Death of a Nation

by Stephen R A'Barrow

  The haphazard redrawing of European boundaries by keen amateur cartographers, with limited or no understanding of the complex mix that was Central Europe, or of its ethnic allegiances, left over 30 million Europeans stranded on the wrong side of international frontiers. Testimony to their ineptitude is underscored by the fact that very few of the lines drawn in 1919 have survived to the present day.clxii

  The protection of the rights of minorities was an afterthought, which no one had taken particularly seriously. The League of Nations was inundated with so many complaints from Europe’s new minorities about their treatment that she gave up trying to arbitrate them altogether after 1934.

  PAYMENT

  Punishment did not only take the form of putting Germans under the yoke of foreign rule, the interlocking principal between ‘punishment’ and ‘prevention’ was ‘payment’. ‘Payment’ was intended to stop Germany from re-arming and to pay for the damage of the war, but in practice Germany was asked to pay a crippling indemnity, which bore no relation to the physical damage inflicted during the war. The Armistice had not included mention of reparations or war guilt, and neither had Wilson’s fourteen points (which had specifically renounced the idea of ‘punitive damages’). America adopted the moral high ground by simply wanting her loans repaid. The largest loans by far had been made to Great Britain and France, who wanted the money to pay these back. Alongside the main infrastructural damages of war, which had mostly been sustained in parts of Belgium and north-eastern France, ever more items were added to the list of damages, including war widow’s pensions.

  The British and French invented Article 231 of the Versailles treaty to justify Article 232. The former assigned responsibility to Germany for the damages that the Allies sustained during the war (the so-called ‘war guilt’ clause), while the latter effectively assigned unlimited liability for damages. John Maynard Keynes was one of the British experts on the commission whose task was to work out the details of German reparations payments. He came up with a range of enlightened proposals but eventually resigned in the face of the vindictive and shortsighted demands made by France and Britain that would cripple Europe economically and perpetuate hatred for generations. Keynes called the article on war guilt an excuse to press for sky-high reparations and described it as a ‘shakedown’. His long-term view was unfortunately lost on the less gifted spirits around him. He argued that the ‘peacemakers’ should have been setting up a free trade area, rather than creating myriad new borders; and rather than arguing about what they owed each other, they should have been talking about cancelling out as much debt as possible. Keynes believed that a maximum of 10 billion dollars should be paid by Germany, arguing that anything else risked bankrupting her and destroying any chance of a European recovery. His essential idea was brilliant in its simplicity: the European Allies needed money to repair the damage and repay their American debts, the Central Powers would issue bonds for their reparations, but those bonds would be guaranteed by both former enemy and Allied nations; finances would flow again, repayments made, investments undertaken and all would ultimately benefit.(7) Keynes’s book, The Economic Consequences of Peace, eventually became an international bestseller around the world and did much to bring public opinion in the victorious nations over to the view that Versailles had been an unjust peace.

  The list of demands made upon Germany from the signing of the Armistice, and following her internal collapse into revolution, became endless. Belgium put in a claim for more than its total prewar wealth and France for over half of hers. The list increasingly took on the appearance, not of a ‘bill for damages’, but of a colossal ‘fine for losing’.(8) The initial figure demanded was 480 billion Reichsmarks, which was equal to 1,700 per cent of Germany’s annual net income. The Allies did not agree upon a final figure until April 1921, when they set the reparations bill at 132 billion gold Reichsmarks. As a result of the ensuing hyperinflation caused by the German government having to print ever more paper money to borrow the funds it needed to keep up reparations payments, the Dawes Commission had to ease the burden by tying reparations payments to Germany’s economic performance and underwriting them with short-term loans, which helped the economy get back on its feet between 1924–29. The Young Commission, reporting in 1929, went further by rescheduling the date of payments at a fixed rate based on projections of German exports, and thereby replaced the Dawes schedule. However, this payment schedule now meant Germany would be paying reparations for the First World War until 1988.clxiii (9)

