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Uhura's Mazda - Heads of State of the Territory of the Saar Basin
Heads of State of the Territory of the Saar Basin
1920-1938: Grand Duke Georg I (House of Nassau-Merenberg) [1]
1938-1944: Grand Duke Georg II (House of Nassau-Merenberg) [2]
1944-1945: Gauleiter Joseph Bürckel (NSDAP) [3]
1945-1948: Grand Duke Georg I (House of Nassau-Merenberg) [4]
1948-1957: Grand Duke Frank I (House of Rochford-Nassau) [5]
1957-1962: Vorsitzender Fritz Bäsel (Saarland Communist Party) [6]
[1] - The Treaty of Versailles, which punished the German Empire for its part in the First World War, involved many interested parties: some, like the Republic-fetishising United States, were large and powerful; others, such as Luxembourg, were not. But both had their part to play in the future of Europe.
The main border re-drawings of Western Europe were done to save France from another German invasion (at least, that was the theory), and it was therefore proposed that a little chunk of profitably industrial land be taken from Germany and turned into a temporary League of Nations mandate to be leached dry by France for 15 years. But the Luxembourg delegation had a different idea: they had been almost bankrupted by the German occupation, and yet were still paying a large pension to Count Georg von Merenberg, a cousin of the Grand Duchess whose claim to the throne of Luxembourg had been passed over. Luxembourg proposed that the Saar Basin (historically owned by the House of Nassua, from whom Merenberg was descended) be turned into a separate Grand Duchy, so that a nationalist spirit could be engendered in this unnatural territory and it could remain a trading colony of France for far longer than it would be as a mere Mandate. France was in full agreement, naturally, and nobody else could really be bothered to argue against the idea, since they were all fighting for their own proposals. Although several British cartoonists likened the Grand Duchy of the Territory of the Saar Basin to those artificial Kingdoms that Napoleon had created for his own brothers a century before.
Grand Duke Georg himself, a grandson of the poet Pushkin, had retreated into private life after his various lawsuits against his Luxembourger cousins had been thrown out, and was frankly rather miffed to be deprived of his generous state pension on the vague promise of a Civil List from some scrap of land whose entire purpose was to reimburse the French for the millions they spent on the War. However, he settled into monarchical life fairly easily, by all accounts, despite the frequent pro-German protests and the unpopularity of the Franco-British administrators who had been sent to run the Territory. The Saar Basin Landtag had been set up by 1922, but was only ever a consultative body, and all legislation and administration came ultimately from the occupiers. The 'circuses' that the Grand Duke provided went some way towards outweighing the lack of 'bread', but it wasn't nearly enough to make him, the institution of the monarchy, or the Frankenstein's monster of a country, popular.
[2] - While Georg I was the model of a priggish Prussian nobleman, he was still linked in the minds of the people with the French occupiers. His son, however, also called Georg, was wilier, and created a name for himself by serving in the German Army during the early 1930s. But by 1938, the cries of the people were reaching an event horizon. Broadly speaking, almost everyone wanted to rejoin Germany, apart from the Left, which had wanted to rejoin Germany until Hitler had taken power a couple of years before, and now just wanted democracy, no matter who was in charge. And all were united in a new campaign of civil disobedience. The ultimate impact of this was that the French saw that this was no longer a profitable venture, and pulled out of the deal. Grand Duke George I abdicated almost immediately after, going into exile in the Netherlands (and spending the next three years suing the Luxembourg government to start giving him his pension again).
At that point, it would have been natural for Hitler to send in the Army and take over Germany's natural western border, but at that moment, he was concentrating on the Austrian Anschluss and could not divert the manpower required, still less risk angering the Versailles powers twice in one month. And when Georg I had abdicated, Georg II had taken the throne: this offered enough pro-Germanism to satisfy the Right and enough non-Nazi-ness to earn the qualified support of the Left. For a while, the monarchy symbolised a genuine compromise. Democratic elections were held in early 1939, but the Saar-based franchise of the Nazi Party won a convincing majority of the seats.
Soon after, the Second World War broke out. Georg II had been militaristic enough and friendly enough with German High Command that he had secretly agreed beforehand to allow the Wehrmacht to march through his Territory on the way to wipe out France, and that had taken the French by surprise. For the rest of the War, Saar Basin troops helped keep the peace in occupied France and marched with the Germans as far as Stalingrad in the east. But when D-Day came, Hitler could not risk a separate Army defending the middle of his Western border against the Allies, and merged the Saar units - and the Saar itself - into Grossdeutschland.
