How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  Despite these serious handicaps, the Republic got off to a promising start in the January 1919 election for the constitutional convention. Of the parties fielding candidates for this convention, three took a clear stance in support of democracy: the Socialists, the Catholic Center Party, and the Democrats. This “Weimar Coalition” of pro-democracy parties scored a resounding triumph, taking over three-quarters of the vote: 37.9 percent for the Socialists, 19.7 percent for the Center, and 18.5 percent for the Democrats. If this election is any indication, the German people (though not the country’s elite) were willing to at least give democracy a chance. Two serious misfortunes seem to have ruined that chance and changed many voters’ minds about the Republic. The first blow was losing the war in November 1918; the second was the peace treaty that the winners of the war imposed on Germany in June 1919. Conservative elites, in their typically unscrupulous fashion, managed to blame both disasters on the Republic, often going so far as to accuse the Socialists, Center, and Democrats of outright treason. These accusations simply continued the strategy of Germany’s ruling class, begun in the 1890s and used with greater intensity during the war, of attacking democracy and socialism as unpatriotic. Erroneous beliefs about Germany’s defeat and the peace treaty gained widespread acceptance in part because of the unfortunate timing of Germany’s surrender and the revolution in 1918.10

  By late September 1918, the German military High Command, chaired by Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg, had recognized that Germany had lost the war and that the German Army was on the brink of collapse. Germany had faced a coalition of powerful enemies—Britain, France, and the United States—and its soldiers were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. When the shooting stopped, about 3.5 million German and Austro-Hungarian troops faced nearly 6.5 million Allied soldiers. On September 29, Ludendorff told the emperor that the war was lost and advised him to seek peace terms. Germany’s request for a cease-fire was published on October 3, which gave the German people the first inkling that their long-promised victory was not in prospect. However, the High Command had carefully censored information from the front, and few citizens suspected that Germany had no cards left to play and would have to surrender unconditionally. The armistice negotiations proceeded in secret, while the German people harbored naïve hopes concerning their outcome. Meanwhile, the country erupted in rebellion and the emperor abdicated, and it was in this context that on November 9 the socialist Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the revolution. Only two days later, on November 11, the new government announced Germany’s humiliating surrender, which had been signed not by the emperor or by the generals who had directed the war, but by representatives of the new civilian government.11

  This close coincidence in time between the revolution and the surrender gave a surface plausibility to the accusation that the democratic revolutionaries had betrayed the country, surrendering out of cowardice or even worse motives. General Paul von Hindenburg gave this grotesque myth its most pithy formulation in his testimony before a parliamentary committee in November 1919. The Germany Army, declared Hindenburg, had not been defeated by the Allies. Rather, it had been “stabbed in the back” by the home front. Criticism of the war, and political agitation among the troops by socialist conspirators, had allegedly destroyed the German Army’s morale. Jews, long accused of instigating socialism, came under especially vicious attack. Adolf Hitler’s ferocious hatred toward Jews drew much of its fury from his belief that they had engineered Germany’s defeat.12

  This enormously destructive “stab in the back legend” gained further credibility when the right-wing parties stuck the Republic’s supporters with the responsibility for signing the hated Treaty of Versailles. The peace imposed on Germany at Versailles was in truth not nearly as unjust as most Germans thought, but nonetheless it was perceived as humiliating and deeply unfair. The terms of the treaty were not remotely as harsh toward Germany as the peace terms that the German government had imposed on Russia in March 1918, and that it had planned to force on Germany’s other enemies if Germany had won. Although Germany had to pay billions of marks in reparations to the victors, this financial burden did not cripple Germany’s economy during the 1920s, although some observers argued that it did.13

  Seen objectively, the Treaty of Versailles was grossly unfair in only two respects, although these were important. First, the Germans had to sign the so-called war-guilt clause, in which they and their Austro-Hungarian allies accepted all blame for causing the war. This paragraph of the treaty was not only historically inaccurate, but for Germans it was deeply humiliating. The second unfair aspect was that the treaty deprived Germany of the means to defend itself against foreign aggression. Germany could have no air force, no submarine fleet, only a very limited navy, and an army of only 100,000 men. The Germans could also maintain no fortifications and station no troops on their territories located on the banks of the Rhine River. Their border with France was thus unprotected. As long as they abided by the terms of this treaty, the Germans were defenseless.

