Category Archives: Germany

by Joel | 7 July 2024 · 8:27 am

Japan vs. Germany in the Pacific

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 80-84:

The European war that began in August 1914 was more than European. Though it was the great European powers that immolated themselves in both victory and defeat, the war was fought around the globe and had immediate consequences for Asia and Japan.

The requirements of the European war were such that Britain, France, Germany, and Russia had to redeploy the troops maintaining their empires in Asia to the European theater of war. At the same time, they all wanted to defend those parts of their empires they could while depriving the enemy of his. Japan was Germany’s foe in this war and a very useful ally of Britain. The war was the final denouement of the tsarist regime in Russia and, when the Bolshevik Revolution had run its course, it would present Japan with a new, virulent, and formidable neighboring regime. Moreover, the successful Marxist revolution in Russia would embolden the nascent communist party in China just as the Bolshevik regime would aid and abet the Chinese revolutionaries who would one day make their own revolution and reshape Japan’s geopolitical reality. In the meanwhile, it was Japan that had an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the geopolitical contours of Asia.

Japan entered the war without hesitation on the side of Britain, sending an ultimatum to Germany on August 15 demanding that Germany withdraw all naval forces from Asian waters, disarm those not withdrawn, and turn over to Japan the whole of Germany’s Chinese territory. A week later, Japan blockaded the German-controlled port of Tsingtao and in early September Japan landed a force in order to assault the port from the rear. By November 7, 1914, Japan had taken the base at Tsingtao. At the same time, Japan also took over Germany’s other Pacific territories and bases, including the Marshall Islands, the Mariana Islands, Palau, and the Caroline Islands, prizes Japan kept as rewards for its participation in the war against Germany. The former German possessions gave Japan’s navy an orientation very different than it had before. Japan’s armed forces were arrayed across the Sea of Japan to China and the continent and, for the first time, had far-flung bases and possessions southward and eastward across the world’s largest ocean.

It is a common view of historians that Japan’s participation in the war was solely to further its territorial ambitions. A typical summary of the period opines that “the Japanese Empire was keen to make the most of the golden opportunity which Germany’s occupation with European events provided. . . . She proceeded to seize every Germany territory in the Pacific she could lay her hands on.” Doubtless this view comes from the Twenty-One Demands that Japan made on China—actually a series of memos that pressed the Chinese to give to Japan the same concessions they had given to Germany, plus several additional ones. The memos put Japan at odds with the United States, which was lamely arguing to restore China’s territorial integrity. In fact, the memoirs of Germany’s Kaiser, written after the war, support this view: “the rapid rise of Tsing-tao as a trading center aroused the envy of the Japanese. . . . Envy prompted England in 1914 to demand that Japan should take Tsing-tao. . . . Japan did this joyfully.”

Yet few history books note Japan’s contributions to the allied effort against Germany. All the great powers, most especially the United States, were apprehensive about Japan’s potential to become the dominant power not only in China but in the Pacific. Germany even briefly tried to pit the anxieties of the North American power against Japan in an effort to save Germany’s Pacific possessions. Britain too was ambivalent about Japan, first demanding that Japan enter the war immediately, then trying to limit the scope of Japan’s operations. But it must be said that Japan adhered to both the letter and spirit of the alliance it had made with Great Britain. In addition to joining the war immediately and taking Germany’s Asian bases, Japan served a number of other roles. First, Japan’s navy helped Britain drive German warships from the Pacific. The Japanese Imperial navy also allowed Britain, and later the United States, to minimize their forces in the Pacific, freeing those ships for duty in waters surrounding Europe. Further, Japan escorted convoys of troops and war materials from the British dominions in the Pacific to Europe—no small task in an era of mine and submarine warfare. Meanwhile, Japanese yards produced both ships of war and merchantmen for British allies. And beginning in 1917, Japan sent two flotillas of destroyers to the Mediterranean Sea to assist Britain in antisubmarine operations and escort troop transports. In the Mediterranean theater alone, the Imperial navy had thirty-two engagements with submarines and escorted a total of 788 allied ships.

One of the few who gave Japan its due was Winston Churchill, who served as Britain’s first lord of the admiralty and wrote a prodigious history of the war. To him Japan was “another island empire situated on the other side of the globe” and “a trustworthy friend.” Similarly, Lord Grey, who served as Britain’s foreign secretary, wrote that “Japan was for us for many, many years a fair, honorable, and loyal Ally.” Nonetheless, when the time came for postwar negotiations, Churchill and Grey were out of office and Britain had obligations to Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, who had all given Britain their firm support in the war.

The Australians and New Zealanders, chips off the Anglo block, were alarmed by Japan’s reach in the Pacific at the war’s end in 1918, and equally aware of Britain’s diminished naval strength. They insisted Japan give up any of the former German holdings south of the equator. Likewise, the United States apprehended Japan, its navy, and its extensive Pacific outposts as a maritime rival and a potential threat to free trade in Asia. As a result, Japan, the United States, Britain, and its oceanic dominions now found themselves in a peculiar geographical and political puzzle.

