By 1921 much of the peace-treaty was being enforced.
It was reasonable to assume that it would gradually lose its contentious
character. Men cannot go on wrangling over a settled question year after year,
however embittered they may feel at first. The French forgot Waterloo; they
even tended to forget Alsace and Lorraine, despite repeated resolves not to do
so. The Germans, too, might have been expected to forget, or at any rate to acquiesce, after a time.
The problem of German power would remain; but it would not be aggravated by an
acute determination to destroy the settlement of 1919 at the first opportunity.
The reverse happened: resentment against the treaty increased with every year.
For one part of the treaty remain unsettled; and disputes over this put the
rest of the treaty in constant question. The unsettled issue was the payment of
reparations- a striking example of good intentions, or to be correct, good
ingenuity, gone wrong.
In 1919 the French wished to lay down uncompromisingly the principle that
Germany must pay the full bill for war damage – an indeterminate liability that
would swell in the future with every step of German economic recovery. The
Americans, more sensibly, proposed to state a fixed sum. Lloyd George
appreciated that, in the heated atmosphere of 1919, this sum, too, would be far
beyond German capacity. He hoped that in
time men (himself included) would come to their senses: the Allies would make a
reasonable demand, the Germans would make a reasonable offer,, and the two
figures would more or less coincide. He therefore swung around behind the
French, though exactly for the opposite reason: they wanted to make the bill
fantastically large, he wanted to scale it down. The Americans gave way. The
peace treaty merely stated the principle of reparations: their amount was to be
settled at some time into future.
Lloyd George had meant to make reconciliation with Germany easier; he made it
almost impossible. For the divergence between the British and French views
which had been covered over in 1919 rose
again to the surface as soon as they tried to fix a figure: the French still
trying to push it up, the British impatiently scaling it down. Nor did the
Germans show any willingness to
co-operate. Far from attempting to estimate their capacity to pay, they
deliberately kept their economic affairs in confusion, well knowing that, if
they once got things straight, the bill for reparations would follow. In 1920
there were angry meetings between the Allies, then conference with the Germans;
more conferences in 1921; still more in 1922. In 1923 the French tried to enforce
payment by occupying the Ruhr. The Germans first answered with passive
resistance; then surrendered at discretion, under the catastrophe of inflation.
The French, almost as exhausted as the Germans, agreed to a compromise: the
Dawes plan, drafted – largely at British prompting – under an American chairman.
Though this temporary settlement was resented by both French and Germans, reparations
were in fact paid for the next five
years. Then there was another conference – more wrangling, more accusations,
more demands, and more evasions. The Young plan, again under an American chairman,
emerged. It had hardly begun to operate before the great depression struck
Europe. The Germans claimed they could not go on paying In 1931 the Hoover moratorium
suspended reparations for twelve months. In 1932 a last conference at Lausanne
wiped the slate clean. Agreement was at last reached; but it has taken thirteen
years, years of mounting suspicion and grievance on all sides. At the end the
French felt swindled; and the German felt robbed. Reparations had kept the passions of war alive.
Reparations would, no doubt, have been a grievance in any case. It was the uncertainty
and argument over them which made the grievance chronic. In 1919 many people
believed that payment of reparations would reduce Germany to a state of Asiatic
poverty. J. M. Keynes held this view, as did all Germans and probably many
Frenchmen did also, though without regretting the consequence. During the
second World war an ingenious young Frenchman,
Etienne Mantoux, demonstrated that the Germans could have paid reparations, without
impoverishment, if they had wished to do so; and Hitler gave a practical
demonstration of this when he extracted vast sums from the Vichy government of
France. The question only has an academic interest. No doubt the apprehensions
of Keynes and the Germans were grotesquely exaggerated. No doubt that the
impoverishment of Germany was caused by war, not by reparations. No doubt the
Germans could have paid reparations, if they had regarded them an obligation of
honor, honestly incurred. In actual fact, as everyone now knows, Germany was a
net gainer by the financial transactions of the nineteen-twenties: she borrowed
far more from private American investors ( and failed to pay back) than she
paid in reparations. This was of course little consolation to the German
taxpayer, who was not at all the same person as the German borrower. For that
matter, reparations gave little consolation to the taxpayers of allied countries,
who immediately saw the proceeds transferred to the United States in repayment
of war debts. Setting one thing against another, the only economic effect of
reparations was to give employment to a large number of bookkeepers. But the
economic facts about reparations are of little importance. Reparations counted as a symbol. They created resentment, suspicion,
and international hostility. More than anything else, they cleared the way for
the second World war.
