in the Protestant, agricultural and small-town areas of Germany, and their most stable vote from 1924 onwards came from small farmers, shopkeepers and the independent artisans of the ‘old’ middle class, who felt threatened by the tensions and tendencies of modernization and industrial society. This core was augmented in periods of economic crisis by a ‘protest vote’ from other sections of society, including a sizeable vote from the new middle classes, and among established professional and upper-middle-class circles. In Childers’ summary of these groups: ‘Motivations were mixed, including fear of the Marxist Left, frustrated career ambitions, and resentment at the erosion of social prestige and professional security. Yet, while sizeable elements of these groups undoubtedly felt their positions or prospects to be challenged during the Weimar era, they cannot be described as uneducated, economically devastated, or socially marginal’.10 Civil servants, pensioners and white-collar workers added their votes to those of the small farmers and shopkeepers in a rising tide of protest against the chaos that Weimar democracy, to them, had ushered in. People of all ages were in the end attracted to the apparently young, energetic, demagogic movement, which appeared to offer a new way forward out of the deadlock and disasters of the Weimar ‘system’.
Armed with his electoral success – which still fell short of an overall majority – Hitler was hoping to be offered the chancellorship by Hindenburg. But the President despised this upstart ‘Bohemian corporal’, as he called him, and snubbed him by refusing to offer anything more than the vice-chancellorship. Enraged, Hitler refused to accept second-best – and caused considerable anger and consternation among the ranks of the Nazi Party, which felt he had missed the opportunity of putting the Nazis into government.
When the Reichstag reopened on 12 September it passed a spectacular vote of no confidence in the Chancellor, Papen, by 512 votes to 42 (the remainder of deputies having abstained or stayed at home). Papen was unable to command either a parliamentary base or popular support for his government, but nor was he able, in tandem with Hindenburg, to finalize plans for establishing a nonparliamentary, authoritarian regime in complete breach of the constitution. Parliament was dissolved and fresh elections called for 6 November. By now the worst trough of the Depression was passing, and the Nazis lost some of their protest vote of the summer. With the loss of two million votes, parliamentary representation of the NSDAP after the November elections was reduced to 196 deputies. Nevertheless, the governmental crisis and parliamentary deadlock were not resolved. At the beginning of December, having been persuaded by General Kurt von Schleicher that unless matters were taken in hand a civil war was likely to break out that the army would not be able to control, Hindenburg rather unwillingly replaced Papen and appointed Schleicher Chancellor. Schleicher’s brief period in office – until 28 January 1933 – was characterized by an unsuccessful and somewhat farfetched attempt to cobble together an unlikely set of alliances, including trade unionists and the ‘left-wing’ of the NSDAP under Gregor Strasser. This attempt failed, and managed along the way to antagonize both industrialists – who were suspicious of Schleicher’s rapprochement with the unions – and agrarian elites, who viewed Schleicher’s plans for agriculture as a form of ‘agrarian bolshevism’, and not nearly as favourable to their interests as Papen’s policies had been.
During January 1933 intrigues and machinations in high places set in motion a campaign to convince the ageing President to appoint Hitler as Chancellor. Papen came round to the view, as did leading representatives of agrarian interests in the (by now Nazi-infiltrated) Reichslandbund, that the Nazis must be included in a coalition conservative–nationalist government in order to provide it with a measure of popular support and that, in order to include the Nazis, it would be necessary to offer Hitler the chancellorship. Those pressurizing Hindenburg to take this move were of the view that, if Hitler and one or two other Nazis were included in a mixed cabinet, they would be effectively hemmed in and could be ‘tamed’ and manipulated. The idea was that the army, industrial and agrarian elites would be able to benefit from and subvert Hitler’s demagogic powers and mass support. Finally, after a series of meetings in Ribbentrop’s house in Berlin in the last week of January 1933, and through the mediations of Hindenburg’s son Oskar, an acceptable set of arrangements was constructed and the President persuaded. On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler was, by fully constitutional means, offered the chancellorship of Germany by a reluctant President Hindenburg. With Hitler’s acceptance the process of dismantling Weimar democracy was accelerated and rapidly completed. For a while the fateful coalition between the old elites and the Nazi mass movement survived; in the end, the last-ditch gamble by elites, who had failed to rule Germany on their own, to try to survive through alliance with Hitler, proved to have been a historical mistake of inestimable and tragic proportions.
Who, finally, should bear the burden of responsibility for the failure of Weimar democracy? What factors are most important in explaining its collapse? The Left has come in for criticism on a range of counts. The bitter hostility obtaining between the KPD and SPD has often been remarked on as a fateful split among those who should have been united in opposition to the greater evil of Nazism. In addition to the bitterness arising in the early years, when the SPD as the party of government had no qualms about using force to suppress radical communist uprisings, the rift was deepened by the late 1920s and 1930s, when the KPD, under the influence of Moscow, adopted the theory that social democracy was equivalent to ‘social fascism’. Whatever one’s views on these matters, in a wider sense the working class in the closing years of the Weimar Republic was scarcely in a position to resist the course of events effectively. In contrast to 1920, when a general strike had been sufficient to bring down the Kapp putsch, there was little that could be done on a mass scale in the early 1930s: it is extremely difficult to use the weapon of striking when one is unemployed or desperate to retain a job. For most ordinary working-class people, sheer material survival was all that could be striven for in the years of the Depression.
More attention needs to be paid to those who were in a position to affect events – and indeed often did so, in a direction ultimately favouring Hitler. There are a number of separate strands that interacted to produce the fateful, but by no means inevitable, outcome. The pursuit of deflationary economic policies by Brüning served to exacerbate the economic crisis and nourish the conditions in which the NSDAP was able to achieve mass support. While industrialists may not have played an important role in fostering or financially supporting the rise of the NSDAP, they certainly made little effort to sustain the democratic political system and indeed attacked its structure and fabric sufficiently to render it weak in the face of the final onslaught. The agrarian elites who had such a favourable reception with Hindenburg must also bear a burden of guilt, as must those army officers who worked to undermine democracy and install an authoritarian alternative. The Social Democrats had faced a difficult enough task in guiding the Republic through its early stages, at a time when moderate parties had greater parliamentary support and authoritarian elites had effectively abdicated their responsibility and retired to the wings of the political stage; now, when pro-Republican forces were in a minority and conservative– nationalist forces were joined by a new, popular and virulent right-wing radicalism in the shape of the Nazis, there was even less possibility for democrats of the moderate Left or Centre to control developments.
It was this sociopolitical configuration, in a country defeated in war, reduced in territory and status, subjected to a burden of reparations, rankling with revisionism, lurching from one political crisis to the next, and finally suffering major economic collapse, which ultimately spelled the death of democracy. No one factor alone is sufficient to explain the collapse of the Weimar Republic: not the provisions of the constitution or the implications of the Versailles Treaty, the impact of the Depression, the strategies and political abilities of Hitler and the Nazi Party, or the decisions and actions of other prominent individuals; it was the peculiar combination, under specific historical circumstances, of a range of activities, orientations and pressures that produced the ultimate outcome. Perhaps the only comforting lesson from this complex period is that, while radical and extremist movements have arisen and may arise elsewhere and at other times (and indeed there were many in the interwar period, of which Mussolini’s Fascists were a notably successful example), such a unique combination of circumstances as occurred in Germany, opening the way for the rise of Hitler, is unlikely ever to recur in its entirety.
