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CHAPTER 1

The Seeds of Vengeance

Between August 1914 and November 1918, ranged in two vast and opposing groups, the greatest nations and empires of Europe, Asia and America, aided by all that science could devise or hatred could inspire, had sought to destroy and demoralise each other in the bloodiest war that mankind had yet seen. The central theme of the battle had been the virtual siege of Germany. The frontline soldiers were sustained amid their hardship and terror by close comradeship and a patriotic and disciplined pride. Ringed by hostile armies in France, Italy and Russia, together with her much weaker allies Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria, the great German army – disciplined, brave, patriotic, skilful, well led – had defied the world.

By the spring of 1918 that magnificent army had defeated Russia and crippled Italy, but its leaders had also added the United States to her long list of enemies. Her people, blockaded by the British fleet, were on the verge of starvation. Her industry was failing. War weariness had revealed itself in strikes and unrest at home. Risking all on a gambler’s throw of the dice, the German leaders sought, by a giant hammer blow in the west, to secure victory before the vast military potential of America could be brought to bear. The attacks were led by special-forces, the stormtroopers:¹

‘small bodies of shock troops, specially trained in the offensive and distinguished from the mass of the infantry by youth, physical fitness, skill in close combat, brutality and ruthlessness. These shock troops considered themselves a thing apart and looked with contempt upon the common soldiers, especially those of the rearward services; their loyalty was to their commander rather than to the Kaiser; the tides of their units and their badges were novel departures from the existing system. These characteristics were indeed those of the later Freikorps [who will be encountered and viewed shortly], to which they contributed many recruits.’

The offensives were preceded by a short, but hurricane artillery bombardment; taking advantage of early mists, the stormtroopers punched huge holes in the allied lines. But although they gained tactical successes, and although they inflicted heavy casualties, the German assaults expended too much in both blood and morale. The German army lost 348,000 men. The quantity of goods and food looted from the allied lines contrasted starkly with the poverty of their own supplies, and laid bare the mendacity of their own propaganda.

General (later Marshal) Foch, the newly created allied generalissimo, now presided over a series of well timed, limited attacks, each broken off when they lost momentum. On August 8th, 1918, Australian and Canadian troops, aided by 456 tanks, stormed the German lines south of the Somme. The German Chief of Staff and effective commander, General Ludendorff, wrote ‘August 8^th was the black day in the history of the German army in this war … It put the decline of our fighting troops beyond all doubt … the war must be ended.’² On September 15^th Franco-British-Serbian forces attacked the Bulgarians on the Salonika front, and after a series of defeats, Bulgaria crumbled, being granted an armistice on 29^th September. Clearly, German forces were needed from the reserves. But on September 26^th a further series of attacks began in the west, orchestrated by the allied generalissimo. Ludendorff, convinced that victory was no longer possible, arranged a meeting with Germany’s political leaders.

On September 29^th came an attack on the Hindenburg line by the British army. Ludendorff fell on to the floor in a fit, and afterwards, his nerve temporarily broken, took the decision to appeal for an armistice at once. On October 1^st this was conveyed to Germany’s political leaders. On October 3rd an appeal was made to President Wilson. But by October 17th, Ludendorff, reflecting in a calmer mood, became convinced that it was possible to resist.³

But now it was too late! The country, its will broken, was in the throes of revolution. Ludendorff was forced to resign by October 26th. Germany’s allies, utterly reliant on the staggering giant, collapsed, and revolution gripped Germany itself. The Kaiser fled, never to return. On November 9^th a republic was proclaimed – but even this was a confused affair, the Spartacist Karl Liebneckt and the Socialist Philip Scheidemann making separate and hostile proclamations.⁴ The fleet, fearful of being ordered to wrest the command of the sea from the giant dreadnoughts of Great Britain and the United States, mutinied. Soldiers and sailors, led by revolutionary socialists, formed councils. The home front, and the army and navy at home, were falling apart.