Reparations fixed the French in an attitude of sullen, but rather hopeless
resistance. They had, after all, a not unjustified claim. Northeast France had
been devastated during the war; and, whatever the rights and wrongs of war guilt,
it was reasonable that the Germans should help restore the damage. But the
French soon cheated on reparations, as everyone else did. Some Frenchmen wanted
to ruin Germany forever. Others hoped that reparations would not be paid, so that
the armies of occupation should stay in the Rhineland. French taxpayers had been
told that Germany would pay for the war; and were indignant against the Germans
when their own taxers went up. In the end, the French cheated in their turn; they
got virtually nothing except the moral blame for having demanded reparations at
all. As the French saw it, they had made a series of concessions over reparations
to please the Germans. Finally they had they had to abandon all claim to
reparations. The Germans emerged more dissatisfied than ever. The French concluded
from this experience that concessions in other fields – over disarmament or
frontiers – would be equally futile. They also concluded, though less
consciously, that concessions would be made. The French were distinguished, in
the years before the second World war, by lack of faith in their leaders and in
themselves. This despairing cynicism had a long and complicated origin which
has often been dissected by historians. But the record of reparations was its
immediate, practical cause. Here the French had certainly lost; and their
leaders had as certainly displayed a singular incapacity, or at least a
singular failure, to fulfil their promises. Reparations did almost as much to damage to democracy in France as in
Germany itself.
Reparations had also a critical influence on the relations between France
and Great Britain. In the last days of the war, the British – both politicians
a and public – had shared the French enthusiasm for reparations. It was a
British statesman of high competence, not a Frenchman, who proposed to squeeze
the German orange till the pips squeaked; and even Lloyd George had been more
clamorous for reparations than he subsequently like to imagine. Soon however
the British changed round. They began to denounce the folly of reparations once
they had themselves carried off the German merchant navy. Perhaps they were influenced by the writings of Keynes. Their more
practical motive was to restore the economic life of Europe so as to promote
the recovery of their own export industries. They listened readily to the
German stories of the endless woes which would follow the payment of
reparations; and, once they had condemned reparations, they soon condemned
other clauses of the peace treaty. Reparations were wicked. Therefore the disarmament
of Germany was wicked; the frontier with Poland was wicked, the new national
states were wicked. And not only wicked: they were a justified German
grievance, and the Germans would be neither content nor prosperous until they
were undone. The British grew indignant at French logic, at French anxiety
about German recovery, and particularly indignant at French insistence that treaties
should be honored once they had been signed. French claims to reparations were
pernicious and dangerous nonsense; therefore their claim for security s
pernicious and dangerous nonsense also. The British had some plausible ground
for complaint. In 1931 they were forced off the gold-standard. The French, who
had claimed to be ruined by the war, had a stable currency and the largest
gold-reserve in Europe. It was a bad beginning for the years of danger. The disagreements over reparations in the
years after the first World war made it almost impossible for the British and
French to agree over security in the years
before the second.
The most catastrophic effect of reparations was on the Germans
themselves. Of course they would have
been aggrieved in any case. They had not only lost the war. They had lost
territory; they had been compelled to disarm; they had been saddled with a
war-guilt which they did not feel. But these were intellectual grievances:
things to grumble over in the evenings, not the cause of suffering in everyday
life. Reparations hit every German, or seemed to, at each moment of his
existence. It would be useless to discuss whether reparations in fact
impoverished Germany; and it was equally useless to argue the point in 1919. No
German was likely to accept the proposition that Norman Angell had advanced in The Great Illusion that the payment of
the indemnity by the French in 1871 benefited France and injured Germany. The
common sense of mankind says that a man is the poorer for paying out money; and
what is true for an individual appears to be true for a nation. Germany was paying
reparations; and therefore was the poorer for it. By an easy transition
reparations became the sole cause of German poverty. The businessman in
difficulties; the underpaid schoolteacher; the unemployed worker all blamed
their troubles on reparations. The cry of a hungry child was a cry against reparations. Old men
stumbled into the grave because of reparations. The great inflation of 1923 was
attributed to reparations; so was the great depression of 1929. These views
were not just held merely by the German man-in-the-street. They were held just as strongly by the most distinguished
financial and political experts. The campaign against ‘the slave-treaty’ hardly
needed the promptings of extremist agitators. Every touch of economic hardship stirred the Germans to shake off ‘the
shackles of Versailles’.
Once men reject a treaty, they cannot be expected to remember precisely
which clause they reject. The Germans began with the more or less rational
belief that they were being ruined by reparations. They soon proceeded to the
less rational belief that they were being ruined by the treaty as a whole.
Finally, retracing their steps, they concluded that they were being ruined by
clauses of the treaty which had nothing to do with reparations. German
disarmament, for instance, may have been humiliating; it may have exposed
Germany to invasion by Poland or France. But economically it was to the good so
far as it had any effect at all [with
remarkable, though not unique ingenuity, however, the German generals managed
to make disarmament more expensive than armament had been. It cost the German
taxpayers less to maintain the great army and navy of 1914 than to maintain a
small army and no navy after 1919]. This is not what the ordinary German
felt. He assumed that, since reparations made him poorer, disarmament did also.
