Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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278 james m. diehl
work in the trenches, punctuated by danger, was not that different from ordinary
work routines.
3
Stalemate presented new challenges to the belligerent governments. Mobilization
of military forces was no longer enough to ensure victory. It was necessary to mobilize
the entire nation, above all the economy. In short, governments had to create a home
front that could sustain the fighting front. The resources of the nation, both material
and human, had to be fully mobilized and harnessed to the war effort. Non-essential
sectors of the economy were allowed to languish or were shut down. All available
sources of labor were tapped. The unexpected complexity of directing the first indus-
trial war led to an unprecedented increase in the state’s power, an experience that
was to provide a model for diverse political persuasions after the war.
After two years of total war, war weariness gripped the belligerent nations. Both
the home and fighting fronts were affected. On the military front, discipline began
to break down. Soldiers despaired and increasingly felt that they were victims, not
heroes. The endless slaughter that they experienced seemed to be for no purpose, as
the battle lines remained fixed. While the troops experienced a disconnect and isola-
tion from the home front, which was increasingly alien, furloughs and letters provided
a connection to families, and soldiers’ anger with their governments grew as a result
of reports from loved ones of inadequate separation allowances and insufficient food.
In Russia, the most autocratic regime failed the test of total war. Both the home
front and the army collapsed. Soldiers deserted in droves and the country was
engulfed in revolution.
4
On the western front, the French army mutinied in the spring
of 1917. Here the troops’ actions were not directed against the regime per se, but
against the military leadership and the way in which the war was being fought. French
troops were willing to fight for their country and its liberation from foreign occupi-
ers, but they wanted an end to the continuation of tactics that produced nothing but
senseless slaughter. The French mutinies were more like an industrial strike against
unbearable working conditions than a prelude to revolution, a fitting response to the
first industrial war.
5
On the home front, social truces began to break down. The massive slaughter at
the front touched nearly every family by death. The home front combatants chafed
at increasing regimentation and deprivation. The legitimacy of governmental policies
was questioned. Domestic politics began to reassert themselves under the guise of
the debate over war aims.
6
Governments were increasingly pressed to explicate what
they were fighting for. Demands for a negotiated peace began to be raised.
Governments were forced to remobilize their exhausted populations on both the
home and fighting fronts.
7
The terms for further support of the war had to be negoti-
ated (or renegotiated), a process that involved concessions in the present and prom-
ises of reform in the future. The democratic governments, Britain and France,
succeeded in this process, largely because they had more credibility and their citizens
felt they had a stake in their government’s success. Italy and the authoritarian mon-
archies failed to succeed in remobilizing their people because it was clear that their
governments were not seriously committed to correcting the glaring inequities that
the war had so clearly revealed. War, even if it ended in victory, would not bring
reform, and support declined accordingly.
Once the war ended, demobilization, longed for by the combatants of both the
fighting and home fronts, brought not the promised and expected better world, but
demobilization and discontent 279
disappointment, disillusionment, and discontent. While many in the Forces of Order
camp had welcomed the war and the ensuing social truces as a way of blocking
reform, they now discovered that the strains of prolonged war and continued resis-
tance to change weakened morale and delegitimized the state, creating an environ-
ment in which defeat meant revolution. Following their defeats, the eastern monarchies
were swept away. In Russia the tsarist regime was replaced by a revolutionary Soviet
regime, which called for a world revolution. In Austria-Hungary, the Habsburg
Empire disintegrated into its component ethnic parts. In Germany, Wilhelm II was
forced to abdicate and the conservative Bismarckian Reich was replaced by a liberal
parliamentary government, the Weimar republic. Although Italy was nominally a
victor and the monarchy remained intact, the nation emerged from the war bitterly
divided.
Postwar Problems
In the years immediately following the war, it appeared that the Allies’ claim that the
war was “to make the world safe for democracy” had been vindicated. The democ-
racies had been victorious and the new regimes that emerged from the wreckage
of the defeated authoritarian states were democratic. But the apparent triumph of
democracy was short lived. By the early 1920s Russia and Italy were dictatorships.
