Death of a Nation

by Stephen R A'Barrow

The German General Staff could not face up either to telling the people the truth, or to signing the Armistice. They left the poisoned chalice of ‘negotiating’ the peace to the very civilian government they had emasculated, having already pulled the rug out from under their feet by insisting on an immediate cessation of hostilities. Allied commanders had hoped for victory in 1918, but few believed it would come. However, shock, disbelief and then anger exploded in Germany, and the country turned in on itself, almost oblivious to the outside forces threatening to overwhelm it. The military and large sections of the public set about looking for scapegoats, whilst the hard core revolutionaries prepared for a civil war to turn Germany into a Soviet state.

  The Allies appeared equally oblivious to the danger of a central European implosion and the westward spread of communist-inspired revolution. The German General Staff in the tumult of revolution informed the Kaiser he no longer had the support of his rapidly disintegrating military, and that those still prepared to fight on the home front would not do so to save his throne. The Allies were now also insisting on negotiating with Germany’s democratic civilian leaders. One after another, Germany’s military leaders recommended that the Kaiser abdicate. Kaiser Wilhelm, in shock at the mutiny of his beloved navy and stunned at the rapid unravelling of events, laid down his crown on 9th November and shortly thereafter went into exile in Holland, a broken man. The politicans, led by the largest group in the Reichstag, the Social Democrats, now attempted to create the best conditions in which to meet the Western Allies, on the terms the Allies were requesting, in the hope of securing a reasonable peace.

  Germany’s socialist leaders proclaimed a republic from the balcony of the Reichstag on 9th November. The same afternoon, the Communists proclaimed a Socialist (Soviet) Republic from the balcony of the Royal Palace in Berlin. The Allies would now take for granted the fact that the old order in Germany had been swept away, that the Kaiser was gone, the generals had slunk away, and give no credit to Germany’s democratic parliamentarians for taking the actions they had insisted on. Whilst Germany’s democratic politicans got to work on a new constitution and began to combat the revolution that was spreading through Germany — the Western Allies sent their most rabid German-hating general, Marshal Foch, to ‘negotiate’ the Armistice. The terms were punitive and would only get worse as the Allies sought to take advantage of Germany’s slide into revolutionary chaos.

  The man sent to meet Foch from the German side was Matthias Erzberger, the moderate leader of the Catholic Centre Party, which together with a majority of parties in the German Reichstag had been urging for a negotiated peace ‘without annexations or reparations’clvi since 1917. When Erzberger faced Marshal Foch and read the terms, he put his head in his hands in disbelief. Erzberger then prophetically warned that continuing the blockade, and thereby punishing innocent and starving women and children, would throw open the gates to Bolshevik revolution. When Marshal Foch shrugged his shoulders, Erzberger, in more strident terms and through gritted teeth, told the old marshal that whatever happened, the Allies could punish Germany but a nation of 70 million could not die. He said if these were the terms of the Armistice then on their heads be it. It was an ominous foretaste of how Germans would come to see the victors’ peace and thereby long to break each and every rotten chain of it.

  THE COST OF VERSAILLES

  Germany had asked for an Armistice on the basis of Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic — some might say utopian — fourteen points. They had anticipated conditions for disarmament, demilitarisation and revision of borders in the east, to accommodate an independent Poland, and an indemnity of up to 60 billion Reichsmarks. They had, after all, been party to both the Congress of Vienna and the Peace of Frankfurt, following which France had to pay an indemnity for starting one set of wars and for losing another. However, the German delegation expected to keep their colonies and fully anticipated that the right to self-determination would not mean onerous changes to Germany’s frontiers in Alsace-Lorraine, Silesia or elsewhere. They also fully expected German Austria to be allowed union with Germany.(2) There was no reason to think that Germany would be barred from the League of Nations: the Kaiser was gone, the old guard had been swept away, and the new socialist republican Germany looked forward to a shiny new democratic future as part of an American-inspired New World Order based on law, not the old imperialist balance of power. The Allied delegations had asked for the precedents of previous grand European treaties — including the Treaties of Westphalia, Paris and the Congress of Vienna — to be studied, but these reports were subsequently ignored. A century before the royal courts of Europe had been keen to restore pre-revolutionary order; the democracies of 1919 had a very different set of objectives, which set new precedents of their own.

