The occupation of the Ruhr

On the morning of 11 January 1923 French troops drove into Essen, the capital of German heavy industry. Within a few days the forces of France and Belgium had occupied the whole of the Ruhr, as far as Dortmund in the east. The French prime minister, Raymond Poincaré, explained that the troops were there merely to protect a commission of engineers who would ensure the deliveries of coal and coke owed to France as reparations. In practice it was the occupation of Germany’s most important industrial district, which produced most of the country’s coal and smelted most of its steel. The government in Berlin called on the inhabitants to offer passive resistance. So began the “Ruhrkampf”, the struggle for the Ruhr, which for eight months wrecked the economies of both sides, finished off the German mark and plunged the Weimar Republic into its deepest crisis before 1930. For Adolf Hitler it became the occasion for his first attempt to seize power.

The dispute over reparations

The Treaty of Versailles made Germany responsible for war damage and obliged it to make good the losses, but it did not fix a sum. In May 1921, in the so-called London Ultimatum, the Allies set it at 132 billion gold marks and threatened to occupy the Ruhr if Germany did not accept the schedule of payments. In March 1921, after an earlier refusal by Berlin, French and Belgian troops had already occupied Düsseldorf, Duisburg and the port of Ruhrort on the right bank of the Rhine. The government of Chancellor Joseph Wirth accepted the ultimatum and embarked on the policy of fulfilment: Germany would pay in order to show that the demands exceeded its means. A large part of the 132 billion – the so-called C bonds – existed only on paper, and the real burden was much smaller than the propaganda of both sides suggested.

France had its own reasons for not giving way. The war in the west had been fought on its soil; its northern departments, mines and steelworks had been destroyed, and since 1918 its budget had shown deficits larger than during the war. Reconstruction had been financed in the expectation of German money, while Paris owed enormous sums to the United States and Britain. In January 1922 Poincaré became head of government: a Lorrainer, a former president and an advocate of strict enforcement of the treaty. He believed that any concession on reparations would open the way to dismantling the entire Versailles order. In April 1922 Germany signed the Treaty of Rapallo with Soviet Russia, which Paris took as a challenge. In July Berlin asked for a moratorium of several years. Poincaré replied that he would agree to a delay only in exchange for “productive pledges” (gages productifs) – control over German mines, forests and customs revenue. The French General Staff had been preparing and updating plans for occupying the Ruhr since 1919, and in the summer of 1922 the prime minister instructed Marshal Ferdinand Foch to prepare the operation.

Meanwhile the mark was falling ever faster in Germany. After the murder of the foreign minister Walther Rathenau in June 1922, and in the absence of foreign credit, its exchange rate collapsed: in June a dollar cost about 300 marks, in December about 7,500. In November 1922 Wirth’s government fell and the non-party Wilhelm Cuno, general director of the great Hamburg shipping line HAPAG, became chancellor. Britain, where the Conservative Andrew Bonar Law had replaced David Lloyd George in October, was opposed to the use of force but had no intention of restraining France. Conferences of prime ministers in London in December 1922 and in Paris at the beginning of January 1923 produced no agreement.

Telegraph poles and coal

The pretext was supplied by the Reparation Commission. On 26 December 1922, by the votes of France, Belgium and Italy against the British representative, it declared Germany in default on deliveries of timber, chiefly sawn wood and telegraph poles. The shortfall was small, and the British delegate, John Bradbury, is said to have remarked that not since the Trojan horse had wood been put to such bad use. On 9 January 1923 the commission added coal deliveries to the list of defaults. By French reckoning it was the thirty-fourth coal default in thirty-six months. Historians still argue over whether the Cuno government was deliberately testing how far it could go, and when exactly Poincaré finally decided on armed action. The French Council of Ministers had taken the political decision as early as November 1922, and the Belgium of Prime Minister Georges Theunis joined in December. The Italy of Benito Mussolini, only recently prime minister, sent just a few engineers.

On 10 January the German ambassador in Paris was informed that the Inter-Allied Mission for the Control of Factories and Mines, MICUM for short, made up of several dozen French, Belgian and Italian engineers, would enter the Ruhr, and that the troops would merely protect it. The French spoke of a “peaceful occupation”.

The invasion

On 11 January French troops under General Jean-Marie Degoutte, commander of the army of occupation in the Rhineland, entered Essen. In the following days they occupied Gelsenkirchen, Bochum, Recklinghausen and other towns between the Ruhr and the Lippe, and on 16 January Dortmund. At first the force numbered several tens of thousands of men; by spring, according to various estimates, it was between 70,000 and 100,000, including several thousand Belgians. The troops came with tanks, machine guns and artillery. The German historian Gerd Krumeich speaks plainly of a “regular military occupation”. The Allies had held the Rhineland towns on the left bank and the bridgeheads since the Armistice of 11 November 1918, but the Ruhr on the right bank had until then been free. Now a guarded border separated it from the rest of Germany.

