In Unfinished Victory Arthur Bryant also wrote about how the outworking of the Great War of 1914 impacted on the Jews within defeated Germany and devastated Europe.

The Holocaust of the European Jews is now taken to be the undisputable justification for why Britain fought its Second World War against Germany. That war against Germany is now even popularly described as a war against Hitler. But in order to see things in that way you really have to abstract cause and effect in the historical chain of causation. Bryant, writing in 1939, could not do that. He could not foresee the future and write in anticipation of it. He was a historian with a desire to describe the facts of the matter and how events had led to the increasingly dangerous situation he described.

The extermination of the Jews occurred obscurely in the hinterland of the German-Soviet war and it is a virtual certainty than it would not have happened without the Second World War and its extension eastward in 1941, as a consequence of the British defeat in the European war of 1939-40, and its insistence not to make a settlement after that defeat. After the British/French 1940 defeat in the war they declared on Germany a new war developed when Hitler had to choose which of his enemies he had to dispose of first – Britain or Bolshevik Russia – while holding the other at bay.

The Jewish Holocaust was, therefore, a consequence of Britain’s Second World War on Germany and not a cause of it.

It was World War II that did for the Jews. Arthur Bryant did everything in his power to prevent it. Winston Churchill did everything in his power to wage it. Who is more responsible for what happened to the Jews, objectively, therefore?

It should be pointed out that during the mid-1930s the Nazi treatment of the Jews in Germany was not something that was out of the ordinary in terms of brutality – particularly for people who knew at first hand the experience of living under the British Empire and were aware of history and world affairs.

As the Catholic Bulletin in Ireland pointed out to Dr. Hertz, the Chief Rabbi of London, it was not legitimate to complain about treatment of Jews in Germany whilst

“… to be blind to England’s Penal Laws in Ireland for two hundred years, to the British pogrom that drove thousands of Catholics out of Ulster in our own day, to England’s brazen efforts to foment dissension in Ireland today, as it does between Germany and Austria, not to speak of the close on a quarter million Germans driven into insanity by herself and her Allies in the past decade, or the Indian villages bombed off the map by English war-planes as we write – to the disgrace of Christianity, and the justification of Japan’s menacing aggression in China.” (‘Gleanings,’ Catholic Bulletin, September 1933)

Churchill had a hand in most of the above, except for Japan’s aggression in China, which he fully supported during the 1930s, while condemning the Nazis.

The one-party Unionist Government and its supporters in the North had pioneered most of the Nazi tactics against its large Catholic minority since 1920 (including pogroms against Belfast Catholics). And the British Empire was acting far more aggressively and murderously in India, Africa, Palestine and the Middle East than anything the Nazis had accomplished in this sphere of progress at that point.

Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, though well publicised in England, did not begin to attain the levels of brutality that England’s policies in Ireland between the 17^th and 19^th Centuries had reached until after the Catholic Bulletin had ceased publication at the end of 1939.

The Jews were not being exterminated when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. The Jews were not being exterminated when Arthur Bryant wrote Unfinished Victory in 1939/40. The Jewish question does not figure in the British Declaration of War on Germany in September 1939 and was not made an issue of.

The extermination did not begin until two years into the war, after Britain had succeeded in spreading it to Soviet Russia. What happened to the Jews in the East was unimaginable in 1939. There were no predictions of it.

It was in the context of the Nazi war with Bolshevism – an existential biological war – that the National Socialists took up the idea of using Bolshevik methods to solve their Jewish problem, which they enhanced by going eastward toward where most Jews lived. Without the German/Soviet War it is entirely possible that the Nazis could have solved their Jewish Question by less thorough means than they did.

Even when the German invasion of the USSR happened Britain did not make the extermination of the Jews into a war issue, despite being informed about it by the Polish resistance. It made no attempt to bomb the concentration/death camps or to inform the German public about what was happening in their name to the east, so that they might reject Hitler.

There is a curious unasked question to go with the other curious unasked questions about World War 2: why no European leader (aside from Churchill) urged the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to remain in Europe in 1945? Perhaps that was because the Central and East European states were all conducting extensive pogroms against their minorities, particularly including Germans and surviving Jews.

The merit of Arthur Bryant’s Unfinished Victory is that it is written without the false vision of hindsight. Bryant observed German affairs and he attempted to explain to the English public in 1939 why the German electorate had voted in such large numbers for Hitler and supported him for the previous 6 years in office. And in Unfinished Victory he explained to the British public why the National Socialist idea that the Jews were a problem for Germany had traction with the German public.

There is a big difference between explanation and justification. Bryant’s book is an explanation of the way Germany was, and not a justification – despite what Hugh Trevor Roper and Andrew Roberts said about Unfinished Victory.

The author of the Balfour Declaration, when Prime Minister of Britain, said in a speech in Parliament on 10 July 1905, in support of his Aliens Bill, which aimed at the exclusion of East European Jews from the UK:

“… it would not be to the advantage of the civilisation of the country that there should be an immense body of persons who, however patriotic, able, and industrious, however much they threw themselves into the national life, still, by their own action, remained a people apart, and not merely held a religion differing from the vast majority of their fellow – countrymen, but only inter-married among themselves. He quite agreed this country had not nearly reached the point when such a state of things became a serious national danger; but they must bear in mind that some of the undoubted evils which had fallen upon portions of the country came from an alien immigration which was largely Jewish.”

On 8 February 1920 Andrew Robert’s hero, Winston Churchill, had published an article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald which spoke of “the schemes of the International Jews” warning about the “adherents of this sinister confederacy” which represented “a world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society.” He wrote of the “evil prominence” obtained by Jews in Bela Kun’s “reign of terror” in Hungary and argued that “Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every bit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.”

This was in the same year that the London Times published a document called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion whose gist was that there was an international conspiracy of Jews to determine the affairs of the world.

By the mid-1930s Churchill no longer spoke this language. He had gone into the wilderness and campaigned on a platform against Baldwin and the English appeasers of Indian self-determination. But having failed to make headway on this issue as a path back to political power and the job he coveted most – Prime Minister – he seized on the Hitler issue and German threat. Having done this, Churchill drew in Jewish support of a political and financial kind and all talk about International Jewish conspiracies ceased. Apparently, wealthy Jews were very helpful in helping Churchill pay off his father’s extensive gambling debts. Why continue to bite the hand that feeds?

Many books that were very supportive of the Nazi regime were still published in London in the mid-1930s. These were not just on the political extreme but within the British mainstream itself. The Tory Spectator for example published a series of reports from Germany under the title ‘Hitler’s First Year’. The Daily Mail’s famous Foreign Correspondent, George Ward Price, wrote admiring articles and books, like ‘I know These Dictators’ (1937) and joined Hitler for afternoon tea at his Eagle’s Nest in 1938. Other English observers saw National Socialism as the welcome remodelling of Germany along English lines and British values, particularly those of the public school.

There was much to be said in favour of this argument since the British Empire and its off shoot in America were great inspirers of many facets of National Socialism. Hitler was very fond of the Anglo-Saxons and their achievements and strove for a world in which Germany, the originator of the virile Anglo-Saxon race, was permitted its “place in the Sun” alongside them.

