The Coming of the Third Reich (16 page)

The most important of the veterans’ associations fully shared these resentments and campaigned vigorously for a return to the old Imperial system under which they had fought. Known as the ‘Steel Helmets: League of Front-Soldiers’, it was founded on 13 November 1918 by Franz Seldte, the owner of a small soda-water factory in Magdeburg. Born in 1882, Seldte had been an active member of a student duelling corps before he fought on the Western Front, where he was decorated for bravery. At an early public meeting, when members of the audience doubted his commitment to the nationalist cause, Seldte demonstratively waved at them the stump of his left arm, which he had lost at the Battle of the Somme. Instinctively cautious and conservative, he preferred to emphasize the Steel Helmets’ primary function as a source of financial support for old soldiers fallen on hard times. He easily fell under the influence of stronger characters, particularly those whose principles were firmer than his own. One such figure was his fellow-leader of the Steel Helmets, Theodor Duesterberg, another ex-army officer who had fought on the Western Front before taking on a series of staff jobs, particularly liaising with allied powers such as Turkey and Hungary. Duesterberg, born in 1875, had been educated in an army cadet school and was a Prussian officer in the classic mould, obsessed with discipline and order, inflexible and unbending in his political views and, like Seldte, completely incapable of adjusting to a world without the Kaiser. Both men therefore believed that the Steel Helmets should be ‘above politics’. But this meant in practice that they wanted to overcome party divisions and restore the patriotic spirit of 1914. The organization’s 1927 Berlin manifesto declared: ‘The Steel Helmets proclaim the battle against all softness and cowardice, which seek to weaken and destroy the consciousness of honour of the German people through renunciation of the right of defence and will to defence.’ It denounced the Treaty of Versailles and demanded its abrogation, it wanted the restoration of the black-white-red national flag of the Bismarckian Reich, and it ascribed the economic problems of Germany to ‘the deficiency in living-space and the territory in which to work’. In order to implement this programme, strong leadership was necessary. The spirit of comradeship born in the war had to provide the basis for a national unity that would overcome present party differences. By the mid- 1920s the Steel Helmets boasted some 300,000 members. They were a formidable and decidedly militaristic presence on the streets when they held their marches and rallies; in 1927, indeed, no fewer than 132,000 members in military uniforms took part in a march-past in Berlin as a demonstration of their loyalty to the old order.
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For most Germans, as for the Steel Helmets, the trauma of the First World War, and above all the shock of the unexpected defeat, refused to be healed. When Germans referred to ‘peacetime’ after 1918, it was not to the era in which they were actually living, but to the period before the Great War had begun. Germany failed to make the transition from wartime back to peacetime after 1918. Instead, it remained on a continued war footing; at war with itself, and at war with the rest of the world, as the shock of the Treaty of Versailles united virtually every part of the political spectrum in a grim determination to overthrow its central provisions, restore the lost territories, end the payment of reparations and re-establish Germany as the dominant power in Central Europe once more.
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Military models of conduct had been widespread in German society and culture before 1914; but after the war they became all-pervasive; the language of politics was permeated by metaphors of warfare, the other party was an enemy to be smashed, and struggle, terror and violence became widely accepted as legitimate weapons in the political struggle. Uniforms were everywhere. Politics, to reverse a famous dictum of the early nineteenth-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, became war pursued by other means.
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The First World War legitimized violence to a degree that not even Bismarck’s wars of unification in 1864-70 had been able to do. Before the war, Germans even of widely differing and bitterly opposed political beliefs had been able to discuss their differences without resorting to violence.
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After 1918, however, things were entirely different. The changed climate could already be observed in parliamentary proceedings. These had remained relatively decorous under the Empire, but after 1918 they degenerated all too often into unseemly shouting matches, with each side showing open contempt for the other, and the chair unable to keep order. Far worse, however, was the situation on the streets, where all sides organized armed squads of thugs, fights and brawls became commonplace, and beatings-up and assassinations were widely used. Those who carried out these acts of violence were not only former soldiers, but also included men in their late teens and twenties who had been too young to fight in the war themselves and for whom civil violence became a way of legitimizing themselves in the face of the powerful myth of the older generation of front-soldiers.
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Not untypical was the experience of the young Raimund Pretzel, child of a well-to-do senior civil servant, who remembered later that he and his schoolfriends played war games all the time from 1914 to 1918, followed battle reports with avid interest, and with his entire generation ‘experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that’, he added in the 1930s,‘has now become the underlying vision of Nazism.’
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War, armed conflict, violence and death were often for them abstract concepts, killing something they had read about and had processed in their adolescent minds under the influence of a propaganda that presented it as a heroic, necessary, patriotic act.
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Before long, political parties associated themselves with armed and uniformed squads, paramilitary troops whose task it was to provide guards at meetings, impress the public by marching in military order through the streets, and to intimidate, beat up and on occasion kill members of the paramilitary units associated with other political parties. The relationship between the politicians and the paramilitaries was often fraught with tension, and paramilitary organizations always maintained a greater or lesser degree of autonomy; still, their political colouring was usually clear enough. The Steel Helmets, ostensibly just a veterans’ association, left no doubt about their paramilitary functions when they paraded through the streets or engaged in brawls with rival groups. Their affinities with the hard right became closer from the middle of the 1920s, when they took a more radical stance, banning Jews from membership despite the fact that the organization was intended to provide for all ex-front-soldiers, and there were plenty of Jewish veterans who needed its support as much as anyone else did. The Nationalists also founded their own ‘Fighting Leagues’ which they had a better chance of bending to their purpose than they did with the confused and divided Steel Helmets. In 1924 the Social Democrats took a leading part in founding the Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold, signifying their allegiance to the Republic by incorporating the colours of its flag into their title, though in alliance with the far more ambivalent concept of the Reich; and the Communists set up the Red Front-Fighters’ League, where the term ‘Red Front’ itself was a telling incorporation of a military metaphor into the political struggle.