It was the same with the territorial clauses of the treaty. There were defects,
of course, in the settlement. The eastern front put too many Germans in Poland-
though it also put too many Poles in Germany. It could have been improved by
some redrawing and by an exchange of populations – an expedient not
contemplated in those civilized days. But an impartial judge, if such existed,
would have found little fault with the territorial settlement once the principle
of national states was accepted. The so-called Polish corridor was inhabited
predominantly by Poles; and the arrangement of free railway-communication with
East Prussia were adequate. Danzig would actually have been better off
economically if it had been included in Poland.
As to the former German colonies – also a fertile cause of grievance –
they had always been an expense, not a source of profit.
All this was lost sight of, thanks to the link between reparations and the rest
of the treaty. The German believed he was ill-dressed, hungry, or out-of-work,
because Danzig was a Free City, because
the corridor cut off East Prussia from the Reich; or because Germany had no
colonies. Even the highly intelligent banker Schacht attributed Germany’s
financial difficulties to the loss of her colonies – a view which he continued
to hold, sincerely no doubt, even after the second World war. The Germans were
not being self-centered or uniquely stupid in holding such views. This outlook
was shared by enlightened liberal Englishmen such as Keynes; by nearly all the
leaders of the British Labor party, and by all Americans who thought about European
affairs. Yet it is difficult to see why the loss of colonies and land in Europe
should have crippled Germany economically. After the second World war Germany
had much greater territorial losses, yet became more prosperous than at any
time in her history. There could be no clearer demonstration that the economic
difficulties of Germany between the wars were due to defects in her domestic
policies, not to unjust frontiers. The demonstration has been in vain; every
textbook continues to attribute Germany’s difficulties to the treaty of
Versailles. The myth went further, and still does. First, the economic problems
of Germany were blamed on the treaty. Then it was observed that these problems
continued. From this it was held to follow that nothing was done to conciliate
Germany and to modify the system set up in 1919. ‘Appeasement’ was supposed to
have been attempted only in 1938; and by that time it was too late.
This was far from the truth. Even reparations were constantly revised, and
always downward; though no doubt the revision dragged out tiresomely long. In
other ways appeasement was attempted sooner, and with success. . .
[And so on -
the issue of disarmament proved as difficult to resolve as that of reparations
- perhaps the most complex historical narrative I have ever encountered, diplomatic fiascos lasting decades, only
really comparable to what’s going on today]
Rearmament
The first World war shattered all the Great Powers involved, with the exception
of the United States, who took virtually no part in it; maybe they were all
foolish to go on trying to be Great Powers afterwards. Total war is probably
beyond the strength of any Great Power. Now even preparations for such a war
threaten to ruin the Great Powers who attempt them. Nor is this new. In the eighteenth
century Frederick the Great led Prussia to the point of collapse in the effort
to be a Great Power. The Napoleonic wars brought France down from her high
estate in Europe, and she never recovered her former greatness. This is an odd,
inescapable dilemma. Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to
fight a great war, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one,
or to fight it on a limited scale. This was the secret of Great Britain’s
greatness so long as she stuck to naval warfare and did not try to become a
military power on a continental pattern. Hitler did not need instruction from a
historian in order to appreciate this. The inability of Germany to fight a long
war was a constant theme of his; and so was the danger which threatened Germany
if the other Great Powers combined against her. In talking like this, Hitler
was more sensible than the German generals who imagined all would be well if
they got Germany back to the position she occupied before Ludendorff’s offense
in March 1918. Hitler did not draw the moral that it was silly for Germany to
be a Great Power. Instead he proposed to dodge the problem by ingenuity, much
as the British had once done. Where they relied on sea power, he relied on
guile. Far from wanting war, a general war was the last thing he wanted. He
wanted the fruits of total victory without total war; and thanks to the stupidity
of others he nearly got them. Other Powers thought that they were faced with the
choice between total war and surrender. At first they chose surrender; then
they chose total war, to Hitler’s ultimate ruin.
This is not guesswork. It is demonstrated beyond peradventure by the record of
German armament before the second World war and even during it. It would have
been obvious long ago if men had not been blinded by two mistakes. Before the
war they listened to what Hitler said instead of looking at what he did. After
the war they wanted to pin on him the guilt for everything which happened,
regardless of the evidence. The record,
however, is there for anyone that wishes to use it: until the spring of 1936
German rearmament was largely a myth. This does not mean merely that the
preliminary stages of rearmament were not producing increase strength, as always
happens. Even the preliminary stages were not being undertaken at all
seriously. Hitler cheated foreign powers
and the German people in exactly the opposite sense from that which is usually
supposed. He, or rather Goering, announced: ‘Guns before butter’. In fact, he put
butter before guns.
