Assuming that Hitler and his Nazis never rise to power is a common game. Yes, Hitler harnessed a unique blend of charisma and violence to get what he wanted, but the frustrations with democratic rule were something which grew even without his influence. Even during the infamous 1932 vote which gained Hitler the Chancellorship, several other political parties--including the Zentrum and the DNVP--were distrustful of democracy and craving a change in the system. This sympathy for non-democratic rule could have been harnessed by any capable politician, of which there were many.
I am currently working on a story idea wherein Hitler dies in the Beer Putsch and the Nazi Party never rises to prominence, but despite this the democracy comes under attack by far-right forces who seek to dismantle democracy, albeit to return to what existed before rather than creating a new form of despotism like National Socialism. As such, I am looking for opinions on what people think the most likely result of such an attack would be. Would they succeed? Would they just inspire another, more capable group? Or would the people be unwilling to accept such a change and revolt?
The NSDAP achieved something which had been deemed impossible in German politics for several decades - a unification of the German right. Before and especially after 1918, everyone kept talking about how the right, constantly run over by the reformist and democratic forces, will be eaten alive unless it unites and presents a common platform - this was why the DNVP was founded in 1918 in the first place - but nobody succeeded.
You had several different currents which seemed entirely incompatible with one another. The traditional elitist Prussian Protestant constituency that was the backbone of the DkP before 1918; the interests of far-right Ruhr coal and steel business which pursued a platform of unabashed colonial expansionism and hardline free market policies and were represented by Hugenberg; the populist, "Bonapartist" national revolutionaries that were born out of the Navy League and sought to downplay sectarian differences in favor of an all-national militaristic dictatorship; the highly conservative and often Ultramontanist right-wing Catholic leadership that took control of Zentrum in the late 1920s; reactionary regionalists who despised all attempts at state centralization as seen in Bavaria and partially in Hanover; revanchist officers who were inspired by modern ideas of total war and wished for a militarized totalitarian dictatorship; modern extremists who arose from the radicalized middle class and despised the old aristocracy while also wishing for an authoritarian nationalist regime; former socialists turned to the nationalist camp for one reason or another; all forms of racialized nationalism and esotericism, so on and so forth.
The NSDAP was important because it was the first which managed to unite almost all of these (not the regionalists, of course) and was also the first right-wing political party which managed to transcend the class and religious barrier. That's something you never saw in the DNVP, which never managed to gather any significant support among Catholics, or the workers, or the urban electorate in general.
What I'm getting at is that without the NSDAP, the right
probably can't win. It will be consumed by its own differences and conflicts and would have probably ultimately floundered. The DNVP, for example, detonated itself into several groups by 1930, well before the Nazis rose to become the strongest party and could siphon their support into the brown mass that eventually overtook Germany. Papen was a failure who couldn't hold a government together. Schleicher was a failure who couldn't hold a government together.
A military putsch is possible, but it also runs into the issue of who they would support. Schleicher wasn't much of a putschist, though to be fair he is so much of a "question mark with epaulettes" that people kinda guess what his actual goal was to this day.
