A HOUSE DIVIDED and REVOLT IN BAVARIA

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

THE SHADOW OF VERSAILLES

THE SHADOW OF VERSAILLES

Before the drafting of the Weimar Constitution was finished an inevitable event occurred which cast a spell of doom over it and the Republic which it was to establish. This was the drawing up of the Treaty of Versailles. During the first chaotic and riotous days of the peace and even after the deliberations of the National Assembly got under way in Weimar the German people seemed to give little thought to the consequences of their defeat. Or if they did, they appeared to be smugly confident that having, as the Allies urged, got rid of the Hohenzollerns, squelched the Bolshevists and set about forming a democratic, republican government, they were entitled to a just peace based not on their having lost the war but on President Wilson’s celebrated Fourteen Points.

German memories did not appear to stretch back as far as one year, to March 3, 1918, when the then victorious German Supreme Command had imposed on a defeated Russia at Brest Litovsk a peace treaty which to a British historian, writing two decades after the passions of war had cooled, was a ”humiliation without precedent or equal in modern history,”90 It deprived Russia of a territory nearly as large as Austria-Hungary and Turkey combined, with 56,000,000 inhabitants, or 32 per cent of her whole population; a third of her railway mileage, 73 per cent of her total iron ore, 89 per cent of her total coal production; and more than 5,000 factories and industrial plants. Moreover, Russia was obliged to pay Germany an indemnity of six billion marks.

The day of reckoning arrived for the Germans in the late spring of 1919. The terms of the Versailles Treaty, laid down by the Allies without negotiation with Germany, were published in Berlin on May 7. They came as a staggering blow to a people who had insisted on deluding themselves to the last moment. Angry mass meetings were organized throughout the country to protest against the treaty and to demand that Germany refuse to sign it. Scheidemann, who had become Chancellor during the Weimar Assembly, cried, ”May the hand wither that signs this treaty!” On May 8 Ebert, who had become Provisional President, and the government publicly branded the terms as ”unrealizable and unbearable.”

The next day the German delegation at Versailles wrote the unbending Clemenceau that such a treaty was ”intolerable for any nation.” What was so intolerable about it? It restored Alsace-Lorraine to France, a parcel of territory to Belgium, a similar parcel in Schleswig to Denmark – after a plebiscite – which Bismarck had taken from the Danes in the previous century after defeating them in war. It gave back to the Poles the lands, some of them only after a plebiscite, which the Germans had taken during the partition of Poland.

This was one of the stipulations which infuriated the Germans the most, not only because they resented separating East Prussia from the Fatherland by a corridor which gave Poland access to the sea, but because they despised the Poles, whom they considered an inferior race. Scarcely less infuriating to the Germans was that the treaty forced them to accept responsibility for starting the war and demanded that they turn over to the Allies Kaiser Wilhelm II and some eight hundred other ”war criminals.” Reparations were to be fixed later, but a first payment of five billion dollars in gold marks was to be paid between 1919 and 1921, and certain deliveries in kind – coal, ships, lumber, cattle, etc. – were to be made in lieu of cash reparations.

But what hurt most was that Versailles virtually disarmed Germany (It restricted the Army to 100,000 long-term volunteers and prohibited it from having planes or tanks. The General Staff was also outlawed. The Navy was reduced to little more than a token force and forbidden to build submarines or vessels over 10,000 tons.) and thus, for the time being anyway, barred the way to German hegemony in Europe.  And yet the hated Treaty of Versailles, unlike that which Germany had imposed on Russia, left the Reich geographically and economically largely intact and preserved her political unity and her potential strength as a great nation.

The provisional government at Weimar, with the exception of Erzberger, who urged acceptance of the treaty on the grounds that its terms could be easily evaded, was strongly against accepting the Versailles Diktat, as it was now being called. Behind the government stood the overwhelming majority of citizens, from right to left. And the Army? If the treaty were rejected, could the Army resist an inevitable Allied attack from the west? Ebert put it up to the Supreme Command, which had now moved its headquarters to Kolberg in Pomerania. On June 17 Field Marshal von Hindenburg, prodded by General Groener, who saw that German military resistance would be futile, replied: In the event of a resumption of hostilities we can reconquer the province of Posen [in Poland] and defend our frontiers in the east.

In the west, however, we can scarcely count upon being able to withstand a serious offensive on the part of the enemy in view of the numerical superiority of the Entente and their ability to outflank us on both wings. The success of the operation as a whole is therefore very doubtful, but as a soldier I cannot help feeling that it were better to perish honorably than accept a disgraceful peace. The concluding words of the revered Commander in Chief were in the best German military tradition but their sincerity may be judged by knowledge of the fact which the German people were unaware of – that Hindenburg had agreed with Groener that to try to resist the Allies now would not only be hopeless but might result in the destruction of the cherished officer corps of the Army and indeed of Germany itself.

The Allies were now demanding a definite answer from Germany. On June 16, the day previous to Hindenburg’s written answer to Ebert, they had given the Germans an ultimatum: Either the treaty must be accepted by June 24 or the armistice agreement would be terminated and the Allied powers would” take such steps as they think necessary to enforce their terms.”

Once again Ebert appealed to Groener. If the Supreme Command thought there was the slightest possibility of successful military resistance to the Allies, Ebert promised to try to secure the rejection of the treaty by the Assembly. But he must have an answer immediately. The last day of the ultimatum, June 24, had arrived. The cabinet was meeting at 4:30 P.M. to make its final decision.

Once more Hindenburg and Groener conferred. ”You know as well as I do that armed resistance is impossible,” the aging, worn Field Marshal said. But once again, as at Spa on November 9, 1918, when he could not bring himself to tell the Kaiser the final truth and left the unpleasant duty to Groener, he declined to tell the truth to the Provisional President of the Republic. ”You can give  the answer to the President as well as I can,” he said to Groener.91 And again the courageous General took the final responsibility which belonged to the Field Marshal, though he must have known that it would eventually make doubly sure his being made a scapegoat for the officer corps. He telephoned the Supreme Command’s view to the President. Relieved at having the Army’s leaders take the responsibility – a fact that was soon forgotten in Germany – the National Assembly approved the signing of the peace treaty by a large majority and its decision was communicated to Clemenceau a bare nineteen minutes before the Allied ultimatum ran out. Four days later, on June 28, 1919, the treaty of peace was signed in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles.

