Germany joins the League of Nations

On 8 September 1926 the Assembly of the League of Nations, meeting in Geneva, admitted Germany as a member of the organisation and gave it a permanent seat on its Council alongside Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan. Two days later, on 10 September, the German delegation, led by Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, entered the assembly hall to applause. Seven years after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which had excluded Germany from the League’s founding members, the defeated power was returning to the community of states as an equal partner. For Stresemann it was the summit of his policy of understanding with the West, for the French a hope of lasting reconciliation, and for Poland a cause for concern.

The road to Geneva

When the League of Nations began its work in January 1920, Germany was not invited to join. The victors held that the state deemed responsible for the war must first prove that it was carrying out the treaty. In the first post-war years this was out of the question: disputes over reparations led in 1923 to the occupation of the Ruhr and catastrophic inflation. The breakthrough came only with Stresemann, Chancellor in the autumn of 1923 and thereafter Foreign Minister without interruption. He believed that Germany could regain its position as a great power only through understanding with the West. In 1924 the Dawes Plan settled reparations, and in the autumn of 1925 at Locarno Germany voluntarily recognised its western border with France and Belgium.

The Locarno Treaties, signed in London on 1 December 1925, were to come into force only once Germany joined the League. Stresemann had negotiated an important reservation along the way. Article 16 of the League Covenant obliged members to take part in sanctions against an aggressor and to allow League forces to cross their territory. Germany feared that in the event of a Polish–Soviet war it would be drawn into conflict with Russia. In a separate note, therefore, the powers granted it the right to take part in sanctions only to the extent permitted by its position and military strength. In Poland this was received with concern, since it meant that Western help would not pass through Germany.

The March crisis

On 8 February 1926 the government of Chancellor Hans Luther decided to apply for admission to the League, and submitted its application a few days later. An extraordinary Assembly was convened in Geneva for 8 March, which was simply to admit Germany as a formality. It then emerged, however, that other states also wanted permanent seats on the Council. Spain and Brazil demanded them, and so did Poland, which was backed by France, keen to have a counterweight to Germany on the Council. Germany objected, because it regarded a permanent seat on the Council as confirmation of its great-power status, which it did not wish to share with smaller states. Council decisions required unanimity, and Brazil announced that it would veto Germany’s admission to the Council unless it received a permanent seat itself. On 17 March the Assembly dispersed without settling the matter. Luther and Stresemann returned to Berlin empty-handed, and the German right, opposed from the start to joining the League, was triumphant.

In the months that followed Stresemann covered himself in the east. On 24 April 1926 Germany signed the Treaty of Berlin of friendship and neutrality with the Soviet Union, assuring Moscow that League membership did not mean taking part in a bloc hostile to it. Meanwhile a special commission worked out a compromise. The League Council was enlarged: only Germany was to receive a permanent seat, but the number of non-permanent seats was increased from six to nine, and three of them could be filled again by the same states after a three-year term. These so-called semi-permanent seats were meant to satisfy the ambitions of the smaller states. Brazil did not accept this solution and in June announced its withdrawal from the League. Spain did the same in September, although it returned in 1928.

September in Geneva

At the regular session in September 1926 there were no longer any obstacles. On 8 September the Assembly admitted Germany to the League and approved the enlargement of the Council. On 10 September Stresemann addressed the League for the first time. He said that only on the foundation of a community embracing all states without distinction, in full equality, could help and justice become humanity’s true guiding stars. He was answered by the French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand, who called it a day of peace between Germany and France and the end of the bloody clashes of the past. His most remembered words were the cry: “Away with rifles, machine guns, cannon! Make way for conciliation, arbitration, peace!” In December 1926 Briand and Stresemann jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1926. At the same time the prize for 1925 was awarded a year late, to the British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, the third father of Locarno, and to Charles Dawes.

A few days later Poland was elected to the Council to one of the new semi-permanent seats. Its demand that Germany should not be left alone with a voice in the affairs of Central and Eastern Europe was thus met. On 17 September Briand and Stresemann met for a long lunch at a country inn at Thoiry, on the French side of the Swiss border. They discussed whether France might withdraw its troops from the Rhineland sooner and return the Saar to Germany, with Germany helping France financially in return. The plan came to nothing, because Paris was unwilling to make such large concessions and the franc soon stabilised. The withdrawal from the Rhineland had, however, already begun: in January 1926 the British had left the Cologne zone.

Germany in the League

For Stresemann the League was not an end in itself but a tool. A seat on the Council gave Germany a voice in matters concerning Gdańsk (Danzig), the Saar and national minorities, especially the German minority in Poland. German complaints against Poland flowed into Geneva throughout the period of membership. In December 1928, at a Council session in Lugano, Stresemann clashed sharply over this issue with the Polish Foreign Minister, August Zaleski. Stresemann never renounced the revision of the eastern border, but he wanted to achieve it peacefully, through diplomacy and economics. Not all Germans shared this caution. For the nationalists League membership was yet another humiliation, and the “policy of fulfilment” of the treaty was treason.

Stresemann died suddenly on 3 October 1929, a few weeks before the Wall Street Crash. The Great Depression destroyed everything on which the Locarno settlement rested. Subsequent German governments demanded ever more loudly in Geneva equality of rights in armaments, and Adolf Hitler, who came to power in January 1933, regarded the League as useless. On 14 October 1933 he announced Germany’s withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations, and in a plebiscite in November more than 90 per cent of voters endorsed the decision. A few months earlier Japan had left the League after being condemned for its seizure of Manchuria.

Significance

Germany’s entry into the League of Nations was the high point of the “spirit of Locarno”, the brief period when it seemed that Europe had found a path to lasting peace. Germany had returned to the ranks of the great powers without war, and for the first time the League included all the great states of Europe except the Soviet Union. The settlement, however, had a weak point. At Locarno Germany had recognised only its western borders, and it continued to regard its eastern ones, with Poland and Czechoslovakia, as provisional. The League, in which it now sat, became for Germany a platform in the struggle to revise those borders.

When Hitler took Germany out of Geneva seven years later, he did so without any consequences. On 7 March 1936 German troops entered the demilitarised Rhineland, breaking both the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. The League Council found that the treaties had been violated but imposed no sanctions. The organisation into which Stresemann had led Germany in 1926 was by then merely a witness to the events leading to a new war. Józef Piłsudski, who had distrusted the Geneva system from the outset, opted in 1934 for a direct understanding with Hitler, while other states sought security outside the League, in alliances or in concessions to Germany.