PEEBLES PROFILES
EPISODE XXVII
Richard Stumpf
CHRISTIAN, JOURNEYMAN, SEAMAN
Born February 20, 1892 in Grafenberg, Bavaria, Richard Stumpf was a Roman Catholic, tinsmith, and member of a Christian trade union. For six years, he served in the High Seas Fleet of the Imperial German Navy.
From just before the start of the First World War to its end, Stumpf wrote a personal diary, which comprehensively represented the internal situation of the fleet from the perspective of a normal sailor. His account has been documented in full length by the enquiry commission of the Weimar Republic’s parliament (the Reichstag) in its investigation report.
As a youth, Richard Stumpf received the typical worker’s education. However, he was well-read and interested in other things. As a journeyman, Stumpf had come as far as Veneto and South Tyrol, and he constantly educated himself further.
Most of his time in the Imperial German Navy (i.e. the period shortly before the outbreak of war up until the spring of 1918) was spent on the SMS Helgoland from the I. Squadron. Stumpf started out as a seaman, later becoming seaman first class.
In a diary entry from 1916, Stumpf noted that he still had not managed to become a seaman first class due to always frankly stating his opinion. However, in March 1918, Stumpf mentioned that he had become a seaman first class by then, probably on the occasion of being transferred to the SMS Wittelsbach. At the same time, he was a member of a Christian trade union. He even joined the right-wing German Fatherland Party.
THE WAR DIARY
Stumpf’s war diary spanned over six books, shedding light on the internal situation and especially on the relationship between the officers and enlisted men. This is why the Reichstag enquiry commission included the text in full length in its investigation report, despite making certain names anonymous. Huck, Pieken, and Rogg established an exhibition titled: “Die Flotte schläft im Hafen ein (The fleet fells asleep in the harbor)”, presenting Stumpf’s notes alongside another diary. In the exhibition catalogue, the three men explained that Stumpf’s six notebooks cannot be regarded as diaries in a strict sense, but that they contain transcripts, which have been written on the basis of lost diary records. The transcripts show several corrections in another handwriting that can be attributed to an editing for publication in 1927. Stumpf himself was appointed special expert for navy activities by the enquiry commission.
Almost every day, Stumpf noted down his experiences, observations, and assessments. He also read several books and various newspapers. In detail, Stumpf discussed the ongoing political and military developments in Imperial Germany.
Initially, Richard Stumpf was conservative, identifying himself with the war aims of the Central Powers. He repeatedly described the general enthusiasm at the beginning of the war. Soon, however, the perceived unfair treatment by the officers brought him to view the war from a different perspective. He repeatedly described that the “officer caste” would receive a high war allowance along with their hefty salary. This “caste” would live abundantly during the war, while the sailors would suffer the hardships. In addition, the officers would humiliate the crews, exert senseless drills, and constantly invent new bullying methods.
Only during battles (such as Jutland), the sailors and stokers felt they were being treated properly and seriously by the officers. However, there were few of these battles, because the largely inflexible strategy of the Imperial German Navy was based on a misinterpretation of the English approach.
This catastrophic plan, which centered on a large naval battle against England near Heligoland, found its reflection in Stumpf’s diary when he noted:
“We all had to realize gradually that even a victorious naval battle will not guarantee Germany access to the open sea.”
Arrogance accompanied by strategic inability caused Stumpf to hope that one day, the officer caste could be forced to take on an honorable profession and perform a useful activity. The sailors wanted to pay back the constant humiliations and harassments perpetrated by the officers under the protection of strict military discipline. In Stumpf’s final analysis, only the officers would have an interest in the continuation of the war, while the soldiers and workers had to risk their lives and take great deprivations for the Junkers, “walking safes”, and the military aristocracy. He even viewed priests as officers in plain clothes!
Around mid-1917, Stumpf wrote that the sailors wanted peace as quickly as possible, and the opinion would prevail that only the officers and war profiteers want to continue the fight. In another entry, he wrote that it was the officer caste that had plunged Germany into war.
One morning in February 1917, a pamphlet of the left-wing party (the USPD) appeared on board, causing great excitement. Stumpf wrote that this leaflet was a motley mixture of silly platitudes and phrases, but it also contained considerable truth. According to Stumpf, many of its sheets seem to have been handed over to his superiors.
The unrest in the Imperial German Navy during the summer of 1917 also found its reflection in Stumpf’s diary. He described the events in detail and then noted:
“If, in the past, someone had told me that it would be possible for people to be sentenced to jail or executed in Germany without having committed a crime, I would have looked upon him as a fool.”
In some text passages, Stumpf speaks of the “Jew Liebknecht”, the member of parliament for the SPD and later the USPD and KPD-member Karl Liebknecht. Conservative and right-wing extremist politicians (many naval officers were ideologically close to the latter), claimed that Liebknecht was Jewish in order to exploit anti-Semitism against the leftist movement.
