Military occupation of the Ruhr

market the Soviet oil under the fi rm DEROP, the Deutsch–Russische Petroleumgesellschaft. This had the added advantage of allowing Germany to get out from under the iron grip of British and American oil interests, which had had a total monopoly on German petroleum sales since Versailles. Rathenau never refused the London Ultimatum reparations demands. But he insisted on a practical means of realizing those demands.4

MILITARY OCCUPATION OF THE RUHR

The response to Rapallo was not long in arriving. Within two days of its formal announcement, on April 18 at Genoa, the German delegation was presented with an Allied note of protest that Germany had negotiated the Russian accord ‘behind the backs’ of the Reparations Committee.

Then, on June 22, 1922, little more than two months after the Rapallo Treaty had been made public, Walther Rathenau was assassinated while leaving his home in the Berlin Grünewald. Two right-wing extremists, later identifi ed as members of a pro-monarchist ‘Organization C,’ were charged with the murder, and it was portrayed as part of the growing wave of extremism and anti-Semitism. But reports circulated in Germany pointing to ‘foreign interests,’ and some said Britain, or British interests, stood behind the two hitmen. In any event, the most prominent statesman and architect of Rapallo was gone, and the nation was shaken to the roots. But the murder of Rathenau was to be only the beginning of a horror to which few nations before or since have been subjected.

Britain took care to distance herself publicly from the French revanchist policy of Poincaré’s regime, but behind the scenes she had worked out a quid pro quo. France was to cede rights over the French territories in the Mosul, granted her during the secret Sykes–Picot accords of 1916, to the British. In return, as we noted in Chapter 3, Britain gave France its private assurance that Britain would do no more than offer verbal protest to a French military occupation of the Ruhr. It well suited British balance-of-power requirements that France should be the marcher lord to bring Germany into submission.5

All that was lacking for the Poincaré regime was a visible pretext. On December 26, 1922, at the scheduled year-end meeting of the Allied Reparations Committee in London, President Poincaré announced that Germany had violated the strict terms of the Versailles Treaty by