Arthur Bryant saw Hitler and National Socialism as a symptom of the German problem which had been created by the Great War and its aftermath. He linked the growth of anti-Semitism in Germany to the rise of Bolshevism, which had a strong Jewish character amongst its leadership, both in Russia and Europe generally, and to the economic dislocation brought about by the Great War on Germany and the Versailles Treaty. He also described how the peculiar exclusive character of the Jewish community made it both a provider of services to its host and a benefiter from its troubles, inflicted on Germany by the Allied Powers.

Bryant called Chapter 3 of Unfinished Victory, ‘In Time of the Breaking of Nations.’ He understood, like Arthur Griffith, that the nation had become the fundamental mode of existence of peoples. But the Allies were intent on the breaking of the German nation state, threatening German existence. And the exclusivist Jews, who had previously been a loyal and useful part of German development, were now implicated, politically and economically, in the breaking of the nation.

That was a lethal combination, transforming the casual anti-Semitism widespread in Europe into something much greater – particularly with a war situation brewing. And it was Bryant’s objective to prevent such a development, even if that meant risking his career and livelihood.

He wrote about the Jewish issue as it was before Hitler obtained power and consolidated it, explaining how it gave the Nazis purchase on the German people.

There was, indeed, a great surge of anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1920s in the new states created by Britain and France at the Versailles Conference. The Great War victors had decided to break up the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire which had made functional arrangements for national development for minorities, among them the Jews, prior to its breaking up.

The British and French re-orderers of Europe decided, however, to replace it with small national states which intensified nationalist feeling, particularly against non-national or international, cosmopolitan elements. Anti-Semitism became one of the social facts of Life in these smaller, new national states created by Versailles.

The new Central and Eastern European Versailles States proved conducive to the growth of anti-Semitism partly for the reason that the position held by the Jews as a social group spread right across the nationalities of the Hapsburg Empire and this became problematical when the Imperial State was destroyed by Britain and France and the nationalities were constructed into separate states. It became necessary to oust the Jews from the positions they had gained in the former empires, to replace them with new national bourgeoisies.

Jewish minorities tended to perform the same economic function across Europe, providing the commercial element in societies that had underdeveloped commercial sectors. The Jews were the financial oil of the Habsburg state. Jews across Europe benefiting from their cosmopolitan status and availed of business opportunities through knowing where opportunities might exist and having useful connections wherever they might go to do business. The existing economic and social infrastructure of the Jewish communities was available to them as it was not to more rooted locals wishing to do the same in foreign lands.

While Jews enjoyed those benefits, they suffered from the political implications of post-Versailles Europe when multi-national structures were broken up. Most of the new countries of Central and Eastern Europe had ruling majorities which looked upon all minorities, and particularly the Jews, as undesirable foreign bodies whose elimination would enhance the welfare and safety of their states. National bourgeoisies were necessary for national development and Jews could only be a component of these through thorough assimilation.

While some prominent and long-located Jews, who had done well for themselves, craved assimilation into the societies in which they lived, the general tendency with Judaism was to live and prosper in exclusive form within alien political structures, emphasizing the distinctions between Jews and all others. They wished to profit from the host without becoming part of it. A clergy and a class of intellectuals were maintained to teach Jews how to be distinct and continue to live a Jewish life among the Gentiles.

Jews saw themselves as the eternal element in the world and all else, nations and peoples, were transitory.

With the new national states and the exclusivist character of Judaism, right across Central and Eastern Europe the Jews were resented and suffered persecution through the appearances of various demagogues and anti-Semitic organizations maintaining an agitation against Jews as both an alien problematic element and the problematic element in the post-war situation. Jews were abused, violence was ever-present and well-organised boycott drives endangered Jewish business and communities right across Central and Eastern Europe.

The progressive elimination of Jews from economic life of the nations which is frequently associated with Nazi Germany was actually conceived and practiced in Eastern Europe well before Hitler had assumed control in Germany. Richard Pipes, the Jewish historian, makes the argument in Russia under the Bolshevik Regime 1917-24, that what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust was actually begun in Ukraine, by Ukrainian nationalists. German organisation and power made everything more thorough, but the same spirit was common elsewhere.

While the Jews were a normal functional part of pre-war Europe with its multinational Empires, they became an abnormal element for these new States in which nationalist normalisation was an anti-Jewish process. The disabling of the Jews was a requirement of the line of progress that was determined for Central and Eastern Europe by the re-orderers of the world at Versailles.

Bryant noted how Jewish business benefited greatly from the economic dislocation brought about by the Great War across Europe – and particularly in Germany. The stable national economic order in Germany, which included a strong Jewish element in business and finance, was unbalanced by the destruction of the war, the Royal Navy blockade and the terms of Versailles. The British had planned the economic meltdown of Germany prior to the War as both a method for destroying German resistance and a general War Aim.

Jewish business seemed to benefit within the meltdown. Germany’s national economy was in ruination but in all capitalist events there are winners and losers. While the Germans of all classes, and particularly the middle class, were the losers, the Jews, with their economic structures based upon making a living on individual and general hardship (usury) and their international connections, that made movement to more profitable locations possible, were the winners. And large numbers of migrant Jews appeared in Germany after the establishment of national states to the east and the growth of anti-Semitism.

This became clear to the Germans – and the National Socialists with their programme, were able to avail of the traction pointing this out gave them among the distressed German people. The Nazis also pointed out that many of the Left who had given Germany the “stab in the back” to lose the war, that had not been lost on the battlefield, had been of Jewish origin.

The Balfour Declaration was fundamental to this. It came about partly as a means of taming Jewish influence in the world, which was seen by many in Britain as being of advantage to the enemy. Both the German and Ottoman states were often depicted as being either run, or heavily infiltrated by Jews, bent on undermining the British Empire. Reports from the British Embassy in Istanbul and its dragomen are full of anti-Semitic tropes and the Young Turks are depicted as Salonica Jews, in disguise. And this became a part of popular culture through John Buchan’s second instalment of the 39 Steps series, Greenmantle. It should be noted that Buchan came to head the British propaganda department in the Great War – where fiction met fact. 

The dispersed, and exclusivist Jews, having been in receipt of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, increasingly asserted themselves as an actual nation, distinct from the nations in which they lived and not bound to those nations by national ties. That mode of existence, after 1917, became increasingly problematic for the European Jews among the nations. The Nazis themselves acted upon it by establishing a bureau of emigration for the German Jews to encourage them to avail of the national home that Britain had generously established for them in Palestine.

A board game was sold in Germany during the early 1930s called Juden Raus!. Auf nach Palästina! (Jews Out! Go to Palestine!). Players competed in organizing for 3 Jews to leave Germany and go to Palestine. It sold very little, but the game has been given great publicity.

The Jewish community in Germany themselves, however, produced a board game for Jewish children, Das Alijah-Spiel, promoting the objective of a colonization of Palestine by Jews. At the Jewish Museums in Munich and Berlin there is a picture of two children from the Theodore Herzl school in Berlin playing it with Herbert and Leni Sonnenfeld, two well-known Zionists, in Berlin in 1935. This game, despite having a place in Jewish museums has been written out of Western media accounts (including Google searches and AI) and the story spun that the game is of much recent origin. Why?

It seems that the objective of anti-Semites in Nazi Germany was very similar to that of Zionists – to put the Jews in Palestine, no matter what the consequences.

Seeing the Jews as a distinct race or nation had been previously seen as a form of “anti-Semitism” but the Balfour Declaration began to transform the meaning of the term. If there was a Jewish nation with a territory the opposite view now became problematic.

