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- [00:00]
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- [00:17]
Peter Frankopan
Hello, and welcome to a new series of Legacy. Today we're going to look at one of history's most chilling and best known subjects, the Nazis. We're going to look at how a movement that seemed marginal, maybe even laughable at first came to seize control of one of the most advanced societies on Earth.
- [00:36]
AFWA Hersh
Everyone knows the end of this story, genocide and disaster. But we want to look at the beginning, at the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1920s and the 1930s. We want to figure out how it happened. And the answer might surprise you, because as well as politics, so speeches and crowds, the story involves two things you might not expect. Disease and religion.
- [01:01]
Peter Frankopan
That's right. And the echoes of pandemic outbreaks and the appeal of faith shaped the mood in Germany after the First World War. And we're going to look at that in some detail. And that, combined with humiliation, poverty, despair, created a perfect storm and a storm into which charismatic figure stepped.
- [01:20]
AFWA Hersh
I don't think anyone will be surprised to learn his name. And we'll get to him, but not yet, because first we need to set the scene. So, Peter, know anything about the First World War? I mean, that's a massively rhetorical question, because I know you know a lot.
- [01:37]
Peter Frankopan
No, no, I, I, I do. I, I'm really interested in the First World War, partly because I learned about it so many times at school. But there are lots of things that still don't make a huge amount of sense to me, like how and why the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo triggered a sequence of events that left millions of people dead and destroyed European empires. Or why it was that generals on both sides or all the sides in the war kept sending men to meet pretty much certain death rather than looking for a settlement. You know, of course, we had to study what life was like in the trenches. So, you know, I'm pretty good on the First World War. How about you? Did you have an affinity for the stories of the global First World War?
- [02:17]
AFWA Hersh
Yes. Well, when I was 11, I memorized the Wilfred Owens poem Dulce et Decorum est and recited it at school. And I remember delivering that poem with great emotion. And I think there's something about the story of the trenches and what these young men went through that is very visceral and quite captivating for a young person trying to understand war and, you know, what it means on a personal level as well as the bigger historical picture. So that really, really touched me. And then the more I learned about the global history, things stood out because of their omission in my formal education. So, for example, I was quite surprised to learn that the first shot fired as part of the First World War, the conflict was fired in what's now Ghana. At the time it was part of German Togoland in a communications station on the border. And you know, that always fascinated me, me, because Africa is so left out of most Western history teaching about the First World War. I think people don't really know it was involved. And the other thing that's always kind of reached me is my family's involvement. And I'll never forget when my daughter was in primary school, she was learning about the First World War in history and she got homework one day where her assignment was to go home and find out if any of her ancestors had fought in the First World War. And she was quite pleased when I told her that her great great grandfather had indeed fought in the First World War and been awarded a medal for bravery. So she was really excited and she was like writing all up to go back and tell her teachers, yes, I have a great great grandfather who fought in the war. And so as she was asking me about it, she said, so what did he do exactly? And I said, well, he won the Iron Cross fighting for Germany. And she was like, no, mummy, that's not the assignment. The assignment is to have an ancestor who fought for Britain. And um. But of course my great grandfather was a German Jew who at that time felt unquestionably German patriotic towards Germany. And like so many other Jewish Germans, paid a huge price to fight for Germany in the First World War. So I think it rocked my daughter to realize that's part of our heritage. Especially as my family don't feel a connection to Germany now because as Jews they were then forced to flee because of this story, the rise of the Nazis. So it's a really important time, you know, in my personal history, but also for us understanding our contemporary reality.
- [04:38]
Peter Frankopan
I think, Peter, and you say contemporary reality. On top of that, we've got the wars with the Ottoman forces in Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia and in Palestine. That has obviously long term significances. The ways in which African states colonies were invaded by Allied troops from Germany, from France, from Belgium, From Britain, you know, you name it. Indian soldiers fighting in France on the front lines and fighting in East Africa, you know, more than 1.3 million people dead, too. And then Australia, New Zealand, you know, it just goes on and on and on. And then, of course, the seas become a battlefield, too. So all of this is hugely significant for the world of that follows in the 20th century and for the world of today. And I think we're going to circle back to a lot of this a few times, to how it changed the lives of women as well. But today we're going to look at some new ways, understanding the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany.
- [05:28]
AFWA Hersh
But before we do that, sorry, Peter, I just want to ask you because I'm always sharing my family history, but do you have any personal family connection to these events, to the First World War, to the rise of the Nazis?
- [05:37]
Peter Frankopan
My grandfather fought for the Austro Hungarian Empire in the Dolomites in the early part of the 20th century, in the First World War, and was shooting against his cousins who were fighting for Italy. So it was hugely traumatic. He, too, won Iron Crosses. So I'm on the wrong side of history for that side. So the legacies of the First World War in central Eastern Europe were catastrophic for the creation of Yugoslavia, the creation of Czechoslovakia, and that had a huge impact on making families have to make choices. So it was nowhere near as traumatic as it was for the Jewish populations of Europe. But I think that those legacies of what the war, those chain reactions that rolled through were absolutely enormous. So I think it's really important that we take this one. Not everybody knows that much about the end of the First World War. That's where we're going to start the story and then to go through to Hitler. So let's start at the beginning of the end and the closing stages of the horrors of the First World War. From original Legacy Productions, I'm Peter Frankopan.
