How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  CHAPTER 6

  DIVISION AND DISASTER

  It cannot be disputed that in some circumstances it is the moral and political duty of a government to use war as a political tool.

  —General Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War (1912)1

  When war broke out in August 1914, radical nationalists like Heinrich Class thought their hour had finally struck. The long-desired war would unite all Germans against a common enemy, weaken the socialist movement, and open up rich opportunities for territorial and economic expansion. The mood of the German public seemed to confirm their fondest hopes for national unity and the suppression of class conflict. When the war began, in every combatant society voices called for all citizens to rally round the flag and set aside the political conflicts that had divided them during the years before the war. In France this domestic political truce was called the “sacred union.” Germans called it the “peace of the fortress,” evoking a beleaguered community sheltered in a castle and surrounded by enemies. This “spirit of 1914” had great emotional resonance for Germans because their country had been so badly divided in the last years before the war, with the socialists declaring their intention to destroy the Imperial political system, and the nationalist Right constantly denouncing the socialists as traitors. As it happened, the sequence of events leading to war smoothed the way for the socialist party and labor unions to come in from the cold and join the national community.

  Because Russia called up its troops before Germany did, the German government could persuade the socialists that Germany was fighting in self-defense. What is more, since the Russian Empire was even less democratic than Germany, and was viewed by most Germans as culturally backward, socialists gladly rallied to the flag. No one wanted to lose a war to “barbaric,” autocratic Russia. In the almost fifty years of the party’s existence, the socialists had proclaimed their rejection of the Imperial system by voting against every single budget. Now, on August 4, with Germany at war on two fronts against three enemies, the government asked them to vote for war loans. Joining a unanimous parliament, the socialists voted to support the war effort and were welcomed—at least for a while—into the national community. To thunderous applause from a crowd of 300,000 in front of the Imperial Palace, Emperor Wilhelm II declared: “I know no more parties. I know only Germans.”2

  Hatred for Germany’s enemies helped cement the new bonds of national unity and social peace. Ernst Lissauer, a German-Jewish poet, expressed these ideas in his celebrated “Hate Song Against England,” written shortly after the war began. Like many German nationalists, Lissauer harbored a special grudge against England. These men did not understand that Germany’s bullying behavior and construction of battleships had driven the British into an alliance with France, so they accused Britain of entering the war for the sole purpose of destroying an economic competitor. The final verse of Lissauer’s poem celebrates the unity of all classes of Germans, bound by love for each other and hatred for the English:

  You we will hate with a lasting hate,

  We will never forgo our hate,

  Hate by water and hate by land,

  Hate of the head and hate of the hand,

  Hate of the hammers and hate of the crown,

  Hate of seventy millions choking down.

  They love as one, they hate as one,

  They have one foe and one alone—

  ENGLAND

  The Germans might be choking on their hatred, but finally, or so hoped Lissauer and other nationalists, the socialist working class (“the hammers” and “the hand”) were united in common purpose with educated elites (“the head”) and the Imperial government (“the crown”).3

  Yet if nationalists hoped that the war would bring political harmony and a tamed socialist party, German workers soon had other ideas. They made terrible sacrifices for their country during World War I: they died in the trenches by the hundreds of thousands, suffered massive additional deaths from malnutrition amid food shortages, worked extra shifts in armaments factories, and saw their wages eaten up by inflation when the government printed money to finance the war effort. Naturally, they expected a reward for their patriotic service: full citizenship through reforms that would finally give them a say in how they were governed. Many wars have brought about democratic reform, and for exactly this reason. Women finally got the vote, just after the end of World War I, in Germany, Britain, and the United States. This was partly because their contributions to the war effort—for example, by working in munitions factories—strengthened their claim to full citizenship. In the United States, the voting age was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen in 1971 because eighteen-year-old Americans were dying in the Vietnam War, and could no longer be denied the right to vote.

  In Germany, World War I sharpened the conflict between the people’s democratic aspirations and their rulers’ determination to block all reform. Tensions worsened so markedly that by the time Germany lost the war, massive civil violence was almost inevitable. Right-wing politics during the war also paved the way for making German Jews the scapegoats for Germany’s defeat, because conservative nationalists had long blamed Jews for the rise of the socialist party, and most critics of the war came from the socialist ranks.