Bryant and Unfinished Victory are routinely described as anti-Semitic by recent commentators. But there is a big problem here. Richard Griffith, a Welsh academic with an interest in the “British Pro-Nazi Right” investigated the matter for his book, What Did you Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45.

Griffith was startled to find that the reviews of Unfinished Victory across the British press were, on the whole, entirely positive. He described them as “rave reviews.” Even the small number of critical ones in the Guardian, New Statesman and Spectator were critical only on the basis that Bryant had sympathised too much with Germany and had been too understanding of the Germans who were supporting Hitler.

They were all written by anti-appeasers who wanted war with Hitler and who were appalled at Bryant’s failure to demonise Germany. Bryant’s crime was that he had become a fellow-traveller.

But there was no English criticism of the book for being anti-Semitic.

That left only 2 possibilities: Either Unfinished Victory was notanti-Semitic at all, or the English reviewers did not find it peculiarly anti-Semitic!

This would mean that English society had the same general understanding of the Jewish problem that Bryant had. Perish the thought!

Has anti-Semitism any meaning these days?

Today it seems to be “anti-Semitism” to point out the fact that Judaism, which for a long time treated itself as a nation with extensive territorial rights over Palestine and beyond, had been made into an actual nation fusing a religion with a nation and state, through being awarded a Jewish State by British Imperialism. And saying such a thing is likely to be responded to with by book banning by the nicest of people.

The redefinition of “anti-Semitism” employed to shut down criticism of the Jewish State must surely have another effect – a questioning of whether a factual description of Jewish activity in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s should be continued to be seen as “beyond the Pale,” to coin a joint Irish/Jewish phrase.

Until now there has been an understandable wariness to delve into such areas, lest such knowledge interfere with the narrative that aims to prevent such catastrophic things ever happening again, as happened to the European Jews.

Yet what happens when such catastrophe reoccurs again, despite the best of intentions?

What happens when the survivors of catastrophe/holocaust and their descendants constitute themselves in a Jewish State and replicate the catastrophe/holocaust upon others?

What happens when the permitted, official history is employed to serve a new ethnic cleansing of vast proportions along with attempted genocide – and criticism of it is forbidden by the power of law?

What to do, but go back to Arthur Bryant, before the use of subsequent events distorted history, to try to understand it?

ARTHUR BRYANT (1940) UNFINISHED VICTORY

CHAPTER 3

IN TIME OF THE BREAKING OF NATIONS

“The German revolution . . . passed across our anxious, satiated, jaded consciousness with no more attention than surviving troops just withdrawn into rest. The story requires a book to tell. . . The nation is beaten in war, the Fleet and Army mutiny and dissolve, the Emperor is deposed, and Authority bankrupt is repudiated by all. Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Councils are set up, a Socialist Government is hustled into office; upon the famine-stricken homeland return millions of soldiers quivering from long-drawn torment, aching with defeat. The Police have disappeared; industry is at a standstill; the mob are hungry; it is winter.” — WINSTON CHURCHILL, World Crisis.

On November 9th a crowd of sailors wearing red brassards and cockades broke into the Hapag building in Hamburg, headquarters of the Hamburg-America Line, and bawling out that the German Republic had been proclaimed, threatened to thrash the great Albert Ballin, founder of the Line and master architect of Germany’s mercantile power. A few days before their comrades at Kiel had refused to sail against the English, mutinied and hoisted the Red Flag over the High Seas Fleet…

It was the first casualty of the German Revolution and the end of an era. Forty -eight hours later, Baffin’s friend and patron, the Kaiser, drove silently through the rain to Amerongen in neutral Holland… Behind him in the November rain he left a defeated, divided and starving people.

The Revolution, so heralded, spread quickly. Shabby trains, bearing waving, cockaded sailors perambulated the country, announcing that peace and the social millennium had come together… At Pasewalk in Pomerania, Adolf Hitler, corporal in the 16th Bavarian Infantry, lay in hospital with eyes like burning coals and watched the sailors and their youthful leaders, mostly Jews, swarming out of their lorries as they called on the wounded veterans to revolt. In Berlin processions marched through the streets singing the Marseillaise. In Munich loud-speakers on the Teresian Field blared out “Down with Capitalism! ” “Down with the Wittelsbachs!” while the Jew, Kurt Eisner, aroused the crowd with his eloquence till it swarmed shouting into the city to release the criminals from the gaols and plunder the shops.

Old Prince von Bulow, who had been Imperial Chancellor in the old days before the war, has described the coming of that revolution which was Germany’s counterpart to our own delirious Armistice Day. Alas, the German revolution was drearily Philistine, lacking in all fire or inspiration… I have never in my life seen anything more brutally vulgar than those straggling lines of tanks and lorries manned by drunken sailors and deserters from reserve formations, which trailed through the Berlin streets on 9th November. That afternoon from the window of my suite at the Adlon I had a view both of the Linden and the Pariser Platz. I have seldom witnessed anything so nauseating, so maddeningly revolting and base, as the spectacle of half-grown louts, tricked out with the red armlets of Social-Democracy, who, in bands of several at a time, came creeping up behind any officer wearing the Iron Cross or the order Pour le Merite, to pin down his elbows at his sides and tear off his epaulettes.

On the frontiers, trailing back along a thousand muddy, lorry-pocked roadways the armies were returning. “Gaunt, immobile, under shrapnel helmets, wasted limbs, ragged uniforms”, they marched, as one onlooker saw them, in silence, “as though they were the envoys of the deadliest, loneliest, iciest cold. They looked neither to the left nor right but passed through the first German towns with stony, expression-less eyes. The girls who stood waiting for them in the cold with pathetic bunches of flowers watched, trembling and uncertain, their faces pale and twitching. Some bolder spirits attempted a few feeble cheers, but there was no response. The heart of imperial Germany had broken… Their sacrifices had been in vain.

It was the end of the greatest military gamble in history. The brave men whose lives had been staked to win it and who had fought for four years against an ever-growing ring of enemies now received their reward at the hands of their own countrymen. In many of the chief German cities, already in the hands of the revolutionaries, they were received in silence and contempt. Bulow saw them passing through Berlin, their whole aspect that of insurmountable fatigue, of deeply ingrained suffering and privation. Nobody wanted them or had any further use for their constancy and love of country.

Soon they began to dissolve… As they arrived at the stations in the bigger cities they were met by Communist agents, who urged them to join the Red Army or offered them a few marks and a meal for their arms. A rifle sold for two or three marks…

Authority had temporarily ceased to exist in the most authoritarian country in the world. In Berlin two puppet governments contended for a feeble mastery, the Social Democrats and the Independent Socialists or Communists. The former represented the same semi-Liberal, bourgeois but timorous and therefore ineffectual elements that had followed Kerensky in Russia: the latter the extremists of the Left, the men of the Mountain who wished to establish by force a new social order, or at least to destroy an old one. At first it looked as if the revolutionary Communists, or Spartacists as they were called, would triumph. Defeated and starving Germany seemed about to follow in the steps of Russia, where after three years of modern warfare a third of the world, its faith and ancient social order shattered, had lapsed, at the dictation of a tiny minority of ruthless iconoclasts, into anarchy, famine and pestilence as the fiery prelude to a new world.

From the Soviet east poured into dissolving Germany a stream not only of disintegrating ideas but of gold — the accumulated treasure of the fallen Muscovite Empire.