Source: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shrirer, pp. 53-55

Profession and Vocation of Albert Speer

From the memoires of Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments for Hitler’s Nazi party. His book is entitled “Inside the Third Reich.” These are pages 12-21. It is very interesting to see the perspective of the "normal" German under the hypnotic influence of Hitler and how people responded to him. The chapters out of this book give a good insight into the character and influence of Hitler.

Profession and Vocation

I VERY NEARLY BECAME AN OFFICIAL COURT ARCHITECT AS EARLY AS 1928.

Aman Ullah, ruler of the Afghans, wanted to reform his country and was hiring young German technicians with that end in view. Joseph Brix, Professor of Urban Architecture and Road Building, organized the group. It was proposed that I would serve as city planner and architect and in addition as teacher of architecture at a technical school which was to be founded in Kabul. My wife and I pored over all available books on remote Afghanistan. We considered how a style natural to the country could be developed out of the simple existing structures, and the pictures of wild mountains filled us with dreams of ski tours. Favorable contractual conditions were worked out. But no sooner was everything virtually settled— the King had just been received with great honors by President Hindenburg— than the Afghans overthrew their ruler in a coup d'etat.

The prospect of continuing to work with Tessenow consoled me. I had been having some misgivings anyhow, and I was glad that the fall of Aman Ullah removed the need to make a decision. I had to look after my seminar only three days a week; in addition there were five months of academic vacation. Nevertheless I received 300 Reichsmark— about the equivalent in value of 800 Deutsche Mark* [$200] today. (All figures in DM do not take into account the 1969 revaluation of the mark. The reader can easily reckon the amounts in U.S. dollars by dividing DM figures by four.) Tessenow delivered no lectures; he came to the large seminar room only to correct the papers of his fifty-odd students. He was around for no more than four to six hours a week; the rest of the time the students were left in my care for instruction and correction.

The first months in particular were very strenuous for me. The students assumed a highly critical attitude toward me and tried to trap me into a show of ignorance or weakness. It took a while before my initial nervousness subsided. But the commissions for buildings, which I had hoped to spend my ample free time on, did not come my way. Probably I struck people as too young. Moreover, the construction industry was very slow because of the economic depression. One exception was the commission to build a house in Heidelberg for my wife's parents. It proved to be a modest building which was followed by two others of no great con- sequence-two garage annexes for Wannsee villas— and the designing of the Berlin offices of the Academic Exchange Service.

In 1930 we sailed our two faltboats from Donaueschingen, which is in Swabia, down the Danube to Vienna. By the time we returned, there had been a Reichstag election on September 14 which remains in my memory only because my father was greatly perturbed about it. The NSDAP (National Socialist Party) had won 107 seats and was suddenly the chief topic of political discussion.

My father had the darkest forebodings, chiefly in view of the NSDAFs socialist tendencies. He was already disturbed enough by the strength of the Social Democrats and the Communists.

Our Institute of Technology had in the meanwhile become a center of National Socialist endeavors. The small group of Communist architecture students gravitated to Professor Poelzig's seminar, while the National Socialists gathered around Tessenow, even though he was and remained a forthright opponent of the Hitler movement, for there were parallels, unexpressed and unintended, between his doctrine and the ideology of the National Socialists. Tessenow was not aware of these parallels. He would surely have been horrified by the thought of any kinship between his ideas and National Socialist views.

Among other things, Tessenow taught: "Style comes from the people. It is in our nature to love our native land. There can be no true culture that is international. True culture comes only from the maternal womb of a nation."  

Hitler, too, denounced the internationalization of art. The National Socialist creed held that the roots of renewal were to be found in the native soil of Germany.

Tessenow decried the metropolis and extolled the peasant virtues: The metropolis is a dreadful thing. The metropolis is a confusion of old and new. The metropolis is conflict, brutal conflict. Everything good should be left outside of big cities. . . . Where urbanism meets the peasantry, the spirit of the peasantry is ruined. A pity that people can no longer think in peasant terms." In a similar vein, Hitler cried out against the erosion of morals in the big cities. He warned against the ill effects of civilization which, he said, damaged the biological substance of the people. And he emphasized the importance of a healthy peasantry as a mainstay for the state.

Hitler was able to sense these and other currents which were in the air of the times, though many of them were still diffuse and intangible. He was able to articulate them and to exploit them for his own ends. In the process of my correcting their papers, the National Socialist students often involved me in political discussions. Naturally, Tessenow's ideas were passionately debated. Well trained in dialectics, these students easily crushed the feeble objections I could make, borrowed as they were from my father's vocabulary.

The students were chiefly turning to the extremists for their beliefs, and Hitler's party appealed directly to the idealism of this generation. And after all, was not a man like Tessenow also fanning these flames? About 1931 he had declared: "Someone will have to come along who thinks very simply. Thinking today has become too complicated. An un- cultured man, a peasant as it were, would solve everything much more easily merely because he would still be unspoiled. He would also have the strength to carry out his simple ideas."  To us this oracular remark seemed to herald Hitler.

Hitler was delivering an address to the students of Berlin University and the Institute of Technology. My students urged me to attend. Not yet convinced, but already uncertain of my ground, I went along. The site of the meeting was a beer hall called the Hasenheide. Dirty walls, narrow stairs, and an ill-kept interior created a poverty-stricken atmosphere. This was a place where workmen ordinarily held beer parties. The room was overcrowded. It seemed as if nearly all the students in Berlin wanted to see and hear this man whom his adherents so much admired and his opponents so much detested. A large number of professors sat in favored places in the middle of a bare platform. Their presence gave the meeting an importance and a social acceptability that it would not otherwise have had. Our group had also secured good seats on the platform, not far from the lectern.

