German Disarmament after World War I: The Diplomacy of International Arms Inspection, 1920-1931 (review)

In 1919 the Allied Powers hoped that the Versailles Treaty would form the foundation for a permanent settlement of the European order. By disarming Germany and carefully limiting her military potential, the Versailles Treaty was intended to forestall any military action by Germany and to ensure France's position as Europe's primary military power.

A critical part of the peace process was the creation of the Interallied Military Control Commission, known as the IAMCC, as a military/diplomatic organization designed to ensure Germany's disarmament. Beginning its work in 1920 the IAMCC initially included British, French, Belgian, Italian, and Japanese officers and at its peak consisted of more than 1,200 personnel. The IAMCC officers were spread across Germany inspecting factories and fortresses, searching for military depots, and overseeing destruction of material.

While beginning as a multinational operation, the IAMCC was soon dominated by the British and French as other participating nations lost interest in the work. Basing his research on the British and French documents, the author starts with a detailed look at the apparatus of the IAMCC, the work of its various committees and boards, and their procedures for reporting German compliance, or lack of it, to their national governments.

By all accounts, by 1923 Germany was effectively disarmed and the IAMCC had been effective in enforcing the major provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The German army had been reduced to the treaty strength of 100,000 men and hundreds of factories had been converted to civilian use. From that point the story of the IAMCC to its formal dissolution in 1931 becomes a study of British/French diplomatic friction as the French representatives insisted on strict compliance with the Versailles Treaty and the British took a more conciliatory tack towards Germany. German Disarmament After World War I provides a useful and insightful case study of friction within coalitions and the role of military personnel serving in support of their government's diplomatic efforts.

However, this is only half the story of the effort to disarm Germany in the 1920s. In peace, as in war, the enemy also gets a vote. While the book provides a thorough account of the British and French side of the story, the German documents are essentially glossed over and largely ignored. The secret German program to train forces and develop weapons in Russia from 1923 to 1934 was one of Germany's most successful efforts to evade the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty but receives only the briefest mention (pp. 60–61). Yet even more important was Germany's program to undermine the Versailles Treaty by perfectly legal means. The Versailles Treaty attempted to cripple any future efforts to expand the army by limiting Germany to a 100,000-man army with only 4,000 officers. But the Treaty failed to put any restrictions on NCO numbers and in the 1920s the Reichswehr became virtually an all-NCO army, with 80,000 carefully selected and superbly trained NCOs in the ranks. While following the Treaty provisions to the letter the German government built a force that could be rapidly and very efficiently expanded—as it was when Hitler came to power.

The author's lack of understanding of the German side of the story is somewhat disconcerting. He describes the Reichswehr of the late 1920s as "little more than a domestic police force" thanks to the Allied inspection program (pp. 189–90). This is perhaps how some IAMCC observers saw the German army—and it also proves just how mistaken diplomats and soldiers can be. More astute military observers of the era, among them British and French officers, saw the Reichswehr as a model army with a dangerous potential and they were right.

Of course, there were other legal means of evading the Versailles Treaty that played a central role in preparing the ground for rearmament...