Many of the leaders of the Communist Revolution in both countries were Jews. The racial tie strengthened the ideological bonds between them. The prophet of the Russian Revolution, Karl Marx, himself had been a German Jew. Hugo Haase, who had organised the Sailors’ Revolt at Kiel, Kurt Eisner, who led the rioting at Munich and got himself nominated President of Bavaria; Ernst Toller, Levien, Axelrod and Levine-Nissen, who succeeded him; and Rosa Luxemburg, who, with Karl Liebknecht, founded the Spartacist League and controlled the Revolution in Berlin, were all Jews.

Long denied a proper outlet for their latent talents, these children of an exiled but invincible race tended naturally to identify themselves with the forces that wished to overthrow the social order of eastern and central Europe. Having themselves suffered prolonged indignities and tortures, they were not always squeamish in the methods they advocated. “Turn imperialistic war into Civil War!” “The armed rising is the highest form of the political struggle of the Proletariat!” had long been their watchwords.

They now openly lauded the Terror and the Blood Bath which had come to pass in Russia, that should purge the world of its ancient faiths and wrongs and inaugurate the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The prospect, though hopeful for the submerged tenth, promised some pretty grim experiences for everyone else.

They were not long in materialising. During the first few months of the Armistice over two thousand people in Germany lost their lives as a result of mob violence and street fighting. A confused world ensued of local dictatorships and Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Councils, in which every town printed its own currency and nobody could be certain where authority resided.

Public order there was little or none. The police and troops did as they pleased; their barracks were full at mealtimes, but when they were wanted there was no-one there. The Marxist revolutionaries… power lay in their control of the roving bands of armed hooligans which they drew from the undisciplined underworld of the industrial cities. Bolshevist leaflets, distributed in millions among the illiterate and needy, had done their work. The German Revolution seemed to be following the classic lines laid down by Marx in his studies of half a century before.

Yet… the course of revolution faltered and, after a while, failed. Germany, which had given birth to Marx, did not take kindly to the Marxist hypothesis, or at least to that part of it which advocated anarchy as the broad and easy way to Utopia. Kurt Eisner’s untidy Utopia at Munich never impressed the Teuton mind as anything but a pigstye. An orderly people, deeply embittered though they were by the failure of past authority, rebelled instinctively against the slatternly, destructive rule of the “lesser breeds without the law” who had now fastened on their afflicted country…

It was the incapacity of the revolutionary leaders that discredited them in the eyes of a people accustomed to value order. A nation of brave and industrious automatons could never respect cowards and idlers. There seemed to be a complete lack of co-ordination between the spasmodic outbursts of Bolshevist violence. The Communist Revolution in Berlin was already over and liquidated and the bullet-ridden corpses of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in their graves before the Spartacists had seized control of the other great cities. Hamburg, Dresden, Brunswick, Erfurt, Wilhelmshaven, Dusseldorf, Bremen and Cuxhaven all had their spell of Red rule and of the terror that went with it. Munich after its first blood bath under Kurt Eisner — shot by an army officer — suffered a second under the sailor Rudolf Eglhofer, three Jewish Commissars from Soviet Russia and the poet, Ernst Toller…

It was, in fact, the German people rather than the discredited ruling class who defeated Bolshevism in central Europe. The surge of revolution that swept Russia in 1918 and was to devastate Spain twenty years later was never allowed to develop into the orgy of mass murder and destruction that it became in these more primitive lands…

Yet it had been touch-and-go. The Allied statesmen in Paris were haunted by the fear that Germany would relapse as Russia had done, and that a raging sea of primitive terror and barbarism would engulf all Europe and Asia from the Pacific shore to the banks of the Rhine.

Their fear was no old maid’s nightmare, as some have since supposed. Mr. Winston Churchill, in his World Crisis, quotes figures to show that in the first flush of revolution the Communist dictators of Russia killed 28 bishops, over 1200 priests, 6000 professors and teachers, 9000 doctors, 12,000 landowners, 54,000 officers, and more than a million bourgeois, workmen and peasants. “Russia had fallen by the way; and in falling she had changed her identity. An apparition with countenance different from any yet seen on earth stood in the place of the old Ally. We saw a state without a nation, an army without a country, a religion without a God.”  (Churchill, World Crisis, p.71)

From these astronomical figures of murder and waste Germany was saved not by the Allies but by herself. Yet she had felt the breath of the furnace and did not quickly forget either her fear or her hatred of that nameless terror. It is doubtful whether for all the recent apostacy of her Nazi leaders she has forgotten it yet. Law-abiding Britons who in the past have cast doubt on the genuineness of the popular German dread of Bolshevism should try to conceive the effect on themselves if, in an hour of famine and defeat Manchester, Bradford, Hull, Birmingham, Birkenhead, Nottingham, Plymouth, West Ham and Bristol had in turn been seized by a Communist junta and sacked by the mob, and Buckingham Palace, after the King s flight, tenanted for two months by a gang of armed mutineers. That theoretical sympathy for Communism among the well-to-do and sheltered classes in this island which has surprised and sometimes enraged the inhabitants of countries situated nearer the storm centres of eastern Europe and Asia, would have had little chance to grow under such circumstances.

Yet even the strong foundations of Britain rocked after four years of modern warfare. The first months of the Armistice saw an epidemic of mutinies in the army. In a single week at the beginning of 1919 thirty cases of insubordination were reported from different centres. At Luton the Town Hall was burnt by a mob; even the Horse Guards Parade witnessed a brief, quickly suppressed hour of pandemonium. In the industrial areas angry strikes paralysed trade and kept nerves taut for years. It was not till the imperceptible but steady hand of Baldwin grasped the tiller in 1923 that the country began once more to feel assured of its own unshakable stability. Even then a miasma of cynicism and defeatism for long hung over the English intellectual and moral landscape, time-honoured values were subverted and false prophets honoured.

The further east one travelled in Europe the more profoundly had the foundations of order and civilisation been shaken by the earthquake of war. In Italy general strikes, riots and political murders passed for some years as common occurrences, and the very members of Parliament carried revolvers in the Chamber. In Vienna class war was epidemic.

Hungary was the scene of a full-dress Communist coup d’état in the spring of 1919: Bela Kun, a native Jew returned from a Russian prison to establish what was described as a dictatorship of the Proletariat, in other words of himself and his friends…

The Bolshevist regime lasted till the beginning of August, when a wholesale massacre on the Russian model had been planned to secure Bela Kun’s tottering throne. Before it could be carried out, the Romanians marched in and the Hungarian Conservatives rose simultaneously against the Red Guards. As in Bavaria, the latter proved of poor quality when it came to a show-down : their leaders scampered over the border, and the rank and file surrendered without a fight. As usual, cruelty begot cruelty, and the same ruthless violence that had characterised the imposition of Communism in Hungary also marked its suppression.

But if the Bolshevist tide that threatened to submerge war-ruined central Europe was stemmed, the dreary landscape of ruin remained. The floodgates over which it had poured were still unmended. In Germany, as 1920 succeeded to 1919, there seemed for the vast majority of people nothing for which to live and hardly anything for which to hope…

Nobody pitied them — nobody, that is, but a few sentimental Britons and Americans. The Chancelleries of Europe turned a discreet and unseeing eye on their sufferings. To the now all-powerful French they were still les barbares Boches — lepers of the European community who had richly deserved all that they were suffering.

