When Philipp Scheidemann took the floor, he plunged the Parliament into mayhem. Within minutes of his speech, the parties on the Right exploded in anger. “Traitor!” they shouted. “Treason!” Using their greater numbers, the Socialists tried to shout their opponents back down but to no effect. Communists shrieked in disbelief at Scheidemann’s allegations, unable to believe what they were hearing about this unwholesome union between Mother Russia and the Fatherland. Reichstag President Paul Löbe repeatedly rang his bell, fruitlessly calling the assembly back to order. At one point, a parliamentarian on the Right leapt up and, pointing to the American Ambassador seated in the gallery, cried, “Why reveal these things to our enemies?”1 In the end, Scheidemann’s speech, just days before Christmas 1926, would bring down the Weimar government and force a new coalition into being.
Scheidemann asserted that it was not only their right but their responsibility to speak out in order to keep Germany on the democratic path and the path of peace. An armed force that pursues its own political agenda that is opposed to democracy and peace, he continued, cannot be maintained. Citing a recent speech by General Wilhelm Heye (Chief of the Truppenamt2), in which the General called the army an obedient instrument of the state, Scheidemann remarked that this is a goal that had not yet been reached. Instead, he charged, the Reichswehr had become a state within a state.3
Given his stature, Scheidemann’s revelations could not simply be dismissed. He was, after all, the very man who had proclaimed the German Republic. Standing on the Reichstag balcony in 1918 at the war’s close, Scheidemann addressed a mob of Berliners and declared that rule by monarchs had ended. He did this in part to stave off an impending revolution, but no vote had ever been cast on the matter. He was acting on his own authority. In February 1919, he became the Republic’s first Chancellor. That summer he resigned, refusing to sign the Versailles Treaty once its harsh terms were announced. Despite his act of nationalistic protest, as a leading German socialist Scheidemann remained the target of right-wing furor, even being attacked with acid by extremists. His historical significance aside, as the Social Democratic Party head, he presently controlled a substantial bloc of votes in parliament. Thus, in December of 1926, when the ex-Chancellor rose to speak, he commanded considerable attention.
Turning to the delegates on the Right and addressing them directly, Scheidemann announced: “Do not pretend that what we discuss here today is a surprise to other nations. I know and expect this comment. If you are honest, you must admit that probably all countries in the world know exactly what is happening here.” The German people, he explained, knew the least about what the Reichswehr was doing.4
Although German resistance to disarmament and Allied occupation had been widely suspected, Scheidemann was referring specifically to a recent exposé in the December 6 Manchester Guardian. The newspaper—probably working from leads given to them by the Social Democratic Party—described some of the details surrounding the Reichswehr’s secret rearmament inside Soviet Russia. Because he could not obtain satisfactory assurances from the government that these activities would cease, Scheidemann decided to reveal the full story (or as much of it as he could) to the public through his Reichstag address. His speech has often been depicted as a purely political maneuver, intended to discredit the government and force a reorganization, but when one actually examines the text of his remarks, it is clear that deeper issues were also at stake.
Scheidemann’s address covered three distinct acts of subterfuge: financial improprieties, covert military training, and the production of war materiel. First, he described how money from the federal budget was being diverted to fund illegal rearmament in Russia. He outlined the scheme of withdrawing cash from a bank account and covering up the money trail. When he told the assembly that German officers and generals had been traveling to Russia under fake names and false passports, the Right erupted. One parliamentarian from Mecklenburg, Herr von Graefe, shouted, “What would happen to you in Paris if you said these things about the French?”5 His point was that no nation would tolerate the public disclosure of state secrets.
The effect of von Graefe’s words was electrifying. The entire room descended into cries from the Right and counter-charges from the Left. Reichstag President Löbe called for silence. Scheidemann tried to continue. “I have only the wish—” before being drowned out by shouts of “Traitor!” President Löbe fecklessly rang his bell for order.
When Scheidemann at last resumed, he described in overpowering detail how the Reichswehr was in league with right-wing organizations across Germany to secretly drill future soldiers under the guise of athletic training. The military, he alleged, was providing weapons and funds to train civilians in military functions. It was employing former officers as so-called sports instructors—all in violation of Versailles.
In the final section of his address, Scheidemann discussed the rearmament currently underway inside Russia, to the great embarrassment of Communists present. Seeing no need to rehash the details reported by the Manchester Guardian, he instead supplemented the case with additional allegations. According to his sources, airplanes, bombs, and poison gas were all being built beneath the Soviet cloak. As recently as late September to early October 1926, four ships had traveled from Leningrad to Stettin, a port city then part of Germany. Three of these ships—the Gottenburg, Artushof, and Kolberg—reached Germany, though the fourth had sunk. The workers unloading the cargo were sworn to secrecy. The contents were innocuously labeled “Aluminum” and “Rundeisen” (a type of steel). In reality it was thousands of tons of war materiel. Finally, Scheidemann described a collaboration between Reichswehr financing, a chemical company in Hamburg, and the plant in Russia producing gas grenades. This time, the Communists were outraged. Though publicly pledged to supporting Communist movements throughout the world, here was evidence that Soviet Russia was aiding the harshest opponents of Communism inside Germany. Nothing was making sense.
