The Weimar Republic was doomed from the start because its constitution was written by stupid Professors, like Max Weber, with little practical political experience. Hugo Preuss, a disciple of Otto von Gierke who believed that Genossenschaft needs Herrschaft- i.e. free association needs 'dominion'- was a Professor of Constitutional law who, lacking any political nous, shafted the new Republic by ensuring it could become an autocracy which denied a fundamental right to property on the basis that all such rights are 'social' not 'private'.
Preuss, the main author of the constitution's, made two mistakes.
The first was that he replaced 'first past the post' with proportional representation which meant firstly that a charismatic party leader could dominate his legislators and secondly that there would be a plethora of small parties making coalition governments unstable.
The second mistake was the mechanism for 'the direct election of the President' which first happened in 1925. This election was to be a modified two-round system, such that if no candidate received an absolute majority of votes (i.e. more than half) in the first round of a presidential election then a second ballot would occur in which the candidate with a plurality of votes would be deemed elected. It was permitted for a group to nominate an alternative candidate in the second round. A more sensible method would have been to let the second round be a run-off between the two biggest winners in the first round because this would have promoted coalition stability. Hindenburg, who had not been in the first round, got elected in the second round. Otherwise, the second round contest would have been won either by Karl Jarres, a sensible enough Liberal Conservative or else the SDP's Otto Braun from Prussia against whom Papen would later direct a constitutional putsch. Hindenburg was a reluctant candidate and the hope was that he would be a figurehead. But, as an elderly Junker, he was bound to resist any attempt at land reform in the East and to give higher weight to agricultural interests. Only if German industry could subsidize the agricultural sector in some substantial manner could Hindenburg be relied upon to be a King Log rather than a King Stork. Otherwise, if the farmers grew restive- as they did from January 1928 onward- he would be bound to favor Catholics from the Centre party in the belief that this would unify the agricultural interest groups and promote a generous solution to the problems of the farmers. The problem was that big landlords in the East wanted protection for grain production whereas the smaller Catholic or Northern farmers were more concerned with livestock and thus their interests could clash. The crucial issue, for Hindenburg, was 'Osthilfe' by which bankrupt Junker estates were given a lifeline. Significantly, Hindenburg got rid of both Bruning and Schliecher just when they proposed to subdivide estates which were beyond redemption.
I suppose the hyperinflation had involved a one-off transfer of working capital from farmers to grain dealers (though farmers also gained by having the real value of their loans reduced to zero) and some of those dealers may have been Jewish. This, together with the corrupt practices of profiteers like the Barmats and Skalreks, contributed to increased anti-Semitism. It was in this connection that the notion that the Law should have a 'social' basis proved mischievous. There could be a notion of collective guilt. It was one thing to say that the German Nation had incurred war guilt. It was another to say that the German people had done so. Yet this is what many Germans did to the Jews. All were guilty of the corruption or profiteering of the very few.
It so happened that Preuss was Jewish and his party- the DPP- was popular with Jews. I suppose those parties who wanted Weimar to fail were content with Preuss's foolish arrangement. They could point to the Jewish origin, or Jewish spouses, of important Weimar statesmen like Rathenau or Stresemann, to further their 'stab in the back' theory.
However, it was the fact that, under Preuss's constitution, the President and Chancellor would be relatively independent of the Legislature- indeed, the President could rule by decree- which ensured that beneath the democratic facade of the Weimar Republic, there lurked an autocratic possibility punctuated, no doubt, by Presidential plebiscites.
To be precise- the least marked reading of the constitution was that if the chancellor met with a vote of no confidence the President could either abandon his cabinet or stick with it by a continual dissolution of the Reichstag in order to prevent a proper session or the deferment of new elections beyond the constitutionally mandatory sixty-day period.
Prof. Eberhard Kolb writes- 'While deferring new elections would have been a clear breach of the constitution, repeatedly dissolving the Reichstag and holding new elections (until perhaps the desired result was achieved) was a course that could not be maintained politically over a longer period. For this reason, the president's retention of a cabinet not tolerated by parliament was, either way, bound to lead to a breach of the constitution and the declaration of a state of emergency, culminating in a temporary dictatorship that rested on the authority of the president and the armed forces.'
