The armistice of November, 1918, ushered in a policy which in all human probability was bound to lead gradually to total submission. Historical examples of a similar nature show that nations which lay down their arms without compelling reasons prefer in the ensuing period to accept the greatest humiliations and extortions rather than attempt to change their fate by a renewed appeal to force.
This is humanly understandable. A shrewd victor will, if possible, always present his demands to the vanquished in installments. And then, with a nation that has lost its characterand this is the case of every one which voluntarily submitshe can be sure that it will not regard one more of these individual oppressions as an adequate reason for taking up arms again. ‘The more extortions are willingly accepted in this way, the more unjustified it strikes people finally to take up the defensive against a new, apparently isolated, though constantly recurring, oppression, especially when, all in all, so much more and greater misfortune has already been borne in patient silence.
The fall of Carthage is the most horrible picture of such a slow execution of a people through its own deserts.
That is why Clausewitz in his Drei Bekenntnisse incomparably singles out this idea and nails it fast for all time, when he says:
‘That the stain of a cowardly submission can never be effaced; that this drop of poison in the blood of a people is passed on to posterity and will paralyze and undermine the strength of later generations’; that, on the other hand, ‘even the loss of this freedom after a bloody and honorable struggle assures the rebirth of a people and is the seed of life from which some day a new tree will strike fast roots.’
Of course, a people that has lost all honor and character will not concern itself with such teachings. For no one who takes them to heart can sink so low; only he who forgets them, or no longer wants to know them, collapses. Therefore, we must not expect those who embody a spineless submission suddenly to look into their hearts and, on the basis of reason and all human experience, begin to act differently than before. On the contrary, it is these men in particular who will dismiss all such teachings until either the nation is definitely accustomed to its yoke of slavery or until better forces push to the surface, to wrest the power from the hands of the infamous spoilers. In the first case these people usually do not feel so badly, since not seldom they are appointed by the shrewd victors to the office of slave overseer, which these spineless natures usually wield more mercilessly over their people than any foreign beast put in by the enemy himself.
The development since 1918 shows us that in Germany the hope of winning the victor’s favor by voluntary submission unfortunately determines the political opinions and the actions of the broad masses in the most catastrophic way. I attach special importance to emphasizing the broad masses, because I cannot bring myself to profess the belief that the commissions and omissions of our people’s leaders are attributable to the same ruinous lunacy. As the leadership of our destinies has, since the end of the War, been quite openly furnished by Jews, we really cannot assume that faulty knowledge alone is the cause of our misfortune; we must, on the contrary, hold the conviction that conscious purpose is destroying our nation. And once we examine the apparent madness of our nation’s leadership in the field of foreign affairs from this standpoint, it is revealed as the subtlest, icecold logic, in the service of the Jewish idea and struggle for world conquest. And thus, it becomes understandable that the same timespan, which from 1806 to 1813 sufficed to imbue a totally collapsed Prussia with new vital energy and determination for struggle, today has not only elapsed unused, but, on the contrary, has led to an evergreater weakening of our state.
Seven years after November, 1918, the Treaty of Locarno was signed.
The course of events was that indicated above: Once the disgraceful armistice had been signed, neither the energy nor the courage could be summoned suddenly to oppose resistance to our foes’ repressive measures, which subsequently were repeated over and over. Our enemies were too shrewd to demand too much at once. They always limit their extortions to the amount which, in their opinionand that of the German leadership would at the moment be bearable enough so that an explosion of popular feeling need not be feared. But the more of these individual dictates had been signed, the less justified it seemed, because of a single additional extortion or exacted humiliation, to do the thing that had not been done because of so many others: to offer resistance. For this is the ‘ drop of poison ‘ of which Clausewitz speaks: the spinelessness which once begun must increase more and more and which gradually becomes the foulest heritage, burdening every future decision. It can become a terrible lead weight, a weight which a nation is not likely to shake off, but which finally drags it down into the existence of a slave race.
