From Weimar Culture (Peter Gay, 2001) pp18-21
… Despite all Platonic obeisances to the idea of national unity, some social-democratic holders of power defended particular interests with an eagerness no less intense than that shown earlier by the dynasts. The affair was to provide a painful lesson to Socialists jealous of their office: a short-range parochial gain proved to be a long-range public disaster.
The nationalization of major industries had the same history; ambitious schemes and goodwill were never translated into policy. The economist Rudolph Wissell pointed out the road to socialism through planning, and the road was clear enough. But it was never taken. Big industry proceeded to “nationalize” the economy in its own way – through cartelization. Indeed, “the largest trusts in German history were formed during the Weimar Republic,” including the merger in 1926 of four large steel companies, and the formation of the chemical trust, I. G. Farben, the year before, through a merger of “the six largest corporations in this field.” The Socialists stood by, either too timid to act or in the doctrinaire and unrealistic conviction that cartelization was an inevitable higher stage of capitalism which must be traversed on the road to socialism. In relying on history, German Socialists became its victim.
These were fateful strategic mistakes, but the men of Weimar made an even more fateful mistake when they failed to tame, or transform, the machinery of the old order — the military, the civil service, and the courts. The military caste had come out of the war demoralized, its prestige shattered, in panic, ready for any compromise. The generals had led Germany into disaster, lying to themselves as much as to the world, wasting uncounted lives. Friedrich Meinecke acknowledged late in 1918 that the unmeasured claims of the pan-German-militarist-conservative combine ”had utterly discredited them.” Yet within a few years this combine had regained its charisma for wide circles of the public and burdened the Republic with the legend of an undefeated German Army stabbed in the back at home by Jews and Communists — the notorious Dolchstosslegende.
This resurgence was largely the responsibility of the Weimar leaders who made the old army indispensable. On November 10, the day after the proclamation of the Republic, Ebert had concluded a far- reaching agreement with General Groener, accepting the aid of the army in keeping order. Regular troops, aided by hastily formed Freikorps, shot down militant Spartacists by the score; the Social Democrat Noske, the “bloodhound” of the Republic, gave the right- wing troops wide latitude for action—that is to say, for organized assassination. There were excesses on all sides — “These were terrible months,” Arnold Brecht, a sober observer, later remembered — and the goodwill of Ebert and Noske is beyond question. Their judgment is something else again. On February 2, 1919, more than a month before Noske’s notorious edict commanding his troops to shoot on sight anyone found with arms in his hands, and three months before the white terror vented its fury on the conquered Soviet Republic of Bavaria, Count Kessler prophesied that the present regime could not last: “The paradox of a republican-social-democratic government allowing itself and the capitalists’ safes to be defended by hired unemployed and by royalist officers, is simply too insane.”
The same air of unreality hovers around the continued employment of imperial officials. In the light of the traditional authoritarian structure of German society, which the revolution had done little to shake, the consequences of this policy were predictable. Even without the burden of hostile officials German democracy was fragile enough. The German civil service was world-famous for its efficiency and for its neutrality, but during the Republic it used its highly trained capacities mainly for administrative sabotage; their proverbial loyalty to their superiors apparently did not extend to Social Democratic or liberal ministers. But the most astounding instance of this sophistic appeal to independence and objectivity — a fertile breeding ground for cynicism among the beneficiaries on the right as much as among the victims on the left — was the conduct of judges, prosecutors, and juries in the Republic. The surviving judges of the Empire were taken into service after the revolution; they were irremovable and, as their behavior was to show, immovable as well: almost all of them came from the privileged orders; with close connections among aristocrats, officers, conservative politicians, they had little pity for accused Communists but suave forbearance for ex-officers.
The consequences are notorious, but they deserve emphasis: between 1918 and 1922, assassinations traced to left-wing elements numbered twenty-two; of these, seventeen were rigorously punished, ten with the death penalty. Right-wing extremists, on the other hand, found the courts sympathetic: of the 354 murders committed by them, only one was rigorously punished, and not even that by the death penalty. The average prison sentences handed out to these political murderers reflect the same bias: fifteen years for the left, four months for the right. Right-wing putschists like Kapp, who had tried to overthrow the Republic by force and violence — his associates committed several revolting murders — were acquitted, freed on a technicality, or allowed to escape abroad. After the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch of November 1923 failed, the trial of the putschists was degraded into a political farce; the court permitted the accused and their lawyers to insult the government in the most offensive and incendiary language and finally convicted Hitler to five years of Festungshaft, a comfortable form of detention of which, in any event, he served less than a year. The Feme murders committed by members of illegal “defense organizations,” paramilitary vigilante groups, belong to the most atrocious crimes in a century filled with atrocities: unemployed fanatics and unemployable ex-officers clubbed men to death and strangled women often on the mere suspicion of “unpatriotic activities.” Few of the murderers were tried, few of those tried convicted, and none of those convicted long detained or in any way deterred from later criminal activity. Indeed, one of these Feme murderers, Edmund Heines, one of Rohm’s friends, actually served around a year and a half in jail and was finally disposed of, in an act of poetic justice, in the Nazi purges of June 30, 1934. The two murderers of Erzberger were allowed to escape, the whole network of conspirators against him, though commonly known, was largely unmolested, and the chief conspirator was acquitted. Whenever the judges found it possible to twist the law in behalf of reaction, they twisted it: Hitler, as an ‘Austrian, should have been deported after his putsch, but was allowed to stay in Germany because he thought himself a German. Against Spartacists, Communists, or candid journalists, on the other hand, the courts proceeded with the utmost rigor. Whoever was found to have had the slightest connection with the Bavarian Soviet Republic was harshly punished; writers who “insulted” the Reichswehr were convicted even if their exposé was proved to be true.
The soberest of historians must confront these statistics with baffled sense of despair. Socialist and Communist newspapers and politicians orated and warned and exposed; independent and radical journals like the Weltbiihne or the Tagebuch fought the assassins with facts and sarcasm. To no avail. The statistician E. J. Gumbel, who collected and documented all possible details about these crimes with great personal courage and impeccable scholarship, found that none of his reports had any effect. In 1924, in the Tagebuch, he compiled another list of crimes and their consequences, and concluded: “One sees that the documents are piling up, mountain high. The courts are working feverishly. One prosecution after another is begun. Each has its own structure. Only the result is always the same: the true murderers remain unpunished.”
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