German guilt

A. L. Rowse War of Illusions, German Policies from 1911 to 1914 Fritz Fischer (Chatto and Windus £12.00)

Fritz Fischer is the most important German historian today, famous — or rather, with Germans notorious — for telling them the truth that Germany was responsible up to the hilt for the war of 1914-1918 and proving it from all the evidence. If he had dared to say all this just after that war, he might have been assassinated 'by the reactionary Frei Korps, as so many were — including the Catholic Centre Party leader, Erzberger, for signing the Treaty of Versailles, though this book shows what a deep-dyed nationalist and annexationist he was. Perhaps that taught him,. or he had learned something from the war, like Stresemann, who was another.

The point of the book is this. All Germans have been ready to heap the blame for the Second German War on Hitler — and absolve themselves from any responsibility for the First. Fischer proves — what anyone with knowledge of the facts, and the judgment to appraise them, has known all along — that there was absolute continuity: Hitler carried on the programme, and took over the ideas, of the German governing class right from the Bismarck period. Indeed, one effect of reading this thoroughly documented book is to rob Hitler of some of his originality. For the programme is all there well before 1914: Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, i.e. pushing Russia right back to St Petersburg — this objective was carried out in 1917, with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; the aim was subjugation, or extermination, of Slays (as with Jews later) for the settlement of Germans. The reduction of France to a second-rate power, dependent on Germany, seducing the propertied classes by appealing to their class-interest — carried out by Hitler with Main. The end of Britain as a world-power and as a sea-power, in the way of Germany's colonial expansion in the outside world. The use of anti-Semitism to bemuse the German masses; control of the press; lies as an instrument of policy, e.g. that Britain, not Germany began the war, that France had started by bombing German towns; that in 1918 Germany was not defeated but betrayed by a stab-in-the-back, etc. It is all there.

What Hitler did for the dominant classes in Germany, the reactionaries of heavy industry and the land, was the psychological preparation, mass-propaganda, mass-subjugation, the destruction of all opposition, so that they could carry forward their long-term objectives in the more favourable circumstances of the 'thirties. What he accomplished for them was wonderful in its way — no wonder he was mad at the Generals' conspiracy in 1944, after all he had done for them.

It is a terrible indictment. But Fischer puts it forward with objectivity, moderation and complete conviction. It is impossible to deny it or even to fault it — though German historians denied it all along, until now the facts and the documents force them to face the truth. Fischer reveals the steps that were taken by German governments after 1918 to conceal the truth, while German historians helped' them to do so. Here is Erzberger on the German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg's, statement of Germany's case in 1914 — this man has always been given an undeservedly favourable press in England as a kind of German Asquith: "it gave historic proof that this is England's war and that England wanted the war. This is what Germany believes today."

Of course it was untrue:. a war was the last thing Britain wanted, and this book shows the exhaustive efforts Sir Edward Grey made to keep the peace. Fischer proves that Germany, so far from restraining Austria-Hungary over Sarajevo, pushed her into making war against Serbia, despite all the latter's concessions. A month before Grey's efforts at mediation "the plan had been decided on by Germany to use the favourable opportunity of the murder at .Sarajevo, for the start of the Continental war which Germany regarded as necessary."

Once more the truth was put by Erzberger in his programme: "the bloody struggle makes it imperative that victory is used to give Germany military supremacy on the Continent for all time. The second aim is the termination of England's tutelage on questions of world policy, which is intolerable for Germany. The third the breaking up of the Russian colossus." Erzberger again: "An understanding with England would be regarded as a cruel disappointment ,by the German people ... and the military conflict with England must take place thoroughly and ruthlessly, free from all rules of so-called international law. Germany can only obtain the hoped-for goal, lasting peace in Europe [i.e. Under German domination] after this terrible blood bath, if it does not come to terms with England hut defeats it."

Fischer puts it mildly when he describes "The consensus which existed within the educated and propertied German middle class." In other words, these were the objectives of the whole of the German bourgeoisie. The Social Democrats, poor things, were merely their stooges: the war was represented to them as a defensive war against Tsarist Russia. They fell for it (to Lenin's disgust). Admiral von Muller, in the' privacy of his diary, gives away the game in August 1914: "The mood is brilliant. The government has managed brilliantly to make us appear the attacked." Bethmann-Hollweg was able to answer opponents who thought he was not aggressive enough by pointing out he had managed so well that the Social Democrats had always voted the Armaments budget. In 1914 he was able to assure his Prussian colleagues that "there was nothing much to be feared from Social Democracy. ... a general strike or sabotage was out of the question." Only one, Liebknecht voted against the credits for war in 1914; in 1919, after the defeat, he was assassinated.

