I

The Depression’s first political victim was the Grand Coalition cabinet led by the Social Democrat Hermann Müller, one of the Republic’s most stable and durable governments, in office since the elections of 1928. The Grand Coalition was a rare attempt to compromise between the ideological and social interests of the Social Democrats and the ‘bourgeois’ parties left of the Nationalists. It was held together mainly by its common effort to secure the Young Plan, an effort made in the teeth of bitter opposition from the Nationalists and the extreme right. Once the plan was agreed towards the end of 1929, there was little left to bind the parties to one another. Following the onset of the Depression in October 1929, the coalition’s constituent parties failed to agree on how to tackle the rapidly worsening unemployment problem. Deprived of the moderating influence of its former leader Gustav Stresemann, who died in October 1929, the People’s Party broke with the coalition over the Social Democrats’ refusal to cut unemployment benefits, and the government was forced to tender its resignation on 27 March 1930.³⁵

Although few realized it at the time, this marked the beginning of the end of Weimar democracy. From this point on, no government ruled with the support of a parliamentary majority in the Reichstag. Indeed, those who had President Hindenburg’s ear saw the fall of the Grand Coalition as a chance to establish an authoritarian regime through the use of the Presidential power of rule by decree. Particularly influential in this respect was the German army, represented by the Minister of Defence, General Wilhelm Groener. His appointment in January 1928 to replace the Democrat politician Otto Gessler had signalled the liberation of the army from any kind of political control, and was cemented by the right of the army chief to report directly to the President instead of going through the cabinet. Despite the limitations placed by the Treaty of Versailles on its numbers and equipment, the army remained by a long way the most powerful, most disciplined and most heavily armed force in Germany. While civilian institutions of one kind and another, from the political parties to the legislature itself, crumbled, the army remained united. For most of the 1920s, since the debacle of the Kapp putsch, it had stayed quiet, focusing its attention on building up illegal equipment and manpower, but in the crisis of the early 1930s it saw its opportunity. Rearmament and the rebuilding of Germany as a great power could, in the view of men like Groener’s political adviser, Colonel, later General Kurt von Schleicher, now be grasped by freeing the state from the shackles of parliamentary coalitions. And the more Germany descended into political chaos and extremist violence, the more pivotal the position of the army became. Already in the autumn of 1930 Groener was telling officers: ‘Not a brick can be moved any more in the political process in Germany without the word of the army being thrown decisively onto the scales.’³⁶

The army threw its weight into the political process initially in order to protect itself from budgetary cutbacks, which it successfully did. While all around it state institutions were having their budgets slashed, the army’s stayed intact. But it still remained generally aloof from the Nazi Party. Older officers, schooled in the stern traditions of Prussian monarchism, were generally resistant to the populist appeal of radical nationalist politics. Even here, however, there were some who openly favoured the Nazis, like Colonel Ludwig Beck.³⁷ And younger officers were much more susceptible to Nazi propaganda. Already in 1929 a number of junior officers were engaging in discussions with the Nazis and debating the prospects for a ‘national revolution’. The army leadership under Groener and Schleicher combated these tendencies vigorously, engaging in counter-propaganda and having the three ringleaders in the discussions arrested and put on trial in 1930 for preparing an act of high treason. The trial outraged other young officers, even those who were not inclined to collaborate with the Nazis. The army leadership, wrote one of them, had caved in to the ‘Novemberists’ and tried men whose only motivation was ‘unselfish love of the fatherland’. Ninety per cent of the officers, he added, thought the same way.³⁸

The trial was the occasion for a widely publicized speech delivered by Hitler from the witness box, where he was summoned by Hans Frank, the Nazi lawyer who was acting for one of the defendants. The Nazi Party, he declared, had no intention of committing high treason or subverting the army from within. Its intention was to come to power by legal means, and he had expelled those, like Otto Strasser, who had urged it to carry out a revolution. The Party would win a majority in an election and form a legitimately constituted government. At that point, he said, to cheers from the public benches, the real traitors, the ‘November criminals’ of 1918, would be put on trial, and ‘heads will roll’. But until then, the Party would stay within the law. The court made Hitler swear to the veracity of his testimony on oath. ‘Now we are strictly legal’, Goebbels is reported to have said. Putzi Hanfstaengl, recently put in charge of Hitler’s foreign press relations, made sure that the speech was reported around the world. He sold three articles by Hitler outlining the Nazi Party’s aims and methods, in suitably bowdlerized form, to William Randolph Hearst, the American press baron, for 1,000 Reichsmarks each. The money enabled Hitler to use the Kaiserhof Hotel in the centre of Berlin as his headquarters whenever he stayed in the capital from then on. In Germany itself, Hitler’s reassurances dispelled the fears of many middle-class Germans about the Nazi Party’s intentions.³⁹

