History of the Weimar Republic. I. 1918-1923.

Germany’s defeat and ultimate national humiliation after the First World War led to widespread political chaos. Workers composed a revolutionary mass that forced the old monarchic governments out of office in November 1918, but there remained a strong minority among the workers who wanted more than a democratic revolution that had already been fulfilled. They saw the overthrow of the monarchy as a first step toward establishing Communism by following the precedent that the Bolsheviks had already set in Russia in 1917, especially after social differences were heightened during the war. Almost everyone became poorer, but the lower income groups faced hunger more greatly than the higher income groups since they had suffered the most because of supply problems for food and fuel throughout becoming increasingly war weary. Meanwhile, the immediate future of the state remained uncertain.

             Political chaos that ensued following the end of the First World War left to local populations taking spontaneous action to express their grievances, akin to the March 1917 revolution in Russia that likewise filled a political vacuum, while the old order did not initially counter with any resistance. The armistice on 11 November 1918 effectively meant a surrender in view of total military defeat, regardless of this term implying an honourable ceasefire that implied a peace between equal parties. However, the actual military situation was not evident to the public, as it was to military personnel, including the naval personnel who were conscious of the thorough effectiveness of the ongoing British blockade that could not be overcome, and also stifled international trade. The sailors’ revolutionary outbreak that had begun in Kiel on 1 November spread to other northern German ports, which was followed by setting up workers’ and soldiers’ councils in all of the major cities and ports, while coexisting uneasily albeit peacefully with the civil service, as they did not seek to overthrow the old order, apart from overthrowing the emperor and demanding the establishment of a fully democratic form of government. A decisive development took place with the proclamation of a republic in Bavaria on 8 November in the face of fearing an invasion following the collapse of Austria-Hungary

           The Independent Socialists (USPD) under Kurt Eisner seized the initiative in Bavaria by establishing a council of workers, soldiers and peasants, which deposed the Wittelsbach monarchy and proclaimed the Bavarian Democratic and Socialist Republic on 8 November, which was joined by the Majority Socialists (SPD), as part of a radical middle class political revolution. They confirmed maintaining the former officials in power, pledged to maintain law and order, protect property, and convene a national assembly, while also repudiating socialising the means of production at a time of economic dislocation. The self-proclaimed Shop Stewards composed the most active revolutionary group who had planned for an armed uprising, and had conferred with the USPD leaders on 2 November to determine a date for seizing power. The USPD membership itself was divided over applying parliamentary methods, as was advocated by the party leader, Hugo Haase, in contrast to revolutionary tactics. A more radical party was the Sparticist League, which broke away from the USPD and later called itself the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) on 1 January 1919. This group, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, spurned parliamentary institutions, and called for the immediate seizure of power and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat by intending to provoke a “true” socialist revolution following the Bolshevik model. Liebknecht and Luxemburg, had opposed the war, and sought to follow the success of the Russian revolution, although they had reservations about how Lenin consolidated his power in an autocratic manner, including Luxemburg calling for not resorting to violence.

         While the Shop Stewards and the USPD debated whether armed insurrection was advisable, which resulted in a twenty-one to nineteen to postpone launching an insurrection, the SPD under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert and Philip Scheidemann, played the leading role in determining the course of subsequent events constituting a limited middle-class revolution while they were determined that the working class would only come to power though constitutional parliamentary means. They demanded greater representation in the national government’s cabinet upon the emperor’s abdication and establishing a new democratic constitutional government, to which Prince Max concurred as the only way to avoid the outbreak of civil war and announced the abdication of the emperor and the crown prince at noon on 8 November. Wilhelm Gröner, Ludendorff’s successor, informed William II that the soldiers would neither support him or take action against bolshevism, and demanded an armistice. Prince Max thereafter appointed Ebert as the new head of state on 9 November in an attempt to create a constitutional monarchy.

    During this time, Scheidemann was warned that Liebknecht was on the verge of proclaiming “a free Socialist German republic.” Fearing similar consequences in Germany that had taken place in Russia, where Lenin dissolved the constituent assembly in January 1918, and considering “soviet rule” to be synonymous with the Bolshevik reign of terror, Scheidemann sought to pacify raucous demonstrators assembled in front of the Reichstag and ended with speech with proclaiming a German republic, which set an irreversible course for the remaining course of the restoration of governmental stability in conjunction with conservative rather than radical elements, as Ebert expected to maintain the support of the civil service and the officer corps, while hoping to bring peace as soon as possible, and preserve law and order. Liebknecht proclaimed the establishment of a socialist republic two hours after Scheidemann announced the fall of the German monarchy, while public disorder prevailed.

The new national administration’s authority remained tenuous in view of revolutionary disturbances, including the Shop Stewards planning to set up a provisional government based on the workers’ and soldiers’ councils without reference to the Reichstag representatives. Ebert thus offered memberships to USPD members in the new national government on 9 November to forestall an uprising from below, which they accepted by a vote of twenty-one to nineteen. The SPD and the USPD members thus formed a new government, the Council of People’s Deputies, on 10 November, each with six representatives from both parties. Not any Spartacists who aimed to take over the state and expropriate the means of production, i.e. execute revolutionary Marxism into practice, were elected. The workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Berlin approved the composition of this government by a wide majority at a mass meeting, and a twenty-eight member executive committee was elected to manage their collective concerns on the same day. Although they imitated the Russian Soviets in name, they strove to maintain order in the immediate postwar chaos without revolutionary purposes, and governed Germany for the next three months.