  By not even inviting Germans to the peace talks in Paris, the victorious Allies further demeaned Germany. They made not even the faintest pretense of negotiating. Instead, they announced the peace terms on May 7, 1919, and gave the German government only twenty-one days to respond in writing. On June 16, the victorious powers gave the Germans the treaty’s final text and only seven days’ time in which to sign. Should the Germans refuse, Allied troops stood ready to invade Germany and impose even harsher terms. At this crucial juncture, when Germany was forced at gunpoint to sign a treaty that all Germans angrily condemned, the only responsible course of action would have been a unanimous vote in the constitutional convention to approve signing the treaty. In this way the German people would know that their political leaders had no choice but to sign the treaty, even though every German politician hated having to do so. Instead, while 237 delegates voted to sign the treaty, 138 voted against and 5 abstained. Most of the votes against signing came from three parties. The great majority of the Democrats voted against it, and their party left the government, which henceforth was led by only two parties, the Catholic Center Party and the Socialists. All delegates from the two right-wing parties, the People’s Party and the Nationalists, voted against signing. Before long, both of these parties began attacking the others who had voted to sign, questioning their patriotism. The more extreme right-wing party, the Nationalists, soon accused the Center Party and the Socialists of outright treason. Branding the signers of the treaty as traitors became a favorite tactic of the Nazi Party.14

  Once the democratic constitution had been written, elections were held for the new parliament. The results of the June 1920 elections showed that the Republic’s fragile legitimacy had already been severely compromised by the “stab in the back legend,” the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, and a year and a half of political violence, including four leftist uprisings that were brutally suppressed by right-wing paramilitaries. The Weimar Coalition—the parties that embraced democracy—fell from the 76 percent of the vote it had polled in January 1919 to under half of the electorate, taking only 43 percent of the seats in parliament. The two right-wing parties, the People’s Party and the Nationalists, together took 28 percent, and both were openly hostile to the Republic, as were the Communists (7 percent) and many of the members of the Independent Socialists (13 percent), a short-lived party whose members and voters later gravitated to the Communists or Socialists.15

  When a government is widely perceived as illegitimate, violence often follows, because if there are no generally accepted rules that determine who shall have power, power is up for grabs. Consequently, all means to getting power seem acceptable, and no one feels obligated to obey the law. This is why many revolutions that begin with little violence—the French Revolution of 1789, or the democratic revolution of March 1917 in Russia, for example—end in massive bloodshed. Revolutionary governments, being completely new, have to struggle to establish their legitimacy, often fac
ing armed challenges from opponents who do not accept that the revolutionaries have the right to govern.

  The potential for political violence was especially great in Germany after the November 1918 revolution, because four years of war had produced a surplus of violent young men with military training. After Germany’s surrender on November 11, the army largely disbanded, and the young Republic had no military force to guarantee its security. Consequently, its leaders permitted the creation of the Free Corps, private armies recruited by veteran officers. Because militant nationalists were probably the only soldiers who wanted to continue fighting after such a horrible war, the Free Corps became magnets for right-wing activists, many of them traumatized combat veterans who were addicted to violence and unable to adjust to civilian life. In most cases, the Free Corps were ferociously hostile to socialism and communism. They became increasingly alienated from the Republic, especially after the Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919. The treaty made their wartime sacrifice seem pointless.16

