This year marks 100 years since the first German republican constitution was adopted in Weimar, Germany, a renowned centre of culture and enlightenment. The Weimar Constitution is still considered one of the most progressive and democratic constitutions of the 20th century and was an inspiration to democrats all over the world at the time it was drafted. Not even the United States of America had such an open and egalitarian political system at the beginning of the last century. The Charter was to seal the Weimar Republic, which emerged from the wreckage of the First World War to save a humiliated and defeated Germany from the shackles of the military ghost of the past, autocracy and conservative imperialism. The Weimar Republic existed from the end of the First World War until 30 January 1933, when an elderly and half-senile President, Paul Von Hindenburg, signed the death warrant for democracy and, reluctantly, gave Hitler the Chancellorship.
Post-war Germany is etched in the collective memory above all as a land of wounded pride, where radical and nationalist forces and paramilitaries flourished in preparation for a great revenge for the “Versailles dictatorship”, or the unfair treatment of the Allied Powers.
But post-war Germany was also the embodiment of a democratic society, open-mindedness, incredible cultural achievements, attempts at international integration and new beginnings in general. The end of the old imperial order unleashed the political and social creativity that characterised modern German society.
Universal suffrage, equality before the law, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, of the media, of association, amnesty for political prisoners, and at the same time the introduction of a welfare state with an eight-hour working day, generous support for the unemployed and war invalids, paid maternity leave, social housing – all this was put on paper and adopted by its first representatives of the people.
How was it possible that on 9 November 1918, two days before the signing of the Armistice that ended a morass of hitherto unimaginable proportions, when their hungry and exhausted army was no longer able or willing to fight, the Germans proclaimed a social-democratic republic and government? At the same time, they promised immediate elections, set about writing a constitution and, of course, exiled their own Kaiser, until recently the personification of the mighty and invincible German Empire.
Towards the end of the war, German society and politics were increasingly divided and could not find common ground on what the future should look like. More and more people supported the far left and German communists dreamed of a Soviet-style revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat. The people, tired of war, wanted above all an end to it, and even in this they had the example of the Russians, who had withdrawn from the war. The Red Danger was therefore very real and the conditions for the success of the communist revolution were almost perfect. Marx had already predicted that such a revolution would first succeed in Germany.
The thought of a communist revolution struck fear into the bones of the right and centre-right forces, the military high command, the nobility and all the established elites in general. The more moderate and pro-democracy parties therefore joined with the centre-left parties in the Weimar coalition to try to introduce as much of a welfare state as possible and thus to turn people away from the communists.
But on the fringes remained a number of influential extremists and nationalists who steadily undermined the Weimar Republic until its tragic end in 1933. They fed their success on hatred, violence, terrorism and propaganda, but most of all on the world economic crisis that followed the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929. Up until then they had been no more than a threatening presence on German soil, but then overnight they became part of the mainstream political trend.
The collapse of the Weimar Republic is certainly not the fault of Nazi extremists alone. It was a fundamentally fragile democracy that collapsed under the weight of the consequences of military defeat, the financial crisis and Germany’s authoritarian nationalist tradition. The rise of nationalism can be traced back to the very creation of the German Empire in 1871. With little to bind the newly created country together other than language, its founders, notably the Iron Chancellor Bismarck, deliberately created a collective national identity.
Unexpected defeat
On 21 March 1918, the Germans launched the last major offensive of the First World War on the Western Front. After the Russians withdrew from the war by signing a peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk, the Germans were able to move troops from the Eastern to the Western Front. But there were worrying reports from the battlefields – the soldiers were exhausted, hungry and tired of war. They deserted in droves and jumped off trains as they were transported like cattle from the Russian border to France. The British naval blockade of trade also left the German Empire short of material resources, while the Allies were strengthened by the American entry into the war.
The mighty army of the mighty Reich was in its last gasps. Despite the recruitment of younger and older soldiers, they could no longer be replaced in numbers. At the front, food and clothing were in short supply, the soldiers were typhus-ridden, starving and completely at their wits’ end. Many were fading and convinced that they had landed in an eternal hell.
Thus, even during the last offensive, the Germans failed to break through the Allied forces. Nevertheless, a significant part of the self-confident military elite still turned a blind eye and lied to the Kaiser, who was convinced of victory. The ordinary German population was also under an illusion. But on home soil, more and more sensible voices began to spread, resigned to the coming defeat and wanting to prepare for it as best they could. Above all, they wanted to win Germany favourable grounds for peace negotiations with the Allies.
