3
The Collapse of Democracy and the Rise of Hitler
Two rather different processes coincided in the late 1920s and early 1930s. One was the collapse of the democratic political system of the Weimar Republic. The other was the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party, immeasurably aided by the economic depression after 1929. The collapse of democracy effectively preceded, and was an essential precondition for, the rise of Hitler; and the appointment of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship of Germany was by no means the only possible, or inevitable, outcome of the collapse of Weimar democracy. Given the consequences of this appointment, it is scarcely surprising that the causes, the relative contribution and importance of different factors, have been so hotly debated.
The Flawed Compromise
We have seen that Weimar democracy was born under difficult circumstances. The 1918–19 revolution in effect represented a temporary abdication of responsibility on the part of old elites unwilling to take the opprobrium of defeat or shoulder the burdens of postwar reconstruction. Fearful of more radical revolution, they made crucial concessions to moderate socialist forces; but they did not view these concessions as permanent, and remained in the wings, waiting and watching for chances to revise both the domestic and international settlements of 1918–19. On the part of the urban masses, on the other hand, the participation for the first time in government of the SPD, and the newly recognized and established position of the trade unions awakened expectations which an impoverished postwar country would find it hard to deliver. Defeated in war, burdened with the harsh provisions of the Versailles Treaty, essentially contested in its very essence and attacked from both Left and Right, the Weimar Republic certainly bore a considerable weight of problems from the very start.
Yet it survived the difficulties of the early years. A general strike in 1920 served to defeat the Kapp putsch; the hyper-inflation of 1923 was successfully dealt with, reparations were renegotiated, and international affairs apparently brought onto a firmer footing by the mid-1920s. The question thus arises: was Weimar democracy, as some pessimistic accounts tend to suggest, really ‘doomed from the start’; or, rather, was its collapse contingent on the immediate effects of the world economic depression after 1929? Were the causes of its collapse essentially structural and long term or circumstantial and short term in nature? And, in so far as they were short term, what roles were played by different groups and individuals, and what, if any, alternative outcomes might have been possible? What options and courses of action might have been available to those key historical actors, who, if they had taken different decisions, might have been in a position to alter the fatal course of Weimar history? Could the economic distress which provided much of the rapidly increasing strength of the Nazi Party after 1928 have been in some way ameliorated? Did Hitler actually ‘seize power’, or was it rather handed to him? And if so, by whom? Clearly answers to these questions cannot easily be found, and the concomitant debates are by no means resolved.
In February 1925 Friedrich Ebert died, prematurely, from appendicitis. In the ensuing election, the 77-year-old right-wing monarchist Junker Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was elected, on a second ballot, President of the Weimar Republic. Unlike the Social Democrat Ebert, Hindenburg was not in principle committed to upholding and strengthening the democratic system: on the contrary, he made little secret of his intention to replace it with a more authoritarian political system as soon as was practicable. The election of Hindenburg was of two-fold significance: it illustrated the prevailing political orientations of a little over half of the German electorate in the mid-1920s; and it put into a position of considerable power an individual who would use this power to undermine the democracy which he was empowered to uphold.
Hindenburg’s election was symptomatic of wider trends. As far as the actual functioning of parliamentary democracy was concerned, all was far from well even before the onset of the recession. Under an electoral system of proportional representation, in which the relatively numerous parties held radically different opinions on a range of domestic and foreign affairs, it was extremely difficult to form any sort of stable coalition government with majority support in Parliament, even in the ‘good years’. While some combinations of parties were able to agree on domestic issues, they could not agree on foreign affairs; and other combinations could agree on foreign affairs but not on domestic matters. With no party able to dominate a fragmented political landscape, any coalition was intrinsically unstable, and in the event short-lived. The instability of parliamentary government only helped to discredit a system which was in any event rather lacking in legitimacy among large sectors of the population.
