236 ChaPter^5
ment,” or making payment. The conservatives did not and seized power and
began a policy of “passive resistance” in the mining industry, meaning that
miners refused to work and thus produced no coal to deliver to France or
others for reparations. But this caused economic chaos inside Germany as the
government just printed money to pay the miners and other workers, which
caused inflation to soar. In 1914, a dollar was equal to 4.2 German marks; by
1923, it was worth 4.2 trillion. The harsh settlement at Versailles had indeed
made matters much worse. Woodrow Wilson’s fears had come to pass.
Politically, the economy and a resurgence of German patriotism against the
other western powers for what they had done at Versailles had greater conse-
quences. In the mid-1920s Germany did reach agreements with Britain and
France on borders and was admitted into the League of Nations, but when
the global depression hit in 1929, the right-wing made major advances. In
September 1930 elections, the National Socialists, better known as Nazis, went
from 15 to 107 seats in parliament. The Nazis, like Mussolini in Italy, were
advocates of fascism and restoring traditional military power. Most alarming,
in January 1933, barely a month before FDR became president in the U.S.,
Adolph Hitler became the German chancellor. Hitler’s rise and ideas are well-
known—he blamed Jews and Communists [which he saw as virtually the
same thing] for Germany’s postwar problems and began to steadily reverse the
effects of Versailles and regain German glory. Although Hitler’s views on race
and ethnicity—he believed that Germany should control the lands where
there were a majority of German people [such as Austria, Czechoslovakia, or
Poland]—were most noticed, they did not represent a major shift in European
thinking. For generations, Europeans, particularly the ruling classes, had
blamed Jews for their problems and created the idea that they controlled the
banking system. Indeed, Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice was about
anti-Jewish attitudes and that was written around 1597.
The West in particular feared that Hitler would get control of Central
Europe and close it off economically to the rest of the world. Fascist eco-
nomic policy was based on the idea of autarchy, a condition in which a coun-
try had absolute sovereignty, produced its own good for its own consumption,
and did not have commercial relations outside of its own empire. If the Nazis
succeeded in establishing an autarchic system, then the rest of the West would
have no access to German materials, trade, or investment—which, again as
Wilson warned, would create havoc and disrupt, if not destroy, the Open