Johannes Bell

Johannes Bell, a lawyer and notary from Essen, was for more than twenty years one of the more important deputies of the German Centre Party, the party of Germany’s Catholics. He went down in history for a single signature. On 28 June 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, he and the Foreign Minister, Hermann Müller, signed the Treaty of Versailles on Germany’s behalf. The two men did what neither the head of government, Philipp Scheidemann, nor the minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau had been willing to do. To the nationalists, and later to the Nazis, Bell was from then on one of the “men of Versailles”, although his subsequent career ran a quiet course in parliament and in the ministries of the republic.

A Catholic from the Ruhr

He was born on 23 September 1868 in Essen, a fast-growing industrial city in the Ruhr, the son of a surveyor, Josef Bell. He attended grammar schools in Essen, Dortmund and Minden. From 1886 to 1889 he studied law and political science at Tübingen, Leipzig and Bonn. He belonged to the Catholic student fraternities that produced many Centre Party politicians. After his studies he took a doctorate in law and did his legal training at the courts in Werden, Essen and Hamm.

From 1894 he was a lawyer at the regional court in Essen, and from 1900 also a notary. In the same year he became a town councillor, sitting on the Essen council until 1919. Politics in the Ruhr at that time meant competing for the votes of workers, of Catholics and Protestants, between the Social Democrats and the bourgeois parties. The Centre, born in the days of Bismarck’s struggle with the Catholic Church, united voters from different social classes through a common faith and was one of the most stable parties in Germany.

Deputy

In 1908 Bell was elected to the Prussian House of Representatives, and in 1912 to the Reichstag, in which, apart from the period of the National Assembly, he sat until 1933. He was a member of the leadership of the Centre’s Reichstag group and of the party executive in the Rhineland. During the war he belonged to the wing which, together with Matthias Erzberger, supported the Reichstag’s Peace Resolution of July 1917, calling for a negotiated peace without annexations, and demanded constitutional reforms, above all a government answerable to parliament.

After the November Revolution the Centre accepted the republic and entered a coalition with the Social Democrats and the liberals of the German Democratic Party. In January 1919 Bell was elected to the National Assembly, which met in Weimar. On 13 February 1919 he became Colonial Minister in Scheidemann’s government. It was an office with no future. All Germany’s colonies in Africa and the Pacific had been occupied by the Allies during the war, and from the start of the peace conference it was clear that Germany would not get them back.

The signature at Versailles

In June 1919 the dispute over accepting the peace terms broke the government apart. On 20 June Scheidemann resigned, and the new government of Gustav Bauer rested only on the Social Democrats and the Centre. Bell kept the Colonial Ministry. The Centre, under Erzberger’s influence, came out in favour of signing the treaty, believing that refusal would mean the occupation and break-up of the country. When on 23 June the National Assembly agreed to sign without conditions, people had to be found to go to Versailles. Members of the existing delegation refused. In the end representatives of both coalition parties went: the Social Democrat Müller, who had been Foreign Minister for only a few days, and Bell of the Centre.

On the afternoon of 28 June 1919 the two men entered the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles, where the delegations of the victors awaited them, led by Georges Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George. Clemenceau had chosen the hall because the German Empire had been proclaimed there in 1871. Müller and Bell signed the treaty first, followed by the representatives of the Allied and Associated Powers. After the ceremony they were escorted out of the hall separately. According to those present, they remained composed.

The treaty took from Germany the colonies that Bell formally administered, as well as Alsace-Lorraine, the Province of Posen and most of West Prussia; it limited the army to a hundred thousand men and imposed reparations. At home it was universally regarded as a “Diktat”. The nationalists counted everyone who had had a hand in it among the “November criminals”. In 1921 Erzberger, Bell’s party colleague, fell victim to this campaign of hatred, shot dead by far-right assassins.

Minister and Vice-President of the Reichstag

The Colonial Ministry lost its reason for existing, and in the second half of 1919 Bell took over the new Ministry of Transport. Sources give different dates for his appointment, from June to November 1919. The ministry’s chief task was to merge the railways of the German states – Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and the rest – into a single network owned by the Reich. The new Weimar constitution provided for this, and the railways passed to the Reich in the spring of 1920. Bell headed the ministry until May 1920.

From 1920 to 1926 he was Vice-President of the Reichstag. In 1926, in the third government of his party colleague Chancellor Wilhelm Marx, he became Minister of Justice and Minister for the Occupied Territories, a ministry responsible for the Rhineland, which was still occupied by Allied troops. He held these offices until January 1927. He also worked on the reform of criminal law.

From 1930 he chaired the Reichstag committee which, as part of a parliamentary commission of inquiry, examined breaches of international law during the World War. He was the editor of the series it prepared, Völkerrecht im Weltkrieg (International Law in the World War). The commission of inquiry, set up in 1919 to investigate the causes of the war and of the defeat, in practice also served to defend Germany against the charge of sole responsibility for the war laid down in Article 231 of the treaty – which Bell himself had signed.

After 1933

After Adolf Hitler came to power, the Centre, like the other parties, was forced to dissolve itself in the summer of 1933. Bell sat in the Reichstag until the end of the parliamentary term in November 1933 and then withdrew from political life. He lived through the war that began with the German attack on Poland and the dispute over Danzig and the “Corridor” – that is, with the revision of the terms of the treaty that bore his signature. He died on 21 October 1949 in Würgassen on the Weser, a few months after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Legacy

Bell was not a front-rank politician. Yet his life shows how the Treaty of Versailles divided German politics. It was signed by representatives of the parties that had built the republic, the Social Democrats and the Centre, and not by the soldiers who had lost the war and who in June 1919 had themselves concluded that resistance was impossible. For years the right exploited this to portray the republic as the work of men who had accepted the “shame of Versailles”. Bell’s story is also a reminder that even the politicians who signed the treaty did not consider it just. The Weimar Republic sought its revision from the very beginning, and Hitler won support by promising to achieve it faster and more brutally.