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Germany History 1914 - 1945
F 2 World War I
The outbreak of war aroused in Germany—as in England and France—enthusiastic and naive outbursts of patriotism and dreams of romantic adventure. Devastating death tolls soon brought home the ugly reality of modern warfare to all participants. Patriotic fervor remained strong, however, even in the darkest moments of death and deprivation. Conservative members of the German military refused all efforts at a negotiated peace, extending the bloodiest war in history for a total of four years at a cost of more than 6 million German lives.
F2 a Course of the War
The German high command hoped that a quick conquest of France would secure the western front and release forces to fight in the east. Avoiding the fortified French frontier, German armies moved through neutral Belgium, hoping to take Paris by surprise, but the Germans encountered greater resistance in Belgium than expected. Their violation of international law by invading Belgium brought Britain to the aid of France and destroyed all sympathy for Germany and its allies.
German forces nearly reached Paris before they were turned back at the extremely bloody Battle of the Marne in September 1914. The two sides then dug trenches for a ferocious four-year war of attrition. Meanwhile, the Russians attacked on the east, plunging Germany into a two-front war.
The Germans defeated the ill-equipped Russians several times, but they could make no headway on the western front. The Allies—as the countries fighting against Germany were called—blockaded Germany to cut off food and raw materials, causing extensive hardship and rationing of supplies. In 1916 some antiwar socialists broke from the SPD to form the Independent Social Democratic Party, but military leaders, particularly General Erich Ludendorff, dominated the government and prevented any compromise for peace. Desperate to break the blockade, the Germans declared unrestricted submarine warfare. After several American ships were sunk, the United States entered the war in April 1917. The next year, Russia, in the throes of political revolution, sued for peace, which was concluded by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Freed in the east, the German army launched a final, all-out offensive in the west, but the Allies slowly turned the tide.
Recognizing the situation as hopeless, the German high command urged William to let a new civil government sue for peace, particularly since U.S. president Woodrow Wilson insisted on dealing with civilians. William grudgingly appointed Prince Max of Baden chancellor. While Prince Max negotiated with Wilson, fighting continued, sailors mutinied, socialists staged strikes, workers and members of the military formed Communist councils, and revolution broke out in Bavaria. On November 9, 1918, Prince Max announced the abdication of William II and his own resignation as chancellor. Prince Max handed over the government to Friedrich Ebert, leader of the SPD. That same day, Philip Scheidemann, a member of the new government, proclaimed a new republic. Germany agreed to an armistice taking effect on November 11.
F2 b Treaty of Versailles
Having surrendered and changed governments, Germans expected a negotiated peace. But the Allies were determined to receive reparation for their losses and to see that their enemy was never again in a position to endanger them. Accordingly, they imposed the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles on Germany in 1919. Germany was forced to surrender Alsace-Lorraine to France and West Prussia to Poland, creating a Polish corridor between Germany and East Prussia. Germany also lost its colonies and had to give up most of its coal, trains, merchant ships, and navy. It had to limit its army and submit to occupation of the Rhineland for 15 years. Worst of all, Germany had to accept full responsibility for causing the war and, consequently, pay its total cost—more than $30 billion in gold. These last provisions particularly rankled, since Germans did not consider themselves any more guilty than anyone else and could not possibly pay all that was demanded.
The Treaty of Versailles, justifiable from the Allies’ immediate point of view, did not ensure lasting peace. Germany was neither crushed completely—as some of the victors had demanded—nor encouraged to return to the European community. Instead, by accepting the treaty, the new German government gained a bad name among it citizens and crippled its chances of success, while fueling feelings of bitterness later exploited by the Nazis.
On February 16, 1919, a national assembly, led by the SPD, met in Weimar, Thuringia, to write a new constitution. The constitution adopted on July 31, 1919, transformed the German Empire into a democratic republic, known as the Weimar Republic.
F 3 The Weimar Republic (1919-1933)
The short-lived Weimar Republic has become a symbol of many things to subsequent observers. To Nazis, it embodied the humiliation of an imposed settlement and an “un-German” cosmopolitanism that they considered decadent. To post-Nazi Germans, it was a beacon of pre-Hitler democracy. Finally, to many cultural scholars, the period of the Weimar Republic was a fascinating time when the old and the new in German society collided and blended, often producing enduring works of art and literature.
F3 a Politics and Government
The Weimar constitution provided all of the basic civil rights common to other democratic countries: universal suffrage and freedom of speech, of press, of movement, and of association. Although the right to private property was recognized, plans were made to nationalize several key industries. The reform-minded Friedrich Ebert of the SPD was the Republic’s first president, from 1919 to 1925. He was succeeded by the elderly war hero Paul von Hindenburg, who was president until his death in 1934.
