Nein!: Standing up to Hitler 1935–1944. Paddy Ashdown

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       Prologue

      To the millions whose votes helped make Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany, he was the hero who would rescue them from the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty and the shaming chaos that followed.

      John Maynard Keynes, who attended the 1919 peace conference, condemned Versailles afterwards in unforgiving and uncannily prophetic terms: ‘If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.’

      Keynes was not the only person to understand that in the punitive conditions imposed by Versailles lay the seeds of another explosion of German militarism. Others referred to it as ‘the peace built on quicksand’.

      Under Clause 231 of the Treaty, the ‘War Guilt’ clause, Germany was deprived of all her colonies, 80 per cent of her pre-war fleet, almost half her iron production, 16 per cent of coal output, 13 per cent of her territory (including the great German-speaking port of Danzig) and more than a tenth of her population. To add to these humiliations, the victorious Allies also planted a deadly economic time bomb beneath what was left of the German economy. This took the form of war reparations amounting to some $US32 billion, to be paid largely in shipments of coal and steel.

      In 1922, when Germany inevitably defaulted, French and Belgian troops occupied the centre of German coal and steel production in the Ruhr valley. Faced with the collapse of the domestic economy, the German government sought refuge in printing money, with the inevitable consequence of explosive runaway inflation. In 1921 a US dollar was worth 75 German marks. Two years later, each dollar was valued at 4.2 trillion marks. By November 1923, a life’s savings of 100,000 marks would barely buy a loaf of bread.

      In the months immediately following the Armistice, an armed uprising inspired by Lenin and the Russian Revolution ended in 1919 with the removal of the kaiser and elections for Germany’s first democratic government, christened the Weimar Republic after the city in which its first Assembly took place. It all began in a blaze of hope, but soon descended into squabbling and dysfunctionality. Unstable, riven with shifting coalitions, burdened with war reparations, incapable of meeting the challenges of the global depression, the new government, along with politicians of every stripe and hue, soon became objects of derision and even hatred. Compromise was seen as failure, easy slogans replaced rational policies, the elite were regarded with suspicion, and the establishment was deluged with accusations of corruption and profiteering.

      A new myth – that of the ‘stab in the back’ – began to be promulgated by the German right. This blamed ‘the politicians’ for the defeat of 1918 and the Versailles humiliations that followed. It was claimed that the German army was undefeated, but had been betrayed by the politicians in Berlin who signed the Armistice. It was not long before the Jews were added into the mix, which swiftly mutated into an international conspiracy aimed at the destruction of Germany and its people. The ‘stab in the back’ legend became so deeply imbedded in the German pre-war psyche that it would restrain Hitler’s domestic opponents, and influence the Allies’ terms for peace, right up until the end of the coming war.

      Between 1924 and 1929 the German economy stabilised, thanks in large measure to US loans. A period of great artistic renaissance followed. Berlin, reverberating to the talents of Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Max Reinhardt, Marlene Dietrich and the artists and architects of the Bauhaus movement, became the cultural capital of the world.

      No sooner was hope reborn than it was broken again on the wheel of a second economic crisis, this time brought about by the Wall Street crash of October 1929. By 1932, with unemployment standing at six million, those, including dependants, directly affected by loss of work amounted to 20 per cent of the German population.

      Revolt was once again in the air. Running battles broke out in the streets between communists and Hitler’s stormtroopers. A German commentator on these years wrote, ‘In [these] times, principles are cheap and perfidy, calculation and fear reign supreme.’

      These were perfect hothouse conditions for the growth of the most radical forms of extremism. Driven by a mystic and misshapen belief in the moral rebirth of Germany, unencumbered by doubt, unheeding of convention, fed on hate, armoured with conspiracies and slogans and led by a messianic leader who combined charisma with an astonishing ability to move the masses, the Nazi Party’s time had come. In the 1928 elections, the National Socialist Democratic Party – known by its shortened version, ‘Nazi’ – was no more than a tiny fringe party winning only 2.6 per cent of the vote. Just four years later, in July 1932, Hitler’s party secured 13.7 million votes, making it, with 37 per cent of the national vote, by far the largest party in the German Reichstag. A second national election in November of that year saw a drop in the Nazi vote. Nevertheless, after a period of parliamentary stalemate, the ageing German president Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933, believing that this was the best means to control him. СКАЧАТЬ