A HOUSE DIVIDED
From that day on Germany became a house divided.
The conservatives would accept neither the treaty of peace
nor the Republic which had ratified it. Nor, in the long run, would the Army –
General Groener excepted – though it had sworn to support the new democratic
regime and had itself made the final decision to sign at Versailles. Despite
the November ”revolution,” the conservatives still held the economic power.
They owned the industries, the large estates and most of the country’s capital.
Their wealth could be used, and was, to subsidize political parties and a political
press that would strive from now on to undermine the Republic.
The Army began to circumvent the military restrictions of
the peace treaty before the ink on it was scarcely dry. And thanks to the timidity
and shortsightedness of the Socialist leaders, the officer corps managed not
only to maintain the Army in its old Prussian traditions, as we have seen but
to become the real center of political power in the new Germany. The Army did
not, until the last days of the short-lived Republic, stake its fortunes on any
one political movement. But under General Hans von Seeckt, the brilliant
creator of the 100,000-man Reichswehr, the Army, small as it was in numbers,
became a state within a state, exerting an increasing influence on the nation’s
foreign and domestic policies until a point was reached where the Republic’s
continued existence depended on the will of the officer corps.
As a state within a state it maintained its independence of
the national government. Under the Weimar Constitution the Army could have been
subordinated to the cabinet and Parliament, as the military establishments of
the other Western democracies were. But it was not. Nor was the officer corps
purged of its monarchist, antirepublican frame of mind. A few Socialist leaders
such as Scheidemann and Grzesinski urged ”democratizing” the armed forces. They
saw the danger of handing the Army back to the officers of the old
authoritarian, imperialist tradition. But they were successfully opposed not
only by the generals but by their fellow Socialists, led by the Minister of
Defense, Noske. This proletarian minister of the Republic openly boasted that
he wanted to revive” the proud soldier memories of the World War.” The failure
of the duly elected government to build a new Army that would be faithful to
its own democratic spirit and subordinate to the cabinet and the Reichstag was
a fatal mistake for the Republic, as time would tell.
The failure to clean out ’the judiciary was another. The
administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution,
perverting justice for reactionary political ends. ”It is impossible to escape
the conclusion,” the historian Franz L. Neumann declared, ”that political
justice is the blackest page in the life of the German Republic.”92 After the
Kapp putsch in 1920 the government charged 705 persons with high treason; only
one, the police president of Berlin, received a sentence – five years of
”honorary confinement.” When the state of Prussia withdrew his pension the
Supreme Court ordered it restored. A German court in December 1926 awarded
General von Luettwitz, the military leader of the Kapp putsch, back payment of
his pension to cover the period when he was a rebel against the government and
also the five years that he was a fugitive from justice in Hungary.
Yet hundreds of German liberals were sentenced to long
prison terms on charges of treason because they revealed or denounced in the
press or by speech the Army’s constant violations of the Versailles Treaty. The
treason laws were ruthlessly applied to the supporters of the Republic; those
on the Right who tried to overthrow it, as Adolf Hitler was soon to learn, got
off either free or with the lightest of sentences. Even the assassins, if they
were of the Right and their victims democrats, were leniently treated by the
courts or, as often happened, helped to escape from the custody of the courts by
Army officers and right-wing extremists.
And so the mild Socialists, aided by the democrats and the
Catholic Centrists, were left to carry on the Republic, which tottered from its
birth. They bore the hatred, the abuse and sometimes the bullets of their
opponents, who grew in number and in resolve. ”In the heart of the people,”
cried Oswald Spengler, who had skyrocketed to fame with his book The Decline of
the West, ”the Weimar Constitution is already doomed.” Down in Bavaria the
young firebrand Adolf Hitler grasped the strength of the new nationalist,
antidemocratic, anti-republican tide. He began to ride it. He was greatly aided
by the course of events, two in particular: the fall of the mark and the French
occupation of the Ruhr. The mark, as we have seen, had begun to slide in. 1921,
when it dropped to 75 to the dollar; the next year it fell to 400 and by the
beginning of 1923 to 7,000. Already in the fall of 1922 the German government
had asked the Allies to grant a moratorium on reparation payments. This the
French government of Poincare had bluntly refused. When Germany defaulted in
deliveries of timber, the hardheaded French Premier, who had been the wartime
President of France, ordered French troops to occupy the Ruhr. The industrial
heart of Germany, which, after the loss of Upper Silesia to Poland, furnished
the Reich with four fifths of its coal and steel production, was cut off from
the rest of the country.
