The military collapse and the revolutionary disturbances created only superficial caesuras, for the First World War had brought about no qualitative change in the composition of society and the economy. Now as before, the principle of the continuity of that which is continued to hold sway. This applied with particular force to the ruling elites of the Kaiserreich : landed property, industry, the army, the Bildungsbürgertum, the bureaucracy and the judiciary still occupied their traditional places.77 Nothing changed as a result of the constitutional revision of the Bismarckian state in October 1918, such measures – instituted at the behest of Ludendorff – being in principle entirely consonant with the tradition of ‘revolution from above’. The incipient parliamentarization of the national constitution actually owed much less to indigenous liberal forces than to the demands of US President Wilson, for a show of deference to these, it was hoped, might help the Reich to secure a more advantageous peace. When this expectation was not fulfilled, the German Democratic Party (DDP) declined rapidly from 75 Reichstag seats in January 1919 to a mere two seats by 1933. Liberal-democratic forces remained a weak influence in German society. Thus the German People’s Party (DVP) began and ended on the right of the political spectrum after a difficult middle course during the Stresemann years, finally lapsing into insignificance. Despite the swing towards parliamentary democracy that began with the constituent assembly, traditional power structures were not altered, not even by the fall of the monarchy in the Reich and the associated states. Indeed, they tended to be rather strengthened and in part restored in the course of the suppression of the left-wing extremist rebel movements. Thanks to Max Weber, an emphatically monarchistic element lived on in the position of the Reich president, with his emergency powers. Its second incumbent, Hindenburg, the First World War field marshal and victor of Tannenberg, powerfully embodied this element as a kind of ‘surrogate emperor’, aiding and abetting Hitler’s ‘seizure of power’ through his office and his personality.
The structure of the private sector of the economy was similarly unaltered. In 1922 and 1923 the surviving remnants of the wartime planned economy were done away with and the autonomy of the free enterprise economy was restored. In 1919 a unified industrial lobby was created with the founding of the National Association of German Industry (RDI). With this move industry sharpened its cutting-edge vis-a-vis the state and the trade unions, even though the older elements of competing industrial groups lived on within the new association. During the inflation year of 1923 and in the period of stabilization that began in 1924 the process of economic concentration continued, achieving a new dimension with the founding of the United Steelworks in 1926, through IG-Farben and the formation of a Banking Group of Four (the D-D banks). In spite of the growing influence of the engineering, electrical and chemical industries, which between 1926 and 1931 provided the RDI with its president in Carl Duisberg of IG-Farben, direction of the Association remained with the large Ruhr corporations of the coal, iron and steel industries. It was a similar story with the successor organization to the Farmers’ League, the National Rural League (RLB), which as time went on was increasingly dominated by representatives of the East Elbian landed magnates. Notwithstanding all the differences,78 not least that over attitudes towards the trade unions, in the Weimar state the post-1878 alliance of the old power elites was renewed via the brawl to carry the customs tariff of 1924–5, albeit under circumstances which gave diminished weight to agriculture in comparison with the prewar period. For the formulation of German economic policyeconomic policy,79 but also in relation to social policy and public policy in general, this alliance had wide-ranging consequences. Through demonstrable co-operation, even in the forefield of foreign trade policy, e.g. for the trade treaties with Poland and France, via the co-ordination of industrial and agricultural interests, a course was charted whose detailed implementation was left to the civil service. After the war, and partly because of the experience of war, the degree of collaboration between the syndicates and the ministries actually increased in the direction of an economic revisionism, for national recovery seemed possible only through economic and political co-operation. Given the tradition of ‘authoritarian capitalism’ in Germany, it was natural that such co-operation proceeded much more directly under conservative cabinets than under leftist ones. Its achievements during the war, and particularly the demise of courtly and aristocratic society as the pinnacle of the social pyramid after the end of the princely households, gave the captains of industry, especially the ‘Ruhr barons’ of whom Hugo Stinnes was typical, an aura and a respect that were unattainable in the Kaiserreich, where they had had to work their way up the hierarchy, at heavy financial cost and in competition with the aristocracy, to the post of Commercial Privy Councillor. Under the republic, by contrast, they enjoyed much greater real influence.
