Darkness into Light Box Set Page 5

  On the other hand – and this is what prompted the return of the chronic insomnia of his Bitterfeld days – he was straining every sinew to win the war for his country, a war he believed was unnecessary, economically ruinous and morally repugnant.

  And yet he could not publicly condemn it. He had refused to sign a petition against the war organised by his friend the novelist Robert Musil and supported by most of the rest of artistic Berlin - Gerhart Hauptmann, the playwright, who he also knew, and many others.

  He had refused to sign even the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, a document in which leading figures from science and culture in Germany rejected Germany’s pariah status, as forced on them by the Allies, rejected the charges of German barbarism and asserted Germany’s place as the cradle of European culture and scientific progress.

  Fritz Haber had signed it. Second cousin Max Liebermann had signed it. Many Jews (practising, lapsed, converted) had signed it, to signal yet again how utterly German they were. Rathenau found the document odious.

  Hard work was a relief from this inner turmoil. He worked closely with Wichard von Moellendorff, so closely that many biographers of Rathenau have wasted time and space on a vain attempt to work out who did what.

  Broadly speaking, Rathenau had a synthesizing, unifying mind – he was a Spinozan, he had the mind of a monist. He also had a co-operative temperament, at least in his public life. He tended to bring people, organisations and ideas together. At the conceptual level, he set aims. A lot of the work of enablement fell on the young engineer – he of the oval, pale sensitive face - and Moellendorff did it well.

  Rathenau and Moellendorff decided to send out a questionnaire to every relevant company in Germany, to be as clear as possible on the exact state of current raw materials provision. The results took about three weeks to come in, and when they did they were staggering:

  Although supplies of some essential raw materials would last for a year, in many cases they would be exhausted far sooner. If anything, the picture was even worse than the one Rathenau had painted for Falkenhayn, except of course that the urgent and vital saltpetre issue had now been resolved.

  Rathenau and Moellendorf decided to create and concentrate on an essential list of the 900 to 1000 most vital firms supplying the Ministry of War. In effect, they were creating a model of the supply situation which was more manageable to work with.

  They were also dealing with a constantly changing, and in most cases worsening, situation. With regard to metals; antimony, wolfram and chrome had to be added to the ‘core’ metals of copper, tin and nickel on the list of shortages.

  As Moellendorff pointed out to Rathenau, early on, the agreement with Falkenhayn

  made the KRA responsible also for textiles ‘which are necessary for national defence and which cannot long-term be found in sufficient quantities within our borders.’

  Falkenhayn had in mind such items as wool for the German field-grey uniforms. (The department was already responsible for the metal to make helmets) However, the number of textiles, and hence branches of the textile industry, had grown by over 100 in the first month of the department’s operation.

  As Rathenau put it ‘We have provided our soldiers with bullets, but at this rate they are going to have to fire them naked.’ The aphorisms were still pouring out of him .

  The first directives went out to the 900 to 1,000 key firms, steering the flow of the relevant raw materials to where the war-need was greatest and, where necessary, banning the production of luxury goods. More directives fixed prices for the raw materials, most of which were under threat of shortage.

  With Colonel Oehme’s connivance, a ‘secret extra secretary’ was smuggled in. Oehme was indeed proving himself the expert manipulator of systems that Falkenhayn had introduced him as. But they were still massively understaffed and short of space. Again with Oehme’s help, the three rooms were expanded to twenty, then rapidly to sixty.

  The KRA was now occupying an entire wing of the Ministry of War. Among the first of the many enemies the department made were those evicted from these offices.

  Staff expanded commensurately, first from four to a dozen, then steadily increasing, reaching 131 by 1st January 1915. However, it was difficult to find staff sufficiently skilled, who were prepared to work daily until midnight (they started at 9am) and who were prepared to put up with chaos which was not helped by the open access to the public, a condition forced on Rathenau.

