Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

A direct challenge to the republic from the Right came in March 1920, when Captain Ehrhardt’s Brigade of the Free Corps marched into Berlin, forced the government to flee to Dresden, and set up a government under Wolfgang Kapp, an ultranationalist. Kapp was supported by the army commander in the Berlin area, Baron Walther von Lüttwitz, who became Reichswehr minister in Kapp’s government. Since General Hans von Seeckt, chief of staff, refused to support the legal government, it was helpless, and was saved only by a general strike of the workers in Berlin and a great proletarian rising in the industrial regions of western Germany. The Kapp government was unable to function, and collapsed, while the army proceeded to violate the territorial disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles by invading the Ruhr in order to crush the workers’ uprising in that area. Seeckt was rewarded for his noncooperation by being appointed commander in chief in May 1920.

As a consequence of these disturbances, the general election of July 1920 went against the “Weimar Coalition.” A new government came in which was completely middle-class in its alignment, the Socialists of the Weimar Coalition being replaced by the party of big business, the German People’s Party. Noske was replaced as Reichswehr minister by Otto Gessler, a willing tool of the Officers’ Corps. Gessler, who held this critical position from March 1920 to January 1928, made no effort to subject the army to democratic, or even civilian, control, but cooperated in every way with Seeckt’s secret efforts to evade the disarmament provisions of the peace treaties. German armaments factories were moved to Turkey, Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. German officers were drilled in prohibited weapons in Russia and China. Inside Germany, secret armaments were prepared on a considerable scale, and troops in excess of the treaty limits were organized in a “Black Reichswehr” which was supported by secret funds of the regular Reichswehr. The Reichstag had no control over either organization. When the Western Powers in 1920 demanded that the Free Corps be disbanded, these groups went underground and formed a parallel organization to the Black Reichswehr, being supplied with protection, funds, information, and arms from the Reichswehr and Conservatives. In return the Free Corps engaged in large-scale conspiracy and murder on behalf of the Conservatives. According to The Times of London, the Free Corps murdered four hundred victims of the Left and Center in one year.

The middle-class Cabinet of Konstantin Fehrenbach resigned on May 4, 1921 and allowed the Weimar Coalition of Socialists, Democrats, and Center to take office to receive the reparations ultimatum of the Allied governments on May 5th. Thus, the democratic regime was further discredited in the eyes of Germans as an instrument of weakness, hardship, and shame. As soon as the job was done, the Socialists were replaced by the People’s Party, and the Wirth Cabinet was succeeded by a purely middle-class government under Wilhelm Cuno, general manager of the Hamburg-American Steamship Line. It was this government which “managed” the hyperinflation of 1923 and the passive resistance against the French forces in the Ruhr. The inflation, which was a great benefit to the Quartet, destroyed the economic position of the middle classes and lower middle classes and permanently alienated them from the republic. The Cuno government was ended by a deal between Stresemann and the Socialists. The former, on behalf of the People’s Party, which had hitherto been resolutely anti-republican, accepted the republic; the Socialists agreed to support a Stresemann Cabinet; and a broad coalition was formed for a policy of fulfillment of the Treaty of Versailles. This ended the Period of Turmoil (August 1923).

The Period of Fulfillment (192 3-1930) is associated with the name of Gustav Stresemann, who was in every Cabinet until his death in October 1929. A reactionary Pan-German and economic imperialist in the period before 1919, Stresemann was always a supporter of the Quartet, and the chief creator of the German People’s Party, the party of heavy industry. In 1923, while still keeping his previous convictions, he decided that it would be good policy to reverse them publicly and adopt a program of support for the republic and fulfillment of treaty obligations. He did this because he realized that Germany was too weak to do anything else and that she could get stronger only by obtaining release from the more stringent treaty restrictions, by foreign loans from sympathetic British and American financiers, and by secret consolidation of the Quartet. All these things could be achieved more easily by a policy of fulfillment than by a policy of resistance like Cuno’s.

The Bavarian government of the Right, which had been installed under Gustav von Kahr in 1921, refused to accept Stresemann’s decision to readmit the Socialists to the Reich government in Berlin. Instead, Kahr assumed dictatorial powers with the title of state commissioner of Bavaria. In reply the Stresemann Cabinet invested the executive power of the Reich in the Reichswehr minister, an act which had the effect of making von Seeckt the ruler of Germany. In terror of a rightist coup d’etat {putsch), the Communist International decided to allow the German Communist Party to cooperate with the Socialists in an anti-Right front within the parliamentary regime. This was done at once in the states of Saxony and Thuringia. At this the Reichswehr commander in Bavaria, General Otto von Lossow, shifted his allegiance from Seeckt to Kahr. Stresemann-Seeckt in Berlin faced Kahr-Lossow in Munich with the “Red” governments of Saxony and Thuringia in between. The Reichswehr chiefly obeyed Berlin, while the Black Reichswehr and underground Free Corps (especially Ehrhardt’s and Rossbach’s) obeyed Munich. Kahr-Lossow, with the support of Hitler and Ludendorff, planned to invade Saxony and Thuringia, overthrow the Red governments on the pretext of suppressing Bolshevism, and then continue northward to overthrow the central government in Berlin. The Reich government headed this plot off by an illegal act: The Reichswehr forces of Seeckt overthrew the constitutional Red governments of Saxony and Thuringia to anticipate Bavaria. As a result, Lossow and Kahr gave up the plans for revolt, while Hitler and Ludendorff refused to do so. By the “Beer-Hall” Putsch of November 8, 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff tried to abduct Kahr and Lossow and force them to continue the revolt. They were overcome in a blast of gunfire. Kahr, Lossow, and Ludendorff were never punished; Hermann Göring fled the country; Hitler and Rudolf Hess were given living quarters in a fortress for a year, profiting by the occasion to write the famous volume Mein Kampf.

In order to deal with the economic crisis and the inflation, Stresemann’s government was granted dictatorial powers overriding all constitutional guarantees, except that the Socialists won a promise not to touch the eight-hour day or the social-insurance system. In this way the inflation was curbed, and a new monetary system was established; incidentally, the eight-hour day was abolished by decree (1923). A reparations agreement (the Dawes Plan) was made with the Allied governments, and the Ruhr was successfully evacuated. In the course of these events the Social Democrats abandoned the Stresemann government in protest at its illegal suppression of the Red government of Saxony, but the Stresemann program continued with the support of the parties of the Center and Right, including, for the first time, the support of the anti-Republican Nationalists. Indeed, the Nationalists with three or four seats in the Cabinet in 1926-1928 were the dominant force in the government, although they continued to protest in public against the policy of fulfillment, and Stresemann continued to pretend that his administration of that policy exposed him to imminent danger of assassination at the hands of the Right extremists.