The trade unions under Legien’s leadership (another element of continuity) held fast to their social reformist course and were not prepared to jeopardize their organization through socialization experiments and by supporting the ‘workers’ and soldiers’ councils’. Their exclusive concern was recognition and consolidation of their place within the prevailing economic system and to extend the position they had won in November 1916 during the war. Through the founding of the ‘joint industrial alliance’ (ZAG) with the organized employers in the so-called Legien-Stinnes pact80 in November 1918 they believed it possible to avoid mass unemployment and to raise wages. Yet the ZAG enjoyed the support of only a puny segment of organized business, mainly in the chemical and electrical trade, who planned eventually to drop their alliance with the pre-industrial castes in favour of collaboration with organized labour. The far stronger section of the employers, that grouped around the coal, iron and steel industrialists, regarded the alliance with Legien as a mere temporary expedient designed exclusively to steer the free enterprise system safely through the shoals of socialization. This group, whose spokesmen were Ruhr industrialists like Reusch, Thyssen, Springorum, Vogler and Kirdorf, remained irreconcilable with the Weimar polity, even when it was governed by bourgeois cabinets, as it was after 1920. They were not only anti-democratic but, in ideological terms, anti-parliamentary as well. At a very early stage they called for a strong state independent of parties and parliament, and from 1930 onwards they demanded a ‘leader’. Hence their close collaboration with the German Nationalists (successor party to the Conservatives) and the right wing of the German People’s Party (successor party of the National Liberals), in which the industrial lobby, particularly that of the west, formed a kind of ‘veto bloc’ against a continuation of social policy.81 These groups also worked towards a pre-parliamentary authoritarian corporate state. This may be seen in the ideas for a reconstitution of the state prevalent in the conservative camp of the ‘resistance’ to Hitler during the Second World War, for these harked back not to the Weimar republic, to democracy, but to the Bismarckian empire, even to the pre-Bismarckian era. That the Reichstag elections of May 1928 registered a swing to the left, after years of relative prosperity and bourgeois cabinets which included even German Nationalist (DNVP) participation, created alarm among the bourgeois parties and the interest groups of industry and agriculture. In place of the moderate Count Westarp, the Pan-German Hugenberg now became chairman of the German Nationalist People’s Party, and Prelate Kaas, on the far right of his party, was elected chairman of the Centre Party.
Right-wing circles were irritated by the return of a Social Democrat to the office of chancellor, even though he headed a ‘grand coalition’ government in which the DVP reluctantly participated and which the DNVP fought remorselessly. As early as the spring of 1929 the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung or DAZ (close to industry and popular reading among the educated classes) demanded ‘a ministry of civil renewal’ with power to dissolve the Reichstag and governing through an ‘enabling law’. The bourgeois world was to take a stand against that of the proletariat. Such circles had begun to look to Italian fascism no later than 1928. Hans Reupke, a CDI syndic, published a book on Italian fascism which made a particularly favourable impression on Vogler. He published newspaper articles on the same subject in the Tag. Here the kernel of fascism was identified as ‘national socialism plus anti-Marxism’; it was the authoritarian state minus socialism. (No doubt the emphasis was determined with pedagogic intent and in reference to the national socialism of Hitler’s party.) Mussolini was allegedly imbued with the ‘overriding importance of the business mentality’; fascism was a ‘pathfinder of the capitalist system’, destined to ‘annihilate and supplant the class concept which permeates the modern world’.
Similar to the May elections of 1928 in its alarming impact on industry was the trade unions’ demand for ‘codetermination’ in the larger enterprises. Although it probably appears today as an over-estimation of the possibilities of the time and of the cohesion of the Weimar system, this demand was raised in 1928 at the Hamburg congress of the Free Trade Unions. This precipitated the employers’ struggle against the so-called ‘political’ wage,82 which took the form of a lockout of 250,000 workers in the iron and steel industry and lasted for several months, from 1928 into 1929. In the great economic crisis, a capitalist crisis of global dimensions, which in Germany under prevailing conditions became a political crisis, particular employer groups representing ‘reform capitalism’ demonstrated a willingness to resume co-operation with the trade unions in a revival of the ZAG of 1919–24 (as, for example, the lignite industrialist Silverberg had already indicated in his well-known speech of 1926,83 albeit with no practical result). However, since the bulk of small business had also taken fright at the Social Democratic demand for ‘economic democracy’, the moderate groups were unable to carry their concept against the opposition of heavy industry, who for their part, as they had done prior to the First World War, envisaged a solution to the crisis and a possible economic revival exclusively in the suppression and destruction of the trade unions. However, not only economic interests but also the ‘inherited social mentalities and forms of behaviour’ characteristic of ‘authoritarian capitalism’ were now brought to bear in a sustained attack on the welfare-state component of the Weimar constitution itself.84 The demand that the collective bargaining system be relaxed or abolished, that compulsory arbitration of labour disputes in particular (as a last resort, when management and labour were unable to reach agreement) be abandoned, and for abolition of state social-security services (social insurance, unemployment relief) formed the components of this offensive. Its objective could be reached only if pushed through under the momentary duress of the crisis, before a possible recovery supervened to enhance the strength of the trade unions.
Large-scale industry had viewed with growing displeasure the government of the grand coalition, welcomed its fall and at first held high hopes of the Brüning government, whose deflationary policy of drastic cuts in government expenditure and revenue (tax reductions) went a long way towards meeting industry’s demands for a ‘self-healing’ of the economy. In fact, his policy of slashing both wages and prices led to ever greater contraction of the economy and correspondingly rising numbers of unemployed, whose distress the NSDAP sought to exploit.85 Although Brüning’s economic policy significantly deepened the crisis, it did not go anywhere near far enough for the leaders of the business community. They demanded a further round of wage cuts and abstention from price-reduction measures, and when Brüning failed to practise this policy with sufficient vigour they abandoned him to his fate in the autumn of 1931.86 In view of the weakness of the bourgeois-liberal forces and the vulnerability of the workforce, at war with itself in two hostile parties, the parliamentary-democratic camp now had its back to the wall while, on the other side, the old power elites of landed wealth, industry, army and civil-service mandarins now appeared to champion order and recovery from a position of greater strength than ever. Of these, the numerically small group of landed aristocrats, together with the Reichswehr (Schleicher), effected the overthrow of Chancellor Brüning, although in the midst of his policy of deflation he had put millions at the disposal of both, through rearmament and Osthilfe (agricultural subsidies to assist farming in the east). For the President, the agrarians, the army and industry (Hindenburg told Brüning at their last meeting, ‘The rule of the trade-union secretaries must cease!’), not the least of the factors necessitating Brüning’s dismissal was his inability to carry out the commission he had received from Hindenburg to remove Social Democracy from any share in government once and for all: to the political right, it seemed, on the contrary, that Brüning was dependent on SPD toleration.
