A Perfidious Distortion of History

by Jurgen Tampke

  A case can be made that Berlin’s conviction that rival empires were politically, economically, and militarily bent on preventing Wilhelmine Germany from taking up its rightful place among the leading nations of the world was not the sole motivation behind its decision to force the issue. Germany was economically in dire straits. The huge costs of the military, in particular the construction of the large battle fleet, had led to a spiralling national debt. Imperial indebtedness, which stood at 1.2 billion Reichsmarks in 1890, had doubled to 2.4 billion by 1900, and had more than doubled again by 1914 to 5.2 billion Reichsmarks. As 90 per cent of the Reich’s budget was swallowed up by the army and navy, the states and communes were starved of funds. Their liabilities, virtually zero in 1890, had increased to 27.6 billion Reichsmarks by 1914.

  Total German debt on the eve of war amounted to 32.8 billion Reichsmarks. Yet the growth of the army from 588,000 soldiers in 1904 to 748,000 in 1913 demanded ever more funds, as did the ceaseless enlargement of the fleet. Levies on consumption, in particular on food and alcoholic beverages, the main form of taxation, had reached their limits, and direct taxes were resented by the propertied classes, as were demands for an inheritance tax. A modest progressive property tax introduced in 1913 made little impact. Only loans could bridge the gap between income and expenditure, but as Germany’s credit rating deteriorated, foreign loans were getting harder to come by and were more expensive. A victorious war would lay the burden to pay off the debts upon the shoulders of the defeated enemy. 47

  Only by taking into consideration whether a government ‘pulls the trigger’ — that is, whether it launches into full-scale combat with or without a declaration of war — can it be established that a nation is bent on going to war. And the states that pulled the trigger in late July and early August 1914 were the Austro-Hungarian and German empires.

  ‘The war that led to the Versailles Peace that led to Hitler’

  Even though the Versailles Peace Treaty was not about allocating responsibility for the outbreak of war, such claims linger. Nor did German re-unification in 1990 mean the revival of ‘Teutonic supremacy’ policies, as some — notably British prime minister Margaret Thatcher — feared. The enlarged Federal Republic was in a league of its own in the European Union in terms of population and, especially, in terms of economic strength. However, all subsequent German governments have handled this new status with consideration and tact. Germany stood behind the positive approach towards EU enlargement in the 1990s and early 21st century, and the German government played a key role in the introduction of the Euro currency. At the time of writing, the government of chancellor Angela Merkel, against considerable opposition from within its own ranks, has resisted attempts to solve the European debt crisis by ousting members, notably Greece. Against even stronger opposition from its Bavarian coalition partner and also most member states of the European Union, the Merkel government insists upon policies that allow a humanitarian approach to the European refugee crisis.

  It can no longer be claimed seriously that Germans still shy away from the Nazi past. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, which provides a moving record of the tragedy, attracts 500,000 visitors each year, and most German regional and local history museums set aside a section illustrating the fate of their Jewish communities during the Third Reich. Feature films, dramatised television series, and documentaries provide constant reminders of what happened. Germany’s leaders attend in full the anniversaries of the key dates of the persecution of the European Jewry, such as Crystal Night and the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camps.

  However, acknowledging the Nazi past is one thing; explaining the reason for Hitler is a different matter. As one German expatriate has remarked, ‘[T]he German media have a longing for a clean historical account and an ennobling self-presentation’. 48 The tendency to blame the rise of Nazism on outside factors supports this. The last crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Otto von Habsburg, shortly before his death, described the First World War as ‘the war that led to the Versailles Peace Treaty that led to Adolf Hitler’.

  As the centenary of the outbreak of war approached, the presumption that the origin of the war and the peacemaking after it combine to explain the rise of Nazism (and the subsequent Second World War) was not uncommon in German accounts. Commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the signing of the peace treaty, the news journal Der Spiegel, for example, published a lead article under the heading ‘The giveaway peace — Why a Second World War had to follow upon the first one’. Its tendentious title notwithstanding, the author’s account of the peacemaking at Paris is not unbalanced. In describing the slow train journey of the German delegation to Versailles, it illustrates the apocalyptic impact the German invasion had upon northern France. It acknowledges that von Brockdorff-Rantzau, head of the German delegation, a ‘touchy prestige-hungry fellow’, still held dreams of German world-domination. It concedes that the hyperinflation of 1923 and the disastrous economic policies of the early 1930s were the fault of the Weimar governments, and that the reparations Germany actually paid were modest.