Japan was Britain’s ally, had built a formidable navy, and had acquired far-flung Pacific bases. Australia and New Zealand were dependable British dominions but strongly preferred to have their security guaranteed by the motherland rather than by Japan. The United States never had a peacetime alliance with Britain, but Britain valued U.S. friendship, and the two democratic, commercial, naval powers sat astride the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, Japanese and American interests and possessions in the Pacific were not separated by any discernible boundary and the two powers viewed each other as rivals. The Americans also insisted on an “Open Door” trading policy in China but Japan clearly had gained the upper hand over the Europeans in that chaotic country.

The Americans had some reason to be concerned about Japan’s new position in the northwest Pacific. Japan had been consolidating its control in southern Manchuria and Korea, had taken over Shantung, and had won most of its twenty-one demands from China. The Open Door policy, the idea that outside powers would compete on equal terms in China and respect its sovereignty, was seriously threatened by Japan’s increasingly advantageous position. Government in China was becoming ever more fragmented and corrupt.

The American government also had domestic pressures to deal with in regard to Asian policy. Navalists saw British power fading and Japanese power expanding. The trend seemed to be toward Japanese dominance in the Pacific. Likewise, American traders wanted the government to take a more aggressive stance that would give them some advantage—or at least, not put them at such a disadvantage in Asia in general and in China in particular. Christian missionaries were also keen to set to work on the vast populations now accessible to their gospel. But worst of all, and most outspoken, the racist Anti-Immigration League in California made barring Japanese immigrants from schools, jobs, and property the sine qua non of their agenda and, consequently, of California politics. The Californians now found allies in various anti-immigration societies in the eastern United States as well as in worker unions and even in recent European immigrants who feared the Asians would not only drive down wages but take their jobs. Thus, the nascent Japanese-American rivalry found expression even at the level of local politics.

Complicating matters further, the Western allies, including Japan, still had troops in Siberia. Their intervention there was a confused, fruitless, and embarrassing attempt to stave the Bolshevik Revolution, or rescue the Czech freedom fighters, or prop up an alternative government, or prevent the massive resources of Siberia from falling into somebody else’s hands, or something similar. Everyone, except perhaps the Japanese, was ready to leave Siberia but not so willing to leave first and allow Japan a free hand. Consequently, the peace conference at the palace Versailles was an infamous mess.

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by Joel | 8 June 2024 · 9:35 am

U.S. Enlists Mafia to Invade Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 316-317:

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Mussolini declared his support for Hitler, with whom he had concluded the so-called Pact of Steel four months before. He did not immediately declare war—the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, having warned him that Italy simply did not have enough tanks, armored cars and aircraft. To get involved in the European conflict at this point would, said Badoglio, be tantamount to suicide. Nine months later, however, the situation had changed dramatically. Norway, Belgium and Holland had been invaded; France was falling. On June 10 Italy declared war. Mussolini had hoped to help himself to Savoy, Nice, Corsica, Tunisia and Algeria from the French, but to his disgust Germany signed an armistice establishing the collaborationist government under Marshal Pétain at Vichy, which retained control over southern France and all its colonies.

So far as North Africa was concerned, only Egypt was left; and in September 1940 the Duce sent a large Italian force across the Libyan border. The British troops stationed in Egypt were at first hopelessly outnumbered; their counterattack, however, proved far more successful than expected and resulted in massive numbers of prisoners. So decisive was the Italian defeat that Hitler was obliged to send out his Afrikakorps, under the command of General Erwin Rommel. Only then did the British lose the initiative, ultimately to regain it at the Battle of El Alamein in October–November 1942.

The story of the Desert War is not ours, but it exemplifies the several successive humiliations suffered by Italy between 1940 and 1943. Mussolini’s invasion of Greece in October 1940 once again forced Hitler to send troops to his rescue; and by the beginning of 1943 disaster threatened him from every side. Half the Italian troops serving in Russia had been annihilated; both his North African and his Balkan adventures had been dismal failures. The Italians had had enough. Then, in July 1943, the Allies launched an operation which, as well as giving them a foothold in Europe, promised to remove Mussolini from the scene for good. They invaded Sicily.

For Sicily, hitherto, the war had been disastrous. As an island, it had suffered even more acutely than the rest of Italy. The ferryboats to the mainland were disrupted; the export market largely disappeared, while imports became irregular and uncertain; sometimes the Sicilians had found themselves with virtually nothing to eat but their own oranges. The rationing system was a bad joke; the black market reigned supreme. For the Mafia, on the other hand, conditions could hardly have been better. With a good deal of help from its branches in New York and Chicago, in the last years of peace it had already begun a swift recovery from the Mori reign of terror; and by 1943, whatever Mussolini might have said or believed, it was flourishing.

