The French withdrawal begins

On 18 August 1924, two days after the adoption of the Dawes Plan at the London Conference, French troops left the Baden town of Offenburg and the nearby railway junction of Appenweier. It was the first evacuation of territory seized by the French and Belgians during the reparations conflict that had begun in January 1923 with the entry into the Ruhr. This date is often given as the day France began withdrawing its troops from the Ruhr. In fact, on 18 August not a single unit had yet moved out of the Ruhr itself. Offenburg lies several hundred kilometres to the south, in the Rhine valley opposite Strasbourg, but its occupation had been part of the same campaign of coercion, and its evacuation opened the way to the withdrawal of troops from the whole region. The French and Belgians left the Ruhr proper gradually, over the following year.

The occupation and its costs

When in January 1923 the Reparations Commission declared Germany in default on coal deliveries, the French prime minister, Raymond Poincaré, sent troops into the Ruhr under General Jean-Marie Degoutte. Between 11 and 16 January the French and Belgians occupied the whole region as far as Dortmund. The number of soldiers rose rapidly, by various estimates to 70,000–100,000. Officially they were there only to protect the engineers of an inter-Allied commission supervising the mines and factories. In practice it was a military occupation in the full sense of the term.

The German government called for passive resistance. Miners, railwaymen and officials refused to work for the occupiers, and the French responded with arrests, fines and expulsions. According to various figures, the occupation authorities handed down between 120,000 and 150,000 sentences, the great majority of them orders of expulsion to unoccupied Reich territory. By August 1924 about 137 people had been killed and more than 600 wounded in clashes and incidents involving the occupiers. At the Krupp works in Essen, in March 1923, French soldiers shot dead more than a dozen workers. Nationalist saboteurs blew up railway lines and bridges, and one of them, the former Freikorps member Albert Leo Schlageter, was executed by the French on 26 May 1923. Passive resistance financed by the printing press led to hyperinflation, and in September 1923 Chancellor Gustav Stresemann had to call it off.

In the course of the same conflict the French also occupied other areas, always as a penalty for specific failures. At the beginning of 1923 Germany, pleading a shortage of coal, suspended the international trains from Paris to Prague and Bucharest. In response, on 4 February 1923 the French extended the bridgehead around Kehl, which they had held since 1919, as far as Offenburg and Appenweier. This cut the main railway line from Karlsruhe to Basel, and for a year and a half the Germans had to send trains on detours.

The London commitments

At the London Conference in July and August 1924 the new French prime minister, Édouard Herriot, under pressure from the British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and American bankers, agreed to end the occupation. France and Belgium promised to withdraw their troops from the Ruhr within a year at the latest, and to leave some of the smaller areas occupied in 1923 at once. Offenburg and Appenweier, seized over railway failures rather than for coal, were the best candidates. On 18 August the French soldiers departed, and traffic on the line along the Rhine could return to normal.

Further steps followed when the Dawes Plan came into force on 1 September 1924. The economic exploitation of the Ruhr ended: Germany regained the railways, which had been run by a Franco-Belgian administration since 1923, and the mines and steelworks stopped handing coal and coke over to the occupiers under separate agreements. At the beginning of September the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission returned the administration of the areas occupied in 1923 to the Germans, an amnesty was declared and those who had been expelled were allowed to return. In October 1924 the French left Dortmund and Hörde, the easternmost towns of the occupied area, and by November the right-bank territory seized around the Cologne, Koblenz and Mainz bridgeheads. The forces in the rest of the Ruhr steadily shrank.

The end of the occupation

The last troops left in July and August 1925. By then France was governed by Prime Minister Paul Painlevé, and the foreign minister was Aristide Briand, who wanted an understanding with Germany. On 25 August 1925 the French and Belgians left Düsseldorf, Duisburg and the port of Ruhrort, towns occupied as early as March 1921 as a penalty for Germany’s rejection of the reparations terms. With that, the occupation of the Ruhr came to an end. In the space of five years the region had thus seen two military interventions: in 1920 the German Reichswehr and the Freikorps bloodily crushed a workers’ uprising there, and in 1923–1925 it was garrisoned by French and Belgian troops.

On 17 September 1925 celebrations of the “liberation of Westphalia” were held in Bochum in the presence of President Paul von Hindenburg. On the left bank of the Rhine, however, Allied troops remained longer, in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles. They were due to leave the Cologne zone in January 1925, but because of charges that Germany was not carrying out the disarmament provisions, the evacuation was postponed by a year, and the last soldiers left the Rhineland only in 1930.

Significance

The withdrawal from the Ruhr was an admission that the attempt to extract reparations by force had failed. France collected some coal and money in the Ruhr, but at the cost of a quarrel with Britain and the United States, a crisis of the franc and a reputation as a state bent on destroying its defeated neighbour. From then on Paris no longer dared to act without its allies. Instead of enforcing the treaty, it went on to the defensive: at the end of the 1920s it decided to build the Maginot Line on its eastern frontier. When on 7 March 1936 Adolf Hitler sent troops into the demilitarised Rhineland, France, mindful of its isolation in 1923, did not respond.

For Stresemann every scrap of territory evacuated was proof that compromise gained Germany more than resistance, and an argument against the nationalists who called his policy treason. Without the French withdrawal from the Ruhr, the talks at Locarno a year later are hard to imagine. Even so, the occupation left behind in Germany a conviction that the united resistance of the whole nation had forced the enemy to retreat, and a lasting sense of grievance. The National Socialists made Schlageter a martyr and “the first soldier of the Third Reich”, and exploited the memory of the “struggle for the Ruhr” (Ruhrkampf) in anti-French propaganda throughout the 1930s.