Category Archives: war

by | 16 April 2024 · 8:37 am

U.S. vs. U.K. on Mass Internment

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. 65-67:

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, TWO days before Britain declared war on Germany, police forces around the country received the order to unseal the envelopes sent by MI5 and arrest those individuals named within. In London, officers escorted the internees to the Olympia exhibition hall on Hammersmith, which had been set aside as a clearing center, even forcing the men to pay for the taxi ride. By the end of the week, 350 individuals had been arrested across the country and delivered to Internment Camp No. 4, an out-of-season seaside resort at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, just fifteen miles away from the Kindertransport camp at Harwich.

Despite months of investigation and planning, this first wave of arrests—intended to capture only the most dangerous Nazi sympathizers and fervent communists—was characterized by mistakes and misunderstandings. Eugen Spier, Alex Nathan, and Dr. Bernhard Weiss, all Jews and staunch anti-fascists, were among the first men arrested and taken to Olympia, where they were herded alongside bona fide Nazis such as Hitler’s friend Ernst Hanfstaengl. Weiss was the former Berlin police chief and had become famous in Germany after he sued Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, more than forty times for libel and won every time. It was difficult to imagine a less likely suspect for a Nazi spy.

With those MI5 had deemed highest risk interned, the question of what was to be done with the thousands of other “enemy aliens” living in Britain immediately arose. In the House of Commons on September 4, the MP Arthur Greenwood put the following question to the home secretary, Sir John Anderson, who had been on the job only a day: “What steps [do you] intend to take to deal with aliens in time of war?”

For the first time in public, Anderson began to explain the government’s plans.

“A number of aliens whose suspicious activities have been under observation are already under detention,” explained Anderson. Others, he said, would now have to report to the police and obtain permits for change of residence, travel, and the possession of items such as cameras and motorcars.

“A large proportion of the Germans and Austrians at present in this country are refugees, and there will, I am sure, be a general desire to avoid treating as enemies those who are friendly to the country which has offered them asylum,” Anderson continued. “At the same time, care must be taken to sift out any persons who, though claiming to be refugees, may not, in fact, be friendly to this country.”

Here was the essence of the problem facing the British government. In a letter to the foreign secretary, Sir John Anderson explained that “It was felt… it would be wrong to treat as enemies [those] refugees who are hostile to the Nazi regime, unlikely to do anything to assist the enemy and often anxious to assist the country which has given them asylum.” And yet, there was a risk that there could be enemies posing as refugees, spies who had already entered Britain under the cloak of asylum.

On September 29, Cordell Hull, the US secretary of state, sent a telegram to the American embassy in London warning of the moral dangers inherent in a policy of mass internment. Hull referenced the lessons of the First World War, when “the rigorous… internment of enemy aliens” caused “widespread and seemingly unnecessary suffering to thousands of innocent persons.” Copies of the message were also sent to the American embassies in Berlin and Paris, a pointed sign of US neutrality at this stage of the war.

For now, however, the threat of mass internment seemed both remote and mitigated by the plan for the tribunals that, between October 1939 and March 1940, would deliberate no fewer than 73,353 cases, including that of Peter Fleischmann. Most were refugees, and the others long-established residents or people who, by chance, were in Britain at the outbreak of war. Nevertheless, the reliability and loyalty of everyone would be examined by a panel. If suspicions remained, they were to be interned.

Not everyone condoned such a magnanimous approach. Guy Liddell, MI5’s head of counterintelligence, summed up his view of the decision to forgo mass internment with a single word: “Farce.”

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by | 14 April 2024 · 12:39 pm

Death of Stresemann, 1929

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 506-508:

As news spread of Stresemann’s death, there was a flood of tributes. The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (German General Newspaper) wrote, ‘It seemed necessary for this man to die for his real greatness to be appreciated by his compatriots.’ There were glowing tributes from leading world leaders, including Ramsay MacDonald, the British Prime Minister, who commented: ‘His memory is secure, and I cannot believe the great service he has given to pacification with such patience and faith can now be undone.’ Aristide Briand, the French Prime Minister, sent a telegram to Stresemann’s widow Käte, which read: ‘I will always retain the deepest respect for his memory. In pursuit of our common ideal, Dr Stresemann caused me to appreciate his lofty outlook and fine loyalty.’

