazi) in German South-West Africa stood out for its brutality. The year 1904 saw the twentieth century’s first genocide, when General Lothar von Trotha drove the Herero people into the Namibian desert, where up to 100,000 perished from thirst and starvation. 18
The Allies’ accusation of German colonial maladministration was an example of the pot calling the kettle black, and with hindsight the loss of the colonies was a blessing. None of the other colonisers had objected to the German empire’s belated acquisition of territory overseas, as the richest pickings had long been made. In terms of nineteenth-century colonialism, the German possessions in Africa and the Pacific yielded few returns and had to be subsidised, and they did not provide an outlet for Germany’s rapidly expanding population. By 1913 the number of Germans in the African colonies totalled 18,362, many of whom were military and administrative staff and temporary residents engaged in railway construction. The actual number of German settlers would have been around ten thousand, most of them in German South-West Africa.
Economically, the colonies provided Germany with only 2 per cent of its so-called ‘colonial wares’: cotton, rubber, tobacco, and copra palm kernels. Less than a third of one per cent of Germany’s total foreign commerce came from the African colonies, and trade with the Pacific Islands was even less. By the time the twentieth-century mining boom had reached Africa and the Pacific (and in particular New Guinea), national liberation movements had brought the mandate system to an end. The seeds of anti-colonialism were being planted at Paris even while the peacemaking process was in progress. Ho Chi Minh, a young Vietnamese working as a kitchen hand at the Ritz Hotel, presented a petition seeking Vietnam’s independence from France. 19 As the French and Americans were to find out decades later, it would have been wise to have listened to him.
The loss of its colonies meant that Germany was spared humiliation and cost when, after World War II, liberation movements in ‘Third World’ countries pushed out their European overlords. The German population of what had been German South-West Africa supported the Union of South Africa, with its apartheid system. When the African National Congress put an end to apartheid, Nelson Mandela returned the government of the former mandate to its original inhabitants. Like other white minorities of southern Africa, the German settlers acquiesced peacefully, and in Namibia, as the ex-colony is now called, black and white now live in harmony.
Treaty Articles 128 to 158 specified that treaties made by Germany with a number of states in North Africa and Asia 20 previous to and during the war were to be invalidated. The most important of these concerned the Chinese Shantung peninsula (Articles 156–158) where, since 1898, Germany had held a 99-year lease for 100 square miles at Kiachow Bay in the south. Here, at Tsingtao, they constructed a harbour where the German Cruiser Squadron was stationed. Tsingtao was overrun by the Japanese in the early months of the war, and they expanded their base far beyond the territory leased to Germany. The Allies, keen to secure continued Japanese assistance in East Asia and the Pacific, had assured Japan in 1917 that it could take over from Germany in Shantung after the war, but U.S. delegates at the peace conference objected to the acquisition. Under pressure to finalise the treaty in the last days of April, Wilson agreed to a compromise: Japan could take over Germany’s economic rights in Shantung — the port, the railways, and the mines — but had to pull out its occupation forces. When the Chinese delegates were handed these terms, they left the conference. Japan withdrew from Shantung in 1922, but invaded the Chinese mainland, including Shantung, fifteen years later. It was the beginning of a war and an occupation that was to take the life of twenty million Chinese.
Part V of the treaty — Military, Naval and Airforces (Articles 159–221) — was severe. Germany had to reduce its army to 100,000 men, of whom only 4,000 could be officers. The latter were allowed to serve for 25 years; the other ranks, for twelve. Germany was also banned from possessing tanks or armoured cars, heavy guns, poison gas, or other chemical weapons. Only a limited amount of smaller armaments was exempt. Likewise, the navy was to be reduced to 36 smaller ships and 15,000 personnel, and Germany was allowed no submarines or military aircraft. Arms and ammunition could only be produced in a number of designated plants. In addition to the Articles on the Rhineland referred to above, all existing stocks of weapon and fortifications in the region had to be destroyed. There were to be restrictions on the manpower and training of organisations such as the police, customs, and coastguards. Private societies such as veteran’s associations were not to pursue military goals. The system of cadet students in high schools and universities was to be discontinued. These restrictions were aimed at reducing the likelihood of renewed German aggression.
It was characteristic of the Peace Treaty and the peacemaking process that what was demanded on paper and what happened in reality did not match. ‘Military men’, comments Versailles expert Stephen Schuker, ‘no more believed in the permanent disarmament of a major industrial nation than they gave credence to the tooth-fairy’. 21 Implementation of the 62 disarmament articles was to be carried out by the Germans themselves, supervised by an Inter-Allied Military Control Commission (IAMCC) in an arrangement characterised by one historian as ‘like the ropes of the Lilliputians over Gulliver’. 22
The Allies felt satisfied by the middle of 1921 that naval and aerial disarmament had by and large been achieved. But while ships and aeroplanes could not easily be hidden, other armaments could. The IAMCC had a staff of only 1,200 soldiers, and could not extend its control over the whole of Germany. Obstruction was common. Allied inspectors were given a hostile reception in most plants and barracks, and were hindered in carrying out their task.