- [06:45]
AFWA Hersh
I'm AFWA Hersh.
- [06:46]
Peter Frankopan
And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputation that they truly deserve.
- [07:04]
AFWA Hersh
This is the rise of the Nazis. How disaster led to catastrophe.
- [07:15]
Peter Frankopan
Okay, let's say let's start with the end of the war and its immediate aftermath. So we mostly know about the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. And in fact, we still commemorate that here in the UK with great solemnity and dignity every year, because our Armistice Day has become the symbol for remembering not just everybody who fell in the First World War, but for all who've been armed forces and given their lives for their countries. But because of the Versailles Settlement and the humiliation of Germany that follows, it's worth remembering that the end of the war actually came quite quickly. So just a few months before Armistice Day, the German army had looked like they were going to make a breakthrough and it would be Berlin that would set out the terms for peace.
- [07:55]
AFWA Hersh
And the war had started in 1914, partly because of German fears that France and Russia would attack at the same time. And those fears had been sparked by the Russian Tsar's decision to mobilise his army in the summer of 1914, which triggered this chain reaction of the German high command.
- [08:12]
Peter Frankopan
So the Germans go through Belgium, that triggers a neutrality clause, that Britain gets involved too. We'll do definitely some more episodes on the First World War in its global context. But as the war sort of plays out, one of the key developments is that Germany's trying to fight on two different flanks, in the killing fields of Flanders and the Somme on the west, and then against the Russians in the East. In 1917, though, there are two revolutions in Russia, which dramatically changes the landscape. And after the Bolsheviks take power, Lenin doesn't just withdraw from the war, but hands over vast amounts of territory to Germany. And in practice, what that means is that the German army can be united and can shift all of its weight from two flanks onto one flank in the west. And it looks like that that might be decisive for a breakthrough.
- [08:58]
AFWA Hersh
In the first months of 1918, there were half a million troops sent, transferred from the east to the Western Front to launch the Kaiserschlacht, the Kaiser's offensive. And by June, German armies had driven deep into France, reaching the Marne again and threatening Paris.
- [09:14]
Peter Frankopan
So General Erich Ludendorff, who's the mastermind of the offensive, later says, we're staking everything on one card. So the Germans are filling up their troops, heading out towards the west, and that gamble very, very nearly works. So in the opening weeks of the offensive, German soldiers smashed through the allied lines, advancing 40 miles in days. And you remember in the trenches, people are fighting over, you know, a few yards here and there. And the crisis is so bad that the commander of the French forces, Marshal Foch, says it's the most dangerous crisis of the war. And things are so precarious that Paris starts to be prepared for an evacuation. And in June 1918, the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, he defiantly declares in the Chamber of Deputies that I will fight before Paris, I will fight in Paris, I will fight behind Paris. So the fact that we're three months away from the end of the war, where Germany folds, it's quite something.
- [10:08]
AFWA Hersh
And as an American officer who was watching these events play out put it so powerfully, it was a scene out of Dante. Columns of refugees, guns stuck in the mud, and through it all, the grey tide of Germans rolling forward. It looked like the Allies might lose the war, or at least be pushed into a bad settlement. So things from the Western European perspective are not going well.
- [10:33]
Peter Frankopan
But advancing is difficult because you need your logistics to work. Communications are hard. This is pre ability to send messages easily backwards and forwards. Troops are exhausted, so they're looting food. Discipline starts to erode, and above all, the Germans don't have the tanks and motor transport to sustain momentum. I wouldn't say obsessive about logistics, but logistics explains everything. So the ways in which motor vehicles are the kind of key to the war. It's not something I learned about when I did this stuff at school, but I think it's really important to see how if you can't keep the momentum going, things get worse very quickly. So one German soldier writes home in a letter from the front and says, we're marching, we're fighting, but we're starving. The English have machines, but we only have have our feet. So by July, just a couple of months in, the tide is starting to turn, partly because 250,000 men from the United States arrive and they pour into the support that Woodrow Wilson has promised.
- [11:34]
AFWA Hersh
The Allies that summer. Counteroffensives on the 18th of July shattered German hopes. In a matter of weeks, the Germans had been brought to the brink of victory and then to the brink of collapse. On 8 August, a massive Allied attack involving hundreds of tanks, 2,000 aircraft and 20 divisions of British, French, Canadian, Australian and other colonial troops broke through. And I just want to add to that, because this is the bit that's so often left out, that the reason that Britain and France were able to summon so much manpower was in part because of their African, West Indian, Indian colonies. So there were lots of black and brown soldiers who were part of that and who played a really decisive part in this assault, which ended up with more than 16,000 German troops surrendering within a matter of hours. Ludendorff called it the Black day of the German Army.
