The Failure of the Weimar Republic and the Rise of Hitler

Abstract

In Weimar the interest groups, particularly big business and agriculture, exerted direct pressure on the bourgeois middle and right-wing parties and claimed also personal concessions where the composition of the leadership and of the Reichstag delegation were concerned. The Social Democrats’ room for manauvre was also limited by the increasing influence of the Free Trade Unions which filled up to a third of their Reichstag seats. The erroneous assumption that they could solve the crisis in production costs by expanding capacity in the steel and coal industry intensified social tensions. Official speakers of the Federal government tend to interpret the failure of Weimar democracy as a result of increasing radicalism of the political left and the political right which eventually strangled the Republic under the pressure of the world economic crisis. An evaluation of the domestic factors leading to the dissolution of the Republic should not overrate the shortcomings of the Weimar constitution, especially in respect of its plebiscitarian elements.