This is something I haven't seen very often, and I'm curious if there's any way to do it. Could the Weimar Republic as we know it be saved as a functional government and make it through the Great Depression, without either falling to the Nazis/other fascist government/military rule? If so, what would the best point of divergence be?
How does one go about saving the Weimar Republic?
- Thread starter Practical Lobster
- Start date
The best way IMO is delay, mitigating or stopping the Great Depression. Best way to do that IMO is to have a trade conference where everyone chops their tariffs in half. The US would then buy more from GB, France and Germany. France and GB would buy more from Germany. Germany would have had money to pay the reparations easier. GB and France would have more money to pay back their debt easier and the US would be little, if any, worse off even in the short run as all the money it would spend abroad would come back as debt repayment and increased sales abroad anyway.
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Start with the begining, instead of going in bed with the extreme right the SPD should have phased them out over time. Kick the authorian civil servants out. Same with aristocrats in the military. The republic was full with anti democratic elements and this was hardly challenged. I admit the SPD are in a cauldron here, because they sometimes needed the military might of the extreme right, but I believe this could have been changed through acquiring their own means.
Have the Weimar government keep fighting and ignore Ludendorff and Hindenburg while revealing their blunders. Then when defeat comes the Stabbed in the Back myth dies quickly
Then they get blamed for Germany getting trashed. Hindenburg would say "We told them it was hopeless and we should surrender and because they didn't listen to us and now a lot of Germans are dead and a lot of property was destroyed that shouldn't have been."
Having Hindenburg lose the 1925 presidential election to Wilhelm Marx would go a long way, since the latter wouldn't sabotage the Republic from the inside by doing things like forcing Hermann Müller - one of its more capable chancellors - to resign.
Which "Weimar Republic" do you mean? The one from 1919-1930? Or the one from 1930-1933? Because those two states didn't share much except the constitution.
The first one, I would say, is pretty hard to save: It was a compromise nobody liked. The left didn't like it because it was literally build on it's corpses and the right didn't like it because it was a republic (!) born out of defeat (!) in a war. You would need the Weimar coalition (SPD-Zentrum-DDP) to hold the majority for a long time and then do the right decisions with it. If Weimar wants to survive, it has to break the Reichswehr-independence. Any state that doesn't control it's army will face problems short-term or long-term. Then you need to reign in the bureaucracy: In a democratic state it can't be that the same crime gets different verdicts. Also you need a SPD that is willing to do economic policies: In reality the SPD didn't want to do any deficit spending and just use the surplus for welfare programms. Of course when the surplus dried up in 1929, this left them with no concrete policies at all. The Nazis rose to such high levels because they embraced some form of keynesian spending program and thus could say that everybody would get a job, if they were only in government.
The second "Weimar Republic" can be saved pretty easy: Just have Gregor Strasser not go skiing in 1931 and thus avoid his crash which weakened him for the rest of his life. In 1932 he almost reached a deal with Hitler to become vice-chancellor under Kurt von Schleicher (Hitler would've become "honorary president" of the NSDAP) until Göring torpedoed it. When Kurt von Schleicher has integrated the NSDAP into his coalition, he will spend Germany out of the crisis with big infrastructure programs until he dies in around 1934/1935 (his health deteriorated quickly around that time, the Nazis IOTL murdered a man who just had few months to live).
The first one, I would say, is pretty hard to save: It was a compromise nobody liked. The left didn't like it because it was literally build on it's corpses and the right didn't like it because it was a republic (!) born out of defeat (!) in a war. You would need the Weimar coalition (SPD-Zentrum-DDP) to hold the majority for a long time and then do the right decisions with it. If Weimar wants to survive, it has to break the Reichswehr-independence. Any state that doesn't control it's army will face problems short-term or long-term. Then you need to reign in the bureaucracy: In a democratic state it can't be that the same crime gets different verdicts. Also you need a SPD that is willing to do economic policies: In reality the SPD didn't want to do any deficit spending and just use the surplus for welfare programms. Of course when the surplus dried up in 1929, this left them with no concrete policies at all. The Nazis rose to such high levels because they embraced some form of keynesian spending program and thus could say that everybody would get a job, if they were only in government.