  This meant that any crank with a complaint, usually about food shortages, which were not even in the department’s remit, could wander in and had to be seen, dealt with and if possible satisfied.

  Among the first cohort of extra staff taken on was Fritz Todt, later to be Hitler’s first Armaments Minister, after he had learned his trade from Moellendorff and Rathenau.

  Hitler’s second Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, was to be better known, as he was caught alive after World War II. Speer gave Rathenau and the KRA a

  glowing testimonial that Walther would have hated.

  Within six weeks, all the companies controlling the production and distribution of each raw material had been set up. Where necessary, Rathenau used his banking contacts, like Max Warburg, who was Jewish, to arrange the outright purchase of key companies, through his rapidly diminishing credit line.

  The companies occupied a unique position between Joint Stock companies (capitalist, private enterprise) and a government controlled bureaucracy (state socialist). The socialist part consisted of an independent, government controlled Commission for Valuation and Distribution. The companies were run for public benefit and were not allowed to issue dividends or make profits from liquidation.

  In many respects, Rathenau’s conception of the state’s relationship to commerce was similar to the medieval German guild laws. Rathenau hoped his unique model of industrial organisation would foreshadow the future, after the war.

  By and large, the new companies, the realisation of Rathenau’s extraordinary vision, worked well from the outset, but there were constant difficulties: the suppliers would understate their stock of, say, aluminium to drive the price up. More significantly, the states of Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg had their own war ministries. Persuading them to centralize control of raw materials under a war ministry situated in the loathed and feared Prussia was a triumph.

  But Rathenau prevailed. Germany’s economy was reorganised onto a war footing.

  However, the enemies of the KRA were growing in number and significance. These enemies were led by a cohort known as The Circle of Hate, even at the time. The Circle of Hate consisted of Hugo Stinnes, Karl Helfferich and Erich Ludendorff. And the Circle was closing around Rathenau.

  Hugo Stinnes was active among his fellow industrialists. Karl Helfferich, a Reichstag deputy for the far-right German National People’s Party, (DNVP – or just ‘Nationalists’), rallied the politicians. Ludendorff was always as much a politician as he was an army man.

  The Circle of Hate began their co-operation at this time because they had the same

  overall war aims. These aims were annexationist – they wanted Germany to conquer as much territory as possible. They then wanted foreign prisoners of war used in new

  factories set up abroad to produce raw materials. Until this could be achieved they did not want the workforce of German factories lost to the army.

  There was also a doctrinal dimension to their opposition: The KRA was seen as an arm of state intervention. It was called socialist, it was called communist. In the quasi-autonomous regions of this highly federalised country, especially in the states in the south, it was called Prussian socialism, Prussian communism – yet more intervention by the hated Berlin.

  Chapter Nine

  Karl Helfferich, was, for all his massive intellect, an instinctive rather than a rational fascist. He truly believed that an educated elite should rule, not because, or not only because, such people were cleverer but because they were better – a higher form of being.

  Ra
thenau once characterised him as ‘the only man I have ever hated.’ And hatred came hard to Walther. For his part, Helfferich invented an entirely new anti-Jewish jibe to refer to Rathenau, behind his back – Koofmich, a corruption of Kaufmich or buy me.

  He was an economic historian of some renown. His main tome - pithily entitled Money - receiving the same sort of enviable sales, and indeed acclaim, as Rathenau’s books.

  He had a militaristic bent, having played with tin soldiers as a boy – always putting himself on the German side, bullying his younger brothers in the process. He had also served in the German army as a one-year volunteer in a mounted battery of the Third Bavarian Artillery. This was crucial to his later co-operation with Ludendorff, who had a Manichean view of life, as civilians versus the armed forces.

  Helfferich looked like a ferret. He had little beady eyes, ferrety mouth and big, slightly protuberant ears. However, his house in Bambergerstrasse was almost as exquisite as Rathenau’s Grunewald villa (and Freienwalde of course) and the fascist was a near concert level pianist, as good as Walther, and a talented amateur artist.

