Death of a Nation
Page 47
Less than a week before the March 1933 elections (which Hitler had agreed to as a condition of his becoming Chancellor), the Reichstag was conveniently burned down by a deranged Dutch communist. This gave the Nazis the perfect opportunity they needed to shout from the rooftops that the ‘Communist Revolution’ had begun. Leading socialist and communist politicians were rounded up, imprisoned or beaten to death. Then, with all the levers of the state at their disposal, the Nazis launched an election campaign playing on the public’s fears of the ‘Red Peril’. With many of their opponents imprisoned, intimidated or killed, the Nazis gained 43.9 per cent of the vote. Together with the votes of Hugenberg’s nationalists, who had polled 8 per cent of the popular vote, it was enough to give the Nazis a working majority in the Reichstag. Hitler was undoubtedly the strongest man in Germany and a sizeable minority of the electorate was prepared to give him a chance to put Germany’s house in order.
On 23rd March, following the election, the Reichstag convened at the Kroll Opera House (for lack of another suitably large venue following the burning down of the parliament). Large numbers of socialist and communist Members of Parliament had been ‘prevented’ from attending so as to ensure the approval of the ‘temporary’ use of the Enabling Laws giving the Nazis dictatorial powers. Only a few Social Democrats were brave enough to loudly protest the destruction of German democracy, to the backdrop of Brownshirts in the shadows, eager to cart them off once the session was over. The ‘temporary’ Enabling Laws remained in force until the end of the Third Reich.
By July 1933, all opposition parties had either been outlawed or ‘dissolved themselves’. With President Hindenburg’s death in 1934, Hitler became the supreme head of the German state, combining the role of Chancellor and President — henceforth he would simply be ‘the Führer’. ‘Führer’ literally translated means leader, but Nazi propaganda transformed this into something more. It took on an almost spiritual connotation — the leader Germany had been waiting for, as if the Emperor Barbarossa had arisen to answer the call of history in Germany’s hour of need. A memorial of roughly-hewn stone slabs now stands in front of the Reichstag of a reunited Germany in Berlin; each slab has the name of a former Reichstag politician murdered by the Nazi regime.
cl Few had dared to think just what an utterly devastating kind of war it was likely to be. One of the few exceptions had been Generaloberst Moltke, Chief of German General Staff, who argued that this would not be just another Balkan War, or like the wars of unification — short and relatively bloodless. He had warned the Kaiser that it would be a long struggle and that it would ‘utterly exhaust our own people, even if we are victorious’ — hardly an optimistic outlook, or jingoistic cry for war.(11) Added to which, Germany and Austria had undertaken no joint operational studies for war against Russia and/or France at all prior to the outbreak of hostilities. The German military strategy, the Schlieffen Plan, which had envisaged having to fight a war on two fronts, also required ninety-four divisions; Germany only had sixty-four ready by the outbreak of hostilities.(12) Who wanted this war? Certainly not German industrialists who had seen Germany become the pre-eminent economy in Europe and the second largest industrial economy in the world; why risk all that on war?(13)
cli In addition to Sir Edward Grey, there were a number of other hawks who had helped reconfigure British foreign policy towards the Entente and against Germany, ascribing to German foreign policy wildly exaggerated ‘Napoleonic’ colonial aspirations. The hawks included Eyre Crowe, Mallet and Nicolson at the Foreign Office, Winston Churchill in the Cabinet, and media mogul Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail and The Times. Despite the lack of formal military conventions among the Entente, all military planning in Britain had been directed solely against Germany in the twenty years preceding the First World War, with these plans becoming ever more detailed in the years leading up to the war. The Committee for Imperial Defence (CID) brought British plans for war against Germany into sharp relief on 23rd August 1911 (sixteen months before the Kaiser initiated Germany’s so-called ‘war council’ in December 1912). At the CID meeting, the General Staff laid out reasons and plans for Britains support for France if she found herself at war with Germany. These plans included landing British troops in France and implementing a naval blockage against Germany. The British War Office then went on to work out detailed plans with the French General Staff. At a further CID meeting in December 1912 two Cabinet members, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, went on to state that Belgium and the Netherlands could not remain neutral in such a conflict but that, ‘They must be friends or foes…’, implying that if Germany did not violate Belgian neutrality, Great Britain would.(14)
clii Before that day, Germany’s Social Democrats had been pacifists and internationalists, who were opposed to voting for military appropriations. Nevertheless, they too believed in a defensive struggle and feared a victory by reactionary Russia. Not only that, they fully expected that their support would lift the stigma from their being ‘nationally unreliable’; if in Germany’s hour of need they showed themselves to be true patriots — putting nation before class — they anticipated this would smooth the process to greater democratic reforms. Indeed, they did gain considerable commitments to greater internal reform, the abolition of the three-tier franchise in the Prussian Landtag and greater welfare provisions from the Kaiser himself in 1917. The war itself led to more central planning and a hitherto unprecedented level of government intervention, labelled by some commentators as ‘war socialism’. Government expenditure rose from 10 per cent of GDP before the war to 50 per cent at its end. The precedent began for Betriebsraete, workers’ committees set up with employers to settle disputes over conditions and wages (which exists to this day) and had its origins in the last year of the war.
