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By Root 871 0

its work and that there were widespread violations of the disarmament clauses of the treaty. There was a storm of protest in Germany at this calumny. (Years later, after Hitler had come to power, German generals admitted that the article had been quite right.61) Where, said the Germans, was the general disarmament so often talked about? Why should Germany be the only nation in the world to disarm? The Americans, who had retreated so visibly from world affairs with the repudiation of the League, could scarcely disagree. Nor could the British. The French found themselves increasingly isolated when they complained that Germany was disobeying the military clauses.

The extent of the violations was not completely known at the time, even to the French. Flying clubs were suddenly very popular and were so effective that when Hitler became chancellor he was able to produce a German air force almost at once. The Prussian police force, the largest in Germany, became more and more military in its organization and training. Its officers could easily have moved into the German army, and some did. The self-appointed Freikorps, which had sprung up in 1918, dissolved and its members reformed with dazzling ingenuity as labor gangs, bicycle agencies, traveling circuses and detective bureaus. Some moved wholesale into the army. The Treaty of Versailles limited the number of officers in the army itself to 4,000 but it said nothing about the noncommissioned officers. So the German army had 40,000 sergeants and corporals.62 Foch had been right; a volunteer army could provide the backbone for rapid expansion.

Factories that had once produced tanks now turned out inordinately heavy tractors; the research was useful for the future. In the Berlin cabarets, they told jokes about the worker who smuggled parts out of a baby carriage factory for his new child only to find when he tried to put them all together he kept getting a machine gun. All over Europe, in safe neutral countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden, companies whose ultimate ownership was in German hands worked on tanks or submarines. The safest place of all, farthest from the prying eyes of the Control Commission, was the Soviet Union. In 1921 the two pariah nations of Europe realized they had something to offer each other. In return for space and secrecy for experiments with tanks, aircraft and poison gas, Germany provided technical assistance and training.63

When historians look, as they have increasingly been doing, at the other details, the picture of a Germany crushed by a vindictive peace cannot be sustained. Germany did lose territory; that was an inevitable consequence of losing the war. If it had won, we should remember, it would have certainly taken Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of the north of France and much of the Netherlands. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk showed the intentions of the German supreme command for the eastern frontiers. Despite its losses Germany remained the largest country in Europe west of the Soviet Union between the wars. Its strategic position was significantly better than it had been before 1914. With the reemergence of Poland, there was now a barrier between it and the old Russian menace. In place of Austria-Hungary, Germany had only a series of weaker and quarreling states on its eastern frontier. As the 1930s showed, Germany was well placed to extend its economic and political sway among them.

The separation of East Prussia from the rest of Germany was an irritation, but such separations were nothing new in the history of Prussia, which for most of its existence had been a series of noncontiguous parcels of territory. Is such a separation necessarily bound to bring trouble? Alaska is separated from the rest of the United States by a large piece of Canada. When was the last time Washington and Ottawa complained to each other about transit rights? 64 The real problem with the Polish Corridor was that many, perhaps a majority, of Germans in the interwar years did not accept it, for all sorts of reasons to do with attitudes toward the Poles and resentment