The new German socialist government asked for an armistice, which was secured by the surrender of 2500 heavy and 2500 field guns, 25,000 machine guns, 3000 trench mortars, 1700 aircraft and by the establishment of an allied bridgehead over the Rhine. All allied prisoners were to be released.⁵ This meant that they would be powerless to renew the war, whatever the peace terms they might be offered. But both Foch and General Haig, the commander of the British Expeditionary force, felt that the German army could have fought on. ‘Germany is not broken in a military sense’, said Haig; ‘During the last weeks her armies have withdrawn fighting very bravely and in excellent order …’ Foch thought that ‘the Germans could undoubtedly take up a new position, and we could not prevent it.’ Many among the allies felt the same.⁶ But on November 11^th the armistice came into effect. The German frontline soldiers marched home to recriminations, bitterness, revolution and civil war.

However some, at least, of the German soldiers at the front were still of high morale; it was recounted by the South African Brigade that, after a battle which raged for all of November 10^th and up to just before the armistice, a German machine gunner ‘fired the longest burst anyone had ever heard, lasting two minutes, and ending dead at 11am. A German soldier then stood up, removed his helmet, bowed to his audience, and walked slowly away.’⁷ Hermann Goering, the commander of the Richthofen squadron, ordered his pilots into the sky and threatened to strafe members of a soldier’s council who had looted his comrade’s medals. They were returned.⁸ Goering gave the following valedictory address to his men:

‘Never forget that the glorious German flying Corps was not defeated in the air; it was stabbed in the back by Pacifists, Communists and Jews. But don’t abandon hope. There will come a day when we shall be in a position to avenge all the treachery and humiliation we are now suffering.’⁹

Later, an embittered soldier who had endured throughout the war, wrote:

‘And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our duty; and in vain the death of two millions … Would not the graves of all the hundreds of thousands open … and send the silent mud- and blood-covered heroes back as spirits of vengeance to the homeland which had cheated them … Did all this happen so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland … ?’

The resolve of this soldier was of more sinister import for the world than the opening of graves and release of vengeful spirits. ‘I, for my part’, he wrote, ‘decided to go into politics’. His name was Adolf Hitler.¹⁰

The Prussian war ministry declared (echoing the socialist chancellor Ebert) that ‘our field grey heroes return to the Heimat (homeland) undefeated.’… ‘But’, wrote Richard Bessel, ‘if the soldiers had returned home undefeated, then who was to blame for the tribulations of the post war years?’¹¹ An answer was conveniently to hand, and the cult of vengeance entered German politics. Among the former soldiers of that once formidable army, and among their descendants, arose a belief in their betrayal, ‘stabbed in the back’ by the ‘November criminals’. This would have dire consequences for the future. By strange and tortuous paths it would contribute to a huge advance in the technology and science of space research and travel; and it would lead to a likeable and gifted young girl being escorted to her death from the Amsterdam flat where she had sought refuge from her tormentors.¹² These seemingly disparate events were paralleled by a renewed and more dreadful global war.

War has often been compared to chess. But the great and fundamental difference is, that in war the pieces are independent of the player and of each other – they think and have a life of their own; they have different wishes and aspirations; some might move unasked, or might refuse to move, or might simply run away or surrender. The only connection the pieces have to each other on the board of war is that they are playing their commander’s game. The commander has to infuse each piece with discipline, and with his spirit and his will.

Hitler believed that at the core of the German defeat had been the failure of morale and will. He attributed this failure to propaganda – effective propaganda by the allies, who sought to divide the Prussians from the Bavarians, blaming the militarism of the former for the war – and defective by the German government, who allowed Jews and Marxists to spread revolutionary doctrines unopposed.

