Versailles dictation

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Versailles Diktat (also "Schanddiktat von Versailles" ) was a political battle term coined during the Weimar Republic , with which mainly conservative , German national , ethnic and right-wing extremists polemicized against the 1919 Peace Treaty of Versailles . In addition to the stab in the back and the alleged threat from “ World Jewry ”, it was a central component of Nazi propaganda .

Origin and general use of the term

The term “dictation” was also occasionally used by representatives of the left and the middle class, as the Versailles Treaty, which sealed Germany's defeat in World War I , was actually perceived by the majority of the population as unjust and humiliating.

There were several reasons for this rejection:

  • The treaty had only been negotiated between the victorious powers, so that the new government of the German Reich , which was democratic after the November Revolution of 1918, was ultimately only able to implement minor amendments.
  • In addition, Article 231 of the treaty stated that Germany was solely to blame for the outbreak of war and therefore responsible for all damage caused. The latter justified high reparation claims .
  • The treaty provided for extensive territorial cessions and the loss of all German colonies.
  • The size of the German army was limited to 100,000 men.
  • Germany was not accepted into the League of Nations.
  • Many Germans saw themselves as betrayed because they had expected a peace agreement based on US President Woodrow Wilson's 14-point program and the peoples' right to self-determination , which they had now been denied.

Since a rejection of the treaty threatened the hopeless continuation of the war and ultimately the occupation of all of Germany, the majority in the Reichstag was inevitably in favor of its acceptance. However, all democratic governments of the Weimar Republic worked successfully until 1933 on a gradual, peaceful partial revision of the terms of the treaty.

Nevertheless, the political right denounced the representatives of the Weimar coalition as " compliance politicians " who had bowed to a " dictation ". In contrast, they themselves never showed any promising alternative courses of action. In addition, they suppressed two essential facts: On the one hand, imperial Germany , for which they mourned, had imposed conditions on the defeated Russia in the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1917 that were even more severe than those of the Versailles treaty; on the other hand, the imperial government had already rejected Wilson's 14-point program - not least because of the peace of Brest-Litovsk - before the successes of the Entente powers on the western front in the summer of 1918 created new facts that decisively restricted the empire's scope for negotiation .

Significance for Nazi propaganda according to Elias Canetti

The term “Versailles Dictate” was part of the propaganda arsenal of Hitler and the NSDAP . They destroyed the first German democracy in 1933 and triggered World War II in 1939 with the aim of forcibly revising the regulations of Versailles.

The later Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti analyzed in his main work Mass and Power the impact of this battle term and its significance for Nazi propaganda. Canetti saw the main reason for the general rejection of the Versailles Treaty in Germany as the downsizing of the German army, which in fact resulted in a ban on general conscription. This has deprived the Germans of the experience of the closed crowd, for example from exercising, giving and receiving commands. In place of the closed masses, the open mass, accessible to everyone, the party, in this case the NSDAP. Canetti sees the “birth of National Socialism ” in the prohibition of general conscription . He writes:

“Hitler used the catchphrase of the Versailles dictation with an unrivaled indefatigability. […] For the German, the word 'Versailles' did not mean so much the defeat that he never really acknowledged, it meant the prohibition of the army; the prohibition of a certain sacrosanct practice without which he could hardly imagine life. Banning the army was like banning a religion. The faith of the fathers was broken; to restore it was a sacred duty of every man. The word 'Versailles' struck this wound every time it was used; it kept her fresh, she kept bleeding, she never closed. [...]
It is important that there was always talk of a dictation , never a contract. ›Dictation‹ recalls the sphere of command. A single, foreign order, the order of the enemy, therefore called "dictation", had prevented all this imperious activity of military orders from Germans to Germans. Anyone who heard or read the word of the Versailles Dictate felt the deepest thing that had been stolen from them: the German army. Their recovery seemed the only really important goal. With her everything would be as it used to be. [...]
It is no exaggeration to say that all of the important slogans of the National Socialists, with the exception of those that applied to the Jews, can be derived from the one word of the “Versailles Dictate” through division: “The Third Reich”, “Sieg-Heil ‹And so on. The content of the movement was concentrated in one word: the defeat which is to become victory ; the forbidden army, which has to be set up for this purpose. "

- Elias Canetti

literature

  • Elias Canetti: Mass and Power. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 978-3-596-26544-2 .
  • Margaret MacMillan: The Peace Makers. How the Versailles Treaty changed the world. Ullstein book publishers, Berlin 2015.
  • Wolfgang Schivelbusch : The culture of defeat. The American South 1865, France 1871, Germany 1918. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-596-15729-3 .
  • Versailles 1919 from the perspective of contemporary witnesses. Herbig, Munich 2002.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Margaret MacMillan: The Peace Makers. How the Versailles Treaty changed the world , Ullstein Buchverlage, Berlin 2015, p. 11.
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Schivelbusch: The culture of defeat. The American South 1865, France 1871, Germany 1918 , Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 237.
  3. ↑ Elias Canetti: Mass and Power , Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1980, p. 211.
  4. ↑ Elias Canetti: Mass and Power , Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1980, p. 212 f.