Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (27 page)

Hitler’s policy of creating a vanguard-élite party on a mass base was, of course, modelled on Lenin’s experience. Indeed in important respects he remained a Leninist to the end, particularly in his belief that a highly disciplined and centralized party, culminating in an autocratic apex, was the only instrument capable of carrying through a fundamental revolution. Once in power he put in motion a systematic party take-over of all the organs of society exactly as Lenin did. And initially he planned to take power in the same way as Lenin in 1917, by a paramilitary
putsch.
He was encouraged in this resolve by the success of Mussolini’s march on Rome in the autumn of 1922. A year later he thought the time had come in Germany too.

In 1923 the German currency, long teetering on the brink of chaos, finally fell into it. In 1913 the German mark had been worth 2.38 US dollars. By 1918 it had fallen to 7 cents, and by the middle of 1922 one US cent would buy 100 marks. The German financial authorities blamed the fall on the reparation clauses of the Versailles Treaty. In fact reparations had nothing directly to do with it. German public finance had been unsound since Bismarck’s day, when he had paid for his wars by borrowing, afterwards liquidating the debts with the loot. The same technique was tried in 1914–18 but this time there was no loot and Germany emerged with a mountain of public debt in government bonds and a stupendous amount of paper money in circulation. The inflation began long before reparations were heard of and it had reached hyper-inflation levels by 1921 when the first payments became due. The crisis was due entirely to the reckless manner in which the Ministry of Finance, abetted by the Reichsbank, allowed credit and the money supply to expand. No one in the financial and business establishment cared a damn for the ‘Republican mark’. They speculated and hedged against it, shipped capital abroad and, in the case of the industrialists, invested in fixed capital as fast as they could by borrowing paper money. When Keynes was called in to advise in the autumn of 1922 he proposed a sharp remedy which a later generation would term ‘monetarism’ – the government, he said, must at all costs balance the budget and curb money supply. This excellent advice was rejected and the printing presses accelerated.
⁷⁵

The final currency collapse began in January 1923 when the French occupied the Ruhr, the population stopped working and the German government accepted the financial responsibility to continue paying their wages. By the summer of 1923 a visiting US Congressman, A.P.Andrew, recorded he got 4,000 million marks for 7
dollars; a meal for two in a restaurant cost 1,500 million, plus a 400 million tip. By 30 November the daily issue was up to 4,000 quintillions. The banks were charging 35 per cent interest a day on loans, while paying depositors only 18 per cent a year. As a result, a peasant woman who deposited the price of a cow and drew it out six months later found it was worth less than the price of a herring. Small depositors and holders of government bonds lost everything. The big gainers, apart from the government itself, were the landowners, who redeemed all their mortgages, and the industrialists, who repaid their debts in worthless paper and became the absolute owners of all their fixed capital. It was one of the biggest and crudest transfers of wealth in history. The responsibilities were clear; the beneficiaries of the fraud were easily identifiable. Yet it is a depressing indication of public obtuseness in economic matters that the German public, and above all the losers, far from ‘developing a proletarian consciousness’ – as Marx had predicted they would in such a case – blamed the Versailles Treaty and ‘Jewish speculators’.

Naturally such an upheaval had political results. On 13 August Gustav Stresemann, the only popular Weimar politician, formed a ‘Great Coalition’ from the Social Democrats to the fairly respectable Right. It lasted only one hundred days. A state of emergency was declared and power placed in the hands of the Defence Minister. There was talk of a ‘March on Berlin’. But it was the Communists, as nearly always happened, who began the cycle of violence by an uprising in Saxony. Hitler now decided it was time to take over Bavaria. On 8 November his men surrounded a beer-hall where the local government was meeting, took its leaders into custody, formed them into a new dictatorial government with himself as political boss and Ludendorff head of the army, and then marched on the city with 3,000 men. But the police opened fire, the march dispersed, Hitler was arrested and in due course sentenced to five years in Landsberg fortress-prison.
⁷⁶