Permanent officials cooperated willingly with Ebert as the legitimate successor of Prince Max, but they would not agree to work with the executive committee of the councils. The officer corps also pledged their full support to the new parliamentary democracy on 9 November in exchange for an orderly withdrawal of three million troops across the Rhine by 12 December in accordance with the armistice terms, as well as defend Germany against bolshevism by having the army at the government’s disposal for this purpose. Since the SPD did not see any possibility of creating a moderate and democratic armed force that could preserve order until a democratic constitution could be promulgated, Ebert representing the revolutionary government, and Gröner representing the military High Command, concluded a secret agreement during a private telephone conversation on 10 November to maintain order and curtail “bolshevism” by curtailing the power of the soldiers’ councils, along with protecting the government from attacks by radical leftist elements, in return for continued military support. Gröner likewise expressed exaggerated concerns that the revolution would destroy the authority of the officer corps, and lead to a disastrous civil war that would weaken Germany and open the way to Bolshevik control, although there was a pervasive conservative sentiment among the working class that was solidly committed to parliamentary democracy. The majority of moderate council members were primarily concerned about the restoration of civil order and economic security, rather than political ideology.

A Congress of Councils from all over Germany assembled at the Circus Busch in Berlin on 16 December, where the delegates refused to give the Spartacist League any opportunity to express their views in the assembly deliberations, and elected a new executive that as completely composed of SPD members who supported Ebert’s plan for the election of a National Assembly. They reached an agreement on 22 November on a new constitutional form for the transitional period before the constituent assembly would meet, vesting all executive and legislative power vested in the workers’ and soldiers’ councils of “the German Socialist Republic.” The government was to exercise power in the name of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, to which Ebert reluctantly agreement with the grave suspicion that these councils could compose a possible source of opposition to parliamentary government, while there was ongoing friction between the SPD and the USPD about whether the gains of the revolution were to be either consolidated or extended, as the SPD would not sanction the transition to complete socialism. Another agreement was the Hamburg ratified on 16 December, which called for creating a popular militia would elect its own officers, and serve under the command of the cabinet and executive committee. An overwhelming majority approved the government decision on 19 December to elect the constituent assembly on 19 January.

  The USPD left the government on 29 December 1918 in protest against the SPD that would not sanction replacing the old military system with a popular militia, which the army leadership would not accept, and nor would Ebert who remained concerned about continued disorder in the form of mob violence, and therefore required army units to impose order. The Spartacists hereafter broke with the USPD to form the KPD on 1 January 1918, and denounced Ebert as “the enemy of the working class.” called for a government composed of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. The Shop Stewards and Berlin USPD joined the Communists in a call for mass protest demonstrations on 5 January, and a fifty-three member revolutionary committee of Communists and Shop Stewards was set on the following day, which issued a proclamation deposing the establishment of a new revolutionary government led by Liebknecht.

Liebknecht and Luxemburg considered the timing to be too early, but they felt compelled to take this opportunity to take action out of loyalty to the workers who pillaged arsenals to arm bands of radical workers, occupied the newspaper building of the SPD and nearby public buildings while calling for a socialist revolution, which was followed by similar uprisings in other cities, regardless of their limited power base. While the majority SPD now governed the state, Gustav Noske, the SPD Minister of War, depended on over a hundred Free Corps (Freikorps) as counter-revolutionary volunteer paramilitary militia forces to establish order and face threats from radical leftist elements through applying their discipline, motivation, competent leadership and tactical experience. Captain (later General and future Chancellor) Kurt von Schleicher who worked with the political department of the Reichswehr, contributed to setting up these armed formations consisting of small self-contained units composed of military veterans and ardent nationalists, who were secretly equipped and paid by the Reichswehr with the support of the SPD and financed by leading industrial and agrarian interests, in addition to possibly pilfering weapons and other supplies from former German army stocks that were supposed to have been destroyed under the terms of the Versailles treaty.

  The uprising was repressed by 12 January. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered by Free Corps officers on 13 January. The forceful imposition of order caused deep resentment of the SPD among moderate workers who did not support the uprising, since the bloody intervention by the Free Corps were called and directed by the SPD that undermined working class support during the suppression of unrest through authoritarian means by the Free Corps that remained ongoing throughout Germany, including suppressing revolts in Brunswick, Saxony and Bavaria. National elections were held thereafter on 19 January, with results showing strong support for parties advocating democratic government and moderate reform, showing an increase for the SPD without a majority, which formed a coalition cabinet with the Centre Party and the Progressives, now called the German Democratic Party (DDP), with Ebert the SPD leader as President of the Republic. The population thus repudiated leftist extremism and conservative reaction. On 6 February 1919, this provisional government convened a constituent assembly in Weimar, away from the political unrest in Berlin where violence was widespread, and disassociation from the defeated Prussian militarism. This assembly met on 10 February and elected Ebert as the president of the republic.

             This Weimar assembly largely composed of middle-class delegates were opposed to socialist experiments, while the authorities were already attempting to suppress the councils in the factories and Noske’s use of the Free Corps caused great bitterness among workers. The Communists organised widespread strikes in defence of workers’ councils, which led to sporadic street fighting in certain cities and attempts to proclaim Soviet Republics, and also called for a general strike as a a first step to a second revolution, which was endorsed by the USDP and the Berlin workers’ and soldiers’ council, and the USPD completely rejecting parliamentary democracy, and calling for a government of workers’ councils.