Turning to address the Communist delegates, Scheidemann admonished that they should be opposed to what Russia was doing because it was only pushing the country further to the Right. “We want to be Moscow’s friend, but we don’t want to be its fool.” Scheidemann called it a mistake that Germany forged an agreement with Russia just after making peace, but it would be far worse if such dealings were continuing even after Locarno and Germany’s entry into the League. Becoming ever bolder, he proclaimed, “Enough with these dirty dealings. No more munitions from Russia for German weapons.” The Communists let loose a cacophony, but Scheidemann was not cowed. “You want to drown me out with your shouts, so I will repeat it. No more munitions from Russia for German weapons.”6
To some, Scheidemann’s Reichstag speech was a flagrant act of high treason. To others, it was a profile in courage. Toward the close of his remarks, Scheidemann delivered a powerful and prescient defense of his position. He declared that secret armament was a grave danger. It irresponsibly damaged foreign policy. It compelled the nation to lies and hypocrisy. One day, he warned, we will be caught, and then the world will say that Germany is dishonest. “This cannot serve our Republic. We want to be seen in the world as an upstanding people that fulfills its obligations.” Finally, Scheidemann announced that his Party would withdraw its support for the government in order to trigger the formation of a new one.7 But neither Scheidemann’s words nor his Party’s actions could alter the course toward rearmament.
Throughout the whole of his speech, Scheidemann restricted his attacks to the military alone. In one of his only references to the Foreign Minister, he portrayed Stresemann as embattled by the Reichswehr’s actions. He insisted that Germany’s opponents abroad referred continuously to Germany’s lack of disarmament, saying that Germany gave only the appearance of disarming. He implied that, unfortunately, they were correct. “If you don’t know this, ask Herr Stresemann, who must overcome these difficulties.”8 In essence, he was giving the Foreign Minister a free pass.
Scheidemann’s speech created a pattern break moment. It forced the issue of German rearmament into the open, enabling Stresemann to observe reactions from East and West. Would the British and French demand an end to German–Soviet relations? Would the Soviets call off the military cooperation? Or could Germany continue with business as usual, preserving ties to both sides and thereby extract concessions from both?
The Soviet response was telling. Having frequently threatened to expose the secret arrangements, once they were already partly revealed, the Soviets now showed themselves eager to cover up the rest and keep the agreements intact, just as Stresemann had suspected. What Stalin had declared at the start of 1926, that the Soviet Union should build socialism in one country, appeared to be his genuine position. Stresemann had grasped that Stalin’s greater aim, at least for the time being, was not fomenting revolution inside Germany but instead revitalizing Soviet military and economic strength.
Stresemann also did not expect the West to retaliate against Germany, and after the speech he received ample signals that his assessment was correct. Scheidemann’s allegations created a sensation across the Western press. The story ran prominently in all the major papers. Under the headline “German Royalists Accused of Raising Huge Secret Army,” the Washington Post detailed the stormy Reichstag session and the key points of Scheidemann’s speech, including, at the article’s start, the covert shipment of arms from Russia to Germany.9 The following day, the Post’s page-one headline declared “Germany’s Cabinet, Defeated, Resigns in Face of Charges.”10 Evidencing the general respect for Stresemann’s leadership in foreign affairs, the Post piece ended by observing that Stresemann had not been seriously attacked at any time during the past two days of bitter Reichstag debate, and therefore German foreign policy would likely remain unchanged. The New York Times also featured the story, while Time referenced it within an article on Weimar’s unstable coalitions.11
In Britain, The Manchester Guardian, having first broken the story, continued to run articles on the unfolding events. The newspaper reported that the issue had become the primary topic of discussion in the press and Parliament. It added that “big sums” from the German taxpayer have been secretly diverted to fund illegal dealings in Russia and at home.12 The next day, The Guardian ran a piece on German gun-running, filled with speculation about possible Reichswehr plans to acquire large quantities of arms from Russia, including rifles, field guns, howitzers, and antitank guns.13 The paper followed up the reports on December 21 with a piece titled “The Exposure of German Militarists,” noting that French Socialist leader Leon Blum had requested an inquiry into the issues that Scheidemann had raised.14
Unlike the left-leaning Guardian, the conservative newspaper The London Times downplayed the significance of Scheidemann’s disclosures, claiming that they were all well-known abroad. The Times itself had noted the rumored dealings between German and Soviet militaries back in 1922, shortly after the two nations signed their infamous Rapallo agreement, which was putatively restricted to diplomatic and trade issues, not military ones.15 The Times now painted the German Socialists as having launched a fierce but undeserved attack on the German army. It reported almost none of the details contained within Scheidemann’s speech. Instead, it portrayed the Socialists as paranoids: “The more recent revelations of negotiations between Reichswehr officers and the Soviet Government with regard to the manufacture of arms, with all their schoolboy paraphernalia of false names and forged passports, made the Socialists still more suspicious . . .” The paper then described the Chancellor’s defense, that most of the allegations were either untrue or under investigation. Strongly suggesting support for the German Right, the article’s final sentence cited a Nationalist Deputy, Herr von der Schulenburg, who declared that “. . . if the assertions of Herr Scheidemann were true, his speech fulfilled all the requirements of an act of treason.”16
Scheidemann’s speech was an embarrassment for Stresemann. He had repeatedly vowed that Germany would disarm, as this condition was central to the withdrawal of Allied troops from German soil. To make matters worse, just six days earlier he had received the Nobel Prize for Peace, owing to his accommodating fulfillment policy. If Scheidemann’s allegations were found to be true, then Stresemann would appear a hypocrite, and his Locarno success could be in jeopardy.
