Hitler's Heralds: The story of the Freikorps 1918-1923 by Jones Nigel

Author:Jones, Nigel [Jones, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2020-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

12

VERSAILLES: RESISTANCE OR

SUBMISSION?

‘May the hand wither that signs the Treaty.’

Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann,

June 1919.

For the last half of 1919, German national politics were obsessed by one theme only: the treaty dictated to the defeated nation by the Allies at Versailles. The consequences of those distant deliberations in the Hall of Mirrors, where Bismarck had proclaimed the German Empire in 1871, were to provide Adolf Hitler with his most potent and persistent grievance; were to saddle the struggling Weimar Republic with crippling and unpayable war debts; and were to cover the politicians who submitted to it with such ignominy and shame that – in many cases – it led to their deaths at the hands of the vengeful Right. But the most immediate and not the least of the consequences of Versailles was the only full-blown attempt by the Freikorps to overthrow the detested Republic and substitute a dictatorial Fascist regime: the Kapp Putsch.

As the Munich Soviet Republic crumbled under the Freikorps guns an official German delegation left Berlin for Paris on 28 April to hear the peace terms decided upon by Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and the French Premier Clemenceau after prolonged wrangling. The delegation was headed by the Foreign Minister chosen by Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann in February when he succeeded Ebert, who had been elevated to the office of President. Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau was an artistocrat chosen because it was thought his long diplomatic experience would impress the Allies. There could hardly have been a worse choice; haughty, monocled, stiff, Rantzau represented in Allied eyes the worst type of unreconstructed Prussian arrogance. Rantzau took with him German proposals for the treaty, supposing that the Allies would be willing to treat with their former foes as equals. He was to be grieviously disappointed.

As soon as the Germans crossed the border, their reception set the tone: the train was forced to crawl across the war-ravaged fields of northern France at a steady ten miles per hour so that the Germans could feast their eyes on the devastation their armies had wrought. In Versailles they were housed in a hotel surrounded by barbed wire, like quarantined lepers. Here they were forced to kick their heels for a whole week before the Allies deigned to summon them to the Palace to hear their fate. Clemenceau greeted them with the ominous pronouncement: ‘The hour has struck for the weighty settlement of our account.’ The elaborate German peace proposals never left the attaché cases of the delegation: they were merely called upon to receive and transmit the terms already decided upon.

The terms they heard were stunningly harsh: so harsh that President Wilson himself was heard to mutter: ‘If I were a German, I think I should never sign it.’ Baldly, Germany was to lose the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine – acquired after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 – to France. France would also occupy all German territory on the east bank of the Rhine, plus the rich coal and steel producing district of the Saar which was to be administered by the newly formed League of Nations.

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