Hitler entered and was tempestuously hailed by his numerous followers among the students. This enthusiasm in itself made a great impression upon me. But his appearance also surprised me. On posters and in caricatures I had seen him in military tunic, with shoulder straps, swastika armband, and hair flapping over his forehead. But here he was wearing a well-fitted blue suit and looking markedly respectable. Everything about him bore out the note of reasonable modesty. Later I learned that he had a great gift for adjusting— consciously or intuitively— to his surroundings.

As the ovation went on for minutes he tried, as if slightly pained, to check it. Then, in a low voice, hesitantly and somewhat shyly, he began a kind of historical lecture rather than a speech. To me there was something engaging about it— all the more so since it ran counter to everything the propaganda of his opponents had led me to expect: a hysterical demagogue, a shrieking and gesticulating fanatic in uniform. He did not allow the bursts of applause to tempt him away from his sober tone.

It seemed as if he were candidly presenting his anxieties about the future. His irony was softened by a somewhat self-conscious humor; his South German charm reminded me agreeably of my native region. A cool Prussian could never have captivated me that way. Hitler’s initial shyness soon disappeared; at times now his pitch rose. He spoke urgently and with hypnotic persuasiveness. The mood he cast was much deeper than the speech itself, most of which I did not remember for long.

Moreover, I was carried on the wave of the enthusiasm which, one could almost feel this physically, bore the speaker along from sentence to sentence. It swept away any skepticism, any reservations. Opponents were given no chance to speak. This furthered the illusion, at least momentarily, of unanimity. Finally, Hitler no longer seemed to be speaking to convince; rather, he seemed to feel that he was expressing what the audience, by now transformed into a single mass, expected of him. It was as if it were the most natural thing in the world to lead students and part of the faculty of the two greatest academies in Germany submissively by a leash. Yet that evening he was not yet the absolute ruler, immune from all criticism, but was still exposed to attacks from all directions.

Others may afterward have discussed that stirring evening over a glass of beer. Certainly my students pressed me to do so. But I felt I had to straighten things out in my own mind, to master my confusion. I needed to be alone. Shaken, I drove off into the night in my small car, stopped in a pine forest near the Havel, and went for a long walk.

Here, it seemed to me, was hope. Here were new ideals, a new understanding, new tasks. Even Spengler s dark predictions seemed to me refuted, and his prophecy of the coming of a new Roman emperor simultaneously fulfilled. The peril of communism, which seemed inexorably on its way, could be checked, Hitler persuaded us, and instead of hopeless unemployment, Germany could move toward economic recovery. He had mentioned the Jewish problem only peripherally. But such re- marks did not worry me, although I was not an anti-Semite; rather, I had Jewish friends from my school days and university days, like virtually everyone else.

A few weeks after this speech, which had been so important to me, friends took me to a demonstration at the Sportpalast. Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, spoke. How different my impression was: much phrase-making, careful structure, and incisive formulations; a roaring crowd whom Goebbels whipped up to wilder and wilder frenzies of enthusiasm and hatred; a witches' cauldron of excitement such as I had hitherto witnessed only at six-day bike races. I felt repelled; the positive effect Hitler had had upon me was diminished, though not extinguished.

Both Goebbels and Hitler had understood how to unleash mass instincts at their meetings, how to play on the passions that underlay the veneer of ordinary respectable life. Practiced demagogues, they succeeded in fusing the assembled workers, petites bourgeois, and students into a homogeneous mob whose opinions they could mold as they pleased. . . . But as I see it today, these politicians in particular were in fact molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and its daydreams. Of course Goebbels and Hitler knew how to penetrate through to the instincts of their audiences; but in the deeper sense they derived their whole existence from these audiences. Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler’s and Goebbels's baton; yet they were not the true conductors. The mob determined the theme. To compensate for misery, insecurity, unemployment, and hopelessness, this anonymous assemblage wallowed for hours at a time in obsessions, savagery, license. This was no ardent nationalism. Rather, for a few short hours the personal unhappiness caused by the breakdown of the economy was replaced by a frenzy that demanded victims. And Hitler and Goebbels threw them the victims. By lashing out at their opponents and vilifying the Jews they gave expression and direction to fierce, primal passions.

The Sportpalast emptied. The crowd moved calmly down Potsdamer Strasse. Their self-assurance fed by Goebbels's speech, they challengingly took up the whole width of the street, so that automobile traffic and the streetcars were blocked. At first the police took no action; perhaps they did not want to provoke the crowd. But in the side streets mounted squads and trucks with special patrols were held in readiness. At last the mounted police rode into the crowd, with raised truncheons, to clear the street.  Indignantly, I watched the procedure; until that moment I had never witnessed such use of force. At the same time I felt a sense of partisanship, compounded of sympathy for the crowd and opposition to authority, take possession of me. My feelings probably had nothing to do with political motives. Actually, nothing extraordinary had happened. There had not even been any injuries.

The following day I applied for membership in the National Socialist Party and in January 1931 became Member Number 474,481.

It was an utterly undramatic decision. Then and ever afterward I scarcely felt myself to be a member of a political party. I was not choosing the NSDAP, but becoming a follower of Hitler, whose magnetic force had reached out to me the first time I saw him and had not, thereafter, released me. His persuasiveness, the peculiar magic of his by no means pleasant voice, the oddity of his rather banal manner, the seductive simplicity with which he attacked the complexity of our problems— all that bewildered and fascinated me. I knew virtually nothing about his program. He had taken hold of me before I had grasped what was happening.