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On the far right there were other, smaller ‘Combat Leagues’, shading off into illegal, conspiratorial groups such as the ‘Organization Escherich’, closely associated with the Steel Helmets, and the ‘Organization Consul’, which belonged to a murky world of political assassination and revenge killings. Bands of uniformed men marching through the streets and clashing with each other in brutally physical encounters became a commonplace sight in the Weimar Republic, adding to the general atmosphere of violence and aggression in political life.
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The German Revolution of 1918-19 did not resolve the conflicts that had been boiling up in the country in the final phase of the war. Few were entirely satisfied with the Revolution’s results. On the extreme left, revolutionaries led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg saw in the events of November 1918 the opportunity to create a socialist state run by the workers’ and soldiers’ councils that had sprung up all over the country as the old Imperial system disintegrated. With the model of Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution in Russia before their eyes, they pressed on with plans for a second revolution to complete their work. For their part, the mainstream Social Democrats feared that the revolutionaries might institute the kind of ‘red terror’ that was now taking place in Russia. Afraid for their lives, and conscious of the need to prevent the country from falling into complete anarchy, they sanctioned the recruitment of heavily armed paramilitary bands consisting of a mixture of war veterans and younger men, and known as the Free Corps, to put down any further revolutionary uprisings.

In the early months of 1919, when the extreme left staged a poorly organized uprising in Berlin, the Free Corps, egged on by the mainstream Social Democrats, reacted with unprecedented violence and brutality. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered, and revolutionaries were mown down or summarily executed in a number of German cities where they had taken control or appeared to be a threat. These events left a permanent legacy of bitterness and hatred on the political left, made worse by another major outbreak of political violence in the spring of 1920. A Red Army of workers, initially formed by left-wing Social Democrats and Communists to defend civil liberties in the industrial region of the Ruhr in the face of an attempted right-wing coup in Berlin, began to advance more radical political demands. Once the attempted coup had been defeated by a general strike, the Red Army was put down by Free Corps units, backed by the mainstream Social Democrats and supported by the regular army, in what amounted in effect to a regional civil war. Well over a thousand members of the Red Army were slaughtered, most of them prisoners ‘shot while trying to escape’.
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These events doomed any kind of co-operation between Social Democrats and Communists to failure from the outset. Mutual fear, mutual recriminations and mutual hatred between the two parties far outweighed any potential purpose they might have had in common. The legacy of the 1918 Revolution was scarcely less ominous on the right. Extreme violence against the left had been legitimized, if not encouraged, by the moderate Social Democrats; but this in no way exempted them from being a target themselves, as the Free Corps now turned on their masters. Many of the Free Corps leaders were former army officers whose belief in the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth was unshakeable. The depth of the Free Corps’ hatred of the Revolution and its supporters was almost without limit. The language of their propaganda, their memoirs, their fictional representations of the military actions they took part in, breathed a rabid spirit of aggression and revenge, often bordering on the pathological. The ‘reds‘, they believed, were an inhuman mass, like a pack of rats, a poisonous flood pouring over Germany, requiring measures of extreme violence if it was to be held in check.
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Their feelings were shared to a greater or lesser extent by large numbers of regular officers, and by the vast majority of right-wing politicians. Scores of young students and others who had missed the war now flocked to their banner. For these people, socialists and democrats of any hue were no better than traitors—the ‘November criminals’ or ‘November traitors’ as they were soon dubbed, the men who had first stabbed the army in the back, then in November 1918 committed the double crime of overthrowing the Kaiser and signing the Armistice. For some democratic politicians, indeed, signing the Treaty of Versailles was tantamount to signing their own death warrant, as Free Corps members formed secret assassination squads to root out and kill those they regarded as traitors to the nation, including the democratic politician Walther Rathenau, the leading socialist Hugo Haase, and the prominent Centre Party deputy Matthias Erzberger.
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Political violence reached fresh heights in 1923, a year marked not only by the bloody suppression of an abortive Communist uprising in Hamburg but also by gun battles between rival political groups in Munich and armed clashes involving French-backed separatists in the Rhineland. In the early 1920S, extreme leftists such as Karl Plättner and Max Hölz carried out campaigns of armed robbery and ‘expropriation’ that ended only when they were arrested and sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment.
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It was in this atmosphere of national trauma, political extremism, violent conflict and revolutionary upheaval that Nazism was born. Most of the elements that went into its eclectic ideology were already current in Germany before 1914 and had become even more familiar to the public during the war. The dramatic collapse of Germany into political chaos towards the end of 1918, a chaos that endured for several years after the war, provided the spur to translate extreme ideas into violent action. The heady mixture of hatred, fear and ambition that had intoxicated a small number of Pan-German extremists suddenly gained a crucial extra element: the willingness, determination even, to use physical force. National humiliation, the collapse of the Bismarckian Empire, the triumph of Social Democracy, the threat of Communism, all this seemed to some to justify the use of violence and murder to implement the measures which Pan-Germans, antisemites, eugenicists and ultra-nationalists had been advocating since before the turn of the century, if the German nation was ever to recover.