Effects of the Arandora Star Sinking

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 178-179:

THROUGHOUT THE WARM WEEKS OF July [1940], as Hutchinson’s internees appointed their leaders and cooks, drew up the schedule of lectures and entertainments, and learned to paint, a pile of suitcases sat in a corner of another internment camp in Devon, a few hundred miles away. Rescued from the wreck of the Arandora Star, these unclaimed effects were the somber luggage of the recently deceased. It was a smaller pile of belongings than those left at the doors to the Holocaust’s shower rooms, but still emblematic of injustice. As the swollen bodies of the dead began to wash onto Irish and Hebridean beaches, so fresh details about the tragedy continued to emerge, casting further doubt on the official version of events.

On July 30, in the House of Commons, the secretary of state for war, Anthony Eden was asked whether the government had known for sure that, as previously claimed, everyone aboard the Arandora Star had been a Nazi sympathizer. By now, Eden knew for certain that this had not been the case.

“Fifty-three [Germans and Austrians aboard] were or claimed to be refugees, but had nevertheless been placed in category A,” he conceded.

In Whitehall, the impersonal statistics were now clothed with the intimacies of story. Politicians learned that, among the dead, there was a German sailor who came to Britain as an anti-fascist, only to be interned with a “mélange” of Nazi sympathizers; there was a metalworker who, after spending four years imprisoned in Nazi camps, escaped to Britain, was interned, then killed in the sinking; there was the blind pensioner who had been separated from his wife for the first time in his life.

The admission that refugees of Nazi oppression had been aboard the ship caused widespread outrage and called into question the wider policy of mass internment, which had begun to seem less like a rational security measure and more like victim-blaming on an industrial scale. The Jewish Chronicle, which just a few months earlier had defended a wartime government’s “right to interfere drastically with the freedom of the individual,” now likened the “disgraceful hounding of refugees” to “Gestapo methods.” Readers agreed. “It seems strange that in order to defeat the Gestapo abroad, it should be considered necessary to introduce their methods at home,” wrote Moya Woodside in a typical letter published in the Northern Whig. The public’s attitude had changed. Policy would duly follow.

While still far from secure, Britain’s general position in the war had shifted enough that, as Churchill put it to his cabinet, it was now possible to “take a somewhat less rigid attitude in regard to the internment of aliens.” Arrests, which had continued at a rate of around 150 per day throughout July, were suspended. If a so-called enemy alien had thus far managed to avoid being apprehended, they would most likely remain free for the remainder of the war. Mass internment was finished.

“That tragedy may… have served a useful if terrible purpose,” said Lord Faringdon of the Arandora Star in a speech to the House of Lords later that week. “For it may have opened the eyes of those responsible, and of members of the public, and of His Majesty’s Government.” It would take months and years to unpick the tangled mess of internment. Politicians’ efforts to justify and distance themselves from the episode were, by contrast, immediate.

Hutchinson Internment Camp in U.K.

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 164-166:

Hutchinson was six weeks old; Peter had entered a maturing universe. The internees had developed their daily routines—the favored mug, the preferred toilet cubicle, the ideal route to take when crossing the lawn—habits of minor, vital comfort. The camp’s daily, immovable routine provided the semblance of a reassuring structure, too. For those who couldn’t manage to rouse themselves for the optional dawn exercises held on the lawn square at 7:00, there was mandatory roll call at 7:30. Breakfast: 8:15. Lunch: 12:30. Supper: 7:00. Then, a final counting of heads at 9:30 in the evening.

Thanks to Ahrends and Hinrichsen’s formidable powers of organization, the camp’s schedule of intellectual diversions had grown and diversified, too. On the week of Peter’s arrival, Hutchinson’s timetable of cultural events listed no fewer than forty lectures. The subjects covered philosophy, bookkeeping, medieval history, and the nutritional benefits of fruit (Title: “Q. ‘Why should we eat oranges?’ A. ‘Vitamins’ ”), as well as performances of Brahms and Schubert by a young graduate of the Royal College of Music, Hans Fürth, accompanied on violin by the impressionist painter Fritz Salomonski.

