days and had indulged in playground games of warfare were readily recruited to nationalistic violence. And the army and the Free Corps took the lead in suppressing left-wing uprisings.
The first four years of the fledgling Republic were characterized by a high level of political violence, with frequent political assassinations, coup attempts, strikes and demonstrations, these last being put down with considerable force. In May 1919, Free Corps units brutally suppressed a second attempt at establishing a Bavarian Republic, following the assassination of Kurt Eisner, with around a thousand deaths. An attempted national right-wing putsch in March 1920, with a march on Berlin led by the East Prussian civil servant, monarchist and nationalist Wolfgang Kapp and Infantry General Freiherr von Lüttwitz, with the support of the Free Corps unit led by Hermann Erhardt, caused the flight of the government. In the end, it lasted only a couple of days, but it was brought down only by a general strike called by the SPD, after the army had refused to fire on the putschist troops. Even so, the Kapp putsch assisted right-wing causes elsewhere. A military-supported coup in Bavaria installed a right-wing regime under Gustav Ritter von Kahr, turning Bavaria into a haven in which small nationalist (or völkisch) groups could safely organize and foment unrest against democracy. One among many agitators at this time, who began to stand out through his growing abilities in speech-making and rabble-rousing, was Adolf Hitler, demobilized and disorientated but finding a new role for himself on these right-wing fringes. But the time was not yet ripe, even if the Republic was far from secure.
The army’s inclinations towards the right were evident; despite its unwillingness to act against the Kapp putsch, it was only too happy to fire on the so-called Red Army in the Ruhr, when there were left-wing uprisings against the Republic in spring 1920. As we shall see, the army and Free Corps were also keen to intervene to suppress communist-led uprisings and left-wing regimes in Saxony, Thuringia and Hamburg in autumn 1923; and from the mid-1920s, elements in the army leadership would be ever more actively conspiring to overturn the provisions of the Versailles Treaty and overthrow the democratic system.
Faced with repeated strikes, demonstrations and political violence, the SPD sadly misjudged the situation and, instead of responding to the causes of distress, sought to use force to suppress the symptoms of unrest. Moreover, the judiciary throughout the Weimar Republic displayed considerable political bias in treating left-wing offenders very harshly while meting out lenient sentences to offenders on the Right. A deeply polarized society was hardly coming to terms with the new political circumstances of the time.
In the elections of June 1920 there was a swing to the parties of the extreme Left and the Right, while the more moderate ‘Weimar coalition’ parties lost ground. The SPD’s share of the vote fell from 37.9% to 21.7%, while the German Democratic Party’s (DDP) vote fell to 8.2%, less than half its former 18.5%, and the Centre dropped moderately from 19.7% to 13.6%. The USPD share grew from 7.6% to 17.8%, while the KPD (which had not contested the 1919 elections) won 2% of the vote; on the Right, the German People’s Party (DVP) increased its poll from 4.4% to 13.9%, and the German National People’s Party (DNVP) gained 15% compared with its earlier 10.3% share of the vote. The SPD-led coalition government was replaced by a centre-right coalition.
Map 2.1 The Versailles settlement, 1919.
From 1921 to summer 1923 governmental policies served to exacerbate Germany’s political and economic difficulties. Wirth’s government of 1921–2 pursued a so-called policy of fulfilment which, by attempting to fulfil Germany’s reparations obligation, served to demonstrate that the German economy was in fact too weak to pay reparations as envisaged. This coincided with the pursuit by the French of revisionist policies aimed at gaining control of the left bank of the Rhine and setting up a puppet state. Matters came to a head under the government of Wilhelm Cuno, from November 1922 to August 1923, which included the DVP while the SPD remained in opposition. In January 1923 the French and Belgians sent troops to ‘supervise’ production in the Ruhr, using the shortfall in German wood and coal deliveries to the French as a pretext. This military occupation of the Ruhr entailed the deployment of 100,000 men – equivalent to the total strength of the German Army. The Germans responded with a policy of ‘passive resistance’, ceasing economic production and refusing to cooperate with the occupation. The need to subsidize Germans in the now unproductive Ruhr was exceedingly detrimental to the German economy, and coincided with an extraordinary period of catastrophic inflation.
While the roots of German inflation lay in the earlier financing of war by bonds and loans rather than taxation increases, its explosive growth was fuelled by, among other factors, the printing of paper money for the payment of reparations and for the financing of heavy social expenditure (on pensions, for example). This sent the value of money totally out of control. In the course of spring and summer 1923 the German Mark progressively became worthless. The American dollar was worth 4.2 Marks in July 1914; it had risen to 8.9 Marks in January 1919, 14 Marks by July 1919 and a peak of 64.8 Marks in January 1920. There was then a brief period of respite, but after January 1921 the snowball started rolling again. By July 1922 the dollar was worth 493.2 Marks; by January 1923 the figure was 17,972, and in an inflationary explosion the figures rose to 4.62 million Marks by August, 98.86 million Marks by September, 25,260 million Marks by October and an almost unimaginable 4,200,000 million Marks by 15 November 1923.7 Paper notes were simply stamped with a new increased value; people were paid their wages by the cartload; prices doubled and trebled several times a day, making shopping with money almost impossible; and the savings, hopes, plans, assumptions and aspirations of huge numbers of people were swept away in a chaotic whirlwind.
Those on fixed incomes and those dependent on money savings were of course hit the hardest. Even when the worst material impact was over, the psychological shock of the experience was to have longer-lasting effects, confirming a deep-seated dislike of democracy – which was thereafter equated with economic distress – and a heightened fear of the possible consequences of economic instability. A few groups and individuals were by contrast well-placed to benefit, and even to make a profit, from the inflation, such as the industrialist Hugo Stinnes.
In the end the situation was brought under control by the short-lived government headed by Gustav Stresemann from August to November 1923. The policy of passive resistance in the Ruhr was terminated, easing the burden on the German economy and defusing international tension, while a currency reform introduced the Rentenmark and laid the foundations both of a more stable currency and of a reconsideration of the reparations question in the following year. At the same time, a number of putsch attempts, including communist-inspired uprisings in Saxony, Thuringia and Hamburg, were suppressed. One putsch attempt of this period – which was at the time but one among many – has gained particular historical notoriety. In Bavaria a number of nationalist groups were laying complex plans for a right-wing ‘march on Berlin’, copying the successful model of Mussolini’s fascist march on Rome of the previous year. One of the groups associated with these plans was the small party formed out of the earlier German Worker’s Party (DAP) led by Anton Drexler, now known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP, or Nazi) under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. At the time relatively insignificant, the failed ‘Beer Hall Putsch’ of 8–9 November 1923 – which lost crucial support in high places at the last moment – gave Hitler and his associates considerable national publicity in the trial which ensued. Sentenced to a minimum of five years’ detention – of which he served less than a year, in relatively comfortable circumstances in Landsberg prison – Hitler took the opportunity to write the political diatribe entitled Mein Kampf and to ruminate on the future strategy of his party. In the meantime, however, from 1924 the Republic appeared to be recovering from its early turbulence and entering into a new period of stabilization on both the domestic and international fronts.
Apparent Stabilization, 1924–1929
In November 1923 Gustav Stresemann became foreign minister.
