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Originally published in 1979.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691639284 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1703 |
| Pages: | 588 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
German Rearmament and the West, 1932-1933
By Edward W. Bennett
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1979 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05269-4
CHAPTER 1
The Political Implications of Reichswehr Plans
1. The Protest against Disarmament
Most Germans felt that the 1919 peace settlement had perpetrated a colossal series of wrongs. They considered the reparations prescribed to be an unbearable burden, and blamed them for German economic distress. They regarded the occupation of the Rhineland by foreign forces as a shame and a scandal, especially when carried out by French African troops. They believed the boundaries laid down in the East to be unjust and irrational, particularly those that established a Polish Corridor between East Prussia and the rest of Germany; the Corridor problem seemed all the more urgent because the lost territories were becoming increasingly Polonized with each passing year. The military disarmament imposed on Germany was a more telling blow than the rest of the treaty, because it forced the country, in the last analysis, to abide by all the other provisions that the other powers wished to maintain in force. German disarmament guaranteed the rest of the status quo established in 1919.
Germany's disarmament might have seemed less onerous if middle-and upper-class Germans had not believed that their country had had the best army in the world, that the nation had been unified through the agency of military force, and that a military career was the most honorable of professions. As under the Prussian monarchy, the military leaders still believed that the army was the rock on which the state rested, and in truth, in a new and unstable republic, armed force was highly important to state power. In addition, with the election of Paul von Hindenburg as President in 1925, the highest office in the republic was assumed by the former wartime commander of the armies. Hindenburg had no dictatorial ambitions, but he tended to regard himself as the heir to the powers of the Prussian kings. The legal fact that the Weimar constitution granted him special powers in an emergency was less important than the tradition that the monarch could choose the advisers and policies that he believed would best serve state interests. Hindenburg naturally looked to soldiers for advice. As they were at once responsible for national security and unable with existing resources to ensure it, they naturally pressed for increased military strength, despite treaty limitations.
The soldiers favored the political forces that claimed to support the army's objectives. The German National People's party (DNVP), representing conservative traditions, especially those of Prussia, called loudly for a German military revival, as did the populist and racist National Socialists (NSDAP). Although German officers professed to stand "above party," they found the outlook of the DNVP to be close to their own. But in the center of the spectrum, the business-oriented German People's party (DVP), most of the more republican German Democratic party (DDP), and the Catholic Center party (Z) also gave their backing to defense programs, and the support of these parties was in practice more useful than that of the far right, since they were usually represented in the government. Even among the Socialists or Social Democrats (SPD), some leaders sympathized with the army's objectives. A desire for German rearmament, both before and after Hitler's accession, was the conventional German view, rooted in traditional institutions and respected ideas.
This is not to say that the German people as a whole were militaristic. Germany had a significant pacifist movement, at least in the early 1920s, and much of the SPD, the largest German party, and especially its leadership in the Land (state) of Prussia, strongly opposed rearmament. Ironically, the force of the Socialists' opposition would hasten their own downfall. They failed to develop a coherent policy of their own, but they were in a position to obstruct military preparations by parliamentary action, hostile publicity, and the refusal of administrative cooperation, and they often did so; as a result, the military came to regard the elimination of Socialist power as a patriotic necessity.
Aside from parties as such, interest groups were important powers in German society, and with respect to armament, one naturally thinks of the heavy industrialists. Did they join forces with the military, or egg the military on? Certainly the industrialists were nationalists, like the soldiers, and at least as anti-Socialist. As individual, upper-middleclass Germans, most industrialists assuredly favored rearmament, and as businessmen they were ready to turn a profit, if that could be done, by selling guns or armor plate. But the experience of World War I controls had made German businessmen wary of government intervention, and government arms contracts were not necessarily profitable; the military wanted industry to maintain facilities for full wartime production, and these were often underemployed and uneconomic in peacetime, especially under Versailles restrictions. Military and industrial interests overlapped, but they were far from identical.
During the depression of the early 1930s, military leaders became concerned over the financial difficulties of some of their arms suppliers. The government aided the Borsig (Tegel) firm with an advance of RM 3 million, eventually merging it with the state-owned Rheinmetall, and we shall see the head of the army's Ordnance Office pleading generally that German defenses would be threatened if the arms manufacturers were not saved from bankruptcy. But the effort to plan and launch rearmament antedated the financial difficulties; it did not spring from them. Military documents indicate that defense policy decisions, including for supporting arms manufacture, were based on military, not economic, grounds. Politically, industrial influence could add little to the military pressures for secret arms appropriations; socially, industrialists were largely separate from, and inferior to, the military caste. From 35 to 49 percent of the officers were sons of officers, and from 37 to 42 percent were sons of high civil officials or professional men, yet only 6 to 10 percent were sons of businessmen or factory owners.
