27 March 2024

Revolts Left, Right, and Rhenish, 1923

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 289-291:

The Munich Beer Hall Putsch is the most notorious event in the early history of Hitler and the National Socialist Party (NSDAP). It was hurriedly planned, bungled in execution, and resulted in humiliating failure. Because of what came later it has been elevated to the status of a monumental event, when in fact what occurred was a small, localised revolt, confined to Munich, which lasted a few hours. It failed because Hitler had allowed his party to become a purely paramilitary organisation involved in an ill-defined conspiracy with disparate Bavarian right-wing politicians. Hitler, who had never been brought into the heart of Kahr’s conspiracy, had whipped up his own supporters into a frenzy only to find that he had already been deserted by his supposed co-conspirators before he ever arrived at the Bürgerbräukeller.

Gustav Stresemann gave a speech on 11 November 1923 in which he reflected on the recent events in Munich, admitting that ‘Germany is now confronted with the demand for a dictatorship’, but he stressed that anyone thinking a dictatorship would improve matters was making a ‘great mistake’. The recent attempt by Hitler to bring about a dictatorship via a beer hall in Munich would have brought no help to the German people. Stresemann was most ‘deeply shaken’ by the involvement of Ludendorff in Hitler’s attempted coup. Stresemann thought a ‘destructive force’ such as Hitler’s movement represented could never have provided competent government for Germany, even if he had succeeded.

At the same time as the left-wing revolt in central Germany and the right-wing struggle in Bavaria were going on, a much more dangerous threat to the territorial unity of the Weimar Republic had erupted in the Rhineland. In the occupied area, separatist associations and parties flourished, primarily under the patronage of the French occupying authorities. The Reich government was powerless to intervene, as it was prohibited from using the Reichswehr in the demilitarised Rhineland under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

The leading figure in the Rhineland separatist movement was Hans Dorten, the wealthy owner of a porcelain company, who created the Rhenish People’s Union (Volksvereinigung), which demanded a Rhenish republic as an autonomous state within the Reich, but his opponents suspected his real aim was an independent Rhenish republic. In the occupied Ruhr the separatist movement also flourished, with various groups sprouting up, including the Rhenish Republic People’s Party and the Rhenish Independence League. Separatists armed themselves, held demonstrations, occupied town halls, and called for the foundation of an autonomous Rhenish republic. Some of their supporters even advocated the full integration of the Rhineland into France. After the end of passive resistance, separatist demonstrations broke out in several Rhineland cities. On 21 October, separatists led by Leo Deckers captured the City Hall in Aachen, and proclaimed a Free and Independent Rhenish Republic. This so-called Rhenish Republic was based in three areas: North (Lower Rhine), South (Upper and Middle Rhine) and the Ruhr, but it received little support from the local population.

The French gave the impression in many places they supported the separatists. The military authorities thought a Rhineland buffer state would offer additional security from a future German invasion, and there is no doubt the French provided arms and offered military security for separatist demonstrations. This was especially true in the Bavarian Palatinate, where the French General Georges de Metz, was in command. He encouraged the local state parliament to proclaim the Palatinate’s independence on 24 October. On 26 October, Paul Tirard, the French High Commissioner, announced the separatists were also in effective control of Koblenz, but it had been recaptured with French military support.

26 March 2024

Weimar-Soviet Rapprochement

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 229-230, 232:

The Treaty of Rapallo, signed on 16 April, was the first of Germany’s major diplomatic surprises of the inter-war period. The agreement was not the result, as is often supposed, of a spur-of-the-moment flight of inspiration by Rathenau, but resulted from painstaking secret diplomacy by the German Foreign Ministry, led by Maltzan, which had already resulted in the signing of a Russo-German trade agreement on 6 May 1921, and had also led to the formal diplomatic recognition of the Soviet government by the German government.

The Treaty of Rapallo was called a ‘treaty of friendship’, with both signatories agreeing to improve trade relations by offering each other ‘most favoured’ trading status, re-establishing normal diplomatic relations, and renouncing reparations claims against each other. The German government also agreed to waive indemnities and losses sustained by German citizens due to the abolition of private property in Soviet Russia. The treaty did not contain any secret military provisions, but secret military cooperation did develop in the years following.

