Political Violence in Germany, 1932

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 597-599:

Out on the streets, there was an alarming increase in violence between the National Socialists and the Communists. Yet the idea Germany was nearing civil war after 1929 has been greatly exaggerated. On 12 October, the Liberal-left newspaper Die Welt am Montag (The World on Monday) published statistics, based on official sources and newspaper reports, on those killed and injured during political clashes since the beginning of 1923 to July 1931. These revealed that 457 people had been killed, and 1,154 had been injured in the period. However, just over half of those fatalities (236), and one-third of those injured (462), had occurred in 1923 alone. Between 1924 and 1928, the period of economic stability, there had been 66 fatalities and 266 injured. From 1929 to July 1931, the number of deaths increased to 155, with 426 injured. Violence was certainly on the rise after 1930, but it never reached the levels of the 1919 to 1923 period. A closer look at the post-1929 statistics reveals which side suffered more victims. The Communists and Left radicals suffered 108 deaths since 1929, while in the same period, right-wing organisations, including the National Socialists, suffered 31 dead. There were only eight fatalities among pro-republican groups such as the SPD-led Reichsbanner. There were also 10 police officers killed. Most violent clashes resulting in death involved the National Socialists and Communists.

This picture can be confirmed in greater detail with the help of statistical surveys, and police reports in the German state of Saxony. In 1929, there were 51 recorded Communist–NSDAP clashes, in 1929, this jumped to 172, and then hit 229 in 1931. The most violent clashes happened during indoor meetings. There was, however, a noticeable difference in how the police dealt with these violent confrontations. The police acted against Communist ‘troublemakers’ far more often than against National Socialists. In 1929, the ratio of police interventions was 30 KPD to 11 NSDAP; in 1930, it was 121 KPD to 32 NSDAP, and, in 1931, it was 140 KPD to 63 NSDAP. It was only during 1932 that political violence really escalated, with the Prussian Ministry of the Interior recording 155 deaths; of these 55 belonged to the NSDAP and 54 to the KPD.

The information on weapons seized by police during NSDAP– KPD clashes shows that in 1929 the police confiscated only two guns and eight knives, a figure that rose to 17 guns and 181 other weapons in 1930, but in 1931 this fell to 5 guns and 78 other weapons. This is in stark contrast to the earlier Weimar era, from 1918 to 1923, when firearms featured heavily in clashes between Left and Right. As bad as violence was after 1929, it would be totally misleading to suggest the police could not contain it or that Germany was nearing civil war. In rural areas, there were hardly any violent clashes which resulted in fatalities at all.

The front line of Left–Right violent confrontations after 1929 was primarily in the big cities. Communists felt they ruled the working-class urban streets. Any place that was home to large numbers of industrial workers was prepared to violently resist the advance of the National Socialists on the streets. Communists rarely took action to break up Social Democratic political meetings, except for a few large-scale events, mainly organised by the Reichsbanner. In contrast, Communists adopted a proactive approach whenever the National Socialists held rallies and meetings in the big cities. Most of these violent confrontations occurred during and after indoor meetings. Communists initiated most of them, keen to emphasise National Socialists were not welcome in working-class areas. Well-organised Communist gangs arrived in force at NSDAP meetings, hell bent on violence. The police authorities, however, had a broad spectrum of special powers to break up or ban demonstrations.

As violence escalated, a culture of political martyrdom emerged, with those killed on both sides receiving elaborate funerals attended by thousands of activists.

Austrian-German Banking Crisis, 1931

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 575-576:

The bungled fiasco of the German–Austrian Customs Union led directly to the Austrian banking crisis. On 13 May, the Creditanstalt, the largest and most respected Austrian bank, suddenly declared bankruptcy, sending shock-waves through world financial markets. Jittery creditors everywhere withdrew funds. The bank’s initial losses amounted to 828 million Austrian schillings. During May, Austria’s foreign-currency reserves fell by 850 million schillings. Otto Ender, the Austrian Chancellor, was forced to put together a government-backed financial rescue plan by buying up 100 million schillings’ worth of Creditanstalt stock. Support in this rescue package was given by the powerful Rothschild banking family of Austria, and on 16 June the Bank of England provided a sizeable loan to the Austrian government to assist with the plan.

