The Dorpmüller Controversy of 1926: Cabinet Politics, Reparations, and Railways in the Weimar Republic

Abstract

German minister of finance, Peter Reinhold (DDP [Democratic Party]), on 8 June 1926, wrote a letter to his state secretary, David Fischer, expressing his fear that one of Germany's largest organizations was trying to evade government control, indeed, 'supported by the London Protocol, was trying to form a state within the state'.1 Reinhold was not complaining about the army, but about the Deutsche Reichsbahn Gesellschaft [German National Railway Company]. The event that triggered Reinhold's fears was the nomination of Julius Dorpmiiller as general director of the Reichsbahn by its board of directors (Verwaltungsrat) on 4 June 1926, the culmination of a struggle between the cabinet and the board of the Reichsbahn for control of Germany's largest company. By itself, this would draw our attention to the matter. Yet implicit in the dispute were matters of even greater importance. In seeking a decisive influence over the selection of the general director of the Reichsbahn and representation at the railway's board meetings, the cabinet hoped substantially to modify the Dawes Plan of 1924 which governed the payment by Germany of reparations without the consent of the Allies. Simultaneously, the cabinet was attempting to reassert the traditional view that the railway should be a tool of government economic and social policy, not a profit-oriented business. The Deutsche Reichsbahn Gesellschaft and the quiet middle period of Weimar history as a whole have received comparatively scant treatment by historians, who have concentrated on the turbulent early republic, the fall of Germany's first democracy, and the rise of