The Germans could not defend themselves by force of arms. General Hans von Seeckt, head of the Army Command of the hundred-thousand-strong Reichswehr, had told the government at the beginning of January that the army was not capable of it. President Friedrich Ebert and Chancellor Cuno called on the population to remain calm and avoid violence, and the government suspended all reparation deliveries to France and Belgium. In Essen the lord mayor, Hans Luther, refused to greet a French officer in front of the town hall and received him only in his office, under protest. The gesture went round the German press. Residents closed their shops and drew their blinds. On 13 January Cuno addressed the Reichstag, which backed the government’s policy by an overwhelming majority. According to frequently cited figures, 283 deputies voted for the government’s statement and 12 against.

Passive resistance

The government had no ready plan, but within a few days a campaign took shape that came to be called passive resistance. On 14 January Berlin banned deliveries of coal and coke to the occupiers. The coal syndicate moved its headquarters from Essen to Hamburg together with its records, without which the French did not know where coal was coming from or going to. On 19 January officials were instructed not to carry out the orders of the occupation authorities. Railwaymen abandoned their posts, took away documents, removed signs from stations and signal boxes, and ran locomotives off into unoccupied territory. Workers went on strike at the sight of soldiers; shopkeepers and waiters refused to serve the French. The government and the industrialists agreed that the works would not lay men off and that the Reich would reimburse their wages for enforced stoppages. The resistance brought together parties that rarely agreed: trade unions and industrialists, Social Democrats and nationalists, Catholics and Protestants.

The French were taken by surprise. In the first days Degoutte even considered withdrawing. At the end of January General Maxime Weygand arrived in the Ruhr and the occupiers switched to a harder line. The Ruhr was cut off from the rest of the country by a customs cordon and a blockade of coal transport. From March the occupiers ran their own railway, the so-called Régie, staffed by railwaymen brought in from France and Belgium. For the first few months it worked badly, because the newcomers did not know the German equipment. Germans who refused to cooperate were expelled from the occupied territory. According to various sources the occupation authorities imposed between 120,000 and 150,000 penalties, most of them expulsions, often of whole families. Some 25,000 railwaymen alone were expelled, together with more than 60,000 members of their families. Mayors, officials and industrialists were arrested and tried before French military courts, among them Fritz Thyssen. The occupiers seized cash offices and depots and requisitioned coal from the stockpiles. The food supply broke down, and hundreds of thousands of undernourished children were sent out of the Ruhr to families in other parts of Germany.

Blood in Essen and sabotage

On 31 March 1923, Holy Saturday, a French detachment entered the Krupp works in Essen to requisition lorries. Sirens summoned thousands of workers, who surrounded the soldiers. In the confusion the French opened fire. Thirteen workers were killed and dozens wounded. The French side claimed that the soldiers had been defending themselves; the German side that they had shot people in the back. Hundreds of thousands attended the victims’ funeral. A French military court later sentenced the head of the firm, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, and several directors to prison terms, Krupp himself to 15 years. He was released after a few months.

Alongside passive resistance there was also active resistance, which the government officially disowned but for a time secretly financed. Former Freikorps men, intelligence agents and members of the so-called Black Reichswehr blew up railway lines, bridges and canals, and killed Germans suspected of collaborating with the occupier. French sources recorded more than 250 acts of sabotage between March and June. In mid-March a group that included Albert Leo Schlageter, a 28-year-old veteran of the war and the Freikorps, blew up a railway line near Kalkum between Duisburg and Düsseldorf. Schlageter, a member of an organisation linked to the NSDAP, was arrested in April, sentenced to death by a French military court on 9 May for espionage and sabotage, and shot on 26 May on the Golzheim heath near Düsseldorf. His death stirred the whole of Germany, from nationalists to communists. The communist Karl Radek, speaking in Moscow, called him a “martyr of German nationalism”. For the Nazis he became the “first soldier of the Third Reich”, and after 1933 streets, schools and monuments throughout the country bore his name. On the night of 9–10 June in Dortmund, unknown assailants shot two Frenchmen dead. The occupiers declared a curfew of which residents returning from a Sunday outing were unaware, and shot seven of them without warning. On 30 June an attack on a Belgian military train on the bridge at Duisburg-Hochfeld killed between a dozen and twenty people, according to various sources. In July the government in Berlin publicly condemned violence.