Stresemann lay in state in the German parliament. Thousands of people filed past the open coffin to pay their respects before his state funeral on 6 October. Hermann Müller, the Reich Chancellor, bowed to the coffin in the Plenary Hall of the Reichstag, where the memorial service was held, before delivering a moving eulogy, describing Stresemann as a towering figure in world politics. There was then a solemn funeral procession through Berlin, pausing for several minutes outside the Foreign Ministry, before proceeding to burial in the Luisenstädtischer Friedhof in Kreuzberg, Berlin. It was estimated that a crowd of 200,000 had lined the route. Film newsreels of the event appeared in cinemas around the world.

Gustav Stresemann’s record entitles him to be seen not only as the Weimar Republic’s most successful Foreign Minister, but undoubtedly its most dominant political figure. It is impossible to see German history in the 1920s taking the same course without him. Some politicians make an enormous difference, and he was one of those who did. He was a member of every German cabinet from 1923 to 1929, and the Social Democrats were his most consistent supporters. Stresemann raised Germany from a humiliated and disgruntled foe in 1923 into a diplomatic equal and Great Power again at the time of his death. His achievements as Foreign Minister ended the Ruhr occupation of 1923, contributed to the stabilisation of the Republic, finalised the Locarno and Rapallo Treaties and the Kellogg–Briand Pact, took Germany into the League of Nations, eased Germany’s reparations burdens through the Dawes and Young Plans, and brought the foreign occupation of Germany to an end. Never has the Nobel Peace Prize had a more justified recipient.

Stresemann’s death left a huge void in German political life. He had been a force of stability within a deeply unstable political system, and had gained admiration around the world. There was no speech at the League of Nations in the months following his death that did not begin with a homage to his memory. There was simply no one in Germany or outside it capable of stepping into his shoes.

It is difficult to calculate the exact part his tragic death played in the destruction of German democracy, and the souring of international relations, but he was probably the one Weimar politician who, through the sheer force of his personality, might have saved it, though Stresemann himself thought everything in politics was determined by the state of the economy. Critics of Stresemann have depicted him as an opportunistic and deceitful power-politician with a hidden militaristic agenda, with some even trying to depict him as Hitler in a morning suit. Between the extremes of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stresemann was predominantly Dr Jekyll, whereas Hitler was always Mr Hyde. But there is truly little evidence in his private papers or his diaries of Stresemann desiring a war of revenge or territorial expansion beyond restoring the territory lost by Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and putting an end to reparations.

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by | 9 April 2024 · 9:44 am

Kellogg-Briand Delusions, 1927

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 468-470:

At the same time as Hitler was planning a future world war, the world’s major powers were gathering in the Clock Room (Salon de l’Horloge) inside the French Foreign Office on the Quai d’Orsay, Paris, on 27 August, for an elaborate ceremony to sign the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy. The pact had evolved from negotiations begun in 1927 by Frank Kellogg, the US Secretary of State, and Aristide Briand, the French Foreign Minister. On 6 April 1927, Briand announced his country’s intention to enter into a bilateral agreement with the USA, stipulating that neither country would resort to war with each other, and that any dispute between them would be settled by peaceful means. Two months later, Briand submitted to the American government a draft of the proposed treaty. The American reply came in December 1927. Kellogg suggested the proposed Franco-American agreement should be expanded into a multilateral treaty to be signed by other countries, to which Briand readily agreed. In recognition of their joint diplomatic efforts, the agreement became known as the Kellogg–Briand Pact, and was greatly welcomed by the public.

At the signature ceremony in Paris, Briand gave an inspiring speech, saying at one point: ‘Can the world present a nobler lesson than the spectacle of this assemblage, where Germany appears for the signature of a pact against war, of its own free will, and without reserve, among the other signatories, its former enemies?’ Briand also spoke in glowing terms of Stresemann: ‘One can believe me particularly happy, to render homage to the highness of mind and to the courage of this eminent politician who, during more than three years, has not hesitated to assume full responsibility in the work of European co-operation for the maintenance of peace.’