[3] - Georg II was no longer Grand Duke. He moved to Berlin were he took up the role of a German staff General, until the end of the War, when the Soviets briefly took him prisoner. In his place was long-time Nazi apparatchik Joseph Bürckel, who had previously been the organiser of the Anschluss referendum and became Gauleiter of Vienna until his return to his native Saar Basin. He oversaw the merging of the Saar Basin Territory with the Third Reich, which took a terrible toll on his health, especially considering the Allies were advancing day by day. He contracted pneumonia and had a complete mental breakdown in March 1945. When the Americans stormed into Saarbrucken and seized the former offices of the Ministry of State Affairs (then the local Nazi HQ) they found him screaming for his mother in a straitjacket, and he only survived a few days later. It's hard to be too sorry for Bürckel, though, considering that he found time in that overwhelming situation to root out the thousands upon thousands of Jews who had fled to the Saar Basin and survived until 1944 under the protection of the relatively honourable Grand Duke Georg II.
[4] - Nobody was quite sure what to do with the Saar Basin in the aftermath of WWII. Germany wanted to keep it; France was keen on establishing a Protectorate to skim off the coal deposits of the area and create a bridgehead in their zone of occupation. Naturally, the compromise was a return of the status quo ante, except with France merely demanding untramelled military access and an egregious percentage of the coal mined in the Saar. Georg I, who had retired seven years earlier, was invited back and re-entered Saarbrucken in a massive parade very similar to his first entry as Grand Duke. Georg II was, as a Nazi collaborator, not invited back, and lived out his days in house arrest in East Germany. In the 1946 elections, the Communist Party of the Saar (KPS) became the largest Party, taking power in a minority Government and acting as cheering onlookers for the Communists in the East.
[5] - Georg I was now very old, and as this whole 'monarchy' thing was clearly going to stick around for a while in order to give the Saar Basin a reason to exist, the matter of succession arose. The Grand Duke's only son was persona non grata, and the 1920 Constitution had just said that the throne would pass in the male line (the entire point of the House of Merenberg was that they didn't like women being in charge), so a search through the archives was launched. The House of Nassau, established in the 11th century, was now almost extinct, with the Dutch and Luxembourger thrones having passed through female lines rather than descend to the Merenbergs. It looked as if Georg I would be the last Nassau monarch.
But he was not. It was discovered that the illegitimate son of one of the Dutch Stadholders had had some even more illegitimate descendants who were then living in Essex, in England - and despite coming from a deeply base line, Georg I argued that there wasn't technically anything in the Constitution about the throne passing in the legitimate male line. And so, Frank Rochford Nassau, a warehouseman of Harwich in Essex, was invited over to Saarbrucken in 1947 to become the heir of a Grand Duchy. Nobody was quite sure what to make of this aggressively uncultured new ruler, but he generally allowed politics to continue as normal while not embarrassing himself too much during diplomatic visits.
However, after Grand Duke Frank had been on the throne for seven years, the KPS lost the Landtag elections to a coalition of all the opposition parties (the liberal and pro-Independence Demokratische Partei Saarbeckengebiets; the christian-democratic and pro-Independence Christliche Volkspartei; and the Deutschespartei, which was a pro-German Reunification franchise of both the CDU and the SPD) and chaos began to reign. It had been acceptable for the Saarland to be a mild cheerleader for the Eastern Bloc during the early Cold War, but now the balance had been broken and the Constitutional Question made part of coalition politics. The DPS tore down the welfarist and leftist policies of the previous decade of KPS government while the DP agitated to join Germany while the other parties attacked them one minute and demanded their support the next. It was far too complicated for Grand Duke Frank.
[6] - Which was the official reason why Fritz Bäsel and the rest of the KPS deposed him in the Saar Coup of 1968, with the support of student activists and other leftists. The KPS had been under fire since they were voted out, and now came back in, guns blazing. The Grand Ducal Family was sent back to Britain. Significant opposition politicians were arrested. The Communists made themselves the only legal party and fully joined the Eastern Bloc. Nobody dared to anything: starting a nuclear war with Evil Scary Russia was one thing, but endangering the lives of half of Western Europe with your own warheads was quite another. The fragile peace was maintained - and there was a steady flood of defectors into the Saar Territory over the next few years as the best luxury goods the Soviet Union could provide were funnelled into this outlet mall of Communism.
In the end, the end of the bizarrely long-lived Territory of the Saar Basin was a footnote in a larger conflict - just like the rest of its history, in fact. President Kennedy's resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis just happened to entail a rationalisation of the Iron Curtain: West Berlin for the Saar. Neither side wanted the other to be able to advertise on the other side, and it was felt that being able to spy on each other slightly easier was not good enough to outweigh the manpower and military costs of supplying these places. And that was that. Several KPS officials were put on trial but the rest were ignored, and the 'Saarland' became just another West German state.