In other words, one way or another you would have had a dictatorship if the President and the party or coalition capable of providing 'toleration' could not get along. Thus, the moment Hindenburg- a very elderly conservative was elected- there was only one way matters could end- viz. Dictatorship. What was unexpected was that Hitler would turn out to be smarter and more ruthless than anyone else. When others- e.g. Goebbels- were rattled, he stuck to his guns. This meant, the moment Hindenburg gave him his imprimatur, he became a Chancellor who could take over the Presidency. Once the Enabling Acts were passed and the Army took an oath of loyalty to him, there was nothing left but autocracy. The logic of the Weimar Constitution had completed its vicious circle.
All this was entirely predictable. Why did Weber & Preuss & other such pedants go down such a disastrous road? I suppose the answer is that the DPP Liberals knew they would get very few seats under first past the post and thus plumped for a fatal proportional representation. They couldn't embrace proper 'dual sovereignty' Federalism because of the risk of secession. At the same time, being German Professors- i.e. as stupid as fuck- they ensured the President could be a Dictator because...urm... isn't the transcendental deduktion of the Kantian ethischen gemeinen Wesens nothing but willing the universalization of the willing of the dick which has a potato attached to it? Is not the dick-tato the irrefragable being-in-becoming of the foreverafterization of the hermeneutic of some dude with a comic moustache?
It wasn't just the Professors who shat the bed. German economists ensured firstly that there would be hyperinflation such that the middle class would be pauperized and then that a deflationary policy was implemented at just the moment when the Great Depression hit hardest. This ensured mass unemployment. If these nutters wanted to create the conditions for a Communist putsch, then they did a good job. But, the rise of Communism would be bound to create consolidation around a Fascist alternative simply because everyone could see a Mussolini was way better than a Lenin or a Stalin. The Commies, on the other hand, were even more devious. They knew that to get supreme power over any portion of Germany, a Hitler would be needed to smash all forms of legality in the country into atoms. They were proved right in that they got to rule East Germany.
Mark Jones writes in Project Syndicate-
In his new book, 'Hitler's People' Richard Evans sees the fall of the Weimar Republic as “the paradigm of democracy’s collapse and dictatorship’s triumph'
This seems odd. Democracy had already collapsed in Italy and then Portugal. Poland concentrated power in the hands of the President from 1926 onward but the same thing happened a short while later in Germany where General Hindenburg ruled by decree.
Following a summer of violent street fighting between Nazi Brownshirts and Communists, Hitler’s party won 37% of the vote and 230 seats in the Reichstag in the election on July 31, 1932.
There had been plenty of such street fighting in previous years. What had changed was that the grand coalition which took power in 1928 could only have survived if American financial markets had taken over Germany's debt- i.e. if 'extend and pretend' had been permitted to continue. This was impossible because of the Wall Street Crash which turned out to be no temporary blip. The SDP was internally divided over how to finance welfare payments and so Chancellor Muller resigned after the President refused to use his emergency powers on his behalf. He was succeeded by a Centre (Catholic) Party economist, Bruning, who used deflationary measures to meet the terms of the Young Plan. This made him very unpopular. Hindenberg could not get the German Right to support Bruning who then asked the President to call early elections. Meanwhile his party moved to the Right. The result was that in the 1932 elections the Nazis were the biggest winners followed by the Communists while the SDP, which had only lost 10 seats and remained the biggest Party, was now incapable of leading, or even participating in, a grand coalition. In other words, Bruning- a stupid economist who had studied at the LSE- doomed Weimar by deflating the economy at the wrong time and then, very foolishly, calling elections. But it was his proposal for agricultural land reform which caused Hindenburg to drop him. Later, he told some story of hoping to restore the Monarchy. As things were, Hindenburg's power had increased. However, the 1932 election showed that Hitler had a big following. The Communists believed that they would gain most if Hitler came to power because he was bound to fail. I suppose, for the East German Communist regime, that was a true prediction. Still, the position was that no coalition could gain a majority save by including either the Communists or the Nazis. But the Commies wouldn't play ball because they believed history was on their side and so the Nazis had the advantage in the short run.
Currently, we see something like this unfolding in France. The Left won most seats but overplayed their hand and so Macron has chosen a right wing Prime Minister who will have to rely on Le Pen.
The magnitude of the Nazis’ triumph led Hitler to assume that he was entitled to the position of chancellor.
He had more seats than Muller had gained.
But German President Paul von Hindenburg, whose office was supposed to serve as a guardian of the constitution, disagreed.
