IB History Role of Conflict Notes

Role of Conflict: A Republic Born and Battered by Violence

The Spartacist Uprising, 1918-1919

1. The new Weimar government under Friedrich Ebert faced an armed left-wing challenge almost immediately, when the Spartacist League attempted a revolutionary uprising in Berlin in January 1919.
2. Ebert struck a pact with Wilhelm Groener, Chief of Staff of the German military, trading military protection for allowing the army to remain a virtual state within a state.
3. The army, alongside the paramilitary Freikorps, crushed the Spartacist uprising with considerable violence, including the murder of the revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
4. This early reliance on the military and Freikorps to defend the Republic set a troubling precedent: Weimar's survival from its very first weeks depended on armed forces whose loyalty to democracy itself was, at best, conditional.

The Kapp Putsch, 1920

1. In March 1920 a group on the political right, led by Wolfgang Kapp, attempted to overthrow the Weimar government in the Kapp Putsch.
2. This time the military declined to defend the Republic, with the Reichswehr's leadership declaring it would not fire upon fellow Reichswehr soldiers involved in the putsch.
3. The putsch was defeated instead by a general strike called by socialist trade unions, showing that organised labour, not the state's own armed forces, had become one of democracy's most reliable defenders.
4. The contrast between the army's willingness to crush the left-wing Spartacists and its reluctance to act against the right-wing Kapp putschists revealed a serious and lasting bias within Germany's military establishment.

Communist Uprisings, 1919-1923

1. Beyond Berlin, communist uprisings also broke out in Munich, the Ruhr, and Hamburg between 1919 and 1923, part of a broader pattern of armed challenges to the fragile new Republic.
2. Each uprising was eventually suppressed, but the recurring pattern of armed left-wing insurrection reinforced middle-class fears of a Bolshevik-style revolution reaching Germany.
3. This persistent instability meant ordinary Germans experienced the Republic's early years as a period of near-continuous political violence rather than settled democratic normality.
4. The KPD's repeated willingness to attempt armed seizures of power also gave right-wing parties a ready justification for their own paramilitary organisation.

The Beerhall Putsch, 1923

1. In November 1923, at the height of the hyperinflation crisis, Hitler attempted his own armed seizure of power in Munich, consciously imitating Mussolini's March on Rome of the previous year.
2. The Beerhall Putsch failed within a day, and Hitler was arrested, tried, and sentenced to five years in prison, of which he served only nine months at Landsberg.
3. The failure of the putsch taught Hitler a crucial lesson: as he later put it, if outvoting his opponents took longer than outshooting them, at least the result would be guaranteed by their own constitution.
4. From this point onward the Nazi Party abandoned direct armed insurrection in favour of a dual strategy, contesting elections while still using paramilitary violence to intimidate rivals and dominate the streets.

Street Violence: The SA Versus the KPD

1. Through the late 1920s and early 1930s, Nazi Sturmabteilung, or SA, paramilitaries fought recurring street battles against Communist Party paramilitaries for physical control of German streets and meeting halls.
2. This violence was not incidental to Nazi strategy but central to it, since visibly dominating public space signalled strength and inevitability to undecided voters.
3. Police and judicial authorities frequently treated Nazi violence more leniently than left-wing violence, reflecting the same institutional bias toward the right that had been visible since the Kapp Putsch.
4. By the early 1930s Germany's largest cities regularly saw pitched street battles between uniformed paramilitary formations, a level of normalised political violence unmatched in most other Western democracies of the period.

The Ruhr Occupation and Passive Resistance, 1923

1. When Germany defaulted on reparations payments at the end of 1922, France and Belgium responded by occupying the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland, in January 1923.
2. The German government responded by encouraging passive resistance and non-cooperation among Ruhr workers, continuing to pay their wages even as industrial production collapsed entirely.
3. Funding this policy of passive resistance through the simple printing of more money was a direct trigger for the hyperinflation crisis that peaked in November 1923.
4. The Ruhr crisis therefore shows how an international conflict over reparations translated directly into a domestic economic and political emergency that further destabilised the young Republic.

The Reichstag Fire, 1933

1. On 27 February 1933, about a week before the crucial March election, the Reichstag building burned down in an act of arson.
2. A Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was tried and executed for the fire, though historians remain divided on whether he acted entirely alone.
3. Regardless of who set the fire, the Nazi Party gained the most from it, since Hitler used the incident to persuade President Hindenburg to issue an emergency decree suspending basic civil rights.
4. As one assessment of the episode put it, this decree laid one of the legal cornerstones of the Nazi dictatorship, transforming a single act of arson into the justification for permanent emergency rule.

Conflict as Both Cause and Pretext

1. The pattern across this section shows conflict operating in two related but distinct ways in Nazi Germany's emergence, as a genuine destabilising force and as a manufactured pretext for further repression.
2. The Spartacist uprising and Kapp Putsch were genuine attempts at seizing power that destabilised the Republic in reality.
3. The Reichstag Fire, by contrast, may have been a single act by one individual that the Nazis then deliberately exaggerated into a fabricated communist conspiracy to justify actions they had already intended to take.
4. Distinguishing between conflict that genuinely threatened the state and conflict that was opportunistically exploited is central to understanding how authoritarian rule actually emerged in Germany.