From the very beginning, conservative Germany, especially the great estates and big business, welcomed Papen’s authoritarian state, aiming at permanently neutering the trade unions and the political labour movement, as the fulfilment of their long-cherished hopes – constitutionally, in economic policy and in the realm of social policy. Actually, this experiment sailed very close to civil war, with its unpredictable consequences, for the army alone was ultimately unable to provide a sufficiently stable base for an authoritarian policy against the left. This dilemma confronting the Papen government was in fact very much in the minds of representatives of the conservative ruling strata, of big business above all, but increasingly oppressive also to Papen himself (as demonstrated by his club speech of September 1932), namely the awareness that it was impossible for them to mobilize mass support for their own interests as a counterweight to industrial labour. Yet this is precisely what was offered them by Hitler, who, with the aid of anti-Semitism and an extreme nationalism, had welded together a mass party, albeit one formed principally from the crisis-victims of uprooted Mittelstand,87 lower middle-class and peasant elements. Before an accommodation could be reached,88 certain reservations on the conservative side had first to be eliminated. There was no disagreement on rejection of the Weimar democracy, but industry was still sceptical of the vulgar demagogy and, above all, the petty-bourgeois anti-capitalism of the Nazi Party. After 1930 Hitler tried to bridge these differences. Consciously pursuing a double strategy, he sought to make clear in intimate discussions with industry representatives that his assumption of office would mean no significant change in the existing free-enterprise system. At the same time he held fast to his party’s customary style of agitation, so as not to jeopardize his influence with the voting masses. This tactic was still in operation in the summer of 1932. While the party fought the Reichstag elections on the so-called Strasser programme, wooing both the lower middle classes and the unemployed with a pointedly anti-cyclical economic policy, Hitler, using the good offices of Schacht, entered into private relations with big business. After the July elections of 1932, on the advice of Schacht and presumably also in response to heavy-industry intervention, Hitler dropped the Strasser programme and then, in autumn 1932, gave the nod to industry by promulgating a new, pro-industry ‘economic construction programme’ that was to be binding on the whole party. This programme focused primarily on the tax cuts already initiated by Papen. In this way the man with a mass-following at his disposal (still; and this factor had to be exploited!), who had none the less virtually sacrificed the petty-bourgeois and anti-capitalist tendencies within his party, became increasingly attractive to heavy industry as a potential alliance partner. Lower middle-class anti-capitalism was replaced by a big-business production policy which was also the only avenue to the large-scale rearmament objective desired by both industry and Hitler. This process of accommodation received a further boost when in early December Hitler cold-shouldered Strasser – because of his sympathy for the ‘trade-union axis’ that Schleicher as chancellor had striven to construct as a political prop by promoting the Christian and the socialist trade unions – and Papen simultaneously began making overtures to Hitler. Thus the preconditions for the ‘bracketing concept’ were created. Both of them, Papen and Hitler, practised an authoritarian style of leadership, Papen and Hugenberg together functioning as guarantors of the economic interests of the bourgeoisie, while Hitler brought to the alliance the mass-base which the others lacked.
It is correct that it was not the electoral results which brought Hitler to power (the November 1932 elections were a setback for the Nazis) but the policy of the power elites, and that in January 1933 an important part in Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor was played by the Prussian Junkers,89 a ‘pre-industrial’ group living, like the President, under the cloud of an Osthilfe scandal. On the other hand, it is no less true that important business groups also participated (e.g., through petitions to Hindenburg, and via Papen and Schröder) in the process whereby power was bestowed on Hitler. To be sure, there were still major differences between business and agriculture in January 1933,90 and these ignited most readily on the extreme tariff demands of agriculture, which threatened to put at risk the entire German commercial-treaty system. Both sides nevertheless agreed that the NSDAP was a political force which must be won over; that a mere return to the ‘Papen system’ was out of the question; that Nazi participation in government was, in any case, the lesser evil vis-à-vis Schleicher’s attempt to draw the trade unions into the presidial state and so to preserve certain welfare-state elements in the Weimar political system, for the most influential farming and business groups had been persistently pursuing the abolition of these very elements since 1928. For this reason they had hailed as their own the Papen government which in September 1932 permitted a reduction of up to 50 per cent in contractual wage-rates, even if they were obliged to admit to the unpopularity of ‘such a blatant régime of economic and social privilege’, and even though their perennial call for the ‘strong man’ and the ‘leader’ finally led to Hitler. To adhere to this view is not to presuppose a homogeneity of all interests. Yet it is untenable to speak of this, as was asserted apologetically after 1945, as a question of saving the democratic state by the rational conservatives, as they liked to see themselves, ‘taming’ the irrational popular tribune through their numerical superiority in the cabinet. Rather did these groups seek to put the NSDAP chairman to work in the service of their social and economic, even their military and power-political interests and objectives. What united both sides, Hitler and the old elites, however much they diverged in motivation and political vocabulary, was their commitment to the national power-state at home and abroad, and it is this which made possible the collaboration between these dissimilar partners. In the organized subordination of the people to the holders of political power, and in bellicose assertiveness and expansion, there was a harking-back to the traditions of Imperial Germany (the day at Potsdam, for example), against which background the Weimar years necessarily appeared as a confused apparition of disorganization and weakness. With the destruction of the parties and trade unions and the creation of a totalitarian state-directed union in the ‘German Labour Front’, objectives were attained that Bismarck had striven in vain to realize.