In 1936, according to Churchill, two independent estimates placed German
rearmament expenditure at an annual rate of 12 thousand million marks. The
actual rate was under 5 thousand million. Hitler himself asserted that the Nazi
government had spent 90 thousand million marks on armaments before the outbreak
of war. In fact the German government expenditure, war and non-war, did not
amount to much more than this between 1933 and 1938. Rearmament cost about
forty thousand million marks in the six fiscal years ending 31 Mach 1939, and about 50 thousand millions up
to the out break of war.
Why was German rearmament on such a limited scale? For one thing, Hitler was
anxious not to weaken his popularity by reducing the standard of civilian life
in Germany. The most rearmament did was to prevent its rising faster than it
otherwise would have done. Even so the Germans were better off than they had
ever been before. Then the Nazi system was inefficient, corrupt and muddle.
More important, Hitler would not increase taxes but was terrified of inflation.
Even the overthrown of Schacht did not really shake the financial limitations,
though it was supposed to do so. Most important of all, Hitler did not make large
war preparations simply because his concept of warfare did not require them.
Rather he planned to solve Germany’s living space problem in piecemeal fashion
– by a series of small wars. One even suspects Hitler hoped to get by without
any war at all. The one thing he did not plan for was the great war often attributed
to him.
Pretending to prepare for a great war and not in fact doing it was an essential
part of Hitler’s strategy; and those who sounded the alarm against him, such as
Churchill, unwittingly did his work for him. This device was new and took
everyone in. Previously governments spent more on armaments than they admitted,
as most do to the present day. This was sometimes to deceive their own people,
sometimes to deceive a potential enemy. In 1909, for instance, the German government
were accused by many British people of secretly accelerating naval building
without the approval of the Reichstag. This accusation was probably untrue. But
it left a permanent legacy of suspicion that the German would d it again; and
this suspicion was strengthened by the evasions of the disarmament imposed by
the treaty of Versailles, which successive German governments practiced, though
to little advantage, after 1919. Hitler encouraged this suspicion and exploited
it. There is a very good illustration. On 28 November 1934 Baldwin denied
Churchill’s statement tat German air strength was equal to that of Great
Britain’s. Baldwin’s figures were right; Churchill’s were wrong. On 24 March
1935 Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden visited Hitler. He told them that the
German air force was already equal to that of Great Britain, if not indeed
superior. He was at one believed, and has been believed ever since. Baldwin was
discredited. Panic was created. How was it possible that a statesman could
exaggerate his armaments instead of concealing them? Yet this is what Hitler
had done.
German rearmament was largely a myth until the spring of 1936. Ten Hitler put
some reality in it. His motive was principally fear of the Red Army, and of
course Great Britain and France had begun to rearm also. Hitler raced along
with the others, and not much faster. In
October 1936 he told Goering to prepare the German army for war within four
years, though he did not lay down any detailed requirements. In 1938-39, the
last peacetime year, Germany spent about 15% of her gross national product. The
British proportion was almost exactly the same. German expenditure on armaments
was actually cut down after Munich and remained at this lower level, so that
British production of airplanes, for example, was way ahead of the German by
1940. When the wat broke out in 1939, Germany had 1450 modern fighter planes
and 800 bombers’ Great Britain and France had 950 fighters and 1300 bombers. The
Germans had 3500 tanks, Great Britain and France had 3850. In each case Allied
intelligence estimated German strength at more than twice the true figure. As
usual, Hitler was thought to have planned and prepared for a great war. In
fact, he had not.
It may be objected that these figures are irrelevant. Whatever the deficiencies
of German armaments on paper, Hitler won a war against two European Great
Powers when the test came. However,
though Hitler won, he won by mistake – a mistake he shared. Of course the Germans
were confident that they could defeat Poland if they were left undisturbed in
the west. Here Hitler’s judgment that the French could do nothing proved more
accurate than the apprehensions of the German generals. But he had no idea that
he could knock France out of the war when he invaded Belgium and Holland on 10
May 1940. This was a defensive move: to secure the Ruhr from Allied invasion.
The conquest of France was an unforeseen bonus. Even after this Hitler did not
prepare for a great war. He imagined he could defeat Soviet Russia without
serious effort as he had defeated France. German production of armaments was
not reduced merely during the winter of 1940-41; it was reduced still more in
the autumn of 1941 when the war against Russia had already begun. No serious
change took place after the initial setback in Russia nor even after the catastrophe
at Stalingrad. Germany remained with ‘a peace-like war economy” Only British bombing
attacks on German cities stimulated Hitler and the Germans to take war
seriously. German war production reached its height just when Allied bombing
did: in July 1944. From the first to last, ingenuity, not military strength,
was Hitler’s secret of success. He was done for when military strength became
decisive, as he had always know he would be.
