Few people are more associated with the ‘might-have-beens’ of German history between the two world wars than Gustav Stresemann. Born in Berlin, it was in 1906 at the age of 28 that he became a deputy in the Reichstag (parliament) and he was elected the leader of the National Liberal Party in 1917. By this time he had moved to the right wing of this party and had come to support the Kaiser’s expansionist policies and the unrestricted sinking of merchant ships by German U-boats.
In 1919, he gathered most of the right wing of the old National Liberal Party into the German People’s Party (the DVP), with himself as chairman. At first, Stresemann opposed the Weimar Republic but, by the middle of the 1920s, he had become a reluctant supporter; not because he believed in it but because he thought it was necessary for the good of Germany. As a result, he was prepared to work with the parties of the moderate left (such as the Social Democrats) and the Catholic Centre Party to promote stability.
As a liberal politician and statesman he served as Chancellor and Foreign Minister and oversaw the introduction of a new currency, which assisted Germany’s recovery from the hyperinflation of 1923, and he was responsible for the negotiations leading to the Dawes Plan of 1924, which reduced Germany’s reparations payments. His most notable achievement was reconciliation between Germany and France, for which he and the French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926. The period of apparent stability that Weimar Germany experienced from 1924 to 1929 means that his name has since been closely associated with this so-called ‘Golden Age of Weimar’. He seemed to embody what might have happened to Germany as an alternative scenario to the Third Reich: Democratic government, humane policies, increasing prosperity and the settling of international issues by diplomacy with Germany as an international player once more.
On the other hand, he was complex. He refused to deal firmly with those responsible for the Munich Putsch and he supported anti-Polish policies and engineered a trade war between Germany and Poland. Furthermore, while he accepted Germany’s western borders (in the Locarno Treaty, 1925), there was no such commitment to accept the eastern borders. Along with most German politicians – from the reasonable to the fanatic – he felt that there was unfinished business there with Poland. As such, his career reminds us that even the most attractive of Germany’s Weimar politicians had not accepted the Versailles settlement and would undermine it – at least in the east – if possible. Even at the time there was uncertainty over whether his policies represented a temporary ruse until Germany had recovered its strength, or a genuine desire for accommodation with other European nations.1 Little wonder then that the desire to revise the Versailles settlement – but by much more brutal means – was strongly represented amongst the hardline politicians of the right wing. And, ironically, as Weimar Germany seemed to be gaining in legitimacy under Stresemann, international scrutiny of its behaviour was reduced, unintentionally making it more likely that these right-wing groups would challenge Weimar’s constitution.2
Nevertheless, the career of Stresemann reminds us that alternative scenarios exist in history. But the question remains: could even he have weathered the storm that would strike Germany – and the world – at the end of the 1920s? The question must remain unanswered because he died of a stroke on 3 October 1929 at the age of fifty-one. On 24 October, Wall Street crashed.
Following the failure of the Munich Putsch, the Nazis faced major problems. In the national elections in 1924, the German nationalist groups were crushed. In all of the electoral constituencies except one, the Nazis gained less than ten per cent of the vote. The Nazi Party was in disarray without Hitler’s central leadership.3 Things looked very bleak. Even when Hitler was released from prison in December 1924, he was still subject to controls because he was only released on parole. In most parts of Germany, he was banned from public speaking until 1927. In Prussia (the largest by far of the different regional states of Weimar Germany), the ban on public speaking lasted until 1928. As well as this, Hitler faced dissent from leading Nazis in the north of Germany and in the Rhineland. In these areas, Gregor Strasser and Joseph Goebbels favoured a form of Nazism with a greater emphasis on socialism.4 If Hitler was to reassert his authority these would have to be tamed.