In 1924 Germany saw two governments made up of a bourgeois coalition without a parliamentary majority come and go: the first, headed by Wilhelm Marx, failed to gain support in the May General Election, as did the second Marx cabinet in the General Election of December 1924. In the period up to the next General Election of May 1928, there were four different cabinets. The first, headed by Hans Luther, which lasted from 15 January 1925 to 5 December 1925, was a coalition of the Right which collapsed as a result of the opposition of the right-wing German National People’s Party (DNVP) to the Locarno Pact. The second, surviving from 20 January 1926 to 12 May 1926, and again headed by Luther, was a bourgeois coalition lacking a parliamentary majority; it was brought down by a combination of forces in the Reichstag. The third flourished only from 16 May to 17 December 1926, headed once more by Marx, and was a renewed bourgeois coalition lacking parliamentary support; it was ultimately brought down by a vote of no confidence in the Reichstag proposed by the SPD and supported by both Communists and Nationalists, as well as by other smaller parties. A new right-wing coalition, headed again by Marx, lasted from 29 January 1927 until after the General Election of 1928. After the short-lived grand coalition of the Stresemann government of 13 August–23 November 1923, the SPD had chosen to remain on the sidelines of parliamentary politics. In 1928 the SPD returned again to government in a grand coalition under Chancellor Hermann Müller: this was to be the last truly democratic regime of the Weimar Republic. From 1929 onwards it was faced with mounting economic, social and political problems that finally tore apart the delicate fabric of Weimar democracy and ushered in the period of de facto presidential rule. But it is clear that even in the period from 1924 to 1928 the functioning of Weimar parliamentary politics was less than smooth; and the instability of governments only helped to bring the whole ‘system’ into disrepute.
The problems of Weimar parliamentary democracy cannot be attributed simply to specific constitutional features, such as proportional representation or the ease by which Chancellors could be voted out of office. Party politics reflected the deeper socioeconomic and cultural divisions in Weimar Germany, which in turn contributed to the fragmentation and increasing extremism of party politics in the later Weimar years, and the expansion of an effective political vacuum in the centre ground.
For one thing, because of the new and prominent role of the state in economic and social affairs, socioeconomic conflicts were inevitably politicized. Particular issues became generalized; criticism of specific policies widened to become critiques of the ‘system’ as a whole. Again, these tendencies predated the onset of economic recession, and weakened the internal structure of Weimar democracy even before it was subjected to the sustained battering of the depression years.
As early as 1923 employers had mounted an effective attack on the eight-hour day agreed in the Stinnes–Legien agreement of 1918; and the failure of the Zentral-Arbeits-Gemeinschaft (ZAG) to resolve industrial disputes led to the official resignation of the trade union organization, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB), in January 1924. After 1923 trade unions began losing members, funds and credibility. They had increasingly to rely on the state as the effective guarantor of their position. Yet employers, despite their relatively strong position, remained on the defensive. Although it is difficult to generalize about employers’ attitudes, the Ruhr lock-out of 1928 is a significant illustration of one important strand. Unwilling to concede even a modest wage increase (of 2–4 per cent), certain Ruhr industrialists locked out around a quarter of a million workers in protest against the very system of state arbitration. Gradually, significant sectors of industry came to feel that it was the democratic parliamentary system itself, which guaranteed the position of workers and unions that needed to be revised. As they lost faith in a system for which they had never, in any event, had much love, so also they began to withdraw support – and funds – from the liberal parties of the bourgeois middle. More broadly, the Weimar Republic was identified with the institutionalized power of workers and their political and union organizations – which employers, who had formed their attitudes in what were now seen as the golden days of Imperial Germany, tended to regard as essentially illegitimate, by definition little more than ‘enemies of the Empire’ (Reichsfeinde), in Bismarck’s phrase.
Labour relations constituted but one element in undermining support for the Republic among certain economic elites. Far more widespread was the rejection of the Versailles Treaty and all it implied for Germany’s geographical boundaries, and for her political and military status. This resentment was extensive – and was to play an important role in the eventual mass popularity of the Nazi Party – but it took on a particular significance in connection with one particular elite: the Army. While there are varying analyses of the role of the Army in Weimar politics (ranging from older, liberal interpretations of the Army as comprising a ‘state within a state’ to the more recent explorations of the interconnections between Army, industry and government), it is clear that in a number of ways the Army played a key role in undermining Weimar democracy. The Reichswehr was to a degree split within itself; there were differences of attitude towards the Republic and a growth of factions after 1918.1 Many leading officers claimed that while they supported the German nation, they could not support the democratic state: thus, in the early years, in different ways, Generals Groener, Seeckt and others co-operated with right-wing groups and paramilitary organizations, such as the ex-service-men’s association, the Stahlhelm. German military schools were opened in Russia (under the Treaty of Rapallo) to train officers, and secret rearmament programmes were initiated in contravention of the Versailles Treaty. From 1926 onwards, General Kurt von Schleicher played a leading role in supporting and influencing President Hindenburg’s plans for a more authoritarian form of government which would reinstate the pre-1918 elites in what they deemed to be their rightful positions of power. Schleicher’s role was to become particularly important in the closing stages of the Republic’s brief history.