American intelligence officers, somewhat better informed than the Duce, understood that for the projected invasion to be successful it was vitally important to have the Mafia firmly on the Allied side. They therefore made careful approaches to the dominant boss of gangland crime in the United States, a Sicilian named Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano. He had in fact been in prison since 1936 on compulsory prostitution charges, but was still very much in command. In late 1942, after long discussions, the two sides struck a deal. Luciano would have his sentence commuted; in return, he made two promises. The first was that his friend Albert Anastasia, who ran the notorious Murder Inc. and who also controlled the American docks, would protect the waterfront and prevent dockworker strikes for the duration of hostilities. The second was that he, Luciano, would contact other friends in Sicily, who would in turn ensure that the invasion would run as smoothly as possible.

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Filed under Africa, Germany, Italy, Mediterranean, migration, nationalism, U.S., war

by Joel | 1 June 2024 · 5:14 pm

Bismarck Unites Italy

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 297-298:

In 1866 the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck found Austria to be a serious obstacle to the realization of his dream of uniting all the German states into a single empire. He therefore forged an alliance with the new kingdom of Italy: the two would attack Austria simultaneously on two fronts. In the event of victory, Italy’s reward would be Venice and the Veneto. A single battle was enough. It was fought on July 3 at Sadowa—also known by its German name of Königgrätz—some sixty-five miles northeast of Prague, and it engaged the greatest number of troops—some 330,000—ever assembled on a European battlefield. The Prussian victory was total. It bankrupted the military resources of the Emperor Franz Josef and opened the way to Vienna. The ensuing armistice duly resulted in the cession of the promised territory. Venice was no longer the independent republic that she had once been, but she was at least an Italian city rather than an Austrian one; and Italy could boast a new and economically invaluable port on the northern Adriatic.

The unity of Italy, however, could not be achieved without Rome; and Rome too was acquired by courtesy of Bismarck, who had cunningly drawn France into a war by his threat to place a prince of the ruling Prussian House of Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain—a proposal clearly unacceptable to the French, who would have then found themselves completely surrounded by Germany. War was therefore declared—by France, not Prussia—on July 15, 1870. It was to prove a bitter struggle; Napoleon III was going to need every soldier he had for the fighting that lay ahead. Thus, by the end of August, not one French soldier remained in Rome. Pope Pius IX was left defenseless. Napoleon’s defeat at Sedan on September 1 spelled the end of the Second Empire; and on September 20 the Italian army entered the Holy City. The Pope withdrew inside the walls of the Vatican, where he remained for the last eight years of his life. The plebiscite that was held shortly afterward registered 133,681 votes in favor of the incorporation of Rome into the new kingdom and 1,507 against. Rome was now part of Italy, not by right of conquest but by the will of its people; and the kingdom of Italy, under its sovereign King Victor Emmanuel II, finally took its place among the nations of Europe.

As the voting figures showed, the Sicilians were as happy as their new compatriots. They were, after all, a good deal more Italian than Spanish, and even though their King was a Piedmontese—a man of the mountains rather than of the sea, and hailing from as far from Sicily as it was possible to go while remaining an Italian—there seemed a fair chance that they would be allowed to play a larger part in their own affairs than they had in the past. They hoped so, anyway.

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by Joel | 5 May 2024 · 6:20 am

Who Killed Weimar Democracy?

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 673-678:

Given all the cumulative problems it faced, it is surprising Weimar democracy lasted as long as it did, but we need to remember that it endured longer than Hitler’s Third Reich. The period from 1918 to 1923 was politically and economically turbulent, but democracy survived. Between 1924 and 1929, the economy stabilised, Germany regained international respectability, and democratic rule was never threatened. Even in the period of deep political and economic crisis between 1930 and 1933, during the time of authoritarian ‘presidential rule’, there was no attempt to overthrow the Republic.

The commonly held view is that the ‘Great Depression’ led to the collapse of Weimar democracy, and brought Hitler to power, is not credible. The USA and Britain suffered economic problems often as difficult as those of Germany, but democracy did not collapse in either of those countries. This suggests there was something specific about the nature of the political and economic crisis that was peculiar to Germany at this time.

The two decisive ingredients in the period from 1930 to 1933 were the supreme indifference of President Hindenburg, and his inner circle, to sustain democratic government, and the dramatic rise in electoral support for Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP. It was a toxic mixture of these two factors, operating at a time of deep economic depression, which ensured Germany’s experiment with democracy failed.

Yet the seeds of the Weimar’s democratic tragedy were planted by the type of democratic system established after the November Revolution of 1918, and embedded into the Weimar Constitution of 1919. The November Revolution was a very strange one indeed, which left Germany’s judicial, bureaucratic, and military elite largely intact. Weimar judges punished those on the Left with harsh sentences, while treating radicals on the Right very leniently, and the Reichswehr remained a law unto itself, being more preoccupied with shaking off the military restrictions placed upon it by the Treaty of Versailles than defending democracy.

One of the essential ingredients for the successful transition from an authoritarian to a democratic form of government is the existence of a strong, resilient party of the moderate Right, committed to the ideals of democracy. In Britain, the Conservative Party fulfilled this role, evolving from the late 19th century into a mainstay of the British party system. In Germany, no such party was able to take on that stabilising role. The leading conservative party in Germany was the DNVP. Between 1919 and 1930, its voter support reached a high point of 20.5 per cent and 103 seats in the December 1924 election, but then fell to a low point of 7 per cent at the September 1930 election, when it gained just 41 seats. During the Weimar era, the DNVP was a bitter opponent of Weimar democracy, with a leader in Alfred Hugenberg who moved the party to the extreme Right.