         While the Allies deliberated on the treatment of postwar Germany, without Germany being a party to the negotiations, there was further political violence within Germany. Communists in Berlin called a general strike in March 1919, which led to fighting against the Free Corps until 16 March that left 1,200 killed. After a right-wing student killed the Bavarian Minister President, Kurt Eisner, a member of the USPD, on 21 April, as he was about to resign when his party only acquired two percent of the popular vote, further violence broke out. The USPD called for a general strike in Bavaria, which led to months of instability. On 7 April, some USPD members seized power in Munich and proclaimed a Bavarian Soviet Republic as a second attempt at revolution, which was further radicalized by local Communists proclaimed their own Soviet Republic on 9 April. Free Corps as both military adjunct mercenaries and regular army units brutally repressed this revolution on 1-2 May 1919, which was to have a conservative reactionary effect on regional political life in Bavaria thereafter.

       The aims of the German revolution of 1918 beyond the overthrow of the monarchy remained unclear, while there was no resistance from the old monarchical interests that became replaced by a constitutional democracy, and left the socialists and democrats to deal with a hopeless situation. Moreover, apart from turning Germany into a democracy, the revolution did not change the social structure while the traditional parties in the government administration and the military remained in place, rather than being replaced with democrats, who continued identifying with the pre-revolutionary state and were opposed to the government that had signed the armistice. A socialist government composed of the SPD and USPD as a separate independent party drawn from the SPD members ruled for several weeks following the emperor’s abdication while the unity between the two socialist parties represented in the government was tenuous. The USPD wanted constitutionally institutionalised powers for the workers’ councils, whereas the SPD aimed at calling a National Assembly that would draft a democratic constitution and limit the power of the councils, which eventually faded out of existence. In spite of their differences regarding Germany’s future, the government agreed in December 1918 to schedule general elections to a National Assembly on 19 January 1919, which opened in Weimar, a distance away from the political unrest in Berlin on 6 February. Ebert was elected president on 11 February, and a cabinet under Scheidemann was formed from a coalition of SPD, the Centre, and the German Democratic Party on 13 February, marking the end of the revolutionary period.

As the spirit of imperial Germany continued in the unreformed civil service, the judiciary, the National Assembly promulgated an emergency constitution that was modeled on the imperial constitution. The president would be elected by the assembly in place of the emperor, and would have strong individual powers, as in the U.S., but would leave the conduct of everyday political matters to a Reich chancellor who would propose ministers to the president. The president nominated ministers, who were responsible to the assembly, which was sovereign, except for the rights of the states. The conduct of everyday political matters would be left to a Reich chancellor, who proposed ministers to the president. The federal principle was expressed in an upper house, whose assent was required for legislation. In case of disagreement between the two chambers, the issue was to be decided by a referendum. Germany now had a democratic government, and similar events happened in all German states, where most of them adopted equally democratic elections and elected democratic governments led by the SPD. However, order was not yet restored, as there still remained fighting between radical leftist workers and the Free Corps for several months, while the national assembly set out to making a new constitution on the pattern of western parliamentary democracy, which was later enacted on 11 August 1919.

         The British blockade meanwhile remained in place until the German National Assembly voted to accept the Allied peace terms on 23 June, before the Versailles treaty was signed on 28 June, which possibly caused 750,000 civilian deaths from starvation by that time while also strangling international trade. Shortages of food and coal remained ongoing, and many industries that had supplied the military needed to close, which caused a rise in unemployment, adding to the masses of returning soldiers who did not have employment prospects, as well as being traumatized by the war experience in different ways. The Allies further jeopardized the postwar situation by formulating the draft of the highly punitive Versailles treaty on 7 May that would undermine the popularity of the new Weimar Republic. A final text was handed to the German delegation on 16 June, which the cabinet rejected by eight votes to six, whereas Hindenburg admitted that the outcome of further military operations was extremely doubtful, as Germany could not hold out against the Entente, with Gröner fully agreeing that this would also lead to continued internal disorders, along with the complete destruction of the country and the officer corps. Hence, being forced to accept this peace settlement was inevitable.

Difficulties thus emanated from abroad that would further cause internal factors to undermine the Weimar Republic. The leading statesmen of the victorious national met in Paris on 18 January 1919, the anniversary of the creation of the German Empire in 1871 as a deliberate humiliation to Germany, to decide the future of the defeated Central Powers. They demonstrated a distinctively hostile attitude toward them, and while the turbulence continued within Germany, their decisions further undermined support for the Weimar republic. President Wilson’s most important goal was the establishment of a League of Nations that would mediate all future conflicts between nations and make war as a means of politics unnecessary, which was also prompted by the fear of Communism. He wanted to offer a pacifist vision to Europeans, and envisioned a European union of free, democratic nations, based on the principle of self-determination, and also to permanently weaken Germany’s military potential while enabling its restoration as a peaceful and prosperous nation. However, Germany was not allowed to join the newly founded League of Nations, thus expressing remaining animosity while imposing draconian demands in the peace settlement that conformed to French and British war aims.

The main priority for the French was establishing security against a future German invasion through shifting the balance of power by weakening Germany’s economic and demographic potential, at a time when Germany had a much more intensive industrial production than France, and sought to reduce German superiority, reconstruct the destroyed areas, and cover their own war debt. The French wanted high amounts of reparations, while also hoping to control Germany’s western industrial heartlands by separating the Rhineland and the Ruhr from Germany. As an additional safeguard against future German aggression, France also hoped to establish an alliance network among the newly independent nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland to threaten Germany with a second front. The British wanted to demilitarize Germany and to seize its battle fleet and merchant navy, claiming their share in German reparations and demanded control over most of Germany’s African possessions. They also believed, like the Americans, that Germany should eventually recover as a major trade partner without posing a military threat.