It is interesting how the whole German political establishment believed that the Allies would not be too strict and that they would negotiate with them as equal partners. This was one of the great illusions of the First World War. Germany’s willingness to make peace came too late, with too much pride and little or no sense of guilt. Even the pacifist US President Woodrow Wilson ran out of patience.
Resigned to their impending defeat, the German war heroes, Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, recommended an armistice to Kaiser Wilhelm II and urged him to negotiate mainly with the Americans. Even at the beginning of 1918, Wilson had advocated a softer approach towards the Central Powers and had proclaimed the famous 14 Points in the US Congress, which included, among other things, the right of each country to decide its own destiny and to develop freely. While his manifesto was a laudable attempt to make a new, fairer start in international relations, it was utopian given the situation and the complete loss of trust between the opponents.
As typical representatives of the imperial army, the generals were the very epitome of authoritarianism, thinking more about the reputation of the army than the fate of the nation. They planned in advance how to blame the civilian government for the defeat. At that time, the “legend of the knife in the back”, of which Hindenburg was the author, was already taking shape. Its main message was that the German army had never actually been defeated on the battlefield, but that the defeat had been caused by traitorous and subversive forces at home, who had planned and carried out the systemic corruption of the army through lies. The Bolsheviks and the Jews were, of course, primarily responsible. The legend had many versions, but what they all had in common was that the German army did not lose the war in combat and that civilian politicians, not military elites, were responsible for its defeat.
The new government was formed at the beginning of October and was made up of the parliamentary parties that had been campaigning for peace since 1917, including finally the Social Democrats (SPD), the largest party for two decades, which has repeatedly challenged the right-wing and autocratic tendencies.
Then, at the end of October, there was the sailors’ uprising in Kiel, Germany. First they resisted being conscripted into a hopeless battle, but then the revolt quickly grew into a general socialist revolution. The Kaiser had no choice but to resign and flee into exile in Holland.
With such positive changes, German leaders were slow to lend a hand to the Allies, but too much misery had been done for sympathy and understanding. When the Germans agreed to sign the armistice, their opponents inflicted another 10,000 casualties on them in the last hours before the end of hostilities, out of sheer vindictiveness and anger. The peace negotiations thus did not bode well from the start.
This is not peace.
“This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years”, said the Supreme Allied Commander, the French Marshal Foch, when the unforgiving Treaty of Versailles was ready to be signed in April 1919. On 11 November 1918, under the leadership of the politician Matthias Erzberger, only an armistice was signed. The train of the German delegation was then moving at five kilometres per hour across the devastated French countryside, so that the aggressors could see at close quarters what they had wrought. Later, the far-right successfully coined the term “November criminals” for the signatories of the armistice, and Erzberger was murdered a few years later by members of the paramilitary extremist Freikorps as a traitor to the nation.
The peace negotiations that followed the ceasefire were protracted. In the so-called Paris Peace Process, the Allies concluded individual treaties with each of the defeated powers, the most extensive and best known being the Versailles Treaty with Germany.
The peace process was emotionally charged for all involved. In four years of slaughter – some ten million soldiers and seven million civilians killed – every family in Europe lost a loved one. In addition, the war left millions disabled and tens of thousands mentally handicapped, not to mention the material damage. Some parts of France where the protracted trench warfare took place are still burnt and barren today. France has probably suffered the most damage, and it is the French who have therefore been the most vindictive. Moreover, memories of the Franco-German War of 1871, in which the Germans were victorious, were still vivid.
At a time when a new German constitution was being drafted in Weimar and many German cities were being shaken by communist uprisings, representatives of the victorious powers gathered in Paris to draw up the terms of peace. The so-called Four Great Powers, Wilson for the United States, Lloyd George for Great Britain, Clemenceau for France and Orlando for Italy, had a difficult task ahead of them – they had to redesign the European political order, since the European balance of power concert established after the Napoleonic Wars had broken down at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
In addition to defining new borders after the collapse of the German, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and containing the Bolshevik Revolution, Germany had to be punished first and foremost. The English and French public were the most eager for revenge and their politicians wanted to satisfy them. Some even demanded the execution of the German Kaiser and his generals.
