The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  First in March, and then more seriously in June, the Germans appealed for British and American mediation. But both countries were loath to act. For Secretary of State Hughes, ‘America was the only point of stability in the world and . . . for this reason, we absolutely could not make any move unless it would surely be successful’. After Wilson’s fiasco, the Harding administration would not risk finding itself caught between the Europeans and Congress.17 Hughes had no desire to tangle with a Senate in which the internationalists were now split between Anglophiles and Francophiles, and strong-arm nationalists of the Teddy Roosevelt variety, who sympathized with Poincaré, clashed with a growing pro-German faction.18 As Hughes remarked to the British ambassador Lord D’Abernon, in tones reminiscent of ‘peace without victory’, France and Germany would each have to ‘enjoy its own bit of chaos’ until they would be willing to reach a ‘fair settlement’.19 Indeed, so reminiscent were Hughes’s views of those that the British representatives had encountered from the American delegation in Paris in 1919 that senior members of the British government fell unconsciously into the habit of referring to the Secretary of State as ‘Wilson’.20

  Meanwhile, Britain had withdrawn from a position at the very centre of European affairs to a position of deliberate abstention. To the new, all-Tory government it seemed that the greater the distance they kept from their turbulent neighbours on the continent the better. In June 1923 Parliament was persuaded to vote additional funds to more than double the establishment of the newly formed Royal Air Force, the principal mission of which was to deter a French attack on Britain.21 But though they did not want to back Poincaré, neither Washington nor London leapt to Germany’s assistance. On 20 July, in response to the latest German call for help, London suggested a joint approach to the reparations question. But when Poincaré insisted that Germany must first call off passive resistance and Berlin refused, London and Washington withdrew to the sidelines.22

  How long could they stay there? If the situation on the Rhine was not bad enough, over the summer of 1923 the world was treated to its first display of Fascist aggression. On 27 August an international commission attempting to demarcate the boundaries of Greece and Albania was ambushed by Greek bandits. An Italian general and his staff were murdered. When the Greeks refused to pay Mussolini’s exorbitant compensation demand, or to allow Italians to take charge of the murder investigation, Italy’s new Prime Minister sent his fleet to bombard and then to occupy the Ionian island of Corfu, killing 15 civilians. The Greeks appealed to the League of Nations. Finally, London was shocked out of its detached complacency. Foreign Secretary George Curzon, fresh from having finalized the Lausanne peace settlement with Ataturk and determined to prevent another flare-up in the Mediterranean, denounced Italy’s ‘conduct’ as ‘violent and inexcusable’.23 The British Embassy in Rome wired to London in panic-stricken tones that Mussolini was a ‘mad dog, who may do infinite harm before he is dispatched’. The Italian dictator was ‘capable of any ill-considered and reckless action which might even plunge Europe into war’.

  Unlike the Ruhr crisis, which was a matter pertaining directly to the Versailles Treaty, the violence in the Ionian Islands was precisely the kind of incident that the League of Nations was designed to de-escalate. Corfu was viewed as a test by all sides. Mussolini did not hide his scorn for a ‘League which placed Haiti and Ireland on equality with great powers, which showed impotence in questions of Greco-Turkish conflict, Ruhr or Saar, and reserved its activities for encouraging socialist attacks on Fascisti Italy’.24 In reply, the British Foreign Office seriously weighed the possibility of imposing full-scale sanctions on Italy. However, a full naval blockade proved too cumbersome. It would have required not only a mobilization of the entire British fleet but the collaboration of all of Italy’s neighbours. Nor could it be effective without America. Furthermore, given the unresolved situation in the Ruhr, France had no interest in antagonizing Mussolini. Paris vetoed any attempt to take the issue to the League and insisted that the question be resolved instead through the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris. Their verdict, swiftly delivered on 8 September, was widely considered a travesty of justice for the tough terms it imposed on Greece. But at least Mussolini’s attempt to annex Corfu had been foiled. Furthermore, the kack-handed negotiations of the ambassadors strengthened the critics of old-school diplomacy, who insisted that the League must play a greater role in the future. Despite his open contempt for the League, Mussolini was too sensitive a politician not to realize the seriousness of the international indignation he had provoked. Until the more general collapse of the international order in the early 1930s, Corfu marked the limit of his aggression.