  As early as November 1914, Helfferich managed to get enough support for a debate about the KRA in the Reichstag. Supported by a coalition of far-right deputies, he moved that existing departments of the War Office should be charged with the supply of raw materials. It was not necessary to have a specialist department. This was a blatant attempt to strangle Rathenau’s KRA at birth.

  Von Falkenhayn managed to rally enough deputies to oppose. Rathenau was hardly

  able to help. He was not a deputy at this time; he had no political patronage; his direct political influence was weak. He sat in the old Reichstag building (the one that served the Nazi cause so well when it burned down in 1933) listening to the debate.

  Rathenau was white in the face, having not slept for days. He was convinced Germany would lose the war in weeks if his department was destroyed. It was therefore painful for him to hear it calumnised as an overly bureaucratic elephant which was actually hampering the war effort.

  Falkenhayn had managed to garner enough support to defeat this, Helfferich’s first effort to get Rathenau, though by no means his last.

  Helfferich’s little effort was not the only parliamentary opposition to the KRA:

  The Centre Party complained that small firms were being squeezed, even forced out of business, by the award of all major contracts to the giant industrial conglomerations. They meant ‘giant industrial conglomerations like Rathenau’s own AEG’, but did not quite spit it out.

  There was actually something in this charge, in the early days. As a result, Rathenau told his exhausted staff to give smaller firms more time to bid where possible.

  Meanwhile, it took Helfferich only weeks, quite possibly days, to return to the attack, with some effect. In December 1914, the post of Secretary General to the Treasury became vacant. The incumbent, one Josef Kühn, had suffered lung problems for some time. Rathenau had taken over some aspects of his job. There was a good reason for this: According to the terms of the Enabling Act which brought the KRA into being, the Secretary General to the Treasury controlled its budget.

  But when Kühn finally resigned, who should stand against Rathenau in the election to succeed him but Karl Helfferich. Rathenau nobly refused to abandon or even delegate work he (rightly) regarded as essential to Germany’s war effort in order to lobby for the vacant post. And in any case, his political contacts were relatively weak – weak compared to his contacts in the artistic and literary world.

  Helfferich, however, was not only a finance expert of world renown, he was also an expert lobbyist. Rathenau’s candidature stood no chance; he duly lost. Control of the purse-strings for Rathenau’s department was now entirely in Helfferich’s hands - in the hands of a man who hated Rathenau as an individual and as a Jew.

  When the initial twenty million marks credit-line Falkenhayn had arranged for the KRA ran out, Rathenau would have to go begging, bowl in hand, to the fascist. Helfferich had one hand on his throat.

  Rathenau had been outflanked and outmanoeuvred by the anti-Jewish far right. He was lonely, overworking, physically exhausted.

  ‘I am at the end of my tether’ he wrote to Lily Deutsch, wife of the AEG director, Felix Deutsch, ‘I don’t know if I can go on.’

  Chapter Ten

  Rathenau was embarking on a four day visit to the headquarters of the eastern front – Kovno, in Lithuania. The man he was going to see was Erich Ludendorff.

  Out of sorts from the massive rail journey from Berlin, Rathenau was met at Kovno

  station by Ludendorff’s adjutant, Captain Markau. Markau accompanied him in a staff car to the Hotel Levinsohn, an establishment which did nothing to lighten Rathenau’s mood. Requisitioned by the army, it was dirty and freezing cold. Rathenau was disgusted with it and felt he deserved better. His rejection of luxury always did have its limits.

  He spent the next morning inspecting the Tillmann iron factories in Kovno and Libau. These factories made screws; AEG was interested in taking them over. The afternoon was spent on the telephone trying to get information about barbed wire manufacture at nearby Libau.