         The peace terms (see Eurodocs, World War I Archive: Versailles) regarding Germany were especially severe, owing to the persistence of French and British war aims that extended beyond the American President Wilson’s Fourteen Point peace plan. The Allies acting with a high degree of severity on Germany in pursuing their national interests. The French delegation at the Versailles Conference sought national security interests in the face of compensating for its losses by weakening Germany, whereas British delegation sought a restoration of the balance of power in Europe, while also maintaining Germany as a free market for British commerce. In practice, the peace terms that were dictated to the German delegation that was received in early May 1919 were highly punitive, which largely disregarded German requests for alleviating its burdensome provisions on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

In terms of territorial compensation, Germany had to cede Alsace-Lorraine to France and accept an allied occupation of most of its western provinces. The French combined parts of Rhenish Prussia and the Bavarian Palatinate to create the Saarland, which was transferred to French control under a League of Nations Commission for fifteen years, and a plebiscite would determine its future thereafter, but Germany would have to buy back the rich coal mines there if there was going to be a pro-German majority. The border areas of Stavelot-Malmédy and Moresnet with a German-speaking minority were annexed by Belgium, and the Rhineland was occupied by French, British, American and Belgian troops. A plebiscite in northern Schleswig with its Danish minority resulted in splitting this province between Germany and Denmark. In the east, Germany ceded the provinces of West Prussia and Posen to Poland to provide it with access to the Baltic Sea, along with some of Upper Silesia. Danzig became a so-called free city under a League of Nations mandate, which split East Prussia from the rest of Germany. A small area in Silesia was given to Czechoslovakia and another strip of land, the Memel, in northern East Prussia was initially placed under the administration of a French high commissioner, and then later taken over by Lithuania in 1923 in accordance with the terms of the Versailles Treaty. This meant Germany losing thirteen percent of its territory and subjecting ethnic Germans to foreign governance, while losing 14.6 percent of its arable land, 74.5 percent of its iron ore, 68.1 percent of its zinc, and 26 percent of its coal resources, in addition to giving up all of the German colonies.

          In terms of its military capacity, Germany had to disarm completely and its army was reduced to 100,000, down from 4.6 million in 1918, with service time for officers slated for twenty-five years, and twelve years for enlisted troops, and therefore prevented training reserve forces. This would be inferior even to the Polish army, with an army of 300,000 and 1.2 million in reserves. The German army was also prohibited from having an army general staff, as well as a general staff academy in which generals had undergone training for future commands. The German military was thus reduced to providing frontier defence and maintaining internal order. Restrictions on war production also had economic effects, since Germany was also prohibited from exporting weaponry, and only produce certain types of arms and ammunition for the Reichswehr, which undermined the operations of the local heavy, chemical, and manufacturing industries that could be considered either directly or indirectly supplying production for war materials. Germany also had to demilitarize a fifty-kilometre zone on the right bank of the Rhine by dismantling all fortifications, as well as on Heligoland, and was forbidden to have military aircraft, submarines, tanks, heavy artillery and poison gas. The navy was limited to coastal defence with a total of 15,000 personnel manning largely outdated warships. The existing battle fleet would have to be given to Britain along with all merchant ships. An Inter-Allied Military Control Commission was granted large powers to supervise and control German disarmament in each of the military branches until 1927. Meanwhile, the interwar Reichswehr composed entirely of volunteers retained the best and brightest of wartime personnel among its officer corps and non-commissioned officers that constituted the core of future rapid mobilisation of future enlistments. Every military rank was trained to assume the duties of the next higher ranks that would facilitate a rapid growth of a leadership cadre at separate levels, with more senior personnel being discharged early to allow for new enlistments, with the rate of enlisted discharges rising from twelve to twenty-five percent by 19126, and thereby creating a well-trained reserve force.

         There were further conditions that added to Germany’s burdens. In financial terms, the Entente and the French in particular had always claimed that the Germans would have to pay for the damage in the occupied regions and also most of the Entente’s war expenses. To justify such an enormous claim, the Entente argued that Germany and its allies had started the war and were therefore responsible for all of their enemies’ costs and damages. Germany was thus to sign a blank check for a yet undetermined amount. In judicial terms, the Entente claimed that the Germany leaders had conducted the war partly in a criminal manner, mainly by opting for submarine warfare. The Kaiser and about two thousand German top officers and officials were to be put on trial.

Contemporary circumstances forced the German government to sign the peace treaty while being unable to make any substantial changes to its highly punitive provisions. The German public was incensed and horrified by the claim of German guilt for starting the war, and the universal consensus was that this extremely unjust treaty required modification. The trade conditions favouring the Allies would lapse after five years, the occupation would end after fifteen years, and according to the letter of the treaty, German disarmament was ultimately conditional upon worldwide disarmament after Germany had disarmed first.

Germany was weakened more than Wilson had intended, but he had been forced to negotiate of weakness and make far reaching concessions to the allies in order to secure the peace treaty at all, and this treaty also had a decisively negative effect on the German population. The fourteen points and Wilson’s assurances in October 1918 had suggested milder terms, but the biggest problem was that the Germans still refused to acknowledge that they had lost a world war. This gave rise to illusions that they had been duped into disarming by the alleged promise of a just peace by the American president, and it remained difficult to envisage how they had lost the war without losing a decisive battle and without an Allied invasion of Germany. As a result, the trauma of defeat and the harsh peace settlement made many Germans susceptible to distortions of the truth about why the war was lost. Nevertheless, the German government was forced to accept the Versailles Treaty on 28 June 1919 to avert an Allied invasion that could not be withstood, as well as the possibility of a communist insurrection, and begin establishing postwar stability.