- [12:26]
Peter Frankopan
It's all logistics, it's all having mass production. That's the secret of the war, is to be able to get your factories to produce the stuff you need. And I guess that has some obvious similarities with what's happened in Ukraine since 2022. You know, to be able to get the manufacturing workforce, materials, designs and to scale them up allows you to be able to move things forwards, and the Germans didn't have that. From that point on, it's basically just a matter of time. What later becomes called the 100 days offensive delivers one blow after another that pushes the German army back along the Western Front until the exhausted Empire basically has no other choice except for to sue for peace.
- [13:06]
AFWA Hersh
The first blow fell at Amiens, with tanks rumbling forward through the morning mist. Allied troops began to advance up to seven miles in a single day. Although scenes of trenches and lives being lost to gain a few feet or inches quickly becoming a memory. And this left the top brass very focused. General Sir Henry Rawlinson recorded with astonishment the enemy's resistance was feeble. We have taken thousands of prisoners.
- [13:32]
Peter Frankopan
And a lot of this is about momentum, Afro, you know, if you like, in everything, it's about confidence, it's about getting the machine moving. And by late August, Allied forces have launched attacks at Arras and at Bapaume. And just a week later, Allies, particularly French and Americans, eliminate a German position that had been threatening Paris more or less since the start of the war. So Frank Richards, a private in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, writes, for the first time in four years, we felt we were chasing them and not the other way around. So that sense of belief that the war might be coming to an end is also based on the fact that there's a battlefield victory that's coming and.
- [14:12]
AFWA Hersh
By now the blows are falling thick and fast. By the end of September, the Allies have breached the Hindenburg line, Germany's last great defensive barrier, and what the famous Australian war journalist Charles Bean called the mightiest system of trenches, dugouts and wire ever contrived. By the 5th of October, it was in Allied hands. German soldiers, exhausted and under supplied, were surrendering in droves. It must have been terrifying. Peter, I think one of the great.
- [14:40]
Peter Frankopan
Things about the modern age Afro is that we've got these fantastic filmmakers who have made, you know, things like films like 1917 or All Quiet on the Western Front, that the sound systems in cinemas is so fantastic. In fact, even in home cinemas, you know, your TV has got amazing sound. It gives you a sense of how awful life truly was. And because filmmakers are smart as well, it's not just seeing it through the eyes of the generals, it's seeing what life was like on the ground and in the trenches and of body parts and of the smells and of the horrors and of the suffering so, you know, I think that suddenly this, these trenches where people have been fighting for years, the fact that that is sort of giving way must have felt like sand giving way underneath your feet. You know, it must have been terrifying. And also the worry about what's going to come next.
- [15:28]
AFWA Hersh
And we rarely in Britain really think that much about the German experience. You know, Germans were the losers, and as we know, it's the victors who get to tell the story. But conditions inside Germany were deteriorating rapidly. The British naval blockade had left civilians hungry, malnourished, some on the point of starvation. Rationing meant that people were barely able to get a thousand calories per day, which is much less than an adult needs to be healthy. A woman in Berlin noted in her diary that she had to queue for hours for bread that never comes and that children were fainting in schoolrooms. And that was actually only the beginning of the humanitarian post war disaster.
- [16:08]
Peter Frankopan
Peter because then on top of that, you got influenza that comes back with a vengeance. So in the autumn of 1918, the so called Spanish flu was cutting through barracks, hospitals and cities. And funnily enough, until Covid, no one had really heard or thought too much about Spanish flu unless you were a historian working on the first world war. But these pandemics can be disastrous and we're going to come back to that. But one German army doctor at the time says we're burying them faster than we can count. It's as if the plague itself has returned. And the Spanish flu, as we're going to find out, has really important consequences for what happens in post war Germany and perhaps even teach us some important lessons that we should be thinking about as we come to terms with our own post pandemic world.
- [17:01]
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- [18:06]
AFWA Hersh
So now we're in a situation in Germany, Peter, where we've got defeat at the front, food in critically short supply, disease and fear ripping through urban populations. Morale has utterly collapsed and unrest is spreading fast.
- [18:22]
Peter Frankopan
So by late October 1918, sailors at Kiel, the big German port on the Baltic, mutiny and refuse orders. And soon that revolt spreads to places like Hamburg and Bremen and Munich, where workers and soldiers councils declare themselves to be in control. And they're taking their inspiration, of course, from what's happened a few months earlier when the Bolsheviks has seized power in Russia. So one journalist writes that the streets are full of red flags. Germany is dissolving before our eyes. And I wonder, Alfred, in times of collapsing confidence and crisis, whether that feeds a world of uncertainty and gives an opportunity for people to offer new solutions. Do you think that revolution and uprisings, they're contagious?