However, the claim lacked any validity. Karl Liebknecht’s family came from Saxony with a Protestant-Christian background. Liebknecht himself was born in 1871 in Leipzig and baptized as a Protestant in St. Thomas Church. A great-uncle of his father was a Protestant pastor.
On the occasion of the unrest in the German Navy during the summer of 1917, Stumpf viewed the labor leader in a different light:
“Now I gradually realize why some people fight the military and its system with such determination. Poor Karl Liebknecht! How sorry I feel for you now!”
Stumpf also addressed the commandment of the Bible, “Thou shalt not kill” and revealed some pacifistic tendencies,. But time and again, Stumpf expressed clearly conservative views when (1) he ranted about the “perfidious Albion” (England) or against France’s rapacity, (2) he showed satisfaction that England had finally to sacrifice rivers of blood, and (3) he wanted to combine the last forces for the defense of the Fatherland. His inner conflict is expressed among others in the following entry at the end of the diary:
“… why did we have to have such criminal, conscienceless officers? It was they who deprived us of all our love for the Fatherland, our joy in our German existence, and our pride for our incomparable institutions. Even now my blood boils with anger whenever I think of the many injustices.”
At the end of the war, Richard Stumpf followed, albeit reluctantly, the red flag of revolution:
“To the thunderous applause of the mob, the huge Imperial flag was lowered and the red flag of liberty, equality, and fraternity rose up over the barracks. I could no longer resist and was swept along by the mass hysteria.”
But Stumpf’s inner conflict was revealed again when the armistice conditions became known. He exclaims, “That’s what you get for your God damn brotherhood of nations.” But when the fleet had to be later surrendered to the Allies, Stumpf expressed relief that these instruments of destruction disappeared from German waters.
In one of the enquiry commission’s hearings, Stumpf had a discussion with Adolf von Trotha, Chief of Staff of the German Imperial High Seas Fleet at the end of the war. Trotha had primarily initiated the planned fleet attack against England (Operations Instruction Number 19). The advance was prepared without the knowledge and against the clearly expressed orders of the government. These intentions of the Navy command had led to the sailors’ mutiny in Kiel.
Trotha tried to portray Stumpf’s allegations as individual cases. Stumpf responded by saying he still had the feeling that two different worlds were facing each other, separated by a Chinese wall. In preparation for the discussion, he had interviewed Fritz Betz, who also served on board the SMS Helgoland. Betz explicitly confirmed that the vast majority of naval officers in the High Seas Fleet humiliated and abused the sailors and stokers with constant harassment and offensive remarks.
When in the beginning of the 1920s an intense debate about the stab-in-the-back myth began (Dolchstoßlegende), Stumpf realized that his diary could contribute to the elucidation of the role of naval officers. So he handed it to Joseph Joos of the Catholic Centre Party, who recognized the value of the records and ensured that they were read before the enquiry commission.
In 1927 the USPD-MP Wilhelm Dittmann published an abbreviated version under the title: “Warum die Flotte zerbrach – Kriegstagebuch eines christlichen Arbeiters (Why the fleet broke up – war diary of a Christian worker)”. Dittmann added a preface, in which he stated that not any outside revolutionary influences have led to the disaster, but the conditions in the fleet itself. He also added headings and a table of contents.
In 1967, Daniel Horn (then assistant professor of history at Douglas College, Rutgers State University in New Brunswick, New Jersey) translated the diary into English and published it in full length. He added an introduction, many explanatory notes and an index.
Horn also restored as far as possible the anonymous names. Born in Vienna, Austria, he encountered the diaries in the context of his research on the unrest in the Imperial Navy and the German Revolution.
Horn evaluated the historical significance of the diary in his introduction by listing the reasons which led the enquiry commission to include Stumpf’s diary as the only personal memory in its report:
“While the other persons giving testimony before the enquiry commission were officers and politicians, anxious to defend or substantiate their actions respectively their position, Stumpf was a worker, who had served as a common sailor in the Navy and his records mirrored his feelings and views at that time, without being influenced by the discussions which ensued later. Stumpf intended to keep a private diary. However, through his active and intensive involvement in the discussions of the sailors and stokers not only of the SMS Helgoland but also of many other ships as well as through his keen sense of the moods of his comrades, Stumpf expressed the general mood as well. Thus the diary constitutes an invaluable historical source of the individual but also the collective mentality of the lower ranks in the Imperial Navy.”
According to Horn, the diary provides a coherent explanation, not only why the conscripted sailors mutinied against their officers, but also why Germany lost the war, why the German Empire collapsed, and why it was overthrown by revolution. Sailors and stokers rebelled because they suffered from hunger and deprivation, they were abused by their officers, they wanted peace, and they were denied democratic rights. The officers tried to extend the duration of the war, lacking any sympathy with their subordinates, in order to enforce imperial aspirations and annexations. The sailors and stokers viewed the continuation of the war as being only in the interest of the officers who were not the least considerate, but on the contrary deliberately harassed them.