Thus, in Germany edicts of disarmament alternated with edicts of enslavement, political emasculation with economic pillage, and finally created that moral spirit which can regard the Dawes Plan as a stroke of good fortune and the Treaty of Locarno as a success. Viewing all this from a higher vantagepoint, we can speak of one single piece of good fortune in all this misery, which is that, though men can be befuddled, the heavens cannot be bribed. For their blessing remained absent: since then hardship and care have been the constant companionsof our people, and our one faithful ally has been misery. Destiny made no exception in this case, but gave us what we deserved. Since we no longer know how to value honor, it teaches us at least to appreciate freedom in the matter of bread. By now people have learned to cry out for bread, but one of these days they will pray for freedom.
Bitter as was the collapse of our nation in the years after 1918, and obvious at that very time, every man who dared prophesy even then what later always materialized was violently and resolutely persecuted. Wretched and bad as the leaders of our nation were, they were equally arrogant, and especially when it came to ridding themselves of undesired, because unpleasant, prophets. We were treated to the spectacle (as we still are today!) of the greatest parliamentary thickheads, regular saddlers and glovemakersand not only by profession, which in itself means nothingsuddenly setting themselves on the pedestal of statesmen, from which they could lecture down at plain ordinary mortals. It had and has nothing to do with the case that such a ‘ statesman ‘ by the sixth month of his activity is shown up as the most incompetent windbag, the butt of everyone’s ridicule and contempt, that he doesn’t know which way to turn and has provided unmistakable proof of his total incapacity ! No, that makes no difference, on the contrary: the more lacking the parliamentary statesmen of this Republic are in real accomplishment, the more furiously they persecute those who expect accomplishments from them, who have the audacity to point out the failure of their previous activity and predict the failure of their future moves. But if once you finally pin down one of these parliamentary honorables, and this political showman really cannot deny the collapse of his whole activity and its results any longer, they find thousands and thousands of grounds for excusing their lack of success, and there is only one that they will not admit, namely, that they themselves are the main cause of all evil.
By the winter of 192223, at the latest, it should have been generally understood that even after the conclusion of peace France was still endeavoring with iron logic to achieve the war aim she had originally had in mind. For no one will be likely to believe that France poured out the blood of her people never too rich to begin withfor four and a half years in the most decisive struggle of her history, only to have the damage previously done made good by subsequent reparations. Even AlsaceLorraine in itself would not explain the energy with which the French carried on the War, if it had not been a part of French foreign policy’s really great political program for the future. And this goal is: the dissolution of Germany into a hodgepodge of little states. That is what chauvinistic France fought for, though at the same time in reality it sold its people as mercenaries to the international world
This French war aim would have been attainable by the War alone if, as Paris had first hoped, the struggle had taken place on German soil. Suppose that the bloody battles of the World War had been fought, not on the Somme, in Flanders, in Artois, before Warsaw, NijniNovgorod, Kovno, Riga, and all the other places, but in Germany, on the Ruhr and the Main, on the Elbe, at Hanover, Leipzig, Nuremberg, etc., and you will have to agree that this would have offered a possibility of breaking up Germany. It is very questionable whether our young federative state could for four and a half years have survived the same test of strain as rigidly centralized France, oriented solely toward her uncontested center in Paris. The fact that this gigantic struggle of nations occurred outside the borders of our fatherland was not only to the immortal credit of the old army, it was also the greatest good fortune for the German future. It is my firm and heartfelt conviction, and sometimes almost a source of anguish to me, that otherwise there would long since have been no German Reich, but only ‘ German states.’ And this is the sole reason why the blood of our fallen friends and brothers has at least not Bowed entirely in vain.
Thus everything turned out differently! True, Germany collapsed like a flash in November, 1918. But when the catastrophe occurred in the homeland, our field armies were still deep in enemy territory. The first concern of France at that time was not the dissolution of Germany, but: How shall we get the German armies out of France and Belgium as quickly as possible? And so the first task of the heads of state in Paris for concluding the World War was to disarm the German armies and if possible drive them back to Germany at once; and only after that could they devote themselves to the fulfillment of their real and original war aim. In this respect, to be sure, France was already paralyzed. For England the War had really been victoriously concluded with the annihilation of Germany as a colonial and commercial power and her reduction to the rank of a secondclass state. Not only did the English possess no interest in the total extermination of the German state; they even had every reason to desire a rival against France in Europe for the future. Hence the French political leaders had to continue with determined peacetime labor what the War had begun, and Clemenceau’s utterance, that for him the peace was only the continuation of the War, took on an increased significance.
