WORLD WAR 1 BLOODLINE: HOME FROM THE WAR 1921

Wilhelm Salzmann before and after; thinner and wearing Russian clothes

The 1921 photograph below shows my grandparents in a group of returning German POWs from Siberia. The couple are third and fourth from the left, sitting on the ground. They have disembarked in a Baltic port and are ready to go home, to the Ruhr. By now, a few Germans had Russian wives and small children. Many spoke more-or-less fluent Russian. Rita Streich is the baby in white, in her mothers arms, on the right. They must have been apprehensive about what awaited them in the defeated country, but relieved to be out of the turbulent finale of the Russian Civil War.

During the previous year, the victorious Allies had insisted on collecting extortionate reparations from Germany as part of the peace treaty. Local authorities produced their own currencies in an attempt to keep their economies afloat. Communist uprisings and mutinies were suppressed by Freikorps volunteers and the new Weimar Republic's army. In 1920, marines under Corvette Commander Hermann Ehrhardt attempted a monarchist coup in Berlin; the so-called Kapp putsch. The Ruhr valley responded by raising a Red Army of roughly 50,000 armed Communist and Socialist workers, which included many war veterans. After the Kapp putsch failed, the Freikorps and Army invaded the Ruhr under General Oscar von Watter to crush the Red Army militia and execute thousands of captives without trial. Wilhelm and Tatiana must have arrived in Bochum in the bitter aftermath of these events. It is unlikely that they would have been greeted with enthusiasm in their distinctly Russian clothes. At least, judging by the photograph, the weather was warm at first.

However, the welcome from old Peter Salzmann was distinctly cold. He was not pleased to see that his oldest son was now apparently married to a Russian peasant woman who spoke no German, and proceeded to treat her like a barely-tolerated servant. He did not realise that Tatiana was, in fact, better-educated than anybody else in his family and had been a wealthy woman in her own right, with her own Siberian timber business. 

On the map of the Red Ruhr below, Bochum lay at the heart of the 1920 disturbances in the valley. Tatiana had fled from Trotsky's Red Army only to find herself among recently-defeated Marxist coal miners and steelworkers. Not only had the industrial proletariat of the Ruhr lost the Great War, but also the class struggle against Weimar's Reichswehr Army and the monarchist Freikorps. The new SPD government, although nominally socialist, had shown itself more willing to kill workers than unrepentant militarists. The situation may not have been quite as dangerous as in Siberia, but it was still desperate and uncertain. Wilhelm had never been particularly interested in politics, so Tatiana was forced to try and understand these confusing events alone, in an unaccustomed urban environment, thousands of miles from home and in an incomprehensible language. To her, German sounded like the grunting of pigs. Her father-in-law's hostility was the final straw. It was only a matter of time before she began to plan her return to Siberia, leaving her husband behind if necessary.

The map also shows the proximity of British, French and Belgian occupying forces on and beyond the Rhine, to the south and west of the Ruhr valley's coalfields. All in all, there were considerably larger numbers of heavily-armed troops in the vicinity than there had ever been in sparsely-populated Western Siberia.

Under the weight of the war reparations and social unrest, the German economy went into free-fall. The local emergency money, or Notgeld, was useless for larger transactions. The Reichsmark plummeted in value. The once-powerful industrialised German state suffered the most dramatic example of hyper-inflation in history. For the miserly Peter Salzmann, who had considerable savings, this was an absolute catastrophe. In 1922, he could have acquired enough property to set himself up for life. A year later, in 1923, he was, effectively, broke. A sum of money that could have bought, say, a house was suddenly barely enough to buy a packet of cigarettes. 

One could be a billionaire with a single, badly-printed, worthless banknote. The lower middle class, especially, saw all its hopes shattered and became the natural constituency for extreme, undemocratic parties. In the photograph below, Wilhelm, complete with Kaiser moustache, and Tatiana pose as a respectable, upwardly-mobile young couple before the Great German Inflation made this highly unlikely.

 Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler, in his comfortable prison after his failed beer-hall putsch, dictated 'Mein Kampf' to his boyfriend/secretary Rudolf Hess, with Jewish financiers like Tatiana's erstwhile role model, Baron Rothschild, firmly in his sights. He also linked his economic theories, which may have had a limited factual basis, to primitive tribal fantasies about blood and earth. The Jews were actually not human, but devilish vermin. The Slavs were, as their name implied, only fit to be slaves. The blacks were part of the animal kingdom. These ideas were not new, and not particularly German, but they were to become so increasingly after the Great Inflation, replacing the International Marxist solution with a unashamedly racist National Socialist program. As a Slav, already smarting under old Peter Salzmann's insults, Tatiana doubted whether she had a future in her new husband's country at all. Perhaps she would be better-off with the devil she knew, on home ground, in Siberia. The gold rubles had been well-hidden, giving her a springboard to Shanghai or San Francisco. Her sister, Shura, had married a prominent Siberian communist, which might come in handy. At this stage, before Stalin took over, it was still possible to dream that a stable, egalitarian society might emerge from the revolutionary bloodshed. The Salzmann family looked more and more like a bad-tempered trap within the bigger poverty-stricken trap of Bochum. Could she convince Wilhelm to come with her? When he, understandably, hesitated, she decided he wasn't up to the challenge. She scraped the fare together and began the long, perilous journey back to her Siberian village without him.

Hitler devoured the popular press, identifying bigoted views to serve his ambition