I was not even thrown off by attending a meeting of the racist Kampfbund Deutscher Kultur (League of Struggle for German Culture), although I heard many of the aims advocated by our teacher Tessenow roundly condemned. One of the speakers called for a return to old- fashioned forms and artistic principles; he attacked modernism and finally berated Der Ring, the society of architects to which Tessenow, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Scharoun, Mendelsohn, Taut, Behrens, and Poelzig belonged. Thereupon one of our students sent a letter to Hitler in which he took exception to this speech and spoke with schoolboyish ardor of our admired master. Soon afterward he received a routine letter from party headquarters to the effect that National Socialists had the greatest respect for the work of Tessenow. We laid great weight on that. However, I did not tell Tessenow at the time about my membership in the party.* (After 1933 all the accusations made against Tessenow at this meeting, as well as his connection with the publisher Cassirer and his circle, were cited as incriminating. He became politically suspect and was barred from teaching. But thanks to my privileged position, I was able to persuade the Minister of Education to have him reinstated. He kept his chair at the Berlin Institute of Technology until the end of the war. After 1945 his reputation soared; he was elected one of the first rectors of Berlin's Technical University. "After 1933, Speer soon became a total stranger to me," Tessenow wrote to my wife in 1950, "but I have never thought of him as anything but the friendly, good-natured person I used to know.")

It must have been during these months that my mother saw an SA parade in the streets of Heidelberg. The sight of discipline in a time of chaos, the impression of energy in an atmosphere of universal hopelessness, seems to have won her over also. At any rate, without ever having heard a speech or read a pamphlet, she joined the party. Both of us seem to have felt this decision to be a breach with a liberal family tradition. In any case, we concealed it from one another and from my father. Only years later, long after I had become part of Hitler’s inner circle, did my mother and I discover by chance that we shared early membership in the party.

Quite often even the most important step in a man’s life, his choice of vocation, is taken quite frivolously. He does not bother to find out enough about the basis and the various aspects of that vocation. Once he has chosen it, he is inclined to switch off his critical awareness and to fit himself wholly into the predetermined career.

My decision to enter Hitler's party was no less frivolous. Why, for example, was I willing to abide by the almost hypnotic impression Hitler's speech had made upon me? Why did I not undertake a thorough, systematic investigation of, say, the value or worthlessness of the ideologies of all the parties? Why did I not read the various party programs, or at least Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century?

As an intellectual I might have been expected to collect documentation with the same thoroughness and to examine various points of view with the same lack of bias that I had learned to apply to my preliminary architectural studies. This failure was rooted in my inadequate political schooling. As a result, I remained uncritical, unable to deal with the arguments of my student friends, who were predominantly indoctrinated with the National Socialist ideology.

For had I only wanted to, I could have found out even then that Hitler was proclaiming expansion of the Reich to the east; that he was a rank anti-Semite; that he was committed to a system of authoritarian rule; that after attaining power he intended to eliminate democratic procedures and would thereafter yield only to force. Not to have worked that out for myself; not, given my education, to have read books, magazines, and newspapers of various viewpoints; not to have tried to see through the whole apparatus of mystification— was already criminal. At this initial stage my guilt was as grave as, at the end, my work for Hitler. For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences— from the very beginning.

I did see quite a number of rough spots in the party doctrines. But I assumed that they would be polished in time, as has often happened in the history of other revolutions. The crucial fact appeared to me to be that I personally had to choose between a future Communist Germany or a future National Socialist Germany since the political center between these antipodes had melted away. Moreover, in 1931, I had some reason to feel that Hitler was moving in a moderate direction. I did not realize that there were opportunistic reasons for this. Hitler was trying to appear respectable in order to seem qualified to enter the government. The party at that time was confining itself— as far as I can recall today— to denouncing what it called the excessive influence of the Jews upon various spheres of cultural and economic life. It was demanding that their participation in these various areas be reduced to a level consonant with their percentage of the population. Moreover, Hitler's alliance with the old-style nationalists of the Harzburg Front led me to think that a contradiction could be detected between his statements at public meetings and his political views. I regarded this contradiction as highly promising. In actuality Hitler only wanted to thrust his way to power by whatever means he could.

Even after joining the party I continued to associate with Jewish acquaintances, who for their part did not break relations with me although they knew or suspected that I belonged to this anti-Semitic organization. At that time I was no more an anti-Semite than I became in the following years. In none of my speeches, letters, or actions is there any trace of anti-Semitic feelings or phraseology.

Had Hitler announced, before 1933, that a few years later he would burn down Jewish synagogues, involve Germany in a war, and kill Jews and his political opponents, he would at one blow have lost me and probably most of the adherents he wonafter 1930. Goebbels had realized that, for on November 2, 1931, he wrote an editorial in the Angriff entitled "Septemberlings" concerning the host of new members who joined the party after the September election of 1930. In this editorial he warned the party against the infiltration of more bourgeois intellectuals who came from the propertied and educated classes and were not as trustworthy as the Old Fighters. In character and principles, he maintained, they stood abysmally far below the good old party comrades, but they were far ahead in intellectual skills: "They are of the opinion that the Movement has been brought to greatness by the talk of mere demagogues and are now prepared to take it over themselves and provide it with leadership and expertise. That's what they think!"

In making this decision to join the accursed party, I had for the first time denied my own past, my upper-middle-class origins, and my previous environment. Far more than I suspected, the "time of decision" was already past for me. I felt, in Martin Buber's phrase, "anchored in responsibility in a party." My inclination to be relieved of having to think, particularly about unpleasant facts, helped to sway the balance. In this I did not differ from millions of others. Such mental slackness above all facilitated, established, and finally assured the success of the National Socialist system. And I thought that by paying my party dues of a few marks a month I had settled with my political obligations.

How incalculable the consequences were!

The superficiality of my attitude made the fundamental error all the worse. By entering Hitler's party I had already, in essence, assumed a responsibility that led directly to the brutalities of forced labor, to the destruction of war, and to the deaths of those millions of so-called un- desirable stock— to the crushing of justice and the elevation of every evil. In 1931 I had no idea that fourteen years later I would have to answer for a host of crimes to which I subscribed beforehand by entering the party. I did not yet know that I would atone with twenty-one years of my life for frivolity and thoughtlessness and breaking with tradition. Still, I will never be rid of that sin.

