The outlook for another alleged winner, Belgium, was even grimmer. The German invasion had been accompanied by a wave of violence directed at the Belgian civilian population. All told, 4,700 Belgian civilians lost their lives. Following the example of the persecution of alleged francs-tireurs during the war of 1870–71, German soldiers from the first day embarked on a rampage of pillage, arson, and murder, culminating in the burning of the mediaeval town of Louvain in the last week of August 1914. The brutality of this act shocked the world. The German Foreign Office blamed the Belgians for the disaster, but as observers from neutral countries had witnessed what was happening, their claim found little acceptance. A manifesto addressed by 93 German professors and intellectuals to the ‘Civilised World’, which stressed the civilising aspects of German culture and denied any German wrongdoing, also made no impact, in view of so much evidence to the contrary. 52
During its occupation of Belgium, Germany picked the country clean, dismantling factories, tearing up railway tracks, and transferring livestock to Germany. Industries that might have competed with their German counterparts, such as the spinning industry, were wiped out. The coke, iron, and steel industries were also hit. Of the 60 blast furnaces Belgium had before the war, only nine survived intact. Coke production fell to one-seventh of pre-war levels, steel to less than one-tenth, lead to a fifth, and zinc production to one-twentieth. The situation for the chemical industry, cement production, and glassworks was almost as dire. In addition to machinery and tools, the Germans removed stocks of industrial goods, semi-finished products, and spare parts ‘down to the smallest screw’. 53 In total, 85 per cent of Belgium’s industrial production was paralysed after the Armistice, and three-quarters of its workforce (900,000 out of 1,200,000 people) were still unemployed six months after the war’s end. A third of the main railway tracks and half of the local lines were either carried off to Germany for steel, or destroyed, or heavily damaged. Destroyed, too, were 350 railway bridges, and of 3,500 locomotives, only 81 survived. The small quantity of rolling stock left was in poor condition after four years of no maintenance.
Farming was equally affected. The Germans had moved livestock out of Belgium even during and after the Armistice, in contravention of its terms. It had lost two-thirds of its horses, over half its cattle and pigs, 35,000 sheep and goats, and two million chickens. The Belgian population during the period of the peace conference was kept alive only through large-scale American aid.
Only coalmines escaped destruction. The authorities had planned to flood them as they had in France, but held back probably because of Woodrow Wilson’s request late in the Armistice negotiations. Though the mines were spared, they were still in poor shape. There was a substantial lack of tools and a severe shortage of pit ponies. 54 From 1916, Belgian men and women had been forced to work in German mines and plants, and the few miners left for Belgian pits were suffering from malnutrition. As a result, Belgian coal production fell to 40 per cent of pre-war levels.
After the war, Belgium’s hopes of receiving generous compensation for the damage done were soon dashed. Lloyd George and Clemenceau were not impressed by the Belgians’ claims at the peace conference, although the Americans were more sympathetic. 55 Wilson agreed to Belgium’s being the only country allowed to add its war costs to the reparation bill, and consequently it was awarded a priority payment of $500 million — although some of this was used to pay for settlement of its pre-Armistice debt to the U.S. Belgium also received a stretch of forest between Eupen and Malmedy, to make up for the deforestation carried out by the Germans, along with a small slice of the former German East African colony.
Arguably, the French contributed most to the German defeat in the battlefields. For this, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France. It also gained Togo and the Cameroons in Africa, as well as some former Turkish territories. It was entitled to receive Saar coal for fifteen years (with the prospect — albeit slight — that the people of the Saar might choose to stay with la Grande Nation), and was entitled to German coal deliveries for an unspecified amount of time (of which not much actually arrived). On paper, there was also the promise of German physical assistance in the repair of war-caused damage (which never arrived). The gains were modest compared with French expectations. France, like Britain, emerged from the war disadvantaged.