The number of victims of the occupation is uncertain. According to the compilations of the French historian Stanislas Jeannesson, German sources gave 149 killed in the Ruhr and the Rhineland in 1923, French sources 114. A figure of 137 civilians killed by August 1924 is also often quoted. There were casualties on the occupiers’ side too. The history of the occupation also includes rapes and violence by soldiers against the civilian population, which German propaganda exaggerated but which really did occur.

The end of resistance

Passive resistance was financed by the printing press. The Reich paid the salaries of officials who could not work, benefits to those expelled and a large part of the wages in the Ruhr, while tax revenue from the richest region vanished. From February to April the Reichsbank, by throwing gold and foreign currency onto the market, held the dollar at about 20,000–21,000 marks. In mid-April the support operation collapsed and the mark plunged into the abyss, dragging wages and savings down with it. In May there were strikes and food riots in the Ruhr, and in the summer a wave of strikes swept across the whole of Germany. Resistance weakened: merchants began selling to the occupiers, people used the Régie railway, and the French shipped out more and more coal from the mines they had seized. Paris rejected the German notes of May and June in which Berlin offered negotiations, because Poincaré demanded first the unconditional end of resistance. In a note of 11 August the British did declare the occupation incompatible with the Treaty of Versailles, but did nothing more. The United States had already withdrawn its last soldiers from Koblenz in January.

On 12 August the Cuno government resigned. The next day Gustav Stresemann became chancellor of a grand coalition stretching from the Social Democrats to the right-wing liberals. He concluded that resistance had no chance and that printing more money would destroy the state. On 26 September 1923 the government announced the end of passive resistance. The right called it capitulation. That same day the Bavarian government declared a state of emergency and handed executive power to Gustav von Kahr, and Ebert declared a state of emergency throughout the Reich.

A victory that brought nothing

Poincaré won the trial of strength, but gained little from it. In November 1923 the Ruhr industrialists, led by Hugo Stinnes, concluded agreements with MICUM on coal deliveries. The occupiers also backed separatist movements in the Rhineland and the Palatinate: in October 1923 a Rhenish Republic was proclaimed in Aachen and other towns, and it fell apart after a few weeks without popular support. Historians disagree over whether Poincaré wanted to detach the Rhineland permanently from the Reich or merely to force compliance with the treaty. The American historian Sally Marks calculated that after deducting costs the occupation brought France a profit of around 900 million gold marks. At the same time, however, it deepened the crisis of the franc, which fell sharply in 1924, and isolated France. The British and Americans saw it as proof of French militarism, and in Britain it strengthened the conviction that France, not Germany, was the threat to peace in Europe.

In the autumn of 1923 Poincaré agreed that Germany’s capacity to pay should be assessed by international experts. On 30 November the Reparation Commission set up a committee chaired by the American banker Charles Dawes. His plan, adopted in the summer of 1924 at the London Conference, spread reparations over instalments, and France and Belgium undertook there to withdraw their troops from the Ruhr within a year. Poincaré was no longer the one to sign it. In May 1924 he lost the election, and the new prime minister, the Radical Édouard Herriot, made concessions under pressure from London and the New York banks. The last troops left the Ruhr in July and August 1925, and on 25 August Düsseldorf and Duisburg as well.

The long shadow of the Ruhr

The occupation of the Ruhr was the last attempt to enforce the Treaty of Versailles by force. Its effects proved the opposite of what was intended. In Germany it united the whole nation against France for several months and fixed the image of the “hereditary enemy” bent on destroying Germany. Its costs finished off the mark, and hyperinflation wiped out the savings of the middle class and its trust in the republic. The crisis of 1923 gave the far right and the communists the sense that the state was collapsing. Adolf Hitler did not join the national front against France, proclaiming instead that the “November criminals” in Berlin had to be dealt with first. In November 1923, in the atmosphere that followed the end of resistance, he tried to seize power in Munich, modelling himself on Mussolini’s March on Rome. Nazi propaganda cultivated the Schlageter cult until 1945.

In France the Ruhr left the opposite lessons. A costly, solitary action without the British and Americans made French policy cautious. After 1924 Paris chose the path of understanding with Germany, symbolised by the Locarno Treaties, and the army began to think above all about defending the border. When the Wehrmacht marched into the demilitarised Rhineland on 7 March 1936, France did nothing. The memory of 1923 – of isolation and the collapse of the franc – was one of the reasons why no one in Paris wanted to repeat a solitary intervention. The Ruhr itself, the forge of German armaments, became one of the main targets of Allied bombers during the Second World War.