For now that Britain and America were ceasing to interest themselves in the affairs of Europe, the hegemony of the Continent had passed into Gallic hands. The United States, stoutly denying the divinity of Wilson, had refused through its Senate to ratify the peace treaties and even to accept membership of the League, thus dooming that institution to ultimate impotence from the very first. The promise of its President to guarantee the western frontiers of France, which Clemenceau had extracted from him and Lloyd George in return for France’s abandoning her claim to the left bank of the Rhine, was never ratified. America’s rejection of her part in the joint guarantee automatically released Britain from hers. France was left alone to fend for herself. It was in every sense a tragedy.

For the moment she was able to do so. Central Europe was powerless, Italy weak and divided, Russia a welter of barbarism. The French army was the one dependable instrument of force left in Europe. From its position astride the Rhine it was able to make the German feel what he had not experienced since Leipzig but had known so often before in his humiliating past, that the Gaul was his military and political master.

For twelve years after the Armistice the French and their Allies occupied the Rhineland. It affords an illustration of the prolongation of hatred between nations created by the horrors of modern war. A hundred years before, after twenty-two years of warfare during which the Napoleonic armies had entered every capital in Europe, France suffered only three years of foreign occupation. In 1923, five years after the Armistice, there were still 163,000 foreign troops quartered on the German people, and even as late as 1928, 67,000. To accommodate them, over 10,000 private houses were sequestered. The maintenance of this vast army alone cost Germany half again as much as the total indemnity extracted from France after 1871.

From 1918 to 1930, six million Germans, like seven million unhappy Czechs today, were subjected to continuous foreign military rule… They were subjected to arbitrary arrest at the hands of the military and summary trial by army courts. At one time or another nearly a quarter of a million of them, of all sexes and ages, were expelled from their homes and driven destitute across the frontiers, leaving behind everything save what they could carry with them. It should not be forgotten that what the Germans have since made others suffer they themselves suffered under the Occupation. The Rhinelanders’ political independence was extinguished…

These were the years when Mein Kampf was conceived and written, and when the dragons’ teeth, seeds of Hitler’s power — predicted as far back as 1919 in a famous article in the Observer — were being sown. (A. Lethbridge, Germany as it is Today, p. 66.) …

The haunting fear of every German in the occupied lands was that the French would never leave. There were Frenchmen in high place who shared their doubts. When Lloyd George and Wilson persuaded a reluctant Clemenceau to abandon France’s un-ethnographical claim to the left bank of the Rhine, they did not cause his countrymen to relinquish their fears. The subsequent collapse of the Anglo-American guarantee of their eastern frontiers only increased their passionate desire for security. The longer they could hold the Rhine, and by doing so keep Germany weak, poor and abject, the longer would the integrity of France and her immunity from revenge be assured.

The Peace Treaty sanctioned the occupation of German territory as a security for the payment of reparations. If these were delayed, the period of occupation could be lengthened. Despite repeated reductions in the capital and rate of payment — the result of many wrangling and thwarted conferences — the reparations which a crippled Germany was asked to pay were virtually unobtainable. They could not be paid in money and they could only be paid in goods at the prohibitive price of sacrificing Allied manufacturers and artisans to German.

The inevitability of Germany’s default was seen by French statesmen as an opportunity for prolonging the period of subjection. In this way their country’s necessity could be turned to glorious gain. The end of the policy they now pursued was a permanent French control of the Rhine, either by direct occupation or by the establishment of a puppet buffer state — a Rhenish Manchuria — between France and the Reich…

In 1923 France invaded the Ruhr ostensibly to make Germany do what she neither could nor would do — pay…

On September 30th, 1923, the Rhineland Separatist forces, conveyed in seventy French Regie trains together with a large body of Polish miners from the Ruhr, attempted an armed Putsch in the great industrial city of Dusseldorf. The massacre of “Red Sunday” offered a foretaste of the terror which threatened the obdurate Rhinelanders… October 1923 saw the proclamation of a Rhine Republic at Aix-la-Chapelle under Belgian protection…

In the early spring of 1923 with the French occupation of the Ruhr — the key point in Germany’s industrial system — galloping disaster set in. The currency, which had fallen by fifty per cent during the war and had since declined to a mere fraction of its former value, now lost its moorings altogether.

The immediate cause of the collapse was almost certainly the invasion of the Ruhr and the policy of “passive resistance” with which this act of what we have since learnt to call aggression was met… Serious inflation had set in long before the Ruhr invasion. During 1922 the index figure for the cost of living had risen… more than a thousand times its pre-war figure. The economic wounds suffered by Germany at Versailles — the loss of a tenth of her territory, including her finest agricultural land, a third of her coal, three-quarters of her iron-ore and all her colonies and overseas investments, together with the payment out of a depleted gold store of the cost of maintaining the armies of occupation — had made default inevitable even without taking account of the unpayable bill for Reparations. The French invasion of January 1923 and the resistance it provoked only gave the final push that sent the whole crazy structure of post-war German finance crashing…

But for the German people, as apart from their leaders, Inflation meant a return to the conditions of the Blockade. Wages rose as the currency fell, but failed to keep time with the plunging rate of fall. In the year before the final collapse Germany was consuming approximately 30 per cent less wheat, 25 per cent less rye, 33 per cent less barley and 30 per cent less meat than before the war, while the import of coffee — the tea of the working classes of the Continent — had shrunk to a third of its former figure. Any further fall in the standard of living would inevitably entail starvation. It soon came…

It requires no great power of imagination to picture what this meant to tens of millions of harried, anxious men and women. The sudden increase in the death-rate and in the figures for tuberculosis and phthisis for 1923 compiled by the German Red Cross tell their dismal tale. Before the end of the year 33 per cent of the working population of the country was out of work, with the rate of unemployment pay equivalent to less than 8|d. a day…

When the Inflation ended and the mark was stabilised at four trillion, two hundred billion to the dollar, the national debt and the standing mortgages on land and industry had been virtually wiped out. The price paid was the extinction of a class, and that the best educated and most intelligent in the nation.

The deluge ceased, but with the subsidence of the floods Germany was left without her natural leaders. A vast number of professional men — civil servants, doctors, professors, schoolmasters, musicians, artists, traders, shopkeepers and the like — were no longer able to pursue their callings. They were driven from their homes and their children dispossessed. Close on half the teachers at the Prussian Universities were forced to seek employment in factories and on canals and railways. Of five thousand medical men in the province of Brandenburg, nearly two thousand were reduced to beggary.

The change in the distribution of German wealth that followed this great disaster amounted to nothing less than a revolution. The number of those who owned property equivalent to more than £ 1000 and less than £25,000 fell by two-thirds. In 1913 there were 12,000 men in Germany with a fortune of a million gold marks: in 1924 there were only 400.

Ten years after the Inflation, of sixty-five million Germans less than two and a half millions possessed more than £250. The loss to national culture, both then and in the future, was incalculable. “The whole middle class of Germany,” wrote Vernon Bartlett… “was wiped out in the space of a few weeks.”

There were a few, of course, who profited by this gigantic transfer of property. The larger landowners, who had not been forced by hunger to sell during the crash, and the great industrialists and astuter financial manipulators found themselves richer than they had been before. The… chief gainers were those who had been able to command foreign currency or credit during the inflationary period. Theirs had been the opportunity of buying up the assets of a nation at “knock-out” prices. While others were selling, frantically and at almost any sacrifice to save themselves from starvation, they had been purchasers. Anyone who had a relation or friend abroad capable of advancing the smallest amount of foreign currency could enjoy for the easy reaping a golden harvest he had never sown.

