Episode 1: Treaty of Discord
Hello everyone. Welcome to Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Times.
This is a re-recording of my debut episode. The reason I decided to re-write and re-record for two reasons.
- First is because I’d originally used a hypothetical experience to convey life as it was. Instead, we will rely on hearing from people who were actually there to see the German Revolution.
- Second is because the first episode was so terrible even I couldn’t listen to it without cringing.
In this podcast we will go back in time and relive life in Germany between 1918 and 1945 through the eyes of the people there to witness it.
I chose to begin with the closing days of the First World War and German Revolution because the Nazi Party didn’t appear out of nowhere. Its rise was a direct consequence of political instability, a stagnate lower class, and a rise of liberal movements…among a host of other reasons.
The Nazis sought to rid Germany of free thought and association while carving out an empire they thought was denied to them in the final days of World War 1.
Without further ado, let’s step into history.
Episode 1: Treaty of Discord
First Stop: The Last Days of the Great War
To understand the trauma into which the First German Republic was born, better known as the Weimar Republic, we have to go back to the final year of the First World War, known as the Great War back then.
For most of it, Germany was winning.
So how did she go from winning to being on the receiving end of one of the worst treaties in modern history? It’s a long story but I’m going to do my best to shrink it down for our purposes.
At the start on the 20th Century, Germany emerged as the master of Central Europe. A cold war turned hot following the assassination of a foreign Archduke Ferdinand in the Balkans. We’ll ignore the entanglement of alliances and jump straight to the war.
While militarily strong, Germany had an Achilles heel: natural resources. Without raw materials, the modern factories couldn’t produce ammo. With the field hands serving as soldiers, agriculture suffered, too.
In 1917, revolution in Germany knocked Russia out of the war. The peace, known as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, transferred power over Poland, the Baltics, and Ukrainians to Germany. Previously, those ethnics were under the control of the Russians. They weren’t happy under them, they certainly didn’t like being under Germany.
But more on that later!
This treaty gives Germany the room to ship a million soldiers from East to West to attack the Allies in France. They brought back thousands of Allied prisoners and an unwanted bonus: the Spanish Flu. It wreaked havoc on malnourished civilians.
In addition, church bells and various metal infrastructure was harvested for their metals to further the war effort at the expense of the public.
By the final months of the war, Germany’s front line was under pressure from every direction:
Across no-man’s land are 3 armies attacking you. From inside the trenches, the war feels unwinnable. Soldiers face shortages of men, horses, fuel, food, and ammo all at once. The railways were strained, but the logistics crisis was much broader than transportation alone.
Behind the line, the Empire was bankrupt. It was out of food. It was out of bandages. They were running out of infrastructure to dig up to make bullets. They were being outproduced on a scale impossible to imagine four years before.
Archivist Note: I do want to point out things weren’t too cheery for the Allies either. In Britain and France, labor strikes were destabilizing society, and, like Germany, they were running out of men.
As discipline broke down, some units adopted Soviet-style Soldiers’ Councils like those used in Russia the year before. Officers could not improve the situation, yet generals still ordered them to hold the line.
Think about what that meant. You’re in the army. You’ve been fighting for years. Food and medicine have a hard time reaching you. Soon that becomes a trickle. Then it almost stops. Ammunition stops coming too. Then you’re ordered to defend a trench without it.
There’s a word for that: suicide. Since most soldiers plan to survive a war, enough of them began to refuse orders to attack. Still others took it a step further and deserted the Army altogether.
Imagine that! You’ve been fighting for years. On an empty belly you just leave when no one is looking. With your rifle and ammunition. Soon thousands did just that.
The front line was literally dissolving away, and there was little the army leadership could do to stop it.
But the ordinary citizens knew nothing of the hardships at the Front. It was stable. Things might be rough at home, but the Front is stable, might have been a general thought among people. And chances are the opposite was true for the men in the trenches believing their loved ones were doing okay under the circumstances.
Children were the most impressionable. Sebastian Haffner was ten years old in 1918 and living in Berlin with his family.
SEBASTIAN H: Every day, I went to a police station where the army bulletin was posted several hours before they appeared in the newspapers…I waited for the ‘final victory’ with anxiety. That it would come was inevitable.
Haffner, Sebastian. Defying Hitler 21
Germany wasn’t a centralized state like we think of her today. Each province was linked to the Greater German Empire by way of treaties with Prussia and the Emperor, or Kaiser. Bavaria kept its own king while being part of the larger empire. In the final month of the war, years of starvation and shortages inspired political revolution deposing these smaller regencies like dominoes. [McDonough Loc 620]
Then, on November 9, 1918, German Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated, creating a power vacuum. The next day politicians in Berlin shouted Republic! and an Armistice was signed with the allies.
