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The Palace and the Bunker

Royal Resistance to Hitler

The History Press

THE GERMAN TRAGEDY

What is this new spirit of German nationalism? The worst of the old Prussian Imperialism, with an added savagery, a racial pride, an exclusiveness which cannot allow to any fellow-subject not of 'pure Nordic birth' equality of rights and citizenship within the nation to which he belongs. Are you going to discuss revision [of the Treaty of Versailles] with a Government like that?

Austen Chamberlain

Historians ascribe motives to actions, yet we are but dimly aware of the multiplicity of influences on our protagonists or the deeper hidden thoughts that have informed their decisions. If we can be better apprised of the truth through interpretation all well and good, but the work of the historian must be more about detection and awareness than interpretation – especially interpretation based on a personal viewpoint obscured by an intervening political chronology. Just as on the eve of the First World War it would have been impossible to predict the circumstances of a second world war, so post-Second World War and post-Cold War it is not easy to reflect on the inter-war period without a hindsight that hinders more than assists our understanding of the people and events of which we speak.

In 1914 the German and Austrian monarchies may not have been as autocratic as has been popularly believed, but they still existed as a real force in national and international affairs. As to whether the German or Austrian emperors were culpable for the outbreak of an internecine war, the scale of which had not been experienced before, is quite another story. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was trying to revive the Dreikaiserbund (understanding between the three emperors in Germany, Austria and Russia) right up until his assassination, which cut off the head (so to speak) of the very means of preventing the war that resulted. His grandson George von Hohenberg said, 'we stumbled into the war, without knowing what was happening to us. It was the incomprehensible suicide of Europe.'

Nations responded differently to the cultural pessimism of the fin de siècle and the inhumanity of the First World War. Britain, France and Germany were each affected in different ways. The fundament, however, was a spiritual void as modern man lost touch with his soul and searched for it everywhere, including the gutter, and in his despair began to worship the body as if it were immortal. The depression that gripped France in the after-gloom of defeat in the Franco-Prussian war visited itself on Germany from 1918. However, pessimism in general intruded into the heart of every nation, eroding former trust in religion, national duty and an expected eventual golden destiny for the human race. There had been lamentation in Germany that old Germany was disintegrating (after 1871) in spite of its new unity. It seemed pulled apart by modernity – by liberalism, secularism and industrialisation – and there appeared to be a decline of the German spirit and idealism because of politics and materialism. Paul de Lagarde complained of cultural discontent in England as well as Germany: 'Everywhere one gets the sense that their hope is but a phrase, and that only their despair and resignation are truth.' The trauma of the First World War added to a movement that questioned all the values and apparent certainties of the past. The differences between how it manifested in each state was a response to their particular experiences of war and its aftermath, informed by pre-existing national aspirations and sentiments.

'Bismark had created a state that had no constitutional theory; its justification, he thought, was that it worked,' writes Richard Stern Fritz. He continues:

Power thinly disguised on the one hand, and spirit emptied of all practicality on the other – these surely were two aspects of imperial Germany. The link between the two realms was the idealization of power; the middle classes, in Max Webber's phrase, 'ethicized' Bismark's achievement of power. This also encouraged a certain idolatry of idealism in politics ... Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller, outsiders all, appealed as idealists, whether their ideas had a shred of practicality or not.

The 'war guilt' that German politicians were forced to accept at the Treaty of Versailles is still almost a given, but Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein wrote that although 'no particular "war guilt" reverted to Germany ... It was Hitler's unchaining of the Second World War retrospectively, so to speak, made Germany appear responsible also for the first.' Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria regretted that the idea of Germany's war guilt still had considerable currency in 1922. He also believed in the kaiser's 'will to peace'. 'During the Moroccan Crisis the Kaiser at a confidential conference with the commanding generals exclaimed "I fervently hope peace can be maintained". This never got into the papers, I believe,' the Crown prince commented to the New York Times correspondent. The Emperor Karl of Austria also rejected German war guilt and believed in the kaiser's 'goodwill'. He further maintained that the kaiser had been too much in the thrall of his generals, Eric Ludendorff in particular. It is hard for anyone brought up in France, Britain or the United States to contemplate that the First World War was not the kaiser's war of course, but that says more about how deeply ingrained are our prejudices than anything about the true origins of the war.