Meanwhile, in the civilian arena, towards the end of the 1920s, increasing disaffection with democracy was reflected in the right-wards shift of a number of ‘bourgeois’ parties. Most notable among these was the DNVP, which was taken over by the right-wing nationalist press baron Hugenberg in 1928. After the death of Stresemann in 1929 the DVP also moved towards the Right. But even as they shifted, so were they being outstripped – and their support sapped away from them – by the emergence and dramatic growth of an infinitely more radical party: the NSDAP. And, unlike the traditional conservative and nationalist parties, the NSDAP was able, in the new era of plebiscitary democracy and economic crisis, to attract a wide popular following. Ultimately, elites disaffected with democracy were to feel they must ally with the Nazis to gain a mass base from which to bring the shaky edifice down.
The Rise of the NSDAP
The Nazi Party was, in the early 1920s, but one among many nationalist and völkisch radical political groups. It was catapulted to prominence with the onset of economic recession in the late 1920s: having secured only 2.6 per cent of the national vote in the 1928 General Election, the NSDAP became the second largest party in the Reichstag with 18.3 per cent of the vote in September 1930. The Nazis owed their spectacular success to a combination of two discrete sets of factors: first, their distinctive organization and strategy: and second, the wider socioeconomic conditions which created climates of opinion and sets of grievances on which the Nazis could prey.
Following Hitler’s release from imprisonment at the end of 1924, the NSDAP was formally refounded in February 1925. Over the course of the next few years, Hitler rose from his pre-1923 role of ‘drummer’ to become the undisputed leader or ‘Führer’, standing to some extent above the organizational fray and exerting his powers of charismatic leadership through his gifts of oratory and control of mass audiences.2 The eventual semblance of a well-organized, united party – symbolized by the brown-shirt uniforms of the SA, the serried ranks of units marching past the Führer with arms raised in Hitler-salute, the visual and emotional effects of the mass rallies with the leader as the focal point – partially disguised more complex realities.
The paramilitary SA – founded in 1920, one of the many paramilitary groups to spring up in the aftermath of the First World War – was at first organized only at the local level. After the return of the war veteran Ernst Röhm from Bolivia to head the organization in 1930, the SA remained somewhat unruly, and, in conventional political terms, more radical than Hitler’s conception of Nazi ideology was to be. Nor were all Nazi leaders united on a clearly definable ‘ideology’ in any case. An important figure with ideas somewhat different from those of Hitler was Gregor Strasser, whose role in Nazi party organization was strengthened in 1925 when Hitler was banned from making speeches in public. Strasser, who had considerable organizational skills, played a key role in spreading the Nazi party organization across broad areas of Germany, beyond the original Nazi heartland in Bavaria. In some areas, particularly in north-west Germany, the NSDAP had a more ‘revolutionary’ or radical flavour.
During 1925–6 the NSDAP suffered much infighting. Hitler, on returning to the public rostrum, was able to transcend this factionalism and unite the party under his unique form of leadership. The Berlin party chief Joseph Goebbels was persuaded of Hitler’s merits, and made it his task to promote and strengthen the ‘Führer myth’ through propaganda. At the same time, the ‘putschist’ strategy of the early years was rejected in favour of following a legal, parliamentary road to the overthrow of parliamentary democracy. New party organizations were founded to begin to penetrate a range of social and professional groups. In 1926 the National Socialist League of German Students and the Hitler Youth were founded. The League of Nazi Lawyers, the League of Nazi Doctors, the League of Nazi School-teachers and the Fighting League for German Culture were all established by 1929. In 1928 the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO) was created in an attempt to infiltrate the heartland of left-wing politics, the working class. From 1930 onwards, concerted efforts were made to infiltrate existing agrarian and white-collar worker pressure groups, such as the Reichslandbund and the Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfenverband. Attempts were also made to win over – or at least neutralize and allay the suspicions of – important industrialists.