At a naval training academy, Rolf Johanneson learned the Kaiser abdicated, a republic was proclaimed in his place, and the new government requested an armistice. His whole world fell apart. A few weeks later he and the rest of his class was told to go home.
Fighting in Europe was officially over. But fighting in Berlin was just beginning.
Bella Fromm, a Berlin socialite and journalist, wrote in her diary that day:
BELLA F: Revolution! When the news came out it was not unexpected, but it was shocking nonetheless. The Navy Mutinies. The Emperor flees. He was going to be brought before a court-martial. I asked my colleague about the whereabouts of King Ludwig of Bavaria. He shook his head and said ‘I don’t know.’
Fromm, Bella. Blood & Banquets. 8
One veteran confined to his hospital in Baden-Baden, near the French border in southern Germany, watched the demonstrations in the street below with contempt.
MALE VOICE: If the Worker and Soldier Councils imagine they’ve given the People the freedom they want, they are much mistaken. It will probably give way to some stronger German government.
Toland, John. No Man’s Land. 446
Second Stop: The Rocky Birth of the First German Republic
The German Revolution happened pretty suddenly.
After the Kaiser abdicated, rumors were everywhere. Was the Crown Prince going to take up the job? No. He wasn’t. But the power vacuum was turning the streets into anarchy.
Thousands of men discharged from the army, or the countless which deserted, were drawn to Berlin like moths to a revolutionary flame. Fun Fact: men who desert the army usually keep their weapons. And in the chaos of peace, thousands of discharged soldiers kept their rifles, too.
Throw into the mix a host of competing political ideologies like communism, nationalism, democracy, anarchy… you name it. Germany was a powder keg.
The Social Democrats, the largest Opposition party to the Kaiser, sought to save the country from civil war and fill the power vacuum by channeling those competing factions into a parliamentary democracy. That is how a republic no one asked for was declared.
It is said the future chancellor, Adolf Hitler, a corporal recovering in a military hospital, went into
As Franz Seldte arrived at Berlin’s Potsdam train station that very day:
MALE VOICE: Bullets swept the whole side of the train. [I] darted out of the station to find the streets in wild tumult. From somewhere on the roof, there were bullets smacking the pavement…in a rage I walked to [the government district]. I was infuriated a Republic had been proclaimed from the Reichstag.
Toland, John. No Man’s Land, 447
Berlin and many other major cities like Munich and Hamburg saw short street battles among rival factions. Sebastian Haffner, the young boy in Berlin, recalled listening to the revolution unfolding just a few blocks away.
SEBASTIAN H: We stood by open windows in one of our back rooms and heard the distinct sounds of machine-gun fire. Some explained the differences between heavy and light machine guns. It sounded like it was coming from the palace! Was the garrison finally defending itself?
Haffner, Sebastian. Defying Hitler, 23
Much to his disappointment, it was just a gunfight between two opposing revolutionary groups. Like I said, there were a few to choose from. The Communists called for further revolution from the street corners. The Social Democrats said the revolution was achieved; no further action needed. The Nationalists were pissed at both groups. And those loyal to the monarchy were left out in the cold.
Keep into consideration this all happened in a matter of three days.
Three days. Three days sounds like a long time. It’s not. One day you have an empire with an emperor at its head. Two days later the new government agreed to the most egregious war-ending terms bestowed in contemporary history.
Young Herr Haffner remembered the first day of school after the Revolution. It occurred the following day. His headmaster declared in front of the classroom there was no revolution in school and discipline would continue as it had Before.
After school that day, Sebastian was wondering the drizzly streets of Berlin in a sort of shock.
SEBASTIAN H: I spotted a bunch of people gazing into the window of a newsagent’s shop. It was an early edition of the newspaper and bore the headline “Armistice Signed.” Underneath were the terms, a long list. I read them and turned to stone.”
Defying Hitler, 26
Germany had to leave all artillery, aircraft, vehicles, and whatnot behind. She had to surrender her navy to England. Return all Allied prisoners-of-war immediately.
With local harvests, what little there was, going to France, food insecurity affected every social class. Berlin was hit especially hard by malnutrition. Tens of thousands of people flocked to the capital looking for work during the war and after which compounded the problem. Markets were transformed into public soup kitchens where citizens of all social standing were fed daily. Berliners were soon recognized by protruding cheekbones and loose-fitting clothes. [Boyd 26]
Such was the sensitivity to food that meals could no longer be enacted on the stage as the ‘pretense of one was sure to turn the most uproarious comedy into a melodrama. {Boyd 26]
Third Stop: The Occupation of the Rhineland
Another provision was the Allied occupation of an area known as the Rhineland until a Treaty could be negotiated in Versailles.
