On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler became head of a “National Coalition government” containing only two other Nazis, interior minister Wilhelm Frick and minister without portfolio Hermann Göring. Hindenburg feared the leader of the National Socialist German Workers, or Nazi Party, would use the office to turn the country into a dictatorship. But former chancellor Franz on Papen convinced him Hitler could be “tamed” by a cabinet full of traditional conservatives. It was a disastrous miscalculation with earth-shattering consequences.
Germany’s military defeat in the First World War had cast a huge shadow over the democratic Weimar Republic. A myth developed that Germany had not been defeated on the battlefield but “stabbed-in-the-back” by Liberals, Jews and Socialists. These negative feelings fed a hatred of the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which saddled Germany with massive compensation payments until 1983. And the politicians who signed the 1919 peace treaty became known as the “November Criminals”. The period from 1918 to 1923 was politically and economically unstable, culminating with the “Great Inflation” as prices soared – but German democracy survived the various assaults from right and left. Between 1924 and 1929 the rule of law was never seriously threatened and the economy showed some signs of recovery.
Even after 1930, during the era of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, Germany remained democratically stable. Yet the Constitution signed in the spa town of Weimar in the wake of the First World War was badly flawed. Its voting system, based on proportional representation, allowed small parties to win representation in the Reichstag. In July 1932 alone, 27 different political parties contested the election. All of them appealed to narrow class or economic interests. This made creating stable coalition governments difficult. There were no less than 20 different Weimar coalitions from 1918 to 1933, with no single political party ever commanding an overall majority.
The to find a parliamentary consensus eventually made Germany ungovernable, and no viable parliamentary coalition was possible after March 1930. Those who drafted the Weimar Constitution unwittingly created a mechanism that helped destroy democracy. This was contained in Article 48, which allowed the president to declare a state of “national emergency” – including the power to appoint and dismiss chancellors and cabinets, dissolve the Reichstag and suspend civil rights. It was a fatal flaw.
The lack of democratic legitimacy in the republic was reflected by the fluctuating electoral support for the three parties who were the most loyal to the Weimar Republic: the Social Democratic Party, the German Democratic Party and the Centre Party. These parties polled 76.2% of votes in the national election of January 19, 1919, but in the last fully free election on November 6, 1932, their combined vote was just 33.25%. In contrast, two parties pledged to destroy democracy – the Nazis and the Communist Party – and polled 50%.
During this period, Adolf Hitler emerged as the single most popular and dynamic politician in Germany. The voting rise of the Nazi Party was spectacular. In 1928 the Nazis polled 2.63% of voters in national elections. By 1930 this had risen to 18.3% – and to 37.3% by 1932. Yet Hitler was hardly a respectable figure. He was not even a German citizen until 1932, having been born in Austria. He was also a convicted criminal, having been found guilty of “high treason” for attempting to overthrow the government of Bavaria during the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch for which he served just over a year in prison.
His private life was also extremely controversial. He was attracted to young women, including an unhealthy relationship with his 23-year-old half-niece, Geli Raubel, who was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Hitler’s Munich apartment on September 18, 1931. But even this scandal did not dent his political popularity, amid his repeated promises to make the Fatherland a world power again. In fact, during his rise to power from 1930 to 1933, it was the respectable middle classes who voted for him in the largest numbers.
A total of 13.7 million Germans voted for Hitler of their own free will in the July 1932 elections. Solid middle-class groups, usually the cement that holds democracy together, decided to support a party pledging to destroy it. They wanted to escape from freedom. Hitler’s popularity grew because millions of Germans felt democratic government had been a monumental failed experiment.
To these voters, he offered a utopian vision of creating an authoritarian “national community” that would sweep away what they felt was the chaos of democracy, provide strong leadership, restore prosperity and return Germany to its rightful place in the world. To this end, he promised torebuild the country’s military strength. And many Germans found the idea of a strong leader appealing. Though Hitler was a passionate antisemite, he initially toned this hatred down to attract middle-class voters. Another factor that attracted many of them was Hitler’s promise to deal with the “communist menace”. He pledged to combat communist violence on the streets and to put an end to strikes in factories.
Nazi propaganda portrayed Hitler as the “destroyer of Marxism” and promised he would use the power of the state to restore law and order and end the rights and freedoms enjoyed by the socialist left and the trade unions. Hitler’s innate political ability should not be underestimated either. He transformed the Nazi Party into a modern political machine, uniting the German Right by managing to project an appeal that was anti-elitist, anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist but, at the same time, deeply patriotic and nationalistic.
He adopted modern electioneering tactics, too. During 1932 he used a plane to visit numerous cities and towns across Germany to garner votes. Nazi propaganda, masterminded by Joseph Goebbels, targeted voters using index cards, tailored advertising and local speakers. Yet it was not Hitler who destroyed democracy before 1933. The really decisive factor in the period from 1930 to 1933 was the supreme indifference of President Hindenburg and his small circle of conservative friends.
By invoking Article 48 from March 1930, he appointed three increasingly unpopular chancellors: Heinrich Bruning, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, all of whom had no popular authority and governed using emergency decrees – refusing to involve the Social Democrats, the strongest supporters of democracy in government. Hindenburg’s presidential rule was really a blind alley. The only politician who could add popularity to his regime was Hitler.
It was Hindenburg’s decision to take the gamble on Hitler that put the final nail in the coffin for democracy. He would be dead a year later but, in doing so, he opened the path to catastrophe for Germany and the world.