This paralyzing blow to Germany’s economy united the people
momentarily as they had not been united since 1914. The workers of the Ruhr
declared a general strike and received financial support from the government in
Berlin, which called for a campaign of passive resistance. With the help of the
Army, sabotage and guerrilla warfare were organized. The French countered with
arrests, deportations and even death sentences. But not a wheel in the Ruhr
turned.
The strangulation of Germany’s economy hastened the final
plunge of the mark. On the occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, it fell to
18,000 to the dollar; by July 1 it had dropped to 160,000; by August 1 to a
million. By November, when Hitler thought his hour had struck, it took four billion
marks to buy a dollar, and thereafter the figures became trillions. German
currency had become utterly worthless. Purchasing power of salaries and wages
was reduced to zero. The life savings of the middle classes and the working
classes were wiped out. But something even more important was destroyed: the
faith of the people in the economic structure of German society. What good were
the standards and practices of such a society, which encouraged savings and investment
and solemnly promised a safe return from them and then defaulted? Was this not
a fraud upon the people? And was not the democratic Republic, which had
surrendered to the enemy and accepted the burden of reparations, to blame for
the disaster? Unfortunately for its survival, the Republic did bear a
responsibility. The inflation could have been halted by merely balancing the
budget – a difficult but not impossible feat. Adequate taxation might have
achieved this, but the new government did not dare to tax adequately. After
all, the cost of the war – 164 billion marks – had been met not even in part by
direct taxation but 93 billions of it by war loans, 29 billions out of Treasury
bills and the rest by increasing the issue of paper money. Instead of
drastically raising taxes on those who could pay, the republican government
actually reduced them in 1921.
From then on, goaded by the big industrialists and
landlords, who stood to gain though the masses of the people were financially
ruined, the government deliberately let the mark tumble in order to free the
State of its public debts, to escape from paying reparations and to sabotage
the French in the Ruhr.
Moreover, the destruction of the currency enabled German
heavy industry to wipe out its indebtedness by refunding its obligations in
worthless marks. The General Staff, disguised as the ”Truppenamt” (Office of
Troops) to evade the peace treaty which supposedly had outlawed it, took notice
that the fall of the mark wiped out the war debts and thus left Germany
financially unencumbered for a new war.
The masses of the people, however, did not realize how much
the industrial tycoons, the Army and the State were benefiting from the ruin of
the currency. All they knew was that a large bank account could not buy a
straggly bunch of carrots, a half peck of potatoes, a few ounces of sugar, a
pound of flour. They knew that as individuals they were bankrupt. And they knew
hunger when it gnawed at them, as it did daily. In their misery and
hopelessness they made the Republic the scapegoat for all that had happened. Such
times were heaven-sent for Adolf Hitler.
REVOLT IN BAVARIA
”The government calmly goes on printing these scraps of
paper because, if it stopped, that would be the end of the government,” he
cried. ”Because once the printing presses stopped – and that is the prerequisite
for the stabilization of the mark – the swindle would at once be brought to
light . . . Believe me, our misery will increase. The scoundrel will get by.
The reason: because the State itself has become the biggest swindler and crook.
A robbers’ state! . . . If the horrified people notice that they can starve on
billions, they must arrive at this conclusion: we will no longer submit to a
State which is built on the swindling idea of the majority. We want a
dictatorship . . . ”
No doubt the hardships and uncertainties of the wanton
inflation were driving millions of Germans toward that conclusion and Hitler
was ready to lead them on. In fact, he had begun to believe that the chaotic
conditions of 1923 had created an opportunity to overthrow the Republic which
might not recur. But certain difficulties lay in his way if he were himself to
lead the counterrevolution, and he was not much interested in it unless he was.
In the first place, the Nazi Party, though it was growing daily in numbers, was
far from being even the most important political movement in Bavaria, and outside
that state it was unknown. How could such a small party overthrow the Republic?
Hitler, who was not easily discouraged by odds against him, thought he saw a
way. He might unite under his leadership all the anti-republican, nationalist forces
in Bavaria. Then with the support of the Bavarian government, the armed leagues
and the Reichswehr stationed in Bavaria, he might lead a march on Berlin – as
Mussolini had marched on Rome the year before – and bring the Weimar Republic
down. Obviously Mussolini’s easy success had given him food for thought.
