A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (6 page)

Using his formidable knowledge of history and world affairs, Chicherin fell into line, toughened the Soviet position, and dispatched an armada of arguments like the Alabama Claims case. As with so many legal wranglings, the move was extremely clever and thoroughly unwise. The talks eventually disbanded without agreement. Constructive diplomatic relations between Russia and Britain would not resume for years. Later in the conference, the Soviet delegation met secretly with German representatives at the nearby town of Rapallo. There, the then German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau signed the treaty renouncing all debts between the Russian government and his own, and the two countries embarked on a troubled alliance that would shape the decade to come.

Struggling for Stability

We cannot comprehend the full challenge Stresemann confronted in reading the Russians without first recognizing the dangerous environment in which he had to function. Stresemann had to develop his strategic empathy in the crucible of nationwide upheaval. He and most of Germany’s prominent politicians in the immediate postwar years risked much more than merely their careers. In a very real sense, they had reason to fear for their lives. With the stakes this high, knowing one’s enemy could literally be vital.

In January 1919, both of the German Communist Party’s (KPD) most prominent spokesmen, the fiery Jewish intellectual Rosa Luxemburg and the rash Karl Liebknecht, were murdered by right-wing Free Corps units, paramilitary bands that had sprung up across the nation. Another left-wing leader, Bavaria’s Jewish Minister-President Kurt Eisener, was shot and killed in Munich. Immediately thereafter, Bavaria declared itself a Soviet Republic. Within one month, that government was
overthrown by Reichswehr (the German military) and Free Corps forces who killed more than 1,000 government supporters during the struggle. The following year, Free Corps units under the leadership of Wolfgang Kapp marched on Berlin, forcing officials of the federal government to flee to Stuttgart. Though militarily proficient, Kapp and his men failed to forge the political alliances needed to govern. A general strike quickly brought them down, and the Social Democratic government returned to power.

The year 1921 saw workers’ strikes and revolts flare up across the country. In the wake of Rosa Luxemburg’s assassination, Ruth Fischer, a fervent Marxist who had helped found the Austrian Communist Party before moving to Berlin, assumed an increasing leadership role within the KPD. Yet neither she nor her comrades were able to inspire enough of the German working class, the majority of whom still supported the more moderate Social Democratic Party. The KPD attempted to spark a revolution, but the unrest was met with force and quelled.

Political violence touched even some of the government’s highest officials. In 1922, Weimar’s first Chancellor, Philipp Scheidemann, who had resigned in protest over the Versailles Treaty, went strolling in the woods. His daughter, along with her eight-year-old niece, walked at his side. From behind a large tree, an assailant rushed toward the ex-Chancellor and sprayed acid at his face. The chemicals missed his head, burning instead his arms and legs. Prudently, given the climate of political violence at the time, Scheidemann was armed. Pulling a revolver from his pocket, he managed to fire two shots before he collapsed. The perpetrator and his accomplice escaped.
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Years later, Scheidemann’s assailants were captured and tried. In their defense they claimed that their actions had been inspired by the right-wing media.

One of the first to contact Scheidemann to congratulate him on his escape was the German Jewish Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau. A few weeks later, when Rathenau was driving to work at the Foreign Ministry, armed gunmen drove up beside him, fired machine guns, and lobbed a hand grenade into his car. It was Rathenau who had signed the Rapallo Treaty with Russia, normalizing relations with the communist regime, an extraordinary diplomatic move but one that the far right-wing could not abide.

As turbulent as the political scene had become, it was about to grow worse. In January of 1923, French and Belgian armies invaded. Frustrated over Germany’s refusal to pay the exceedingly high reparations imposed at Versailles, France and Belgium seized the coal-producing Ruhr region of western Germany. The plan was ill-conceived from the start. Militarily, Germany had no means of response. Unwilling to accept a violation of its sovereignty, the German government organized a general strike in the region. Without German workers to mine and extract the coal, France had no ability to remove what it had seized. A popular cartoon of the day depicted a French general telegraphing to Paris that the military operations had gone exactly to plan, but the soldiers were freezing, so please send some coal.