He let his poodle Von Papen dissolve the Prussian Assembly and take power there. This 'Prussian Coup' helped Hitler. However, it was his ability to appeal to Northern agriculturists which gave him the edge. If he could also gain support from the Catholic South, he could gain a majority. This is one reason Hindenburg was suspicious of him.
At a meeting on August 13, 1932, Hindenburg snubbed Hitler and used emergency powers available to him under the Weimar constitution to support the chancellorship of arch-conservative Franz von Papen,
a Catholic but the Centre party didn't like him because he would sometimes support other parties. The leader of the party, a Priest, came to feel that only the Nazis would protect the Church and reach a Concordat with the Vatican. Thus the Centre would later vote for Hitler's Enabling Act.
the leader of the cabinet that Hindenburg had appointed on June 1, 1932. Papen’s government was entirely dependent on Hindenburg’s support and lacked an electoral mandate of any kind. It was so stacked with aristocratic conservatives that it was known as the “cabinet of barons.”
Papen was ruling through Presidential decrees. In other words, Germany was already an autocracy. Indeed it had been since 1930 when Bruning became Chancellor.
In late summer 1932, shocking scenes played out in the briefly reconvened German parliament. Reichstag President Hermann Göring, who had received the position in August thanks to the votes of his fellow Nazi Party members, abused the position to humiliate Papen by ignoring him in the Chamber before the Nazis and Communists joined forces to vote through a no-confidence motion in Papen’s government.
This is misleading. The no-confidence vote was put by the Communists. 84% of the Reichstag voted for it. It was the Communists who gained most in the November elections. The Nazis lost a fair number of seats. It looked as though History was indeed on the side of the Communists. With record unemployment, it was likely that more and more of the SDP rank and file would come over to them- if they weren't accused of being 'Social Fascists' and chased away.
Hindenburg then called yet another election for that November. But when this failed to produce a workable parliamentary majority, he changed his mind about who should be chancellor, this time appointing General Kurt von Schleicher. Like Papen, Schleicher lacked an electoral mandate, but he did have the support of the army and business.
He had made an enemy of Blomberg. However, it was his overtures to the Centre party and even the Trade Unions which embittered Hugenberg and the hardline 'Harzburg' conservatives. Odd as it may sound, Schleicher was perceived as the man who might revive 'parliamentarism' by going down a 'Corporatist' path. In particular, there was the danger that the left-wing of the Nazi party might join hands with Schleicher.
Schleicher’s cabinet lasted for just eight weeks.
I think the withdrawal of support by the National Rural League would have alarmed Hindenburg. Apparently, some Junkers suspected that Schleicher (though a landlord himself) was behind investigations into misuse of Osthilfe funds.
Hindenburg now decided he wanted a Chancellor with a majority in Parliament. Since Hitler was willing to join hands with Von Papen and the Centre (because his own position seemed to be weakening) and since Hugenberg could be manipulated into coming on board, Hitler got the job. But previous Chancellors had failed ignominiously and so the Communists were happy.
Angry about being dismissed, Papen conspired against the new chancellor and sought Hitler’s support for a new government. When Schleicher demanded more support from Hindenburg in the final days of January 1933, the aging president decided to push him to the side.
Schleicher should have kept the Rural league sweet instead of trying to suck up to the Trade Unions.
On January 30, 1933, with Papen’s encouragement, Hindenburg appointed Hitler, who had served as a corporal when Hindenburg was field marshal. The new chancellor would head a coalition government surrounded by “respectable” conservatives led by Papen.
But Papen ensured the Nazis would have a free hand in Prussia. The man was a fool.
The latter believed that he had “boxed” Hitler in, and that he would be able to control and manipulate the new chancellor to force through his own conservative agenda.
These guys wanted Hitler to be the fall guy for the horrible condition of the economy.
Ryback offers a blow-by-blow account of the intrigues and scheming that occurred during the 170 days between Hindenburg and Hitler’s meeting on August 13, 1932, and Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.
That intrigue changed nothing because no coalition could be formed without either the Nazis or the Communists. The Communists would not play ball and so Hitler won by default.
