February 27, 1933 was the night of the Reichstag fire and arguably, the end of German democracy and the Weimar Republic. The next day, the Cabinet approved and President von Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree giving the Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, dictatorial powers to fight a communist conspiracy. The Germany of Weimar had been a bastion of freedom, electoral rights, flourishing arts, creative music and theater, manufacturing and science. But, all of those positives eventually failed. "The Nazis were a response to an overwhelming triumph of global liberal capitalism at the end of the Great War." The war had cost the country the lives of 2 million men and saddled it with reparations and economic chaos. Not enough people were willing to move on and attempt to rejoin the world community.
Germany was met with abdication, armistice and revolution in November, 1918. "The German Army was stabbed in the back" was a statement made by von Hindenburg to an investigative committee in 1919. It would be the battle cry of the right for decades. It was a theme Hitler picked up when he began his public speaking career in Munich. The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch brought Hitler fame and afforded him the opportunity to write Mein Kampf. In the second half of the decade, Germany successfully negotiated a treaty to establish its borders, joined the League of Nations and restructured its debt. Its role as pariah began to fade. Domestically though, the country was falling apart."Divisions, increasingly bitter, increasingly irreconcilable, in matters of politics, religion, social class, occupation and region, were the hallmarks of the Weimar Republic." The Communists were opposed to the Social Democrats and the Nazis and vice versa. Everyone had militias that fought with the police. There was a distinct urban/rural divide capped by an antipathy for Berlin around the country. Insurgencies on the right and left, as well as the military and big business wished to either eliminate or emasculate the Reichstag. The structure of the Reichstag allowed parties seats based on their percentage of the vote in national elections. This led to multiple parties unable to form governing coalitions because of their inherent tribalism and inability to consider compromise.
Elections in 1930 gave the Nazis 107 seats with 18.3% of the vote, up from 12 seats and 2.6% two years earlier. They had made a major inroad into the centrist Protestant parties, whose voters feared communism. Germany had the largest Communist party outside of the USSR. It followed Stalin's instructions and German stability was not one of his goals. Hitler realized that he might achieve power through legitimate electoral means. The Depression played into his hands. Germany was still struggling with reparations, making the global world order their enemy. Throw in the antipathy toward the 80,000 eastern European Jews who had settled in the country after the Great War as fuel for the Nazi fire. The Depression deepened so in 1931 that Germans were going hungry and comparing circumstances to the war years. The dysfunctional system led to endless elections, and in 1931, the Nazis moved up to 230 seats. Emboldened by their success, Hitler unleashed the SA and planned to use his Reichstag seats to impeach von Hindenburg. "The intransigencies of Germany's political parties, especially the right-wingers, and several years of miscalculation by President Hindenburg, Brining, Schleicher and Papen, had thrown German politics into a full-blown crisis. The Nazis knew they could not come to power against the establishment. But, neither could the establishment go on without the Nazi's." Hitler would not accept any offers for a coalition government without him as Chancellor. Everyone kept trying solutions, but Hindenburg, who viewed the "Austrian private" as perhaps qualified to be the postal minister, refused. He eventually gave in and offered the position to Hitler on Jan.30, 1933. It took Hitler and the Nazis the next eighteen months, until von Hindenburg's death, to consolidate their power and lead Germany and much of Europe into the abyss.
This is a very interesting book and a fascinating reminder once again about how determined minorities can take over countries and impose their will on others. The author, by focusing on the global order and a populist pushback, draws the obvious comparison to the 21st century in Europe and America. The stumbling block for me to thoroughly enjoying this has been the Constitution of the Weimar Republic. I do not wish for more explanation of it because I'm not sure it would have helped me wrap my mind around the process and the problems.
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