Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [14]
While the civil war ground down to a Franco victory, Italy came more and more into the German orbit. Mussolini joined the Anti-Communist Pact with Germany and Japan in 1937 and withdrew from the League of Nations. He meddled around the fringes of the Munich crisis in 1938. He took over Albania openly in 1939, and in May of that year he signed a political and military alliance with Germany. The master had by now been thoroughly upstaged by the pupil; Italy had become the tail of the Fascist kite.
Germany tried democracy from 1919 to 1933, and nearly made it work. Kaiser Wilhelm, who did so much to bring about his own destruction, abdicated in November of 1918. A republic was proclaimed, a constitutional convention met in early 1919 at the university town of Weimar, and the Weimar Republic was launched on its hopeful but ill-fated journey. From the beginning it was hampered by burdens imposed by others.
The members of the Weimar government, for one thing, had to bear the stigma, in German eyes, of having signed the Versailles peace, the humiliating “Diktat” against which German politicians and demagogues raged so profitably for the next decade. The German Army very cleverly and successfully passed off the fiction that it had not been defeated “in the field,” but that it had been stabbed in the back by insidious and cowardly politicians, who were now, of course, running the country. The republic also had to bear the weight of Allied reparations payments, and although it can be argued that these were no real burden, that in fact the German government made more from American loans than it paid to the Allies in reparations, nonetheless, reparations became a major bone of contention in Germany and were a chief factor in the Germans’ ruining their own economy by bringing about massive inflation.
At bottom, however, the root of the whole matter was that there were simply not enough people in Germany committed to parliamentary forms and the idea of democracy. The essence of that, ultimately, is compromise, and the Germans could not quite make it work. The president of the republic himself, for most of its existence, Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the “wooden titan,” was a heartfelt monarchist and hoped someday to see the Kaiser restored to power. His views were shared by substantial groups of right-wing politicians and agitators, who, if they did not necessarily want a return to monarchy, wanted some form of one-party authoritarian state. Equally strong on the other side were the left-wing radicals, especially the Communists, who also wanted their own form of authoritarian state. The republic was caught in the middle.
A regime which lacked broad popular support could hardly hope to deal with the social and economic problems left by the war. Happily for Germany, the war had not been fought on her soil; she had not therefore suffered the kind of property damage that France and Belgium had. But she had incurred damages of another kind. The Allied blockade had eventually taken its toll by the end of the war, and thousands of Germans had suffered from malnutrition and deprivation of one kind or another. Germany had had nearly two million war dead, she had lost millions more in the great influenza epidemic at the end of the war—as had indeed everyone else—the Allied blockade had been kept up until mid-1919 after the signing of the Versailles treaty, and the country’s institutions lay in chaos by then.
The government was beset by attempts on its life from both sides. In January of 1919, the extreme left, Communists known as Spartacists, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, broke out in revolt. They were finally put down after bitter fighting by the provisional government and troops of the regular army. Later in the spring, a Soviet government