The figures who feature most prominently include Hitler and his inner circle; his Nazi Party rival Gregor Strasser;
Schleicher offered to make him Vice Chancellor. Hitler used this opportunity to isolate Strasser and force him out of politics. Later he killed him and Schleicher in the night of the long knives. This was a decisive turn of events. If you are going to have Mafia rule, better to have an all powerful Don who will kill any of his Capos who fall out of line.
his rivals for the chancellery, Papen and Schleicher;
who had no constituency of their own. Papen was repudiated by the head of his own party. Schleicher had pushed out his own mentor, General Groener, who was probably the one military man whom the SDP could rely on. But Groener was unpopular with his comrades and thus held office as a civilian. Schleicher got rid of him so as to ally with the Nazis- a dangerous game.
the conservative politician and media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg;
who hated 'parliamentarianism' as much as the Communist Thalman
and the aging but fully lucid Hindenburg.
who relied on his stupid son Oskar who was a pal of Schleicher. It is said that Oskar got his father to appoint Hitler and keep Papen out of power. Later he was a witness against Papen at Nuremburg.
Ryback ... offers a powerful historical message: while Nazism was once explained as the product of centuries of German history, the truth is that the story could have turned in another direction right up until the final minutes before Hitler became chancellor.
Not really. Schleicher had the same agenda as Hitler- viz. rearm and conquer land to the East. This had been the aim of Weimar diplomacy. The reparations headache was over. The Rhineland had been returned. Under the Locarno pact, France could not attack if Germany 'adjusted' its Eastern borders by force. The question for Germany was who would push through the 'maximal program' of conquest. It couldn't be Ludendorff- he was too crazy and anti-Catholic. It couldn't be Hindenburg- he was too old. It couldn't be Schleicher, nobody really liked him and the Army didn't raise a peep when Hitler had him and his wife killed. Blomberg, who got the army to swear a personal oath of obedience to Hitler, was later dismissed for having married a prostitute. The fact is, Hitler was actually less stupid than the General Staff.
Even on the morning of January 30, 1933, there was a last-gasp debate about whether to back out and abandon the envisaged coalition. There is human agency at every moment in history.
The outcome would have been the same. Sooner or later, Germany would have turned on its Eastern neighbors. France lacked an offensive doctrine but, like England, might still have been foolish enough to declare war. But, unlike in the Great War, they had no appetite to take big losses. The Germans had had their own side deal with the Bolsheviks since 1922. When Germany took a bite out of Czechoslovakia, Poland eagerly took a slice. Why should Stalin not do the same to Poland when the Germans finally got around to 'adjusting' the border?
But this point, however well delivered, isn’t really new. The American historian Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy, published in 2018, is just as much of a page-turner, and it includes a closer examination of why things happened as they did, making it a superior book. Takeover, by contrast, includes hardly any analysis of the Germans who opposed Nazism during the winter of 1932-33.
The one guy who mattered was Thalmann, the leader of the Communist party. He thought the Social Democrats were the real enemy. Stalin didn't bother to get him out of Hitler's jail after the two became pals. He was shot on Hitler's orders in 1944. His rival, Walter Ulbricht lived to rule East Germany for over a decade. He understood Communism which is why he insisted the Russians build the Berlin Wall so as to prevent people escaping it.
When speaking of Fascism or Nazism or those disgusting Social Fascists who call themselves 'the Labor Party' (more like 'the party of genocidal mercenaries for Neo-fucking-Liberalism'!) we should remember that all these obscene political pathologies are but a response to TRUE democracy which can only be achieved in the Gulag.
... recent events in the Democratic Party have shown, those who oppose populists do have choices, and they can use them to re-energize the defense of democracy.
No. Recent events have shown you need to get rid of senile leaders like Biden or Hindenburg. Opposing populists means telling lies- e.g. Obama was born in Kenya, Kamala is a Communist, Trump is a Nazi, Vance fucks sofas, etc.
Hitler’s People is an excellent book, because it shows us who the Nazis really were: upper-class and middle-class Germans
Hitler was working class. Thalmann, more so. They headed parties without one of which no grand coalition could be formed. But this wasn't their fault. The fault lay with a Jewish Professor who had also ensured that, under the constitution, the President could be an autocrat. Had Ludendorff not been crazy, he would have been Hindenburg's Chancellor. The fact is, over the course of the Great War, the General Staff came to the conclusion that expansion to the East was the only way forward. Keynes endorsed this view in his 'Economic consequences'. He went further. He said Germany would starve if it didn't do so. After the hyper-inflation (which effectively meant that Weimar was getting rid of its own domestic National debt) and the occupation of the Ruhr (because reparations payments were not forthcoming) it became obvious that Weimar wasn't just politically doomed to fail by reason of its stupid constitution, it was also fiscally unviable and monetarily untrustworthy. There only remained the 'social' question- i.e. land redistribution and an expanded welfare state- which could only be pushed through if the Communists had supported the Social Democrats. But they dreamed of killing policemen, beating up the Freikorps and the militas of other parties, and staging a Bolshevik Revolution of their own after which they would kill priests and class-enemies- including Jews- and collectivize the land and have a nice big famine. Hitler was the better alternative. Nobody really believed the Hohenzollern's were smart. Monarchism was merely nostalgia. In Hungary, Horthy was a Regent who was in no hurry to invite back the Hapsburg king. Hindenburg too may have made monarchist noises, but had no very high opinion of the Dynasty.
