Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (21 page)

THREE
Waiting for Hitler

On 10 November 1918 the Lutheran chaplain at the Pasewalk Military Hospital in Pomerania summoned the patients to tell them that the House of Hohenzollern had fallen: Germany was now a republic. The news came like a thunderbolt to the wounded soldiers. One of them was Adolf Hitler, a twenty-nine-year-old junior
NCO.
He had fought on the Western Front throughout the war, had twice distinguished himself in action, and earlier that year had received the rare accolade of the Iron Cross First Class. A month before, on 13 October south of Ypres, he had been temporarily blinded in a British mustard gas attack. He had not been able to read the newspapers and had dismissed rumours of collapse and revolution as a ‘local affair’, got up by ‘a few Jewish youths’ who had ‘not been at the Front’ but ‘in a clap hospital’. Now the aged pastor, tears pouring down his face, told them their Kaiser had fled, the war was lost and the Reich was throwing itself unconditionally upon the mercy of its enemies. The news of the surrender was, as Hitler later wrote, ‘the most terrible certainty of my life. Everything went black before my eyes. I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow. Since the day I had stood on my mother’s grave, I had not wept …. But now I could not help it.’
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The shock of defeat to most Germans, especially the soldiers, was enormous. It was something no one in the West understood. The Germans knew they were retreating on the Western Front. But the withdrawal was orderly; the army was intact. And it was not in the West that Germany’s main anxieties and ambitions lay. Germany had fought the war principally from fear of the growing industrial and military strength of Russia, a huge, overbearing, tyrannical and barbarous neighbour, right on Germany’s doorstep and threatening to overwhelm her. By the middle of 1918 Germany, despite the desperate struggles on the Western Front, had exorcized what to her
was the principal spectre. Tsarist Russia had been beaten and destroyed. Its successor had signed a dictated peace. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gave Germany all the security she had ever needed. It deprived Russia of 70 per cent of her iron and steel capacity, 40 per cent of her total industry. It gave Germany everything in European Russia she considered of any value: as a member of the German government gloated, it is in the East that we shall collect the interest on our War Bonds.’
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Indeed it gave more, because it reopened the prospect of a vast economic empire in Eastern Europe, a colonization of the great plains which had been the aim of the expanding German civilization of the Middle Ages. The ‘pull of the East’ had always meant more to average Germans than their belated exercise in African colonization or even the Kaiser’s bid for commercial and maritime supremacy. It was Tsarist Great Russia which had blocked Germany’s ‘manifest destiny’ to the East. Now that monstrous despotism was at last in ruins. The programme of the Teutonic Knights could again be resumed.

On 1 March 1918 Kiev fell and Ludendorff occupied the Ukraine, set up a ‘Landowners’ Republic’ under German supervision, and laid the foundation of a satellite-colony of the Reich. The Kaiser became Duke of Courland, embracing Livonia and Estonia, to be run by their small German minorities and tied to Germany’s economy. In April German troops landed in Finland, another potential satellite. On 7 May Germany forced a dictated peace on Romania, and there too economic colonization proceeded quickly. Ludendorff put troops in the Crimea, which was earmarked for a German settlement, and in September he had penetrated as far as the Baku oilfields, preparatory to a plunge into Transcaucasia, to take up a strategic position on the rim of Central Asia. Even rumours of the downfall of the Habsburgs and the break-up of Turkey were seen by German geopoliticians as opportunities for further plunder and economic penetration, in central Europe and the Middle East. In the early autumn of 1918 it appeared to them that the war, far from being lost, had in all essentials been won – and won overwhelmingly. Indeed Germany might emerge from the settlement the equal, in military and economic potential, of the United States and the British Empire, the third superpower.

Some illusions survived even the first, overwhelming shock of defeat. Leaving aside the fact that Wilson and Colonel House had already secretly accepted the Anglo-French interpretation of the ‘Fourteen Points’, the optimistic construction the Germans placed on them was totally unwarranted. One south German town welcomed its demobilized soldiers with the banner ‘Welcome, brave soldiers, your work has been done,/God and Wilson will carry it on’.
³
The truth was finally brought home to Germany only when the terms of the Treaty
were published in May 1919. In fact Versailles, for Germany, was not really a ‘Carthaginian Peace’. Keynes was quite wrong in this respect. Austria and Hungary fared much worse. Versailles allowed Germany to retain all the essentials of Bismarck’s work. Had she chosen the path of peace, Germany must inevitably have become, over the next two decades, the dominant economic force in the whole of central and eastern Europe.

But Germany’s losses have to be seen in the perspective of the colossal gains she thought she had secured only a short time before. The thought that Tsarist Russia would have imposed infinitely worse terms on Germany (very like, no doubt, those dictated in 1945) does not seem to have occurred to the Germans. In any case Tsarist Russia had been destroyed by German arms! Why, then, was Germany being forced in the East to hand over entire German communities to the barbarous Slavs, in the Polish Corridor, in East Prussia, and above all in Silesia, rich in coal and iron and industry? It was these losses which caused the Germans the most grief and anger because they struck at their pride: it was, to them, against nature for Germans to live under Slav rule. Even the Silesian plebiscite, an important concession secured for Germany by Lloyd George, became a further source of German anger, for the government never explained to the German public that, under the Versailles Treaty, division of the province was permitted in accordance with local results. The plebiscite on 21 March 1921 gave a 60 per cent majority to Germany. But the League awarded some 40 per cent of the territory, containing a Polish majority, to Poland, and this portion included the most valuable industrial area. The Germans thought they had been swindled again; and this time their rage turned against the League.
⁴

In a sense the Germans had been swindled for many years, but chiefly by their own governments, which had never told the country the truth about their foreign policy aims and methods. The full truth, indeed, did not begin to emerge until 1961 when the great German historian Fritz Fischer published his
Griff nach der Weltmacht
, in which he traced the aggressive continuities in Germany’s expansive foreign and military policy.
⁵
A long and bitter controversy followed among German historians, culminating in the Berlin meeting of the German Historical Association in 1964.
⁶
During this debate, the essentials of the case for German war guilt were established beyond doubt, and in time accepted even by most of his critics. They are worth restating briefly.