The Allies invited the Germans to sign the treaty at the end of April 1919. They went to great lengths to put the German envoys in as submissive and humiliating a position as possible. At Versailles, the 180-strong delegation was “unceremoniously loaded on to coaches and taken to a hotel, where their luggage was thrown on a heap in the courtyard; they themselves had to rummage through their suitcases and take them to their rooms”.
But the Germans were still under the illusion that they could negotiate, and even had maps with plans of the territories they wanted to annex or keep. But for them, everything went wrong at Versailles.
French President Clemenceau opened the meeting by saying, “The hour for settling accounts has come. You asked for peace. We are ready to grant it.” The German representative read out a long, insulting speech, instead of showing at least some humility and respect. His pride being hurt, he complained about the unfair treatment and did not even stand up during his speech. This event is considered to be one of the greatest diplomatic blunders in the history of diplomacy.
The allies were incensed, and Wilson said, “This is the most inappropriate speech I have ever heard. The Germans are a really stupid people. They always do the wrong thing.” Clemenceau was even more blunt: “The problem with the Germans is that there are 20 million too many of them.”
The legacy of the Treaty of Versailles
And so, under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany lost about a tenth of its population, a seventh of its pre-war territory, including Alsace and Lorraine, parts of western Prussia, Silesia, industrial Saarland, and was prevented from the reunification with Austria that they both wanted. In addition, it had to give up all its overseas colonies. Most of its troops had to be demobilised, as it was only allowed to have 100 000, and it was no longer allowed to have an air force. It was not allowed to join the newly created international organisation, the League of Nations.
The most serious provision of all was Article 231, which blamed Germany for starting the war and provided the legal basis for setting reparations, which the Allies in Paris could not yet agree on. It was precisely the issues of blame and reparations that were central to Germany, since it had never collectively accepted blame for the war. If anything united the Germans as a nation in the tumultuous post-war years, it was the sense of injustice at the Treaty of Versailles, or the “Versailles chains of shame treaty”, as it was called.
Germany had two weeks to sign the treaty or face invasion by foreign forces. They appealed against every article of the treaty, but in the end they signed. It was also a symbolically vindictive moment for the Allies, especially the French – on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of the Habsburg heir to the throne, Franz Joseph, in Sarajevo, the treaty was signed in the Versailles Hall of Mirrors, exactly where the Germans had proclaimed the creation of the German Reich in 1871.
During the 14 years of the Weimar Republic, the Germans resisted virtually all the articles of the Treaty of Versailles, but the issue of reparations, or war debts, was the one that weighed most heavily on their minds. The legacy of the Treaty of Versailles is said to be one of the key reasons for the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Foreign academics and intellectuals, such as the well-known economist Maynard Keynes, who wrote a book entitled The Economic Consequences of Peace, had already warned of the dangers of the treaty’s intransigence. The “war to end all wars” was anything but that.
Germany was in total ruins, suffering almost 2 million casualties, 4.2 million wounded and 1.2 million prisoners of war, which together accounted for more than half of all mobilised troops! In addition, the defeat and the difficult peace conditions also left it with a deep crisis of national identity. One million defeated soldiers returned home in need of jobs and hope for a better future.
In this period of general uncertainty, it was impossible to create political stability overnight. That is why parties and militarist groups promising extreme solutions flourished. It is true that peace had finally come and that Germany had one of the most liberal regimes in the world, but it was without a solid democratic basis. The start of the Republic was difficult and Germany was bursting at the seams. For many years to come, many lamented the solid monarchy, while masses of poor proletarians were leaning to the far left, hoping that the Russian scenario would enable Germany to emerge from the multi-faceted crisis.
The Socialist Revolution and the Spartacist Uprising
The humiliating end of the war, combined with the economic and military crisis, created conditions similar to those in Russia, and the danger of a communist revolution along the lines of the Russian one was imminent. The Russian model was still fascinating at that time and the Soviets spread to other European countries such as Italy, Hungary and Austria.
In the last days of October 1918, sailors in Kiel harbour were ordered to take to the high seas in readiness for battle. It was a drop over the edge. Already during the war, the German navy had not achieved any noteworthy success and had spent most of its time in port. When the hungry, ragged and fed-up sailors realised that the war was coming to an end, and their officers tried to send them into a doomed final battle anyway, they mutinied. The mutiny ignited a spark that spread instantly throughout Germany and triggered the socialist revolution.