  Early in the war, Germany’s rulers recognized that workers’ sacrifices would increase pressure for democracy, which they wanted to thwart at all costs. So, they set out to fight reform with the same strategy they had followed for the two decades before 1914: using nationalism and anti-Semitism as weapons against democracy. The ruling elites offered national triumph—in this case victory at war—as a substitute for real political participation, attacking as unpatriotic anyone who criticized the government. During the war, they refused to even consider negotiating a compromise peace with Germany’s opponents. Instead, they insisted on a crushing German victory that would let Germany take land and resources from its neighbors and force the nation’s defeated enemies to pay the cost of the German war effort. Such a “victory peace,” they imagined, would make the government wildly popular, and perhaps even allow them to crush the socialist party once and for all. This wishful and irresponsible thinking was neatly stated by Alfred Hugenberg, a wealthy businessman and prominent member of the Pan-German League. Hugenberg warned that workers who had fought at the front would come back to work resisting “factory discipline” and the power of business owners. Hugenberg’s answer to this problem? “It would therefore be well advised . . . to distract the attention of the people and to give fantasies concerning the extension of German territory room to play.”4

  Already in September 1914, with the war barely a month old, Germany’s prime minister, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, drafted a confidential outline of Germany’s war aims that was breathtaking in its arrogance and greed. Leaders of industry, of the nationalist pressure groups, and of the military produced their own war aims plans. And although the details varied, the basic thrust of the plans did not: France and Russia would be permanently reduced to the status of second-rate powers, and Germany would become the unchallenged master of the European continent. Germany’s defeated enemies would have to surrender some of their overseas colonies. Germany would annex or otherwise control all of Belgium, mainly for its coal and steel industries and the strategic value of its coastline for naval warfare. Germany would likewise gobble up large industrial regions of northern France and a gigantic swath of the western Russian Empire, including the Baltic region (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), Ukraine, Russian Poland, and more. Whether it was directly annexed or indirectly controlled, Ukraine would become Germany’s breadbasket, while Russian coal and iron mines would give Germany a permanent and crushing superiority in arms production. Germany’s military leaders saw a further benefit to these massive thefts of land in the East: Germany’s surplus population could settle on farms taken from Slavic peasants. Prospering on large farms, these Germans would raise large and healthy families, breeding the soldiers who would be needed for future wars again
st the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia.5

  Germany’s rulers, especially the military leadership, had thus embraced a set of ideas that would profoundly influence Adolf Hitler, and which led in a straight line to Germany’s genocidal war against the Soviet Union in 1941. They assumed, first, that future wars were inevitable, and second, that Germany had to secure sufficient land and resources—and breed enough soldiers—to defeat numerically superior enemies. They embraced racist ideas about the inferiority of the Slavic peoples, ideas that justified the most ruthless treatment of these peoples if it helped ensure Germany’s survival. No one knows for sure exactly how Hitler came to adopt this thinking as his own, and to follow it to its most extreme conclusions, but by serving as a propaganda officer in the German Army directly after World War I, he would have been exposed to these ideas in one form or another. The communist revolution in Russia in November 1917 further radicalized these anti-Slavic imperialist ideas in the military and throughout the right wing of German politics, as fear that communism might spread to Germany only intensified hatred toward the Russians. This shift ensured that when German forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, they would show no mercy. Within the context of this murderous war against the Soviets, it became possible to imagine the most extreme racist project of all, the complete extermination of the Jewish people.

  By insisting on expansionist war aims, Germany’s ruling class thus continued its well-worn strategy of using aggressive nationalism to block democracy, but now in a far more extreme and violent fashion. None of the major powers fighting World War I was seriously interested in a negotiated peace, but German policy made any compromise inconceivable. Germany’s leaders would fight to the bitter end, hoping vainly for a total victory, no matter how heavy the toll in lost and ruined lives.6

  Predictably, Germany’s leaders and right-wing nationalists branded all critics of the war as traitors, and any call for a negotiated peace as a betrayal of the patriotic dead. Especially after the “turnip winter” of 1916–1917, when a failed potato crop caused hundreds of thousands of Germans to die of malnutrition, socialist workers increasingly called for a compromise peace and democratic reform. A large strike in the Berlin munitions factories in January 1918 crystallized a mass movement against expansionist war aims, and in favor of reforms that would make Germany a democracy. “Peace, bread, and freedom” became the slogan of the day. It came as no surprise to anyone that Germany’s rulers accused the striking workers of lacking patriotism. More radical voices on the Right talked of executing labor leaders. Yet they could take this kind of argument only so far, because German workers did their duty in the factories and at the front, while the socialist party continued to vote for further war loans. It would be a hollow kind of national unity to rally the country against the entire industrial working class, which made up over a third of the population. At least in part for this reason, Germany’s leaders sought to restore the fleeting sense of harmony of the first two war years by uniting the country against a small and unloved minority: German Jews, whom they had long accused of dividing the country by instigating socialism.

