Proportional representation did not necessarily assist with the formation of stable coalition cabinets, but the claim that Weimar’s electoral system undermined government does not bear scrutiny. 3 More serious shortcomings of the Weimar constitution were articles providing the president with emergency powers: article 53 allowed for the dismissal of cabinets at will; article 25 enabled the president to dismiss the Reichstag at any time and to call new elections; and, in particular, article 48 provided sweeping emergency powers enacting rule by decree and e of the army in times of trouble. Although article 48 was intended to be used only in exceptional circumstances, Weimar’s first president, Ebert, applied it 136 times. During the Ruhr conflict of 1920, he frequently enforced the article to give post-facto legal sanction to summary executions of members of the workers’ Red Army. 4 In the final years of the Republic, president Hindenburg’s continuous reliance on article 48 contributed to the rise of the Nazis.
The June Reichstag election saw the vote of the three democratic parties — the SPD, the Catholic Centre Party, and the German Democratic Party or DVD, the successor of the pre-war left-liberal Progressive People’s Party, reduced from 76.2 per cent to 43.6 per cent. They were not able to form a government in their own right in subsequent elections, and government could only be formed in co-operation with opponents of Weimar’s political system. Coalition with the communists — detested by the other parties as much as the communists detested them — was out of the question. There were two right-wing parties. The German National People’s Party or Nationalists (the DNVP, the conservatives of the Kaiser’s time) were opposed to the Republic and wanted the return of the Bismarckian Reich and the Kaiser. They gained, on average, 20 per cent of the vote, but participated — reluctantly — in only two of Weimar’s 21 cabinets. More inclined to compromise was the German People’s Party (DVP), the successor of the pro-Bismarckian National-Liberals. Although they would have preferred a return to the pre-war order, they were willing to regularly participate in coalition governments.
Governing Weimar was a difficult and tedious process. In the fourteen years of the Republic, there were 20 different coalitions. Reichstag coalitions normally had to settle for the lowest common denominator, and added little to the overall quality of the Republic’s political life.
A compounding difficulty was the political attitude of the dominant sections of German society. The old guard of the Kaiser’s time still held key positions in the upper levels of the civil service, the judiciary, the army, and the education system, and they held little sympathy for the new order. Many senior civil servants were opposed to the Republic, but they carried on their administrative duties, and by and large refrained from undermining the Weimar system. More damaging was the stand taken by the German judiciary. Whereas in the British legal system, judges were appointed to their position after a long period at the bar, the German judiciary was trained for this task from the beginning of their university education. The majority of Weimar’s judges had served during the Kaiser’s time, and still adhered to the principles and values of Imperial Germany.
Imperial law-making in pre-war Germany has been branded as ‘Klassenjustiz’ — justice meted out according to social standing. As a result, the German working class suffered from legal injustices, a process that continued into the Weimar Republic. Crimes committed by the political left received severe sentences; criminals of nationalist right-wing persuasion were more lightly dealt with. A contemporary critique pointed out that the twenty political murders committed by the left between 1919 and 1922 resulted in ten executions and prison sentences averaging 15 years. In contrast, of the 354 murders which were said to have been committed by right-wing activists, only 24 led to convictions, there were no executions, and prison sentences amounted to a mere four months on average. Twenty-three right-wing murderers who had confessed to their crimes were in fact acquitted by the courts. 5
Right-wing terrorists targeted leading politicians. Reichstag Centre Party deputy Matthias Erzberger was assassinated in August 1921. The assassins escaped to Czechoslovakia, were given hero status in Nazi Germany, and received short prison sentences after the Second World War in the Federal Republic.
Walther Rathenau, at the time of his murder the Republic’s foreign minister, fell victim in July 1922. Of the thirteen people charged, one was sentenced to fifteen years jail for having been an accomplice to murder, three were acquitted, and the rest were given prison sentences ranging from one year to five.
Independent Socialist leader Hugo Haase was shot on 8 October by Johann Voss, a leather worker. Haase died a month later. His assassin was judged mentally ill, and no charges were laid.
In March 1920, when it seemed that Freecorps units were about to be disbanded, its mercenaries marched on Berlin, where they installed a government lead by Wolfgang Kapp, a former public servant with extreme right-wing views. The Reichswehr refused to support the legitimate government, which again sought refuge in Weimar. Rebuffed, it was forced to move to Stuttgart, the capital of Württemberg, in the south-west of Germany. The ineptitude of the Putschists, together with a general strike, brought about the collapse of the Kapp Putsch. Five hundred people were involved, but charges of high treason were laid against only one hundred, of whom a handful were eventually put on trial. All that resulted was a single sentence. General Lüttwitz, one of the leaders of the putsch, was forced into retirement on his general’s pension.
