Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

ARYANS OF ALL NATIONS, UNITE 103At the same time a bloody war was being fought between bands ofGerman and Polish volunteers in the province o£ Upper Silesia on thePolish border. The peace treaty stipulated that a plebiscite decidewhether Upper Silesia, one of Germany's three great coal provinces,should belong to Germany or Poland. The plebiscite in Upper Silesiagave (March 20, 1921), a clear German majority (707,000 to 479,000),though by far not so pronounced as in the German-Polish borderprovinces of West and East Prussia, one time before. Poland sought toseize the province by means of an illegal army (the so-called'insurrectionary leagues'). Germany sent her illegal army against them,among them the most active groups of the Bavarian Citizens' Defense.Hitler cried: 'We have lost our first coal province, the Saar on theGerman French border, to the French; we shall lose the second andlargest, the Ruhr, for it lies within the range of French cannon; the thirdand last, Upper Silesia, must be lost unless our illegal army [Citizens'Defense] defends it.' But he added — and this is his true political line:'This is possible only if the pigsty of Jewish corruption, democratichypocrisy, and Marxist deception is swept out with an iron broom.'An internal crisis was approaching in the Reich. The Germangovernment, under Foreign Minister Doctor Walter Simons, anoutstanding jurist but less of a diplomat, tried to overcome the homecrisis by a solution of the foreign questions, and to gain strength for thesolution of the foreign questions by overcoming the home crisis.Simons, willing in principle to carry out the peace treaty, regarded theeconomic section, providing for an indemnity in the scores of billions,as impracticable; in this view the German government had the supportof John Maynard Keynes, the eminent British economist. It wanted tonegotiate with the Allies; but it did not want to obey commands andsuffer penalties for an indefinite time. In other words, the Allies treatedGermany as a defeated, and, therefore, still reluctant, enemy; theGerman government wanted to be treated like a party that hadconcluded a negotiated peace — although, in their eyes, a definitelyunfavorable and unjust one.Thus, the German government agreed, though only half-heartedly, tothe dissolution of the illegal army, thus hoping to gain