Page 10 - Willi Distel Diary

Life in the French-occupied Palatinate in 1923: transport bans, closed Rhine bridges, shuttered factories, mass unemployment and hyperinflation

Translated from Willi's German.

...to the point where we no longer spoke to one another at all, which suited me very well. The only daughter, Hilde, was a gentle child of fourteen, and I would gladly have fallen in love with her had she not been so young and so timid. The Palatinate, as I have already mentioned, was occupied by the Moroccans; the French, provoked by the ongoing resistance, oppressed the people wherever they could. For the whole of that time no train ran, and cars, motorcycles and bicycles were only allowed to travel at certain hours. The bridges and other crossings over the Rhine were often closed for weeks on end, so that not even pedestrians could get across. Parcel-post traffic stopped completely, and letters often took fourteen to twenty days to arrive. Theatre, concerts, gymnastics and sport were all forbidden. The sugar factory and the Baden Aniline and Soda Factory were shut down for months and stripped of their stocks and materials, all of which was meant to go to France. Under these conditions almost no factory ran, and people no longer bothered to work either, for the dole (stamping the card) paid better. So it came about that thousands wandered the streets, hatching nothing but bad schemes. On top of all this misery came the collapse of the currency, the inflation, which hit us small businesspeople hard and very nearly ruined us altogether.

Interesting facts

The occupied Rhineland. After the First World War the Treaty of Versailles placed the German territory west of the Rhine, including the Palatinate, under Allied military occupation. Here that meant French troops controlling daily life, transport and the Rhine crossings.
Colonial troops on the Rhine. France garrisoned its Rhineland occupation partly with soldiers from its North and West African colonies, including Moroccans. Their presence was a genuine fact of the occupation and became a bitterly resented theme in German public feeling of the time.
The Ruhr and passive resistance. In January 1923 France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr over unpaid war reparations, and Germany answered with 'passive resistance' - strikes and non-cooperation. The occupiers retaliated across the occupied zones with the transport bans, closed bridges and clampdowns Willi describes.
The great chemical works. The 'Baden Aniline and Soda Factory' shut down here is BASF, founded in 1865 at Ludwigshafen and one of the largest chemical companies in the world - so its closure, and the stripping of its stocks, threw huge numbers out of work.
Money that melted away. The 'inflation' that nearly ruined Willi's employer was the notorious hyperinflation of 1923, when the German mark collapsed so fast that prices could double within days. It wiped out savings and hit shopkeepers and wage-earners hardest before a new currency steadied things that November.