The agreement came as a huge surprise to the British and French governments. Their first reactions were a combination of anger and fear. The agreement between Europe’s two political outcasts was viewed by the Western Allies as a potential menace to the European balance of power. The French government’s response was particularly bitter. Poincaré voiced his objections plainly in a speech on 24 April, in his home town of Bar-le-Duc. He declared the treaty a provocation and reiterated his determination to ensure the complete fulfilment of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles by Germany. He also warned that if the Allies could not agree how to secure their treaty rights and reparations payments, then the French government would resort to unilateral action against Germany.

The British government was also deeply alarmed. Lloyd George had been trying to create an alliance of the non-socialist countries to force Soviet Russia to recognise the debts incurred by the deposed Tsarist regime before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The release of Soviet Russia from the diplomatic ghetto gave him no pleasure whatsoever. Lloyd George had also been trying to restrain Poincaré from taking unilateral military action by occupying the Ruhr, and he thought the Treaty would only serve to gain support in France for military action.

...

A belief commonly held among the Allies was that the treaty contained secret military clauses. Both the German and Soviet governments denied this, publishing the treaty in full to pour icy water on this accusation. Yet soon after the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo, Seeckt did conclude a secret agreement with the Russian Army general staff. To conceal secret German military training and rearmament, Seeckt was granted generous funds from the German government to set up the Society for the Encouragement of Commercial Enterprises (GEFU). Under cover of this organisation, he negotiated opportunities for German military training in the use of tanks and aircraft in Soviet Russia. This led to the later creation between 1929 and 1933 of the secret Kama Tank school near Kazan, in the Soviet Union, which trained Germans in the use of modern tanks, and the Lipetsk Fighter-Pilot school, in Lipetsk, also in the Soviet Union which trained German pilots. In return, Russian officers gained valuable training in military strategy from their German counterparts. The Russian military were also commissioned to manufacture artillery ammunition, planes, and poison gas for Germany. These secret military training arrangements and armaments supply deals remained in effect throughout the Weimar years.

25 March 2024

Weimar Inflation, 1921–22

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 218-219, 238, 242:

The Weimar Republic would have undoubtedly been helped by having a stable economy, but instead it was fragile, with a rate of growth well below that of its major competitors. German growth from 1913 to 1929 was 0.3 per cent, compared to 1.4 per cent in the UK and 2.2 per cent in the USA. The state of the German budget in 1921 made grim reading. The accumulated government debt was over 400 billion marks. The government had to also bear the cost of food and wage subsidies to deal with rising inflation. The Weimar government refused to cut expenditure or to raise taxes to deal with the deficit. This kept people in jobs. Unemployment in 1921 was at a record low of 0.9 per cent.

In response to rising prices, the German government simply printed money, which only served to push prices up still further. The rising cost of living was already causing industrial unrest in the Ruhr, in the autumn of 1921, and led to bread riots. There were also severe shortages of food in shops. Prices of basic goods rocketed by 40 per cent in the last three months of 1921. Inflation was worst for those on fixed incomes, as it was gradually wiping out their savings and reducing their real spending power. This affected even previously affluent pensioners and those with investments, usually people in solid salaried middle-class occupations such as academics, civil servants, and lawyers. War widows, disabled war veterans and those on welfare on fixed benefits also suffered greatly from the rise in the cost of living.

It would be wrong, however, to think that inflation was bad for everyone. Industrial workers, supported by strong unions, saw their working hours decrease, but their wages increase, often in line with inflation. Big industry also did very well, with industrial production increasing by 20 per cent in 1921–22. The rich industrialists – among them Hugo Stinnes, the richest of them all – grew much richer during the era of high inflation and spent their money on material assets, especially property and new machinery. They also had access to foreign currency loans at low interest rates, and because of inflation interest payments on these were reducing week by week.

...

Meanwhile, Germany’s reparations payment difficulties continued. During July, prices inside Germany rose by 50 per cent, which was then accepted as the beginning of the hyperinflation period. A litre of milk had cost 7 marks in April 1922, but rose to 16 marks in August, and then to 26 marks by mid-September. The prices of other basic goods rose in a comparable manner. The German government response to rising inflation was to continue printing money, with the number of marks in circulation rising from 35 billion in 1919 to 200 billion in 1922.