Stresemann’s deputy, Schubert, urged yet again that the relationship with Moscow be brought to an end, as the risks had become too great.17 Stresemann disagreed. Instead, he waited to gauge both Soviet and Western reactions. He had good reason to think that Britain and France would be reluctant to pressure him into terminating the covert rearmament. As embarrassed as the German government might be by Scheidemann’s revelations, the British and French Foreign Ministers might be even more so, thanks in large part to the Nobel Foundation.
The timing of Scheidemann’s speech could hardly have been more awkward for Britain and France, nor more providential for Stresemann. The Manchester Guardian story appeared just as the French and British Foreign Ministers, Aristide Briand and Austen Chamberlain, were finalizing the withdrawal of the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission (IMCC), even though the Commission’s report stated that Germany had not met the disarmament conditions.18 Four days later, the Foundation announced not only that Dr. Stresemann would receive the Peace Prize for his handling of European disputes but that Briand and Chamberlain, along with American Vice-President Dawes, would share the award for their roles in ushering in the spirit of Locarno. For the British, French, or American foreign ministries to have loudly protested German violations at the very moment when they were basking in their Nobel glory would have been an unmitigated embarrassment. It could have called into question the entire Locarno undertaking, the trustworthiness of Stresemann, and the credibility of the statesmen themselves. Instead of drawing attention to German rearmament, the Nobel laureates voiced their genuine hopes for future peace.
Upon learning that he had won the Nobel Prize, Austen Chamberlain declared: “I feel greatly honored by the award, because it sets the seal of international approbation on the work of peace accomplished at Locarno.”19 French Foreign Minister Briand enthused over the announcement with equal relish:
Of course, I am delighted; but my ambition is that, ten years hence, the people will say that we deserved this award. Sir Austen Chamberlain, Dr. Stresemann and myself have worked together for the last two years in perfect harmony, with only one object in view. That object was the peace of the world. We have done our best, and will continue in the same spirit. Today we have the distinguished honor of receiving the Nobel prize. But history will say whether we deserved it. For the sake of humanity I sincerely hope that it will.20
Commenting on Stresemann’s receipt of the honor, The New York Times reflected the popular view of him at the time. The newspaper called Stresemann “sincere in his tribute to the new spirit of the international accord.” The profile credited the Foreign Minister with changing German attitudes toward the once-detested League of Nations. Affirming the general perception, The New York Times proclaimed: “Stresemann has held firm to the major principle that for Germany the soundest policy is loyal cooperation with her former enemies.”21
The Peace Prize was a windfall for Stresemann, as it constrained the French and British foreign ministers’ reactions. They could not raise objections to Germany’s covert rearmament without tarnishing the luster on their award.
Around the same time as the Nobel Prize awards, Stresemann was receiving many more signals that Britain and France were not prepared to make an issue of German violations. The official British response to Scheidemann’s revelations proved remarkably muted. The episode had no effect on the government’s impressions of Stresemann. It appears not even to have triggered an investigation into the extent of Stresemann’s knowledge of the Reichswehr’s activities. Instead, Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain remained exceedingly deferential to his German counterpart throughout the episode.22 At a Cabinet meeting on December 1, 1926, Chamberlain described how well he, Briand, and Stresemann had cooperated at a recent meeting in Geneva. Relations were so congenial that they envisioned the withdrawal of Allied forces from Germany in the very near future in exchange for a financial payment from Germany. Chamberlain hoped for another conference similar to Locarno, but he feared that the sensitive state of European public opinion was not yet ready for such an affair.23 Obviously, Stresemann did not know the details of this particular Cabinet meeting, but British and French compliance with German demands continued to be forthcoming.
At the following Cabinet meeting on December 15, just one day before Scheidemann’s speech but a week after The Manchester Guardian’s exposé, Chamberlain reported that the IMCC would at last be fully withdrawn from German territory, thanks to Briand’s acceptance of German goodwill.24 The planned withdrawal date had been set for February 1, 1927, but in deference to Stresemann they reset the date to January 31, as this was the anniversary of the evacuation of Allied troops from Cologne and held symbolic value for the Germans.25
Chamberlain went on to assert that 99 of the 101 outstanding points not settled at Locarno had each been resolved. The remaining two issues involved what would today be called “dual use materials” and the disarmament of the Königsberg fortress. Both the British and French War Offices recognized the danger from the accumulation of large quantities of jigs and gauges. These devices could be used for commercial purposes, but they could also be used in weapons. As the minutes reveal, Stresemann’s word sufficed to allay any concerns. “Dr. Stresemann had, however, given an emphatic undertaking that there should be no accumulations.”26
The question of disarming the fortress proved more complicated. The Versailles Treaty stated in Article 180 that Germany’s system of fortified works along its southern and eastern frontiers should be maintained in its existing state. The British assumed that this referred to the state the fortresses were in at the war’s end. But the Germans devised a novel interpretation, insisting that the article meant that Germany could keep them up to date. Presumably the fortresses had the latest weaponry in 1918, and the Germans wanted them to have the latest weaponry now, in 1926. Though Chamberlain initially insisted on the British interpretation, General Paweltz, who was the German liaison officer to the IMCC, vehemently refused to agree. The talks might have foundered on this point, but then “Dr. Stresemann had insisted that the Germans had no offensive ideas and only contemplated the fortresses in their defensive capacity.”27 Again, Stresemann’s assurances were enough, and this provided the basis for renewed negotiations. In point after point, Germany was getting its way.
