Analysis: What Shall We Do with Germany?

Date: September 24, 1943

Author: Bernadotte E. Schmitt

Genre: speech

Summary Overview

Bernadotte Everly Schmitt was a Pulitzer Prize–winning professor at the University of Chicago when he gave this speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Schmitt had been an advocate of assigning Germany responsibility for World War I and had written a strong denouncement of Germany's militaristic culture. In the years after World War I, historians debated whether Germany was solely responsible for the war or whether other nations had been equally culpable. Revisionist historians blamed international empire-building and militarism, as well as a deeply flawed tangle of alliances, for starting the war. Schmitt was best known for his firm belief in Germany's guilt, and when World War II broke out, he considered this proof of a deep-seated cultural propensity among the Germans to militarism, barbarity, and totalitarianism. In this speech, Schmitt urges an overwhelming military defeat of Germany along with drastic restrictions on its ability to make war in the future. Only by making Germany pay dearly for starting two world wars would its culture of militarism be changed, he believed.

Defining Moment

World War I ended in November 1918, with an estimated 37 million casualties. The winning Allied Powers, primarily England, France, Italy, and the United States, agreed that Germany was the primary cause of the war. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, contained Article 231, which left no doubt: “The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments… have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.” As part of the treaty, Germany lost all of its overseas possessions and 13 percent of its prewar European territory. Germany's military force was drastically reduced, reparation payments were introduced, and Germany's industrial heartland was occupied by Allied troops.

Scholars quickly began debating the reasons for World War I, however, and in the 1920s and 1930s, a significant number of leading historians found causes other than German aggression for the international conflict. German foreign policy advanced a more complex picture of the events that led to war. Some historians blamed imperialism and capitalism. Others argued that incompetent politicians and diplomats failed to prevent it. Most historians moved away from the idea that Germany was solely to blame for the war and instead blamed powerful international forces like complex alliances, nationalism, imperialism, and militarism, for pushing Europe into war. American historians such as Harry Elmer Barnes and Sidney Fay led this school of thought.

Barnes and Fay, both of Smith College, published books in 1926 and 1928, respectively, that argued that guilt for the war was shared among nations. In 1930, Schmitt responded with The Coming of War, 1914, which argues his belief that Germany was uniquely culturally disposed to a totalitarian and militaristic mindset and bore primary responsibility for the war. Schmitt won the 1930 George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association and the 1931 Pulitzer Prize in History. As Adolf Hitler rose rapidly to power in Nazi Germany, Schmitt's theories of German aggression became more popular, and Schmitt called for the United States to intervene in the war in Europe, even vocally opposing the president of the University of Chicago, where he taught.

Most historians since the war have accepted that there was a uniquely militaristic culture in pre-1914 Germany that destabilized international relations and led to war, but a more nuanced view is taken of the responsibilities of other nations. Many European governments were willing to go to war and so share some of the blame. The outbreak of World War II, however, can be attributed directly to the failure of the Treaty of Versailles to limit Germany's capacity to wage war or to change the culture in Germany that supported it. Schmitt and others saw both wars as stages in an ongoing German militarism that was deeply rooted in German culture and history.

Author Biography

Bernadotte Everly Schmitt was born May 19, 1886, in Strasburg, Virginia. His father taught at the University of Tennessee, where Schmitt enrolled and graduated early at age eighteen. He attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, studying Anglo-German relations at Merton College. In 1906, he traveled briefly in Germany, and his observations of the militaristic culture there influenced much of his future work. After graduating from Oxford, Schmitt completed a doctoral program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, graduating in 1910. He then taught at Western Reserve University in Ohio. He left academia briefly in 1918 to serve in the armed forces. Schmitt taught European history at the University of Chicago from 1924 to 1946. During that time he also cofounded the Journal of Modern History, for which he served as editor from 1929 to 1946.