Historiography: How Far Did the Reichstag Fire Change the Outcome?

Comparing the Role of Conflict Across Case Studies

1. Germany's pattern of both genuine armed uprisings and manufactured pretexts recurs, in different forms, across this unit's case studies.
2. Castro's Sierra Maestra guerrilla campaign against Batista represents conflict as a genuine, sustained military struggle rather than a single dramatic incident like the Reichstag Fire.
3. China's civil war between the CCP and the Guomindang similarly involved sustained armed conflict over years rather than a single seizure of power, closer to Castro's pattern than to Hitler's single failed putsch followed by legal manoeuvring.
4. For a Section B(b) essay on the role of conflict, pairing the Reichstag Fire with Castro's Sierra Maestra campaign shows two very different relationships between violence and the achievement of power, a single exploited incident versus a sustained military campaign.

The Freikorps and Privatised Political Violence

1. The Freikorps were volunteer paramilitary units formed largely from demobilised soldiers, operating with informal government tolerance rather than as an official part of the Reichswehr.
2. These units carried out much of the actual violence used to crush the Spartacist uprising and other left-wing insurrections in 1919, allowing the formal military to keep some distance from the brutality involved.
3. Many former Freikorps members later moved directly into Nazi paramilitary organisations, carrying their experience of unaccountable political violence with them into the SA.
4. This pattern of the state informally outsourcing violence to loosely controlled paramilitary groups became a recurring feature of German political life throughout the Weimar period.

The Night of the Long Knives, 1934

1. By 1934 the SA's leadership under Ernst Röhm had grown so large and independently powerful that it posed a potential threat to Hitler's own authority and to the army's cooperation with the regime.
2. In the Night of the Long Knives in June and July 1934, Hitler ordered the murder of Röhm and dozens of other SA leaders, along with several unrelated political rivals.
3. This purge, carried out entirely outside any legal process, demonstrated that the regime's earlier reliance on the SA's street violence had itself become something to be managed and, when necessary, violently suppressed.
4. The army's approval of this purge, in exchange for the SA's diminished role, helped secure military loyalty to Hitler and paved the way for his later assumption of the title Führer.

Conflict as a Recruiting Tool

1. Beyond its immediate political effects, ongoing street violence served the Nazi Party as an effective recruiting and propaganda tool throughout the early 1930s.
2. SA marches, uniforms, and confrontations projected an image of disciplined strength that appealed to Germans exhausted by years of perceived governmental weakness.
3. Nazi propaganda consistently blamed communist provocation for violence the SA had itself often initiated, allowing the Party to present itself simultaneously as both aggressor and victim.
4. This dual image, strong enough to dominate the streets yet supposedly acting only in self-defence, proved a highly effective way of building support among voters anxious about disorder.

The International Dimension: Versailles as a Source of Conflict

1. Beyond domestic street violence, the Treaty of Versailles itself represented a form of ongoing international conflict that shaped German politics throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.
2. Continued German resentment of Versailles fed directly into support for parties promising to overturn it, well before Hitler's own more aggressive foreign policy began after 1933.
3. The Ruhr occupation of 1923 showed how quickly this underlying international conflict could escalate into a concrete domestic crisis when reparations disputes turned into military occupation.
4. This entanglement of international grievance with domestic political conflict meant German authoritarian movements could draw on both foreign and domestic sources of anger simultaneously.

Why the Republic's Defenders Could Not Match This Violence

1. Parties genuinely committed to defending Weimar democracy, especially the SPD, generally lacked an equivalent paramilitary force willing to match Nazi and Communist street violence blow for blow.
2. The Reichsbanner, a paramilitary organisation formed by pro-republican parties, existed but never achieved the same scale, discipline, or state tolerance as the SA.
3. This imbalance meant that as street violence escalated through the early 1930s, the forces most invested in preserving Weimar democracy were consistently outmatched in the very arena, physical control of public space, that increasingly determined political outcomes.
4. This asymmetry between the Republic's defenders and its paramilitary opponents is a key reason conflict on the streets translated so directly into conflict's political payoff for the Nazis.

The Long Shadow of 1919-1923 Violence

1. The cumulative effect of nearly five years of recurring uprisings, putsches, and street violence between 1918 and 1923 was to normalise the idea that German politics could legitimately be settled by force rather than solely through parliamentary means.
2. Even after the relative calm of the Golden Age from 1924 to 1929, this earlier normalisation of violence never fully disappeared from German political culture.
3. When the Great Depression reignited political extremism after 1929, this reservoir of accepted violence was readily available to be mobilised again, first by the SA and then, briefly, by renewed street conflict, before culminating in the Reichstag Fire and its aftermath.