during the transition period' (2nd September-7th October) provided for in the agreement between the Allied Governments and Germany which had been signed on the 30th August and had previously been attached as Annex III to the Final Protocol of the London Conference.1 Thenceforward, however, the deliveries were to be paid for at prices to be fixed by the Reparation Commission and by the new Mixed (German and Allied) Committee 2 for dealing with deliveries in kind, and payments on account were to be made to the mine-owners by the Agent-General for Reparation Payments on the 10th, 20th, and 30th September. This marks the point at which the régime of violence, inaugurated by the Franco-Belgian invasion of the Ruhr on the 11th January, 1923, gave place to the régime inaugurated by the agreed settlement between all the Governments concerned, the history of which, from the 12th October, 1923, to the 30th August, 1924, is traced below.

It must be added that, while the payments and deliveries which were imposed upon the Ruhr mine-owners, as has been described above, were the most important fruits of the Franco-Belgian victory, the victors did not confine their attentions to the Bergbauverein but exploited all the leading industries of the Occupied and Invaded Territory to the best of their ability during the nine months in question. It would be tedious to record the history of these other negotiations, which were conducted in the Invaded. Territory by the M.I.C.U.M. and in the Occupied Territory by the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission (the British representative abstaining), since the manner in which these agreements and renewals of agreements were extorted was nothing new. The most important products involved were wood and chemicals, including dye-stuffs, especially the products of the Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik of Ludwigshafen; but similar measures were applied to cutlery, tools, and other metal goods, automobiles, bicycles, safes, aluminium, enamels, glass, bricks, paper, textiles, and sugar.5 These deliveries were partly financed by a turn-over tax, usually fixed at 2 per cent., which was designed to distribute the burden by imposing part of it upon industries, or branches of industries, the

4

1 See Section (vi), p. 383, below.

3

2 Set up under the Protocol of the 16th August, 1924, Annex II, Clause 3. 3 The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 27th February; Le Temps, 1st March,

1924.

Le Temps, 2nd February; The Times, 3rd February and 4th April, 1924. 5 Le Temps, 27th February, 1st March, 2nd and 28th May; The Times, 4th and 17th April, 1924.

products of which were not susceptible of transportation to France and Belgium.1 The general effect of these measures was to turn the Occupied and Invaded Territories, from December 1923 to August 1924 inclusive, into a 'Reparations Province' in which France and Belgium extracted a local tribute from private German industry in lieu of the payments due to them by the Government of the German Reich. This procedure, which was as uneconomic as it was inequitable, had almost accomplished the ruin, not only of the Rhineland and the Ruhr, but of Germany as a whole, when, just in time, the Dawes Plan' was substituted for it.

(iii) The So-Called 'Separatist Movement' in the Occupied German Territories (1923–4).2

The history of the so-called 'Separatist Movement' in the Occupied German Territories down to the Franco-Belgian invasion of the Ruhr on the 11th January, 1923, has been given in the preceding volume, where it has been indicated that, during the first phase, the movement had been neither representative of the local German population nor an important factor in international affairs. During the second phase, which opened at Düsseldorf three days after the German Government's resistance to the Franco-Belgian invasion had been brought to an end by President Ebert's decree of the 1 See an account of this in The Times of the 25th March, 1924.

2 The principal relevant documents are collected in the following publications :

(1) German Government (Ministry of Foreign Affairs): Notenwechsel zwischen der Deutschen und der Französischen Regierung über die Separatistischen Umtriebe in den besetzten Gebieten (1924, No. 1, Berlin, Reichsdruckerei).

(2) German Government (Ministry for the Occupied Territories): Urkunden zum Separatistenputsch im Rheinland im Herbst 1923 [down to the 1st August, 1924] (Berlin, 1925, Heymann).

(3) Central Office for the Aid of Refugees from the Palatinate, Heidelberg : Documentary Evidence of the Assistance given by the French Military and Civil Authorities to the Separatists in the Palatinate. (I. End of October 1923 to beginning of February 1924; II. 1st-16th February, 1924; III. Since the 16th February, 1924.) [All this evidence was stated to be from official sources.]

Nos. 1 and 2 are referred to hereafter as White Book and Yellow Book respectively.

Survey, 1920-3, pp. 95-6.

4 For a doubly instructive description of Dr. Dorten, the protagonist of the movement during this first phase, see Yellow Book, pp. 41-56: Report, dated the 16th April, 1923, from the Marquis de Lillers, the French Chief Delegate in the Wiesbaden District, to M. Tirard, the French High Commissioner in the Occupied Territories. This document was first published in The Observer (London) of the 24th June, 1923.

1

27th September, 1923, the Separatists were no more representative of their fellow-countrymen than they had been previously; but their activities had far more serious consequences-partly on account of the disorganization into which the German administration in the Occupied Territories had been thrown by the foregoing struggle with France and Belgium, and partly because of the greater measure of support which the Separatists received this time from representatives on the spot of the French Government. The first of these two new elements in the situation was aptly described in a note of the 10th November, 1923, from the German Ambassador in Paris to the French Government :

2

The events at present occurring in the Rhineland are really only explicable if account is taken of the way in which the ground for them has been prepared by the measures which the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission has taken during the current year. The defensive front which has to bear the brunt of the Separatists' attempts to make a Putsch has been utterly weakened in advance. Owing to the mass expulsions of officials, and especially of the leading officials without exception, the administrative machine is already completely shattered. Moreover, in almost all localities the population has been robbed of its leaders, since the policy of expulsion has not spared the heads of the political parties and of the trade unions. Any enlightenment of the population has been impossible for months owing to the crippling of the entire non-Separatist Press by the most severe administration of the censorship, the standing suppression of many newspapers, and the disallowance of all meetings not convened by the Separatists. Finally, any liaison between the political, economic and trade union organizations of the Rhineland and the corresponding associations in the rest of Germany has long been made difficult, or rather absolutely impossible, by the drawing of a strict cordon of isolation round the entire Occupied Territory.