cliii The Liberal Government had promised Ireland home rule and received in response the threat of Ulster Unionist rebellion and civil war. For Asquith the spotlight shifted from the looming prospect of civil war in Ireland, which had been part of Great Britain since 1800, to the war in Europe. On 3rd August he wrote: ‘The one great spot in this hateful war was the settlement of Irish strife… God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.’ Which was one way of looking at exchanging one war for another. It did him no good as civil war broke out in Ireland in 1916 in any case, and Ireland gained partial independence in 1922.(5)
cliv British forces again violated international neutrality agreements, this time China’s, by contributing two battalions to Japan’s invasion of the German colony at Tsingtao and again when they breached Greece’s neutrality during the Salonika/Dardenelles campaign, giving credence to the German statement that Britain went to war over a mere ‘scrap of paper’ in declaring war on Germany over her violation of Belgian neutrality.(11) In terms of the colonial war between Great Britain and Imperial Germany, a remarkable game of cat and mouse ensued across East Africa, one in which a tiny German force of some 15,000 men, led by General von Lettow-Vorbeck, took the war to Britain in Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Rhodesia and Zambia, tying down tens of thousands of British, Colonial and Allied troops only to surrender undefeated on 23rd November at Abercorn in present day Zambia, nearly two weeks after the armistice had been signed in Europe.
clv Field Marshal Hindenburg, the victor of Tannenberg, the East Prussian battle which had halted the Russian invasion of Germany in its tracks and then thrown it back, was head of the General Staff and de facto leader of Germany.
clvi The Centre Party together with the SPD, the left-liberal Progressive People’s Party and the National Liberals formed a majority in the German Reichstag in July 1917, calling for a negotiated peace free of forced annexations but at this late stage in the war, the generals were in charge, the Kaiser refused to accept defeat and the Reichstag’s demands fell on deaf ears. Right-wing extremists later assassinated Erzberger for signing the ‘Traitors’ Peace’.
clvii The territory was to change hands again in 1940, with many of its citizens being conscripte
d to fight on the Eastern Front, including the infamous Waffen SS Charlemagne Division. Their fate was to return to France again in 1945, after which some 200,000 Germans were expelled from the region and Paris constituted a radical anti-Germanisation policy; the use of the German language was banned in schools and regional administration as well as in public. A wholesale attempt was made to erase all traces of German culture and traditions of the region. Today, the situation is that only a dwindling minority of elderly Elsass and Lothringers speak German at home. The architecture, food and place names may remain German but the enforced policy of Francophonisation has been a ‘success’. Preferable to the ethnic cleansing that would follow after the Second World War in Germany’s eastern provinces, but not a shining example of French democracy in action. For more on the modern day Alsace see the appropriate section following the Epilogue.
clviii See maps and stats on German and Austrian territorial losses.
clix The people of Alsace, descendants of the ancient Alamanni who had inhabited both the left and right bank of the Rhine since the third century and part of the Holy Roman Empire from 800–1648 and the Second Reich from 1870–1919, were not given a plebiscite, because it is highly unlikely they would have voted to become part of France. Had there been a clear-cut majority in favour then one would have been called.
clx The French argument ran that one could not even begin to envisage increasing the size of Germany after her defeat. The German ethnic footprint in Europe however was not and had never been the Germany of 1870. Bismarck’s design had not included all Germans within the Reich nor sought to reconstitute the Austrian-dominated Holy Roman Empire. Twenty per cent of the German-speaking people of Europe lay outside of Germany, most of them in what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire and their ethnic German footprint was now in full retreat. Even if German Austria had been allowed to unify with Germany, German Europe would still have remained much reduced from its pre-war territorial expanse and influence.
clxi With a population of 8 million Hungarians living in Hungary today, there are still over 3 million ethnic Hungarians who live as second-class citizens in the neighbouring states of Romania, Slovakia and Serbia. Two of these nations are now members of the European Union and will hopefully have to start treating their Hungarian minorities with considerably more respect than they have done for the last ninety years.
clxii Slovenes and Croats, who had fought to the bitter end of the First World War with Austria-Hungary, went into a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia (South Slav land). The state barely survived the death of its icon, Tito (who was half Slovene, half Croat), and collapsed into civil war in 1991. Slovaks, who had been promised autonomy within Czechoslovakia, got Czech domination in a state of nationalities within which, after a decade, only the Czechs still believed in Czechoslovakia. The state disintegrated after the Munich Agreement in 1938 and the Czechs and Slovaks managed an amicable divorce in 1993.