Suicides in the Weimar Republic

Part 1 of 4

The Weimar Background

I

On 27 December 1918, just a few weeks after Germany’s defeat, the scientist Richard Semon shot himself, wrapped in a German Imperial flag, in his Munich study. He was allegedly depressed by the German defeat.¹Justifying one’s suicide with reference to the defeat of 1918 was common among nationalist men in the war’s immediate aftermath, reflecting despair at Germany’s failure. In a similar case, Karl, the older brother of Baldur von Schirach, the later leader of the Hitler Youth, shot himself in November1918. Allegedly, as Baldur von Schirach wrote in his autobiography in which he tried to justify why he became a Nazi, Karl committed suicide because he did not want to ‘survive Germany’s misfortune’.² For these suicides, the German defeat, the revolution of 1918, and the shift from a largely authoritarian monarchy to a seemingly chaotic republic amounted to a vast upheaval of traditional norms and values. Their known world had ceased to exist. Here was suicide presented as an act of patriotism, reflecting the military tradition of shooting oneself to maintain one’s honour.

After 1918, contemporaries generally believed that times of general uncertainty, political disorder, and socio-economic hardship inevitably led to rising suicide levels. This obsession with rising suicide rates helped undermine the stability of the Weimar Republic. The Weimar background is crucial to an understanding of Nazi attitudes towards suicide in the Third Reich. The Nazis and other extremist political parties attacked the Weimar Republic by pointing to the high suicide rates. But not only extremist parties shared the belief that Weimar Germany was doomed with record suicide levels. Popular newspapers and ordinary people increasingly shared this notion. In order to understand how this assumption gradually turned into a mantra, we need to begin with a brief analysis of suicide levels and their contemporary perceptions. Then we will turn to various discourses on suicide and finally to individual acts of suicide.

At the turn of the century, newspapers began to link suicide with urbanization and modernization. Newspaper articles on suicide had carried headlines such as ‘Tragedy in the Big City’ or ‘Defeated in the Struggle for Survival’.³ Many thought that the defeat and revolution of 1918 and the Versailles Treaty had overthrown the existing order.

Observers pointed to rising suicide levels from the mid-1920s onwards. ‘Our country has been hit by an alarming suicide epidemic, which has reached a climax that has to be stopped by every means ... This is yet another representation of the enormously tragic fate of the German Volk.’⁴ Thus the Catholic Kolner Tageblatt claimed on 17 November 1925. Generally, contemporary observers not only blamed the defeat of 1918, the inflation and the Versailles Treaty for the increasing suicide levels, but also the impact of modernity and secularization.

Things were getting worse and suicide rates rose. The following 1925 article in Der Berliner Westen, a local paper, was typical:

In greater Berlin ... the terrible suicide epidemic ... is consistently causing casualties ... and it can be safely assumed that our people have not yet become    so brutalized and indifferent, despite war and bloodshed, mass murder, and revolution that voluntary death does not move people and genuine philanthropists to help ... Misery is great, and voluntary death persists. Each hour of failure makes us guilty, since other people’s suffering, even if caused by themselves, is a concern for everyone ...⁵

Acts of suicide should thus have prompted other Germans to help each other and strengthen their sense of community to prevent others from killing themselves. The statistics, however, suggested that this did not happen or, if it did, it did not work. Suicide rates carried on rising. The general rise, however, concealed wide variations between different age groups, and within these, between men and women.

During the First World War, the suicide rate dropped. According to Durkheim, wars have a lower suicide rate, since almost everyone is drawn into the war effort. This mobilization prompts a higher degree of social integration.⁶ Some argued that during the war, the state authorities in charge of registering suicides did not have the necessary staff resources to do so adequately. Writing in 1940, at a time when many Germans glorified the experience of the First World War, the psychiatrist Hans W Gruhle dismissed this claim and commended the ‘great communal experience’ of the war.⁷ Of course, during the war, front-line soldiers could easily commit suicide by exposing themselves to enemy fire, and such cases would not be recorded as suicide. This might offer a partial explanation as to why suicide levels fell during the war. Nevertheless, the rise from 1917 to 1919 and then 1921 is still striking, but we cannot say with complete certainty that the war alone really led to lower suicide levels.

A detailed study of suicide compiled by the municipal statistical office of Frankfurt am Main in 1932 revealed that suicide had become a more common way of dying since the end of the First World War. In 1913, only 1.15 per cent of all deaths in Germany had been suicides. But in 1931, 2.5 per cent of all deaths were suicides. August Busch, the author of this study, explained this rise with reference to a drop in other causes of death, such as tuberculosis, in the city, so that the usefulness of this particular measure is questionable.⁸

Female levels were much lower than male levels. However, throughout the Weimar years, female suicide rates were much higher than they had been in 1913. Male rates only began to rise significantly above pre-war levels in the final years of the Republic, despite a slight jump in 1926. More than 2 million young men had died on the battlefields and in the trenches, so elderly people, generally more prone to commit suicide than young people, formed a higher proportion of the general population.⁹ With the deaths of so many young men, the surplus of women in the population increased.

The unemployed were more likely to kill themselves than others, many commentators thought.¹⁰ In particular, unemployed men, especially fathers of families, were more likely to commit suicide than single women without a job. For men with families, unemployment did not just mean the simple loss of earnings. It had much wider social ramifications. Jobless fathers of families felt unable to fulfill their role as breadwinners for their families.

Such men thought that they had failed to conform to social expectations about what it meant to be a man.¹¹ In this devastating situation, many men committed suicide. Since the winter of 1925–6, unemployment figures had been rising, and for the rest of its existence, the Weimar Republic suffered from high unemployment. From 1929 millions of Germans were unemployed. The existing system of support could not cope, not even after crisis relief (Krisenunterstutzung) for those ineligible for unemployment relief (Erwerbslosenfursorge) was introduced in 1926. Most of the long-term unemployed thus had to rely on welfare relief, paid by local authorities, which was substantially lower than unemployment benefits. These cuts in welfare provision created a feeling of hopelessness and despair and prompted, as we will see, many welfare recipients to threaten to commit suicide. Victimization was a widespread feeling in Weimar Germany. Ordinary people saw themselves as victims of insufficient welfare provisions and the political and economic uncertainty, while their need for welfare support constantly rose at the same time.¹²

Of course, unemployment alone does not explain suicidal behaviour.¹³ Nevertheless, it seems obvious that it must have been a factor in the rising suicide rates of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1932, the medical doctor Karl Freudenberg argued that the overall suicide rate had not increased since 1918 as a result of the inflation and mass unemployment, but rather because of the different age structure, with more elderly people living in Germany, and a lower birth rate.¹⁴ Freudenberg commented on the suicide rate among the male population of employment age: ‘Despite the especially adverse conditions, the suicide rate is thus hardly higher than in 1913 ... This should prove that the main reasons for suicide do not lie in the environment.’¹⁵ A breakdown of suicide levels by age and sex surely invalidates this argument.