The Austrian banking crisis had a domino effect, with the panic-selling of the stock of German banks soon following. In early June, the Reichsbank announced it had suffered the withdrawal of 1 billion Reichsmarks since the Creditanstalt collapse, with foreign deposits falling by 25 per cent. The German government was now having great difficulty in raising foreign loans to service its huge public-spending deficit, and the Reichsmark was falling on currency markets. On 5 June, Brüning issued the Second Emergency Decree for the Protection of the Economy and Finances, which brought in reductions in welfare benefits, wage cuts for all public-sector employees, plus a ‘crisis’ tax, levied on better-paid white-collar workers, and increases in sales taxes on sugar and imported oil. The one concession to organised labour was a promise of 200 million Reichsmarks for the funding of public works. This new decree was accompanied by a blunt declaration from Brüning that ‘the limit of privations which we can impose on the German people had been reached’, and he further warned that Germany could not make the reparations payments due in 1931 under the Young Plan.

On 7 June, Heinrich Brüning, accompanied by Julius Curtius, the German Foreign Minister, met with Ramsay MacDonald, at Chequers, the British Prime Minister’s picturesque country retreat. The purpose of the visit was for a ‘mutual exchange of views’. Also present was Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, who expressed dissatisfaction with Brüning’s announcement of his intention to suspend reparations payments. In response, Brüning explained his declaration was really a warning of what would happen if the issue of Germany’s payments for 1931 was not urgently addressed. The friendly meeting only yielded the release of a joint statement, which laid stress on ‘the difficulties of the existing position in Germany and the need for alleviation’.

The US President, Herbert Hoover, was following European economic affairs closely, and he fully appreciated the impact the financial collapse of German banks would have on American creditors. The magnanimous proposal by Hoover of a payments moratorium was initially opposed by the French government, Germany’s principal reparations creditor, but was finally accepted, on 6 July, with the condition that the German government spent the one-year saving on reparations for domestic rather than military purposes. The Hoover Moratorium really marked the beginning of the end of German reparations payments, which were never resumed.

Weimar Elections of 1930

 From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 552-554:

Given the horrors that followed, it now seems impossible to understand why German people of their own free will could vote in such large numbers for a party pledged to destroy democracy. In Dresden, Victor Klemperer, an academic at Dresden University, wrote in his diary: ‘107 National Socialists. What a humiliation! How close are we to civil war!’ In contrast, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency there was no reason for despair over Hitler’s strong showing in the national elections because ‘it was only a symptom, not necessarily of anti-Jewish hatred, but was caused by unemployment and economic misery within the ranks of misguided youth’.

It seems 24 per cent of NSDAP voters were voting in an election for the first time, many of them young people and pensioners, 22 per cent of new NSDAP voters had previously voted for the DNVP, with 18 per cent moving from the middle-class liberal parties, and 14 per cent from the Social Democrats. In sum, the biggest movement of voters to the NSDAP came from the middle-class conservative and liberal parties, and the party received the least swing votes from the KPD and Zentrum. There was also a strong reluctance to vote NSDAP in the big cities with large working-class industrial workers.

The most impressive gains for the NSDAP were in Protestant rural areas, especially those of northern and eastern Germany stretching from Schleswig-Holstein to East Prussia. The party performed very well in large northern states such as Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Hanover, Brunswick and Oldenburg, and achieved comparable results in predominantly Protestant Franconia and Hesse-Nassau. Voting support in these areas came primarily from elements of the lower middle class: small shopkeepers, farmers, self-employed tradespeople such as builders, plumbers, electricians and joiners, but there was also an upswing of support from middle-class white-collar workers, lower civil servants, teachers and university students. It was these who would represent the party’s core voters during its rise to power, but the NSDAP was not simply a ‘middle-class protest party,’ as was once thought. It is now clear Hitler’s party was able to gain support from all sections of society in a way the other political parties could not.

It was not, as is often supposed, primarily economic misery that drove voters to the NSDAP. Hitler’s campaign had focused on the failure of the Weimar political system to solve Germany’s problems, and this issue seems to have struck a far stronger chord with voters than the state of the economy. There was a growing loss of confidence in the Weimar political system, which made the decision to vote for a party that was not tainted by involvement in that system much easier. An editorial in the Frankfurter Zeitung spoke of an ‘election of embitterment’ in which voters expressed deep disaffection with ‘the methods of governing or rather non-governing’ of parliamentary government.

Hitler’s dramatic election breakthrough had a devastating impact abroad. There was a large withdrawal of gold and foreign currency from the Reichsbank, and a sharp fall in German stocks on international markets. Even larger German banks were shaken by the wave of panic selling. Julius Curtius, the Foreign Minister, who was in Geneva while the League of Nations was in session, reported when he heard the results: ‘the mood was one of the greatest alarm’. The world now started taking much greater interest in Adolf Hitler.

