The Weimar Republic was the largest functioning constitutional democracy in continental Europe in the late 1920s. It had a written constitution drafted in 1919 by some of the best liberal legal minds of the day. It had universal suffrage for both sexes from the outset — eleven years ahead of the United Kingdom, twenty-one ahead of France. It had a federal structure that protected regional identities while pooling national authority. It had, by the standards of the period, robust press freedom, a developed welfare apparatus, and a thriving avant-garde culture that produced Bauhaus, Brecht, Weill, Dietrich, Lang, the early Adorno, and most of the foundational work of twentieth-century physics, sociology and psychoanalysis. It was, in a phrase that would later acquire enormous weight, the modern Europe in miniature. By the end of January 1933 it was over.
This chapter is the prologue to the dictatorship. It tries to answer a question that nearly every account of the period evades or answers with one cause: how did a working liberal democracy, less than fifteen years old, deliver itself peacefully into the hands of a fringe party whose programme included the abolition of every institution that had elected it? The answer is not one cause. It is a stacked series of failures — economic, constitutional, electoral, generational, and finally personal — that compounded between October 1929 and the end of January 1933, and that none of the protagonists at the time understood as a single phenomenon.
The Republic in 1928
The German general election of May 1928 was the high-water mark of inter-war German democracy. The Social Democrats won 29.8 per cent of the vote — their best result since the founding of the republic. The two principal liberal parties between them took another 13 per cent. The Catholic Centre and its Bavarian sister BVP held a combined 15 per cent. The conservative DNVP got 14 per cent. The Communists took 10 per cent. The National Socialist Workers' Party — the NSDAP, the Nazis — got 2.6 per cent and twelve seats. The chancellor was a Social Democrat called Hermann Müller, leading a "grand coalition" that comprised most of the constitutional centre and held a comfortable majority in the Reichstag. Unemployment was 1.4 million on a workforce of about 18 million. The currency had been stable for five years. The Treaty of Locarno, signed in 1925, had normalised Germany's relations with France, Belgium and the United Kingdom, and Germany had been admitted to the League of Nations in 1926. The country looked, from outside, like a recovered patient.
Three things were not visible from outside. First, the agrarian sector — particularly the smallholders of eastern Prussia and the dairy farmers of Schleswig-Holstein — was in chronic structural distress, with farm income lagging industrial wages by a widening margin since 1925. Rural protest votes for splinter and single-issue parties had been quietly rising for years. Second, the constitution gave the Reich president — at this point still the seventy-eight-year-old Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, elected in 1925 — extraordinary emergency powers under Article 48, including the ability to rule by decree and to dismiss governments that lost parliamentary confidence. The constitution's drafters had intended Article 48 as a fire extinguisher; from 1930 onward it would be operated as a routine throttle. Third, the German political class had not, as a generational matter, internalised the republic. Of the senior civil servants, judges and military officers, a large majority had been trained in the imperial period and regarded the republic as a regrettable necessity rather than a settled fact. They would not actively defend it.
The Wall Street crash and the German banking crisis
The American stock market crash of late October 1929 reached Germany as a financial reversal first and an economic one second. The German economic recovery of 1924–1928 had been built on short-term American loans — primarily New York bank credit lines extended to German municipalities, industrial concerns and agricultural cooperatives. When American banks began calling those loans home in late 1929 to meet their own liquidity demands, German municipal governments and industrial firms suddenly found their working capital evaporating. The Reichsbank's reserves were insufficient to bridge the gap. By 1930 the German economy was contracting at an annualised 8 per cent; by 1931 unemployment had passed 4.5 million; by January 1932 it was approaching 6 million on roughly the same workforce of 18 million.
In May 1931 the Austrian Creditanstalt — the largest bank in central Europe — collapsed. The contagion crossed the border within weeks; on the 13th of July the Darmstädter und Nationalbank (the Danatbank) suspended payments, triggering a German banking panic. The Reich government, by now headed by the conservative Catholic Centre politician Heinrich Brüning, responded with a deflationary austerity programme — emergency decrees cutting public-sector wages by 23 per cent, cutting unemployment benefits, raising taxes, and forbidding municipal borrowing — pursued, in Brüning's later self-justification, in order to demonstrate to the Allied powers that Germany could not pay any further reparations and to extract a moratorium from them. The austerity programme deepened the depression substantially and made the German political crisis of 1930–1933 the worst of any major industrial economy. (Britain and the United States, both of which abandoned the gold standard in 1931–33, recovered faster and more completely.)
The September 1930 election
The crucial inflection point was the federal election of the 14th of September 1930, which Brüning had been advised against calling and which he called anyway, believing he could secure a working majority for his austerity decrees. He was disastrously wrong. The election produced the first of the great electoral landslides of the Weimar collapse. The Social Democrats held their share at 24.5 per cent. The Centre and BVP held theirs. But the two non-extremist liberal parties were halved. The conservative DNVP was halved. The Communists rose to 13 per cent. And the National Socialists — who had taken 2.6 per cent in 1928 — took 18.3 per cent, becoming the second-largest party in the Reichstag with 107 seats. They had grown by a factor of seven in twenty-eight months.