The main text of the Kellogg–Briand Pact consisted of two brief articles. Under Article 1, the signatories condemned the ‘recourse to war for the solution of international controversies’, and further promised to ‘renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relationship with one another’. Article 2 required the contracting parties to solve all disputes or conflicts by peaceful means. The original 15 signatories were the United Kingdom, Germany, USA, France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, and South Africa. Eventually, a further 47 nations followed suit. Elements of the pact were later incorporated into the League of Nations charter.

The Kellogg–Briand agreement, which was seen at the time as a milestone in international relations, gave the public around the world the false illusion that perpetual peace had arrived, but did not limit in any way the right of a nation to self-defence against the attack of any other nation, or alter the military obligations arising from the Covenant of the League of Nations or already agreed binding treaties. The pact contained no legal mechanism for enforcement and was, for some, a ‘worthless piece of paper’, which proved completely ineffective as a means of preventing war. It did provide, however, a legal basis for the concept of a ‘crime against peace’, the crime for which the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Tribunal tried and executed the senior leaders judged responsible for starting the Second World War.

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by | 6 April 2024 · 8:32 am

Turning Point at Locarno, 1925

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 377-379:

When the question of Germany’s entry to the League of Nations cropped up, Stresemann defended his government’s unwillingness to be bound by Article 16 of the Covenant. Germany, he said, could not pledge itself to support Poland in a war involving the Soviet Union. Briand tried to reassure him by saying that as Germany would be given a permanent seat on the League Council it could veto any proposal it disagreed with. A formula was finally worked out whereby each member of the League was obligated to cooperate against military aggression ‘to an extent which is compatible with its military situation, and which takes its geographical situation into account’. In return, Stresemann promised Germany would seek entry into the League of Nations as soon as possible.

Mussolini, the Italian Prime Minister, was initially lukewarm on the proposed Locarno agreements. He wanted a guarantee of the Brenner frontier between Italy and Austria to be added to the treaties, but Stresemann said this would only be possible if Germany was allowed to unite with Austria, something the Allies were not willing to accept. However, once it became clear the agreements would be signed, Mussolini turned up, on 14 October, wanting to share in the glory of joining Britain in guaranteeing the peace of Europe.

The ‘big day’ of the Conference took place in the town hall in Locarno on 16 October 1925. It witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Mutual Guarantee between Germany, France, Belgium, Great Britain, and Italy (the Locarno Pact). Under its terms, Germany recognised its western borders as fixed by the Treaty of Versailles, and the continuance of the Rhineland demilitarised zone in perpetuity. Stresemann emphasised the voluntary affirmation of Germany’s western borders was much more acceptable than the dictated terms of the Versailles Treaty. Germany, France and Belgium all agreed not to attack each other ever again, and Britain and Italy agreed to function as the joint guarantors of the agreement. All the parties agreed to settle disputes by peaceful means in future. The Locarno Treaties would only come into force when Germany was finally admitted to the League of Nations. The signatories further agreed to meet in London on 1 December for a formal signing ceremony.

Annexed to the main treaties were the German–Polish, German–Czechoslovak, German–Belgian, and French–German arbitration treaties, which promised all disputes which could not be settled amicably through normal diplomatic channels would be submitted to an Arbitration Panel or to the Permanent Court of International Justice. To add further insurance in Eastern Europe, France signed binding treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia, pledging mutual assistance, in the event of conflict with Germany. Polish and Czech leaders signed these agreements in fear rather than hope. The agreements reaffirmed existing treaties of alliance concluded by France with Poland on 19 February 1921, and with Czechoslovakia on 25 January 1924. The British government refused to be a party to the arbitration treaties.

The Locarno Treaties were a key turning-point in the international relations of the 1920s. They were the effective diplomatic end of the Great War, and reconciled Germany and France in a way that had previously seemed impossible. Locarno was a much bigger triumph for the appeasement of Germany than Neville Chamberlain ever achieved, and how ironic that his half-brother Austen was one of its chief architects.