- [19:07]
AFWA Hersh
Absolutely. And, you know, we know that the Bolsheviks fully planned their revolution to go international. Taking stock of the situation in other European countries, especially Germany, you can see why they thought it was very fertile ground for revolution. And it often actually could look at it from a different lens. As, you know, women and black people and people who are minoritized or oppressed. It is often only in times of huge upheaval that they are able to make great gains in their rights. So, for example, the war was actually quite liberating for women. By 1918, around 700,000 German women were employed in armaments production, while others filled roles as tram conductors, postal workers, agriculture. That would be quite a familiar scenario for people who've studied the Second World War, where Britain also witnessed this kind of surge of female agency because women had to do jobs while men were away fighting. And the economist Louise Sietz observed in 1917, so a contemporary witness, the war has made women indispensable in every sphere of life. The summer of 1918 created opportunities for these radical solutions. And it's just another area of life where everything must have seemed on the table. Peter the whole status quo is becoming unrecognizable at this point point.
- [20:26]
Peter Frankopan
And that's, of course, hard for those elites. So at the end of September, Kaiser Wilhelm II's generals are already telling him that the game is up. So at a meeting of the German Supreme Army Command at Spa in Belgium, General Hindenburg tells the Kaiser and the Chancellor George Von Hertling that the military situation was helpless and that Germany needed to sue for peace. I labor for His Majesty the military situation, said General Ludendorff, the war could not be won and we must obtain peace at any price. And then at the start of November, General Hindenburg again bluntly declares that the army couldn't hold on for any longer.
- [21:02]
AFWA Hersh
And this is where you start to ask yourself where chaos ends and anarchy begins. And it must have seemed like a very porous boundary between the two. One leading protester warned, if the Kaiser does not abdicate, the German revolution will sweep him aside. Even the army's leaders abandoned him. And despite him attempting to calm tensions by saying he was determined to remain in charge, it had the opposite effect. Your Majesty, one general said, the army will not follow you.
- [21:31]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah, it'd be good to do an episode, I think, on Kaiser Wilhelm. I mean, he's again one of those figures that people know the name but don't know too much about his life and his views. I mean, amazingly in this one, on the 9th of November, so two days before the armistice, the Reich Chancellor Max von Baden announces to the public, without the Kaiser's consent, by the way, that he had abdicated. The next day, Wilhelm crosses the border into the Netherlands at Iceland, where he's granted asylum by the Dutch government only on the condition that he remain politically neutral. And he spends the rest of his life there feeling sorry for himself. I was deserted by my people, he says, deserted by my army, deserted by my navy. The revolution has dethroned me, but the revolution has also dethroned Germany. So for him there was no difference between him and Germany. And he started to develop what today we call conspiracy theories. I think at the time you just say was bonkers, but perhaps was also quite contemporary in his opinions about who was at fault that for. Right.
- [22:28]
AFWA Hersh
I actually think about him a bit. I live in Wimbledon, I'm recording this in Wimbledon. And Kaiser Wilhelm II actually came to Wimbledon in the 1890s. Peter. There are pictures of his kind of convoy going up Wimbledon Hill and Queen Victoria, who I think was his cousin or second cousin.
- [22:43]
Peter Frankopan
His cousin, yeah.
- [22:44]
AFWA Hersh
Held a National Rifle association military firing event with him on Wimbledon Common. Which is.
- [22:51]
Peter Frankopan
Which is why you think of him a lot. Do you attend those meetings there regularly.
- [22:54]
AFWA Hersh
Obviously as a card carrying NRA member? No, I joking. But I do sometimes imagine going for a run on Wimbledon Common and kind of bumping into Kaiser Wilhelm II and all his military pomp. So it was a real fall from Grace. You know, 20 years earlier, he was Riding high. And now he is feeling extremely sorry for himself.
- [23:15]
Peter Frankopan
And who's he blaming? Afraid.
- [23:16]
AFWA Hersh
Tell us who he's.
- [23:17]
Peter Frankopan
Who he's blaming, amongst others.
- [23:18]
AFWA Hersh
It's going to sound familiar, you know, when things are not going well for you and you could even say he had a legitimate grievance, things really weren't going well for him. He wasn't imagining that. But instead of maybe taking some accountability or looking at the deeper reasons why he made bad choices, he decides to blame it on someone else. The Jews, he says, are to blame for all the misery in the world. I am convinced that they are the cause of the downfall of my country. And this is of course, a war in which many Jews, like my great grandfather, had served with great distinction. But he wasn't going to let those facts get in the way of the bogeyman that he wanted to blame.