For internees who wished to practice their French, there was a weekly “Cercle Française” run by Dr. Arthur Bratu, a teacher who fled Germany for Belgium before escaping to Britain on a fishing boat. Anyone interested in photography could join weekly classes offered by Paul Henning, a member of the Artists Café. There were soccer games, chess tournaments, boxing matches, and local hikes—albeit under armed guard—through the island countryside, with its bowed reeds and ragwort. In the afternoons Peter could watch a kind of proto-aerobics session on the lawn: exercise set to music, led by Kurt Böhm, the school gymnastics teacher. For a young orphan from Berlin it was overwhelming.

“Artists? Painting? Concerts? For free? Every day? It was unheard of,” Peter later recalled.

There was, in Hutchinson camp, no shortage for a man in search of diversion. There was opportunity for paid work, too. The Camp Bank consisted of one manager and a few clerks; the Post and Parcel Office employed a postmaster and four staff. Sixteen men made up the Fire Brigade and the Air Raid Precaution Services and had regular drills to practice using the portable reciprocating water pumps known as stirrup pumps. They were supplemented by one doctor and twelve stretcher bearers.

In the six weeks since its opening, the camp office had expanded its range of community services, too. It now housed two shoemakers, a laundry, a tailor, a pressing and ironing service, a shirt repairer, two hairdressers, and four watch repairers; services that had enabled some internees to return to the vocations they had been forced to leave behind in their homelands. At the suggestion of Bertha Bracey’s man-in-situ, William Hughes, the members of this last group fixed watches owned by residents outside the camp at the trade union pay rate, on the proviso that the watchmakers did not train any fellow internees—presumably so as not to further threaten the livelihoods of British workers. Those who preferred outdoor employment could apply to chop wood or work as farm laborers. One group of young men from Hutchinson helped to build the island’s airport, digging ditches and laying cables.

Anyone could buy items from the camp canteen, managed by Hans Guttmann, the director of Hammond book publishing. Guttmann, supported by four shop assistants, would even allow any internee to purchase items on credit, provided they could prove they owned a bank account on the outside. In time, every prisoner of war and internment camp, including Hutchinson, received bespoke currency: generic notes stamped with the “camp of issue.”

The camp had emerging opportunities for men who wished to exercise existing talents or seek out new ones. Few may have recognized Otto Haas-Heye, a distinguished clothes designer who, via his Berlin salon Alfred-Marie, helped shape fashion during the 1920s. After a dozen or so men joined his weaving school and began to produce exquisite rugs under his tutelage and direction, however, everyone recognized his work. A carpentry school taught woodwork, while another group made artificial flowers and stuffed animals. Some items were of a particularly high quality. Michael Corvin wrote of Leon Kuhmerker’s talent for artificial flower making: “The [flowers] consist mainly of fine coloured leather and their appearance is amazingly vivid… no flower leaves the little shop which is not perfect in form and unique in making.”

A shop was opened in Douglas to sell items made by the internees, including rugs from the weaving school and model boats made by the carpenters. In her role as chair of the Central Department for Interned Refugees, Bertha Bracey organized materials for most of the workshops and schools.

U.S. vs. U.K. on Mass Internment

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 65-67:

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, TWO days before Britain declared war on Germany, police forces around the country received the order to unseal the envelopes sent by MI5 and arrest those individuals named within. In London, officers escorted the internees to the Olympia exhibition hall on Hammersmith, which had been set aside as a clearing center, even forcing the men to pay for the taxi ride. By the end of the week, 350 individuals had been arrested across the country and delivered to Internment Camp No. 4, an out-of-season seaside resort at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, just fifteen miles away from the Kindertransport camp at Harwich.

Despite months of investigation and planning, this first wave of arrests—intended to capture only the most dangerous Nazi sympathizers and fervent communists—was characterized by mistakes and misunderstandings. Eugen Spier, Alex Nathan, and Dr. Bernhard Weiss, all Jews and staunch anti-fascists, were among the first men arrested and taken to Olympia, where they were herded alongside bona fide Nazis such as Hitler’s friend Ernst Hanfstaengl. Weiss was the former Berlin police chief and had become famous in Germany after he sued Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, more than forty times for libel and won every time. It was difficult to imagine a less likely suspect for a Nazi spy.

With those MI5 had deemed highest risk interned, the question of what was to be done with the thousands of other “enemy aliens” living in Britain immediately arose. In the House of Commons on September 4, the MP Arthur Greenwood put the following question to the home secretary, Sir John Anderson, who had been on the job only a day: “What steps [do you] intend to take to deal with aliens in time of war?”