For most Germans, the Weimar government bore the stigma of defeat. In addition, as a parliamentary government, it was opposed on principle by both conservative militarists and revolutionary socialists. Both sides, using private armies, frequently tried to overthrow the government. In 1919 the Communist Spartacists under Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg tried unsuccessfully to overturn the government, and in 1920 a much more dangerous rightist military revolt, the Kapp Putsch, was put down.
F3 b Economic and Political Crises
The economic situation of Germany during the first five postwar years made the political situation even more precarious. Because Germany could not meet reparations requirements, France invaded the industrial center of the Ruhr in 1923, seizing control of all its coal deposits. The German government encouraged the workers to resist passively, and it printed vast amounts of devalued money to pay them. Before July 1922, the value of the Reichsmark had already dropped from about 4 to 493 to the dollar, but during the next 16 months it plummeted to 4.2 trillion to the dollar. The resulting inflation wiped out the savings, pensions, insurance, and other forms of fixed income of most middle-class and working-class Germans.
In 1924 the Dawes Plan was implemented to ease the German reparations burden and provide for foreign loans. The brilliant chancellor and foreign minister Gustav Stresemann reorganized the monetary system and encouraged industrial growth. For the next five years, Germany enjoyed relative peace and prosperity, gradually fulfilling its obligations under the Versailles treaty. In 1925 England, France, Italy, and Germany signed the Treaties of Locarno, which finally established the western borders of Germany and began the withdrawal of occupation forces along the Rhine. In 1926 Germany was admitted to the League of Nations.
The worldwide depression of the 1930s, however, plunged the country once more into disaster. Millions of unemployed Germans, disillusioned by capitalist democracy, turned either to the Communist Party or to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), the party of National Socialism, or Nazism. By 1930 the Nazis were the second largest party in the Reichstag.
F 4 The Third Reich (1933-1945)
Probably no regime in the 20th century or any other has been so closely identified with institutionalized terror and evil as that of the Third Reich under the control of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Its rise and demise had worldwide consequences, and its legacy continued to shape the identity of Germans long afterward.
F4 a Hitler and National Socialism
A failed artist and former army corporal in World War I, Adolf Hitler hated aristocrats, capitalists, Bolsheviks (Communists), and liberals, as well as Jews and other so-called non-Aryans. He had already tried to topple the government in the ill-fated “beer hall putsch” of 1923. This early abortive attempt at revolution occurred when Hitler (then chairman of the NSDAP), the right-wing general Ludendorff, and several Nazi supporters stormed a Munich beer hall and forced local political leaders to declare their support for the “national revolution.” Nazi attempts to take over the Bavarian War Ministry were quickly defeated, however, and Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison for treason.
Released after serving less than one year, he immediately rejoined the NSDAP, and in 1926 again became its leader. Hitler used his public speaking gifts to win supporters for the Nazi cause, seizing every opportunity to denounce the unpopular Weimar government as weak and decadent. He also proposed giving the jobs of Jews—whom he painted as parasitical and villainous—to deserving Germans. In return for restoring Germany’s former glory and honor, he asked for the unconditional loyalty and obedience of all patriotic Germans. To reinforce his message, his followers, brown-shirted storm troopers, sporadically harassed and attacked Communists, Jews, and other enemies of the National Socialists.
In 1927 the entire Nazi membership was only 40,000. Yet by the depths of the depression of 1932, the Nazis were the most successful party in the country, although still garnering only 38 percent of the vote. Many right-wing military and civilian leaders thought that Hitler could be effectively manipulated and so, with the backing of several prominent businessmen, they succeeded in having him named chancellor on January 30, 1933.
Their belief that Hitler would be a Nazi figurehead was soon shattered, however. To secure supreme power for himself as the nation’s Führer (leader), Hitler blamed a fire in the Reichstag building on the Communists, banned the Communist Party, and called new elections. Even in this highly coercive atmosphere, the Nazis still did not obtain an absolute majority in the new Reichstag. Nevertheless, together with their political allies, they succeeded in passing the revolutionary Enabling Act, which granted the government dictatorial powers over all aspects of German life.
F4 b Totalitarian Germany
Armed with this power, Hitler set out to create a new totalitarian, nationalist empire, the Third Reich. The groundwork had been laid in the old Prussian militarist tradition and in World War I, when the military ran the government. From that foundation, Hitler proceeded with formidable efficiency. He consolidated legislative, executive, judicial, and military authority and then assumed that authority himself. He also became head of state after the death of President von Hindenburg in 1934. The Nazis combined extreme nationalism and political authoritarianism to produce a fascist state, akin to the states created in Italy by Benito Mussolini and in Spain by Francisco Franco.