The sailors first demanded improved living conditions, but their demands quickly became more general. They demanded an immediate end to the war, the deposition of the Emperor and a democratic government. They were joined by soldiers, workers, students and the unemployed. Within days Kiel was in the hands of the rebels. Here, too, they set up a self-governing body which represented the heart of the communist revolution in Bolshevik Russia, the soviet. The revolution spread from Kiel by rail. Soldiers began to abandon their posts and desert en masse. Calls for a general strike grew louder and louder.
When the revolt reached Berlin, the Kaiser resigned and Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democrats, became the new Chancellor, advocating gradual reforms. In contrast, the more radical leftists, or communists, were in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but for the time being they still sat in government. On 11 November, the day of the signing of the armistice in France, the latter proclaimed the German Republic from the balcony of the German parliament.
But it was also a time of disintegration of the united left. A few hundred metres away, from the balcony of the Royal Palace, the leader of the Spartacists, Karl Liebknecht – a communist radical split from the independent Social Democrats – proclaimed the German Socialist Republic. The confusion was complete.
A struggle has begun between the supporters of parliamentary democracy and the Russian-style state. The communists initially tried to overthrow the new federal government, claiming that it had betrayed the ideals of the November Revolution. At the same time, strike waves and organised armed uprisings shook many German cities where they enjoyed majority support. Fearing civil war, the government sent in the army against the insurgents. The split on the left did not benefit the new republic, but it did benefit the far right, which during this period was busily recruiting supporters, mainly instigators, fighters and disillusioned ex-soldiers. Among them was the then still disreputable veteran Adolf Hitler, who was recovering from exposure to war gas and a nervous breakdown suffered as a result of his defeat in the war.
It was the far right that was responsible for the murder of two now world-famous left-wing leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Their Spartacus Alliance split from the less radical independent Social Democrats, who were united with the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD) for the first few years.
Red Rosa was born in Poland and her political ideology was among the more extreme Leninist views and moderate socialist thought. She was an extremely talented and charismatic speaker. Liebknecht was even for a time a member of the SPD in Parliament, and both were pacifists. In 1915 they founded the Spartacus Alliance, named after the ancient gladiatorial slave rebel against the Roman Republic.
In January 1919, the Spartacus organised a violent revolt and declared a general strike. Communist militants swarmed the streets and the ruling SPD committed one of the worst strategic internal political mistakes of the Weimar Republic. They sent in the infamous Volunteer Corps, or Freikorps, a paramilitary Nazi sympathiser made up of the most bloodthirsty and unscrupulous thugs. They were mainly ex-officers, many noblemen, but also young men who regretted that they had not been able to prove themselves in the war. In April 1919 they already had around 250,000 members.
Unfortunately, the new government failed to form a new army loyal to republican principles, leaving the Freikorps as the only existing military formation the government could count on. In the final years of Weimar, this proved fatal, because a military structure loyal to the right and to violence was crucial to its success.
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered on 15 January and Rosa’s body was found in a canal only a year later. She had become an eternal martyr of the socialist movement. Two thousand people died alongside them in the two-month-long revolt. All this happened shortly before the first elections after the adoption of the new constitution, and had a crucial impact on German post-war society, marked above all by the inability of the left to organise among itself.
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The Weimar Spirit
Bavaria was also on the boil, where both the radical left and the right have traditionally been strong. In Munich, under the leadership of Kurt Eisner, the communist movement tried to proclaim a left-wing Free State after King Ludwig III of Bavaria fled. But the attempt failed and Eisner too was driven out of the world by right-wing terrorists. Hitler, who was in Munich at the time, watched the events with interest and even supported Eisner for a while.
Despite the general unrest, the federal government continued with its state-building programme. Central to this was a new constitution that would enable society to progress and develop. But the writing of the constitution took place not in a turbulent Berlin, marked by left-wing violence, but in Weimar, a town with a long tradition of enlightenment, culture, progress and the stamp of a classical humanist Germany. Goethe, Schiller, Liszt, Bach and many others were active there in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Weimar was therefore not chosen at random; Weimar was a clear message about the intentions of the framers of the new constitution and a symbol of the new Germany in the making. Even in the 1920s, Germany was marked by the Weimar spirit and its intellectual traditions, culture, music, theatre, film and architecture were renowned throughout the world. The latter found its best expression in the Bauhaus movement.