Hitler began by rebuilding the Nazi Party. He re-founded it in 1925 and called on all its old members to rejoin and completely accept his leadership. Old Nazis who refused to accept Hitler’s total authority were pushed out of the party. The SA leader Ernst Röhm refused to accept Hitler’s decision that the SA should be brought fully under the control of the Nazi leadership and, as a result, he was forced out of a position of authority in the SA, left the party and went to Bolivia to train the Bolivian army. In February 1926, Hitler called the northern party leaders to a meeting in the town of Bamberg. Over two hours, Hitler attacked the northern Nazis’ ideas for seizing the private property of the German princes (who had lost power in 1918 but still owned huge areas of land) and instead he argued that nothing should distract the Nazis from their central belief in conquering Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe. Goebbels was unimpressed, but kept silent. However, Strasser gave way and this made it difficult for his allies to continue to resist Hitler. Afterwards, this meeting would be known in the party as the ‘Führer congress’ because it resulted in the triumph of Hitler and his concept of both the party and his leadership style.
In April 1926, Hitler invited Goebbels to Munich. Here he lectured him on his ‘errors’ but promised to forget about them if Goebbels accepted his leadership. Goebbels was finally completely convinced. He wrote in his diary: ‘I bow to the greater one, the political genius.’ And a few days later, he wrote: ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius.’5 From this moment – until he shot himself in Hitler’s bunker in April 1945 – Goebbels would remain totally loyal to Hitler and completely under his control. In return, Hitler made him the Gauleiter (regional party boss) in ‘Red Berlin’, with the job of battling the communists there. Soon Goebbels’ adulation knew no bounds, describing Hitler as ‘like a meteor before our astonished eyes’.6 At the 1926 party rally, the representatives accepted Hitler’s total domination of the organization. Only Hitler would decide who held the most important jobs. In addition, the ‘Heil, Hitler’ salute was made compulsory in the party.
Between 1927 and 1928, Hitler followed on from his success in disciplining the party by reorganizing it. He gave the job of doing this to Strasser. The Nazi Party was restructured into 35 regional areas, or Gau. Each one of these regional areas was the same as a Reichstag constituency. This was important because it meant these regional organizations had as their main function getting Nazis elected to the Reichstag. Hitler was now committed to gaining power through the ballot box.
The final piece in the creation of the new structure of the Nazi Party came in January 1929, when Heinrich Himmler was appointed head of Hitler’s bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel (protection formation), or SS.7 Originally formed out of units of the SA, the SS had appeared in public for the first time in July 1926, when 116 of the SS paraded, along with 3,600 SA, at the party rally at Weimar and the SS was then presented with the ‘Blood Flag’, the banner that had led the march in the Munich Putsch of 1923. When Himmler took control, the SS numbered 290 men. Within a year this had risen to a thousand and within two years to nearly three thousand. In 1930, Himmler persuaded Hitler to make the SS fully independent of the SA. The SS, with its black uniform and military organization, regarded itself as an elite formation. SS members tended to be better educated and with an older age-profile than the SA. As one leading historian reminds us, ‘The SS included bullies too, but they were superior, academically educated examples of the type.’8
It soon became an internal Nazi Party police force, collecting information on SA leaders as well as on external enemies of the party. Later, in 1934, it was the SS who would be used by Hitler to destroy the SA leadership. By the 1940s, the SS had grown to many thousands. It had, by then, developed its own security organisation (the SD), its own security police (the SIPO SD), gained control over the Gestapo (secret police) and Himmler had created a terror and police organization that ran concentration and extermination camps and even had regiments fighting alongside the army (the Waffen SS). Nazi Germany, after 1933, developed into an ‘SS state’. But, in the late 1920s, all this lay ahead. In the meantime, the Nazis had to face the uncomfortable truth that extremism struggles in times of stability, and the second half of the 1920s brought much-needed recovery for Weimar Germany.
