‘Find out what people HATE and make them hate it MORE’: The ruinous reparations demanded of Germany after World War I led to hyperinflation – and the cynical exploitation by Hitler and Goebbels of the bitterness felt by ordinary people

BOOK OF THE WEEK

THE WEIMAR YEARS

by Frank McDonough (Apollo £25, 592pp)

A Munich housewife dragged a suitcase full of banknotes to her local grocery store. She left it outside while she went in to do some shopping. When she came out, someone had stolen the luggage but tipped out the worthless money.

This was in 1923, at the height of hyperinflation in Germany. A loaf of bread cost 700 marks in January, 100,000 marks in May, two million in September, 670 million in October and 80 billion in November. A 5,000 mark cup of coffee was worth 8,000 marks by the time you drank it.

The cover of McDonough’s brilliant new book about the Weimar years (a prequel to his critically acclaimed two-part The Hitler Years) features a photo of German children playing in the street and using blocks of worthless banknotes to build a castle. Those notes also made good wallpaper.

What had gone wrong to cause this economic frenzy? McDonough tells the entire complicated story of the Weimar Republic with an excellent command of his material, lavishly illustrated with full-page photographs of mass protests and rallies, and a succession of mustached chancellors, leading inexorably to the rise of the mustached dictator.

Frame by frame, over fifteen years of well-intentioned but chaotic democracy, we see how the foundation is being laid for the catastrophe of the Hitler regime.

What this book shows with terrifying clarity is that everything in global politics is interconnected. The seeds of disaster were sown in 1919. The Allied victors of World War I, determined to punish Germany for their “war guilt,” demanded huge, crippling reparations.

Under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Germany was obliged to pay 20 billion gold marks by 1921, then two billion per year for the next five years, rising to four billion for the next four years, and then six billion per year until 1963 .

Germany screamed and protested, feeling complete disgust at this punishment. To begin with, the country accepted no blame for starting the war. Also, many Germans did not even accept that Germany had lost the war, because their territory was never conquered. They continued to ask the Allies for ‘payment holidays’.

Prime Minister Lloyd George took pity on them and advised French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré that this ruthless ‘impoverishment of the German people’ was counterproductive. Poincaré strongly disagreed. He would not give up his excessive demands. When the Germans began overprinting money in 1922, causing the value of the currency to drop, Poincaré thought they were deliberately bankrupting themselves to avoid making payments. France thus carried out its threat to invade and occupy the Ruhr until Germany relented.

It was at this humiliating moment that the German government initiated a policy of ‘passive resistance’. Germans were encouraged to strike and stop doing business with the Allies. And how did the government finance this policy? By using 30 factories to print banknotes day and night to pay workers and companies: a version of the ‘furlough’ system. It was a disaster. At the height of the madness, the highest value was a 100 trillion mark banknote.

This book serves as a salutary warning about the dangers of proportional representation. In the photo: Hitler, Goebbels and Stuttgart

Always in the background you hear the drumbeat of the young Nazi party and the increasing success of Hitler and Goebbels’ propaganda method: “Find out what people hate and make them hate it even more.” The couple pictured together

In retrospect, we know that any democracy – no matter how chaotic – was better than the evil dictatorship and killing machine that would follow. But McDonough shows how the Weimar system was riddled with flaws from the start.

This book serves as a salutary warning about the dangers of proportional representation. During the years 1918 to 1933, there were only two presidents (Ebert until 1925 and Hindenburg until 1933), but twenty different coalition governments, under a succession of chancellors that each lasted an average of nine months.

There were far too many political parties, each with their own acronym, making some of these pages a bewildering mass of capital letters.

Forty-one parties contested the 1928 elections. This was an unworkable fragmentation of politics, the failure of which Hitler used to argue for the need for a single strong ‘Führer’. He blamed “the November Criminals” (as he called the politicians who signed the Treaty of Versailles) for unleashing an era of poverty and chaos.

If only the New York Times had been right in 1924. When Hitler emerged from captivity after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, they wrote: “It is believed that he will retire to private life and return to Austria.” If only the promise signed by Germany, France and Belgium in the Locarno Treaties of 1925 that they would ‘never attack each other again’ had been kept.

Thanks to a few moderate, flexible and fundamentally good politicians, in particular Gustav Stresemann (Chancellor from August to November 1923, then Minister of Foreign Affairs until his much too early death in 1929), constructive talks were established between Germany and the US . with the Dawes Plan and then the Young Plan to help Germany meet its (new, slightly reduced) reparations by better managing its own economy.

But always in the background you hear the drumbeat of the young Nazi party and the increasing success of Hitler and Goebbels’ propaganda method: “Find out what people hate and make them hate it even more.”

Another built-in flaw of the Weimar Republic was Article 48 of the Constitution, which granted the president the power to appoint and dismiss elected governments, dissolve parliament, and suspend civil rights in times he declared a “national emergency.” .

President Hindenburg and his inner circle felt a “supreme indifference” toward supporting a democratic government. In the early 1930s they actually governed Germany themselves. This paved the way for a dictatorship.

It was Weimar’s penultimate Chancellor Franz von Papen who won Hindenburg over Hitler, as his popularity increased inexorably. “It is my unpleasant duty,” Hindenburg told his circle in January 1933, “to appoint this fellow Hitler chancellor.” He determined that it must be a ‘national coalition’. To which we can only utter a hollow laugh.

Those thirteen Weimar years had been politically chaotic, but they allowed a remarkable cultural and artistic freedom to flourish. Although this is primarily a political book, McDonough dips in and out of cultural life.

In 1930 there were 899 cabaret locations in Berlin. The nightly dancing, the uninhibited cross-dressing, the liberal attitude towards homosexuality, the beautiful freedom of artistic expression in movements like the Bauhaus, all had their thirteen years to breathe freely. before they were wiped out by the puritanical, racist and petty-bourgeois Hitler.

Yes, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the resulting rise in unemployment did not help the Weimar Republic, but McDonough insists that this was not the sole cause of its death and the rise of Nazism.

Britain and the US suffered the same economic crash but managed to avoid a fascist dictatorship. He believes that Hindenburg’s decision in 1930 to create a presidential authoritarian regime opened the way for Hitler – a catastrophe for Germany and the world.