  Whilst the Corfu crisis was contained, in Germany the crisis escalated sharply. On 13 August 1923, with the population of the Ruhr on the point of starvation, the centre-right government of Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno resigned. Gustav Stresemann took office as Chancellor of a cross-party coalition of national solidarity. Stresemann’s accession to power in 1923 was the defining moment in his remarkable trajectory from wartime imperialist ideologue to the architect of a new German foreign policy. The key to Stresemann’s understanding of the world was his belief in the central role of American economic power.25 During the war this had led him to demand that Germany must create for itself an American-sized greater economic sphere in central Europe. In defeat, like his Japanese counterparts, Stresemann came around to the view that America’s rise to power was initiating an entirely new era in which Germany’s only realistic policy was to accommodate itself to American hegemony and to seek a place for itself as a valued market and investment vehicle for American capital. In August 1923 Stresemann at first hoped that by drawing the Americans and British back into European politics he might be able to avoid capitulating to the French. But Poincaré had made his conditions clear and neither Washington nor London hurried to Germany’s aid.

  Berlin was faced with an appalling dilemma. Should the Republic preserve its national honour by continuing to support resistance in the Ruhr even if this came at the price of risking total national disintegration? Or should it seek to come to terms with France? After five weeks of agonizing discussion, on 26 September the Berlin government gave in. The cabinet decided that it would end official support for the Ruhr and seek to meet French demands as best it could. Following the Armistice of November 1918 and acceptance of the Versailles terms in June 1919, the autumn of 1923 witnessed Germany’s third capitulation and it unleashed a period of truly existential crisis. In 1918 and 1919 Erzberger and the Social Democrats had at least been able to present acceptance of the peace as part of the process of overcoming the Wilhelmine past. They had been united by bonds of wartime patriotism. When a French army marched into the Ruhr, the population had rallied around the Republic as they had around the Wilhelmine Empire in August 1914, only for their hopes to be dashed once more. Across the steel cities of the Ruhr in the autum of 1923 German police as well as French tanks were required to restrain the outraged population.26

  The French had won. As Poincaré had promised, the Ruhr occupation had paid dividends. The costs of the operation up to the end of September had come to 700 million francs, against revenues from the Ruhr of 1 billion francs.27 But France had done far more than vindicate its military power and gain economic advantage. The entire structure of the post-war order was in play. On the French side the possibilities that had been shut down by Clemenceau at Versailles were reopened. Perhaps, after all, France did not have to accept the sovereignty of an integral German nation.28 Having shrunk from the task in 1919, in early October 1923 France was presented with a second chance to construct a radically new map of Europe, a second Westphalian peace, which would return to 1648 in founding European security on the disintegration of Germany.

  Jacques Bainville, the most penetrating conservative critic of the 1919 peace, was known to exercise considerable influence over Poincaré. On 21 October separatist putsches with more or less overt French sponsor
ship were launched all along the western rim of Germany, in Aachen, Trier, Koblenz, Bonn and the Palatinate.29 In practice none of these uprisings had any popular following. When not chaperoned by French troops, German separatists were liable to be lynched. But by the autumn of 1923 the most dangerous threat to the Reich’s integrity came not from French intrigue but from within. Germany’s long-simmering civil war was coming back to the boil.30 Since 1920, when the Comintern had demanded that all its members should prepare for civil war, the German Communist Party had been drilling a paramilitary organization. In October 1923 when the leader of the party, Heinrich Brandler, was summoned to Moscow for instructions, he claimed to have at his disposal a force of over 113,000 men.31