The French occupation of the Ruhr, though it brought a renewal
of German hatred for the traditional enemy and thus revived the spirit of
nationalism, complicated Hitler’s task. It began to unify the German people
behind the republican government in Berlin which had chosen to defy France.
This was the last thing Hitler wanted. His aim was to do away with the
Republic. France could be taken care of after Germany had had its nationalist
revolution and established a dictatorship. Against a strong current of public
opinion Hitler dared to take an unpopular line: ”No – not down with France, but
down with the traitors of the Fatherland, down with the November criminals!
That must be our slogan.”
All through the first months of 1923 Hitler dedicated
himself to making the slogan effective. In February, due largely to the organizational
talents of Roehm, four of the armed ”patriotic leagues” of Bavaria joined with
the Nazis to form the so-called Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vaterlaendischen
Kampfverbaende (Working Union of the Fatherland Fighting Leagues) under the
political leadership of Hitler. In September an even stronger group was
established under the name of the Deutscher Kampfbund (German Fighting Union),
with Hitler one of a triumvirate of leaders. This organization sprang from a
great mass meeting held at Nuremberg on September 2 to celebrate the
anniversary of the German defeat of France at Sedan in 1870. Most of the fascist-minded
groups in southern Germany were represented and Hitler received something of an
ovation after a violent speech against the national government. The objectives
of the new Kampfbund were openly stated: overthrow of the Republic and the
tearing up of the Treaty of Versailles.
At the Nuremberg meeting Hitler had stood in the reviewing
stand next to General Ludendorff during a parade of the demonstrators. This was
not by accident. For some time the young Nazi chief had been cultivating the
war hero, who had lent his famous name to the makers of the Kapp putsch in
Berlin and who, since he continued to encourage counterrevolution from the
Right, might be tempted to back an action which was beginning to germinate in
Hitler’s mind. The old General had no political sense; living now outside
Munich, he did not disguise his contempt for Bavarians, for Crown Prince
Rupprecht, the Bavarian pretender, and for the Catholic Church in this most
Catholic of all states in Germany. All this Hitler knew, but it suited his
purposes. He did not want Ludendorff as the political leader of the nationalist
counterrevolution, a role which it was known the war hero was ambitious to
assume. Hitler insisted on that role for himself. But Ludendorffs name, his
renown in the officer corps and among the conservatives throughout Germany
would be an asset to a provincial politician still largely unknown outside
Bavaria. Hitler began to include Ludendorff in his plans.
In the fall of 1923 the German Republic and the state of
Bavaria reached a point of crisis. On September 26, Gustav Stresemann, the
Chancellor, announced the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr and the
resumption of German reparation payments. This former mouthpiece of Hindenburg
and Ludendorff, a staunch conservative and, at heart, a monarchist, had come to
the conclusion that if Germany were to be saved, united and made strong again
it must, at least for the time being, accept the Republic, come to terms with
the Allies and obtain a period of tranquillity in which to regain its economic
strength. To drift any further would only end in civil war and perhaps in the
final destruction of the nation.
The abandonment of resistance to the French in the Ruhr and
the resumption of the burden of reparations touched off an outburst of anger
and hysteria among the German nationalists, and the Communists, who also had
been growing in strength, joined them in bitter denunciation of the Republic.
Stresemann was faced with serious revolt from both extreme Right and extreme
Left. He had anticipated it by having President Ebert declare a state of
emergency on the very day he announced the change of policy on the Ruhr and
reparations. From September 26, 1923, until February 1924, executive power in
Germany under the Emergency Act was placed in the hands of the Minister of
Defense, Otto Gessler, and of the Commander of the Army, General von Seeckt. In
reality this made the General and his Army virtual dictators of the Reich.
Bavaria was in no mood to accept such a solution. The
Bavarian cabinet of Eugen von Knilling proclaimed its own state of emergency on
September 26 and named the right-wing monarchist and former premier Gustav von
Kahr as State Commissioner with dictatorial powers. In Berlin it was feared
that Bavaria might secede from the Reich, restore the Wittelsbach monarchy and perhaps
form a South German union with Austria. A meeting of the cabinet was hastily
summoned by President Ebert, and General von Seeckt was invited to attend.
Ebert wanted to know where the Army stood. Seeckt bluntly told him. ”The Army,
Mr. President, stands behind me.”
The icy words pronounced by the monocled, poker-faced
Prussian Commander in Chief did not, as might have been expected, dismay the
German President or his Chancellor. They had already recognized the Army’s
position as a state within the State and subject only to itself. Three years
before, as we have seen, when the Kapp forces had occupied Berlin and a similar
appeal had been made to Seeckt, the Army had stood not behind the Republic but
behind the General.
