The Question of German Unification by Imanuel Geiss

Author:Imanuel Geiss [Geiss, Imanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781136185687
Google: vtJcAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-12-16T03:36:49+00:00

THIRD REICH AND SECOND WORLD WAR, 1933–1945

The external German Question: revision and expansion

The main reason for the victory of National Socialism in the final stages of the kleindeutsch Reich of the Weimar Republic was the Germans’ sense of uncertainty and insecurity regarding their position in Europe and the world. In 1871 the German Question seemed to have been definitively settled, but it had been violently thrown up anew in 1918/19 by the express desire of the German Austrians and the Sudeten Germans in Bohemia and Moravia for Anschluβ with the Reich, and it was now directed at the Germans themselves. What did they want to be in Europe? One nation among others within a system which had hitherto always resisted the hegemony of any single European power? Or was defeat in 1918, at the hands of almost the whole world, merely an incentive to do better next time?

What Hitler and the NSDAP were agitating for, which was borne out by the subsequent course of history up to 1939 and 1945, shows that most Germans preferred the second alternative. The circumstances of Germany’s geographical position in Europe, the more onerous stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles, the political weakness of her neighbours to the east and the south east – all helped bring about a programme of German revisionism. Hitler merely took over from the Weimar Republic and carried it out, effecting a smooth transition from the limited revisionism of wanting to return to the borders of 1914, to running amok in a Greater German crusade against Europe and the world.

The logic of geography, of the patterns of domestic and foreign policy and of traditional power politics, all combined to produce a sequence of coordinated steps which any bright German schoolchild of the day could reel off: first, political unity and internal consolidation, then external expansion. Hitler achieved internal unity in his centralized, one-party/one-leader state in 1933/34 by a combination of meek compliance and sheer terror, disguised by clever propaganda. At least for members of the German Volk, the bureaucratic state based on the rule of law continued – with limitations – as before, though its source of legitimacy was new: ‘The Führer protects the law’ (Carl Schmitt).

The traditional momentum of (ostensible) success and terror quashed all serious resistance to an expansionary programme which sought to remove the alleged ‘injustice’ of the ‘Diktat’ or ‘shameful peace’ of Versailles. Resentment at being ‘deprived of the right to self-determination’ was uppermost in people’s minds. By sweeping aside the clause of the Versailles Treaty prohibiting Anschluβ, Hitler in March 1938 fulfilled the 1848 national dream of a Greater German answer to the German Question.

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