By and large, it was individuals who suffered from legal improprieties during the Weimar Republic, but the wholesale maladministration of justice in the November 1923 uprising in Munich had more far-reaching consequences. Commonly referred to as the ‘Beer Hall Putsch’, its chief instigator was Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Munich based National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). He was charged with and found of guilty of high treason. Four policemen had been shot dead in the attempt, offences which should have carried the death penalty. Instead, Hitler was sentenced to a mere five years’ confinement in the prison fortress of Landsberg. The jury felt that even this was too severe, but the presiding judge assured them that the prisoner would be eligible for parole after six months. In the end, Hitler spent nine comfortable months at the old castle, working on an account of his life that was published a year later under the title Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’). Had proper justice been meted out, Hitler’s career would have been over.
Historians have long warned against overrating the importance of the individual in history. In his monograph In Defence of History, Cambridge don Richard J. Evans raises the question of whether history would have taken a different course had Hitler, for example, died in 1928. The chances of Weimar’s democracy surviving the 1929 Depression, he argues, were small. A right-wing dictatorship or the return of the monarchy, ‘would almost certainly have led to a similar sequence of events to that which took place anyway: rearmament, revision of the Treaty of Versailles, Anschluss in Austria, and the resumption, with more energy and determination than ever before, of the drive for conquest which had been so evident in Germany’s war aims between 1914 and 1918’. 6 Even anti-Semitism was by no means confined to the Nazis. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether without Hitler’s tireless dedication and, eventually, his large popular appeal, the NSDAP would have gained office and the subsequent course of history would have plunged to such a unique level of evil.
The German army was even more opposed to the Republic than the judiciary was. At its head stood General Hans von Seeckt, an authoritarian reactionary who, wearing a monocle over his left eye, epitomised the old Prussian officer class. He refused to assist the government during the Kapp Putsch, and worked consistently towards undermining Weimar democracy. Evans’ claim that as far as foreign policies were concerned, there was little difference in the ambitions of the German military and the policies pursued later by the National Socialists, can readily be demonstrated. Consider, for example, a memorandum prepared in 1926 by Colonel Joachim von Stülpnagel, a leading army official, on behalf of
the Reichswehr for the German Foreign Office:
The immediate aim of German policy must be the regaining of full sovereignty over the area retained by Germany, the firm acquisition of those areas at present separated from her and the reacquisition of those areas essential to the German economy. That is to say: (1) liberation of the Rhineland and the Saar area; (2) the abolition of the Corridor and the regaining of Polish upper Silesia; (3) the Anschluss of German Austria; (4) the regaining of her world position will be the task for the distant future … It is certainly to be assumed that a reborn Germany will eventually come into conflict with the American-English powers in the struggle for raw materials and markets, and that she will then need adequate maritime forces. But this conflict will be fought on the basis of a firm European position, after a new solution of the Franco-German problem has been achieved through either peace or war. 7
Establishment of a ‘firm European position’ implied armed conflict and territorial annexation.
The one unifying element in Weimar Germany’s political system was hatred of the Versailles Peace Treaty, coupled with a determination to repudiate most of it. Article 231 was the chief target. To combat the allegation that Germany had been responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914, the German Foreign Office arranged for the publication of a large number of documents aimed at illustrating that Germany was no more guilty than any other of the great powers. The scholars chosen to carry out this project were Johannes Lepsius, a Protestant missionary and orientalist; Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, professor of law at Hamburg University; and the librarian Friedrich Thimme. Published between 1922 and 1927, Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette amounted to a collection of forty volumes, in 54 parts, of German Foreign Office documents on various aspects of international relations between 1871 and 1914. The enterprise was financed by the Foreign Office itself, though this was hidden from the public. The editors’ claim that their selection was guided solely by scholarly considerations and made in complete objectivity is unconvincing.
Until this time, foreign-policy matters had not been published in a major way. The documents provide some insight into the conduct of Europe’s diplomatic history in the decades preceding the war. The material presented in Grosse Politik illustrates that there was rivalry and a steady deterioration in European relations, and that the foreign policies pursued by all the powers were influenced by vested national and/or imperial interests, security matters, and defence arrangements.
There was nothing new or of major importance in the documents published, and they do not provide an answer to the question of how war had come about in 1914. Documents were selected only from files of the pre-war Foreign Office, and there was no material from other offices involved in war preparations, such as the War Ministry, the General Staff, the Navy Office, or the bureau responsible for the economic preparation for war. The documents selected were often shortened and, indeed, falsified. In particular, the 1914 July crisis is inadequately dealt with:
[T]he editors failed to include (perhaps destroyed) a number of utterly critical documents: the discussion on 5 and 6 July at Potsdam not only among German leaders but also with Austro-Hungarian representatives, the detailed analysis of the Viennese ultimatum to Serbia, missing in Die Grosse Politik but handed to the Baden plenipotentiary on July 20, any and all contacts between Wilhelm II and his political as well as military leaders after the monarch’s return from his northern cruise on 27 July, and, last but not least, any and all notes pertaining to important telephone calls, telegraphs or other verbal communications. 8
The only three documents listed for July 1914 concern a planned British-Russian Naval agreement.