By the end of the decade the successor states were almost without exception authori-
tarian, and Germany entered a crisis that ended with the Nazi takeover. Even the
established democracies foundered. The war had created a new political landscape
peopled with democratic institutions, but the socioeconomic, political, and psycho-
logical strains and dislocations of the war created powerful obstacles to their success-
ful operation.
If in international terms the interwar years represented an era of cold war between
defenders and opponents of the order created at the Paris Peace Conference, in
domestic terms it was an era of civil war, open and latent, between the (primarily
Marxist) left and the (primarily bourgeois) right. In terms of domestic politics, the
interwar years opened not with the end of World War I in 1918 but with the Russian
revolution of 1917 and closed not with the beginning of World War II but with its
end.
8
If before 1914 war was the continuation of politics by other means, after 1917
politics became a continuation of war by other means.
Postwar societies were deeply divided and badly fractured. Prewar problems had
not been solved by the war, but were exacerbated, while new ones had been created.
All of the belligerent states, including the victors, faced enormous problems. The
main and most debilitating of these was class conflict. The war had dramatically
changed the prewar socioeconomic and political balance of power. Because labor
formed the backbone of industrial warfare, its position was strengthened. To ensure
uninterrupted production, governments had to make concessions and socialist parties
and trade unions emerged from the war stronger. This was in sharp contrast to the
middle-class experience. Key areas of middle-class economic activity such as consumer
goods and service industries had languished or shut down during the war, since they
were non-essential. While all sectors of society were hurt by war-induced inflation
and postwar hyperinflation, the middle classes were hit hardest.
9
War bonds, bought
with patriotic enthusiasm, declined in value and in some cases became worthless.
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Savings disappeared. Salaried employment, an asset before the war, became a liability
in an inflationary environment. Long-term economic planning, a staple of the
bourgeois lifestyle, became impossible. As a result of these factors, the socioeconomic
position of the middle classes eroded, while that of labor, at least in relative terms,
improved. The war also deepened mistrust between urban and rural populations.
The result was sharpened class conflict, which became the keystone of postwar
politics.
The war also deepened another prewar social division. The division of the belliger-
ent countries into home and fighting fronts was more than a functional one. It was
also gendered, with a masculinized fighting front and feminized home front. Women
were pulled into the labor force to replace men who had been drafted and killed.
This was not the result, as it is often portrayed, of a massive influx of previously
unemployed women, but primarily a transfer of working women from sectors of the
prewar economy that had been dominated by women into areas that had been
monopolized by men.
10
After the war some women welcomed the increased inde-
pendence provided by working outside the home and wanted to remain in the labor
force. Many, widows and younger women with reduced prospects of marriage, had
no choice. In any case women were quickly pushed out of industry and returned to
traditional sectors. The threat, feared by many males, that they would be replaced by
unskilled women never became reality, except in the clerical and retail sectors.
Although the emancipating effects of war are often exaggerated, women after the
war were more visible and assertive and this fed misogynist anger among many males
and cultural conservatives. Some soldiers resented the way expected wartime roles
did not play out the way they were expected to, but were reversed: the mobilization
of women freed them geographically and socially, while the mobilization of men
immobilized them in the trenches and made them dependent and passive.
11
Moreover,
at the same time that wartime service appeared to masculinize women, the growing
number of shell shock cases, “male hysteria,” raised fears that war, rather than enhanc-
ing male soldiers’ virility, was feminizing them. Postwar anxiety over gender roles
was compounded by demographic concerns.
12
One of the several shared goals of
cultural conservatives and fascists in the interwar years was the restoration of women
to their traditional roles as wives and mothers.
The deepened gender gap was also accompanied by a deepened generation gap.
Soldiers were angered by the policies of politicians and senior staff that consigned
them to the hellish world of the trenches. Wartime memoir literature is replete with
soldiers’ outrage with the older generation, which, safe in its armchairs, sent the war
generation to its death and repeatedly bungled the war effort. On the home front
parental authority was weakened as a result of the drafting of fathers and the wartime
employment of mothers. Children were unsupervised and through wartime employ-
ment gained a certain economic independence. They no longer were willing to accept
control by traditional sources of authority, parents, teachers, clergymen. As with
women, the changed role of youth was the source of a chorus of Cassandra calls by
cultural conservatives, who, like the fascists, believed the way to tame wild youth was
through military service and the inculcation of military values. While the older gen-
eration deplored the changes caused by the war, the war and postwar generations
resented the fact that there had not been enough change and that the old, prewar
leaders were still in charge.