The authorities, however, had no intention he should serve his term. Hitler benefited from the double-standard which favoured all ‘Easterner’ criminals. ‘The prisoner of Landsberg’ was a popular and cosseted inmate. Instead of gaol garb he wore
Lederhosen
, a Bavarian peasant jacket and a green hunting hat with a feather. He spent up to six hours a day receiving a constant stream of visitors, including admiring women and cringing politicians. On his thirty-fifth birthday the flowers and parcels filled several rooms of the fortress, and his cell, according to one eyewitness, always ‘looked like a delicatessen store’.
⁷⁷
The months he spent there were just long enough for him to write
Mein Kampf
, tapping it out, as Hess’s wife Use later testified, ‘with two fingers on an ancient typewriter’.
⁷⁸

While Hitler was in Landsberg a great change came over Germany. In the short term events moved against him. The new president of the Reichsbank, Dr Hjalmar Schacht, stabilized the currency, introduced a new Reichsmark, based on gold and negotiable abroad, stopped printing money and slashed government expenditure – did, in fact, what Keynes had advised eighteen months before. The German economy, indeed the world economy, moved into smoother waters. The next five years saw steady economic expansion and in consequence a much higher degree of political stability: they were the best years of Weimar’s life. Hitler realized, in Landsberg, that he was not going to get power Lenin’s way. He must become a demotic politician.
Mein Kampf
acknowledged this fact and indicated exactly how he would do it. But he also sensed that the year 1923 had been a watershed, which in the long run must favour his endeavour. For millions of its victims, the legacy of the Great Inflation would be an inextinguishable, burning hatred of Weimar and its managers, of the ‘Westernizing’ establishment, of the Treaty and the Allies and those in Germany who had been associated with them. The German middle class had shifted its axis. Henceforth the Western cause was doomed; ‘culture’ would prevail over ‘civilization’. Hitler noted this seismic reorientation in the remarkable fourth chapter of
Mein Kampf
describing the ‘war for living space’ fought against Russia. ‘We stop the endless German movement to the south and west’, he wrote, ‘and turn our gaze towards the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policies of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.’
⁷⁹

Almost at the exact moment Hitler was writing this, a strange and intuitive Englishman was coming to exactly the same conclusion. On 19 February 1924 D.H.Lawrence wrote a ‘Letter from Germany’.
⁸⁰
It was, he said, ‘as if the Germanic life were slowly ebbing away from contact with western Europe, ebbing to the deserts of the east’. On his last visit in 1921, Germany ‘was still open to Europe. Then it still looked to western Europe for a reunion … reconciliation. Now that is over … the positivity of our civilization has broken. The influences that come, come invisibly out of Tartary …. Returning again to the fascination of the destructive East that produced Attila.’ He continued:

… at night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness …. There is a sense of danger … a queer,
bristling
feeling of uncanny danger …. The hope in peace-and-production is broken. The old flow, the old adherence is ruptured. And a still older flow has set in. Back, back to the savage polarity of Tartary, and away from the polarity of civilized Christian Europe. This, it seems to me, has already happened. And it is a happening of far more profound import than any actual
event.
It is the father of the next phase of events.

Determined to exploit this new polarity, and in his role of populist politician, Hitler – who had an undoubted streak of creative imagination – spent his last weeks in gaol thinking out the concept of spectacular scenic roads built specially for cars, the future
autobahnen
, and of a ‘people’s car’ or
Volkswagen
to carry the nation along them.
⁸¹
He was released on 20 December 1924 and, suffering from Wagner-starvation, made straight for the house of the pianist Ernst Hanfstaengel and commanded him: ‘Play the
Liebestod’
The next morning he bought a Mercedes for 26,000 marks and thereafter, until he became Chancellor, insisted on passing every car on the road.
⁸²

FOUR
Legitimacy in Decadence

While the Eastern wind was blowing again in Germany, the Anglo-French alliance was coming apart. On 22 September 1922 there was an appalling scene at the Hotel Matignon in Paris between Raymond Poincaré, the French Prime Minister, and Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary. Three days before, the French had pulled out their troops from Chanak, leaving the tiny British contingent exposed to the full fury of Ataturk’s nationalists, and making a humiliation inevitable. Curzon had come to remonstrate.