         During the same time, Allied troops occupied western Germany, while the Polish army moved into some of the eastern territories and fought with remainders of the German army, while some German units joined the Russian civil war. Free Corps were initially deployed to protect the country’s eastern borders where skirmishes broke out between the local populations, including a prolonged dispute over the boundary delineation in upper Silesia from 1919 to 1921, and also violently suppressing leftist workers’ uprisings to restore order throughout Germany to stem revolutionary demands that threatened the new democracy. Although the Weimar government ordered the Iron Division Freikorps taking part in the Russian Civil War in the newly independent states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to withdraw in August 1919 following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, they nevertheless remained fighting on the side of the local nationalists against the Bolsheviks as part of the West Russian Volunteer Army and the Rossback Freikorps, only retreating into Lithuania at the end of November, and then back to East Prussia by mid-December. Baltic ethnic German Landeswehr, or locally organised militias, troops fighting under British command continued fighting against the Bolsheviks in the Baltics until as long as 1 February 1920.

         The worst detrimental effect on the newly-established German democracy was the stab in the back conspiracy theory that Hindenburg and Ludendorff propagated in August 1919. They claimed that the defeat had resulted from democratic and socialist strivings for reforms on the home front that compromised the military as a result of politicians who exercised their influence over an undefeated German army by launching a revolution, and it was therefore unnecessary to accept a total defeat. They had already claimed before November 1918 that the democrats had undermined the war effort by diverting popular attention from ultimate support for the war in favour of concern about domestic gains. Hence, Socialists and Democrats who represented the new Weimar system were responsible for the German defeat. In fact, the revolution was triggered by the decisive admission of military defeat, and Ludendorff had ordered the constitutional government into existence. All of Germany’s allies in southeastern Europe had broken down in October 1918, and the western front was about to crumble due to the vast superiority of the Entente forces. As Ludendorff himself admitted before the revolution that the ultimate breakdown of the German army was only a matter of time due to the vast superiority of the Entente forces in the west and the southeast.

           Although it would be possible for Germany to recover from the Treaty of Versailles, this treaty was sure to make a significant section of the German public unforgiving and eager for revenge, which made it, in the words of the German writer Berthold Brecht, a truce in a European thirty-year war. This treaty also poisoned political life in the Weimar Republic by undermining its authority, as the extremely difficult adjustment period following the war was blamed primarily on the Weimar government’s compliance with the peace treaty rather than the war itself while there appeared to be no need to accept a total defeat. The Weimar government suffered from its acceptance of this treaty that was too harsh to reconcile Germany with its former war enemies and thereby Germany’s integration into a lasting peaceful postwar order, which contradicted Wilson’s intention that Germany could expect a settlement that would contribute to establishing postwar national stability, which was opposed by the French and British war aims.

         The new Weimar Republic thus had to begin its life in the shadow of defeat in the First World War and hostility from both abroad and within the state while also had fundamental weaknesses. Its life began when its constitution was promulgated on 12 August 1919, and appeared at least on paper that it could bring about a stable democracy. One fundamental weakness of this new constitution was Article 48, which gave the president of the republic, who was to be directly elected by popular vote every seven years, the right to govern by decree in emergencies, or temporary dictatorial powers that he could confer on the defence minister or the army chief of staff. The purpose of this specific provision was never intended to be applied against parliamentary governance, but remained ill-defined. There were also some modifications to parliamentary government, such as giving the president the right to dissolve the Reichstag and appoint the chancellor. The president also had the right to interfere with the legislation of the Reichstag and submit single laws to a plebiscite.

         The Reichstag was the main legislative body that controlled the government, and if it lost confidence in a chancellor, the president had to dismiss him, and could secure the Reichstag’s approval to the chancellor after dissolving the Reichstag and calling new elections. The Reichstag was normally elected every fourth year by universal, equal and secret suffrage by all people older than the age of 20. Parliamentary seats were distributed roughly by percentage of the parties’ votes. Which allowed even very small splinter party minorities to occupy Reichstag seats that could be combined into coalitions of several parties that could determine the government composition with the president’s approval. However, this also allowed for parties that were hostile to the new state that could acquire an otherwise insignificant presence in the Reichstag and position themselves to join these coalitions that could be in a position to stymie parliamentary decision-making and undermine majority governments.

One of the most pressing problems that the new German republic had to face at the end of the First World War and the peace terms was being burdened with intractable economic problems. Germany’s finances were in a parlous state by 1919 as a result of largely financing its war effort through short term loans and inflating the currency while firmly anticipating its enemies to pay for the war costs. The German mark was worth less than one-third of its prewar value due to the inflationary means that the imperial government had used to finance the war. The state revenues from taxation based on nominal values were hopelessly inadequate while running a trade deficit with a low probability of eliciting foreign investment when capital was in short supply. During the same time, governments hesitated to increase direct taxation or restrict credit to a considerable degree in the face of political instability, and therefore would not risk the possibility of alienating public support. Moreover, the Treaty of Versailles imposed crushing economic impacts on its industrial potential. Germany lost 13 percent of its territory, 10 percent of its population, 15 percent of its arable land, 75 percent of iron and 68 percent of zinc ore, 26 percent of its coal resources, the entire Alsatian potash and textile industries, and communications system built around Alsace-Lorraine and Upper Silesia, along with ninety percent of the merchant navy and a substantial amount of railway rolling-stock. This was in addition to reparations payments fixed in April and June 1921 on the basis of the “war guilt” clause, Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty that demanded that Germany recognise that it was the sole cause of the war, which provided the justification for imposing economically crippling reparations. The Reparations Commission imposed a total of 132 billion gold Reichsmarks, with another 6 billion for Belgium, in April 1921, superseding the initial demand for 40 million ton of coal to be delivered annually, which further depressed the value of German currency. J. M. Keynes estimated these demands exceeded Germany’s ability to pay by three times, and would inevitably result in facing paying reparations for seventy years.