Germany’s military defeat in the Great War also cast a giant shadow over the Weimar Republic. The ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth, which held that Germany was not defeated on the battlefield, but betrayed by Liberals, Jews and Socialists on the home front, remained a powerful one. Some of these negative feelings fed into the general hatred of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The inclusion of Article 231, known as the ‘war-guilt clause’, seemed particularly vindictive. Add in the bill for reparations and you have a perfect recipe for deeply held animosity towards democracy. Any government forced to sign such a treaty would have been unpopular, but the fact this task fell to the SPD-led coalition government was deeply damaging for the stability of democracy. The tag ‘November Criminals’ was hung around the necks of those politicians who had instigated the fall of the Kaiser and were responsible for the establishment of democracy.

There were also two aspects of the Weimar Constitution which undoubtedly contributed to the failure of democracy. The first was the voting system, based on proportional representation, which gave Reichstag seats in exact proportion to the votes cast in elections. In Germany, this system did not work. In July 1932, 27 different political parties contested the election, ranging across the political spectrum, with each representing one class or interest group. These differing parties reflected the bitter divisions in German society and made the task of creating stable coalition governments extremely difficult, and eventually impossible. Some coalitions took weeks to form, but could fall apart in days. The last functioning Weimar coalitions were those led by SPD Chancellor Herman Müller between 1928 and 1930, involving the SPD, Zentrum, the DDP, the DVP, but they finally broke apart over the increasing payments of unemployment benefits.

The Weimar Republic also lacked the one key factor that made democracy stable in the USA and Britain – that is, a two-party system, with one left-wing liberal democratic and one conservative party, alternating in periods of power, with each loyal to the democratic system. If there had been a first-past-the-post electoral constituency system, as operated in Britain, then probably a small number of parties would have ruled, and there would have been a better chance of stable government, although given the deep differences between the Weimar political parties that is by no means certain.

Those who drafted the Weimar Constitution were unwittingly culpable in offering a means of destroying democracy. This was the special powers the Weimar Constitution invested in the role of the President. No one realised when drafting the Constitution how an anti-democratic holder of the post could subvert the power of the President. Article 48 gave the German President extensive subsidiary powers in a ‘state of emergency’ to appoint and dismiss Chancellors and cabinets, to dissolve the Reichstag, call elections and suspend civil rights. The two German presidents of the Weimar years were quite different. Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert was an enthusiastic supporter of Weimar democracy. He used Article 48 on 136 occasions during the period 1918 to 1925, but always with the intention of sustaining the Republic by preventing coup attempts, not with the aim of undermining or threatening its existence. Paul von Hindenburg, elected in 1925, was a great contrast. He was a right-wing figure, who had led Germany’s militaristic armed forces during the Great War of 1914–1918. Up until March 1930, Hindenburg never used Article 48 at all. Henceforth, influenced by a small inner circle of advisers, all militaristic and authoritarian in outlook, he appointed Chancellors of his own choosing, who remained in power using emergency powers granted under Article 48.

It was President Hindenburg, therefore, who mortally damaged the infant democratic structure in Germany more than anyone else. It was not the Constitution or the voting system that was the fundamental problem, but the culpable actions of Hindenburg, who chose to deliberately subvert the power it had invested in him. Hindenburg appointed three Chancellors between 1930 and 1933: Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen, and Kurt von Schleicher, all of whom governed using emergency decrees granted by the President.

The political crisis after 1930 was deliberately manufactured by Hindenburg, who refused to involve Social Democrats in government, who were the strongest supporters of democracy. It must not be forgotten, however, that from 1930 onwards Adolf Hitler was the single most dynamic and popular politician in Germany. He united the voters on the Right of German politics in a way no other politician had been able to do so since the beginning of the Weimar years. The NSDAP managed to be anti-elitist and anti-capitalist while at the same time being patriotic and nationalist. The spectacular voting rise of the NSDAP from 2.63 per cent of voters in national elections in 1928, to 18.3 per cent in 1930, then to a high point of 37.3 in July 1932, was on a scale never seen in a democratic election before.

It was not by elections that Hitler finally came to power, however, but he would not have even been considered as a potential German Chancellor without his huge electoral support. A total of 13.74 million people voted for Hitler of their own free will in July 1932. Solid middle-class groups, usually the cement that holds together democratic governments, decided to support a party openly promising to destroy democracy. This mass electoral support was the decisive factor that propelled Hitler to a position where he could be offered power. Hitler’s party grew because millions of Germans felt democratic government had been a monumental failed experiment. To these voters, Hitler offered the utopian vision of creating an authoritarian ‘national community’ that would sweep away the seeming chaos and instability of democratic government, and provide strong leadership.