Trevor Wilson’s summary of the reality of post-war Europe is concise:
The crucial fact about Germany’s situation after 1919 was that the internal upheaval at the end of the war and the territorial settlement which followed it had brought neither the social dislocation which had befallen Russia nor the dismemberment which had taken the Habsburg and Ottoman regimes. Germany remained the greatest power on the Continent. It overshadowed France, as before, in terms of population and economic development. So potentially, it overshadowed France in war-making capacity.
In truth, not only had the war failed to alter the fundamental imbalance between France and Germany in the former’s favour, in important aspects it had moved the balance yet further to Germany’s advantage. The apparent restoration of France’s status in Europe which had developed after 1890 was fatally undermined by events beginning 1917. After all, the Franco-Russian alliance had from 1894 confronted Germany with a potent deterrent to war-making — the menace of a war on two fronts. If despite its potency, that deterrent had failed in effect in 1914, how much more threatening was the situation for France after 1919, with no major power on Germany’s eastern frontier on whom France could rely for assistance. That is, the withdrawal of Russia from a clear-cut, regular place in the European power alignment following the Bolshevik seizure of power had introduced a fatal element of instability into European affairs such as had not existed prior to 1914 — itself not an era of surpassing stability. Should a regime arise in Germany tempted to seek a replay of the endeavours of 1914–1918, the circumstances of the post-war years were altogether more menacing for supposedly victorious France. 56
French strategists repeatedly pointed to the threat to peace posed by the undiminished strength of nationalist and imperialist sentiments within the German political, economic, and military elites. Their view found no acceptance, and instead the French were (and in most of the literature still are) criticised for being unreasonable, obstinate, aggressive, and unforgiving. London, in particular, took the high moral ground: ‘The British wrapped their policy in rectitude, complete with elevated oratory about the only route to permanent peace, and soon convinced themselves and much of the Western world that they had a monopoly on international morality’. 57 The French saw the dividends of the Versailles Peace dissipate one by one. The Dawes Plan ended France’s leading influence in the Reparation Commission with its right of sanction in case of German default, and forced the French to lift the economic and military occupation of the Ruhr. 58 Having won the war, France lost the peace.
All of the European belligerents suffered heavy losses, but Germany, as Stephen Schuker commented long ago, ‘emerged from World War I despite military defeat less damaged in terms of human and economic resources than the other European combatants’. 59 With its economy intact, the Reich had not endured invasion. It had suffered no transfer of entire industrial plants to enemy territory, no devastation of agricultural land, no complete denuding of forests. Despite the loss of Lorraine’s iron ore and its temporary loss of Saar coal, Germany remained Europe’s industrial powerhouse. When the five-year constraints written into the Peace Treaty lapsed in 1925, Germany was heading for industrial hegemony in Europe. If to this we add the weaknesses of the successor states in eastern Europe following the collapse of the Habsburg and tsarist empires, and the weak state of France, Germany’s position in geo-political and military terms was arguably stronger than it had been in August 1914. In the converse of what befell France, though it may have lost the war, it won the peace.
CHAPTER FIVE
Weimar
After the wounds left by the bitter division over Germany’s role in the war, chances t
hat a united workers’ movement would give strength to the newborn republic were slight, as was evident almost immediately. The speed with which the monarchical system was wiped away within less than a week — having been regarded as invincible little more than four years previously — stunned Germany’s political establishment. On 10 November 1918, the two socialist parties formed a revolutionary government that consisted of three Majority Socialist and three Independent Socialist members, under the impressive title of ‘The Council of the People’s Deputies’. Far-reaching social and constitutional reforms were decreed.
Behind the scenes, though, a less united picture was emerging. Frightened, like most Germans, that the revolution would lead to Bolshevik chaos, Friedrich Ebert, the SPD leader and member of the council — a man known for his saying that ‘he hated revolution like sin’ — made an agreement with General Groener (who had succeeded Ludendorff as commander-in-chief) to secure the survival of the Reichswehr. Less than a week later, Karl Legien, the leader of the German trade union movement, made a pact with industrialist Hugo Stinnes not to tamper with the existing economic structure. This was the logical continuation of the reformist approach most party and union leaders had followed before the outbreak of war. The SPD leaders’ objective was clear: the establishment of democracy, already decreed in the final stages of the war, as quickly as possible. Social changes were to come gradually through the ballot box and through the trade unions, taking onto account prevailing economic conditions. The SPD saw their role as a caretaker government, to thwart radicalism until a National Assembly had been elected.
