Abstract
While the Weimar Constitution made the German Foreign Office the sole agency for the administration of German foreign affairs, the Reich President was left with a decisive voice in treaty making and the appointment of diplomatic officers. All cabinets of the 1920’s were coalition governments over which the Chancellor presided as chairman rather than as director. In certain matters, however, he was able to disregard the Foreign Minister. The Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Economics were also influential in foreign affairs. After 1920, the direction of German foreign policy fell into the hands of German bourgeois parties such as the German Peoples Party (Deutsche Volkspartei), which represented most industrialists including the coal and iron magnates of the Ruhr.1
The truth is that the defensive battle on Rhine and Ruhr was given birth by the perceptions of justice and freedom of the German people of all strata and productive classes. The German representation, in taking up this defensive battle, was united and would have tolerated no government which acted otherwise.... Would the German people yet enjoy even a trace of attention from the outside world if it had employed only diplomatic and paper protests? Stresemann (April 4, 1924)
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References
Hajo Haiborn, “Diplomats and Diplomacy in the Early Weimar Republic” in, Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert (editors), The Diplomats 1919-1939 (New York: Atheneum, 1963), I, pp. 25–28.
Ibid., p. 29; Anthonina Vallentin, Stresemann (London: Constable and Co., 1931), v.
Henry L. Bretton, Stresemann and the Revision of Versailles: A Fight for Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), p. 43.
Hans W. Gatzke, Stresemann and the Rearmament of Germany (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954), p. 5
Edward W. Bennett, Germany and the Diplomacy of the Financial Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 1–2
Annelise Thimme, Gustav Stresemann (Hannover and Frankfurt a/M.: Norddeutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1957), passim
Henry Ashley Turner, Jr., Stresemann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 12 and passim.
Eric Sutton (editor and translator) Gustav Stresemann, His Diaries, Letters, and Papers (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 28–29
Gustav Stresemann, Vermächtnis: Der Nachlass in Drei Bänden (Berlin: Ullstein, 1932), passim.
Ernst Fraenkel, Military Occupation and the Rule of Law: Occupation Government in the Rhineland 1918-1923 (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1944), pp. 15–16.
Gert Von Klass, Hugo Stinnes (Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich Verlag, 1958), pp. 9–14.
Ibid., pp. 276-294. See also Paul Ufermann and Carl Hüglin, Stinnes und seine Konzerne (Berlin: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 1923), for the details of the Stinnes-de Lubersac agreement.
Ibid., pp. 303-308, 312, 323; Arnold J. Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs 1924 (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), pp. 288–90.
Paul Weymar, Adenauer (New York: Dutton and Co., 1957), p. 50.
Ibid., March 7, 8, 9, 12, notes on Schacht’s proposal; See also Hjalmar Schacht, Autobiography-Confessions of the Old Wizard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1956), pp. 181–83.
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© 1968 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Schmidt, R.J. (1968). Stresemann and the Fulfilment Policy. In: Versailles and the Ruhr: Seedbed of World War II. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-1081-3_8
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