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by | 5 April 2024 · 4:23 pm

Death of Weimar President Ebert, 1925

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 355-357:

The Barmat-Kutisker Scandal did little to improve the failing health of President Ebert, who had been suffering from undiagnosed severe stomach pain for weeks. He became even more ill in mid-February, and was confined to bed with what was initially diagnosed as a severe bout of influenza. His condition then deteriorated further, and his doctors next thought he was suffering from a recurrence of a severe gall-bladder infection known as cholecystitis. Finally, on 23 February, he was admitted to a hospital in Charlottenburg with appendicitis and peritonitis. Ebert underwent an emergency appendectomy, performed by August Bier, one of Germany’s most eminent surgeons. At first, he seemed to be recovering, but then his condition suddenly worsened. On 28 February at 10.15 a.m., Ebert died in his sleep, aged just 54, of post-operative septic shock, with his wife and family at the bedside.

Friedrich Ebert was a Social Democrat of humble origins, and a firm supporter of democracy, who had led democratic Germany through six difficult years from the ashes of defeat in 1918 to the threshold of international reconciliation. He considered himself a patriot and a social reformer, not a rabble-rouser. Despite all the hostility he faced from the extreme Left and Right, he remained the Republic’s anchor of stability, always showing a willingness to find a consensus among different viewpoints. His departure from the political scene was undoubtedly a bitter blow and a key turning point in the history of the Weimar Republic.

The state funeral of Friedrich Ebert was a huge public event, attended by vast crowds in Berlin and Heidelberg. Ebert’s coffin was draped in the flag of the Reich President in which the black-red-gold colours of the Republic were prominent. The black eagle on a yellow background was also displayed. The main ceremony was held in the presidential palace, followed by a sombre funeral procession including representatives of the police, the Reichswehr, the Reichstag and the German states, which wound a slow passage through Berlin’s streets to the Brandenburg Gate, and to the nearby Reichstag building, then proceeded to Potsdam railway station where the coffin remained for a while so that ordinary Germans could pay their respects.

…

The funeral train journeyed to Ebert’s home town of Heidelberg for the service and burial in the Bergfriedhof Cemetery. The memorial service began with the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, played by the orchestra of the German State Opera. A moving eulogy was then read by Hans Luther, the German Chancellor, and the ceremony ended movingly with the music of Mozart. A short newsreel film of the funeral, showing scenes from the Berlin and Heidelberg ceremonies, appeared in cinemas throughout Germany.

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by | 2 April 2024 · 8:23 am

New Reichsmarks and Elections, 1924

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 341-343:

Whilst the Allied Control inspection was in progress in the autumn of 1924, there was a huge shake-up in German currency. On 11 October, the Reichsmark (RM) was introduced, as part of the Dawes Plan [to pay war reparations under the Versailles Treaty], as a permanent replacement for the interim currency, the Rentenmark, which had restored economic stability, and the old Papiermark, which had collapsed under the weight of hyperinflation. The denominations of Reichsmarks came in lower-value coins and banknotes of 5M, 10RM, 20RM, 50RM, 100RM and 1,000RM. Each Reichsmark was divided into 100 Reichspfennigs. Germany finally had a stable currency once again, guaranteed by the independent Reichsbank. The Reichsmark remained the German currency until it was replaced by the Deutsche Mark on 23 June 1948, which itself was succeeded by the Euro in 2002.

…

The German national election took place on 7 December 1924. Voter turnout was 78.8 per cent. The parties who had supported the Dawes Plan did well. The party gaining the most seats was the SPD, which won 131 seats, a gain of 31 from May 1924, with a popular vote of 26 per cent (7.88 million), up 5.5 per cent. The middle-class parties made smaller gains. The DVP, led by Gustav Stresemann, won 51 seats, up from 45, and polled 3.05 million votes, or 10.1 per cent of the electorate, an increase of 0.99 per cent since May. Zentrum won 69 seats, up from 65, polling 13.6 per cent overall (4.11 million), only up by a narrow 0.22 per cent since May. The DDP improved its position slightly, winning 32 seats, up from 28, taking 6.3 per cent of the popular vote (1.91 million), an increase of 0.6 per cent. The big electoral surprise was the performance of the nationalist DNVP, which improved its position, winning 103 seats, an increase of eight from May, taking 20.5 per cent of the popular vote (6.20 million), an increase of just 1 per cent.