To solve the problem of worthless German money, a new currency was introduced in December 1923. This was called the Rentenmark and was organized by Hjalmar Schacht (a famous German finance expert appointed by Stresemann). These actions helped draw the economic crisis to a close. In addition, Germany was increasingly accepted as a member of the international community again. In 1924, the Dawes Plan led to the USA loaning Germany 800 million gold marks to help economic recovery and allowed a longer period of time for Germany to make its reparation payments. The amount paid each year was also fixed according to how much Germany could afford. Tension with France was reduced as Germany’s western border was guaranteed by the Locarno Pact of 1925, while Germany was still free to contest the eastern frontiers where it was most anxious to revise the map-making of Versailles. In 1926, Germany was invited to join the League of Nations. In that same year, the Treaty of Berlin continued Germany’s friendly relations with the communist USSR, which dated from the Rapallo Treaty of 1922. This put further pressure on the Poles who were sandwiched between Germany and the USSR. Germany seemed of consequence once more. In 1929, the Young Plan reduced and rescheduled German reparation repayments, although these would continue to be repaid until 1988.
As a result, unrest in Germany decreased, and it seemed possible that some of the effects of the First World War on Germany might be solved through negotiation. From 1924 to 1929, Germany seemed to be experiencing both an amazing economic recovery and a surprising degree of political stability. By 1928, production in heavy industry was back to the levels it had reached before the outbreak of war in 1914. Foreign investors were keen to invest in Germany again and exports also rose. Other aspects of Weimar society were also positive: workers’ spending power was higher than in 1914; health care was better and covered more people than before the First World War; crime levels fell; living standards were rising.9
This made life difficult for extremist groups (such as the Nazis and the communists), who thrived on unrest, and whose support had increased during the troubled years of the early 1920s. By 1928, the Nazi share of the vote had fallen to 2.6 per cent and they gained only 12 out of the 491 seats in the Reichstag; similarly, the communists could not achieve higher than 10.6 per cent of the vote in this year. At the same time, those parties who supported the Weimar Republic increased their share of the vote. In 1928, the Social Democrats gained 29.8 per cent. When its leader, Hermann Müller, formed a coalition that year he led a group that was supported by over 60 per cent of the Reichstag. Even the conservative nationalists of the German National People’s Party (the DNVP) decided that, if they were to have any influence over the government, they would have to give up their total opposition to the Weimar system. As a result, they joined Weimar coalition governments in 1925 and in 1927. So it seemed in the mid-1920s that economic stability was being accompanied by political stability and that Weimar democracy was firmly established.
There were, though, clouds on the horizon. In 1925, the First World War hero Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was elected President. He would remain President until 1934 and his influence on Weimar democracy was mixed. On one hand, he was loyal to the Weimar constitution and kept within its rules; he made no attempt to restore the German monarchy; he made the Weimar Republic a little more acceptable to some right-wing Germans and his military reputation increased the loyalty of the army to the office of president. On the other hand, his advisers were men who opposed the idea of the Weimar Republic. He was unwilling to appoint Social Democrat members to the government and, when he could, appointed conservative nationalists instead; as Germany faced unrest after 1929, he would increasingly use his power as President to bypass the Reichstag and so weakened the Weimar democracy.
And there were yet other clouds on the Weimar horizon. The German liberal parties lacked unity and while this could be managed in good times it did not bode well if Germany were to enter another period of unrest; the economy was heavily dependent on US loans; German farmers found it hard to compete in a world where trade still had not fully recovered from the First World War; unemployment never fell below 1.3 million. And even before the crisis of 1929, support for middle-of-the-road parties was declining as many middle-class voters felt that Stresemann’s foreign policy successes had little positive impact on their local economy and wellbeing. The Weimar Republic was therefore much more vulnerable than it appeared. In fact, it was built on the equivalent of a financial faultline. A tremor in the world economy would threaten the stability of the whole Weimar economy (and with it, Weimar democracy). And the Wall Street Crash in October 1929 was not a financial tremor – it was a financial earthquake.
On 24 October, the largest stock market in the world, on Wall Street in New York, crashed. By 1932, six million Germans were out of work. This meant that about one third of all German workers were unemployed and becoming desperate. Between 1929 and 1932, there was a 24 per cent increase in arrests for theft in Berlin.