Here, however, domestic and foreign policy objectives cannot be separated. Unquestionably, those business magnates who supported National Socialism before 1933 did so ‘precisely for the sake of the goals realized immediately following the change of government – elimination of the trade unions and the political labour movement, abolition of the parliamentary system of government, rearmament’ – all of which were intended to bring them and their businesses back onto the profit side of the ledger, ‘at the cost of a muzzled working class’.91 Yet with a ‘muzzled working class’ there was no longer any political force to offer serious resistance to those who would challenge the status quo in Europe and the world, whether by economic means, through the use of military force or even by means of war. In their desire for peace and disarmament, the German workers were just as isolated in the Weimar republic as they had been in Imperial Germany, and this despite the principled support which the SPD and the trade unions had given to the idea of national defence, for example, at the 1929 Magdeburg party congress.92 Yet it was their very rejection of an excessive rearmament policy and a revisionist and expansionist policy based on coercion that led to their political castration in Prussia, at the hands of the ‘reaction’ in the form of the Papen cabinet, as early as 20 July 1932.93
A line of continuity is also exhibited in German foreign policy after 1919. The meaning of what historians have all too innocently termed ‘revisionism’ was that the Reich, or the surviving elites controlling the levers of power, refused to recognize the new European order resulting from the war and that, by one means or another, these elites were determined to alter the status quo of 1919. The principal ‘revisionist’ forces were the Foreign Office, the army, the Commerce Ministry, the parties of the right and the economic and social groups associated with them. Their aim was the restoration of the German Great Power position in Europe and ultimately in the world, a goal also shared by Stresemann. This was not possible by military means in the decade after 1919. Stresemann therefore made deliberate diplomatic and political use of the economic opportunities open to the Reich and of cultural realities like the minorities question, and it was for this purpose that he sought German admission to the League of Nations. But his final objective of transforming the European status quo was incompatible with the intentions of his counterpart Briand, whose goal was the maintenance of the 1919 settlement. Stresemann’s refusal to enter into an eastern Locarno pact with Poland and Czechoslovakia reveals the offensive character of his policy. Even if he was unable, without completely discrediting his Locarno policy, to raise the question of an Anschluss with Austria,94 this was nevertheless among his long-term objectives. He publicly proclaimed his aim to achieve a Reich of 70 million Germans in December 1918, and again in January 1925, this time in strict secrecy, he reformulated it for the Reich cabinet as ‘the creation of a state whose political frontiers encompass all parts of the German people living within the identifiably German area of Central Europe and desiring incorporation in the Reich’. There would also be within this Central European state, he added, ‘members of foreign nationalities living beside our compatriots under German suzerainty’. While Briand sought ‘security’ for France, Stresemann was working for ‘equal rights’ as a mere stepping-stone to the restoration, even the enlargement of Germany’s old power position. The incompatibility in the French and German positions on the Continent became clear in the German reply to Briand’s memorandum on European union, which was conceived as a diplomatic move against a possible Austro-German union, i.e. against German hegemonial ambitions in eastern and south-eastern Europe. For this very reason the Briand proposal was rejected by the Brüning-Curtius government, which believed itself to be combating French hegemony.95
The Anschluss issue was of power-political importance in that Austria functioned as a German spring-board to south-eastern Europe and beyond into the Near East, as it had done prior to 1914 and during the First World War. Thus from 1925 onwards the foreign policy of the Reich clearly aimed at creating in east-central and south-eastern Europe a string of client states which, with the exception of the claim on Poland (the Polish corridor), were not to be subject to territorial annexations but were to be subjected to thoroughgoing German economic penetration. The Foreign Office regarded a ‘customs union’ as a particularly ‘appropriate means’ to this specific end ‘as it highlights the economic facts and obscures from outside observation the political ramifications’, which were envisaged as conducing to an ‘almost unlimited dependence on Germany’ (already achieved by 1925 in the case of Lithuania).96 With the 1931 Brüning-Schober attempt to create an Austro-German customs union – an attempt which had devastating economic as well as diplomatic repercussions – the Foreign Office also entertained hopes of being able to attract Czechoslovakia and Poland through the force of ‘economic necessity’, especially if the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) should also join this ‘commercial grouping’. The conclusion of preferential tariff agreements with Rumania and Hungary in 1931, so it was hoped in the Foreign Office and the Reich Ministry for Commerce, could be followed by similar treaties with Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.