  In late 1917, already bitterly divided by the war, the Germans entered a nightmarish seven-year period in which one traumatic event followed another. This cascade of hammer blows drained much of Germany’s wealth, amputated large swaths of its territory, reduced the country to the status of a second-rate power, and drastically intensified the economic and political conflicts that divided Germans. Together with the war, these traumatic and disorienting events made the German people even more extremist and divided, and even more desperate for a charismatic leader who could draw the country together. The first and in some ways most important of these events occurred outside of Germany in November 1917, when the communists, or Bolsheviks, seized control of Russia in a violent uprising.7

  The communist revolution in Russia made a vivid reality of the nightmare that had long terrified generations of Europeans, especially in the middle and upper classes. European socialist parties had long challenged the capitalist economic system and threatened private property, but they had largely confined themselves to nonviolent methods. The Russian Bolsheviks, in contrast, proceeded to destroy capitalism and confiscate property at the point of a gun, provoking a bloody civil war that lasted four years and took the lives of as many as 10 million people. Militant communist parties, many of them loyal to Moscow, sprang up all across Europe, and Germany’s communist party became one of the largest, taking 12.6 percent of the vote in the elections of May 1924 and an alarming 16.9 percent in the last elections held before Hitler took power, in November 1932. German elites, and probably most of the middle class as well, now saw in Russia a terrifying vision of the future that awaited them if they did not take decisive measures to crush communism. Fear of a communist revolution inspired a great deal of right-wing violence in the early 1920s, and it later moved millions of Germans to vote for the Nazi Party in 1932 and applaud Hitler when he locked up socialist and communist leaders in 1933.8

  Almost exactly one year after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Germans had their own revolution and lost World War I. After German sailors mutinied at the end of October 1918, German cities and the German Army erupted in largely peaceful rebellion, with workers and soldiers ceasing to obey the elites who had commanded them for so long. Because Germany seemed to be dissolving into chaos, and because he hoped to prevent a violent revolution by communists, the socialist Philipp Scheidemann stepped to a balcony of the parliament building on November 9, announcing to an expectant crowd that Germany had undergone a revolution and would henceforth be a democracy. Scheidemann’s improvised revolution lent a focus to the popular rebellion and kept it in peaceful channels. A provisional government was swiftly established, and nationwide elections were called for January 1919 to elect a convention that would draft a democratic constitution for Germany. Because the constitutional convention met in the historic city of Weimar, Germany’s first democracy became known as the Weimar Republic.9

  Like any new system of government, the Weimar Republic faced a crucial problem: how to establish its legitimacy. A government has “legitimacy” when its citizens automatically accept that the government and its officials have the right to make and enforce laws. Governments can establish their legitimacy in several ways; one of the most important is by following rules that everyone accepts when choosing the leaders of the government. In the United States, this means picking the president, the members of Congress, and other officials in democratic elections. Since almost all Americans agree that democracy is a fair and just system, they normally obey laws that are made and enforced by democratically elected officials, even when they disagree with this or that particular law. An equally important source of legitimacy is time. Governments establish their legitimacy with the passage of years and by force of habit, as their citizens get used to obeying the government and its laws. If a government functions reasonably well for enough years, eventually most of its citizens will accept its authority. Unfortunately, the Weimar Republic never got this crucially important breathing space; it didn’t get the time it needed to establish its legitimacy. No sooner had the Republic been founded than it had to face a string of severe political and economic crises, shattering blows that would have shaken even the most long-established of governments. Even worse, the German people had had no prior experience with the rules that make up democracy; from the outset, at least a quarter of the voters, including most of the country’s elite, were downright hostile to the democratic form of government.

  Until the revolution of 1918, all German men had been able to vote for a parliament, but their votes had not given them any real influence on the decisions made by the government: the parliament, and the parties represented in it, had held very little power. In this sense, although Germans had practice in voting, they had no real experience of democracy. Before 1918, only the much-maligned socialist party had demanded that the country become a democracy. This fact had automa
tically discredited the idea of democracy for much of the rest of the country. Although the socialists had become very moderate in their policies by 1914, they had still talked about destroying the capitalist system—and they had become the largest political party. Germans who might otherwise have welcomed democracy and demanded a say in government for themselves had no use for democracy if it meant giving the socialists real power. Germany’s ruling class was especially hostile to democracy. After all, under the authoritarian constitution of the empire (1871–1918), they enjoyed far more power than the rest of German society, and they would lose much of this power if Germany became a democracy. As wealthy property owners, they had also had the most to lose if the socialists gained any say in government.

  Because of this antidemocratic legacy from the politics of the empire, the Weimar Republic suffered a serious lack of legitimacy from its very beginning, not only in the country at large, but precisely among the most articulate and influential members of German society, including the civil service, the legal system, and the military—namely, the people it needed to enforce its laws and guarantee its security. This deficit of legitimacy was all the greater not only because democracy had been associated in everyone’s mind with socialism during the years of the empire, but also because the socialist party had led the revolution and dominated the provisional revolutionary government during its first months. For millions of Germans, socialism and democracy were therefore one and the same.