- [23:55]
Peter Frankopan
I mean, but Kaiser Wilhelm wasn't exactly the only person who had these kinds of views. I mean, in 1920, Winston Churchill wrote about what he called the worldwide conspiracy that had been steadily growing. It's been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century. And it wasn't just conservatives and people who believed in empire. So Beatrice Webb, one of the most important socialist thinkers and activists at the time, wrote about the insidious cosmopolitanism of the Jew, which is a real danger, and that their presence, or Jews presence in England is a continual poison. So the Kaiser wasn't just barking mad on his own. I think these kinds of prejudice were baked in. But as you said, afw, he needs somebody else to blame rather than recognized that perhaps he was the architect of his own demise.
- [24:39]
AFWA Hersh
And they're baked in, you know, to all European societies, back to the Inquisition. Now we've talked about Martin Luther and how the Protestant Reformation went hand in hand with these really horrifically depraved antisemitic ideas. And as a result of that history, there's a specifically German cultural strain of anti Semitism where it's almost part of the German identity to have this sense of Jews being this threat. So it's one of those great ironies that, you know, no matter how much Jewish people assimilated, contributed, participated in German society, they were always seen as this threat. And it was almost like this view became the default when things were going badly. I wish that sounded less familiar than it was, but, you know, the visible other, the person who is racially or culturally different, being kind of dragged out as the scapegoat when things go wrong.
- [25:28]
Peter Frankopan
So two days after the Kaiser loses his throne. At 5am on 11 November 1918, German envoys sign the armistice in a railway carriage in the forest of compiegne. And at 11am the guns finally fall silent. And as one British private writes simply his diary, after four years of thunder, only silence, it feels impossible. And news quickly starts to spread the whole way through Europe. In Paris, crowds start to pour into the boulevards singing the Marseillaise. The New York Times correspondent reports that never in history has a city given itself up to such jubilant rejoicing. In London, big Ben strikes 11 for the first time since 1914, while Prime Minister David Lloyd George tells a jubilant crowd, I hope we may say that thus this fateful morning, the long night is over. So there's elation, there's relief, there's joy. And in many parts of Europe you feel that right has won and that the bad guys have lost.
- [26:30]
AFWA Hersh
And even in Germany, the coping mechanism with the very different atmosphere of defeat is to also try and find a narrative that this is the beginning of a new era. So the Kaiser has fled into exile and Philipp Scheidemann of the Social Democrats stands on a balcony at the Reichstag and proclaims, the old and rotten. The monarchy has collapsed. Long live the new. Long live the German Republic.
- [26:56]
Peter Frankopan
That sounds great, but as you said Afra, it's a story. It's a line of trying to make the best out of it. But the reality is Germany is completely exhausted. So we've already mentioned civilians malnourished because of naval blockades and because of unavailability of food. Hunger is gnawing at people across the whole country. Meanwhile, revolution is starting to spread. So those sailors mutinies in Kiel, they've ignited soldiers and workers council throughout the country. In Munich, Kurt Eisner, a journalist and a socialist, declares that Bavaria is a free state, topples the Wisselbach monarchy and Germany is now literally on the brink of anarchy and collapse.
- [27:33]
AFWA Hersh
The thing is, not everybody advocates a radical solution to this situation. So in Berlin, Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the majority party, the Social Democrats, assumes the role of Chancellor reluctantly. But the thing that he wants is not this radical new order, but to restore the existing one. He says to his colleagues, we hate revolution like sin. Meanwhile, on the radical left, there's a very different aspiration for what should happen next. Figures like Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Liebknecht, leading figures of the Spartacus League, want a Soviet style revolution in Germany. The war is over, they declared. The revolution has begun. We will not Rest until the whole world is in flames.
- [28:17]
Peter Frankopan
So the next few weeks, there's confusion, there's hope, there's expectation, there's violence. Germany is teetering between early fragile democracy and radical upheaval. So the armistice may have ended the war, but it's opened a new and very uncertain chapter, one in which peace looks as dangerous and contested as war itself.
- [28:39]
AFWA Hersh
And a major factor in this uncertainty is the economic situation, which is in free fall. And this is something that many people listening may have learned about at school. This is the beginning of an era of hyperinflation, where you see images of people wheeling wheelbarrows, stuffed full of notes and stories about how, you know, they couldn't leave the wheelbarrow that was stuffed full of money unattended, because if they did, someone would tip out the money and steal the wheelbarrow because it was worth more than all the money it was carrying. Bread rations fell to 200 grams per day in Berlin, and some mothers were so desperate that they were selling their wedding rings in exchange for potatoes.
- [29:18]
Peter Frankopan
We know you wouldn't do that because you don't like the potato. That's still. That's still my shock. Shock. News of the year. I can't believe it. There's so many varieties anyway. That's a difference.
- [29:27]
AFWA Hersh
Even I, if I was only eating 200 grams of food a day, might have to resort to a potato.