Just as Kapp’s plans had succeeded militarily but foundered politically, defeated by a general strike, the French and Belgian efforts met a similar result. Force could not accomplish what only a political solution could achieve. Yet the strike took a painful toll on the German populace. In order to maintain their defiant action, the federal government continued to pay workers in the Ruhr not to work. This decision, combined with the printing of money in order to purposely inflate the Reichsmark and thereby render reparation payments worthless, led to hyperinflation. The political costs of extreme economic dysfunction left the country primed for revolution.

It was in this troubled context that Gustav Stresemann assumed the Chancellorship in August of 1923. Although he served as Chancellor for a scant three months, it proved a breathtakingly tense period. Facing the fallout from domestic hyperinflation and foreign invasion would have challenged any new regime. On the economic front, Stresemann’s introduction of the Rentenmark dramatically reduced inflation.
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On the political front, however, instability was still deadly. On September 26, Stresemann called off resistance to the Ruhr occupation, realizing that it only inflamed the situation and hindered Germany’s hopes of normalizing relations with the West. Continued truculence could not raise the nation up from its supine posture. He believed that a certain degree of compliance with the West was the only feasible method of getting Germany back on its feet and restoring its strength. The danger in his fulfillment policy was that the far right viewed it as unforgivable: nothing less than subservience to the victors. Unbeknownst to
Stresemann, scarcely more than one month into his Chancellorship, Hugo Stinnes, an extremely wealthy Ruhr industrialist, was plotting a coup. Stinnes approached American Ambassador Alinson B. Houghton to feel out whether he could obtain American support. In place of Stresemann, Stinnes himself, along with the head of the Reichswehr, Hans von Seeckt, and the former chief of the Krupp corporation would rule Germany, presumably ensuring order and economic growth. This in turn would enhance Germany’s ability to repay its reparations to the United States and others. American Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes was not impressed, and the plot never materialized.
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But this was merely the first bullet that Stresemann luckily escaped. Another came from within a rogue band of the German military. Hans von Seeckt, head of the Reichswehr and a staunch monarchist, had no fondness for the Weimar Republic. He served the state in order to rebuild the military. His eventual hope was to destroy Poland and restore German borders to their prewar frontiers. Although in 1920 he had refused to move the Reichswehr against the Kapp putsch, leaving the Weimar government in the lurch, he did act decisively to crush a putsch attempt on the night of September 29, 1923. For several years, a clandestine group within the military known as the Black Reichswehr had been murdering Germans who cooperated with the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission, a body established by the victors in World War I to inspect and oversee German disarmament. Now a Black Reichswehr leader, Major Bruno Buchrucker, captured several forts on the outskirts of Berlin, the first step toward a coup d’état. Seeckt ordered the official Reichswehr to put down the attempt. Buchrucker capitulated after only two days. He was tried, fined, and sentenced to prison.
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General Seeckt used this opportunity to disband the Black Reichswehr, rather than lose control of it.

Where the Russians Stood

The Reichswehr’s intrigues proved minor in comparison to the two large-scale violent uprisings that Stresemann next confronted. One came from the Right, when Adolf Hitler launched his notorious Beer Hall Putsch. The other emerged from the Left, when the Soviet Union’s leadership instigated what it hoped would be a communist seizure of power.
Moscow’s attempt to topple Stresemann’s regime and spark a revolution across Germany left Stresemann in a bind. For the remainder of his time in office, he would need to maintain extreme vigilance against a repeated Soviet threat while at the same time cooperating with the Russians to help gain leverage against Britain and France. His most immediate concern in 1923, however, was simply to survive.

