The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic
288
The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic
288eBook
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Overview
A riveting account of how the Nazi Party came to power and how the failures of the Weimar Republic and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen.
Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time.
To say that Hitler was elected is too simple. He would never have come to power if Germany’s leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist insurgencies by trying to co-opt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler’s hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship.
Benjamin Carter Hett is a leading scholar of twentieth-century Germany and a gifted storyteller whose portraits of these feckless politicians show how fragile democracy can be when those in power do not respect it. He offers a powerful lesson for today, when democracy once again finds itself embattled and the siren song of strongmen sounds ever louder.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250162519 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/03/2018 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 173,109 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Benjamin Carter Hett is the author of The Death of Democracy, Burning the Reichstag, Crossing Hitler, and Death in the Tiergarten. He is a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and holds a PhD in history from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of Toronto. He now lives in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
August and November
Prince Max von Baden spends most of the day waiting impatiently for news from Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Prince Max is a trim man who seems to look into every camera lens with the baleful expression of someone who has seen a lot, been impressed by little, and bears few illusions about his fellow men and women. He has an unusual reputation as a liberal German prince. This was why he was named chancellor of the German Reich in October, at the age of fifty-one. Later, he will record his experiences in a dry tone, betraying irritation with almost everyone he had to deal with: the Kaiser, the generals, the moderate and radical socialists.
Prince Max's problem is that the Kaiser — Germany's hereditary emperor, whose family has ruled from Berlin since the fifteenth century — cannot make up his mind to abdicate the throne. Germany is falling further into the grip of revolution and every minute counts. Max's repeated phone calls to the Army's headquarters at Spa in Belgium, where the Kaiser has gone, are met only with stalling. The prince wants to save what he can of the old order. He knows that the revolution is winning. It can't be "beaten down," but "it might perhaps be stifled out." The only thing to do is contain the revolution by naming Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the moderate Social Democrats, as chancellor by royal authority.
Ebert will soon be chancellor one way or another, Max reasons, if not by royal appointment then by revolution in the streets. "If Ebert is presented to me as the Tribune of the People by the mob, we shall have the Republic," he tells himself. A still-worse fate is possible. If the mob makes the more radical independent socialist Karl Liebknecht chancellor instead of Ebert, "we shall have Bolshevism as well." But if, in his last act, Kaiser Wilhelm names Ebert, "then there would still be a slender hope for the monarchy left. Perhaps we should then succeed in diverting the revolutionary energy into the lawful channels of an election campaign."
Prince Max doesn't know about the drama playing out at the Kaiser's headquarters. At Spa, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of the German Army, understands two things clearly: the Kaiser has to abdicate, and Hindenburg himself must escape blame for pushing him to this realization. The Kaiser is toying with the idea of leading his army back to Germany to crush the revolutionaries. Hindenburg understands that this will lead to a disastrous civil war. He does not want to be responsible for such a thing. But Hindenburg is also a monarchist, and he knows that other monarchists might blame him for not standing by his king. Hindenburg is the hero of Tannenberg, one of Germany's few great victories in this lost war. He cannot let his reputation be tarnished now.
He solves the problem by giving the job to his second in command, First Quartermaster General Wilhelm Groener. Groener tells the Kaiser bluntly that the army will return peacefully to Germany under its commanders, "but not under the command of your majesty, because it no longer stands behind your majesty." Hindenburg quietly begins arranging the Kaiser's escape to neutral Holland, where he will be safe.
These events set a pattern. More than a decade later, Hindenburg will still be wrestling with the problem of potential civil war. He will still be trying to find a way to keep the army out of domestic strife while preserving his own reputation. He will still be unloading unpleasant tasks on his subordinates.
With no decision from Spa, Prince Max runs out of patience and decides to take matters into his own hands. He will announce Wilhelm's abdication himself. Prince Max summons Ebert and asks if he is prepared to govern in accordance with "the monarchical constitution." Ebert is an unusually conservative Social Democrat and would have preferred to retain the monarchy, but events have gone too far. "Yesterday I could have given an unconditional affirmative," he tells Prince Max. "Today I must first consult my friends." Prince Max asks him about considering a regency, someone to serve as placeholder for a future monarch. Ebert replies that it is "too late." Behind Ebert, as Max's jaded pen records, the other Social Democrats in the room repeat in unison: "Too late, too late!"
Meanwhile, Ebert's colleague Philipp Scheidemann stands on a balcony of the Reichstag and calls out, "Long live the Republic!" This is taken as a declaration that Germany has in fact become a democratic republic, although Scheidemann will later say he meant it only as a "confession of faith" in the idea.
At the royal palace, a half mile or so east of the Reichstag, the radical Karl Liebknecht declares Germany a "socialist republic." By this time, the Kaiser has finally abdicated as emperor of Germany.