Harry Franck, a travel writer from the United States, arrived only a few weeks after the Armistice. “While he could anticipate his travels with the enthusiasm of a healthy young man, German citizens had nothing to look forward but grief, hunger, and uncertainty.” [Travellers in the Third Reich, 15].
YOUNG MALE VOICE: The Germans were not allowed to travel, write letters, telephone, telegraph, or publish newspapers without permission. Nor were they permitted to drink anything stronger than beer or wine; or gather at a café without written consent.
Boyd, Julia. Travellers in the Third Reich, 17
On Post-War Street Life
For Germans, a new war waged against starvation. Men were seen in fields loading wagons with fat turnips was all that stood between the German and starvation. [Boyd 17].
The Allied occupation forces suffered no shortages in their stay. In Cologne, British troops lived like kings.
MALE VOICE: Their canteens are in the best hotels. Outside are great notices: No Germans Allowed. Their food is all paid for in German taxes! And German children stand outside the windows watching them eat beefsteaks.
Travellers in the Third Reich, 16.
Travellers in the Third Reich, 16.
MALE VOICE: Occupation means a horde of armed strangers permeating every nook and cranny of your town, your house, your private life. It means giving up your bed, it means subjugating yourself to the rules…sometimes to the whims of the occupiers.
Travellers in the Third Reich, 16
German citizens turned up to the military events held at the Cathedral in large numbers. The wife of a British officer remembered the strangeness of it all.
ELEGANT FEMALE VOICE: Can we imagine a parade of Germans at Buckingham Palace to which the inhabitants of London would flock?
Travellers in the Third Reich 17
For the time being, Germans had no choice but to submit to the occupation no matter how distasteful it might be.
Another thundering split which the armistice delivered was the nullification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. At once, the sacrifice of millions of Germans seemed in vain. She won an eastern empire with the blood of her sons. Now it was gone. What right did the West have to decide the East?
But there was no opportunity to complain. Nobody to complain too. The politicians had their hands full of problems and they were about to get much worse.
Former soldiers began organizing themselves into armed volunteer units. That vast majority still possessed their old army rifles. These became known as the Freikorps: private militias that promised to restore order where they believed the new republic could not. They were used by conservative generals to restore or enforce order.
Why did they take it upon themselves to form vigilante and borderline mercenary army? Good question. The great fear was Germany following Russia into anarchy. They felt it was their job to keep prevent the Bolshevik takeover of Germany.
These weren’t just bands of hotheads with rifles. They were disciplined military formations led by experienced officers, fighting pitched battles from the streets of Berlin to the frontiers of what would become Poland and Estonia.
With cannibalized infrastructure each day was a battle in survival. Some days there was no electricity. What little food could be harvested had a difficult time getting from the countryside into the cities; leading to resentment. Inflation rose fast.
For two weeks after Christmas in 1918 there was no newspaper service in Berlin. That was the internet back in the day. Everyone read it. It would hold fictional stories, community updates, travel advertisements, and news events; nearly everything we look up online. Imagine two weeks without that.
Unscheduled Stop: Spartacist Revolt
In January 1919, less than two months after the Revolution, a faction of Communists known as the Spartacists tried to seize the government in Berlin.
Arming themselves, the rebels took to the streets and seized food stores, the main government printing office, police stations; important roads and intersections were barricaded. [German Revolution, 73]
BETTY S: Machine-gun fire rattles while I write!! The Spartacus people have occupied all of the newspaper offices. Your father has just told me that a regiment of the Guards has gone over to their side.
Betty Scholem, Berlin Resident
Later known as Bloody Week, the people of Berlin saw first-hand the brutality of political disagreement, as the veteran troops of the conservative Freikorps crushed the rebels. The two ringleaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht, were captured and murdered by the officers at the order of the new government. [Shirer 53]
With the latest revolt put down, people resumed picking up their lives.
Gunther Goldschmidt recalled his father returning home from the Front two months after the Armistice. They lived in a town named Oldenburg not far outside Berlin. Gunther was five years old when this happened. This man had just come home after four years fighting at the Front.
Looking up at his mother, Gunther asks, “Who is that man?” She had to tell him, “Your father.”
This exact scenario repeated in countless families all over the country.