In addition to economic difficulties, another threat to the Weimar republic that attempted to establish Germany’s first democracy came from hostile political parties on the extreme right who resented the republic and sought to overthrow the government. The members of the Free Corps who had fought against the leftists were not only anti-democratic, but also passionately nationalist and opposed to every clause of the Versailles Treaty, and thereby became a serious threat to the Republic by seeking to repudiate the Versailles Treaty that came into force on 10 January 1920. A short-lived incident resulted in a coup attempt to overthrow the republic for this purpose and establish an authoritarian regime, which was triggered by the Allies demanding the Free Corps Marine Brigade, that had fought Bolsheviks in the Baltic States and had played a leading reactionary role in Munich, be disbanded. Wolfgang Kapp, the head of the former Fatherland Party created in 1917, and Captain Waldemar Pabst, who had ordered the murder Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht reacted on 13 March 1920 by attempting a putsch with military support from Baron von Lüttwitz, the commanding general of Army Group 1 in Berlin, and Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, the leader of the Marine Brigade, whose Freikorps troops were the first to paint a swastika on their helmets. Kapp’s supporters occupied Berlin and proclaimed him as the new chancellor while attempting to establish an autocratic regime.

         When Germany’s Commander-in-Chief of the army under Colonel-General von Seeckt refused to fight them and declared itself “neutral,” rather than using armed force against other German soldiers with the underlying realistic understanding that Germany could not withstand an allied military intervention to impose the Versailles Treaty requirements. The legitimate government under SPD leadership fled to Dresden and then Stuttgart where they were afforded military protection. One of the consequences of this coup attempt was the army and Freikorps units in Bavaria led by Colonel Franz Ritter von Epp taking action against the Social Democratic Bavarian government by forcing it to resign, and called on Ernst Röhm and Adolf Hitler to lend their support for the coup in Berlin.

However, the national civil service refused cooperate with the putschists. Although leftists were divided as a result of the SPD having had suppressed Communist elements, the parties representing the working class, the KPD, USPD and SPD, became temporarily united by reinforcing this resistance by proclaiming a general strike. Twelve million striking workers paralysed life in Berlin and ceased all industrial activity, as well as banking and civil service operations, in addition to the army refusing to provide support, which brought down the short-lived self-appointed Kapp government on 17 March. While there were not any consequences for those who supported this coup attempt, the strike also turned into communist uprisings in the Ruhr, where a Ruhr Red Army that had secretly stockpiled small arms was formed to defend against military repression, and 5,000 protest strikes took place. The Ruhr Communist party demanded that the reinstated SPD government to grant them greater control over the mining industry and extensive socialization of other economic sectors, and took control of the region by 18 March. These developments brought further instability while the Reichswehr, local Free Corps troops, and the Prussian police bloodily suppressed the Ruhr Red Army and offered armed resistance on 2 April.

         The Kapp putsch attempt had dramatically shown the paucity of loyalty the German army was prepared to provide to the Weimar republic, which had not intervened against a reactionary uprising, while the army took action against leftist uprisings in the Ruhr in mid-March 1920 by a communist “Ruhr Red Army” in reaction to the Kapp putsch, which fought against and defeated local Freikorps troops under Franz Ritter von Epp in late March, and chose to disband themselves thereafter after the earlier fighting in early April in an armed effort against the central government that could not be sustained against armed resistance from the state, which deployed army units to disperse scattered leftist elements in early April, in spite of the region being demilitarized according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, at the risk of French and Belgian armed intervention. This violation of treaty terms led to French forces advancing toward and occupying Frankfurt-am-Main and other nearby cities on 6 April. The police would later continue this intervention after 27 April to make arrests and collect weapons abandoned by the leftist insurgents, after the military advance was withdrawn. The French forces were withdrawn on 17 May, following the withdrawal of German troops from the demilitarized zone a few days earlier.

              Further disturbances broke out in Saxony and Thuringia in April that were violently repressed along with the Free Corps that ended these final attempts to stage a “second revolution.” Outbreaks of violence between German and Polish paramilitary forces in Upper Silesia that had broken out in August 1919, which resumed in August 1920 and thereafter in a so-called “shadow war” over determining the local postwar frontier there between Germany and Poland. The Free Corps carried on fighting against Polish insurgents there when the Polish government refused to accept the result of the March 1921 plebiscite in which sixty percent of the population voted to remain with Germany, with fighting continuing until the Allies accepted a report by the League of Nation that recommended granting eighty percent of Upper Silesia to Poland, including much of its industrial populations, in 1922. The opposition to the republic was also true for the administration of justice that imposed mild punishments on the putschists. In the aftermath of this failed putsch, radical rightists who interpret the hated republic fulfilling the Versailles Treaty as betraying the state turned to terrorist tactics. The murder of Kurt Eisner that set this the precedent was followed by the killings of Matthias Erzberger in August 1921 and Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by anti-republican nationalists in June 1922 as a trend of right-wing terrorism during worsening economic conditions marked by rising inflation.

