The Weimar Republic
After Germany lost the First World War, the Kaiser fled and a new democratic government of Germany was declared in February 1919 at the small town of Weimar. It was too dangerous to make a declaration in Berlin where there had just been a revolt by a Communist group called the Spartacists. The Weimar Republic was a genuine attempt to create a perfect democratic [Democratic: Something that follows the principles of democracy which advocate majority rule and fair process, usually involving elections ] country.The perfect democracy?
These features of the Republic served to ensure that it was the perfect democracy:- A Bill of Rights guaranteed every German citizen freedom of speech and religion, and equality under the law.
- All men and women over the age of 20 were given the vote. This was even better than Britain where only women over 30 could vote.
- There was an elected president and an elected Reichstag (parliament).
- The Reichstag made the laws and appointed the government, which had to do what the Reichstag wanted.
However, hidden in the detail were two flaws that eventually destroyed the Republic:
- Proportional representation - instead of voting for an MP, like we do in Britain, Weimar Germans voted for a party. Each party was then allocated seats in the Reichstag exactly reflecting (proportional' to) the number of people who had voted for it. This sounds fair, but in practice it was a disaster it resulted in dozens of tiny parties, with no party strong enough to get a majority, and, therefore, no government to get its laws passed in the Reichstag. This was a major weakness of the Republic.
- Article 48 - this said that, in an emergency, the president did not need the agreement of the Reichstag, but could issue decrees [Decrees: Laws passed by one minister in a parliament, which have not been approved by the majority parliament. ]. The problem with this was that it did not say what an emergency was, and in the end, it turned out to be a back door that Hitler used to take power legally.
Hyperinflation
- During the first half of 1922, the Mark stabilized at about 320 Marks per Dollar. This was accompanied by international reparations conferences, including one in June 1922 organized by U.S. investment banker J. P. Morgan, Jr. When these meetings produced no workable solution, the inflation changed to hyperinflation and the Mark fell to 800 Marks per Dollar by December 1922. The cost-of-living index was 41 in June 1922 and 685 in December, a 15-fold increase.
- In January 1923 French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, the industrial region of Germany in the Ruhr valley to ensure that the reparations were paid in goods, such as coal from the Ruhr and other industrial zones of Germany. Because the Mark was practically worthless, it became impossible for Germany to buy foreign exchange or gold using paper Marks. Instead, reparations were paid in goods. Inflation was exacerbated when workers in the Ruhr went on a general strike and the German government printed more money in order to continue paying them for "passively resisting"
Great Depression
When the stock market collapsed on Wall Street on Tuesday, October 29, 1929, it sent financial markets worldwide into a tailspin with disastrous effects.
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The German economy was especially vulnerable since it was built upon foreign capital, mostly loans from America and was very dependent on foreign trade. When those loans suddenly came due and when the world market for German exports dried up, the well oiled German industrial machine quickly ground to a halt.
As production levels fell, German workers were laid off. Along with this, banks failed throughout Germany. Savings accounts, the result of years of hard work, were instantly wiped out. Inflation soon followed making it hard for families to purchase expensive necessities with devalued money.
Overnight, the middle class standard of living so many German families enjoyed was ruined by events outside of Germany, beyond their control. The Great Depression began and they were cast into poverty and deep misery and began looking for a solution, any solution.
Adolf Hitler knew his opportunity had arrived.
In the good times before the Great Depression the Nazi Party experienced slow growth, barely reaching 100,000 members in a country of over sixty million. But the Party, despite its tiny size, was a tightly controlled, highly disciplined organization of fanatics poised to spring into action.
Since the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Hitler had changed tactics and was for the most part playing by the rules of democracy. Hitler had gambled in 1923, attempting to overthrow the young German democracy by force, and lost. Now he was determined to overthrow it legally by getting elected while at the same time building a Nazi shadow government that would one day replace the democracy.
Hitler had begun his career in politics as a street brawling revolutionary appealing to disgruntled World War I veterans predisposed to violence. By 1930 he was quite different, or so it seemed. Hitler counted among his supporters a number of German industrialists, and upper middle class socialites, a far cry from the semi-literate toughs he started out with.
He intentionally broadened his appeal because it was necessary. Now he needed to broaden his appeal to the great mass of voting Germans. His chief assets were his speech making ability and a keen sense of what the people wanted to hear.
By mid-1930, amid the economic pressures of the Great Depression, the German democratic government was beginning to unravel.
Gustav Stresemann, the outstanding German Foreign Minister, had died in October 1929, just before the Wall Street crash. He had spent years working to restore the German economy and stabilize the republic and died, having exhausted himself in the process.
The crisis of the Great Depression brought disunity to the political parties in the Reichstag. Instead of forging an alliance to enact desperately need legislation, they broke up into squabbling, uncompromising groups. In March of 1930, Heinrich Bruening, a member of the Catholic Center Party, became Chancellor.
Despite the overwhelming need for a financial program to help the German people, Chancellor Bruening encountered stubborn opposition to his plans. To break the bitter stalemate, he went to President Hindenburg and asked the Old Gentleman to invoke Article 48 of the German constitution which gave emergency powers to the president to rule by decree. This provoked a huge outcry from the opposition, demanding withdrawal of the decree.
As a measure of last resort, Bruening asked Hindenburg in July 1930 to dissolve the Reichstag according to parliamentary rules and call for new elections.
The elections were set for September 14th. Hitler and the Nazis sprang into action. Their time for campaigning had arrived.
The German people were tired of the political haggling in Berlin. They were tired of misery, tired of suffering, tired of weakness. These were desperate times and they were willing to listen to anyone, even Adolf Hitler.
Nazi ideology
Adolf Hitler and his followers in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) had a strong commitment to values and ideas. Under Hitler’s leadership the NSDAP developed its own ideology, which informed both its methods and objectives. They called this ideology National Socialism; today it is more commonly referred to as Nazism. Ideology seems central to the Nazi movement – however while Nazism revolved around some common ideas and prejudices, Nazi ideology was relatively fluid. The NSDAP had very few clear and concrete expressions of its ideology, only its 25 Points (drafted in 1920) and Hitler’s rambling memoir Mein Kampf (1924). In many respects, Nazi ideology was defined by Hitler himself. It was contained in his speeches, policy statements and orders. It could and did change over time, as Hitler’s objectives changed, and was not without its contradictions.