The following statistical analysis presents a broad survey of the quantitative extent of suicide in Weimar Germany. It furthermore enables us to identify potential distortions of suicide rates by commentators like Freudenberg and their reasons for deliberate misinterpretations of suicide rates. While conceding that many suicides were due to economic problems, an article in the liberal Berliner Tageblatt on 29 January 1932 concluded, based on a recent survey by the Berlin Statistical Office, that ‘these tragic reactions to a desperate economic situation have not increased so much in the years of crisis as is commonly assumed’.¹⁶ A closer analysis of suicide by age and sex yields some further conclusions. The more advanced the age, the higher the suicide rate.¹⁷ Suicide rates among young women did not increase significantly under the Weimar Republic: indeed they even fell slightly down to 1924. Although female suicide rates were higher than they had been before the war, they did not seem to be much affected by the ups and downs of the Weimar economy, except perhaps at the very end.¹⁸

Among 15- to 30-year-olds, both male and female rates were relatively consistent with pre-war levels. The lack of increasing rates among 15- to 30-year olds may conceal an increase among those in the twenties (a more precise generational breakdown is unfortunately not available). Rates were generally very low among adolescents. Young men’s energies may have been galvanized up to 1923 by crime and street violence in a general context in which political activity was on the rise among the young, although they probably did not affect a majority of them.

The increase in suicide levels in 1924 among young men was most probably due to the deflationary economic reforms that had brought the inflation to an end and the resulting sharp rise in unemployment. It became suddenly much more difficult to find a job.¹⁹ Men of working age had a higher suicide rate in 1924 and thereafter because of unemployment. Women’s suicide rates were higher in the 15- to 30- age bracket during the inflation, when women’s domestic role of finding food and shopping had come under considerable pressure, and jumped in 1923 when this role became almost impossible to fulfill. In 1924, the economic deflation and the consequent rise in unemployment for men coupled with the mass dismissal of female ‘double-earners’ had an almost equally severe effect. The great majority of young women still worked and earned wages only before they got married, so this age-group was especially vulnerable. Rising levels of suicide towards the end of the Republic may well have reflected rising female unemployment levels.²⁰

Suicide rates in the age group 30–60, where most men were working, or expected to work, and most women were bringing up children, or were engaged in the part-time, casual labor market, or both, were somewhat higher among those aged 30–60 than among 15- to 30-year olds in the early 1920s but became a great deal higher during the Great Depression.

Rates among men rose in 1924, leveling off in 1926–7, and after a small decline, increased again from 1929 onwards. This correlates neatly with the rise in unemployment during the post-inflationary stabilization, the years of relative prosperity from 1925 to 1928, and the sharp rise in unemployment from 1929. The mass unemployment from 1929 until 1932 is clearly behind the rise in rates among 30- to 60-year olds. So huge was unemployment that older dependents were now suffering too. Suicide rates of males at working age were substantially lower than in 1913 until the mass unemployment of the Great Depression in 1930. From 1924 to 1931, suicide rates of females at working age were much higher than in 1913 due to the rise in female employment and subsequent unemployment. Suicide rates also increased among women of working age, reflecting female employment patterns and a new understanding of gender roles. The female unemployment rate rose, though not as sharply as among men, during the Great Depression.²¹ This was also a difficult time for housewives, with the husband or father often unemployed, and economic crisis hitting the household.

Suicide rates in the age bracket 60–70 were generally two to three times higher than those in the age group 30–60; the gap narrowed during the Great Depression but was still substantial. The same pattern, though less marked than among the younger age groups, is noticeable here too, namely a decline in the ‘good years’ of the Weimar economy and a rise during the Great Depression. The same factors were probably at work here too—unemployment and living standards. Many of the people behind these statistics (those 65 and younger) were still of working age and were hit by unemployment, perhaps more severely than younger people as companies tended to make elderly, rather than young people, redundant. Women were hit particularly hard. Female pensioners were affected badly by the inflation of 1923, when many lost their assets and during the Great Depression when the government cut pensions.

Among those aged 70 and above, where almost everybody was a pensioner or a dependent, suicide rates rose sharply during the inflation. This rise most probably reflected the severe economic difficulties this caused for these people, with savings and pensions losing all value. The suicide rate here in 1923 was extraordinarily high among men in particular. Here too there was a decline in the mid-1920s and then a rise in the Great Depression years, though by no means as striking as that of the inflation.

There was also a religious divide of German suicide rates. In Bavaria, largely Protestant areas such as Middle Franconia had substantially lower rates than Catholic districts, such as Upper Bavaria. Probably trying to prevent people from comparing Bavarian suicide levels to others, the Bavarian Statistical Office did not publish suicide rates, but only absolute numbers. This makes a comparison to other Lander impossible. Some comparative material is available in the national statistics however. Protestant Saxony’s suicide rates were almost twice as high as Catholic Bavaria’s. Saxony was one of the most densely populated and most heavily industrialized German states and had traditionally carried very high suicide rates.²² Gruhle’s monograph on suicide offers some revealing numbers for Bavaria. From 1919 until 1921, there were 19.6 suicides per 100,000 of the population in Middle Franconia, similar to national levels. Only 27.01 per cent of the Mid-Franconian population was Catholic. In Upper Bavaria, with a 91.06 per cent Catholic population, on the other hand, there were only 16.8 suicides per 100,000 at the same time. Presumably, Munich suicides made up the largest proportion of Upper Bavarian suicides. Indeed, in 1922, 136 of the 251 Upper Bavarian suicides took place in Munich. Contemporaries saw big cities, as noted earlier, as creating a suicidal environment.²³ Furthermore, Gruhle noted: ‘In the countryside, it is much easier to conceal suicides and to pretend accidents and illness, while in cities, the statistical registration of suicide is more exact.’²⁴