The only question now, in 1923, was where Seeckt stood.
Fortunately for the Republic he now chose to stand behind
it, not because he believed in republican, democratic principles but because he
saw that for the moment the support of the existing regime was necessary for
the preservation of the Army, itself threatened by revolt in Bavaria and in the
north, and for saving Germany from a disastrous civil war. Seeckt knew that
some of the leading officers of the Army division in Munich were siding with
the Bavarian separatists.
He knew of a conspiracy of the ”Black Reichswehr” under
Major Buchrucker, a former General Staff officer, to occupy Berlin and turn the
republican government out. He now moved with cool precision and absolute
determination, to set the Army right and end the threat of civil war.
On the night of September 30, 1923, ”Black Reichswehr”
troops under the command of Major Buchrucker seized three forts to the east of
Berlin. Seeckt ordered regular forces to besiege them, and after two days
Buchrucker surrendered. He was tried for high treason and actually sentenced to
ten years of fortress detention. The ”Black Reichswehr,” which had been set up
by Seeckt himself under the cover name of Arbeitskommandos (Labor Commandos) to
provide secret reinforcements for the 100,000-man Reichswehr, was dissolved. (The ”Black
Reichswehr” troops, numbering roughly twenty thousand, were stationed on the
eastern frontier to help guard it against the Poles in the turbulent days of
1920- 23. The illicit organization became notorious for its revival of the
horrors of the medieval Femegerichte – secret courts – which dealt arbitrary
death sentences against Germans who revealed the activities of the ”Black
Reichswehr” to the Allied Control Commission. Several of these brutal murders
reached the courts. At one trial the German Defense Minister, Otto Gessler, who
had succeeded Noske, denied any knowledge of the organization and insisted that
it did not exist. But when one of his questioners protested against such
innocence Gessler cried, ”He who speaks of the ’Black Reichswehr’ commits an
act of high treason!”)
Seeckt next turned his attention to the threats of Communist
uprisings in Saxony, Thuringia, Hamburg and the Ruhr. In suppressing the Left
the loyalty of the Army could be taken for granted. In Saxony the
Socialist-Communist government was arrested by the local Reichswehr commander
and a Reich Commissioner appointed to rule. In Hamburg and in the other areas
the Communists were quickly and severely squelched. It now seemed to Berlin
that the relativelyeasy suppression of the Bolshevists had robbed the
conspirators in Bavaria of the pretext that they were really acting to save the
Republic from Communism, and that they would now recognize the authority of the
national government. But it did not turn out that way.
Bavaria remained defiant of Berlin. It was now under the
dictatorial control of a triumvirate: Kahr, the State Commissioner, General
Otto von Lossow, commander of the Reichswehr in Bavaria, and Colonel Hans von
Seisser, the head of the state police. Kahr refused to recognize that President
Ebert’s proclamation of a state of emergency in Germany had any application in
Bavaria. He declined to carry out any orders from Berlin. When the national
government demanded the suppression of Hitler’s newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter,
because of its vitriolic attacks on the Republic in general and on Seeckt,
Stresemann and Gessler in particular, Kahr contemptuously refused.
A second order from Berlin to arrest three notorious leaders
of some of the armed bands in Bavaria, Captain Heiss, Captain Ehrhardt (the
”hero” of the Kapp putsch) and Lieutenant Rossbach (a friend of Roehm), was
also ignored by Kahr. Seeckt, his patience strained, ordered General von Lossow
to suppress the Nazi newspaper and arrest the three free-corps men. The
General, himself a Bavarian and a confused and weak officer who had been taken
in by Hitler’s eloquence and Kahr’s persuasiveness, hesitated to obey. On October
24 Seeckt sacked him and appointed General Kress von Kressenstein in his place.
Kahr, however, would not take this kind of dictation from Berlin. He declared
that Lossow would retain the command of the Reichswehr in Bavaria and defying
not only Seeckt but the constitution, forced the officers and the men of the
Army to take a special oath of allegiance to the Bavarian government. This, to
Berlin, was not only political but military rebellion, and General von Seeckt
was now determined to put down both.