There were widespread violations of the military articles of the Peace Treaty. Large caches of war material were frequently discovered, 23 and German arms producers soon found ways to circumvent Allied control. Rheinmetall, for example, produced artillery under the guise of railway equipment. Factories that had previously manufactured tanks now fabricated inordinately huge tractors. The joke was told in Berlin’s cabarets of the worker who smuggled parts out of his pram factory for his newborn, only to find when he put them together that he had assembled a machine gun. 24 The bulk of post-war armament production was moved outside the country, with manufacturers transporting their plants to neutral countries such as Switzerland, Holland, and Sweden. Leading arms producer Krupp, for example, set up a giant firm in the Netherlands, and was able to gain control of Swedish armament producer Bofors. 25
German avoidance of the disarmament demands reached its peak after the Treaty of Rapollo, signed with the Soviet Union on 16 April 1922. Rapollo was a spin-off from the Genoa conference held in April and May 1922, in which representatives of 34 countries, including Germany and Russia, discussed ways to tackle the economic problems left by the war. With the conference making little headway, the German and Soviet foreign ministers, Walther Rathenau and Georgi Chicherin, slipped away with a team of delegates to nearby Rapollo to settle the differences between their countries.
Officially, the treaty was to normalise diplomatic
and economic relations and to renounce all territorial and financial claims resulting from the war. Unofficially, the result was clandestine military co-operation, which enabled the Reichswehr to test on Soviet soil weapons and equipment forbidden by the Versailles Treaty and to train military personnel in their use. In return, German know-how was to improve the Soviets’ deficient and backward military.
A number of German firms (among them Junkers, Krupp, Rheinmetall, and Stolzenberg) participated in the reconstruction of the Soviet armaments industry, and in 1924 a German-Soviet company was set up to manufacture poison gas, ammunition, and aircraft. The enterprise failed because of economic, technical, and personnel problems, but not before a shipment of 300,000 rounds of ammunition was discovered heading for Germany — causing a storm of indignation in the Western media. 26
The treaty with the Soviet Union also assisted in circumventing the demands made in the Versailles military clauses to reduce the size of the German army. During the peacemaking processs, the British delegate on the commission dealing with disarmament, Henry Wilson, had argued for a volunteer army where members would serve for a number of years. French commander Foch, however, warned that the creation of such an army led by long-serving officers would form the nucleus of a much larger force and, to avoid this, demanded a system in which conscripts would serve no longer than a year. The French lost out, at Lloyd George’s insistence, and the concept of a conscript German army was abandoned. By the end of 1920, the British members of the IAMCC believed that Germany had reduced the size of its army to the required 100,000 men. The French were more sceptical, and they were supported by Brigadier-General J. H. Morgan, a dissenting voice among the British in the IAMCC. Morgan was active in uncovering German attempts to circumvent the clauses of the treaty. In two articles published in The Times in September 1921, he pointed out that Germany had enough personnel, clothing, and armaments for 800,000 men. 27
Foch’s fear that the volunteer army would grow around a large nucleus of well-trained officers proved well founded. Because the peacemakers failed to place restrictions on the number of non-commissioned officers in the Reichswehr, the number of sergeants and corporals amounted to 40,000. 28 This contravention assisted Nazi Germany with its re-armament policy of the mid-1930s.
Part VI (Articles 214–226) of the treaty specified that there should be a speedy, orderly, and humane repatriation of prisoners of war and interned civilians, and that the fallen on both sides should be buried in their respective territories as far as this was possible. Part VII on penalties dealt in part with Kaiser Wilhelm. He was to be extradited from the Netherlands and put on trial for ‘supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties’ (Article 227). The next Article recognised the right of the Allies ‘to bring before military tribunals persons accused of having committed acts in violation of the laws and customs of war’. The committee in charge of drawing up penalties had also been charged with establishing responsibility for the outbreak of war, a task that could not be carried out because members did not have at their disposal material to investigate. The conclusion to Part VIII stated the optimistic demand that the German government provide all documents and information necessary to deal with the criminal acts and the perpetrators (Article 230).
Reparations and Article 231: ‘Paragraph of disgrace’, or ‘Paragraph of good fortune’?
By the time the details of the Versailles Peace Treaty had been made public, interest in the prosecution of war crimes had all but vanished, at least in Britain and the U.S. The question of ‘war guilt’ was another matter. Article 231, introducing Part VIII on ‘Reparations’, stated ‘That the Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies’. There was no reference suggesting that Germany was responsible for the outbreak of war. The term ‘aggression’, as it did in the Pre-Armistice Agreement, referred to German violation of international conduct as spelt out in The Hague Convention of 1907, and in particular to Imperial Germany’s unprovoked attack upon neutral Belgium. Article 231 was merely an introductory clause stating the ethical and jurisdictional justification for the reparation liability. Insisting that Article 231 assigned ‘war guilt’ (Kriegsschuld) to Germany, the German response was strident. No other part, sentence, or paragraph of the Versailles Treaty was attacked with such ferocity.
