Hitler’s Terror Weapons: The Price of Vengeance. Richard Overy

this organisation was in turn forbidden, Rossbach changed his command into an “Agricultural Workers Union”, only to be declared illegal a week later. However he boasted that he could found organisations more quickly than the authorities could suppress them. A little later Rossbach entered the Nazi Party and became its delegate in Mecklenburg where he organised semi – military physical training societies. Arrested a second time, he was nevertheless able to get to Munich and take part in the Putsch of 9^th November 1923. After its failure he sought refuge in Vienna, and many of his Corps became party members.’²³

      During the disorders in Berlin, Ebert’s government had been forced to quit the city for Weimar, some 150 miles away, and the German republic of 1918–1933 has ever after been known to history as the ‘Weimar Republic’. This republic, powerless since the armistice, had now to bear the burden of the Treaty of Versailles which the victorious allies imposed upon it. The American President Wilson’s idealistic 14 points, which the hapless Germans had presumed would form the basis of the treaty, were brushed aside as far as Germany was concerned, and the disarmed republic had now to accept the cup of humiliation and defeat. There were no negotiations. Alsace Lorraine was returned to France, and German minorities in the East were to be ruled by the newly independent Czechs, Poles and Lithuanians. The fleet was lost, the army reduced to 100,000 men. The Rhineland was ‘demilitarised’, heavy artillery and military aeroplanes were forbidden. Of her arable land 15% and of her iron ore deposits 75%, were gone, her steel capacity was reduced by 38%, pig iron by 44%, coal by 18%. She was branded with the guilt of the war. As reparation, she was forced to pay to the victorious allies 132 billion gold marks, equivalent in 1918 rates to some 33 billion dollars. In addition, the war had cost the Germans some 150 billion reichsmarks, nearly all of it borrowed.²⁴

      All this added to the bitterness, not only towards the allies, but more importantly, of German for German. Disorder, faction, the occupation of the Ruhr by the French, a catastrophic inflation, a Soviet Republic in Bavaria and, between 1919 and 1922, 376 political murders, (356 by rightist extremists) told of the ruin of Germany. Ten years earlier, in 1912, Rupert Brooke, writing in Berlin, had parodied the orderliness of the German people²⁵; now chaos and paramilitary hooliganism stalked the streets.

      The philosophical legacy of war for defeated Germany was thus essentially different from that in the west, particularly in Britain. Among the victors it had become ‘the war to end war.’ The generals were regarded as incompetent butchers, blundering fools, who were careless of the lives of their soldiers and indifferent to their suffering.

      Flag-waving patriotism seemed to have been sullied by the conflict. The Roman poet’s contention, that it was fitting and proper to die for your country, was now called ‘the old lie.’ Socialist ideas gained ground, in which the true nature of man was held to be good and noble, but was everywhere sullied by a system of oppression and exploitation, by greed, militarism, elitism, jingoistic nationalism and racialism – remove the restraints, take men and women into the daylight, and they would rise to new heights.

      In Germany it was the misfortune of these ideas almost to triumph before the end of the war, and therefore to be seen in some circles as not the solution to war, but the cause of the defeat and humiliation. This made the considerable gulf between left and right unbridgeable, particularly as the extreme right began to regard the leadership and focus of the left as being intrinsically different, inveterate, sub-human and degenerate.

      ‘If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world,’ wrote Hitler, ‘his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity.’²⁶ These, however, had supposedly been Hitler’s thoughts before the war, although here expressed as a rallying call to the Nazi party some six years afterwards. Jewish thinkers had indeed been at the forefront of left wing activism and philosophy, from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels through to the soviet revolutions in Russia, Hungary and the Soviet Republic of Bavaria. That Jewish people were also at the forefront of the very capitalism that the revolutionaries sought to destroy was not seen by Hitler as the proof of individualism and disunity, or as evidence that personal considerations were paramount over ‘national’ with most human activity, but as further evidence of a concerted and world wide Jewish plot, in which the ‘lesser’ races, such as the Slavs were, in a cosmopolitan equality, manipulated in order to corrupt the purity of the ‘German blood.’ This, however, remained for years the extreme doctrine of an embittered fanatic, head of a party which, nationally, could attract no more than some 6% of the electorate in 1924, after defeat, inflation, revolution, French invasion and civil bloodshed had heated political feelings to fever pitch.

      Understandably, both victors and vanquished felt reverentially towards the ‘fallen’, those who had died in the service of their country. In the highest circles of church and state, it was held that they had done so as a sacrifice – their lives had been ‘given’ to their native land – and the easy presumption, which perhaps assuaged the grief or guilt of the survivors, became adapted to the prevailing spirit of the times. In the west, the belief that it had been ‘the war to end war’ introduced the idea that the fallen had given their lives for peace. Ten million separate and individual reasons for death in battle were easily and understandably collated by horror, grief, religion and politics into a common sacrifice.

      In Germany, the power which had almost single handedly defied the other great powers for four years, which had, indeed, come close to defeating them, whose brave, well led and disciplined armies and fleets had won the respect, even admiration, of their foes, the soldiers could hardly be said to have sacrificed themselves for peace. They had only just been baulked of outright victory. The surviving front soldiers must have had great difficulty coming to terms with their apparently useless suffering, and the loss of their comrades. The honoured dead and their devotion to Germany were a constant source of anger and recrimination among the large and menacing organisations of the right wing. Perhaps guilt, or fear, now gripped those soldiers who had deserted, or formed soldiers councils, or who had called their more devoted comrades ‘blacklegs’ for continuing the war. What could be more natural than to join in the accusations, particularly when the Jews and the Communists could be blamed as the ultimate villains. Indeed, the S.A. members themselves, ‘desperadoes in search of a pension’, were often recruited wholesale from the left wing parties.

      There was a profound sense of destiny abroad in Germany, a feeling that history had reached one of its great climacterics, in which the future of races and nations would be decided, as in the great ‘wandering of the peoples’ that had followed the collapse of the Roman empire in the west, when the Wagnerian gods and heroes so beloved of Hitler had hammered out the destinies of Europe. Now the west was felt to be in a similar state of collapse, and heading towards an abyss, from which the German people, united, regenerated in a new kind of disciplined, authoritarian state, would advance to the leadership of a new European order. The conflict of capitalism and Marxism, the effete doctrines of democracy, internationalism and liberalism, would be swept away by a new corporate German Reich united in the Volksgemeinschaft, the peoples’ community. The German race, the leaders of the great aryan ‘people’²⁷, purified and ennobled for the continuous Darwinian struggle for existence, would stand at the portals of a new age.

      These ideas, although not in such an extreme form, had been common in Europe at the turn of the century. The northern Europeans, amazed at their own advances in the arts and sciences, in politics and in war, in industry and in medicine had, not surprisingly, attributed this in part to their innate superiority. Leading figures in England and America had descried the future greatness of their own nations in the forests of Germany, whence the Anglo Saxon people had emerged to colonise England and, eventually, to rule the globe either directly or by the example of their free institutions. This Anglo-Saxonism²⁸, to which the Scottish, Irish and Welsh peoples were by a necessary generosity admitted, was expanded to embrace the ‘English speaking peoples’, since a too narrow interpretation would have excluded the majority of the people of the United