On August 23, 1923, the Politburo met to discuss opportunities for fomenting a German revolution. Leon Trotsky was the most enthusiastic, believing that Germany’s time was imminent. Grigory Zinoviev was only slightly less optimistic, assuming that the revolution might still be months away. Their expectations resulted in part from the popular German resistance to the French invasion of the Ruhr earlier in the year. Stalin, in contrast, doubted that a revolution would succeed, but he had not yet consolidated his power within the group. Years later, he would use the fact that he had been right to discredit his rivals. But in the fall of 1923, Trotsky and Zinoviev held greater sway. Karl Radek, the Communist International (Comintern) member most knowledgeable about Germany, also believed that the German masses were not yet prepared to take the requisite action in support of a revolution, but he did not express his full concerns at the Politburo meeting. Heinrich Brandler, who led the KPD, tried to resist the push for immediate uprisings, but during a series of meetings in Moscow, his reluctance withered. Under pressure, Brandler consented to the ill-conceived plot.
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On paper, the scheme must have seemed plausible. Using the Soviet embassy in Berlin as cover, Moscow smuggled money and advisors into Germany to help organize the coming assaults. The Politburo charged the Soviet Ambassador to Germany, Nikolai Krestinski, with overseeing the secret funds.
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The Soviets covertly shipped weapons from Petrograd to Hamburg, which were then off-loaded by Communist Party longshoremen. These party members stored the weapons in areas under their control. The entire operation was to be overseen by Radek. Meanwhile, Brandler was instructed to ally with Social Democrats of Saxony and organize 50,000 to 60,000 workers to serve essentially as armed paramilitary units, warding off the expected attacks from the Right. Brandler asked Moscow to send an appropriate expert to coordinate the revolution’s military aspects. Peter Skoblevsky, who served as a general during the Russian Civil War, arrived to take charge of all armed operations.

Spotting the signs of increased agitation, the Prussian police began cracking down on the KPD in late August. They raided the office of the communist newspaper, the
Rote Fahne
(Red Flag), and soon thereafter raided the Party’s headquarters. They had a warrant for Ruth Fischer’s arrest, but she was not to be found. Fischer, along with Brandler and other top communists, were already in (or heading toward) Moscow, making plans for the coming seizure of power. Trotsky distrusted Fischer and preferred that she remain in Moscow during the revolution, but Zinoviev opposed him on this point. As a compromise, Fischer was permitted to return to Germany, while her colleague Arkady Maslow was forced to stay behind and endure an investigation of his past performance within the Party.

Soviet Russia’s dual policy of conducting traditional diplomacy on the one hand while supporting foreign revolutions on the other left diplomats and statesmen both frustrated and perplexed. The German Ambassador in Moscow, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, reported on his conversations with Soviet Foreign Minister Chicherin. The Soviets were anxious over the possibility of a Franco–German alliance that would leave Russia isolated. This fear would haunt Moscow throughout the interwar era. Yet if this were truly a Soviet concern, then Russian policy seemed contradictory. In the wake of ongoing Soviet support for communist upheavals in Germany, Brockdorff-Rantzau expressed the same confusion occurring across Western capitals. Just who was making Russian foreign policy: the government or the communist party?
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Diplomacy is full of duplicity, and the Ambassador’s conversations with Karl Radek illustrate this well. On September 27, Brockdorff-Rantzau complained to Radek about an article in the German Communist newspaper
Rote Fahne
in which Leon Trotsky called for a widening of revolutionary activity. Radek explained that Trotsky was merely referring to activity in Bulgaria. There was no reason for concern. Radek expressed confidence in the possibilities for greater German–Soviet cooperation.
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In actuality, Radek was not only aware of the imminent German communist uprising, he was in the midst of organizing it.

Fortunately for Stresemann, the October revolution was a total failure. German communists lacked both the popular support and the military sophistication to replicate 1917. Unable to obtain the support of German Social Democrats, Brandler called off the uprisings before they
ever switched into high gear. Reichswehr forces moved into Saxony and thwarted any insurrection. Word of the cancellation could not reach Hamburg in time, where revolutionaries were crushed by police. Adding insult to injury, even the revolution’s military head, General Skoblevsky, was captured and imprisoned. Shortly after the communist uprising was aborted, Adolf Hitler set a right-wing coup in motion in Bavaria. Stresemann immediately issued a report to the heads of all German states. Hitler’s act of high treason would be countered with the full energy of the government. Stresemann survived both challenges, thanks in both cases to strong police and military actions, as well as his own decisive response. The lessons were clear. Stability was essential if a politically moderate government in Berlin hoped to continue.