The two other parties who had opposed the Dawes Plan, the Communists and the National Socialists, performed poorly. The KPD won 45 seats, a loss of 17 seats since May, polling 8.9 per cent of votes (2.7 million), down 3.7 per cent. The National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP), led by Ludendorff, won 14 seats, down 18 on May, polling a total vote of 3 per cent (907, 242), down by 3.55 per cent. The mediocre performance of these extreme parties was proof of the change that had come over the economy since the May election. The gradual consolidation of economic affairs was clearly impacting on voting behaviour. Inflation was now under control and unemployment was falling. This meant the working classes and the lower middle class were much better off than they had been six months earlier. In these circumstances, the parties of the extreme Right and Left seemed much less attractive.

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by | 30 March 2024 · 7:02 am

British Alien Internment Camps, WW2

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. 2-4:

EIGHT WEEKS EARLIER, ON SATURDAY, July 13, 1940, Captain Hubert Daniel, a kindly, keen-drinking forty-eight-year-old army officer, had declared the camp open. Hutchinson was the seventh of ten internment camps to open on the Isle of Man, an island positioned sufficiently far from the neighboring coasts to be ideally suited for imprisonment. The island’s boat-owning residents had been instructed to stow the oars and remove the spark plugs from their vessels’ engines at night. Even if an escapee were to board a suitable craft, the journey to the mainland was perilous. If you were here, you were here for good.

Hutchinson was currently home to around twelve hundred prisoners, predominantly refugees from Nazi Germany who had been living peacefully in Britain at the time of their arrest. In recent months rumors abounded that a fifth column—a neologism to Britain, now universally understood to refer to traitors living within their country of asylum—had assisted the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Newspapers had stoked national paranoia with claims that a similar network of spies lurked in Britain.

Even before the outbreak of war, Scotland Yard, working in conjunction with MI5, the British domestic intelligence service, had been deluged with tip-offs about suspicious refugees and foreigners. The police detained one man when investigators found an entry in his diary that read: “Exchange British Queen for Italian Queen.” The detective assumed he had exposed a fascist plot against the crown. In fact, the man was a beekeeper, planning to overthrow only the tiny monarch that ruled his hive.

The police were first alerted to one of Hutchinson camp’s internees, the young art historian Dr. Klaus Hinrichsen, and his fiancée, Gretel, when a neighbor reported hearing the young couple’s lovemaking. The distrustful neighbor suspected the rhythmic knocking of the bed might contain a coded message. It was difficult, Klaus pointed out, to prove that one did not understand Morse code.

The recent German occupation of France meant an invasion attempt seemed not only plausible but imminent. Days after he became prime minister, Winston Churchill authorized the arrest of thousands of so-called “enemy aliens.” In the chaotic roundups that followed, thousands of Jews who had fled Nazi Germany—including some teenagers like Peter who came via the feted Kindertransport trains—were imprisoned by the same people in whom they had staked their trust, a nightmarish betrayal. The refugees that comprised the majority of tonight’s audience had experienced a collective trauma: to be imprisoned by one’s liberator is to endure an injustice of chronology.

Status and class, those twin, usually indefatigable armaments of privilege, had provided no protection. Oxbridge dons, surgeons, dentists, lawyers, and scores of celebrated artists were taken. The police arrested Emil Goldmann, a sixty-seven-year-old professor from the University of Vienna, on the grounds of Eton College, Britain’s most elite school. At Cambridge University dozens of staff and students were detained in the Guildhall, including Friedrich Hohenzollern, also known as Prince Frederick of Prussia, a grandson of Queen Victoria. That year’s law finals were almost canceled because one of the interned professors had the exam papers locked in his desk and had no time to pass someone the key. The police came for Peter in the early hours of the morning, without prior warning, a manner of detention that had reminded him of the Gestapo’s moonlit roundups and the muggy world of fear and distrust from which he had just fled.

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by | 26 March 2024 · 4:30 am

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.

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by | 25 March 2024 · 5:28 am

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.

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by | 24 March 2024 · 4:43 am

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.

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