The Foreign Office also established a ‘war guilt department’ (Kriegsschuldreferat) to distribute material. It published an historical journal, Die Kriegsschuldfrage, which influenced scholars in Britain and the USA to adopt a more pro-German attitude in regard to the outbreak of war and the Versailles Peace Treaty.
All historical accounts and history textbooks from primary to tertiary levels continued to glorify Germany’s Prussian past and to allege that the Allies had encircled the German empire and wanted to destroy the German nation — and, to top it off, they now blamed Germany for the outbreak of war and were attempting to ruin the country economically.
On the other hand, anything implying German responsibility for the events of July–August 1914 was suppressed, and authors were persecuted. Some of the documents that should have been included in Grosse Politik were presented in a further study, conducted by Hermann Kantorowicz, relating to the origins of the war. Gutachten zur Kriegsschuldfrage 1914 (‘Report on the question of war guilt 1914’) was never published during the Weimar Republic. It was brought out decades later in the wake of a revisionist debate about the causes of the war that was set off by Fritz Fischer.
Kantorowicz was born in Posen in 1877, the son of a Jewish spirit merchant who had moved his business to Berlin around the turn of the century. He studied law in Berlin, and was appointed lecturer in 1907 at the University of Freiburg, where he became professor in 1913. Frequent contact with British officer POWs during the war resulted in his admiration of England and contributed to his embracing the new parliamentary democracy with enthusiasm. He attracted negative headlines in late 1921 when he wrote a newspaper article criticising the glorification of Bismarck and his policies, which he saw still permeating German thinking. The article provoked a backlash from the university’s establishment and the political right. But surprisingly, it was he — ‘a Jew, an Anglophile, a pacifist, a republican, and a democrat’ 9 — who was asked to write a report on the events of July 1914.
Kantorowicz had gained the support of Eugen Fischer-Baling, general secretary of the Reichstag’s commission investigating the causes of the war, who was impressed by Kantorowicz’s democratic fervour and his lucid thoughts. Kantorowicz worked on the project between 1921 and 1927, and, on its completion, was confronted by strong opposition from the Foreign Office, which wanted the publication stopped at all costs. He also saw his academic future impeded. The Foreign Office did everything to prevent his appointment to the chair of the Law Faculty at the University of Kiel. Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, in particular, warned that the publication of Kantorowicz’s findings and his appointment to the Kiel Chair would greatly damage Germany’s international reputation:
The report, if published, will definitely damage our reputation abroad because by laying the chief blame for the outbreak of the World War upon Austria and Germany he plays into the hands of the Entente propaganda. Professor Kantorowicz’s meagre and quibbling method to judge and evaluate events according to legal principles strips his presentation of all credibility. Moreover his arguments are based on such poor scientific foundations that there should be no difficulty to prove him wrong. But what I object to most is the spiteful way the report is presented. As there is no scientific objectivity to his argument, and as we have succeeded thanks to untiring efforts over the last years to persuade practically the entire world of a more realistic assessment of the events leading up to the war, his work will be viewed with embarrassment even in countries not favourably inclined to us. All told we are dealing with a sorry effort, which because of its low quality, is not likely to cause the damage that I originally feared. 10
Kantorowicz was eventually appointed to Kiel, but the Nazi takeover of power in Germany forced him to flee to England. Cambridge University offered him the position of assistant director of research in law, an office he held until his death in 1940.
Gutachten zur Kriegsschuldfrage was shelved by the Foreign Office, but was rediscovered in microfilm form by American scholars twenty years after World War II. The Foreign Office’s fury at Kantorowicz’s survey is easy to understand, because his findings undermined the official version of German innocence peddled by the Kriegsschuldreferat. Documents referred to in Kantorowicz’s study include Wilhelm II’s ‘Blanco-Vollmacht’ (blank cheque) for Austria-Hungary to take any action consid
ered necessary against the Kingdom of Serbia, and the Kaiser’s subsequent confirmation that the German empire would honour its alliance obligation to Habsburg should tsarist Russia declare war. 11 He also pointed out that under article three of the Triple-Alliance agreement, Germany had not been obliged to come to Austria-Hungary’s assistance in July 1914. Article 3 stipulated that the casus foederis (Bündnispflicht) in the Triple Alliance would come into existence only if one of the partners were the victim of an unprovoked attack by two major powers. This was not the case in July 1914. Russia had not attacked the Danube Monarchy; instead, the Austrian government declared war on Russia on 6 August on German insistence. In the absence of an unprovoked attack, Kantorowicz lamented that the German people ‘had been led to the slaughter’ via a treaty obligation that did not exist. 12
A Perfidious Distortion of History Page 17