A Perfidious Distortion of History

by Jurgen Tampke

  In the two years of Bruning’s government, unemployment rose from 2 million to 6 million. This was the official figure; it did not include those who, owing to long-term unemployment, had exhausted their claim for benefits. In addition, if the young, female seasonal, and casual workers were included, the total was more like 9 million.

  The only sector of the economy receiving government assistance was East Elbian rural estate holders, who managed to win tariffs for their product, thus excluding cheap foreign agricultural imports that might have kept prices down. The combination of extensive unemployment and high food prices brought poverty and suffering to the majority of the German population.

  Not surprisingly, Brüning was known as the ‘hunger chancellor’. Altogether, about 15 million people received their livelihood through social services or welfare organisations. The unemployed received their small unemployment benefit for about a year, then they had to depend on welfare, which in many cases meant that they could not afford a bed at night. Not unexpectedly, there was great unrest among the population.

  The impact of the Depression was worse in Germany than elsewhere, not only in terms of poverty. Historians have referred to the effect of the psychological threat of losing one’s job. This is said to have affected about half the wage earners in France and Britain, and just over half in the United States, but virtually everyone in Germany. Moreover, in France and Britain there was relative job security for most white-collar workers, so that the middle stratum of society was less affected than in Germany, and they remained a stabilising, state-supporting element. This stabilising element did not exist in Germany; instead, the middle class became further alienated from the Republic.

  An early chronicler of the Third Reich sums it up:

  [A] sense of total discouragement and meaninglessness pervaded everything. Among the most striking concomitants of the Great Depression was an unprecedented wave of suicides. At first the victims were chiefly failed bankers and businessmen, but as the Depression deepened, members of the middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie more and more frequently took their lives. With their keen sense of status, many office workers, owners of small shops, and persons with small private incomes had long regarded poverty as a badge of social degradation. Quite often whole families chose death together. Dropping birth rates and rising death rates led to decreasing population in at least twenty of Germany’s major cities … And, as always, such eschatological moods were accompanied by wild hopes that sprang up like weeds, along with irrational longings for a complete alteration of the world. Charlatans, astrologers, clairvoyants, numerologists, and mediums flourished. These times of distress taught men, if not to pray, pseudo-religious feelings, and turned their eyes willy-nilly to those seemingly elect personalities who saw beyond mere human tasks and promised more than normality, order, and politics as usual — who offered, in fact, to restore to life its lost meaning. 53

  The Nazis gained from the misery of the people. They had done poorly in the May 1928 election, with a mere 2.6 per cent of the vote. By 1930, however, the rank and file had been tightly restructured, and the party was an efficient, well-led organisation. Relying on the oratorical skills of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Göbbels, the NSDAP was ready for the September 1930 election that Brüning had called to overcome the stalemate in the Reichstag. The Nazis did not offer concrete solutions for Germany’s economic malaise, but, through ‘powerful, simple slogans and images, frenetic, manic activity, marches, rallies, demonstrations, speeches, posters, placards and the like’, they were more than just an ordinary party — ‘they were a movement sweeping up the German people and carrying them unstoppably to a better future’. 54 In fact, the Nazis promised everything to everyone. To the people in Germany’s rural and semi-rural regions, it was a return to decent, traditional German values; to the people in the cities, it was an end to street violence and a return to law and order.

  The September 1930 election result was dramatic. The number of votes cast for the NSDAP increased from 800,000 to 6.4 million, its share of the vote went from 2.6 to 18.3 per cent, and its seats in the Reichstag went from 12 to 107. Although some of the gains may have come from the Social Democrats or the Communists, the majority came from the bourgeois parties. The reason for this big swing to the Nazis does not lie in the Versailles Treaty. All parties rejected the treaty. In contrast to other extreme right-wing parties, as stated above, the Nazis were chiefly concerned with restoring Germany’s eastern borders; their demands in the West were confined to the return of Eupen-Malmedy. It was the suffering caused by the Depression, and disillusionment with Weimar politics, that accounted for the Nazis’ rise in September 1930 and the subsequent doubling of their vote in November 1932 — not the Versailles Peace Treaty. The Versailles peace was not the reason for the political turmoil that led president Hindenburg to swear Hitler into office as reich-chancellor on 30 January 1933. Yet this is the story that has been told by many historians. 55

  Germany has blamed the political and economic malaise of the Republic on outside factors. The failure of democracy was also blamed on outside factors and not on Germany. ‘There are two reasons for Hitler’, announced the long-time SPD minister-president of Prussia, Otto Braun, shortly after the Nazis seized power: ‘Versailles and Moscow’.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Bonn

  By 8 May 1945, the worst of the Nazi nightmare was over. At the headquarters of the Western Allies in Reims, General Walter Bedell Smith, chief of staff to commander of the Western Front General Dwight D. Eisenhower, handed over the documents specifying the unconditional capitulation of the German Wehrmacht. The papers had been signed on behalf of the Germans by General Alfred Jodl, who had used the occasion to give a last speech about the brave achievements and suffering of his people, a heroic effort that he claimed history had never before witnessed. There was not a word of remorse about the violent death of tens of millions and the utter devastation the Third Reich had inflicted upon the countries of Europe and beyond. The capitulation procedure was repeated the next day in Berlin, where Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed in front of Marshal Georgy Zhukov, head of the Soviet forces that had taken the capital.