  In the great crash of 1929, Germany was hit hardest and defaulted on her loans. Her economy subsequently went into freefall from 1930–33. Reparations repayments were suspended in 1930 and ended in 1932. In the end, Germany repaid roughly a third of the total reparations imposed.(10) Of greatest significance was not what Germany actually ended up paying, it was the fact that initially there was no limit imposed upon the figure. When a figure was reached it dwarfed all previous post-war settlements. The only way Germany could pay such an enormous sum was by taking out loans from the United States, which left her especially vulnerable to the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression that followed when liquidity dried up. The German economy then went into free fall and German unemployment skyrocketed to over 6 million — a reservoir for extremism that fuelled near civil war on the streets of Germany between communists and fascists. More importantly still, every economic ill and failing of the Weimar Republic was laid at the door of Versailles. Every struggling factory worker, unemployed labourer and housewife desperate to feed her child blamed the Versailles treaty for all their economic woes and for Germany’s suffering.

  PREVENTION

  Only in terms of prevention was it easier to find common ground among the Western Allies, but by no means on all of France’s many demands. The first priority was to prevent German arms being capable of making war. When the German navy sailed out of Kiel, sixty-nine vessels in all, the second largest navy in the world, the British, Americans and French squabbled over these rich pickings. The German crews, in one last show of defiance, scuttled their ships and sent them to the bottom of Scapa Flow. Her U-boats were sunk, her air force was scrapped and her army was reduced to a police force, barely capable of putting out the fires of revolution in Germany, let alone defending her borders. France’s priority, beyond emasculating German military might was to weaken, prevent and deprive Germany of as much territory and industry as she could. The point which caused the greatest argument among the Allies was the French demand for the annexation of the Rhineland and the Saar in addition to Alsace-Lorraine. This would have given France an enormous minority of 10 million Germans and have immeasurably strengthened France and weakened Germany. This was seen as a step too far and was rejected by her alliance partners.

  The high-minded principles called for by President Wilson were for all nations to disarm, but only Germany was made to do so. The British and French had no intention of disarming and the newly-created states of central Europe had embarked on a new arms race of their own. When the time came, Hitler’s job of repudiating high-minded pretensions at disarmament were made all the easier by the rank hypocrisy of the Allies regarding their disarmament commitments.

  LEGACY

  Rantzau, the leader of the German delegation, wrote, ‘What hand would not wither which placed this chain upon itself and upon us?’ — a ‘slave peace’.(11) Rumours abounded that the German government and its delegation would not sign. The Allies prevaricated and argued. But with the British pushing for more concessions favourable to Germany, the American President’s health deteriorating, and France as belligerent as ever, the talks again came close to collapse in early June 1919. Finally, when their collective resolve returned, Britain prepared to tighten the reigns of the blockade, and Marshal Foch readied forty divisions to march deep into Germany. Given the chaotic circumstances in Germany, and despite Hindenburg’s sentiment that he would rather ‘lose an honourable war than sign a dishonourable peace’, the German General Staff urged
their politicians to sign the peace. The leader of the Catholic Centre Party and long-time advocate of a negotiated peace, Matthias Erzberger’s dire warnings echoed in everyone’s ears. He had argued that failure to sign would mean Allied occupation of the Ruhr and Germany’s industrial collapse. It would mean Polish invasion and further land grabs in the east, followed by violent revolution with communist and nationalist paramilitaries reigning supreme on German streets and the attendant break-up of Germany herself.(12) At the eleventh hour, even nationalist MPs ‘graciously’ contended that those who signed would not bear the ignominy alone. Such sentiments did not hold and Versailles became a millstone around the new Weimar Republic’s neck. Erzberger paid for his words, having urged his countrymen to sign, with his life. He was assassinated in 1921 for signing the ‘Traitors’ Peace’. The perpetrators of his assassination were not brought to justice until after the Second World War.

  Some contemporary historians have sought to play down the punitive nature of Versailles on Germany, although not of Saint-Germain and Trianon on Austria-Hungary. In part, this is due to the conditions Germany had imposed on Russia after her surrender and of those she would have imposed on France had she won in the West. Even the huge amount she was told to pay in reparations, on top of all her other substantial losses, has been played down. Perhaps, because the punishment meted out to Germany after the Second World War was so much greater again than that of Versailles, the latter now appears as somewhat less harsh. Perhaps, because Germany did recover to launch an aggressive and revisionist war against the settlement of Versailles, it can be argued that the treaty — in terms of prevention — had not been harsh enough.