Hyperinflation led in turn to a dizzying fall in the value of the German mark, which the Reichsbank, lacking gold and foreign currency reserves, was powerless to stop. On 29 July, the mark hit a new low of 650 to 1 US$. The German government claimed this fall in the value of German currency was linked to the demand by the Allies for cash reparations payments. State and local authorities began to issue money tokens called Notgeld ['emergency money'] to replace payments in worthless paper marks.

...

On 14 August [1922], the Conference on Reparations ended without any agreement on Germany’s request for a further payment holiday. On the next day, the German government once more defaulted on its reparations payments, claiming it could not afford to pay. The downward tumble of the mark continued. On 24 August, it plummeted to a new all-time low of US$2,000 to 1 mark [sic; should be 2000 marks to 1 US$!], or 9,000 to the British pound. On 31 August, the Allied Reparations Commission decided to grant Germany an exceptional six-month moratorium on reparations payments.

24 March 2024

Weimar's 1921 Communist Uprising

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 194-196:

In the midst of this bitter diplomatic crisis [over reparations], the German government was faced with a fresh wave of violent clashes between the Prussian Security Police (Schutzpolizei), and communist revolutionaries allied to the United Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD), and the KPD between 17 March and 1 April. The province of Saxony in central Germany was at the centre of these clashes, which were at their worst in Halle, Leuna, Hamburg, Merseburg, and Mansfeld. They became known as the March Action (März Aktion).

The Communists had been buoyed up by performing exceptionally well in elections to the Prussian State Parliament on 20 February 1920, in which the VKPD [Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands] had performed particularly well in central Germany which led party activists to lead a wave of strikes and street clashes with the police. This prompted Otto Hörsing, the Social Democratic Minister-President of Saxony, and Carl Severing, the Social Democratic Prussian Minister of the Interior, to send in a strong contingent of armed Prussian security police to restore order.

The Communists were led by Max Hölz of the VKPD, who had no coordinated plan for what the left-wing rebels were seeking to achieve. He put together a force of 2,500 armed men, mostly aged between 18 and 45. Hölz was something of a communist folk hero, who had been a leader of a ‘Red Army’ in Vogtland, near the Czech border, during the aftermath of the Kapp Putsch in the previous year. In his memoirs, Hölz claimed the workers were far from in a revolutionary mood when he arrived. It was the brutality of the police that had forced the workers to take up arms and adopt guerrilla tactics, he added.

On 18 March, the communist daily newspaper Die Rote Fahne called on the workers to arm themselves. The Communists were able to equip the rebels with guns and ammunition. The rebels engaged in a wave of arson, looting, bank robberies and bomb attacks on public buildings and factories, during which the VKPD leadership increasingly lost control of the armed workers. The SPD and the USPD both issued a joint appeal to the workers of the industrial region of central Germany. This offered some criticism of the high-handed police action, but claimed the so-called revolutionaries had then behaved like criminals and thugs. They called on workers not to support calls for an insurrection or a general strike.

On 24 March, President Ebert declared a non-military state of emergency for Saxony and Hamburg, using his emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. Outdoor meetings, demonstrations and Communist newspapers were banned. In an act of desperation, the Communist leadership called for a general strike, but this failed to materialise. By 1 April, the police had successfully put down the revolt without needing to call on the Reichswehr for help. The police confiscated 1,346 rifles, 34 machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition from the rebels. According to the Prussian official figures, 34 police officers were killed and 67 wounded, with 145 rebels and civilians killed, and a further 51 wounded. Some brutal atrocities occured towards the end of the conflict. On 29 March, in Gröbers, near Halle, 11 police officers were brutally tortured, killed and mutilated, while at the Leuna Works, the police maltreated prisoners, and forced rebels to sing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles’.

The ‘March Action’ did not remotely threaten even the local Prussian government. It proved to be the final rising of the radical left-wing during the Weimar years. Neither a general strike nor a mass revolt by the working class happened. The immediate consequences for the VKPD and KPD were disastrous. The violent clashes seemed to confirm the ‘dictatorial’ leadership of the party was out of touch with ordinary working class people. Within weeks, 200,000 members had left the KPD.

23 March 2024

Second Weimar Election, 1920

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 178-180:

The National Assembly held its last session on 21 May 1920. Few mourned its passing. An election campaign to elect the new Reichstag now followed. Elections did not take place in Schleswig-Holstein, Upper Silesia and East and West Prussia, owing to scheduled referenda due to take place in those areas. The 42 sitting parliamentary members for those areas retained their seats until elections took place.