He issued a plain warning to the Bavarian triumvirate and to
Hitler and the armed leagues that any rebellion on their part would be opposed
by force. But for the Nazi leader it was too late to draw back. His rabid
followers were demanding action. Lieutenant Wilhelm Brueckner, one of his S.A.
commanders, urged him to strike at once. ”The day is coming,” he warned, ”when
I won’t be able to hold the men back. If nothing happens now, they’ll run away
from us.” Hitler realized too that if Stresemann gained much more time and
began to succeed in his endeavor to restore tranquillity in the country, his
own opportunity would be lost. He pleaded with Kahr and Lossow to march on
Berlin before Berlin marched on Munich. And his suspicion grew that either the
triumvirate was losing heart or that it was planning a separatist coup without
him for the purpose of detaching Bavaria from the Reich. To this, Hitler, with
his fanatical ideas for a strong, nationalist, unified Reich, was unalterably
opposed. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were beginning to lose heart after Seeckt’s
warning.
They were not interested in a futile gesture that might
destroy them. On November 6 they informed the Kampfbund, of which Hitler was
the leading political figure, that they would not be hurried into precipitate
action and that they alone would decide when and how to act. This was a signal
to Hitler that he must seize the initiative himself. He did not possess the
backing to carry out a putsch alone. He would have to have the support of the
Bavarian state, the Army and the police – this was a lesson he had learned in
his beggarly Vienna days. Somehow he would have to put Kahr, Lossow and Seisser
in a position where they would have to act with him and from which there would be
no turning back. Boldness, even recklessness, was called for, and that Hitler now
proved he had. He decided to kidnap the triumvirate and force them to use their
power at his bidding.
The idea had first been proposed to Hitler by two refugees
from Russia, Rosenberg and Scheubner-Richter. The latter, who had ennobled
himself with his wife’s name and called himself Max Erwin von
Scheubner-Richter, was a dubious character who, like Rosenberg, had spent most
of his life in the Russian Baltic provinces and after the war made his way with
other refugees from the Soviet Union to Munich, where he joined the Nazi Party
and became one of Hitler’s close confidants.
On November 4, Germany’s Memorial Day (Totengedenktag) would
be observed by a military parade in the heart of Munich, and it had been
announced in the press that not only the popular Crown Prince Rupprecht but
Kahr, Lossow and Seisser would take the salute of the troops from a stand in a
narrow street leading from the Feldherrnhalle. Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg
proposed to Hitler that a few hundred storm troopers, transported by trucks,
should converge on the little street before the parading troops arrived and
seal it off with machine guns. Hitler would then mount the tribune, proclaim
the revolution and at pistol point prevail upon the notables to join it and
help him lead it.
The plan appealed to Hitler and he enthusiastically endorsed
it. But, on the appointed day, when Rosenberg arrived early on the scene for
purposes of reconnaissance he discovered to his dismay that the narrow street
was fully protected by a large body of well-armed police. The plot, indeed the
”revolution,” had to be abandoned.
Actually it was merely postponed. A second plan was
concocted, one that could not be balked by the presence of a band of
strategically located police. On the night of November 10-11, the S.A. and the
other armed bands of the Kampfbund would be concentrated on the Froettmaninger
Heath, just north of Munich, and on the morning of the eleventh, the
anniversary of the hated, shameful armistice, would march into the city, seize
strategic points, proclaim the national revolution and present the hesitant
Kahr, Lossow and Seisser with a fait accompli.
At this point a not very important public announcement
induced Hitler to drop that plan and improvise a new one. A brief notice
appeared in the press that, at the request of some business organizations in
Munich, Kahr would address a meeting at the Buergerbraukeller, a large beer
hall on the southeastern outskirts of the city. The date was November 8, in the
evening. The subject of the Commissioner’s speech, the notice said, would be
the program of the Bavarian government. General von Lossow, Colonel von Seisser
and other notables would be present.
Two considerations led Hitler to a rash decision. The first
was that he suspected Kahr might use the meeting to announce the proclamation
of Bavarian independence and the restoration of the Wittelsbachs to the Bavarian
throne. All day long on November 8 Hitler tried in vain to see Kahr, who put
him off until the ninth. This only increased the Nazi leader’s suspicions. He
must forestall Kahr. Also, and this was the second consideration, the
Buergerbraukeller meeting provided the opportunity which had been missed on
November 4: the chance to rope in all three members of the triumvirate and at
the point of a pistol force them to join the Nazis in carrying out the
revolution. Hitler decided to act at once. Plans for the November 10 mobilization
were called off; the storm troops were hastily alerted for duty at the big beer
hall.
Source: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William
Shrirer, pp. 55-63