clxiii Following German reunification in 1991 the American government asked for payment of the outstanding inter-war loans Germany received to service payment on her reparations during the 1920s. The German government paid up in 1995. Germany had to cough up a further $94 million in October 2010 with regard to agreements Chancellor Adenauer had made after the Second World War to continue to repay German reparations from the First World War in order to be able to secure additional loans. The headlines in October 2010 stated ‘Germany finally finishes paying for World War I’ but a group of American investors has subsequently launched law suits arguing they are still owed more money on Germany’s post-First World War bonds in relation to her reparations repayments. Therefore, Germany may not yet have finished paying for the First World War, a ‘mere’ century after the event.
clxiv Churchill and Roosevelt gave those Germans opposed to Hitler no hope of a negotiated peace. They not only stuck doggedly to dictating ‘unconditional surrender’, Roosevelt was not even willing to go as far as saying ‘we do not intend to destroy the German nation’. They both dreaded the idea that the German resistance would overthrow Hitler and put themselves in a stronger moral position to negotiate terms. At Yalta, the Allies agreed that even under the circumstances of the German resistance overthrowing the Nazi regime they would continue to insist on unconditional surrender and if it were not accepted, the Allies would continue the war to its bitter conclusion, no matter what the cost. Only Allen Dulles of the US OSS (Office of Strategic Services — Intelligence Service — forerunner of the CIA) laboured on relentlessly to try and dissuade the two leaders of the ‘ideal gift’ the policy of unconditional surrender was to the Nazis. He made numerous contacts with Germans plotting against Hitler raising the possibility of a separate peace with the Anglo-Americans. The conspirators wanted assurances of a separate peace that would allow them to turn ‘full throttle against the Soviets’. They never materialised. When Stalin pressed Churchill at Yalta as to whether they should add a dismemberment clause to the surrender terms for Germany, Churchill said he did not feel the need to consult ‘any German’ about ‘their future’.(15) There were forty-two separate plots against Hitler’s life of which twenty can be considered serious, virtually all attempted by individual Germans such as the ingenious and very unlucky ‘lone bomber’, Georg Elser, who blew up the Munich Burgerbraeukeller on 8 November 1939, killing eight and injuring sixty-seven only thirteen minutes after Hitler left the podium after an unusually short speech; or by other members of the German resistance, of which Henning von Tresckow and Klaus von Stauffenberg’s most famous July 1944 attempt was the last. These attempts continued throughout the war, from the outset and whilst Germany was winning, not only in desperation at the end, to free Germany and Europe from the tyranny of the Nazis.(16)
clxv Other key institutions in Weimar Germany including the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the educational system and the religious establishment also remained largely untouched by and unsympathetic towards the new republic.
clxvi After the Treaty of Versailles, Germany’s military was restricted to a mere 100,000 men, barely a police force and certainly not enough for the German state to defend itself from a foreign invasion. The Freikorps was a paramilitary organisation made up mostly of former front line soldiers who had returned from the war. They became increasingly reactionary and anti-Republican, believing the revolution had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’ at the time of her greatest need and that the socialist government had signed a ‘traitors’ peace’. They murdered the leaders of the Spartacist communist movement during their March 1920 uprising in cold blood and sought a return to a more authoritarian Germany. They were hardly natural allies for the Social Democrats, but whilst the government was more fearful of a red revolution from below than the emergence of a unified extreme right, they made common cause against the communists.
clxvii Welfare spending under the Weimar Republic increased thirteen-fold. Tax rates increased from 9 per cent in 1913 to 18 per cent in 1929 but as unemployment grew, these levels of spending became unsustainable. Ironically, it was Prussia and the Prussian parliament that remained the most stable and democratic state within the Weimar Republic. From 1919–32 it survived all its terms to their full duration. It was governed by the East Prussian Social Democrat, Otto Bauer, nicknamed the Red East Prussian. This is even more ironic when one considers that it was in the eastern regions affected most by the territorial changes following the First World War, where the Nazis attained some of their best electoral results.(4)
clxviii The Weimar Republic inherited a fractured political culture from the Wihelmian era that made cross-class and party cooperation more difficult in that the larger parties continued to have their own ‘Lager/Milieu’, one might even say ghettos. They inhabited a separate sphere of life, not only in politics, but in all walks. They read their own newspapers, and attended societies and clubs based on their political affiliations, often created and/or organised by their party. If you wanted to play football you would need to choose between a socialist or a nationalist club, if you want
ed to sing in a choir you would need to select a Catholic or a Protestant one. Richard Evans has described this lager culture in the following terms: ‘A member of the Social Democratic Party before the war could have virtually his entire life encompassed by the party and its organisations: he could read a Social Democratic newspaper, go to a Social Democratic pub or bar, belong to a Social Democratic trade union, borrow books from the Social Democratic library, go to Social Democratic festivals and plays, marry a woman who belonged to the Social Democratic women’s organisation, enrol his children in the Social Democratic youth movement and be buried with the aid of the Social Democratic burial fund.’(8) This was a model which the Nazis learned from and began to adapt, using the array of new leisure activities such as the cinema, radio, dance halls, and their own newspapers to entice the younger generation away from the narrower confines of party affiliation and entertainment to their own movement. In fact the Nazis would become masters at embracing and using such modern mediums to preach their message. They would use these tools to reach out across class and factional divides.