The membership of the communists rose from 117,000 in 1929 to 360,000 in 1932. To many middle-class people the threat of a communist revolution seemed very real, despite the fact that support for the communists never reached the level that made such an event likely. These people looked to the right-wing groups, such as the Nazis, to protect their interests. This helps explain the growth of extreme politics at this time of national crisis. The support for the moderate middle ground melted away as desperate people looked for desperate answers to their problems.
The Wall Street Crash brought down one of the most stable governments Weimar Germany had enjoyed – the so-called ‘Grand Coalition’. In March 1930 it collapsed. This was one of those events that time shows to have been a significant milestone on the road to the end of Weimar democracy, although it would not have appeared so at the time. Its significance lies in the fact that it was the last Weimar government to command a majority of seats in the Reichstag. From this point onwards power shifted increasingly from the Reichstag to the President. Many of the leading advisers around President Hindenburg thought it would be a positive move to give up relying on changing groups of parties in the Reichstag and, instead, to establish a more authoritarian kind of government in which chancellors they approved of used the president’s power to rule by decree, under Article 48 of the constitution. The leaders of the German army were particularly keen on this style of government, as it seemed to offer them more influence and promised the kind of stable society that they wanted for Germany.
The new government, which replaced the Grand Coalition, was led by President Hindenburg’s choice as Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning. He was leader of the Catholic Centre Party, which had given the most consistent support to the Weimar Republic. But his party was changing and moving to the right. The signs for democracy were not good.
Brüning planned to change the Weimar constitution by uniting his role of Reich Chancellor with that of Prussian Minister-President. The Prussian Minister-President headed up the largest of the länder (states) of Germany. By uniting the two roles, Brüning would greatly increase his power and reduce the influence of the Social Democrats, who dominated Prussia. It was the first of Brüning’s attempts to reduce democratic controls and increase the power of the government. Despite the failure of this attempt – because Hindenburg would not allow it – its importance lies in that it indicates where Brüning’s sympathies lay, and it was a suggestion that the Nazis would later take up. In March 1931, Brüning reduced the power of newspapers to criticize his government.
In the summer of 1931, the economic situation worsened and the German banking system seemed on the brink of collapse as more and more foreign investment flowed out of Germany. The Reichsmark soon could not be exchanged for any foreign currency. In December 1931, Brüning issued his fourth emergency decree; this one would reduce wages to the level of 1927. Not surprisingly, opposition to his policies was growing. This was seen in the Reichstag election of September 1930, which turned out to be a breakthrough for the Nazis.
The results of this election were a fatal blow to Weimar. For the Centre Party there was some good news, as the number of Centre Party seats rose from sixty-two to sixty-eight. The Social Democrats did less well and lost ten seats, taking their total down to 143. However, Brüning’s allies amongst the moderate nationalists did disastrously, while more extreme groups did well. The Communist Party share of seats rose from fifty-four to seventy-seven. But the shock was the success of the Nazi Party, whose number of seats catapulted from 12 to 107. In 1928, only 0.8 million people had voted Nazi but by 1930 this had increased to 6.4 million (or 18.3 per cent of the votes cast).
Conflicts between uniformed Nazi Reichstag deputies and Communist Party ones made the Reichstag virtually unmanageable. Between 1920 and March 1931, the Reichstag met for business on average one hundred days a year; in the year from April 1931 to July 1932, it met for only twenty-four days; between then and the end of January 1933, it met for only three days. Parliamentary government had virtually ceased well before the Nazis eventually came to power in January 1933.
As anxiety gripped large numbers outside the closed circle of political influence, actual political power in Germany became increasingly concentrated in the small group of men around President Hindenburg. These included General von Schleicher (responsible for relations between the army and the government and a natural intriguer) and Oskar Hindenburg (the President’s son). General von Schleicher began to plot to remove Brüning, with his reliance on the support offered him by the Social Democrats, and instead to try to harness the popular support and power held by the Nazis.