In the late afternoon, Prince Max has a final meeting with Ebert. Ebert now asks the prince to stay on as "administrator," a regent by another name. Prince Max replies stiffly, "I know you are on the point of concluding an agreement with the Independents [the more radical Independent Social Democrats] and I cannot work with the Independents." As he leaves, he turns to say one last thing: "Herr Ebert, I commit the German Empire to your keeping!"
Ebert responds gravely, "I have lost two sons for this Empire."
It is November 9, 1918.
Two days later, an armistice negotiated between German politicians and Allied military officers goes into effect. The First World War is over. For most Germans, defeat comes suddenly and shockingly. Among them is a wounded soldier convalescing from a poison gas attack at a hospital in Pasewalk, a small Pomeranian town about seventy-five miles northeast of Berlin.
"So it had all been in vain," he writes. "In vain all the sacrifices and deprivations ... futile the deaths of two millions who died ..." Had Germany's soldiers fought only to "allow a mob of wretched criminals to lay hands on the Fatherland?" He has not wept since the day of his mother's funeral, but now the young man staggers back to his ward and buries his "burning head in the blankets and pillow."
His name is Adolf Hitler, Private First Class.
* * *
If you look closely, you will find that almost everything about the Weimar Republic was really about the First World War.
There had never been a war like it, with such high casualties concentrated in such a relatively short period of time. Germany suffered 1.7 million soldiers killed in just over four years, more than any country except Russia. Civilians, including women, had been mobilized for industrial and other war work as never before. Wartime pressures forced the state to demand ever more labor and sacrifice from its people. This made it crucial to maintain public support. The new mass media opened up myriad possibilities for the state to "sell" the war, usually through highly emotional and largely untrue versions of the meaning of the conflict, or the nature of the enemy. Wartime propaganda left a deep imprint on the German people, as it did on people in other countries.
The war dragged its way from the summer of 1914 to the late autumn of 1918, but the real moment of decision came halfway through, toward the end of 1916. Shocked by the completely unexpected costs of the war and the growing unrest at home, the governments of all the warring countries faced the same decision: they could push to win outright, or they could accept the stalemate and negotiate peace. To win, they would have to take on more debt, accept still more casualties, and redouble efforts to extract labor and sacrifice from what they now called "the home front." In all the important cases, governments decided to push for victory. More resolute leaders came to power everywhere. In December 1916, the energetic David Lloyd George replaced the burned-out H. H. Asquith as prime minister of Great Britain. In November 1917, the fierce Georges Clemenceau ("the Tiger") came to power as French prime minister with the simple, grim promise "I make war." In Germany, the process was subtler. In the second half of 1916, the two supreme army commanders, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff, steadily imposed their authority not only on the conduct of the war but on management of the home front as well. They marginalized Kaiser Wilhelm's civilian government and replaced it with their own "silent dictatorship." There was a paradox here, one that pointed to Germany's future. Hindenburg and Ludendorff had been appointed to the Supreme Command in the summer of 1916, against the Kaiser's wishes and as a result of popular pressure. Their dictatorship was therefore a kind of populism.
More ruthless leadership could not change the basic facts of modern total war. Total war demanded the labor or fighting power of every citizen. In turn, this gave citizens unprecedented bargaining power with the state, which was forced to make ever more extravagant promises about the wonderful world that would come with victory. Great Britain, for instance, entered the war with its government talking only of the sanctity of treaty rights and the defense of "brave little Belgium" against the German onslaught. But it is hard to ask hundreds of thousands of young men to die, and their loved ones to mourn them, for the sanctity of treaties. So, by 1918, Lloyd George had joined with U.S. president Woodrow Wilson in calling for a "League of Nations," dubbing the struggle "The War That Will End War" (a phrase coined originally by British science-fiction writer and social critic H. G. Wells). Lloyd George promised extensive social reform and, in the words of one of his cabinet ministers, to make Germany pay by squeezing it "until the pips squeak." Total war fostered a new kind of nationalism, more populist and egalitarian and less deferential to elites and traditional symbolism.
In Germany, the government felt forced to promise democratic reforms, particularly to change the voting rules for Prussian state elections, which had been heavily weighted toward the wealthy. Gustav Stresemann, a Reichstag deputy who would go on to be foreign minister in the Weimar Republic and one of the Republic's most important statesmen, told his parliamentary colleagues in 1917 that the war had changed the relationship between the people and the state. The postwar state, he said, would have to become more democratic. Even the "Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law," which Hindenburg and Ludendorff introduced in 1916, could look like democratic progress, although it drafted workers into war industries. The democratic parties in the Reichstag had cooperated in drafting the law. It included provisions for workers to be represented in management decisions.
