Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

On January 9 the Reparations Commission declared Germany in wilful default in 1922 coal deliveries by three votes to one. Sir John Bradbury cast the minority vote. The American observer, Roland W. Boyden, said that it would be easy for him to remain silent, but that he wanted to record his personal opinion. Germany, according to Mr. Boyden, had made “a very considerable effort in a very difficult matter and had attained a very large measure of success.” If he were making a report he would go further than simply to explain his reasons for believing Germany less culpable than she appeared in the matter of the particular defaults in question, and would explain that the conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles had been demonstrated by experience to be impossible. Moreover, he believed that that impossibility had affected not only Germany’s financial situation and her financial obligations to the Allies, but that “the continuation of these conditions had already resulted in great loss of money to the Allies and would result in still further loss so long as they were maintained.”

The British and American point of view was not heeded. On January 10 the French and Belgian Governments, in a note to the German Government, announced their intention to “despatch to the Ruhr a mission of control composed of engineers and having the necessary power to supervise the acts of the Kohlensyndicat and to assure by virtue of orders given by its President either to the latter syndicate or to the German transport service strict application of the schedules fixed by the Reparations Commission and take all necessary measures for the payment of reparations.” The next day Germany protested to all the powers that had signed the Treaty of Versailles “against the oppression applied toward Germany in contradiction to the treaty and international law. The German Government does not intend to meet violence with violence nor to reply to the breach of the treaty with a withdrawal from the treaty.” On the same day President Ebert issued a manifesto, exhorting the inhabitants of the Ruhr Valley to remain calm, and declaring that “the execution of the peace treaty becomes an absolute impossibility, and at the same time the living conditions of the suffering German Nation are disorganized.”

The French and Belgian troops marched into the Ruhr on January 11. Their first objective was Essen, but in a few days the occupation was extended to the other centers of Westphalian coal production. The German authorities and population did not resist, and the local police coöperated with the invaders in maintaining order. But that was as far as coöperation went. The Kohlensyndicat had already transferred all its records to Hamburg. The German Government ordered the operators not to deliver coal to the French and Belgian authorities even though it were paid for. The mine-owners, at a meeting called by the French authorities on January 15, refused to obey General Degoutte’s order to continue deliveries, on the ground that they had to obey the order of their own Government. It was suggested that negotiation for coal deliveries should be carried on between Paris and Berlin. Thereupon the six largest coal producers were arrested and sent to Mainz for trial by court martial. The miners employed by the arrested men promptly went on strike. Wherever French soldiers appeared in mines or factories the workers quit immediately. There were no exceptions. The solidarity of the workers with their employers and the Berlin Government amazed and baffled the French and Belgians. Threats and arrests had no effect.

When the invaders tried to move the coal and coke already mined, the German Government issued orders to railroad and Rhine navigation officials and employees to transport no reparation coal. This measure completely tied up Ruhr traffic, blocked the Rhine ports with barges, and necessitated the militarization of the intricate system of railways. But the French and Belgian Governments did not have the one hundred and twenty thousand trained railwaymen and canal-boat and tug hands to grapple with the situation. The mine-owners paid their striking workmen, and full pay was sent from Berlin to the railwaymen. Where the French succeeded in moving trains and barges, sabotage began. Bridges and locks were dynamited, signal-stations and switches tampered with, and vital parts of machinery removed from locomotives and tug-boats. Efforts, partly successful at first, were made to run locomotives and rolling-stock into unoccupied Germany. The local authorities refused point-blank to coöperate with the French and Belgians, and this movement spread throughout the Rhineland, except in the British zone. (The Americans had withdrawn from Coblenz within a fortnight after the Ruhr occupation.) Hotel- and restaurant-keepers joined with shopkeepers in boycotting the invading troops.

French retaliation took the form of fining, imprisoning, and deporting Government officials, industrialists, and superintendents and chief engineers of the mines; expelling wholesale customs and railway employees and their families; confiscating state properties in the Rhineland and Ruhr; seizing money in transit to branches of the Reichsbank and found in municipal treasuries and post-office and railway-station tills; requisitioning hotels and restaurants; closing shops; seizing custom-houses; and putting a cordon around the invaded territories. The French military authorities announced that they would issue export licenses and collect the taxes. The German Government forbade manufacturers and operators to apply for these licenses. During the winter and spring business came gradually to a standstill.