In the second half of the nineteenth century Germany became an enormous and highly successful industrial power. This involved bringing into existence a vast industrial proletariat, who could not be
managed like peasants and with whom the German ruling class of landowners and military men was unwilling to share power. Bismarck created a dual solution to this problem. On the one hand, in the 1880s, he expanded the traditional social welfare services of the Prussian monarchy into the world’s first welfare state.
⁷
On the other, after his expansionary wars were done, he deliberately sought to preserve domestic unity by creating largely imaginary foreign threats of ‘encirclement’, thus enclosing the nation in a homogeneous state of siege mentality. Bismarck knew how to manage this artificial nightmare. His successors did not. Indeed they came to believe in it themselves, victims of a growing irrationalism and dread. By 1911 at the latest, Germany’s ruling group had unleashed a new ethnic nationalism: ‘The aim was to consolidate the position of the ruling classes with a successful foreign policy; indeed it was hoped a war would resolve the growing social tensions. By involving the masses in the great struggle those parts of the nation that had hitherto stood apart would be integrated into the monarchical state.’
⁸
The object of the 1914 war was to create a new European order in which Germany would be dominant. As Bethmann Hollweg’s secretary, Riezler, described the proposed European economic union, it was ‘The European disguise of our will to power’.
⁹
Bethmann Hollweg recognized that Britain could not possibly accept total German dominance in Europe. Therefore Britain (as well as France and Russia) had to be defeated; and that meant Germany exercising the role of a world superpower. As Riezler put it, echoing Bethmann’s thoughts: ‘England’s tragic error might consist of compelling us to rally all our strength, to exploit all our potentialities, to drive us into world-wide problems, to force upon us – against our will – a desire for world domination.’
¹⁰
This last formulation was very characteristic of the German desire to shift the moral responsibility for its aggression onto others.

If the responsibility for starting the war was shared jointly by the military and civilian wings of the German ruling establishment, the magnitude of the defeat was the fault of the generals and the admirals. Germany ceased to be in any sense a civilian empire on 9 January 1917 when Bethmann Hollweg surrendered to the demand, which he had resisted for three years, to wage unrestricted submarine warfare. Thereafter the admirals and Ludendorff were in charge. It was their war. They raised the stakes at the gambling table, thus making it certain that, when the inevitable crash came, Germany would not merely be defeated but broken, bankrupted, shamed and humiliated. As Riezler put it: ‘We will practically have to accept the
Diktat.
Slavery for a hundred years. The dream about the world finished forever. The end of all hubris. The dispersion of Germans around the world. The fate of the Jews.’
¹¹

It is a pity that Keynes could not have been privy to these desperate thoughts of a man who was at the very centre of the German decision-making machine. He could then have appreciated that the so-called ‘Carthaginian Peace’ was in fact very much more generous than Germany’s rulers secretly expected. But of course the overwhelming mass of the Germans were even more ignorant than Keynes. They had been taught, and they believed, that the war had been caused principally by Russian expansionism and British commercial jealousy. For Germany it had been a defensive war of survival. The tragedy is that, when the collapse came in 1918, the opportunity to tell the truth to the German people was missed. Even among the German Socialists, the only ones to admit German war-guilt were Kurt Eisner, who was murdered in 1919, Karl Kautsky, who had the job of putting the pre-war diplomatic documents in order, and Eduard David, who had seen the key papers when he was Under-Secretary at the Foreign Ministry immediately after the monarchy fell.
¹²
But none of the really revealing documents was published or made accessible. German historians, the best in the world, betrayed their profession and deluded themselves. Equally important, the chief actors in the tragedy lied or concealed the facts. Bethmann Hollweg could have told the truth about the origins of the war and the role of the military in losing it. He did not do so, despite provocation. Both Tirpitz and Ludendorff savaged him in their memoirs. But Bethmann’s own account says very little: he feared to deepen the already wide divisions in German society.
¹³

Not only was the truth not told: it was deliberately concealed beneath a myth that the German war-machine had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by civilian defeatism and cowardice. It is, looking back on it, extraordinary that this myth should have been accepted. No force in Wilhelmine Germany was capable of defying the military, let alone stabbing it in the back. Germany was in many ways the most militarized society on earth. Even the new industry was regimented in a military fashion. The factory-towns grew up around the barrack-cities of the Hohenzollern soldier-kings. The continuous military drill affected the business classes, and even the early stages of the trade union and Social Democratic movements, with their profound stress on discipline. Uniforms were everywhere. The Kaiser referred contemptuously to ministers, politicians and diplomats as ‘stupid civilians’. To raise their prestige, members of the government affected military dress. Bismarck sported the rig of a cavalry general. When Bethmann Hollweg first appeared as Chancellor in the Reichstag he was dressed as a major. The Kaiser himself sat at his desk perched on a military saddle instead of a chair.
¹⁴
The idea of civilians somehow overturning this enormous and all-pervasive military structure,
above all in the middle of the greatest war in history, was preposterous.