The German military leadership never believed that they would be defeated: they thought that the Schlieffen Plan, i.e. a blitzkrieg on France through neutral Belgium (as in 1940 again) would infallibly bring victory. When it did not, and the Germans were held up by their defeats on the Marne and at Ypres, they were deliberately concealed from the German people. Moltke, who had egged on war all along, whined: "the whole world has conspired against us; it looks as if the task of all the other nations was to destroy Germany for ever. The few neutral states are not friendly to us. Germany has not a friend in the world."

What else could be expected from Germany's whole course and conduct from Bismarck on?

Fischer's moderately phrased conclusion is unassailable: "As far as Germany was concerned it [the war] was because of the determination with which the politically and economically leading classes clung to their vision of Germany's future position in the world and to their conviction that only a victorious war could guarantee their social and political pre-eminence in the Empire." This points to a secondary theme of the book: in Marxist terms, the German ruling classes sought to deflect the rise of the masses into the path of imperialist conquest, European domination and Weltmacht.

The truth of the matter has always been clear to the intelligent: but the real triumph of the Germans was to cover it up, suppress the truth. organise sympathy in the outside world, and undermine the Treaty of Versailles to resume the attempt. Here is the propaganda programme, in a memorandum to the German Foreign Office: "It is essential today to draw the attention of the German people with ever new publications firmly and aggressively to the fact that 'Britain, Russia and France definitely wanted the war and consciously prepared for it. • The hour demands that straightforward material is collected which can be understood by the masses, and that this is widely circulated .. and at every opportunity." Lies, of course,

What then are we to think of those fools who allowed themselves, in Britain and America, to be taken in? I do not refer to crackpots like Harry Elmer Barnes, but reputable liberal. historians — paradoxically pro-German — who had the most deplorable effect in confusing the minds of a whole generation and making them suppose that the Treaty of Versailles was responsible for the trouble in Europe between the wars. This played straight into the hands of the German reactionaries — the dominant'' classes in Germany: what they resented was not so much Versailles as that they had lost the war, and were determined to reverse the result. What are we to think of liberal and Leftist irresponsibles here — like Keynes, Russell etc — who played the game of the German Right by • attacking Versailles, and ignorantly exonerating Germany from guilt?

Before 1914 British policy was far more intelligently conducted. We have reason to be grateful that the views of Eyre Crowe and Nicolson in the Foreign Office prevailed. The consistent aim of Germany before 1914 was to secure Britain's neutrality; i.e. to keep Britain out of Europe to give Germany a free hand to knock out France and Russia, and achieve the domination of Europe. What sort of a future would there have been for this country then?

Nor was the Foreign Office wrong in the 'thirties, when Germany resumed the aggression with the demand for a free hand in Europe. The ignorant Chamberlain gave it to them over annexing Austria and then Czecho-Slovakia. Vansittart was perfectly right about Germany all along — as Douglas Home admitted 'to me the other day, and that he himself had been wrong over Appeasing Germany. To think that common-sense about Germany should have been framed by these ignorant stooges of the Left as `Vansittartism 1 Their idiocy passes' belief — if one did not know that Swift was roughly right about human beings, especially in politics.

No doubt whatever about the guilt of

Germany's ruling classes, the secondary theme. of Fischer's book is subtler and more original,. though not clearly expressed, in the German: manner. This is the dichotomy between the" internal pressures within Germany and the policy of external aggression — expansion, Lebensraum, more space, Weltmacht. The internal aim was to stave off the rise of Social: democracy (which makes the sympathies of': Leftist liberal Revisionists all the more ludicrous).

As both a historian and an oldtime Labour',.man, I have no sympathy with the European governing classes committing suicide — as they-'. look round at the ruin of their social order, their civilisation going down the drain, they have only themselves to blame. 1 hope they like what: they have to contemplate; I did not much enjoy: • going through the 'thirties when they helped their confreres in Germany to bring it all downon us again* When the end of the Second German War came in 1945, and Europe lay in ruins, a representative collection of German academics • was brought to my rooms at All Souls. They were among the first out of the madhouse: a dozen grey-faced, impoverished, pathetic professors. They were quite unable to see the point that this was the result of Germany's whole course from Bismark onwards: the . unification by Blood and Iron, by inflicting three wars (on Denmark, Austria-Hungary, France), a policy of aggression which natur*cf, m y A /I Souls and Appeasement

ally united other peoples in self-defence.

This was the course the German ruling classes were set on all the way from Bismarck. Bismarck's course in itself was, in the long run, disastrous. The Revision so necessary for Germany was not a revision of the Treaty of Versailles but a revision of their whole way of looking at their past, and the conduct of the nation, i.e. their ruling classes, from Bismarck on. It would have been possible for Europe to live with a Federal Germany, under responsible, representaive government: it was not possible for Europe to live with a Germany united under militarist leadership and irresponsible, autocratic government, Bismarck or the Kaiser or Hitler.

Fritz Fischer has set going this exceedingly important task of getting Germans to set the record right, understanding their own past and what they have been responsible for. It is much to be hoped that they will take it to heart and get on with it, taking the record back to Bismarck.