The Nazis propagated, not a coherent doctrine or body of systematically interrelated ideas, but rather a vaguer world-view made up of a number of prejudices with varied appeals to different audiences which could scarcely be dignified with the term ‘ideology’. As far as Hitler himself was concerned, two major elements were of decisive importance. One was his radical anti-Semitism; the other was his ambitious set of foreign policy aims – his desire for mastery of Europe, the creation of ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for the ‘Aryan’ Germans and eventually for mastery of the world. Linked to these was Hitler’s anti-communism: ‘Jews and Bolsheviks’ were often pejoratively associated, even indissolubly equated, as in their alleged responsibility for the debacle of 1918. The fight against the perceived evils of modern capitalism was to be a simultaneous fight against ‘international Jewry’ and against the threat of communism. Anti-Semitism was far from unique to Germany at this time, but Hitler’s ‘racial’ interpretation gave it a particular virulence. It certainly fell on fertile ground as far as wider anti-Semitic prejudices were concerned; but while anti-Semitism was undoubtedly a major theme for Hitler and for Nazi activists, it was less important as an element in the Nazi Party’s appeal to the wider population.3 At this broader level, Nazi ‘ideology’ was a somewhat rag-bag collection of largely negative views combined with a utopian vision of a grandiose future coloured by nostalgic appeals to aspects of a mythical past. Thus Nazism opposed certain pernicious, potentially threatening tendencies of ‘modern’ capitalist society: the evils of big business (large department stores, often owned by Jews), international finance (‘Jewish’) and revolutionary communism. Nazis promoted a vision of a harmonious national community (Volksgemeinschaft) which would be racially pure (cleansed of the ‘pollution’ of Jews, hereditary degenerates and other supposedly racially or biologically inferior types), and which would overcome the class divisions which beset Imperial and Weimar Germany. Nazism claimed to be able to transcend the divisions and heal the wounds of capitalist society, and to present a new way forwards to a great future, presenting a genuine alternative to both the discredited authoritarianism of the Imperial past and the ‘despicable’ democracy of the Weimar present. How this transcendence would look in detail and in reality was never fully spelled out: Hitler was able to appeal to a wide range of groups harbouring different resentments – and to allay suspicions on a number of fronts – precisely because he was never very specific on the details of the proposed new order. In addition to particular social grievances and fears, there was very widespread nationalist resentment about the Treaty of Versailles from which Hitler was able to benefit. But most important for the expanding appeal of Nazism were the economic developments in the closing years of the Weimar Republic.
Economic Crises and the Collapse of Democracy
The Weimar Republic had suffered since its inception from major economic problems. The means of financing the First World War – through loans and bonds rather than taxes – had laid the foundations for postwar inflation, which had been fuelled and exacerbated by government policies in connection with reparations in 1922–3. Even after the stabilization of the currency in 1923–4, and the revision of reparations arrangements with the Dawes Plan, the Weimar economy was far from strong. For one thing, it was heavily reliant on short-term loans from abroad. These could rapidly be withdrawn, with far-reaching consequences – as indeed occurred after the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. For another, as Harold James has put it, ‘Weimar’s economy suffered from an inherent instability, and like any unstable structure required only a relatively small push to bring down the whole structure’.4 On both the industrial and agrarian fronts there were difficulties. Workers were heavily reliant on state arbitration to back wage claims that were disputed by employers, and, on some interpretations, relatively high labour costs contributed to the problems of the Weimar economy. Whatever one’s view on the question of whether wages were ‘too high’ in an era characterized by ‘Taylorism’ and ‘Fordism’ (the attempted rationalization of labour and enhanced productivity through the introduction of American time-and-motion studies, assembly-line methods and the like), distributional struggles certainly contributed to Weimar’s political problems. Nor was all well on the agricultural front, and the difficulties in the agrarian sphere were to play a major role in the rise of Hitler. From 1924, when the agricultural protectionism introduced at the beginning of the war came to an end, there was a need for rationalization in agriculture. From the mid-1920s onwards, agricultural indebtedness increased, and every year there were greater numbers of bankrupt estates: a heightened political radicalism among farmers resulted. Agrarian elites also came to bring considerable pressure to bear on President Hindenburg – himself a Junker with experience of indebtedness – in the final intrigues leading to the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor.
Given its inherent weaknesses, it is scarcely surprising that Germany’s economy was affected so badly by the world recession in the years after 1929.5 Whatever the intrinsic political weaknesses of Weimar democracy even in the ‘golden years’, it was undoubtedly the Depression which precipitated the actual collapse of Weimar democracy and paved the way for the rise of the Nazis to power.
The Grand Coalition of 1928–30, including the SPD, led by Chancellor Hermann Müller, was the last genuinely parliamentary government of Weimar Germany. Plans had already been made for its replacement by a more authoritarian alternative – essentially presidential rule through a Chancellor and cabinet lacking majority support in Parliament – several weeks before its actual collapse. Having survived earlier crises, the Müller administration fell over the issue of unemployment insurance in the wider context of economic recession and rising unemployment. In October 1929 the Wall Street Crash prompted the withdrawal of American loans from Germany, and heralded a phenomenal rise in bankruptcies and unemployment in the following three years. With rising numbers out of work, unemployment insurance could no longer be paid at the level decreed in the unemployment insurance legislation of July 1927. Müller’s coalition government was unable to reach agreement on the issue of whether to raise contributions or lower the level of benefits. Foundering on this issue, the last cabinet of the Weimar Republic to rely on parliamentary support was replaced by a presidential cabinet under Chancellor Brüning, which, lacking majority support in Parliament, was to rule by presidential decree.