demobilization and discontent 281
Interwar politics were dominated by economic issues. Ultimately, the question was
who was going to pay for the war and, then, the Depression, itself a product of the
war. In the broken postwar world, classic economic solutions no longer worked and
often exacerbated the problems they sought to solve. Would inflation be combated
through reduced government spending or higher taxes? Would the Depression be
solved through deflationary or inflationary measures? Economists notwithstanding,
the solutions were not value-free. They had consequences that favored some social
groups and hurt others. In an age of mass politics it was no longer possible, as it had
been in the nineteenth century, to disregard the interests of the weaker elements of
society. Because they represented discrete socioeconomic constituencies that were
directly and oppositely affected by the different solutions to economic problems
being considered, it was difficult for working-class and middle-class liberal parties to
work together. While cooperation was often possible on political and foreign policy
issues, when it came to economic and fiscal issues cooperation broke down. As a
result, parliamentary government foundered.
The postwar empowerment of previously disenfranchised groups made mass poli-
tics a reality. In the abstract, it might be expected that wartime socioeconomic level-
ing and postwar political reform would help ease the way for postwar democracy, but
the opposite occurred. The aspirations of those who had, at least in relative terms,
benefited, were raised, while the fears of those whose positions had been weakened
grew. Wartime sacrifice combined with postwar economic difficulties created wide-
spread disillusionment. Everyone felt that they had been victimized and that their
socioeconomic and political rivals had unjustly gained at their expense. As postwar
social and political tension mounted, the wartime practice of dividing the world
into friends and foes and demonizing enemies was carried over into peacetime and
furthered by the increasingly ideological nature of politics. Postwar politics became
a no-holds-barred, zero-sum game in which more people were fighting for a smaller
pie. Compromise was ruled out.
A concrete manifestation of postwar polarization was a new phenomenon that
became a hallmark of the interwar years: street violence produced by clashes between
the “political soldiers” of opposing social and political “fronts.” Demobilized soldiers
formed the core of these paramilitary organizations in the immediate postwar years,
but by the end of the 1920s their ranks were increasingly being filled by young men
who had missed the war but now sought their own war experience in the streets,
rather than in the trenches.
Moderate centrist parties declined as the ferocity of political conflict increased.
Postwar politics increasingly become polarized around the opposing poles of com-
munism and fascism. The war convinced many on the left that liberal democracy and
social democracy were bankrupt and that the more radical communist program was
the correct roadmap of the future. Similarly, the war and postwar developments
convinced many of the middle and upper classes that the liberal parliamentary state,
as well as traditional conservatism, was bankrupt and incapable of defending their
interests against a strengthened left. The fact that each ideology became embodied
in a state, the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s fascist regime, worked to frighten oppo-
nents and embolden proponents. Above all, the formation of national communist
parties fed fears of the propertied classes, and many, especially in the revolution-
wracked defeated states, turned to fascism to defeat both their “internal” and
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“external” enemies. The success of fascism depended on a number of factors: the
extent of the threat from the left; the confidence of the bourgeoisie in the state’s
ability to counter leftist threats; the loyalty of civil and military institutions – the
bureaucracy, police, and army. In Italy and Germany these institutions were domi-
nated by traditional elites who distrusted democratic government and consequently
forged alliances with the fascists to destroy it. In England the weakness of the com-
munist threat combined with the almost uninterrupted rule of the Conservative Party
reassured the propertied classes and checked the growth of fascism. In France the
political pendulum swung back and forth. When the Republic’s institutions seemed
able to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie, as in 1919–24 and 1928–32, fascism
waned. When, however, institutions appeared to be captured by the left, after the
victories of the cartel des gauches in 1924 and 1932, then fascism waxed. Following
the victory of the Popular Front in 1936, France was in a state of virtual civil war, a
guerre franco-française.
