Nazi Germany: History in an Hour. Rupert Colley

War. Germany had not been permitted to take part in the talks and was too weak, politically and militarily, to resist the dictated terms set by the representatives of thirty-two nations, led by the Allied powers – the US, Britain, France and Italy.

      The terms were harsh and not for negotiation. Germany lost 13 per cent of her territory, which meant 12 per cent of Germans now lived in a foreign country, and Germany’s colonial possessions were redistributed among the other colonial powers. The German Rhineland, on the border with France, was to be demilitarized (stripped of an armed presence) and placed under Allied control until 1935. The small but industrially important Saar region was to be governed by Britain and France for fifteen years, and its coal exported to France in recompense for the French coal mines destroyed by Germany during the war. After fifteen years a plebiscite (or referendum) of the Saar population would decide its future.

      Most of West Prussia was given to Poland. The German city of Danzig (modern-day Gdansk) was made a ‘free’ city so that Poland could have use of a port not situated in Germany. To give Poland access to Danzig, they were given a strip of land, the ‘Polish Corridor’, through Prussia, thereby cutting East Prussia off from the rest of Germany.

      Militarily, Germany’s army was to be limited to a token 100,000 men, and its navy to 15,000, plus a ban on conscription. She was not permitted to have an air force, nor tanks, and was prohibited from producing or importing weaponry.

      The payment of reparations was for ‘compensation for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allied powers and their property’. It was to include raw material, such as the coal from the Saar and Ruhr regions. Two years later, in 1921, the cost of reparations was announced – £6.6 billion, which German economists calculated would take until 1988 to pay. The figure shocked and angered Germans who conveniently forgot that Germany had demanded an even greater sum from a defeated France following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

      But it was the humiliating clause that forced Germany into accepting responsibility for the war and for the damage to the civilian populations of the Allies that rankled most with the public at home.

      The treaty satisfied no one. Germany was outraged. Britain thought it too harsh, believing an economically weak Germany would be detrimental to all Europe; the US, also considering it harsh, refused to ratify the treaty or to join the newly formed League of Nations; and the French felt it not harsh enough. It was they, the French argued, who had suffered most during the war. The French public were so dissatisfied with their president, Clemenceau, that they voted him out six months later, replacing him with Ferdinand Foch who, with sharp intuition, said, ‘This is not peace, this is an armistice for twenty years.’

      The Weimar government, although democratically elected, was deemed responsible for Germany’s humiliation, and criticized by all sides for its weakness in standing up to the Allies. In March 1920 the Freikorps, led by Wolfgang Kapp, tried to seize power in Berlin but the coup, unable to gain the army’s support, failed.

       DAP: Member 555

      The Kapp Putsch, as it became known, may have failed but it illustrated the feeling of anger among the extreme right in Germany. Among the many small political parties was the German Workers’ Party or, to use its German abbreviation, DAP, set up in 1919 by 35-year-old Munich locksmith, Anton Drexler. The DAP, a far-right party that aimed at appealing to the workers, consisted of only about fifty members but, to give the impression of greater numbers, began their membership cards at number five hundred.

      It was to a meeting of this party that in September 1919 Adolf Hitler, at this stage being groomed by the army as a political instructor, was sent to observe and speak. The beer hall meeting consisted of only about twenty attendees but Hitler’s speech so impressed Drexler that he was invited to join the party. With membership number 555, although he later claimed in Mein Kampf that he was the seventh member, he signed his name as ‘Hittler’.

      NSDAP: Nationalism and Socialism under One Roof

      Hitler’s oratory and leadership skills were evident and he soon took over from Drexler as the DAP’s leader. On 24 February 1920, still maintaining its peculiar mix of right extremism and socialist ideals, the party lengthened its name to the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP. Now boasting 3,000 members, the Nazi Party was born. Two months later Hitler resigned from the army to concentrate full time on expanding his party.

      Corporal Hitler

      Born in 1889 in Austria, Hitler spent much of his youth in Vienna, living in cheap accommodation, frequenting coffee houses and trying to sell his paintings. Art was his passion and his failure to secure a place at art school plunged him into depression. Resentment of the Jew was rife in the city and Hitler absorbed this anti-Semitism and, like many of his contemporaries, believed the Jew to be set apart from ‘the rest of humanity’.

      At the outbreak of the First World War Hitler was in Munich and, having managed to avoid conscription into the Austrian army, signed up to a Bavarian regiment within the German army. He served as a messenger and did so with distinction throughout the war. Having no aspirations for promotion, he finished the war as a corporal having twice been awarded the Iron Cross and twice wounded – the second time in October 1918 when he was temporarily blinded by mustard gas.

       Adolf Hitler (right) during the First World War

      It was during his recuperation that the armistice was signed, leaving Hitler and many other Germans embittered. Germany had won the war in the east, and following the ‘Spring Offensive’ of 1918, looked well placed to win it in the west. But a strike of German munitions workers towards the end of the war, believed to have been organized by Jews, disrupted the supply of arms and the front-line soldier suffered as a consequence. The government had accepted defeat and it was they, not the soldier, who had lost Germany the war. The signing seven months later of the Treaty of Versailles confirmed this sense of betrayal, the feeling that the German people had been ‘stabbed in the back’.

      As the new leader of the fledging Nazi Party, Hitler met Hermann Göring and Rudolph Hess, two men who would serve him well over the next twenty years, and Ernst Röhm (pictured with Hitler), a tough ex-soldier and former member of the Freikorps, who went on to form the Nazi Storm Troopers (or SA).

       Hitler and Röhm, 1933

       Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1982-159-21A / Unknown / CC-BY-SA

       The Nazi Manifesto: A Thousand Years

      In February 1920 the party drew up its manifesto which, among its twenty-five points, demanded the union of all Germans into a greater Germany, and called for an expansion of living space to accommodate the growth of the German race. This space, Lebensraum, was to be found in the east at the expense of the Slavic races, who would, according to the party, be simply evicted.

      The manifesto rejected the Treaty of Versailles – Germany needed to find her pride again and to rid the nation of the traitors who had so meekly accepted the peace of 1919. Hitler would lead such a Germany, a Third Reich that would reign for a thousand years.

      The Jew, the source of German humiliation, was not and could not, stated the manifesto, be German. The manifesto maintained within its nationalist and anti-Semitic principles ones that were socialist in nature, designed to broaden its appeal to the German workers.

      Nazism relied on the use of symbols – the swastika, which although far from new, was already identified with the Nazis, and, fifteen years later, in September 1935, was officially adopted as the national flag of Germany alongside a black, red and white tricolour. In September 1935, the flag of the Nazi Party was established as the. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote about the colours of the flag: ‘In the red we see the social idea of the movement; in the white, the nationalist