Brüning’s policies have been the subject of considerable debate. He pursued austere, deflationary policies designed – at the cost of sacrificing the well-being of millions of German families – to achieve certain foreign policy aims. In particular, he consciously exacerbated a worsening unemployment situation with the intention of lifting the burden of reparations payments from the German economy. This was effected first in the Hoover Moratorium of 1931 and then ultimately, when Brüning was no longer Chancellor, by the cancellation of all reparations at the Lausanne Conference of 1932. Brüning’s deflationary policies have been defended by some historians, who suggest that there was no alternative set of economic policies either politically or technically open to him at the time. Brüning, on this view, operated in a period when there was very little room for manoeuvre (in Knut Borchardt’s phrase, Handlungsspielraum). Others, such as C.-L. Holtfrerich, have disputed such an interpretation, suggesting that a range of other policies was open both theoretically and politically and could thus have been pursued – and indeed was being promoted increasingly by influential groups at this time.6 Whatever the balance of argument in this debate, one thing is quite clear: the consequences of Brüning’s policies were such as to produce the socioeconomic circumstances which provided fertile ground for Nazi agitation.
Brüning had been appointed Müller’s successor, on the collapse of the latter’s cabinet, without any dissolution of the Reichstag. However, when the latter demanded the withdrawal of a decree which Brüning had issued after the Reichstag’s rejection of parts of the finance bill, Brüning chose to have the Reichstag dissolved in the summer of 1930. Under the constitution new elections would have to be called within sixty days. These took place in September 1930. Now, under conditions of rising economic crisis, the NSDAP achieved its electoral breakthrough. With 6.4 million votes, or 18.3 per cent of the total vote, the NSDAP became the second largest party in the Reichstag, after the SPD (with 24.5 per cent of the vote). At last, with 107 deputies out of a total of 608, the Nazis had a large, visible, disruptive presence in the Reichstag. The NSDAP made its greatest gains in the Protestant, agricultural regions and small towns of north and northeast Germany. In 1930 they achieved figures of 27 per cent in Schleswig-Holstein, 24.3 per cent in Pomerania and 24.3 per cent in Hanover South-Brunswick. In the mixed agricultural and small-scale industrial areas of Lower Silesia-Breslau (24.2 per cent), Chemnitz-Zwickau (23.8 per cent) and Rhineland-Palatinate (22.8 per cent) the Nazis also achieved good results.7 Most impervious to Nazi penetration were Catholic areas, where Catholics tended to remain loyal to the Centre Party, and urban industrial areas, where the organized working class on the whole stayed with the two major parties of labour, the SPD and KPD, although, as the Depression worsened, the Social Democrats lost votes to the communists. (In 1930, when the Nazis gained 107 seats the communists won 77 seats.)
Presented, by skilful propaganda, as the party of dynamism and of youth, in contrast to the ageing, stolid image of the SPD, the NSDAP attracted many young voters and new voters with visions of a better future. The Nazis also benefited from the enhanced respectability and widespread publicity arising from co-operation with Hugenberg’s DNVP in the campaign against the Young Plan in 1929. With a more ‘respectable’ image, the NSDAP was able to make inroads among ‘pillars of the community’ – local notables such as mayors, schoolteachers and Protestant pastors. The increasing radicalism of frightened former liberals and conservatives who had previously supported a range of parties led many more into the Nazi camp. In the closing years of the Weimar Republic the support for liberal and conservative parties shrank markedly. The share of the vote held by the DVP and DDP collapsed from 20 per cent at the beginning of the Weimar Republic to a mere 2.2 per cent in July 1932; the DNVP’s share fell from 20 per cent in late 1924 to 5.9 per cent in July 1932; the Wirtschaftspartei and the agrarian parties also collapsed mainly to the benefit of the NSDAP.
Given the outcome of the September 1930 elections the SPD chose to ‘tolerate’ the Brüning government rather than trying to topple it and risk new elections which might provide further support for the extreme Right. In the meantime, Brüning’s policies only served to heighten the misery of millions in the economic depression. Unemployment rose steadily, from 1.3 million in September 1929 to over 3 million by September 1930, to over 6 million by the beginning of 1933. This last figure represented one in three of the working population; with official underestimation of the true figures, and with widespread short-time working, perhaps one in two families in Germany were severely affected by the Depression. Brüning’s priority nevertheless remained that of showing that Germany was unable to pay reparations, whatever the cost in human misery, misery which could have been alleviated by public expenditure programmes and less deflationary policies. In the summer of 1931 the economic situation was further exacerbated by a financial crisis. A failed attempt at a German–Austrian customs union led to a withdrawal of French credits from Austria, precipitating a collapse of the main Austrian bank, a rush of bankruptcies in Austria and Germany and a banking crisis, which necessitated a ‘bank holiday’ of three weeks’ duration in July 1931.