13
Veterans
The war produced a new social group, veterans, which played an important and often
disruptive role in the fractured postwar societies. Veterans, the human war surplus of
the Great War, had already emerged as a political force before postwar demobiliza-
tion. The first to take collective action were those who had been wounded and dis-
abled, those demobilized by disability. By 1916 two years of unremitting slaughter
had exposed the inadequacies of existing systems of disability treatment, rehabilita-
tion, and pensions. The vast numbers of wounded and maimed overwhelmed systems
that were designed to care for professional soldiers and only limited numbers of
conscript casualties. Prewar care for disabled veterans was piecemeal and heavily
dependent on voluntary charitable organizations. World War I sounded the death
knell of voluntarism. By the end of 1916 war-disabled organizations were being
formed in all the belligerent nations. The new organizations demanded an acknowl-
edgment of the modern wartime social contract: since the state had compelled them
to defend it, and while doing so they had been injured, the state was obligated to
provide compensation. As they repeatedly asserted, the war disabled wanted justice,
not charity: comprehensive, state-supported programs for the treatment of disabled
veterans. They also demanded rehabilitation and reintegration, rather than the ware-
housing that had characterized prewar treatment of disabled veterans. This demand
found favor with many state officials, who wanted to reclaim the labor potential of
the disabled.
The original impetus for the foundation of organizations for the war-disabled came
from the left, and welfare demands were increasingly coupled with political demands.
After the Russian revolution governments could ill afford to ignore the political
potential of veterans. Efforts were made to establish organizations that would mobi-
lize veterans in support of the existing political and social order. Piecemeal reforms
were implemented and promises were made, but nothing substantive was done until
after the war. The resulting war-disability systems were complicated and costly,
prompting discontent among both the disabled and taxpayers.
Like those demobilized by disability, the able-bodied veterans demobilized by
victory or defeat were a volatile force. For millions of men the war remained the
demobilization and discontent 283
decisive formative experience of their lives and they were unable to free themselves
from its spell. Their experience in the liminal, troglodyte world of the trenches scarred
and embittered them and made their reintegration into civilian society difficult.
14
As
a result, every belligerent nation was host to a substantial postwar army of men unable
or unwilling to demobilize psychologically.
While veterans were a universal product of the war and shared much in common,
their postwar experience was filtered through the particular national matrix to which
they returned. In Russia, soldiers, who had demobilized themselves by “voting for
peace with their feet,” were soon remobilized into a brutal civil war and a new war
against foreign invaders. Although veterans of the Red Army received recognition by
the Soviet state, those of World War I did not.
15
Elsewhere, veterans fared better, but
their treatment and postwar roles varied considerably.
British veterans, like others, began to organize in 1916. Because of its tradition
of a small, voluntary army, Britain, even more than the other belligerent countries,
was unprepared to cope with the staggering number of casualties. With the introduc-
tion of conscription in 1916, the issue became even more pressing, since one could
no longer say one joined the army at one’s own risk. Scattered groups of disabled
soldiers were formed in 1916. In January 1917 the first major organization, the
National Federation of Discharged and Demobilized Sailors and Soldiers, was
founded. In November Conservatives, headed by Lord Derby, created an organiza-
tion, the Comrades of the Great War, which was designed to mobilize veterans in
support of the status quo. Other groups were also established and by war’s end there
were four separate veterans’ organizations in Britain.
16
Following the armistice, the discontent of veterans became a major problem and
a source of concern for the British government, which, mindful of the role of veterans
in the Russian revolution, maintained close surveillance of their actions. The slow
pace of demobilization combined with high levels of unemployment fueled discon-
tent, producing riots and “soldiers’strikes.” Veteran unrest and disruptive activity
reached its peak in the summer and fall of 1919. Thereafter, discontent subsided as
the labor market improved and the government acted to fulfill demands for pensions.
In 1921 the remaining veterans’ organizations merged to form the British Legion,
which largely limited its activity to lobbying for improved benefits and avoided the
pursuit of “external” (i.e., political) goals.
17
The story in France was similar, though there ideological and political differences,
reflecting French society, were more diverse and deeper.
18
The initial impulse to
organize veterans came from the author Henri Barbusse, who used the royalties from
his bestselling anti-war novel, Under Fire, to found the Republican Association of
War Veterans (ARAC), which was dedicated to bringing peace and establishing pen-
sions for the war-disabled. ARAC claimed to be apolitical, but it soon, like its founder,
became affiliated with the communists. By 1923 it was little more than the veterans’
auxiliary of the French Communist Party, which doomed it to insignificance.