So much for Khrushchev's famous dictum, "Ich bin ein Saarbruckener."
1920-1938: Grand Duke Georg I (House of Nassau-Merenberg) [1]
1938-1944: Grand Duke Georg II (House of Nassau-Merenberg) [2]
1944-1945: Gauleiter Joseph Bürckel (NSDAP) [3]
1945-1948: Grand Duke Georg I (House of Nassau-Merenberg) [4]
1948-1957: Grand Duke Frank I (House of Rochford-Nassau) [5]
1957-1962: Vorsitzender Fritz Bäsel (Saarland Communist Party) [6]
[1] - The Treaty of Versailles, which punished the German Empire for its part in the First World War, involved many interested parties: some, like the Republic-fetishising United States, were large and powerful; others, such as Luxembourg, were not. But both had their part to play in the future of Europe.
The main border re-drawings of Western Europe were done to save France from another German invasion (at least, that was the theory), and it was therefore proposed that a little chunk of profitably industrial land be taken from Germany and turned into a temporary League of Nations mandate to be leached dry by France for 15 years. But the Luxembourg delegation had a different idea: they had been almost bankrupted by the German occupation, and yet were still paying a large pension to Count Georg von Merenberg, a cousin of the Grand Duchess whose claim to the throne of Luxembourg had been passed over. Luxembourg proposed that the Saar Basin (historically owned by the House of Nassua, from whom Merenberg was descended) be turned into a separate Grand Duchy, so that a nationalist spirit could be engendered in this unnatural territory and it could remain a trading colony of France for far longer than it would be as a mere Mandate. France was in full agreement, naturally, and nobody else could really be bothered to argue against the idea, since they were all fighting for their own proposals. Although several British cartoonists likened the Grand Duchy of the Territory of the Saar Basin to those artificial Kingdoms that Napoleon had created for his own brothers a century before.
Grand Duke Georg himself, a grandson of the poet Pushkin, had retreated into private life after his various lawsuits against his Luxembourger cousins had been thrown out, and was frankly rather miffed to be deprived of his generous state pension on the vague promise of a Civil List from some scrap of land whose entire purpose was to reimburse the French for the millions they spent on the War. However, he settled into monarchical life fairly easily, by all accounts, despite the frequent pro-German protests and the unpopularity of the Franco-British administrators who had been sent to run the Territory. The Saar Basin Landtag had been set up by 1922, but was only ever a consultative body, and all legislation and administration came ultimately from the occupiers. The 'circuses' that the Grand Duke provided went some way towards outweighing the lack of 'bread', but it wasn't nearly enough to make him, the institution of the monarchy, or the Frankenstein's monster of a country, popular.
[2] - While Georg I was the model of a priggish Prussian nobleman, he was still linked in the minds of the people with the French occupiers. His son, however, also called Georg, was wilier, and created a name for himself by serving in the German Army during the early 1930s. But by 1938, the cries of the people were reaching an event horizon. Broadly speaking, almost everyone wanted to rejoin Germany, apart from the Left, which had wanted to rejoin Germany until Hitler had taken power a couple of years before, and now just wanted democracy, no matter who was in charge. And all were united in a new campaign of civil disobedience. The ultimate impact of this was that the French saw that this was no longer a profitable venture, and pulled out of the deal. Grand Duke George I abdicated almost immediately after, going into exile in the Netherlands (and spending the next three years suing the Luxembourg government to start giving him his pension again).
At that point, it would have been natural for Hitler to send in the Army and take over Germany's natural western border, but at that moment, he was concentrating on the Austrian Anschluss and could not divert the manpower required, still less risk angering the Versailles powers twice in one month. And when Georg I had abdicated, Georg II had taken the throne: this offered enough pro-Germanism to satisfy the Right and enough non-Nazi-ness to earn the qualified support of the Left. For a while, the monarchy symbolised a genuine compromise. Democratic elections were held in early 1939, but the Saar-based franchise of the Nazi Party won a convincing majority of the seats.
Soon after, the Second World War broke out. Georg II had been militaristic enough and friendly enough with German High Command that he had secretly agreed beforehand to allow the Wehrmacht to march through his Territory on the way to wipe out France, and that had taken the French by surprise. For the rest of the War, Saar Basin troops helped keep the peace in occupied France and marched with the Germans as far as Stalingrad in the east. But when D-Day came, Hitler could not risk a separate Army defending the middle of his Western border against the Allies, and merged the Saar units - and the Saar itself - into Grossdeutschland.