The Reichstag elections of 6 June, with a voter turnout of 79.2 per cent, proved disastrous for the SPD-led Weimar Coalition, which lost its previous huge overall majority. The most serious reverse was suffered by the SPD itself, which polled 21.9 per cent, securing only 103 seats. The SPD remained the largest party, but had lost 62 seats, dropping from 37.9 per cent of the vote at the last election, from 11.51 to 6.17 million votes. Even heavier losses were suffered by the SPD’s partners in government, the liberal DDP, led by Carl Petersen, which polled 2.3 million votes, down from 5.6 million at the previous election, with the number of the party’s seats dropping from 75 to 39 and its percentage of votes falling from 18.6 to 8.3 per cent. This marked the beginning of a decline for middle-class liberalism from which it never really recovered. The third party in the Weimar Coalition, Zentrum, led by Karl Trimborn, also fared badly, with its seats falling from 91 to 64, its votes reducing from 5.9 to 3.84 million and its voter percentage moving downward to 13.6 from 19.7 per cent.

By contrast, the two anti-Republican parties: the DVP, led by Gustav Stresemann, and the DNVP, led by Oskar Hergt, both made gains. The DVP increased its seats from 19 to 65, its vote percentage from 4.4 to 13.9 per cent, with its popular vote going up from 1.34 to 3.91 million. The number of votes for the DNVP also rose, from 3.12 to 4.24 million, its number of seats increasing from 44 to 71 and its poll share up from 10.3 to 15.1 per cent. It was now the strongest middle-class party in Germany.

The party furthest to the Left contesting the election, the USPD, led by Arthur Crispien, made the biggest gains, with a large segment of the industrial working class transferring their allegiance from the SPD to the USPD. The party’s seats increased in number, from 33 to 83 seats, with its percentage vote increasing, from 7.6 to 17.6 per cent, and its total vote share up from 2.32 to 4.91 million. The USPD was now the second most popular party in Germany. Many working-class voters were clearly outraged by the harsh treatment of left-wing radicals during the recent Ruhr Uprising. The KPD decided to contest the election, but fared badly, only polling 589,454 votes, or 2.09 per cent, and securing four seats.

The new Weimar Republic had clearly disappointed German voters. President Ebert, following the tradition of giving the strongest party the first chance to form a government, asked Hermann Müller, the incumbent SPD Chancellor, to form a new coalition. On 8 June, Müller tried half-heartedly to convince the USPD to join a new coalition, but party leader Arthur Crispien decided he would only take his party into a government if the Independents were the largest party, as part of a purely socialist coalition. As Müller did not want to form a coalition involving the DVP, on 12 June, he declined the opportunity to continue trying to form a government.

Ebert finally turned to Constantin Fehrenbach, one of the leaders of Zentrum, and widely respected as the speaker of the National Assembly, to form a minority government, after the Social Democrats had refused to join his government. The SPD now played the bizarre role of being crucial in keeping governments in power, but mostly deciding not to participate in them. The Fehrenbach cabinet was based on three parties: Zentrum, the DDP and, for the first time, the centre-right DVP led by Gustav Stresemann. The DDP had only agreed to join a coalition with the DVP, provided that party promised it would accept the Weimar Constitution, which its leader Stresemann duly did.

22 March 2024

Aftermath of the 1920 Kapp Putsch

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 168-170:

The Kapp Putsch may have been a bungled fiasco, but it made possible a victory of immense importance for right-wing counterrevolutionary elements in Bavaria. On the night of 13–14 March, General Alfred von Möhl, the commander of the armed forces in the Munich area, after hearing news of Kapp’s coup in Berlin, decided to launch one of his own, supported by a local paramilitary self-defence militia, known as the Home Guard (Einwohnerwehr). Möhl informed Johannes Hoffmann (SPD), the Prime Minister of Bavaria, that he could not guarantee the safety of his government unless it transferred power to the Army. Hoffmann hurriedly assembled his cabinet in the early hours of 14 March, urging the rejection of the general’s ultimatum. Most of his ministers shrank from such a course of action. Instead, they supported a proposal by Ernst Müller-Meiningen, the DDP leader, who suggested the right-wing nationalist Dr Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the government president of Upper Bavaria and a member of the pro-monarchist BVP, should take over.