The day after Chamberlain informed the British Cabinet that the IMCC’s mission would soon end, Scheidemann delivered his stunning Reichstag address. But owing to the Christmas holiday, the British Cabinet did not reconvene until January. When it next met, the entire agenda was consumed by a single item: a crisis in China regarding the seizure of a British concession. In fact, each weekly Cabinet meeting that month centered almost exclusively on the China issue. Unlike normal meetings at which a variety of domestic and foreign affairs were discussed, the China crisis absorbed the Cabinet’s near-complete attention.
If the secret rearmament in Russia had been well-known to the British, then why did they not seize this opportunity to protest it? Governments are often hamstrung in their ability to object to a country’s actions when their objections are based on covert intelligence reports. No government wants to risk exposing its spies, sources, or methods. But once a public disclosure occurs, governments are free to make diplomatic protests at no risk. Scheidemann’s speech handed the British a perfect chance to do this. Chamberlain, for one, could have expressed Her Majesty’s Government’s deep disapproval of Germany’s violations and demanded they cease. Instead, the British said nothing.28
From the British perspective, German rearmament was rather modest at this stage. Knowing that some German rearmament was inevitable, the British were willing to ignore these relatively minor violations. However, Britain’s lack of response only hastened the pace of Russo–German cooperation. As the incisive German diplomat in Russia, Gustav Hilger, observed in his post–World War II memoirs, after the Scheidemann affair German activities inside Russia rapidly expanded. More German officers than ever before came to Moscow, Hilger wrote, though greater efforts were taken to camouflage their identity.29
Some limited German rearmament was viewed as a positive development given concerns over a potentially resurgent Russia and the growing communist movement. But if the British truly feared a Russian resurgence, then the last thing they would have wanted was German aid to the Red Army. The Reichswehr was actively training Russian officers, teaching pilots, and establishing a school for instruction in tank warfare. German industrial plants agreed in some cases to give the Red Army one-third of the planes produced on Soviet territory. For Britain, however, a moderately rearmed Germany might also one day serve as a counterweight to France.
The British Foreign Office pursued a parallel policy of tacit acceptance toward internal as well as external German violations. Cabling from Berlin, British Ambassador Ronald Lindsay offered a lengthy assessment of the many militaristic Bunds operating inside Germany, the groups to which Scheidemann had referred in his Reichstag address. Lindsay attributed a fundamental nature to the Germans, who, when assembled in a group of more than one, adopt a “combative nature.” He asserted that the German “. . . becomes peculiarly aggressive in combination with others, and that he cannot conceive of co-operation except as directed against something or somebody.” Despite these putative national characteristics, Lindsay concluded that the upsurge in militarism and covert training of young men by ex-officers should not be a cause for concern. He argued that the only reasonable course available was to “. . . secure a promise from the German Government that they will observe the clear stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles on this point.”30 In other words, trust the German government and hope that rearmament would not lead to aggression.
In fact, there was little that Britain and France could do to prevent German rearmament. If Britain had come down hard on German violations, the Germans might have proceeded with rearmament at full speed and Britain would have likely been unable to halt it. This in turn would have revealed Allied weakness.
Britain and France also feared jeopardizing Germany’s payment of reparations. If the Allies raised too much fuss over disarmament violations, then Germany might refuse to continue its payments, the subject of greatest concern to Allied statesmen throughout the 1920s. Establishing how to extract those payments from Germany consumed more time and effort than any other issue of postwar politics. By 1926, it seemed as though a system, and a leadership, at last existed for the smooth transfer of money from Berlin to Allied capitals. One rather obvious clue to the French attitude came on September 17, when Stresemann met secretly with French Foreign Minister Briand in the town of Thoiry. The two ministers hoped to strike a deal: the return of French-occupied German territory in exchange for a one-time payment to France. At one point in their discussions Briand admitted that when his military intelligence officers presented him with documents detailing German violations of Versailles, he had casually tossed the files in a corner and ignored them.31 Although Briand was concerned about some of Germany’s attempts to rearm and remilitarize, those qualms were secondary to his desire for German reparations.
Given the limited scope for British and French action, their policy of tacit consent for rearmament was grounded in the hope that German behavior could be changed over time—a not unreasonable ambition. The timing of Scheidemann’s speech, the hopes invested in Stresemann as a peacemaker, and the West’s limited ability to impose meaningful penalties all combined to constrain British and French responses. Those constraints led to a tacit overlooking of Germany’s transgressions and Stresemann’s possible role therein. And Stresemann had every reason to expect that his Western counterparts were sufficiently constrained. He soberly judged their reactions while also observing the signals emerging from the East.