The new Constitution was officially proclaimed on 11 August 1919 and was the embodiment of genuine democracy. It introduced equality before the law, gender equality, protected basic freedoms, abolished the privileges of the nobility, introduced a proportional electoral system and the right to vote for everyone over 21. Germany was the sixth European country to introduce universal suffrage for women. The Weimar Constitution was a mixture of the French, English and Swiss constitutions, with additional social elements. It brought the German political system closer to other Western democracies.
Moreover, the entire Weimar period was marked by an exceptionally high voter turnout. 83% of eligible voters took part in the first elections. Among them, people turned out en masse against the monarchy as well as against the radical right and left.
Germany became a federal state with 18 Länder, headed by a Chancellor and responsible to Parliament instead of the Kaiser. The President had a seven-year term and appointed the Chancellor and the Cabinet. Article 48, which gave the President special powers in the event of an emergency, later proved to be the constitution’s greatest weakness. In the years before Hitler’s complete seizure of power, rule by presidential action, without the consent of parliament, had become commonplace and facilitated the transition to dictatorship.
The founders of the new state believed deeply in democracy, which was not the case for the established conservative elites. But at least in the first period, during the constant communist riots, they were willing to work with the Social Democrats, the German People’s Party and the Catholic Centre Party, the so-called Weimar coalition. But when the communist danger abated somewhat, the anti-Republican military elites, industrialists, bankers and capitalists in general, preferred to look to the right for allies. And soon found them in the National Socialists.
The rise of the right
What united the right most in its hatred of the Republic, the government and the signatories of the armistice and the peace treaty was the belief in the legend of the knife in the back. Those who supported peace, such as Matthias Erzberger, one of the so-called November criminals, were thus also blamed for the defeat. That is why two former officers murdered him in cold blood while walking in the woods.
Right-wing criminals committed 354 similar politically motivated murders between 1918 and 1922. They were rarely punished, as the courts were in the hands of the old authoritarian elites, who were hostile to the republic. During the same period, the radical left also committed 22 murders, but while only one of the right-wing murderers received a life sentence, as many as ten of the left-wing murderers were sentenced to death.
The assassination of Walter Rathenau, the German Foreign Minister of Jewish origin, horrified the entire German and world public. His greatest crime was his Jewish origin, and he was also “guilty” of signing the Rapallo Treaty in 1922, which was an attempt by Germany to normalise relations with the communist Soviet Union. As many as 400,000 people took to the streets to protest against the violence, demonstrating the German people’s faith in justice and democracy. As a result, Parliament passed legislation to ban extremist organisations, but in practice this applied more to left-wing extremists than to right-wing extremists.
The right-wing attempted its first coup d’état, the so-called ‘Kapp Putsch’, as early as 1920, and in a way it was a prelude to Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch a few years later. The Kappa putsch was organised by landlords and industrialists and the Prussian militarised elite led by the former officer Lüttwitz. The government fled first to Dresden, then to Stuttgart, and although the seizure of power was prevented with the help of left-wing militias, the government lost the confidence of a large part of the people.
Moreover, Germany was at that moment sinking into an economic crisis: in 1922, it declared that it could no longer pay reparations, and France and Belgium, with 100,000 troops, occupied the Ruhr, the heart of German industry. The occupation lasted from 1923 to 1925 and did nothing to help the left. Germany’s policy of passive resistance had disastrous economic consequences for its economy. Production fell, hyperinflation set in, and by the end of 1923, one dollar was worth 4.2 trillion deutschmarks. Prices were absurd.
On 3 January 1923, a kilo of bread cost 163 marks, and on 19 November it cost 233 billion marks. Ninety percent of all family income went on food. Amazing stories circulated around the world, and Germans still have a distaste for inflation today!
These were the ideal circumstances for right-wing rhetoric and propaganda to flourish. Hitler was then working in Munich, a hotbed of anti-Weimar sentiment. He had successfully tempered his National Socialist ideology in the small Workers’ Party and soon became an established agitator and spokesman before the masses. He did not (yet) have a special reputation among the leaders of the right. But he had already worked with some of the most prominent Nazi leaders of later times, such as Göring and Hess. In addition to the Freikorps, the Steel Helmets, a paramilitary organisation of veterans, and the infamous Sturmabteilung (SA) were also active, all united in the goal of destroying the Weimar Republic.