In France, as elsewhere, there were two cohorts of veterans: those demobilized by
disability and those demobilized by the ending of the war. In November 1917 a
national congress was held of local disabled veterans’ organizations that had been
spontaneously formed throughout France during the previous year, and the Federated
Union of Veterans (UF) was founded the following February. The UF’s political
composition was centrist; it concentrated its efforts on expanding the pension system
284 james m. diehl
and avoided partisan politics. In November 1918 the National Union of Veterans
(UNC) was founded. It consisted primarily of non-disabled veterans and was politi-
cally conservative. Unlike the UF, the UNC was formed from the top down and was
an effort by traditional elites to control veterans and steer them away from radical
activity. Despite the organizations’ different constituencies and political orientations,
they were able to cooperate in lobbying for benefits. Although the UNC’s leaders
periodically flirted with radical right-wing organizations, they were reined in by the
rank and file, and extremist efforts to gain control of the UNC failed. As a conse-
quence, the major veterans’ organizations in France were on the whole moderate,
more regime stabilizing than destabilizing.
The various fascist leagues were a different matter. The first leagues, which emerged
in the early 1920s, were inspired by, and modeled on, the Italian squadristi. Like the
latter, they included many veterans, but they were not, strictly speaking, veterans’
organizations. The leagues flourished following the leftist victory in the 1924 elec-
tions, but declined after the rightist victory in 1928. The Croix de Feu (Cross of
Fire), founded in 1928, initially limited membership to veterans who had fought at
the front. In its early years the organization was conservative and nationalist, but
largely apolitical. This changed in the early 1930s, when it became fascist, but by
then its membership had been broadened to include non-veterans.
19
Unlike other belligerent nations, where the outbreak of war initially produced
consensus and unity, in Italy the war divided the country from the beginning.
20
The
war was imposed on an unwilling majority. Italy’s entrance was not dictated by
defensive needs or treaty obligations, but by the opportunistic calculations of its
leaders and extra-parliamentary pressure from nationalist organizations. The country
was unprepared for war, and the illusion that it would be short faded quickly. The
war greatly distorted Italy’s already weak economy and Italians suffered accordingly.
The resentment and alienation of the lower classes, exploited and excluded before
the war, steadily mounted. Aware of the general discontent, the government reacted
harshly, militarizing society and the economy. The measures taken in Italy to mobilize
the nation for war were more like those taken by the militaristic authoritarian Central
Powers than those of the western democracies to which Italy nominally belonged.
Victory brought to Italy, not peace, but a revolutionary crisis. The postwar demo-
bilization was as clumsy and ill-managed as the mobilization of 1915. There was
unrest among workers not only in cities but also in rural areas, where promises of
land reform had not been kept. High rates of unemployment and inflation added to
the general turmoil. The government, fearful of revolution, kept soldiers scheduled
for demobilization in active service to combat potential uprisings, a move which
further angered soldiers and their families.
Italians across the political spectrum felt they had been betrayed by the Liberal
government and emerged from the war convinced that wartime policies had favored
their rivals while hurting them. The left denounced the state’s favoring of the prop-
ertied interests, while the right denounced the state’s concessions to labor and
charged that leftist opposition had weakened Italy’s war effort and undercut its posi-
tion at the peace conference, producing a “mutilated victory.” Democratic institu-
tions, never strong in Italy, were irreparably weakened and unable to regain legitimacy.
At the same time, the enormous power that the state had wielded during the war
made clear the desirability of capturing control of it.
demobilization and discontent 285
With the end of the war, a bitter struggle for power broke out with the pendulum
swinging first to the left and then to the right. The relaxation of wartime controls
unleashed a strong shift to the left, the Biennio Rosso or “two red years.” The leftist
surge was fueled by a number of factors: solidarity generated by prewar and wartime
grievances, organizational consolidation of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and its
affiliated unions, vacillation by the Liberal government, and disarray on the right.