For the first time in public, Anderson began to explain the government’s plans.

“A number of aliens whose suspicious activities have been under observation are already under detention,” explained Anderson. Others, he said, would now have to report to the police and obtain permits for change of residence, travel, and the possession of items such as cameras and motorcars.

“A large proportion of the Germans and Austrians at present in this country are refugees, and there will, I am sure, be a general desire to avoid treating as enemies those who are friendly to the country which has offered them asylum,” Anderson continued. “At the same time, care must be taken to sift out any persons who, though claiming to be refugees, may not, in fact, be friendly to this country.”

Here was the essence of the problem facing the British government. In a letter to the foreign secretary, Sir John Anderson explained that “It was felt… it would be wrong to treat as enemies [those] refugees who are hostile to the Nazi regime, unlikely to do anything to assist the enemy and often anxious to assist the country which has given them asylum.” And yet, there was a risk that there could be enemies posing as refugees, spies who had already entered Britain under the cloak of asylum.

On September 29, Cordell Hull, the US secretary of state, sent a telegram to the American embassy in London warning of the moral dangers inherent in a policy of mass internment. Hull referenced the lessons of the First World War, when “the rigorous… internment of enemy aliens” caused “widespread and seemingly unnecessary suffering to thousands of innocent persons.” Copies of the message were also sent to the American embassies in Berlin and Paris, a pointed sign of US neutrality at this stage of the war.

For now, however, the threat of mass internment seemed both remote and mitigated by the plan for the tribunals that, between October 1939 and March 1940, would deliberate no fewer than 73,353 cases, including that of Peter Fleischmann. Most were refugees, and the others long-established residents or people who, by chance, were in Britain at the outbreak of war. Nevertheless, the reliability and loyalty of everyone would be examined by a panel. If suspicions remained, they were to be interned.

Not everyone condoned such a magnanimous approach. Guy Liddell, MI5’s head of counterintelligence, summed up his view of the decision to forgo mass internment with a single word: “Farce.”

Death of Stresemann, 1929

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 506-508:

As news spread of Stresemann’s death, there was a flood of tributes. The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (German General Newspaper) wrote, ‘It seemed necessary for this man to die for his real greatness to be appreciated by his compatriots.’ There were glowing tributes from leading world leaders, including Ramsay MacDonald, the British Prime Minister, who commented: ‘His memory is secure, and I cannot believe the great service he has given to pacification with such patience and faith can now be undone.’ Aristide Briand, the French Prime Minister, sent a telegram to Stresemann’s widow Käte, which read: ‘I will always retain the deepest respect for his memory. In pursuit of our common ideal, Dr Stresemann caused me to appreciate his lofty outlook and fine loyalty.’

Stresemann lay in state in the German parliament. Thousands of people filed past the open coffin to pay their respects before his state funeral on 6 October. Hermann Müller, the Reich Chancellor, bowed to the coffin in the Plenary Hall of the Reichstag, where the memorial service was held, before delivering a moving eulogy, describing Stresemann as a towering figure in world politics. There was then a solemn funeral procession through Berlin, pausing for several minutes outside the Foreign Ministry, before proceeding to burial in the Luisenstädtischer Friedhof in Kreuzberg, Berlin. It was estimated that a crowd of 200,000 had lined the route. Film newsreels of the event appeared in cinemas around the world.

Gustav Stresemann’s record entitles him to be seen not only as the Weimar Republic’s most successful Foreign Minister, but undoubtedly its most dominant political figure. It is impossible to see German history in the 1920s taking the same course without him. Some politicians make an enormous difference, and he was one of those who did. He was a member of every German cabinet from 1923 to 1929, and the Social Democrats were his most consistent supporters. Stresemann raised Germany from a humiliated and disgruntled foe in 1923 into a diplomatic equal and Great Power again at the time of his death. His achievements as Foreign Minister ended the Ruhr occupation of 1923, contributed to the stabilisation of the Republic, finalised the Locarno and Rapallo Treaties and the Kellogg–Briand Pact, took Germany into the League of Nations, eased Germany’s reparations burdens through the Dawes and Young Plans, and brought the foreign occupation of Germany to an end. Never has the Nobel Peace Prize had a more justified recipient.

Stresemann’s death left a huge void in German political life. He had been a force of stability within a deeply unstable political system, and had gained admiration around the world. There was no speech at the League of Nations in the months following his death that did not begin with a homage to his memory. There was simply no one in Germany or outside it capable of stepping into his shoes.