Hitler was catapulted into the world by the Putsch in November 1923, probably inspired by Mussolini’s seizure of power and his march on Rome the previous year, and he drew up the putsch scenario with the eccentric General Ludendorff. After the summer of 1923, he learned that the march on Berlin was also being prepared by the established Bavarian right-wing leadership, which had previously declared a state of emergency.
But Hitler was looked down on and did not intend to play a major role in the takeover. Hitler played them tactfully, and with his followers – he had around 4000 men under him at the time – stormed a right-wing rally in Munich’s biggest beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller, and declared a coup d’état and the ouster of the Bavarian government. The uprising was quickly crushed by the regular army, and many of Hitler’s followers put their tails between their legs.
The failure of the Putsch notwithstanding, it was probably the most crucial event in the rise of Hitler as the undisputed leader of the National Socialists. He emerged as a courageous and fearless leader, and at his trial he proudly took all the blame. During the coup, he would almost have lost his life, as a broomstick fatally struck an officer marching alongside him and they both collapsed to the ground. Hitler is said to have even contemplated suicide in hiding afterwards, and was arrested two days later anyway.
In principle, he could have been sentenced to death for this kind of high treason, but as I said, the judiciary was in favour of the right. The trial was therefore a farce. Hitler was like the lead actor in a play on stage, blowing the enthusiastic audience in the courtroom’s mind with patriotic speeches: “Convict us for guilty a thousand times over – the goddess of eternal history will laugh /…/ she forgives us”.
He was almost acquitted, but in the end he was given a five-year sentence and released eight months later. In prison, he was comfortable in his spacious cell, received at least five hundred visitors, countless gifts and even love letters. He dictated the infamous Nazi bible My Struggle to his fellow prisoner Rudolf Hess.
After serving his sentence, Hitler adopted a completely different tactic. He had put an end to anti-state revolts and putsches, and decided to attack the state apparatus with legal means and electoral success. This was a winning approach in the long run.
Calm before the storm
But, to Hitler’s misfortune, Germany began to enter a period of development and prosperity in the mid-1920s. The period between 1924 and 1929 was the most stable period of the Weimar Republic, with no major political upheavals and economic growth. The occupation of the Ruhr was over and the international community slowly softened its attitude towards the Germans, for example by signing the Dawes Plan, which allowed for more gradual reparation payments. These were also significantly reduced. The Americans were behind the proposal and, of course, saw the growth of the German economy as beneficial for themselves. They made huge loans to the Germans to help them repay reparations and invest in the economy.
The most influential German politician of this period was Gustav Stresemann of the German People’s Party, first Chancellor and then Foreign Minister until his death in 1929. Together with the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, he was responsible for the re-establishment of Franco-German relations and the signing of the Treaty of Lucerne in 1926. With this treaty, the Germans accepted new borders with France, the demilitarisation of the Rhineland, and became members of the League of Nations. Stresemann believed that this made the possibility of renewed armed conflict in Europe much less likely. In 1926, Stresemann and Briand were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The treaty was a precursor to the Kellog-Briand Pact of 1928, which ruled out the use of war to settle international disputes in favour of multilateral diplomacy. Despite the fact that the Americans in the 1920s were mainly committed to a policy of isolationism, Secretary of State Kellogg was one of the few politicians who devoted himself to international relations. In August 1929, the Allies cut reparations by a further 20%, although it would still take 50 years to pay them in full.
In the meantime, Hitler and his extremism sank into public obscurity. His party, renamed the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in 1925, the Nazi Party for short, was not doing well. It had extremely low support and won only 2.8% of the vote in the 1928 elections. Hitler retreated to Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps and the fortunes of the 20th century looked very different from what we know today.
But some worrying signs were already surfacing. Germany had been secretly rearming itself since 1926, despite an international ban, with the help of the Soviet Union, and the membership of the SA’s assault detachments was also growing much faster than that of the regular army. In Berlin, the master propagandist Joseph Goebbels was already active as leader of the Nazis there.
Then, in October 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashed and the cards were shuffled faster than ever.