In the midst of this mounting economic chaos, politics was increasingly played out not in Parliament but on the streets. Skirmishes took place between rival political gangs: most frequently, the paramilitary organizations of the KPD joined violent battle with the unruly SA units. Hitler, in an attempt to retain the air of respectability cultivated over the preceding few years, now made concerted efforts to improve his relations with conservative elites: the Army, agricultural landowners, leaders of industry. While some industrialists – particularly Fritz Thyssen and the banker Hjalmar Schacht – had for some time been sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the prevailing attitude among business leaders was on the whole one of suspicion. Weimar democracy might have been rejected in principle; but it was quite another matter to consider Hitler’s Nazism as embodying a preferable alternative. Before 1933 industrialists were not important supporters, at least financially, of the NSDAP; small donations by local notables were a more significant source of NSDAP funds than any contributions from leaders of industry (with the exception of Thyssen, whose book entitled I Paid Hitler provided a basis for much of this myth).8 In the early 1930s it was clear to Hitler that he needed to woo industrialists and convince them that he was worth backing. On 26 January 1932 Hitler addressed the prestigious Düsseldorf Industry Club, seeking to create a distinction between his condemnation of Jewish capital and capitalism in general. More important perhaps was a combination of increasing disaffection with Brüning’s management of the economic crisis and increased willingness, in the apparent absence of viable alternatives, to view Nazism as at least acceptable or tolerable. This shift in attitude was particularly important in Army circles, who began to insist that officers and civil servants should be allowed to become members of the NSDAP. An attempt at developing links between conservative parties and the NSDAP in a right-wing ‘National Opposition’ was less successful. In October 1931 the so-called Harzburg Front – named after a rally in Bad Harzburg – consisting of Hugenberg’s DNVP, the leadership of the veterans’ Stahlhelm organization and Hitler’s Nazis, failed to develop a truly united front in opposition to the Brüning government.
In the spring of 1932 Hindenburg’s seven-year term of office as President came to an end. Brüning mismanaged – from Hindenburg’s point of view – attempts to obviate the need for re-election, and Hindenburg had to face the humiliation of going to a second ballot, having failed to win an absolute majority on the first round against a powerful vote for Hitler as President. Symptomatic of the politics of this period was the line-up of candidates: Germans of a Social Democratic or liberal persuasion were constrained to choose between the conservative nationalist Hindenburg, the Nazi Hitler, the right-wing Stahlhelm representative Theodor Duesterberg, or, at the other extreme, the declared enemy of the Social Democrats, the Communist Ernst Thälmann. The anti-democratic, elderly Field Marshal, who had been working systematically to replace parliamentary democracy by more authoritarian rule, was now the only possible choice for all those genuine and committed republicans who feared that a vote for any of the other candidates would only bring ‘something worse’. In the event, the re-election of Hindenburg was to effect precisely that result. From the early summer of 1932 a series of alternatives were pursued and played out, until finally the appointment of Hitler to the chancellorship seemed to the old elites and the ageing President the only viable solution to the perceived problems of the ill-fated Weimar Republic.
Hitler’s Path to Power
From April 1932 to January 1933 the final debacle of the Weimar Republic unfolded through a series of intrigues and machinations, as alternative strategies were pursued, and found unworkable, in relation to the economic, political and governmental crisis. Distanced from Brüning by his management of the presidential elections, Hindenburg was prepared to countenance the removal of this increasingly unpopular Chancellor. First the Army Minister Groener was forced to resign on 12 May, over the issue of his ban on the SA and SS in April; then, at the end of May, when Brüning gave Hindenburg an emergency decree to sign, proposing drastic measures to deal with indebted East Elbian estates, the President refused to sign and instead accepted Brüning’s resignation. Brüning’s proposal to dispossess East Elbian estates overburdened with debts was the occasion, rather than the cause, of his downfall; behind it lay wider plots for alternative political scenarios.