Catching an Interned Spy

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 257-258, 281-282:

WARSCHAUER HAD FIRST COME TO MI5’s attention in early 1940, after the chief constable of the Special Branch, Scotland Yard, received a letter from the former head of the German Jewish Aid Committee, the thirty-seven-year-old Hubert Pollack, who claimed to have helped [Ludwig] Warschauer obtain the immigration permits for Echen and her family. Pollack explained in his letter that, while he had known Warschauer to be an acquaintance of high-ranking Nazis, he had had no reason to suspect his loyalties at the time. In recent weeks, however, he had learned of Warschauer’s involvement with a sting operation in Berlin.

The ruse, Pollack claimed, went like this: Warschauer would invite a Jewish acquaintance whom the Gestapo wanted to arrest to lunch in a public restaurant. At some point an Aryan woman would join them at the table. Warschauer would excuse himself, and the moment he left the table, Gestapo personnel would enter and arrest the man for fraternizing outside of his race. Pollack felt compelled to alert the British to this information, adding that while Warschauer owed him money, this was not his motive for writing.

Sir Vernon Kell, then director of MI5, read the letter with keen interest. This was precisely the kind of suspicious activity—with “a Gestapo flavor”—that Kell had been looking for among refugees in Britain. MI5 duly opened a file that, thanks to the informants in Hutchinson [Internment Camp], had now grown to a weighty document.

Information had come from various sources. A private serving in the Pioneer Corps claimed that Warschauer had masterminded a profitable blackmail operation in Berlin. The soldier claimed that the engineer had an arrangement with a pretty barmaid. Warschauer would go out drinking with a target; then, once they were blind drunk, deliver the individual to a room at his accomplice’s bar. In the morning the man would awake to find the barmaid next to him in bed. Warschauer would then extort the target for money in exchange for discretion. Men now in Hutchinson may have been victims of the scheme.

...

The author and translator Claud W. Sykes, a senior figure at MI5 who concluded that “[Warschauer] would have been a Nazi but for his Jewish blood,” wrote a letter recommending that Warschauer be immediately transferred from Hutchinson camp, to separate him both from his cronies and the indulgent commandant.

“It seems to me too dangerous to leave him in a position where he is [Major] Daniel’s blue-eyed boy,” wrote Sykes.

In March 1942, five months after Peter left the camp and when only about 350 men remained in Hutchinson, Warschauer was transferred from the island to the London Oratory School on Stewart’s Grove, in the salubrious London Borough of Chelsea, also known as Internment Camp 001, which was used to house high-security internees.

BY EARLY 1942, THE INVESTIGATOR James Craufurd’s suspicion that Warschauer had been sent to England as a Gestapo agent had grown “nearly to a certainty.” The evidence collected during MI5’s raid on Warschauer’s office—in the home he shared with Echen—had provided a mountain of jigsaw pieces. Among the haul there were letters from Dr. Hans Sauer, the man who had ensured Warschauer’s smooth exit from Germany, as well as canisters of photographic film rigged to produce a blotted-out image unless developed in a specific way. MI5 spent weeks studying the letter Sauer had sent Warschauer for clues and code words, even employing an expert to analyze Sauer’s handwriting (“There is in the writing unusual intelligence, knowledge and mental ability, but a bad man,” the expert concluded banally).

Rushen Women's Internment Camp

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 199-201:

The Rushen women’s internment camp had opened on the [Isle of Man’s] southern peninsula on May 29, incorporating two small seaside resorts: Port Erin and Port St. Mary. Despite the considerable number of women held there—close to four thousand, three hundred of whom were pregnant—security was laxer than at the men’s camps. A single barbed-wire perimeter encircled both resorts and, while the women had to apply for a permit before they could visit each other’s houses, they were free to walk between the two sites without hindrance.

At first the Hutchinson men whose wives were interned on the island had to send letters via the usual route to the backlogged censor’s office in Liverpool, where delays often meant their messages were long out-of-date by the time they arrived. From the moment the first internees arrived on the island, Bertha Bracey had pressured the government to establish a separate camp for married couples. Convincing the relevant departments to make such an expenditure was proving difficult.

In lieu of a married camp, Hutchinson’s intelligence officer, Captain Jurgensen, announced in late autumn the first monthly meeting between husbands and wives interned on the island. The rendezvous, he explained, would take place at the Port Erin branch of Collinson’s Café.

