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The events of the Tage der Wut have been used in the histories of both the apologists and detractors of the German Workers’ Republic as a defining moment in the formation of the state. The justification and scale of the violence which reached a high point between July 20-24, 1934 remains a subject of great controversy.



In the years following the events the Communist leadership themselves could be seen to tacitly admit that events had gotten out of hand, albeit that the reprisals carried out against wealthy families, landlords and in some cases churches, were a righteous display of indignation at what the activities of the International Financier Plot had brought about.


The Polish occupation of East Prussia sparked panic in a nation already primed with fear. Ever since the French coup the nation had been preparing for a foreign invasion whilst the assassination attempt on both Hitler and Zeigner created a new worry of the enemy within. As we have seen, Hitler played to both of these fears in the immediate aftermath of the attempt. The International Financier Plot was now elaborated upon in depth for the first time.

The Enabling Act hurriedly passed through the Reichstag gave both a quasi-legal justification for Hitler’s dictatorship whilst giving the new dictator carte blanche to act upon his theories of a conspiracy composed of both domestic and foreign agents to destroy Germany. What followed was both the mass arming of what were designated to be German revolutionary forces and an endless list of potential enemies to eliminate. The ensuing scale of revolutionary violence eclipsed anything seen from the periods between 1918/19 or 1930/31 as scores up and down the country were settled with no barriers to hold them back. Junker estates left untouched by the United Front’s land reform program saw the landowners beaten or outright executed in repayment for decades of exploitation, their managers and families often meeting similar fates. Their dwellings were burned, lighting up many parts of the German countryside. Industries previously outside the remit of the National Reconstruction Council were occupied by their workers, the industrialists and financiers finding it easier to escape with less attachment to their property. Some were found at home however and met with arrest when lucky, the same going for the larger aristocratic elites and bourgeois intelligentsia who had had neither the means nor wherewithal to already flee. Conservatives, Catholics, liberals, monarchists and other such elements labelled to be in some way or another part of the International Financier Plot were faced with arbitrary arrest or immediate violence. Casualty estimates vary but even the most conservative figures are numbered in the thousands.

The role of the People’s Guard in facilitating this wave of revolutionary violence remains disputed but by the time it had become clear that there would be no immediate invasion to fend off the task of dealing with the tens of thousands of prisoners apprehended in the preceding days became a logistical effort which only they could be called upon to handle. Beyond a small minority who escaped or were otherwise sent home, those who had been arrested in the previous days were now held in courtyards, sports grounds and other available public locations. Few were held in prisons amidst the bureaucratic nature of the system and state judiciaries not always willing to cooperate with the new regime at this initial stage. There are examples of thousands being deposited in disused warehouses or surrounded by barbed wire in empty fields. Some of these temporary sites would eventually form the first reclamation centres, where so many Germans would disappear in the coming years.

These arbitrary purges would begin to receive a legislative stamp not long after the violence had died down. The judiciary and civil service had remained a hangover from the imperial era throughout the life of the republic and though many of its worst offenders had been removed following the civil war, the remainder were now put through a trial by fire in accommodating a swathe of new procedures which effectively put Germany on a war footing. Blanket judgements on those incarcerated during the round-ups and reorganising departments to better facilitate the directives of the new regime nonetheless required round the clock shifts, forcing resignations and early retirements where suspect individuals could not cope.

The Reichstag was not immune to this. Following the Enabling Act, Hitler elaborated on new evidence which implicated Noske’s German Socialist Party and the allied German People’s Party in the conspiracy to attack Germany. It was alleged Noske had been playing a long game ever since the civil war and the ‘Fatherland Front’ the two parties had campaigned under was merely a manifestation of the reactionary forces at play. The Catholic Centre Party was similarly proscribed not long after, new ties to Mussolini being cited alongside the party’s historic relationship to the Holy See when Hitler described them as ‘the two voices of Rome in the People’s Chamber’. With the right-wing DVFP having been banned shortly after Dirlewangler’s assasination attempt, the Reichstag was now limited to the parties of the United Front, their occasional allies in the German Democratic Party and a handful of smaller interest parties. The United Front itself was soon also broken however.

The Social Democratic Party split in two and with it the only major force dedicated to the maintenance of the republic they were largely responsible for creating was rendered ineffectual. The death of Zeigner, who finally succumbed to his wounds in August, prompted calls for fresh Presidential elections. Hitler refused, citing the continuing emergency situation. Those willing to continue to work with Hitler, at the very least for the sake of Germany, formed their own working group as the remainder of the party in the Reichstag stated its opposition to Hitler’s indefinite assumption of Presidential power.

Although he would not take on the Volksfuhrer title formally until the constitutional convention delivered its verdicts in the spring of the following year, Hitler had already cast aside any illusions that he was now dictator of Germany. The insurgent Social Democrats and their liberal allies would continue on in anemic opposition in a Reichstag which was increasingly bypassed before their parties were dissolved entirely to make way for the delegates of the constitutional convention. From then on the Social Democratic presence in the Reichstag would be limited to the Revolutionary Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. They would march in lockstep with the Communist Party in the direction Hitler had set out on the basis of Zeigner’s legacy.

The two million people living within East Prussia were left to endure their own set of misfortunes at the hands of their Polish occupiers although the subsequent installation of a client regime of conservatives and monarchists brought a peace of a sort. Some within the largely agrarian territory even welcomed this return to power of the old elites whilst the population swelled from the influx of refugees eager to reach a Germany which was free of Hitler’s control.


The time of Weimar had ended. The Enabling Act Hitler presented to the Reichstag following the events of the Polish occupation gave carte blanche to the Communist leader to restructure German society to his whim. The anger he had summoned within the German people, whether ideological or patriotic, would become infused with what was to come.




It was in this fire that the German Workers’ Republic was forged.





~ Shaun Williams, Weimar's Rise and Fall






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The pictogram is Factory Occupation by Gerd Arntz

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