  To coincide with the anniversary not of the German revolution of 1918 but the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, the date for the Communist uprising in Germany was set at 9 November 1923.32 Following a miscommunication with revolutionary headquarters, the local party in the port city of Hamburg launched an ill-prepared uprising on 23 October, which was quickly put down. But Moscow was undaunted. Mobile units of the Red Army were moved to the Polish border along with every available German-speaking officer. In Germany the main body of Communist militancy was massing in the industrial regions in the centre of the country.33 Worryingly for Berlin, in early October the state government of Saxony was taken over by a United Front coalition headed by left-wing Socialists but including Communist Party ministers who were taking instructions directly from Moscow.34 On 17 October, under the emergency laws in force since the surrender of 26 September, 60,000 Reichswehr troops were moved into the region. The Reich suspended the authority of the Socialist government and the much-touted Communist militia were rapidly overwhelmed.

  Following only weeks after the surrender to France, the result of the Saxon intervention was to throw German politics once more into crisis. Having been abandoned by the right wing in September, Stresemann’s coalition was now deserted by the Socialist Party, which departed in protest against the Reich’s lopsided action against the left. The centre-right now had to govern alone, but as far as Stresemann was concerned there was no choice. He had to act against the left in Saxony so as to preserve his grip on the situation in Bavaria, where an even more menacing threat had arisen on the far right. Following the end of the fighting against the Poles in Silesia in 1921, Bavaria had become the rallying place for German admirers of Mussolini.35 Since the spring of 1923 the youthful rabble-rouser Adolf Hitler had risen to prominence as one of the loudest advocates of a bloody struggle with the French. Invoking the Russian decision to torch their own capital in the face of Napoleonic occupation in 1812, Hitler demanded that the Ruhr must become Poincaré’s Moscow on the Rhine.36 With the brown-shirted stormtroops of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) at his back, Hitler was clearly waiting for his chance to mount a coup, and it was far from obvious how Bavaria’s highly conservative state government would react. There was talk of a Bavarian anti-communist crusade against Saxony. In desperation, Chancellor Stresemann appealed to the Reichswehr, only for its commander, General Hans von Seeckt, to reply that whereas he was happy to intervene against the Red Guards in Saxony, he could not order his troops to fire on their Bavarian comrades. There were well-founded rumours in Berlin that Seeckt himself was weighing up the Bonapartist option of putting paid to the Weimar Republic with a ‘whiff of grapeshot’.

  Despite his personal sympathy for the agenda of the nationalist right, Stresemann was convinced that no authoritarian government could possibly broker the international settlement on which Germany’s future depended. By fomenting internal disorder, the conspirators placed in jeopardy the value he held most deeply, the integrity of the Reich itself. Challenging the right wing of his own party, the German People’s Party (DVP), to give him their wholehearted backing, Stresemann announced on 5 November 1923 ‘this week will decide whether the Vaterlaendische Verbaende (nationalist paramilitary associations) will risk a battle’. Were they to challenge the authority of the Reich, the result would be ‘civil war’ and the ‘loss of the Rhine and Ruhr’ to the French-backed separatists. To preserve the Reich there must be order at home. He was ‘sick and tired’ of irresponsible intrigue and the blackmail of the business and agrarian interests who had brought on the hyperinflationary disaster. If the nationalist stormtroops marched on Berlin, Stresemann would stand his ground. They would have to ‘shoot’ him down in the Reich’s Chancellery, where as the head of government he had a ‘right to be’.37

  Berlin was saved from this scenario, by Hitler’s impatience and the internecine rivalries of the Bavarian right. On 9 November 1923 it was not the Communists but Hitler and his SA-men with General Erich Ludendorff in their midst who marched through the streets of Munich, to be met with the ‘whiff of grapeshot’ delivered by the Bavarian police. Hitler fled ignominiously from the scene. The challenge to the Weimar Republic from the right as well as the left had been defeated. Over the next 15 months of incarceration Hitler was to arrive at the conclusion that was also dawning on the Comintern in Moscow: a violent seizure of power was out of the question in modern Germany. If he was to destroy ‘the system’, Hitler would have to do so from within.