Other wartime developments pointed to a more ominous future. The German government promised its people that victory would bring a new kind of imperial grandeur. Germany would become the dominant power in Europe, annexing territory from Belgium and France, and still more from the western lands of the Russian Empire. This vision was briefly realized when Russia dropped out of the war in 1918 and the Germans controlled, directly or indirectly, what is now Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine. A new political party that formed in 1917, the Fatherland Party, called for continuing the war until Germany had won a complete victory, crushing political moderates at home and establishing itself as the dominant power in Europe and "up to the Gates of India." One Fatherland Party member was Alfred Hugenberg, a steel executive and media baron who, in the Weimar Republic, would go on to lead the main establishment right-wing party, the German National People's Party. Another was a Munich toolmaker and locksmith named Anton Drexler. In 1919, to keep the Fatherland Party's vision alive, Drexler would found something called the German Workers' Party. In another year, after recruiting the young war veteran Adolf Hitler to its ranks, the German Workers' Party would change its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party — the Nazis.
Just as the war pushed some Germans to the extreme right, it pushed others to the extreme left. One of the victims of wartime disillusion was the Social Democratic Party. The Social Democrats had been the largest party in prewar Germany and the largest socialist party in the world, with a million members. In 1912, they had won the largest share of seats in the Reichstag elections. Although their socialist ideology should have committed them to peace, they had loyally supported Germany's war effort, and their Reichstag deputies had voted for all necessary war spending. Partly as a result, their membership plummeted during the war, down to a quarter million by 1917. That year, a faction of the Social Democratic Party split away to oppose all further military spending. The new faction became known as the Independent Social Democratic Party. By the end of 1917, it could count 120,000 members — nearly half the membership of the mainstream Social Democrats. The Independents were the root from which, after 1918, Germany's Communist Party would grow. The German workers' movement was now permanently divided.
Yet the political center could still hold. In July 1917, the three most democratic parties in the Reichstag (the Social Democrats, the left liberals, and the Catholic Center Party), together controlling nearly two-thirds of the seats, passed a resolution in favor of a negotiated peace without annexations or forced reparation payments. The resolution could not bind Hindenburg and Ludendorff, but it could frighten them. After all, the Reichstag majority presumably expressed the views of a majority of Germans. It was in the immediate aftermath of this resolution that the generals arranged the formation of the Fatherland Party. They also brought about the dismissal of the hapless head of government Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, whom they judged too weak to control the unruly Reichstag democrats.
The real significance of the Peace Resolution was that it clearly defined a democratic block in German politics. The three parties behind it would become the pillars of Weimar democracy after 1918 — in fact, they became known as "the Weimar coalition." From 1917 until 1933, German politics would be dominated by the struggle between this democratic block and the nationalist block, those conservatives and right-wing liberals who stood behind a more aggressive pursuit of the war.
By the late summer of 1918, the German Army was exhausted. Defeat was looming on the Western Front. Hindenburg and Ludendorff understood this perfectly well — Ludendorff called an Allied attack at Amiens on August 8 "the black day of the German army"— and in late September, they told the Kaiser it was time to seek an armistice with the western powers. Cagey as always, the generals refused to negotiate the armistice themselves, instead handing the job to the democratic leaders from the Reichstag. Disastrously, Woodrow Wilson played along, refusing to negotiate with the German "militarists." An armistice is usually negotiated by the respective military commanders on both sides. In this case, democratic politicians carried the ball for Germany. Later, they would carry the blame.
In the autumn of 1918, the German armed forces stood everywhere on foreign ground, still occupying most of Belgium and much of northern France and controlling vast stretches of eastern Europe as well. Not a square foot of Germany was occupied by enemy troops. Unlike in the Second World War, the technology of bombs and aircraft had not developed to the point that Allied air forces could do significant damage to German towns. The German wartime press had been heavily censored and had carried nothing but news of victories and promises of more to come. Only an unusually imaginative or well-informed civilian could have understood that Germany was on the verge of defeat. Yet, suddenly, its leaders had asked for an armistice. It is little wonder that most Germans found defeat difficult to grasp.
Before an armistice could come into effect, though, Germany was shaken by revolution. It began with a naval mutiny, led by sailors who saw no point in the suicide mission against the British that their commanders were ordering. In a war-weary, exhausted, and hungry country, revolution spread from town to town and even to army units in France. In the space of a few days in early November, all the ancient royal houses that had still ruled Germany's federal states, such as the Wittelsbachs in Bavaria and the Wettins in Saxony, and finally even Kaiser Wilhelm himself in Berlin, were forced into abdication. On November 9, the Social Democrats and the Independent Social Democrats took power in the capital. These two parties had split only the year before. Now the revolution pushed them temporarily back together.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Death of Democracy"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Benjamin Carter Hett.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Cast of Characters,
Important Political Parties in the Weimar Republic,
Introduction,
1. August and November,
2. "Don't Believe Him, He's Telling the Truth",
3. Blood May and the Creeper,
4. The Hunger Chancellor,
5. State of Emergency,
6. The Bohemian Private and the Gentleman Jockey,
7. Coordination,
8. "We Have to Get Rid of Him",
Photographs,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
Also by Benjamin Carter Hett,
About the Author,
Copyright,
Related Subjects
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