  The first meeting with Ludendorff was next day at Government House in Kovno. The general had just come from a conference in the next room. He greeted the Jewish industrialist, who was two years his junior, like a returning prodigal, hugging him, and enquiring solicitously about his accommodation. Taking his cue from the general’s hypocrisy, Rathenau declared his living conditions first class.

  Ludendorff knew perfectly well that after the huge failure at the Marne in September 1914, Germany would have been out of the war by now, had it not been for the KRA.

  He immediately and enthusiastically agreed to everything Rathenau proposed with regard to barbed wire supply and the screw factory.

  In the evening, over a meal at the Tillmann villa, they discussed the prospects for peace – a subject dear to Rathenau but one which he increasingly felt was hopeless. Ludendorff said peace would come with a German victory.

  He said he would drive Rathenau out to the famous Kovno forts the next day.

  On the drive to the Kovno forts, Rathenau first noticed Ludendorff’s mental condition.

  He was breathing heavily; he had a facial tic on the right side. He kept bending forward - Rathenau feared he might succumb to car-sickness from the lurching of the heavy staff car on the potted roads.

  As the adjutant, Captain Markau, drove them through the flat, uninspiring countryside, Rathenau asked about war leadership – how it compared with leadership in peace. To his surprise Ludendorff became animated. He compared himself to a chess player who not only cannot see the other side’s pieces but can see his own only occasionally, through a cloud or a miasma.

  Ludendorff felt, rightly, that he carried the weight of the German battle effort. Yet he felt he had no control. It is a small step from feeling one has no control to being out of control. Ludendorff’s own doctor, Franz Oppenheimer, diagnosed incipient megalomania in him at this time.

  Surprisingly, the general discussed his mental condition with a frankness which

  amazed Rathenau. Ludendorff admitted ‘I would not be able to fight the battle of

  Tannenberg over again today.’ Rathenau later made a note of the remark.

  Ludendorff spoke about the role of instinct in battle decisions, an instinct he felt had deserted him. This ‘instinct’ was, to Rathenau, not so far removed from the intuition which Spinoza had placed above reason. The general nodded with short sharp movements of his head, but Rathenau was unsure if he had understood, or indeed was listening.

  As they neared the captured Russian trenches they were to visit, the general was animatedly cursing the Austrians for, as he put it, letting themselves be completely vanquished at Ivangorod, making the first encirclement of the Russians impossible.

  He was revealing a deep-seated hatred of Russians that went beyond rationality. He started to sniff as he talked, as if smell
ing out Russians. Rathenau demurred, politely, knowing that Germany’s diplomatic interests would always involve peace with Russia.

  Bismarck himself had said that the secret of politics was to make a good treaty with Russia.

  They reached the now abandoned Russian trenches; Rathenau stretching to his full imposing height as he got out of the car, breathing in the sharp clean air after the claustrophobic effect of Ludendorff’s conversation in an enclosed space. He could hear the cawing of curlews overhead as they flew from their nesting grounds in Scandinavia.

  He was surprised at how narrow the trenches were at the top, no more than a few inches. They were reinforced with corrugated iron and wire netting, but there was plenty of sand on the floor where the sandbags had split.

  Ludendorff was holding forth on the inferiority of trenches dug by eastern peoples – the fire-step was insufficiently built up and insufficiently supported. German trenches were of superior construction. Rathenau nodded, knowing that to be true but less inclined to take the point to its racial conclusion.

  Ever on the lookout for AEG’s interests, Rathenau asked about the barbed wire he hoped to be supplying to the military. Tangled coils of wire, stakes and screw-pickets were visible ahead of the trenches.

  With facts to support him, Ludendorff became crisper and more in control than he had been in the car: the wire needed to be three feet high and about thirty in depth, he said. The army was especially interested in chevaux-de-frise – preconstructed obstacles of posts and barbed wire that could be carried into position and staked out quickly, possibly even when the troops were under fire.

  Rathenau took out a black leather notebook and began to scribble notes. He said he