Deprived of political or military support, Hoffmann was unceremoniously driven from office. On 16 March, Kahr was elected as the Prime Minister of Bavaria in a vote in the Bavarian Assembly. The Social Democrats refused to participate in Kahr’s right-wing conservative government, and would never again hold power in Bavaria during the Weimar years. Under Kahr, Bavaria became a conspiratorial, anti-Republican ‘cell of order’ (Ordnungszelle). Kahr immediately issued a decree to curtail the immigration of ‘Eastern Jews’ to Bavaria, and he actively encouraged antisemitism. Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, whose naval brigade had played a key role in the Kapp Putsch, immediately found a safe haven in Munich, where he established a new secret society called Organisation Consul (OC), whose main purpose was to murder leading supporters and politicians in the Weimar Republic.

Adolf Hitler was now in the perfect place to establish a new anti-democratic, nationalistic, antisemitic party. On 20 February, the German Workers’ Party (DAP), led by Anton Drexler, changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). Members of the party, contrary to widespread belief, did not initially call themselves Nazis but rather National Socialists (Nationalsozialisten), but their opponents used the term, and the name stuck.

On 24 February, the first large meeting of the newly named NSDAP took place in the first-floor hall of the Hofbräuhaus, before a crowd of 2,000 people. This day was commemorated by the party as Founding Day, and became the location of an annual speech by Adolf Hitler. At the meeting, Hitler was given the task by Drexler of reading out the 25 points of the NSDAP party programme, which he declared ‘unalterable’. The main authors of the programme were Hitler and Drexler, with some economic ideas from Gottfried Feder added. They were remarkably like those being advanced by many other nationalist right-wing parties at the time. The party’s most notable gimmick was to combine nationalist and antisemitic ideas with anti-capitalist and so-called ‘socialist’ measures. This novel combination allowed the NSDAP a banner under which workers could shelter along with conservative middle- and upper-class groups, thereby acting as a bulwark against communist revolution at home and offering the possibility of restoring German military power abroad.

The ‘national’ elements of the party programme included promises to revise the Treaty of Versailles, to unite German-speakers into an expanded Greater German Reich, which would exclude Jews from German citizenship rights, treat them as foreigners and halt future Jewish immigration. The ‘socialist’ parts of the party platform included pledges to nationalise trusts, abolish land rents, restrict interest on loans, introduce profit-sharing in industry, promised the nationalisation of big business, to open large department stores to small traders, confiscate profits made by industry during the war, and create a People’s Army. The anti-capitalist elements of the party programme appeared to spell the end of interest-bearing loans and clearly threatened the existence of banks.

21 March 2024

Weaknesses of the Weimar Constitution

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 138-139:

The Weimar Constitution was intended to be a charter for an advanced democracy. It claimed to be the most egalitarian and libertarian in the world. The centrepiece of the power structure was the dual power system whereby the Reich President and the Reichstag were elected by direct popular vote. This certainly transformed Germany into a state in which central government was supreme, and where the powers of the federal states were controlled and their autonomy limited, which represented a break from the pre-war Kaiserreich. The federal Länder were now expected to enforce national laws. The result was the extension of the central government’s control over local officials.

The Weimar Constitution of 1919 was, therefore, not a federation of states (Staatenbund), as the Holy Roman Empire had been, or a federal state (Bundesstaat) as the Wilhelmine Empire had been, but a central unitary state deriving power from the people (Volksstaat). Only subsequent legislation and political action would determine the success or failure of the Constitution. It is all too easy in hindsight to point to obvious weaknesses in the Weimar Constitution, but it is impossible to know what other sort of constitution would have prevented the destruction of democracy.

The proportional representation electoral system has been viewed as one of the key weaknesses of the Weimar Constitution. The Social Democrats were the biggest advocates of this system, as they felt the pre-1914 first-past-the-post system had left them grossly underrepresented in the Reichstag; but proportional representation encouraged weak coalition governments and allowed far too many political parties a voice in the Reichstag.

A further interesting feature of the Weimar Constitution was the provision for referenda to be held. A referendum could be called by the President and the Reichsrat, if either were opposed to a piece of legislation passed by the Reichstag. It was also possible for the Reichstag to call a referendum to decide if the President should remain in office. The public was allowed the right to submit a petition either as an ordinary bill or as an amendment to the Constitution and if the number of signatures exceeded 10 per cent of registered voters, a referendum of the whole electorate would be conducted.