In contrast to the British, the Soviets were outraged, and for good reason. One of their best bargaining chips had just been whittled down. Though they could still conceivably threaten further exposures, two important changes had occurred in the wake of Scheidemann’s address. First, now that at least some of the secret arrangement had been made public, Soviet threats of exposing more details were unlikely to have a significant impact on Germany’s relations with the West. Second, the Soviets themselves revealed that they wanted military cooperation to continue without obstruction. The immediate reaction among some in Moscow was to abandon military cooperation with Germany altogether, but this was of course impractical. The relationship held too much value for both technological progress and international relations.
The day after Scheidemann’s speech, Schubert met with Krestinski. The Soviet Ambassador was in a highly agitated state. He wanted to know what the German Foreign Ministry intended to do about Scheidemann’s revelations. Schubert assured him that the Ministry had no intention of saying anything about it unless compelled to do so by the French press. In that event, they would make a partial admission and say that the whole affair simply belonged to a previous era. Krestinski was scarcely pacified. He felt that the best approach was to deny everything.32
The Soviet bluff had finally been called. Yet instead of retreating from the secret military relations, as they had threatened to do, they sought assurance that the arrangements would remain in place. At the start of the new year, Stresemann received the clearest signal yet that Moscow wanted to cooperate with the German government far more than it wanted to overthrow it. On January 5, 1927, Krestinski met with Stresemann and raised the issue of Scheidemann’s indiscretion. Although the scandal had faded from the news, Krestinski feared that it could be resurrected. The Soviet Ambassador understood from his conversations with Schubert and Herbert von Dirksen, head of the Foreign Ministry’s East European division, that if the German government were compelled to clarify the matter in public, it planned to claim that the arms shipments were from long ago and did not reflect any current military cooperation between the two countries. Krestinski explained that this would place the Soviet regime in a very uncomfortable position, as it had been denying the deal entirely. The Ambassador expressed the wish of his government that the German government consider the Soviet position as well as its own.
Stresemann tried to reassure Krestinski by declaring it unlikely that the Social Democrats would pursue the issue. Krestinski was not mollified. He said that the Second International (a worldwide association of socialist parties and trade unions) might draw attention to the scandal. In the end, he expressed the Soviet wish that both governments remain in contact regarding their mutual tactics for handling the matter.33
In effect, the Soviets were pleading with the Germans not to expose their duplicity. The Russians were scared of the consequences, and Stresemann knew it. The long pattern of Soviet threats to expose their secret arms deal had finally broken, and the Russians blinked. The fact that they were now intent on covering up the affair had to mean that the Kremlin valued German military and technical assistance more than it valued fomenting a German revolution. This in turn meant that Schubert was wrong. The costs of cooperation to Germany were indeed minimal, as Stresemann had surmised. The arrangement could continue without risk to Locarno and Germany’s broader Western policy. At a pattern break moment, the Soviets revealed their underlying drivers: the restoration of Russian might. It would clearly take years before Russia’s resurgence could rival Western power, and no one could know what that would eventually produce. But for now, that day was still far in the future. For at least the short and medium term, Stresemann had a pretty clear sense of his enemy’s drivers and constraints.
Although attacks and disinformation about Germany persisted in the Russian press over the early part of 1927, they did not seriously derail relations. Meanwhile, within the German parliament, the Social Democrats formed an investigative committee and the government attempted a cover-up. Schubert cabled Brockdorff-Rantzau that although the head of the Reichswehr did not want to make any admissions, Schubert thought that some statement would be necessary.34 Brockdorff-Rantzau wired back advising the Foreign Ministry not to admit to anything in the hearings, as that would embarrass key individuals in Moscow who were clinging to their denials. Chicherin was even charging that the allegations were British provocations.35
Eager to ensure that no further disclosures would occur, Chicherin’s deputy, Litvinov, contacted the German Foreign Office about continued military cooperation. The Soviets wanted to obtain a clear understanding on the furnishing of the training school in Kazan, which Germany had been financing by cooking the books. In May of 1927, Stresemann, along with General Heye and War Minister Gessler, met in the Foreign Ministry to discuss the Soviet request. With only some qualifications, Stresemann endorsed the arrangement. By August, Stresemann cabled the embassy in Moscow about the presence of Germans at the training school in Kazan. As far as Stresemann was concerned, “We have no concerns about the continuation of this program.”36 With Stresemann’s blessing, Russo–German military cooperation henceforth intensified.
If Stresemann recognized the Soviets’ underlying drivers and constraints by scrutinizing their behavior during pattern breaks, then could his foreign counterparts have done the same to him? What did Stresemann actually want? His pursuit of rearmament has left historians without a consensus on his underlying motivations. Some historians conclude that Stresemann’s policies of overt cooperation and covert defiance of Versailles demonstrated an aggressive inclination, one that inadvertently helped lay the groundwork for Hitler’s later war.37 More recent historians take the opposite view, insisting that Stresemann actively strove for European amity. They assert that his support of covert rearmament was merely a political necessity.38 In the view of these scholars, Stresemann actually sought to check or restrain the Reichswehr’s rearmament plans. Henry Kissinger once called the problem of divining Stresemann’s true intentions “one of history’s unsolved riddles.”39 Historians are still divided in their judgment, and if historians cannot agree on how to assess this important figure, what chance did Stresemann’s contemporaries have of accurately assessing him?