Löwenstein reflected that his father's generation had not experienced war and were not prepared for what followed, its outbreak or its attendant risks. He comments that within days the civilised nations of Europe were engulfed in a wave of mass hysteria: 'Germans, Russians, French, British – depending on which nation you belonged to yourself – changed overnight into veritable beasts, devils in the guise of men. The ties of history, culture, and blood were forgotten as though they had never existed.'

A similar sentiment was expressed in the pages of the New York Sun at the outbreak of hostilities:

One day there is civilization, authentic, complex, triumphant; comes war, and in a moment the entire fabric sinks down into a slime of mud and blood. In a day, in an hour, a cycle of civilization is cancelled. What you saw in the morning was suave and ordered life; and the sun sets on howling savagery. In the morning black-coated men lifted their hats to women. Ere nightfall they are slashing them with sabres and burning the houses over their heads.

Modern civilization is the most complex machine imaginable; its infinite cogged wheels turn endlessly upon each other; and perfectly it accomplishes its multifarious purposes; but smash one wheel and it all falls apart into muddle and ruin. The declaration of war was like thrusting a mailed fist into the intricate works of a clock. There was an end of the perfected machine of civilization. Everything stopped. We are savages once more. For science is dead. All the laboratories are shut, save those where poison is brewed and destruction is put up in packages. Education has ceased, save that fierce Nietzschean education which declares: 'The weak and helpless must go to the wall; and we shall help them go.' All that made life humanly fair is hidden in the fetid clouds of war where savages (in terror and hysteria) grope for each other's throats.

It was not the expected quick war promised by the politicians. When the German advance was arrested the two sides dug in. But for the German army, after failing to break through with their 1914 offensive, the war was effectively lost to them. What followed was mutual siege warfare across the trenches. All the Allies really had to do was hold out until their adversary had exhausted himself on their lines and retired out of a lack of will, munitions and rations. However, without the means to sustain a long war themselves the Allies, like the Germans, chose to throw munitions and human beings at the enemy in an attempt to break through and avoid national bankruptcy. The peace moves by the Emperor Karl were the last best hope of saving Europe from catastrophe and prolonged economic decline.

By November 1918 the intricate machinery of German civilisation had been smashed seemingly beyond repair as the country descended into chaos and civil war. When the German High Seas Fleet surrendered at Scapa Flow, Admiral of the British Fleet David Beatty was highly suspicious: 'It seemed too wonderful for an extremely powerful fleet to give themselves up without a blow! One thing I do know – that if we had been in the position of those Hun we would have had a good run for our money before we got "put under".' So incredulous was the admiral that he ordered the German battle flags lowered while their ships remained fully armed and ready for action. He could not believe that his powerful and respected adversary could be so beaten in spirit.

In the early 1930s Marshall Hindenburg confided in his chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, that he already knew the war was lost as early as February 1918, but wanted to give General Erich Ludendorff 'one more chance'. Brüning was appalled that a commander-in-chief could ask for 100,000 lives to be sacrificed for an offensive that he did not think could succeed. Commenting on the government of Germany, which had surrendered to the Allies, Eric Ludendorff said in 1919:

The power of the state failed, as nobody can doubt, because in its external and internal policy, before and during the war, it had not recognized the exigencies of the struggle for existence in which Germany has always been involved. It had demonstrated its inability to understand that politics is war and war is politics ... Finally the political leadership disarmed the unconquered army and delivered over Germany to the destructive will of the enemy in order that it might carry through the revolution in Germany unhindered. That was the climax in the betrayal of the German people.

The First World War left Europe in ruins, where even the victors were shattered and entire nations left psychologically – as well as economically and militarily – damaged. If whole peoples can be shell-shocked, the French, British, Belgians and others were almost as damaged as their former enemies, which might somewhat explain their subsequent attitudes and actions.

On 9 November 1918, against a background of naval mutiny, popular uprisings, disorder and the takeover of Munich by the Independent Socialists two days before, Phillip Scheideman, one man acting alone without consultation with his fellow Social Democrats, announced a German republic from the Reichstag building. From this illegal act and the equally illegal grant of power by Prince Maximilian von Baden (who had falsely announced the abdication of the kaiser) to MSPD leader Friedrich Ebert, the Weimar Republic was eventually born. This had followed the receipt of a note from President Woodrow Wilson of the USA, which suggested that the abdication of the kaiser (voluntary or otherwise) was a precondition of peace. Winston Churchill records, 'The prejudice of the Americans ... had made it clear that [Germany] would have better treatment from the Allies as a republic than a monarchy.' It was also a reaction against an intended announcement by the extreme left-wing Sparticist movement of a socialist republic. The Social Democrats did not want the fall of the monarchy, but laboured to convince the kaiser to abdicate so that his line would continue to reign in Germany.

Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia doubted that the fall of the monarchy in Germany was the result of any revolutionary fervour on the part of the people:

The Revolution of November 9, 1918, was neither a social upheaval nor was it directed primarily against our dynasty or against any ruling family in Germany. It was a revolution of hunger, caused by the desperate desire of the people for peace at any price especially after President Wilson had proclaimed his fourteen points. The great majority of the people had no political grudge against the German dynasties.

He added that the German people had a 'lack of talent for revolutions' because of their inherent love of order.

The consequences of this act and the ending of the war were far reaching. At the Versailles Conference that followed the Allies not only demanded territorial concessions and financial reparations, but also an admission of war guilt, before the lifting of a blockade that had caused great hardship in Germany and the official ending of hostilities could take place. The politicians believed that by bowing to the perceived wishes of the Allies in assuming the full government of the Reich and creating a non-militaristic republic that they would be able to negotiate the peace. There was no negotiation; Germany was handed the terms of surrender and, without the means to defend their country, the ministers were forced to accept. As a result of this grossly unequal agreement a myth grew up that the German army, which still occupied large areas of enemy territory in November 1918, was stabbed in the back by the politicians in Berlin who had declared the republic and made peace with the Allies out of their own personal ambition and not in the interests of the Reich. This myth filled many people on the Right in Germany with a loathing for the republic and fed right-wing paramilitary groups the emotional ammunition for counter-revolution. Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein, however, reminds us that the republic was declared against a background of social and political collapse in Germany and with the knowledge that the left-wing extremist Spartacists, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were about to declare a socialist republic (Freie Sozialistische Republik) in Germany that evening, and fearing it would be the prelude to a communist revolution.

When the republic could not pay its reparations, French and Belgian troops entered the industrial Ruhr region and took over production, which led to a temporary passive resistance by German workers supported by their government. Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein described the invasion of the Ruhr district in early 1923 as an international tragedy, 'The permanent damage done thereby to the young German republic was never quite repaired. Adolf Hitler had every reason to be grateful for it.' In 1923 Leon Trotsky ordered the German KPD to take advantage of the economic chaos in Germany to launch a full-blown revolution. Communist-inspired insurrection took place in Saxony and Thuringa. Chancellor Gustav Streseman was at heart a monarchist, but he was also a pragmatist. On 26 September he ordered the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr as useless.

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck wrote in his preface to his book, Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich):

If the Third Reich is to put an end to strife it will not be born in a pace of philosophic dreaming. The Third Reich will be an empire of organization in the midst of European chaos. The occupation of the Ruhr and its consequences worked a change in the minds of men. It was the first thing that made the nation think. It opened up the possibility of liberation for a betrayed people. It seemed about to put an end to the 'policy of fulfilment' which had been merely party politics disguised as foreign policy. It threw us back on our own power of decision. It restored our will. Parliamentism has become an institution of our public life, whose chief function would appear to be - in the name of the people - to enfeeble all political demands and all national passions.

It was in 1923, with the Reich government in disarray over the occupation of the Ruhr and with Mussolini's 'March on Rome' as inspiration, that Hitler and Ludendorff launched an abortive putsch in Munich, intending to march on Berlin and seize power. Hitler was imprisoned and used the time to write his book Mein Kampf. The failure of the rising also led to a change in tactics that added the ballot box to the NSDAP armoury.

During the 1920s the organisation of the party was refined and centralised. Under the Strasser brothers, Gregor and Otto, with their party headquarters in Berlin, the northern and western branches of the NSDAP achieved a large, well-organised membership by presenting a programme that emphasised the socialist aspects of the party. However, the size and strength of the northern group threatened Hitler's personal authority and, when Gregor was offered the vice-chancellorship of Germany, the possibility of his acceptance threatened to split the party. As a result, Hitler asserted his leadership at the Bamberg Conference in 1926, condemning the 'national bolshevist faction' in the party. Otto was forced out of the NSDAP and Gregor was later murdered in the Night of the Long Knives. Although Hitler owed much to the two brothers, he could allow no rivals to overshadow him.

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Excerpted from The Palace and the Bunker by Frank Millard. Copyright © 2011 Frank Millard. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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