It was the Jews with their international affiliations and their hereditary flair for finance who were best able to seize such opportunities. Jakob, the small shopkeeper whose father had emigrated from eastern Europe a generation before, had only to apply to cousin Mordecai in Poland or Czechoslovakia to receive the needful for effecting the transaction of a lifetime. By purchasing the movable assets of his neighbours for a song during the universal want of Inflation and re-selling abroad for foreign currency, he was able, before the debacle ended, to buy up enough real property in Germany to make him a rich man. It was perfectly natural — and from his point of view perfectly just — that he should do so.

England’s necessity, it used to be said, was Ireland’s opportunity. Germany’s was that of the Jews. Many who had hitherto enjoyed so much less than their fair share of the good things of life found themselves by legal process of exchange the residuary legatees of a broken kingdom. They merely did what others in their place would have done. And since the sun does not shine often on their race, they made hay as fast as they could. They did so with such effect that, even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to The Times Correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich. Most of it came into their hands during the Inflation.

But to those who had lost their all this bewildering transfer seemed a monstrous injustice. After prolonged sufferings they had now been deprived of their last possessions. They saw them pass into the hands of strangers, many of whom had not shared their sacrifices and who cared little or nothing for their national standards and traditions.

There were not lacking angry and passionate spokesmen to voice the smarting and unreasoning feelings of the dispossessed. “Thousands of old-age pensioners, middle-class people, scientists, war widows”, shouted the rising Munich orator, Adolf Hitler, during that August of galloping Inflation, “are selling their last gold values for scraps of paper. The last national property of the whole people is thus passing lightly into the hands of the Jews who are drawing all things to themselves. Millions of existences which were supported on the thrift of a generation are being tricked of everything by this swindle.”

It was, in reality, a revolution almost as complete if not as murderous as that which had occurred in Russia. A few years before, Maynard Keynes had predicted the political consequences of Inflation. “Lenin, ” he wrote, “ is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.

The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become “profiteers”, who are the object of hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.” (Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 220)

During the years that immediately followed the Inflation, when German trade, freed from every prior charge, was temporarily booming and when foreign money, seeking an outlet from more fortunate lands, poured in the shape of loans into the Republic, the Jews obtained a wonderful ascendancy in politics, business and the learned professions. Though there were little more than half a million of them living in the midst of a people of sixty-two millions — less, that is, than one per cent of the population — their control of the national wealth and power soon lost all relation to their numbers.

In the 1924 Reichstag nearly a quarter of the Social Democratic representatives were Jews. Every post-war Ministry had its quota of them. In business, according to figures published in 1931 by a Jewish statistician, they controlled 57 per cent of the metal trade, 22 per cent of the grain and 39 per cent of the textile. Of 98 members of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 50, or more than half, were Jewish, and of the 1474 of the Stock Exchange in 1930 no less than 1200. Twelve out of sixteen of the Committee of the Berlin Commodity Exchange were Jews and ten out of twelve of the Metal Exchange.

The banks, including the Reichsbank and the big private banks, were practically controlled by them. So were the publishing trade, the cinema, the theatres and a large part of the Press — all the normal means, in fact, by which public opinion in a civilised country is formed. In 1931, of 29 theatres in Berlin 23 had Jewish directors. The largest newspaper combine in the country with a daily circulation of four millions was a Jewish monopoly. So virtually were the Press Departments of the Prussian administration…

In the artistic and learned professions the Jewish supremacy was as marked. Authorship in Germany almost seemed to have become a kind of Hebrew monopoly. This helps perhaps to explain the contempt for some of the greatest products of the human mind which has since so tragically prevailed in Nazi Germany. For many years the professional organisations of German writers were controlled almost entirely by Jews. In 1931, of 144 him scripts worked, 119 were written by Jews and 77 produced by them. Medicine and the Law followed the same trend: 42 per cent of the Berlin doctors in 1932 were Jews, and 48 per cent of the lawyers…

At this time it was not the Aryans who exercised racial discrimination. It was a discrimination which operated without violence. It was one exercised by a minority against a majority. There was no persecution, only elimination. “It seems”, Montz Goldstein, the Jewish essayist, had written before the war, “as if German cultural life was to be completely transformed into Jewish hands. . .  Consequently, we are now faced by the following problem. We Jews guide and administrate the intellectual property of a nation which denies our qualification and competency to do so.” By the third decade of the century the process had reached a new stage. It was the native Germans who were now confronted with a problem — that of rescuing their indigenous culture from an alien hand and restoring it to their own race.

The Jews cannot be blamed because they did not understand the feelings of the German people or satisfy their cultural needs… Few of the Jews who set the spiritual and cultural fashions for Germany in the ’twenties and early ’thirties had any comprehension of a countryman’s point of view. They were not themselves countrymen or producers, but by long wont migrants and middle-men: the descendants of men who had been forced to live for centuries as exploiters rather than as creators because all other livelihood and outlet for their strong racial genius had been denied them. They gathered in the great cities of the industrial capitalist world, where quick fortunes were to be had by quick wits.

Their inherited instinct was to skim the cream rather than to waste vain time and effort in making enduring things which would only be taken from them by their Christian oppressors before they could be enjoyed. They were exponents of the get-rich-quick philosophy that all persecution tends to beget: lovers of the flamboyant and the arts of advertisement: scorners of the slow and unshowy creative virtues of discipline, labour and craftsmanship — of all, that is, that the solid and more sedentary native Teuton means by thorough.

I am writing not of the Jews long domiciled in Germany who had learnt to live and think as Germans and who had often conferred, especially in the realms of learning, science and medicine, the greatest distinction on their adopted country, but of the migrant type who in the nineteen-twenties seemed, with all the invincible vitality and irrepressible opportunism of their race, to be making of a broken nation their washpot.

Of the 200,000 or more Jews who congregated in the capital, a quarter were aliens who had not yet acquired German nationality. Many of them had poured into the country during the post-war upheaval from the ghettoes and slums of Eastern Europe — the tragic products of centuries of intolerance and neglect.

It was the contrast between the wealth enjoyed — and lavishly displayed — by aliens of cosmopolitan tastes and the poverty and misery of millions of native Germans that has made anti-Semitism so dangerous and ugly a force in the new Europe. Beggars on horseback are seldom popular, least of all with those whom they have thrown out of the saddle. And some of the upstarts of post-Inflationary Germany, whom, as Mr. Mowrer points out, sudden emancipation and promotion had certainly not made more modest — and they came of a proud and resentful race — were not easy to love. They were arrogant, they were vulgar, and they were vicious.

The films and plays and books of that time seem to be largely concerned with the triumphs of financial crooks, criminals and prostitutes. Their prototypes in real life — possessors of fleets of cars, unlimited champagne and few recognisable standards — were to be seen in the innumerable night-clubs and vice-resorts which mocked the squalid poverty of the German capital. It was not a pleasant thing in that period, which now seems so remote but which many of us can still vividly recall, to watch the throng of children of both sexes who haunted the doors of the great Berlin hotels and restaurants to sell their bodies to rich arrivistes.