Yet Hindenburg needed a great deal of persuading before he finally made Hitler the Chancellor of a ‘national coalition’. It was former Chancellor Franz von Papen who played the most decisive role in convincing Hindenburg that Hitler could be ‘tamed’ by being invited to lead a cabinet of conservatives. By then, the only alternative to Hitler taking on the role was for Hindenburg to grant Schleicher, the current Chancellor, the power to declare a ‘state of emergency’, ban the Communists and National Socialists, suspend the Reichstag indefinitely and rule with the support of the Reichswehr. Behind-the-scenes intrigues and the personal rivalry between Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher were also factors that played a crucial role in bringing Hitler to power. But it was Hindenburg’s decision in March 1930 to create a presidential authoritarian right-wing regime that was the most decisive step that opened a path towards this solution.

The real problem Hindenburg faced was that the three previous Chancellors, Brüning, Papen and Schleicher, had no popular legitimacy, and no parliamentary support. Hindenburg’s presidential rule had taken Germany down a blind alley. The only politician who could add popularity to Hindenburg’s faltering presidential regime was Adolf Hitler. It was the decision to appoint the NSDAP leader as Chancellor which put the final nail in the coffin of Weimar democracy, and opened the path to catastrophe for Germany and the world. Hindenburg had been the gravedigger and the undertaker.

The history of the Weimar Years is therefore a warning sign of how a democracy under poor leadership can drift towards a form of authoritarian rule that ultimately destroys it, under the pressure of economic crisis and unrelenting political instability. This is a question that continues to engage us today.

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by Joel | 1 May 2024 · 2:23 pm

Political Violence in Germany, 1932

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 597-599:

Out on the streets, there was an alarming increase in violence between the National Socialists and the Communists. Yet the idea Germany was nearing civil war after 1929 has been greatly exaggerated. On 12 October, the Liberal-left newspaper Die Welt am Montag (The World on Monday) published statistics, based on official sources and newspaper reports, on those killed and injured during political clashes since the beginning of 1923 to July 1931. These revealed that 457 people had been killed, and 1,154 had been injured in the period. However, just over half of those fatalities (236), and one-third of those injured (462), had occurred in 1923 alone. Between 1924 and 1928, the period of economic stability, there had been 66 fatalities and 266 injured. From 1929 to July 1931, the number of deaths increased to 155, with 426 injured. Violence was certainly on the rise after 1930, but it never reached the levels of the 1919 to 1923 period. A closer look at the post-1929 statistics reveals which side suffered more victims. The Communists and Left radicals suffered 108 deaths since 1929, while in the same period, right-wing organisations, including the National Socialists, suffered 31 dead. There were only eight fatalities among pro-republican groups such as the SPD-led Reichsbanner. There were also 10 police officers killed. Most violent clashes resulting in death involved the National Socialists and Communists.

This picture can be confirmed in greater detail with the help of statistical surveys, and police reports in the German state of Saxony. In 1929, there were 51 recorded Communist–NSDAP clashes, in 1929, this jumped to 172, and then hit 229 in 1931. The most violent clashes happened during indoor meetings. There was, however, a noticeable difference in how the police dealt with these violent confrontations. The police acted against Communist ‘troublemakers’ far more often than against National Socialists. In 1929, the ratio of police interventions was 30 KPD to 11 NSDAP; in 1930, it was 121 KPD to 32 NSDAP, and, in 1931, it was 140 KPD to 63 NSDAP. It was only during 1932 that political violence really escalated, with the Prussian Ministry of the Interior recording 155 deaths; of these 55 belonged to the NSDAP and 54 to the KPD.

The information on weapons seized by police during NSDAP– KPD clashes shows that in 1929 the police confiscated only two guns and eight knives, a figure that rose to 17 guns and 181 other weapons in 1930, but in 1931 this fell to 5 guns and 78 other weapons. This is in stark contrast to the earlier Weimar era, from 1918 to 1923, when firearms featured heavily in clashes between Left and Right. As bad as violence was after 1929, it would be totally misleading to suggest the police could not contain it or that Germany was nearing civil war. In rural areas, there were hardly any violent clashes which resulted in fatalities at all.

The front line of Left–Right violent confrontations after 1929 was primarily in the big cities. Communists felt they ruled the working-class urban streets. Any place that was home to large numbers of industrial workers was prepared to violently resist the advance of the National Socialists on the streets. Communists rarely took action to break up Social Democratic political meetings, except for a few large-scale events, mainly organised by the Reichsbanner. In contrast, Communists adopted a proactive approach whenever the National Socialists held rallies and meetings in the big cities. Most of these violent confrontations occurred during and after indoor meetings. Communists initiated most of them, keen to emphasise National Socialists were not welcome in working-class areas. Well-organised Communist gangs arrived in force at NSDAP meetings, hell bent on violence. The police authorities, however, had a broad spectrum of special powers to break up or ban demonstrations.

As violence escalated, a culture of political martyrdom emerged, with those killed on both sides receiving elaborate funerals attended by thousands of activists.