Horn could think only of two other publications that can be compared with Stumpf’s diary. The first was Joachim Ringelnatz’ work “Als Mariner im Krieg (as mariner at war)”, which Horn, however, views as not nearly as authentic, stirring, and poignant. Secondly, Horn refers to the memories of Willy Sachse, but according to Horn, Sachse lost credibility by later published opposite statements in his work “Rost an Mann und Schiff (rust on man and ship)”.
Huck, Pieken and Rogg saw echoes of a classic drama as the diary described hubris (arrogance) and fall of the world power ambitions of the German Empire manifested in naval armaments. The diary also described the erosion of the Wilhelmine class society in the Imperial Navy. Indeed, the person of Richard Stumpf reflected the fact that well-trained workers, literally starved for education (as could be seen in the working-class youth of the time), no longer wanted to be treated as children or animals by whippersnappers with a limited intellectual horizon. It was believed that these closed-minded individuals sometimes found access to their officers posts through the money of their parents.
THE WORKER AND WRITER
After the end of the First World War, Stumpf was unemployed and stayed in Neunkirchen near Nuremberg. In 1919, he joined the Freikorps to fight the Bavarian council government. He was persuaded by the argument, that this would be the desire of the Berlin government and the diocese.
Having not yet taken part in any actual fighting, Stumpf witnessed a massacre of members of the Catholic Journeymen Association of St. Joseph. The Freikorps members confined them to a cellar and threw hand grenades into it. Promptly, Stumpf left the Freikorps and concluded that the government forces lost about eighteen men in killing nearly five thousand! According to Stumpf, it was cold-blooded murder.
In 1921, Stumpf married Anna Birzle and stayed with his sister for a short period of time. From 1922 to 1924, he worked as a polisher in a metal factory in Nuremberg. This enabled the couple to start their own household, and they were soon blessed with four sons.
Stumpf began attending meetings of the left-liberal German Democratic Party in 1925. Through the intervention of Hermann Luppe (mayor of Nuremberg), he got a job in his old profession and a flat. Stumpf started to write and publish on historical and political issues regarding the Navy. He also criticized the rise of the Nazi Party. One of his articles came to the attention of Dr. Joos, who then contacted the Reichstag enquiry commission.
The commission was looking into the issues of who caused the First World War and who was to blame for its continuation and defeat. Stumpf was appointed as an expert witness, and he had a prolonged stay in Berlin. Thereafter, the former seaman worked again in his old profession and continued his literary activity. With the dawn of Nazism, Stumpf tried to enhance international understanding with France on the basis of common religious beliefs.
Under the Nazi dictatorship, Stumpf’s diaries were burned, and he was (according to his son Richard) denied adequate jobs. After the worldwide depression had peaked, Stumpf finally found a job as a hostel warden of the “Mainzerhof” of the Kolping Society in Heiligenstadt in Thuringia, where he remained the entire time of the Second World War. Because of his age and bad rheumatism, Stumpf was not eligible to enlist, but he participated in occasional military work and guard services.
After the war, Stumpf continued to live in Heiligenstadt, which was now located in the Soviet occupation zone. He became a policeman and participated in actions to arrest Nazis. He also became a member of anti-fascist committees. In 1946, Stumpf joined the East German Christian Democratic Union, the successor to the Catholic Centre Party. He had known the president Jakob Kaiser from his apprenticeship days in Nuremberg.
When the Soviet troops marched into Heiligenstadt, Stumpf his his service pistol, which was given to him as a warden. It was eventually discovered, and a tenant of a house belonging to the Kolping restaurant was subsequently arrested. As Stumpf learned of this, he surrendered himself to the authorities, although such an offense was punishable by death. He was abused, but was subsequently released in March 1946.
Under the Soviet-led German Democratic Republic, Stumpf was arrested after the uprising on June 17, 1953 and accused of anti-democratic activities. He had established relationships with Jakob Kaiser (who stayed in West Berlin) and had given information to the bishop in Fulda on the occupying power and other Soviet organizations. During his time in detention, Stumpf wrote another diary on his final years of life, which today is probably stored in either the archives of Rutgers University in New Jersey or the Leo Baeck Institute. The case was closed, and Stumpf was discharged without conviction. At the instigation of his eldest son Lothar, Stumpf was rehabilitated thirty-five years after his death.
In November 1953, Stumpf requested and received permission to adorn the war memorial in Heinrich-Heine Park in memory of the fallen soldiers. The following year, the graves of dead Soviet soldiers were desecrated. Stumpf was branded a suspect, and he was arrested for anti-Soviet activities. After lengthy interrogations and proven innocence, he was again released.
Richard Stumpf later died on July 23, 1958 in Heiligenstadt at the age of sixty-six.