Demonstrations were almost a daily event in the capital. There were so many gunfights between rival factions he and his friends could determine the differences between various machine guns and rifles just by the sound of them. When barricades went up, children would make a sport of infiltrating them.
Soon, barricades and street battles were a common enough occurrence most citizens didn’t both worrying about it much unless it came driving down the road as one street of Berliners were enjoying a leisurely Sunday. Then several armored vehicles came rolling down the street. At that same moment a machine gun and rifles start firing from an unknown position. Explosions detonate nearby. Window glass shatters onto the sidewalk and street. Citizens scrambled left and right for cover anywhere they could find it.
After several long minutes the armored cars, which seems to have instigated this whole adventure, disappears further down the street. Bullets stop flying. Explosions cease.
SEBASTIAN H: We boys were the first to emerge from our hiding spots. A strange sight. The long avenue was deserted. Piled in front of each house were heaps of broken glass; all the windows had been blown out. Then, the strollers reappeared. A few minutes later the street was again bathed in a Spring Sunday, as though nothing had happened.
Defying Hitler, 36
A few months after that, a Constitution was ratified after 6 months of hard debate by a dozen factions. According to historian William Shirer, it was one of the most liberal and democratic document of its kind. [Shirer 56]
Sure, there were flaws. No system will be perfect. But a major flaw was the rejection of a centralized state in which quasi-independent states like Prussia, Germany’s largest, be dissolved and transformed into provinces. [Shirer 56]
Fifth Stop: Treaty of Discord
The terms of the Versailles Treaty were published throughout Germany. Angry protests broke out the country demanding the government refuse to sign it. [Shirer 58]
What made it so terrible? It chopped off pieces of Germany on each frontier. One of the most insulting losses was to Poland. A nation, a century dead, resurrected in a treaty. Many Poles fought with Germany against Russia. The emperor promised them independence as a protectorate after WW1 if it won. Now pieces of Germany were getting annexed into Poland.
No. This was a wound that never healed.
Versailles forced Germany to admit to starting the World War 1 in the first place (Spoiler Alert: She didn’t. They didn’t help stop it, but she didn’t start it either).
The Allies demanded reparations. Five billion of which had to be paid between in the next two years, and deliveries of coal, cattle, etc. be made as well.
But the biggest kick in the balls was it disarmed Germany. Her military was limited to 100,000 men, no air force, no tanks, no artillery. To put it politely, the army couldn’t even defend Berlin with that. She was literally at the mercy of her neighbors.
But! There was a silver lining that would come back and bite the Allies in the ass. That small army became professionals to train new recruits when rearmament came, sooner or later.
With little hope left, army commander Hindenburg urged the new government to sign the treaty at the last minute.
Historian A.J.P. Taylor noted that Hindenburg could have advised against signing. Resistance likely would have failed, but Germany might still have bluffed its way to better terms.
One elderly woman recalled feeling no hatred during the War but the terms of Versailles instilled bitter resentment:
ELDERLY FEMALE: To be treated as outcasts, as individuals with whom no relations are possible, is even worse than hunger or constant anxiety. [Boyd 31]
MALE VOICE: Certainly, mercy and the future of the world cannot be expected from France. Se we must drink the bitter tasks of despair. [Boyd 31]
As you can guess, the new Republic did not endear itself to the national population. Instead, it bounced from one crisis to another. Thanks to some short-sighted policies from WW1, inflation was already high and the sudden loss in billions of gold assets and commodities at Versailles the economic situation continued to deteriorate.
Numerous extremist cells rebelled against the new Republic. With the Army in the transition phase of demilitarization, the Freikorps were usually called in to put them down.
SEBASTIAN H: I heard from a former Freikorps member talk about it not without a good-natured sympathy of the victims who’d fallen or been “shot while trying to escape” in their hundreds. Brave lads some of them. This is how we filed away these memories.
[Haffner 41]
This whole system collapsed in March 1920. Let me explain. Only a year after the Spartacist Revolt was the Kapp Revolt. Instead of far-left revolutionaries trying to seize the government, ironically, it was the far-right Freikorps who tried it.
The leader of one of the Freikorps brigades, a guy by the name of Kapp, declared himself Reich Chancellor and President of Prussia (yes, that second title is important).
Kathy Kollwitz, a working-class resident of Berlin described the event in her diary.
KATHY K: Now the counter-revolution has begun. This morning troops marched into Doberitz with black-white-and-red flags. The government has fled. Public buildings have been occupied. People are standing together in packs on the streets, everyone seems stunned. What will happen now?
