History at a Precipice: 1923

Few topics are as important as ‘rise of the Nazis’. How did a man like Hitler, a loner with few friends and followers, end up becoming German Chancellor and Führer of the twentieth century’s most brutal dictatorship? The Weimar Republic is always a part of the answer. Weimar was the democratic political system that existed in Germany from 9 November 1918 to 30 January 1933, when Hitler was first appointed Chancellor. Since the defeat of Nazism, historians have asked if Weimar democracy was ‘doomed from the start’ or if it actually had a reasonable chance of becoming a mature and stable democracy?

In the recent past, the answers to these questions have become more important. Just three decades after Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the ‘end of history,’ even in established liberal democracies like the United States and the UK, there has been a surge of doubt about the future of democracy. Those doubts are making us ask the question: are we reliving Weimar? It was, after all, a democracy that was ultimately destroyed by democratic means. In 1932 Reichstag elections, over half of all voters supported two parties, the Nazis and Communists, that were intent upon its destruction.

In the summer of 1932, the opponents of democracy took control over the state of Prussia, the largest of the German federal states, home to 60% of the Republic’s 63 million citizens, and up to that point a bastion of support for Weimar democracy. From then until Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the destruction of Weimar democracy proceeded at pace.

A decade before the fall of Prussia, the likelihood that German democracy would succumb to tyranny was not unimaginable. Conservative forces within the judiciary, police, civil service and among religious all opposed the Republic’s existence. At the end of August 1922, Munich’s Catholic Archbishop, Cardinal Michael Faulhaber even preached at the Catholic Day, ‘when the laws of a state conflict with the laws of God, then the rule is: God’s law triumphs the law of the state. The Revolution (that established the Republic) was perjury and treason.’

But concentrating upon the existence of anti-democratic forces also means that we risk forgetting that Weimar democracy had its supporters too. Social Democratic leaders like Friedrich Ebert and Carl Severing. Until his death in 1925, Ebert was the leader of the Social Democratic Party and the first President of the Weimar Republic. When Hitler’s supporters numbered a few hundred, Ebert’s SPD had more than a million. Like Ebert, Severing too was a Social Democrat. As Prussian Internal Minister, he was a pro-Republican politician in the state of Prussia, never blind to the continued influence of anti-Republican networks. He didn’t quite lead a Soviet style Republican purge. But he did begin the process of clearing out of the old monarchist guard from the police and judiciary.

Men like Severing and Ebert also wanted Germans to identify with their democracy. They gave Weimar a new set of symbols, including the black-red-gold flag – the colours of the flags of the revolutionaries of 1848. They also made 11 August a national holiday. It was Germany’s ‘constitution day.’ In the mid-1920s Time Magazine told its American readers that it was Germany’s 4 of July.

In the summer of 1922, the clashes between supporters and opponents of the Republic reached fever pitch. On 24 June 1922, as he was being driven from his home in western-Berlin to the Foreign Office in the government district at Berlin’s centre, German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau was murdered by three members of a right wing anti-Republican terrorist cell.

The murder was the political event of the year 1922. Rathenau was a supporter of the Republic. He was also Jewish. The day before his death, he had been subjected to a verbal tirade in the Reichstag by populist anti-Republican political Karl Helfferich. As Helfferich spoke, Rathenau sat in the German parliament, slumped in his seat, listening to Helfferich even suggest that Rathenau deserved the death sentence, personally blaming him for everything that had gone wrong in Germany in the recent past. The following day, when Rathenau was actually dead, Helfferich’s words were even more scandalous.

Supporters of the Republic were enraged. The days after the murder saw the largest pro-Republican demonstrations to take place in Germany in the interwar period. Pro-Republican demonstrations in the streets were met with pro-republican measures from above. Ebert played a key role. He helped to usher in new laws for the protection of the Republic.

They foresaw punishment of the opponents of the Republic and made it illegal to insult its representatives or symbols. When Ebert accused Rathenau’s killers of being outside of the German nation, his words had authority.

The reaction to Rathenau’s murder set stage for a re-founding of the Republic’s authority. That fight would have pitted a Republican politicians, led by men like Severing and Ebert, against  anti-Republican conservatives, many of whom were based in the southern state of Bavaria, from where Hitler’s star would start to rise during the late winter of 1922-23.

But time needed for the Republic’s re-founding was cut short dramatically. Supporters of German democracy in late 1922, did not just have to clear out the opponents to the Republic within Germany. They also had to face up to the challenge of Germany’s international relations. They faced the challenge of trying to create a stable democracy in Germany at a time when democracy and the support of democratic systems of government was not a norm in the international system of states, not even in Europe.

This is often forgotten in Britain and the United States. It makes us uncomfortable to remember that after the First World War, imperialism, not democracy, was the norm in international politics. And so, when it came to their dealings with Weimar Germany, France and Britain put their imperial interests ahead of the stabilisation of European democracy, while at the end of 1922, the United States decided that it was better to let the European fire burn itself out before deciding to assert its leadership role.