- [29:34]
Peter Frankopan
Peter all of this is made even more difficult by the fact that lots of men are now coming back from the front line and they are jobless and they're hungry and they're disillusioned and they're also angry. So apart from the trauma of seeing friends and family killed and badly wounded in front of them, they also felt that their sacrifices of the last four years have been in vain. So, as one veteran puts it, we marched home not as victors, but as beggars. So in this atmosphere of uncertainty, politicians like Ebert are trying to stabilize the state. They're promising elections for a National assembly scheduled for January 1919. But his government has enemies both on the left and on the right, while most people are just trying to work out how to feed themselves and worrying about chaos and spiralling violence.
- [30:19]
AFWA Hersh
In the Bitter Winter of January 1919, Berlin finally erupts into violence. The young Weimar Republic, only weeks old, is already under threat. The Spartacus League, which, as I mentioned, was led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, wanted to push this Bolshevik Russian model and demanded the overthrow of Friedrich Ebert's provisional government and the creation of A socialist workers state. And that idea was on fertile ground. On 5 January, mass demonstrations filled the streets. Crowds erected barricades, seized newspaper offices. The headquarters of the Social Democrats was occupied. And Liebnecht proclaimed, the Ebert Scheidemann government has betrayed the revolution. Power must return to the workers. And you can see how, Peter, when the old order has been so thoroughly disgraced, when everybody is suffering in such visceral ways, this is a message that is finding very receptive ears.
- [31:16]
Peter Frankopan
And so you know what comes next is that force gets used. So the government responds by summoning the Freikorps, so paramilitary units of ex soldiers who are hardened by the trenches. One of the German ministers says, you know, you need to have a bloodhound. I'll take the responsibility. And he has no hesitation in using force. So you have street fighting raging across Berlin for days. You have machine gun fire echoing in working class districts. In some places you even find artillery being used against occupied buildings. And the government by 13th of January crushes the revolt. But hundreds of people are dead. Two days later, AFWR 15th of January, Luxembourg and Liebknecht are arrested.
- [31:59]
AFWA Hersh
So we've mentioned them a few times, the leaders of the Spartacus League, Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, now instead of inspiring this revolution, find themselves arrested, beaten and ultimately murdered by Freikorp's officers. Luxembourg's body is dumped into the Berlin Landwehr canal. In her last article, just days before her death, she urged the revolution, says I was, I am, I shall be, which is a chilling message. And somebody is murdered just shortly after writing it.
- [32:33]
Peter Frankopan
Not only that, but I suppose it's the epitaph of the attempted revolution, which is I was, I am and I shall be, and it's dead. So as one workers Council in Munich puts it, the murder of Luxembourg and Liebk is the murder of German democracy. So for the government the bloodshed seems to be a price worth paying. It secures its fragile hold in power. And that Germany won't follow Russia over the edge into huge loss of life and untold suffering. But while this is all happening in Germany, the victors of the war are preparing for peace. And the idea that war should never be allowed to happen is one of the key parts of Woodrow Wilson's so called 14 points that have been outlined earlier, promising self determination and a just and a fair peace. But when he arrives in December 1918, so a month before the revolt is put down in Germany, he's telling the cheering crowds the world must be made safe. For democracy. So that new world that's being born means very different things to very different people.
- [33:30]
AFWA Hersh
But among the audience who are happy to hear that message, Woodrow Wilson is a hero. As Lifigaro pointed out on 14 December, never has a foreign leader been received with such enthusiasm. The people see in Wilson the prophet of peace. But things look a little different in London and Paris, Peter.
- [33:50]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah. And in Britain, Lloyd George has campaigned for December general election with the promise that he would get retribution and compensation from those who've been defeated. Germany must pay to the utmost farthing, he said in a speech that basically is stoking public anger and brings to life the idea that there should be a financial settlement and that the people who are going to pay will be the Germans. And that's something that is being told in France too. So the premier, Georges Clemenceau there is also uncompromising saying in December also, Germany shall never again be able to disturb the peace of the world. That is our firm resolve. We've suffered too much not to demand vengeance. And you can see where this is going to go in terms of how the blame and the history of the origins of the war is going to take shape.
- [34:36]
AFWA Hersh
By this time, the Allied leaders had already agreed to convene a conference in Paris to settle this new post world order. It opened on 18 January 1919, a date that had been very deliberately chosen 48 years earlier. On the exact same day in 1871, the German Empire had been proclaimed in Versailles. So this was a very pointed and barbed way of saying it was time to unravel the project that had been started decades earlier, when at that time it had been the humiliation of France after the Franco Prussian War. This is a little bit vindictive, no?
- [35:11]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah, definitely. And what's more vindictive is that the Germans are excluded from the opening sessions and they're forced to wait outside as the victors decide what the shape of a post war world will look like. And those divisions inside Germany and the conflicting aims of the Allies means that the months between armistice and the conference doesn't heal wounds, but deepens them and sets the stage for a bitter and punitive settlement. So the conference is gathering the victors of the war. It's not gathering those who've been defeated. Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey are excluded from negotiations. And as Clemenceau says, the enemy is not invited to sit with us until we have finished our work. And I think that that is going to set up for some of the reasons why people in Germany feel that they have not just lost a war, but been deliberately humiliated too.