On being invalided to a military hospital in 1916, Hitler had noted that ‘shirkers’ abounded, who decried the war and derided those who fought in it. Indeed, by 1918 ‘over a million wounded, disabled and discontented soldiers … choked the hospitals and lines of communication spreading alarm and despondency in the rear.’¹³ However during the 1918 revolution ‘neurotic patients suddenly shed their symptoms and became revolutionary leaders.’¹⁴

‘There was general agreement among the doctors that four years of war had produced “mass hysteria”, which found an outlet in social upheaval. The shock of the episode left most German psychiatrists aligned with the political right long before Hitler came to power. Most importantly of all, however, German doctors vowed to pursue a much tougher and purely military policy towards war neurotics in any future war.’¹⁵

According to the German psychiatrists, when the German republic became unable to pay pensions to psychoneurotic war victims in 1926, ‘all the “Kriegzitterer” abruptly lost their symptoms and could function again’¹⁶.

Between 1914 and 1918 the German military authorities shot 71 soldiers for military offences; between 1939 and 1945 the number would be 15,000 – a whole division – for Hitler became obsessively determined that the collapse would not be repeated. A new Germany would consider the maintenance of will and morale by a pervasive and fanaticising propaganda to be a basic pillar of the state. The defeat of 1918 would be explained simply and boldly, the villains would be marked, and the lessons continually hammered home:

‘In general the art of all truly great natural leaders at all times consists among other things primarily in not dividing the attention of a people, but in concentrating it upon a single foe. The more unified the application of a people’s will to fight, the greater will be the magnetic attraction of a movement and the mightier will be the impetus of the thrust. It belongs to the genius of a great leader to make even adversaries far removed from one another seem to belong to a single category, because in weak and uncertain characters the knowledge of having different enemies can only too readily lead to the beginning of doubt in their own right.

Once the wavering mass sees itself in a struggle against too many enemies, objectivity will put in an appearance, throwing open the question whether all others are really wrong and only their own people or their own movement are in the right.

And this brings about the first paralysis of their own power. Hence a multiplicity of different adversaries must always be combined so that in the eyes of the masses of one’s own supporters the struggle is directed against only one enemy. This strengthens their faith in their own right and enhances their bitterness against those who attack it.’¹⁷

Morale, will and unity had failed in this war; in the next, it would not be Germany who cracked. The Jews would make a wonderfully convenient focus for the enhancement of bitterness, would easily become the ‘one enemy’ that even the ‘wavering masses’ could identify; that 12,000 Jews died for their country – Germany – between 1914 and 1918; that the German-Jewish community contained an intellectual elite that would be a source of strength to any nation, or that it would be a gift of great value to Germany’s enemies, Hitler ignored – the Jews would be the central enemy, the common thread which would run through his propaganda. They were too unifying a target to resist. Hitler’s hatred for the Jews was probably sincere, and this no doubt aided the process of demonisation.

The soldiers returned to starvation (the British blockade did not end until peace was signed) and intermittent civil war – although some German prisoners of war continued to trickle back until as late as May 1920.¹⁸ Discipline, especially behind the lines, had now broken down. Army property – horses and vehicles – was ‘sold for a few Marks, a loaf of bread, or some cigarettes’… and 1,895,092 rifles, 8452 machine guns and 400 mortars were held illegally in 1920, according to a German government calculation.¹⁹ These would be found by vengeful hands. Friedrich Ebert, the new leader and eventual president, with the disintegration and chaos of Russia before his eyes, formed an agreement with General Wilhelm Groener, the new army commander, to suppress the spate of revolts. In that purpose they were assisted by the Freikorps, unofficial groups of ex-soldiers and students:²⁰

‘There were plenty of ex-officers and ex-regular NCOs eager to continue the fight in a different form, who gladly accepted responsibility and immediately undertook the creation of volunteer units of all kinds and strengths. The government provided inducements such as special rates of pay and rations. Most of these units took the names of their founders and leaders. In other cases a regiment, while retaining its number, was simply called “a regiment of volunteers”. Still other regiments were left on a mobile footing to defend the frontiers in the east and were then, or later, turned into volunteer formations. It was not long before they became fighting bodies worthy of respect.’²¹