  What is more significant than this retrospective view however is examining how the treaties against the Central Powers were viewed at the time and the legacy they left in the inter-war years. As the full scope of the treaties unfolded there was no shortage of prominent critics. Key members of the British and American delegations resigned and/or went on to publicly vent or publish their scorn on the ‘peacemakers’. These included John Maynard Keynes and David Lloyd George in Britain, and Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, and William Bullitt from the American delegations. Their views left an indelible mark on inter-war politicians and public opinion, and laid the groundwork for a popular policy of appeasement and revisionism, which aimed to redress the wrongs of Versailles and defuse the many grievances it had created.

  The British Empire Delegation insisted Lloyd George go back and renegotiate large tranches of the treaty. The leading critic on the British Empire side was General Smuts, the South African president, who rallied the delegation to stand up to French revanchism arguing, ‘I am grieved beyond words that such should be the result of our statesmanship… [This is] an impossible peace [on reparations]… [and it] must kill the goose which is to lay the golden eggs [on the Rhineland/Saar and the Polish frontier]… [It is] full of menace for Europe… [with] too much of the French demands in that settlement.’(13) With Lloyd George’s acquiescence he swung the delegation around to ask for a range of moderations more in line with Woodrow Wilson’s own principles, but the only concession this achieved was for plebiscites in Silesia. In the end, the negotiations between Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau had been so fraught and bitter, that undoing what had been so painfully agreed upon was akin to pulling teeth.

  The treaties that concluded the ‘war to end all wars’ had been born out of the idealism enshrined in Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points. America offered the world an opportunity to replace the bankrupt policy of the ‘balance of power’ — the policy that had led to the alliance system that had triggered the war — with a New World Order based on international law and mediated by a new League of Nations. France (and to a lesser extent Great Britain) shrugged off these noble ideals in favour of dividing up the spoils of war and reconstituting the balance of power all over again, as though nothing had happened. Their actions did much to dispel the belief that the relentless march forward of European civilisations could continue; a belief that had been dealt a mortal blow in the trenches of the First World War. Humanity appeared to be incapable of learning from its most recent and bloody mistakes. The propaganda of wartime received exceptional longevity in both France and Britain, where the punitive terms of the peace were underpinned by the notion that the Western Allies had fought a moral war against brutal German militarism, that had sought to enslave Europe and end Western civilisation. Medals were issued engraved with the words ‘The Great War for Civilisation’. Such myths were belied by the Entente’s betrayal of their own high-minded principals in the squabble over Germany’s colonies, the rejection of the principal of self-determination, and the implementation of new annexations and indemnities of their own.

  The signing ceremony held on 28th June, 1919 in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, was a stage-managed three ring circus. Each of the victorious powers allocated itself sixty ringside seats, many of which were sold to celebrities and notables for stellar prices. The remaining seating was opened up to the delegates from every nation in the world. It was a symbolically humiliating ending to a treaty that did nothing to secure peace in Europe. The responsibility of the great statesmen had been initially to seek justice and restitution, but also to ensure a settlement was made that at least attempted to create a just peace and the possibility of peaceful co-existence between neighbouring states. The treaties that concluded the end of the First World War did nothing of the sort. The ‘peacemakers’ all but wrote the roadmap for the next European war.

  The treaties were written by people who were largely ignorant of the history, culture and ethnic complexity of Central and Eastern Europe. They left a gaping hole and a power vacuum at the heart of Europe, and did nothing to aid the flowering of democracy. Instead, they led to the old multiethnic patchwork of the Austro-Hungarian Empire being replaced with a rash of nationalistic dictatorial successor states. In utter frustration, Lloyd George wrote, ‘It fills me with despair the way in which I have seen small nations, before they have hardly leaped into the light of freedom, beginning to oppress other races than their own.’(14) The treaties were seen as being universally unfair and in direct contravention of Wilson’s fourteen points, on which Germany and Austria had signed their Armistices. The fourteen points included, ‘Restoration of invaded territories, no annexations, no punitive damages, and yes to self determination.’ What a deception these noble principles turned out to be.

