/ world today news/ What happened a hundred years ago in Munich became known as the “Beer Putsch”. There is mockery and contempt in this. But there is nothing funny about the speech of the German nationalists on November 8, 1923. The name of Adolf Hitler, the hitherto unknown leader of a small nationalist party, instantly became famous throughout Germany. And despite prison sentences, his fellow party members are gaining recognition across the country. Why? Are the people of Germany really that crazy to believe such a hysterical clown?
The most serious authors who wrote about Hitler warn against underestimating this man. Hitler was no fool at all. Thus, the famous German publicist Sebastian Hafner wrote: “Hitler has always been underestimated. The biggest mistake of his opponents was that they wanted to make him petty and ridiculous. It wasn’t petty or funny. Hitler was a very bad man. Great men are often bad. And Hitler was also, which must not be misconstrued, with all his terrible characteristics, a very great man, as shown again and again in the courage of his insight and in the sharpness of his instincts during the next ten years.”
Joachim Fest, the author of what is generally considered the best biography of Hitler, wrote of the same: “if Hitler had died in 1938, he would have been considered the most important statesman in history.” Lloyd George, after meeting Hitler, called him the most significant figure in European politics after Napoleon and the greatest German of the 20th century: he “managed to unite Catholics and Protestants, entrepreneurs and workers, poor and rich, into one and united nation .” This is the opinion of the most serious politicians of the time and the most insightful authors of the present day.
And the very appearance of Hitler in the political arena a hundred years ago does not seem funny at all. But let’s start from the beginning.
The Treaty of Versailles, which Germany was forced to sign with threats of blockade and starvation, turned into a complete nightmare for her. Germany must pay the victors 132 billion gold marks – an unheard of sum, twice the country’s national income in pre-war 1913. Also, deprived of an army, merchant navy and colonies, Germany is forced to allocate most of its production capacity for building ships for the Allies and mining coal for France.
The following year, the Weimar government, looking for reserves to pay reparations, decided to impose extremely high taxes on large German capital. As a result capital is flowing out of the country.
By this time the Reichsbank was barely surviving. On August 31, 1921, Germany would issue its first billion in gold marks, causing the value of the mark to immediately drop from 60 to 100 marks to the dollar. By the end of 1922, prices would exceed pre-war levels 1,475 times. Under such conditions, Germany can no longer repay its monstrous debt.
France would immediately take advantage of her critical situation and, accusing Germany of breaching her obligations, would occupy the Ruhr, the industrial heart of the country, in January of the following year.
The occupation of the Ruhr opened up enormous prospects for France: its heavy industry got coal and coke, and Alsatian textile mills got German markets. France became the economic and political hegemon of Europe.
Deprived of an army, Germany could offer no resistance to the aggressors. And attempts at “passive resistance” were brutally suppressed by the French: on March 31, 1923, a peaceful demonstration of workers in Essen was shot. In total, up to 400 people were killed or shot during the occupation.
The already agonizing German economy did not survive the occupation of the Ruhr. The German mark plunged into the abyss: in November 1923, the gold mark was already worth one trillion paper marks, one egg – eight million marks. Unemployment has tripled and the infant mortality rate has reached 20%. Instantly, the country’s impoverished population returned to the state of desperate starvation it had already experienced in 1918-1919, when Germany was forced to sign the Versailles Accords. Then the famine takes hundreds of thousands of lives.
And now Germany lies in the middle of Europe again, an exhausted victim. Thousands of speculators from America and the eastern part of Europe rush to the rich prey. The interest rates of moneylenders are rising by 35 percent every day. Any swindler with a thousand or two dollars in his pocket could make unheard of deals at the time. Thus, a certain Richard Kahn, who made a fortune from the post-war liquidation of wine warehouses, buys the largest state-owned military plant in Germany, Deutsche Werke, at the price of scrap. This is happening all over the country.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Comintern fighters are becoming more active in the “red areas” of the country, and separatists are active in the outskirts. Germany finds itself on the brink of total collapse and revolutionary chaos.
After entering the Ruhr, the French began active activities to further dismember the country. The idea was this: by separating the Catholic lands of Germany from the Protestant north, to create a block of buffer bordering states from Austria to the Lower Rhine. At the same time, the Rhineland was to become the Republic of the Rhine, and Bavaria a Catholic monarchy under the patronage of France.
At the same time, the Comintern intended to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia. The communists, taking advantage of the crisis, want to raise a pan-German uprising, for the preparation of which emissaries August Guralski and Matias Rakosi were sent to Germany. The center of the uprising was to be Saxony, where the Social Democrats and Communists came to power in March 1923. With the help of the local authorities, the militants intended to capture the necessary amount of weapons. At the beginning of the uprising, Rákosi had to blow up the railway bridge connecting Saxony to Czechoslovakia, thus provoking Czech intervention and increasing the chaos in the country. At the same time, the Red Army was preparing to come to the aid of the German Communists.
But the German authorities unexpectedly demonstrated speed and determination. On October 13, the Stresemann government declared a state of emergency in Saxony. Plans for a communist takeover fail. Only in Hamburg on October 23 did the communists rise up. But the police and the Reichswehr bear the brunt, and after 30 hours of street fighting, Hamburg is cleared of the extremists.
But simultaneously with the activation of the Bolsheviks, France was preparing to put into action its plan for the secession of Bavaria. According to the plan, Gustav von Carr should declare independence in alliance with the French.
In the end, it was against the implementation of this plan that the uprising of the small nationalist party in Munich began. The riot was put down by the police. But anyone who followed the situation in Germany at that time understood very well what was going on then.
What if Carr and the French had succeeded in their plan? In this case, the next act of the German drama would most likely be the collapse and subsequent Bolshevization of the country. But if Germany, after Russia, falls into the hands of the Communists, what will Europe expect then? You don’t need to be a prophet to know: Paris will fall next, under pressure from outside and the onslaught of its own Bolsheviks. Which in turn meant the beginning of communist chaos throughout Europe.
All this, of course, is clearly visible not only in Germany. Thus, a large-scale reaction against the French adventure is already rising throughout Europe.
However, the first to react to the attempt to break up the country was the small party of German nationalists in alliance with the veteran organization Kampfbund. The conspirators want to arrest Carr, then overthrow the president and declare a national government. The coup falls. The army, as the rebels hope, does not go over to their side. More than twenty demonstrators were killed in clashes with the police, and the main conspirators were captured and convicted of treason.
Still, the putschists succeeded in something, and quite a bit: thus the plans of the separatists and their French curators to dismember the country were thwarted. Germany is saved from collapse. And in the eyes of the German people, people who do this become national heroes.
This is actually the basis of the German people’s sympathies for National Socialism. Thus, the hitherto unknown leader of a small party became a national celebrity overnight. This is how the greedy masters of Versailles, the insane French political adventurism, the shameless plundering of the country by foreign bankers and usurers, plus the bloody dreams of the Bolsheviks for the “red states of Europe” tie the knots of the future European tragedy. It happens so often in history: what starts out as the right thing ends up as a nightmare.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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