The two men hated each other. Poincaré was the spokesman of the French
rentiers
, a Forsytian lawyer, sharp, prudent, thrifty, who liked to quote Guizot’s advice to the French, ‘
Enrichissez-vous!’ L’Avocat de France
, they called him: he had inherited the nationalism of Thiers, whose biography he was writing. His boast was incorruptibility: he insisted on writing all his letters by hand and when he sent an official messenger on private business, paid for it himself.
¹
Curzon, too, wrote his own letters, thousands and thousands of them, sitting up late into the night, unable to sleep from a childhood back-injury. He, too, had a parsimonious streak, rigorously scrutinizing Lady Curzon’s household accounts, keeping the servants up to the mark, not above telling a housemaid how to dust the furniture or a footman how to pour tea. But Poincaré brought out all his aristocratic contempt for middle-class vulgarity and French emotional self-indulgence. As the two men argued, Poincaré ‘lost all command of his temper and for a quarter of an hour shouted and raved at the top of his voice’. Lord Hardinge, the British Ambassador, had to help the shocked Curzon to another room, where he collapsed on a scarlet sofa, his hands trembling violently. ‘Charley,’ he said, ‘I can’t bear that horrid little man. I can’t bear him. I can’t bear him.’ And Lord Curzon wept.
²

The underlying cause of the Anglo—French division was precisely a different estimate of the likelihood of a German military revival. Most of the British regarded French statesmen as paranoid on the subject of
Germany, ‘I tell you,’ Edouard Herriot was heard to say by Sir Austen Chamberlain, ‘I look forward with terror to her making war upon us again in ten years.’
³
This French view was shared by the British members of the Inter-Allied Commission of Control, whose job was to supervise Articles 168–9 of the Versailles Treaty governing the disarmament of Germany. Brigadier-General J.H.Morgan reported privately that Germany had retained more of its pre-war characteristics, especially its militarism, than any other state in Europe.
⁴
The French claimed that every time they checked a statement by the Weimar War Ministry, they found it to be untrue. But the reports of the Control Commission, recording brazen violations, were never published; were, in the view of some, deliberately suppressed, to help the general cause of disarmament and cutting defence spending. The British Ambassador to Germany, Lord D’Abernon, a high-minded militant teetotaller, was passionately pro-German, the first of the Appeasers; he believed every word in Keynes’s book and reported that it was impossible for Germany to conceal evasions of the Treaty.
⁵
He had nothing to say in his reports about holding companies set up by German firms to make weapons in Turkey, Finland, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Bilbao and Cadiz, and arrangements made by Krupps to develop tanks and guns in Sweden.
⁶

French resentment at British indifference to the risks of a German revival was further fuelled on 16 April 1922 when Germany signed the Rapallo Treaty with Russia. One of the secret objects of this agreement, as the French suspected, was to extend arrangements for the joint manufacture of arms in Russia, and even to have German pilots and tank-crews trained there. It also had a sinister message to France’s eastern ally Poland, hinting at a German-Soviet deal against her which finally emerged as the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Rapallo strengthened Poincaré’s determination to get reparations from Germany by force, if necessary, and it was not long after the break with Britain over Chanak that he sent French troops into the Ruhr, on 11 January 1923. Some of these troops were from French Africa, and it was one of Poincaré’s boasts that France was ‘a country not of 40 million but of 100 million’. The French railway system in Africa, such as it was, had as its main purpose the rapid transportation of troops to the European theatre. The fact that the Germans had a particular hatred for the Arabs and blacks in French uniform was, to the French, an additional reason for sending them there. France’s harsh line brought short-term results on 26 September 1923 when the German government, in effect, capitulated to Poincaré’s demands. The fierce little lawyer, who held power (with one interruption) until 1929, was the dominant figure in Western
European politics for most of the Twenties and appeared to many (including some of the British and Americans) to personify a French aggressiveness which was a greater threat to European and world stability than anything likely to emerge from Germany.