  In 1919, Free Corps units suppressed two poorly organized leftist uprisings in Berlin, one in January and the second in March. Neither rebellion seriously threatened the government, but the Free Corps, only nominally under the government’s control, acted with shocking brutality. In January one unit murdered two widely admired communist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In March the Free Corps killed roughly 1,200 people in Berlin’s working-class neighborhoods. In Munich shortly thereafter, communists established their own government in opposition to the national regime in Berlin. Free Corps and regular army units invaded the city at the beginning of May, slaughtering real or suspected communists as they marched in, and frequently executing men who had already surrendered. At least 600 people lost their lives, more than half of them civilians. In March 1920, Free Corps units mounted a coup against the democratic government in Berlin, which in turn called a nationwide general strike in a bid to paralyze the economy and thwart the coup. The coup fell apart within days, but the strike gave birth to a communist “army” in the industrial Ruhr Valley in western Germany. Seeing no alternative, the government sent Free Corps units into the Ruhr to crush this latest rebellion from the Left. No one knows how many people they killed, but all estimates run into the thousands.17

  This series of leftist uprisings, suppressed with needless brutality by right-wing paramilitaries, profoundly embittered the German working class. Millions of workers turned against the moderate Socialist party, which dominated the government that had ordered in the Free Corps. These angry workers found their new political home in the Communist party, which had been only a tiny radical clique before the shocking murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, now transformed into celebrated martyrs. The communists were relentlessly hostile to democracy and took their marching orders from the Soviet regime in Moscow. At the same time, although the leftist uprisings were easily crushed, they ratcheted up the general fear of communism to a state of hysteria among all levels of German society outside the working class, and even among moderate socialists. Fear of communism, fury at the loss of the war and the Treaty of Versailles, and the bloody precedent set by the Free Corps—all these factors stoked a campaign of political murder that ravaged the Republic during the first years of its existence.

  During the period 1919–1922, right-wing activists committed at least 354 political murders in Germany. Nothing inhibited the killers, who did not hesitate to assassinate the Republic’s top leaders. Many focused their hatred on Matthias Erzberger, leader of the Center Party, who had signed the German surrender in 1918 and had rallied his party to sign the Treaty of Versailles. The leading Nationalist politician Karl Helfferich published a pamphlet, entitled “Away with Erzberger!” unfairly accusing him of corruption, and claiming that Erzberger would lead Germany into “complete annihilation” if he was “not finally stopped!” Erzberger sued Helfferich for defamation in early 1920. A war veteran shot Erzberger in the shoulder during the trial, perhaps encouraged by a description of the plump Center politician in the right-wing press as “round like a bullet, but not bulletproof.” In June 1921, two former Free Corps officers caught Erzberger taking a stroll in the scenic Black Forest and gunned him down. In their fury, they fired twelve shots at him as he lay helpless on the ground, taking flight only after they had emptied the clips of their pistols.18

  On June 4, 1922, an assassin armed with cyanide tried to murder Philipp Scheidemann, the socialist who had proclaimed the democratic revolution in November 1918. Then, on June 24, two former naval officers shot down Walther Rathenau, Germany’s brilliant foreign minister, a man of unimpeachable patriotism who had helped organize the German economy during World War I. Rathenau’s murder followed inflammatory statements by right-wing politicians and repeated calls for his murder in radical nationalist circles. The nationalists hated him not only for his prominent role in the Republic, but also because he was Jewish. A popular chant expressed hatred for Rathenau and Prime Minister Joseph Wirth:

  Bash Wirth always soundly,

  Bash his skull, so that it clatters.

  Rathenau, also, Walther,

  Will not get much older.

  Gun down Walther Rathenau,

  The goddamned Jewish swine!