Together, the army and the Freikorps repressed the spartacist revolt in Berlin, the Freikorps shooting the leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, out of hand. In March 1920 the Freikorps suppressed the ‘Red Ruhr Army’ (after having supported a failed right wing putsch in Berlin a month before – the Kapp Putsch) and in May 1921 they fought a successful, but unofficial, battle with Poland over Silesia.²² The Freikorps were employed by the army as a militia to supplement their own inadequate professional force on the borders of the Reich, as well as to imprint the army’s view on internal politics. An illustration of the loyalties of the Freikorps may be found in the history of No. 19, Trench Mortar Company; reinforced by some men from the No. 2 Naval Brigade (the Erhardt brigade), it was inaugurated on August 3rd 1921 as an ‘iron organisation’ to serve the Nazi party. They were known as the stormtroopers, the sturmabteilung, or S.A., after the crack troops who had led the 1918 offensives.

When, as a result of allied pressure, the Freikorps were disbanded, their members nursed a bitter hatred of the Republic, which, they felt, had betrayed them. They did not all disband. On some large estates they were employed as labour organisations by day, while the hours of darkness saw them training and gun-running. The corps of Rossbach, one among many filled with similar bitterness, may serve as another example of the nature of these troops; the following brief history was compiled by British military intelligence:

‘Early in 1919 this Freikorps was absorbed into the provincial Reichswehr, but on (the) signing of the Treaty (of Versailles) in June, Rossbach tore off his badges, designed a new flag for his Corps and had his men swear allegiance away from the Reich to himself. Ignoring the orders of the government and von Seekt, the Corps marched to Riga to join the “iron division” fighting to retain the Baltic provinces. It was however forced to withdraw in conformity with the remainder of the troops there, and Rossbach with his fifteen hundred men returned to Germany where he was charged with desertion … But Rossbach refused to submit to disbandment and instead offered his services by press advertisement to any individual that would use it for “a national interest”. Soon after, the corps was subsidised by the promoters of the Kapp Putsch in which it took part, and after its failure it, like all the others involved, was for a second time ordered to disband, but it again refused, and, assisted by the Pommersche Landbund (League of Pomeranian Landowners) it set up as a “Worker’s Community”. Its arms which had been left behind after the Kapp Putsch were forwarded to it, consigned as “component parts”.

Reinforced to four thousand men of all arms, the Rossbach corps mobilised in 48 hours and joined other insurgents to fight the Polish insurgents in Upper Silesia during the disturbances which had just broken out there in the spring of 1921. But on the signing of an armistice, the corps was ordered to hand over its arms to the Allied Disarmament Commission in the Plebiscite area and to demobilise. Instead it escaped back to Pomerania and resumed its role as “Worker’s Community”; its arms, which had been hidden in farms and houses in Upper Silesia, followed. Shortly after all such workers’ organisations were prohibited in Prussia by virtue of the Treaty, and a decree was also published once more ordering the dissolution of the “Illegal Freikorps” throughout the Reich. Rossbach now blossomed out as a “Mutual Savings Association”, with his men “on leave” and dispersed in formed bodies on estates, but with a central office in Berlin. When this organisation was in turn forbidden, Rossbach changed his command into an “Agricultural Workers Union”, only to be declared illegal a week later. However he boasted that he could found organisations more quickly than the authorities could suppress them. A little later Rossbach entered the Nazi Party and became its delegate in Mecklenburg where he organised semi – military physical training societies. Arrested a second time, he was nevertheless able to get to Munich and take part in the Putsch of 9^th November 1923. After its failure he sought refuge in Vienna, and many of his Corps became party members.’²³