Were Catholic suicide rates generally lower than Protestant rates? In Baden, a confessionally mixed area (38.2 per cent of Badeners were Protestant and 58.4 per cent Catholic), the average suicide rate for the years 1927 to 1935 was 31.2 per 100,000 for Protestants and a mere 18 for Catholics. Protestant levels broadly reflected the national average, while Catholic rates were substantially below it.²⁵ Protestant areas thus carried higher suicide rates than Catholic areas. The Catholic proscription against suicide was so strong that it either prevented Catholics from killing themselves or prompted relatives and doctors to conceal suicides.

Rural areas generally displayed lower suicide rates than towns. In the rural Buchen district of Baden, the average suicide rate for the years 1926 to 1935 was 10.3 per 100,000. The corresponding rate for the heavily industrialized and urban Mannheim district was 32.7.²⁶ Gruhle analyzed suicides in Prussian towns and concluded that the denser the population, the greater the suicide levels. In 1924, Berlin’s suicide rate was 45.4, while the average Prussian town with a population of 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants had an average suicide rate of 22 per 100,000.²⁷ This rate still exceeded rural suicide rates. Gruhle blamed cities for causing higher suicide rates because of ‘industrialization, more conflict and the dissolution of traditional milieus (church) and ... dubious, morally unstable persons’.²⁸ His statement reflected the anti-modern and anti-urban sentiment many contemporary observers shared, above all if they were writing in the Third Reich like Gruhle. Yet suicide rates were higher in towns than in villages. In villages, religious affiliations were generally greater than in cities, which might have prevented people from killing themselves.²⁹

Official suicide levels rose in the Weimar Republic. Amidst the ubiquity of public suicide discourses (discussed below), authorities may well have been more inclined to report suicides than they had been before 1918. However, the available evidence suggests that Weimar authorities largely used the same bureaucratic practices when compiling suicide rates as they had done in Imperial Germany.³⁰ The increase was therefore a real one. Female suicide levels rose considerably. Socio-economic factors clearly did matter. Suicide statistics reflected these changes, which affected people’s everyday lives. This rather detailed statistical analysis has identified broader motivations for suicide like socio-economic change and unemployment. Yet these statistics hardly shed light on people’s personal motivations for killing themselves.

Ernst Rohm Biography

Ernst Rohm

[Ernst Julius Röhm, (Munich November 28, 1887 – July 2, 1934) was a homosexual German army officer and Nazi leader. He was a co-founder of the Sturmabteilung ("assault battalion"; SA), the Nazi Party militia, and later was SA commander. In 1934, he was executed on Hitler's orders.]

QuotesIn a fascinating read of 204 well documented pages, the authors of The Pink Swastika track down the facts behind the homosexual movement’s current claims for Nazi-victim status. Divided into seven parts, the story opens as the new Nazi party is founded in the smoky din of the Bratwurstglockl, “a tavern frequented by homosexual roughnecks and bully-boys....a gay bar,” favored by Hitler’s closest comrade, Captain Ernst Rohm. Almost every biography of Hitler reports that Rohm was a flagrant homosexual and the only man Hitler called by the familiar “du.”
Hitler’s beloved Storm Trooper Chief and founder of the Brown Shirts, the authors note, had a “taste for young boys." Almost as close to Hitler as Rohm was Rudolph Hess, known for his dress-up attire as “‘Black Bertha’” in the gay bars of pre-war Berlin”. In fact, Mein Kampf was dedicated to Hess while Hitler was in prison. The Pink Swastika reports that Hitler was given power by a homosexual gang, a gang says Dr. Carroll Quigley, President bill Clinton’s college teacher and mentor, that subverted Germany’s free elections by underhanded and brutal strategies. THE PINK SWASTIKA AND HOLOCAUST REVISIONIST HISTORY by Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D.

Many of the highest-placed leaders in the Nazi party, including Hitler, Roehm, Forster, von Schirach and almost all of his bodyguards were gay. Hitler surrounded himself with homosexuals and even retrieved Roehm from Bolivia, making him Deputy Fuhrer. This knowledge enabled outside countries like Britain and ideologies like the Freemasons to control Hitler, his high command and his bodyguards. Hitler and his band of merry bandits became puppets with wooden strings. In this way, any foreign society can be destroyed with a leader hiding their sexuality. Hitler, Roehm, Forster and von Schirach took part in destroying their own societies while enjoying the power it gave them. Hitler was a double agent prime minister. He worked for a foreign country (Britain) and a foreign ideology (the Freemasons). The formula proved so effective it is still used today, in politics and the media, especially with TV personalities, radio announcers, prime ministers and presidents, both male and female. Hitler was a British Agent by Greg Hallett p.65

With Roehm's backing, Hitler became the first president of the party in 1921 (ibid.:21) and changed its name to the National Socialist German Worker's Party. Soon after, Rossbach's Storm Troopers, the SA, became its military arm. In his classic Nazi history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, author William Shirer describes Roehm as "a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar- faced professional soldier...[and] like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual"
......Betraying his roots in the "Butch" faction of the German "gay rights" movement, Roehm viewed homosexuality as the basis for a new society. Louis Snyder writes that Roehm "projected a social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a human behavior pattern of high repute...he flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted that his cronies do the same. What was needed, Roehm believed, was a proud and arrogant lot who could brawl, carouse, smash windows, kill and slaughter for the hell of it. Straights, in his eyes, were not as adept in such behavior as practicing homosexuals" (Snyder:55). "The principle function of this army-like organization," writes historian Thomas Fuchs, "was beating up anyone who opposed the Nazis, and Hitler believed this was a job best undertaken by homosexuals" (Fuchs:48f). The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

