The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

In a matter of weeks, hundreds of thousands of German troops and their equipment – including many guns captured from the Russians during the final German advance - were transferred from one front to the other.
    The Army High Command (OHL), and in particular its head, seventy-year-old Field Marshal Hindenburg, and his deputy, Quartermaster-General and de facto commander-in-chief, General Erich Ludendorff, had begun to exercise a virtual dictatorship over the country from 1916 onwards, albeit one disguised by a veneer of law and a not entirely compliant Reichstag. With hundreds of thousands of fresh American ‘doughboys’ pouring into France, and the USA mobilising its finances and its industries for war, the High Command knew that Germany would soon face a far stronger enemy than before. Best to strike the decisive blow now. A great offensive in France had therefore been in preparation for some months.
    On 21 March 1918, the High Command launched a massive attack on the British 5th Army. The German planners had chosen a perceived weak point of the enemy front, the hinge between the British and French forces, near St Quentin on the Somme. Preceded by the most massive artillery bombardment of the war – involving 6,000 heavy guns and 3,000 mortars – and assisted by extremely foggy conditions on the ground, elite German ‘storm-troop’ units punched holes in the enemy lines and forced the British back.
    The German offensive gained four and a half miles in a day and took 21,000 British prisoners. Within two days, they had reached the key barrier of the Somme River, and by dawn on 23 March three giant guns specially manufactured by Krupp were in position and bombarding Paris, which was now only seventy-four miles distant. Two hundred and fifty-six Parisians were killed in a single morning. The Kaiser declared ‘the battle won, the English totally defeated’. The next day, the Germans crossed the Somme and began to advance on Paris itself. 7
    There were further gains over the following weeks, here and elsewhere on the long front line, and on a map the bulge created by the German offensive looked impressive. But the ‘English’ were not defeated. Nor were the French or the Americans. As spring turned to summer, there were no more quick, dramatic advances. The German army found itself short of reserves and having to man a much longer, less easily defensible line than the one they had occupied in March, before the offensive began. 8 In fact, the strength of the German field army fell between March and July from 5.1 million to 4.2 million – many of the casualties its best, most experienced soldiers 9 – just at the same time as the Entente forces were being strengthened by a total of 2 million fresh Americans. Certain categories of light artillery and flame-throwers had their production quotas reduced because there were simply not enough trained fighting men at the front available to use the quantities being shipped from Germany’s factories. 10
    The German thrust was eventually held in mid-July 1918, sixty miles or so north-east of Paris. For the first time, American troops, fighting around Château-Thierry, played a decisive role. Within a matter of weeks, the enemy had begun to advance once more, and German troops were forced into a retreat that would end only with the Reich’s plea for an armistice little more than a hundred days later.
     
    The collapse of the final, desperate German offensive in the west accentuated the growing social and political polarisation in the Reich. In 1914, almost the entire German political spectrum (with a few exceptions on the far left) had united in a so-called Burgfrieden (literally ‘fortress peace’), or wartime truce. Something similar occurred in France, where the Prime Minister of the time dubbed it the union sacrée (‘sacred union’).
    Immediately following the outbreak of the war, only one Social Democrat Reichstag deputy, Karl Liebknecht, had voted against war credits.