[3] - Georg II was no longer Grand Duke. He moved to Berlin were he took up the role of a German staff General, until the end of the War, when the Soviets briefly took him prisoner. In his place was long-time Nazi apparatchik Joseph Bürckel, who had previously been the organiser of the Anschluss referendum and became Gauleiter of Vienna until his return to his native Saar Basin. He oversaw the merging of the Saar Basin Territory with the Third Reich, which took a terrible toll on his health, especially considering the Allies were advancing day by day. He contracted pneumonia and had a complete mental breakdown in March 1945. When the Americans stormed into Saarbrucken and seized the former offices of the Ministry of State Affairs (then the local Nazi HQ) they found him screaming for his mother in a straitjacket, and he only survived a few days later. It's hard to be too sorry for Bürckel, though, considering that he found time in that overwhelming situation to root out the thousands upon thousands of Jews who had fled to the Saar Basin and survived until 1944 under the protection of the relatively honourable Grand Duke Georg II.
[4] - Nobody was quite sure what to do with the Saar Basin in the aftermath of WWII. Germany wanted to keep it; France was keen on establishing a Protectorate to skim off the coal deposits of the area and create a bridgehead in their zone of occupation. Naturally, the compromise was a return of the status quo ante, except with France merely demanding untramelled military access and an egregious percentage of the coal mined in the Saar. Georg I, who had retired seven years earlier, was invited back and re-entered Saarbrucken in a massive parade very similar to his first entry as Grand Duke. Georg II was, as a Nazi collaborator, not invited back, and lived out his days in house arrest in East Germany. In the 1946 elections, the Communist Party of the Saar (KPS) became the largest Party, taking power in a minority Government and acting as cheering onlookers for the Communists in the East.
[5] - Georg I was now very old, and as this whole 'monarchy' thing was clearly going to stick around for a while in order to give the Saar Basin a reason to exist, the matter of succession arose. The Grand Duke's only son was persona non grata, and the 1920 Constitution had just said that the throne would pass in the male line (the entire point of the House of Merenberg was that they didn't like women being in charge), so a search through the archives was launched. The House of Nassau, established in the 11th century, was now almost extinct, with the Dutch and Luxembourger thrones having passed through female lines rather than descend to the Merenbergs. It looked as if Georg I would be the last Nassau monarch.
But he was not. It was discovered that the illegitimate son of one of the Dutch Stadholders had had some even more illegitimate descendants who were then living in Essex, in England - and despite coming from a deeply base line, Georg I argued that there wasn't technically anything in the Constitution about the throne passing in the legitimate male line. And so, Frank Rochford Nassau, a warehouseman of Harwich in Essex, was invited over to Saarbrucken in 1947 to become the heir of a Grand Duchy. Nobody was quite sure what to make of this aggressively uncultured new ruler, but he generally allowed politics to continue as normal while not embarrassing himself too much during diplomatic visits.
However, after Grand Duke Frank had been on the throne for seven years, the KPS lost the Landtag elections to a coalition of all the opposition parties (the liberal and pro-Independence Demokratische Partei Saarbeckengebiets; the christian-democratic and pro-Independence Christliche Volkspartei; and the Deutschespartei, which was a pro-German Reunification franchise of both the CDU and the SPD) and chaos began to reign. It had been acceptable for the Saarland to be a mild cheerleader for the Eastern Bloc during the early Cold War, but now the balance had been broken and the Constitutional Question made part of coalition politics. The DPS tore down the welfarist and leftist policies of the previous decade of KPS government while the DP agitated to join Germany while the other parties attacked them one minute and demanded their support the next. It was far too complicated for Grand Duke Frank.
[6] - Which was the official reason why Fritz Bäsel and the rest of the KPS deposed him in the Saar Coup of 1968, with the support of student activists and other leftists. The KPS had been under fire since they were voted out, and now came back in, guns blazing. The Grand Ducal Family was sent back to Britain. Significant opposition politicians were arrested. The Communists made themselves the only legal party and fully joined the Eastern Bloc. Nobody dared to anything: starting a nuclear war with Evil Scary Russia was one thing, but endangering the lives of half of Western Europe with your own warheads was quite another. The fragile peace was maintained - and there was a steady flood of defectors into the Saar Territory over the next few years as the best luxury goods the Soviet Union could provide were funnelled into this outlet mall of Communism.
In the end, the end of the bizarrely long-lived Territory of the Saar Basin was a footnote in a larger conflict - just like the rest of its history, in fact. President Kennedy's resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis just happened to entail a rationalisation of the Iron Curtain: West Berlin for the Saar. Neither side wanted the other to be able to advertise on the other side, and it was felt that being able to spy on each other slightly easier was not good enough to outweigh the manpower and military costs of supplying these places. And that was that. Several KPS officials were put on trial but the rest were ignored, and the 'Saarland' became just another West German state.
So much for Khrushchev's famous dictum, "Ich bin ein Saarbruckener."
- Uhura's Mazda
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