In 1916, Schmitt published his first major work, in which he concluded that Germany was responsible for war in 1914. This was later followed by 1930's The Coming of the War, 1914, which won him the Pulitzer Prize and the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association. Schmitt was also a Guggenheim fellow in 1927. During World War II, Schmitt worked in the Office of Strategic Services, where his expertise in European diplomacy was needed, and he was an adviser to the UN secretary-general at the 1945 San Francisco Conference, at which the United Nations Charter was signed. He retired after the war, but was voted president of the American Historical Association in 1960. Schmitt died on March 22, 1969.

Document Analysis

This speech begins with Schmitt's explanation that his opinions on German responsibility for World War I are long-standing and certainly inform his opinions in 1943. He had never changed his opinion that Germany was responsible for the previous war, but now turns his attention to how to deal with the Germans' responsibility for the current war.

Schmitt believes that there were many reasons for Americans to think fondly of Germany in “ordinary times,” such as between the wars. There were cultural ties—many Americans are of German descent. Many Germans had come to the United States between the wars and were loyal citizens. Germany was an easy place to for Americans to visit. It was comfortable and easy to navigate, even for those who spoke limited German. Schmitt explains that Americans moved away from a view of strict German accountability for World War I because “during the Twenties… Germans were more popular with Americans than any other European people.” When Hitler rose to power, many saw him as an aberration and waited for the German people to realize that he was dangerous and deal with him internally. Even in 1943, with nearly two years of bloody war behind them, some Americans believed that “if only we could get rid of Hitler and his gang, it would be possible to make a reasonable and decent peace with Germany.”

Schmitt draws upon his many decades of experience with Germany to paint a picture of a culture deeply enmeshed in militarism. He first visited in 1906 and was both impressed and frightened by Germans' nationalism and ambition. Schmitt asked his listeners to accept that his conclusions about Germany were based on study and scholarship, formed even before World War I, rather than on prejudice. His conclusions were that Germany was fundamentally different from the rest of Europe and that its reverence for militarism, authoritarian governance, and ideas of ethnic superiority, along with its lack of a strong tradition of self-government, combined to make it culturally dedicated to war-mongering. Schmitt also identified a certain “sadistic trait” in Germans, which he traces back to the sixteenth century. Taken together, these were traits “extremely repulsive to us… to all civilized people.”

Schmitt dismisses the idea that the strict terms of the Treaty of Versailles were to blame for the rise of Hitler and instead blames the Allies for failing to bring the war directly to the German people. He believes that the Allies should not entertain the idea of a negotiated peace but rather press for full military defeat, complete with an invasion and disarmament of Germany. Reparations must be made, and criminals punished. Germany must be made to understand that it was defeated, and its military completely destroyed. He argues that once conquered, Germany should not be divided up and should be allowed to choose its own form of government, but that government must be closely monitored. He concludes, “We should punish the Germans for having let loose two world wars in 25 years, make them see that war does not pay.”

Glossary

adumbrate: to produce a faint image or resemblance; to foreshadow or prefigure

anathema: a person or thing detested or loathed

gauleiters: the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control

Gestapo: the German state secret police during the Nazi regime, organized in 1933 and known for its brutal methods

Hohenzollerns: a member of the royal family that ruled in Romania from 1866 to 1947, in Prussia from 1701 to 1918, and in the German Empire from 1871 to 1918

obsequiousness: servility, deferential compliance

smithereens: small pieces; bits

Weimar Republic: the German Republic (1919–1933), founded in the city of Weimar

Bibliography and Additional Reading

Beevor, Antony. The Second World War. New York: Little, 2012. Print.

Clark, Christopher. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: Harper, 2013. Print.

Graebner, Norman A., and Edward M. Bennett. The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy: The Failure of the Wilsonian Vision. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.

Ritter, Gerhard. The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany. Vol. 4 of The Reign of German Militarism and the Disaster of 1918. Miami: U of Miami P, 1973. Print.

Schmitt, Bernadotte E. The Coming of the War. 1930. New York: Fertig, 1968. Print.