  The French wars of 1790–1815 (known as the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 onwards) were fought both on land and sea, as far afield as the United States, the coast of South America, the Nile Delta, the Iberian Peninsula, and right across the continent of Europe to Moscow. Some historians have called the Great French War the real ‘First World War’. France had been at war with England pretty much non-stop since 1689, in what has been termed by some as ‘the second Hundred Years War’. For a war of unprecedented scale and brutality, which cost up to 3.5 million military and as many as 3 million civilian casualties, France did not lose a single square kilometre of French territory. Furthermore, she was allowed to keep her Flemish gains from the war of 1790–92, which had gained her Dunkirk and an additional 8,495 square kilometres of territory. Most of her colonies were returned to her, with the minor exceptions of Malta and Tobago, and France was simply asked for an indemnity of 700 million Francs to pay for the damage and cost of her twenty-five years’ worth of occupations.(3) When France lost again in 1871, she lost the largely German-speaking areas of Alsace-Lorraine, but the population was not given a plebiscite. (They were not given one in 1919 either; in fact at the prospect of changing hands again in 1919, the region proclaimed its independence.) French troops put an end to any ideas of independence and French politicians did the same to any notion of holding a plebiscite.clvii After her defeat in 1871, France was forced to pay an indemnity of 5 million gold Francs. France got off incredibly lightly for her imperial wars of conquest, a fact she seemed to forget when it came to Germany’s punishment.

  When the German delegation was finally given the lengthy list of terms to which Germany was expected to submit, the head of the delegation, Brockdorff-Rantzau, echoed Matthias Erzberger when he signed the initial Armistice, saying, ‘If the Entente insist on these conditions, in my opinion Bolshevik revolution would be unavoidable in Germany.’ The threat of Bolshevik revolution spreading west from Russia into the turmoil and chaos of post-war Central Europe was the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’. They all feared it, but none dared mention it, lest it distract them from the main order of the day, namely extracting their pound of flesh from Germany and Austria-Hungary. But as the negotiations proceeded, this fear became an ever more present danger. Bolshevik Russia and Poland were at war from February 1919 onward, and a month later, Hungary fell prey to a communist coup. Also in March, the Spartacist communists in Germany launched a revolution that was only put down by the bloody interventions of the military and paramilitary Freikorps. In Bavaria the communists actually seized power and set up government.(4) The German delegation, with characteristic thoroughness, literally brought a trainload of packing crates containing detailed ethnic maps of Europe to the ‘negotiations’. They were not needed, there were to be no negotiations. It was an incredible contrast to the way in which French diplomats had been treated and allowed to horse-trade during the negotiations at the Congress of Vienna following Napoleon’s defeat.

  THE LIST

  Margaret Macmillan’s Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World, is a superb source for any historian who wants immerse themselves in the dreadful mess that was the conferences that tore up the map of Europe and get a feeling for all the bitterness and recrimina
tions that filled the halls of the palaces where the future of Europe was being ‘mapped out’ — and that was just among the Allies! The fact that the whole rotten assemblage didn’t collapse (it came close in the spring of 1919) and they didn’t all either pack their bags and go home or declare war on one another, was a minor miracle. Her book also helps to sift through the mass of documents and treaties to summarise what the Allies eventually came to agree upon and the stages they went through to get there. There is still precious little agreement within the historical establishment as to what the legacies of the ‘peacemaking’ efforts were. These still range from the argument that they did not do enough to weaken Germany to those who put the case that they effectively laid the groundwork and wrote the roadmap for the Second World War. From the outset of ‘the talks’, the Allies had an ever-growing wish list of terms but increasingly disagreed over detail and there was to be plenty of that. They particularly could not agree on the extent to which their former enemies were not only to be punished and humiliated, but how much they were to pay. They broadly came to agree on the following core points:

  a) Germany must be destroyed as a great power.