On 2 June the Catholic Franz von Papen became Chancellor – losing the support of his own Centre Party in the process. Papen failed in the period of his chancellorship to gain parliamentary support: his cabinet excluded Social Democrats and trade unionists, and never succeeded in securing a substantial conservative nationalist base. On 4 June the Reichstag was dissolved and new elections called for 31 July. The ban on the SA and SS was lifted on 18 June, and despite the fact that the paramilitary organizations of the KPD were still outlawed, there was near civil war on the streets as Nazis and Communists engaged in violent battles. The alleged failure of the Prussian state police to control political violence – which had in effect been legalized by the Reich government, with its unleashing of the SA – provided the justification for a coup against the Prussian state government on 20 July. The SPD leadership of Prussia (at that time heading a caretaker coalition) was ousted and replaced by a Reich Commissar – a useful precedent for Hitler’s takeover of Land governments the following year. The SPD’s lack of resistance to this coup has often been criticized; but Social Democrats still believed in the rule of law, and were unwilling to meet force with force; they also, by this time, were suffering from a certain weariness and resignation, a lack of a broader vision in the face of changing events.
In the General Election of 31 July 1932, held amidst this atmosphere of violence and crisis, the Nazis achieved their greatest electoral success in the period before Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor. With 37.8 per cent of the vote, and 230 of the 608 seats, the NSDAP for the first time became the largest party in the Reichstag. Claiming to be a ‘people’s party’ or Volkspartei, transcending class boundaries and narrow interests, the NSDAP at the height of its electoral success did indeed succeed in gaining a relatively wide social spread of support, in contrast to the narrower socioeconomic, regional or confessional bases of the parties of the Weimar period.9 As before, the organized industrial working class tended to remain faithful to the SPD and KPD, with the latter gaining votes from the former, and particularly winning support among the increasing numbers of unemployed. But the Nazis actively solicited votes among the working class, and were to a limited but nevertheless significant degree successful in winning support among workers in handicrafts and small-scale manufacturing, who were not so fully integrated into the organized working class. Similarly, most Catholics remained loyal to their Centre Party, which had retained a remarkably stable vote throughout the Weimar Republic. The Nazis benefited most from the collapse of the liberal and conservative parties. The NSDAP’s greatest electoral successes were in the Protestant, agricultural and small-town areas of Germany, and their most stable vote from 1924 onwards came from small farmers, shopkeepers and the independent artisans of the ‘old’ middle class, who felt threatened by the tensions and tendencies of modernization and industrial society. This core was augmented in periods of economic crisis by a ‘protest vote’ from other sections of society, including a sizeable vote from the new middle classes, and among established professional and upper-middle-class circles. In Childers’ summary of these groups: ‘Motivations were mixed, including fear of the Marxist Left, frustrated career ambitions, and resentment at the erosion of social prestige and professional security. Yet, while sizeable elements of these groups undoubtedly felt their positions or prospects to be challenged during the Weimar era, they cannot be described as uneducated, economically devastated, or socially marginal’.10 Civil servants, pensioners, white-collar workers, added their votes to those of the small farmers and shopkeepers in a rising tide of protest against the chaos that Weimar democracy, to them, had ushered in. People of all ages were in the end attracted to the apparently young, energetic, demagogic movement, which appeared to offer a new way forward out of the deadlock and disasters of the Weimar ‘system’.
Armed with his electoral success – which still fell short of an overall majority – Hitler was hoping to be offered the chancellorship by Hindenburg. But the President despised this upstart ‘Bohemian corporal’, and snubbed him by refusing to offer anything more than the vice-chancellorship. Enraged, Hitler refused to accept second-best – and caused considerable anger and consternation among the ranks of the Nazi Party, who felt he had missed the opportunity of putting the Nazis into government.
When the Reichstag reopened on 12 September it passed a spectacular vote of no confidence in the Chancellor, Papen, by 512 votes to 42 (the remainder of deputies having abstained or stayed at home). Papen was unable to command either a parliamentary base or popular support for his government; but nor was he able, in tandem with Hindenburg, to finalize plans for establishing a non-parliamentary, authoritarian regime in complete breach of the constitution. Parliament was dissolved and fresh elections called for 6 November. By now the worst trough of the Depression was passing and the Nazis lost some of their protest vote of the summer. With the loss of two million votes, parliamentary representation of the NSDAP after the November elections was reduced to 196 deputies. Nevertheless, the governmental crisis and parliamentary deadlock were not resolved. At the beginning of December, having been persuaded by General von Schleicher that unless matters were taken in hand a civil war was likely to break out which the Army would not be able to control, Hindenburg rather unwillingly replaced Papen and appointed Schleicher Chancellor. Schleicher’s brief period in office – until 28 January 1933 – was characterized by an unsuccessful and somewhat farfetched attempt to cobble together an unlikely set of alliances, including trade unionists and the ‘left-wing’ of the NSDAP under Gregor Strasser. This attempt failed, and managed along the way to antagonize both industrialists – who were suspicious of Schleicher’s rapprochement with the unions – and agrarian elites, who viewed Schleicher’s plans for agriculture as a form of ‘agrarian bolshevism’, and not nearly as favourable to their interests as Papen’s policies had been.