The court was not impressed by Hitler, whom it reprimanded for abusing his position as a witness, and sentenced the young officers to eighteen months’ imprisonment, cashiering two of them from the army.⁴⁰ The conservatism of the judiciary was almost bound to put the court on the side of the army. Still, the sentences did nothing to stop young army officers from continuing their flirtation with Nazism. Schleicher’s attempts to counter such ideas, curb the radicalism of the younger officers and restore political discipline in the army, were less than effective, not least because he admitted openly to the officer corps that he sympathized with the ‘national part’ of the Nazis’ programme, and particularly with ‘the wave of indignation brought forth by the National Socialist movement against Bolshevism, treason, filth etc. Here’, he said, ‘the National Socialist campaign undoubtedly has extremely stirring effects.’⁴¹ Sympathy with the Nazis meant co-operating with them, but such was the arrogance and self-importance of the army leaders that they still thought they could bend the Nazis to their will and enlist them as military and political auxiliaries, much as they had done with other paramilitary groups in the early 1920s. Time was to show how misguided this policy really was.

The newly prominent political position of the army found expression in the appointment by Hindenburg, acting above all on the advice of senior officers, including Schleicher, of Müller’s successor as Chancellor. From the outset there was no attempt to appoint a government that would rest on the democratic support of the parties represented in the Reichstag. Instead, a ‘cabinet of experts’ would be put in place, with the intention of bypassing the Reichstag through the use of Hindenburg’s power to rule by emergency decree. Of course, the scope of rule by decree was limited, and many measures, above all the budget, still had to be approved by the Reichstag. Steps were taken to ensure that this did not appear as the inauguration of an authoritarian regime. The new cabinet included such well-known Reichstag politicians as Josef Wirth, a former Reich Chancellor, for the Centre Party, Hermann Dietrich, for the Democrats (renamed the State Party in July 1930), Martin Schiele, for the Nationalists, Julius Curtius, for the People’s Party, and Viktor Bredt, for the small Economy Party. But it did not include the Social Democrats, to whom Hindenburg and his advisers were unwilling to entrust the power of ruling by decree. Without the Social Democrats it had no parliamentary majority. But this did not seem to matter any more.

The new government was led by a man whose appointment as Reich Chancellor proved in retrospect to be a fatal choice. Superficially, the President’s nomination of Heinrich Brüning, born in 1885, as Reich Chancellor was defensible in democratic terms. As floor leader of the Centre Party’s deputies in the Reichstag, he represented the political force that more than any other had been the mainstay of parliamentary democracy in the Weimar Republic. But already by the time of his appointment the Centre, under the influence of its new leader Prelate Ludwig Kaas, was moving towards a more authoritarian position, more narrowly concerned with defending the interests of the Catholic Church. Moreover, Brüning himself was at best a fair-weather friend of Weimar democracy. A former army officer, he had been shocked by the November Revolution, and remained a staunch monarchist all his life. In his memoirs, indeed, he portrayed the restoration of the monarchy as his main purpose after becoming Chancellor. Yet in doing so he was probably lending retrospective coherence to a political career that was dominated, like that of so many politicians, by short-term imperatives.⁴² Despite his inner conviction that a return to the Bismarckian system would be best for all, he had no detailed plan to restore the monarchy, let alone bring back the Kaiser. Nevertheless, his instincts were authoritarian at heart.⁴³ He planned to reform the constitution by reducing the power of the Reichstag and combining the offices of Reich Chancellor and Prussian Minister-President in his own person, thus removing the Social Democrats from their dominance of Germany’s largest state. Brüning did not have sufficient backing from Hindenburg to put this idea into effect, but it remained on the table, ready for anyone to use who did. Brüning also began to restrict democratic rights and civil liberties.⁴⁴ In March 1931, for instance, he introduced sharp curbs on the freedom of the press, especially when it published criticisms of his own policies. By mid-July the liberal Berlin Daily News-Sheet (Berliner Tageblatt) was estimating that up to a hundred newspaper editions were being banned every month across the country. By 1932 the Communist newspaper The Red Flag was being banned on more than one day in three. Press freedom was seriously compromised long before the Nazis came to power.⁴⁵

In effect, Brüning thus began the dismantling of democratic and civil freedoms that was to be pursued with such vigour under the Nazis. Some, indeed, have argued that his much-criticized economic policy during the crisis was in part designed to weaken the trade unions and the Social Democrats, two of the main forces that kept Weimar democracy afloat.⁴⁶ To be sure, Brüning was not a dictator and his appointment did not mark the end of Weimar democracy. Brüning had not reached his position in the Centre Party without becoming adept at political calculation and manoeuvre, or skilled in constructing political coalitions and alliances. He had won himself a considerable reputation as a specialist on finance and taxation, and a man who knew his way around in these often rather technical areas was clearly needed at the helm in 1930. But the room for manoeuvre was becoming rapidly narrower after 1930, not least because of his own catastrophic political miscalculations. And even his staunchest defenders have never maintained that he was a charismatic or inspiring leader. Austere in appearance, secretive, inscrutable, given to taking decisions without sufficient consultation, denied the gift of rhetoric, Brüning was not the man to win mass support from an electorate increasingly appalled at the economic chaos and political violence that were plunging the country into a crisis whose dimensions beggared even those of 1923.⁴⁷