During the disorders in Berlin, Ebert’s government had been forced to quit the city for Weimar, some 150 miles away, and the German republic of 1918–1933 has ever after been known to history as the ‘Weimar Republic’. This republic, powerless since the armistice, had now to bear the burden of the Treaty of Versailles which the victorious allies imposed upon it. The American President Wilson’s idealistic 14 points, which the hapless Germans had presumed would form the basis of the treaty, were brushed aside as far as Germany was concerned, and the disarmed republic had now to accept the cup of humiliation and defeat. There were no negotiations. Alsace Lorraine was returned to France, and German minorities in the East were to be ruled by the newly independent Czechs, Poles and Lithuanians. The fleet was lost, the army reduced to 100,000 men. The Rhineland was ‘demilitarised’, heavy artillery and military aeroplanes were forbidden. Of her arable land 15% and of her iron ore deposits 75%, were gone, her steel capacity was reduced by 38%, pig iron by 44%, coal by 18%. She was branded with the guilt of the war. As reparation, she was forced to pay to the victorious allies 132 billion gold marks, equivalent in 1918 rates to some 33 billion dollars. In addition, the war had cost the Germans some 150 billion reichsmarks, nearly all of it borrowed.²⁴

All this added to the bitterness, not only towards the allies, but more importantly, of German for German. Disorder, faction, the occupation of the Ruhr by the French, a catastrophic inflation, a Soviet Republic in Bavaria and, between 1919 and 1922, 376 political murders, (356 by rightist extremists) told of the ruin of Germany. Ten years earlier, in 1912, Rupert Brooke, writing in Berlin, had parodied the orderliness of the German people²⁵; now chaos and paramilitary hooliganism stalked the streets.

The philosophical legacy of war for defeated Germany was thus essentially different from that in the west, particularly in Britain. Among the victors it had become ‘the war to end war.’ The generals were regarded as incompetent butchers, blundering fools, who were careless of the lives of their soldiers and indifferent to their suffering.

Flag-waving patriotism seemed to have been sullied by the conflict. The Roman poet’s contention, that it was fitting and proper to die for your country, was now called ‘the old lie.’ Socialist ideas gained ground, in which the true nature of man was held to be good and noble, but was everywhere sullied by a system of oppression and exploitation, by greed, militarism, elitism, jingoistic nationalism and racialism – remove the restraints, take men and women into the daylight, and they would rise to new heights.

In Germany it was the misfortune of these ideas almost to triumph before the end of the war, and therefore to be seen in some circles as not the solution to war, but the cause of the defeat and humiliation. This made the considerable gulf between left and right unbridgeable, particularly as the extreme right began to regard the leadership and focus of the left as being intrinsically different, inveterate, sub-human and degenerate.

‘If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world,’ wrote Hitler, ‘his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity.’²⁶ These, however, had supposedly been Hitler’s thoughts before the war, although here expressed as a rallying call to the Nazi party some six years afterwards. Jewish thinkers had indeed been at the forefront of left wing activism and philosophy, from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels through to the soviet revolutions in Russia, Hungary and the Soviet Republic of Bavaria. That Jewish people were also at the forefront of the very capitalism that the revolutionaries sought to destroy was not seen by Hitler as the proof of individualism and disunity, or as evidence that personal considerations were paramount over ‘national’ with most human activity, but as further evidence of a concerted and world wide Jewish plot, in which the ‘lesser’ races, such as the Slavs were, in a cosmopolitan equality, manipulated in order to corrupt the purity of the ‘German blood.’ This, however, remained for years the extreme doctrine of an embittered fanatic, head of a party which, nationally, could attract no more than some 6% of the electorate in 1924, after defeat, inflation, revolution, French invasion and civil bloodshed had heated political feelings to fever pitch.

Understandably, both victors and vanquished felt reverentially towards the ‘fallen’, those who had died in the service of their country. In the highest circles of church and state, it was held that they had done so as a sacrifice – their lives had been ‘given’ to their native land – and the easy presumption, which perhaps assuaged the grief or guilt of the survivors, became adapted to the prevailing spirit of the times. In the west, the belief that it had been ‘the war to end war’ introduced the idea that the fallen had given their lives for peace. Ten million separate and individual reasons for death in battle were easily and understandably collated by horror, grief, religion and politics into a common sacrifice.