  The ‘slave treaties’ were seen as being vindictive and unjust, and they were the one factor that united all Germans across the political spectrum. The short-sightedness of these treaties gave extremists like Hitler the perfect platform from which to rail against the spitefulness of Germany’s enemies. In every foreign policy speech and pronouncement that Hitler made he used Versailles as a rallying cry. His foreign policy roadmap was entirely based upon undoing the shackles of Versailles, and in each and every step along this road he had the overwhelming mass of the German people behind him. The plight of German minorities also increasingly had the public sympathy of leading figures in Britain, as seen with the example of the Czechoslovak crisis, when Lord Runciman’s report commissioned by the British government was highly unfavourable about the actions of the Czech government in Sudeten German regions of Bohemia. Hitler’s other policy objectives — the national community, social economy and anti-Semitism — never rallied the German people in the way his calls to untie Germany from Versailles did. It is unthinkable that Hitler and the Nazis would have come to power had it not been for Versailles.

  The final legacy of Versailles ensured that no German leader would prostrate himself before the good will of the Allies again. Versailles killed the idea of a negotiated peace for all time. During the Second World War no quarter was given nor expected. The Allies settled on a policy of accepting only ‘unconditional surrender’ when such a prospect seemed a dim and distant goal. Hitler gambled Germany’s future on the hope that the appeasement of Great Britain and F
rance would continue to allow him to carve out a new German Empire in the East. When his gamble failed, he committed Germany to a fate of either total victory or total destruction. The memory of Versailles made it exceptionally difficult for patriotic Germans who opposed Hitler to contemplate overthrowing his tyranny in the forlorn hope that the Allies would be merciful to Germany; those who tried out of sheer desperation had not the slightest encouragement from the West.clxiv

  WEIMAR AND THE PERFECT STORM

  There are no shortage of authors who have tried to summarise the ‘Greatest Catastrophe of the Twentieth Century’ (of the First World War) as being in part or entirely a product of the German Sonderweg theory described earlier in this book. Few have done so more convincingly than Peter Watson in his brilliant book The German Genius, in a study of Germany’s educational, scientific and cultural development from 1750 onwards. The book focuses on the unique and peculiar sense of ‘inwardness’ in many aspects of German cultural life, in a nation which became a Kulturnation long before it became a modern nation state, and which placed supreme importance on the concept of Bildung (meaning far more than its literal translation of ‘education’), exemplifying a belief in the necessity to search for a form of betterment and creativity that transcended any earthly political sphere, notions that the author argues were reinforced by centuries of Lutheran and Pietist concern with inner conviction rather than merely with Catholic displays of religiosity. This was a culture in which the romantic movement and a love of high music represented further expressions of the same inwardness; of a desire to listen intently for the sublime — where the artist is greater than any scientist, because the former creates whilst the later only discovers. Kant’s philosophy is also highlighted as focusing on the importance of instinct and intuition, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the paramount importance of the will and Freud and Jung on their obsession with the unconscious. Watson charts the rise of individualism, alienation, nihilism and the fear that the national community (Gemeinschaft) is rapidly disintegrating in the face of the rise of rampant consumerist individualism; and he points to the significant increase in cultural pessimism in Germany after the First World War, giving rise to a desire in many quarters for the establishment of a new redemptive community. But the same could be said of France, Italy, Great Britain and many other countries where similar concerns were mirrored and found public expression, not least Freud’s ideas which spawned an industry of work analysing the alienating nature of modern Western capitalism and the need to search for a universal set of ethics/rules by which humanity could live. The counter-argument was elegantly summarised by Hannah Arendt who argued that the First World War was the cause of the ‘Great Catastrophe’, a conflict whose ‘murderous arbitrariness’ did more than anything else to destroy the belief in community, or in any pre-ordained and deserving established hierarchy, something which terrified the masses, raising the spectre of a bloody new revolutionary era devoid of any moral foundation or anchor. The economic tsunami that followed in the wake of the Great Depression then swept away any faith in the institutions and traditions of the past that remained, particularly in those nations that had been hardest hit by the ensuing turmoil.