  The author also regards the war-guilt paragraph as harmless, and admits that, in the end, ‘the treaty was not so bad’. After all, he points out, Germany remained economically the leading nation in Europe, and was strategically in a stronger position than before the war. The article pokes fun at some of the treaty’s clauses, and some do indeed invite ridicule. But whereas the inclusion of ‘500 stallions, 2,000 oxen, 90,000 milk cows, 20,000 sheep [and] 14,000 sows’ may seem petty today, these things were a matter of life and death to French and Belgian farmers after the war. The article puts a great deal of emphasis upon president Wilson’s failure to bind the old continent economically and politically to Europe, but this overlooks the deep-seated isolationism of American politicians after 1919 — regardless of their affiliation — and of the American public at large. And, in the end, the key question of why Versailles necessitated a Second World War is left unanswered. 49

  The illusion that the Versailles peacemakers are to be blamed for the subsequent disastrous course of history is found not only in contemporary German accounts. In his history of the German occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II, John Nettles, the British actor best known for his role as the redoubtable Inspector Tom Barnaby of Midsomer Murders, maintains that ‘The victorious Allies imposed a peace on Germany which was not a peace at all … [but] … reduced the country to grinding poverty, economic ruin, starvation and great suffering. It was rumoured that mothers in Hamburg were killing their babies because they had no way of feeding them.’ 50 Neil MacGregor, the former director of the British Museum in London, in his recent and no doubt excellent book, Germany: memory of a nation, maintains that ‘in 1919 the victorious powers insisted on declaring Germany guilty, with consequences which ran for the next thirty years’. 51

  These kinds of claims — still a trickle by 2014 — will become a torrent in 2019, the centenary year of the Paris peacemaking. The continuous hype surrounding The Sleepwalkers — Clark was knighted in June 2015 at the instigation of the British Foreign Office — points in this direction.

  This is not just another case of historians quarrelling. Something more is at stake. Margaret MacMillan, in her thoughtful study about the uses and abuses of history, points out that the dividing line between political decisions and historical accounts can be a fine one, and warns us not to allow leaders and opinion makers to use history to bolster false claims and justify bad and foolish policies. 52 Thus she accuses, for example, George W. Bush (‘by common consent … one of the most incompetent American presidents of the modern era’ 53) of ignoring the lessons of the American past in his invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. To her, the United States ‘was abandoning its own history of working with others to uphold a world order and … its long history of opposition to imperialism. Worse, as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo would show, it was going to undermine and compromise its own deep respect for the rule of law’. 54

/>   Bad history, MacMillan warns, often makes sweeping generalisations for which there is little evidence, and ignores evidence to the contrary because it does not fit the common myth. In her view, accounts of the Treaty of Versailles readily fall into this category. The popular notion that the treaty was so foolish and vindictive that it led inevitably to World War II owed much to the polemical writings of John Maynard Keynes and others. But, she rightly points out, that notion has the severe limitation that it is not compatible with reality. After all, the Germans did lose the war; and they were not nearly as badly treated as they claimed and as many in Britain and America later believed. The reparations were not a major burden, and in any event they were cancelled when Hitler seized power. As economist Étienne Mantoux showed long ago, things were improving economically in Europe in the 1920s. The financial problems Germany faced were of its own making. Likewise the political picture was getting brighter, with the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union entering the international community. Hence, argues MacMillan:

  Without the Great Depression, which put fearful strains on even the strongest democracies, and without a whole series of bad decisions, including those by respectable German statesmen and generals who thought they could use Hitler once they got him into power, the slide into aggression and then the war might not have occurred. Bad history ignores such nuances in favour of tales that belong to morality plays but do not help to consider the past in all its complexities. 55

  In his recent critical study of counterfactuals (‘what ifs?’) in history, Richard J. Evans turns his attention to Harvard historian Neill Ferguson’s hypothesis about what would have happened had Britain remained neutral in the Great War. In that event, Ferguson reasoned, Germany’s war aims would have been less ambitious, she would have won the war, and she would have established hegemony over continental Europe — a desirable state of affairs which, in Ferguson’s opinion, occurred anyway a century later with the German domination of the European Union, to the benefit of the Europeans. Consequently, Ferguson posited, the reasons for the rise of Nazism — frustration over the defeat in war and the Versailles Diktat — would have been removed. Hence no Hitler, no Second World War, no Holocaust, no renewed mass slaughter. There would still be a powerful British empire, rather than the current state of affairs in which, he considered, Britain’s position had declined to that of mere adjunct to a German-run Europe. 56