In the first four months of the Ruhr occupation France and Belgium received less coal and coke than they would have got in a fortnight of normal deliveries. The cost of the occupation was appalling and required the maintenance of a military establishment that grew by leaps and bounds to six times the figure originally planned for. French and Belgian francs fell 25 per cent, while German marks depreciated to one-two thousandth of par and reached almost the vanishing point on foreign exchanges. There was remarkably little bloodshed, and not as great hardship to the Ruhr inhabitants as one would have supposed. But the gulf of hatred separating the peoples was greatly widened, and the Germans seemed to have recovered to a certain extent from their complete abasement of the years succeeding the great defeat. The recovery was of a dangerous kind, however, as it tended to play into the hands of the reactionaries. The Ruhr workmen who never had any too much love for their employers made a hero of Thyssen, and especially of Krupp von Bohlen, who was sentenced by a regimental court martial to fifteen years’ imprisonment for supposed complicity in an attack on French soldiers at the Krupp works in April, in which no French were hurt but thirteen Germans were killed and many wounded.

The extension of the French occupation cut off the British in the Cologne area from contact with unoccupied Germany and led to an insistent demand in the British press for the withdrawal of the Army of Occupation, following the American example. Critics of the Bonar Law Government declared that Great Britain was being unnecessarily humiliated on the Rhine. Had it not been for commercial interests involved, such a complaint would have received little attention. It is a quality of British officials to be fair-minded; and, while they did not relish the position they were in, the military and civil authorities at Cologne realized that the location of the Ruhr Valley made it necessary for the French to extend their lines around the British zone. The opposition of British commercial interests and of Liberal and Labor leaders in Parliament was far more serious. In the first three months of 1923 the Ruhr occupation caused serious losses to British firms, which were scarcely offset by the German orders for Welsh coal and the consequent profit to the shipping trade. It was realized that Germany could not find the credits to continue buying in British markets. The two war premiers, Asquith and Lloyd George, declared in Parliament that four months of the Ruhr experiment were sufficient to show the disaster of the undertaking, not only to Germany and France, but to the entire world. They insisted on British intervention. Lord Robert Cecil proposed that the Government invite the French Government to bring the question before the League of Nations.

The Poincaré Cabinet was disappointed in the failure of Italy to back the Ruhr policy more vigorously, and was alarmed over the growing opposition in Belgian labor and shipping circles. Protests had come in from Sweden, Holland, and Switzerland. The two latter countries declared that their treaty rights on the Rhine had been infringed upon, and that their industries had suffered from the failure to get Ruhr coal. Most serious of all was the split in the great steel organization in France, which had been supporting the Poincaré Government, if not actually inspiring it. The Schneiders, the largest single firm in France, which owned Le Creusot, withdrew from the Société des Forges de France in April as a protest against the policy of the Wendel and other groups, who believed that if France stuck it out Germany would surrender unconditionally. The Schneiders did not relish the idea of Ruhr products competing in French markets.

In every public utterance during the winter and spring of 1923 Poincaré made it clear that France and Belgium were at one in their intention to stay in the Ruhr until Germany paid the schedule of reparations fixed in May, 1921. He said, moreover, that France would not treat with Germany or discuss any conditions until the German Government abandoned the policy of passive resistance in the Ruhr. This meant that Germany could settle the reparations issue only by abandoning the sole weapon she had and thereby consenting to France’s indefinite occupation of the heart of industrial Germany.

Despite this uncompromising attitude, Lord Curzon urged Germany to make a direct offer to France. He stated what all the world knew, including the Germans, that if the demands of the victors had been impracticable, the offers of Germany had failed equally to take into account the facts of the situation. Before the Treaty of Versailles was imposed the German delegation had offered to pay 100,000,000,000 gold marks, but the offer was coupled with unacceptable conditions, retention of Upper Silesia, a League mandate to Germany for her former colonies, and other concessions that the victors could hardly be expected to accept. In 1921, when the time came to fix the total amount, Germany offered 50,000,000,000 gold marks, still with the stipulation concerning Upper Silesia. In both instances there was a wide discrepancy between the Allied and German estimates as to the value of German payments since the war.