The German economy, in collaboration with the German state, was active in the same direction. After the prohibition of Anschluss, German buying into Austrian business, which was particularly heavy in the iron and steel industry (Alpine Mining, for example), offered an avenue for re-entry into the Balkans. Efforts to create a ‘Mitteleuropa’ had intensified after 1927 in the reconstitution of the ‘Central European Economic Association’ (Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftstag),97 a direct successor organization of a similar institution that had existed during the Kaiserreich but now fell under the dominating influence of autarkic German big business, whose leading lights belonged to it, as did those of large-scale agriculture. The heads of the national government departments (Karl Ritter of the Foreign Office, Karl Posse of the Ministry for Commerce) gave powerful assistance to this economic expansion through their direct co-operation with the Central European Economic Association. Thus Posse, addressing this body on 19 May 1932, underlined the need to expand the German trading area and to ‘camouflage our ultimate political aims’ in the process.98
There were three variations on this theme. Carl Duisberg, the leading man of IG-Farben, recommended German expansion with rather than against France, so that the great financial strength of France might be exploited to the advantage of the chemical interests of both countries. What he had in mind, on 24 March 1931, was a customs association stretching from Bordeaux to Odessa.99 A leading spokesman of the Rhenish-Westphalian steel industry and general-secretary of the Long-name Association (Verein zur Wahrung der gemeinsamen wirtschaftlichen Interessen in Rheinland und Westfalen – Association for the Protection of Common Economic Interests in the Rhineland and Westphalia), Schlenker, urged a customs union between Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Bulgaria, to create, as he said (on 13 February 1931), a market of 100 million people. He gave this programme a strongly anti-Russian accent, directing it against the massive dumping of grain and manufactures practised by Russia, but it was also envisaged as an economic region united against North America, all of which made it identical with the ideas of 1914–18. Half a year later, on 17 June 1931, at a huge Berlin meeting of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists, the same man declared himself still more pointedly in favour of the creation of a great Mitteleuropa trading area as a front directed against Communist Russia.100 From 1933–4 until the eve of the Second World War, the Foreign Office and the Reich Ministry for Commerce pursued these plans uninterruptedly in their efforts to create an extended economic unit (Grossraumwirtschaft), now directed to a so-called ‘war economy’ (Wehrwirtschaft), one of its forms being bilateral treaties with all the Balkan states and Turkey.101
Although German economic interests, in their collaboration with government departments prior to 1933, were still primarily concerned with economic objectives in which political aims were more latent and which cannot be equated simply with military expansion, the power-political and bellicose element is abundantly clear in the case of the two conservative groups which, with Hitler, initiated the campaign against the Young Plan in late 1929, which joined the Harzburg front with him in October 1931 and formed a coalition government with him in January 1933- the DNVP and the ‘Stahlhelm’, which were both closely connected with the Protestant church. In them there lived on, in the tradition of the ‘Hakatists’, the 1914–18 annexationism and the post-1919 Free Corps struggles, an extreme hatred of Poland, which was regarded as the most dangerous enemy of the Reich. In 1928, for instance, the Stahlhelm publicly proclaimed, ‘with heart and soul we hate the present state … because it affords us no prospect of liberating our enslaved fatherland, of purging the German people of the war-guilt lie, of gaining the living-space we need in the east, of making the German people once again capable of defending itself.’ In this document Hitler’s aims are already anticipated, namely (1) the abolition of the parliamentary system of government, (2) the rearmament of the German people and the restoration of its self-defence capability, and (3) the conquest of living-space in the east. At the Stahlhelm congress in Breslau in 1931 a formal declaration of war was issued against Poland, causing enormous excitement there. Another example would be the party leader Hugenberg explaining in his 1931 public speeches that Germany, a ‘fenced-in people’ (Volk ohne Raum), a ‘people in chains’, required for its ‘vigorous race’ new areas for colonization in the east in addition to a colonial empire in Africa, that Germany needed ‘freedom and space’ which the German people could acquire only through self-help. A further example was the German Nationalist deputy von Freytagh-Loringhoven, addressing a 1932 conference of his party’s leaders, proclaiming the goal of first revising the nation’s frontiers, above all in the east, and creating a ‘Greater German Empire’, and then ‘gaining new land, new space for our people’ and ‘restoring it as a spiritually and physically healthy peasant ethnicity’. Here we have an ideology which is scarcely distinguishable from National Socialist doctrine, right up to the ‘blood and soil’ theory, and at the same time a sketch of the temporal launching of the action programme, as this was subsequently observed in common with the National Socialist coalition partner.102
Beyond the end of the war there survived in these conservative groups an intellectual tradition which saw nationalism and Christianity as being practically identical. As German revisionism began in the late twenties and with growing singlemindedness to pursue aims which could be achieved only by means of war, the attitude of the church to war necessarily gained in importance. In 1930 Otto Dibelius published his book, Is War Permissible according to the Will of God? And he answered his question by combining Luther, Hobbes and Social Darwinism:
From this spiritual outlook no resistance was to be expected to a policy which embraced war in realizing its goals.103 It is therefore understandable that both the Protestant and Catholic churches, the latter from a natural-law standpoint, did not hesitate, when war again became a reality in 1939, once again to urge the faithful to obey the authorities and to look for a divine purpose in all that transpired.