France’s Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré was a key figure. He was already known as a French hawk before the First World War. He had been French President during the war, a position that gave him great prestige but little power at times of key decision making. To his great frustration he had watched on as Georges Clemenceau, ‘the Tiger,’ Poincaré’s hated personal and political rival outshone him at every turn during the war and at the Paris Peace conference in 1919. By the summer of 1922 Poincaré was back as France’s Prime Minister and determined to leave his mark upon Europe, and especially Germany.

Poincaré faced a unique set of challenges. After the First World War, France was Europe’s strongest military power. But its economy was declining and it faced the greatest challenge of reconstruction in post-First World War western Europe. More than four years of industrialized warfare had left an area of France that was the size of the Netherlands completely destroyed.

France needed financial reparations from Germany to pay to re-build it. They also wanted to weaken Germany to maintain France’s security, all the more so, after the British and American’s reneged on a security alliance that they had offered France prior to signing the Versailles Treaty as a means to convince the French that the Treaty had punished Germany enough.

To complicate the reparations issue further, the British also wanted reparations to help pay for their military pensions bill and both France and Britain wanted reparations to help pay for their loans, money that they had borrowed from the United States. That created a row over both the amounts and rates at which Germany would pay reparations (and who they should pay back first).

The leaders of the Weimar Republic recognized the problem. Men like Rathenau were also willing to pay. After all, the recognized that Germany, Europe’s largest economy should help to pay for European reconstruction But there was initially no solution to the conflict over how much they would pay and how often. That conflict was the root of instability in the European international system for the first half of the 1920s. It also brought considerable instability to German governance.

On 11 January 1923, the reparations crisis brought French soldiers into the Ruhr district. Six months after Ebert had led the attempt to re-found the Republic and give pro-democratic forces greater authority in their battles against the anti-Republican right – famously summed up by then Chancellor Joseph Wirth calling out “the enemy is on the right,” Poincaré sent around 100,000 French and Belgian troops into the Ruhr district, the heart of the German industrial economy in the early twentieth century.

The Ruhr district was the motor of Weimar industry. Its coal pits provided the energy that powered all industrial activity. As many as a half a million men were working underground in the pits at any given time and there was so much smoke in the Ruhr’s sky that it had a distinctive pink red colour. Poincaré’s soldiers went there to provide military support for what the French termed a technical expedition. The expedition, led by around 100 engineers, was to establish if Germany really was paying its reparations in kind to the best of Germany’s abilities.

Without an army to fight back, the Republic’s leaders called upon the workers of the Ruhr to passively resist. In reality, this meant shutting down the Ruhr’s industry. It was one of the largest state sponsored strikes to have ever taken place. Initially, the German leaders responsible for this decision, including Wilhelm Cuno, a businessman who had become German Chancellor in November 1922, thought that the strike would last for at most a couple of weeks.

To pay the striking workers, the Reichsbank started printing extra notes. Like Cuno, the President of the German Reichsbank, Rudolf Havenstein thought that the note printing would be sustainable. He had bet that the reserves of the Reichsbank could provide stability until the occupation of the Ruhr was resolved. But when the politics of the Ruhr occupation radicalized in the spring and there could be no de-escalation, Havenstein lost his bet and for Germans, the summer of 1923 became the summer of zeros. The best-known images of Weimar Germany, the wheelbarrows of paper notes with multipes of zeros are from this time.

To understand why there could be no reversing of a bad policy as Germany was caught in the grip of nationalism, we have to discover the events of the Ruhr occupation themselves: the shooting of German civilians by French soldiers, the rape of German women by the occupying armies, the arrest and show trials of German business leaders, including Fritz Thyssen, the head of the Thyssen steel dynasty. These events fuelled nationalist passions on both sides. They made it almost impossible for a German government to reverse the policy – that decision was akin to surrender.

The spiral of events quickly transformed a stage in which the victory of the supporters of democracy was likely at the end of 1922 into one that became the stage for Hitler’s breakthrough year in 1923. In the 11 months following the Ruhr occupation, Nazi party membership jumped from around 8,000 to over 50,000. It was the whirlwind that began with the Ruhr crisis that first led him to think that he could seize power by imitating Mussolini and marching on Rome. In November 1923, the forces of the Republic were still strong enough to defeat him. But the costs of resisting the French occupation undoubtedly weakened the bond between millions of Germans and their democracy. The debate over whether that means that Weimar was doomed from November 1923 onwards will continue. Knowledge of the events of that crucial year is essential for anyone who wants to fully participate in it.

Mark Jones is Assistant Professor in History at University College Dublin, and the author of 1923: The Forgotten Crisis in the Year of Hitler’s Coup.