On the morning of the first meeting, a group of around fifty men, wearing their finest clothes and, in some cases, carrying bunches of flowers, gathered in readiness to leave the camp and be reunited, for a fleeting moment, with their imprisoned wives. A few hours later the men returned to Hutchinson. Many looked dejected. Werner Klein, one of Hinrichsen’s neighbors who had gone to meet his wife, explained to his friend that the psychological conditions in the women’s camp were even more strained than at Hutchinson. His wife had told him that Rushen was riddled with Nazi sympathizers, who had been whipped into a state of obstinate zeal by their self-appointed leader, Wanda Wehrhan, wife of a Lutheran pastor based in London and an energetic fascist. There had been no consideration of race or political allegiance when allocating women to Rushen’s houses. In some cases, Jewish women had been forced to share beds with fervent anti-Semites.

The Nazi women, like many of the male internees, believed that invasion was imminent. In some houses, Jewish women were banned by their Nazi housemates from the common room and forced to remain in their bedrooms. When one refugee entered the local Methodist church, one of the Nazis said, loudly: “Oh there is a bad smell, a Jewish smell, in this church.”

The women were permitted to leave the camp to shop twice a week. One of the landladies whose house had been requisitioned recalled overhearing a group of Nazi-supporting women discussing which of the local houses they would take for themselves when Germany won the war.

Rushen camp’s commandant, Dame Joanna Cruickshank, was seemingly ill-equipped to deal with these sensitivities and conflicts. Cruickshank, a former matron in chief of both Princess Mary’s RAF Nursing Service and the British Red Cross, had enjoyed a distinguished career in military nursing appointments. She had formidable powers of organization, but no understanding—or apparent willingness to understand—the situation of the women in her charge. She hired Nazi women to work on the camp staff, granted them access to camp records and, intent on preserving impartiality, ordered Jews and Nazis to collaborate on the production of the camp’s newspaper, of which only a single issue was produced.

Unaccustomed to being questioned by intelligent women from civilian life, Cruickshank became entrenched when challenged on her decision-making. When Klein’s wife, a non-Jew, had proposed to her camp commandant the separation of Jews and Nazis, Cruickshank said: “You are all enemy aliens, and that is the end of it.”

Effects of the Arandora Star Sinking

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 178-179:

THROUGHOUT THE WARM WEEKS OF July [1940], as Hutchinson’s internees appointed their leaders and cooks, drew up the schedule of lectures and entertainments, and learned to paint, a pile of suitcases sat in a corner of another internment camp in Devon, a few hundred miles away. Rescued from the wreck of the Arandora Star, these unclaimed effects were the somber luggage of the recently deceased. It was a smaller pile of belongings than those left at the doors to the Holocaust’s shower rooms, but still emblematic of injustice. As the swollen bodies of the dead began to wash onto Irish and Hebridean beaches, so fresh details about the tragedy continued to emerge, casting further doubt on the official version of events.

On July 30, in the House of Commons, the secretary of state for war, Anthony Eden was asked whether the government had known for sure that, as previously claimed, everyone aboard the Arandora Star had been a Nazi sympathizer. By now, Eden knew for certain that this had not been the case.

“Fifty-three [Germans and Austrians aboard] were or claimed to be refugees, but had nevertheless been placed in category A,” he conceded.

In Whitehall, the impersonal statistics were now clothed with the intimacies of story. Politicians learned that, among the dead, there was a German sailor who came to Britain as an anti-fascist, only to be interned with a “mélange” of Nazi sympathizers; there was a metalworker who, after spending four years imprisoned in Nazi camps, escaped to Britain, was interned, then killed in the sinking; there was the blind pensioner who had been separated from his wife for the first time in his life.

The admission that refugees of Nazi oppression had been aboard the ship caused widespread outrage and called into question the wider policy of mass internment, which had begun to seem less like a rational security measure and more like victim-blaming on an industrial scale. The Jewish Chronicle, which just a few months earlier had defended a wartime government’s “right to interfere drastically with the freedom of the individual,” now likened the “disgraceful hounding of refugees” to “Gestapo methods.” Readers agreed. “It seems strange that in order to defeat the Gestapo abroad, it should be considered necessary to introduce their methods at home,” wrote Moya Woodside in a typical letter published in the Northern Whig. The public’s attitude had changed. Policy would duly follow.

While still far from secure, Britain’s general position in the war had shifted enough that, as Churchill put it to his cabinet, it was now possible to “take a somewhat less rigid attitude in regard to the internment of aliens.” Arrests, which had continued at a rate of around 150 per day throughout July, were suspended. If a so-called enemy alien had thus far managed to avoid being apprehended, they would most likely remain free for the remainder of the war. Mass internment was finished.