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by Joel | 30 April 2024 · 5:41 pm

Austrian-German Banking Crisis, 1931

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 575-576:

The bungled fiasco of the German–Austrian Customs Union led directly to the Austrian banking crisis. On 13 May, the Creditanstalt, the largest and most respected Austrian bank, suddenly declared bankruptcy, sending shock-waves through world financial markets. Jittery creditors everywhere withdrew funds. The bank’s initial losses amounted to 828 million Austrian schillings. During May, Austria’s foreign-currency reserves fell by 850 million schillings. Otto Ender, the Austrian Chancellor, was forced to put together a government-backed financial rescue plan by buying up 100 million schillings’ worth of Creditanstalt stock. Support in this rescue package was given by the powerful Rothschild banking family of Austria, and on 16 June the Bank of England provided a sizeable loan to the Austrian government to assist with the plan.

The Austrian banking crisis had a domino effect, with the panic-selling of the stock of German banks soon following. In early June, the Reichsbank announced it had suffered the withdrawal of 1 billion Reichsmarks since the Creditanstalt collapse, with foreign deposits falling by 25 per cent. The German government was now having great difficulty in raising foreign loans to service its huge public-spending deficit, and the Reichsmark was falling on currency markets. On 5 June, Brüning issued the Second Emergency Decree for the Protection of the Economy and Finances, which brought in reductions in welfare benefits, wage cuts for all public-sector employees, plus a ‘crisis’ tax, levied on better-paid white-collar workers, and increases in sales taxes on sugar and imported oil. The one concession to organised labour was a promise of 200 million Reichsmarks for the funding of public works. This new decree was accompanied by a blunt declaration from Brüning that ‘the limit of privations which we can impose on the German people had been reached’, and he further warned that Germany could not make the reparations payments due in 1931 under the Young Plan.

On 7 June, Heinrich Brüning, accompanied by Julius Curtius, the German Foreign Minister, met with Ramsay MacDonald, at Chequers, the British Prime Minister’s picturesque country retreat. The purpose of the visit was for a ‘mutual exchange of views’. Also present was Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, who expressed dissatisfaction with Brüning’s announcement of his intention to suspend reparations payments. In response, Brüning explained his declaration was really a warning of what would happen if the issue of Germany’s payments for 1931 was not urgently addressed. The friendly meeting only yielded the release of a joint statement, which laid stress on ‘the difficulties of the existing position in Germany and the need for alleviation’.

The US President, Herbert Hoover, was following European economic affairs closely, and he fully appreciated the impact the financial collapse of German banks would have on American creditors. The magnanimous proposal by Hoover of a payments moratorium was initially opposed by the French government, Germany’s principal reparations creditor, but was finally accepted, on 6 July, with the condition that the German government spent the one-year saving on reparations for domestic rather than military purposes. The Hoover Moratorium really marked the beginning of the end of German reparations payments, which were never resumed.

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by Joel | 28 April 2024 · 1:12 pm

Weimar Elections of 1930

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 552-554:

Given the horrors that followed, it now seems impossible to understand why German people of their own free will could vote in such large numbers for a party pledged to destroy democracy. In Dresden, Victor Klemperer, an academic at Dresden University, wrote in his diary: ‘107 National Socialists. What a humiliation! How close are we to civil war!’ In contrast, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency there was no reason for despair over Hitler’s strong showing in the national elections because ‘it was only a symptom, not necessarily of anti-Jewish hatred, but was caused by unemployment and economic misery within the ranks of misguided youth’.

It seems 24 per cent of NSDAP voters were voting in an election for the first time, many of them young people and pensioners, 22 per cent of new NSDAP voters had previously voted for the DNVP, with 18 per cent moving from the middle-class liberal parties, and 14 per cent from the Social Democrats. In sum, the biggest movement of voters to the NSDAP came from the middle-class conservative and liberal parties, and the party received the least swing votes from the KPD and Zentrum. There was also a strong reluctance to vote NSDAP in the big cities with large working-class industrial workers.

The most impressive gains for the NSDAP were in Protestant rural areas, especially those of northern and eastern Germany stretching from Schleswig-Holstein to East Prussia. The party performed very well in large northern states such as Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Hanover, Brunswick and Oldenburg, and achieved comparable results in predominantly Protestant Franconia and Hesse-Nassau. Voting support in these areas came primarily from elements of the lower middle class: small shopkeepers, farmers, self-employed tradespeople such as builders, plumbers, electricians and joiners, but there was also an upswing of support from middle-class white-collar workers, lower civil servants, teachers and university students. It was these who would represent the party’s core voters during its rise to power, but the NSDAP was not simply a ‘middle-class protest party,’ as was once thought. It is now clear Hitler’s party was able to gain support from all sections of society in a way the other political parties could not.

It was not, as is often supposed, primarily economic misery that drove voters to the NSDAP. Hitler’s campaign had focused on the failure of the Weimar political system to solve Germany’s problems, and this issue seems to have struck a far stronger chord with voters than the state of the economy. There was a growing loss of confidence in the Weimar political system, which made the decision to vote for a party that was not tainted by involvement in that system much easier. An editorial in the Frankfurter Zeitung spoke of an ‘election of embitterment’ in which voters expressed deep disaffection with ‘the methods of governing or rather non-governing’ of parliamentary government.

