Hitler and his God

Annus terribilis

After a series of bad years, 1923 was a terrible year for Germany. In retaliation for unsatisfactory “reparations”, i.e. punitive payments agreed upon in the Treaty of Versailles, three French and Belgian divisions occupied the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. The German Government responded with “passive resistance”, stopping all production. Yet the industrialists and the workers had to be compensated in some way, and the Government began to print money, thereby causing galloping inflation. The victors of the Great War were now being paid with worthless money, but the consequences were catastrophic for the German population, in the first place for the middle classes, who lost all their savings.

Soon the “hyperinflation” took on nightmarish proportions. Stacks of banknotes were no longer counted but measured with a ruler. “It was cheaper to burn money than coal”, writes Weiss. 207 Heiden uses the term “starving billionaires”. One egg cost five million marks. “Practically speaking there was no money any more in Germany”, says Haffner. 208 Thousands lost their jobs; there was a spate of angry strikes and riots in which shops in the towns and farms in the countryside were attacked by hordes of hungry people; swindlers, black marketers and usurers thrived. The middle classes, who had their own code of honour in imitation of the respected nobility, the military and state officialdom, were severely shaken in their convictions, and turned as a consequence toward the extreme right-wing parties with their promises of drastic action to make Germany healthy, decent and self-respecting again. The membership numbers of the NSDAP shot up.

The Communists, now directly controlled by Moscow (which soon will mean Stalin), judged that the moment had come for the “second revolution” in Germany: the Bolshevik take-over of the Socialist (Menshevik) revolution which, as the Weimar Republic, was still in power. “Indeed, in Thuringia and in Saxony, where also since September a Popular Front was in power, the radical Left – as had been decided by the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party – made preparations for the great armed revolt. Military command groups were organized with the collaboration of Soviet instructors and the first ‘revolutionary centuries’ of armed workers were formed after the example of the revolutionary guards in Petersburg. Their task was … to spread the revolution that was to expand like a wildfire from the middle of the Reich, and to bring about a ‘German October’ in imitation of the Russian October.” 209

Germany was split into Left and Right, with the looming possibility of civil war. But the Left was itself fatally divided into Socialists and Communists. The reason that the civil war in Germany did not break out in the years immediately following the armistice was in fact the bitter enmity between the two leftist ideologies, turned more fiercely against each other than against the Right. An ironical upshot of this situation was that the social-democratic government had to rely on the ultra-nationalist Army, the Reichswehr, to clamp down on the communist uprisings and keep itself in the saddle.

The social-democratic governments of Scheidemann and Stresemann, at times in coalition with the Liberals and Catholics of the centre, were capable and patriotic, dedicated not only to the improvement of the lot of the workers but also to the well-being of their country as a whole. But they had inherited an unmanageable situation, first in having to execute the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles and second in having to govern a nation on the brink of disaster – all the while being disdained and mocked by the rightist, reactionary, nationalist part of the population which considered itself the true Germany and the living incarnation of its values. This attitude of reactionary Germany, which may be called instinctive, towards the ideological values of Socialism and its representation of the fourth estate was a direct cause of the conditions that made Hitler possible, and will be exploited to the utmost by the man himself.

The general in command of the Reichswehr was Hans von Seeckt, a monocled officer of the Prussian school, very capable and very aware of his vital position and clout. Some counted him among the candidates for a rightist dictatorship. True, the German army had been reduced to 100 000 men, without a navy or air force. But there were the thousands of trained and fanatically nationalist men of the Free Corps and the state militias, which Seeckt himself cleverly incorporated into a “Black Reichswehr”, often camouflaged as youth organizations or sports clubs. It was now Seeckt’s job to put down the communist uprisings in Thuringia and Saxony, plus those in Hamburg, in the Ruhr and elsewhere. This does not seem to have been very difficult, maybe because he could count on the support of every non-communist German, as Communism, only six years after the Russian revolution, was still generally feared and abhorred.

A more serious problem for General von Seeckt, and for the government of the Weimar Republic, was posed by Bavaria, which was anything but communist. Bavaria was to all German reactionaries the bulwark of the nationalist spirit, and had, as we have seen, put its doors wide open for any activist rightist in distress or fugitive from justice. One should bear in mind that the German states still commanded a considerable degree of independence; the army and the police, for instance, were run by the state. Another important factor is that Catholic Bavaria was strongly separatist and involved in a battle for prestige with Protestant Prussia. Munich, “Athens on the Isar”, was synonymous with culture, while Prussian Berlin stood for boorishness and aberration. “Since Bismarck had founded the Second German Reich, Bavaria had been little more than a provincial vassal and here opportunity was being offered for Munich to assume the leadership of Germany and take it away from the despised Prussians in Berlin.” 210

The tension between Bavaria and the federal Government increased when Chancellor Stresemann no longer tolerated the aggression against himself and the Republic in the Munich rightist press, especially in the Völkische Beobachter, and when the open Bavarian defiance of the law exceeded all tolerable bounds by giving custody to people like Ehrhardt and Klintzsch against whom there were warrants of arrest. When General Otto von Lossow, commander of the Reichswehr in Bavaria, refused to act on his instructions, the federal Minister of Defence deposed him. Both the State Government of Bavaria and the federal Government of Germany declared a state of emergency on the same day in September. The President of Bavaria nominated Otto von Kahr “State Commissioner” with dictatorial powers and General von Lossow was reinstated as head of the Bavarian Reichswehr. This was an act of mutiny: Bavaria was now in open defiance of the Weimar Republic.

Taking into account the occupation of the Ruhr, which the French tried to make into a separate state apart from the German fatherland, the communist uprisings instigated by Moscow, the red hot tension between Bavaria and the central Government, and the catastrophic state of the finances and the economy with the resulting riots and unemployment, it is no wonder that Sebastian Haffner writes: “In the autumn of 1923 the German Reich was on the verge of political extinction.” 211 Joachim Fest is of the same opinion: “The harassed [central] government might well see the events in Munich as the signal for total collapse.” 212