  b) Germany’s fleet should be destroyed.

  c) Germany should lose her colonies.

  d) Germany’s territory should be diminished in Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig, in Prussia (via the Polish Corridor), Eupen Malmedy, and parts of Silesia. (Decisions on Germany and Austria’s territories were framed in terms of where useful industry or war making material — especially the production of iron and coal — existed; these should then be ‘usefully reallocated’ to their neighbours.)

  e) There should be no self-determination for Germans or German Austrians if this meant increasing the size of Germany (no matter how great the territorial and population losses had been on German Austria).

  f) The Central Powers should be symbolically humiliated at the conference and not allowed to join the League of Nations.

  g) There should be no recognition of, or leniency towards, the new governments in Berlin and Vienna.

  h) There should be payment of reparations to the Allies.

  i) There should be the addition of a ‘war guilt’ clause with suitably punitive punishments (one of the more eccentric of these was Lloyd George’s suggestion of exiling Kaiser Wilhelm II to the Falklands, similar to Napoleon’s banishment to the mid Atlantic island of St Helena a century before).

  PUNISHMENT

  The First World War had been the greatest slaughter in the history of mankind, and the butcher’s bill was long on all sides. The mood in the victorious nations changed from relief at achieving victory (which had been largely unforeseen six months before), to media-led cries for justice and retribution; someone had to pay. Austria had disintegrated but Germany remained. ‘Punishment, Payment and Prevention’ were the buzzwords of the Allied delegations and their many special committees. Upon hearing the terms that the Allies had set, the German media and public initally reacted with disbelief, then with growing anger. Demonstrations against these terms of the ‘slave peace’ sprang up spontaneously across the country and remained a unifying point across all classes at a time when German society was more fractured and divided than at any time in its recent history. Under the terms that the Allies eventually came to agree upon, Germany saw all her colonies neatly divided up between Great Britain and France, and virtually every German border had to cede territory to her neighbours. Germany lost 10 per cent of her population and 13 per cent of her territory. German Austrians fared even worse, with half of them being stranded on the wrong side of arbitrary borders that had been drawn to benefit the old empire’s successor states.clviii Austria lost 60 per cent of the industrial capacity that had been in Bohemia and Moravia to Czechoslovakia. The regions that Germany lost contained 50 per cent of her iron and coal, as well as 25 per cent of her chemical and pharmaceutical production. To boot, 50,000 locomotives were requisitioned along with a large part of her merchant fleet. Germany lost prime agricultural land and half of her dairy cattle at a time when the blockade was still in force and starvation was rife. Over 750,000 German civilians succumbed to the effects of malnutrition and disease caused by the blockade.

  The Rhineland was still coveted by France, and when Germany struggled to repay her reparations French troops crossed the Rhine to occupy the Ruhr. The Saar, with its rich coalmines, was put under French administration for fifteen years. The richest coalfield in Silesia went to Poland.(5) Alsace-Lorraine, West Prussia and the Duchy of Posen were all lost; the ancient Baltic ports of Danzig and Memel, founded by the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century, were lost to international control and Lithuania respectively; and Eupen Malmedy fell to Belgium — all with no plebiscite. While the Allies insisted on Poland’s right to access the sea, irrespective of the German populations that stood in the way of making this a reality, the fact that German Austria lost its access to the sea via its main coastal port of Trieste and Hungary also at its only deep water port of Fiume was of no concern to them.