The results were huge gains for the PSI in the national elections of 1919, socialist
control of local and regional governments, and favorable wage and labor contracts,
both in factories and in rural areas. By 1921 the leftist wave began to ebb, weakened
by indecisive leadership and partisan divisions. The right, galvanized by the Biennio
Rosso, went on the attack, led by Mussolini’s reconstituted fascist movement. The
rightist offensive was spearheaded by the fascist squadristi which violently smashed
leftist organizations, beat and murdered their leaders, and forcibly ousted recently
installed socialist governments. The murderous assaults of the squadristi were not
only tolerated but also openly applauded by the traditional elites, the police and
military, and the frightened middle classes, who feared a socialist revolution. The
fascist victory culminated in the March on Rome and Mussolini’s installation as prime
minister in the fall of 1922. Veterans were a key ingredient in the violent postwar
struggle for power in Italy. Initially they were associated as much, if not more, with
the left as with the right, but eventually they became primarily identified with the
right as a result of their prominent role in the fascist squadristi.
21
Once in power the
fascist party brought veterans under state control and appropriated the romantic,
heroic version of the front experience for the regime.
In Germany, as elsewhere, disabled veterans began to organize and make their
voices heard in late 1916 and early 1917. Their demands for improved treatment
and compensation for their sacrifice were quickly linked to demands for political
reform in general and, in particular, reform of the inequitable Prussian suffrage
system. The argument that wartime sacrifice should be rewarded with political
equality was a powerful one and was adroitly exploited by the Social Democrats.
Conservatives responded by attempting to organize veterans in support of the
status quo, building upon existing veterans’ organizations which had been an
important prop of the empire. The Forces of Order hoped to postpone welfare
reform until after the war, when Germany’s defeated enemies would be forced
to pay for them, and to blunt demands for political change through military
victory.
In November 1918 the German nation was rocked by the dual traumas of defeat
and revolution: the German army was defeated and the country was swept by revolu-
tion. Germany’s “external” and “internal” enemies had triumphed. The nation could
no longer resist the former and the propertied classes appeared defenseless against
the latter. By coupling the emancipation of the “internal” enemy with national defeat
in an inverted cause and effect relationship through the infamous stab-in-the-back
(Dolchstoss) legend, Germany’s displaced elites delegitimized the former and denied
the latter. Germany had not been defeated, but betrayed, “stabbed in the back,” by
the founders of the republic. The previous “state supporting” elements now became
the most vitriolic opponents of the new democratic German state. Prominent among
these were organized veterans, which were a major source of instability in Weimar
Germany. In spite of the republic’s efforts to meet the needs of veterans, German
286 james m. diehl
veterans’ organizations, with the exception of the war-disabled, were violently anti-
republican.
22
The claim that the republic was ungrateful to veterans is a myth created
by its rightist opponents. In contrast to other belligerent nations, the transition to a
peacetime economy was relatively smooth and unemployment among veterans was
low. The National Welfare Law (RVG), passed in 1920, provided a progressive system
of rehabilitation and benefits for the war-disabled and the next-of-kin of soldiers killed
in the war. But, like the war itself, the RVG remained a source of contention, con-
sidered inadequate by its beneficiaries and too indulgent by others.
23
Defeat made it
impossible to come to some sort of reconciliation with the enormous human damage
caused by the war. Disabled veterans could not console themselves with the belief
that they were heroes who had successfully defended their nation, and for German
society as a whole the war-disabled were human placards advertising the futility of
the war effort. Meanwhile, former officers happily pocketed generous pensions while
attacking the new democratic order.
The collapse of the imperial army created a power vacuum. Obsessed with restor-
ing order and avoiding “Russian conditions,” the new Social Democratic government
filled the vacuum with volunteer forces that brutally suppressed the workers’ and
soldiers’ councils that had spearheaded the revolution. The volunteer forces were
recruited from the middle classes and through their actions many ordinary and
respectable middle-class Germans came to appreciate the use of armed force to
achieve political ends. The volunteer forces became the seedbed for a violent para-
military subculture that was instrumental in undermining the Weimar republic.
24
In 1920 the Allies ordered the dissolution of German volunteer forces. This did
not mean their end, however. They reemerged as Military Associations (Wehrverbände),
private organizations, composed primarily of veterans of World War I and postwar
volunteer associations. They were uniformed, militarily organized, and violent.
Despising traditional political activity, the Military Associations hoped to achieve their
political aims, the destruction of Germany’s “internal” and “external” enemies, by
means of military rather than political action.
