Fritz Berber and the Nazi revolution

The scale of the impending European crisis was in no way unforeseen. On 8 October 1931, Jan Christian Smuts – the Boer general who became a member of the Imperial War Cabinet in the First World War – delivered the Basil Hicks Lecture at the University of Sheffield. His subject was ‘the disarmed peace’. He pointed out that the armament situation that reached a climax in 1914 was unprecedented in history. This was the ‘armed peace’ that emerged after the Franco-Prussian war: 1871 marked the beginning of an ‘unstable equilibrium of peace maintained through great armies and navies always ready to take the field or go to sea at short notice’. Each nation spurred on the others, and in 1914 the situation passed out of the control of statesmen altogether. Following the war, Germany's forces were reduced to a minimum, and assurances given that her disarmament would be the first step towards a general disarmament. No such thing.

Smuts' ambition was modest. He accepted that it would take a long time to wean nations from their trust in armaments.