The end of the occupation of the Rhineland

On 30 June 1930 the last units of the French Army of the Rhine left Mainz, the Palatinate and the rest of the third zone on the left bank of the Rhine, the one occupied the longest. With that, after eleven and a half years, the occupation of the Rhineland came to an end. The victors had imposed it after the Armistice of Compiègne, and the Treaty of Versailles had provided for it to last fifteen years, until January 1935. The troops left five years early, under an agreement reached at The Hague in August 1929 together with the Young Plan. In Germany the French departure was celebrated as a “liberation”, but the celebrations showed no gratitude to France and little remembrance of Gustav Stresemann, the minister who had negotiated this success and had died a few months earlier. On 30 June it was not just the last French troops who left the Rhineland, but the last occupation troops of any nation: the British and the Belgians had already gone at the end of 1929, and the Americans in 1923.

Occupation “as a guarantee”

At the Paris Peace Conference France had wanted to separate the left bank of the Rhine from Germany. Marshal Ferdinand Foch argued that only a frontier on the Rhine could protect the country against its more populous neighbour. President Woodrow Wilson and Prime Minister David Lloyd George refused to agree, and Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau accepted a compromise. The Rhineland remained German but was to be permanently demilitarised: Germany could not station troops or build fortifications on the left bank of the Rhine or in a 50-kilometre strip on the right bank. In addition, the left bank, together with bridgeheads around Cologne, Koblenz, Mainz and Kehl, was to be occupied for fifteen years “as a guarantee for the execution” of the treaty. Article 429 divided the area into three zones: the occupiers were to leave the northern zone, around Cologne, after five years, the central zone, around Koblenz, after ten, and the southern zone, around Mainz, after fifteen, provided Germany fulfilled its obligations. In this way the occupation turned from an instrument of security into, above all, a pledge for reparations.

Troops of four countries stood guard. The British Army of the Rhine was stationed in the Cologne zone, the Americans in the Koblenz zone and the Belgians in the north-west, while most of the territory, including Mainz and the Palatinate, was held by the French Army of the Rhine. From 10 January 1920 civil authority was exercised by the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission, based in Koblenz and chaired by the Frenchman Paul Tirard. It could issue ordinances, approved German laws applying in the occupied territory and punished disobedience. The United States, which had not ratified the Treaty of Versailles, withdrew its corps in January 1923, and the French took over its zone.

For the Germans the occupation was a daily humiliation: billeting, requisitions, censorship, the expulsion of recalcitrant officials. The presence of soldiers from France’s African colonies aroused particular hostility. The right, followed by government offices and part of the press, waged a racist campaign against them about the “black disgrace” on the Rhine, and Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that it was the Jews who had brought black soldiers to the Rhine in order to destroy the white race. In 1923, during the occupation of the Ruhr, the French backed separatists in the Rhineland and the Palatinate who tried to proclaim a Rhenish Republic. The attempt collapsed after a few months, but the memory of it remained.

By stages to The Hague

The Cologne zone was due to be evacuated in January 1925, but the victors held back because the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission accused Germany of breaching the disarmament provisions. After the adoption of the Dawes Plan and the withdrawal of troops from the Ruhr in 1925, and above all after the Locarno Treaties, in which Germany voluntarily recognised its western frontier and the demilitarisation of the Rhineland, the British left Cologne at the turn of January and February 1926. Their army moved to Wiesbaden, in the Mainz zone. The number of occupation troops was reduced and the commission softened its rule.

Stresemann wanted more. He believed that after Locarno and Germany’s entry into the League of Nations there was no justification for continuing the occupation. After his meeting with Aristide Briand at Thoiry in September 1926 there was even talk of a rapid evacuation in exchange for German money, but the plan came to nothing. France wanted to keep its pledge for as long as there was no final settlement of reparations. Only in September 1928, in Geneva, did Chancellor Hermann Müller obtain agreement that talks on a new reparations plan and on the Rhineland should be conducted in parallel.

The decision came at the first Hague Conference. At the end of August 1929, once the dispute over the instalments had been settled, Briand, the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson and the Belgians agreed to the evacuation. The troops were to begin leaving the Koblenz zone in September and complete the process within three months, while the British and Belgians were to withdraw entirely. France was to evacuate the Mainz zone once the Young Plan came into force, and no later than 30 June 1930. All this was set down in a protocol of 31 August 1929. In November 1929 the troops left the central zone, and the Rhineland commission moved from Koblenz to Wiesbaden. By the end of 1929 the last British soldiers had gone home and the Belgians had ended the occupation they had maintained since December 1918.