  The greatest iniquity of the settlement was the betrayal of the principal of ‘self-determination’. If the Germans had been allowed the principal of self-determination, French leaders were terrified they would not have been able to annex Alsace-Lorraine, as the German-speaking majority there would have been unlikely to vote for union with France.clix Furthermore, the French feared that even with their old adversary Austria-Hungary torn to shreds, Germany could not now be allowed to ‘gain’ territory if the German parts of Austria-Hungary were allowed to independently vote for union with Germany. French policy was determined to see both German states reduced as much as possible. On this basis, French leaders protested loudest whenever the call went up for plebiscites in German-speaking areas.

  There were plebiscites in northern Schleswig — despite the fact that this territory had become part of Prussia in 1864 — because it was anticipated that this would reduce German territory, with the Danish-speaking areas deciding to join Denmark. There was no plebiscite for the 3.5 million German Austrians trapped in the newly created Czechoslovak state, despite their express wish to join with Austria. There were no plebiscites in the South Tirol, eastern Burgenland and the lower Steiermark where over a million more German Austrians were left stranded on the wrong side of Europe’s redrawn borders. The most significant refusal to allow the principal of self-determination was for the Germans in what was left of Austria. Their national identity was swept away with the demise of the universalist and supranational mission of the Habsburg monarchy and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The successor states to the Austro-Hungarian Empire that emerged proceeded to take whatever they wanted, stripping Austria bare of locomotives, livestock and even many of her art treasures. The newly created borders, regulations, currencies and so forth utterly wrecked her trade; her factories fell idle, unemployment mounted and Austrian industry ground to a halt. Austria was left with beautiful scenery, virtually no industrial capacity, and an identity crisis. The National Assembly seized on the idea of national self-determination, voted for union with Germany, and immediately opened up negotiations between Vienna and Berlin. However, the German delegation was wary of accepting union with Austria with open arms, fearing that it would lead France to claim that since Germany was gaining in the South, France should gain more along her eastern frontier, namely not only the Saar but the Rhineland as well. In the end, it was an unfounded concern; the Allies had decided early on that self-determination was not for Germans and certainly not for German Austrians.clx

  The 12 million Germans of the former Austria-Hungarian Empire had made up nearly 25 per cent of the old empire’s population; after the carve-ups that gave Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Italy and Romania virtually all they wanted, German Austria was left with just over 12 per cent of the empire’s territory, and half its German population stranded outside her new borders.(6) With Austria carved down to such a tiny size, the Allies did take pity on her in terms of reparations. Although they did not
have much choice, since Austria was now utterly devoid of industry with which to pay for them.

  In total, some 17 million ethnic Germans were left stranded outside the borders of the two German states. This many Germans had never lived outside the borders of the Holy Roman Empire or outside the borders of German-dominated states. They now formed significant second-class minorities in Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Italy, France and Belgium. This was a harsh new reality, which sowed the seeds for renewed conflict. The Rhineland, Anschluß with Austria, the Munich Crisis, Danzig and the Polish Corridor were all international crises born at Versailles and Saint-Germain. Had the principal of self-determination been upheld, these sores would not have been left to fester and rupture, they would not have served as breeding grounds for national resentment in both Germany and Austria, and they would not have been the fuel for the Nazi firebrands who exploited them to their benefit.

  Hungary, and her excruciating Treaty of Trianon, also deserves to be remembered here. While the Allies showed some pity for what they had done to Austria, they showed none for Hungary. The Magyars were seen as Eastern and almost ‘other worldly’ by the Allies. This feeling was reinforced when Bela Kun came to power in a communist revolution that threatened to link arms with the Bolsheviks in Russia, and spread the revolution into the heart of Europe. In the ensuing chaos, actively encouraged by their French allies, the Czechoslovaks marched into the north of Hungary taking her last remaining coalfield, the Romanians occupied all of Transylvania and the Serbs advanced north to claim a swathe of the south of Hungary. Consequently, Hungary lost over half of her territory and around 40 per cent of her population, which lay stranded as persecuted minorities outside the rump of her bleeding borders. Lloyd George pitied her, but to no avail. To add insult to the manifest injuries Hungary suffered, she was also burdened with reparations. Of all the Central Powers, Hungary was the most abused.clxi