       A greater threat from the extreme right was being established at the grass roots level at the same time. On 5 January 1919, a new party created by Anton Drexler initially supported by railway workers who were motivated by calling for social change and nationalism, the German Workers’ Party (DAP), initially appeared in Munich in reaction to the revolutionary troubles in the winter of 1918-1919, which increased its influence under Adolf Hitler by using his extraordinary rhetorical and organizational talents. The DAP’s political views and the party’s decision to convey these views to a larger public through public rallies attracted the attention of the Bavarian Reichswehr authorities. Hitler remained with the military after the end of the First World War, rather than returning to a personal life of poverty and aimlessness, and worked as a political indoctrination official, and was commissioned by the army’s local political division to report on the threatening activities of radical political parties in the face of the contemporary revolutionary uprisings. Hitler’s postwar political activity began with serving as an elected representative in Eisner’s Bavarian People’s State, and was then re-elected into the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Upon receiving “anti-Bolshevik” training from his unit commanders from 5 June 1919, and then locating the DAP during this time, he continued his political career by joining this party on 12 September 1919, having accepted it ideas about a specifically German type of socialism that was against capitalism and Marxism while being against Jews that would establish an “Aryan dictatorship” waging race rather than class warfare. (See The History Place: The Rise of Adolf Hitler.)

         After being discharged from the military in March 1920, Hitler worked for the DAP full time, and designed its logo with colours taken from the flag of the German empire: a black swastika to represent the struggle of Aryan workers on a white circle to represent the national ideal on a red background to represent socialist ideology. With his extraordinary talents as a public speaker, he rose quickly in the party’s organizational hierarchy, and by the end of the year, he was both chief of propaganda and a member of the executive committee, while also finding a great deal to criticize about the inefficient business procedures in the party, and the intra-party democracy in the internal administration of the DAP. (See The History Place: The Rise of Adolf Hitler).

         Hitler extended his influence in the DAP as its only effective public speaker, giving his first speech on 16 October 1919, and diluted the present membership with an influx of new members, who would join primarily because of Hitler’s association with it and would be loyal to him personally. In December 1920, Drexler and Hitler drafted the party’s goals to lay the foundation for a new membership drive, and emphasized their interest in the lower and especially urban worker classes as a far-sighted manoeuvre to persuade the public that the DAP’s activities represented a significant contribution toward the effort to build a bulwark against further revolutionary attempts. On 24 April 1920, the party began to call itself the NSDAP, probably to give greater credibility to the “socialist” content of its propaganda to a wider audience base. By the time the party assembled in Munich for its first national congress on 22 January 1921, it had about 3,000 members and had become a respected and influential part of the extreme right in Bavaria, largely due to Hitler’s efforts. By the time of the party congress, Hitler was appointed chairman of the NSDAP on 29 July 1921, on the strength of his being the party’s greatest propaganda asset, and was able to secure assistance from wealthy individuals, intellectuals and former army officers. Along with the party were its auxiliary formations, of which the most important were the Nazi paramilitary formations – the SA (Sturmabteilung, or storm troops, also known as “Brownshirts”), formed in September 1921, who were trained by Röhm to stage shows of force. The SS (Schutzstaffeln, or Protective Guards) that was established under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler as Hitler’s personal bodyguard who swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler at a time of prevailing political stability when the police could not be completely relied on to provide public security at political events. Röhm would later aspire for the SA to become closely allied with the German army, following the SA being primarily engaging in threats, intimidation, assaults and street battles against political rivals and Jews as elements of society that the Nazi leadership considered to be in opposition to German nationalism.

         The Weimar government sought to operate in the postwar circumstances under the influences of the Versailles treaty while facing pressure from different factors during this time. The main political parties did not act in concert to defend the republic. The chancellor and the cabinet ministers required possessing th confidence of the Reichstag in accordance with common democratic procedure, and were obliged to resign when this was forfeited, which made creating coalition government inevitable. This had the effect of jeopardizing a democratic government from functioning normally by allowing for anti-republican representation and an opportunity for exposure and growth. The entire foreign policy of the Weimar Republic throughout the 1920s, resulted from the peace concluded at Versailles that was imposed on Germany. Since the western allies rebuffed Germany’s interests though imposing the Treaty of Versailles, German authorities established an independent foreign policy by establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union on 12 April 1922 in the Treaty of Rapallo, while Russia sought to drive a wedge between the western powers. The Russians took advantage of the German reaction against what was considered French sabotage of the Genoa conference on reparations, and it provided for the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Russia abandoned any claims to reparations, in exchange for Germany waiving all claims for expropriated German property.

         There remained serious economic problems that had been aggravated by the Versailles Treaty that continued worsening. The implacable problem of reparations contributed to the uncontrollable inflation of the early 1920s, while the German government had not made any attempt to stabilise the currency before 1923, and direct taxation was actually reduced in 1921 as a form of passive resistance against raising funds for paying reparations, which in turn led to failing to balance revenue that could have been raised from drawing taxes from high income earners and government expenditure. The Reparations Committee declared Germany to be in default of making reparations payments on 9 January, which culminated in the occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops, beginning on 11 January 1923 that finally triggered the final strangulation of Germany’s economy. Due to a delay in the payment of German reparations in kind in the form of wood, coal, and 140,000 telephone poles, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr district and areas on the right bank of the Rhine with support from the Italian government on the pretext of “supervising” production in the Ruhr, which held eighty-five percent of Germany’s coal resources, eighty percent of its steel and iron production, and ten percent of the national population. The German government reacted to this unexpected intervention by declaring passive resistance against the forcible seizure commodities on 16 January in the form of a state-sponsored general strike in the occupied areas. The staggering costs of maintaining this passive resistance against military force aggravated inflation since the government subsidised the Ruhr strikers to not go to work at the cost of approximately forty-one million Reichsmarks per day by July and August. The systematic conversion of the Ruhr, from which eighty-five percent of Germany’s coal reserves were drawn, into an economic unit under foreign control deprived Germany as a whole of vital resources. Production was disrupted, which then led to increasing unemployment in the rest of Germany, where the numbers of unemployed required governmental financial assistance, and it inevitably became impossible for the central government to sustain these extraordinary obligations with its existing resources. After not having any remaining monetary reserves left, the government resorted to printing money, triggering hyperinflation until the value of the mark was eventually reduced from 18,000 Reichsmarks to the dollar in early 1923 to 4,600,000 by August, and then to 4 billion in November.