The hoardings that announced the revues, with which the new arbiters of popular culture regaled the German capital, lined the streets with the slogans of the brothel — “A Thousand Naked Women!’ “Undress Yourselves!”, “Houses of Lust!” “Gee, a Thousand Pretty Girls!”, “Strictly Prohibited!” “Sweet and Sinful!” In the reigning society of the German metropolis one could not say with Burke that vice had lost half its evil by being purged of all its grossness. To anyone brought up in a Christian and traditionalist culture it can seldom have worn a more loathsome and repellent form.

The moral degradation of the German capital in those years had to be seen to be believed.

Hundreds of cabarets, pleasure resorts and the like served for purposes of getting acquainted and acquiring the proper mood. Most of them were owned and managed by Jews. And it was the Jews rather than the Christians among the promoters of this trade who were remembered in after years.

Many of the devotees of the new morality did not confine their pleasures to natural forms of self-indulgence. The perversion which has always been a major German failing was now exploited and stimulated by Jewish caterers who, while seldom sharing such tastes, did not hesitate to turn them to their profit. The book-stalls — for Berlin in those days was the pornographic Mecca of Europe — made no disguise of the matter. Mr. Mowrer gives a list of titles noted in the window of a Berlin bookstore:

The Witches’ Love Kettle.

Eroticism in Photography.

Sexual Errors.

Flagellantism and Jesuit Confessions.

The Labyrinth of Eroticism.

Sadism and Masochism.

The Whip in Sexuality.

Sappho and Lesbos.

The Cruel Female.

Massage Institutes (for adults only).

A magazine, The Third Sex.

The Venal Female.

Venal Love among Civilised Peoples.

Places of Prostitution in Berlin.

“Somehow”, he writes, “the unhampered exhibits and sale of these works was a symbol of German democracy and the freest Republic in the world. It was a symbol which decent Germans did not regard with much pride…

There were many simple Germans who believed or affected to believe that this organised orgy of vice was not solely the result of commercial opportunism exploiting post-war laxity, but was part of a planned international campaign to overthrow the existing order by undermining the traditional standards of morality. More than a century before a shrewd American observer in Paris had noted how a general prostitution of morals provided the necessary materials for the first of the great revolutions of the modern age. Like those that had preceded it the Communist revolutionary movement was aided by the moral degradation of the ancien regime, for once honour and faith are gone no cement can hold together a crumbling social system in the hour of shock.

A stream of subversive books, cubist and jazz pictures and statues, discordant unharmonic music, though mingled sometimes with much that was original and fine, shook men’s beliefs in the values on which they had formerly based their lives…

There were other ways in which the new rulers of Germany offended popular susceptibilities. With the inauguration of the Republic a wave of financial corruption swept the country. Sharp dealing, dishonest manipulation of figures under company law, bribery and corruption came to be regarded almost as normal methods of business in a State which had formerly prided itself on its financial rectitude. The names of Jews were too often associated with such practices. However much the better and older type of German Jew might deplore what was happening, the newcomers from the eastern ghettos — “soldiers of fortune attracted by the decomposing stench of German currency”, as one observer, himself a Jew, described them — had captured the limelight and for the moment monopolised the centre of the German stage.

They felt no scruples at what they did but plundered their new neighbours with a kind of genial insolence that enraged old-fashioned Teutons.

The financial scandals of that age, such as that of the four Sklarek brothers and the Barmats — all Jews — shook the confidence of the nation in the Republic and lowered the whole national standard of good faith. A Lithuanian Jew named Kutisker, who entered the country without passport or identity papers, was able, under the protection of a highly- placed police official of his own race, to get away with more than fourteen million gold marks of the public money advanced to him by the Prussian State Bank in credits for his fraudulent companies.

Swindles defrauding investors and taxpayers of vast sums and incriminating members of successive German Governments made the democratic Republican system a byword for easy financial morality. It was not wholly for reasons of propaganda that the bigots who later dominated Germany referred to the surviving parliamentarian nations as pluto-democracies: an unhappy experience in their own undemocratic land had made them think them so. Punishment if it followed at all was generally light and nearly always — under cover of elaborate legalistic and ostensibly democratic forms — long delayed…

It is a German characteristic — an unfortunate one — to carry things to extremes. For some years the whole nation followed the example of their betters. After the triple agony of Blockade, Defeat and Inflation, commercial Germany dropped all pretence of idealism and hoisted the Jolly Roger of the financial adventurer. Duty and honour were the outworn shibboleths of a discredited past: self-interest and unashamed materialism became the fashion of the hour. Nepotism was rampant, as always happens where power passes into the hands of a class which has not yet learnt to treat privilege as a trust. So was financial pluralism. One eminent Jewish financier, according to the Directory of Directors for 1930, held no less than 115 directorships. Fifteen others of the same favoured race shared 718 between them.

A period of brief, deceptive but hectic prosperity ensued. It was based chiefly on borrowed money obtained with reckless promises of high returns from American and British speculators who, having abandoned the fiction that a crippled Germany could pay for the war out of her own resources, were now seeking an outlet for idle capital. Between 1924 and 1931 £750,000,000 flowed into Germany in foreign loans. In those seven years she became a foreign financier’s colony with an apparently inexhaustible supply of new civic and municipal buildings, sports stadiums and swimming pools, schools and hospitals — “ the finest poor-house in the world ” — all built out of borrowed money and offering endless opportunities for those who knew how to take quick chances. There was a greedy rush to the trough.

The boom did not last. It could not. For nothing had happened — Locarno notwithstanding — to alter the fact, pointed out by Maynard Keynes in 1919, that the Germany created by the peace treaties was not a practicable economic unit. Driven back on her own resources, she could never be anything in the long run but bankrupt. So soon as the inflow of foreign capital ceased, the brief spell of post-inflation prosperity ceased with it.

At the end of 1929 the great World Depression set in with a crash on the American Stock Exchange. For the moment there was no more foreign capital to invest. The hectic flush on the face of capitalist Germany faded and revealed once more the pallid features of the post-war Reich. The tinsel prosperity of Grand Hotel suddenly vanished into air.

Behind its tawdry facade Germany starved… 17,500,000 Germans… or almost one-third of the population, were being supported by the State, of whom none, according to official statistics, had enough to eat. The unemployment dole stood at the equivalent of less than 16s. 6d. a week, and the communal charity, which was all that could be afforded to the millions whose right to unemployment benefit had expired, at about 7s. 2d…

For the Communist Party, though for the moment proceeding under the forms of peace and even apparently of democracy, was part of a great fighting organisation, directed by the rulers of a foreign power which already controlled a sixth of the earth’s surface and whose professed aim it was to destroy the national states of the past and, by levelling all frontiers in a common war of class against class, to found a new world order. Civil war was its first objective for without civil war its final aims could not be achieved… Once Germany was inflamed, Poland, the Baltic States and the Balkans, wedged between Muscovy and Germany, would follow inevitably. The Red Flag would then fly from the Pacific shores to the banks of the Rhine.

To this great end the wealth of the Union of Soviet Republics and the organisation of the Comintern were placed at the disposal of those bold and fanatic Germans who wished to overthrow the existing order… The German Communist Party was not merely a faction of the nation: it was the advance guard of a foreign army whose headquarters were not in Berlin but in Moscow…

At the height of its power it was believed that the enrolled members of the Communist Party in Germany numbered over a million. Many of them were brave and resolute men working for a belief that meant more to them than life itself. All were hoping to destroy the existing framework of state and society and were subject to no laws, whether of God or man, but those laid down by the mighty international organisation they served. Of that organisation it was a cardinal rule that the end justified the means.