  But it was not only the extremists who learned from this crisis. At the very heart of events in 1923 was Konrad Adenauer, the Centre Party Mayor of Cologne, the capital of the Rhineland. After 1949, as the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic, Adenauer would do more than any other individual to shape the West German success story. But already, thirty years earlier, with the British Army occupying his city, Adenauer had made himself into the spokesman for a daring vision of West European pacification. Rather than separating the Rhineland from the Reich, as was advocated by the traitorous collaborators of the French, Adenauer proposed splitting his westward-facing region from the authoritarian grip of Prussia. Prussia’s presence in the west of Germany was an unfortunate legacy of the Congress of Vienna, which had sought to erect a buffer against France. The result had been to unbalance the constitution of Germany, out of whose population of 65 million, 42 million were subjects of Prussia. Under Adenauer’s federalist vision, an autonomous Rhineland state with 15 million industrious, cosmopolitan inhabitants would give the Reich the balance it needed to steer toward an accommodation with its western neighbour. By breaking the grip of Prussia, an intact German nation state could be reconciled with a peaceful European order.38

  In 1919 Adenauer had hoped that such a vision would appeal to Britain, which could surely have no interest in the Rhineland becoming a ‘French colony’.39 By 1923, despairing of the British, Adenauer hoped that his plan would appeal to France. Rather than subsidizing a general strike, the German government would pay the coal mines of the Ruhr to make reparations deliveries to France.40 By the end of 1923 the leading coal and steel baron of the Ruhr, Hugo Stinnes, was lobbying Berlin to approve a megamerger of all the major steel interests in the Ruhr as the economic basis for a ‘new state structure’ that would have a ‘mediating role between France and Germany’.41 Unlike Gustav Stresemann, who continued to look to Washington and Wall Street, Adenauer and Stinnes had arrived at the conclusion that no ‘significant help’ was to be ‘expected either from America or England’. To the German ambassador in Washington, Stinnes sketched the vision of a ‘continental block’ based on the Ruhr and the Rhineland that would resist ‘Anglo-Saxon’ hegemony.42 Stinnes was now convinced that the entire post-war order was the result of an Anglo-American diktat and threatened that when ‘international capitalism attempted to suck Germany out . . . the youth of Germany would take up arms’.43 Emotionally satisfying though such talk might be, it was profoundly out of season. At this moment, the culminating point of the post-war crisis, everything had once more come to pivot on the United States.

  II

  In the autumn of 1923, with Mussolini on the loose in the Mediterranean, talk of a division of Germany, a new Westphalian peace and Franco-German rapprochement on the Rhine,
with Nazis and Communists contending for power, and Stresemann, Ludendorff, Hitler and Adenauer all on the scene simultaneously, it was as though the entire drama of western European history for the next two generations was to be compressed into a matter of months. All the options, from Communist and Fascist coups to the total dismemberment of Germany, were on the table. Would the door swing open already in 1923 to the comprehensive disaster of 1945? If the French and Belgians were enacting revenge for the brutal German occupation of 1914, Hitler’s fantasies of a Moscow on the Rhine prefigured the fiery hell that was to consume the Ruhr between 1943 and 1945. Given this remarkable flash of premonition, the outcome of the crisis of 1923 is all the more significant. The order created in 1919 proved more resilient than anyone expected.

  In the spring of 1923 the Europeans were certainly enjoying the ‘bit of chaos’ prescribed by Secretary of State Hughes. But whereas he seemed to expect this to result in a stalemate that would set the stage for America to arbitrate a reasonable solution, in fact the Ruhr crisis had ended in a French victory. Germany was prostrate as never before. It was the prospect of what France might do with its victory that forced the United States and Britain to re-enter the European game. America could not stand by as France divided up Germany or collaborated with the likes of Stinnes in creating a powerful industrial complex that might one day overshadow even America’s economic might.44 On 11 October Hughes reaffirmed the terms of his New Haven speech of the previous December. The United States would extend its backing to an expert inquiry. This was eagerly taken up by London.45 The question was how the French would respond.