Stresemann was a controversial figure in his own time. He may be even more of one today. The earliest interpretations of Stresemann, those written in the years shortly after his death in 1929 and those just after World War II, depicted the foreign minister as a cooperative, sober-minded statesman, working toward peaceful resolution of post–World War I conflicts.40 Within a decade following the end of World War II, however, some historians, Hans Gatzke most prominently among them, fervently challenged the more positive prior interpretations.41 Gatzke saw the foreign minister as a cool, calculating nationalist, bent on German revanchism. Other works then echoed this view. Recently that interpretation has been challenged in a probing biography by the Oxford scholar Jonathan Wright.42 In Wright’s account, Stresemann sought to revise Versailles but to do it peacefully. Four years later, Wright’s view was complemented by Patrick Cohrs, whose impressively researched study of 1920s European diplomacy cast the Foreign Minister in a similar light.43
Naturally, this revision of Stresemann’s reputation has not gone unchallenged. Writing in the Journal of American History, Stephen Schuker argued that Stresemann’s intentions are best reflected in a letter he wrote to the German Crown Prince shortly before Locarno. In that missive, the Foreign Minister rather bluntly outlined his foreign policy objectives. These included (as cited by Schuker):
. . . freedom from Allied occupation; a reparations solution tolerable to Germany; the protection of the ten to twelve million ethnic Germans living under a foreign yoke; readjustment of the eastern frontiers; union with German Austria; exploitation of disarmament, Danzig, and the Saar questions at the League of Nations; and, in the background, though postponed until a future generation, the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine.44
Schuker questioned whether such robust ambitions could plausibly reflect a peaceful plan.45
Both Wright and Cohrs see this letter in a less incriminating light. Cohrs believes that Stresemann never sought revision through military means. “Crucially, Stresemann only envisaged territorial changes if they could be achieved in ‘agreement’ with Germany’s neighbours and did not jeopardize its accommodation with the Western powers.”46 Wright asserts, “All the evidence suggests that Stresemann remained committed to peaceful revision . . .”47
For Gatzke and Schuker the letter reveals Stresemann’s true colors, but for Wright and Cohrs it merely indicates a nonviolent intention to restore Germany’s rightful place among the great powers of Europe while highlighting his political acumen for playing to his audience. Stresemann’s policies were therefore not two-faced but two-sided: win over the West through fulfillment and placate the German Right with modest bows to rearmament.
Still, Stresemann’s letter to the Crown Prince is not the only inconvenient evidence against his pacific intentions. More problematic is his reluctance to oppose rearmament. Stresemann’s biographer, Jonathan Wright, concludes that while the Foreign Minister believed in the utility of military force he objected to the Reichswehr’s pursuit of an independent policy and wanted to rein in the Reichswehr’s activities. But Stresemann never did so. Wright speculates that this was either because he did not feel strong enough to oppose them or because he was held back by his innate respect for the military and did not want to damage its morale. Wright notes that Stresemann was constantly worried that the rearmament would be exposed, and only after he saw the West’s minimal reaction to Scheidemann’s speech did he agree to continue the program in Russia. “Perhaps because of this lack of reaction,” Wright explains, “when General Heye asked for political authorization for continued cooperation with the Red Army in the training of pilots, a tank school, and gas warfare, Stresemann agreed.”48
By this point in 1927, Stresemann had succeeded in exerting some control over Reichswehr activities. Military officials were requesting his consent. They were not pursuing a wholly independent policy. Yet Stresemann did not use his position to check Reichswehr rearmament. He exerted influence over the program simply because he understood that knowledge is power and ignorance can cause a politician’s demise. The Foreign Minister wanted to ensure that he was kept in the know about Reichswehr programs. He does not appear to have had any interest in obstructing them.
Stresemann’s contemporaries, as well as subsequent historians, could have looked to the great statesman’s behavior at a critical pattern break. If Stresemann had truly been opposed to the Reichswehr’s secret program, Scheidemann’s speech represented the ideal moment to end it. The Foreign Minister could have insisted that the risks to Germany’s image abroad were simply too great. He could then have sought to placate the Reichswehr and industrial concerns by other means. Stresemann’s German People’s Party drew much of its support from German industry, and if anyone knew how to curry favor with industrialists, it was Stresemann. He might have used his considerable influence to persuade the industrialists who were profiting from rearmament that their interests would be better served by looking West. He could have appeased the industrialists with promises to seek more favorable trade agreements. He could have pointed out that the scale of American loans dwarfed the financial benefits flowing from covert rearmament. The industrialists would never have wanted those to be placed in jeopardy. He could easily have argued that the financial benefits from rearmament could not possibly outweigh the risk of further revelations similar to Scheidemann’s. Given Stresemann’s close working relationship with Chamberlain and Briand, he could also have quietly urged his counterparts to raise a ruckus against the Reichswehr’s activities, if he had really wished to dissuade the military from proceeding. Instead, he did none of these things. He accurately sensed that Britain and France were unlikely to object and that the Soviets were desperate to preserve the arrangement. Once his assessments proved correct, he supported the program’s continuation.49
Diplomats must often lie for their country, and Stresemann was no different in that respect. After Scheidemann’s revelations, Stresemann denied knowledge of the rearmament program. He continued to deny it thereafter. The fact that he did this so skillfully shows his effectiveness as a diplomat. In a speech before the Reichstag in February 1928, he went so far as to proclaim that “. . . no state has contributed more or even as much to the solution of the security question as Germany.” He categorically announced, “Germany is disarmed.”50 This statement was not entirely truthful. Although the IMCC had succeeded in destroying considerable quantities of munitions, German violations were many, and Stresemann was well aware of them.