The second new element in the situation was the barely disguised countenance and support which the Separatists now received from the French authorities. Although the unauthorized bearing of fire-arms by German nationals in the Occupied Territory was strictly forbidden, under severe penalties, by the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission 3 (this being, indeed, one of the elementary duties of a body which had been called into existence in order to provide for the security of the Allied Armies of Occupation), the so-called 'Separatists' were now permitted, not merely to bear arms, but to form themselves into military organizations, under

Texts of protests by authoritative and representative bodies in the Occupied Territory, Yellow Book, pp. 10-20.

2 White Book, No. 7.

3 Ordinance No. 3, Article 20, of the 10th January, 1920.

the eyes of the French officials, gendarmes, and soldiers." Indeed, there were cases in which arms that private German citizens had been properly compelled to deliver up at the beginning of the Occupation were served out to the Separatists by the French authorities who had them in charge. There were other cases in which weapons captured from Separatists by the German police, representing the lawfully constituted German authorities, in the course of fighting which had arisen out of attempts, on the Separatists' part, to capture public buildings, were restored by the French authorities to these disturbers of the peace, who-even if they possessed a warrant (which ought never to have been granted to them) from a representative of the Rhineland High Commission— had forfeited any right to bear these arms by the use to which they had put them. It may be added that the Separatists were frequently conveyed to their fields of action in special trains placed at their disposal by the Franco-Belgian Railway Régie, and that in such cases they were usually permitted to use the local railway station as their base of operations. On the other hand, the German after the first bloodshed at

8

police were, in almost every case Düsseldorf on the 30th September, 1923, either disarmed by the French before the appearance of the Separatist bands or else forbidden to use fire-arms against the Separatists in any circumstances under pain of immediate intervention on the part of the French military forces." In the latter case, French troops or gendarmes sometimes escorted the Separatists as they advanced to the attack in order to make it impossible for the German police to transgress the prohibition without immediately bringing themselves into armed conflict with the Occupying Powers. If, nevertheless, the police did succeed-by the use of sabres, bâtons, or fire-hosesin keeping the Separatists at bay (a method of defending public buildings which required considerable courage, when the assailants were free to employ fire-arms and did so), the French authorities contrived, either by ordering the police to quit the buildings which they were defending, or by actually placing them under arrest, to enable the Separatists to capture their objectives. When once this had been achieved and the Separatists had hoisted their flag and installed their travesty of an administration, any counter-attempts, on the part of the lawful authorities or the population, to eject them were severely repressed as breaches of the peace; pressure was

K

. This and the following references, in the letters of the Greek alphabet, are to notes printed at the end of the section (pp. 320-2).

λ

brought to bear upon the lawful German officials by the French authorities to carry on their work under the Separatist régime; and the Separatists were actively assisted not only by being given free passes over the Régie lines and free rations from the French military stores," but by being allowed to force printers to print and shopkeepers to accept illegal paper-money (their so-called Notgeld"), while they were enabled to maintain their authority by deporting loyal officials and prominent private citizens wholesale into the Unoccupied Territory.*

No doubt it would be an error to assume that the French authorities foresaw and approved all the misdeeds of their protégés. The Separatists appear to have numbered among them no single individual of either standing or ability. Many of them were foreign to the Rhineland and even to Germany, and convicted criminals were freely admitted into their ranks. Their régime meant the substitution of anarchy for an administration which, though not one of the most liberal, had been admittedly one of the most orderly in the world, and the subjection of a civilized people in the heart of Western Europe to conditions which, until the outbreak of the War of 1914, had been banished from Europe proper (outside the Balkan Peninsula and the Russian Border) for many generations past. In the Rhineland the French people and Government, which were more implacable in their attitude towards Bolshevism than most of their neighbours, were instrumental in placing in power, not the proletariat or the peasantry (which suffered with the rest) but the criminal dregs of society, and the fact that the necessary military support was mainly provided by French African troops gave a touch to the picture for which it is difficult to find a parallel except in the reconquered Southern States of the American Union. during the worst days of the reconstruction' which followed the Civil War of 1861-5.

Perhaps the most painful feature in the whole affair was the official attitude of the French Government, which maintained that it had held completely aloof from the preparations which had culminated in the launching of the Separatist activities'; 2 that it had remained, and continued to remain, a stranger to the events

1 In the Reichstag, on the 20th February, 1924, Dr. Höfle, the Minister for the Occupied Territories, stated in answer to an interpellation that, out of a total of 140,000 troops in garrison in the Rhineland, 120,000 were coloured. (The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 22nd February, 1924.)

2 M. Poincaré's note of the 6th November, 1923 (White Book, No. 6).

1