The NSDAP vote in September 1930 was, broadly, a protest vote from the agricultural and small-town Protestant north, and from the lower-middle-class urban professionals — shopkeepers, civil servants, clerks — whose livelihoods the deflation was destroying. It was not, contrary to a persistent myth, primarily a working-class or industrial-Catholic vote: in the Catholic Rhineland and Bavaria the NSDAP underperformed; the Centre Party held its share until 1933. The vote was an angry rejection of a political class that the voter could not distinguish from the depression itself. The party that the protest vote chose happened to be one whose programme included the abolition of every other party. The voters did not, in 1930, generally understand this. Many of them would later say so.
The presidential year, 1932
The years 1931 and 1932 are the period during which the Weimar Republic's constitutional centre dissolved. Brüning ruled by emergency decree from March 1930 onward; the Reichstag, which could have rescinded the decrees, declined to do so because the Social Democrats — the largest pro-constitutional party — preferred a Brüning rule-by-decree to the alternative of a centre-right cabinet relying on NSDAP toleration. The April 1932 federal president's election was contested by Hindenburg (the incumbent and the official candidate of the constitutional parties, the unfamiliar configuration), Hitler, and the Communist Ernst Thälmann. Hindenburg won in the second round with 53 per cent; Hitler took 37 per cent and 13.4 million votes. Hindenburg's electors were now mostly the very Social Democrats and Centre Catholics whom he had spent his career despising; his actual political confidants were the conservative Junker landowners of his Neudeck estate in East Prussia, and they detested Brüning's emergency-decree austerity for entirely different reasons than the SPD did.
On the 30th of May 1932 Hindenburg, on the advice of the conservative camarilla around the army officer Kurt von Schleicher, dismissed Brüning and replaced him with the unaffiliated nobleman Franz von Papen. Papen had been a sleeper agent in the United States during the First World War, was a member of the Centre's right wing but commanded no party loyalty, and had never held cabinet rank. His cabinet was made up almost entirely of aristocrats unconnected to any electoral party — the "cabinet of barons". He governed for six months. In July 1932 he provoked a new federal election to legitimate his cabinet; the election produced an NSDAP vote of 37.3 per cent, 230 seats, and the largest single party in the Reichstag. Together with the Communists' 89 seats, opponents of the republic now held a structural negative majority — they could veto everything but could not govern.
In November 1932 Papen called yet another federal election. The NSDAP vote fell to 33.1 per cent, 196 seats — the only declining trend in the party's electoral history under Weimar. There was a brief, real moment when the party looked as if it might be losing momentum. But the negative majority was unchanged: the Communists rose to 100 seats, the conservative DNVP rose marginally, the constitutional centre continued to shrink. No government could be formed by parliamentary means. Papen advised Hindenburg to suspend the constitution and rule by an open dictatorship of the Reichswehr; Schleicher — by now Papen's rival rather than his patron — counter-advised that the army would not back such a step, and offered to form a government himself that would split the NSDAP by recruiting Gregor Strasser's left wing of the party. On the 2nd of December 1932 Hindenburg appointed Schleicher chancellor.
The 30th of January 1933
Schleicher's government lasted fifty-seven days. He could not split the NSDAP; Strasser, threatened by Hitler with expulsion, resigned all his party offices on the 8th of December and went on a winter holiday in Italy. Schleicher could not get the Social Democrats' toleration either; they suspected him, with reason, of preparing a Reichswehr coup. By mid-January 1933 he had reached the same conclusion as Papen — that a parliamentary government was impossible — and asked Hindenburg for the same emergency powers Papen had asked for in November. Hindenburg refused.
The decisive negotiation took place at Papen's house in Berlin's Lennéstrasse over the second half of January 1933. Papen, smarting at Schleicher's betrayal and convinced that the NSDAP could be tamed by including its leader in a cabinet of conservatives, offered Hitler the chancellorship in a coalition cabinet in which only two further ministries (Interior and the Prussian Interior Ministry, both crucial to police authority) would be NSDAP. Hitler accepted. Papen would take the vice-chancellorship. The cabinet would otherwise be drawn from the DNVP and from non-party conservative technocrats. Papen reassured the alarmed Hindenburg with the celebrated phrase: "Wir haben ihn uns engagiert" — "We have hired him". Hindenburg, eighty-five years old, exhausted, deeply uncomfortable with the "Bohemian corporal", but persuaded by Papen and by his own son Oskar that the only alternative was civil war, agreed. On the morning of the 30th of January 1933 Hitler was sworn in at the Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse. By evening there were SA torchlight processions through the Brandenburg Gate down Unter den Linden. The Weimar Republic had ended without a single shot fired against it.
What the constitutional politicians of January 1933 did not see — and what those of October 1929 had had no way of imagining — was that the Reichstag elected in November 1932 had two months left to function as a legislature. By the end of March, under a state of emergency declared after the Reichstag fire, the same chamber would have abolished itself. The next chapter is about those two months.
End of Chapter I