- [36:01]
AFWA Hersh
Three men dominated these proceedings, the so called Big Three, Clemenceau of France, David Lloyd George of Britain and Woodrow Wilson of the us. They all have their own vision of the settlement, not just for Germany, but this is also like the Berlin Conference that's famous for the earlier colonial era of how to divvy up the world. All of Germany's colonial possessions are also to be stripped from her. This is also the period where they start giving out rights to mandatory Palestine. It's an era of, in a way that's really difficult to reconcile with even international law as it existed then, kind of carving up territory and handing it out to the victors. And that is a really dangerous thing to do because the depth of grievances it creates, well, don't even really have to be explained now. There's so many of them that we're still living with. But the immediate terrible consequences are really evident in the way that Germany feels about the resolution for its territory.
- [37:01]
Peter Frankopan
Peter well, on the 7th of May 1919, the German delegation is summoned to Versailles and presented with a draft treaty. And the German Foreign Minister, Ulrich von Broktor Franzow reads the response and then stands pale and nervous and says we're under no illusions as to the extent of our defeat, but we protest at being treated as the only guilty nation. And the Germans are given three weeks to respond and the Allies, that's just too bad. When the German negotiators say that it's impossible to repay reparations or pay back the penalties, Clemencer just says the law is hard, but it is the law. So the Germans are backed into a corner and they're given an ultimatum. They're told if the German government does not sign the treaty as it stands, hostilities will recommence and Germany will find herself confronted with a situation worse than before. And the Germans believe that, I mean that's the division of Germany at least into a splintering of states, but possibly into the carving up completely of mainland Europe.
- [38:01]
AFWA Hersh
Germany is in such a weak position that it's ultimately at the mercy of all of the Allied powers. And they'd each had these different approaches. You know, France wanted the Rhineland, the Americans wanted self determination, the Europeans wanted punishment. And Germany's essentially getting hit with all three and so little leverage on its own side that it feels it has no choice but to agree to this terrible deal. So on 29 June 1919, in the hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Germany signs The treaty and the symbolism could not be more brutal or direct. It's the exact same room where Bismarck had declared the German Empire in 1871. Now the hall of Mirrors is witnessing Germany's ultimate humiliation.
- [38:55]
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- [39:37]
Peter Frankopan
So the Treaty of Versailles is a disaster for Germany. It strips the country of 13% of its territory, all of its colonies, reduces its army to 100,000 men, and imposes reparations set at a rather modest 132 billion gold marks.
- [39:52]
AFWA Hersh
That's a huge amount and an amount that often gets resuscitated now in contemporary debates about reparations, because it really sets a precedent for how much a company can be made to pay for its wrongs.
- [40:04]
Peter Frankopan
And perhaps even more dramatic is, and most humiliating is Article 231, the so called war guilt clause, which declares that Germany is solely responsible for the war. And Germany Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann, who we mentioned a couple of times before he resigns rather than accept the terms, calling them a sentence of death for millions of men, women and children. But his successors don't really have a great deal of choice because the Allies are threatening to attack Germany all over again.
- [40:31]
AFWA Hersh
I mean, I described this as a deal earlier, but it's not really a deal. This is something that Germany has accepted by imposition rather than by negotiation. As Harold Nicholson, one of Britain's delegates, reflects, the Germans were not consulted, they were told.
- [40:45]
Peter Frankopan
And it's not a surprise that when the treaty is finally signed on 28 June 1919, there's outrage across Germany, because to most Germans it's not a peace, it's a humiliation and a diktat imposed at gunpoint. So Scheidemann had refused to sign it and resigned. His successor, Gustav Bauer, explains that the German people have got no choice. We are in no position to resume war. Our people are starving. Our defenses are broken. We must bow to force. And when news of the signing reaches Berlin, church bells are silent and flags remain furled. The newspaper, the Berliner Tagerblatt calls the Treaty a piece of violence which no nation in the world would ever have endured willingly. And in Munich, crowds gather, chanting never better war than this disgrace.
- [41:32]
AFWA Hersh
It's fascinating to me how this is such a comprehensively humiliating arrangement. But the things that seem to land most deeply in the German psyche were actually the assaults on its dignity and its identity. So the war guilt clause, Article 231 of the treaty, declared Germany as solely responsible for the war. And for many it was actually this rather than the military or financial repercussions that was utterly intolerable. Ulrich von Brockdorf Rantzau, who led the German delegation at Versailles, said that such a confession in my mouth would be a lie. And then there were the financial reparations and just how badly they affected the average German. So this is not just a kind of abstract idea about Germany's position on the world stage. This is middle class families seeing their real life savings completely wiped out, industrialists fearing collapse. This was personal theft, as many German families felt it, that they themselves may have played no role in the war other than having male family members who were called on to fight, were now personally having to repay this debt that was set with no consultation with Germany, but by the Allied powers in Versailles.