who faced downward social mobility,
those who hadn't inherited real estate were pauperized by the hyperinflation.
feared equality and social progress, and took out their frustrations over Germany’s defeat in World War I on those least responsible for it, Jews and Social Democrats.
A Jew wrote the Weimar Constitution. But he wasn't a Social Democrat.
From the earliest days of the Nazi movement, they supported or fully tolerated its violence.
Had they objected to the violence the Kaiser unleashed? No. The truth is that most Germans believed, as Keynes did, that the Nation must grab agricultural and other resource rich land or else starve. Such land was no longer available in Africa or America. It had to be taken from its Eastern neighbors. This meant guys goosestepping down the road rather than blokes knifing each other in beerhalls.
Even after Hitler launched a genocidal war across Europe, they continued to cheer for him. And most of those who survived Nazism’s final defeat were unrepentant for the rest of their days.
Whereas Americans weep bitter tears over their genocide against indigenous people.
... my only disappointment with Hitler’s People is that its subjects do not include any of the university presidents who oversaw the academic world that helped transform students of medicine into mass murderers.
There were also physicists and rocket scientists who rendered the work of those Doctors wholly irrelevant. Why bother with genocide when you can blow up the entire world? Only the cockroaches might survive.
Many of these men would remain respected figures in their fields long after 1945.
Unless they had become American citizens under 'Operation Paperclip'.
They do not deserve to have their complicity in the Nazi-era horrors so conveniently forgotten.
It turned out the Allies could do horror better.
Reading Hitler’s People, one cannot help but recognize the parallels to those who are complicit in, or openly profiting from, undermining democracy today.
There are no parallels. This is because there is no Communist threat. Nor is there a Fascist threat. What we need to fear is a return of the Spanish Inquisition.
We should all share Evans’s anger.
No. The thing does not matter in the slightest. Life in Hitler's Germany was better than in Stalin's Russia. Had the cretin not attacked Russia and then declared war on America, his party would still rule a greater Germany. Europe might still have colonies in Africa and Asia. The US might still be isolationist. Indeed, but for its militarization, it may have stronger Dual Sovereignty- i.e. some States might still have a watered down Jim Crow.
History has already shown us what happens when democracies allow their enemies to weaken them from within.
A good question to ask is why France didn't have an offensive doctrine in either War. The answer is 'internal divisions' but there was no 'enemy within'. De Gaulle, probably with Israeli help, got France its nuclear deterrent. That's what keeps it safe. Will Macron or his successor be able to organize a European Union Army with lots of nukes? I suppose so. Ukraine has been a wake-up call. Brussels, in its sclerotic manner, might get with the program.
The fates of democracies are not 'inextricably linked'. The fate of a particular democracy depends on social cohesion, the rule of Law, and a good enough 'threat point' to deter aggression. It is welcome to ally with non-democracies to achieve 'collective security'.
Hitler's rise to power was by no means inevitable. Nor was Lenin's or Stalin's or Mao's. But it is enough for stupid people to do stupid shit for other stupid people to do stupider, more evil, shit. A direct result of Merkel posing as Mother Theresa is the victory of far right parties in two German States- the very ones where the Nazis first made their breakthrough.
The lesson of History is that those who won't learn from it are compelled to teach it. Mark Jones is an Assistant Professor of History in Dublin- a country where the Fine Gael party had a paramilitary outfit named the Blue-shirts. Were they Fascist? YES! Leo Varadkar- a gay Maharashtrian is guilty of genocide and the ethnic cleansing, by leprechauns, of Iyers from their original homeland. Once she becomes POTUS, Kamala will take action. After all, her Mum was an Iyer. Mind it kindly.
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