Like most clever politicians, Stresemann said many different things to different audiences. One can find evidence to support claims of his aggressive intentions and counterevidence in defense of his pacific ways. Speaking about the far-off future, he once remarked to the State President of Wurtemburg, in response to the State President’s assertion that there could be no peaceful solution to Germany’s situation:
I fervently hope that if it comes to that—and I believe that in the final analysis these great questions will always be decided by the sword—the moment may be put off as long as possible. I can only foresee the downfall of our people so long as we do not have the sword—that much is certain. If we look forward to a time when the German people will again be strong enough to play a more significant role, then we must first give the German people the necessary foundation . . . To Create this foundation is the most urgent challenge facing us.51
If Stresemann had one underlying driver, it was to restore German greatness by any reasonable means. It was his responsibility to the nation to keep rearmament moving forward so that Germany’s sword would one day be ready. However, being a consummate diplomat, he recognized that the implicit threat of force, not its actual use, can often be sufficient to achieve one’s ends. To that end, cooperation with the Western powers and the Soviet Union made perfect sense. Schaukelpolitik, the policy of balancing between East and West, held that Germany could extract the most concessions from each side by preserving ties to both. The riskiness of this strategy was that it required a sensitive estimation of how far Germany could go. Stresemann witnessed Moscow’s transformation from arming German revolutionaries to arming the Reichswehr. That break in Moscow’s pattern of behavior helped him to sense just how much the Soviets needed German cooperation. This in turn enabled him to gauge how much German closeness to the West that the Soviets could accept. Conversely, by accurately assessing the constraints on British and French statesmen, Stresemann gained a sense of how much military cooperation with Russia the West could tolerate. One measure of Stresemann’s strategic empathy is that he never pushed either relationship beyond a point that the other side could bear.
There is yet another way of thinking about how Stresemann thought. His behavior at the pattern break moment strongly suggests an underlying driver: the desire to restore German greatness. But we do not need to conclude from this that the Foreign Minister possessed a definite long-term plan, one that he assiduously and consistently pursued. He could easily have held to a consistent desire for German great power status while varying his behavior over time. In other words, his specific actions at any given moment need not have been consistent with aggressive rearmament or peaceful conciliation. He might easily have been of many minds.
The evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban not only argues that most of us are awash in conflicting beliefs, but insists that it does not even make sense to say that a person holds consistent beliefs at all. At least when it comes to preferences, psychologists have argued that we do not hold fixed preferences, as rational choice advocates have long maintained. In just one of many studies, for example, people were asked to choose between receiving six dollars or a fancy pen. Roughly one-third of the subjects chose the pen. But when the choice was presented between receiving six dollars, a fancy pen, and a clearly inferior pen, the number of people who chose the fancy pen rose to nearly 50 percent. Other studies have shown how people reverse their preferences when the context changes. The evidence has been mounting that preferences are context-dependent.
In Kurzban’s view, and that of other evolutionary psychologists, the mind evolved bit by bit and not toward a state of rational perfection. Whereas psychologists such as Daniel Kahnemann see the mind as divided into two systems—one fast and emotional, the other slow and calculating—Kurzban asserts that our minds are constructed of many modules, each performing different functions. Those modules can be thought of as subroutines in a computer program. Sometimes they work in concert, but often they clash. This is why people sometimes hold contradictory beliefs. Different modules in the brain are engaged at different moments. This does not mean, of course, that we never believe anything or that we cannot maintain certain beliefs over a long period. It means instead that context can shape our desires, and it can activate a variety of conflicting beliefs. Kurzban puts it this way:
If the context one’s in, or the state one’s in, turns certain modules on, then the preferences in those modules will drive one’s performance. In a different context, the very same options will be evaluated by different modules, leading to the possibility of a different choice being made.52
These findings can offer us an alternative way of understanding Stresemann’s seemingly inconsistent behavior. Surely the choice between six dollars and a pen cannot be analogous to a statesman’s choices between passivity and aggression. This is true enough, but the massive body of research on rational decision-making, heuristics, and biases illustrates that, at least on small-scale decisions, we are frequently inconsistent and affected by context.53 Indeed, on larger-scale matters, there is also evidence that we compartmentalize our views. We need only consider the many professional scientists who hold deeply religious beliefs to realize that sophisticated thinkers often adhere to seemingly contradictory ideas. Seen in this light, the debate about Stresemann (and by extension the debates over the motives of other complex historical figures) has been too narrow.