At the universities the historical profession remained bound to a nationalist and conservative tradition in the vast majority of cases. Certainly, the ‘republicans only by force of circumstances’ (Vernunftrepublikaner) like Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Troeltsch, who adopted a constitutional and social-policy position which was very close to that of the German Democratic Party, remained few and uninfluential. The veneration of a handful of outsiders (like Eckart Kehr, Arthur Rosenberg or Johannes Ziekusch today) should not be allowed to obscure the contours of the then dominant outlook. In the interpretation of Luther and Bismarck, as previously during the war with the jubilees of 1915 and 1917, a philosophically vindicated anti-Western line was consistently apparent. Thus Gerhard Ritter, for example, in his 1925 book on Luther, rejected the ‘modern world’, as he put it, ‘if one chooses to understand by that the spirit of Anglo-Saxon and Romance civilization’. Here one also finds, ‘however often a wave of West European thought seems to deluge our spiritual development … again and again one notices the German spirit offering resistance to such floods’. From such a source it was not possible to derive a positive relationship with the parliamentary-democratic political system, its toleration being the best one might hope for. Certain it is that the republic could not be defended from this position, even though the 1932 conservative ‘strong-state’ solution was dearer to the hearts of most of these historians than was the political form arrived at in 1933. The ‘Continental power-state’ was contrasted with the ‘insular welfare state’ and, measured against the former, the Weimar republic was judged to be an alien excrescence, something grafted onto German history, unserviceable for the revival of German power. By contrast, the new government of 1933 was perceived as marking the return of the strong state and was therefore viewed from the perspective of the ‘day of Potsdam’. Thus, three years later, in his biography of Frederick the Great, Gerhard Ritter depicted a line of continuity in these terms: ‘And finally the day of Potsdam, the solemn opening of the “Third Reich”, established an externally formal link with the proudest traditions of Old Prussian history’.104 This was the same spiritual tradition in which the army lived.
Beside the elites of agriculture and industry, the Foreign Office and the Commerce Ministry, the universities and the churches, the leading elements of the army through the 1920s and 1930s stood out as the strongest pillars of the traditional social structures and political ambitions of the Wilhelmine Germany of prewar and wartime vintage.
Thanks to the so-called Ebert-Groener pact of 9 November 1918 and the conditions that the army managed to impose on the government of the People’s Commissioners in November and December, the army had preserved a degree of independence which left it virtually untouched by political change.105 It was a ‘birth defect’ of the republic that it relied upon an officer corps, in the words of F. L. Carsten, ‘from which no one could expect that it would welcome or be converted to the new order’. Part of the problem, no doubt, was that the Social Democrats lacked the confidence to build up a republican army. Under Seeckt, whom Ebert appointed to head the army, the social composition of the officer corps was therefore confined to ‘a wafer-thin upper stratum’ consisting, for the most part, of General Staff officers with a large proportion of aristocrats. Living in the past, and for the future of the ‘nation’, this army maintained a cool and frequently hostile distance towards the existing state, towards the Weimar republic.106
Thus Joachim von Stülpnagel, head of the army section in the Troops Office, i.e. in the General Staff, outlined the Reichswehr dilemma as follows: it was charged with ‘protecting the constitution, of a sick system, in other words; and the preparation of a liberation struggle which the system obstructs’. In 1924, during an in-service lecture entitled ‘Thoughts on the War of the Future’, the same officer contemplated a renewed war with France as imperative to the survival and future development of the Reich, leaving open only the question of ‘when and under which preconditions’. In his well-known memorandum for the Foreign Office in 1926,107 and taking up Groener’s idea of 1919, the same Stülpnagel developed a two-stage plan which envisaged that ‘in the next stages of her political development Germany [would] aim solely at the recovery of her European position and only much later take up the struggle for recovery of her global position’, the latter ‘in conflict with the Anglo-American powers’. (In so arguing, he was in accord with the memoranda of Lieutenant General Wandel of the Prussian War Ministry and of Moltke and Ludendorff of the General Staff when in 1911 and 1912 they successfully championed a military priority over the hitherto favoured naval armaments requirements, while nevertheless giving whole-hearted approval to the navy’s ultimate function.108) Stülpnagel further calculated that what he envisaged as the next step, namely the re-annexation of the economically indispensable lost territories of 1919 and Anschluss with Austria, would lead to conflict with France and its allies in East-Central Europe, namely, Poland and Czechoslovakia. What this allegedly boiled down to was ‘stripping France of its domineering military power’. The contemplated route to this goal lay via the forum of the disarmament conference, which should also help to promote German rearmament, thereby eliminating the ‘anomalous’ limitations on German armaments. Planned army and navy manoeuvres in the years 1926 to 1929 covered the contingency of a two-front war with Poland and France.