All political parties except the Nazis were banned. Strikes were forbidden and the unemployed were enrolled in labor camps or the army as Germany strove to be economically self-sufficient. Unemployment plummeted from 6 million to less than 2 million by July 1935. A professional army, enlarged by conscription, was established to carry out Hitler’s plan for conquest. Hermann Wilhelm Göring oversaw the buildup of the new German air force. Paul Joseph Goebbels directed a sophisticated system of propaganda employing the mass media of publishing, film, and radio. Children were thoroughly indoctrinated at every turn, especially in groups such as the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. Spectacular rallies were staged to galvanize the German public into support for Hitler’s agenda.
Backing up the propaganda were various bureaus of organized brutality, most notoriously the secret police, or Gestapo, and Hitler’s elite bodyguard, known as the SS (Schutzstaffel), both eventually under Heinrich Himmler. Together with other military and civilian departments, these groups had virtually free rein to arrest, torture, imprison, and execute anyone who challenged the government.
F4 c The Holocaust
Already in 1933, the Nazi government had begun construction of concentration camps to imprison enemies of the regime, including political opponents, as well as Jews, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, Communists, religious dissenters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, professional criminals, and prostitutes. Many people fled the country as Nazi repression became increasingly severe, particularly after the 1935 enactment of the Nürnberg Laws, which deprived German Jews of citizenship and various civil rights. Once the international attention of the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 had passed, Jewish firms were systematically liquidated or purchased for a fraction of their actual value. Sporadic attacks on Jewish individuals and property were also common. The most dramatic was Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) on November 9, 1938, when Nazis and their sympathizers randomly killed more than 90 Jews, set fire to synagogues, and smashed the windows of thousands of Jewish-owned stores. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the country to escape persecution, but many more could not or would not leave.
When Germany occupied Poland in September 1939, Polish Jews were killed or forced into walled ghettos, where many died of starvation and illness. The conquests of France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Yugoslavia, and Greece brought hundreds of thousands more Jews under German rule. Following its invasion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in June 1941, the German army sent in death squads to execute nearly 1 million Jews in Russia, Belorussia, and Ukraine.
In the growing number of concentration camps throughout the expanded German empire, Jews and other inmates were exploited as forced laborers; when no longer able to work, they were killed by gassing, shooting, or fatal injections. Inmates were also used for medical experiments. By January 1942 Hitler’s staff had formulated a “final solution” to what they called “the Jewish problem.” Extermination centers were built to kill entire populations in the most efficient manner possible; at full operation, the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz and Birkenau could kill up to 9,000 people within 24 hours. By the end of the war, Jewish dead numbered between 5.6 million and 5.9 million, an unprecedented act of genocide later known as the Holocaust. Hundreds of thousands of other “inferior” or “treasonous” individuals also perished in German camps during the 12 years of the Third Reich.
F4 d Opposition and Resistance
Although many people in the countries occupied by Germany collaborated with Germany’s extermination of Jews and others, there was also substantial resistance. Before invasion, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland, and Italy refused to deport Jews to Germany. Widespread partisan resistance also existed in the occupied territories. Jews resisted with armed uprisings in Tarnow, Radom, Bedzin, and Białystok, as well as in the camp at Sobibór. For three weeks in 1943, the 65,000 Jews remaining in the Warsaw ghetto battled German police attempting a final roundup of Jews.
Within Germany, opposition to Hitler came from two different groups. The first comprised those individuals who felt a moral or philosophical repugnance to the Nazi state and thus defied it openly or passively. Many members of the German Evangelical Church formed a splinter institution known as the Confessing Church that openly opposed Nazi racism and brutality. Its leaders were imprisoned, exiled, or—as in the case of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer—executed. A number of Catholic clerics and lay people also resisted without official church support. Some students and teachers at the University of Munich formed an underground resistance movement (“The White Rose”) but were eventually apprehended and executed in April 1943. Socialists and Communists who had escaped Nazi roundups also fought the fascist government, although with negligible results.
The second type of German resistance to Hitler came from highly placed individuals who believed that Hitler’s leadership and methods had grown erratic and thus threatened Germany. This group, which included civil servants, military staff officers of various ranks, and members of the East Prussian aristocracy, engaged in a conspiracy to remove him. Their very late—and unsuccessful—attempt to kill Hitler with a bomb on July 20, 1944, led to a bloodthirsty purge and a series of especially brutal public executions.
F 5 World War II
F5 a Prelude to World War II
The massive destruction of World War I did not resolve the international tensions within Europe and in many ways the Treaty of Versailles made the situation worse. Germany’s revived militarism and expansionism under the Nazis were met with concern by other Europeans, but the painful memory of World War I led them to make concessions in order to avoid another violent conflict. Hitler manipulated such war weariness to Germany’s advantage as long as possible and then launched the very war that Europeans had feared.