Persistently, on every conceivable occasion, they had to shatter the structure of the Reich. By the imposition of one disarmament note after another, on the one hand, and by the economic extortion thus made possible, on the other hand, Paris hoped slowly to disjoint the Reich structure. The more rapidly national honor withered away in Germany, the sooner could economic pressure and unending poverty lead to destructive political effects. Such a policy of political repression and economic plunder, carried on for ten or twenty years, must gradually ruin even the best state structure and under certain circumstances dissolve it. And thereby the French war aim would finally be achieved.
By the winter of 192223 this must long since have been recognized as the French intent. Only two possibilities remained: We might hope gradually to blunt the French will against the tenacity of the German nation, or at long last to do what would have to be done in the end anyway, to pull the helm of the Reich ship about on some particularly crass occasion, and ram the enemy. This, to be sure, meant a lifeanddeath struggle, and there existed a prospect of life only if previously we succeeded in isolating France to such a degree that this second war would not again constitute a struggle of Germany against the world, but a defense of Germany against a France which was constantly disturbing the world and its peace.
I emphasize the fact, and I am firmly convinced of it, that this second eventuality must and will some day occur, whatever happens. I never believe that France’s intentions toward us could ever change, for in the last analysis they are merely in line with the selfpreservation of the French nation. If I were a Frenchman, and if the greatness of France were as dear to me as that of Germany is sacred, I could not and would not act any differently from Clemenceau. The French nation, slowly dying out, not only with regard to population, but particularly with regard to its best racial elements, can in the long run retain its position in the world only if Germany is shattered. French policy may pursue a thousand detours; somewhere in the end there will be this goal, the fulfillment of ultimate desires and deepest longing. And it is false to believe that a purely passive will, desiring only to preserve itself, can for any length of time resist a will that is no less powerful, but proceeds actively. As long as the eternal conflict between Germany and France is carried on only in the form of a German defense against French aggression, it will never be decided, but from year to year, from century to century, Germany will lose one position after another. Follow the movements of the German language frontier beginning with the twelfth century until today, and you will hardly be able to count on the success of an attitude and a development which has done us so much damage up till now.
Only when this is fully understood in Germany, so that the vital will of the German nation is no longer allowed to languish in purely passive defense, but is pulled together for a final active reckoning with France and thrown into a last decisive struggle with the greatest ultimate aims on the German side only then will we be able to end the eternal and essentially so fruitless struggle between ourselves and France; presupposing, of course, that Germany actually regards the destruction of France as only a means which will afterward enable her finally to give our people the expansion made possible elsewhere. Today we count eighty million Germans in Europe! This foreign policy will be acknowledged as correct only if, after scarcely a hundred years, there are two hundred and fifty million Germans on this continent, and not living penned in as factory coolies for the rest of the world, but: as peasants and workers, who guarantee each other’s livelihood by their labor.
In December, 1922, the situation between Germany and France again seemed menacingly exacerbated. France was contemplating immense new extortions, and needed pledges for them. The economic pillage had to be preceded by a political pressure and it seemed to the French that only a violent blow at the nerve center of our entire German life would enable them to subject our ‘recalcitrant’ people to a sharper yoke. With the occupation of the Roar, the French hoped not only to break the moral backbone of Germany once and for all, but to put us into an embarrassing economic situation in which, whether we liked it or not, we would have to assume every obligation, even the heaviest.
It was a question of bending and breaking. Germany bent at the very outset, and ended up by breaking completely later. With the occupation of the Ruhr, Fate once again held out a hand to help the German people rise again. For what at the first moment could not but seem a great misfortune embraced on closer inspection an infinitely promising opportunity to terminate all German misery.