There is another possible reason for a lack of industrial influence: in the case of the land army, which in Germany was the "senior service," and on which we will concentrate here, German military experts did not think of "rearmament" primarily in terms of hardware, of armor and explosives; this was more of an Anglo-American habit Most German officers gave priority, rather, to the organization, training, and handling of men. One officer who did concern himself for years with advocating and preparing for industrial mobilization, General Georg Thomas, commented later in a retrospective survey of this work: "The experiences of the [First] World War were soon forgotten, and the military leadership primarily concerned itself with the operational or else the organizational and personnel aspects of national defense." German generals did not, of course, suppose that industrial power was irrelevant, and they took more interest in material armament after Hitler and Hjalmar Schacht made massive arms production possible. Despite all bureaucratic rivalries and mistaken judgments at the top, even German industrial mobilization itself far outstripped that elsewhere up until 1939. But in both world wars, Germany was able to gain early victories and then delay for years defeat at the hands of numerically and materially superior opponents, and much of this accomplishment was due to just that stress on men, organization, and tactics which Thomas deplored.
The officers' claim to defense leadership also gained strength from the need to avoid disclosures. Any serious defense planning would violate the Treaty of Versailles, and if such a violation of the treaty became known, it would arouse opposition abroad and perhaps trigger intervention; therefore, secrecy was essential. German staff officers devised Germany's military plans and thus became the guardians of their secrecy. The officers had to inform cabinet ministers to some extent — usually slight — to secure authorizations, and they invited Geraian diplomats to participate in war games, so as to obtain foreign policy advice and enlist the diplomats' support, inside the German government as well as in foreign negotiations. Manufacturers of forbidden arms necessarily knew about the particular contracts they were engaged on. But the staff officers kept all the threads in their own hands, and, so far as possible, concealed the scope of their preparations from outside scrutiny. This concealment did not entirely succeed, but it was successful enough to mislead contemporaries and affect later historical writing.
2. Means and Goals of Evasion
There was a model for carrying out concealed rearmament, following a military defeat. Germans, and especially German officers, could recall the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon and the treaties of Tilsit of 1807 and of Paris of 1808, which had imposed an indemnity and an army of occupation, reduced Prussian territory by about half, and set the maximum strength of the Prussian army at 42,000 men. This catastrophe had been followed by a movement of regeneration, led by Baron vom Stein, and also, in military affairs, by Gerhard von Scharnhorst. According to the exaggerated legend, Scharnhorst initiated a so-called Krümper system, giving short-term basic training to successive batches of recruits, and thereby circumventing the attempt to limit army strength; once trained, these men or Krümper had constituted a reserve, and supposedly 150,000 of them had leaped to arms in 1813. Actually, Prussia only had about 36,000 Krümper by the fall of 1812, most of them old soldiers, but they did provide more cadre for training raw recruits, enabling Prussia to put approximately 280,000 men in the field, and to become a great power again. Of more lasting importance were the introduction in 1814 of universal peacetime training in the regular army, and Albrecht von Roon's 1860 reform of integrating all the younger trained men in wartime into regular units with expanded cadres, leaving only older men in the Landwehr or militia. After the Prussian army proved the value of these measures by rapidly defeating the professional forces of Austria and France, other continental European powers imitated the Prussian pattern, at least in its broad outlines. The idea of building reserves of trained conscripts in peacetime and then mobilizing them in wartime may well have been Germany's greatest contribution to military technique. In any case, after 1918 it was natural for patriotic Germans to draw historical parallels with the nineteenth century, and to think of ways in which, once again, a dictated peace might be overturned, and preeminence as a power won. Even Gustav Stresemann, who led Germany 16 — Political Implications of Reichswehr Plans back into European political society, believed that his country could not regain its freedom and independence as long as it was not a great power and had no significant army.
The victors of 1919 also remembered the story of the Krümper, and they saw to it that Part V of the Treaty of Versailles, the section concerning armament restrictions, not only limited the size of the German army to 100,000 men, but also specified that officers had to serve for twenty-five years and enlisted men for twelve years; each year, no more than five percent of the effectives could be discharged before their full term had expired, e.g., for reasons of health. In fact, Part V attempted to erect a whole series of obstacles to another Scharnhorst; its prohibitions included officers' schools, preparations for mobilization including the organization of reserves, the maintenance of an overall general staff, and the provision of military training by educational establishments, veterans organizations, shooting clubs, and "associations of every description." Part V also banned tanks, aircraft, and heavy artillery, and the flexibility of German planning was further limited by the specification that the army should consist of seven infantry and three cavalry divisions. The treaty also drastically limited the German navy; submarines were forbidden, and no German capital ship was to have a displacement of more than 10,000 tons. Part V completely forbade the German possession of an air force. Another part of the treaty permanently excluded the German forces from the territory bordering on and west of the Rhine. Also, it was not without importance that the Treaty of Versailles, including Part V, was part of the law of Germany.