Hitler threatened and bluffed the European powers into allowing him gradually to revise Germany’s boundaries. His goal, to unite all ethnic Germans and give them Lebensraum (living space), did not seem unreasonable to some foreign statesmen, who recognized that the Versailles treaty had been unjust. At the time, no single demand of Hitler’s seemed worth risking war to protest. In 1933 Germany left the League of Nations, and in 1935 it began to rearm—virtually unopposed—occupying the Rhineland the next year. It then signed an anti-Communist pact with Japan and made an alliance with Fascist Italy, agreements which led to the creation of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis in 1940. In 1938 Germany declared an Anschluss (union) with Austria, with little resistance from other powers or the Austrians themselves. In Munich later that year, Britain, France, and Italy signed the Munich Pact. This pact permitted Hitler to occupy the German-populated Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in exchange for his promise that Germany would then be satisfied. The Munich Pact later became the symbol of the disastrous consequences of appeasing an aggressor.
In March 1939 Hitler broke his word and occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. In August, dramatically reversing his anti-Communist policy, he made a surprising nonaggression pact with the USSR; this pact contained a secret promise to split Poland between Germany and the USSR. His repeated demands for Danzig (Gdańsk) in the so-called Polish Corridor led to a Polish-British pact and Polish mobilization. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France promptly declared war on Germany. World War II had begun.
F5 b Course of the War
In a few weeks of Blitzkrieg (lightning war), mechanized German divisions easily overwhelmed the ill-equipped Poles, taking western Poland. The Soviets seized the eastern part. In 1940 Germanyswallowed Denmark, Norway, and the Low Countries and invaded France, which rapidly collapsed. With relish, Hitler forced the French to sign an armistice in the same train car where the Treaty of Versailles had been imposed on Germany 20 years earlier. Hitler then blockaded Britain and launched air raids and bomb attacks. In 1941, to aid faltering Italian forces, he sent troops to North Africa, Greece, and Yugoslavia. Then he suddenly turned toward the east and invaded the USSR, breaking his nonaggression pact. As the Soviets retreated eastward, German armies engulfed the agriculturally rich Ukraine.
At this point, Hitler was master of continental Europe, although Britain was still resisting. In 1942 the United States entered the war after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and dramatically increased its shipments of supplies and personnel to Britain and the USSR. Hitler then ordered total mobilization of people and resources. Throughout Europe, conquered peoples, especially Slavs and Jews, were executed or enslaved in German war factories, while occupied countries were drained of food and raw materials.
By 1943 the tide had begun to turn. The German army’s supply lines in the USSR were overextended, and following Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad (modern Volgograd), the Germans were forced to retreat westward. The Allies defeated Axis forces in North Africa and invaded Italy. Meanwhile, from 1942 on, German cities and factories were systematically bombed from air bases in England, resulting in huge civilian casualties. The single-night fire bombings of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945 caused 60,000 and 135,000 fatalities respectively. Although defeat appeared inevitable, Hitler refused to surrender. The war dragged on as British and U.S. forces invaded Normandy (Normandie) in June 1944 and swept inexorably east, while the Soviets closed in from the other front. Just before Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin in April 1945, Hitler committed suicide. Germany surrendered the following month.
F 6 Life in Germany During the 20th Century
F6 a Population
The most significant demographic change of the early 20th century in Germany was increased urbanization. In 1871 only 36.1 percent of the population lived in cities; by the onset of World War I, the figure had risen to more than 60 percent, with the greatest population increase occurring in cities with more than 100,000 people. The overall population of Germany also grew considerably during this period, from 45 million in 1871 to 68 million in 1915; however, the toll of the two wars was heavy. In the postwar divided Germany, West Germany experienced its biggest growth during the 1950s, increasing from 48 million to 54 million people, while the population of East Germany remained at about 17 million. At the time of reunification in 1990, the total German population was about 82 million.
F6 b Economic and Technological Developments
Germany’s massive industrial buildup during the mid-19th century continued in the 20th century. By 1914, for instance, German coal production equaled that of the world’s largest producer, Britain. Numerous German technological innovations and scientific discoveries contributed to the nation’s industrial growth. In the automobile industry, the invention by Gottlieb Daimler of the gasoline motor and power carriage were complemented by Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel’s invention of the engine that bears his name. Daimler’s partnership with Karl Benz eventually yielded the world-famous Mercedes Benz and other car lines, rivaled by models from Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) and Volkswagen. In 1900 a dirigible airship was devised by Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin. From 1901 to 1930 German scientists won 26 Nobel prizes in chemistry, physics, and medicine. Although most known for giants in quantum physics such as Albert Einstein and Max Planck, Germany’s scientific community has made numerous contributions in every area of the natural and social sciences. Next
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