During January 1933 intrigues and machinations in high places set in motion a campaign to convince the ageing President to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. Papen came round to the view, as did leading representatives of agrarian interests in the (by now Nazi-infiltrated) Reichslandbund, that the Nazis must be included in a coalition conservative–nationalist government, in order to provide it with a measure of popular support; and that, in order to include the Nazis, it would be necessary to offer Hitler the chancellorship. Those pressurizing Hindenburg to take this move were of the view that, if Hitler and one or two other Nazis were included in a mixed cabinet, they would be effectively hemmed in and could be ‘tamed’ and manipulated. The idea was that the Army, industrial and agrarian elites would be able to benefit from and subvert Hitler’s demagogic powers and mass support. Finally, after a series of meetings in Ribbentrop’s house in Berlin in the last week of January 1933, and through the mediations of Hindenburg’s son Oskar, an acceptable set of arrangements was constructed and the President persuaded. On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler was, by fully constitutional means, offered the chancellorship of Germany by a reluctant President Hindenburg. With Hitler’s acceptance the process of dismantling Weimar democracy was accelerated and rapidly completed. For a while the fateful coalition between the old elites and the Nazi mass movement survived; in the end, the last-ditch gamble by elites, who had failed to rule Germany on their own, to survive through alliance with Hitler, proved to have been a historical mistake of inestimable and tragic proportions.
Who, finally, should bear the burden of responsibility for the failure of Weimar democracy? What factors are most important in explaining its collapse? The Left has often come in for criticism on a range of counts. The bitter hostility obtaining between the KPD and SPD has often been remarked on as a fateful split among those who should have been united in opposition to the greater evil of Nazism. In addition to the bitterness arising in the early years, when the SPD as the party of government had no qualms about using force to suppress radical communist uprisings, the rift was deepened by the late 1920s and 1930s, when the KPD, under the influence of Moscow, adopted the theory that social democracy was equivalent to social fascism. Whatever one’s views on these matters, in a wider sense the working class in the closing years of the Weimar Republic was scarcely in a position to resist the course of events effectively. In contrast to 1920, when a general strike had been sufficient to bring down the Kapp putsch, there was little that could be done on a mass scale in the early 1930s: it is extremely difficult to use the weapon of striking when one is unemployed or desperate to retain a job. For most ordinary working-class people, sheer material survival was all that could be striven for in the years of the Depression.
More attention needs to be paid to those who were in a position to affect events – and indeed often did so, in a direction ultimately favouring Hitler. There are a number of separate strands which interrelated to produce the fateful, but by no means inevitable, outcome. The pursuit of deflationary economic policies by Brüning served to exacerbate the economic crisis and nourish the conditions in which the NSDAP was able to achieve mass support. While industrialists may not have played an important role in fostering or financially supporting the rise of the NSDAP, they certainly made little effort to sustain the democratic political system and indeed attacked its structure and fabric sufficiently to render it weak in the face of the final onslaught. The agrarian elites who had such a favourable reception with Hindenburg must also bear a burden of guilt, as must those Army officers who worked to undermine democracy and install an authoritarian alternative. The Social Democrats had faced a difficult enough task in guiding the Republic through its early stages, at a time when moderate parties had greater parliamentary support and authoritarian elites had effectively abdicated their responsibility and retired to the wings of the political stage; now, when pro-Republican forces were in a minority and conservative–nationalist forces were joined by a new, popular and virulent right-wing radicalism in the shape of the Nazis, there was even less possibility for democrats of the moderate Left or centre to control developments.
It was this sociopolitical configuration, in a country defeated in war, reduced in territory and status, subjected to a burden of reparations, rankling with revisionism, lurching from one political crisis to the next, and finally suffering major economic collapse, which ultimately spelled the death of democracy. No one factor alone is sufficient to explain the collapse of the Weimar Republic: not the provisions of the constitution, nor the implications of the Versailles Treaty, the impact of the Depression, the strategies and political abilities of Hitler and the Nazi Party, nor the decisions and actions of other prominent individuals; it was the peculiar combination, under specific historical circumstances, of a range of activities, orientations and pressures which produced the ultimate outcome. Perhaps the only comforting lesson from this complex period is that, while radical and extremist movements have arisen and may arise elsewhere and at other times (and indeed there were many in the interwar period, of which Mussolini’s Fascists were a notably successful example), such a unique combination of circumstances as occurred in Germany, opening the way for the rise of Hitler, is unlikely ever to recur in its entirety.