       The worst runaway hyperinflation in history destroyed the currency that had already lost value since 1914 as the result of huge wartime deficit spending, which then led to hyperinflation that wiped out the savings of the middle class and had catastrophic social effects as a result of economic hardship that affected them the most. A new governmental coalition formed on 13 August 1923 under Gustav Stressemann unconditionally called off passive resistance on 26 September in the face of overwhelming economic difficulties, and agreeing to resume reparations payments. The introduction of a new temporary Rentenmark as a transitional currency, as orchestrated by a prominent banker, Hjalmar Schacht, as a special commissar for the currency along with Hans Luther, the minister of finance, which superseded the increasingly valueless Reichsmark.

Another effect at this time of renewed hostility was further armed strife and intensifying secret rearmament. The Commander-in-Chief of the Germany, Colonel-General Hans von Seeckt, restored a concealed form of general staff by preserving its operations staff that was repurposed as the “troop office.” He also maintained efforts to ascertain the munitions and equipment requirements for an expanded army by enlisting the clandestine cooperation of heavy industry in Germany, as well as abroad. Secret military cooperation was already in the making between the German army (Reichswehr) and the Soviet Red Army in 1920. Seeckt formed a special department, Sondergruppe R (Special Group Russia) to open the way for cooperation with Russia in 1921-1922, which was followed by the Reichswehr providing technological assistance to Russia with the means to build an arms industry, in exchange for Russia training German pilots and tank crews, and providing sites for Krupp factories near Moscow. Soon after the Treaty of Riga obliged the Soviet Union in 1921 to accept a substantial loss of territory to Poland, when Lenin asked for German assistance in reorganising the Red Army after the Russo-Polish war. German industrial concerns evaded the Versailles Treaty restrictions on rearmament to maintain their commercial activities through establishing industrial facilities in neutral countries. Prototypes of heavy armaments were manufactured abroad by anonymous limited companies with foreign subsidiaries. These included producing and testing submarines in Spain and Finland, and also designing these craft at a German navy civil engineering office in the Netherlands. Aircraft development took place in Sweden under the direction of Hugo Junkers. Other weapons were developed in Denmark. War material production was also shifted into neutral companies, including Rheinmetall moved its plant to continue producing war materials in the Netherlands and Switzerland. German companies, such as Zeiss, Siemens, Mauser, Heinkel and Krupp set up production facilities in Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Contact between German and Soviet military authorities was maintained thereafter that likewise circumvented the Versailles Treaty provisions on disarmament. Aircraft and chemical factories were set up in the Russia from 1920, as German representatives provided capital, technical expertise and military training, in exchange for Russia providing secret training bases and factory sites to build war materials that were forbidden by the Versailles Treaty. Secret rearmament in the Soviet Union continued by developing and testing aircraft and tanks in the Soviet Union until 1933, beginning with Junkers providing investment capital for constructing an aircraft factory in exchange for production facilities in Fili outside Moscow in 1921, and opening a flight school at Lipetsk in 1925 with German financing and Soviet production and personnel under a German director, with the Dutch aircraft manufacturer, Fokker, providing modern single engine fighter aircraft for training German pilots. Training in the Soviet Union subsequently continued with training expanded to include ground-air coordination, reconnaissance training and technical ground personnel that formed the core of the future German air force. Apart from German facilities in the Soviet Union that included weapons testing facilities for various types of military aircraft, a tank school was set up near Kazan in 1927 to develop and test new prototypes and train personnel to operate them while simulating wartime conditions, with engineers, technicians and mechanics from Daimler, Rheinmetall, Büssing and Magirus taking part in the production process. A separate chemical research and training facility was established called Tomka, near Volsk.

       Rightist paramilitary groups received military assistance from the army to form secret units known as the Black Reichswehr under the leadership of Colonel-General von Seeckt, who surreptitiously augmented the strength of the standing army by disguising them as labour battalions. Meanwhile, radical rightists and Communists began planning for a putsch, and during the growing crisis, a new government coalition was formed under Gustav Stresemann who took office on 13 August 1923 that lifted the passive resistance on 26 September. On 1 October 1923, certain Black Reichswehr military units attempted to transform the passive resistance into an active war against France and to overthrow the democratic government in the Buchrucker Putsch, which failed immediately due to a lack of sufficient amounts of army support. In Saxony and Thuringia, Communists build up “red hundreds” paramilitary formations, while the army later deposed the leftist governments in Saxony and Thuringia on 29 October and early November, while not staging a similar intervention taken against the right-wing Bavarian nationalist government to the same degree. On the day that Stresemann called off passive resistance in the Ruhr, Gustav von Kahr, the former Bavarian prime minister was brought back as state commissioner with dictatorial powers to check the most militant radicals in Bavaria, including the NSDAP that was still a party without any significant support outside Bavaria.