The German Reichswehr, or armed forces, could evade many of these restrictions. It continued general-staff work under conditions of secrecy, in a division of the Ministry of Defense known as the Truppenamt, or Troops Office. It concealed stocks of arms, and made preparations for initiating war production when that should become necessary. A locally recruited border militia, the Grenzschutz, was organized in the Eastern provinces. Forbidden weapons could be and were tested outside of Germany, in Soviet Russia. And, most important, while Germany could be compelled to reduce gradually to 100,000 men on active duty, the war veterans who were discharged could have been recalled in case of war; Part V restrictions would hardly be honored then. What counted was not peacetime strength, but mobilizable wartime strength. German military planning was based on the idea of a threefold, or possibly a ninefold, expansion of the seven infantry divisions, to twenty-one or sixty-three divisions, and it was this that lay behind the doctrine that every man should be capable of doing the job of his superior: lieutenants should be potential captains, captains potential majors, and so on. In the plans of the mid-twenties, mobilized divisions were to be of varying quality, with varying proportions of regulars to reserves. Even in 1914, regular German divisions had, after mobilization, contained an average of 46 percent reserves. As the 1914 army had been expanded by reserves, the 100,000-man army could be, too — at least as long as there were reserves young enough to fight.
These clandestine plans for wartime expansion had implications extending far beyond the military sphere. In order to fill the ranks of the expanded force, the army planned an illicit organization to compile lists of veterans for a recall to arms. It also maintained secret stores of arms and encouraged secret military training outside the army. Such mobilization preparations were known in the army as Landesschutz. Landesschutz work was supported by Reichswehr funds and guided largely by ex-officers. It included preparatory steps for mustering the Grenzschutz to defend the borders, and indeed the fairly well known Grenzschutz was deliberately used as a cover for Landesschutz activities generally. But aside from Grenzschutz work, Landesschutz also, and more significantly, involved the finding, training, and registering of reserves for expanding the regular army. Private paramilitary organizations, the so-called Wehrverbände, constituted one potential source of reserves, and close relations existed at first between the army and these groups, which were for the most part rightist and antirepublican. Such ties were reduced after the groups proved uncontrollable. Later, army leaders would attempt to establish a more official and less partisan system, but they came to believe that it was impossible to do this under an open, federal, and democratic regime — to the misfortune of the regime — and they turned again to the Wehrverbande.
A consequence of illicit military planning was that many respectable members of society — and no one in Germany was more respectable than an officer — involved themselves in conspiratorial activity. Social pressures and, in the early 1920s, terrorist action, worked to discourage disclosures. Considering what their reporters must have known, newspapers evidently exercised considerable self-restraint. Officially, many people were tried and convicted of the crime of Landesverrat or treason against the external security of the state, when their crime was the disclosure of illegal rearmament activities. A state-of-siege mentality developed, exemplified in an article by the legal adviser of the Defense Ministry, which sought to show that leading pacifists were guilty of treason. The compromise of legality and condemnation of protest help to explain the later legal breakdown and acceptance of repression in the Nazi period. At the time and among those concerned, however, belief in patriotic and national ideals seemed to make rearmament a high, noble, moral goal.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from German Rearmament and the West, 1932-1933 by Edward W. Bennett. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Abbreviations, pg. xi
- Preface, pg. xiii
- Introduction, pg. 1
- Chapter One. The Political Implications of Reichswehr Plans, pg. 11
- Chapter Two. Perceptions and Preoccupations of France and Britain, pg. 78
- Chapter Three. The United States and the Legends of Lost Opportunity, pg. 131
- Chapter Four. General von Schleicher's New Approach, pg. 169
- Chapter Five. Britain Intervenes to Prevent a Break, pg. 208
- Chapter Six. Schleicher Reaches a Dead End, pg. 273
- Chapter Seven. Hitler's Accommodation with the Military, pg. 307
- Chapter Eight. Britain Reconsiders Its Policy, pg. 356
- Chapter Nine. France Attempts to Form a New Alliance, pg. 406
- Chapter Ten. Hitler's Hand Is Forced, and He Frees It, pg. 449
- Conclusion, pg. 506
- Appendix, pg. 513
- Bibliography, pg. 517
- Index, pg. 553