- [42:43]
Peter Frankopan
And there's particular anger with Veterans association because of the betrayal or perceived betrayal by the government. And it fuels the so called Dulschuste legende, the sort of the stab in the back myth that the Germans had actually been let down by their own politicians, by their own people. And that version becomes established in Germany, that the Germans hadn't been beaten in the field, but had been betrayed by weak politicians, by socialists and by Jews. So as a veterans pamphlet puts it, in 1920, our army stood undefeated in France, the Fatherland was stabbed in the back from behind in Berlin. And that catches across the whole political spectrum. So you have the nationalist right vowing revenge, the conservatives talking about the Republic as being led by November criminals who'd surrendered meekly. And on the left, even the Social Democrats admit that the terms are harsh. And Ebert, the president of Social Democrats, tells the Reichstag, this treaty is unjust, but we have to live with it. And that sets together a sort of sequence of factors that are going to have dramatic consequences.
- [43:46]
AFWA Hersh
The Weimar Republic is born at this moment in history out of not hope or vision, but out of defeat, revolution and humiliation. By January 1919, the country has already held elections for a National assembly to draft a new constitution. More than 80% of women are eligible to vote for the first time, which is a democratic landmark in female participation. And Ebert does become the Republic's first president, the leader of the Social Democrats. But it is a settlement, a new republic that is saddled with humiliation, economic burdens, and this toxic narrative of betrayal from within, which is a really important part of understanding what happens in Germany next.
- [44:32]
Peter Frankopan
And that new democracy is super fragile. So even by March 1920, you find coup attempts, so called the Kapp Putsch, led by Wolfgang Kapp and Freikorps units who are angered by attempts to disband them. They seize Berlin and declare a new government. And Ebert and his ministers flee in fear. And what saves the Republic was not its army actually, which hesitates, but a general strike that's called by trade unions. And that strike paralyzes the country, which means trains stop working, banks close, electricity's cut off, and after four days, Cap's, well, so called regime collapses. So as one Berlin worker says, we defeated the putschists not with rifles, but with silence and with empty streets. So this fragility of what's going to come next is a melting pot and a boiling pot rather.
- [45:16]
AFWA Hersh
We mentioned hyperinflation already, but this is the era in which it becomes a really defining part of Germany's trauma. So 1921, the mark trades at 90 marks to the US dollar. By 1923 it would fall to 4.2 trillion marks, a modest little change to the dollar. It's impossible to actually understand a currency that is that badly devalued. It was completely worthless at this point.
- [45:44]
Peter Frankopan
So somebody who's living through it, an academic in Dresden called Victor Klempere, says each day brings new prices. Money flows like sand through our hands. We buy as soon as we're paid, because tomorrow money's going to be worthless. So a loaf of bread that cost one mark in 1919 cost 163 by the end of 1922. And people are bartering furniture for food. And like you said, afw, those wheelbarrows people are not just taking cash out of the wheelbarrows. If you leave unattended, kids play with it because the banknotes are absolutely worthless. So it puts strains on society. The middle class, once the backbone of German society, is basically wiped out. And as one official in hamburg says, In 1922, teachers, lawyers, clerks, they beg in the streets with their wives and their children. Their dignity's gone. So it's had a completely catastrophic impact across German society.
- [46:32]
AFWA Hersh
It's also having, and this is often the case, a kind of unexpected effect in really fueling this very experimental avant garde artistic scene. So at this point, Berlin becomes a major center, maybe even the centre for modernist art, theater, film. Bertolt Brecht is premiering his radical plays. The Bauhaus school is opening in 1919, completely disrupting artistic and architectural conventions. And foreign observers are noticing this weird juxtaposition of a country on its knees, but a city in the grip of this incredible vitality. The American journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote in 1921, Berlin is half in ruins, half in revelry. Out of hunger and despair, they create cabaret and satire.
- [47:16]
Peter Frankopan
And behind all this creative brilliance, there's constant political instability. You have extremist parties gaining ground, exploiting the anger at Versailles and despair over the economy. You've got right wing paramilitaries who are openly doing drills in the streets while communist uprisings are flaring in places like Saxony or in the Ruhr. And a Weimar police report of 1922 notes that the Republic is being besieged from all sides. Loyalty to it is shallow while opposition is deep.
- [47:46]
AFWA Hersh
So by the early 1920s, the Weimar Republic is utterly paradoxical, democratic, but very fragile, vibrant, creatively, but psychologically completely traumatized. And it is surviving coup attempts, political assassinations, hyperinflation and economic freefall. Its legitimacy has already been undermined by those who claim its very birth was shrouded in surrender and betrayal. And there are plenty of people whose anger is demanding them to radical lengths. Peter.
- [48:20]
Peter Frankopan
And we're going to talk about them. And one of them in particular. Next time on Legacy.
- [48:43]
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- [49:07]
Peter Frankopan
Forever.
- [49:07]
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