The Community of the Special (CS) asserted that male homosexuality was the foundation of all nation-states and that male homosexuals represented an elite strata of human society. The CS fashioned itself as a modern incarnation of the warrior cults of ancient Greece. Modeling themselves after the military heroes of Sparta, Thebes and Crete, the members of the CS were ultra-masculine, male-supremacist and pederastic (devoted to man/boy sex).
....One of the keys to understanding both the rise of Nazism and the later persecution of some homosexuals by the Nazis is found in this early history of the German "gay rights" movement. For it was the CS which created and shaped what would become the Nazi persona, and it was the loathing which these "Butches" held for effeminate homosexuals ("Femmes") which led to the internment of some of the latter in slave labor camps in the Third Reich. The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

The "Butch" homosexuals of the CS transformed Germany. Their primary vehicle was the German youth movement, known as the Wandervogel (Rovers or Wandering Youth).
....Rising spontaneously in the 1890s as an informal hiking and camping society, the Wandervogel became an official organization at the turn of the century, similar to the Boy Scouts. From early on, however, the Wandervogel was dominated and controlled by the pederasts of the CS. CS co-founder Wilhelm Janzen was its chief benefactor, and its leadership was rife with homosexuality. In 1912, CS theorist Hans Blueher wrote The German Wandervogel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon which told how the organization was used to recruit young boys into homosexuality.
....During World War I, the greatest hero of the German youth movement was Gerhard Rossbach. Described by historian Robert G. L. Waite as a "sadist, murderer and homosexual," Rossbach was "the most important single contributor of the pre-Hitler youth movement" (Waite,1969:210). More importantly, Rossbach was the bridge between the Wandervogel and the Nazi Party.
....Rossbach's adjutant was Edmund Heines, noted for his ability to procure boys for sexual orgies. Ernst Roehm, recruited by Rossbach into homosexuality, later commanded the Storm Troopers for the Nazis, where they were more commonly known as the SA (an acronym for Sturmabteilung). The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

While Adolf Hitler is today recognized as the central figure of Nazism, he was a less important player when the Nazi machine was first assembled. Its first leader was Ernst Roehm. Homosexual historian Frank Rector writes that "Hitler was, to a substantial extent, Roehm's proteg�" (Rector:80). Roehm had been a captain in the German army. Hitler had been a mere corporal. After World War I, Roehm was highly placed in the underground nationalist movement that plotted to overthrow the Weimar government and worked to subvert it through assassinations and terrorism. In The Order of the Death's Head, author Heinz Hohne writes that Roehm met Hitler at a meeting of a socialist terrorist group called the Iron Fist and "saw in Hitler the demagogue he required to mobilize mass support for his secret army" (Hohne:20). Roehm, who had joined the German Worker's Party before Hitler, worked with him to take over the fledgling organization. With Roehm's backing, Hitler became the first president of the party in 1921 (ibid.:21) and changed its name to the National Socialist German Worker's Party. Soon after, Rossbach's Storm Troopers, the SA, became its military arm. In his classic Nazi history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, author William Shirer describes Roehm as "a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar- faced professional soldier...[and] like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual" The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

Betraying his roots in the "Butch" faction of the German "gay rights" movement, Roehm viewed homosexuality as the basis for a new society. Louis Snyder writes that Roehm "projected a social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a human behavior pattern of high repute...he flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted that his cronies do the same. The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

The favorite meeting place of the SA was a "gay" bar in Munich called the Bratwurstglockl where Roehm kept a reserved table (Hohne:82). This was the same tavern where some of the earliest formative meetings of the Nazi Party had been held (Rector:69). At the Bratwurstglockl, Roehm and associates-Edmund Heines, Karl Ernst, Ernst's partner Captain Rohrbein, Captain Petersdorf, Count Ernst Helldorf and the rest-would meet to plan and strategize. These were the men who orchestrated the Nazi campaign of intimidation and terror. All of them were homosexual

Indeed, homosexuality was all that qualified many of these men for their positions in the SA. Heinrich Himmler would later complain of this: "Does it not constitute a danger to the Nazi movement if it can be said that Nazi leaders are chosen for sexual reasons?" (Gallo:57). Himmler was not so much opposed to homosexuality itself as to the fact that non- qualified people were given high rank based on their homosexual relations with Roehm and others. For example, SA Obergruppenfuhrer (Lieutenant General) Karl Ernst, a militant homosexual, had been a hotel doorman and a waiter before joining the SA. "Karl Ernst is not yet 35," writes Gallo, "he commands 250,000 men...he is simply a sadist, a common thug, transformed into a responsible official" (ibid.:50f). The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

This strange brand of nepotism was a hallmark of the SA. By 1933 the SA had grown far larger than the German army, yet the Vikingkorps (Officers' Corps) remained almost exclusively homosexual. "Roehm, as the head of 2,500,000 Storm Troops," writes historian H.R. Knickerbocker, "had surrounded himself with a staff of perverts. His chiefs, men of rank of Gruppenfuhrer or Obergruppenfuhrer, commanding units of several hundred thousand Storm Troopers, were almost without exception homosexuals. Indeed, unless a Storm Troop officer were homosexual he had no chance of advancement" (Knickerbocker:55).................For a monthly salary of 200 marks he kept Roehm supplied with new friends, his main hunting ground being Geisela High School Munich; from this school he recruited no fewer than eleven boys, whom he first tried out and then took to Roehm" (Hohne:82). The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

In 1945 a Jewish historian by the name of Samuel Igra published Germany's National Vice, which called homosexuality the "poisoned stream" that ran through the heart of Nazism. (In the 1920s and 30s, homosexuality was known as "the German vice" across Europe because of the debaucheries of the Weimar period.) Igra, who escaped Germany in 1939, claims that Hitler "had been a male prostitute in Vienna at the time of his sojourn there, from 1907 to 1912, and that he practiced the same calling in Munich from 1912 to 1914" (Igra:67). Desmond Seward, in Napoleon and Hitler, says Hitler is listed as a homosexual in Viennese police records The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.