The second "Weimar Republic" can be saved pretty easy: Just have Gregor Strasser not go skiing in 1931 and thus avoid his crash which weakened him for the rest of his life. In 1932 he almost reached a deal with Hitler to become vice-chancellor under Kurt von Schleicher (Hitler would've become "honorary president" of the NSDAP) until Göring torpedoed it. When Kurt von Schleicher has integrated the NSDAP into his coalition, he will spend Germany out of the crisis with big infrastructure programs until he dies in around 1934/1935 (his health deteriorated quickly around that time, the Nazis IOTL murdered a man who just had few months to live).
This question has been asked a few times before, but when one of the greatest TL writers on this forum asks it, there might be some genial idea behind it, so I'll try to muster what I can to attempt to answer it:
"The Weimar Republic as we know it" is a parameter you gave us, which excludes some of the proposals we've read above which were all grounded on the Ebert-Groener-Pact with the Reichswehr. Not having an Ebert-Groener-Pact would mean a different Revolution, though, and thus not result in the Weimar Republic as we know it.
Weimar as we know it is therefore by definition "endowed", from 1918/19 onwards, with a secret shadow military, with paramilitary Freikorps, with the blood of the crackdowns against leftists in 1919 on its hands.
The earliest and deepest point to change something in this context - because much of the internal instability is written into the system by that - would be the external divergence of having the Paris Peace Conference go differently, but that would render Weimar quite unrecognisable, too, and it's also not easy to see how it could come about.
Some popular solutions have been proposed already:
- Hindenburg was a major problem. Having a more democratic President could, on its own, probably avert a Nazi dictatorship.
- Evidently, Hitler was the no. 1 problem. An easy cop-out would be to have him killed in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
- The Great Depression and the economic policies implemented as a result were another major problem. We've heard proposals of policies which were alternatives to OTL's intentionally destructive deflationary policies of Brüning. They would have gone a long way, too.
- The paramilitaries have been mentioned, too - cutting back on them is not easy though with the premise of the shadow army in the back
I'll base my proposal on my analysis that the weakness of the Weimar Republic was mostly a weakness of the political centre and centre-right where traditional (national) liberalism and conservatism had collapsed and Christian popular parties were not yet there or not yet suited to fill this void. It was this void, and this electorate, which was very readily captured by the Nazis. (Which may sound weird given how radical they were, but there you go, looking at which constituencies they captured and how their various competitors fared, it's a fairly straightforward conclusion.)
To strengthen the Weimar Republic as it was, thus, we need some of the re-inventions which would occur in this segment of the political spectrum or which would occupy it later on, to happen earlier.
What were these re-inventions?
The two party pillars of post-WW2 West Germany were CDU/CSU and SPD. The former embodies the reinvention of a segment of German conservatism AND a segment of German liberalism AND an extension of its formerly confessional political parties into a wider political force. The latter already emerged strengthened after 1945 due to its upright anti-Nazi opposition and resistance for which it had gone through horrible martyrdom, but it was the Godesberg Programme which ultimately made it possible for the SPD to capture the centre-left and much of the centre of the electoral landscape and hold it for decades in many places.
Why am I telling this and what does this have to do with Weimar?
Because I believe that even without the cathartic catastrophic experience that had been WW2, democracy in Germany would have stood on a much firmer foundation if these two developments, or even just one of them, had occurred two decades earlier.
And that is not so difficult to achieve. Looking at a few persons' biographies from the 1910s and 1920s and their statements as well as into sources on the political re-structurings occurring immediately post-1945, I sometimes can't help but conclude that the awareness of what was necessary appeared to be just about to break out and spread, like someone grasping for a word that is at the tip of their tongue, just before they retrieve and spell it out.
There was awareness in the Zentrum, for example, that the limitation on Catholics was a serious hindrance and no longer necessary in post-Bismarckian times, and pushing an agenda of moderate economic reform based on Christian social ethics was there, too, but with the splintering of the trade union landscape and the bitter backward-looking intra-Zentrum controversy between monarchists and republicans was unfortunately stealing most of the attention.