It is difficult to calculate the exact part his tragic death played in the destruction of German democracy, and the souring of international relations, but he was probably the one Weimar politician who, through the sheer force of his personality, might have saved it, though Stresemann himself thought everything in politics was determined by the state of the economy. Critics of Stresemann have depicted him as an opportunistic and deceitful power-politician with a hidden militaristic agenda, with some even trying to depict him as Hitler in a morning suit. Between the extremes of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stresemann was predominantly Dr Jekyll, whereas Hitler was always Mr Hyde. But there is truly little evidence in his private papers or his diaries of Stresemann desiring a war of revenge or territorial expansion beyond restoring the territory lost by Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and putting an end to reparations.

Quaker Roles in Kindertransport

From The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin (Scribner, 2022), Kindle pp. 40-44:

Shortly after Kristallnacht, Wilfrid Israel, a Jewish businessman and owner of Israel’s Department Store, one of the largest in Berlin, wrote to Bertha Bracey. Israel, a descendant of the first chief rabbi of Britain, Hermann Adler, was well connected—his friend Albert Einstein later said of Israel: “Never in my life have I come in contact with a being so noble, so strong and as selfless… a living work of art.”

Israel had already begun work to secure the release of Jews who had been arrested during the pogrom. He invited the commandant of Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp where Jewish men were being forced to accept the blame for Rath’s murder, to do his Christmas shopping at the store for free in exchange for the release of captives.

Now Israel wanted to organize the rescue of Jewish children up to the age of seventeen and find a way to send them to Britain. Israel knew that he needed the assistance of regional committees to quickly establish the machinery to realize such a plan, but British Jews were forbidden to visit Berlin. He had remained in contact with Bertha ever since they met in Nuremberg. Bertha was at her Euston office when she received the invitation from her old friend to visit him in Berlin.

The Quakers, a group that numbered just twenty-three thousand in Britain at the time, were permitted to travel freely to and from Nazi Germany. This generous attitude was the result of the group’s humanitarian work after the First World War, the so-called Quakerspeisung—Quaker feeding—a program that provided five million German children with food in the aftermath of the war and recession.

Many children who benefited from this philanthropic work grew up to become senior Nazi officers; the memory of the group’s benevolence remained clear across the nation and political divides. In 1936 a Nazi dictionary for children provided just three entries for church denominations: Protestanten, Katholische, and Quäker. The definition for Quäker identified the group as having “sacrificially cared for destitute children in Germany after the Great War.” As a result, the Nazi regime allowed the Quakers to continue their philanthropic work relatively unimpeded.

In the days after Kristallnacht, Bertha traveled to Berlin with a delegation of five colleagues to confer with Wilfrid Israel as to how they might, with the utmost urgency, evacuate children to Britain. When she arrived, Bertha attempted to keep her presence in the city secret, fearing that German Quakers living in the city might experience reprisals were the group’s plans exposed. These plans, first suggested by the German Jewish social worker and refugee activist Solomon Adler-Rudel and devised in collaboration with the Jewish Refugees Committee, were a masterpiece of collaboration and international organization.

Vulnerable German children up to the age of seventeen would take a train from Germany to the Netherlands, which, the day after Kristallnacht, had agreed to allow temporary residence to an unlimited number of German and Austrian children. From Holland, they would take the ferry to Britain, to be accepted into the home of a willing family. There would be unimaginable pain as children were parted from their parents, not knowing when or if they would again meet, but the plan seemed preferable to any alternative. As she returned to Britain, Bertha knew that without the backing of the British government—which would need to issue the immigration permits—it would come to naught.

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was torn on how his government should respond to current events. As news from Germany spread, the prevailing tide of public opinion had shifted; national anxieties about asylum seekers were, it seemed, matched and even surpassed by the urge to demonstrate compassion on the international stage. Outrage had finally grown to the monstrous proportions necessary for action.

Chamberlain told the House of Commons that his government would consider “any possible way by which we can help these people.” An “open doors” policy was out of the question, however, not least because of fears that refugees might compete for jobs at a time of high unemployment. Even prominent Jewish representatives appeared to oppose the large-scale admission of Jews, seemingly afraid of agitating anti-Semitism in Britain.