  The Führer had married his longtime partner Eva Braun on the morning of 29 April, and committed suicide with her that afternoon in the bunker below the Reich Chancellery. His most loyal assistant, propaganda minister Joseph Göbbels, and his wife killed themselves a day later, but not before poisoning their six children. Hermann Göring managed to commit suicide the day before he was to be executed. He was one of 23 prominent Nazis put on trial at Nuremberg for ‘major war crimes’. Of these, eleven were given the death penalty. They included Generals Jodl and Keitel, foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg. The remainder received lifelong or lengthy prison sentences, but only the Führer’s former deputy, Rudolf Hess, died in captivity: he was kept in Berlin’s Spandau prison until his suicide in 1987. Also tried at Nuremberg were doctors charged with using and killing humans in medical experiments, and chemists involved in the manufacturing of the poison gas used at Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Viktor Brack and Karl Brandt were sentenced to death for their involvement in the murder of the mentally ill and disabled in the ‘euthanasia action’. Few of the others charged at Nuremberg served the full terms of their sentences.

  Another 250,000 Nazis were arrested throughout Germany as part of the ‘de-nazification program’ carried out by the Allies after the war. In the three western zones, 5,000 were eventually sentenced. Of the 806 death sentences, only 486 were carried out. The rest were let off relatively lightly.

  Rarely, if ever, had so much damage been done in so little time. Twelve years of Nazi rule had produced enough Orwellian Napoleons, along with their killer dogs, to ensure that only total defeat at the hand of the Allies would bring the nightmare to an end. With the Allies closing in on all sides, and with German cities relentlessly bombed, leaving thousands dead after every raid, Gestapo, SS units, and o
ther self-appointed fighters for ‘final victory’ unleashed a last wave of terror against alleged political opponents, deserters, defeatists, or anyone who wanted to call a halt to the long-lost war. Tens of thousands perished. In the end, Germany lay in ruins physically, militarily, politically, economically. The nation was ethically and morally bankrupt. 1

  That an Austrian Hinterwäldler, a failed novelist from the Rhineland, a Bavarian chicken-farmer, and a morphine addict, supported by a legion of thugs, could usurp the power of the entire German military, political, and economic establishment was a national humiliation. That the regime had committed crimes — as a brave German president admitted forty years later — that have few, if any, parallels in human history was unforgivable. 2 Many people had compromised themselves during the years of Nazi rule, but the professional classes stood out. Lawyers profited as their Jewish competitors were forced to close their offices; likewise doctors, and medical experiments on human beings were not confined to the concentration camps. Academics exulted in fostering the Nazi state — none more than historians. Judges handed out over 16,000 death sentences: voicing opposition to official policies sufficed for the gallows, as did petty theft that allegedly undermined Germany’s war effort. Industrialists, too, made a fortune. ‘Until the last stages of war, the benefits of the Third Reich to all those sections of industry and finance connected with armament production were colossal’. 3 Shopkeepers benefited as Jewish shops closed, public servants as Jews were sacked, and looting was frequent when Jewish citizens were deported. And there was scarcely an enterprise in Germany that did not benefit from forced labour. The Holocaust and the extermination of the Slavonic ‘sub-humans’ (Untermenschen) was not confined to SS units, but involved the Wehrmacht as well.

  For a brief period, it looked as though Germany would not survive as a nation. Plans to dismember it began to emerge in 1942, in particular at the urging of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt. They culminated in a plan drawn up by American secretary of state Henry Morgenthau in September 1944. The Morgenthau Plan provided for the ceding of East Prussia and Upper Silesia to Poland, and of the Saar and adjacent territory to France; for the creation of a federation of German states; for forced labour by German personnel outside Germany by way of reparation; and for the internationalisation of the Ruhr, together with the cities of Bremen, Kiel, and Frankfurt. Finally, all industrial and mining equipment was to be dismantled so that Germany would be transformed into a pastoral economy.

  In contrast with the Versailles peace, the Morgenthau Plan would have been a true Carthaginian peace, but it did not come to this. As hostilities ended, the Allies faced a disastrous situation in central Europe, and to avoid a further human disaster they had to rely on the co-operation of the local population. In Germany, utter chaos reigned. The damage was worst in Berlin, but virtually all cities had been bombed. In the Dresden firestorm of 14 February 1945, 35,000 people died in one night. Of Frankfurt’s 177,000 houses, only 44,000 remained standing at the end of the war. In Hamburg, 53 per cent of the buildings had been destroyed, and statistics for most other cities were comparable. The fighting on land and Hitler’s scorched-earth policy had widened the devastation. Viaducts and bridges, even footbridges over village streams, had been destroyed. Few Germans still lived in their original homes. Millions of people had fled from the bombings into the country, millions had fled from the advance of the Red Army, and others had fled east with the arrival of troops in the west. The population seemed to consist only of women, children, and the elderly. One-and-three-quarter million men had been killed in action, two million were prisoners of war, and a further one-and-a-half million were missing. Food supplies and transport had completely broken down.