If, following Seeckt’s dismissal, the Reichswehr leaders co-operated more closely with the civilian political leadership, this did not mean that the Reichswehr had moved to the left. On the contrary, this was no more than a tactical ploy to finance and provide political security for the rearmament programmes (illegal, according to the Versailles Treaty) begun by the Luther, Müller and Brüning governments and pushed through with the aid of a committee of three secretaries of state, and in deliberate deception of parliament.109 The Reichswehr thereby moved not one whit closer to becoming the guarantor of the republic and its democracy. Backed by their party’s defence committee, three leading men of the Social Democratic Party (Chancellor Müller, Interior Minister Severing and the Prussian Premier Braun) had indeed succeeded in reducing socialist reservations in regard to the Reichswehr and its rearmament. It is also true that the 1929 Magdeburg SPD party congress established ‘guidelines on defence policy and matters of national defence’. But this did not go far enough for a Reichswehr leadership that was unable to reach agreement with the Prussian government on the use of patriotic societies, including the SA and the Stahlhelm – both extreme enemies of the republic – for frontier defence, especially since, in the armoured cruisers question, the Social Democrats gave notice of the limits of their co-operativeness.110 Mistrust of SPD ‘pacifism’ therefore continued. In the best tradition of Seeckt, the officer corps and the generals consistently remained aloof from the Weimar state, unlike the ‘desk generals’ who seemed to be too closely associated with this state. In any event, as early as the Müller government (October 1928) the army, like the navy and the air force, was given its first Four-Year Rearmament Plan, for the period 1928 to 1932, which in 1932, under Brüning, was followed by a second such plan, to last until 1938. This development was possible only because there had already been developing since the early 1920s a close relationship between the Reichswehr and the industries concerned with supplying all three branches of the armed forces, through which relationship preconditions were created, at the technical, organizational and financial levels, for the starting-point of the mid and late 1920s.111
In the meantime, thanks to the literature of what Wette terms ‘soldierly nationalism’,112 diffused through such writings as those of the Jünger brothers, W. Beumelburg, E. von Salomon, Schauwecker, Oswald Spengler and Ludendorff, a militaristic conception of society had come to prevail. It conflicted with the reconciliation tendency of the Stresemann era and further exaggerated that predominance of the military factor in German public affairs which had already been instilled by tradition. Its function was to enhance the chances of victory in the next war. It was the thought of the so-called ‘reformers’ or ‘revolutionaries’ which deduced from the World War the theory of ‘total war’.113 This placed economic and propaganda warfare beside and on an equal footing with armed combat. Accordingly, the entire nation was to be earmarked for ‘defence duties’, and even the political leadership was to be subordinated to this task. For such a purpose, the system of parliamentary democracy appeared inappropriate, and the transition to the strong state, as prosecuted by Schleicher – he overthrew three chancellors – seemed indispensable. Together with German policy at the disarmament conference, which was used from first to last as a vehicle for German rearmament, all this led directly, in terms of military policy, to the Hitler era.
As indicated above, the incidence of the Hitler cabinet in 1933 would not have been possible without the collaboration of the conservative elites (and the concurrence of all the bourgeois parties in the ‘enabling law’, in which the attitude and motivation of the Centre Party are of particular importance) or without that of the Reichswehr. The Hitler-Blomberg agreement preceding Hitler’s clash with the SA, the revolutionary wing of the NSDAP, in June 1934 was again the precondition to Reichswehr acquiescence in a personal oath to Hitler after the death of Hindenburg and thus to the final consolidation of the Führer’s position, now also as head of state.114 This declaration of mutual loyalty found its echo in the two-pillars theory of party and armed forces (henceforth the ‘Wehrmacht’) as the twin foundations of the new state.115 The Reichswehr was grateful that the armed forces were freed of all obligation to intervene in the internal arena (the situation prevailing before, during and after the First World War) as this task was now the responsibility of the police, the SA and the SS, while group solidarity and ideological training were now matters for the party. As ‘arms bearer of the nation’, the Wehrmacht was therefore now in a position to prepare exclusively for its function in an external conflict. The personal oath to the commander in chief and the restoration of what the army regarded as ‘the honour of the uniform’ (Blomberg’s expression at the outbreak of war in 1939) created a bond between the new state and the army which, for the majority of the Wehrmacht, survived until 1945.
On the army’s side, this pact of 1933–4 had been entered into in order to uphold the traditional position of the officer corps in the state and society. As they understood it, this embraced at the very least a right to consultation, if not to enjoy the central influence in the political decision-making process. To this extent, the military leaders believed they had merely recovered a position they had occupied during the Kaiserreich but had seen neglected under Weimar and in need of remedy. Hence the support given by the army leaders to Hitler’s Great-Power policy based on an excessive arms build-up – because they believed their own position secure only in a powerful state governed by authoritarian means, and because the restoration of the German Great-Power position accorded with their own convictions.
During the first years of the Hitler government the army, driven by the energy of the Chief of the General Staff Beck, backed by Foreign Minister von Neurath (both belonging to the conservative elites), and in the closest collaboration with big business, prosecuted the rearmament programme more ruthlessly than Hitler himself (Deist speaks of ‘unbounded’ rearmament), who was obliged to move with outwardly greater caution, having recourse to speeches on peace. This was a rearmament programme which the army fashioned both qualitatively and quantitatively as an offensive weapon.