The Independent Socialist Party favoured a parliamentary system with majority rule as a long-term aim, but they wanted to use the council system to clear the path for more genuine social democracy. In their opinion, the nation’s institutions had to be reformed and the power of the old establishment had to be curbed. They doubted that those who ran the public service, the army, judiciary, and police, the universities, the education system in general, and other vital institutions would accept major political and social changes. There was substance to this view. Conservative ideology in pre-war Germany had little respect for Western parliamentarianism, which was considered to have an aura of corruption, if not decadence. The ruling establishment thought that the Prussian bureaucracy was more efficient than the Western system, as Germany’s rapid developments in all fields had shown. Subsequently, the Reichstag was often referred to as a Schwatzbude (the chatter box). Moreover, the people who had acquired power in the revolution, the workers, were detested by the class-conscious German upper and middle classes. Even when the party supported the empire by voting for the war credits in August 1914, the reaction of the conservatives was ‘ice-cold’, as chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg noted, not without concern. Conservatives feared that, one day, concessions would have to be made. The warnings sounded by the Independent Socialists, as the subsequent history of the Weimar Republic was to reveal, were justified.
Calls for Marxist revolutionary action were confined to the Spartacists, a small but vociferous group of radicals. The Spartacists had no significant following at the end of 1918, and were in no position to stage anything resembling a proletarian revolution. This did not stop some fanatical editors from vicious and aggressive polemics in their media, heightening fear of the Bolshevik threat. Indiscriminate shots by members of the old army into a peaceful demonstration in Berlin on 6 December, which killed several workers, marked the beginning of the bloody end of the Revolution. Confrontation between supporters and opponents of the SPD’s policies continued throughout December. In the Workers and Soldiers Council, the uncompromising attitude of the Majority Socialists leaders towards workers’ dissent led to the withdrawal of the three Independent Socialists by the end of the month. Three SPD members took their place.
Bloodshed reached its first peak in the so-called ‘Spartacist Putsch’ of early January in Berlin. The name is misleading because, although Spartacists participated, it was revolutionary shop stewards who organised this ill-fated attempt to take control of the capital. In practice, they got no further than occupying several newspaper offices. Rosa Luxemburg, one of the leading theoreticians of the Spartacists, had spoken against the coup plan, foreseeing that such action would not only be ineffective but would also lead to unnecessary bloodshed. To Luxemburg, the revolution had already failed. She believed that only a properly educated working class in the Marxian sense could achieve a successful revolution — a working class that had understood its historical mission. However, when fighting broke out, she expressed solidarity with the rebellious workers. Troops loyal to the government soon gained the upper hand, particularly as Gustav Noske, one of the new SPD members on the Council of Peoples Delegates, had called in the ‘Freecorps’, newly formed military units made up of officers and soldiers of the old army establishment. Noske, having been placed in charge of this ‘cleaning-up’ operation against militant workers, became known for his saying that someone had to take on the role of the ‘bloodhound’ of the revolution — illustrating the neo-Machiavellian attitude prevailing in sections of the SPD. The Freikorps, aptly described as the ‘vanguard of fascism’, staged a massive bloodbath. Among the many victims were Rosa Luxemburg and fellow Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht. Both were murdered and their bodies thrown into the Berlin Canal.
The election of the National Assembly on 19 January resulted in a three-party centre-left coalition of Majority Socialists, left-liberals, and Catholics, which had gained more than three-quarters of the total vote. The Independent Socialists received only 7.6 per cent of the vote, compared to the SPD’s 38 per cent. This is easy to explain. The Majority Socialists were in a much stronger position to fight the election, controlling most of the workers’ media and enjoying the support of the imperial establishment. Its calls for a return to law and order, and slow, peaceful progress, were more attractive to the bulk of the workforce weary of instability after more than four years of war. In particular, the SPD leaders made effective use of the ‘Bolshevik threat’. Nevertheless, the two workers parties together had gained an impressive 45.5 per cent of the vote, an increase of almost 10 per cent over the last peacetime election. Had they managed to overcome their differences and agree on a common program, with such a large following they would have held a strong position in the new political system.