Hitler’s dramatic election breakthrough had a devastating impact abroad. There was a large withdrawal of gold and foreign currency from the Reichsbank, and a sharp fall in German stocks on international markets. Even larger German banks were shaken by the wave of panic selling. Julius Curtius, the Foreign Minister, who was in Geneva while the League of Nations was in session, reported when he heard the results: ‘the mood was one of the greatest alarm’. The world now started taking much greater interest in Adolf Hitler.

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by Joel | 25 April 2024 · 1:32 pm

Catching an Interned Spy

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 257-258, 281-282:

WARSCHAUER HAD FIRST COME TO MI5’s attention in early 1940, after the chief constable of the Special Branch, Scotland Yard, received a letter from the former head of the German Jewish Aid Committee, the thirty-seven-year-old Hubert Pollack, who claimed to have helped [Ludwig] Warschauer obtain the immigration permits for Echen and her family. Pollack explained in his letter that, while he had known Warschauer to be an acquaintance of high-ranking Nazis, he had had no reason to suspect his loyalties at the time. In recent weeks, however, he had learned of Warschauer’s involvement with a sting operation in Berlin.

The ruse, Pollack claimed, went like this: Warschauer would invite a Jewish acquaintance whom the Gestapo wanted to arrest to lunch in a public restaurant. At some point an Aryan woman would join them at the table. Warschauer would excuse himself, and the moment he left the table, Gestapo personnel would enter and arrest the man for fraternizing outside of his race. Pollack felt compelled to alert the British to this information, adding that while Warschauer owed him money, this was not his motive for writing.

Sir Vernon Kell, then director of MI5, read the letter with keen interest. This was precisely the kind of suspicious activity—with “a Gestapo flavor”—that Kell had been looking for among refugees in Britain. MI5 duly opened a file that, thanks to the informants in Hutchinson [Internment Camp], had now grown to a weighty document.

Information had come from various sources. A private serving in the Pioneer Corps claimed that Warschauer had masterminded a profitable blackmail operation in Berlin. The soldier claimed that the engineer had an arrangement with a pretty barmaid. Warschauer would go out drinking with a target; then, once they were blind drunk, deliver the individual to a room at his accomplice’s bar. In the morning the man would awake to find the barmaid next to him in bed. Warschauer would then extort the target for money in exchange for discretion. Men now in Hutchinson may have been victims of the scheme.

…

The author and translator Claud W. Sykes, a senior figure at MI5 who concluded that “[Warschauer] would have been a Nazi but for his Jewish blood,” wrote a letter recommending that Warschauer be immediately transferred from Hutchinson camp, to separate him both from his cronies and the indulgent commandant.

“It seems to me too dangerous to leave him in a position where he is [Major] Daniel’s blue-eyed boy,” wrote Sykes.

In March 1942, five months after Peter left the camp and when only about 350 men remained in Hutchinson, Warschauer was transferred from the island to the London Oratory School on Stewart’s Grove, in the salubrious London Borough of Chelsea, also known as Internment Camp 001, which was used to house high-security internees.

BY EARLY 1942, THE INVESTIGATOR James Craufurd’s suspicion that Warschauer had been sent to England as a Gestapo agent had grown “nearly to a certainty.” The evidence collected during MI5’s raid on Warschauer’s office—in the home he shared with Echen—had provided a mountain of jigsaw pieces. Among the haul there were letters from Dr. Hans Sauer, the man who had ensured Warschauer’s smooth exit from Germany, as well as canisters of photographic film rigged to produce a blotted-out image unless developed in a specific way. MI5 spent weeks studying the letter Sauer had sent Warschauer for clues and code words, even employing an expert to analyze Sauer’s handwriting (“There is in the writing unusual intelligence, knowledge and mental ability, but a bad man,” the expert concluded banally).

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by Joel | 23 April 2024 · 8:39 am

Rushen Women’s Internment Camp

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 199-201:

The Rushen women’s internment camp had opened on the [Isle of Man’s] southern peninsula on May 29, incorporating two small seaside resorts: Port Erin and Port St. Mary. Despite the considerable number of women held there—close to four thousand, three hundred of whom were pregnant—security was laxer than at the men’s camps. A single barbed-wire perimeter encircled both resorts and, while the women had to apply for a permit before they could visit each other’s houses, they were free to walk between the two sites without hindrance.

At first the Hutchinson men whose wives were interned on the island had to send letters via the usual route to the backlogged censor’s office in Liverpool, where delays often meant their messages were long out-of-date by the time they arrived. From the moment the first internees arrived on the island, Bertha Bracey had pressured the government to establish a separate camp for married couples. Convincing the relevant departments to make such an expenditure was proving difficult.

In lieu of a married camp, Hutchinson’s intelligence officer, Captain Jurgensen, announced in late autumn the first monthly meeting between husbands and wives interned on the island. The rendezvous, he explained, would take place at the Port Erin branch of Collinson’s Café.