The explosive events of 1923, culminating in Hitler’s abortive “March on Berlin,”
in which the Military Associations played a prominent role, seemed to clear the air,
as the social and political turmoil of 1918–23 gave way to comparative peace and
prosperity. Confronted with a “crisis” of stability, the Military Associations trans-
formed themselves into Political Combat Leagues (politische Kampfbünde). Putschism
was to be replaced by politics. The Combat Leagues sought to expand their influence
through the formation of youth groups, women’s auxiliaries, and the development
of a vigorous press. The newspapers, periodicals, and other publications of the rightist
Combat Leagues provided a heady brew of anti-democratic thought cloaked in a
“Front Ideology” that romanticized war and the “Front Experience.” Meanwhile,
political violence not only continued but was also compounded by the formation of
leftist Combat Leagues by supporters of the republic and by the communists.
25
Because of the activities of paramilitary formations, political meetings became scenes
of angry shouting matches and physical confrontation. The constant demonstrations,
counter-demonstrations, and bloody clashes became a surrogate for Germany’s
unresolved civil war. It was during the 1920s that the cadres were trained for the
enormous outburst of violence that crippled the republic in its final years. The activ-
ities of the Combat Leagues created not only an intellectual but also a physical
demobilization and discontent 287
environment that paved the way for the Nazis, whose paramilitary violence did not
seem all that strange to Germans already accustomed to it.
According to proponents of the Front Ideology, the war had been the crucible of
a new era, one in which armed conflict would not disappear, but become central.
The massive slaughter of German youth had not been in vain, it was asserted, but
was a blood sacrifice, one that was necessary for the regeneration of the nation and
the destruction of its internal and external enemies.
26
The Political Combat Leagues,
as well as the Nazis, portrayed themselves as agents for the fulfillment of the Front
Generation’s mission. The “community of the trenches,” represented in their mili-
tarized ranks, was to be transferred to peacetime society, creating a people’s
community (Volksgemeinschaft) that in turn would become an armed community
(Wehrgemeinschaft) that would permit Germany to reverse the defeat of 1918.
Conclusions
Fed by the German example, much has been written about the psychological impact
of the war on veterans’ postwar political views. The stereotype is one of brutalized
veterans flocking to fascist movements. The war unquestionably had an enormous
psychological impact on veterans, but its political consequences are less clear. Memories
of the camaraderie and unity of purpose of the trenches, which most veterans shared,
did not provide a coherent political program in the postwar world. Some veterans
were brutalized and predisposed to fascism, but this was true for civilians as well.
Generally, it seems that the war did not change but reinforced prewar political ten-
dencies, though the war experience and postwar disillusionment often radicalized
these predispositions, especially in defeated countries. Many radicalized veterans (as
well as non-combatants) sought a brave new world, modeled on the Soviet Union
or the fascist regime that emerged in Italy; most just wanted to get back to normal
civilian life. Some, mostly older, veterans hoped to go back to a restored prewar
world. Veterans who had come of age during their military service expected to see a
reformed postwar order which would recognize their sacrifice, provide material ben-
efits, and open doors of opportunity for them. When these hopes were not met there
was much anger and disillusionment, but the vast majority of veterans did not want
revolution: they wanted to expand democracy, not destroy it.
Outside of Germany and Italy the romantic, redemptive view of war propagated
by proponents of the Front Ideology found only a weak echo and the vision of vet-
erans as heralds of a new age, while given lip-service, was ignored. For most Europeans,
once the euphoria of peace wore off, the war was seen as an unmitigated catastrophe.
Nothing had been solved and much had been made worse. It was unbearable that
all the blood and sacrifice had been in vain. Even those in victorious countries began
to doubt whether the war had been worth the cost. It had suspended or even inverted
the just and predictable laws of causality that had governed the prewar world. The
prewar virtues of thrift, prudence, and abstinence no longer brought the promised
rewards: those who practiced them were ruined, while those who flouted them
flourished. Optimism was replaced with bitter irony, which became a marker of the
twentieth century.
27
The seismic changes wrought by the war were irreversible,
and attempts to restore the secure “world of yesterday” were futile, quixotic, and
politically irresponsible.
28
Those who came of age during the war or after it had no