Dissatisfaction with the SPD’s decision to form a coalition with middle-class parties soon emerged, however, and spread rapidly through much of the workforce. Over the next fifteen months there were uprisings in Berlin, the Ruhr region, parts of central Germany, Munich, and other industrial centres. They served as a reminder of how much revolutionary potential had been accumulated. Unrest in Berlin after the suppression of the ‘Spartacist Putsch’, for example, was so strong that members of the National Assembly preferred to leave the capital and hold their constituent sessions in the Thuringian town of Weimar, a centre of German cultural tradition. The Weimar Republic took its name from this town. In the end, the workers’ uprisings proved to be too disorganised, lacking in sufficient support, military equipment, and central leadership. They were eventually put down by the Freecorps in bloody fashion. In the Ruhr uprising of March 1920, for example, over a thousand workers lost their lives. 1
On 6 June 1920, a new Reichstag election was held. The result was a bitter blow for the SPD and its policies. Its share of the vote almost halved from 38 per cent to just over 21 per cent. Its opponents in the labour movement, the Independent Socialists (at 17.9 per cent) and the newly founded Communist Party, which had emerged from the Spartacists (2.1 per cent), together almost matched the SDP vote.
The Independent Socialists enjoyed their election success only briefly. The party split four months after the 6 June election over the issue of admission to the Third International, which Lenin had established in Moscow in 1919. The main conditions of entry required the adoption of the name ‘Communist Party’, and a firm commitment towards working for a proletarian revolution. Of the 900,0
00 party members, only a third supported common cause with the communists. Subsequent elections showed that the Independent Socialists had no electoral appeal, and they disappeared from the political scene. The Communist Party became the third largest in the Reichstag, gaining between 12 and 14 per cent of the vote in all subsequent Reichstag elections. This following was not enough to challenge, let alone topple, the political, economic, or military establishment of the Republic, but it was enough to ensure that fear of communism remained a key issue until the Nazi ‘seizure of power’. The Bolshevik threat joined the Treaty of Versailles as the chief spectre haunting Weimar Germany’s political life and, in the opinion of many Germans, was the chief reason for the Republic’s inglorious end.
The SPD recovered from the setback of the June 1920 election. It continued working constructively for the success of democracy, occasionally joining multi-party coalitions, even forming government itself for a brief period. But it was to no avail in the end. When an Austrian lance-corporal managed to established himself at the helm, communists and social democrats alike ended up in concentration camps, where few survived.
Although labour movements worldwide were affected by the success of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution and their subsequent attempt to take over workers’ movements everywhere, nowhere was the resulting split so harmful as in post-war Germany.
Weimar politics and the Versailles Peace Treaty
The Weimar constitution was among the most advanced in the world. There was universal suffrage, with all men and women above the age of 21 having the right to vote. Provision was made for small parties to have a voice in the Reichstag: under a system of proportional representation, each political party was entitled to one member for every 60,000 votes received. There was no censorship of the press, and freedom of speech, as well as political, religious, and artistic expression, was guaranteed. The union movement was legalised — a longstanding goal of the German labour movement — and the eight-hour day, minimum wages, collective bargaining, and unemployment payments were decreed. Above all, an impressive free and comprehensive health and welfare system for all citizens was introduced (as it turned out, a fair share of these generous schemes were paid for with American money). 2 Organised labour in small to medium enterprises fared well. Industrial barons in the huge iron, steel, and mining industries, however, were as reluctant as ever to abandon their ‘Herr im Haus’ (master in the house) stance, and firmly opposed these welfare policies and the system of collective bargaining. Not surprisingly, many of the workers in their plants turned to communism.
A Perfidious Distortion of History Page 16