The Great Depression leads to the end of the Weimar Republic
The 40% loss in the value of the Wall Street stock market resulted in a major depression and severe unemployment. The crisis spread rapidly around the world, hitting Germany in particular, almost exclusively dependent on US loans. The US demanded that they be repaid within 90 days, causing widespread unemployment. In 1928, 650 000 Germans were unemployed; in 1933, almost 6 million Germans were unemployed, i.e. one out of every three people was out of a job.
General unemployment was the Nazis’ lifeline. Communists and Nazis clashed in the streets and law and order became a thing of the past. The Social Democrats did win the 1930 parliamentary elections, but with 18.25% of the vote, the Nazis’ result was an ominous portent of things to come. The turnout was still very high, around 82%. In the 1932 elections, the Nazis won the largest share of the vote in the history of their existence, 37%.
The crisis meant that elections followed each other like clockwork, but at the same time the government was preparing a massive public works programme to tackle mass unemployment. The Nazis had to seize the opportunity before their popularity waned.
Hitler had by then mastered the modern political tools of recruiting followers and spreading political messages. For example, he was the first to use the airplane to travel around the country, which gave him widespread visibility. His speeches, however, were legendary and literally put the masses into a trance.
President Hindenburg, himself an opponent of the Republic, had always despised Hitler and considered him a petty bourgeois upstart. Despite the Nazis’ growing electoral success, he refused for a long time to appoint Hitler Chancellor. But when the last Chancellor, Franz Van Papen, resigned, the elderly Hindenburg finally relented and gave the Nazi leader the title of Chancellor, thinking that this would tame his ambitions. Only the Social Democrats resisted and tried to prevent the rise of the Nazis with the so-called Iron Front. But it was too late and they no longer had enough support themselves.
On 30 January, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany without a parliamentary majority, he already had more than 400,000 Brownshirts under his command. Goebbels immediately organised a grand torchlight parade through Berlin, in which all uniformed Nazi sympathisers took part.
The only missing epilogue was that Hitler needed full powers for a complete dictatorship. For the time being, he was still “only” Chancellor, who, on paper at least, had to take Parliament into account. Fortune smiled on him in the form of the fire set in the German Parliament on 27 February 1933. Whether the fire was an accident or a Nazi intrigue may not even be that important.
The official Nazi version blamed the fire on the Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe, who was arrested in a confused state, with a box of matches and no shirt. He was supposed to have used it to start the fire. He confessed immediately, although his German was poor. Anyway, the reaction to the fire was immediate. It was as if the Nazis had been waiting in full readiness for such an opportunity. The newly created Gestapo had already prepared lists of the leading and most exposed Communists and other opponents of the Nazis, and the witch-hunt was on before the fire was put out.
Propaganda was at its height and Göring shouted, “This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute! We will show no mercy! We must shoot every Communist on the spot!” And so it was.
Truckloads of riot squads began their march through Berlin, breaking down doors, breaking in and arresting en masse all and sundry, real and imaginary communists, social democrats and liberals alike. In the first few days, 4000 arrests were made, including prominent members of parliament. The indiscriminate torture and killing began.
The next day, Hitler’s position as dictator was a fact. The final nail in Weimar’s coffin was a law which, due to extraordinary circumstances, allowed the cabinet, headed by the Chancellor, to pass laws without a parliament. When Hitler’s party failed to win a majority in the March 1933 elections, Parliament was simply dissolved. From then on, he could write and pass laws as he wished. By the summer, all “enemy of the state” parties except his own had been banned.
Democracy is never a given
The metamorphosis from street agitator to all-powerful dictator of Europe’s largest country was complete. The stage was set for the beginning of the darkest period of the 20th century. In an irony of fate, Hitler undermined democracy in a very cunning way, by the legal means it afforded him.
The process that led to the death sentence of Weimar democracy was complex and did not depend on a single factor. Thus, it cannot be blamed solely on the Treaty of Versailles, on the psychological consequences of the war, on the economic crisis, or on Germany’s authoritarian tradition. All countries had serious problems after the ‘war of all wars’, but not all succumbed to extreme political ideologies.
Today, democracy is again in danger, even in countries with centuries of democratic tradition. Democratic forces are often unable to unite, so people are losing trust in them and authoritarian forces are gaining strength. This was also the case during the Weimar period. Democracy is not a given.