Four days after the attacks, a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Foreign Policy discussed possible responses. The home secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, who was from a Quaker family, suggested that part of the British annual quota of sixty thousand immigrants—of which only about a quarter had currently been used—might be earmarked for German Jews suffering from Nazi oppression. The previous September, Winston Churchill had written an open letter in the Evening Standard imploring Hitler to cease his persecution of Jews; now he suggested settling refugees in a colony such as British Guiana. The discussion ended without resolution.

On the morning of November 21, eleven days after the violence of Kristallnacht, Bertha Bracey met the home secretary, accompanied by five other humanitarian representatives. Among them was Ben Greene, who had returned from a trip to Germany only that morning. The members of this interfaith group, called the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, outlined a plan that, Hoare soon realized, might represent precisely the kind of grand gesture that the British public required.

At first, Hoare expressed some doubt that any parents would willingly send their child alone to a foreign country, to live with strangers. Greene explained that, while he was in Berlin, he had put the same question to Jewish families in person.

“They were,” Greene told the politician, “almost unanimously in favor of parting with their children.” Better to assume the risks of their children going to a foreign country, most parents had told him, than keep them to face the capricious dangers at home.

Moved by Bertha’s tragic descriptions of Berlin, challenged by her display of Quaker faith in action, and no doubt inspired by what seemed like a public relations coup, Hoare at last committed to a course of action. Provided they had a guarantor to offer food, shelter, and the cost of a ticket home, “transmigrant” children, as they were to be known, would be welcome in Britain. Visas and alien cards would be waived in place of a new permit bearing the child’s name and those of his or her parents.

That evening Hoare made good on his promise. In a debate in the House of Commons he pledged that, while the refugee issue was “an international problem” that “no single country can hope to solve,” Britain was “prepared to play [its] full part. “I believe that we could find homes in this country for a very large number [of children] without any harm to our own population,” he continued. We shall, Hoare promised, “put no obstacle in the way of children coming here.”

There was much to be done. In addition to the logistical challenges involved in bringing unaccompanied minors across Europe, there was the issue of locating and vetting British families who could provide safe lodging. Ideally these individuals would be equipped to ease the children’s psychological turmoil at having been separated from their parents. Regional committees needed to be set up to enlist foster parents and organize accommodations.

Then there was the question of how—considering that the need vastly outstripped the provision—places would be allocated. Priority would be given to middle-class candidates, perceived to be likely to adapt most quickly to a new country, and—in a grim paralleling of the Nazi preference for Aryan-looking children—blond girls were favored, as potential British foster parents and guarantors were more inclined to choose them from photographs.

Dennis Cohen, chair of the Jewish Refugees Committee’s emigration department, and his wife left for Berlin on November 28, 1938, to finalize arrangements with the German government and consult with the welfare organizations responsible for making selections—the Reichsvertretung in Germany, and the Kultusgemeinde in Austria—from more than six hundred applications that had already arrived.

The children were to be brought out of Germany by various means, mainly train, but also by plane in some cases. The proposal was dubbed by the German Railway Authority as simply Kindertransport—the Children’s Transport.

The Nazis cooperated with the plan: so long as no money or valuables were removed from Germany, and the emigration was handled discreetly and with no cost to the state, the party voiced no objection to sending Jewish children to Britain. The SS organized extra carriages for the refugees to be attached to regular trains. The refugees would be accompanied by a minimum number of adult supervisors, around one adult per twenty-five children in the first instance. The British act of benevolence was also conditional: all young people accepted into the country were expected to have left Britain for a new country of asylum within two years, preferably one.

Kellogg-Briand Delusions, 1927

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 468-470:

At the same time as Hitler was planning a future world war, the world’s major powers were gathering in the Clock Room (Salon de l’Horloge) inside the French Foreign Office on the Quai d’Orsay, Paris, on 27 August, for an elaborate ceremony to sign the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy. The pact had evolved from negotiations begun in 1927 by Frank Kellogg, the US Secretary of State, and Aristide Briand, the French Foreign Minister. On 6 April 1927, Briand announced his country’s intention to enter into a bilateral agreement with the USA, stipulating that neither country would resort to war with each other, and that any dispute between them would be settled by peaceful means. Two months later, Briand submitted to the American government a draft of the proposed treaty. The American reply came in December 1927. Kellogg suggested the proposed Franco-American agreement should be expanded into a multilateral treaty to be signed by other countries, to which Briand readily agreed. In recognition of their joint diplomatic efforts, the agreement became known as the Kellogg–Briand Pact, and was greatly welcomed by the public.