I'll throw in four key names here: Matthias Erzberger, Konrad Adenauer, Joseph Wirth, and Adam Stegerwald.
The latter was among the chief proponents of what I envisioned above: a supra-confessional Christian party with strong social and party organisations outside of the church(es) which appeals to both bourgeois and proletarian voters with a balanced policy of social security/welfare and economic stability/growth, which leaves the questions of monarchy or republic, Versailles and all that behind, and focuses on bread and butter issues like electricity and water, paved roads and schools in the countryside, peaceful co-operation between trade unions and industrial employers' organisations.
Together with the former three, and including centrist reformists from the Protestant side (the Hannoverian party is one in whose rapidly declining corpse one can certainly find suitable candidates and a suitable electorate to go with it, too), maybe they could have pushed their agenda. Let's assume for the moment - and here is the weak point because I'm not really sure about that - that the assassination of Erzberger played an important role to prevent this from happening. Both because Erzberger would have played a charismatic and influential role in it, and because it discouraged reformers and democrats within the Zentrum deeply. Not having Erzberger assassinated should be doable. When could this *Christian Democratic or *Christian Social Party form? I think it would take some time and trial-and-error, but if the 1920s were a time in which this agenda had been more widely discussed and prepared and the support on the ground had been laid, then it might be conceivable to see it happen under the impression of the crisis if the party is not paralysed by Brüning's chancellorship (which should be doable, too, especially without Hindenburg as president). A successor party of the Zentrum propagating an anti-OTL-Brüning-esque New Deal-like reform agenda in the early 1930s looks ironical from our OTL perspective, but it could easily gather at least as much electoral momentum as the Nazis if it focused on economic and social issues and put the weight of all the above-mentioned pundits behind it.
Likewise, if the SPD had not passed its Heidelberg Programme of 1925 and instead had taken inspiration from their Swedish and Danish sister parties and decided to appeal to an electorate beyond organised labour with an economic reform agenda not too dissimilar from the one above, probably just a few nuances further to the left and replacing Christian with socialist semantics, they could have pulled a similar electoral capture of the centre. A surviving Ebert (not suffering from the health problems which his frequent judicial trials had aggravated) does not do it, he was too much of a man of realpolitik. But a Scheidemann not retreating into local politics in 1919 could do it - he was much more a man of great visions and a charismatic speaker, and while he was to the left of Ebert's, he was not an orthodox Marxist by any means. His retirement from national politics was not good for the SPD at all.
If both happen - and there is a chance that one such move "into the centre" would trigger the other to follow -, even better.
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Weimar was never doomed to fail. There are IMO a lot of PODs that could have saved Weimar. As MrHaakwood already pointed out, the administration was a major problem for the republic. Many people there were still reactionaries or conservatives and opposed the new regime. For example when Ludendorf was put on trial for the Beer Hall Putsch he did not got acquitted and Hitler was released after only 6 months in prison. A more democratic administration could have prevented this.
Another factor that led to Weimars downfall was the presidency of Hindenburg. Hindenburg rejected democracy and worked actively against the Republic. In addition it was Hindenburg, who appointed Hitler as chancellor. If Marx won in 1925, democracy may could have prevailed.
Another factor that led to Weimars downfall was the presidency of Hindenburg. Hindenburg rejected democracy and worked actively against the Republic. In addition it was Hindenburg, who appointed Hitler as chancellor. If Marx won in 1925, democracy may could have prevailed.
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To get increased spending in the early 1930's Germany you probably will need to decrease spending in the early 1920's. The hyperinflation of the 1920's would naturally make the German government of the 1930's very cautious in running a deficit. The government needed to cut the military faster, increase social spending far less and raise taxes in the early 1920's to make inflation manageable. Most of the deficit that you would have left should have been used for infrastructure. Fix roads and railroads with the money. Once the economy recovers in the 1920's you can raise social spending.
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Which butterflies away the Weimar Republic as we know it, awaiting another event to dethrone Wilhelmine Imperial Germany.
True, but you wouldn't have the Weimer Republic in the first place if that happened. It would remain a monarchy under the Kaiser.