The last day

The hardest part of the task still lay ahead of the French. The Young Plan was finally signed at The Hague in January 1930, passed by the Reichstag on 12 March, signed by President Paul von Hindenburg the following day, and came into force on 17 May. Immediately afterwards French troops began to leave the Palatinate, Mainz and the other garrisons of the third zone. They had been commanded since 1924 by General Adolphe Guillaumat, commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in the Rhineland. On 28 June, in Wiesbaden, the Rhineland commission held its last meeting and wound up its work. On 30 June 1930 the last units left the territory of the Reich. There were no longer any foreign soldiers on the left bank of the Rhine – but there were no German ones either: the demilitarisation, confirmed at Locarno, remained in force.

The Reich responded with a great celebration. In many towns rallies and processions were already being held on the night of 30 June to 1 July. The Reich government could not bring itself to say a word of thanks to France for keeping the agreement, and Stresemann was mentioned only in passing during the festivities. In July Hindenburg toured the liberated towns and spoke of casting off the “chains of slavery”. In his presence a monument to the liberation of the Rhineland by Benno Elkan, a Jewish sculptor from Frankfurt, was unveiled in Mainz. The central celebrations, held in Koblenz on 22 July, ended in tragedy. In the evening a temporary bridge over the Moselle collapsed under a crowd returning from the illuminations, and 38 people drowned. Hindenburg broke off his journey. The government had commemorative 3- and 5-mark coins struck bearing a quotation from Ernst Moritz Arndt: “The Rhine, Germany’s river, not Germany’s border”. In France this was read as a sign of further demands to come.

The rejoicing also had a dark side. Immediately after the French left, riots broke out in Mainz and other towns of the Rhineland and the Palatinate against real and supposed “separatists” – people who had collaborated with the occupiers in 1923 or were suspected of having done so. On the night of 2 to 3 July in Mainz a mob smashed the windows of shops and homes, wrecked furniture and looted. Jews were among the victims. In 1933 the Nazis removed and destroyed Elkan’s monument as the work of a “non-Aryan”.

Paris and Berlin after the evacuation

In France the early withdrawal from the Rhineland was controversial from the outset. The right accused Briand of giving up the last guarantee of security in exchange for promises. Briand’s cabinet fell in October 1929, a few weeks after The Hague, and his successor, André Tardieu, put his faith in military security. At the turn of 1929 and 1930 parliament passed a law, promulgated on 14 January 1930, granting the first credits for a system of fortifications along the border with Germany, which was named after the Minister of War: the Maginot Line. Tardieu openly justified it by the approaching evacuation of the Rhineland. France, which in 1923 had itself marched into the Ruhr, now adopted a doctrine of defence behind concrete.

Germany was by now governed by Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, whose ministers saw the evacuation not as the end of revision but as merely its next stage. On 17 May 1930 Briand presented a memorandum on a European federal union. Brüning’s cabinet received it coolly and made it clear that cooperation in Europe must not set the existing borders in stone. On 10 August Minister Gottfried Treviranus, until recently minister for the occupied territories, spoke in Berlin of an “unhealed wound on the eastern flank” and of “the severed land on the Vistula”, calling for revision of the border with Poland. The alarm in Paris and Warsaw was enormous. A few weeks later the Reichstag election ended in success for the Nazis. Historians often describe the summer of 1930 as the end of the Locarno era.

Significance

The end of the occupation was the last great fruit of the policy of reconciliation pursued by Stresemann and Briand. Germany regained full authority over the whole of its territory, with the exception of the Saar Territory, which was to remain under League of Nations administration until a plebiscite. But with the soldiers, France also lost the only real means of pressure it had possessed. From then on it could uphold the Treaty of Versailles only by threatening war, and neither France nor Britain was prepared to go to war over the treaty’s provisions. What remained was demilitarisation: an empty, defenceless strip along the Rhine that would allow the French army, if necessary, to strike quickly deep into Germany, for instance to help Poland or Czechoslovakia.

That strip survived for less than six years. On 7 March 1936 Hitler, breaking both the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno agreements, sent units of the Wehrmacht into the demilitarised zone. The forces were small, and the generals had orders to withdraw if France responded with force. France, sheltering behind the Maginot Line it was still building and in the middle of an election campaign, did not respond, and Britain saw no reason why the Germans should not keep troops in “their own back garden”. The remilitarisation of the Rhineland changed the balance of power in Europe. As early as 1936 Germany began building the Siegfried Line along its western border, a line greatly expanded in 1938, and France’s alliances in the east lost their value, because France could no longer easily come to the aid of its allies. In September 1939, when the Wehrmacht attacked Poland, the French army stood before the fortified border of the Reich and confined itself to a token offensive in the Saar.