Historians who depict the Foreign Minister as ceaselessly bent on a forcible revision of Versailles force him into an unnatural box. Such interpretations take a static and far too consistently rational view of individuals. These historians point to Stresemann’s ferocious support for unrestricted submarine warfare against the West during World War I, followed by his ongoing attempts to evade disarmament, and above all the aggressive aims outlined in his letter to the Crown Prince. In these acts, and many more, they see a man whose aims were unaltered throughout the course of his political life. By imposing upon him a long-term, single-minded consistency, they rob Stresemann of any true complexity.
The revisionists, however, who portray Stresemann’s views as having either transformed or evolved toward greater cooperation with the West appear overly optimistic about his unwavering commitment to peace. His support of rearmament during the Scheidemann affair, and indeed his failure to oppose it at such an opportune moment, suggests at the very least that he desired greater military might, not merely that he wished to placate the Reichswehr and industrialists. Stresemann lent his support to rearmament knowing that the Reichswehr leadership sought military strength in order to use it. Whether he would have subsequently supported forceful territorial annexations can never be proved. His decisions would have depended on the future context. But the notion that he was compelled to follow the Reichswehr’s lead on rearmament is not substantiated by his behavior.
More than merely keeping his options open, he may have genuinely held both intentions at different times and sometimes simultaneously. It is not hard to imagine that at various points, such as when writing to the Crown Prince or when supporting covert rearmament, he longed for German greatness and even the satisfaction that comes from military conquest, especially the kind motivated by revenge and the desire to take back what was once in German hands. Yet at other times, at other moments, he may have felt it not only necessary but virtuous to construct the foundations for a stable peace with his former enemies. It is entirely possible to hold multiple and conflicting desires over time. Stresemann’s behavior need only remain an unsolved riddle if we insist on perceiving him as either a peacemaker or an aggressive nationalist. A view that accounts for the contradictory evidence would see him as a man caught amidst a stream of conflicting desires. This view would not diminish his political acumen or strategic savvy. On the contrary, it would be commensurate with the sophisticated thinker and passionate German that he was.
Stresemann’s conflicting behavior aside, his behavior at the pattern break indicates his genuine support for rearmament. His overall pattern of behavior, along with his actions at the pattern break, suggests an underlying desire to resurrect German greatness by any plausible means, namely skillful diplomacy combined with military restoration.
From the time that Stresemann assumed the Chancellorship in 1923 to his death in 1929, Germany transitioned from a country wracked by revolution, hyperinflation, and foreign occupation to a nation of growing economic strength and international power. These extraordinary achievements resulted in no small part from Stresemann’s strategic empathy, enabling his clever playing of the Russian card. Domestically, cooperation with Moscow placated the Reichswehr, satisfied the industrialists who profited from the arrangement, and further secured Stresemann’s own position within the government, lending the Weimar Republic an invaluable degree of stability amidst frequently shifting governing coalitions. Internationally, the ongoing Soviet ties helped to wrest concessions from Britain and France and facilitate Germany’s entry into Western security arrangements from Locarno to the League. The ties, mainly the secret military cooperation, also helped the German government to maintain close communication with Moscow, providing a useful channel for Stresemann to voice objections to communist agitation. Despite the frequent tensions over Soviet meddling in German affairs, when a major pattern break occurred—Scheidemann’s revelations—Stresemann could recognize how much the Soviets valued their two nations’ military engagement.
Stresemann’s sense of precisely how far he could push rearmament proved astute. Against the wishes of his deputy, Schubert, who argued for terminating the arrangement, Stresemann correctly assessed both the drivers and constraints on his opponents. He saw that the Soviets had changed since their failed attempt to spark a German revolution in 1923. By 1926, the Soviet pattern of putting ideology first in foreign affairs had reversed. By the close of 1926, at least with respect to Germany, matters of national interest took precedence. The Kremlin was more concerned with avoiding international isolation and modernizing its military. Cooperation with Germany offered the best means of accomplishing both those ends. By May 1927, it was even more apparent that the Soviets wanted that relationship to persist, especially as Soviet efforts to forge agreements with Poland and France had not produced benefits comparable to cooperation with the Reichswehr.
Stresemann gained an equally clear sense for British and French drivers and constraints. The Nobel Peace Prize made it highly unlikely that Chamberlain or Briand would raise objections to Germany’s Versailles violations. Their continued acquiescence to German demands over the withdrawal of Allied troops from German territory only reinforced his conviction that Britain and France were not willing to pressure Germany to halt rearmament.
Following Stresemann’s death in 1929, Germany’s domestic instability increased in the wake of the Great Depression and the rise of the Nazi Party. As Chancellor, Hitler oversaw the general course of German foreign policy, though he was often greatly influenced by the irrational organization of overlapping ministries that he created.54 Throughout the 1930s and beyond, statesmen would again struggle to determine the relative primacy of ideology in foreign policy. National leaders needed to know Hitler’s underlying drivers—something that in retrospect seems painfully clear but at the time was far more murky. By 1941, Stalin faced this same difficulty when deciding how to deal with the Nazi invasion that he knew would eventually come. Part of the reason why he failed to heed the warning signs lies in the patterns he perceived and the pattern breaks he could not grasp.