Why Is Their Growing Controversy Surrounding Stresemann’S Foreign Policy?

It has bee suggested that he had private reasons for signing the Lacarno Pacts and The Young and Dawes plans other than what was best for Germany. After his death in 1929 some of his papers and extracts from his diaries were published, but these showed him as a peacemaker and a good European. After the defeat in the Second World War more evidence became available. Papers that seemed to suggest that Stresemann had extremely Nationalist points of view about Germanys Eastern frontiers and he harboured the idea of a Union with Austria. (Both similar to the beliefs of AH.) He also spent a lot of time working for a détente in the west of Germany. He also made a secret Military agreement with the U.S.S.R and he tried to bring Berlin and Moscow closer.

However this is not that surprising, Stresemann had always been an ardent Nationalist and this was shown in his Career in the war.

It could be said that due to Germanys weakness after the First World War Stresemann had no choice but to make concession over reparations and passive resistance in the Ruhr, and the fixing of Germany's frontiers in the west and because Germany was week he felt that he had no choice to obey even though he did not really ideologically agree with what he was doing, but he was using pragmatism to make Germany get the most out of every opportunity, he forgot his ideals to try to do what was best for Germany in the long term.

However this does not mean that his ideals were gone but just buried under a blanket of pragmatism. We cannot be sure how his foreign policy would have changed had he lived to see Germany regrow to strength, but the controversy over his foreign policy is not so much to do with what he did do when he was alive but what he might of done if he had lived. However the one point about which there is Western controversy is the illegal remilitarisation which the closer relationship with the U.S.S.R. The majority of his foreign policy was however completed in good faith at least to the extent of what was best for Germany.

The controversy surrounding Stresemann's foreign Policy is due to the documentary evidence to which became available after World War II due to the Allied conquest of Germany in 1945.