  Two other crises contributed to the general sense of lawlessness and underscored the Republic’s vulnerability and lack of legitimacy. The first was the inflation that had wiped out Germans’ life savings and deeply devalued their wages by early 1922, and then escalated into complete economic chaos the following year. The second was the French and Belgian invasion of western Germany in January 1923.19

  Unwilling to raise taxes, and unable to borrow on international financial markets, the Imperial government had financed much of the war effort by simply printing money. Germany’s rulers planned to undo the damage by winning the war and forcing Germany’s enemies to foot the bill. When Germany lost, the inevitable consequence was that inflation, which had already robbed the country’s currency of two-thirds of its value by the summer of 1918, accelerated dramatically after the war’s end. This wartime policy, followed by the inflationary policies of the Republic’s first governments, reduced the German mark to only 5 percent of its prewar value by January 1922. Assets denominated in German currency—such as war bonds, mortgages, and pensions, which constituted the life savings of millions of middle-class Germans—had thus lost 95 percent of their worth. The cost of living consistently outran the growth of wages, so that the real value of salaries for higher civil servants had fallen by January 1922 to only 36 percent of their prewar value.20

  As if the young Republic did not have troubles enough, in January 1923 French and Belgian troops crossed the German border and occupied the Ruhr Valley, the center of Germany’s coal and steel industries. The French gave as their excuse the German failure to deliver reparations payments on time: they would extract reparations directly from the production of German coal mines and steel mills, managing these enterprises themselves. Their ultimate goal, however, was to establish the entire Rhine-Ruhr region as a separate political entity, as a way of whittling Germany’s military potential down to size. The conflict in the Ruhr rallied radical nationalists once again, giving angry young men opportunities to take violent action in a campaign of sabotage directed against the French occupation. It also ignited the final, catastrophic phase of the German inflation.

  Prime Minister Wilhelm Cuno called for a campaign of “passive resistance” against the French, whereby every German in the Ruhr would stop working and the German government would pay the strikers’ salaries. The resistance campaign earned Cuno a short-lived popularity, but the government could not afford it, and ended up just printing money to pay the striking workers. At this point, the German mark began losing value so rapidly, from one day to the next, that it could no longer be used as a means of exchange. The economy began to break down altogether, and unemployment rose sharply. In Berlin, a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of potatoes, which had cost 20 marks in January 1923, sold for 90
billion marks in November. In December of that year, a kilogram of bread cost 467 billion marks. Eggs and cigarettes replaced the mark as a kind of currency, and one could get more heat by burning banknotes than from using the coal that they could buy. A government official who—unlike most people of his social class—supported the Republic, asked despairingly: “How is one supposed to convince a people of the worth of democracy, in such a witch’s Sabbath?”21

  The war and its terrible aftermath had two important consequences. First, this traumatic series of events undermined the legitimacy of the Republic and gave democracy a very bad name. Even during the years of relative political stability (1924–1930), at least a third of the voters supported parties that clearly rejected the democratic form of government. In the election of December 1924, the Nationalists polled 20.5 percent, the Communists 9 percent, and the Nazis, together with other right-wing fringe parties, 3 percent. In the 1928 election, the Nationalists took 14.2 percent, the Nazis 2.6 percent, and the Communists 10.6 percent, and 13.7 percent of the vote went to an array of single-issue parties whose support for the Republic was doubtful at best. The only parties that unambiguously embraced democracy—the Weimar Coalition of the Socialists, the Democrats, and the Catholic Center Party—never took a majority of the vote after the election of January 1919.22

  The war also shaped the man who would lead Germany into yet another war and bring about the Holocaust. Before World War I broke out in 1914, Adolf Hitler had known nothing but failure. He imagined himself to be an artistic genius, but failed the entrance examination of the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts in September 1907. So deep was his humiliation that he told neither his mother nor his only friend, August Kubizek, of his failure. Hitler’s mother died of cancer in December of that year, and he moved to Vienna in February 1908, living off his inheritance and planning to reapply to the academy that fall. Chronically lazy and self-deluding, Hitler did nothing to prepare for the impending examination; instead, he frittered away his time attending the opera, going to museums, and pursuing a series of fantasy projects, each dropped soon after it was barely begun: writing plays, turning a Germanic saga into an opera, and trying to create a new drink to replace alcohol, to name only a few. In October, the Academy of Fine Arts decided not to even let him take the entrance examination a second time. Perhaps unable to face his friend after this failure, Hitler moved out of their shared lodgings without leaving Kubizek a forwarding address.23