At the signature ceremony in Paris, Briand gave an inspiring speech, saying at one point: ‘Can the world present a nobler lesson than the spectacle of this assemblage, where Germany appears for the signature of a pact against war, of its own free will, and without reserve, among the other signatories, its former enemies?’ Briand also spoke in glowing terms of Stresemann: ‘One can believe me particularly happy, to render homage to the highness of mind and to the courage of this eminent politician who, during more than three years, has not hesitated to assume full responsibility in the work of European co-operation for the maintenance of peace.’

The main text of the Kellogg–Briand Pact consisted of two brief articles. Under Article 1, the signatories condemned the ‘recourse to war for the solution of international controversies’, and further promised to ‘renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relationship with one another’. Article 2 required the contracting parties to solve all disputes or conflicts by peaceful means. The original 15 signatories were the United Kingdom, Germany, USA, France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, and South Africa. Eventually, a further 47 nations followed suit. Elements of the pact were later incorporated into the League of Nations charter.

The Kellogg–Briand agreement, which was seen at the time as a milestone in international relations, gave the public around the world the false illusion that perpetual peace had arrived, but did not limit in any way the right of a nation to self-defence against the attack of any other nation, or alter the military obligations arising from the Covenant of the League of Nations or already agreed binding treaties. The pact contained no legal mechanism for enforcement and was, for some, a ‘worthless piece of paper’, which proved completely ineffective as a means of preventing war. It did provide, however, a legal basis for the concept of a ‘crime against peace’, the crime for which the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Tribunal tried and executed the senior leaders judged responsible for starting the Second World War.

Russo-German Rearmament, 1926

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 417-419:

The year ended dramatically with another domestic political crisis, revolving once again around the activities of the Reichswehr. It began on 3 December, when the Manchester Guardian published an article by its Berlin correspondent, Frederick Voigt, on the clandestine connection between the Reichswehr and the Soviet government, headlined ‘Cargoes of Munitions from Russia to Germany’. The article gave details of an agreement between the Junkers Company and the Soviet government to build factories for the manufacture of military aircraft. Details of this plan fell into the hands of Voigt, who also discovered plans for the building of chemical plants in the Soviet Union that would manufacture poison gas for both countries. Voigt further revealed that a Soviet cargo ship loaded with ammunition and weapons had sunk in the Baltic, en-route to Germany. A second article by Voigt, published on 6 December, with the headline ‘Berlin Military Transactions’, gave details about the building of a Junkers plant in Moscow, which was intended to manufacture 100 aeroplanes for German use. It was clear Seeckt had sanctioned these plans, and officers of the Reichswehr had travelled to Russia on false passports to disguise their identities.

On 9 December, the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts printed these startling revelations, under the headline: ‘Soviet Grenades for German Guns’. The Social Democrats were given further damaging information about German secret rearmament: in the harbour of Stettin, local stevedores had observed freighters bringing in artillery shells from Russia for delivery to the Reichswehr. These workers admitted they were given extra money in return for a promise of secrecy. On 16 December, Philipp Scheidemann, a prominent Social Democratic member of the Reichstag, used parliamentary exemption from prosecution to deliver a devastating speech outlining details of the Russo-German secret rearmament, during which he called for the resignation of Otto Gessler, the Defence Minister. Right-wing nationalists called Scheidemann ‘a traitor’ and walked out of the debating chamber. Of course, the allegations made by Scheidemann were not new, but the effect of revealing them in a Reichstag debate raised the political temperature to boiling point.

The Social Democrats called on the Chancellor, Wilhelm Marx, to immediately remove Gessler as the Defence Minister and reform the Reichswehr. Failure to act would compel them to withdraw their support from the government. On 17 December, the day after Scheidemann’s incendiary speech, the Social Democrats tabled a vote of no confidence against the Marx government, which was carried by a vote of 249 to 171, with the DNVP surprisingly voting for the motion because they were determined to join the next government.

The third Marx cabinet resigned on 18 December, but agreed to Hindenburg’s request to stay on in a caretaker capacity until a new government was formed. For the third year running, Germans celebrated Christmas with another government crisis. Once again, it would not be resolved until the New Year.