The Allied withdrawal from Cologne

On 31 January 1926 the last British soldiers left Cologne, where they had been stationed since December 1918. With them went the last Belgian and French units deployed in that part of the Rhineland. This brought to an end the occupation of the first, so-called Cologne, zone, which comprised the bridgehead around Cologne and the land on the left bank of the Rhine north of a line running through Düren, Euskirchen and Rheinbach to the mouth of the Ahr. War chronologies record that British and Belgian troops left Cologne. This is a simplification, but it is consistent with the facts: the British were in charge of the zone, and German records note that Belgian soldiers and some French ones also left on the last day of January. On the night of 31 January to 1 February crowds celebrated the “liberation” in the square in front of Cologne Cathedral, and similar celebrations took place in Bonn, Mönchengladbach, Viersen and many smaller towns.

The British on the Rhine

Under the Armistice of Compiègne the German forces had to leave the left bank of the Rhine, and the armies of the victors moved in in their place. The British entered Cologne on 6 December 1918 and a few days later occupied the bridgehead on the right bank of the river. In March 1919 the British Army of the Rhine was formed, with its headquarters in Cologne. Its strength fell rapidly: in 1920 it numbered about 13,000 men. South of the British, around Koblenz, were the Americans, and in the largest, southern zone around Mainz the French. The Belgians had their own zone in the north-west, with its headquarters in Aachen.

The Treaty of Versailles made the occupation a guarantee that the peace would be carried out. The left bank of the Rhine and the bridgeheads were to remain occupied for fifteen years, but if Germany fulfilled its obligations the zones were to be evacuated in stages. The Cologne zone was to be handed back after five years, that is on 10 January 1925, the Koblenz zone after ten and the Mainz zone after fifteen. The whole belt on both sides of the Rhine was, moreover, to remain demilitarised for ever.

The British occupation was among the mildest. Relations with the inhabitants were correct, the officers played polo and golf, and the soldiers read their own newspaper, The Cologne Post. The Lord Mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, knew how to work with the British, and during the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 London neither supported the Franco-Belgian action nor took part in it, so that the British zone was for the Germans a kind of island of calm. For France, on the other hand, the British presence in Cologne was proof that Great Britain was still taking part in keeping watch over Germany.

A year’s delay

The deadline for evacuating the Cologne zone fell on 10 January 1925, but on 5 January the Allies announced that their troops would remain. They justified this in general terms by breaches of the disarmament provisions. The Inter-Allied Military Control Commission, which had been inspecting German barracks and factories since 1920, had uncovered secret arms depots, police forces exceeding their limits and irregularities in the organisation of the Reichswehr, commanded by General Hans von Seeckt. The commission’s full report was not ready until February 1925, and at the beginning of June the Allies handed Germany a list of demands on whose fulfilment they made the withdrawal conditional.

The decision provoked outrage in Germany, but it also set in motion the diplomacy that led to Locarno. In January and February 1925 the Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, proposed to Great Britain and France a pact guaranteeing the border on the Rhine. For him the evacuation of Cologne was the first and most tangible goal. He wrote that before Germany could turn to anything else it had to “get the strangler off its neck”. In the summer of 1925 the French and Belgians left the Ruhr and the Rhine towns occupied in 1921 as a sanction, and in the autumn the Rhineland Pact was agreed at Locarno. Germany promised to meet the most important disarmament demands, and in return the Allies eased the occupation regime in the remaining zones and agreed to leave Cologne.

The evacuation began on 30 November 1925, the day before the Locarno Treaties were signed in London, and lasted two months. The British Army of the Rhine did not, however, go home. It moved to Wiesbaden, which the French handed over to it at the end of December 1925, and remained in the Rhineland for almost four more years. In this way the British stayed in the occupation to the end, as a counterweight to France and a witness to what was happening on the Rhine.

The liberation of Cologne

For the people of Cologne and the surrounding towns the end of the occupation was a momentous experience. On the night of 31 January to 1 February 1926 thousands gathered in the square in front of the cathedral for celebrations organised by the city authorities, headed by Lord Mayor Adenauer, a Catholic politician of the Centre Party. The festivities also had a political undertone: Germans still remembered the French attempts of 1923 to create a separate Rhineland state, and the celebration was also a demonstration of unity with Germany. On 21 and 22 March 1926 President Paul von Hindenburg came to Cologne and was welcomed like a victorious commander. The official celebrations stressed loyalty to the “German Rhine” but said little about the fact that the withdrawal was the fruit of a settlement that the right was at that very time calling treason.

Of the occupied Rhineland there still remained the Koblenz zone, held by the French since the American departure in 1923, and the Mainz zone. A year later, on 31 January 1927, the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission was wound up. After the Young Plan the Allies agreed to leave the whole Rhineland ahead of schedule. The Koblenz zone was evacuated at the end of 1929, and on 30 June 1930 the last French soldiers left Mainz. The occupation of the Rhineland ended five years earlier than the treaty had provided.

Significance

The withdrawal from Cologne was the first measurable fruit of Stresemann’s policy: it turned out that accommodation brought Germany more than the resistance of 1923. At the same time it revealed something that would matter for the future. The occupation of the Rhineland was the strongest guarantee that Germany could not threaten its neighbours, and the victors were giving it up piece by piece in exchange for promises. When the last soldier left in 1930, the security of France and its eastern allies rested only on the signatures under the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno agreements – that is, on the ban on moving troops into the demilitarised zone.

That ban lasted six years. On 7 March 1936 Wehrmacht soldiers marched across the Hohenzollern Bridge into Cologne, greeted by cheering crowds, and Adolf Hitler repudiated the Rhineland Pact. France and Great Britain did not respond. Cologne, which in 1926 had celebrated becoming a city free of foreign soldiers, became the rear base of an army preparing for war. During the Second World War Allied bombing destroyed most of its old town, and on 6 March 1945 foreign soldiers again entered Cologne on the left bank of the Rhine, this time Americans. Konrad Adenauer, removed from office by the Nazis in 1933, briefly became Lord Mayor again after the war, and in 1949 the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.