  It was not very difficult for Evans to demolish Ferguson’s counterfactual theory. Still, ‘what ifs’ enjoyed popularity in the 1990s. At a conference held by the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. to mark the 75th anniversary of the signing of the peace treaty, William R. Keylor, in his paper on ‘Versailles and International Diplomacy’, raised some ‘what ifs’ in regard to the peacemaking. What if there had been open diplomacy at Paris? What if the German delegation had been admitted as equal partner? What if all ethnic Germans had been permitted to join the Reich? What if the Allies had settled for Keynes’s reparation sums? What if there had been no ‘war guilt clause’, but all belligerents had accepted to equal blame for the war? 57 Would this have brought peace and harmony to Europe? Keylor, too, had little difficulty in dismissing such counterfactuals as useless mind games that could not be substantiated from the documentary record of the peace conference.

  On the contrary, he proposed that anyone interested in evaluating the Versailles Peace should seek to escape from ‘the thick underbrush of mythology’ that still surrounded the treaty and, instead of indulging in counterfactuals, should approach the topic with a few basic facts in mind. First, the allegedly ‘Wilsonian’ notion of open diplomacy did not herald a new concept for international relations; rather, it was the last gasp of a ‘noble but evanescent aspiration’ that gave way to the twentieth century’s new diplomacy of utmost secrecy. Second, the much-celebrated principle of national self-determination, believed by many ‘Wilsonians’, though not by Wilson himself, to be the cure for the world’s ills, soon proved to be a bird that could not fly (and, incidentally, in my opinion, was something that contributed significantly to many of the twentieth century’s disasters). It is therefore inappropriate to condemn the peacemakers for failing to achieve its universal introduction. Third, there was no war guilt attributed in the treaty. Fourth, the claim that the post-war budgetary policies of France were based on reparation payments constitutes an illusion. Fifth, the British politicians who so recklessly contested the Khaki Election of December 1918 were interested less in the guidelines for the peacemaking process than in exploiting the post-war euphoria — that was soon to abate in any case — to win their seats. And last, but certainly not least, John Maynard Keynes’s talk of a ‘Carthaginian Peace’ was nonsense. 58

  Keylor concluded his paper by raising the question of whether at the centenary conference 25 years away the treaty would have recovered from the ‘severe indictment originally issued by disaffected Wilsonians in the interwar period and perpetuated in subsequent generations’. He concluded:

  Will the new scholarly discoveries and interpretations of the 1970s and 1980s finally have been incorporated into the general historiography, and therefore public memory, of the Versailles settlement? Or will the conventional wisdom continue to embrace the condemnatory verdict of those embittered angry young men in the American and English delegation at Paris who had briefly glimpsed the promised land — or so they thought — only to recede from view as the grim realities of national interest, power, and politics inconveniently intruded into the negotiations to produce a less-than-perfect, that is to say a human, pact of peace. 59

  I hope, with this book, to contribute to the success of the first alternative.

  Acknowledgements

  I was inspired to write this book by the publications of my compatriots Bruce Kent and Douglas Newton. For the finalisation of the manuscript, I am most indebted to Michael Harrington and Chris Vening. Chris Cunnneen made many valuable comments on the draft, and David Walker’s interest in the project was of major benefit. Anna Street and Bernhard Schlegel assisted with overcoming the challenges — faced by many of my generation — presented by computers and the Internet. Arnold Velden’s research assistance was invaluable, and Arthur Street provided me with useful material.

  A big thanks to my agent, Sheila Drummond, and to Ilka Tampke for recommending me to her.

  The publisher, Henry Rosenbloom of Scribe, and his assistant, Anna Thwaites, did a superb job.

  In writing this script, I was able to take advantage of the work of fine scholars from North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe I have had not had the privilege of meeting, but whom courtesy demands I acknowledge. These are Margaret MacMillan, Sally Marks, Manfred F. Boemeke, Robert Boyce, William M. Keylor, Ignaz Miller, Antony Lentin, Stephen A. Schuker, and Trevor Wilson.

  Finally, thanks to Christine for everything.

  Bibliography

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