On the morning of the first meeting, a group of around fifty men, wearing their finest clothes and, in some cases, carrying bunches of flowers, gathered in readiness to leave the camp and be reunited, for a fleeting moment, with their imprisoned wives. A few hours later the men returned to Hutchinson. Many looked dejected. Werner Klein, one of Hinrichsen’s neighbors who had gone to meet his wife, explained to his friend that the psychological conditions in the women’s camp were even more strained than at Hutchinson. His wife had told him that Rushen was riddled with Nazi sympathizers, who had been whipped into a state of obstinate zeal by their self-appointed leader, Wanda Wehrhan, wife of a Lutheran pastor based in London and an energetic fascist. There had been no consideration of race or political allegiance when allocating women to Rushen’s houses. In some cases, Jewish women had been forced to share beds with fervent anti-Semites.

The Nazi women, like many of the male internees, believed that invasion was imminent. In some houses, Jewish women were banned by their Nazi housemates from the common room and forced to remain in their bedrooms. When one refugee entered the local Methodist church, one of the Nazis said, loudly: “Oh there is a bad smell, a Jewish smell, in this church.”

The women were permitted to leave the camp to shop twice a week. One of the landladies whose house had been requisitioned recalled overhearing a group of Nazi-supporting women discussing which of the local houses they would take for themselves when Germany won the war.

Rushen camp’s commandant, Dame Joanna Cruickshank, was seemingly ill-equipped to deal with these sensitivities and conflicts. Cruickshank, a former matron in chief of both Princess Mary’s RAF Nursing Service and the British Red Cross, had enjoyed a distinguished career in military nursing appointments. She had formidable powers of organization, but no understanding—or apparent willingness to understand—the situation of the women in her charge. She hired Nazi women to work on the camp staff, granted them access to camp records and, intent on preserving impartiality, ordered Jews and Nazis to collaborate on the production of the camp’s newspaper, of which only a single issue was produced.

Unaccustomed to being questioned by intelligent women from civilian life, Cruickshank became entrenched when challenged on her decision-making. When Klein’s wife, a non-Jew, had proposed to her camp commandant the separation of Jews and Nazis, Cruickshank said: “You are all enemy aliens, and that is the end of it.”

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by Joel | 19 April 2024 · 6:02 am

Effects of the Arandora Star Sinking

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 178-179:

THROUGHOUT THE WARM WEEKS OF July [1940], as Hutchinson’s internees appointed their leaders and cooks, drew up the schedule of lectures and entertainments, and learned to paint, a pile of suitcases sat in a corner of another internment camp in Devon, a few hundred miles away. Rescued from the wreck of the Arandora Star, these unclaimed effects were the somber luggage of the recently deceased. It was a smaller pile of belongings than those left at the doors to the Holocaust’s shower rooms, but still emblematic of injustice. As the swollen bodies of the dead began to wash onto Irish and Hebridean beaches, so fresh details about the tragedy continued to emerge, casting further doubt on the official version of events.

On July 30, in the House of Commons, the secretary of state for war, Anthony Eden was asked whether the government had known for sure that, as previously claimed, everyone aboard the Arandora Star had been a Nazi sympathizer. By now, Eden knew for certain that this had not been the case.

“Fifty-three [Germans and Austrians aboard] were or claimed to be refugees, but had nevertheless been placed in category A,” he conceded.

In Whitehall, the impersonal statistics were now clothed with the intimacies of story. Politicians learned that, among the dead, there was a German sailor who came to Britain as an anti-fascist, only to be interned with a “mélange” of Nazi sympathizers; there was a metalworker who, after spending four years imprisoned in Nazi camps, escaped to Britain, was interned, then killed in the sinking; there was the blind pensioner who had been separated from his wife for the first time in his life.

The admission that refugees of Nazi oppression had been aboard the ship caused widespread outrage and called into question the wider policy of mass internment, which had begun to seem less like a rational security measure and more like victim-blaming on an industrial scale. The Jewish Chronicle, which just a few months earlier had defended a wartime government’s “right to interfere drastically with the freedom of the individual,” now likened the “disgraceful hounding of refugees” to “Gestapo methods.” Readers agreed. “It seems strange that in order to defeat the Gestapo abroad, it should be considered necessary to introduce their methods at home,” wrote Moya Woodside in a typical letter published in the Northern Whig. The public’s attitude had changed. Policy would duly follow.

While still far from secure, Britain’s general position in the war had shifted enough that, as Churchill put it to his cabinet, it was now possible to “take a somewhat less rigid attitude in regard to the internment of aliens.” Arrests, which had continued at a rate of around 150 per day throughout July, were suspended. If a so-called enemy alien had thus far managed to avoid being apprehended, they would most likely remain free for the remainder of the war. Mass internment was finished.

“That tragedy may… have served a useful if terrible purpose,” said Lord Faringdon of the Arandora Star in a speech to the House of Lords later that week. “For it may have opened the eyes of those responsible, and of members of the public, and of His Majesty’s Government.” It would take months and years to unpick the tangled mess of internment. Politicians’ efforts to justify and distance themselves from the episode were, by contrast, immediate.