The insistence on Article 231 as the source of all evil that was to befall Germany has surprised treaty specialists outside Germany for some time. Given the importance of the issue for this book, I have taken the liberty of quoting one of these specialists at length:
The issue of German responsibility — as specified in the notorious article 231 of the peace treaty — has given rise to the most egregious popular misconceptions about the reparation settlement that have persisted down through the decades. The truth of the matter is that this provision had been inserted at the behest not of some French or British hard-liner (such as the devious ‘Klotzkie’, the bombastic ‘Billy’ Hughes, or the obdurate ‘heavenly twins’), but rather of the American representatives of the Reparation Commission, Norman Davis and John Foster Dulles. The courtly southern gentleman and the stolid Wall Street lawyer had been conscientiously seeking diplomatic language that would mollify the British and the French while reducing the amount of Germany’s financial obligation were it held liable for the totality of war costs, as Clemenceau and Lloyd George had been frantically demanding in order to satisfy their publics’ insistence on integral repayment. By affirming [in article 231] Germany’s moral responsibility for the war and its legal liability for the damage to persons and property, while implicitly acknowledging [in article 232] her financial incapacity to pay the enormous bills that was certain to result from an objective inspection of the devastated regions of France and an actuarial projection of pension costs, Davis and Dulles thought that they had devised a brilliant solution to the reparation dilemma: Here was a means of furnishing what Arthur Walworth has aptly called a ‘psychological sop’ to Allied public opinion as compensation for the loss of the huge German payments that Allied leaders knew could and would never be made. 29
There is one obvious reason for Germany’s sensitivity about Article 231. To concede that the German empire bore responsibility for the events of July–August 1914 and the calamity that followed them was unthinkable. To admit that the sacrifices — the two million of their people dead, the four million crippled, blinded, or otherwise incapacitated, the sufferings demanded of the bulk of the population — may have been of Germany’s own making, no upright German could contemplate.
There was another reason why Article 231 was vilified. The German government was aware of its true meaning. Before negotiations commenced, it was reluctant to bring the question of war guilt to the table, and it was not altogether in agreement with Brockdorff-Rantzau’s decision to jump the gun and base the attack in his reply of 7 May on the issue of German war guilt. 30 The German note of 29 May referred to Article 231, but did not mention that it implied war guilt. 31 When the Allies became aware of the furore created by the clause, they pointed out that the German delegation had ‘misinterpreted the reparation proposals of the treaty’. 32
The Austrian and Hungarian governments, which had faced provisions similar to Article 231, had not questioned their inclusion, but accepted them as what amounted to petty legal points to back up the Allies’ reparation claims as specified in the Pre-Armistice Agreement. Had the German government acted likewise, there would have been little justification for dissent. On the contrary, if German politicians and opinion-makers had disputed or challenged the Allies on this point, attention would have been drawn again to the collapse of the German war effort in September–October 1918, to the acceptance of the Fourteen Points with the Pre-Armistice Agreement, and to Germany’
s signing of the full Armistice terms — in short, to the fact that the nation had in all but name made an unconditional surrender. Had such a discussion occurred, it would have countered the ever-increasing feeling of the German public that the empire had not lost the war.
Weeks before the collapse, the public believed that the fatherland was set for victory. Because no foreign soldier had set foot on German soil, SPD leader Ebert, soon to become president of the German Reich, could welcome the troops with the proud assurance ‘that no enemy has conquered you’. With the political right recovering from the sudden shock of defeat, and with war hero Ludendorff (who had fled in November to Sweden in false whiskers and tinted glasses) and his companions from the former OHL proclaiming the story of the brave German soldier, undefeated in the field but stabbed in the back by shoddy left-wing politicians and Jews (long before anyone had heard the name Adolf Hitler), renewed discussion about the true nature of the ending of the war could be avoided.
With Article 231 discounted as an Allied attempt to blame Germany for the outbreak of war and make it pay on that basis, myriad possibilities emerged for the Germans to mount a crusade against the Versailles Peace Treaty. ‘Expert’ historians could be (and were) used to provide volumes — forty in all — of counter-evidence as to the reasons for the war. A government department could be (and was) set up to spread the message that the war had not been Germany’s fault, and endless propaganda countering such a false assumption could be (and was) circulated around the world. And if it could be shown that the German empire did not cause the war, then not just the reparation clauses, but the Versailles Peace Treaty as a whole, was based on a falsehood, was an attack by the Allies, and was null and void. Article 231 could be (and was) blamed for the entire malaise that befell the Republic — economic difficulties such as inflation, high prices, low wages, and unemployment, and the country’s permanent political instability — and, above all, for the Republic’s inglorious end in January 1933. Viewed in such terms, Article 231 for Weimar Germany was not a paragraph of disgrace but of good fortune.