Meanwhile the “conquest of the majority of the working class”, to use the phrase of the Third International, proceeded according to plan. The Communist vote had risen steadily. In 1920 it was over half a million: by 1928, strengthened by the growing unemployment created by the new labour-saving machines from America, it was three and a quarter millions. Two years later, with the coming of the slump, it had risen to four and a half millions, or nearly 15 per cent of the electorate. In the capital the Communists polled over a quarter of the votes cast, outstripping even the predominant Social Democrats. By 1932 the vote had reached six million. In Russia, a far vaster country, the Bolsheviks had seized power with only a tiny fraction of these numbers.

There were good reasons for the rise in the Communist power. The ever-growing poverty of the workless afforded a dismal and terrible contrast to the licence and display of the capital’s night life… The rage of silent millions kept vigil in the dark outside those lighted doors…

There were other reasons for that tense and bitter anger. The Treaty of Versailles still rankled in every German heart. And it rankled as much for the poor as for the rich, perhaps more since their sufferings had been greater.

In the transient prosperity between 1924 and 1928 these feelings had temporarily diminished. After the stabilisation of the mark, an improvement had begun in Germany’s relations with her western neighbours, though those with Poland in the east remained as bad as ever…

In 1925 the French withdrew from the Ruhr, and the conciliatory tact of a British Conservative Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, achieved in the Locarno Pact the first international gesture of goodwill since the War… The mutual Security Pact of Locarno was signed in October, Britain guaranteeing the frontiers of France and Germany alike from further aggression. In September 1926 Germany, after eight years’ banishment from the polity of nations, was formally admitted into the League.

Yet the promise of Locarno was soon belied… Five years were still to pass before the last Allied soldiers were withdrawn from the Rhineland. The hated eastern frontiers were not revised, Danzig and the Saar remained separated from the Republic, and the right of self-determination for the Germans in Austria and Czechoslovakia — for all of which Stresemann pleaded in vain a dozen years before Hitler — were still indignantly denied. The shaming inequality of the Disarmament Clauses of the Peace Treaty, despite further pious but unfulfilled hopes expressed in the Locarno Pact, continued to mock Germany in a Europe still armed to the teeth.

Above all, the economic disabilities created by Versailles remained: a Germany, shorn of her richest agricultural land and half her industries, still limped, as a Frenchman had described her, across the middle of Europe like a wounded animal.

Three years later, with the foreign armies still on German soil, Dr. Stresemann died. “If you had granted me one single concession” he declared before the end, I could have saved this generation for Peace. That you did not has been my tragedy and your crime!”

With him died the last real hope of a Europe without bitterness. With him died also the last hope of the democratic republic in Germany. The parliamentary “System ” was now finally discredited. It had been begotten in defeat and cradled in the humiliations and sufferings of Versailles. Every new foreign slight to national dignity by reminding men of those humiliations weakened still further the tumbling credit of democracy. And with the end of the brief “boom” the sufferings also had returned.

In the spring of 1931, when the Berlin Bourse set up a statue to the Unknown Solvent, a bankrupt Germany and a starving Austria turned to each other and negotiated a Customs Union. France was alarmed, declared the economic Anschluss a breach of the peace treaties, and appealed to the League of Nations. The Hague Court, not without external pressure and at grave loss of moral prestige to itself, upheld the French view. Germany and Austria were helpless and disarmed: the powerful armies of France, Poland, Yugoslavia and Italy encircled them, while 30 miles from Vienna and 150 from Berlin stood the obedient republic of Czechoslovakia with her bombing aeroplanes, her Skoda munition works and her age-long enmity to all things German. There was nothing for Teutons to do but to swallow the humiliation and tighten their belts. The economic Anschluss was abandoned.

The immediate result was a financial crisis which threatened to bring down the pillars of European civilisation on the heads of its short-sighted arbiters. The Austrian Credit-Anstalt failed. Bankruptcy in Vienna was followed by bankruptcy in Berlin. For a week the doors of every bank in Germany were closed. Only Mr. Hoover’s proposal of a year’s universal moratorium saved Europe from economic chaos.

As it was, Britain, shaken by a flight from the pound, was driven off the gold standard during a political crisis of the first magnitude. A dozen other countries followed her example. At Basle an international committee of experts reported that they could recall no previous parallel in time of peace to the dislocation that was taking place: “The German problem which is largely responsible for the growing financial paralysis of the world … if not dealt with will only prove the forerunner of further catastrophes…

It was the end of Reparations, although another year had to pass before official acknowledgment was made of the inevitable. Of the hundred and thirty milliard gold Reichsmarks originally demanded, Germany in a dozen chequered years had remitted just under a tenth. With the addition of property transferred to the Allies in 1919, but excluding territorial cessions, colonies and colonial assets, Germany had perhaps paid approximately twenty milliards of gold marks. The rest remained permanently in default.

The new National Government in Britain, in return for a general renunciation of reparation payments, cancelled the vast debts for war aid and material owing her by her former continental Allies. Britain in turn, faced by an impossible unilateral payment of thirty-two million pounds a year in gold, defaulted on her war debt to America.

Europe, Spengler prophesied, was plunging to ruin in an economic war more fatal than that of the battlefields of 1914 to 1918. From that war, he held, only Japan and the Soviet Union would emerge victorious.

Meanwhile Germany faced the black present in a mood of unrelieved gloom. Pessimism was universal. Her leaders could give her nothing. Since the first days of the Republic they had never been anything but helpless puppets — make-believe rulers playing their brief part on the unavailing stage only by sufferance of Germany’s enemies. They had not even been masters in their own house. For years they had performed the part of bailiffs for the conquerors, taking orders from a Reparations Commission whose power had comprised the right to demand the surrender of any German property whenever and wherever it should be demanded. “Germany,” ran Article 241 of the Treaty of Versailles, “undertakes to pass, issue and maintain in force any legislation, orders and decrees that may be necessary to give complete effect to these provisions.” By virtue of that instrument a foreign Commission, acting as a Receiver, had for more than a decade exercised greater powers in democratic Germany than those possessed by her own former Emperors.

And the rulers of the Republic had done nothing but acquiesce. Some had protested for a while, but in the end they had all given way…

Had the foundations of Germany’s unity been stronger or the annals of her nationhood longer or more clearly writ, the psychological effect of all this might have been less disastrous to the cause of democracy. But Germany, after centuries of disunion, civil war, and invasion, had only achieved national union and a common frontier against her neighbours in 1871. Her people were still in the same stage of political development as the English had been after the wars of the Roses or the French after those of the Fronde. Like all arrivistes, they were in political matters self-assertive, gauche and childishly sensitive.

They wanted above all things a strong Government that would give them unity and national self-respect. That which they most dreaded was division and weakness and partisanship. And it was these things, made repugnant to them by generations of racial suffering, now reinforced by the tragic experiences of the post-war years, that the democratic politicians entailed still further on their country…

The twenty, sometimes thirty political parties shuffling and lying for power, of eighteen separate State Parliaments and Diets all reproducing the formless, purposeless absurdities of the national assembly, tragically but inevitably sickened the German people of everythingto do with democracy. However unfair to the German democratic leaders, it is how they and their works appeared to the ordinary German…