Revision as of 22:08, 14 May 2005

Edgar Ansel Mowrer

Edgar Ansel Mowrer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his reporting on the rise of Adolf Hitler . Mowrer had a very long and distinguished career in Journalism and no other American is known to have witnessed more great moments of 20 th century historical events . His understanding of War and Politics was unrivalled and his writings remain the clearest source for their understanding gained by this personal proximity or Witness POV he had as a Foreign Correspondent .

Weimar Germany

Mowrer is particularly clear in regard to the state of Germany between World war I and World War II and his analysis following bears the essence of the German situation in the years preceding the ascent to power of the Nazis , at which point hitler had had him required to leave Berlin as his first act after the disastrous Enabling act of March 1933.

Mowrer's analysis starts with an assertion that neither a foreigner nor a German himself in those days could understand the motives for any German actions but only what those actions might be. This began with the First World war defeat . The Military leaders who had to the last shot fed their populace a false diet of victory talk , then of a sudden imposed both the withdrawal and ending of the royal House of Hohenzollern and the implementing of a new Republic .

Public expectations therefore were of a negotiation of the terms of the Versailles Treaty whereas the country faced in fact a complete Diktat of the terms . It was take -it-or-leave-it , and the German forces were beyond re-opening hostilities . Mowrer reports that in fact though , the terms of this diktat were less severe than the terms imposed by Germany herself upon Russia the previous year 1917 at The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk . The People however knew that Russia had been subject to German invasion after her defeat whereas in 1918 German soldiery were everywhere placed on foreign soil when its' commanders petitioned for peace .

The following years of disappointment , of tribulation and continuous crises became for Germany a night-mare on top of the nationally wounding 6 million war-dead. Germany was prey to continous partisan and political Insurrection as well as pressure from Belgium and France . In result the unrepentant nationalists created the legend that an undefeated germany had been felled by a Revolutionary dagger thrust at home . A new army and the Radical Right combined and fought against Poles , Communists and Left Socialists and against the self-same new Weimar Republic . The influential Oswald Spengler was the first to declare that in fact the new Republic was doomed .

The Republic refused , as the tough Mowrer language reports , to hand over the hundreds in number of War Criminals demanded of them and in fact the Berlin Government circumvented the agreed limitations upon the magnitude and character of its new armed forces inside Germany ,until with the Rapallo Agreement , it began semi-secretly to develope prohibited Air and Tank forces inside Russia . Why disarm if no-one else does , being Mowrers reflection.

Republican leaders (of the Establishment classes ) who had throughout supported the Kaiser's War and aprobated Annexations in the good times , now contested their own government's technical admission of Germany's war guilt, correctly recognising it's basis for the payment of damages done by their own invading Imperial armies in Belgium and France .

Mowrer even-handedly wrote that they relied on the support of Washington because the U.S.A had removed itself from the Versailles Treaty apart from it's desire for continuance of the payments of inter allied debts . Mowrer accuses these German Republicans of conniving more with Britain where all party leaders disapproved of the reparations (Britain itself not having been invaded he says ) , and favoured typically British further balancing of power machinations .

The losing Imperial War was financed nearly exclusively with internal loans and currency inflation . The landed and industrial German Baronetcy now saw that these heavy internal loans would have to be repaid (having banked on the defeated Allies footing the bill} as well as them shouldering the promised reparations. Their pressure led to the democratic republic repudiating the payment schedule- and imperilling the German people further with the consequent franco-belgian takeover of the economic Ruhr heartland . Mowrer knew that the British had been encouraging the German government throughout reparation demands to simply export new printed Marks. When America's President Coolidge removed all occupying American forces open resistance against those remaining followed and Passive Resistance in the Ruhr prevented franco-belgian exploitation , as well as further debasing the German currency and destroying the small-savings of the next echelon of society .In January 1923 the Allied Reparations Commission formally accused Germany of breaking the terms of the peace treaty .

In the Ruhr the French used force by executing saboteurs and jailing industrialists , agitators and workers .They seized the railways and industries and against the British , organised a separatist movement for secession of the Rhineland .

Despite the Reichsbank discount rate reaching 30 per cent exports fell to nothing amidst general despair . Bavarian Monarchists combined with Fascists under General Ludendorff in overthrow of the republic .In Saxony and Thuringia , Communist-sympathising local authorities acted against the Republic. At which the German Chancellor Gustav Stresemann stopped the several billion dollar costs of Passive Resistance by negotiating with the French President Poincare .

With the use of force General Hans von Seekt neutralised the Black Reichswehr and Labour Commandos, moving the Prussian Army to the Bavarian border to stop the ReichSecession agitation . Proper financiers such as Helferich and Hjalmar Schacht were employed to repair the currency which had been debased to 6,000,000 Marks per Dollar on November 1923.

This was an abandonment of the hitherto Catastrophe Policy and now German leaders settled into acceptance of the peace treaty . The French accepted discussions (the Franc had also fallen from 12 to 26 to the dollar during the Ruhr war) and the Americans promised to privately enter two commissions of study into the German problems .

In social terms the Mowrer reports are highly illustrative of the consequences of the defeat , inflation and robbery inflicted upon the German people , but he is firm in viewing the years of the treaty observance as showing no more than a scheme to eject the Allied forces and then default on payments . Mowrer remained convinced through later history that although the Weimar Republic was indeed the creation of Unilateral Disarmament following exlusivity of war guilt , that Weimar would have in fact survived and prospered were it not for the heavier ,in Germany than elsewhere, effects of the 1929Depression . Mowrer witnessed from 1923 onwards that the war-weary German population wanted no-more than a democratic republic so long as it brought the also universally desired restoration of status.