  In addition, eleven million people from eastern or south-eastern Europe had flooded into Germany, pushed out of their homes for the misdemeanours committed by the Nazis or having escaped from the advancing Red Army. To forestall the possibility of large-scale social and political unrest, the Allies insisted that these refugees had to be integrated as speedily as possible.

  Temporarily, Germany was divided into three zones and, when the French were invited to join the post-war administration of the country, into four: three in the west (soon to become West Germany) and the Soviet zone in the east (soon to become East Germany). East Prussia, Silesia, and much of Pomerania were lost to Germany for good.

  Economic and political recovery came sooner than expected, in particular for the people in the western-occupation zones. The wartime alliance held as long as there was a common enemy, but given the divergent ideological positions of the victorious powers, the end of hostilities meant the end of co-operation. The failure of Nazi Germany’s crusade against Bolshevism had resulted in the establishment of communist governments in the very heart of Europe. Moreover, communist parties in a number of Western countries were experiencing a surge in popularity. Decisive action would be required to stem the further spread of communism. The Western Allies created a single economic entity out of their zones in January 1947. The Marshall Plan, which brought large-scale American investment into Europe, soon followed, and on 23 May 1949 the German Federal Republic constituted itself in the Rhenish city of Bonn. The eastern zone followed suit, establishing itself in East Berlin on 7 October as the German Democratic Republic. The foundation of the two German states marked the beginning of forty years of separation.

  Germany’s subsequent history stands in striking contrast to the preceding eighty years.

  The harmonious development of Western Europe through the second half of the twentieth century was initiated by two conservative statesmen: Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic, and Robert Schumann, the prime minister and foreign minister in several French post-war governments. They were united by their fervent Catholicism, their aim to put an end once and for all to the mutual conflict that had marked the previous 100 years, and their determination to stop any further advance of communism in Europe. Adenauer had been lord mayor of Cologne from 1917 to May 1933, when he was dismissed by the Nazis. He was interned several times during the Third Reich. After the war, he became leader of the Centre Party, which he revamped into the Christian Democratic Union, a conservative party aiming to gain the support of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Adenauer was able to form a centre-right coalition government following the elections for the constituent assembly of the Federal Republic on 15 August 1949.

  His French counterpart, Robert Schumann, was a keen Europeanist. In a declaration made on 9 May 1950, Schumann suggested that the French and Germans pool their coal and steel industries and place them under a common authority (the Schuman Plan). Adenauer, who firmly believed that the Federal Republic’s future lay with the West, speedily accepted. As other nations were invited to join less than a year later, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Italy signed a treaty to form the European Steel and Coal Community (ECSC) in Paris on 18 April 1951. The ECSC having proved a success, the partners agreed to widen their economic co-operation through the formation of a customs union. On 2 May 1957, the six ECSC member nations signed the Treaty of Rome, giving birth to the European Economic Community. Although the treaty laid emphasis on common economic policies, hope was expressed that eventually there might also be political integration. No one at the time could have guessed that the foundation of the EEC would lead within two generations to a transnational political and economic organisation that embraced 28 European states with a population of 500 million.

  Improvement in French-German relations during the 1950s was not confined to the economic and political spheres. There were also attempts to bring the two nations closer together culturally. Among other things, this was done through exchange visits that enabled young students to gain a better understanding of their neighbour’s culture and lifestyle. It was also agreed that attempts should be made to arrive at a less venomous presentation of the recent past that had seen so much bloodshed. This resulted in a profound change in the way history tex
tbooks treated the causes of World War I and its aftermath. Instead of mutual blame, there was to be a balanced account. The new textbooks still criticised Imperial Germany’s rulers for having been too conservative and anti-democratic and too inconsistent in their foreign policies, thus adding to the overall instability of the age, but there was now agreement that national ambitions were characteristic of all major European powers. Imperial rivalry was a common feature of the age, diplomatic mistakes were not confined to Germany, and all nations had been arming in great haste during the last decade of peace. The system of alliances and secret diplomacy contributed to the final disaster. No one, of course, had foreseen how terrible war would be in the twentieth century. All told, the international power structure was balanced precariously, a state often represented as a keg of gunpowder waiting to ignite. The spark was finally provided by the assassination at Sarajevo. Lloyd George’s statement that ‘we all slid into war’ was included in nearly all such accounts.

  This ‘balanced’ explanation for the outbreak of war was not confined to France or the Federal Republic, but has been adopted with minor variations in most Western textbooks, including in the English-speaking world. Once it is agreed that Germany alone did not bear the blame for the outbreak of World War I, criticism of the peacemaking process naturally flows. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which so clearly laid bare the real ambitions of Imperial Germany’s rulers, is commonly omitted from the calculation. Nor are references to Wilson’s Fourteen Points accompanied by an acknowledgement of the pre-armistice agreement or armistice conditions.