Status Updates From Weimar Germany: The Death o...

The day after Christmas 1922, the Reparations Commission registered insufficient deliveries of German timber and telegraph poles…Two weeks later, on 9 January, the Commission censured the Germans for non-delivery of the agreed amounts of coal…Two days later the French and Belgians sent in their troops…

Making money and being a success in business are not necessarily skills that always transfer elsewhere, particularly in a political crisis.

It was reparations that brought down the government of the well-meaning Joseph Wirth as Chancellor, two months before the French invasion of the Ruhr.

On the day the French army marched into the Ruhr, the mark was valued at 48,000 to the British pound. By the end of January, in just twenty days, it had fallen to 227,000.

Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister in August 1914, a prominent Liberal powerbroker, was visiting Berlin the month after the occupation began. She said the invasion was 'dangerous insanity... morally unjust and politically mad'.

01/11/2023 the French invaded the Ruhr region.

On 1 July 1922…one US dollar was worth 402 German marks. A fortnight later the exchange rate was
670.

most of the financial press saw no connection between printing money and its depreciation…The financial paper Berliner Börsen declared authoritatively on 12 Novem-ber: 'It has long been realized that the printing of notes is the result and not the cause of depreciation... A point has now been reached where the lack of money has a worse effect than the deprivation itself.'

the 'hyper prefix to inflation, but in the twenty-first century the general consensus has been the definition proposed by Phillip Cagan, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, who wrote extensively on the subject in the 1950s and 1960s. Hyperinflation, he argued, begins in the month at which price rises first exceed 50 per cent (an annual rise of 600 per cent). This was happening from mid-1922 in Germany.

Felix Fechenbach, Eisner's secretary, who had never personally been involved in any violence and who acted fast to help save the life of the assassin who killed his friend and boss, was given fifteen years' hard labour and served every day of his sentence. ****per Eyck’s 1970 A History of the Weimar Republic, Fechenbach’s 11 year sentence was overturned in December 1926 (pages 119-120)****

Of the 22, there were heavy sentences in 17 of them, including 10 executions. Of the 354 cases against right-wing defendants, 326 were unpunished. average prison sentences for murder were 15 years for left-wingers and 4 months for offenders from the Right.

A study of violence in the period immediately after the Revolution, 'Four Years of Political Murders'… right-wing nationalist offenders were let off far more lightly than those from the Left…found that there were 354 murders committed by right-wing groups in the first four years of the Republic and 23 by the Left.

Much like the German army, the German judiciary was a state within the state.

The language of discourse had been transformed in post-war, post-revolution and post-truth Germany. Words and ideas were entirely acceptable which would not have been used in public before the war. Actions became acceptable too. Routine political murders became salonfähig. ( has no exact synonym in English. It translates literally as 'salon capable' but colloquially means 'acceptable in polite society'.)

Barely six months after the coup attempt, on 4 August, there was a general amnesty that allowed supporters of Kapp, including army and civil service rebels, to continue in their jobs. More soldiers of all ranks who opposed the putsch were 'purged' instead - on the grounds that the armed forces were reducing their numbers according to the Versailles terms.

Ebert & his government never attacked the old elite for the failure of the war or challenged the Right's constant refrain that the Germans were never really defeated but were betrayed, 'stabbed in the back.’ They never tried to make the German people face the reality of defeat.

The new Chancellor, the Social Democrat Hermann Müller…said in his maiden speech in the Reichstag, after taking over: 'It is time for some house cleaning... A democracy without democrats cannot survive for long. Yet the government failed to clean their house. The democrats could not identify their true enemies nor deal with them effectively. They left a deeply reactionary anti-democratic establishment in place

The Republic survived, but Kapp's fiasco led to the collapse of the government. Gustav Bauer's Cabinet resigned on the reasonable grounds that it had failed to prevent the coup. The most prominent loss was Noske, who had become close to the army commanders, but clearly exerted no influence over them.

The putsch was defeated…by the trade unions and the SPD, which called a general strike. Berlin and every German city came to a near-total standstill…no transport, and no electricity nor gas…the Left was united. Originally the Communists wanted no part…Almost all the Communist workers joined the strike in opposition to the coup.

overnight on 12/13 March, 2020, 2,500
Ehrhardt paramilitaries, along with another 2,000 from other Baltic Freikorps outfits, marched on Berlin…The Freikorps met with no opposition from the army, which was supposed to defend the Republic. Noske instructed the army commander…to confront the putschists...von Seeckt ordered his troops to confine themselves to barracks. He told Noske, ‘troops do not fire on troops.'

a new figurehead he proposed to make Chancellor…Dr Kapp…was born in New York City but returned to Berlin in the early 1890s, turned himself into a fanatical German nationalist, and… he was one of the founders…of the ultra-right-wing Fatherland Party…He made no secret of the fact that he was virulently opposed to the Republic, a rabid anti-Semite and firm believer in the 'stab in the back' myth.

On 3 March, 1920, General Walther von Lüttwitz and his aide-de-camp Colonel Pabst…approached Noske. They told him the Ebert government was hopeless, the army needed to takeover…and that he, Noske, was the obvious name to head a new junta-style government, brought into power by the Freikorps but supported also by the Reichswehr. The 'bloodhound' would have nothing to do with the plot

In 1921 Expressionist playwright was sentenced to jail for theft of furniture from a flat he was renting…and sold it. He wrote from jail: 'Among the members of the independent professional classes-doctors, authors, journalists, actors-having two jobs is now virtually the rule; people are running around in all directions looking for ways to earn money; the leisure which used to nourish intellectual activity and pe

The Treaty of Versailles signed in the Hall of Mirrors on 6/28/1919 anniversary of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. In 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors, Kaiser Wilhelm I & was declared Emperor of Germany after beating France. Treaty went into effect on 1/10/1920.

The principal voice of practical reason was Matthias Erz-berger, the Finance Minister, leader of the Centre Party, the man whom the generals had strong-armed into signing the armistice at the railway carriage at Compiègne in November. He said he was against 'pointless shows of heroics'. Refusing to sign the deal would be a catastrophe for Germany.

Left, Right and centre came together in indignation, Communist blamed the capitalists, not the masses, & penalties imposed on workers were unfair.
The nationalist Right and part of the middle class, blamed the new republican establishment, and 'November criminals'. Moderates (MSPD and DDP Ebert and centrist coalition) blamed the monarchy. Believed German people were punished for Kaiser’s sins.