The navy leadership under Raeder, for whom the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement, with its 35 per cent settlement, was never more than a transitional solution, prepared for Germany’s admission to the ‘naval power club’ and opted for an anti-British policy at a time when Hitler was still angling for an alliance with Britain and even for its neutrality. Within the navy, the Tirpitz intellectual legacy persisted in unbroken continuity, as when it proposed (as in 1914) the conquest of the French Atlantic coast, of Holland and Denmark (to broaden the navy’s operational base), and the vigorous construction of a strong home fleet as well as an overseas fleet of four divisions to operate independently on the high seas. (Referring to such proposals emanating from the navy chief Carl, Deist speaks of unreality, hubris, quixotic fantasy and apocalyptic utopias, for these plans envisaged a struggle with half to two-thirds of the entire globe.116) Hitler personally began to push naval rearmament only when disappointed in his expectations of Britain.
In the course of the Four-Year Plan of 1936, the character of this rearmament on land, at sea and in the air produced a shift in the centre of gravity within big business away from the hitherto dominant coal, iron and steel group to the more recent chemical (IG-Farben) and electrical group117 – a transition which began in 1932 and continued beyond 1945. However this may be judged by economic and social historians, in the present context the important consideration is that such a growth in power would have been unthinkable without big business, notwithstanding the material and personnel limitations which soon became apparent. In 1939 the bulk of the German populace, despite the most intensive propaganda bombardment to which it was subject, remained unimpressed by talk of menace and ‘encirclement’. The plain fact is that there existed no enthusiasm for war, as there had been in 1914. The miseries of war were still too fresh a memory for the masses. Only after the rapid military successes in Poland and France was there a brief and temporary change in mood.
Vis-à-vis the First World War, there was no qualitative leap entailed in the military contest with Poland and France in 1939 and 1940. This was similarly planned to take the form of localized lightning wars (Blitzkriege) and lay well with the logic, or at least the risk factor, of revisionist policy. Even the 1941 campaign against Russia was planned and initiated as a Blitzkrieg. In this campaign, incidentally, as Hillgruber maintains, the army leaders found themselves in unison with Hitler to a degree unknown in previous campaigns. According to the latest research of the same author, the to this extent surprising successes in the French campaign of 1940 encouraged the armed forces command, and especially that of the army, to believe in the possibility of inflicting a decisive defeat on Russia within four to six weeks. The same author sees the source of this ‘frivolous’ optimism in the Prusso-German General Staff tradition, going back to Moltke and Schlieffen, of the primacy of operational thought, which discouraged ‘enemy assessment’ (realistic evaluation of the opposing forces and potentialities) and the related estimation of probable logistic or supply problems.118 Indeed, it is necessary to go further and say that this tradition neglected the issue of the long-term resources of both sides, as was then again demonstrated in the same year with the decision to declare war on America. Only the collapse of the campaign in front of Moscow led to a revival of the theories of ‘total war’, as crystallized out of the experience of four years of war from the battle of the Marne in November 1914 to November 1918. This revival, together with the ‘armament in depth’ achieved under Albert Speer,119 alone made it possible for Germany to wage war for a further three-and-a-half years.
It is noteworthy that the ‘campaign’ (this expression is itself a continuity, for the First World War was initially so described by the responsible actors) begun in June 1941 as a war of aggression – it was, in reality, a war of conquest – was converted in the retrospection of the participants (Halder, for example), in 1945 and subsequently, into a war for the defence of the Occident.
While the notion of race-war was but an exaggerated form of the pre-First World War propaganda slogan of the impending showdown between Slav and Teuton, a qualitative difference from the First World War is here apparent in the ideology of anti-Bolshevism (enabling the churches to sanction even this war), the hypertrophy of the ‘living-space’ idea, the treatment of the population in occupied territories as helots,120 and plans for the resettlement of 30 million people (Generalplan Ost).
Quite within the bounds of traditional power-politics, on the other hand, was the exploitation of Continental western Europe and, to an even greater extent, of eastern Europe. This was done in the name of the German war effort but equally within the larger framework of an extended economic unit designed both to complete the German national economy and to provide a counterweight to American economic might.121
A further continuity to the pre-First World War era was the hope of 1933 to 1939 that Britain might be kept out of the anticipated Continental war or at least persuaded, by means of peace offers, to abandon the war in the wake of the projected German victories. Britain, in other words, was to be induced to recognize the altered position of the Reich in Europe, especially in eastern Europe, and possibly compelled to agree also to a repartition of overseas possessions and markets, which expectations ran aground on Britain’s determination to win through. A similar continuity is apparent in the expectation, such as had existed from 1917 onwards, that Britain could be disabled by an unlimited U-boat war without the US intervening even indirectly. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, however, Germany declared war on the USA, thereby provoking direct US intervention against herself. This step was prompted not by a subconscious urge to self-destruction on the part of Hitler; it was rooted in a renewed underestimation of America. As in 1918, the weight of US economic power, which was not to be counterbalanced by any European war economy, and soon that of America’s military power as well (based on the most modern military technology), together with the protracted and costly resistance of the Soviet Union, finally also decided the Second World War against Germany.