While this was happening, Hindenburg had come to the end of his seven years as President. Hitler eventually decided to stand and arrangements were hurriedly carried out to make him a German citizen in February 1932. Hitler flew from city to city in his ‘Hitler over Germany’ campaign and eventually gained 37 per cent of the vote compared to the communist Thalmann’s 10 per cent and Hindenburg’s 53 per cent. The old Field Marshall had won but the election had shown that Hitler was now a national figure.
On 30 May 1932, Brüning handed in his resignation as Chancellor and was replaced by Franz von Papen. The appointment of von Papen marked the end of parliamentary democracy in Germany. Most members of von Papen’s new cabinet had no connections with political parties and no support in the Reichstag. It became known as ‘the cabinet of barons’. Von Papen seems to have thought he was creating a new system that was above party politics – unfortunately it was also disconnected from popular support.
The results of the July 1932 election brought another massive boost of power to the Nazis. Their vote more than doubled, from 6.4 million to 13.8 million. This was a jump from 18.3 per cent of the vote, gained in September 1930, to a huge 37.4 per cent. They gained 230 seats in the Reichstag and this was nearly one hundred seats more than their nearest rivals the Social Democrats, with their 133 seats. The communists also increased their vote, but with 89 seats were no rival to the Nazis. The Centre Party gained its highest ever number of seats at 75, but it too was incapable of challenging the Nazis. The nationalists lost heavily and the old liberal parties collapsed.
Von Papen returned as Chancellor but without a majority in the Reichstag. His intention seems to have been to dissolve the Reichstag as soon as it met and to use the presidential power of decree to declare that there would be no more elections and, instead, to create a virtual dictatorship with Hindenburg at its head and von Papen running the government. How this would have survived the reaction amongst those excluded from power was never explored because von Papen was outmanoeuvred in the Reichstag. The Nazi who was now chairing the Reichstag meetings – Hermann Göring – ignored von Papen’s attempt to dissolve the Reichstag and, instead, allowed a communist vote of no-confidence in the government to go ahead. The result was such a crushing humiliation for von Papen that he had to abandon his plan to end elections. It was clear from the vote that he had next to no support in the country. Instead, von Papen, in desperation, called another Reichstag election. There were possibilities that the Nazis might weaken: they were running short of money and the economy was starting to recover. In fact, the results of the November 1932 Reichstag election were mixed. On one hand, the Nazi vote did decline and the turnout of voters was much lower than in July 1932. As a result, the Nazi share of the vote fell from 13.8 million to 11.7 million and so the number of Nazi Reichstag deputies fell from 230 to 196. On the other hand, the communist share of the vote rose to 17 per cent, frightening many of the wealthy and conservative leaders of Germany who advised Hindenburg. This was good for the Nazis as it made these conservatives more likely to work with them.
The new Reichstag was even more unmanageable than the previous one, with 100 communist deputies facing 196 Nazi ones. Von Papen was in deep trouble. He had little support in the country and was now losing the support of the army. Without the support of the army, he could not possibly go ahead with a plan he was considering to ban both the Nazis and the communists and to rule by presidential decree. Furthermore, von Papen had also fallen out with a former ally who had assisted him to come to power. General Kurt von Schleicher had become Minister of Defence earlier in the year and resented von Papen for trying to put together an authoritarian answer to Germany’s crisis without cooperating with him.
Unable to prevent the increasing street violence or proceed with his plans for an authoritarian government, von Papen resigned in December 1932. General von Schleicher replaced him as Chancellor. However, he, like von Papen, faced a major problem. Along with Hindenburg and his closest advisers, he wanted to create a form of rule whereby the President would appoint the Chancellor to run the government without any reference to the Reichstag. However, to do this risked starting a civil war, unless a majority in the Reichstag could be persuaded to vote for the change. But why should the Reichstag vote for its own end?
