Monarchism in the Weimar Republic by Dr. Walter Kaufmann

Author:Dr. Walter Kaufmann [Kaufmann, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, United States, Europe, General, Germany, Special Forces
ISBN: 9781789121087
Google: RcZQDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2018-03-12T03:05:02+00:00

CHAPTER SIX—THE MONARCHISTS’ DILEMMA

1. The DNVP and German Foreign Policy

The development in the years following 1925 showed clearly how much the electoral victory of the monarchists in 1925 had been truly a Pyrrhic victory: a victory paid for with the victors loss of strength. After the election of Hindenburg, the cabinet of Luther remained in office without changes. Also the program which had been accepted by the government and had been endorsed by the Reichstag under Ebert’s presidency remained the same. The strong man in the government was not its chancellor Luther, nor any of his Nationalist colleagues, but the foreign minister, Stresemann. Under his guidance and influence, foreign political considerations retained the primate in the cabinet’s policies. Yet it was precisely this foreign political program which the German Nationals found most difficult to accept. In the measure as they remained the reactionary force inside Germany they were also the champions of revisionism in foreign affairs. We have seen that the policy of rapprochement which had received an auspicious start with the acceptance of the Dawes Plan could only be launched over the grudgingly made concession by the DNVP caucus to free its parliamentary members from party restrictions. With six deputies not voting, forty-eight of the deputies—representing chiefly the interests of agriculture and heavy industry—had broken away from the powerful clique which upheld the official party platform of obstinate negation. Disregarding Germany’s actual needs, the others would accept political and economic chaos rather than a revitalized national economy by the grace of the former enemies. Any approach to and understanding with the victor nations was denounced by the Nationals as acceptance of the Versailles treaty which contained the especially painful clause of Germany’s war guilt. Only after the Marx government had publicly repudiated Germany’s war guilt (although, under pressure of the Allies, no official note to this effect was dispatched to the foreign capitals), the DNVP Reichstag faction had given its members freedom to vote independently.

While the German Nationals felt to have brought the supreme sacrifice of their political principles with this compromise in the Dawes vote, the DVP considered acceptance of the Dawes plan only as an opening measure for a closer co-operation with the Western powers and for admitting Germany as a fully accepted and acknowledged power within the family of nations. The DVP did not pretend that such a policy could be accepted with enthusiasm even by some of its own partisans. Before the elections of May, 1924, when the proposed Dawes Plan was one of the most acute political issues in Germany, the party had officially declared that “now as before the DVP opposes a policy of fulfillment, but it is nevertheless prepared to make heavy sacrifices within the framework of economic, social, and foreign-political possibilities.”{434} Again they put the welfare of the fatherland—that which they considered advantageous for Germany—before party doctrines. And although Stresemann repeatedly, and with great passion, took issue especially with the incriminatory clauses of Versailles, he was, nevertheless, willing to accept its western territorial provisions and reaffirm them in new treaties.

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