“That tragedy may… have served a useful if terrible purpose,” said Lord Faringdon of the Arandora Star in a speech to the House of Lords later that week. “For it may have opened the eyes of those responsible, and of members of the public, and of His Majesty’s Government.” It would take months and years to unpick the tangled mess of internment. Politicians’ efforts to justify and distance themselves from the episode were, by contrast, immediate.

Hutchinson Internment Camp in U.K.

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 164-166:

Hutchinson was six weeks old; Peter had entered a maturing universe. The internees had developed their daily routines—the favored mug, the preferred toilet cubicle, the ideal route to take when crossing the lawn—habits of minor, vital comfort. The camp’s daily, immovable routine provided the semblance of a reassuring structure, too. For those who couldn’t manage to rouse themselves for the optional dawn exercises held on the lawn square at 7:00, there was mandatory roll call at 7:30. Breakfast: 8:15. Lunch: 12:30. Supper: 7:00. Then, a final counting of heads at 9:30 in the evening.

Thanks to Ahrends and Hinrichsen’s formidable powers of organization, the camp’s schedule of intellectual diversions had grown and diversified, too. On the week of Peter’s arrival, Hutchinson’s timetable of cultural events listed no fewer than forty lectures. The subjects covered philosophy, bookkeeping, medieval history, and the nutritional benefits of fruit (Title: “Q. ‘Why should we eat oranges?’ A. ‘Vitamins’ ”), as well as performances of Brahms and Schubert by a young graduate of the Royal College of Music, Hans Fürth, accompanied on violin by the impressionist painter Fritz Salomonski.

For internees who wished to practice their French, there was a weekly “Cercle Française” run by Dr. Arthur Bratu, a teacher who fled Germany for Belgium before escaping to Britain on a fishing boat. Anyone interested in photography could join weekly classes offered by Paul Henning, a member of the Artists Café. There were soccer games, chess tournaments, boxing matches, and local hikes—albeit under armed guard—through the island countryside, with its bowed reeds and ragwort. In the afternoons Peter could watch a kind of proto-aerobics session on the lawn: exercise set to music, led by Kurt Böhm, the school gymnastics teacher. For a young orphan from Berlin it was overwhelming.

“Artists? Painting? Concerts? For free? Every day? It was unheard of,” Peter later recalled.

There was, in Hutchinson camp, no shortage for a man in search of diversion. There was opportunity for paid work, too. The Camp Bank consisted of one manager and a few clerks; the Post and Parcel Office employed a postmaster and four staff. Sixteen men made up the Fire Brigade and the Air Raid Precaution Services and had regular drills to practice using the portable reciprocating water pumps known as stirrup pumps. They were supplemented by one doctor and twelve stretcher bearers.

In the six weeks since its opening, the camp office had expanded its range of community services, too. It now housed two shoemakers, a laundry, a tailor, a pressing and ironing service, a shirt repairer, two hairdressers, and four watch repairers; services that had enabled some internees to return to the vocations they had been forced to leave behind in their homelands. At the suggestion of Bertha Bracey’s man-in-situ, William Hughes, the members of this last group fixed watches owned by residents outside the camp at the trade union pay rate, on the proviso that the watchmakers did not train any fellow internees—presumably so as not to further threaten the livelihoods of British workers. Those who preferred outdoor employment could apply to chop wood or work as farm laborers. One group of young men from Hutchinson helped to build the island’s airport, digging ditches and laying cables.

Anyone could buy items from the camp canteen, managed by Hans Guttmann, the director of Hammond book publishing. Guttmann, supported by four shop assistants, would even allow any internee to purchase items on credit, provided they could prove they owned a bank account on the outside. In time, every prisoner of war and internment camp, including Hutchinson, received bespoke currency: generic notes stamped with the “camp of issue.”

The camp had emerging opportunities for men who wished to exercise existing talents or seek out new ones. Few may have recognized Otto Haas-Heye, a distinguished clothes designer who, via his Berlin salon Alfred-Marie, helped shape fashion during the 1920s. After a dozen or so men joined his weaving school and began to produce exquisite rugs under his tutelage and direction, however, everyone recognized his work. A carpentry school taught woodwork, while another group made artificial flowers and stuffed animals. Some items were of a particularly high quality. Michael Corvin wrote of Leon Kuhmerker’s talent for artificial flower making: “The [flowers] consist mainly of fine coloured leather and their appearance is amazingly vivid… no flower leaves the little shop which is not perfect in form and unique in making.”

A shop was opened in Douglas to sell items made by the internees, including rugs from the weaving school and model boats made by the carpenters. In her role as chair of the Central Department for Interned Refugees, Bertha Bracey organized materials for most of the workshops and schools.