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Between Stresemann and Hitler: The Foreign Policy of the Brüning Government
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
Extract
Most historians of the Weimar Republic, fully occupied with the domestic affairs of the Brüining government in its crucial place between democracy and dictatorship, show little interest in Germany's foreign policy of the early 1930's. If they do devote some attention to it, their evaluation tends to be highly negative, regardless of their political or national sympathies. Observers who can be classified as liberals, socialists, Nazis, and nationalists—at odds among themselves on virtually every other question—all voice strong criticism of the Brüning diplomacy.
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References
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48 The version of the speech given in Schulthess, 1932, p. 31, is slightly, but significantly, different: “There is one hope, and this hope lies. …” This may be more authentic than the official version, from which such revealing passages have possibly been expurgated.
49 Verhandlungen des Reichstags, Vol. 446, pp. 2596f.
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70 Ibid., 2nd ser., 11, p. 69. “… the alternative,” Vansittart continued, “was one that filled me and, I believed, everybody else with real alarm.”
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