In Germany, the power which had almost single handedly defied the other great powers for four years, which had, indeed, come close to defeating them, whose brave, well led and disciplined armies and fleets had won the respect, even admiration, of their foes, the soldiers could hardly be said to have sacrificed themselves for peace. They had only just been baulked of outright victory. The surviving front soldiers must have had great difficulty coming to terms with their apparently useless suffering, and the loss of their comrades. The honoured dead and their devotion to Germany were a constant source of anger and recrimination among the large and menacing organisations of the right wing. Perhaps guilt, or fear, now gripped those soldiers who had deserted, or formed soldiers councils, or who had called their more devoted comrades ‘blacklegs’ for continuing the war. What could be more natural than to join in the accusations, particularly when the Jews and the Communists could be blamed as the ultimate villains. Indeed, the S.A. members themselves, ‘desperadoes in search of a pension’, were often recruited wholesale from the left wing parties.

There was a profound sense of destiny abroad in Germany, a feeling that history had reached one of its great climacterics, in which the future of races and nations would be decided, as in the great ‘wandering of the peoples’ that had followed the collapse of the Roman empire in the west, when the Wagnerian gods and heroes so beloved of Hitler had hammered out the destinies of Europe. Now the west was felt to be in a similar state of collapse, and heading towards an abyss, from which the German people, united, regenerated in a new kind of disciplined, authoritarian state, would advance to the leadership of a new European order. The conflict of capitalism and Marxism, the effete doctrines of democracy, internationalism and liberalism, would be swept away by a new corporate German Reich united in the Volksgemeinschaft, the peoples’ community. The German race, the leaders of the great aryan ‘people’²⁷, purified and ennobled for the continuous Darwinian struggle for existence, would stand at the portals of a new age.

These ideas, although not in such an extreme form, had been common in Europe at the turn of the century. The northern Europeans, amazed at their own advances in the arts and sciences, in politics and in war, in industry and in medicine had, not surprisingly, attributed this in part to their innate superiority. Leading figures in England and America had descried the future greatness of their own nations in the forests of Germany, whence the Anglo Saxon people had emerged to colonise England and, eventually, to rule the globe either directly or by the example of their free institutions. This Anglo-Saxonism²⁸, to which the Scottish, Irish and Welsh peoples were by a necessary generosity admitted, was expanded to embrace the ‘English speaking peoples’, since a too narrow interpretation would have excluded the majority of the people of the United States, into which a vast immigration was pouring. The Anglo-Saxons eventually sank back into the dark-age history from which that mysterious and perhaps dubious group had been so imperfectly raised. They left an important legacy of Anglo-American rapprochement and common feeling.

Not so the ancestral Germans; the bitterness of defeat seemed to bathe the ancient German tribes in a new light; they appeared as heroes whose purity had been lately corrupted by the admixture of inferior breeds, foremost amongst whom were the Slavs and the Jews. The solution to this ‘problem’ appeared to be simple; a leader, a Fuehrer, was needed to act upon it. The next thousand years of history would justify his ruthless actions. But this could not be achieved, it was thought, until Weimar, tainted with defeat, cosmopolitanism, modernism, democracy and humanity, was swept away.

A war of vengeance had long been contemplated and planned in the highest circles of the German army. Its leaders saw that the Great War had been a war of whole peoples. The collapse of the home front had been caused or aided by a catastrophic failure of agriculture, which had led to famine and bitterness. Industry had been unprepared for a long war, and had been imperfectly mobilised for mass production.

The solution to this was found in a Wehrwirtshaft, the defence based economy, a strategy of total economic mobilisation for war, prepared in peace. Links began to be established with industry, which became more open after 1926, when the allied control commission left Germany.²⁹ The philosophy of an historical climacteric, when the future of whole races and peoples would be decided in a total war in which vengeance would be wreaked, was thus well established in official circles in Germany before Adolf Hitler came to power. The seeds of vengeance had been sown in a rich soil.