Before the rebels arrived at Berlin, government ministers rallied and demanded the army, called the Reichswehr, mobilize its troops to defend them. Instead, the generals refused saying the army wouldn’t shoot at the army. Frustrated, they had not choice but to flee the capital.
I wasn’t there, but I would imagine the whole of Germany held its breath.
Among them was Arnold Brecht, a civil servant. His account is on the German History Documents and Images website. There is a link to it on our blog. After being woken at 3am to attend an emergency cabinet meeting and being refused by the army, he joined the exodus.
ARNOLD B: On the way to Potsdam Square I met the usual morning stream of men and women hurrying to work, still ignorant of what had happened. After discussing matters with colleagues, I went home, packed a few things in a bag, and drove to the Anhalt station, the only one, strangely enough, which had not yet been taken over by the rebels, and got onto a train to Dresden. After unfavorable events there, we switched to Stuttgart.
Arnold Brecht on the Kapp Putsch in 1920. A Retrospective Account. Link.
Their only defense now was a desperate plea for a national labor strike.
What can a national labor strike do to a government? Oh!
KATHY K: We are living now in Berlin completely without light, gas or water. At night it’s a darkness like the countryside. Jet black.
MALE VOICE: The new Government is caught like a rat in a trap. It is increasingly clear that it is not only up against the Labor, Socialist and Democratic parties but that large sections of the middle and lower bureaucracy are passively resisting. I have just seen a proclamation for a general strike in Silesia signed by middle-class men and Socialists, by Catholic Centrists and Communists…
Morgan Philips Price on Workers’ Councils and the Kapp Putsch. Link.
Realistically, this is probably the only scenario the rebels couldn’t account for. How could they? Just about the entire country stopped going to work to protest the rebellion.
ARNOLD B: After a few days Kapp had to admit defeat. The quick collapse of his putsch was due in equal measure to the shallowness of the whole venture, the resistance of the working classes, and the loyalty of most state secretaries in the federal and state ministries.
But life in Germany won’t stay like this for much longer.
You might ask, where was the army in all this? Well, they weren’t about to take sides. The problem is half the army command supported the Kapp Putsch and refused to send in troops to restore order.
The citizens themselves spoke out against this unlawful coup d’etat by organizing a nationwide labor strike. All over Germany, average people stopped going to work until the Wolfgang Kapp and his autocrats resigned which they did five days later. [Defying Hitler 40]
WOLFGANG K: On Monday there was no school. We went off to Unter den Linden, the broad avenue in Central Berlin. We felt darkly that one ought to be [there] on such a momentous day and also we hoped we might see or find out something. There was nothing to see or find out. It felt like a Sunday, quiet and peaceful.
Defying Hitler 42
Frau Bella Fromm, our Society columnist friend, enjoyed lunch with several prominent conservative friends at the Kaiserhof Hotel. Each regretted the putsch was not better prepared.
BELLA F: My friends were of the opinion that Germany was showing too great a Leftist tendency and that something should be done about it. There is tension and foreboding all over Germany. Right and Left have clashed for months. Bavaria is worse. A former corporal is a chief troublemaker there. Here in Prussia…[we are] receptive to anything to remove the constant reminder we are a defeated nation.
Blood & Banquets, 11
Final Stop: Remembering a Revolution
The war’s outbreak was remembered with great exultation. It was a beautiful September day at the peak of German power. The revolution and war’s end, 4 years later perhaps, was fated to be its opposite. The country was bankrupt. Millions were dead from fighting or disease. Weather the whole week was cold and foggy.
Germans were angry.
We won’t get into a full recount of the First World War, but for four years Germans had watched their ministers eat well, winter in Bavaria, and turn on a faucet for water. The experience farther down the social ladder was quite different. Food rations sank toward starvation levels. Infant mortality soared. Coal disappeared. Basic necessities became luxuries, and by war’s end millions were exhausted, hungry, and furious.
Instead of bringing order in the post-war years it proved powerless to prevent the anarchy which spread everywhere. This isn’t because they were inept. Instead, the country was sabotaged by its own politicians who used militias and paramilitaries to attack the other side or take control of the whole country.
From the street, the revolution might not have looked like the birth of some glorious new political order. It might have looked more like rats fighting to be king of the trash heap. Revolutions, counter-revolutions… but things will level off after the Kapp Putsch for a couple of years.
In fact, in 1923 there is a ray of hope that appears on the national stage. But we’ll talk about that next time.
I know this episode covered a lot.
For now, thank you for joining us on our first episode of Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Times. Feel free to visit our blog for more information about post-World War 1 Germany. The link’s in the description.
Thank you and Long Live the Republic!