In December, hoping that the Nazi leadership could be divided, von Schleicher offered the job of Vice-Chancellor to a leading Nazi, Gregor Strasser. Strasser was concerned at the fact that the party organization, which he had built in the 1920s, was on the verge of collapsing due to lack of funds. Strasser refused to join the government without Hitler’s agreement, but Hitler was furious as he was holding out for the top job of Chancellor for himself. As a result of this disagreement, Strasser resigned from the party. The failure of his strategy to split the Nazis meant that von Schleicher had to rely on presidential decrees to rule because he lacked sufficient support in the Reichstag. However, by January 1933, he was fast losing the confidence of both the President, who resented the fact that his friend von Papen had been forced to resign by von Schleicher,10 and the army, who feared civil war if a Chancellor could not be found who could command a majority in the Reichstag.
Faced with these problems, von Schleicher requested that Hindenburg give him wide-ranging emergency powers to rule Germany. Von Schleicher’s strategy was to have the Reichstag dissolved but not to hold elections until the autumn of 1933, in the meantime ruling by declaring a state of emergency. Hindenburg refused. Instead, he responded to a request by von Papen, who persuaded him to appoint Hitler as Chancellor with himself as Vice-Chancellor. On 15 January 1933, the Nazis increased their share of the vote (compared with November 1932) in the parliamentary elections in the tiny German state of Lippe-Detmold, as a result of a massive campaign by the Nazis, which they could never have managed in national elections. This made it seem that Hitler would not accept anything less and was in a stronger position than he really was. This solution, von Papen thought, would allow him to control Hitler but give the government the support of the Nazis and other right-wing groups in the Reichstag. Since the majority of the new cabinet would not be Nazis, von Papen and the nationalist Alfred Hugenberg (leader of the German National People’s Party, the DNVP) believed they could manipulate Hitler. The German army supported the idea too, as it seemed to offer stable government. On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. A combination of factors – the economic crisis, the lack of deep-seated democratic traditions within German society, the wheeler-dealing of ambitious political figures who cared more about power than democracy – had brought down the Weimar Republic.11
That night, thousands of SA, SS and ‘Steel Helmets’ (the First World War veterans’ association) marched through Berlin in a vast torchlit parade. Thousands watched them and Hindenburg took the salute. To many in the crowds it was like the unity that had swept the nation in August 1914 at the start of the First World War. It was as if the years of defeat and humiliation had never happened, as if the longed for national revival was at last taking place.
1. Wright, Jonathan, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 1–2.
2. Mommsen, Hans, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, Forster, Elborg and Jones, Larry Eugene (trans.), University of North Carolina Press, 1998, suggests this interpretation of events.
3. Kershaw, Ian, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 224–6.
4. Ibid., pp. 271–7.
5. Goebbels, quoted in Kershaw, Ian, ibid., p. 277.
6. Kershaw, Ian, The ‘Hitler Myth’, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 26.
7. For a detailed examination of the history of the SS, see Höhne, Heinz, The Order of the Death’s Head, translated by Barry, R., Pan Books, 1969.
8. Burleigh, Michael, The Third Reich, A New History, Pan Books, 2001, p. 104.
9. Weitz, Eric D., Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Princeton University Press, 2007, emphasizes the confident modernity that seemed to characterize Weimar in the mid-1920s and makes the point it should not just be seen as a mere prelude to the Nazi era. See also: Gay, Peter, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, W.W. Norton, 2001.
10. For insights into the close relationship between von Papen and Hindenburg, see Turner, Henry, A., Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, Perseus Books, 1996, pp. 96–7. For an examination of the career of von Papen, see Rolfs, Richard, W., The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: The Life of Franz von Papen, University Press of America, 1996. And for the relationship between Schleicher and von Papen, see Bendersky, Joseph W., A History of Nazi Germany: 1919–1945, Burnham 2nd edition, 2000, pp. 89–90.
11. See Kershaw, Ian, 1999, op. cit., pp. 424–7, for a detailed assessment of the factors that finally led to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor.